Erm...I like tea. Rum too. Oh, and science and stuff, Psychology post-grad. Aaaaand women. Yorkshire-Scot. XX by detour. Former music educator, former piercer and tattoo artist in the making (not anymore), occasionally still do music but now for fun. If I could dance I'd never stop moving, but I can't so I behave like a potato. Selfies are usually tagged as 'me' or 'grenadeface'.
Every mother with trans children should take Cher as an example.
ok i love her but lets not give brownie points because she called him her son. thats like. minimum requirement for a decent human being.
Ok, you know what? No. Brownie points to Cher.
She publicly announced her love and acceptance of her SON and yeah some people would call that “the minimum requirement” of decency, but as someone whose mother gushes about her acceptance in private and sometimes uses gender neutral terms for me (not the male ones I prefer) but aggressively misgenders me in public to keep things from being “awkward”, cher’s public acknowledgement and expression of her love and acceptance for her son is a big deal.
Yes this SHOULD BE the bare minimum of parental decency, but right now it’s not and I’m glad to see Chaz and Cher showing the world that this is the way things are supposed to be.
What is up with the idea that we shouldn’t acknowledge when people do something good/nice/etc. because “everyone should be doing that anyway”? It is BY acknowledging the things we see as good that we tell others how we see the world and enforce what we consider proper behavior. There is literally never a time when it doesn’t make sense to acknowledge something positive. And acknowledging something positive does NOT make some sort of blanket statement about the person like they can do no wrong either. We can acknowledge a positive, and also criticize a negative; there is no zero-sum game here.
Reinforcing good behavior is just as important, in fact more important, than criticizing bad behavior when it comes to making a change. This is true of training pets, children, and cis people.
Also of note: a little history on Chaz Bono and his mom.
Back when Chaz was still presenting as his AGAB, he came out as a lesbian. This was in….I’m gonna say 1990? 1991? I don’t remember exactly. A point in time where that was Really A Terrible Fucking Thing, is the point here.
Cher freaked right the fuck out.
And her fan base basically went “you’re a gay icon and you’re out here doing this? For fucking shame, Cher.”
And it kind of took her aback, and she shut up, and when we heard her talk about it again it was “yeah it was hard to accept but…” which is considered gross now but was pretty astonishing in a world where Ellen DeGeneres couldn’t yet come out of the closet.
Skip ahead to the early 2010s, when Chaz went “so, um. Actually? Not a lesbian. I’m a straight man.” Again: at this point, mainstream trans activism wasn’t a thing. This was as wild a thing to do as when he came out as a lesbian.
AND CHER SHUT RIGHT THE FUCK UP.
The first time she said anything about it at all was like six months later, and it was something along the lines of “well I’ve been using ‘she’ for over 40 years so sometimes I forget but I’ve really been working on it because it makes my son happy to know he’s my son.” And to the best of my knowledge, she’s only ever had a single public slip-up, and it was at a point where she was using Chaz’s deadname in a story about his childhood. Someone told her that’s not a good thing to do AND SHE NEVER DID IT AGAIN.
Cher isn’t just out here doing the right thing. Cher is out here LEARNING the right thing. You think she spent those six months sulking? You don’t know Cher very well. I’d bet a nickel she spent those six months finding accessible options (yes, Cher is disabled, surprise) for every GLAAD publication she could get her hands on.
She is a gold standard of activism. “I fucked up once, it was a learning experience, I’m going to not do that again and show how to not do that.”
This character in this painting is simultaneously beautiful and menacing, but if I saw them in a social setting I might try to talk to them. That is unless their only way if communication was via high pitched bloodbourne style beast screams and the urge to either murder me, consume me, or assimilate me into their face.
So my MSc is almost over and I can pretty much unequivocally state I’m not a fan of my job. I’ve lived in this city since I was five and the UK looks set to implode. I could move home to Edinburgh before the nigh inevitable split from the union, or brave another English city. Hell I’m willing to emigrate anywhere that’ll have me too I think.
Suggestions folks? I’d preferably like somewhere liberal and with a greater chance of meeting WLWs than East Yorkshire :p
I remember some YouTuber tweeting like “TV shows are too political these days old shows like Fresh Prince didn’t have all this sjw bullshit” and like the first episode will and uncle phil talk very sternly about malcom x
If anything, sitcom shows even from Disney esp if they're black were bold in your face political about societal issues
I always find it kind of weird that matriarchal cultures in fiction are always “women fight and hunt, men stay home and care for the babies” because world-building-wise, it makes no sense
think about it. like, assuming that gender even works the same in this fantasy culture as it does in ours, with gender conflated with sex (because let’s be real, all of these stories assume that), men wouldn’t be the ones to make the babies, so why would they be the ones to care for the babies? why is fighting and hunting necessary for leadership?
writing a matriarchy this way is just lazy, because you’re just taking the patriarchy and just swapping the people in it, rather than actually swapping the culture. especially when there are so many other cool things you could explore. like, what if it’s not a swap of roles but of what society deems important?
maybe a matriarchy would have hunting and fighting be part of the man’s job, but undervalued. like taking the trash out or cleaning toilets: necessary, but gross, and not noble or interesting. maybe farming is now the most important thing, and is given a lot of spiritual and cultural weight.
how would law work? what crimes would exist, and what things would be considered too trivial to make illegal? who gets what property? why?
how would religion work? how would you mark time or the passage into adulthood? what would marriage look like? if bloodlines are through the mother, bastardy wouldn’t even be a concept - how does that work?
what qualities would be most important in a person? how would you define strength or leadership? what knowledge would be the most coveted and protected? what acts or roles are considered useless or degrading?
like, you can’t just take our current society and say you’re turning it on its head when you’re just regurgitating it wholesale. you have to really think about why things are the way they are and change that.
I just saw somebody express disappointment that the new Watch show is intended to be “modern and inclusive”
buddy. friend. pal. half the goddamn series is about Vimes unlearning his prejudices and the other half is about Vimes’s extreme dislike of people who abuse their power. if anything I’m willing to bet they’ll tone it down outof cowardice
Samuel Vimes is the embodiment of “always punch up, never down” and if you missed that I’m not even sure we read the same books
I reserve the right to bludgeon anyone who complains about this with hardcover copies of MonstrousRegiment and Snuff.
Anyone who complains about the show being inclusive is going to get a visit from the ghost of Terry Pratchett, who is going to beat the stuffing out of them
it is bold to assume those people ever cared or read Discworld series at all, all they really are is a bunch of right-wing bigots mad that the entertainment cares for more people than them now.
If the people getting mad at the mere thought of diversity had ever read the Discworld books they would come to the Uncomfortable Realisation that they are literally the Villains in most of them
