feature image via Jonny Armstrong
Hello Friday beans! I keep watching all the Ken Burns documentaries on Netflix, but not really watching them? I think I just like Peter Coyote’s voice. I wish he would narrate my vacation videos. I don’t make vacation videos, but if Peter Coyote agreed to narrate them, I’d start.
You Should Go or Do or Give
+ Learn about What’s Your Issue and take their national youth survey! Then share it with your weirdo friends!
+ You know what you should give? These amazing valentines! Girls Invented Punk Rock Hand Drawn Valentines!
+ Fill out this short survey for the LGBTQ Safe Spaces App!
Hellcat Studio is developing a mobile app to find, rate, and review safe spaces by and for the LGBTQIA communities. Our goal is to make it easy to find friendly establishments and LGBTQIA-competent services, such as healthcare providers, home maintenance, therapists, etc.
Queer as in F*ck You
+ Dannielle Owens-Reid has some news for you and your outward appearance!
+ Emily Brooks, whom you’ll remember from AS pieces like “Body as a Second Language: Navigating Queer Girl Culture on the Autism Spectrum“, has some advice on the Parents Project: My Autistic Child Came Out to Me.
+ You should check out #AMPLIFY, a storytelling, community art, and historical archive project sharing the lived experiences of LGBTQ neighbors in Western Pennsylvania from 2015-2017. Are you involved in a local project similar to this one? Tell me about it!
+ Did you see Mey Rude on The Toast??! Transmisogyny and Disc Golfing: A Roundtable Chat With Mey Rude, Brook Shelley, Frances Lee and Gabby Bellot. UGH SO GOOD.
+ All in the (Non Nuclear, Totally Unorthodox) Family.
“You can choose your friends but you can’t choose your relatives,” the saying goes. And yet throughout the United States, clusters of people who consider themselves families are determined to prove otherwise. “You can’t choose” is one of those things that used to be true — like the fact that a child can only have two biological or legal parents, that a woman can’t give birth after menopause, that a marriage is between a man and a woman — but are now being challenged by law, custom and technology.
+ Kristen Rogers has this piece on BGD: Being Queer and “Dating Straight”.
+ My Wife and I Are (Both) Pregnant.
Doll Parts
+ Investigation Into Alleged Police Abuse of Indigenous Women in Quebec Under Way.
+ The Promising Case of a Non-White Nancy Drew by Lenika Cruz. “A new CBS series will have an actress of color play a grown-up version of the beloved teenage sleuth.” !!!
+ Body Hair Politics: A Brown Girl’s Point of View by Nish Israni.
+ PERIOD SEX.
+ And speaking of: The Incredible World of Period Underwear Patents!
+ How a 90 Year-Old Missing Person Became a Hit on Spotify. Oh wow.
+ Women in Combat, in Their Own Words.
Saw This, Thought of You
+ For Jaden, Willow, Quvenzhané, and Other Carefree Black Kids by Cairo Amani.
+ In case you need a primer: Here’s How the Flint, Michigan, Water Crisis Has Escalated to a State of Emergency.
+ Growing Up With White Paranoia: Persecution vs. Privilege by Lyz Lenz.
+ Do you want to have nice things? Here is something nice for you that Rachel found: The Collages of Helen Adam is on pre-sale!
+ Time Of Your Life: “Selling Millennials their own childhood at a 90s festival.” by Nicole Boyce.
+ Jacqui Shine brings you Inside the Police Industrial Complex.
+ How The Oxford English Dictionary Went From Murderer’s Pet Project to Internet Lexicon by Natalie Zarrelli.
+ Inside the Lab Where Invisibility Cloaks Are Made.
And Finally
This Photographer Captures the Secret Lives of Wild Animals.
Photo by Jonny Armstrong
secret! lives! of wild! animals! god i love every word in that!
That round-table was so good!
Wasn’t it? Full of yummy, chewy thinky bits.
I thoroughly regret reading the comments on that Nancy Drew piece.
Sigh.
I will never learn.
Don’t read the comments from that atlantic piece on women in combat. I don’t understand, it’s like men think women spontaneously combust if they touch a set of dumbbells.
Dear autostraddle editors, can you please do an article on women from other countries who are actual combat soldiers/veterans? Especially queer/trans women. Maybe you can get some straddlers to contribute. It would be nice to hear from them for a change instead of whiny sexist men.
Yes, this, pretty pretty please.
Damn, that article where BOTH wives are pregnant at the same time/have the babies 4 days apart is crazy.
Yes, wow. The bonding/breastfeeding thing? That’s some heavy, complicated stuff.
Ok, so I didn’t read the Nancy Drew article, but I need to ask if anyone here used to play those Nancy Drew PC games?
The last picture is absolutely adorable.
The roundtable was excellent, I really enjoyed reading it! I actually ran into a term I haven’t seen much before: binary trans woman. I understand each of these words in isolation, but could someone explain the meaning of them altogether?
My interpretation would be that this is a means of adding specificity to someone’s gender identity, given that not all those who identify as trans necessarily identify as within a gender binary. I apologize if this interpretation is off or inaccurate and I know this reflects my own ignorance. I guess I’m just getting a little confused juxtaposing the terms “binary trans woman” and its meaning with “non-binary trans woman” and its meaning.
Oh wow. I am having feelings about this Connie converse article and I need to say them so I stop telling them to my dog cause I think she’s getting real tired of me at this point.
1) I feel like she was queer. (Take this statement with the knowledge that I just assume all outcast artist types are)
2) I spent the entire article waiting for the paragraph where they mention the fact that her being a woman was an impediment to success as a singer songwriter but it never came. It was just all “this white dude got famous and so did this white guy but not connie because she was so gosh darn shy and bad at self-promotion. Thank god these two white guys that are still alive saved her from obscurity.”
Which is not to say that they did anything wrong, like, yes use your society-given superpowers to lift up women’s voices for sure but also don’t dedicate half the article to them? I dunno, maybe my misandry is getting in the way here.
Thank you so much for linking to Emily Brooks’ advice to the parent of an autistic queer person. I loved everything she said, and would really, really love to read more from her on Autostraddle!