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It’s not uncommon for transgender people to get a negative reaction from their parents when they come out. But parental support is particularly crucial in China, where trans people need parental consent to undergo gender-affirming surgery and change their legal gender — even as adults. (If their parents are deceased, trans people must prove that to authorities.) These hurdles often make it harder for trans people to obtain care.

Lee, who wanted to pursue the surgery, said he considered the consent requirement an effort to prevent parents from seeking legal or physical retribution against doctors. “They’ll make a scene,” he said of parents who may not support their child’s decision to undergo surgery. “There will be family members taking out knives to kill doctors. It will become a social issue.”

That was one of the reasons Lee didn’t pursue gender-affirming surgery in China. “My mom is conservative,” he said. Though consent forms can be forged, he didn’t want her to go after the doctor who helped him.

In China, the need to obtain parental consent for gender-affirming care forces families to resolve their differences about the procedure ahead of time, dealing with drama or disagreements inside the family. According to Cherry, an LGBTQ+ organization worker, who requested the use of a pseudonym to protect their safety, the requirement exists to avoid parents causing a stir at the hospital.

It is also the product of a Confucian and patriarchal way of organizing society, Cherry said. For instance, police who want to put pressure on young queer activists often visit their parents’ workplaces and out them — so that the target has to deal with the ensuing family drama. “The person is managed through the family so they don’t become a problem in the public domain,” Cherry said.

For most, getting ready for a night out at The Rocky Horror Picture Show might involve a trip to the dollar store for toilet paper, toast and playing cards, or a few last-minute costume and makeup flourishes. For some disabled fans, it also involves a thorough investigation of the venue.

Will theatre staff and audience members be wearing masks? Will the house lights be on, off or dimmed during the show? How many stairs are there between the theatre and the bathrooms? Is there a working elevator? Have the event organizers bought or borrowed a HEPA filter in order to make sure the air is as clean as possible? Will the performance be amplified, or captioned or have live interpretation?

For Keat Welsh, a queer and disabled activist and educator based in Toronto, these were some of the questions on their mind as they got ready to head out to a Deaf shadow cast screening and live performance of Rocky Horror at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre last October, hosted by local arts organization the Disability Collective.

The event “was a really cool mixture of disability and queerness—I was blown away,” recalls Welsh. “Not only was it a very iconic queer culture thing and a Deaf shadow cast, and they put the money into Deaf performers, but it was also a masked event. They had financially accessible tickets, as well as reserved seating for people who needed seats where there were no stairs. The Disability Collective also made little videos showing how to get into Buddies in Bad Times, so you could view what it was like and how to get around if you had never been there.

“As disabled folks, we know that going to any place requires prep work, and they did all this prep work for you, and one hundred percent that made a difference for me being able to be in this space.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/31663950

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/31663940

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/31663927

Hello everyone, It’s been a while since I last posted here almost a month. Honestly the truth is I have been completely overwhelmed with stress and depression because of my sister’s sickness. Life has been really heavy and in most days I honestly don’t know how to cope. My sister has been in the hospital for days now. It all started with her feet swelling then her whole body and after she fainted we had to rush her to the hospital. At first they suspected kidney failure then later confirmed she has severe Anemia. She also has another condition that requires her to be on lifelong medication. Right now she is still very weak receiving daily injections and sometimes oxygen when she struggles to breathe. The most painful part is that the hospital won’t continue treatment without us clearing the bills. The total needed is 1,670 USD but we are remaining with 1,057USD. Every single day the cost increases especially for oxygen and medication. I am really afraid of what will happen if we can’t pay. I know times are hard for many but I am begging if you can help us, please do. No amount is too small. And even if you can’t donate, kindly share this appeal becoz it would mean so much.

The support link is in my profile/bio. Thank you deeply for reading this and for any support you can give.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/48467966

Zack Polanski tells the Canary that "transphobia will absolutely not be tolerated under my leadership" in exclusive interview

Prosecution tells hearing Father Ted writer’s posts about Sophia Brooks, 18, were ‘oppressive and unacceptable’

Obsessed over a teenager. How totally normal.

We on the revolutionary left in the United States are inclined to interpret history through icons. Che, Assata, George Jackson, Fred Hampton, Malcolm, Marx: one look at their familiar images and we know what time it is.

But you don’t have to be an icon to be part of history; you don’t have to be in a famous underground cadre, or be martyred by prison or COINTELPRO. You just have to be one person, however “obscure.” You have to stand up for the people you love, to help them live. Then you keep working and fighting. That’s it. Everybody has this potential. And, given history, Black women tend to have it more than most.

Carol Jean Crooks was a Black dyke. Born October 12, 1946, she grew up on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and died alone in early 2022. She worked and fought all her life in relative obscurity. Though most of her work wasn’t legal, her fights created a better and fairer world. If you knew her at all, you probably knew her as Crooksie.

In the early 1970s, Crooksie unwittingly shared space with icons-to-be when she became lovers with, and later a longtime friend of, Afeni Shakur, a brilliant and highly publicized member of the Black Panther Party. A few years later, on August 29, 1974, Crooksie became a small part of recorded history—three years after the Attica Prison Revolt—as the catalyst for the August Rebellion at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, where incarcerated women took over the institution and held it for hours. The August Rebellion remains one of the most resounding uprisings in the history of US women’s prisons; it generated a precedent-setting class action lawsuit whose ruling continues to safeguard the right of due process for people imprisoned in New York State, as well as nationally. What follows is a small, incomplete glimpse into Crooksie’s life, taken mostly from second- and third-hand sources. She deserves more, but for now…

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Queerly Quilled offers a rare third place, away from school or home, for LGBTQ2S+ youth to connect and express themselves freely. Safe spaces for queer and trans people are already scarce and diminishing. But for those too young to get into the bars and nightclubs that have historically served as LGBTQ2S+ safe havens, they are even harder to come by.

Sara Oremland, the teen engagement librarian for the North Vancouver District Public Library, which hosts Queerly Quilled, feels the need for this safe space among the club’s participants, a group she says has grown faster than the library’s other teen groups.

“When the group started getting bigger, they weren’t there for the books. They were there to be together and feel a sense of belonging,” Oremland explains. “I run multiple teen groups, and with [Queerly Quilled], you feel it a lot that there’s just a feeling of belonging and gratitude that they have something like this.”

In the wake of the Minneapolis Catholic church shooting, senior Justice Department officials are weighing proposals to limit transgender people’s right to possess firearms, according to two officials familiar with the internal discussions.

The talks, described as preliminary in nature, appear to build on an idea that has gained some currency in conservative media since the Minneapolis shooting that killed two children and injured 21, most of them children, at Annunciation Catholic Church, an attack that police say was carried out by a 23-year-old transgender woman.

I spent so much of my life trying to shout my truth loud enough that no one could take it from me. I thought if I didn’t fight for every inch of who I am, the world would snatch it back while I slept. Maybe I wasn’t wrong. Maybe that fight was needed for me. But him? He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t bargain with the world for permission.

He just is.

He knows who he is in a way I never did. And in that calm, he’s teaching me a freedom I never thought possible: the freedom of not needing society’s permission.

Still, I am terrified. I watch laws get drafted by people who’ve never met him, never sat across from him at breakfast while he laughs about Pokémon or asks for more syrup. I watch grown adults spin cruel stories about kids like mine, and I want to roar, raise my fists, stand between him and a world that wants him small, hidden, undone.

He just shrugs. They can’t make me not me, he says.

He’s right. Laws can make his life harder, crueller, less safe, but they can’t strip him of who he is.

A battalion of transportation workers armed with cans of black paint has been deployed to open a new front in Ron DeSantis’s “war on woke”, while young students trying to make their schools safer have joined the LGBTQ+ community as targets of Florida’s Republican governor.

The saga began with the state moving in the dead of night to paint over a rainbow-colored crosswalk outside Orlando’s former Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were killed in a 2016 shooting. The city’s mayor, Buddy Dyer, called the erasure of the memorial to the mostly LGBTQ+ victims “a cruel political act”.

Since then, DeSantis’s crosswalk wars have spread across Florida. The governor has ordered the removal of about 400 “non-standard” pieces of street art, even though they all received state approval as a condition of installation. A growing number of municipalities has pledged to fight him.

The state’s declared intent, acquiescent to a national directive by the Trump administration last month, is to “keep our transportation facilities free and clear of political ideologies”, Florida’s transport secretary, Jared Perdue, wrote in a post to X.

LGBTQ+ celebration is not a fucking "political ideology." One might even suggest that it's in line with the teachings of Jesus, though somehow those in power who to claim to follow them lost the plot quite some time ago.

As even the most saccharine queer representation comes under attack, and porn bans proliferate across the U.S., some queer people have rightfully sanitized their presence online and IRL; but others—sex party promoters, kink community leaders and educators alike—have refused to shy away from the more explicit aspects of the queer experience.

Despite what pearl-clutching critics of play parties, bathhouses and other sex-inclusive spaces would have you believe, the bacchanalian festivities actually serve important cultural and historical purposes for queer people, dating back more than a century. More complex than simply a space for people to have sex, bathhouses, play parties and sex clubs are places where queer culture is born, connections are made and community is found.

And though the advent of hookup apps have made these physical spaces less necessary, per se, spaces where people can meet in public for sex, or meet to suss out a potential hookup, still serve a necessary purpose.

[...]According to the national non-profit Community-Based Research Centre’s Sex Now survey, the largest health survey of queer and trans people in Canada, more than three quarters of 2024 respondents say they’ve engaged with substances in the past six months.

But to get a real sense of the prevalence of substances in the queer and trans community, only hold it up against their straight cis peers. Comparing Sex Now to 2023 Statistics Canada data from a 12-month period, LGBTQ2S+ people are more than twice as likely to binge drink, four times as likely to use cocaine, six times for ecstasy use and 12 times for meth use. These figures may be even higher, as Stats Canada tracks a full year vs. six months.

This overlap between queerness and substance use is a Western phenomenon more than a Canadian one. Three in five gay, lesbian and bi Americans struggle with illicit drugs and two-thirds struggle with alcohol use, notes 2020 data from the U.S. government’s agency for substance use and mental health. That’s compared to only five percent and 12 percent of the general U.S. population for drugs and alcohol, respectively. Likewise, a 2023 U.K. study found that queer and bi adults were four times more likely to take drugs than straight people.

Beyond the statistics, this excessive use is felt in the community. Invitations to socialize often come with questions about “pres” and “afters”—places to drink and take drugs before and after the actual night out. Lines for bathroom stalls grow as keys and bags change hands. Dealers are as likely to make drop-offs as Uber drivers.

It’s part of why there’s a concerted effort to create more sober spaces for queer and trans people—whether you’re in addiction recovery, struggling with cutting down or one of the growing number of “sober-curious” people interested in saving money, getting better sleep and being healthier. But finding LGBTQ2S+ sober events can be tricky. For Dave Becker, a Boston-based gay man in his fifth year of sobriety, fostering sober connections can feel like hitting a reset button on how you form relationships.

From the very beginning of DeviantArt’s history, a blend of erotic poetry, roleplaying, kink, and fan art formed the foundation of the niche platform’s original content. The community spawned several notable memes and, more importantly, entire careers for artists who have gone on to work for such established institutions like The Simpsons and DC Comics. But alongside the proliferation of more heteronormative art, DeviantArt also flourished as a virtual home for queer, trans, and nonbinary teens and young adults seeking an online haven.

DeviantArt was part of a burgeoning internet ecosystem that encompassed transformative fan works, which also included websites designed for publishing fanfiction, like Archive of Our Own; in fact, those stories were sometimes accompanied by DeviantArt illustrations. While some of the most popular shows and franchises on DeviantArt centered on straight characters, their online fan communities often reimagined them as queer. For example, the anime Naruto was one of the most popular fandoms on DeviantArt, and the gay ship “SasuNaru,” which paired the characters Sasuke and Naruto, was once one of the most-tagged keywords on the platform. There was also a deluge of drawings on DeviantArt featuring the characters Dean and Castiel from Supernatural, Sherlock and John from Sherlock, and Tony Stark and Steve Rogers from The Avengers. Fans also obsessed over canonically gay pairings, like Kurt and Blaine from Glee.

The DeviantArt of 2025 is a dramatically different experience today. When you join the platform now, it asks you to specify what kinds of art you’re drawn to, including fandoms and subcommunities of kink. You can set a filter to block explicit content, if you’d like. And it asks if you’re interested in creating AI art. A significant chunk of DeviantArt’s user base had already started to migrate elsewhere before it embraced generative AI in 2022, but since then, Wootmaster said “it’s one of the worst things that’s ever happened to DeviantArt.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t so much of it,” he says. “AI completely overwhelms the output of any individual user with endless pictures, endless variations.”

Wootmaster says that AI tools put NSFW artists who work on commission at an even further disadvantage, because customers who don’t want to pay for original work can have infinite versions of their kinks generated for free. Last year, Slate reported that AI bot networks had been able to scrape and harness DeviantArt for material and profit over the human artists who built it into a success in the first place.

There was no policy prohibiting the display of flags on El Capitan until the day after Joslin and their team hung the trans flag, when the NPS issued a new rule banning the hanging of large flags in wilderness areas. Yosemite leadership updated the 2024 Superintendent’s Compendium to include the update.

“Hanging flags has been a tradition that climbers have done on El Cap for decades, and that’s both individuals who are visiting the park, but also employees that are on their off time,” Joslin said. “There’s never been any kind of ramifications to any of those flag hanging activities. I’m the only one who’s been fired for it.”