anti_cishet_aktion

The rainbow flag or pride flag is a symbol of LGBT pride and LGBT social movements. The colors reflect the diversity of the LGBT community and the spectrum of human sexuality and gender. Using a rainbow flag as a symbol of LGBT pride began in San Francisco, California, but eventually became common at LGBT rights events worldwide.

Originally devised by the artists Gilbert Baker, Lynn Segerblom, James McNamara and other activists, the design underwent several revisions after its debut in 1978, and continues to inspire variations. Although Baker's original rainbow flag had eight colors, from 1979 to the present day the most common variant consists of six stripes: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. The flag is typically displayed horizontally, with the red stripe on top, as it would be in a natural rainbow.

LGBT people and allies currently use rainbow flags and many rainbow-themed items and color schemes as an outward symbol of their identity or support. There are derivations of the rainbow flag that are used to focus attention on specific causes or groups within the community (e.g. transgender people, fighting the AIDS epidemic, inclusion of LGBT people of color). In addition to the rainbow, many other flags and symbols are used to communicate specific identities within the LGBT community.

Variations:

Original Gilbert Baker Design

Inspired by the lyrics of Judy Garland’s Over the Rainbow, and the designs used by other social movements such as black civil rights groups from the 1960s, the Rainbow Flag was created. Baker hand-dyed and hand sewed this flag which flew at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day in June 1978.

Seven-color version due to unavailability of pink fabric

Following the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, many people and organisations adopted the Pride flag that he helped to introduce to the community. The demand was so great for a rainbow striped flag, it was impossible for the 8-stripe design to be made in large quantities. Both Paramount and Baker struggled to obtain the hot pink fabric and so began manufacturing a 7-stripe version.

Traditional Gay Pride Flag

In 1979 the design was amended again. The community finalised this six-colour version and this is now the most familiar and recognisable design for the LGBT flag. Numerous complications over the odd number of stripes, including the desire to split the flag to decorate Pride parades, meant that one colour had to be dropped.

The turquoise and indigo stripes were combined to create a royal blue stripe and it was agreed that the flag should typically be flown horizontally, with red at the top, as it would be in a natural rainbow. This design continued to increase in popularity around the world, being a focal point of landmark decisions such as John Stout fighting for his right to fly the flag from his apartment balcony in 1989.

Progress Pride Flag

In June 2018, designer and activist Daniel Quasar released an updated version of the Pride flag. Combining the new elements of the Philadelphia design and the Transgender flag to bring focus on further inclusion and progress. This new flag added a chevron to the hoist of the traditional 6-colour flag which represents marginalised LGBTQ+ communities of colour, those living with HIV/AIDS and those who’ve been lost, and trans and non-binary persons.

This design went viral and was quickly adopted by people and pride parades across the world. The arrow of the chevron points to the right to show forward movement, while being on the left edge shows that progress still needs to be made for full equality, especially for the communities the chevron represents.

Intersex Inclusive Progress Pride Flag

In 2021, Valentino Vecchietti of Intersex Equality Rights UK adapted the Pride Progress flag design to incorporate the intersex flag, creating the Intersex-Inclusive Pride flag 2021.

The intersex community uses the colours purple and yellow as an intentional counterpoint to blue and pink, which have traditionally been seen as binary, gendered colours. The symbol of the circle represents the concept of being unbroken and being whole, symbolising the right of Intersex people to make decisions about their own bodies.

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• 📀 Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 🔥 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⚔ Come talk in the New Weekly PoC thread
• ✨ Talk with fellow Trans comrades in the New Weekly Trans thread

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
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• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 🍉 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

Happy pan visibility day! 🩷💛🩵

Due to some queer accounts on Instagram posting about celebrations of today, I had to get reminded that there are still some awful queer people focusing on discourse about that "bi vs. pan" shit.

There is a tendency for battle-axe bisexuals to state that "bisexual and pansexual mean the exact same thing" with the intent of equating the two because they want to invalidate anyone who identifies as pansexual instead of just identifying as bisexual, but I realized something... this is actually biphobic as hell, not bi-affirming like they think!

Of course, sexual orientation labels are neologisms for a person's own comfort, so being linguistically prescriptivist about them at all is absolute nonsense that anyone who perpetuates this "bi vs. pan" shit doesn't understand.

However, to illustrate my point coherently, a common definition of "pansexual" is a sexual orientation which entails not regarding gender in your attraction. If a battle-axe bisexual asserts something like "Well, bisexuality means not regarding gender too!", then they are literally invalidating every fucking bisexual person that regards gender in their attraction (and there are tons of those). There are many bisexual people who will explicitly say that they regard gender.

To grasp at straws so hard to invalidate people who identify as pansexual that you'll shit out a misconceived biphobic myth that invalidates numerous bisexual people is basically saying "being indirectly biphobic to own the goofy MOGAI pans."

I identify as both bisexual and pansexual simultaneously, so every time this kind of discourse comes up, especially when people have the intent to put bisexuality and pansexuality as "at war" with each other makes me double facepalm.

No one should invalidate anyone's identity. No one should invalidate their own personal interpretation of it. Pansexual people should respect how bisexual people identify themselves. Bisexual people should respect how pansexual people identify themselves. Everyone should just respect other people's labels PERIOD!

Bottom line is that the LGBTQ+ community needs to get over label discourse and policing entirely. You'd think "respect people in how they personally identify" wouldn't be a controversial take for queer people BUT... here we are.

Love all of my m-spec buddies, BTW!

A while ago I was kinda surprised that my attractions shifted predominantly towards men. I knew I was bi for years and was alright with that but, still was predominantly attracted to women. Then for the last couple of weeks my interest in women picked up. Now, I feel myself shifting interest to men again but, not as strongly as the last time.

I guess upon reflection, my growing romantic attraction to men is what probably drove the recent increase in my attraction to the same sex. That was a more recent development that happened in the last year when I tried browsing OLD sites again. I started looking at the men I saw as potential long term partners in a way I only thought about with women until that point.

Does anyone else deal with this too?

Edit: Sorry if the response time was a bit laggy, my shit was longer than usual today.

Hopefully he just want to watch a movie as a pretext bc this shit is quirky. I got a second hand projector with some dead pixels and an HDMI snaking across the room to my laptop that plugs into a little dinky USB speaker I got at a recycling center for free that is plugged into a double jack behind my comfy chair.

Also I got no Netflix or nothing just a Plex my friend put up. Inshallah he likes the weird Almodovar movie I got my pal to put on there, or its just pretext how I said.

The brilliant team name is courtesy of emizeko, I claim no credit for that.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2425113

We have to stop Project 2025...

But I feel powerless at times.

Over 400 artists, bands, and entertainers sign an open letter denouncing anti-trans legislation and policies. Of course like any open letter or petition it's just symbolic. But it was heartwarming to see that Fred Penner and the two surviving members of Sharon Lois & Bram were among the signatories.

bottom text

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2006727

A landmark of trans and feminist nonfiction, Whipping Girl is Julia Serano’s indispensable account of what it means to be a transgender woman in a world that consistently derides and belittles anything feminine. In a series of incisive essays, Serano draws on gender theory, her training as a biologist, her career in queer activism, and her own experiences before and after her gender transition to examine the deep connections between sexism and transphobia. She coins the term transmisogyny to describe the specific discrimination trans women face—and she shows how, in a world where masculinity is seen as unquestionably superior to femininity, transgender women’s very existence becomes a threat to the established gender hierarchy.

Now updated with a new afterword on the contemporary anti-trans backlash, Whipping Girl makes the case that today's feminists and transgender activists must work to embrace and empower femininity—in all of its wondrous forms—and to make the world safe and just for people of all genders and sexualities.

you can order a copy here with code SERANO20 for a discount

embarrassingly i've never read this, but a new edition is the perfect time to change this! it's one of the big books people always talk about as a must read for understanding transphobia and transmisogyny, so now i'm doing that and i feel pretty comfortable recommending others do so as well

I believe I generally understand the concept of the (trans, not Star Trek) usage of "The Prime Directive" but as a cis person, I don't really seem to get why. If a person you know and are close to starts to act or talk in a way like they are possibly trans, why is it... not proper, for lack of a better term, to genuinely tell them "I think you might want to seriously explore these feelings"? It feels like you should? Like you should be reassuring to someone who feels like this?

Just wanted to publicise this library for folks. Membership is free and they run on donations to get queer literature out there on the world, especially where it would otherwise be inaccessible or unsafe for people. It is part of the Libby network.

Idk if it's just a product of their catalogue being small because they have just started up but unfortunately they didn't pass the Leslie Feinberg or Ursula Le Guin vibe check but it's still promising despite that fact.

Of course there's almost everything at your fingertips thanks to LibGen and similar sites but it's worth remembering that non-black market queer libraries directly support queer authors and promote queer culture, and not everyone is fluent or comfortable with pirating ebooks so this library meets a need that doesn't really get met elsewhere.

Looking for trans and queer comrades working on self-acceptance to start a reflection and growth group. It will be sort of like group therapy but with more emphasis on personal reflection. There would be weekly threads to share reflections and to find support with each other.

I started this sort of hokey new-age self-help book titled 'Gay Spirit Warrior' which provides a framework for becoming a liberated, anti-patriarchal Gay Man through processing internalized homophobia, and anxieties around being publicly out.

As I was reading the introduction, it was so easy to replace 'loving other men' with 'letting yourself be genderqueer.' I am really excited to start working through the book! But like all forms of reflection and growth, it is done best through community.

I am committed to spend about two hours each week reflecting, and imagine others could have a worthwhile experience with about half that time. If there are a few interested comrades, I would begin freely adapting the chapters of the book to be about general queer self-acceptance.

I will try to adapt the first chapter by Friday so comrades can have a better idea of what it entails! Probably this will be done by block quoting with interpretive notes.

I almost put this in c/neurodiverse because it's such a weird ramble thing. Where are you supposed to put stuff when you do stuff???

Anyway

The bear website was very slow the other day, so I sorted by "Most Comments" and started scrolling past mega threads. I liked the over-1000 comment thread from six months ago, that was pretty cool. I was surprised to see a thread about a Leslie Feinberg book, however, and this is where I discovered the rare lore of who TC_69, TransComrade_69, actually was: a based individual <3

I haven't read anything like enough theory; it's probably more than the average person but like, three books tops. And Combat Liberalism because lol lmao. When I stumbled upon this thread angrily yelling at me to read Beyond Blue and Pink or else be branded a lib, I figured I probably should, since TC_69 said so and all. Most of it's not that new to me, I'm pretty waist-deep in trans liberation ideas and stuff, and a lot of the fiction I read is related or adjacent to it--I first heard of Kate Bornstein from Nevada--but I feel deeply enriched for reading Blue and Pink.

It's not just that gender markers on passports and other forms of identification should be removed because they're a mechanism by which authorities oppress people based on their gender. Or even that Trans Liberation refutes the weird, shitty idea that crossdressers and drag queens/kings/etc are exaggerated performances, or worse "blackface for women!" which is something I have actually heard people of my generation really actually say. We still need Leslie Feinberg. The theory end of the experience is really great and the primary point, obviously.

But I think I like our history the most.

Reading these old 1990s queer theory books, with their references to even older queer events and people and shit, it's actually really nice! Sometimes it can feel like the current queer movement is floating alone and divorced from anything else, having randomly sprung out of like, late 2000s websites. Susan's Place is not always the type of history I wanna remember... Reading about the thoughts and the activism of our forebears though, that's fucking rad. Leslie Feinberg was so goddamn cool. I get a sense that instead of living in relative comfort purely because I am under the radar, I'm doing so as the benefit of hard work done by people like me, who came before me. Who weren't so different from me, despite being around to witness the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

It really irks my shit when the average liberal queer person in many queer spaces doesn't seem to acknowledge any of this history we share. I guess it's stupid to think that every single queer person ever should read theory and be politically engaged(?), but the struggle for our rights & liberation is still very much an ongoing battle, and I feel like it's kind of very shitty to just disregard our history of activism. Type of USamerican queer person who figured "gay rights" was over in 2015.

I don't wanna bitch too much though, when instead I can be saying how much I appreciate receiving the words of our elders. It's pretty rad, for pretty much the only time in my life I feel a sense of, I guess heritage about it. Somethin' like that. I dunno what you'd call it because it's so rare that I do not feel 100% alienated from everything and everyone. It's nice not to for once. Thanks, TransComrade_69, wherever you may be.

Uphold TC_69 Thought

https://nitter.net/Aiphelix/status/1686802166764236818

https://nitter.net/supacreamss/status/1742023816291709329

(This was originally posted in the games comm, got removed but apparentlt that was just because inappropriate for the comm and its fine here )

For reference, I am a trans girl and pretty sure I'm Endosex. I do not know any openly intersex people IRL.

Is the term GRSM inclusive of intersex people, and if not and it should be, what alternatives besides LGBTQIA+ are? (I've heard Quiltbag and Mogai as well but apparently they are both problematic? Idk but apparently Quiltbag feeds into gay stereotypes and Mogai divides the overrall community but I have no idea).

I would appreciate responses from Intersex comrades if possible, but I'd love any form of help on this issue. Thanks <3

I have well meaning people at a party who are trying to describe their friend who is supposedly gender fluid but they dont really know how to talk about them? Do you just refer to gender fluid people as they/them until they tell you how they feel that day/week/whatever? Do you refer to them as what you last were calling them? Id look it up but im very drunk and i dont teuat googlr in this state lol

I swear I came across every other couple being exactly this when I lived in the US.

Have any queer vibes to share? Here's your place!

Talk about what’s happening queerly in your life - like coming out, getting HRT, questioning, and all that good stuff.

No cishets allowed!