I wrote about my detransition, retransition, and the eternal dissatisfaction that is probably the corest truth of my identity. It's free to read or have narrated to you on my Substack.

This same, hand-tame, Jumping Spider has lived on my front door for about five years.

I've been told they don't live that long, but unless they have a line of succession worked out I'm not sure how else there'd always be an identical one waiting to be fed.

It/they are still there. I never see slings/babies around the door, I just see what genuinely appears to be the exact same spider every time.

It never ceases to amaze me how 'tame' and personable they are.

Lucky me, I also have a young one living in my house plants now. It's doing a great job at fungus gnat control.

Okay so I’ve made about a dozen of these posts in the last month or two, so I’m not going to get as exhaustive as I sometimes do, but here’s the history that my mother and aunties taught me about kink and polyamory as queer.

When I was growing up, I was told that the kink community was the physical space in which the queer community existed and that non-monogamy/polyamory as the concepts that exist today were born directly out of queer culture and the environments that shaped it.

Basically, back in the early years when most of queer culture was an arrestable offense and people mostly only got to meet their partners in the backrooms of old speakeasies and nightclubs, kink spaces were doing the same thing and were one of the only non-mob owned options for gatherings. Kink communities themselves were almost entirely made up of queer folks already anyways because surprise surprise a community made mostly of abuse survivors is gonna have pretty high rates of queer folks in it. And because of the semi-public nature of the spaces and the limited safe dating options polyamory and related non-monogamous practices became common place.

They became so common place in fact that queerness and queer culture completely and foundationally shaped the discussions around consent, relationship needs, emotional connections, and ethical behavior that became central to kink and polyamory as practices. They became so common place in part because it made sense, in part because the cultures all needed each other, and in part because, as my mother always said, “if society had already damned you just for being queer, what did you have to lose by trying all the other things society was going to damn you for as well?” This, incidentally, is also why there have historically been such high numbers of queer folk in illegal occupations like sex work and why my mom and aunties also used to consider sex work as a culture pretty fucking queer too.

But the years went by and your average, “respectable” white gay and lesbian folks with their picket fence day dreams started making progress. They started kicking people to the curb in an effort to make queerness look less “challenging” and different. Bye bye, bisexuals, bye bye drag and trans culture, bye bye non-monogamy what do you mean you actually think the “slippery slope” to gay marriage also leading to polygamy might be a good thing? Bye bye all you sex freaks, sexuality is something your born with and you can’t help who you love, it’s not like all that disgusting talking-about-sex-and-building-the-entire-network-of-sex-ed-information-we-used-to-desperately-try-and-survive-the-AIDS-crisis-ew-you-perverts-our-sex-is-beautiful-and-pure-like-marriage! And so on and so forth.

See, when it was all about survival, the distinction that Straight people drew between gay, kinky, polyamorous, trans, ace, etc was irrelevant. They’d kill us all the same so we might as well band together and make a world in which the next generation might not just live but thrive. But once it became about gaining access to state acceptance and making room within the legal framework that already existed, those of us who were too scary to Straight society, who still needed the hierarchy destroyed, not just expanded, became dead weight. Our labor, our physical space, our intellectual efforts all became irrelevant and all that mattered was when the Straights looked at White Cis Gays they saw Us instead. So the White Cis Gays fixed that by making it clear they thought we were just as disgusting as the Straights thought we were. They abandoned us and took our history and our language and our fucking lives with them and said we weren’t ~allowed~ to have it. And because those of us who were marginalized in many ways or who were doubly or triply damned were more likely to have suffered massive losses during the AIDS crisis and to still be living in poverty, in crime, and in general destitution of social capital, we’ve been fighting an uphill battle not to be erased ever since.

So now you have a whole generation or two or three who grew up being told a sanitized history where a “drag queen” threw the first brick at Stonewall, Pride wasn’t started by one of the bisexual Queens of Kink, and non-monogamy hasn’t been the natural progression of so many of our communities for generations. And they tell us we never existed, we’re just secret straighties thinking our gross sex lives make us queer, we could just choose to be respectable and “normal” like everyone else and then we wouldn’t be “bullied” (because god forbid our actual oppression be recognized) and they completely miss the irony.

And as much as I hate that I have to list my credentials in order for there to be a chance in burning hell for this response to be considered legitimate, I am the nonbinary, bisexual, polyamorous, kinky, intersex child of a bisexual, kinky, polyamorous woman who spent all of my life and most of hers in the heart of Queer culture and politics to the point that she put me on the stand in front of the entire school board and a third of the state at age 10 to fight for our right to participate in the Day of Silence without fear of suspension, expulsion, abuse, or injury/death. I was on my mother’s hip at the state capitol protests with police in riot gear ready to do whatever it took to prevent us from entering the building. I am Queer in so many ways, including ones no one can dare fucking argue and so was my mother before me and my aunties before her, and this is THEIR history I am telling and will keep telling until I’m dead because I will rot before I let people erase their memories, blood, and joy from our history by claiming that kink and polyamory don’t belong.

I apologize for that all sounding angry and upset. It is not aimed at anyone in particular. I am just very very tired and it’s almost Passover which means that my auntie’s are a lot more on my brain than usual and I am just so exhausted by the way I have been mocked and belittled for months now over things that were simply Truth when I was growing up. Please understand how much history is denied and how many ancestors are dishonored by this rhetoric of “who REALLY belongs in the community?”

We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.

We were not supposed to be an exclusive club with a guard at the gate. We were supposed to be a role model by which society learned to better itself and treat us ALL with dignity and humanity. And I am tired of seeing people pretend otherwise.

When I met my “First queer person ™” back in 1990, one of the things she said to me that I spent about 27 years unpacking was this:

“monogamous heterosexual relationships are patriarchal bullshit.”

I took offense at the time. But when you don’t let people use words like “queer” to describe “everyone who isn’t in this Normative Bubble of heterosexual serial monogamy”, you have to get pretty specific about the fact that STRAIGHT refers to this concept of being “normal” which in this culture has meant for many years “Straight, cis, monogamous (or doing your best to fake all of the above)” 

Quit fucking gatekeeping.

The people who hate us hate all of us. Joining them in their hatred doesn’t solve the problem. 

The way they win is if they get us to fight each other. 

I don’t reblog sensitive topics on this blog, but this is exactly what I had a long conversation about recently. I’m not young, and I remember shit like this as it was happening. polyamory is queer as fuck and learn to respect that

Relatedly, also – the legal fights for legal polyamory and kink are fundamentally tied to the legal fights for gay and trans rights.

Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough: even today, most states have anti-kink laws on the books, and will sometimes prosecute consenting kink participants for assault and battery. And in places where this happens, it is pretty much exclusively used to target queer clubs and spaces, in almost exactly the same way that anti-sodomy laws once were.

When I was in undergrad, a queer nightclub near where I went to school got busted because someone was reportedly “hitting a patron with a wooden spoon”. The people arrested were charged with assault with a dangerous weapon – the alleged ‘weapon’ being the spoon – a felony punishable by up to 5 years in state prison and $1,000 fine. Turns out, there wasn’t any play happening in the club at that hour, and there were no wooden spoons found anywhere in the building… but you better believe that the proud queers the cops arrested for it had to find lawyers and make bail and go to court dates anyway. And even if the cops had found a fucking spoon in the club, would that have justified any of it? Make no mistake – this club, like so many other queer kinky clubs across the country, was targeted because it was queer. And separating out the queer from the kinky would do jack shit to help anyone arrested that night.

Anti-kink (and anti-poly) are weaponized in order to target queer people, specifically, and in significant numbers. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s enough to make them inherently anti-queer as political tactics, even laying aside all of the history above. Don’t do our enemy’s dirty work for them.

god fucking thank you for thoroughly explaining this. i’m so exhausted by this argument and so exhausted explaining these points to people.

i am once again begging the baby gays to LEARN YOUR QUEER HISTORY

just on the flip side of this, since this is also an issue: the kink community tends to forget that its roots are very firmly rooted in queer culture, particularly gay male culture. leather subculture, which most mainstream kink copies to some degree, was very specifically a butch gay male thing (formed out of the cross-pollination of post-WWII military guys, bikers, and gay men). high protocol dynamics? collaring? flagging? the aesthetic of wearing leather clothing or harnesses, or using leather equipment like floggers and handcuffs? the sheer concept of using “topping” and “bottoming” as term at all? that’s all fucking gay, dudes!

and incidentally this is why I get pissed off at heterosexual kinksters who like to act that their dynamic is The Truest Expression of Dominance and Submission because the man is the dom and the woman is the sub and that’s the only true/traditional dynamic. my dudes, the “traditional” kink relationship was a Tom of Finland comic.

box car sluts

source 1

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source 3

honestly this is the most badass ten of swords interpretation i've ever heard.  i'm stealing this

i'm legit curious pls reblog this and put in the tags what your first band t shirt or merch was

And this is why you switch to DuckDuckGo. :/

Don't let them lie to you about this. They're acting like the llms are some inherently uncontrollable natural process.

My mom used to write code for the US Navy, and one of the first things she drilled into me when school was teaching us LogoWriter was "A computer is only as smart as the person who programmed it." The creators of these systems have full control over how they operate and what kind of input they're "trained" on. They were just lazy about it, and now the consequences are too big and costly to be worth fixing.

Don't let them lie to you about how this works. They just don't want to take it offline (costs money) and spend the time and money actually doing a good job. They just don't want to admit that it wasn't ready to be released.

"We are sorry but our generate-words-without-context tool is now generating answers without context when people ask it questions"

"Okay so why do you have it answering questions?"

". . ."

I’ve said it before; AI is not being implemented to be good. It’s there to be an ‘act of God’ machine that can be blamed for corporate negligences.

They could train AI to give better answers. But that would require identifying good, useful information. And that would take a lot of work by people they’d have to pay. I know we’re on the “please let me infodump” site, but off tumblr subject matter experts expect to be paid—some quite highly. And the source of a lot of this information is someone’s intellectual property, which AI companies have been extremely reluctant to pay for. In short, AI was built by techbros who figured they could do it quick and cheap, and get out with their billions before AI all crumbled under its own insufficiencies.