Shh

I'm so... So fucking sick of living in an abusive household.

If you're able, please help me out, I'm 19, trans, and bisexual, and I have been emotionally abused, gaslighted, and manipulated by my parents pretty much my entire life.

I'm not going to go into detail because I am just... Too emotionally drained right now to get into it. But I need to get out of here, and I need money in order to do so because everything else I've tried in the past just did not work. At all.

I've been applying to jobs but it just is not going through, the two companies that asked if I wanted an interview were based too far away for me working there full time to be feasible.

I draw ghosts. I draw the kinds that you see holding the sign in that post and two other kinds.

Tethered ghosts which are attached to a person or object

And untethered ghosts who became unlinked from the thing they were attached to

I'm not setting prices, you can choose what you pay. If you want something that's traditional art rather than digital, then I ask that you pay at least £5 so that it can be posted.

All payments will be done through PayPal.

If you can help out, please do. Just DM me to talk about the kind of ghosts you want to be drawn for you.

I also have a PayPal, buying from there will also help me out a lot, but not as much because I have it set to give me a very small amount so that my products aren't as expensive.

the oral history project from act up

the lesbian herstory archives

the transgender archives of the university of victoria

the digital transgender archives

glbt historical society (digital)

anything that moves

a masterpost of lesile feinberg’s works by @genderoutlaws

the dyke march compilation 

paris is burning 

how to survive a plague

united in anger: a history of ACT UP

one archives

Mark 11:1-11 

Jesus’ Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem

“When they were approaching Jerusalem, at Bethphage and Bethany, near the Mount of Olives, he sent two of his disciples and said to them, ‘Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately as you enter it, you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden; untie it and bring it. If anyone says to you, “Why are you doing this?” just say this, “The Lord needs it and will send it back here immediately.”’ They went away and found a colt tied near a door, outside in the street. As they were untying it, some of the bystanders said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ They told them what Jesus had said; and they allowed them to take it. Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting,

‘Hosanna!    Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!Hosanna in the highest heaven!’

Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.”

Nothing in this story is what it first appears. The poor rabbi from the countryside, the young colt/donkey, the cloaks, the branches: all are transformed and transfigured before our very eyes. The poor rabbi, Jesus, becomes the triumphant victor entering his city. The colt is his noble steed. The cloaks form intricate saddle work and a red carpet. The branches are the noble banners of the King. Yes! This is a head canon. Yes! The rabbi is still poor, his ride is not flashy, the branches are torn from the trees at the side of the road and discarded as soon as he has passed. But like all good head canons it works and it holds true. He is the victorious king, this is his noble steed, and these are his noble, flag-waving subjects.

Trans people get this of course. We’ve all had those closeted days when we’re strutting down the street and in our heads we’re the kings, queens and rulers of our own head-canonned world. 

“This longline t-shirt isn’t a t-shirt, it’s a dress, and it moves gracefully as my feminine hips wiggle as I walk.”

“With my long hair tucked into my snapback I look like any of the other boys swaggering down the street.”

 We get that things aren’t always what they seem. That beauty and identity goes deeper than what we wear, where we’re from, and what we look like.

And here is Jesus - assigned poor, unimportant bastard at birth - strutting his stuff on the mean streets of Jerusalem. 

In the tattered dress she bought second-hand, with the heels she borrowed from a friend, with makeup cheap and smudged, and hair she never grew herself; she marches with head held high into the roughest neighbourhood like the Queen of flippin’ Sheba! 

In baggy jeans he stole from his brother, with bundled up socks in the front of his only pair of boxers, with stubble etched on with a pencil, and a voice he can barely keep from breaking; he kicks open the door of the men’s bathroom like Chuck flippin’ Norris! 

And those that see him, really see him. Head canon is becoming canon as the crowds surround Jesus, knowing him for all that he is and all that he is doing for them. They know a true king when they see one. They know the true beauty and identity of the poor rabbi on a donkey. And in them knowing him, they themselves will be known. Not just noble subjects of the king, they are adopted brothers, sisters and siblings of the one who rides triumphant into Jerusalem. 

And we can know Jesus too. And in knowing him, in seeing past the poor rabbi to the king, we get to see past the smudged makeup or dodgy packers not just to the beautiful, handsome, powerful, delightful trans men, women and nonbinary folk that we are, but to princesses, princes, and nobles in the family of the king who rode into Jerusalem to triumph the day we now call “Palm Sunday.“ 

So may you know that you are much, much, much more than you appear. That you are known, loved and valued by a king who knows what it is like for appearance not to match one’s identity. Who looks upon you and sees you for exactly what you are, and welcomes you into his royal family because of it. 

Forbidden candy- Gobi desert agates

A 1980 flyer containing information about hanky flagging produced and distributed by SAMOIS, a San Francisco/Bay area lesbian S/M group — the only in the U.S. at that time.

[ID: Reed Erickson, a trans man with styled hair, wearing a dark suit and posing with his hands folded. END ID.]

Reed Erickson (1917–1992)

Excerpts from the podcast Making Gay History, S04E07: Reed Erickson.

“He was really accepted in society, both for his relationships with women and his transition, which is really interesting when you think about the 1960s. There were very few people who could so openly and publicly transition, let alone maintain multiple marriages.”

“The influence of the Erickson Educational Foundation cannot be stressed enough. We today would not have trans health care, period, without the funding and the information provided by the Erickson Educational Foundation.”

“It was the first organisation in the world that actually provided support and information to trans people, both through its newsletters and publications as well as an in-person office where people could call or drop in to receive information.”

“Essentially, the framework that trans rights organisations use today in terms of collecting resources by area and distributing them to trans people in need, is based off the work of the Erickson Educational Foundation. So without that, the modern trans movement as we know it would not exist.”

[ID: Three photos of Reed Erickson. In the first, he is standing with his girlfriend Daisy Harriman, wearing a dark suit while she wears a pink dress. In the second, he is posing shirtless, with his top surgery scars visible and obvious facial hair. In the third, he is posing with his wife Ailene and their daughter, in the late 1960s. END ID.]

Trans history involves a fabric of people across generations and cultures. Many trans stories have been erased, particularly trans male contributions, in favour of the myth that Stonewall rioting was the single galvanising event responsible for all progress.

Remember:

Trans men have always existed, and have always been involved in the fight for trans rights.

Stonewall was vitally important, but LGBT+ activism existed before then, too. To think otherwise is to erase the hard work done by the full spectrum of LGBT+ people.

Erasing trans male history further isolates modern-day trans men, and perpetuates the myth that we have never been involved with our own communities. Erasing cis gay and lesbian history perpetuates the myth that our communities have never overlapped, or acted as allies to one another. If you’re passionate about Stonewall, for example, I suggest you educate yourself about Stormé DeLarverie, AKA “the gay community’s Rosa Parks”. She instigated the uprising.

This surprise and excitement warms my heart! But also makes me kinda depressed! Because, if our community actually knew its history, this wouldn’t be shocking at all!

Remember…

Trans men have always been around.

Trans men have always contributed to progress.

Trans men are not a footnote.

Erickson was able to fund medical research of transition after inheriting his father’s highly successful lead-smelting company, Schuylkill Industries, in 1962. He began his transition immediately after receiving this inheritance, and reached out to Dr. Harry Benjamin in 1963 for medical care. In the following years, Erickson both directly funded Benjamin’s research and provided funding for research programs at major universities, including UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and Stanford, that would focus on the study of trans health. Furthermore, he provided critical funding for the National Transsexual Counseling Unit (NTCU), an organization that fielded letters from around the world, provided walk-in counseling, and performed on-the-street outreach work. His interest in the NTCU sparked from discussions with Dr. Benjamin, who was directly connected to the trans scene at NTCU’s San Francisco headquarters.

Dr. Benjamin actually studied trans healthcare under the man who coined much of the language and conceptualization of trans identity that we use today: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1911(!), Hirschfeld defined der Transvestit (the transvestite) as any individual “faced with the strong drive to live in the clothing of that sex that does not belong to the relative build of the body.” He pulled the word from the latin words trans, meaning opposite, and vestis, meaning clothing. His recommended treatment for this “drive,” as he called it? To aid the patient in presenting as the gender they understood themselves as– a radical departure from existing “treatments” which aimed to shunt the trans patient back into their birth sex, Hirschfeld’s approach centered the happiness and comfort of his trans patients. As he describes it in The Transvestites:

In the apparel of their own sex the feel confined, bound up, oppressed; they percieve [the clothing] as something strange, something that does not fit them, does not belong to them; on the other hand, they cannot find enough words to describe the feeling of peace, security and exaltation, happiness and well-being that overcomes them when in the clothing of the other sex

Now, as a historian of trans life in the early 20th century, I do want to contest Making Gay History’s argument that the EEF was “the first organization in the world” to provide support for trans people in the form of newsletters and in-person consultations. While it was certainly one of the earliest organizations of this nature in the U.S., the trans community is much older– and geographically speaking, much broader– than this.

There were multiple trans-inclusive and even trans-centered magazines in Europe through the 1920s, including Die Freundin, Garconne, and Das Dritte Geschlecht, to name a few. Weimar-era Berlin alone had a thriving trans community: der Internationaler Transvestiten-Bund (International League of Transvestites) was a prominent trans-rights activist organization, and it was common to see ads for trans social clubs in the gay magazines of the time. See for example, the weekly meetings held at der Zauberflöte (the Magic Flute, a gay bar) for “women living as men,” or the Transvestiten-Gruppe (transvestite’s group) lead by the transmasculine lesbian bar-owner Lotte/Lothar Hahm).

As for more medically-focused support, Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for the Study of Sexuality) provided jobs and therapy to trans people from 1919-1933, and conducted medical research that was foundational to developing the hormone therapy and surgical techniques used today. Unfortunately, large swaths of this research was lost when Hirschfeld’s institute was burned by the Nazis, primarily due to Hirschfeld himself being both a Jewish man and a staunch civil rights activist for both gay and trans communities. 

I recognize that I’ve veered away from Erickson himself a bit, but I really want to showcase how far back the trans past stretches– even the pieces of history I’ve centered on today have focused on Western Europe in the 20th c, when the truth is that there is evidence of trans life stretching back thousands of years, across many other parts of the world (Southeast Asia comes to mind, as do the Cree and Ojibwe tribes of North America; honestly, anywhere you look, you’ll find trans people). I also send you one-thousand heart emojis for your specific focus on trans men, as too often I see our stories sidelined.

Sources:

Die Freundin. April 9, 1930.

Hirschfeld, Magnus. Transvestites, trans. Michael Lombardi-Nash (New York: Prometheus Books, 1991): 124-125.

Stryker, Susan. Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution. (New York: Seal Press, 2017): 56, 63-64, 100-105. (note: in my opinion, this book serves largely as a history of white trans women in America. however, you can find some useful leads on trans men if you’re willing to dig).

Recommended reading for more transmasculine history:

Hirschfeld, Magnus. The Sexual History of the World War. trans. Andreas Gaspar et al. (New York: Falstaff Press, 1937). See chapter 6.

Skidmore, Emily. True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the End of the 20th Century. (New York: NYU Press, 2017).

Smith, Brice. Lou Sullivan: Daring to Be a Man Among Men. (Oakland: Transgress Press, 2018).

Sullivan, Louis. From Female to Male: The Life of Jack Bee Garland. (New York: Alyson Books, 1990)

Oh, the first top surgery for a trans man was before Erikson had been born actually! It took place in Berlin in 1912. Ten years before the term transsexual was even coined. (in 1923)

And in 1945, the first full sex change surgey was preformed by Ralph Millar and Sir Harold Gilles, for Michael Dillon. He officially diagnosed Dillon with acute hypospadias in order to conceal the fact that he was performing sex-reassignment surgery. Dillon had been taking HRT since 1940 and his birth certificate changed to say Male in 1944.

He was the first trans man to get a phalloplasty and he performed an Orchiectomy for Roberta Cowell (who you probably know as the first trans woman to get srs) which was at the time an illegal procedure. Dillion was a self-trained doctor, and had yet to get his credentials as a physician. Afterwards, Cowell would get her Vaginoplasty preformed by Gilles.

Dillon and Cowell were also lovers for several years! Making them the first recorded T4T couple along with the first trans man and trans woman to “fully transition”.

The explosion of trans identities in the early-2000s challenged my own assumptions, including the assumptions that once felt like challenges, and it wasn’t just the transfeminine spectrum that gave me hope in fluidity. I’d always believed that masculinity could only be the enemy, but then there were the trans fags who showed me something beyond the predetermined, a masculinity negotiated and transformed, a flamboyance through choosing a bodily language of one’s own making. A freedom, but not a freedom from accountability. The meanings of queer and trans are constantly shifting—this is part of the allure. At once identities that declare an end to borders, and identities that constantly build walls, challenging enough to derail conversations and at the same time empty enough to use in the name of a TV show or nonprofit. One problem with the politics of representation is that often it’s about who is represented, but not what. I’m not saying we don’t ever need an us and them. I know this is how many of us find one another, dance with the scars into arms that might hold not only to harm. I don’t think there always needs to be an invitation to join us, I don’t think this has to be the case, but I do think this should always be an option. I do think a world without borders is a dream we must hold onto—personally, politically, intimately, explosively, expressively.”

There is incredible beauty to the naming and claiming so often found in these worlds, but also there’s a frightening territorialism. I don’t want to become the cops, I want to end policing in all its forms. This is the dream that queer and trans worlds have helped me to imagine.”

The anthology is called Transgender Marxism, and its available in paperback, hardcover and as an ebook. I hope you find it inspiring: http://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341668/transgender-marxism/

"Jonny Sims bummed a fag off my ma" doesn't contain a slur, but "What are you, some kind of fag?" does.

"Queer studies", "the queer community" and "I'm queer"? Not a slur. Some bigot calling you a "dirty queer"? Slur.

"Be gay, do crimes" and "He's gay" ≠ slur, but "Ew, that's so gay" = slur.

it currently has less than half the signatures it needs to for the government to respond, and though the deadline to get them is in october, i don't know if we can leave things to chance.

please, please sign it if you are a uk resident. this is personally important to me and im sure to many other non-binary individuals here. if you don't live in the uk, reblogs to spread this are so appreciated.

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.

Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.

Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.

Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.

Picture from 1993:

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.

In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.

(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)

When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.

During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything. Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”  It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.

Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.