Results for: be the change
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How Endometriosis Helped Me Become a Tenderhearted Butch
“Instead of getting medical care, I had a work colleague help me to my hotel room and pour me a tumbler of whiskey. I downed the whiskey with a handful of aspirin and prayed for the pain to stop.”
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Stigma and Sisterhood: Life for Trans Women Since 1994’s “I Don’t Wanna Be a Boy”
“It took watching I Don’t Wanna Be A Boy to show me that the negative attitudes towards trans women have always been pervasive in society, that from 1994 to 2016 there hasn’t been much change in how society views us. But it also taught me that we share a sisterhood of sorts. No matter what time and what place, trans women of color are connected by our similar experiences.”
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Digital Mixtapes and Protests: Oh, To Be A Queer Black Millennial
“For a moment, I forgot about the summer of 2015. I forgot about the panic I experienced, the insomnia, the depression. We watched the new season of Orange is the New Black together and by the end of episode 12, it suddenly all came back.”
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Mama Outsider: Reminder Notes to a Dancing Girl
“It is the weekend Beyoncé releases her “Formation” single and a bad queen has just performed it without breaking a sweat. I am watching the queen and learning that the way not to sweat is to move so little that every move seems like drama. I’ve got the not moving part down, which is how I am here at a club with a roommate whose friends want to meet the Black girl she let live in her house.”
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Sexts From My Sickbed: How I Learned to Love My Queer Sick Body by Getting Naked
“How could an incapacitated person feel let alone be sexy, I catch myself thinking. Now, when I have those thoughts, I take out my camera.”
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Queer Latinx Love is Resistance: A Collection of Vignettes
“There’s nothing more I want to remember than every moment and sensation we shared. Our grinding hips at Queer Cumbia, feeling your drunken sweat drip onto my freshly implanted tits. The way we sloppily made out and smeared our red and burgundy lips all over our mouths, noses, forehead, and neck.”
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Birth of The Nintendo Generation
It was the end of my innocence when I realized that being Black or being Queer in this country could get you killed. This was the time before Hurricane Katrina, before 9/11, before Ferguson. Before. Before. Before.
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I Didn’t Know How to Be Poor, Black, Biracial, AND Queer; So I Wasn’t
“I wasn’t in denial, I had just become extremely successful at compartmentalizing difficult emotions that I had no idea what to do with.”
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I’m Just A Small-Town Lesbian Wearing Flannel, Building Community
“But for change to happen, for the community I want to grow, someone has to stay. Someone has to wear the flannel not just because of its function.”
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Disability and the Gym: Let My Body Do the Work
“I like toughness because it acknowledges an uncomfortable, complicated truth—that being disabled is hard—but rejects pity as an acceptable response. Instead, it gives my body credit for outlasting, adapting, and thriving in ways able-bodied people can’t imagine.”
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Five Images Of My Family
“I’m going to be a single, poor, gay, mom, and it’s going to be fine. It’s going to be amazing. I mean sure, I might date sometimes, but I don’t need a partner. Partners just get in the way. And what are the odds that I would meet a woman I would want to be with who would also want to have children with me? I can’t even picture it!”
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My Trans Body as a State of Desire
“My brain is lit like the map of a major metropolis at night. My body is, too. ‘I am at one with a sea of sensations, glitter, silk, skin, eyes, mouths, desire,’ Anaïs Nin wrote, and that’s pretty much it. Or, put another way: I have found an affirmation of selfhood, and I haven’t thought to immediately annul it.”
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Tattoos and Disability: Surviving An Experience Not Everyone Can Handle
“I made a choice about how I would look, and didn’t realize until I’d done it how unprecedented that was.”
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“You’re Carrie, Y’Know?”: 7 Ways My Nondisabled Friends Get it Right
Because the world sure as hell isn’t telling me my body matters. And having nondisabled friends who do, who affirm me precisely for standing out, means I don’t have to accept pity masked as kindness.
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Mama Outsider: No Place Like Home
“Every day since my father died has been at least a little fucked up. There is no such thing as a non-fucked up day when you are a Daddy’s girl without a father.”
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Winter Is Coming: Diary of a SAD Girl #1
“Time Change Sunday is my personal gateway to hell. It gets dark earlier (and then earlier and earlier). It gets cold in the morning and night (and then stays cold all day and all day). I stay inside to keep warm and then I stay inside because I don’t want to leave and then I stay inside because I can’t get out of bed.”
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Sometime In June
“Keeping abreast of the passersby, the evidence of our intimacy was in the way we carried our hands. They were strategically placed so when they touched, it could be disguised as a perpetual accident. In honor of our silent dance, those near us were careful to walk around us instead of in-between.”
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The Pace of Queer Time
“I’ve been thinking recently that queer time for me is a self-declared snow day. A chance to stay in bed and explore ourselves unhindered by the outside world. A chance to exist, to play — free from the hetero pillars of career, marriage, and lineage.”
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My Virtual Brunch With Dolly Parton
“Dear Editor: You are cordially invited to have brunch with country music icon Dolly Parton this Sunday, August 7th.”
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Rebel Girls: Women’s Studies Saved My Life, And I Want It To Change Yours, Too
“I try to remain impartial about most things,” she told us, “except for two: Ronald Reagan and Phyllis Schafly.”