Pan narrans

inspired by @cuppydogshane and @glorpus et al. everyone say yay we love the hollander family torture chamber!!!!!!

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It's in typical Rose style that she, once again, shatters Shane's attempts at obfuscating an uncomfortable truth. "She actually said that? That they thought you might be gay and just, what, decided to let it be?" she cries through the phone speaker, sounding so scandalized that Shane grimaces.

So, yesterday, I got into a rather stupid internet argument with someone who was peddling what seemed to me to be a rather insidious narrative about slur-reclamation. Someone in the ensuing notes raised a point which I thought was interesting, and worrying, and probably needed to be addressed in it’s own post. So here we go:

The word ‘queer’ itself seems to be especially touchy for many, so let me begin to address this by way of analogy.

Instead of talking about “queer”, let’s start by talking about “Jew” - a word which I believe is very similar in its usage in some significant ways.

Now, the word “Jew” has been used as a derogatory term for literally hundreds of years. It is used both as a noun (eg. “That guy ripped me off - what a dirty Jew”) and as a verb (eg. “That guy really Jew-ed me”). These usages are deeply, fundamentally, horrifically offensive, and should be used under no circumstances, ever. And yet, I myself have heard both, even as recently as this past year, even in an urban location with plenty of Jews, in a social situation where people should have known better. In short – the word “Jew”, as it is used by certain antisemites, is – quite unambiguously – a slur. Not a dead slur, not a former slur – and active, living slur that most Jews will at some point in their life encounter in a context where the term is being used to denigrate them and their religion. 

Now here’s the thing, though: I’m a Jew. I call myself a Jew. I prefer that all non-Jews call me a Jew – so do most Jews I know. “Jew” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Judaism, the same way that “Muslim” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Islam, and “Christian” is the correct term for someone who is part of the religion of Christianity. 

In fact, almost all of the terms that non-Jews use to avoid saying “Jew” (eg. “a member of the Jewish persuasion”, “a follower of the Jewish faith”, “coming from a Jewish family”, “identifying as part of the Jewish religion”, etc) are deeply offensive, because these terms imply to us that the speaker sees the term “Jew” (and by extension, what that term stands for) as a dirty word.

“BUT WAIT” – I hear you say – “didn’t you just say that Jew is used as a slur?!?”

Yes. Yes, I did. And also, it is fundamentally offensive not to call us that, because it is our name and our identity.

Let me back up a little bit, and bring you into the world of one of those 2000s PSAs about not using “that’s so gay”. Think of some word that is your identity – something which you consider to be a fundamental and intrinsic part of yourself. It could be “female” or “male”, or “Black” or “white”, “tall” or “short”, “Atheist” or “Mormon” or “Evangelical” – you name it.

Now imagine that people started using that term as a slur.

“What a female thing to do!” they might say. “That teacher doesn’t know anything, he’s so female!”

Or maybe, “Yikes, look at that idiot who’s driving like an atheist. It’s so embarrassing!”

Or perhaps, “Oh gross, that music is so Black, turn it off!”

Now, what would you say if the same groups of people who had been saying those things for years turned around and avoided using those words to describe anything other than an insult?

“Oh, so I see you’re a member of the female persuasion!”

“Is he… a follower of the atheist beliefs? Like does he identify as part of the community of atheist-aligned individuals?”

“So, as a Black-ish identified person yourself – excuse me, as a person who comes from a Black-ish family…”

Here’s the fundamental problem with treating all words that are used as slurs the same, without any regard for how they are used and how they developed – not all slurs are the same.

No one, and I mean no one (except maybe for a small handful of angsty teens who are deliberately making a point of being edgy) self-identifies as a kike. In contrast, essentially all Jews self-identify as Jews. And when non-Jews get weird about that identity on the grounds that “Jew is used as a slur”, despite the fact that it is the name that the Jewish community as a whole resoundingly identifies with, what they are basically saying is that they think that the slur usage is more important than the Jewish community self-identification usage. They are saying, in essence, “we think that your name should be a slur.” 

Now, at the top I said that the word “Jew” and the word “queer” had some significant similarities in terms of their usage, and I think that’s pretty apparent if you look at what people in those communities are saying about those terms. When American Jews were being actively threatened by neo-Nazis in the 70s, the slogan of choice was “For every Jew a .22!″. When the American Queer community was marching in the 90s in protest of systemic anti-queer violence, the slogan of choice was “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” Clearly, these are terms that are used by the communities themselves, in reference to themselves. Clearly, these terms are more than simply slurs.

But while there are useful similarities between how the terms “Jew” and “Queer” are used by bigots and by their own communities, I’d also like to point out that there is pretty substantial and important difference:

Unlike for “queer”, there is no organized group of Jewish antisemites who are using the catchphrase “Jew is a slur!” in order to selectively silence and disenfranchise Jews who are part of minority groups within Judaism. 

This is the real rub with the term queer – no one was campaigning about it being a slur until less than a decade ago. No one was saying that you needed to warn for the word queer when queer people were establishing the academic discipline of queer studies. No one was ‘think of the children”-ing the umbrella term when queer activists were literally marching for their lives. Go back to even 2010 and the term “q slur” would have been basically unparseable – if I saw someone tag something “q slur”, like most queer people I would have wracked my brains trying to figure out what slur even started with q, and if I learned that it was supposed to be “queer”, my default assumption would be that the post was made by a well-meaning but extremely clueless straight person.

I literally remember this shift – and I remember who started it. Exclusionists didn’t like the fact that queer was an umbrella term. Terfs (or radfems as they like to be called now) didn’t like that queer history included trans history; biphobes and aphobes didn’t like that the queer community was also a community to bisexuals and asexuals. And so what could they possibly say, to drive people away from the term that was protecting the sorts of queer people that they wanted to exclude?

Well, naturally, they turned to “queer is a slur.”

And here’s the thing – queer is a slur, just like Jew is a slur, and no one is denying that. And that fact makes “queer is a slur so don’t use it” a very convincing argument on the surface: 1) queer is still often used as a slur, and 2) you shouldn’t ever use slurs without carefully tagging and warning people about them (and better yet, you should never use them at all), and so therefore 3) you need to tag for “the q slur” and you need to warn people not to call the community “the queer community” or it’s members “queer people” or its study “queer studies” – because it’s a slur!

But the crucial step that’s missing here is exactly the same one above, for the word “Jew” – and that step is that not all slurs are the same. When a term is both used as a slur and used as a self-identity term, then favoring the slur meaning instead of the identity meaning is picking the side of the slur-users over the disadvantaged group! 

If you say or tag “q slur” you are sending the message, whether you realize it or not, that people who use “queer” as a slur are more right about its meaning than those who use it as their identity. Tagging for “queer” is one thing. People can filter for “queer” if it triggers them, just like people can filter for anything else. Not everyone has to personally use the term queer, or like the term queer. But there is no circumstance where the term “q slur” does not indicate that you think queer is more of a slur than of an accurate description of a community.

If I, as a Jew, ever came across a post where someone had warned for innocent, positive, non-antisemitic content relating to Judaism with the tag “J slur”, I would be incensed. So would any Jew. The act of tagging a post “J slur” is in and of itself antisemitic and offensive.

I also think this research would cause him to have certain products marketing to him like loop earplugs or weighted blankets. And he’d be like “wow finally some good fucking products”.

Ilya finds this hopelessly endearing.

Yuna sweeps through and declares them BOTH wrong.

“Yes, dear, but who folds the laundry in this house again?” asks David.

The good that features do, is mentioned after them. Their frustrating parts are oft intered with their bones, so let it be, with the reblog chain

The noble tumblr hath told you the reblog chain denied engagement. If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath the reblog chain paid for it

Here, under leave of tumblr and its @staff, for tumblr is an honorable site, so are its @staff, honorable in their help, come I to speak, at the reblog chain's final moments

She was a good feature. Simple, and engaging to me, but tumblr says she denied engagement and tumblr is an honorable site

She had brought many memes to the world, who's sharing did the userbase grow, did this, in the reblog chain, deny engagement?

When that the meme did flop, the reblog chain had not notes! Engagement denial should be made of lesser stuff, yet tumblr says she denied engagement and tumblr is an honorable site

You all did see that in the last 3 years thrice users of other sites flocked to it, and thrice they had not stayed because opening Tumblr for the first time sucks, and absolutely never for the reblog chain, but tumblr says she did deny engagement, and Tumblr, is an honorable site

I speak not to disprove what tumblr spoke, but here I am to speak what I do know.

The New York Admirals: feeling smug that they didn’t drive their captain away. Not having a homophobia thing about the Centaurs. Would like to join in the “maybe being gay makes you good at hockey” jokes on the side of gay hockey.

It's honestly great training for his teaching work, because obviously Kip doesn't want to whitesplain "the gay experience is not singular" to Carter Vaughn, Black Hockey Player, but Carter would barrel right through to "I mean, it's not like I had to come out as Black", in the way that keen but chaotic students do. And Carter hasn't really thought much about specific Black queer experiences. Carter Vaughn would love hearing about Marsha P. Johnson. Or Bayard Rustin.

Yes, I know a slight change to my routine for one day isn't going to kill me.

tldr; I think what I'm trying to say here is trans people aren't crazy exploding landmines. Assuming that we are always offended, actually kinda hurts. We're just normal people with emotions, like everybody else.

Usually in time this weird fear around offending me fear subsides as they start to see I'm just a person.

Sometimes I have a hard time posting about things that deal with negitive emotions, so usually my compromise is to take out the panel that I feel sensitive about since I don't want a large audiance to see it. I've done this here, so it's easier for me to post things. If you see extra panels sometimes on webtoon but not on tumblr, that's why. Let's hope it doesn't take away from the context like the last time I did this.

anyways, alt text for those who need it:

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I noticed that a lot of cisgender people feel like they have to walk on eggshells around trans people. I tell them I'm trans and they become overly cautious.

I think the majority of the time this behavior comes from a good place. They might not be familiar with trans people and don't want to offend anyone.

But sometimes, I think this cautiousness might come from the stereotype that trans people are overly sensitive and will blow up at the slightest provocation.

Regardless of the source of this behavior, I don't like being treated like an emotional landmine. I actually find the opposite to be true. You have to grow a thick skin to misgendering when you're trans, especially if you are pre-HRT. I'm not fragile!

I like to think of it as pebbles in a jar : some are small, some are big. When you give me a pebble, of course I'm not mad at you! Pebbles are light, and they don't mean much. ( left bubble: sorry pal! right bubble: Don't be, I get it all the time)

Most days, carrying my pebbles isn't too hard. It's manageable.

Some days there are more pebbles than usual and the jar becomes heavier. ( bubble: It's a full jar day) But still, It's contained.

The only reason that I would negatively react to pebbles is if someone is THROWING fistfuls of them at me… ( that hurts!) …and doesn't care or acknowledge that they are pebbles

@/hbrowne24 on instagram

USA hockey has quietly barred trans people from participating in hockey safely. Myself included.

The policy stipulates that sex assigned at birth is the eligibility to be followed by ALL leagues. Even recreational adult leagues (BEER LEAGUES).

I was upset and wanted to do more research and realized that this policy also bars myself and other transmen from playing on women’s beer league teams if we’ve undergone hormone therapy.

It’s no surprise that men’s hockey is not a safe environment for gender non-conforming individuals and the women’s side is often the only place for most queer people to play. Barring trans individuals from these spaces essentially bars us from hockey.

During my tenure on a team that was part of the Women's Flat-Track Derby Association, we were working on establishing the ruleset for the sport for inter-league competitions. And as part of that, we were working on a policy for transgender skaters, because perhaps unsurprisingly a ton of queer people were involved in roller derby.

I don't remember the specific years on any of this, but at one point WTFDA put some specific aspects of the ruleset up to a vote of member leagues. There were two protocols offered for trans women who wanted to skate in competition, which had been developed by two leagues who'd had transgender skaters who'd wanted to participate. I don't remember what one policy was called but the other was the Montreal Protocol. The first policy was much like the hockey one he explained in the video above-- you had to prove you were undergoing medical treatment, etc. It wasn't like, horribly invasive, but it did involve disclosing medical status of various things.

The Montreal Policy, which we voted to adopt (I don't remember exactly how it went down but I do think at least on my league we voted pretty overwhelmingly in its favor, and it was adopted by the association), was simply that the skater in question had to live as a woman. That was it. Just-- is she a woman? By her own authority? Then okay. Because the Montreal skaters had found that was enough for them.

And it was. I skated under the Montreal Protocol; we had a trans woman join our league not long after, and yeah, she was a pretty good skater, but she wasn't the best, wasn't the scariest, wasn't the biggest. I have genuinely zero idea what her medical status was, I did not care. She skated on a rival team and I never talked to her very much, but she seemed cool. One of my teammates expressed privately to us that she had a problem, didn't understand, and we talked her through it, and we worked it out among ourselves and she ended up fine with it. I have no idea if anyone on other teams had a problem; I never saw anyone be shitty to the skater, and she stayed with the league after I left so IDK how her career went. It didn't... matter, you know? There were over a hundred of us in the league by then.

Not long after that men started doing derby, and while our league practices didn't go co-ed, my team's private practices often did just to make up numbers for scrimmages and things-- the team captain's brother, one of the refs, occasional visitors came and skated with us. And we found that yeah you can play a full-contact sport full-on co-ed and it doesn't actually matter. Not like you'd think.

These bans are stupid, these bans are not about athletics, these bans are fearmongering stupid culture war bullshit. I would and have skated full-contact with trans women. I would and have skated full-contact with cis men. The culture is what's important. There's no intrinsic physical threat there. I saw women concuss each other, break each other's bones, break their own bones. The officiating was what mattered, the culture; I never saw anything that was out of line that went un-penaltied, it was just the intrinsic risk of the sport. Physically dangerous sports are physically dangerous, it's part of how full-contact works. I wasn't afraid. (I ended my nine-year career by falling stone-cold sober down a flight of stairs with no guardrail, having taken the night off skating to rest my tweaked patellar tendon. I sprained both ankles off-skates and never totally recovered. Shit happens.)

bisexuality is not a get-out-of-queer free card

and thinking that it is is pretty much the textbook definition of biphobia

so if you are thinking that, you have some more thinking to maybe do about bisexuality.

speaking as a bisexual person, i super understand that it is hard to understand other people's sexual orientations. i absolutely can't ever quite wrap my head around the notion of a potential partner's genitals/gender expression being the first thing someone takes into account when experiencing attraction. but plenty of people obviously think that way, so it must be real!

i will also point out for the record that the "slutty bisexual" trope is mostly just a trope. an enormous proportion of the bisexuals I, an elderly (ok, middle-aged) bisexual who has been active in real-life and online queer spaces for several decades, have met and spoken with, are also demisexual. Not all, no, but it's a big, big overlap, and one that is in my experience extremely commonly totally overlooked.

it is incredibly common for people on the ace spectrum to also be bi. because actually bi doesn't mean "not picky", it just means "primarily makes selection of potential sexual/romantic partners based on criteria that are not tied to genitals/sex/gender presentation in the way monosexuals assume".

(I also personally am completely baffled by the concept of having a physical "type". I have had several lovers over the years, and they have had nothing in common physically at all besides being, like, human and around my age, ish, and largely from my own general population demographics, which makes sense to me because those are the people my friend groups have historically been drawn from? People who are like "when a man is tall! *eyes emoji*" what does that mean. what does that do. i don't know. i mean i like a slutty waist for example but that waist can be just about any proportions, the sluttiness is in the presentation, you know?)

So no. Being bisexual doesn't mean i have any kind of "choice" to "just not be queer". In my case, being demisexual means I almost never experience sexual attraction, and on the very rare occasions when I do, it's based entirely on their sense of humor and how well they mesh with me in conversations, and whatever their physical/sexual/gender configuration is doesn't figure into whether or when of the attraction, it only determines just what we actually do when it comes time to get down to doing whatever it is that we're going to do-- about which I am not picky, because if I want to do any of it with you then I don't care what it is as long as it's with you. We'll figure something out, I'm not worried.

I also don't get to choose who I'm attracted to. And yeah, I have had the problem of being attracted to another person while in a monogamous relationship! Demisexuality isn't "just monogamy", it's a different thing even if it looks the same on paper when poorly-explained. I have less temptation than many, probably, but that doesn't mean none. That doesn't mean I'm immune to queer mess. Alas! I am human.

Every relationship I have ever been in was/is queer. Because I am queer.

Being able to pass for straight does not make me straight. It mostly just means that people can conveniently forget that I'm not straight, and can say horrible biphobic shit to me. From both sides, thanks.

it's just so dark out.

Chita is not well. She is eighteen and a half, and her failing thyroid was propped up for years now with medication we were warned would eventually take its toll on her kidneys, which is now happening. We've put her on an appetite stimulant, and she's also now on a medication intended for humans, which stimulates the production of red blood cells, as failing kidneys will not produce that hormone as necessary and she was becoming dangerously anemic. She's been going along like that for some months now, but this past week she's really gone on hunger strike and the appetite stimulants are no longer having much effect. I have been coaxing her out from under the bed and feeding her spoonfuls of milk and bits of churu, and we've managed to get like. A single kibble into her, now and then. It's exhausting and she doesn't like it either. I'm hoping this current crisis is related to a recent dose of the red blood cell production drug, but I just don't know. So that's stressful and sad, and she's grumpy, but she is still herself and does still sleep most of most nights on my face, so.

I have another week at home before I go back to the farm and I am really anxious about leaving her. Dude has her care well in hand, as well as he can, but it's really stressful and upsetting for him, and he has actually sent me emotionally needy texts for the first time in our relationship, pertaining to this issue, which makes it hard for me to be away also.

So that's all a huge bummer and very anxiety-making. But that's what's up.

I'm trying to catch up on various things I let slide for the last six months since I was at home for an extended period, but that's also going slowly. And I've been doing a bunch of writing, but not in order, so that's frustrating.

The very, very next chapter of the WIP beta original novel doc I post will be like, The Big Climax, and I just have to do one final round of edits and then post it, but I've been held up because I'm trying to choreograph the rest of the action past the climax, and it's not going well. I've started considering how I need to restructure the first volume as well. It's all percolating. But it's going slowly. If you had intended to read those novels I could really use a poke on them. It's not too late to start the first one... I know it's a lot but I swear some of the bits are good.

I got really depressed reading that post that's going around where Chuck Tingle and Diane Duane are both like ha ha works never get away from me! Yes, we know, plotters have an edge in productivity, but most of us who are pantsers aren't like that because we've chosen to be. I can't even write a reliable fucking grocery list, you think I'm capable of outlining? I'm capable of making my shit tie together for a million words, I just can't do it briefly and I can't do it to spec. There's not actually a living to be made in writing to spec anymore anyway so don't shame me. There's not a living to be made in writing full stop unless you're a fucking unicorn, so greater efficiency isn't a moral imperative and it's not a practical one either. *If you work faster you can make more money* baby, zero times one is zero and so is zero times ten. I'll get there when I get there.

I'm just having trouble getting there. And it's not lack of time, it's momentum. Which is the hard thing regardless.