Gravity legally cannot hurt you if you scream “NO GODS NO MASTERS” immediately before impact
I’m so fucking tired of this bicycle helmet discourse. Bike helmets aren’t going to do shit to protect you if you get hit by a car
Most of the time… Bike accidents…. Involve things…. Other than cars…… like the ground….also it’s safety gear….. Wearing it is non negotiable…. You are one accident away from being permanently disabled….. You need to protect your brain
Not towards OP
Is OSHA and other safety regulations also cop behavior?
*sigh* The belief that OSHA and other safety regulations are cop behavior are common opinions that people have, anarchist or not. Wearing PPE is annoying and often uncomfortable, sweaty, and cumbersome. People also generally hate being told to be careful, because they believe that “be careful” is synonymous with “hey, you’re too stupid to do that without hurting yourself”.
But all it takes is one time for you to slip up and suddenly the grinder disk that would have gotten stuck in your safety glasses is in your eye, or you’re getting treated for lung cancer because you didn’t want to wear your respirator while you welded. These are decisions that you were free to make, but might seriously regret later on.
People will scream until they’re blue in the face about how oppressive it is to have to wear a safety vest and hard hat on a construction site, but do you really think that the hammer that slipped out of your buddy’s hand is going to take that into consideration when it collides with your skull?
No political theory will save you from an accident. You can either wear your PPE, or can die, unexpectedly, painfully, and slowly. The choice is yours. Go argue with a lathe if you feel so strongly about it.
Wayne was gay. It was obvious. He was unable to stay in the closet even if he wanted to. To make matters worse, he was also Black. From a bullying standpoint, that was not a great combo. Both Black and white students made fun of him relentlessly. He was ostracized from the only community that may have given him protection. Only us theater kids stuck up for him, but not to significant effect.
Wayne was bullied so much that at one point he finally snapped and attacked his bullies with a lunch tray. I was actually seated in perfect line of sight and just sat there chewing my soggy fries in stunned silence. It didn’t even seem real as I was witnessing it. The image of him wailing on his main bully as the food on his tray flew off is permanently logged into my long term memory.
The bully he attacked had blood all over his face and went straight to the nurse. Other than superficial cuts, he was not injured.
Before the attack, Wayne went to teachers for help. He went to guidance counselors for help. He went to the principals for help.
He did all of the things you were supposed to do. No one helped him. They wagged a finger at the bullies and warned them to stop.
Wayne’s lunch tray melee was the only thing that worked. His bullies stayed far away from him. But a week later Wayne was expelled and the bullies were given no punishment.
So… no.
No one in my school talked about being trans.
Because the only way to survive being openly queer was to bash people with a lunch tray.
Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because… he liked wearing eyeliner. That’s it. he had a girlfriend. He’s still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.
And later learned that a number of people I’d known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.
Kids started calling me a “lesbo” on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became “boy crazy” as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn’t a dyke.
It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for “girls.” Ha ha, it’s funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.
That’s my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.
Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn’t.
If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss “homosexually” (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn’t an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).
Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.
Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as “a lesbian with a man’s body” and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female “transvestites” didn’t exist, so I guess I couldn’t feel like that? Painfully.
So why didn’t you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren’t getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.
Yall are talking 2000 and earlier but ik kids at my fucking school who are too terrfied to come out bc they’re in a bad class.
I spent middle school clutching my identity in secret because if it came out I was more then a emo girl with funky colored hair we’d be fucking dead. Litterly.
We went to a good school, in a big-ish city. Our current school is considred one of the queerest, and yet we can still point out each and every closeted person we only know to be trans because they’ve confided in us.
Its still like this. It’s better, but it’s never been the time. It’s been that if we come out, we’re fucking dead.
Graduated high school in 1996. One of the first people I met in the school who wasn’t awful to me was a splendid, but awkward individual who took me home and handed me off to their big sister as a more suitable mentor for a weird, loud, mouthy little baby lesbian.
Said person was several grades ahead of me, and graduated long before I did, but I remained very close with the sister.
Said person fully transitioned the minute we were all out of high school, and he was my manager at my first full-time office job. No, he never talked about being trans on campus. He would have been beaten to death by the other students. But he was trans, and the minute he could live his truth, he did.
I graduated from Jr high in 2004. I knew I was bisexual in 1996 when I saw Disney’s Hunchback (Phoebus AND Esmeralda???? Hello I was living) and in 2003 I was dating a girl (I was a girl at the time) and we got massively bullied for being lesbians. In 2003. In Los Angeles, California. When I went to my principal to get them to leave us alone, she looked me in my eyes and said: “Have you tried not being gay?”
In Los Angeles. In a school full of art kids and artists parents who worked at the studios, in a solid blue town.
You do the math.
I am 35 and it has taken me about 30 years of my concious-of-other-peoples-opinions life to even approach the treshold of potentially being trans. I was 28 or so before I even knew non-binary was an option, which is where I have squared myself for a while.
Because I knew.
I was 4 whole years old when I started getting bullied for playing sports rather than playing house.
In high school I desperately dated and later broke a boys heart because I watched all my other girlfriends going on dates with boys and I sat there thinking something must be wrong with me. I have to fix it now. This is normal right? Why don’t I want this.
Why are we making fun of this popular girl all the sudden? Because there are rumors she invited other girls to her house and they went around topless. Now shes being pulled from her throne in the high-school hirachy
This was just 20 years ago. They want to stuff us all back in the closet again and forget about us. I just found myself. I’m not going back.
Everyone scream about who they are joyfully and with pride.
saw a post a while back like “cis girls and boys should be able to get bottom surgery if they want it” so now im curious. in a perfect world, would you want bottom surgery
KOKOBOT - The Airbnb-Owned Tech Startup - Data Mining Tumblr Users’ Mental Health Crises for “Content”
I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.
Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)
But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.
I couldn’t even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I’m glad I stopped to read, because:
What you say on there won’t be confidential. (And for context, I tried it out and the things people were looking for help with? I didn’t even feel comfortable sharing here as examples, it was all so deeply personal and painful)
Also, what you say on there? Is now…
Koko’s intellectual property - giving them the right to use it in any way they see fit, including
Publicly performing or displaying your “content” (also known as your mental health crisis) in any media format and in any media channel without limitation
Do this indefinitely after you end your account with them
Sell / share this “content” with other businesses
Any harm you come to using Koko? That’s on you.
And Koko won’t take responsibility for anything someone says to you on there (which is bleak when people are using it to spread Christianity to people in crisis)
They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn’t find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of “People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find”. Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.
So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.
(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don’t read if you’re not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)
There are young people on tumblr that actively seek support from KokoBot right now, if you check the tag for recent posts. Those people did not get paid to promote it, so do not harrass them. If you can, direct them towards resources about Kokobot (like this post) that are more transparent about what this company is up to.
I remember in my Arabic class we were going over the alphabet and the teacher was like there’s no ‘P’ etc and this white girl was like wait what but my names Paige and my teacher was like lol then we’d pronounce it as beige and she was so offended I’m crying thinking about it
One of my mom’s friends, Hugh, went to France and they had a lot of trouble pronouncing his name because the entire thing was silent.
salut je m'appelle [REDACTED]
lol when I lived in France my host family had a friend names Hugh. We saw him and his family a lot.
They pronounced it “oog” and I didn’t know until the day before I left France that his name was Hugh. I just thought he had some weird caveman nickname 😭
that is hands down the funniest addition to this post
“it’s weird for queer minors to be friends with queer adults” oh my god. ohhh my god.
intergenerational community support, especially in a community that is split so much age wise as the queer community, is immensely fucking important. get to know older queers and younger queers. this is how communities frazzle out and die to infighting.
the hypothetical queer adult that people are mad over in the post this is refrencing is 35 years old. only 35.
its weird for any minors to be friends with any adults, queer or not. There should be no reason why unrelated adults or minors should be making close relationships in any sense outside of professional ones. I understand wanting education, but they can be taught when they are adults as well.
is this a joke.
If you believe there is something inherently wrong with adults being friends with teens, you’ve been brainwashed into believing that every adult sees youth as a form solicitation.
