I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this. There’s so much going on here. I genuinely love the conception of gender as mystic autodeism. Gender as divine microcosm. Gender as Great Work. It’s gnostic, it’s alchemical, it’s got notes of bacchanalian worship of the body and the inherent magic of self-discovery. This but unironically.
Shoutout to transphobes for thinking gender is this fucking badass
What’s the quote? “God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”
In the mid-2000s there was a brief fad in Australian government messaging where they went out of their way to insult the public as much as possible.
This fad eventually died out after the tourism board attempted the same style of messaging in the UK, causing a minor scandal which led to the head of Tourism Australia, Scott Morrison, getting the sack.
The first time we drove past the “don’t drive like a cock” sign, my mum looked at it was immediately SO confused - after all she’s a good semi-conservative Christian woman. My brother and I knew it right away but for the next half hour she guessed literally EVERY other word for cock (don’t drive like a rooster, chicken, hen, chick, bird, fowl, poultry) trying her goddamned hardest to make the sign make sense until my - at the time - eleven year old brother got fed up and yelled COCK at the top of his lungs from the back seat.
My mum was FURIOUS - we weren’t even allowed to say “heck” - until she realised he’d just been telling her what the sign was, and for the rest of the three hour trip our good semi-conservative Christian mother proceeded to amuse herself by muttering “cock” under her breath and giggling like a teenager every time she did.
We still bring it up every now and then. So that particular advertising campaign has been making my family laugh for over a decade.
This one was always my favourite, though:
Reblogging to make sure this excellent story is seen
Tumblr really has ruined me. I was in a Rite-Aid and “out of touch” came on over the speakers, and I freaked out a bit because I thought I had missed my thursday morning meeting. It took me a minute before I remembered that Out of Touch playing does not always mean its thursday. sometimes people just play the song.
I got very loudly deadnamed and misgendered multiple times at the doctors office today. This new receptionist ignored the preferred name on my profile to deadname and misgender me loudly, louder than she talked about anyone else in the waiting room. My birth certificate says “F” nex to sex, my medical documentation reflects this, and I was still deadnamed and misgendered.
And the saving grace was a woman and her child. I wear cat-ears and the child too young to speak loved them, and kept pointing and looking at me. I’m assuming her mother kept saying “yeah, she’s wearing cat-ears”, “yeah, that woman has cute cat-ears”, and the like. Her child was enamoured with them, and that woman didn’t misgender me once. And each time my very obviously masculine deadname name came up, she looked upset at the receptionist, but not once did she give me a bad look.
It doesn’t have to be much. You don’t need to be a knight in shining armour, or in someones face. Simply a quiet refusal to play along with someone elses bullshit is enough. It was enough to turn a trying and tiring moment into something that put a smile on my face and joy back into my life. It wasn’t a lot but it mattered to me.
