Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
why should trans actresses play trans women? this is why (x)
“
When you are hurting, there will always be people who find a way to make it about themselves. If you break your wrist, they’ll complain about a sprained ankle. If you are sad, they’re sadder. If you’re asking for help, they’ll demand more attention.
Here is a fact: I was in a hospital and sobbing into my palms when a woman approached me and asked why I was making so much noise and I managed to stutter that my best friend shot himself in the head and now he was 100% certified dead and she made this little grunt and had the nerve to tell me, “Well now you made me sad.”
When you get angry, there are going to be people who ask you to shut up and sit down, and they’re not going to do it nicely. Theirs are the faces that turn bright red before you have a chance to finish your sentence. They won’t ask you to explain yourself. They’ll be mad that you’re mad and that will be their whole reason alone.
Here is a fact: I was in an alleyway a few weeks ago, stroking my friend’s back as she vomited fourteen tequila shots. “I hate men,” she wheezed as her sides heaved, “I hate all of them.”
I braided her hair so it wouldn’t get caught in the mess. I didn’t correct her and reply that she does in fact love her father and her little brother too, that there are strangers she has yet to meet that will be better for her than any of her shitty ex-boyfriends, that half of our group of friends identifies as male - I could hear each of her bruises in those words and I didn’t ask her to soften the blow when she was trying to buff them out of her skin. She doesn’t hate all men. She never did.
She had the misfortune to be overheard by a drunk guy in an ill-fitting suit, a boy trying to look like a man and leering down my dress as he stormed towards us. “Fuck you, lady,” he said, “Fuck you. Not all men are evil, you know.”
“Thanks,” I told him dryly, pulling on her hand, trying to get her inside again, “See you.”
He followed us. Wouldn’t stop shouting. How dare she get mad. How dare she was hurting. “It’s hard for me too!” he yowled after us. “With fuckers like you, how’s a guy supposed to live?”
Here’s a fact: my father is Cuban and my genes repeat his. Once one of my teachers looked at my heritage and said, “Your skin doesn’t look dirty enough to be a Mexican.”
When my cheeks grew pink and my tongue dried up, someone else in the classroom stood up. “You can’t say that,” he said, “That’s fucking racist. We could report you for that.”
Our teacher turned vicious. “You wanna fail this class? Go ahead. Report me. I was joking. It’s my word against yours. I hate kids like you. You think you’ve got all the power - you don’t. I do.”
Later that kid and I became close friends and we skipped class to do anything else and the two of us were lying on our backs staring up at the sky and as we talked about that moment, he sighed, “I hate white people.” His girlfriend is white and so is his mom. I reached out until my fingers were resting in the warmth of his palm.
He spoke up each time our teacher said something shitty. He failed the class. I stayed silent. I got the A but I wish that I didn’t.
Here is a fact: I think gender is a social construct and people that want to tell others what defines it just haven’t done their homework. I personally happen to have the luck of the draw and am the same gender as my sex, which basically just means society leaves me alone about this one particular thing.
Until I met Alex, who said he hated cis people. My throat closed up. I’m not good at confrontation. I avoided him because I didn’t want to bother him.
One day I was going on a walk and I found him behind our school, bleeding out of the side of his mouth. The only thing I really know is how to patch people up. He winced when the antibacterial cream went across his new wounds. “I hate cis people,” he said weakly.
I looked at him and pushed his hair back from his head. “I understand why you do.”
Here is a fact: anger is a secondary emotion. Anger is how people stop themselves from hurting. Anger is how people stop themselves by empathizing.
It is easy for the drunken man to be mad at my friend. If he says “Hey, fuck you, lady,” he doesn’t have to worry about what’s so wrong about men.
It’s easy for my teacher to fail the kids who speak up. If we’re just smart-ass students, it’s not his fault we fuck up.
It’s easy for me to hate Alex for labeling me as dangerous when I’ve never hurt someone a day in my life. But I’m safe in my skin and his life is at risk just by going to the bathroom. I understand why he says things like that. I finally do.
There’s a difference between the spread of hatred and the frustration of people who are hurting. The thing is, when you are broken, there will always be someone who says “I’m worse, stop talking.” There will always be people who are mad you’re trying to steal the attention. There will always be people who get mad at the same time as you do - they hate being challenged. It changes the rules.
I say I hate all Mondays but my sister was born on one and she’s the greatest joy I have ever known. I say I hate brown but it’s really just the word and how it turns your mouth down - the colour is my hair and my eyes and my favorite sweater. I say I hate pineapple but I still try it again every Easter, just to see if it stings less this year. It’s okay to be sad when you hear someone generalize a group you’re in. But instead of assuming they’re evil and filled with hatred, maybe ask them why they think that way - who knows, you might just end up with a new and kind friend.
”
—
By telling the oppressed that their anger is unjustified, you allow the oppression to continue. I know it’s hard to stay calm. I know it’s scary. But you’re coming from the safe place and they aren’t. Just please … Try to be more understanding. /// r.i.d (via inkskinned)
So for all you feminists out their who think that all men should die, remember, you are not a feminist.
reblogging for the last comment
Yes
Legit question, I’m not trying to hate on feminists or anything. Why is it called feminist if they’re for equality?
That’s a very good question and thank you for asking so politely.
The word feminism was coined by Charles Fourier in 1837, a French philosopher who advocated for the emancipation of women because he believed society treated women as slaves. We weren’t allowed to vote, own anything, or work a real job. Women were ruled by their fathers/household patriarch until they married at which time they’d be under the rule of their husband. If a woman did not belong to male household she was shunned by society and had very little means to make money, most of them unsavory. You know the idiom “rule of thumb”? That comes from a running joke that started in the 1600s, and was still around in Fourier’s time, that said it was okay for a man to beat a woman with a stick as long as it wasn’t any thicker than his thumb.
The point of the word feminist, and the feminist movement, has never been to say that women are better than men. The point is that women and things associated with women have been given a lesser place in society and we want to bring those things up to a place of equality. The focus is on the feminine because that’s what’s being pushed down. However, focusing on the feminine does not mean we’re focusing only women. Men are belittled and called “less of a man” anytime they portray a trait that is associated with femininity. If women and the feminine were equal to men and masculinity then that wouldn’t happen. Feminism is about raising up things associated with females to have an equal place in society as the things associated with males. It’s called feminism, not equalism, because the focus is on raising up not tearing down. Equalism would suggest that male things need to come down to a lower level so that female things can meet it in the middle. That’s not the point. The point is to raise up the feminine so that it’s on the same playing field that the masculine is already on. We don’t want men to lower themselves, we just want them to make room for us.
An important thing to remember regarding feminism is that it’s not just the fight for women but the fight for FEMININE TRAITS to be as equally valued as masculine ones, and that helps every gender, no matter what.
In my class we have a worm day. If they promise to be gentle and not tug, they can hold one of those beautiful squiggly caretakers of dirt. The wonder they have for it is so real - and I say, did you know they have 5 hearts and love you with all of them. Then I say, “are you holding a boy worm or a girl worm” and they guess. They are all right, and they are all wrong, because worms are both. And I say that. I say, “they are just like people; sometimes not a boy or a girl but something in between, or sometimes they’re both on different days. And they still love you with all 5 hearts.”
“Cool,” says one kid. “I don’t want to be a boy, I want to be a girl sometimes.” And I say okay.
Children are taught fear. They are taught that the worms are gross. It isn’t until they’re a few years older than my class - up in 3rd or 4th grade - that they start shrieking at my little worm friends. They won’t play the silly games or sing the silly songs or even promise not to tug. A fourth grader hears my lesson about gender and says, “That’s so weird,” and suddenly I hear from the mouths of these beautiful children, “Yeah,” “this is weird,” “No, mine is a girl.”
It is not the 4th grader I blame. It is the person in her life that saw something beautiful and ruined it for her. It is the “put that down, it’s gross,” “you don’t want to get dirty” “there’s us and there’s them.” I want to show her - without the humble little blind noses of worms, we are nothing. We need them. Did you know if they grow a belt they’re over a year old! Spent tunnelling through the secrets of roots. I want to show her: it’s okay if tomorrow you feel like a boy or maybe something neither, something different that is entirely you.
But fear, once discovered, is not an easy stain to get out. We say, “What will we tell the children” and forget - the children already heard. They heard you snickering about the person down the street. They saw you talking to your friend about “those people”. And they internalize it, burrow it into them. We don’t tell the children, we model hatred until the children can’t hear you, can’t hear you declare, “do as I say, not as I do.”
Later the 4th grader goes home. “Ugh,” her mother says with a shudder, seeing my box, “I hate worms.”
“There’s a difference between challenging yourself and overwhelming yourself.”
— Something that took me too many years in school to realize (via alltherightnotes)
HIDDEN FIGURES is the incredible untold story of Katherine G. Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe)—brilliant African-American women working at NASA, who served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit, a stunning achievement that restored the nation’s confidence, turned around the Space Race, and galvanized the world. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.
Yep. I’m crying at work. These women are the reason I am where I am today.
They’re the reason, that when I told my daddy in 2nd grade that I was going to be an astronaut he didn’t laugh. He signed me up for space camp and flew with me to Atlanta and drove me to Hunstville so I could attend (sleeping on a friend of a friends couch in Birmingham til the week was over and he could pick me up). When he heard that the next shuttle launch would be the first time a female commander was in charge, he found a way to make sure we were at the launch of STS-93. He found a Civil Air Patrol squadron nearby and made sure that they taught me how to fly before I turned 16. When my highschool didn’t have a computer program past the basics, he went into my school every day for a month to talk to the principal and the computer teacher set up a computer for me in the back next to is so he could teach me Java and C++ in between other classes. That when I applied to the Air Force Academy and MIT (the only two colleges I applied for) his only complaint was that MIT would cost him money, so I better pick the AirForce. And when I picked MIT over the AirForce he found a way to pay for my tuition.
And that first spring when I got to call him and tell him I wouldn’t be coming home for the summer, I’d be working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, training Astronauts on the equipment I’d been helping to design at MIT. Well he didn’t say much. He just said, “Good.” and “When we moving you down there? You’re brother’s in San Antonio. We’ll fly in there and make him drive us over.” Like it was foretold. Like he knew it was going to happen.
I have over 20 spacecraft in LEO, the astronauts handle work I’ve done on a daily basis on the ISS, and this September my first interplanetary mission is launching because the black women that came first made a place in the space industry for me. And because my father (thanks to his own struggles to find space for a black man in aerospace engineering) didn’t for a second think I wouldn’t do what I told him I was going to do when I was a baby.
I’m gonna be a fucking wreck when I see this movie. And to think, that finally people will know what women like Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Annie Easley (fixed the Centaur energy equations and formed the basis of all modern rocketry), and Melba Roy (head of the Goddard computers for the first comm satellites) did for the American space industry. That there’s actually gonna be acknoledgment of the place black women have held at NASA since the very beginning.
I want people to destroy the idea that in a lesbian/gay relationship one has to be masculine and one has to be feminine in order to imitate heterosexuality.
icanhasyarn: In response to the person who talked about how to cope with an unattractive face, I recently came across this quote from Erin McKean that really resonated with me: "You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked 'female'."
Lmfao so when did black people come into the picture? Like I really wanna hear her logic on how and when black people came along.
Do me a favor. try and imagine some kind of hand, a spectral sort of hand that covers your hand and slowly guides your mouse towards the links above. Or, here, I’ll do you one better. Imagine that spectral hand typing these words, yes; I do mean the ones you’re reading right now.
see it? You got that okay? Now, imagine that spectral hand is urging you…to CLICK THAT LINK. I swear, and I know this sounds silly but…when you do that, your internet browser will open up an article for you to read. It’s written by Sheldon Creek doing a series on the volumes of The Image of the Black in Western Art, and it’s all about this painting:
And if this is getting to be too much for you, here’s an excerpt from this “article” I am asking you to consider reading:
The sketch most likely dates to the middle period of the artist’s
career, which coincided with the advent of a new phase in the
post-revolutionary history of France. In 1830 the monarchy was restored
after Napoleon was overthrown. The new leader, Louis-Philippe, sought to
balance the grudges still nursed by partisans of the old regime, the
republic, and the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. As a major part of his
ideological reorientation of the state, Louis-Philippe decided to
memorialize the history of French military exploits with a grand gallery
of paintings to be set up in the former royal palace of Versailles.
Vernet’s sketch may have some connection with this project. The sitter’s
uniform dates to the initial period of the French Revolution, a time
nearly 40 years earlier than the date of the sketch itself.
Ok, you got that?
You know what’s really cool? This guy^^^ might have been a relative of Alexandre Dumas, you know, the french guy? The one who wrote The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers? You know? One of the most famous French authors of the 19th century?
I could probably keep going all the way back to the beginning of time, but mine just ran out. And hey, no one can FORCE you to know things you just don’t FEEL LIKE KNOWING! Congrats, and have a nice life!
“No one can force you to know things you just don’t feel like knowing”
