I do not need to explain to you why the Toronto police should not march in Pride.
You are a decent, rational, compassionate person. You of course recognize that, the individual foibles and allowances of individual officers aside, the Toronto police have been the historical, habitual and ongoing antagonists of Toronto’s LGBT community.
Perhaps you remember Operation Soap, the malicious bathhouse raids that destroyed people’s lives — and subsequently triggered Toronto’s first Pride march as a passionate anti-police protest. If not, you still know about the decades of harassment and attempts to destroy the village’s institutions like the Glad Day Bookshop. You probably saw the footage of HIV-phobic insults hurled at a homeless person in the village. You likely remember 2016’s Project Marie, which descended on anonymous and closeted men in a park and publicly humiliated them in droves. You certainly saw the cheerful police photo op just a few weeks ago with neo-Nazi mayoral candidate Faith Goldy.
You know about the people we lost while begging the police to do something for decades, though perhaps their names escape you; there are, after all, so many of them: Majeed Kayhan, Selim Esen, Skandaraj Navaratnam, Andrew Kinsman, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi, Abdulbasir Faizi, Kirushna Kanagaratnam. The decades of grisly cold cases, now reopened, despite the mockery they once gave us for suggesting there was a killer; the blame the police chief tried shifting to us when the killer was caught too late.
Alloura Wells, left to rot in a morgue while her community searched everywhere. Tess Richey, left in an alley stairwell for her mother to find.
to anyone who is a member of pride TO, this is reason to vote out your board. a board is beholden to their membership and if they go against their members they can be removed. they aren’t allowed to do this kind of shit.
the thing about the “why can’t we say pregnant WOMEN instead of pregnant PEOPLE, PC gone mad!” discussion going on right now is that even the “cis ally” side is kind of not understanding why, exactly, “official” stuff about pregnancy needs to use gender neutral language.
the use of gendered language, whether in law or in company guidelines, has been used as an excuse to exclude trans people from various kinds of reproductive healthcare. there have been stories of abortion providers pointing to the use of “pregnant women” in all clinic literature to justify not giving trans men assistance. there are issues where “women’s health clinics” will refuse to accept referrals for anyone who doesn’t have “F” on their records, which of course includes many trans women. there are in turn stories of trans women being unable to access “male” prostrate cancer screening.
language in this sort of capacity needs to be as factual and neutral and carefully constructed to avoid loopholes as possible. at this stage in my life, as a non-woman capable of pregnancy, i don’t really CARE anymore if you talk casually about pregnancy as something that happens to women. but i DO care if the medical system writes out some guidelines that, in only acknowledging pregnant women as a possibility, open me up to the possibility of being denied care by transphobes who can claim they’re just following the rules.
this is a real issue for us, the gendering of health care leading to single-sex guidelines which are actively used by assholes to say “no, we only treat [gender] here”. it’s not a matter of nitpicking over everyday language; it’s about ensuring we are safe from loopholes that can be used to exploit us.
This kind of thing is something I face every time I go to seek gynecological care at my university’s “women’s” health clinic. Because I’m registered as male for housing, the student insurance is constantly trying to deny me coverage if I go there for an exam, testing, or follow ups on my birth control. I wind up having to sit around the clinic for several hours (and sometimes the whole day) while my doctors try to work around prior authorizations and outright denials of coverage.
“Obviously ‘bihet’ offends a lot of bisexuals, so we need to come up with a better term for bisexuals in m/f relationships.”
How about… and hear me out… this may sound crazy…. but you… continue to call us bisexual… because (and I realize this gets confusing for you people so read this next part slowly) it turns out we continue to be bisexual regardless of who we’re dating.
Okay, this shit gets me all heated up. I’m just a cisgay dude up in here, but I have Some Opinions about this nonsense.
Bisexual people in relationships with folks of the other gender are not only themselves still bisexual (I’m really ashamed of a bunch of all that this shit even needs to be said, like c’mon), but their relationships are queer.
Yes, I just said that straight people can be involved in queer relationships without they themselves being queer.
The reason for this is simple: folks who are in relationships with queer people will always have to deal with their partner’s marginalization impacting their relationship. Always. Even if their bisexual partner chooses to be entirely stealth about their queerness (and that’s their right, by gods, fight me about it), their relationship is still impacted by that very choice existing. It’s a facet heterosexual relationships never have to negotiate.
Frankly, bisexual folks have to deal with active marginalization from multiple angles: heterocentrist and homocentrist. And in case I actually have to say this aloud? We should not be fucking marginalizing our own, y’all. That makes you a bad person, and you should feel bad.
To sum up: Bisexual folks are queer as hell. Straight folks can be in queer relationships without themselves ever being queer. And FFS please stop harassing bi- and pan-folks already, man. It’s 2018. Find hobbies that are not shitty.
There’s a lot of young people who are going to be eligible to vote in America during this election so in light of the fact that this website is currently thrumming with political interest I’d just like to remind them that abstaining from voting is not useful or radical, it’s playing right into the hands of the people who want this country to progress backwards. I can guarantee you that there will be an ENORMOUS conservative turn out and if the younger generation doesn’t match it it will literally be a disaster
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 