The companion tumblr for http://yrwelcome.wordpress.com .
Their coming out asks us to uncouple the idea of who we dance with, sleep with, date and fall in love with from the only social options available: gay, lesbian or bisexual. They require us to grapple with the complexities of our histories, our identities and our hearts. And for many of us, those complexities don’t include lifelong attraction or relationships with only one gender, and they aren’t fully conveyed through the language that’s currently available.
A huge thank you to whoever sent this our way! <3
We have the right to be good people, bad people, people with our own sets of morals and ethics that are not defined by our weight, our diet, our exercise regiment, or our blood pressure. These are indicators of what’s happening in our bodies, not telltale signs about our morality, our fitness to serve as role models, or our impact on our children, neighbors or communities. We have the right to go to the doctor’s office, even just once, even just for a fever or a broken arm, without being lectured about losing weight. We have the right to health care that helps us, not health care that shames us.
Fat people who love themselves scare the shit out of people who don’t love themselves. Even fat people who are TRYING to love themselves scare the shit out of people who can’t do the same. We force people to have to look at why they hate their bodies because we are “supposed” to hate ours and we don’t. And sometimes they have no idea what to do with that, so they act like assholes.
(via sleepydumpling)
We hear these comparisons all the time. Being trans is like being gay. Being a gay couple is like being an interracial couple. Being fat is like being a person with a disability. And everything, apparently, is just like being a person of color.
To their credit, this is often the way that allies—and many community members—struggle to find the language of oppression that hasn’t been taught to them. They’re reaching to link our struggles, and that’s a good impulse. The problem is, they’re doing it in a way that is substantially flawed and makes it deeply difficult to build relationships, coalitions and movements across lines of identity.
An Excerpt from an awesome wordpress, “On Fat, Trans, and the Pitfalls of Comparing Identities”.
GO READ IT.
It expresses my underlying frustration with activism. Our struggles are NOT the same but they do all deal with fundamental issues around our identities and freedom. Direct lazy comparisons between movements are (at best) incomplete and/or inaccurate. No oppression should have to be dismissed so that another one can be seen.
(via jakigriot)
Thanks for the reblogs & praise, everybody! <3
Learn from PETA’s mistakes. Don’t utilize these divisive tactics in your progressive organizing. It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’d never use such overtly exclusionary tactics, because many of us wouldn’t. But on a smaller scale, many of us make these missteps—often unintentionally—every day. We do it when we say that we deserve rights as “taxpaying citizens,” which implies that undocumented people don’t. We do it when we say that “gay is the new black,” an only slightly less ham-fisted message than PETA’s thirteenth amendment law suit. We are already making these mistakes, and the biggest lesson we can take away is to be as attentive in our approach as we are in setting our goals. Of all these tactics that PETA employs, perhaps the biggest threat they pose is making us falsely certain that we don’t, or can’t, make the same mistakes.
A truly liberatory approach to fat positivity/body positivity can’t simply replace one ideal with another, slightly shifting the whole system of body shaming and policing, but ultimately leaving it intact. So why rely on ideals at all? Why not just explode them with images of all of our bodies and stories of all of our experiences?
