I’m out to my friends and family. Most people at work know too. Everyone is cool with it. Yes, thanks to my fabulous sister they’ve done it before, but also because they’re fantastic people. Without the love and support of my wife and friends and family I would not be where I am today.
Lilly Wachowski
While yes, we should celebrate Lilly, please don’t forget that she was basically intimidated into coming out by the media – notably the Daily Mail, the notorious british tabloid – and yes the statement above is uplifting, but I feel it’s kind of covering up the circumstances a lot and I know a lot of people won’t follow the link to the article.
Another extract from the statement in the Windy City Times:
“My sister Lana and I have largely avoided the press. I find talking about my art frustratingly tedious and talking about myself a wholly mortifying experience. I knew at some point I would have to come out publicly. You know, when you’re living as an out transgender person it’s … kind of difficult to hide. I just wanted—needed some time to get my head right, to feel comfortable.
But apparently I don’t get to decide this.
After he had given me his card, and I closed the door it began to dawn on me where I had heard of the Daily Mail. It was the “news” organization that had played a huge part in the national public outing of Lucy Meadows, an elementary school teacher and trans woman in the UK. An editorial in the “not-a-tabloid” demonized her as a damaging influence on the children’s delicate innocence and summarized “he’s not only trapped in the wrong body, he’s in the wrong job.” The reason I knew about her wasn’t because she was transgender it was because three months after the Daily Mail article came out, Lucy committed suicide.
And now here they were, at my front door, almost as if to say—
“There’s another one! Let’s drag ‘em out in the open so we can all have a look!”
Being transgender is not easy. We live in a majority-enforced gender binary world. This means when you’re transgender you have to face the hard reality of living the rest of your life in a world that is openly hostile to you.
I am one of the lucky ones. Having the support of my family and the means to afford doctors and therapists has given me the chance to actually survive this process. Transgender people without support, means and privilege do not have this luxury. And many do not survive. In 2015, the transgender murder rate hit an all-time high in this country. A horrifying disproportionate number of the victims were trans women of color. These are only the recorded homicides so, since trans people do not all fit in the tidy gender binary statistics of murder rates, it means the actual numbers are higher.
And though we have come a long way since Silence of the Lambs, we continue to be demonized and vilified in the media where attack ads portray us as potential predators to keep us from even using the goddamn bathroom. The so-called bathroom bills that are popping up all over this country do not keep children safe, they force trans people into using bathrooms where they can be beaten and or murdered. We are not predators, we are prey.
So yes, Lilly is a fantastic woman, and I am happy that she is comfortably out in her own support network and community. But please remember that she only outed herself publicly because if she didn’t do it herself, the press were going to kick up a fuss.
Please note: I am cis, and I don’t want to speak for or over trans people, I’m simply highlighting what I think is the more important message to take from this press statement.
alternative headline: Daily Mail bullies woman into coming out as transgender
When the Nazi concentration camps were liberated by the Allies, it was a time of great jubilation for the tens of thousands of people incarcerated in them. But an often forgotten fact of this time is that prisoners who happened to be wearing the pink triangle (the Nazis’ way of marking and identifying homosexuals) were forced to serve out the rest of their sentence. This was due to a part of German law simply known as “Paragraph 175” which criminalized homosexuality. The law wasn’t repealed until 1969.
This should be required learning, internationally.
You need to know this. You need to remember this. This is not something to swept under the carpet nor be forgotten.
Never. Too many have died for the way they have loved. That needs stop now.
Make it stop?
I did a report on this in my World History class my sophomore year of high school. It was incredibly unsettling.
My teacher shown the class this. Mostly everyone in the class felt uncomfortable.
I have reblogged this in the past, but it is so ironic that it comes across my dash right now. I a currently working as a docent at my city’s Holocaust Education Center (( I say currently because I’ve also done research and translation for them )) and out current exhibit is one on loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ((USHMM)). This is a little known historical fact that Paragraph 175 was not repealed after the war and those convicted under Nazi laws as a danger to society because they were gay were not released because they had be convicted in a court of law. There was no liberation or justice for them as they weren’t considered criminals, or even victims for that matter. They were criminals who remained persecuted and ostracized and kept on the fringes of society for decades after the war had been won. Paragraph175 wasn’t actually repealed until 1994. And it was only in May 2002, that the German parliament completed legislation to pardon all homosexuals convicted under Paragraph175 during the Nazi era. History has forgotten about these men and women — please educate yourselves so this does not happen again. Remember this history. Remember them.
theres so many pieces of media where gay characters are just not allowed to have a happy ending / are killed off at the end that theres a tvtropes page for it. it’s called Bury Your Gays (tw for slurs and the obvious). the film section ALONE has 46 entries. it has the 3rd most entries out of all the types of media. why do straight people only like us when we’re dead
Willem Arondeus was a Dutch resistance fighter who gave his life trying to protect his Jewish countrymen from the Nazis.
Born in Amsterdam in 1895, Willem was one of six children. From a young age, he was a talented artist and his parents encouraged his creativity, until he came out as homosexual at age 17.
In a time when nearly all gay people were in the closet, Willem’s parents could not accept his choice to live openly. Their rejection led Willem to run away from home.
On his own, Willem took odd jobs and eventually became a successful visual artist and writer. He was commissioned to paint a mural for Rotterdam’s town hall, in a style that combined modern abstract painting with a traditional Dutch motif. Willem was a well-respected author who published a popular biography of Dutch painter and political activist Matthijs Maris.
In 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Willem immediately joined the resistance movement, and urged his fellow artists to fight against the Nazi occupation. WIllem published illegal anti-Nazi pamphlets calling for mass resistance against the Germans.
Willem was especially committed to saving Amsterdam’s Jewish community. Bringing in others to the cause, Willem arranged for Dutch Jews to be hidden in people’s homes. He used his artistic skills to create false identity papers.
In 1943, Willem hatched a brazen plan. Dressed as a German Army captain, and with 15 men behind him, Willem boldly marched into the Public Record Office, where lists identifying people as Jews were kept. Willem drugged the guards and planted a firebomb. The resulting blaze destroyed tens of thousands of documents, and delayed or prevented many Jews from being identified by the Nazis.
Unfortunately, Willem was captured by the Germans and sentenced to death. Willem’s last words before being executed in July, 1943 were, “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”
In 1986 Yad Vashem recognized Arondeus as Righteous Among the Nations.
Because of his sexual orientation, Willem’s story was omitted from Dutch history books. Only in the last 20 years has his courage become widely known.
so i was fact-checking this just to make double sure i was comfortable reblogging it and you guys it gets even better:
HE WAS PART OF A TEAM
A concerted operation was underway to hide Jews among the local population, with various underground organizations preparing forged documents for Jews. Arondeus was a member of one such group, Raad van Verzet (Resistance Council), which also included openly lesbian cellist and conductor Frieda Belinfante and typographer Willem Sandberg, then curator at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. (x)
“openly lesbian cellist and conductor frieda belinfante”, huh wonder if she was as rad as that sounds
PLOT TWIST: SHE WAS
she actively forged documents, helped organize the bombing effort mentioned above, dodged arrest by disguising herself as a man for three months, and ultimately had to cross the alps on foot in order to escape across the swiss border.
after the war, she founded the orange county philharmonic orchestra (the second-ever orchestra ensemble in the world to be longterm conducted and managed by a woman) which funded itself through donations so it could give free public concerts. (x)
(not to take away from willem’s story, because that is also badass. but they were BADASSES WHO FOUGHT THE POWER TOGETHER, what is better than that.)
sure, a mature and intelligent 14 year old girl isn’t allowed to know she’s queer because “she’s a child” but my 4 month old nephew reaches out his hand towards a woman and he’s “a real ladykiller already”
I am not a fan of the language suggesting that the fourteen-year-old isn’t a child. She is.
The reason why people assign heterosexuality to infants isn’t because they see them as mature or intelligent. It’s because they see heterosexuality as not being inherently sexual. They recognize that little kids can have crushes with no sexual element. And what we need to fight for is for the right of queer sexualities to get that same recognition: for it to be okay for a fourteen-year-old girl to know she’s queer not because she’s especially mature for her age, but because there’s nothing unusually mature about having a crush on another girl.
It might seem strange for heterosexual men and women to use one of the largest gay dating apps out there, but many have turned to the app for something other than sex: platonic friendship. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some gay men are not happy about this. Why one straight woman designated herself as a “twink” instead of a “jock.”
is probably one of the worst things I have ever read in my life
Like i honestly read the first images thinking maybe this would be a post discussing the problems with queer dating apps and i was so ready for the conversation
myblog 