The Middle Of 7 Is 4.  

Honestly people who use “grammar” as a cover for their transphobia and desire to invalidate nonbinary people had better not have any speech habits that don’t conform 100% to that narrow subset of academic English they claim to worship. Drop the slang, no run-on sentences, and I know I did not hear you use a sentence fragment on the phone earlier!

And if they’re opposed to neologisms they’d better be consistent with that, too. What’s the cutoff date for a new word to be old enough to be considered “real”? The word “e-mail", coined in the 80s, is newer than the pronouns “sie” and “hir”, transphobes. Don’t use “selfie” if you’re aginst nounself pronouns, which have been around longer. Xe/xem/xer pronouns are older than the word “podcast”. Oh, and the singular “they” has been in use for hundreds of years, so better avoid saying things like “antibiotics” and “lightbulb”!

tl;dr - your cries of “But grammar!” and “But made-up words!” are woefully transparent. You’re doing a truly terrible job of hiding the fact that you’re a transphobic asshole who prefers making marginalized people horribly uncomfortable and possibly dysphoric to, you know, just respectfully changing one word you use to refer to someone.

steve rogers: pr disaster | gen | 4k

(someone asked about the full version of this, so here u go)

“Wait,” says Sam, “you had a publicist?”

“For my first five months at S.H.I.E.L.D,” says Steve. “Then she quit. Uh, decisively.”

“Well yeah, she had to keep you in line,” Bucky says with a half-smirk. “How many times did you make that poor lady want to sock you in the face?”

“Lost count,” Steve admits. “I did offer to let her, once. Seemed fair.”

Sam laughs. “I feel like you’re sitting on a story here.”

“There’s no story,” Steve tells him. Sam raises his eyebrows. Bucky’s half-smirk tilts towards a full smirk. “Seriously,” Steve repeats, “no story.”

Interlude: The Story of Steve “Walking PR Nightmare” Rogers, and How For a Short While He Single-Handedly Destroyed the Emotional Health of Eva Laura Ortiz, His Now Ex-Publicist

Keep reading

Reblog if it is okay to start talking to you.

Statements about DACA (which was referenced in the original screenshot) generally are about immigration, yes.

I also found the tweet that contained the original screenshot of the email. It’s from a reporter at The Blaze, which is a right-wing organization and I believe the group that originally broke the story.

I can’t find the full email anywhere, nor proof that it actually exists that can’t eventually be traced back to that same tweet. I’m also not subscribed to the Planned Parenthood mailing list, so I can’t just check, but if anyone who follows me is subscribed and would like to verify this, the email would have been from around September 5.

(Also, I think it’s legitimate for an organization to briefly mention issues relating to groups that are not its primary focus as an expression of support when it’s relevant. This would be true even if it were a group that I am not particularly involved with. For instance, if Trump were to sign an executive order tomorrow barring Mormons from attending school, it would be reasonable for GLSEN to send out an email saying something like “We stand with our Mormon members” even though that has nothing to do with GLSEN’s mission (and Mormonism is not known for its acceptance of LGBT+ people.) Putting aside questions of immigration law, Planned Parenthood most likely has DACA beneficiaries on its mailing list; if it wants to reassure those people that it supports them, that is legitimate.)

Zero self-awareness

For months, every morning when my daughter was in preschool, I watched her construct an elaborate castle out of blocks, colorful plastic discs, bits of rope, ribbons and feathers, only to have the same little boy gleefully destroy it within seconds of its completion.

No matter how many times he did it, his parents never swooped in BEFORE the morning’s live 3-D reenactment of “Invasion of AstroMonster.” This is what they’d say repeatedly:

“You know! Boys will be boys!” 

“He’s just going through a phase!”

“He’s such a boy! He LOVES destroying things!”

“Oh my god! Girls and boys are SO different!”

“He. Just. Can’t. Help himself!”

I tried to teach my daughter how to stop this from happening. She asked him politely not to do it. We talked about some things she might do. She moved where she built. She stood in his way. She built a stronger foundation to the castle, so that, if he did get to it, she wouldn’t have to rebuild the whole thing. In the meantime, I imagine his parents thinking, “What red-blooded boy wouldn’t knock it down?”

She built a beautiful, glittery castle in a public space.

It was so tempting.

He just couldn’t control himself and, being a boy, had violent inclinations.

She had to keep her building safe.

Her consent didn’t matter. Besides, it’s not like she made a big fuss when he knocked it down. It wasn’t a “legitimate” knocking over if she didn’t throw a tantrum.

His desire — for power, destruction, control, whatever- - was understandable.

Maybe she “shouldn’t have gone to preschool” at all. OR, better if she just kept her building activities to home.

I know it’s a lurid metaphor, but I taught my daughter the preschool block precursor of don’t “get raped” and this child, Boy #1, did not learn the preschool equivalent of “don’t rape.”

Not once did his parents talk to him about invading another person’s space and claiming for his own purposes something that was not his to claim. Respect for her and her work and words was not something he was learning.  How much of the boy’s behavior in coming years would be excused in these ways, be calibrated to meet these expectations and enforce the “rules” his parents kept repeating?

There was another boy who, similarly, decided to knock down her castle one day. When he did it his mother took him in hand, explained to him that it was not his to destroy, asked him how he thought my daughter felt after working so hard on her building and walked over with him so he could apologize. That probably wasn’t much fun for him, but he did not do it again.

There was a third child. He was really smart. He asked if he could knock her building down. She, beneficent ruler of all pre-circle-time castle construction, said yes… but only after she was done building it and said it was OK. They worked out a plan together and eventually he started building things with her and they would both knock the thing down with unadulterated joy. You can’t make this stuff up.

Take each of these three boys and consider what he might do when he’s older, say, at college, drunk at a party, mad at an ex-girlfriend who rebuffs him and uses words that she expects will be meaningful and respecte, “No, I don’t want to. Stop. Leave.”

The “overarching attitudinal characteristic” of abusive men is entitlement

me playing pokemon: why do all of these npc trainers have so many of the same pokemon, and only like teams of 2-3? this is unrealistic they should have full 6 pokemon teams and cover all their type weaknesses and

me playing pokemon go, arms full of nidoran,: I now understand

... What did you do?

Stop John Susan from Making Bones 2k16

So a while ago I bookmarked a bunch of posts to reblog if I ever got a tumblr. Now I finally can!

So this is a really funny post and I realize I’m missing the point but Latin didn’t have a “w.” 

tvmblr, 50 bce

friendly reminder that ivlivs caesar is problematic for he attempts to pass legislation in the senate that does not benefit the eqvites and the optimates, vwv

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