Queer Witch

1. Don’t try to read other peoples’ minds and don’t expect others to be able to read yours. Communicate if it is important to you.

2. Don’t expect to be friends with everyone. We all are different – and we all like different things. Instead, invest your time in a few good friends. That’s all you really need to feel happy and fulfilled.

3. Create a budget and live within your means. Accruing lots of debt will only cause you to feel stressed.

4. Kill off the monster of jealousy – and only compare yourself with yourself.

5. Organize your clutter and get rid of excess stuff. It will leave you feeling calmer, and will save you lots of time!

6. Stay on the sidelines and don’t get drawn into pointless scenes and dramas in other peoples’ lives (unless it’s a crisis – and you know you ought to help).

7. Finish what you’ve started - and then do something else.

8. Treat every person you meet with respect, and err on the side of being gentle and kind.

9. Accept that there are things that you can’t change or control – and focus on those things that you can change or control.

The NAACP is occupying Jeff Sessions’ office to protest his attorney general nomination

The president of the NAACP, along with a handful of other NAACP leaders, is currently waging a sit-in in Sen. Jeff Sessions’ Mobile, Alabama, office.

They are vowing to stay there until he withdraws his name from consideration as Trump’s attorney general — or until they’re arrested. Read more

This is also the most direct individual example I’ve seen of this phenomenon.

The more I think about who uses “queer”, the clearer it is that it’s a ton of people under the bi umbrella - especially because there’s so little bi visibility that MOST bi people are afraid to claim “the B word” - and, especially, a ton of trans people. IIRC, one survey had a majority of trans people identifying their sexual orientation specifically as “queer”.

This is undoubtedly also partly because there’s such a huge overlap between bi and trans people, and because our communities have always been allies.

The more I look at who opposes the word, the more restricted it is to the various branches of the radical feminist communities telling everybody not to use this terrible slur. People outside that community pick it up because it sounds important, when you say something is a slur. Or because they personally hate the word. But that’s where it seems like it originates.

So, it’s coming primarily from a community that’s known for having an extremely anti-trans branch. And which has an overall philosophy that’s toxic to bisexuals, genderqueer/nonbinary people, and aces/aros. And which also has a pattern of wrapping abusive acts in faux-social-justice terminology - pretending that trans people invade women’s spaces, labeling any terms people use for calling them out as “slurs”, etc.

And the “q slur” meme spreads, because it sounds social-justice-y. It makes it seem like the larger community has rejected the term, instead of a subculture of a subculture being very very vocal about…

how we should ban a term that is primarily used by bi/trans people…

that is the only word many people feel safe using to describe themselves, thanks to rampant bi erasure and bi demonizing and to the pressure to fit your sexual orientation into a binary…

and that is the only word any of us has that lets us identify people like us in history without a ton of “but they didn’t have that identity back then”…

or to identify what we all, including aces/aros, have in common today, the essence of what is wonderful about all our different flavors of queerness as well as what the rest of the world…

It’s the only word we have that can build that community and hold it together, without all this infighting about terminology. (All right, I know that people can fight about any term. It’s the one that doesn’t explicitly exclude anybody that it shouldn’t.)

It’s also a word that a huge number of bi people use to identify themselves. A minority of gay and lesbian people prefer it over “gay” or “lesbian”. But in the bi community, it’s a HUGE thing for people to call themselves “queer” instead of “bisexual”. It’s so common that it’s one of the things people include when the spell out what “bi+” includes.

It’s also a word that almost 25% of trans people use to label their sexual orientation (with 52% of trans people identifying as some flavor of “bi+” including this “queer” 25%). (It’s in the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which surveyed almost 2,000 trans people.)

It has seemed to me for a while that the effort to go back to the “queer’s a slur” fight of the fucking 1980s is an unconscious attempt to center things around “same-gender attraction” and push issues that are specific to being intersex, trans, ace/aro, and bi+ out to the margins. Or, anyway, farther out to the margins. Just the same as the tendency to label everything “the gay rights movement” does, or the pattern of referring to “gay and trans” issues and leaving everything else out. 

So yeah.

The gender that you identify as is your real gender.

The pronouns that you prefer are your real pronouns.

What you have chosen to do with your body (staying as is, transitioning, etc.) is exactly how said body is supposed to be, and is your real body.

Your definitions of yourself are what makes the real you.

I think that the choice to become a witch or even a sorcerer is predicated on a decision that I am worth it. The moment I picked up some herbs and a cauldron and determined that I am worth it: I am worth healing, worth a certain amount of wealth, worth being loved, worth great sex, and worth safety. And not only worth it, but I willing to take it for myself instead of waiting for it to be granted to me by some outside power: corporate america, the government, god(s), angels, etc.