"Quick, strike a pose! To help celebrate #Pride month, we’re running a photo drive to the #WordPress Photo Directory and offering up some cash prizes as a bonus. The funding for the prizes are proudly powered by Queeromattic, the collection of queers within Automattic."
Pride Month is coming up. Don’t wait until the last minute to try and book a speaker for your event. (Our schedules fill up pretty fast in June.)
And if you are looking for a keynote speaker, presenter, or panelist for your #pride event who can speak on implicit bias, diversity, equity, and inclusion, policy, law, or growth— drop me a DM or email me for availability and pricing.
"Joker: Folie à Deux," Todd Phillips' sequel to his 2019 movie will not be out until October this year, but GQ says you can watch a better version today. "The People's Joker" is a crowdsourced DIY project from director-cowriter-star Vera Drew about her experiences as a trans woman in comedy, and it was released last week. Here's Jesse Hassenger's breakdown of the movie, which he says, "feels like a more sincere, fully-felt act of adaptation than several 'real' treatments of these characters."
TL;DR: I have launched my #BBS!
Find a suitable Telnet client (syncterm works reasonably well), or connect from your favorite retro machine with whichever serial-to-telnet contraption you might have. The address? Why, floppy.museum
of course! Or bbs.anduin.net, if you prefer. Welcome to the fabulous world of Bulletin Board Systems!
An important part of BBS history (as described in the fabulous documentary*) is how some of them became safe spaces for the LGBT community, allowing them to connect and, for many, discover that they were not alone. In my very tiny way, I want to honour that incredibly beautiful story and dedicate my BBS to those pioneers of on-line community building.
I also need to share a picture of the machine it's running on. The custom RAM with LEDs is provided by Siliconinsider (look them up on Tindie!), and it looks ... stunning.
The BBS is connected to #DOVE-Net, a message exchange with other BBSes around the world. I don't have a lot of files there yet (mostly old #OS/2 software), but I plan to add more in the coming weeks and months.
Connect and join the BBS community! Also, poke me if you have any problems - either here or on the BBS.
(Note: The Guest account is currently disabled due to .. can you imagine .. spamming!)
The American Library Association announced last month that book-banning attempts have reached record highs, and yesterday, it released a report detailing the most challenged books in the country. "Gender Queer: A Memoir" by Maia Kobabe tops the list, which is dominated by books about LGBTQ folk and people of color. “More and more, we’re seeing challenges that say, simply, ‘This book has a gay character,’ or, ‘This book deals with LGBTQ themes,’ even if it has no sexuality in it,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, the director of the ALA’s office for intellectual freedom, says. “We’re seeing those naked attacks on simply the visibility of and knowledge about LGBTQ lives and experiences.” Here's more from Smithsonian Magazine.
In 2007, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered the government to legally recognize a third gender category, audit laws to identify discriminatory ones, and explore recognition of same-sex relationships. Eight years later, a new constitution came into effect that has language specifically protecting LGBTQI people. So. Global Press Journal's Yam Kumari Kandal wonders, why are same-sex couples finding it so difficult to have their marriages recognized, and how did one couple, Adheep Pokhrel and Tobias Volz, break through the bureaucracy?
This year, the Pride celebration in my town is moving from June (when it's normally held) to October. Personally, I find this highly inappropriate. Everyone knows Pride goes before the Fall.
As lawmakers around the U.S. ban books, states enact legislation limiting how sexual orientation and gender identity are taught in schools, and companies reduce their DEI efforts, some are going the other way. Washington state's Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, has recently signed a law including a mandate for public schools to teach LGBTQ+ history, joining California, New Jersey, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada and Illinois, which have similar legislation. Here's more from NBC.
Chaidh ainmeachadh an-dè nach biodh cead aig luchd-obrach air am fastadh le Pàrlamaid na h-Alba tuilleadh lainneardan, prìneachan no bràistean a tha a’ nochdadh taic do ghluasadan sòisealta a chur air.
Chan eil an casg, a chaidh a chur an-gnìomh sa bhad, a’ buntainn do Bhuill-phàrlamaid no an luchd-obrach acasan.
Years ago, author, literary arts organizer and publisher Michelle Tea was hanging out with a fellow writer who was a nanny for a young boy, and noticed how the child was transfixed by the wigs in the window of Gypsy Rosalie's Wigs and Vintage in San Francisco. It was there that she had the germ of the idea for Drag Story Hour, which she launched in 2015 at the Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial branch of the San Francisco Public Library. For Alta Online, she talks about the evolution of the series, how she feels about right-wing attacks on it, and why she chose to launch in libraries. "Librarians have always been cool. They’ve always been pro-queer, pro-liberation, pro-freedom. Of course they’re going to love a drag queen reading to kids.”
"For some people, it comes from the inside: meditation; prayer; mantras of acceptance and empowerment; hormone replacement therapy. Others start on the outside: armoring themselves with a contour brush, biker boots, a navy blue hanky in the back pocket signaling they’re a bottom," writes Tommy Dorfman in her guest editor letter for Elle magazine. "No matter the avenue, the practice of affirmation — for ourselves and for others in the LBGTQ+ community — is a necessity, especially in a world where our existence and self-expression is too often violently and systemically oppressed." Here's a @Flipboard Storyboard with the collection she edited for Elle, including stories from Jake DuPree on the beauty of burlesque, Dua Saleh and Liv Hewson on being nonbinary in Hollywood, and ALOK on the power of queer comedy.
🏳️🌈 Tha eagraichean #HighlandPride air ainmeachadh gum bi iad a’ comharrachadh #Pròis2024 anns an Ògmhios / an Iuchar le sreath de thachartasan air feadh na #Gàidhealtachd. Nam measg thèid caismeachd-pròise na bliadhna seo a chumail 22na An t-Ògmhios ann an #InbhirNis.
Well, that essay grew in scope and has now become a three-parter! The first part will be about the history of the ideology known as gender binarism, the second part will be about the gay rights movement, and the third part will be my own analysis of how these issues are showing up in present day digital spaces.
PART ONE
We will begin with a couple of articles. The first article is here:
I highly encourage you to read this article, but it discusses how pre-colonial African societies held varying, highly flexible ideas about gender and gender norms. Femininity and masculinity were both quite fluid. However, Western colonialism purposefully destroyed these cultural practices in an attempt to homogenize these societies’ behavior to force them to become “civilized”. Violence, shaming, and criminalization were all used as tools to accomplish this. Today, modern African countries still bear the scars of that colonialism, with transmisia being just as common as it is in the West.
Once again, read it for more information, but this article examines various examples of how some indigenous societies in North America and Asia treasured gender fluidity. Not only did cultural practices include those who lived gender fluidity, they also emphasized the importance of such people in spirituality and storytelling. Despite resistance from these indigenous societies, Western colonialism marginalized these practices and attempted to repress these people as much as possible.
Both of these articles show us how Western colonialism, as well as white supremacist patriarchal ideals of masculinity and femininity as rigid and based in anatomy, were forced upon many indigenous peoples and ended up trampling their relatively flexible gender categories. This, in a nutshell, is what is meant when we discuss gender binarism. It is a Western ideology that forces white, “civilized” gender norms on the racial Other, who is depicted as savage, immoral, and deviant.
PART TWO
In this part, we will be looking at the origin of the gay rights movement through the lens of the involvement of two key trans people of color, Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.
Let’s do some reviewing. In this article you will find a brief summary of how both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera became friends and were closely involved with the burgeoning gay rights movement, including their presence at Stonewall and founding of S.T.A.R. :
You can see in this article a mention of how they experienced resistance within the more mainstream gay rights movement. We will expand on this in the next article:
This article is MUCH more in depth. If you’re only going to read one article from this post, make sure it’s this one. While difficult to summarize, I want to draw your attention to a few essential elements. First, the members of S.T.A.R. were predominantly working class and what we would refer to today as trans people of color. Second, they openly allied themselves with the Young Lords and the Black Panthers in a show of solidarity against white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism. Third, the white middle class mainstream gay movement was openly hostile to the members of S.T.A.R. due to that movement’s white supremacist attitudes and adherence to respectability politics, even going so far as to ban Sylvia Rivera from speaking at a Christopher Street Liberation Day in 1973, the first iteration of what eventually became Pride. (She spoke anyway, and you should watch the video, it’s quite stirring: https://vimeo.com/234353103)
Looking at these historical examples, we can see that the gay rights movement suffered immensely from its allegiance to white supremacy and assimilationism. These destructive allegiances fractured the movement, and we see the results today. We have achieved marriage equality (except for disabled folks), the pet issue of white middle class gays, and an ongoing trans genocide simultaneously. Trans people of color suffer the worst, and while we have since then elevated Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera as founding figures of Pride, the Pride parades of today are capitalist white supremacist celebrations of assimilationism with corporations and cops involved in almost every city. Pinkwashing and homonationalism run rampant.
To close part two, you can read more about Marsha P. Johnson here:
PART THREE
For part three, some analysis of my own. Today in the queer community, we are still grappling with the legacy of gender binarism and white supremacy. The fact of the matter is, you cannot dismantle the gender binary without dismantling white supremacy. If you read the history you will see: gender binarism comes from white supremacy and colonialism. The gay rights movement has largely failed to recognize this fact, and our efforts to, as Sylvia Rivera put it, fight for “Gay Power” have been limited and sabotaged by a stubborn adherence to white supremacy. The gay rights movement of the 70s should have heralded the vision, power, and passion of the members of S.T.A.R. and joined their efforts in coalition building, instead of marginalizing them because they were less palatable to the establishment. All because they were poor, not white, and less “polished” (read: civilized).
And we see the legacy of white supremacist Western colonialism even in our queer digital spaces today. For example, I and many other queer and trans BIPOC before me have been raising the alarm about white supremacy on the fediverse for years. We have been speaking at length about how our issues should be centered in digital activism as well. How has this call to action been received?
True to form, white queer and trans people have been extremely hostile to us, claiming that we are participating in transmisia in our efforts to make the fedi a safer space for everyone. To those people I have this to say: it is impossible for you to truly fight transmisia without divesting from white supremacy, the system that invented and forced transmisia on the world. You who fail to align your activism with the struggles of colonized peoples can only ever be agents of white supremacy and therefore agents of transmisia. Many of you will declare your allyship with the colonized and oppressed communities of color, but your actions prove the lie behind your words. False allyship to the colonized and oppressed is just another white supremacist and transmisic tool of destruction.
To close, I will be blunt and specific. For all of you who claim that Ro or WelshPixie are puppetmasters and that those of us working in solidarity with them are members of a cult or are deluded by their manipulations, I have this to say:
You do not have my permission to deny my fucking agency any longer. I am fully capable of speaking for myself as a Black nonbinary transfeminine person. I do not need you or anyone else to tell me how to think or what to believe. I have read the history and I can see the truth, plain as the nose on my face. Furthermore, it is my opinion that any person who examines the facts and is able to renounce their allegiance to white supremacy and gender binarism will believe as I do.
Shame on you for denying my agency! Shame on you for betraying your queer and trans comrades of color with your white supremacist and transmisic ways! Shame on you for participating in a mass disinformation and harassment campaign against those of us FIGHTING to be a part of this community!
Reading the history of colonialism, white supremacy, gender binarism and the gay rights movement and looking at what’s going on now, I have one question.
The largest ever nationwide survey of the transgender community, which surveyed more than 90,000 people, found that the overwhelming majority reported a vast improvement in life satisfaction after transitioning. This is in spite of trans people continuing to experience discrimination and mistreatment because of their gender identities and/or expressions. Here's more from NBC.
One of the perks of the NHL's ban on team-worn #Pride jerseys is that teams can go full artsy if they want to. And the Avs, apparently, want to. I would love one of these.