Being Me

Yesterday an artist, well known for her feminist cartoons, posted a love cartoon to a certain fictional series written by the worlds most famous bigot. Many were unhappy.

The Muslim Association of Canada insists that their anti-LGBTQ+ protests in Canada aren't hateful, demanding apologies, and to that I say: get fucked.

So, the far right bigot brigade is attempting to intimidate businesses into dropping all public displays of support for the LGBTQ+ community and, in particular, the trans community. The latest target for this is Costa Coffee in the UK.

It's Canada Day today and I'm not seeing a lot of reason to celebrate and, for that, I think I'll fly a different flag.

"My faith requires me..." is a constant refrain of bigots, it's their shield against being held accountable for their deeply personal hate and I am so very tired of it.

So, I woke this morning to discover that a former co-worker had posted a series of articles on different women's rights issues ranging from the US to Afghanistan to Iran on Facebook. Good, right?

I pushed my earlier post back to draft because I feel this is more important. McGill University, in Montreal, has made the unconscionable decision to host a speaker from a well-known anti-trans hate group out of the UK.

On the one hand, I really despise the state of "social" media today, it's truly a petrie dish of hate, but there's that part of me that wants to resist just closing it all down and forgetting it exists.

If you've never read Brave New World, I really recommend you do. It comes to mind because the government in that book used a drug, called soma, to keep the masses complacent with what they have.

I don't have anything to add, this is a conversation that you should listen to. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Conscious Lee (@theconsciouslee)

Recently, I attended the Out & Equal conference virtually. There was a great deal of conversation and valuable insights into the world of D&I as it pertains to the 2SLGBTQ+ community. However, what continues to stand out to me is a failure to grasp that one cannot be included inside when they are excluded outside.

I have reached a breaking point on the toxicity of that site and I had to leave.

Nothing worse than seeing casual transphobia on supposedly trans blogs and sites.

It seems like a neverending stream of hate is directed towards us in the LGBTQ+ community and time and again we're told that it's just a fringe, that the majority supports us. Where is that majority? They feel very absent to me. 

We've seen this many times, somebody says or does something that is racist, homophobic, transphobic, or anti-semetic in some way and the truth of that gets pointed out to them. However, rather than apologizing and learning from it, they double down in defense with "I have a ... friend" defense.

Every year, on March 31st, we celebrate the lives and achievements of trans people around the world. It's a day for those of us who are visible to tell our stories and, more importantly, to be visible for those who cannot be.

There’s been some recent news around the rebranding of the Mr. Potato Head line to drop the “Mr.” as a part of the overall branding strategy. The characters of Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head would still exist, and be sold, but the overall branding is being changed to be more inclusive. All in all, a pretty innocuous change, I think, but not to the world of social media. I hesitated to post this, I'll be very honest, but I cannot begin to change my corner of the world without making some, who are closer to me, a little uncomfortable. So, yes, some who read this may well read themselves into the post, but before you get defensive, please ask yourself why you are feeling that way. The reason it’s on my mind at all, despite being well past the age of actually caring about a toy potato, is the casual transphobia that arose as a result of the news. Whether it was meme jokes showing a confused Mr. Potato Head unable to pee at a urinal or a collection of posts and comments along the line of “He...

I'm sure there's a fairly decent chance that you've seen that meme, the one with Archie Bunker and George Jefferson laughing it up and lamenting the fact that we can't make jokes like we used to. Well, keep lamenting as I, for one, have no desire to return to those times.

So today is #TransInFashion day on Twitter. What is it? It's an idea cooked up by Dr. Emmy Zje as a way to help us all combat the blahs from being inside and to give us a reason to jazz it up a bit.

I emotion bottle way more than I thought I did and it seems to be more obvious to me these days than it ever used to be.