Story of my life… until now! Headed to Boston on a redeye tonight. My brother graduates from high school, my grandfather turns 84, and I go to my 5-year high school reunion!
(It’s hard to pack when you have to present many different genders/classes over the course of a single week while it’s RAINING and COLD - things I have forgotten about living on a hippie farm in California)
By Curtis E. Hinkle, Founder, Organisation Intersex International
And Hida Viloria, Human Rights Spokesperson, Organisation Intersex International
1. Intersex means that a person has both sets of genitalia. (False)
This is probably one of the most common misconceptions about…
“[We] find the notion of trans totally foreign to our identity because we are rejecting binary gender altogether and the prefix, ‘trans,’ just like the prefix ‘bi,’ …keeps the binary well intact.”
I realize this isn’t a very profound statement, but it has changed the way I think about cis/trans a little bit. I still think transgender/trans* can work as an umbrella term for nonbinary folks, including nonbinary-identified intersex people, but definitely room for a new term, perhaps
“In other words, hipster anti-racism, like much of hipsterdom, is defined by its appropriation and lack of historicity. In this case, it is an anti-racism that is not making an effort to link itself into broader histories and communities of anti-racist struggle. Note that I don’t think every instance of momentary engagement with race and racialization is an instance of hipster anti-racism. Those moments, could, after all, signify the beginnings of an awakening to ideas of privilege/power and anti-racism. It is only when someone’s anti-racism is only andcontinually displayed through those momentary engagements (rather than a deeper and more actionable shift in consciousness) that I think it wanders into the category of hipster anti-racism.”
Hmm, side-bar: doing my best to be as self-reflexive as possible when positing this on tumblr. As a former Oberlin student, I know people like this. I have been and may very well be a person like this. And positing this on tumblr may be the equivalent of anti-racist “snaps.” So, then, self-reflexive Jon: allow these thoughts to mobilize action. Continually and in meaningful ways.
This is hard. GPOY. Also, I try and teach anti-racist practice to mostly-white current/future hipster high schoolers, and I struggle to know how to talk about the constant appropriation of radical practice into hip action/theory without actually deconstructing power. Am I just passing on the “hipster” attitude that allyship and anti-racist praxis can be taught in a single 2-hour class?
And if so, how can I hold both - continuing to include conversations about allyship in the curriculum *and* trying to avoid creating the next generation of apathetic white folks looking for praise each time they give snaps to the struggles of their (few) peers of color in private schools and beyond?
I’ve spent the past few weeks doing a few things:
-Graduating the most spectacular class of students this school has ever seen
-Herding an 80-person mob of middle schoolers around our campus and pretending to teach them birdwatching, when all they want to do is stare at other middle schoolers through binoculars and lie down because they’re spending too much energy growing to do anything else
-Trying to reach out to schools in my area about the Gender Spectrum Family Conference, an awesome event for gender-variant youth in Berkeley this July. (Check out more info here: http://genderspectrum.org/events/family-conference)
Only, I keep running into EXTREMELY Christian schools. Schools with mottos like “Educating for an Eternity” or “Time is short. It will take an army to finish all the work that needs to be done before Jesus can return. We are helping to train that army, and training begins now.”
WTF. I didn’t think that things like my childhood could be institutionalized into a school setting. And I really, really want to reach out to them in some way, to just get to their TG/GV students and tell them they could have a different life, but I don’t know how to do it. I know if I email their heads of school or their guidance department my email will just be trashed. Blah
…this, also, a kid in my first birding group with a middle school science camp found a dead baby scrub jay and all my dreams are littered with baby birds
(via thoughtslikeskyscrapers)
Hi! I noticed that one of your followers asked about gender-neutral signs, and as an ASL user working on getting my interpreting license, I though I could help out.
There are not many purely neutral signs only because on the way ASL is set up: male nouns (father, boy, male cousin, uncle) happen…
This is super interesting & makes me wish I studied more ASL
Inca and Rayas are two male penguins at a zoo in Madrid who have built a nest together every spring for the last six years, hoping for a chick. To satisfy their apparent craving to start a family, keepers have given them an egg of their own to care for and hatch. More.
THE FEELS.
PENGUIN GAYBY. D’awwww
Though also, thinking all the time lately about how we talk about animal relationships and gender. Concerned about my future as a science teacher; wanting to be really clear about the differences between human and animal sexuality/partnering. But D’AAWWWW
Western Tanager, bird #234 on my life list, and the closest relative to the Northern Cardinal in Seattle, WA
I saw two male WT’s outside the window the morning of my all-day interview. No better omen than flamboyantly gay passerines on a sunny day in Seattle
Not only that, I’m going to be a MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE TEACHER
Things have fallen into place in a way I thought only possible in fiction. Over the course of literally 2 weeks - 14 days - I went from never hearing about a school to being offered a position there. And I never contacted them, they contacted me! Unbelievable.
Next in line is the wilderness retreat, then graduation, then a relaxed summer of farming and reading books about teaching, and then the hardest year of my life
…but also the most exciting. How did this happen? Seriously. I feel like I won the lottery, twice
