FACT: Lesbians can have safer sex, too.
“People get really irritated by mental illness. ‘Just fucking get it together! Suck it up, man!’ I had a breakdown, and a spiritual friend came to visit me in the psych ward. And they said, ‘You need to get out of here. Because this is the story you’re telling yourself. You know, Patch Adams has this great work-group camp where you can learn how to really celebrate life.’ It’s something people are so powerless over, and so often they want to make it your fault. It’s nobody’s fault. I started thinking of suicide when I was 10 years old—I can’t believe that that’s somebody’s fault. Like, ‘Oh, you’re just an attention getter.’ Mental illness isn’t seen as an illness, it’s seen as a choice…. I have a joke about how people don’t talk about mental illness the way they do other regular illnesses. ‘Well, apparently Jeff has cancer. Uh, I have cancer. We all have cancer. You go to chemotherapy you get it taken care of, am I right? You get back to work.’ Or: ‘I was dating this chick, and three months in, she tells me that she wears glasses, and she’s been wearing contact lenses all this time. She needs help seeing. I was like, listen, I’m not into all that Western medicine shit. If you want to see, then work at it. Figure out how not to be so myopic. You know?’” — Maria Bamford (via yeshairy)
(via fuckyeahlaughitoff)
“I always wanted genderqueer to unite me with other transgressive queers. Note that I said unite, not to find people exactly like me. People don’t get me, and that is okay. I am not holding my breath for a place where I do not have to explain myself. I am just working on creating a space where the explanation is welcome.” —
- Rocko Bulldagger - The End of Genderqueer
Published in Nobody Passes (2006)
Rocko explains a feeling I haven’t been able to pinpoint so far: why I am so uncomfortable with spaces where I am expected to get someone’s preferred pronouns right before I’ve been told what those preferred pronouns are.
My discomfort isn’t because I’m too lazy to read the signals of someone’s gender, but because I don’t want to be in a space where gender is expected to be self-explanatory or visible on the outside. I don’t like spaces where the number of possible genders is so limited that I am supposed to be able to recognize them through dress codes and first names.
I understand why you might like the privilege of being recognized as your chosen gender without explaining it, but alas, I refuse to make assumptions about your gender based on how you look, so you’re never going to get that from me.
[video]
- nobody unless they damn well want to now shut your mouth
(via lgbtlaughs)
“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” —
Barack Obama in an interview with ABC News (via nprfreshair)
Dear Obama, I see what you’re trying to do and I appreciate it. You’re trying to make things better while dealing with bigoted idiots and that’s hard. But please stop pointing out how bloody monogamous the same-sex couples you know are. You’re making it sound like it matters. When in fact it doesn’t. Polygamous childless couples that have kinky sex in dark rooms ever Saturday and Thursday deserve equal rights just as much as monogamous couples. And not just the right to get married, all rights. And they deserve your respect.
(via comebaaack)
[video]
FACT: Lesbians can have safer sex, too.
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender And Conformity
by Matt Bernstein Sycamore
“Nobody Passes is a collection of essays that confronts and challenges the very notion of belonging. By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. Nobody Passes explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of “passing.” In a pass/fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create.”
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I don’t often promote books on here, but when I do, I do so because they’re really f*cking amazing.
Ways to Save Money on Injectable Testosterone:
1) Ask your physician to write you a script for the 10mL vial at the 200mg/mL concentration. That effectively doubles the amount of testosterone you get (most guys are on the 100mg/mL concentration) and while you’ll foot more money up front, in the long run it saves you money. The price per milligram of testosterone is decreased - it’s like buying in bulk!
2) If you get your script filled at a local pharmacy, have them order you boxes of needles and syringes. You can buy them in packs of 100, 200, and up. This really is buying in bulk. I bought two year’s supplies worth for under $25 at a Walgreens. In many states, you do not need a prescription for syringes and needles.
3) If your insurance company does not cover your testosterone, consider getting your prescription filled at Strohecker’s Online Pharmacy, or another online pharmacy, rather than just getting it filled at your local pharmacy.
Ways to NOT Save Money on Injectable Testosterone:
1) Do NOT reuse your needles. This is dangerous and unhealthy. Use a fresh needle every time.
2) Do NOT buy your testosterone off the streets. This underground testosterone market is obviously not regulated by the FDA therefore you literally have no idea what you’re getting. Even if it may be cheaper (sometimes it isn’t!) the costs of such behavior is too high.
3) Do NOT alter your dose in order to try to stretch out your supply of T. You should take exactly what you are prescribed. No more, no less. Messing with your dose can mess with your hormones and cause health issues.
4) Do NOT push your testosterone levels beyond normal transition levels. This is very important to keep an eye on if you’re thinking of choosing advice (1). More testosterone will not help you transition faster and your body is likely to correct the overdose by transforming some of that testosterone into testosterone-blockers or female hormones. Taking too much testosterone can actually slow your transition and it’s a waste of money.
“I have a healthy range of fetishes, one of which is so unusual that I’ve never met anyone in ‘real life’ who shares it. Growing up with that sort of ‘dirty secret’ can be a lonely experience; but finding a whole sub-community of dedicated porn-makers who not only shared my kink, but actively celebrated it and acted out the same fantasies, helped me to realize I wasn’t some twisted freak. At least not for that reason. If porn can help kids realize that their urges are natural and healthy, that’s not a bad thing in my book.
The diversity of adult entertainment is so great that just talking about ‘porn’ as if it’s one big pink throbbing homogeneous mass is profoundly ignorant, whether its the subject of a campaign or a research question. For example, a paper by Michael Flood suggests “exposure to pornography helps to sustain young people’s adherence to sexist and unhealthy notions of sex and relationships,” but would we see the same impact from Maggie Mayhem’s feminist porn that we would from Playboy?
Lumping the two together is like trying to ask, “do video games make people violent,” without bothering to differentiate between the Grand Theft Auto series and Pacman. It undermines research, but more seriously it can lead people to tackle the wrong problem. It could well be true, for example, that the majority of porn reinforces misogynistic attitudes, and that this could damage young children as a result; but if that’s the case then the problem is misogyny, not pornography, and it needs to be tackled wherever it appears, not just in the adult entertainment industry.”
— Porn panic! | Martin Robbins | The Lay Scientist | Science | guardian.co.uk (via sexisnottheenemy)
(via sexisnottheenemy)