Imported from Last.fm Tumblr by JoeLaz
“I need to drink this beer”
“Why?!”
“What?”
_
“Dude I really need to spray right now”
“Yea, I really gotta poop too but I know if I get on the pot I won’t poop at all; I’ll just fart a bunch”
_
“DICKS DICKS DICKS DICKS”
“USE WORDS”
“DICKS IS WORDS”
_
“I like yoghurt because it, like, gives me my dairy servings without having to drink milk”
“Isn’t yoghurt, like, made from milk?”
“Nah brah, that’s totally wrong”
_
“The only thing I ever post on my tumblr is Bill Murray”
“That’s so cool!”
_
“I want to die”
“So do I”
“No you don’t”
I get my first 900$ paycheck tomorrow and I’m gonna blow it all on tattoos I’ve been planning on getting for a while! (also rent, mics, and a new bike, but these are all secondary expenses…)
So, where should I get em?
I’m gonna be getting the HRC logo:
and the Pansexual symbol:
I just don’t know where to put ‘em.
Thoughts?
A couple of months ago I wrote a column here called “Dear Lady in the Women’s Washroom” (Xtra #472, Sept 22). I wrote it shortly after returning from a visit to Granville Island with my sweetheart, where I had just endured yet another gender-panic-related “bathroom incident.”
This particular time, a woman had screeched at the top of her lungs when I had entered the “ladies” washroom, glared at me as I bolted for a stall, and then spoke loudly and derisively about me to her friend while I was peeing. I came straight home and belted out a column.
That column got a lot of comments online, and a fair bit of private email as well. I was called entitled, insensitive, transsexual (and yes, I think they meant this as an insult, believe it or not) and basically told me that my right to pee unmolested was less important than other women’s right to feel safe in a public washroom.
One person wrote to tell me, “Why not start a campaign or lobby or what have you — yes, you and all other trans men and trans women — get together and make it so that there is a washroom for those of you who have to ‘think’ harder than us straights as to what washroom to use. That way, you can pee or change your overloaded tampon in peace.”
I was also told, and I quote, “A man in the ladies room is a threat to my well being and I will not surrender my right to protect myself in order to avoid giving you an uneasy moment or hurt feelings,” and, “I will not sacrifice my own safety to yours.” I even received one email that contained a barely veiled threat of physical violence: a woman from somewhere in Texas told me that I “better not ever find myself in the same women’s washroom with her” as she “could not be held responsible” for what she might do to me, given her history with abusive men.
There were other, positive stories too, and I want to share some of them here as well. I also got messages from all over the world from folks thanking me, sharing their own stories of bathroom struggles, and telling me that they had printed up the column, laminated it and taped it up in bathrooms all over their college or university campuses.
I got a letter from a very sweet libra-rian in small-town Nova Scotia, the mother of a young trans man, who had printed up my column and marched it in to her supervisor. It was the final straw that convinced him to remove the gendered signs from the library’s two single-stall locking washrooms and make them both gender-neutral facilities. I did a reading there in person, just last week, and saw the evidence of this with my own two grateful eyes.
Last month I was at a university in Oregon for a show. A young kid slumped into the chair right behind me, just before my gig was about to start. I thought this kid was a young boy, lithe and handsome, about 14 years old, maybe. Then the kid started talking to me, blurting out almost in one long breath that she was 17 years old, turning 18 in just a week, but that she wouldn’t have made it far enough to see her 18th birthday if someone hadn’t given her a copy of my story, “A Butch Roadmap.” She told me it was the first time in her entire life it had dawned on her that she could actually be proud of who she was.
She told me that her single mom had sent her to live with her grandparents when she was about nine, because the new stepdad wasn’t into being a parent, and that her grandparents were rabid Catholics who had freaked when she came out of the closet, and when she cut off all of her hair and started presenting as more male or butch, they had kicked her out of their house altogether. She told me that she was couch-surfing and trying to finish her last year of high school but that the mean girls at her school had started a petition to keep her out of the girls’ washroom, and some of the boys had told her they were going to kick her ass if she even thought about using the boys’ bathroom.
Whew. Then the host got up to introduce me. She thanked the sponsors and then informed the room that for the duration of my show this evening, all of the public washrooms on the entire first floor had been designated as gender-neutral, and that if there were people who required gender-specific facilities, they were located on the second, third and fourth floors, and that if anyone found this inconvenient, then perhaps they could take a minute to reflect on this and consider how it might feel to have to go out of one’s way to find a suitable bathroom.
I felt the kid behind me relax her shoulders and let out a long, drawn breath of pent-up air.
So. I am writing this column because I am tired. I am tired of being told that this kid doesn’t matter, that my eight-year-old tomboy friend who dropped out of science camp because of bathroom trouble and bullying doesn’t matter, and that I don’t matter.
I am sick of hearing that my safety is not as important as other women’s. I resent the implication that butches and trans women and men are never survivors of male violence themselves, and thus do not also need a safe place to pee, and the suggestion that we should somehow be segregated in our own bathrooms so we don’t bother the rest of you normal people, is simply fucked beyond belief.
I also want to state again, for what seems like the one millionth time, that single-stall, lockable, gender-neutral washrooms would solve all of our problems. I refuse to be divided and conquered on this issue. I will not allow myself to be placed in opposing corners of the ring when it comes to all of our safety. I call bullshit.
17th November 2011
Reblogged From cassket
Notes: 220
Everything is too perfect.
And perfection is not attractive.
I look at myself in the mirror and notice my love handles - these disgusting, bulging flaps of skin that hang over the rim of my jeans.
I remember the term ‘muffin topper’ and think about how unattractive the visualization I get in my mind is when I hear that term.
Am I a ‘muffin topper’? Will people find me attractive if I am? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? Who am I to judge my own beauty? I can’t tell - other people define that for me and I lose myself in the anxiety I feel for their decisions.
But they don’t really care; I care if they care.
I want them to care.
But I only want them to care if they think I’m beautiful.
Hunger feels good. It’s the feeling of knowing that I won’t wake up tomorrow and be a little bit fatter. It’s the feeling of knowing that if I sleep on it, I’ll lose weight, no matter how miniscule the amount. Losing weight overnight is easy. It requires no thought, no energy, no self-criticism. I can rest easy with the knowledge that I’ll be so much more beautiful in the morning.
Alcohol is my enemy; alcohol is my friend. It lets the words flow. It lets me be comfortable with my self-judgements. It makes me unhealthy. It makes me forget. It makes my mind flat and my body decay. I love the feeling. I love the haze. I hate the haze on the following days. It makes me feel like a champion of the weak, a weak champion and a weekend champ. I wait for the money and the time and the energy that I spend being with it; I feel the brain cells die and my intellect cry for a reprise from the venomous prize at the end of the lies. I’m a man - I’m a thing - I’m a human being - I’m a person - I’m an entity - I’m as deep as I can get in my relative place.
My thoughts betray me. My testosterone betrays me. My penis betrays me. My desire to stick it in places betrays my values and ethics; The things that I love become nothing in the face of physical, carnal, primordial pleasure.
I can’t ignore my instinct. I mean, I can, but it feels so self-defeating that I grow to hate it (myself). If I fight it, I let it control me, but if I don’t, it controls me anyways. I can’t win. I can’t win because I’m only fighting me. I’m a singular entity and if my immune system attacks itself then I’ll lose protection against other things that attack it. I’ll open myself up for every little punishment that anyone else wants to throw my way. Without a defense, it’ll just flow in like a flash flood in the desert sun.
I don’t know what to do, or what I can do when everything on TV, the thing that controls most of the people in my community, is so contrary to my beliefs.
Just watch some commercials and tell me if there isn’t still a huge problem with sexism in this country. In the WORLD.
It makes me sick, to think that people aren’t all equal.
I can’t speak for everyone. Or anyone, really.
The liberals and radicals don’t even know they’re doing it.
Sometimes I just want to punch people in the face and say “LISTEN UP YOU FUCKER! I SWEAR TO GOD IF YOU TRY TO SAY THAT THERE’S A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE WAY…”
But I lose myself in the wording because I don’t know how to express myself constructively when it comes to gender binaries and roles and preconceptions and jokes that I laugh at even though they are a symbol of the tyranny and control. “It is sick” is the only thing I can say. I can’t fully express how hearing the B-word spoken out loud makes me feel, or how terrible I feel on the rare occasion that I use it myself. Ugly, disgusting power words should never be used. I appreciate what B*tch magazine is trying to do by reclaiming the word, but as Maya Angelou said - It doesn’t matter how pretty the bottle you dress up the poison is - its still poison and it’ll kill you all the same. I mean, there’s no black liberation magazine called ‘N*gg*r’, right? That makes sense. There’s something to be said about knowing history and not letting it repeat itself, but I say the reason that racists and sexists and homophobes are themselves is because they were taught to be. So let’s put all the shit that we’re responsible of behind us. We have to remember it so that we don’t do it again, but we also have to forget it so that our children and children’s children aren’t informed by our mistakes. It’s a tough battle, being logical and such. I don’t even know how to approach it. I just know that if I ever have a chance to teach someone younger than myself, I’ll be sure to let them know that I don’t have all the answers.
They can take care of the tough stuff themselves.
I’ll let them know the importance of cooperation and tolerance and that 1+1=2, but they can take care of the tough stuff themselves.
Because I feel like when a human being is given the chance to rationalize without the influence of teachers or preachers or preconceptions, that human being will always choose logic, reason, and ultimately tolerance.
Thank you for having a blog worth following!
I remember The Cribs,
The romantic and the realist,
The sunny days filled with hope and anticipation before we cared, before money mattered and all all we could do was look ahead,
The love that we all had for observation and to gather a connection,
The call on the campus lawn at a picnic table in the bright light of the dark night where we knew the same things even though we couldn’t be further,
An appointment with consolation; the wishes for each other and an empty, absent longing
There was no ‘ask’, no appeal, not a thing in it at all that could tear at the tight-knit seams back when envy was meaningless and experience was everything
I remember all the smiles,
And criticisms,
And witticisms about the endless cast of absurd and silly characters that stepped in and out of our lives as we carried with us the knowledge that they’d matter no more soon
I remember the way we talked, and the sights and sounds,
The sorrows and aches,
The tears and fears,
But mostly I remember the cribs
You deserve it!
