࿐ ࿔*:･ﾟmei ࿐ ࿔*:･ﾟ

like if you are marginalized it is in your own self-interest to interrogate and deconstruct the cultural narratives that position you as subnormal. this is what starts a lot of queer people on wanting to reform the world into something more compassionate and egalitarian.

Misogyny is not just prejudice experienced by a woman. It is not simply something that happens TO a woman. It has nothing to do with the woman. It’s about the misogynist.

Bigotry is not determined or defined by the target of that bigotry. The bigotry is stored in the bigot.

Misogynists will be misogynistic towards any person they associate with femininity, including cisgender men.

When a misogynist cis man tears another man down for liking something he thinks is girly, he is still being misogynistic.

A cis male coach telling his cis male student he runs like a girl is being misogynistic.

A cis woman punishing her son for wanting a “girl” toy or policing her boyfriend’s hygiene habits and interests for anything she considers emasculating, is being misogynistic!

When a woman gets in a car accident and is injured more severely because the safety testing on that car was only done using crash test dummies and models based on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.

When the medication she takes for her injuries doesn’t work right or has unexpected side effects because it was only tested on men, she’s experiencing misogyny.

When the tools she uses at work that are the wrong shape for her hands, and the jumpsuit that’s part of her uniform which she has to take off completely to use the bathroom, and all the spaces she moves through and everything within them are designed with the assumption that an average male body is the only body that matters— she is experiencing misogyny.

Misogyny is the belief that women are inherently inferior, and the systems and institutions built around that belief. It can be experienced by anyone, and anyone is capable of having misogynistic beliefs and doing misogynistic things.

Bigotry is not about the target. It’s about the bigot, and what the bigot believes, and the way those bigoted beliefs have shaped our world.

I don’t care what race gender or sexuality you are, you were raised with racist, sexist, homophobic beliefs. Because it’s literally impossible not to be.

I dont think I have ever let it affect my care. I hope I never have, and its my responsibility to keep interrogating my judgements and decisions towards my patients to make sure I never do.

Which infuriated this man who began an swear-filled rant about how I am in fucking America and I need to stop speaking fucking Mexican and he's a fucking American and that's why he speaks fucking English etc etc.

And I was like ok well that's a little too much smoke for me so my (white) manager came over because he was screaming at me about sending me back to Mexico if I was going to speak Mexican and he repeated to her that he just wanted a finely ground mush canned food for his megasophagus dog and she, also, said "oh so like a pate" and repeat screaming anti Mexican rant part 2.

There are many problems here including:

My manager was white Italian and very not Mexican or Latina at all.

I'm also not latino or Mexican.

We were speaking English.

The word we were using is a loanword from French but is considered part of the English language at least in the US.

The US has no official language.

I was born in Pennsylvania USA and not Mexico.

My manager was born in California USA and not Mexico.

We are both American citizens, born to American citizens.

This was when I lived in Maryland so that would have been... at the latest 2016 or very early 2017 but could have been earlier than that.

(ʘ‿ʘ✿) “what you say ‘bout me”

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.

spider-techno and man-in-the-chair phil

contribution for @voicesfortheblade 2026, prompted by Pyre on discord!

happy birthday...