end-otw-racism

#Vote to End OTW Racism

A Call To Action

Earlier this week the OTW responded to our previous action and reaffirmed their commitment towards combating and preventing racism within its platforms.

They also thanked us for working to keep holding them accountable to their goals and we intend to keep doing so.

To that end, Fandom Against OTW Racism is calling for our Second Action!! This action is centered around the upcoming Board Elections set for August 11-14. We want to encourage everyone who can to participate in the election process and spread the word far and wide about these elections!

Currently, 4 of the 7 Board positions are up for election, which is a majority. Now is the time to get involved. In light of multiple accounts coming forth about the state of the organization, it is clear that fundamental changes need to happen – and those can only happen with a shift in leadership, from what we currently have to one that is capable of supporting and implementing those much-needed changes.

Please join us in calling upon our fellow fans to vote to make things better for all of us!

How to get involved:

With four Board Seats open, now is the perfect time to act and make this issue a key component of this election to select people who demonstrate a commitment to combating racism in our fannish spaces. So if you can, please plan to vote this election cycle!!

If you already are a member, use your voice and Vote. If you have donated in any of the fundraising drives for AO3 in the last year, you are likely eligible. You can check your eligibility status here by selecting “Is my membership current/Am I eligible to vote?”
If you are not currently a member or eligible, consider donating $10.00 so that you can gain membership in OTW and be able to vote. In order to vote your donation must be received by June 30th.
When donating you can add ‘End OTW Racism’ to the ‘In Honor Of’ field if you feel comfortable doing so.
If you donate, ensure you select the yes to the ‘Do you want to be an OTW member?’ question

image of text that reads “Do you want to be an OTW member? ($10 minimum donation)” with two radio buttons to select from with the choices of “Yes” or “No”

[alt text: image of text that reads “Do you want to be an OTW member? ($10 minimum donation)” with two radio buttons to select from with the choices of “Yes” or “No”]

We understand that many people may not be comfortable doing so or may be unable to and that is perfectly fine! You are under no obligation to spend any money and we do not want to pressure anyone into doing so. There are plenty other ways to get the word out to encourage others to vote as well as continue to show support for this issue.

Other ways to get involved:

When posting a new fanwork between now and August 14, add ‘Vote to End OTW Racism’ to your title and provide a link to the End OTW Racism blog in your top Author’s Note. Reminder: New fanworks participating in the action are always welcome to join our AO3 collection.
For those who may not be creating works or who use AO3 just for commenting/ kudosing, create a Pseud named Vote To End OTW Racism. AO3 will automatically append your default name at the end. So it would look like “Vote To End OTW Racism (Your Name)
Add a link back to this call to action on your profile page, for anyone clicking on your name to see.
Update your pfps/avatars/user icons across social media
Participate in the upcoming Board Meeting between now and the election (August 11-14). The next Board Meeting is scheduled for July 2 and we will post an explainer about how to participate soon!
Send a letter to the Board encouraging them to be more transparent and to better advertise their Board Meetings. (credit to Punk who allowed us to utilize their work for this template)
Submit questions during the Q&A period with the Board Nominees. (We will post about this closer to election time)
Follow us on Tumblr, Twitter or Dreamwidth as we will be reviewing Board Candidates through the lens of our goals and providing more information on how to be involved over the election period.

Pinned Post

mumble-muse

dimir-charmer

Girls will be like Idk why im so unproductive recently and then you ask whats going on in their life and they list eight lifestopping crisies and then say 'yeah but i should be fine :/ '

:') mental health

gremlinbehaviour

snowy2989

They are not as high-profile as the WGA, but I would like to bring everyone's attention to the imminent strike action by thousands of hotel workers in Los Angeles. They are set to go on strike tomorrow, July 1st, 2023.

More than 15,000 hotel workers are seeking higher pay, better benefits, and working conditions. This includes an across-the-board $5 an hour raise, as well as affordable healthcare and better pensions. They also are seeking a ban on the use of E-Verify, which is used to deny employment to undocumented workers and workers involved with the criminal justice system. You can follow what is happening at their Twitter.

gremlinbehaviour

spoonietimelordy

Pls do not reblog anything with the old disability pride flag, it does cause seizure and migraines, please use the new one which was created by the same person with the feedbacks of many other disabled people.

This is the safe one:

Dont use the zigzag one, your making disabled space inaccessible for a part of the community.

capricorn-0mnikorn

[Image description: a “Straight Diagonal” version of the Disability Pride Flag: A charcoal grey flag with a diagonal band from the top left to bottom right corner, made up of five parallel stripes in red, gold, pale grey, blue, and green Description ends]

P.S.: I’ve answered this question in the comments, but not everyone reads those, so:

The reason (as it was explained to me) that the old design caused light sensitive seizures is that as you scrolled past it on your screen (phone, desktop, whatever) the moving, alternating, bright and dark stripes hits your retina and is registered by your brain as if it were flashing lights (and the zigzag shape exaggerated that). That’s why we took out the black stripes between the colors, and reduced the contrast.

This is also your friendly reminder to tag any GIF or video which has flashing lights (or flickering effects) you post with #Flashing, so people who are sensitive to that can block them.

capricorn-0mnikorn

Reblogging the version with the P.S.

looked up the old one and JFC yeah thats just an artistic rendition of a migraine aura disability

gremlinbehaviour

katrafiy

I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women's March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women's Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.

In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they're a "third gender." They're denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn't decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.

Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, "neither male nor female," and often contrast them (a "legitimate" third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).

There's a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture's trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called "women."

Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.

The transmisogynist will say, "Yes, but we can't ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren't trans women, they're a third gender. Now let's worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso."

In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.

"But Kat, you're not Indian or Pakistani. You're not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?"

Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender "femminiello"? It's the term my moniker "The Femme in Yellow" is derived from, and yes, I'm Neapolitan. Shut up.

I'm going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.

They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you'd bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?

Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don't really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.

And if you're sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.

And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.

That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.

So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.

If we translate it, people will say we're artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it's not cis people, that's fine). If we don't, what we're implying, is that this concept doesn't exist in the target language, which suggests that it's fundamentally a different thing

A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!

And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.

The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women's clothing, take women's names, fulfill women's social roles, use women's language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.

This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.

And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It's why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.

And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.

To be blunt, I'm not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I'm not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.

I'm interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I'm a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.

There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don't have. That's not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.

I think that's something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular "third gender" label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.

You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.

There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.

The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I've cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.

The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I'm interested in the former.

I guess what I'm really trying to say with all of this is that we're all family y'all.

interesting!! lgbtq transphobia

gremlinbehaviour

eviltransnecoarc

We have GOT to stop being assholes to people with receding and balding hairlines. There's not a single person that it can't affect. It affects trans men, particularly on hormones, it affects trans women, particularly those not on hormones, it affects people with endocrine issues, something that's becoming more prevalent and common, and it can affect people without a particular cause, including cis women. It's a normal part of being human and we NEED to stop dehumanizing and humiliating ppl for it

androgynuisance

My bf started losing his hair in his early 20s and the effect it's had on him is devastating.

He's an actor and he was dropped by his agent after he stopped hiding his hair loss. The roles he was cast in narrowed and shifted from more heroic characters to villains, and eventually he became so miserable about it that he stopped going to auditions altogether.

He used to enjoy dyeing his hair bright colours, and he lost that means of self expression. It alienated him from his own appearance, which knocked him back in coming out and exploring his queerness. The way he talks about it often feels dysmorphic. He says shaving makes him feel like he's "rotting" - like he's "scraping the mold off [his] head".

I've seen drunk people and teenagers yell at him in the street and mock his baldness. I've seen people come up to him and slap his head or touch it without asking for permission. I've witnessed this behaviour from other trans people and women who I know would absolutely kick off if he took such a degrading or entitled attitude towards a part of their body, but seem to think it's OK to do it to him.

Since going bald people perceive him as more masculine. He feels people are more suspicious of him. Women are less likely to approach him. Folks are quicker to put him in a box or misread his behaviour as aggressive or threatening, when the reality is that he's neurodivergent and can't conform to rigid social norms.

Baldness is a heavily gendered characteristic. If someone is conventionally masculine enough and/or is protected by other intersecting powers and privileges (eg wealth) then baldness can reinforce their maleness and the harm to their social standing is minimised. But if their performance of maleness is complicated by something like queerness or disability, it creates a dissonance. They have what is perceived as a hypermasculine trait standing in sharp contrast with their refusal/failure to perform normative, idealised masculinity.

And that's how baldness is typically read - as failure. Especially when it exists outside of wealthy, successful, heterosexual masculinity but tbh even there too - just look at all the jokes about Jeff Bezos' baldness or Elon Musk getting hair plugs. It's similar to insulting Trump over his weight. Like yeah fuck those guys but all you're really doing is revealing to the fat and bald people in your life that you think their bodies are deserving of mockery.

And God help you if you're a bald woman. All women with receding hairlines are at a huge risk from transmisogyny.

Sorry for the essay. Baldness is absolutely a body neutrality issue. It's an ageism issue, and a trans issue, and I WISH there was a broader recognition of this.

gremlinbehaviour

joebidenfanclub

it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?

greenjudy

My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.

It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.

deathcomes4u

It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.

I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.

According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.

Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.

I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.

(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).

Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.

curlicuecal

A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)

The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”

More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.

magickedteacup

The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway

ineptshieldmaid

#my mom’s a historian #does a lot of research #one of the main takeaways from the census data of literally every US census since the beginning #is that the nuclear family has never been the actual norm #nobody really ever lived like that #and a lot don’t now #and it’s clearly artificial and not ideal for most people #every household in the census had at least a grandma #usually a cousin #some rando #someone living in the house who wasn’t mom or dad or kid #always someone #usually several someones #some uncles etc.#unmarried aunties #that sort of person #but often unrelated friends #we’ve never really lived alone #that’s not how families work #that’s not how humans work

tags by @bomberqueen17

solarcat

Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.

drtanner-sfw

It’s also super a capitalism thing.

With only two working-age people in the house, it’s very difficult to make ends meet without one of them (or increasingly, these days, both of them) working away the vast majority of their waking hours to earn enough money to support the household. The other person, if they aren’t also working similar hours, is there to support that working person, full time, with unpaid labour.

The end result of this is that nobody has any time or energy to spend together properly, and they just end up tired and miserable and shackled to their work, throwing money at their problems because it’s all they can do. It’s very easy to convince tired, miserable people to spend their money in the ways you want them to, and it’s also very easy to manipulate and oppress people who don’t have the energy or the means to fight for their rights. Convince a whole nation that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and you’ll be well away.

Death to the cancerous myth of the nuclear family.

yardsards

this is exactly the type of thing us aros and aces are referring to when we talk about amatonormativity

theadventureofhistorygirl

More than it falling out of fashion, for a long time it became to some extent illegal in many places in the US to live with other adults who were not somehow related to you.

This was done as a conservative measure to a) discourage unmarried people from cohabitating before marriage and b) cut down on “houses of ill repute”, which often featured a number of non-married adults living in one place. These were part of the same blue laws that limited things like alcohol sales. This was especially true in ordinanaces affecting leased rather than owned residences.

It’s only been in the last 15 years or so that we have started to see a lot of these ordinances get overturned. A combination of rising cost of living, housing shortages, and a shift in how folks view the world has led to these coming off the books.

people be normal challenge

gremlinbehaviour

phossyjaw

im expecting a lot of "pride month is over, now it's time for wrath month" posts. that's cool and all. but july is disability pride month.

pride month is when you're SUPPOSED to be angry. it's a celebration AND a riot. that was the best time to get angry. second best time is now. but it's not wrath month. let disabled people have this.

please get angry with us. please fight with us! we are both losing our rights, if we ever even had them to begin with. please don't talk over us, especially during our own pride month.

did you know over 10,000 people die a year while waiting to be told whether or not they can receive disability benefits?

did you know while being provided disability benefits, disabled people cannot have more than $2,000 total in their bank account? the average rent for an apartment in the united states, as of last month, is $1,995. per month.

while they want to kill queer people, they want to kill disabled people just as bad. please look out for your disabled friends and family. please look out for those of us who don't have friends and family. those of us who are out on the streets.