wtf happened to my socks

"It's not hurting anyone" until it is, y'know

shout out to all the trans men on this site that are normal about trans women

shout out to all the binary (+non GNC) trans folks on this site that are normal about nonbinary/genderfluid/multigender/GNC/etc trans people

shout out to all the perisex trans people on this site that are normal about intersex (and intertrans) people

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

At the time, the NYPD was coming under quite a bit of criticism about rising crime rates and the seeming ineffectiveness of the police’s response to the problem. In the Kitty Genovese case, even though people did in fact call the police, it took about an hour for them to show up and the first detectives didn’t arrive until three hours later (at which point they mostly spent their time interrogating Kitty’s girlfriend about their relationship, because for “some reason” they considered her to be the most likely suspect for the murder. In fact, the police wouldn’t catch the actual killer until six days later when he was picked up for having a stolen TV in the trunk of his car, at which point he admitted to having committed a total of three murders). It’s not an accident that one of the things to come out of the Genovese case was the establishment of the 9-1-1 system, because at the time that the attack happened, you had to call the specific number of a particular police precinct and it was up to the duty sergeant on the desk to take action - which was usually to send someone out from the precinct to the address reported, because cops on foot patrol wouldn’t be outfitted with two-way radios for several years. It’s more than a little convenient that at a time when the NYPD is coming in for public scrutiny about its ability to do the basic job of responding to reports of crimes in a timely fashion, the Police Commissioner happens to hand the City Editor of the city’s most prominent newspaper a story which puts the blame for the slow response on the apathy and inaction of New Yorkers, neatly absolving the NYPD for its ridiculously poor performance in this case in particular and its response to the rise in crime in general. 

Eridians' perception of the world relies on something that is completely absent in space — sound. They haven't been looking at the stars their entire existence the way we have. Their concept of aliens might only be as old as their discovery of astrophage. They made a bad ship, because it was their first one ever! Rocky himself says they rushed it, and that multiple (vital) things broke. Their mission was just as much of a Hail Mary pass as ours was — they had no idea what they were doing, if they could even travel in space safely. And, as it turns out, they couldn't.

Humans are the ones who have been doing it over multiple lifetimes. Mary is state of the art. We've been space farers longer than most humans have been alive. We can actually see through space. We are more likely to survive exposure to the void. We can encase our lighter, more flexible, more mobile bodies in a material that lets us walk outside of our ship, and, to a degree, we can get our bearings out there in a way Eridians just can't.

It's okay to cry if you just discovered you're aromantic/asexual/sex-repulsed/romance-repulsed/etc.

The loud sociocultural script surrounding many of us constantly shows that the biggest, most fulfilling goal in life is to meet that one special person, mutually fall in love, become an item, get married, share a sex life with them, form a happy family together, and live joyfully with what you built together until the end of your days

When we finally find out why this script doesn't fit with us as we grow and discover our identity, it will be normal to feel a thron poking at your side, a crushing weight on your heart, an uncomfortable churning in your stomach

Sadness, irritation, disappointment, disbelief, anger, desperation, a chaos brewing your mind and heart

You're grieving

You're mourning a life you thought might be available to you

We were never shown in a positive light the other scripts that can be followed if we "don't fit" the "perfect" one (How many times do we hear people calling them crazy cat ladies? Calling single, childless people selfish? Unmarried couples and polyamory referred to as sinful and deserving of punishment?). Sometimes we haven't been shown the option of other scripts at all

All I want to say is...

It's okay to cry through your new identity

It's okay to say "this fucking sucks" right now

Sometimes, in order to begin our path of true acceptance, we need to fucking mourn it all... the fantasies, the curiosity to experience emotions and sensations, the dream future you saw yourself having one day

Allow us to say: "I hate that this hurts. I wish it were different. But I'm still going to show up for myself."

Later on we'll begin to understand and accept who we are, but for now, as we assimilate what just happened

Normally when a character (usually a woman) who starts the story being villified and villainised, just as Grace was deemed "the harlot whore" for 60 years, their redemption in the eyes of the story comes from the revelation that they were a better person than people gave them credit for. Maybe they were a good mother, or did their best in the face of the deck being stacked against them.

With Grace, we don’t see that. I can’t recall any instance in the movie of her being a particularly good person, or a good mother to Jefferson Wicks, or a virtuous woman as befitting her name. A lot of her actions are recontextualised to be more understandable within the story, yes, but that’s not necessarily the same.

Grace is messy. Some would call her shallow with her focus on expensive brands. She’s unashamedly destructive. She probably wouldn’t have wanted her father’s church where she was pretty much held hostage for years to be named after her, even if the Wicks family weren’t in charge anymore.

And she STILL didn’t deserve what Prentice Wicks and her family did to her, whether she was a good person or not.

There are no perfect victims. Trauma, shocker, tends to mess with people’s mental state a lot, and they’re not always going to act the way people think they should. They can’t always be, well, graceful about it- I dare say they can’t be EXPECTED to be.

And people don’t have to be perfect or even particularly good people to be sympathised with as victims.

And it didn’t take anyone finding out about her secret better side or good deeds. All it took was one person - Vera - having a change in perspective, to consider things from Grace’s point of view and realise she never really had a chance to BE a better person, to plant that idea in the heads of the characters and the audience.

@theythembutch : In fairness, the other key thing (that I also love!!) is that we don't actually know what she was like—only what the people of the church remember about her. She remains kinda two-dimensional, and I think that's intentional and purposeful because maybe there was more to some things about her but we will never know and neither will the characters in the story. She's dead and only the (selective, curated, filtered through their own lenses) memories of her are left, and that's all we see

Whatever it was, to put it this way, if there were 10 studies on the trans community as a whole, there were 3 on trans women and trans fems and 0 on trans men and trans mascs, and 0 on nonbinary people. All of the mixed studies were also pretty much useless for my purposes as well because they were all so lopsided.

I think I swapped to a bunch of different things - addiction rates, smoking, depression, mental health in general - nothing that was even roughly equal in looking at all of us. Trans men, trans mascs and nonbinary people are so under researched as to be nonexistent.