sfreedram:

gatheringbones:

I don’t have the book anymore because I slipped it into the locker of my depressed mormon lesbian coworker on the last day of my retail job but it was that kate bornstein book about 101 reasons not to kill yourself and she had a whole section on how every gay and lesbian in history was betraying their assigned gender so utterly that they automatically became trans people and it’s one of those brilliant batshit things trans women say so often that drives the right people bugfuck nuts and I wish I had the full quote

“The next chapter of gender activism was written by the early gay rights activists. They tackled the law of gender that says loud and clear, ‘Real men love women, real women love men.’ 'No we don’t!’ cried the homosexuals.

And these pioneers transgressed a deeply rooted rule of gender. Lesbians and gays transgressed gender. Lesbians and gays are transgender. And they needed to band themselves together under some flag.

But it’s a terrifying thing to say, 'Hey, I’m a man who loves men, so maybe I’m not a real man!’

And it’s a terrifying thing to say, "I’m a woman who loves women, and so what if I’m not a real woman?”

People were even meaner about that kind of talk back in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than they are today. It was difficult enough to say the lesbian and gay stuff, and in most areas of the world, it still is. No one was ready to hear not-man, not-woman, So they called themselves lesbian women and gay men, and they said things like, 'We’re just like you.“

They named themselves after the system that had oppressed them for such a long time. By the simple act of naming themselves women and men, it seems, in Minnie Bruce Pratt’s words, that their imaginations were in thrall to the institutions that oppressed them.”

Kate Bornstein, Hello Cruel World.

johannestevans:

limor prang… if tain was the father of the obsidian order, prang was its mother… the IMPLICATIONS…

stephanidftba:

ciaran:

ciaran:

ciaran:

if we could read minds I still don’t think we’d understand them.

like I’ve spoken to people who think in images, who have to translate each thought into words before they communicate. and I think entirely in words, laid out across the void inside my head. my father’s thinking is 3d, concepts structured in ways that are incredibly difficult to translate into words. and how would that look to me, if I could see into it? how do I perceive a thought that my mind cannot contain by the nature of their construction?

we all speak a private language to ourselves and we are always translating so we can speak to each other…don’t touch me I’m emotional

tirlaeyn:

There has to be a way to win the game, or why are we even playing?

I can’t, I refuse, to believe that we are only fighting to maintain the balance. That isn’t good enough. Not. Good. Enough. If we aren’t making progress, if we aren’t capable of making progress, then we are all just rats on a wheel. Even if the shadow takes another shape and grows again, I want to be able to say we defeated this version. We won. Even only a little. If there’s a rule that says we can’t have ultimate good without ultimate evil, then someone made that rule. And that person is a fuckhead, because that’s not nature. Nature doesn’t say things like that. People do. And people are just fucked up apes playing god.