For Months, Every Morning When My Daughter Was In Preschool, I Watched Her Construct An Elaborate Castle

*transgender but otherwise this is a nice list. Off the top of my head, I can also add Fires of the Faithful/ Turning the Storm to the fantasy section -- it’s mostly a fantasy novel, but it has two very prominent lesbian characters.

This is a list I made for YALSA’s The Hub on the wide range of YA literature featuring LGBTQ characters. See the full post and a downloadable pdf here. 

John 6:51-53 says, “ I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” That’s fairly unambiguous: his followers are confused about why Jesus would give them flesh to eat, whereas they wouldn’t be confused about being giving bread to eat. They also would not refer to ordinary bread as flesh.

In addition, according to Luke 22:19 and Matthew 26:26-28, Jesus, when giving the disciples the bread/flesh at the Last Supper, said, “This is my body given for you.” He didn’t say, “This is a metaphor for my body.” He said, “This is my body.” Although Jesus frequently spoke in parables, we know from Mark 4:34 that he would explain the parables to his disciples: : “When he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything.” If communion was metaphorical, Jesus would have explained it. There’s no indication that it was meant as a metaphor.

Seriously, one of the important tenets of Protestantism is “sola scriptura,” so why would you ignore the clear statements of Scripture on this topic?

Okay, new rule: if you regularly consume the blood and flesh of a demigod in a room full of chanting elders you’re not allowed to call other religions primitive and evil

reblog if you believe that gender neutral bathrooms should be available everywhere

Ted Cruz just suspended his campaign. This means that Trump will almost certainly be the Republican nominee.

This is going to be an interesting six months, in the most Minnesotan sense of that word possible.

What were your poems about? You’ve gotten me curious.

My English teacher apologetically told me my poems were to controversial to tell in class (we’re in the poetry unit right now) and I can’t tell if I should be proud, concerned, or miffed.

Unpopular Opinion

I enjoyed reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

AU where Dumbledore’s Army uses the Chamber of Secrets instead of the Room of Requirement

Ultimate security as Harry is the only one capable of opening it. 

Myrtle proudly spending her time acting as a guard/lookout. 

Later, Harry diligently teaching Ron, Hermione, and a few choice others, like Neville, how to mimic parseltongue so that they can open it too. 

Muggleborns experiencing vicious satisfaction that they’re using this chamber as a place of education and defense, reclaiming the very space Slytherin built to rid the school of their presence. 

Hermione methodically dismantling the basilisk’s corpse, covertly selling the priceless ingredients to potion masters, using the funds to continue their work - buying books and battle robes and new wands for those who can’t afford it. 

(Hermione saving a portion of those ingredients for her own research, straightening in triumph when she learns what basilisk venom does to horcruxes, knowing she has vials of it hidden up in her room). 

Harry reverently adding the Chamber of Secrets to the Marauder’s Map, proudly continuing his family’s work and reveling in the difference they’re making. 

These students - these kids - choosing to train in a dark, horrifying place that was never meant for them. Learning spells amongst shadows, growing stronger in inches of murky water, the smell of a decomposing corpse in their noses, memories of all that had happened here haunting them. They know this is what war is really like and it helps to push them forward.  

I think the difference here is that minus-zero-blogs is talking about systemic sexism, whereas johnhocksbur is talking about specific incidents of sexism. Men will rarely be victims of systemic sexism (although there are occasional instances, such as how it’s socially acceptable for a woman to wear either a dress or pants but not for a man to wear a dress); however, they may be victims of specific instances of sexism. People are just sexist in specific instances against women more often.

I will also note that your sources both mention sexism against women as being more frequent or more common than sexism against men.

Sexism can be against anyone. And thinking that women can't be as savage and heartless as men is sexist against everybody.

actually women can’t be sexist toward men

women can hate men, or be biased against them, but sexism requires privilege and power

basically it’s the difference between an isolated incident and society being completely rigged against you

being a female means needing to see 10 different doctors to get a proper diagnosis because they always think you’re exaggerating and/or lying

This is by no means an original take, and I probably did not spend as much time as I should have editing the writing into being a coherent take, but:

In an awful lot of movies, Steve Rogers would have been right.

(Or, well, treated-as-right by the narrative, at least; in some of those movies many, many people would have died for his idealism, but this wouldn’t have been treated as wrong.)

When faced with this sort of explicit trolley problem, there are two main messages in pop culture: either you should never pull the level (you might kill a named character) or you should find a way to save everyone. For instance, take The Last Jedi: the narrative treats it as correct that Rose stopped Finn from sacrificing his life, not because his plan wouldn’t have worked, but more-or-less because we don’t trade lives. (Other examples: every fucking YA novel ever. ‘You can choose between your significant other... or saving the world.’ ‘Bye, world.’)

(She is absolutely trading lives, just not in the direction that, you know, saves people.)

(This is not to say that characters never trade off lives! The really obvious example here is that most movies are totally fine with killing the villain to protect innocents, although I’m pretty sure the message is generally closer to “the lives of villains don’t matter” than “pull the lever.” Characters will also sometimes do things like choose which of multiple locations to go to, which is generally understood in their narratives to be trading off lives at least a little. But when there’s this sort of explicit setup, the correct answer as portrayed in the narrative is almost never “pull the lever.”)

Now, I actually can think of counterexamples -- Wrath of Khan is very clear that you should pull the lever, for instance, and since I brought up The Last Jedi earlier I might as well mention Holdo’s choice at the end. But in said counterexamples, the person making the choice is almost always choosing to kill themself, not another person, and they usually would have died anyway.

But when characters are faced with the explicit choice of killing someone, maybe multiple someones, or letting far more people die, the treated-as-correct choice is almost never to kill them. 

And I’m glad that we have a movie where that’s not the case.