fun tip for cis people: instead of saying “back when she was a he” or “back before [birthname] became [preferred name]”, try not being a pile of shit by saying something like “before she came out” or “before she began her transition”!
Pls friends and thanks.
“before she came out” is so easy and preserves so much dignity, PLEASE
I’ve been wondering the best way to say this. Thank you.
also if their transition is irrelevant to the story, don’t bring it up! just say “when X was a kid/ younger/ in college/ etc” and carry on using their current name and pronouns.
That last point is very important! DO NOT OUT ANYONE! Do not bring up their trans status or transition unnecessarily! And you trying to look more interesting/cool/whatever by having a trans friend does not count as “neccessary”!!
(asterisks mark books that are part of a longer series that either I haven’t read all of or doesn’t have prominent WLW characters in other installments)
Series:
Mangoverse, Shira Glassman, fluffy Jewish fantasy ft. lesbian queen and her chosen family
Nemesis, April Daniels, trans lesbian superhero YA
Alpennia, Heather Rose Jones, romantic fantasy ft. court intrigue, swordplay, magic, and lots of f/f romance
Not Otherwise Specified, Hannah Moskowitz, friendship between a black bi girl and the straight white Christian girl she meets in her ED therapy group
It’s Not Like It’s A Secret, Misa Sugiura, this one is billed as a sweet YA romance but it’s also about racism, including racism directed from one POC group to another, which can be a difficult read.
This Is Where It Ends, Marieke Nijkamp, controversial as heck, set during a school shooting. Spoiler: the lesbian couple survive.
YA (speculative fiction):
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, Seanan McGuire*, neglected twin girls find themselves in a Hammer Horror inspired secondary world/portal fantasy
The Abyss Surrounds Us, Emily Skrutskie*, enemies-to-lovers romance ft. pirates and genetically engineered sea monsters
Girls Made of Snow and Glass, Melissa Bashardoust, Snow White retelling with alternating POVs between the princess and her stepmother
Labyrinth Lost, Zoraida Cordova*, a blend of urban fantasy and portal fantasy starring a bi latina girl from a family of witches
Sound, Alexandra Duncan*, teen scientist helps rescue the brother of the girl she loves from the interplanetary slave trade
Adult (literary fiction):
A Thin Bright Line, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, novel inspired by the real life of the author’s aunt, a lesbian working in a Cold War-era climate research facility.
Rubyfruit Jungle, Rita Mae Brown, the archetypical semi-autobiographical lesbian coming of age novel, originally published in 1973. Molly Bolt’s narrative voice is incredibly engaging.
Adult (contemporary romance):
Knit One, Girl Two, Shira Glassman, yarn-maker finds inspiration in the work of a local painter, who turns out to be even more intriguing in person
Roller Girl, Vanessa North, former wakeboarder who quit the sport when she transitioned finds a new sport… and a new love.
Treasure, Rebekah Weatherspoon, college freshman dealing with depression and anxiety starts dating a classmate… who happens to also be a stripper who she met at her sister’s bachelorette party
Thaw, Elyse Springer*, mousy ace librarian falls in love with glamorous supermodel
Ester and Artemisia, Rivka Aarons-Hughes, cat-and-mouse game between an art forger and the expert who proves her works are fake
Romancing the Inventor, Gail Carriger*, lesbian mad scientist Genevieve Le Foux (side character in many of Carriger’s other works) meets a parlourmaid with a gift for mathematics
Beauty & Cruelty, Meredith Katz, Sleeping Beauty and the Wicked Fairy work together to save their world from a real world that thinks fairy tales are irrelevant
An Unkindness of Ghosts, Rivers Solomon, brutal dystopian take on the Generation Starship concept
Borderline, Mishell Baker*, urban fantasy about the connections between Hollywood and Faerie
My Real Children, Jo Walton, elderly woman has two competing sets of memories; in one timeline she has children with her female partner
The Drowning Girl, Caitlin R. Kiernan, impossible to describe meditation on art, madness, love, and ghosts
Walking on Knives, Maya Chhabra, Little Mermaid retelling where the Sea Witch’s sister is in love with the mermaid
❤ Soooooo many books to check out here ❤
I put together a book fair in April of a bunch of books with wlw protagonists and I’m not seeing them here, so here’s the link to the fair, where I labelled the books with genre, amount of sex, and price.
I feel like… people here on tumblr will push that you can’t tell when someone is gay or trans, period, no exceptions.
It makes a lot more sense imo to simultaneously acknowledge that there are those of us who will be read as lgbt, and there are those of us who won’t.
We as members of the lgbt community need to recognize that there are some among us who are much more likely to be targeted for violence. We need to acknowledge that. That’s how we keep each other safe! Starting with those among us who are most vulnerable!
And the fact of the matter is, trans people who are read as trans, gnc gay people (and of course people who fall into both categories!), these are the people who are most at risk, moving through society.
It’s not wrong or inappropriate to be able to recognize individual trans people, individual gay people. And when you recognize each other, keep an eye out for each other.
We all want to make sure we’re not unintentionally hurting or invalidating anyone, and that is important. But at the end of the day, if you see someone you’re sure is LGBT, don’t go up and bother them or whatever, don’t do anything that put them in a bad position, but quietly keep an eye out. And be ready to do what you can to keep them safe.
If every person in the world had one of their best friends look at them
that way, and express that much joy in what it meant for her to be
referred to as the pronoun she is, there would no longer be an argument
[over trans rights].
People would just understand.
So, I’ve seen a lot of exclusionists going on and on about how there are asexual people saying they’re uncomfortable with all PDA at pride. But I’ve seen absolutely no asexual people making posts to that nature. It really seems as if someone decided to either make up this problem or take the existence of one or two posts and blow it up to some enormous and widespread problem, and other people saw those posts made by that someone and thought it is a widespread problem even though there are very few asexual people actually saying that – to the point where I still haven’t seen a single one, while having seen a couple dozen or so posts about this “huge problem.”
honestly, this all stems from the discourse a while ago about sex-repulsed and romance-repulsed people taking part on lgbtqia+ spaces.
the debate was originally about accommodating ace, aro, and traumatized folks who were uncomfortable with pda – often for perfectly valid reasons – in safe spaces, while also accommodating people who sought those spaces as a refuge, who were unable to publicly display their affection to each other elsewhere because they weren’t out, or were in dangerous home/work/personal environments.
i think that the consensus was that this should be handled on a case-by-case basis. essentially… like any other trigger.
i haven’t seen a single person complaining about pda at pride, nor do i think that’s a serious discussion that’s happened. i think some people who deeply misconstrued the original debacle (which was, essentially, about triggers) just anticipated it bleeding into pride month, and started complaining about it before they even had any evidence that it was happening. and then it didn’t happen. and now they look like hatemongers.
i really cannot stress enough that this debate is not even really just about aces and aros, nor does it apply to every ace/aro person. not every ace/aro person is sex- or romance-repulsed! and plenty of otherwise lgbtq+ people ARE repulsed by those things, or triggered by pda specifically, because of their own personal history.
this has been giving me a huge headache because it’s the same misunderstanding that’s made the whole “bars vs cafes” discourse so toxic. there are lgbtqia+ people who need spaces that are alcohol-free, spaces that do not contain sexual undertones, spaces where they will not be hit on, etc etc.
no one was saying that gay bars were any more sexual than any other bar. that’s just realistically what a bar scene is like. it’s a place where people go to relax, indulge in alcohol (and possibly other substances), and be social. people often go to bars to hook up. that’s not specific to gay bars. not one person was saying “get rid of gay bars”; they were saying “lets diversify the spaces that we congregate, so that no one is left without a community” and those words were twisted.
this is the same situation.
i’m not sure where this misconception that ace and aro people all unanimously dislike pda. that’s never been true in any ace or aro space (online or off) that i’ve been a part of. in my city, there’s an ace specific group that marches in the pride parade every year.
the people getting overly aggressive towards the imagined threat of ace people trying to like.. “censor” pride, or whatever it is they’re trying to insinuate, just need to calm down and enjoy pride. they will almost 100% not find a single person at their local pride events who remotely behaves this way.
i can’t even understand the logic here, tbh. pride events are notoriously rowdy events, that people attend specifically to enjoy being queer in public. pda is a given at an event like this. if someone is too triggered by those things, they just won’t attend.
(and besides, it’s not like there aren’t other parts of pride that they can focus on if they do choose to attend. parades, live entertainment, and vendor browsing are all things i enjoy at pride, which have nothing to do with pda)
the thing i do see people complaining about pride is unsolicited kissing, groping, etc, which you’d have to be a terrible person to deliberately NOT address in favor of shitting on ace attendees.
because it’s definitely not just ace people who dislike outright sexual harassment.
it’s very tiresome that everyone is framing these issues through the lens of “ace/aro people don’t belong, that’s why they’re uncomfortable” because that’s literally not true. the issues that were talking about are harmful to a much wider range of people – particularly victims of trauma and abuse – and deserve to be addressed, for the safety of everyone.
tl;dr, nobody is complaining about pda at pride, calm tf down.
Reagan was elected in 1980, around the same time that HIV began spreading and turning into a pandemic. Nearly 60,000 cases were reported with more than 27,000 dead before he even mentioned the disease in a major speech, during his second term.
His administration spent years pushing back on requests for funding for treatment and research. It’s impossible to know for certain, but if the disease had been aggressively studied and treated in the early years it might have been contained to a few hundred or few thousand deaths here in the USA.
Also he cut funds for mental health treatment and facilities, turning disabled people out onto the streets, the War on Drugs was cranked up to inner-city warfare, and the fundamentalist Christian “Moral Majority” that was his power base happily watched queers and black people and sex workers and homeless people die alone and scared.
Until Donald Trump was elected, he was the best example of an oblivious wealthy white person riding a wave of bigotry into the White House, and empowering that bigotry to a degree that cost tens of thousands of lives.
TL;DR, he watched us die and didn’t care.
My friend: “I thought everyone liked Reagan.”
🙄🙄🙄
Republicans like Reagan, idolize him because he was a good public speaker (he was an actor) and he had an overwhelmingly popular re-election campaign because he survived an assassination attempt.
Make no mistake though- blood is on Reagan’s hands for every single person who died from HIV/AIDS. Worse still, his economic policies condemned an entire generation: we’re still suffering from Reaganomics and the stunning amount of cuts he gave to the wealthy to fuck the middle class.
Ronald Reagan can burn in Hell.
The man put a wreath on the graves of Nazis while visiting Germany, because “they were just doing what they were told”. He was a villain
bullshit central 