Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

appalachian-ace:

airagorncharda:

Today I got called by someone claiming to be the IRS. They left three identical automated voicemail messages before I woke up, telling me that I needed to call them immediately and that it was urgent. 

Upon calling them at the number they gave, I was told that due to some mistakes with my taxes there was a WARRANT FOR MY ARREST, and that if the matter was not solved DURING THAT PHONE CALL, police officers would come ARREST ME AT MY HOUSE in 30-35 minutes. 

They used a bunch of scare tactics and sounded fairly convincing. 

I told them I was going to verify with the police, hung up, and called the local police. Before I got out more than “Someone called me claiming to be the IRS–” the police officer said “Oh that’s a scam. The IRS will never call you on the phone.”

After talking to a handful of people about this today and looking it up on the IRS website, here’s what I’ve learned:

1. The IRS will never call you on the phone about taxes owed without first having mailed you a bill.
   
2. The IRS will never ask for credit or debit card numbers over the phone.
   
3. The IRS will never threaten to bring any law-enforcement groups to have you arrested for not paying.
   
4. The IRS will never use email, texts or any social media to discuss your personal tax issue involving bills or refunds.
   
5. If the IRS has a problem with your taxes, you will be given months to handle to situation. The government does not call you and require immediate action. If someone is calling you requiring you to respond instantly, they are not the government. It’s a scam.
6. If you are contacted by someone claiming to be from the IRS in any way (email, phone, mail, fax, etc.) and it seems suspicious or you just want to double check, this is the official IRS website’s recommendations for how to handle and report it.
7. This one might be obvious but just in case: NEVER give out your Social Security Number over the phone, or in any other context unless it is absolutely vital.

These scam artists try to scare you into making fast choices based in panic and fear. If someone contacting you is trying to scare you into giving them money, they are not the government. 

If you know anyone who has anxiety, English isn’t their first language, or who has reasons to be extra afraid of the threat of police, or any other reasons for this type of scam to be especially stressful or effective, please make sure you give them this information. Tell your friends, your siblings, your coworkers, your parents, your grandparents. Please spread this information.  

Another variant claims to be from the treasury department.

The government LOVES paper trails. Phone contact is nearly never their preferred way of getting in contact with you, and those few exceptions are generally things where you made phone contact first (like using the phone application option for the national ACA health marketplace).

notsafef0rtwerk:

heyitscdubs:

biglawbear:

You know what, looking back on it, my friends and I survived the Bush Presidency

We would have survived a McCain Presidency

We would have survived a Romney Presidency

I honestly worry that there are some people who would not survive a Trump Presidency

I don’t care how much you love Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein. On November 8, 2016, one of two things will be true: either Hillary Clinton will be elected President, or Donald Trump will be elected President.

Which one, HONESTLY, would be worse?

This isn’t the year to “vote your conscience.”

There’s a fucking dangerous man one election away from being President.

This is the year to vote to survive.

Any other year, this would be an exaggeration. We survived Bush, we could have survived McCain or Romney. This year, Trump’s danger is no exaggeration.

Don’t vote your conscience, vote to survive.

We will not, not, NOT SURVIVE Trump.

The LGBT community will not survive.

The communities of middle eastern descent will not survive.

Women, especially women who want a right to choose, will not survive.

The black community will not survive.

The latino community will not survive.

The disabled community will not survive.

I guarantee that there are more groups.

We as a country will not survive a Trump-Pence Presidency

philly-osopher:

if you’re a Hamilton/ AmRev writer, reblog with the characters who are easiest for you to write and hardest for you to write in the tags

hotmenandotherdistractions:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

tom-nippleston:

The people in the apartment below me are playing “Never Have I Ever” and I’m smoking on my porch creeping on their game

Guy 1: Never have I ever INTIONALLY walked in on my parents having sex
Gal 1: fuck you brandon! It wasn’t intentional! I didn’t know what they were doing!!!
Brandon (Guy 1): Shut up Katy no one is THAT oblivious take your drink

Katy: Never have I ever LOST a wet tshirt contest

(Good job Katy. You do you. Proud of you boo)

Gal 2: Never have I ever pierced my genitals
Brandon: IT WAS IN FOR LIKE A MONTH!
Katy: Whatever bitch, take a drink you Prince Albert having douche
Brandon: I’m being singled out I hate you all

Guy 2: Never have I ever had a threescore
[Pause]
Guy 2: WHAT THE FUCK KATY?!?!?!?!
Katy: Shut up Andrew it’s before we even knew each other this was years ago!!!
[Pause]
Andrew: And you won’t even watch porn with me…

(the family is disintegrating)

Brandon: Never have I ever been in such a confrontational game of Never Have I Ever….

[People saying ‘cheers’]

(stop fighting guys you’re tearing this family apart…..)

Andrew: Never have I ever had sex WITH a piece of food.
[Pause]
Andrew: Dude
Brandon: Dude
Katy: Dude omg
Gal 2: what? Omg EVERY girl has practiced giving head with a banana!
Katy: Um no Ester. SOME of us just practice on dicks.
Ester: what the fuck though. Whatever.

(Don’t let them kink shame you Ester I still love you)

#TeamEster
#BananaSplits

Andrew is testing a banana. Go for it andrew. Explore your wild side
#TeamEster #TeamKink

Brandon: Never have I ever been called a fuckboy
Katy and Andrew: TO YOUR FACE
Brandon: Go fuck a banana Andrew

#TeamBananaFucking

Ester: Never have I ever had a crush on a family member
Brandon: [random fumbling noises]
Katy: brandon omg ew
Andrew: yeah man come the fuck on wtf man its 2016
Brandon: SHE WAS MY COUSIN AND I WAS 13 IT’S NOT LIKE SHE WAS MY SISTER AND IT WAS JUST A CRUSH NOTHING HAPPENED
Ester: methinks thou dost protest too fucking much
Brandon: NEVER TELLING YOU SHIT AGAIN
Andrew: Chug your drink, Sir IncestsALot
Brandon: Chug a fucking banana Andrew

#TeamBananaFucking #TeamWhatTheFuckBrandon

Katy and Andrew have gone home in an Uber to apparently sex it up. Alway use a designated driver, kids. And always put protection on your Banana.

#BananaCreamPie
#GamesOverKids
#TeamEster

This is spectacular.

shady-mami-is-shady:

poupon:

insearchofkobol:

beatsandblades:

anglerfishy:

theemperorsfeather:

glegrumbles:

Also the Vikings were known to be complete dandies. They sought bright colors, jewelry, imported Persian silks. Ribbons. Little mirrors sewn onto clothing, in Sweden. The men had long hair that was scandalous to Christians, and they carried combs and earspoons and such things with them. I recall seeing documents where the eastern Norse were big on baths and one of their demands in a particular negotiation was “we get to have baths drawn for us whenever we want”, which was often.

They used soap with agents designed to bleach hair to try to make themselves blonder.

SRSLY. Look at this stuff.

I’m sorry longhaired prettyboy viking men in gaudy clothing and jewelry, bleaching and combing their hair, doesn’t match with your Conan-the-Barbarian manlyman aesthetic.

…or the fact that a significant portion of the Norse were traders, fishermen, farmers, and herders, and weren’t raiding, pillaging warriors or hired Byzantine thug-bodyguards.

I also like the parts about how maybe women didn’t dress as modestly as some interpretations of the evidence suggest. And, like, putting BIG METAL CLIPS and STRANDS OF BEADS right across the breasts … kind of draws the eyes right there.

beatsandblades considering that you just posted something Viking related - thought you might be interested in this.

Oh my god, I LOVE THIS.

It also should be noted that they had tweezers and ladies used them to shape their eyebrows and keep their faces neat. It should also be noted that they had the most civilized laws toward women pre christian era in europe. Women were allowed to fight, allowed to inherit or acquire wealth, allowed to have bastard children or be raped without it being a mark against their honor and virtue. In fact, if the family of a raped woman wanted justice, they were free to kill the rapist under the law. Women were also free to divorce their husbands.  

Viking men also composed POETRY as a sign of their virility and reciting poetry to a woman without her father’s permission was considered unseemly, because that was part of courtship and the young man had to take care that he wasn’t challenged or killed for doing so.

The men also had magnificent purses as status symbols, as demonstrated by the find of amazing purse cover in the Sutton Hoo burial ship, which was generally a fancy fancy archaeological windfall. And why not? This suggests most anything made of fine quality materials and made with painstaking craftsmanship could be a status symbol, with little evidence of modern gender panic about the function of ornamentation.

BONUS: after their colonization of Britian, the native menfolk thought they were unfair because they took all the women folk by being handsomely groomed and BAthiNG regularly HOW DARE THEY. There’s a post about that floating around on tumblr you could probably find if you believe in yourself hard enough.

The modern interpretation of vikings, as with most distorted views of the barbarism of previous ages, was pretty much invented by British Victorians   as a combination of a sort of sensational hyper-masculine nostalgia (”remember when we were like being constantly invaded by those barbarians? That’s because they were brutes, but damn it those MEN were MEN*. I mean, they have to had been. They invaded us.”) and as a sort of self-congratulatory “well at least we aren’t like THAT any more” cultural asspat. It’s similar thing that happened with Renaissance scholars about the so-called “medieval period”, lots of facts were distorted or outright invented to make the current age and location look better. Which is not to say the Victorians also provided their own more romantic and chivalric idea of that period, too, which further distorts things.   IN ANY CASE Here’s a summary and extract of a book about Victorian ideas of Vikings, in lieu of me being too lazy to find a more comprehensive or succinct paper.

*see also Weimar Republic-era German fascination and cultural connection with their own idea of “Viking”. But that had a more vengeful edge and was informed by social discontent and near-destroyed national pride.  And of course NOTHING BAD EVER CAME OF THIS PROPAGANDIC VIEW OF HISTORY.

Pillaging your village while looking positively FABULOUS at the same time~

40yodater:

cishetwhiteoppressor:

Person: I don’t want pets.

Society: Yeah, pets are a big responsibility, not everyone has the time or money for that, and not everyone likes animals. 

Person: I don’t want kids.

Society: Whaaaat? How can you not want kids? You’ll surely change your mind when you have your own! Your life is pointless without them! PROCREATE!

I have never seen this comparison and I love it so much! 

leiaas:

“paul rudd ages so well” yeah well chadwick boseman is gonna turn forty in november and he looks about twenty-five

For those of you who, like me, probably couldn’t remember an actor’s name if it was tattooed on their forehead, that’s the goddAMN BLACK PANTHER, HOLY SHIT.

more-tangent-than-normal:

Why do so many people assume that liking Eponine means you want her to end up with Marius? Like, no, I want Eponine to end up with supportive parents and a nice flower garden 

failastrology:

throwspebblesatpeople:

thistranspoet:

Give me a letter. 

• a – age
  
• b – biggest fear
• c – current time 
• d – drink you last had/are having 
• e – easiest person to talk to
• f – favorite song 
• g – ghosts, are they real 
• h – heritage 
• i – in love with 
• k – kissed someone
• l – last time you cried 
• m – middle name 
• n – number of siblings 
• o – one wish
• p – person who you last called 
• q – question you’re always asked 
• r – reason to smile 
• s – song last sang 
  
• t – time you woke up 
• u – underwear color 
• w – worst habit
• x – x-rays you’ve had 
• y – your favorite food 
• z – zodiac sign

ohhhhh y'all gotta come thru with these, these are some good ones

👆👀

taint3edcakes:

Men are so annoying with the whole girls fuck over nice guys like do you know how many guys fuck over nice girls? Girls that will do ANYTHING for them? Girls who want them exclusively and cherish them and try to put up with them while the man cheats and treats her like shit? Like bye with that I don’t feel sorry for y'all. Everyone is capable of being shitty but you don’t hear us girls crying about nice girls finishing last shut the fuck up.

gwendolencorday:

1) I mean it in the most gender-neutral way possible.

2) I will stop if you ask, no judgement.

mapmatthew:

• It’s annoying.
• It gives an imperfect metric for how many followers you have. (I would estimate about 25% of my “followers” are porn blogs run by bots).
• It makes pulling up your activity page iffy even if you use Tumblr strictly for SFW content.
• It’s problematic for individuals who have struggled with sex and/or pornography addictions, especially since many of the blog names are not obviously porn names, causing you to preview the blog.
• It exposes minors to illegal and harmful content.

And to many of us:
• It’s disgusting.
• it’s degrading to human beings, especially women.
• It makes Tumblr a less classy, less reputable place.

Please share this if you agree this is a serious problem.

fuckyeahisawthat:

I already reblogged a thing about Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron and the contrast between how they deal with motherhood, infertility and what it means to be a woman.

It’s surreal to think that these two movies came out just two weeks apart from one another in the US. In a way I feel a little bit sorry for AoU, because it would have looked like a perfectly okay summer blockbuster if Fury Road hadn’t come barreling down right on its tail and smashed all our pathetic lowball expectations to flaming shards in the sand.

When AoU came out, I had a lot of discussions with people about Natasha’s plotline. Because my gut reaction was certainly a massive eyeroll that the one female Avenger’s deep, dark secret is that she can’t have babies. But also, it’s not like a story about a woman who underwent forced sterilization is something we shouldn’t care about. (And in the US, this is a particular form of restriction of reproductive rights that’s disproportionately affected poor women of color.) And if she internalized the line that was fed to her, that she couldn’t be both a killer and a mother, that certainly doesn’t make it her fault.

But it still frustrated me, and my frustrations were really, really well articulated by this article. You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s excellent. But this is the relevant quote:

There’s nothing wrong with stories about women who are housewives or stories about women who struggle because they were forcibly prevented from having kids as a condition of whatever mission they chose to undertake. The problem is that with so few women in superhero movies, each of these portrayals stands not only for the choices Whedon made, but for all the choices he and many others didn’t and don’t make. The portrayals of Natasha and Laura rankle at some level, for me, not because they are stories about a woman traumatized by not having children and a woman waiting for her husband to come home, but because it’s another story about those two women rather than any of the other bazillion women who could exist in this universe and don’t. If you had five butt-kicking women in this movie, it would seem perfectly logical that one of them might have a story related to getting pregnant or not. Why wouldn’t she?

These, for me, are scarcity problems. They are problems because there are so few opportunities to show women in action blockbusters that I tend to crave something very much capable of moving discussions of what those portrayals can be like forward.

…Scarcity will always drive us back to these same conversations about how every woman carries the obligation to represent What This Director Thinks Women Are For, and absolutely no answer to that question will ever be a good answer.

I think this is an interesting discussion in the context of Fury Road, because, intentionally or not, the movie takes on the scarcity problem in a couple of different ways.

On the most basic level, it gives us lots of women. In a context where studies have found that even background crowds in movies are on average only 17% women, Fury Road is FULL of women. Young women. Old women. Women who are disabled. Women who are physically strong and as skilled with weapons and vehicles as any of the men in their world. Women who are not physically strong but fight anyway. 80-year-old women who ride motorbikes and talk about all the kill shots they’ve made.

Look at the shot at the top of this post. Twelve women on screen at once! That’s more women in a single frame that some movies have speaking parts for.

Max may have his name on the title card, but he spends the movie surrounded by women. Team War Rig starts out as one man and six women; later it’s two men and five women; then it gets supplemented by a bunch more women in the third act. It’s almost an exact flip of the 20% rule of thumb, where one woman for every four men seems normal.

But Fury Road deals with the scarcity problem in another way, too, one that I think is particularly important given the film’s content. It gives us six women all reacting to the same circumstances of slavery and sexual violence, and allows them to have different, individualized, and sometimes contradictory reactions, all of which are presented as valid.

So we have Toast, who counts bullets and loads weapons, who hacks off her hair to spite Joe, who grabs his gun at a key moment and gets pistol-whipped for it, who spits on his corpse when he’s dead. Angharad, who self-injures, who uses her status as Joe’s favorite against him, who can be fearless, or reckless, with her own body, but also clings to nonviolence even when that tactic has limitations in a violent world, who stops Furiosa from killing Nux, but then pushes him out of a moving vehicle seconds later. Capable, who holds onto kindness, understanding and compassion, despite all the violence around her, who trusts Nux when Furiosa is pointing a gun at him and growling, “Get out,” and proves to be correct in her instincts. Dag, who retreats into her own head, but is often the first to sense danger, who hurls insults at her abuser, and also at Max while he’s pointing a gun at them. Cheedo, who gets scared and tries to run back to the person who hurt her, but then later uses her perceived fragility as a weapon. And Furiosa, who holds on to her rage even as she fights her way up the ranks to become Joe’s trusted lieutenant, and finally uses it to end him.

And none of these reactions are treated as better or worse or right or wrong or the correct way to be a survivor of violence. It’s okay to be angry; it’s okay to be kind; it’s okay to be scared. Because there are so many women in the movie, each one of them gets to be a unique character instead of an avatar of What This Director Thinks Women Are For.

Extend that to all of filmmaking, and to all the many kinds of identities that are underrepresented on screen today. That’s how you deal with the scarcity problem.

fishyfellow:

snorlaxatives:

the-little-engine-that-couldnt:

snorlaxatives:

good morning cruel world

Don’t you mean goodbye?

no i meant good morning. this world may be cruel but i’m still kickin’

This really cheered me up

out-there-on-the-maroon:

septemberpoems:

jennytrout:

blue-author:

…is that the word gay has been used so overwhelmingly as a pejorative, as a slur, that most children in the U.S. in the past several decades likely grew up learning “gay” as a word for bad, strange, or wrong before they fully understand that there are “gay” people, and that it’s not just a word with negative connotations.

Kids grow up hearing “That’s so gay!” said with such vehemence relating to topics that those same kids aren’t remotely educated about, and they just internalize that it’s bad. This is how you get elementary schoolers saying, “Mr. Hopkins gave us homework, he’s so gay,” and the same elementary schoolers grow up to be high schoolers and adults who say, “What? I don’t mean gay like gay people, I mean gay like stupid or bad.”

And some of them aren’t overt homophobes in any other way… but dang, you teach little kids that a word that describes a class of people means “bad” and “wrong” before they know those people exist, and that’s bound to shape the way they think about things, isn’t it?

And in contrast you get queer kids who start to put 2+2 together about what “gay” really means a little bit faster than the kids around them because they’re desperate for some information, some hints of meaning… but they’re also hearing the same lessons as everybody else, that gay=bad, gay=wrong, gay=undesirable, gay=something no one ones and no one should be, gay is the worst thing you can be.

In the small town I lived in and the school I went to, nobody ever hit me and called me queer. No one ever shouted “queer” from a moving car while I was walking home. No one ever threatened or inflicted violence on me with the word “queer” on their lips.

Gay, though? Yes. And variations on the f-slur, but gay itself was enough of an invective, enough of a pejorative, to the people flinging it.

“Gay” was the slur that cishet people threw at me as a form of violence, often in corollary with physical violence. “Queer” is a word that I learned online, from members of my community. My experience of the former word is as an attack, while the other was as a sanctuary and respite from that attack.

Now, I’m not a gay man, but a bisexual trans woman. I was still sorting that out at the time, but I doubt it would have made a difference to many of my tormenters if I’d been able to explain it properly.

So when “gay” is used as the happy-go-lucky umbrella for what I would personally call the queer community, gay with even its positive connotations strongly coded as male, I’m not just being misgendered/swept under a default label of male along with a lot of other women and non-binary folks, I’m being forced to accept a label that I never sought, one that is definitely used as a pejorative and a slur, and a slur that was specifically used as a weapon against me.

Both “gay” and “queer” have the same problematic histories and problematic presents. They have both been subject to reclamation efforts. To me, the difference is how those efforts are organized. 

“Gay” is an attempt to normalize, to assimilate, to take the elements of our community that are most palatable to the heteronormative homogeneous hegemony and emphasize them, making those elements even more palatable and altering or hiding the other elements of the community. 

“Gay” is like trying to get into an exclusive school that you fear is likely to reject you for prejudiced reasons, so you keep your nose clean, make sure you take all the right extracurriculars, polish your cover letter and personal essay, and try to make the right contacts with influential people on the inside… and if you have to hide some of your past activities, break ties with friends who are less presentable, and de-emphasize your family to make sure the admissions office doesn’t get the wrong idea about what you’d bring to their institution, well, it’ll be worth it, because that’s what you have to do get a, you know, fair shake.

“Queer” rejects that. Queer rejects homogeny, it does not demand that we sand down our rough edges or smooth out our contours. It does not seek to reshape ourselves or our community to fit ever-evolving standards designed to keep us out, but it challenges those standards.

If “gay” is trying to appeal to a bigoted admissions board by being smooth and shiny enough to slip in, “queer” is challenging the admissions board to accept or reject you on your own merits as you exist, and challenging the bigoted assumptions that underline the power structure as revealed by this. It’s bypassing the admissions board by creating your own infrastructure for sharing resources and information. 

I have a suspicion that a certain percentage of the intra-community backlash against the word “queer” is not because the negative connotations of the word hurt us as listeners, but rather that the radical connotations of the word hurt the effort to make assimilate gayness into heteronormativity. 

I.e., it is less, “Queer makes people think it’s okay to bash us.” and more “Queer makes people think we’re not like them.”

Most people end posts in defense of the label “queer” and the umbrella term “queer community” by saying “I won’t call queer if they’re not comfortable with it,” and most of them get told, “BUT THAT’S WHAT YOU’RE DOING WHEN YOU SAY ‘QUEER COMMUNITY!”

I’ve never yet seen anybody talking about the gay community have to disclaim that they’re not using the word to people who view it as unreclaimed slur or who just plain find it too hurtful to have even given that discourse any thought.

I won’t call someone queer if they don’t think of themselves a queer. I will use queer as an umbrella term. If that’s not you, you can cheerfully include yourself out of it. 

And heck, I’m doing you a solid. If you didn’t have a queer community to point to, you wouldn’t have anyone you could point to when you want to clarify that you’re not like those people.

If you’re bi/pan/aro/ace, anything other than black-or-white, capital G gay, you don’t have a word that doesn’t throw “sexual” right into the mix. And once you say “I’m bisexual, I’m pansexual, I’m asexual,” people seize on “sex” and think your sexuality is now public property and they’re allowed to fetishize at will or ask intrusive questions. Obviously this happens to gay men and lesbians, but they have “gay” and “lesbian” as descriptors without the “-sexual” in them. For those of us who don’t, I feel like queer can be a bit of a shield. If I say, “I’m queer,” instead of, “I’m bisexual,” I don’t get the waggled eyebrows and request to consider a threesome. In my experience, queer is somehow odd and confrontational enough that it turns off the “let’s ask sexy details” switch in straight peoples’ minds.

@jennytrout that’s fucking brilliantly put, thank you <3

THIS about the “gay as an insult” for this generation. That’s what I grew up on, kids at school sneering “that’s so gay” over and over again. “Queer” was a word I found online, and in history books about “queer literature” and “queer film history” and such. I think the first time I heard someone say it out loud was in college, at the LGBTQ club. 

redshoesnblueskies:

elodieunderglass:

squeeterbee:

downwithcisfandom:

vergess:

vergess:

If anyone tells you that there are 2-3 sexes in the world I want you to just go ahead and slap them.

I was making a chart this morning, but by the time I got to the twentieth configuration of primary sex characteristics, I got bored and angry, so just fucking slap them. Don’t bother giving them a chart, it’s a pain in the ass to produce anyway.

Here’s some non-chart-form lists.

Primary sex is defined by taking one or more item from each list (roughly, because just as there are double dominant intersex conditions there are double recessive ones too and it’s a whole thing). All potential combinations of these options can be said to constitute their own primary sex category.

Chromosomes:

• XX
• XY
• X/X0
• Mosaic
• XXY
• XXXY
• XXX
• XYY
• Others (there are so many, like I think you can live with up to five chromosomes? So many)

Hormones

• Estrogenized
  
• Androgenized
  
• Double dominant (high levels of both estrogenic and androgenic hormones)
  
• Double recessive (low or no sex hormones)
  

Gonads

• Testicle/es
  
• Ovary/ies
  
• Ovotestes
• Gonads
  
• Testicular agenesis
  
• Gonadal dysgenesis
  
• Probably more, I’m not a professional here

Genitals

• Penis
  
• Vagina
  
• Pseudovaginal pouch
• Clitoromegaly
  
• Micropenis
  
• Hypospadias
  
• Diphallia
• Definitely more but I am Tired™

There’s like at least several dozen primary sexes, and that’s before secondary characteristic development comes into play and the point is biological sex is a fucking mass hallucination. Slap anyone who says otherwise.

(This is not a professionally sourced and cited resource post please do not treat this like it’s some kind of all powerful reference work I literally just made it in a fit of rage in abt ten minutes based on stuff I already know I didn’t even research it be careful use google etc and so forth)

#;-; THAT IS SO CONFUSING (– @all-the-ships-all-of-them )

It so is? Like it’s just ridiculously confusing and complex.

WHICH IS WHY PEOPLE WHO SAY IT’S SIMPLE AND COMES DOWN TO “MALE OR FEMALE”/”MALE, FEMALE, OR INTERSEX” NEED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP AND ACCEPT THEIR SLAPPING PEACEFULLY INSTEAD OF SENDING ME DOZENS OF ANGRY LETTERS

This has gotten more attention than expected so I figure I will put it here as well.

My favorite is that there’s a good chance that people so insistent on the existence of a binary may be intersex and never know unless: they don’t get a first period, develop unexpected secondary sex characteristics during puberty, or struggle with infertility later in life, or GET KARYOTYPED

These are also very human-centric! There are vertebrate animals that don’t use chromosomes as their sex-determination system (reptiles and some birds can also use the environment to determine sex) and there are vertebrate animals that use different chromosome arrangements. 

Birds for example, don’t use XX/XY, they’re ZW/ZZ. In birds, the egg determines the sex (not the sperm) and females are the heterogamous sex (with ZW chromosomes).  There is plenty of room for variation, too - a ZZW bird who presented as female successfully laid and hatched her own eggs (x)

Platypuses, meanwhile, have a system that resembles both XX/XY and ZW/ZZ in function, but the form is a little baffling. Platypus males are XYXYXYXYXY, and females are XXXXXXXXXX. 

Clearly, there is nothing perfect, universal or holy about XX/XY - and anyone who insists there is has demonstrated that they don’t know anything about biology.

And it’s a fluid system even once you grasp the idea of chromosomes - we know that you can hack sex in lizards to create “superfemales” (by incubating an egg with “male” chromosomes at a temperature that hatches “female” babies). Superfemales present as females and can lay viable eggs. You can do it with lizards that happen to use the XX/XY system, and hatch fertile males with XX chromosomes. You can do this with chickens as well - take a “genetically male” fertilized egg and incubate it at the perfect temperature, and you can hatch a “male” chicken that will lay eggs for you. The difficulty is that this only works some of the time in chickens - the cooler temperatures that hatch female chickens tend to kill the male embryos that don’t transition, which is wasteful. Otherwise, this would revolutionize the poultry industry.

So now we know that XX/XY is like the Windows 7 of sexual determinism (lots of people use it, but would be silly to call it the only operating system in the world) how fixed is “sex” anyway? Well, most of us know that clownfish can change sex - if there are changes in their social structure, the dominant female can transition from a reproductively functioning egg-fertilizing male to a reproductively functioning egg-laying female. Bio textbooks say that clownfish “don’t have” sex chromosomes, but I think it’s more likely that they do, but that they don’t have any function. At any rate, the change is down to hormones, which change in response to the social environment the fish is in.

So are hormones, then, the Thing That Totally Definitely Determines What Men and Women Are? Not really. Before puberty, human children don’t have many sex hormones circulating in their bodies, and human children are often quite clear about their own gender. Humans who have had ovaries removed, or who go through menopause, no longer have waves of “female” hormones sloshing around - but we still call most of them “women.” Humans who have had their testicles removed or their androgens depleted (usually because of testicular or prostate cancer, which can feed on hormones) are usually still called “men.” And ovaries produce natural levels of testosterone quite happily, because they need to - just at lower levels! Pregnant humans often have particularly high levels of testosterone. Weirdly, “male” partners of pregnant people often drop to lower levels of testosterone than usual - their pregnant partner’s hormones influence their own biology. But a cisgender father of a fetus does not stop being a male just because he has less testosterone.

Pregnancy gets weirder, too - decades after the fetus has moved out, a pregnant person who once harbored an XY fetus will have XY cells in their body and brain. If you looked at, say, Molly Weasley, you’d be able to find “male” tissue in her brain - where her body traded for some fresh young stem cells from her fetuses, and used them to replenish her own older tissues. So a cisgender person born XX can exhibit microchimerism later in life and never know it. But having XY tissue in your brain doesn’t make you a man. 

Okay, so what about gender roles? Surely those are clear - surely those are necessary for sex and sexuality and the Natural Order and all those things?

Well, we also know that animals practice a range of gender roles. Again, a lot of it is more obvious in fish, reptiles and birds, partly because sexual dimorphism tends to be more pronounced in these animals. But there are plenty of species in which you get multiple “types” of sexes. The most common is the territorial/satellite male arrangement, in which there are multiple distinct types of males, with different genetics, behavior, life history, physical appearance and courtship strategies. 

Ruffs, a type of sandpiper, have distinct territorial and satellite males, plus “faeder” males that were only recently discovered to be male; faeders are identical to females in appearance and most behavior, and plenty of previous sightings of lesbianism in ruffs were probably faeder/female matings. Satellite and territorial males top faeders, but as faeders also top satellite and territorial males, researchers have interpreted this as “ruffs are perfectly aware that faeders aren’t the same as females, and none of them give a shit.” 

Above are some different forms of masculinity in ruffs. The bird on the top left is a female; the birds below are the different male types. In the picture on the right, the independent and satellite male are vying for the attention of the female; the faeder is the brown one on the left. The territory belongs to the territorial male, who will defend it from other territorial males, but he doesn’t attack the satellite and faeder males, because they aren’t in competition. (Imagine your OT4.)

Outside of that, gender roles aren’t as important as humans pretend they are. There isn’t really a Breadwinner/Housewife divide in the animal kingdom because most animals don’t practice capitalism. Performative masculinity only benefits species that gain an evolutionary advantage from it. Non-human mammals don’t find mammary glands to be sexually arousing. Mostly, animals just try to survive in complicated, complex environments that are constantly trying to kill them. The rules are: 1) adapt to changes in environment by being resilient, adaptable and diverse; and 2) successfully pass on the genes that succeed in your environment. You don’t need to be “fit” or fierce or have lots of bright plumage - those are not your objectives and may, in fact, distract you. You don’t even need to mate, or be fertile, or have children of your own - you just need to make sure that your traits survive, and hopefully help your species after your death. There is nothing in the rules about the superiority of special genital configurations, which animals are allowed to touch the color pink, and who gets to grow a beard.

Tl;dr : every time a human tries to come up with a hard-and-fast rule about what “sex” or “gender” or “male” or “female” means, there is a bird somewhere that has quietly devoted the past 2 million years of its existence to proving that person wrong.

everyone here secretly harboring a massive science!crush on elodie raise your hand now plz

revfrog:

allieinarden:

literary-potato:

Let’s be honest: Jesus wouldn’t take the wheel. Jesus would let Peter drive, fall asleep in the back seat, wake up to the sound of the other eleven screaming in mortal terror (while Peter bellows expletives at the car in front), and get them out of a fatal car accident at the very last second by rebuking the speed limit.

Finally, some sound theology on this issue.

rebuking the speed limit

youbuiltcathedrals:

if u were a gifted/talented child who grew into an anxious adult w fragile self worth and a perfectionist streak that makes u abandon things if ur not good at them immediately clap ur hands

kalinara:

strangecousinsusanx:

saucefactory:

Canon: What actually happened.

Headcanon: What you think happened, based on the characters, settings, storylines and all reasonable extrapolations thereof.

Heartcanon: What you feel ought to have happened, quite divorced from rationality or sense.

Soulcanon: What you know happened, deep down in your soul, regardless of what anyone says. Including the creators of canon, themselves.

Crotchcanon: What your gonads wish had happened, or, alternatively, what turns you on.

Oh my goodness.

Okay, this seems like a fun basis for a meme: “Send me a character, and I’ll give you one of each” - a canon fact, a headcanon fact, a heartcanon fact, a soulcanon fact and a crotchcanon fact.”  :-)