wanderings

When Donald Trump was elected in 2016 I stayed up into the early hours of the morning, drinking wine and Skyping with a friend of a similar level of investment and an increasing amount of despair as the evening wound down. Next day's morning transit felt isolating, funereal, but as that day and all of the days progressed there was this thing that kept happening: people would make asides and vent.

The same thing happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022: people kept making asides about it. There was this assurance that other people also thought that it was fucked up. There were suddenly Ukrainian flags everywhere. There still are.

There aren't any Palestinian flags where I live. Nobody's talking about this, and it feels incredibly awful. The only acknowledgement I've seen has been in the queer and leftist spaces that I frequent, with unsurprisingly much more support in the leftist spaces. In the general spaces of my life there are crickets.

This week Canada voted in favour of the UN General Assembly resolution for an "immediate humanitarian ceasefire", so there is some progress, nationally, but: children are dying, people are being bombed in the places they are told by their bombers to go to be safe, sanitation and medical care have collapsed or are collapsing, people are dying.

I don't feel that "no, really, you should stop killing people" is a particularly complex or controversial statement, and yet. (Crickets.)

Having the place that I see the most support for Gazans be social media is deeply unpleasant. My meatspace-linked instagram feed is full of posts and reels about the conflict from too few people and organisations, and it's also a format that is designed to be absolutely terrible with links (have fun finding sources for anything ever), so it's incredibly susceptible to propagandizing and stirring further division.

My Dreamwidth is quiet in general, and I've cultivated a reading list over the years that leans heavily fandom rather than meatspace-focused. I don't see a lot of political content in general. I also don't see those asides that were happening 7 years ago.

The people who I see speaking up are - not exclusively, but - overwhelmingly women of colour. And, you know, wow, it is so weird that there seems to be this, like, racial correlation happening here.

There are all of these cricket-filled spaces in my life right now that feel racist and awful. Though, to be fair, it's also Christmas time, so the experience of going, like, most places, is like being bludgeoned repeatedly by a tinsel-covered baseball bat wielded by the dominant culture.

The Saskatchewan government invoked the notwithstanding clause to pass their Parents' Bill of Rights a week ago. There were nation-wide anti-LGBTQ2SIA+ rallies that Saturday, and also No Space For Hate rallies. OPSEU (Ontario Public Service Employees Union) put out a pretty good events round-up during the organisational period, so they may be a space to watch if you're in Ontario and not linked up to your local group yet. The way things are going I'm sure we'll be out again with our rainbow kit before long.

Speaking of unions: NUPGE (National Union of Public and General Employees) had a statement out this past weekend on the Escalation of Violence in Israel and Palestine. They're against it, which is apparently a really radical position in this country right now. (Early days CBC News online made some very pro-Israeli editorial choices and the provincial political parties have also been going that way.) It's a weird political landscape right now.

Smart Bitches Trashy Books have had a couple pro-Library posts recently, including a guest post by Crystal Anne: Library Board Adventuring One Year In, where she talks about her volunteer work on her library board, including reviewing a book challenge, and what you can do for your library. (Be on the board is a big one if you can swing it, because it can keep people who are in favour of book bans, among other things, off of the board. Helping to keep the library properly funded is another one.)

I think that what I am trying to say with the post is this: this is happening. Get ready.

The far right is rising. Anti-LGBTQ2SIA+ sentiment, rhetoric, and action is growing. Attacks on freedom to read are coming to a library near you, probably, if they're not already there. I feel like as a culture we're losing any sense of nuance, or truth, or history.

Wired had an article a couple years ago on One Woman's Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia, which is a reasonably awful click-baity title for a piece about a woman fighting against historical negationism. (I am increasingly worried about what happens as we get farther away from the Holocaust, and we lose the last people who remember it.)

I am just -that panel in Fraction/Aja's Hawkeye with the newspaper that reads "Every Awful: Oh God Somebody Do Something".

I am so excited about the legalisation of same sex marriage in the United States. I almost cried at work; I have a lot of feelings about this. It's one of my countries and I watched states change their laws and I wouldn't really believe it when people would say that it had happened - I'd go and find a news source that I trusted and verify it with that. ...and it's happened now, and that's, like, completely amazing to me.

Like, it's not done, (The queers are not fully looked after by the American justice system. There are other laws that need to be changed.) but it's pretty nice all the same - marriage is legal in the USA now!

Ten years ago felt so incredibly bleak in terms of where things were politically in the States, and, you know, there is still a lot of shit going down, but this is really nice, and, like, when it happened in Canada in 2005 it was the fourth country in the world to legalise it and I haven't heard anyone listing the USA's number yet, and that's really awesome to me.

I am feeling reasonably optimistic today.

On Sunday I am planning on going to Pride in Toronto and going to watch the parade. I'm looking forward to it. I haven't been to a parade in five years and I know I've got glitter somewhere.

France! New Zealand! Uruguay!

So there's this word that I stopped using a while ago when I realised that it was hurtful.

I should say, there's this word that I stopped using within a certain context when I realised that that context was hurtful, when I realised that using that word to mean pathetic, pitiful, sad, boring, bad, inadequate is associating those words with people who are none of those things.

When I was in middle school I met someone who, whenever someone used the word "gay" as a slur, addressed it. When people spat it out like it was something dirty or used it casually to mean bad things they went Hey. That's not cool. I don't remember what they actually said; it probably changed a bit each time, but that was the message, and you know what? It got through to a lot of people.

That usage of the word "gay" is one that never entered my speech. I don't know that it would have, if I'd never met that person; I don't remember how I felt about that word before they started calling people on it. They are probably responsible for my being able to express, at an early age, why that usage is problematic.

I'm telling that story here because I think that people will relate to it, because I think that most of Fandom can go Yeah, no, using "gay" as a slur, that's not cool, and because "gay" is sometimes used interchangeably with "lame".

I've never used the word "gay" as a slur, but I have used "lame". I knew, when I used it, that it was a word that meant - and I am just going to use Merriam-Webster here - "having a body part and especially a limb so disabled as to impair freedom of movement" or "marked by stiffness and soreness <a lame shoulder>", but it somehow did not occur to me at the time that those other definitions - "inferior", "contemptible, nasty", etc. - stem from the first, that they are a way of saying that disabilities and by extension disabled persons are contemptible and nasty. So, yeah, using "lame" as a slur isn't cool.

That's not something that I connected on my own. I stumbled on a blog post that casually mentioned "lame" as ableist language before I went ...Right. and stopped using it.

This is a post that I've been thinking about making for a while, because it's something that I think needs to be said, and because it's something that's been relevant to my fannish experience lately.

I've gotten into bandom this past year. It's something that I'm really excited about. There are years and years worth of fic out there and some of it is kind of ridiculously awesome. There is fic out there that I pretty much love everything about, ever, except for its ableist language.

The thing is, these are fics that I would gleefully rec if they didn't use the word "lame" as a slur. They do, is the thing, and that significantly reduces my enjoyment of a work and how comfortable I feel recommending it to other people. It's frustrating, because there are so many other, better, words that these writers could be using and the one that they are using is hurtful.

This is a post that I'm writing today because there's discussion going on in bandom right now about using the word "faggot", and this, this? It's the same thing; it's a slur.