Posted 1 day ago

womenwhokickass:

Reina Gossett: Why she kicks ass

  • She joined the Sylvia Rivera Law Project in July 2010 as the membership coordinator, and staffs the newly created Movement Building Team, working to develop SRLP’s membership and community organizing work.
  • Formerly, she was the director of the Welfare Organizing Project at Queers For Economic Justice, and is a Soros Justice Fellow at Critical Resistance.
  • She also has numerous writing credits, including The Scholar & Feminist Online and Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex.

Have seen her present, she’s amazing! Her tumblr is thespiritwas.tumblr.com

Posted 2 days ago

Beautiful is such an ugly word.: The I don’t care list, an open letter to becoming allies

mtfbutches:

  • I don’t care about your feelings of confusion around my gender.

  • I don’t care about your armchair gender theory, where you tell me how we should “do away with gender” without proposing any solutions to existing oppressive structures.

  • I don’t care that your gay friend, or even your white trans man friend, used the term “tranny,” you don’t know the effect of that word and have no right to “reclaim” it.

  • I don’t care when you tell me about how you saw this really fucked up transphobic/transmisogynist thing. Don’t tell me, I know it exists and it’s pervasive. This applies to any intersection of oppression I may inhabit. What I want to hear is what you DID about it in that moment. Otherwise, see my previous lack of caring.

  • I don’t care about being your go-to “call out” person on all things trans*. If you are my ally, my friend, our relationship has to be more than me calling you out. Putting the onus on me to identify when I need to call you out is exactly the kind of pressure allies are supposed to relieve. Friends get angry with each other, and that is how friendship is tested and understanding is built.

  • I care about a lot of things, and that list is far longer. This list itself is in fact an expression of care, a care for myself. Be my ally, wholly and truly in that struggle.

[A/N: presented this as part of my allyship workshop at the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference. People seemed to enjoy it and someone asked me for a copy, so here it is for anyone else interested. -Brynn Cassidy (Cass)]

^ Just my brilliant roomie…

Posted 3 days ago

You don’t need someone who is oppressing you to validate your feelings about that violence.

You don’t need words or language so you can articulate in perfect cadence, in colonized English, in American Sign Language.

That feeling you have in your gut, in your spirit, in your third eye that tells you that it feels bad - that feeling that tells you this shit is racist/ableist/transphobic/sexist.

That feeling is enough, you are enough. Trust your struggle.

Kim Katrin Crosby (via riseabovethemadness)

(Source: queergiftedblack)

Posted 3 days ago

grimybear:

behind every successful man is hundreds of years of privilege

(Source: grimyboy)

Posted 3 days ago

villagevoice:

This week’s cover story, System Failure: The Collapse of Public Education:

From our high schools to CUNY, New York City’s numbers are in—and they are terrifying.

Posted 3 days ago
  1. Straight Person: But who pays for the date?
  2. Queer Person: No one. We dine-and-dash, cackling as we run out the door, flying away on our broomsticks as we flip everyone the bird. It's part of the Gay Agenda.
Posted 3 days ago

As I get older, as time goes by, I care less and less and less about whether someone can talk pretty. I care about action. At the end of the day, I don’t care how well you can articulate your perfectly punctuated anti-oppressive political points, I don’t care how many buzzwords fall from your mouth, I don’t care if you name-drop a thousand acronyms or theorists – I care if you will show up. I care if you will fucking show up.

And I know that showing up is complicated when you struggle with whether or not you can get outta bed. Sometimes showing up means biking to a friend’s house with coconut water & ginger ale & Saltines when she has stomach flu. Sometimes it means sharing your leftover pain meds from your emergency root canal when a friend has a pain spike. Sometimes it means making soup in a friend’s kitchen, stocking his fridge & freezer, blowing him a kiss across his bedroom & miming tucking him up under his sheets, because you can’t actually tuck him in or kiss him good-bye, because your own immune system is fragile enough as it is. And sometimes it means texting a little emoticon heart from your own sick bed, where you are laid up with a shoulder that aches so bad when the weather gets damp (which is a lot in San Francisco), or a stomach that can’t digest a fucking thing, or clogged-up sinuses, or a throat on fire, or a wet raspy cough. Sometimes it just means saying Honey, I love you. Honey, my sick heart reaches out to your sick heart. Honey, I wish I could be there, and I can’t, but I can do this. You mean the world to me. Sister. Brother. Love.

Posted 3 days ago
If social revolution comes to America, it will not come from New York, San Francisco or other cities where the middle class has been obliterated or is struggling to survive. It will come from St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, New Orleans — cities where you can afford to fail. When success is a stranglehold, true freedom is failure. The freedom to fail is the freedom to innovate, to experiment, to challenge.

Fear inhibits innovation. In expensive cities, people live in constant fear. A small wrong move can upend everything, so they conform, terrified of losing their jobs, apartments, health insurance. They conform intellectually, and they conform in behavior. They cling to a career ladder with a drop-off to hell. I don’t judge them. People do what they need to do to survive. But when survival is an aspiration, society has failed.

Posted 3 days ago

juliosalgado83:

queerdesi:

yosimar:

@juliosalgado83 is making me famous in this billboard in the mission. Go check it out! #undocuqueer #undocumented

Me with other much more fabulous people. 

If you find yourself in San Francisco this month, go check out this billboard I designed. It was a collab with some fabulous undocuqueers and Galeria de la Raza. The billboard is in the corner of Bryant and 24th in the Mission District. It’s only up for the month of June, so go now!

Posted 3 days ago

woc-resist:

SVES!!!!!

i don’t know what SVES is but i love everything else going on in this picture

(Source: prunellavulgaris)