So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.
The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.
This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.
It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.
Like, fuck off?
Fuck off.
I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.
And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like
Fucking, why would I ever.
Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?
I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.
I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.
The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.
So yeah.
Queer as in fuck you people in particular.
And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.
I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.
My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.
but it’s fuckign not.
We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.
And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.
Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?
You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”
They’re plus-size underwear. Put them on a plus-size model. The standard “we’re gonna show you a size 2 but trust us, they come in 3x too!” thing is bad enough, but this time they actually bothered to get a larger size of the product and then put it on a thin woman anyway for some reason.
This does nothing to demonstrate the cut or fit of the underwear i.e. what anyone shopping for clothes online needs to know before buying them. You’ve given plus-size people no information about your plus-size product – thus rendering your entire listing pretty much useless and making people take a shot in the dark – all because you don’t want to show a fat person in underwear.
If I’m buying plus-size underwear, it’s most likely because they are for me and I am a large person. Or possibly that I’m buying them as a gift. But if I’m choosing to buy underwear for another person, I probably have a relationship with that person that involves seeing them in said underwear. It’s not like I haven’t seen fat before. The fact that some people have more flesh is not offensive to me.
Stop marketing fat people clothing toward skinny people.
Showing how your product looks on the bodies that are going to be wearing it is more important than protecting the delicate sensibilities of judgmental fatphobes.
IF JEWS ARE SUBJECTED TO IDEOLOGICAL TESTS OTHER GROUPS AREN’T, THEN I DON’T WANT TO BE A PART OF YOUR REVOLUTION
Items once provided to prisoners, such as shoes, extra blankets and toilet paper, now often must be bought from the prison commissary, run by corporations such as Keefe Supply Co. These commissaries are, in effect, company stores where prices are exorbitant and the buyers are hostage. Companies such as GTL force prisoners to pay phone rates five or six times higher than those on the outside. JPay, a money transfer service for prisoners, imposes fees as high as 25 percent. The incarcerated are increasingly being charged for electricity and room and board. This bleeds the prisoners and their families of the little income they possess. Those who run out of money are forced to take out prison loans to buy medications, cover legal and medical fees and purchase commissary items such as soap and deodorant. Debt peonage is as common among prisoners as it is among the wider public. And when prisoners are released they often owe the state thousands of dollars in debt they incurred while locked up. When they can’t pay it back they are tossed back into prison. The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that 75 percent of released prisoners are rearrested within five years. This keeps the perpetual cycle of neoslavery lubricated.
A single mom from Detroit says Bank of America is holding literally “every single dime” she has to her name hostage. After receiving $50,000 in settlement money from a lawsuit regarding her younger brother’s death a teller at one of the bank’s branches took one look at her and decided it was suspicious that someone like her would have this kind of money. Assuming something fishy had to be going on, he flagged her account for fraud, which resulted in her account being frozen.
The $50,000 was wired directly into her account with Bank of America on May 20. There was an initial two-hour hold placed on the funds until everything could be verified, but then she was told she would have full access to her money. Over the next several days she was able to make substantial withdrawals from her account with no problems.
Then on May 24, Anderson totaled her car. She went to a different branch of Bank of America to withdraw $5,000 from her account so that she could purchase a new vehicle. But the teller that waited on her decided there was no way someone like her should have money like that.
The guy behind the counter started asking me where did I get the money from, and a bunch of questions” she recalled. “And I told him, I feel that’s none of his business, so I’m going to go to another branch where I feel more comfortable.”
When Anderson got to a different branch she found out that her account had been frozen, meaning all the money she has is now off-limits. When she accused the bank of discrimination she was told to leave.
I feel like you guys are discriminating against me; is it because I’m black?’ And then … she told me to leave out the back because I was upset,” Anderson said she asked the staff at the bank. “Yes, I was [upset]. I was mad because these are my funds. Why can’t I receive my funds?”
Anderson says she has not been able to access any of her funds since that day. Her rent is due and without a car, she can’t even get to work. The bank has told her nothing about the status of her account..
We’ve frozen the customer’s account under the terms of our Deposit Agreement and Disclosures,” the bank statement explained. “In the agreement, if at any time we believe a customers’ account may be subject to irregular, unauthorized, fraudulent or illegal activity, we may, in our discretion, freeze the funds in the account and in other accounts they maintain with us, without any liability to the customer, until we are able to complete our investigation of the account and transactions.”
The Patriot Act of 2001 gives bank employees the leeway to use their discretion to freeze any accounts that they suspect of suspicious activity. For example, a single black mother who isn’t poverty-stricken. Clearly suspicious.
I feel like my money is being held hostage. Every single dime is tied up in that bank,”Anderson said. “I thought I was being safe putting money in the bank, but it seems I’m safer putting it under my mattress.”
Anderson said she was told by the bank that it could take up to a year for the investigation to be completed and for access to her funds to be restored.
Thoughtfulfangirling 