Binary Gendered Language Is One Of Those Things That Often Goes Unnoticed Even At Churches That Are Trying

*transgender but otherwise this is a nice list. Off the top of my head, I can also add Fires of the Faithful/ Turning the Storm to the fantasy section -- it’s mostly a fantasy novel, but it has two very prominent lesbian characters.

This is a list I made for YALSA’s The Hub on the wide range of YA literature featuring LGBTQ characters. See the full post and a downloadable pdf here. 

Seriously. The same goes for aro/ace people, pan people, demi people, etc.

whats the difference between bi people and unicorns

i can see unicorns on movies and tv

ron: god, professor dumbledore's speeches are so boring. more like dumblesnore amirite?

dumbledore: I HEARD THAT, WEASLEY

dumbledore: TEN POINTS FROM SLYTHERIN

malfoy: hey now what the shit?

dumbledore: FUCK YOU MALFOY

If you are a non-Jewish person attempting to be inclusive of Jewish holidays and traditions, but your method of doing so starts from the assumption that Judaism is exactly like Christianity but with less Jesus, and/or that Hanukkah is just like Christmas but eight days long and harder to spell, you are doing it wrong.

(Hanukkah traditions: not actually Christmas traditions with a different color scheme! Including Jewish traditions: not actually talking about Hanukkah exactly like Christmas but with the name of the holiday switched around! Judaism and Christianity are different and their holidays are different. If you actually want to include Jewish people, recognizing these differences is an important step.)

Watch: Emma Watson and Malala Yousafzai talk equality, her journey and the one thing U.S. politics needs.

Note: The phrase “the chart” refers to the graph in iamretrograde’s post, titled “Comparisons of Intimate Partner Violence Against Various Categories.”

I did a reverse image search on the chart, followed by searching for the text. This led me to this site http://chart-mining.com/comparison-of-intimate-partner-violence-against-various-categories/, which has the graph followed by a source. They source it as being from http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS04C02 . I followed the link, but it didn’t have the image, just a page telling me that I could use the website’s search bar to help find what I was looking for.

I tried searching for some of the keywords used on the image with the site’s search bar and discovered two things:

1. The site has an extreme anti-LGBT+ agenda and is extremely biased.

2. I could not find any mention of the supposed statistics. I did find this article: http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF08L44.pdf , which says, “ ‘Domestic violence is reported to occur in about 11 percent of lesbian homes,’ the article [this is referencing another study] states. It goes on to claim that this is ,about half the rate of 20 percent reported by heterosexual women.’ However, this comparison fails to note that the highest rates of domestic violence among heterosexuals occur among those who are divorced, separated, cohabiting, or in sexual relationships outside of marriage; married women experience the lowest rates of domestic violence of any household arrangement.” Which, as far as I can tell, is claiming that this is study doesn’t count because heterosexual married women are less likely to experience domestic violence than unmarried heterosexual women who have a male partner. This may be true, I’m not sure, but I fail to see how this proves their point. In addition, these figures are significantly lower in both cases than the figures given on the graph.

I then looked up the article they reference. It’s here: http://www.glma.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageID=691 . The organization publishing it, the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (yes, they will also be biased) has removed the statistic and didn’t cite their sources, so that’s mostly a dead end. I found a few other sources, but all of them have various flaws (convenience sampling, over-specificity, etc.) that make them not useful.

Overall, I could not find anything to back up the statistics in that graph. If we accept the statistics provided by an anti-LGBT+ organization, who have a vested interest in the opposite result, then we have clear evidence that domestic violence occurs at lower rates among two-woman couples than one-man one woman couples. Since two-woman couples would have twice as many opportunities to occur, this would seem to indicate that, from a domestic violence point of view, it is safer for a woman to be in a relationship with another woman than with a man. Furthermore, it is safer overall for everyone than that chart indicates. (This does not mean the given statistics are good! However, they are less bad.)

If someone can find a source to back up the chart, I will absolutely reconsider this; until then, it looks like its claims are false.

Heterosexuality is Stockholm Syndrome

(Though I will note that Title IX mostly applies in educational settings.)

Does it bother anyone else that there are parts of your life you don’t remember? You have done and said things that you don’t even know about anymore. That means you don’t even have the right perception of yourself because you don’t even fully know who you are. However, something that you’ve forgotten about could be a prominent memory in somebody else’s mind. It trips me out.

In seventh grade, there was this girl in my class that was convinced that I was dating a tenth grader -- not any specific tenth grader, just one of them. One day, she saw me talking to another student (actually a ninth grader, but she didn’t know that).

 She then came up to me and said something to the effect of, “Suuuure you aren’t dating a tenth grader. I saw you and him talking in the hallway, obviously you must be dating.” 

“That doesn’t even make sense!” I said. “By that logic, you and I are dating, since we’re in the hallway and talking right now. Since we aren’t, there is clearly a flaw in your reasoning.”

Someone in my class overheard this and decided that this meant that she and I were actually dating.

This girl, who at the time was rather homophobic, was extremely bothered by this rumor, and vehemently denied it. This only served to convince our classmates that it was true.

In the end, the rumor stopped spreading because people became convinced I was dating a different person instead.

PleaSe TeLL mE yOur StoRiES