The Dragon Girl is Fat. She spends her day Sleeping on her Hoard of Feathers. They are worth Nothing and yet she is Cozy. The Knights of the Realm stop by her cave to Nap with her. They tell her Bedtime Stories about their Adventures and she Cooks their Food with her Fiery Breath. The Dragon Girl is Fat and she is Beloved for that.
is the dragon girl single,
Yeah, I mean, she’s in this open polyamerous thing but she doesn’t have like, a constant companion. She just has her knights who filter through, seeing each one a few times a year and spending some good quality time with them. It’s unconventional maybe, but it works for her, she’s not interested in settling down with someone and she prefers to see her life as a series of little adventures, and her beloved knights are each a collection of those adventures in and of themselves.
every couple of days someone makes a post on here that’s basically “watch out for those scamming palestinians! they’re really annoying and i don’t like them, which disproves the extensive vetting efforts, because my discomfort is the most important thing in the universe” and everyone in the reblogs is like “thank god someone finally said something! i knew it! i had an inclination in my heart that those palestinians are dirty scammers all along and i was waiting for someone to confirm it! and now that you said you find them annoying that finally confirms it! wait shit that sounds racist i mean uhhhh it’s so tragic that those scammers are taking advantage of a tragedy :( pretending to be real palestinians :( we all know real palestinians don’t know how to use the internet :( thank you for talking about these fakers :(” i hope you all die
of course you’re uncomfortable. you’d better be uncomfortable. seeing people desperately pleading for their lives trying to survive a genocide is heartbreaking. nobody should be comfortable seeing starving and injured children. none of this is normal. you’d rather believe it isn’t happening. but it is, no matter how much you want to pretend it isn’t.
you can look past your own discomfort and understand that taking action is more important, or if you absolutely can’t move past your discomfort, you can block and move on. but making posts telling everyone else to stay away and decrying people as scammers without evidence makes you scum.
Re the recent controversy: I’m not sure what’s going on with the recent switch to Anons. It doesn’t make sense (for anyone, legit or not) as a method to get around a block, because if somebody wants to block you, it’s better to let them block you than waste your time repeatedly messaging the same person who wants you blocked.
That aside, when it comes to Tumblr-based fundraising, @90-ghost continues to be a well-established Palestinian who has even been in the news as such, so that suggests people vetted by him will also indeed be Gazan. And at this point, I don’t think it’s practically possible for a Gazan to be a scammer, insofar as there are probably very few Gazans who don’t honestly need support at this juncture. Once you understand that, it becomes irrelevant to worry about the finer details. Either you wish to help, or you don’t. So either help, or at least don’t hinder.
Hindering, just to make yourself feel better for not helping, is cowardly and immoral. You could just quietly do nothing; that would be preferable to hindering.
Yes, there are scammers around too. That just means pay attention to vetting, that’s all. Find one or more source(s) you trust, and put your money where they direct it by speaking for people.
Like… Do you trust me? I’d expect my long-time mutuals to at least trust my character, if nothing else. That I am a decent person and all that and not a scammer.
If you trust me, and are in a financial position to help Gazans, then talk to me; I can connect you with such; my (Palestinian) friend Alaa has set up a grassroots project to pair donors with personally-vetted families in Gaza. I can personally speak for the difference it has made to various families. I hear from a lot of people, get regular photos and videos from there, etc.
What goes on in Gaza doesn’t have to be a big unknowable mystery if you’re ready to make actual human connections with people.
But I know… Some people would rather it be a big unknowable mystery, because that gets them off the hook when it comes to the shared moral responsibility of what we owe to each other as humans.
Last thing: “but I’m too poor to donate”, ok, then still please promote people’s fundraising efforts rather than try to shoot them down. At the very least, please don’t shoot them down.
hey ummmmm iz promise iz am not trying to start shit. but iz do think that, referring to drag queens as a group as men putting on dresses and pretending to be women, is assumptive and transphobic. the drag scene is filled with black trans women. drag queens are mour sisters unless they show themselves otherwise
I am not referring drag queens as a group that way. My point, which should have been very clear given even a surface-level reading of that post, much less a critical one, was that when people who are not trans women immediately assume that trans women and drag queens are interchangeable, or at the very least are two sides of the same coin, they are not talking about the history of drag as it relates to trans identity and presentation, nor are they talking about trans people participating in drag, they are talking about mainstream rupaul style drag, and they are absolutely associating the idea of men wearing costumes with transfemininity.
I am not anti-drag, not in the least. It’s not for me, but there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m glad that there’s a little bit of mainstream gender-fuckery going on, even at a shallow level, and I do understand the role drag plays in various queer communities, including among trans folks and trans women in particular. Hell, Marsha P. “First Brick At Stonewall” Johnson identified as a drag queen. It’s an art form with a lot of different presentations, from mocking gender roles and stereotypes to creating space for a very complicated form of self expression and self discovery.
I was not saying drag is bad, or evil, or should be ended. I was not saying that drag queens are, inherently, men pretending to be women. Indeed, I’d probably consider myself a fair bit safer in a crowd of drag queens then most others i could imagine, and that right there says a lot about their place in queer culture. What I’m saying is that it’s deeply frustrating and disheartening when media outlets (and yes, for all the people tagging dropout, i hear that) present drag-race style drag queens as equivalent to or a substitute for trans women, and when people outside my community see that and grow to relate the two as well. It’s frustrating when drag queens become peoples primary touchpoint for interacting with the idea of variable gender presentation. And it’s frustrating when people meet a trans woman and then say “Hey, I know what you are, I know of people like you, you’re like the people I see on tv, like the men I see who get dressed up like women, that’s you. That’s how I understand you.”
That is transphobia. It’s transphobia acting at a cultural level. and it sucks.
PLEASE dont forget the incredibly racialised aspect of transmisogynistic murders and violence i am begging yall to not forget the incredibly racialised aspect of transmisogynistic muders and violence. the trans women being murdered are most often black women! they are often sex workers! the murder problem exists at an intersection of yes transphobia and misogyny, but also racism and classism! transmisogynoir is a violent killer! PLEASE im begging yall to not forget the racialised nature of transmisogynistic murders and violence!!!
in addition, black people, obviously, are the most likely to face police violence and false imprisonment. sex workers even more so. black women in general are a historically degendered class. black people are more likely to be impoverished. black people are more likely to be discriminated against in so many aspects of life. black people are the first to get hurt and black people are the last to get listened to. remember to fight for black trans women when you are fighting for trans women.
(1) popular discussions on Body Image and misogyny are fundamentally flawed and myopic for treating a woman’s Poor Body Image as first and foremost an internal subjective pathology, to be overcome with self-help and self-esteem and Healthy Thinking, rather than primarily an objective external reality of misogynist punishment
when a woman foregoing makeup or shaving at work is reprimanded for Being Unprofessional; when she is treated even by other women as less competent at her job for her embodiment; when she is fired for being too visibly or audibly a trans woman; the actual problem she faces is not her “Poor Body Image”. she could have the most love for her own appearance in the world, not give a single fuck about stubble or skincare or visibly aging, and none of that self-love would save her job
yet the focus in popular discourses on Body Positivity, surgeries, medical transition, makeup, shaving, etc. is always on body image as an internal feeling, and specifically, a pathologized subjectivity that must be overcome with Good Vibes, Proper Feminist Consciousness toward her own body, Self-Esteem, and Health. again, none of these things would actually spare the transgressing woman from her punishment, though maybe a union could
I’ve focused on workplace coercion here because employment is such a clear and stark location where the external punishment comes to bear on women, but this reality of misogynist discrimination and mistreatment applies to every other sphere of our lives as well. failing to conform to a misogynist standard of comportment and embodiment results in women being overall treated as less competent and less worthy in social life and friendship, in intellectual and artistic pursuits, by family and friends and lovers and acquaintances and strangers
(2) locating this problem primarily in terms of a pathological body image obscures the reality of misogynist coercion. this is closer to Self-Help than it is to an actual engagement with misogyny
out of the many cloying posts (almost always by TME people) advising women that we can Just Not Wear Makeup Or Shave and there won’t really be consequences, that it really doesn’t matter, I’ve seen exactly one such post acknowledge in any form that women can be punished for these things. it was a disclaimer tacked onto the end acknowledging that women can lose our jobs or be subjected to transmisogynist harassment, and that we shouldn’t push ourselves into unsafe circumstances. I was genuinely shocked to see it even stated briefly for once
why is downplaying misogynist coercion the norm in these discussions? is downplaying misogyny Feminist? is it Feminist to see women navigating objective misogyny and effectively say “skill issue”?
(3) these discourses are outrageously paternalistic and pathologizing toward trans women specifically, even more so than they overwhelmingly already are for cis women
cis women can at least be pitied or allotted some level of acknowledged victimhood in their silly, misguided, unhealthy subjectivities, whereas trans women are largely chided for actively doing it to ourselves with our perverted and misogynist habits, such as Anime, Porn, and Generally Being Oversexed
these attributions are couched in a racist notion of anime as an especially perverted corrupting influence; a transmisogynist notion of trans women having pathological sexualities; and to be blunt, the transmisogynist canard of trans women as misogynist male pervert space-invaders who start wanting to be women because of little girls in anime and sexual degeneracy
with these unhealthy reference points assumed, trans women are then prescribed images of virtuous cis women as “healthy” “realistic” body image and transition reference points—our cis women relatives, cis women you see on the bus, cis women figures considered to be respectable ideals like Sigourney Weaver (who is very skinny btw), etc.—but notably, not other trans women
(4) to the extent that body image does exist as a squishy internal feeling, secondary to the misogynist external reality discussed in (1), the rhetorical omission of trans women from how trans women form such subjective Body Image betrays a lack of good-faith engagement with our lives and that process
the overwhelming majority of trans women I know were heartened to take the plunge on transitioning by seeing other trans women: other trans women’s selfies, other trans women in real life, other trans women’s transition timelines, other trans women being horny in our own skins, seeing and getting to know other trans women
meanwhile—as surprising as this may be to some people—most of us had actually seen a cis woman, and dare I say we even knew and interacted with cis women as people in our lives, prior to coming out to ourselves or transitioning. again, there is a disconnect between trans women and virtuous everyday Real Women [read: cis women] lurking in this framing
what do you mean 6 year olds cant have drugs? you really think kids don’t have as big of problems as adults? we deserve to get as fucked up as the rest of you. mama weed pwease. pwease mama. please can it have some weed mama
I was just acknowledging that it’s been one year since my mom’s passing in March, then my close friend died just a week ago. Next month is my mom’s birthday. Can life let me breathe?
It’s lesbian visibility week, can I please have some help? As a grieving black nb lesbian it’s been hard to cope with how things are changing both in my personal life and in the world. Id appreciate some love and support from y'all, thank you
(RNN) The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine mourns their martyr, comrade Khawla Barakat (32), a unit leader in the women’s organization at the Sheikh Radwan branch in West Gaza Governorate, who was martyred on Friday in the Halawa massacre (https://t.me/PalestineResist/76620?single) in Gaza City.
The DFLP pledges to Khawla and all martyrs to “continue on the path of comprehensive popular resistance and national unity, as the means to halt the ongoing genocide, thwart annexation and displacement projects, and achieve our people’s aspirations for freedom and independence.” They condemned the crime and renewed its pledge to continue the struggle and resistance until the end of the genocide, IOF withdrawal, reconstruction, and the liberation of land occupied since 1967.
