Thorns

Crime Against Nature Kids book about same sex and other "unnatural" relationships in nature. Not sue it works as a kids book but still interesting! Couldn't get it to download though.

When Depression is Contagious Captain Awkward post about how to draw boundaries and look after your own emotional well being when in a relationship with a depressed person.

Say hello to The Old Republic's gay planet All the same sex content in Bioware's Star Wars: The Old Republic MMMORPG is on one planet. Uh huh.

AMAZINGLY OFFENSIVE: On Stephen Hawking, Vader and Being More Machine Than Human Inspired me to make a More machine than man shirt because screw you, self obsessed technophiles.

Why I play violent video games Not the same reasons as me, but still an interesting read from another woman who likes violent video games (and no, not despite the violence)

The secret life of them: What it takes to shift class in Australia Quite different to my experience as an upwardly mobile child of downwardly mobile ex-middle class white people, but that's what you'd expect.

the positive side of socialism

Health Panics in Historical Perspective

“Oh, You Sexy Geek!”: “Geek Girls” and the Problem of Self-Objectification

I've been reading through Pervocracy, I particularly liked
Using my vagina about the validity of having unsexy sex if that's genuinely what you want.

From a different POV, You Need Help: Let's Talk About (Having More) Sex

Conservatives can be persuaded to care more about the environment, study finds

Multiple Sclerosis, Kepral’s Syndrome, and Why I’m Glad Thane Dies The importance of illness narratives with no magical cure.

Headline: Advocates hail first aged-care facilities for gays

Teaser: Gay rights advocates are hailing a Government decision to recognise the specific needs of elderly gay people, with three aged-care facilities being built specifically for gay and lesbian people currently in the works.

Halfway down the page: the Government is going to legislate and include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex older people in the Aged Care Act

(This is a quote, mind you, the journalist might well have left bisexual, transgender and intersex people out of the article altogether given the chance. Too confusing, you know. And let's not even start on other identities like being genderqueer...)

Anyway, the news itself is good. I was actually just discussing this with my mum, who eventually had to put her atheist parents into religious nursing homes because that's all she could find. Grandma complained that noone appreciated her pro same sex marriage stance :)

Also I have decided that this is my bisexuality icon until something better comes along.

So, I decided a couple of weeks ago that I identify as bi (or something along those lines) I see no reason to be in the closet about it should it come up in conversation, but couldn't see that it would that much, or that most people would care. Still, there was that niggling worry about the world suddenly turning into a magical wonderland of homophobia I'd never noticed before.
( And it is pretty magical )

Curently killing time on cams new iPad in the dentists surgery while he has a tooth extracted. (heh, it automatically capitalized iPad. Grr and put the z in capitalized)

Anyway, at the perth train station beforehand cam said "did you see that woman 'defending' marriage? Totally code for being anti gay marriage"

And sure enough a few moments later she approached us.

Her: are you in favor of marriage?
Me: I'm in favor of marriage for all people
Her: good! Then would you like to make a donation or come to our rally?
Me: that depends, are you in favor of marriage for same sex couples?
Her: ... No
Me: then you're not in favor of marriage.

And then we walked away, with her saying a bit belatedly "but marriage is between a man and a woman..."

(would have posted this to alias-sqbr but am logged in here and may have to get off at any minute)

EDIT: The more I think about this the more I worry it's derailing :( I shall leave it unlocked, of only so I can link to it the next time I am annoyed by a boundary policing straight person. But still, apologies.

So, I think homophobia and heterosexism are bad. I'm against any sort of oppression on principle, but I've also seen the terrible hurt these prejudices can cause, both in the wider world and to my LGBTQ friends in particular.

But without meaning to minimise or distract from that (because it is definitely more important), I was recently struck by the way in which a particular form of heterosexism hurts me as a straight woman as well.

Namely, the way that the impossible bind bisexual women are put into (any interest in the same sex-> lesbian! Any interest in the opposite sex-> straight!) also, in a less extreme way, erases the sexuality of those of us who have some same sex attraction but still identify as straight.

Thus, my rambling somewhat self-centered thoughts. This is definitely not a complete analysis of bi erasure! And the primary target of my ire here is boundary policing from straight people (including the little boundary policing straight person in my head), since I feel skeevy lecturing LGBT people about how they should be more inclusive of me. Only talking about women since that's where I've seen it play out, but a lot of this applies to men too¹.

PLEASE let me know if I'm being a straightsplaining jerk, and I apologise in advance if I am. I really hope not, but it's a complicated topic.

EDIT: And I am! Am in the process of editing based on people's criticisms, see the comments.

This is the conversation which inspired this post (and expresses pretty much everything I want to say much more succinctly :)), but is definitely not the first time I've encountered these ideas.
( Read more... )

My last post and related discussions have got me thinking about the ways in which fic in general, and my fic in particular, pokes at social justice issues, as well as what it is about f/f romance that pings for me in a particular way other types of stories don't.

And I've realised that what I really like reading is stories that not only highlight the inequalities in society, and show people from marginalised groups being awesome, but show them working together to overcome those inequalities.

Note: the rest of this post is self indulgent introspection. But I am curious to know if anyone else seeks out stories like this. I know people see it as a trope that SHOULD be written for sensible socially conscious reasons, but for me it's also a very strong entirely selfish personal preference, akin to my love of schmoopy m/f romance.
( Read more... )

As spiralsheep documents in In which Peter Tatchell gamed the system to suppress this academic paper, a paper Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the ‘War on Terror' critical of Islamophobia in the Western/European LGBT movement has been comprehensively censored by the UK gay leader Peter Tatchell who claims to have been libeled by it.

Afaict any factual errors are no worse than your usual critical article and I personally found it a very worthwhile read, so have followed sanguinity's request to host a copy:

• Webarchive of google's cache
  
• Scan of the chapter from the book as a pdf
  
• Spiral Sheep's post, has more information and some of the reactions to the piece
  

As a straight person I don't want to get too involved in poking at the GLBT movement, but there's a lot to take from it on the way white Western feminists use "defending the poor muslim women" as a reason to be Islamophobic.

People have gotten sick of the feminist site Feministing's ableism, from never talking about disability to letting anyone who calls out ableist comments/posts be dogpiled rather than supported. Here's a Feministing and Disability linkspam, with an open letter to sign as well as a selection of the responses to this at Feministing.

Personally I decided I didn't like Feministing because of their racism back before I got disabled and started noticing ableism more, but they're pretty popular and influential, I hope some good comes of all this.

And now some miscellaneous links.

• Another post by trouble, (WARNING) Take Back The Night has some truly disturbing stats about abuse of PWD. Jesus.
  
• The Open Letter To Those Without CFS/Fibro
  
• Students remember inaccurate history films seen in class as fact
  
• 
  Visibility Matters: The Woman Who Cried "Bisexual" There's a lot of creepy sexuality policing where bisexuals are told they're just straight people trying to sound cool or whatever. So I found it instructive to read about how it looks when someone really is pretending.
  
• Recent Migrants and Inclusion in the Australian Arts Scene: Part 1 - Education
  

This is a not a proper post, just stuff I will probably forget about by the time I get around to making an actual post unless I post it now.

Stargate Universe makes Dollhouse and Stargate Atlantis look unproblematic and awesome.

There have been several discussions about issues at Worldcon.

This has been making me think about Aussiecon. This post for example brings up the culture clash between American and Australian/British etc conceptions of race and how this can cause problems with stuff like a "People of Colour Meet & Greet" (beyond the problems they already have with this sort of thing in America(*))

It also made me seriously ponder getting a mobility scooter for Aussiecon. They sound convenient, and walking is hard!

An example of the way it's better to discuss this sort of thing in advance rather than just hoping things go ok is the fact that the location for Femmeconne, the local feminist con, is apparently full of stairs because it simply didn't occur to the organisers to ask about accessibility :/ (I don't do stairs, not unless it's a single flight I walk up once)

(*)I remember reading some posts about how white people got offended by and kept trying to invade the POC safe space at Wiscon but I can't find them now, closest I came was Wiscon Squee and Fail or Why I Still Don't Love Cons. But in Australia there's going to be all that plus cultural differences about what terms to use for POC/non-white people etc, plus the fact that afaict we're more inclined to ignore race as an Issue all together. I forsee Drama.

I've been watching season one of X-files (also Xena. At this rate I'll get into Battlestar around 2020) It's been pretty good.

But when I saw the title of this episode I thought "Oh man, this is not going to be good". And certainly the episode could be read as playing into trans panic and the whole "bisexual men will kill you with their deadly sex" AIDS thing (especially with this being from 93) On the plus side the gender-ambiguous character's gender-ambiguity wasn't played up as being extra-specially scary or weird, they were scary because they went around killing people, and the plot was actually kind of interesting (what we saw of it, a lot wasn't really explained), on the downside it was still "gender ambiguous character kills people with sex" which..yeah.

I don't know if anyone reading this will REMEMBER this episode but hey :)

Anyway, I had some not very deep spoilery thoughts:
( WARNING: maybe somewhat triggering? SPOILERS: For Gender Bender and Eve )

The main reason I avoided X-files at the time was that I was imaging Mulder being all smug and annoying and fey and always right, the way spiritual types-vs-skeptics tend to be in "Everything's real!" fictional settings. But he has a sense of humour about his own wierdness, and Scully is awesome and not stupidly skeptical when it makes no sense to be. And the episode before this Mulder was the skeptic because he just really disliked the psychic, huzzah.

As much as I'm enjoying the cool female characters in this and Xena it's a bit depressing that tv reached that in the 90s and still sucks overall. Every time I hit something in X-files that reminds me of Supernatural I keep expecting the women characters to die or be evil and they (mostly) don't and it's awesome. (Apologies to my Supernatural fan friends, I realise the show has a lot of unique things going for it, but for me and my tastes X-files is "Like Supernatural, but good". The fact I prefer sf to fantasy and het to incestuous slash probably helps)

I don't know, maybe the fact it's so old means I'm willing to cut it more slack.