I Made A Comic About Every Comment Thread Under Any Content Involving A Fat Person Existing. Ever. This

it’s a love story

Things I've seen tumblr memeing about James Somerton doing à la "How did no one see how bigoted he was!" as if those things haven't been a significant part of tumblr culture for over a decade :

Presenting untrue and bordering on conspiratorial versions of (queer or otherwise marginalised) history without any sources

Completely disregarding and disrespecting any expertise on socio-cultural topics/humanities and distrusting academics and historians (incl. acting as if no academics or historians could be queer or marginalised)

Downplaying the role misogyny played in the historical oppression of queer women and concluding that queer men must have been more oppressed than queer women

Bi women are, at best, not as queer as "real" queer ppl, and at worst, simply equivalent to straight women

Despite nominal trans inclusivity, transmasculine ppl are functionally women when convenient (combined with the above, bi transmascs are functionally straight women)

Despite nominal trans inclusivity (bis), shamelessly attacking, threatening and actively endangering any trans woman who questions them or smth they find important (often by unfairly presenting her as violent or as a threat)

Having absolutely fucking wild and reductive takes about ace ppl, the oppression they face and their place in the queer community

Stating that marriage equality is an assimilationist fight while completely ignoring its direct roots in the horrifying consequences of the AIDS crisis for partners of ppl who died of AIDS

Praising western media creators from the past for queer coding even under censure and in the same breath condemning current non western media creators for being homophobic bc their representation isn't explicit enough

Blaming China for all existing homophobic censoring in western media

Assuming all queer media would be better told by western creators and by western standards

Only out queer ppl get to tell queer stories

Heavily criticising almost all queer media created by women or ppl they see as such (see above points about trans ppl) or involving/starring a significant amount of women for any perceived or real amount of "problematicness", but fawning over and praising and negating criticism of queer media created by and starring mostly or even functionally exclusively men (even when it could be argued that, you know, not involving/seriously sidelining women is a pretty clear example of misogyny which should probably be considered "problematic")

And I'm probably forgetting stuff or there's stuff I have internalised myself and don't recognise as an issue

Like idk but I feel like the takeaway from Hbomberguy and Toddintheshadow's videos should maybe be "be aware of such patterns in your communities bc they definitely exist" and not "this guy is uniquely awful" and I feel like a lot of the discussion I've seen surrounding this has been severely failing at that. Most ppl who've spent any significant amount of time on tumblr prob either have internalised at least one of those thought patterns, have had to de-internalise them, or have had to be extremely vigilant to not internalise them (which is done by, you know, seeking out other sources, which also seemed like an important takeaway from the videos)

taylor swift title edits: cowboy like me

This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen

..HOW MUCH I MISS HER!!

link

So I merged the two Dress performances videos from Nashville show with Taylor singing the first part on the b stage where Karlie was standing.

we don’t need a hundred posts from the fandom listing reasons why you shouldn’t doxx and out someone and why it’s fucked up to do. what we need is a heavily homophobic and specifically lesbophobic fandom to realize everything they have done to contribute to what’s happening right now. any post you’ve ever made or reblogged or liked about how it’s gross for sapphics to speculate about taylor’s sexuality or to read her music as gay, any post you made joking about how you don’t hate the gays you just hate kaylors (who are mainly sapphics), any post about how it’s an invasion of privacy or disgusting or uncomfortable or projecting to speculate if taylor is part of the lgbtq+ community, any post that targets and alienates and isolates lgbtq+ fans is what allowed this to happen. doxxing and outing is not the first time this has happened in this fandom and it sadly will not be the last. if you’ve ever supported the posts that contributed to this culture that makes sapphics, minors and adults alike, a target of hate and violence, if you’ve ever thought it would be fun to make an anti kaylor blog and spend your free time screenshotting and publicly making fun of queer fans, if you’ve ever followed an anti kaylor/gaylor blog and read their posts for fun, if you’ve ever logged in to hate-read posts from kaylors and privately make fun of them in groupchats with your homophobic friends, if you’ve ever posted things like ‘why can’t kaylors just all die,’ if you’ve ever made tasteless jokes and laughed at our expense on your blog, you contributed to minors being outed, poc being outed, sapphics in countries where it’s not safe to be gay being outed. 

you’ve contributed, whether you think you have or not. we’re telling you that you have and you continue to and i hope the guilt of this eats you alive. i hope the idea of your homophobic posts leading to real people being outed haunts you. and don’t think you’re innocent if you’re just some blog who has never *really* said anything *too* bad. if you’ve ever made a complete mockery of kaylors/gaylors just because you’re uncomfortable with the idea of taylor being with women, you contributed to this culture that makes other people think it’s okay to go to the extreme lengths of outing someone. you are fucking responsible. and who are the ones who have to pay the price for your reckless and dangerous homophobia you’ve been perpetuating in this fandom? it’s the lgbtq+ fans erasing their social media (the only safe space they had to talk about being lgbtq+) and running for the hills and fearing for their safety and their lives all while you all are posting photos of the folklore photoshoot and talking about how pretty taylor is. 

your homophobia has lead to real people being outed to their families and friends. you, yes, you. and the best you can do is say “it’s bad to out people!! friendly reminder!!!” as if everything you’ve been posting for the past six years since taylor joined tumblr has not contributed to letting people think it’s okay to out someone. i’ve been watching people be outed and threatened for five years, it’s happened to me, it’s terrifying and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. don’t write panic posts about how it’s awful to doxx and out people. instead step back and evaluate who the fuck you are as a person, what you can do to remove all of your homophobic microaggressions from this fandom, and why you think real people being outed is proper retribution for them thinking taylor swift might be gay.

i’ve noticed a lot of people lashing out in response to the posts celebrating and being positive towards men lately and it’s… not great.

in the past few days alone, i’ve seen lot of “wow men are so weak they can’t take ANY criticism or stand posts not praising them” and “in the real world men don’t see women as humans so i don’t care.”

look. i get it. i’m a queer woman who was abused by men. i used to say “all men,” too. but then i got older and met more people and stepped back from my trauma to realize that viewing all men as a single, malevolent group with inherent traits and equal power over women is a broken mentality.

it’s dangerous to say all men have inherent traits and values. that rhetoric reinforces the gender binary, gender norms, and gender essentialism. it prevents all people from being themselves and pursuing life choices while perpetuating the idea that all men are preprogrammed for things like violence. it also allows misogynistic men to absolve themselves with “well, boys will be boys.” posts saying “men can be soft” and the like are fighting this.

oppression is complex. it is not simply “men bad, women good.” race, class, disability, sexuality, etc. all complicate power dynamics. ex: a white woman can exert power over a black man.

certain groups of men—black men, mentally ill men, etc.—are particularly demonized. they are framed as violent and dangerous, which enables their systematic oppression. they deserve to be assured that this is not the case.

a lot of positivity posts are specifically for trans men and trans masc people. they tell them “your gender is not evil. you are not doing a bad thing by transitioning. you do not have to be like X to be a man.”

a lot of these posts are also to let people attracted to men know that their attraction is not a dirty mistake. for years, i felt i had to apologize for being a bisexual woman attracted to men, like it was a flaw.

some of these posts are for younger users here. boys who need to be told they have the power to defy patriarchal values and determine what their gender means and who they are, that they’re not doomed to be misogynistic abusers.

it’s nice to have a friend is not about having a different best friend during different stages of your life and is instead a progression of an imaginary friendship into a lifelong partnership, because after the school bell rings, sidewalk chalk is covered in snow and later when the church bells ring after she marries her best friend, the rice on the ground looks like snow, connecting the final verse to the first verse and therefore confirming that the same friend that that taylor passes notes with and sleeps in tents with and plays 20 questions with is the same friend she later on marries and the song sounds lonely and desolate like a still winter morning when the windows are frosted with snow but the chill hasn’t let itself into your bedroom just yet because it speaks to the inherent loneliness of growing up as a girl who falls in love with her best girl friends, but that lonely girl finally marries her best friend and that is why the song sounds lonely like a grey winter morning but at the same time comforting like a friend/love of your life running her fingers through your hair in bed on a grey winter morning, in this essay i will-

There’s this ableist idea that the default is for people to have zero disabilities and mental illnesses. That’s why there’s a concept of there being “too many diagnoses” - because people totally assume there’s like, a Perfectly Normal Human to begin with and that that idealized body has zero brain issues or disabilities.

And that’s so wrong. That’s just as wrong as assuming non-intersex, cishet middle-class white guys are the Perfectly Normal Human of which everyone else is an imperfect copy.

We’re not made from a mould. We have endless variations and they aren’t divergence from some Perfectly Normal Copy, they’re literally the way life functions. There is no perfect copy. There are only variations, some of which have the privilege of being normalized.

But privileged people see themselves as the default, and “too many differences” can seem “made up” to them, because they’re not used to relating to people who are different. Unfortunately we mentally ill/disabled people absorb this idea too and it’s really hard to unlearn it when we’re stuck in a society that’s constantly reinforcing it.

We have to be gentle with ourselves and with each other and work on normalizing variations like mental illnesses, disabilities, etc., so the focus can be on meeting the needs of people who have them instead of just surviving ableism.