Just vibing

I showed this post to my boyfriend and he tried to take his shirt off like a girl and 

uh

and it made me realize that girls and boys pull their shirt off differently. /amazed

Its not science unless you write it down so 

Well done, i guess…

Second:

I fucked up

It’s all in the way that girl/boys shirts are made.

Girls shirts have less armpit room then boy’s do and are generally shorter so pulling it off over your head is more practical because by lifting your arms all the way up you make enough room for the sleeves to just slip off.

Boys shirts have more room and are generally longer so it is easy to slip them off over your head.

but if you take a girls shirt off like a boys shirt you will get your arms caught because there isn’t much armpit space.

and if you take a boys shirt off like a girls shit you will still have your head in it when you’ve lifted your arms all the way up because of the shirt’s length.

"ohh youll probably change your mind when your older"

yeah im not gonna have kids

"but youre so good with kids"

yeah im not gonna have kids

"youre too young to know that for sure"

yeah im not gonna have kids

"you might meet someone that you really want to start a family with"

This is a pretty major letdown, ngl.

Closest match: Hottonia palustris genome assembly, chromosome: 9 Common name: Water Violet

For years after 9/11 we were constantly told “NEVER FORGET” and the idea was basically “keep feeling sad and afraid and especially ANGRY forever; don’t let time dull your emotional response like it’s naturally supposed to; continue to justify the injustices by feeling this way all the time.” And the 3000 deaths were constantly pointed to as this huge deal that justified any lengths to go to.

And then Covid hit. And there were several points during the height of the pandemic (because fun fact, according to the actual definitions of a pandemic, *it’s not technically over yet!* ) where we were having a 9/11’s worth of deaths every week or so. And suddenly 3000 deaths were not a big deal at all. Instead of being enough reason to go to war far away and strip us at home of many rights too, they weren’t even enough justification to make people wear a damn piece of fabric over their face.

3000 people died once and now the government can legally wiretap anyone without a warrant, and hold people at Gitmo under suspicion of terrorism (no need for due process)… 3000 people dying every week but we should all still be going out to brunch and concerts and who cares about the disabled and immunocompromised?

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

What you're not getting here is that cultural imperialism is a massive issue that is far bigger than 'knowing your own queer history'.

A world in which everyone is familiar with most topics from an American perspective, but not from any other perspective, is a world in which trans people have to express their transness in an American way in order to fit DSM diagnosis criteria and get healthcare.

It's a world in which sexually marginalized communities have to identify as LGBT - regardless of whether that fits their own concepts of sexual and gender diversity - in order to get funding for HIV prevention and treatment.

It's a world in an American academic who presents themselves as an expert on 'Africa' is more likely to be believed and have their opinions turned into policy, than any actual on-the-ground experts who understand the specific context of specific countries in Afrika.

It's a world in which sympathizing with the victims of bombings or disasters is intuitive and automatic when the victim is an American girl-next-door sorority applepie valedictorian AnneMae McDonald, but not when they're called Fatemeh and live in Iran.

Knowing your own history doesn't help with any of that because these problems are about the power imbalance that cultural imperialism creates.

Cultural imperalism creates access to being understood when you name your experiences. Cultural imperialism creates access to empathy. Cultural imperialism creates access to being seen as human, and to your life being seen as worthy of protection.