alllll the reblogs

Men are not inherently Evil

Everyone has the capacity for evil

Transgender Men are men

Transgender Women are women

Excluding Cisgender Men from your spaces requires Transgender Men to out themselves if they want to engage (Same for Women)

Anyone can be Non-Binary, there is no "look" or requirement

Non-binary masculine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces, many are just treated as men and predators

Non-binary feminine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces without being seen as "Woman-Lite"

thing thats bad: aww

thing that has both genuinely amazing pieces of storytelling and abysmal dogshit slop both happening like entirely interchangably:

I have had to find a way to enjoy movies and television even when the script is not written for me and the only characters that look like me are peripheral to the main action because I would like to see more than a few movies in my lifetime. I have had to find a way to work in offices that don't see me as management material while still believing that there is a chance I can get a promotion anyway.

I've had to study history that erased my culture from its pages and know that it did not actually erase me. I've had to learn laws that weren't written to serve me. I've had to learn to write and appreciate words in a language that was forced on my ancestors.

Not only have things in America not been built for me; they have never been built for me. And although that has been physically, financially, politically, and psychologically disastrous for my community, I have come to see that it is also damaging to be led to believe that everything should be built for you and that anything built with the consideration of others is inherently harmful to you. It is harmful to the individual who believes it, and it is harmful to every system they interact with that is supposed to be built on coalition...

...But I must honestly ask: what exactly do people who aren't white men have that could be more inclusive of white men? ...All we have is our struggle. And yet we are told that our struggle for inclusion and equity - and are celebration of even symbolic steps towards them - is divisive and threatening to those who have far greater access to everything else than we can dream of.

If white men are finding that the overwhelmingly white-male-controlled system isn't meeting their needs, how did we end up being the problem?

Performative self-flagellation over being white is not a substitute for doing serious introspection about the ways you have been complicit in or rewarded by a white-supremacist society, nor doing the work to dismantle white supremacy.

You were the victim, and it wasn’t fair, but it’s over now. Nobody came to save you, and I’m sorry, but it’s too late for anyone to go back and do it different.

You’re suffering over something that cannot be resolved. You’re allowed to feel angry, or outraged, or betrayed, but there will eventually come a time that you don’t feel that so violently anymore, and you’re going to want to have something good left to go back to.

You can’t make anyone love you the way you need to be loved. That’s how a lot of good things end. Not with a clear sign, something blocking the road that says “do not proceed”, just a splitting of the path that’s still moving somewhat in the same direction.

You can’t fix them. Nothing you can do will fix them. And if they fix themselves, they can’t do it for you- they have to do it for themselves as well, because otherwise a day may come when they’re alone, and as long as they live, they are their only true constant. So you can support, and you can encourage, but the hardest part is up to them. And sometimes they can’t do it even with your help.

Sometimes letting go of someone feels like mourning at their funeral before they’ve died, and every time you see them after it’s like talking to a ghost that doesn’t know it’s dead. Sometimes that happens. You’ll both still wake up tomorrow anyways.

I understand that you’re afraid, and that you’re afraid for good reasons. And I understand that being brave isn’t as easy as just turning that fear off, and you would if you could in a heartbeat. But the thing is, as long as that fear is able to dictate your choices, it will have power over you. If you don’t believe you can try to fight it, if you accept that it will always be in charge, you let the frightening thing stay present in your life. It will exist as long as you stay paralyzed. And that sounds cruel, but it isn’t something anyone can fix for you.

The person you may let yourself become after experiencing the terrible thing may very well grow into a much bigger, much more terrible thing, and someday it will swallow the first terrible thing whole. And all that will be left is something far worse for someone else. And you will not be able to shrink it down by explaining where it came from, because terrible things that are dead and gone are never as terrible as terrible things that are alive right now in front of you.

If you read this whole thing and found yourself angry, if you thought to yourself ‘I know that, and it doesn’t help. I know that, and I’m still suffering. I know that, I’ve heard that, I’ve been told that before, over and over and over again, by people who aren’t listening who don’t understand, who don’t get it, and I’m still hurting, still tired, still in pain, still suffering, and this isn’t something a handful of pithy words from some asshole who isn’t here and present and walking in my shoes suffering what I’m suffering from can fix. I know all of this and it changes nothing”, I want you to know:

Yeah. That was me, too. I sat at the bottom of a miserable pit that I didn’t even dig while a bunch of detached, emotionally unavailable jackasses who weren’t helping even a little yelled all this down at me, like just saying it hard enough or making me hear it as though I wasn’t already a hundred percent aware and still hurting anyways would magically solve all my problems and it didn’t. Like I was some whiny little rat with a victim complex looking for the easy way out and not the survivor of something awful doing their goddamn best to keep going, scraping by on the skin of their fucking teeth.

Every single note on this list is something someone told me at the exact wrong time, that made me want to scream and cry and smash a goddamn brick over their head because ‘I already know that, you fucking asshole, and it doesn’t change anything, so fucking help me or piss the hell off.”

That’s why I wrote the list.

It’s everything I needed to know that I already knew, that only made me feel worse, and didn’t help me improve anything at all even a little bit until I experienced the exact right circumstances that made them click the exact right way and allowed me to say it to myself and feel only a sense of, “okay yeah, I get it now.”

It’s not something I would ever directly say to someone in a time of crisis, but it’s all stuff I learned and needed to learn while I was that person.

You get what I mean?

Black and rufous sengi - Rhynchocyon petersi

Aardvark - Orycterops afer

Western long-beaked echidna - Zaglossus bruijnii

Star-nosed mole - Condylura cristata

Giant anteater - Myrmecophaga tridactyla

Russian desman - Desmana moschata