amydentata:

theprophetlilith:

adventuresofcesium:

children should be exposed to what transgender means well before they’re exposed to transmisogynistic slurs and it’s so fucked up that that’s not always true

“BUT THEY’RE TOO YOUNG TO UNDERSTAND—”

No.

All it takes to start talking to children about transgender concepts is to say, “Many boys have penises and many girls have vaginas, but that’s not always true.“ How is that difficult?

You don’t have to get into every argument ever to refute biological essentialism and binarism. I’d rather you get into those arguments anyhow, but not to talk to a child.

Just start by challenging that one narrative, that insists all boys have penises and all women have vaginas. Call it a common but mistaken belief.

Then mention that not everyone is a boy or a girl, and there’s nothing wrong with that either.

And here’s the most important thing: Tell your child that it’s OK if they decide they’re not the gender everyone thinks they are, and that they can change their mind at any time, and you will still love them.

Do all that, and you’re making the world a better place.

It’s that easy.

Yes please.

The qualities that make up an abusive man are like the ingredients in a recipe: The basics are always present, but the relative amounts very greatly. One man may be so severely controlling that his partner can’t make a move without checking with him first, and yet, oddly, he contributes substantially to the domestic work and child care. Another man may allow his partner to come and go as she pleases, even accepting her friendships with men, but there is hell to pay if she fails to wait on him hand and foot, or if she makes the mistake of asking him to clean up after himself. Still other abusers are less overtly controlling and entitled than either of these men but mind-twisting in the severity of their manipulations.

The tactics and attitudes of abuser can vary from country to country, from ethnic group to ethnic group, from rich man to poor man. Abusers from each culture have their special areas of control or cruelty. Middle class white abusers, for example, tend to have strict rules about how a woman is allowed to argue. If she talks back to him, shows anger, or doesn’t shut up when she is told to, he is likely to make her pay. My clients from Latin American cultures typically permit their partners to be more forceful and “mouthy” in a conflict than my white clients but can be highly retaliatory if their partners give any attention to another male. Abusers select the pieces of turf they wish to stake out, influenced in those choices by their particular culture and background. Each woman who is involved with an abusive or controlling man has to deal with his unique blend of tactics and attitudes, his particular rhythm of good times and bad times, and his specific way of presenting to the outside world. No one should ever tell an abused woman, “I know just what you’re going through,” because the experience of each woman is different.

Viewed from another angle, however, abuse doesn’t vary that much. One man uses a little more of one ingredient and a little less of the other, but the overall flavor of the mistreatment has core similarities: assaults on the woman’s self-esteem, controlling behavior, undermining her independence, disrespect. Each abused woman has times of feeling that a riptide is dragging her under the sea, and she struggles for air. Confusion has been a part of the experience of almost every one of the hundreds abused women I have spoken with. Whether because of the abusers manipulativeness, his popularity, or simply the mind-bending contrast between his professions of love and his vicious psychological or physical assaults, every abused woman finds herself fighting to make sense of what is happening.

Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men (via internetangstar)

butterytoast:

yousaytheydontcare:

youarenotyou:

lalunanegrita:

i—am—in—repair:

We went over this sheet in group therapy last week.

this stuff is incredibly effective in my experience

i have seen this before but will reblog it whenever i see it

Very cool… I did this to stop having my anxiety physically manifest when it was very bad in high school. I imagined the anxiety as a light that would pass through my body as long as I didn’t tense against it…

Reblog if you would date someone non binary

moetjijweten:

I wonder if also cis/trans people who are binary will reblog this

michaelblume:

moynmoyn:

lilbijou:

can we please stop fucking temporarily (or permanently) making elevators inoperable to “encourage” ppl to take the stairs

like wtf am i supposed to do w this goddamn cane then, astral project to my destination?

 honestly companies/places that do that are scum

Seriously though…

holy shit is this a real thing this is the fucking worst thing ugh D:

Skinny Bitch Review: Einleitung (diesmal die des Buches)

Das Buch fängt schon gut an, und mit gut meine ich eigentlich alles andere als das:
„Haben Sie es satt, fett zu sein? Gut. Wenn Sie keinen Tag länger in Selbstmitleid baden wollen, sind Sie reif für die Skinny Bitch.“
Lassen wir mal die Annahme außer Acht, dass fett sein etwas ist, was man satt haben sollte, aber was hat es mit dem Selbstmitleid auf sich? Baden nach Meinung der Autorinnen etwa alle dicken Leute automatisch in Selbstmitleid?

Der restliche Absatz informiert mich darüber, dass ich nur meine „kleinen, grauen Zellen etwas anstrengen“ müsse, das ganz einfach sei und „Diäten, Zeitschriftenempfehlungen und Pharmawerbung“ uns so manipuliert haben, „dass wir schon gar nicht mehr wissen, was und wie wir für uns selbst denken sollen.“
Natürlich sind demnach alle dicken Leute, die abnehmen wollen und damit ihre liebe Mühe haben, automatisch gehirngewaschene, denkunfähige Dauermedienkonsument_innen, die die einfachsten Sachen nicht hinkriegen. Skinny Bitch dagegen verspricht mir die „reine Wahrheit übers Essen“, damit ich „intelligente, gut informierte Entscheidungen“ treffen und selbst bald eine „Skinny Bitch“ werden könne.

Wie jede anständige Diät behauptet auch Skinny Bitch, keine Diät, sondern ein Lebensstil zu sein, zu mehr Genuss und gesunden, entschlackten und energiegeladenen Gefühlen zu führen (was auch immer ein entschlacktes Gefühl sein mag). „Höchste Zeit, dass Sie wieder das Kommando über Ihren Körper übernehmen“, denn wie wir alle wissen sind dicke Leute völlig außer Kontrolle und werden ohne jede Selbstdisziplin nur von ihrem Appetit gesteuert. Aber laut Skinny Bitch können auch dicke Leute bald wieder „mit knackigem Po die Straßen entlangflanieren“ und „selbstbewusst Stringtangas tragen“.
Wer hat denn auch je von dicken Leuten gehört, die selbstbewusst Stringtangas tragen? Sollte es solche geben, so muss ihnen dringend jemand einreden, ihr Körper zeuge von mangelnder Intelligenz und Selbstkontrolle. (Sonst kauft am Ende niemand mehr Diät-, äh, Lebensstil-Bücher mehr.)

for future reference because i get this question a lot

pinebark:

“how do i know if i’m trans?”

you’re trans

And this is basically how I knew

Sales took off. Quinoa was, in marketing speak, the “miracle grain of the Andes”, a healthy, right-on, ethical addition to the meat avoider’s larder (no dead animals, just a crop that doesn’t feel pain). Consequently, the price shot up – it has tripled since 2006 – with more rarified black, red and “royal” types commanding particularly handsome premiums.

But there is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder. The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken. Outside the cities, and fuelled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture.

In fact, the quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there. It’s beginning to look like a cautionary tale of how a focus on exporting premium foods can damage the producer country’s food security. Feeding our apparently insatiable 365-day-a-year hunger for this luxury vegetable, Peru has also cornered the world market in asparagus. Result? In the arid Ica region where Peruvian asparagus production is concentrated, this thirsty export vegetable has depleted the water resources on which local people depend. NGOs report that asparagus labourers toil in sub-standard conditions and cannot afford to feed their children while fat cat exporters and foreign supermarkets cream off the profits. That’s the pedigree of all those bunches of pricy spears on supermarket shelves.

Soya, a foodstuff beloved of the vegan lobby as an alternative to dairy products, is another problematic import, one that drives environmental destruction [see footnote]. Embarrassingly, for those who portray it as a progressive alternative to planet-destroying meat, soya production is now one of the two main causes of deforestation in South America, along with cattle ranching, where vast expanses of forest and grassland have been felled to make way for huge plantations.

Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa? | Joanna Blythman | Comment is free | theguardian.com (via guerrillamamamedicine)

I don’t know about quinoa, but most of the soya produced worldwide is being used to feed animals (cows, mostly) raised for slaughter, so don’t you put this on our doorstep.

lookatthisfuckingoppressor:

cayenaleva:

slack-of-all-trades:

feministroosterteeth:

WARNING: THE ABOVE VIDEO CONTAINS EXTREME AMOUNTS OF ABLEISM, TRANSPHOBIA, HOMOPHOBIA, MISGENDERING, MAKING FUN OF TRIGGER WARNINGS AND MORE. PLEASE DO NOT CLICK IF YOU ARE TRIGGERED BY THESE THINGS. DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS.

In this video, the creator has basically gone through tumblr and found disabled people’s tumblr’s. He then posts screencaps and reads out their ‘about me’ and/or their posts and makes fun of them so that his followers on youtube can then go and harass these people (many of whom are vulnerable). THIS NEEDS TO BE STOPPED.

Please flag the video for ‘hateful or abusive content’ -> ‘abusing vulnerable individuals’. In the ‘additional details’, feel free to explain on your own, or use something like: ‘This video is targeting disabled people and encouraging harassment. The video takes screenshots of disabled users’ tumblr’s and targets them for harassment. Many victims are already receiving harassment, including minors and vulnerable adults.’

This is important, disabled tumblr users are being attacked. The video already has 35,000 hits and 2,300 likes. It needs to be taken down to prevent further abuse to disabled tumblr users who are featured in the video. Please report or signal boost if you can.

Criminey.

http://www.dailymotion.com/internetaristocrat
https://soundcloud.com/internetaristocrat

These videos are mirrored on multiple different sites. If you’re a soundcloud user or a dailymotion user it would be best to flag them in all three places, though dailymotion requires your full name and address(!) and says it will not process “incomplete reports”.

Get ‘em.

Fuck, this is vile.

(Source: http://lookatthisfuckingoppressor.tumblr.com/)

critical-bitz:

A Moral Inconsistency?

A friend of mine once told me that he thought he had observed a contradiction that applied to most vegetarians. As a near-vegan myself, I was interested to what he thought. He explained that vegetarians tend to be animal-lovers, and animal-lovers tend to own pets, but the owning of companion animals seems to go against the vegetarian (or at least, the vegan) philosophy, since those animals are being controlled and maybe exploited for human benefit. Even though my family owns two cats (one is skinny and orange and the other is pudgy and grey – they are basically the yin and yang of cats), I agreed with parts of this almost immediately, which might have surprised my friend a bit (because people are used to even the most legitimate criticism being met with some defensiveness).

I do think there’s an argument to be made against the keeping of pets (think caged birds, fish, and rodents), but to me, the reason why it was okay for my family to own cats was because they were from a shelter – that is, because there are so many unwanted cats in my area, if we hadn’t adopted ours, they probably would have been euthanized (or other cats would have been in their place). As such, I think it’s reasonable to argue that they are better off because we own them, and the fact that we enjoy owning them is just icing. But this sort of situation highlights an interesting moral question.

Animal-Lovers vs. Animal Welfare Enthusiasts

Lots of people identify as animal-lovers, probably nearly everyone who owns a pet, for instance. But far fewer people are broadly concerned with moral and philosophical issues around animal rights and animal cruelty, which I find a little confusing, since you’d think those things would go together. I believe the difference is a classic separation between intuition and conscious rational thought, which we see all the time in issues of critical thinking.

Animal-loving is an intuition that people either have or don’t have – for example, you can’t rationally persuade someone to become a ‘cat person’ (although you might be able to change their perspective by increasing their exposure to cats). Animal welfare enthusiasm is more likely to result from critical thinking and philosophy – in theory, you can persuade someone to change their position on animal rights, and many scholars have written argumentative papers on exactly that (e.g. Peter Singer). You can have an animal welfare enthusiast who isn’t an animal-lover (e.g. a person who becomes a vegetarian not because they love animals, but because they hate plants – HAHA! – or seriously, because they think it benefits society as a whole, not because they experience an emotional reaction to the idea of livestock being mistreated), and that’s fine, but I think animal-lovers who are not animal welfare enthusiasts can create all kinds of problems.

For instance, it is often these people who will facilitate ‘backyard-breeding’ (either on purpose, or by simply failing to spay or neuter their pet) because they find baby animals particularly appealing. I have no doubt that such people love their pets (and are unlikely to participate in overt physical abuse), but they don’t seem to realize that, in a world where there are already hundreds of unwanted pets at any given time in any sizable city, any kitten born takes up a ‘spot’ in a home which could have gone to another cat (who will probably be euthanized now). They also create the demand for specialized breeds and exotic pets, which can lead to all sorts of problems with capture, transport, caging, and breeding, such as medical issues for purebred and inbred animals who lack genetic diversity. In my opinion, it’s not particularly ethical to demand additional companion animals until the existing population is under control. Although most of us intuitively know that it’s wrong to mistreat an animal who is right in front of us, few of us seem to rationally acknowledge that our (seemingly innocent) actions can lead to animal cruelty indirectly.

Should Cats and Dogs Be Vegetarian?

This is a controversial question, but it fits right in with the contrast between animal-lovers and animal welfare enthusiasts. On average, cats and dogs are naturally more affectionate pets than herbivores like rabbits and birds – I think because being at the top of the food web and their lack of predators has left them with less genetic propensity to be skittish or timid. But for people who are both animal-lovers and animal welfare enthusiasts, it seems natural to want to reconcile their affection for cats and dogs with their desire to avoid causing cruelty to livestock animals (especially since the pet food industry may have even worse standards for treatment than the meat industry as a whole).

The reaction to this idea, from the general public, has been very negative (see this article and this post). Some of it is absolutely understandable, since there are examples of people nearly killing their pet by putting it on a vegan diet. To an animal-lover, this is unacceptable and ignorant, and vegans are already a disliked group, so you get plenty of comments about ‘forcing ideologies’ onto pets. I think it’s particularly easy for people to say “I’m a true animal-lover and would never do that to my pet” and use that to distance themselves from vegans and leave their own dietary choices with regards to mainstream meat unexamined.

But if we step into the shoes of animal welfare enthusiast, vegetarian diets for cats and dogs are a really important question. Doing some rough calculations, an average cat that dies from old age will, if it eats primarily meat (as opposed to pet food filler), need nearly the equivalent of 1 cow or 150 chickens worth of food over its lifetime. That number will be even higher for most dogs, especially the large ones. If we care about all intelligent animals (dogs, sheep, and especially pigs are all ranked pretty highly, although I can’t find a particularly authoritative source – see this list and this list, for instance), then it doesn’t make sense to see a cat as worth the sacrifice and potential mistreatment of several pigs (i.e. smart piggies). But the conclusion that we should never keep carnivorous pets is an uncomfortable one, because it implies that the world would be better off if all cats and dogs were euthanized immediately (because that would save the lives of many more chickens, sheep, pigs, and cows). That’s why I think it’s important to investigate the possibility of vegetarian diets for cats and dogs, rather than rejecting it outright as mere ideology.

I’ve done a cursory search for information on healthy vegetarian diets for cats and dogs (i.e. not like the diet that almost killed a kitten in the article I linked to), but most of the webpages that came up struck me as biased, and I wasn’t sure their information could really be trusted. I did, however, find a Scientific American article that, while short, seems to present some information on both sides of the debate (and clarifies that dogs may take to a vegetarian diet more easily than cats). I particularly like its conclusion, which strikes me as pretty reasonable: “The best approach may well be to give some of the non-meat supplements and/or foods a try. If your cat won’t eat them, or does not do well on them—take kitty to a veterinarian for a check-up to see—you can always go back to what you were feeding her before”. To me, it makes sense to experiment with this option (I wish there was more rigorous research on it, but it’s mostly just un-sourced lists and snarky gif-sets), and if it doesn’t work out, I think the unfortunate conclusion is that herbivorous pets are a more ethical choice than carnivorous ones.

The Problem At-Large (I made a pun – “at-large” – get it?)

I think the question of cat/dog vegetarianism is the most interesting dilemma between animal-lovers and animal welfare enthusiasts, but I also want to quickly point out some broader applications. When people oppose the seal hunt or the controlled euthanization of charismatic animals (e.g. see this article) primarily because it seems wrong (e.g. the gut reaction of animal-lovers), rather than because it’s actually problematic (e.g. the critical analysis of an animal welfare enthusiast), it can confuse the issue unnecessarily. It makes more sense to care about animals because they are intelligent (i.e. because they can experience more profound suffering that we can relate to) rather than because they are cute or interesting – the article above, for instance, observes that probably no one would have objected to the killing of Marius the giraffe if he were an antelope or wild pig instead.

In the end, that gut reaction that animal-lovers feel is not a bad thing (I’m an animal-lover and I feel it too), since it can often be the initial basis for animal welfare enthusiasm. But it’s important to make sure we don’t let it overtake rational and critical analysis. If you are an animal-lover, I think it the most consistent course of action is to genuinely consider some of the arguments from animal welfare enthusiasts (e.g. many vegetarians/vegans), rather than finding a way to paint them as ‘extremists’ or ‘bad guys’ who are not animal-lovers at all.

—Garrett