https://www.kcur.org/politics-elections-and-government/2023-03-29/missouri-house-gives-initial-approval-to-45-6-billion-state-budget-that-defunds-libraries

How long do you think it will be until someone tries to stop me from using the women's bathroom?

I've already heard stories about cis women being called names / attacked because the aggressor was transphobic and thought they were trans

Transmisia hurts all women. Transphobia and feminism are mutually exclusive. Misogyny hurts all women. Trans women are women.

Never forget that when they come for trans women, it means they're coming for cis women too.

Not sure which flair to use I thought this is the most appropriate as mainstream feminism isn’t doing enough to burn the patriarchy.

As the title says mainstream feminism is failing butch women massively. The common discourse is about embracing reclaiming femininity and while this is important for those that want it this ignores the fact that butch women didn’t give up femininity we let go of it and stoped trying to hold onto something that wasn’t even what we wanted.

I’m constantly seeing anytime a slightly rugged woman shows up in media a shit storm happens and people say she shouldn’t have to give up femininity for be masculine to be powerful. This argument ignores the massive amount of feminine and conventionally attractive kick ass women in media. Butch women don’t get any representation let alone good representation. No captain marvel isn’t masculine she’s an alien soldier ptsd or some other trauma.

Also I noticed how women are frustrated by being expected to be a certain way in office settings and are expected to do emotional labour well that might change a bit if butch and masculine women are allowed to exist in media and in real life. It would show that not all women are inherently feminine not all women are good at emotional labour or even intuiting others emotions. By portraying more butch women it would show that there is no one way to be a woman.

Some branches of feminism have even started getting into gender essentialism basically saying all women are naturally emotionally intelligent and nurturing and that it’s empowering to embrace that. This ignores neurodiverse women and women that just don’t intuit others emotions well. I myself don’t intuit emotions if you want something you have to tell me no beating around the bush just plain English. There is no empowerment for me in nurturing I absolutely hate it I can’t do emotional labour it is not natural to me. I am very much naturally masculine by western standards how I dress how I act talk walk so according to gender essentialism I’m either defective or a trans man so which is it?

Every time I see people talking about femininity being erased I’m like where is it being erased because I’ve never seen a butch woman be accepted more than a feminine one. Yah NLOGs exist but I’ve seen so many stories of butch women trying to be femme just to fit in and hating every second of it. I can even show examples from r/butchlesbians forget quote mining I have a whole quote quarry I can pull up just to show how we are brushed aside.

Please support your butch sisters we need acceptance we aren’t a threat to you.

My family flew down to our home town (in Texas) for Spring Break to visit the folks. We were here when the Covenant shooting happened. The entire town is up in arms. Flags being lowered to half mast, signs being put up, vigils being held. Sounds sweet, sounds like a nice show of sympathy and solidarity. But… The problem I am having with all of this is that, less than a week before, there was a school shooting IN THIS TOWN that killed almost as many people. Where were the vigils then? Why weren’t the flags lowered then? We can’t show empathy and solidarity for our own neighbors, but for people miles and miles away. I hate how when “the school shooting” is brought up in conversation I have to ask, “which shooting?” And it’s never the local one. I get that one was elementary kids and one was high school, but dammit these people mourning are IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD. Shouldn’t that literally hit closer to home?? But it feels like, outside those who are directly mourning, the local shooting doesn’t matter. I have this feeling that it’s because of the shooters. You see, the local one was carried out by your standard white cis male. Every time I see a sign or a freshly lowered flag, it doesn’t feel like solidarity or empathy, it feels like transphobia. The fact that I’m the only one talking about the local shooting makes me feel like I’m literally going crazy.

I don’t know what I’m after here, just had to get this out in a safe place.

Darling hearts, I have the last exam of a 4.5 year journey tomorrow... And wowzers, has it been quite the journey.

I started when my child was 1.5 years old, have been working full time, making a run down house bought cheaply into a cozy home, there was a lil old pandemic and the day to day keeping people fed and pants clean. It's been looooonnnggg.

Every holiday snap has a study book in it somewhere too.

Please light a candle for this very tired witch.

I've put the work in, seen 3 rainbows in the same sky at the weekend and got my fuel to 50.00 on the nose... The signs are right!

In 17 hours I'll be done!

Honestly not sure why I haven’t burned these sooner. But last year was the first time I had told anyone about the abuse I went through ever. Going to therapy and all that now. I was going through my closet and saw these and decided I wanted to physically manifest the fact that that bastard is gone. He is no longer part of my life.

sorry if the tag isn’t appropriate, i didnt know what to choose. And this is the only sub id feel safe to vent on

So yeah i was in the STEM school shooting back in 2019. You probably never heard about it because only 1 kid was killed. Yeah so thats the opening to this rant , its not gonna get better from here. If this is too heavy for you i dont blame you but you should get out now.

Now im not here to tell you what the shooting experience was like. Sadly enough there are other post out there (maybe not on this sub i haven’t checked) that can describe what thats like. So let me tell you what its like after the cops show up. Now luckily STEM is literally down the street from a police station so it didnt take long for them to show up and escort everyone out of the building. STEM doesn’t have a proper field or really anything like that , so we were all escorted to this small patch of grass out in the front of the building before they moved us to a proper location.

Now on that piece of grass everyone you know including yourself has just gone through the worst experience of their life, and now its finally over. Lots of kids are crying , my best friend sobbing afterwards is still an image i don’t forget. Theres a lot of friends saying i love you for the first time. There was one kid who i shit you not told me this was his second school shooting. I know as an internet stranger you cant trust that that’s true , but on my soul it is. But more then all of that theres 2 things you’ll find on that grass.

The first thing is a complete and utter lack of surprise. Shock? sure. Surprise? No. Kids all over the place were saying shit like “welp. finally happened.” And why should they be surprised? Most of the schools in the same area of STEM have had the exact same thing happen there. And we were a tech school so yeah you better believe we see the news. People saw it as a matter of time. Honestly the most surprising thing was the shooters waited until last period.

The second thing you find on that grass , is questions. And i don’t mean questions like Why? or What? we could guess to that. No see when you’re school just got shot up literally minutes ago , you don’t have all the information. You don’t know if all your friends got out ok. So you search for them to try and confirm who’s alive. After you find them , or you don’t , the next question was who did it. Cause yeah when you’re all huddled up in the corner of your classroom you don’t know who it is shooting inside. Now 2 people shot up stem. I don’t care to talk about one of them , he’s not relevant to this and i don’t wanna give him the satisfaction. You have the article you can read it if you want.

So in my crowd of people i was talking to , we did know who atleast 1 of the shooters was and that was alec. Now i didnt know alec but alot of my group did (mostly because alec sold alot of drugs at stem according to my friends). And the thing about Alec is that hes a transgender man. His reasoning for the shooting was to get back at people who bullied him for being trans (which by the way is the same as 99% of school shooter motivations just with a twist).

Now i wanna make it very clear that Alec was not the only trans person at stem. I myself didn’t come out until after the shooting , but there were many kids there at the time who were and they’re all pretty lovely people for the most part. STEM in general is pretty much the gayest school in colorado. Genuinely during my time there cishet kids were a minority (cis bi kids were the majority if you’re curious). And the other shooter was a cis man , so no actually conservative creeps , its not the transness of a person that makes a shooter.

And when we were on that grass we knew that if fucking fascist news outlets got wind of alec being trans , they were going to run with it like crazy. Now fortunately those news outlets didnt catch wind of it. Turns out that the whole “Nobody cares about your school shooting because not enough kids died” thing was a blessing in disguise. Because guess what?

almost 4 years later and we were fucking right. And now as a transgender woman i get to deal with that. Honestly i was gonna write more about this , but do i really have to? You can guess why it sucks. Sorry if this reads passive aggressive im just venting. If you read all of this , Thanks.

This realization was prompted because I was going through a tough time in university and mental health and hadn't shaven any parts of my body for a while. One day in the shower I just realized that I actually have no idea what my body looks like in its natural state because I've been shaving various parts of my body since I was 15. My view of my body was that of a teenage body, and I am a fully grown woman now. I know this doesn't apply across the board for women in different cultures but my culture heavily stigmatizes female body hair.

Anyway, I have found that discovering what my body looks like and appreciating it for being an adult has been a really nurturing form of selfcare lately, especially since I've been trying to be more body neutral as a stepping stone to self-love.

Much love, y'all 💓

The last few years I've been who people want and expect me to be. But those people weren't who I am. Today I walked into a hair dressers and I had them cut my waist length hair into shoulder length curls. I regret nothing! Today I AM ME!

I have always felt a connection with paganism and I feel the power today.