GOd Okay I Went To My Neighbor’s Housewarming, And Don’t Get Me Wrong, I Love Parties (if Everybody

IT IS [WEELVIL] WEDNESDAY MY DUDES

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

Anrealage Fall 2025 Ready-To-Wear

MARKGONG Fall 2025 Ready-To-Wear

BIG TRANS RIGHTS UK TO DO LIST POST. PLEASE READ, DISSEMINATE, AND DO THE SHIT IN IT.

Trans Actual: We heard last week that the anti-trans lot write to Keir Starmer very regularly, some write at least once a week. And that’s all he’s hearing. He needs to hear from us. Write to him today, then put a note in your diary to write to him again next week, and the next...

Read our guide: buff.ly/4D2xGXs

@natacha.bsky.social

The best advice right now, from @janefae.bsky.social; If you're trans or non-binary, If you're a cis ally, If you oppose stripping an entire demographic of their human rights, Write; Use theyworkforyou.comcontact.no10.gov.uk Be polite, but WRITE. NOW.

Medium

Get writing!

Things you can do today to challenge the UK Government

Comedian @brainmage.bsky.social:

A bit rambly, but I think I got my point across. Cis folks! Write to your MP! It's real easy to do www.writetothem.com And important! Try to also ask specific things so you actually get a specific answer instead of a boilerplate one!

[TEXT:

Dear Fleur Anderson,

I am writing to you today to once again express concern at how trans rights are being eroded by the Labour government. I have previously written to you before about this (see case ref FA, FA &c.).

Today's letter is about the recent Supreme Court ruling which included in it a judgement about the definition of "women" under the Equality Act 2010.

This ruling is appalling. I am a cisgender man. I have trans friends and family, as I also have cis friends and family. The rhetoric whipped up around trans people is not a belief held by the vast majority of the UK population, and there is good evidence that it is pushed from extreme sectors of the American Evalgelical Christian right, who wish to use it as the thin end of the wedge to erode women's rights to contraceptive medications and abortions, as well as the rights of gay people to get married (see this piece in the Guardian, for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/09/us-religious-right-lgbtq-global-culture-fronts). Crucially, even were this not the thin end of a wedge, it would still be a cruel, harmful and unjustifiable attack on a minority group who are just trying to live their lives.

With regard to the ruling that trans women cannot use women's toilets, this ruling is both unenforcable, and will only result in more women, trans and cis, being attacked for not looking "sufficiently feminine". This will not protect anyone. I have a dear friend who is a cisgender woman who is over six feet tall. She has, since the "trans issue" has been pushed further into the national conversation, faced increasing holsility and fear when using toilets in public. My wife, who is also a cis woman and has previously had short hair and dressed in a gender non-conforming way, also been met with harassment when using toilets. I am not saying this to suggest that cis women's experiences are more important than trans women's - I also have many trans friends who have reported experiences of public transphobia - I am instead saying this to emphasis that, in spite of the anti-trans activists' insistance that they wish to "protect women", the results of their actions lead to exactly the opposite outcome.

All this ruling will do is empower people to harass women - both cis and trans - who are just going about their day.

The ruling is also unenforcable. Will there be an attendent checking the genitals of people using these bathrooms? If so, by what basis will they check? Will they check everyone, or only women deemed "insufficiently feminine"? If that is the case, please explain how this is anything other than a regressive, patriarchal step that will set back women's rights.

It has also been widely-reported the the Supreme Court did not consult with any transgender people in its ruling, but five dedicated anti-trans organisations were permitted to submit lengthy arguments. I find that staggering.

In summary, please directly address the following points in your reply:

1) Do you support this ruling? 2) Do you agree with Kier Starmer, whose spokesperson recently confirmed that he no longer agrees that trans women are women, and that trans women should use men's bathrooms? 3) If you do support the ruling, or agree with the Prime Minister that trans women should use men's bathrooms, please clearly state how this will be enforced, including the criteria that would deem a person insufficiently feminine, and therefore require intervention, as well as the scope of the intervention 4) If this ruling is upheld, and trans women cannot use female toilets, and feel unsafe in male toilets, where do you expect them to go when in public, given the relative infrequency of mixed-gender toilets? 5) If you do NOT support the ruling, what do you intend to do to push back against this, given your letter to me on December 15th 2023, case ref FA, where you said "I am a strong supporter of trans and LGBTQIA+ rights and I am disappointed that we still have such a long way to go. The safety, dignity, personal freedom and equal opportunity of all people is very important to me."?

I look forward to your reply.

Yours sincerely,

Guy Kelly

P.S. If you are a staffer reading, categorising, and responding to these on behalf of my MP, please think very carefully about the role you are playing, how can you can take an opportunity to stand up for and help protect a marginalised group, and do your part to be on the right side of history.

@nancymk.bsky.social‬

Want to contact your MP about the Supreme Court ruling?

@transsolidarity.bsky.social has created an MP letter template to help get you started:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17g6X6jR2Xa6mPXY0hTib089xIdzmu5Y_2t6fVfHiDKQ/mobilebasic

if you're not either in the uk or from the uk, please feel free to just reblog. if you're bri'ish or resident here: get writing.

"But I've already written."

Girl (non-gender specific), the TERFs are writing every day. they have an uncontested field. Outweigh their bullshit. There's more of us than there are of them. Make it LOOK like that.

Dressing Gown

c. 1900

unknown maker

Chicago Historical Society

she always called me a princess, but i became a queen.

STORM // ORORO MUNROE

source → storm (2024) #5, written by murewa ayodele and drawn by lucas werneck.

hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.

Dress

c. 1900-1910

Hallwylska museet