If You Cannot Strike Today, Find Palestinian Music, Cook Palestinian Food, Read Books By Palestinian

I've been in a meme mood lately for some reason

"B-but Palestinians can get their freedom with peace not violence 🥺🥺" no. Screw your feelings. The armed resistance against colonizers and murderers is what will give Palestinians their freedom and what will eventually achieve real peace.

An enemy that bombs and uses white phosphorus against civilians doesn't know nor practice what your broken moral compass describes as "peace". Freedom was proven throughout history not to be achieved through kneeling and asking the oppressor to kindly stop. Freedom needs to be taken by force. Your little Utopian way of thinking doesn't work in the real world. Your feelings don't matter because you're not the one living under occupation. Your feelings don't matter because you're not one of the thousands of children who lost their limbs. You're not one of the children who became orphans due to this genocide. You're not the mother who lost her child to the carpet bombing. You're not the father carrying the remains of your child in plastic bags. You're not the newlywed woman who lost her husband. You're not the one at risk of either getting killed any second or losing your loved ones in the blink of an eye!

"Peace" is not really a thing you see during a live ethnic cleansing!

I am apparently working on becoming a local cryptid at the store. Talents include:

Monitoring the changing of the seasons via mozzarella

Predicting the weather by picking up a piece of cheese and mysteriously saying “oh, the storm is gonna be bigger than we thought...” just before thunder

Mind reading, e.g. “Can you help me find a cheese? It’s called, uh... [starts fishing out shopping list]” “Gruyere?” “...yes O_o”

A real conversation I think the Crows would have specifically to fuck with Kaz….

New pigeon: I’ve heard stories of Dirtyhands but it seems impossible that he could have done so much when he’s still so young. How does he do it?

Kaz: *quiet bc he’s a man a of mystery and theatrics*

Nina: bc he’s a fair man ❤️

Jesper: and the power of friendship ❤️

Wylan: and his acceptance of other people ❤️

Kaz: ?????

Inej: it’s true. He very easily got the best crew in Kerch. Why? He offered fair deals for us to join the crew - right Nina?

Nina: So generous. So kind. He sent a pretty girl to climb through my window too. How could I refuse?

Inej: He recognized the potential and skills of those more easily overlooked.

Wylan, putting a hand over his heart: I never thought anyone would take a merchant’s son seriously in the barrel. But Kaz really has an open heart. It made me so happy to make bombs for him.

Inej: and he knows how to treat those important to him.

Jesper: the man didn’t even kill me once. Could have. Should have. But there’s just too much love in his heart. It's to be expected. He's so close with his parents-

Pigeon: he is? Really?

Nina: haven't you heard? He honors his father daily-

Jesper: and, still lives with his mother-

Kaz: .....get out.

Nina: Inej didn't get her turn to say you're the bestest boyfriend in the whole wide world tho.

Inej, very seriously: the bestest.

*ungodly laughter as they get kicked out of the Crow Club*

they are monologuing

general ouyang

I really do adore the kind of character who would rather make everything worse than even try to fix the problem. Yeah man, fuck communicating with your friends, blow the place to hell!!!

Collective amnesia makes us feel as if there are no bi people in history. That is, until we see that bi people have been there all along, they’ve just been mislabeled or left out of the narrative. Bisexuality is the sexual and/or romantic attraction to multiple genders. Nestled within the term bisexual are other labels, including pansexual, omnisexual, and polysexual. Which term people use is almost entirely down to preference, although sometimes the choice is driven by an ahistorical misconception that the bi in bisexual reinforces a gender binary and excludes trans and nonbinary people.

One reason why we might “forget” bisexuals is because those who are attracted to people of multiple genders rarely call themselves bi. Historically, there have been a number of reasons for this, including wanting to avoid discrimination and stigma. There have long been toxic misconceptions of bisexual people as promiscuous and unfaithful, in a confused state of sexual transition or experimentation, lying about their attractions for attention or to attract men (particularly bi women), or simply adhering to some sort of trend (particularly young people).

Being bi could also get you kicked out of your local queer space. Bisexuality introduces nuance, which has always made it easier to discard than accommodate it. In tough times, when queer people were fighting for their lives and for basic legal protections, some gay rights groups strategically rejected bisexual people. For example, in the 1970s there were instances where the Gay Liberation Front, a queer-rights group, treated bisexual people as effectively straight, and thus associated them with regressive politics and edged them out of the organization.

But historians have never let a lack of self-labeling prevent them from trying to find queer people in history. People also shied away from terms like gay or lesbian, and yet we can find many books on their history. Still, it was only when I went back to university for a master’s in queer history that I realized that the absence of bisexuality in most versions of LGBTQ+ history wasn’t because there were no bi people in the past. Rather, that lack of knowledge is the result of an overcompensation for compulsory heterosexuality, which has meant that most people with homosexual desires in the U.S. were forced to live lives that involved heterosexual sex and relationships.

In the search for queer lives in the past, one way that academics have dealt with this is to assume that people who had any kind of same-sex desires or sex must have been gay or lesbian, even if they were also in heterosexual relationships. Partly because of this, the term bisexual is often entirely absent from historians’ writings. By doing so, we are systematically mislabeling people who were attracted to multiple genders, erasing bi history. When we untether bisexual people from their own past, we obscure the ways in which bisexuality is a cornerstone of the human experience.

Here are some important people in bi history you should know:

The bisexuality researchers you need to know

One of the earliest researchers to legitimize the study of bisexual people was Havelock Ellis (1859-1939). Ellis was based in the U.K., and in the 1927 edition of his book Sexual Inversion, he describes many case studies of bisexual people. He includes some negative stereotypes, but also some decidedly positive ones. For example, he wrote that bi women made “great religious and moral leaders.” It is these kinds of positive statements that led to the first edition of his book being ruled “obscene” in an English court because he dared to write about queer lives without condemning them. It took him multiple attempts to get the book published.

Probably the most famous sex researcher of all time was Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956). He was a biologist at Indiana University who introduced nuance into the discussion of sexuality. His Kinsey Scale allows us to categorize sexuality as a number between 0 and 6, from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. In his famous mid-20th century studies, he shocked the world when he found that a huge number of people (he often stated “a quarter to half”) had homosexual and heterosexual desires. He also openly criticized other researchers who assumed that people could only be either gay or straight, and spoke of the “endless intergradations” that captured the reality of people’s sexualities.

Following in Kinsey’s footsteps, Fritz Klein (1932-2006) was a sex researcher and psychiatrist who published the book, The Bisexual Option, in 1978. He was a bisexual man himself, and he started a group for bisexual men to help them feel secure in their own sexuality; that practice grew into affirmative therapy that would help many people better understand their own sexual behaviors and identity. The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid is an expanded version of the Kinsey Scale. Klein also set up the Journal of Bisexuality and the American Institute of Bisexuality, which both continue to further bi research today. These organizations have been fundamental in giving a home to research and writing on bisexuality.

Bi activists who fought for queer rights

There have also been a number of tireless activists who have fought for queer and bisexual rights, including Brenda Howard (1946-2005). Howard is sometimes referred to as the “mother of pride” because after the Stonewall uprising, she played a major role in organizing the first marches of LGBT+ people, which laid the foundations for global Pride marches.

Another activist who worked in some of the same groups as Howard, and continues their work today, is Lani Ka’ahumanu (born in 1943). Ka’ahumanu has been a leader of the bisexual rights movement in the U.S. since 1980. She founded a number of groups that were specifically for bisexual people, which was particularly important given the shaky history between bi people and gay and lesbian communities. Ka’ahumanu created safe political spaces where bi people didn’t need to justify their sexuality or their inclusion. To this effect, in 1983, she co-founded BiPOL, one of the first bisexual political action groups in the country; she later co-coordinated the San Francisco Bay Area Bisexual Network. Ka’ahumanu is also a major reason why the B is included in LGBT, because of her campaigning in the leadup to the 1993 March on Washington.

Other people who are still fighting for bi visibility and protections today include activist Robyn Ochs, who wrote the most widely cited definition of bisexuality; New York Times columnist Charles Blow, who fights for bi visibility including in the Black community; and Kyrsten Sinema, who was the first openly bisexual person elected to Congress in 2012.

The main thing that people get wrong about the history of bisexuality is assuming that there is none. As more people embrace bisexual identities, I expect there will be a new thirst for knowledge, followed by a quenching wave of bisexual stories uncovered from the archives of history.

By uncovering previously untold accounts, and re-telling the stories of people previously too eagerly labeled gay and lesbian, bisexual people will finally be able to remember some of the pieces of their own history.

Dr. Julia Shaw is a criminal psychologist at University College London and part of Queer Politics at Princeton University which works for LGBT+ equality, democracy, and civil rights. She is actively involved in bisexual research and is the founder of the international Bisexual Research Group. Shaw’s latest book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, is set to be released on June 28.

reblog if you’ve read fanfictions that are more professional, better written than some actual novels. I’m trying to see something

What self-diagnosis ISN'T:

I'm so awkward and I saw a TikTok that says being cute is autism!

I want to prove to everyone that self-diagnosis is fake so I'm going to say I'm autistic just to prove to everyone they're stupid.

I'm bored so I'm going to take up "autistic space" so that people pay attention to me and I get lots of autistic stuff and take it all away from real Autistics.

What self-diagnosis IS:

I've been struggling for a long time with social interaction and communication and I'm really tired and anxious and standard therapy isn't helping and I'm scared and tired but I've been doing a LOT of research and taken a lot of online tests repeatedly because I'm scared I'm faking it but I really really really identify with autism and I find that treating myself as autistic and taking care of my sensory needs and relearning social interaction has really helped and the community is helpful and I am finally less afraid but I can't get an official diagnosis because it's expensive/no one around me does them/my family won't let me/doctors are gatekeeping/insert other valid reason and I just want help.

I graduated high school in 99.

There was a student at our school named Wayne.

Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.

Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn't even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.

The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.

Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.

He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.

Wayne's lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.

So... no.

No one in my school talked about being trans.

Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.