The sacred world of 2SLGBTQQIA+

On the front door of a restaurant in Indianapolis:

(Rainbow flag over “This is a Sacred Space.”)

I get pushback from teens when I casually refer to Rainbow Flagism as a religion. But if it is not a religion, how does the rainbow flag make a space sacred?

For reference, from Wikipedia:

Religion is usually defined as a social-cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion.

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Boston builds a ghetto for the 2SLGBTQQIA+

From state-sponsored media… “Community unites after an LGBTQ+ senior housing project in Boston was defaced” (NPR, July 14, 2022):

The road to building The Pryde, a Boston housing development aimed at LGBTQ+ seniors, has been surprisingly smooth. That’s what made last weekend’s homophobic vandalism all the more shocking.

Among the slurs and death threats covering the perimeter of the construction site, which takes up nearly an entire city block of the Hyde Park neighborhood, were messages saying, “We will burn this,” “die slow,” and “die by fire.”

Meanwhile, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu also responded on Twitter, writing, “Hate & acts of vandalism will not be tolerated at the Pryde — or anywhere in Boston.”

“This affordable, LGBTQ+ senior housing development has been led by local residents, boosted by neighborhood voices & fueled by united support. We will move even faster to get it done,” Wu said.

Intolerance will not be tolerated by the tolerant!

From the developers:

Pennrose, in partnership with LGBTQ Senior Housing Inc., has been selected by the City of Boston to develop 74 new apartments for seniors 62 and older in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. Construction has begun on the 120 year old former William Barton Rogers School that will undergo a historic rehabilitation. Rent-restricted studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments will be available to households and individuals at various income tiers (30%, 50%, 60%, 80% and 100% of Area Median Income). Several apartments will be set aside for homeless individuals. A housing lottery will be conducted, and 70% of the apartments will carry a City of Boston resident preference during the initial lease up of the community.

So many questions! First, why aren’t all of the apartments set aside for those who are currently homeless? (who has a greater need for a home than a homeless individual?) Massachusetts needs to catch up to California with its 160,000+ unhoused residents? Second, if Maskachusetts is Tolerance Central, why do members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community have to live apart from those who do not identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+? Would it be okay to build rent-restricted housing for Black people? For Asian American and Pacific Islander people? If discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is forbidden under Massachusetts law, how can this new government-sponsored development discriminate against cisgender heterosexuals who want to live rent-free?

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Closing out Pride Month in Florida

The density of front lawn signs in our corner of Florida has been less than 1/100th of what it was in Maskachusetts. In fact, it seemed fair to say that an N95 mask is far more popular in Florida than expressing one’s political and social justice beliefs via lawn signs or bumper stickers.

It turns out, however, that our neighbors do celebrate Pride Month in June and signs have appeared on 1 out of 20 front lawns and house facades. Here’s one neighbor, for example:

For the other houses that we regularly pass by, however, the pride signs have all been related to a child graduating from middle school, high school, or college. Examples:

(We were fortunate to meet Ellie, a hard-working young lady who has completed Jupiter High School (run by Palm Beach County) and will soon be a student at Florida State. She did not say anything about identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+)

Here is a house where Henry and Sean are celebrated for finishing an arts magnet middle school and being admitted to the arts magnet high school, funded by a former MIT board member.

Speaking of Pride, “Miami teen accepted into all 8 Ivy League universities” (Good Morning America):

First-generation Nigerian American Ashley Adirika became one of few prospective students to be accepted into all eight Ivy League universities.

“The tears just started to come out. Like they started to flow out,” she said of her reaction to finding out. “My siblings and I were just really excited, like screaming, jumping around. It was crazy,” she said.

From being a teacher to sitting in the Oval Office, Adirika’s dreams have changed over time, but now she is focused on empowering young women of marginalized identities with her organization, Our Story, Our Worth, which she started as a high school sophomore.

She said she looks forward to learning more about herself, her place in the world and how to “maximize the impact” she has in empowering communities when she starts at Harvard University in the fall.

The recent Miami Beach Senior High School graduate and student government president also credits her time on speech and debate teams with building the confidence to make her voice heard.

She did not attend one of the killer magnet schools in the Miami area, but just a regular neighborhood high school, thus proving American Pravda correct once again: “Surprise: Florida and Texas Excel in Math and Reading Scores” (NYT, 2015).

Readers: What are you doing to complete your celebration of Pride Month?

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Who is going to a Pride march today?

Attending mass gatherings is the best way to avoid viral infection, according to Science. See “Pride parades should go on despite monkeypox concerns: WHO” (The Hill, May 30):

A World Health Organization (WHO) adviser said on Monday that people should not change their plans to attend pride parades next month amid the increased circulation of monkeypox.

“It’s important that people who want to go out and celebrate gay pride, LGBTQ+ pride, to continue to go and plan to do so,” said Andy Seale, a strategies adviser in the WHO Department of Global HIV, Hepatitis and Sexually Transmitted Infections Programmes.

WHO experts have pointed to sex at two recent raves in Europe as the leading theory for the spread of the virus, which is endemic in areas of Africa. The agency has said several cases have been reported among men who have sex with men, but cautioned it may be a reflection of “positive health seeking behavior” in that demographic, given that the cases were identified at sexual health clinics.

Seale said at Monday’s public briefing that the organization has linked cases to a number of “social events” in European countries.

Monkeypox and variant SARS-CoV-2 will presumably be celebrating at today’s NYC Pride March. From Wikipedia:

New York City Pride March is an event celebrating the LGBTQ community; it is one of the largest annual Pride marches in the world, attracting tens of thousands of participants and millions of sidewalk spectators each June.

Readers: Who is going to a Pride event today? Below, Science explains why Pride events are typically in March rather than June here in Florida:

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Uber characterizes Mohamed as gay

To celebrate Pride Month, Uber uses a rainbow icon to show the driver’s vehicle. Here’s an example where Uber’s white saviors suggest that “Mohamed” is a follower of Rainbow Flagism:

The good news is that, after a ride in the back of a Tesla 3, the Prius seemed luxurious!

Of course it is brave of Uber to celebrate everything 2SLGBTQQIA+ in the U.S., where the repercussions could be severe, but do the rainbow cars appear for Uber users in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Bahrain, Pakistan, Qatar, and United Arab Emirates?

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Career opportunities for women circa 1922

“U.S. Soccer and Top Players Agree to Guarantee Equal Pay” (NYT, May 18):

That reality arrived Wednesday in landmark contracts with the U.S. Soccer Federation that will guarantee, for the first time, that soccer players representing the United States men’s and women’s national teams will receive the same pay when competing in international matches and competitions.

In addition to equal rates of pay for individual matches, the deals include a provision, believed to be the first of its kind, through which the teams will pool the unequal prize money payments U.S. Soccer receives from FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, for their participation in the quadrennial World Cup. Starting with the 2022 men’s tournament and the 2023 Women’s World Cup, that money will be shared equally among the members of both teams.

It sounds as though those who identify as “women” are better players than “men”:

The difference in compensation for men and women has been one of the most contentious issues in soccer in recent years, particularly after the American women won consecutive World Cup championships, in 2015 and 2019, and the men failed to qualify for the 2018 tournament. Over the years, the women’s team, which includes some of the world’s most recognizable athletes, had escalated and amplified its fight in court filings, news media interviews and on the sport’s grandest stages.

The men are literal failures while the women are winners. But the NYT doesn’t mention that this national team of winners (not failures like the men) has been beaten by a city team of 14-year-olds who identify as “boys”. “THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT World Cup-winning US Women’s team suffer shock 5-2 defeat to FC Dallas’ U-15 boys academy side” (The Sun, 2017):

THEY are currently the best women’s football team in the world.

But not even the likes of legendary midfielder Carli Lloyd could prevent the US women’s national team from crashing to a shock defeat against the FC Dallas U-15 boys academy side on Sunday.

What happens when different gender IDs compete off the soccer pitch? From H.L. Mencken’s 1922 book, In Defense of Women (Ketanji’s panel of biologists was not required back then to define the term “women”):

One seldom, if ever, hears of [women] succeeding in the occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly—for example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie., matching petty tricks with some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or managing factories—despite the circumstance that the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why women shouldn’t succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women graduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; once the door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, as every one knows, the number of women actually practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of them have attained to any distinction in competition with men.

And the employer’s perspective:

The economic and social advantage that women thus seek in marriage—and the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the heart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a husband with a Rolls-Royce—is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before marriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this disadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their very intellectual enterprise makes it difficult for them to become the efficient machines that men are. But part of it is also due to the fact that, with marriage always before them, coloring their every vision of the future, and holding out a steady promise of swift and complete relief, they are under no such implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts they revolt against. The time is too short and the incentive too feeble. Before the woman employee of twenty-one can master a tenth of the idiotic “knowledge” in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or even convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the head of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons the business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put away the hope of marriage, or, at all events, admitted the possibility that she, may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles down in earnest to whatever craft she practises, and makes a genuine effort to develop competence. No sane man, seeking a woman for a post requiring laborious training and unremitting diligence, would select a woman still definitely young and marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose either a woman so unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of snaring a man, or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to be pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex.

Full text at Project Gutenberg.

Related:

  • From 2013, “Women with elite education opting out of full-time careers” (Vanderbilt)
  • “This Woman’s Viral Argument For Marriage As A Career Has The Internet All Riled Up” (HuffPost): As for tips on how to find an employer-husband, the Kansas housewife suggests women actually work for the “high value” men they want to pursue: “You want a lawyer, right? So then you should be a paralegal. Or if you want a dentist, then you should be a dental hygienist.” … [the author] took issue with women who criticize other women who marry their bosses: “Women will bully the woman who’s the secretary who married the doctor, but who has the last laugh?” she asked on camera. “Her in her McMansion with her husband and her baby.” … “The message I try to get across to women is there’s a third economic option outside of serving in the military or receiving an education: You can marry an established man,” Drummond told us via email. “Once you are married, his wealth is your wealth, if he succeeds, you succeed.”
  • Speaking of serving in the military (above), folks of all gender IDs can join the US Air Force:
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Love Wins at the Florida Walmart

Happy Pride Month again!

(Only the LGBTQ Marines are recognized and honored? Why not the 2SLGBTQQIA+ Marines?)

For folks who are dismayed that the dictatorship of Ron DeSantis has stamped out the word “gay” from the vocabulary of Floridians, some photos from May 7, 2022 taken at the Walmart in Jupiter, Florida:

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King George III and the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community

Happy Pride Month! Let’s look back at an early champion of Pride.

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (Andrew Roberts):

In September 1772, John Wilkes joined other important City figures in criticizing the King’s commutation of capital punishment for Captain Robert Jones, who had been sentenced to hang for sodomizing a thirteen-year-old boy (although surprisingly the victim’s age did not seem to have played a part in Jones’ conviction). Friends of Jones – a fireworks expert who had also popularized the sport of figure skating – produced female prostitutes who attested to his bisexuality, as though that would alleviate the seriousness of the crime. Jones (who was in fact an artillery lieutenant) was due to hang until, on the day of the execution, George commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, and then a month later allowed him to go into lifelong exile in the South of France.

Nor was it the only time that George defied the vicious prejudices of the day against homosexuality and bisexuality. In June 1766, as a favour to his theatre-loving brother Prince Edward, the King signed a document making the Little Theatre in Haymarket into the Theatre Royal, which stated that it was ‘Our will and pleasure’ that Samuel Foote, the flamboyant impresario, should have ‘a company of comedians’ act there every summer, and authorized him to charge the sums necessary to offset ‘the great expense of scenes, music and new decorations’.

A footnote showing how much we’ve been enriched by the work of Gender Studies faculty:

These labels of sexual identity were not recognized in the eighteenth century, when people thought and spoke in terms of actual sexual practices, such as sodomy, onanism and so on.

Imagine if elementary school kids, instead of being taught 2SLGBTQQIA+ vocabulary, received an education regarding “actual sexual practices”!

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NYT: It is now women who become pregnant

From the May 11, 2022 NYT, “Don’t Be Fooled. It’s All About Women and Sex”:

When I was back in high school — a Catholic girls’ school in Cincinnati at the beginning of the sexual revolution — our religion class covered the abortion issue in approximately 45 seconds.

“Abortion is murder,” said the priest who was giving the lesson, before moving on to more controversial topics, like necking and heavy petting.

On Wednesday the Senate failed to pass a Democratic bill supporting women’s right to choose in anticipation of a Supreme Court decision going in the other direction.

The many, many activists who have focused their political careers on constraining women’s sexual activity aren’t going to just declare victory and go home.

All this is basically about punishing women who want to have sex for pleasure.

No mention of pregnant men and their right to choose.

From 2018, same newspaper, “A Family in Transition”:

Two fathers and the baby girl they never expected.

As traditional notions of gender shift and blur, parents and children like these are redefining the concept of family.

Paetyn’s father Tanner, 25, is a trans man: He was born female but began transitioning to male in his teens, and takes the male hormone testosterone.

“I was born a man in a female body,” he said.

His partner and Paetyn’s biological father is David, 35, a gay man.

Their daughter, they agree, is the best thing that ever happened to them.
“She’ll grow up in a very diverse home,” David said. “We surround her with people who are different.”

The first time that they saw the fetal heartbeat on ultrasound, they wept.

“Yeah, I’m a pregnant man,” he told friends and acquaintances. “What? I’m pregnant. I’m still a man. You have questions? Come talk to me. You have a problem with it? Don’t be in my life.”

The journalist and editors regard them as legitimate fathers (i.e., men):

As fathers to be, they got some of their most enthusiastic congratulations from the drag world — the regulars at the club where both men perform, dancing and lip-syncing, Tanner as a drag king and David as a sassy, 6-foot-tall drag queen in a tight skirt and size 12-wide high heels.

Apropos the current debate:

And, David said: “I hope she’s a lesbian. Then we won’t have boys coming to the house and we won’t have to worry about her getting pregnant.”

Also recently from the NYT opinion section, “It’s Time to Rage” (by Roxane Gay):

My wife’s stepfather began raping her when she was 11 years old. The abuse went on for years, and as Debbie got older, she was constantly terrified that she was pregnant. She had no one to talk to and nowhere to turn.

Her stepfather often threatened to kill her younger brother and her mother if Debbie told anyone, so when the fear of pregnancy became too consuming, she told her mother she was assaulted at school. Her mother took Debbie to a doctor, who said that because of her scar tissue, she was sexually active and must have a boyfriend. It was the early 1970s.

A pregnancy would have, in Debbie’s words, ruined her life. Today, she is 60 years old. She is still dealing with the repercussions of that trauma. It is unfathomable to consider how a forced pregnancy would have further altered the trajectory of her life.

This story is supposed to make readers see how misguided conservatives who oppose abortion are, but couldn’t the article support those who advocate for conservative sexual values? Stepfathers did not exist in significant quantities until the 1970s no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce revolution. The author’s wife was unlikely to have been abused by a stepfather in the (mythical?) white picket fence era to which Republicans yearn to return because there were hardly any divorces that left moms free to bring an unrelated adult male into a girl’s household.

Circling back to the first topic, pregnant men only recently won their own emoji but now the mainstream media pretends that they don’t exist?

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I’ve been using the Pregnant Man Emoji

“A pregnant man emoji is here and it’s about damn time” (Today’s Parent):

Apple is set to release 37 new emojis, including two that are pregnancy-related. One features a pregnant man and the other features a pregnant person, both created to recognize that not all people who get pregnant are women—some are trans men and non-binary folk.

Others have viewed the new emoji as an important step for trans folks who have been hoping to see themselves represented. “We’ve been crying out for a pregnant man emoji for years so thank you for finally listening!” wrote another Twitter user.

I haven’t had the opportunity to use the emoji to celebrate a male-identifying friend’s pregnancy. This is not because men can’t be pregnant people, of course, but because most of my friends are older than is conventional for becoming a pregnant person.

The emoji, however, turns out to be the perfect response when middle-aged male-identifying friends send food pictures. Two friends recently sent me pictures from a dim sum house, for example. Both guys were sporting their “Lockdown 15” look, so the pregnant man emoji response made sense. One good thing about the Signal messaging app (so thoroughly encrypted that even President Harris won’t be able to incarcerate you for thoughtcrime) is that it allows you to react to a message with any emoji, not just the small handful that Facebook offers. So you don’t even have to respond with this emoji, but can simply use it as a reaction.

And then the emoji’s value was turbocharged last night due to the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion. When people on Facebook or Twitter write about how they believe the decision would affect women, one can respond with “Why is this about “women”? 🫃” (the emoji does not render on my Windows 10 desktop machine; Microsoft is denying Science?)

Readers: What are you doing with this emoji?

Related content from Twitter:

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