We need to acknowledge that dealing with this pathology takes a toll on our mental health, no matter how conscious we are. With that said, make sure you surround yourself with people who validate your experience.
The most important thing is to talk to them and keep talking. Kids will also pick up a lot from what they see and hear you do.
You don’t need to sacrifice your nonbinary identity to be sexual, because you do not need to perform gender during sex. There doesn’t have to be a male or female, dominant or submissive.
I knew why my son didn’t rush to be born; he was trying to stay inside my warm safe womb and part of me wanted him there as well, despite my aches and pains. I suffered this mourning sickness that many Black moms and mamas of all races understand is not just internal queasiness, but the “sick and tired of being sick and tired” illness that makes you nauseous from reading the news. I wanted to go off-grid and never come back.
We’re not disposable and by gatekeeping our stories you are, in fact, contributing to our deaths.
If you don’t believe whitesplaining is wrong, then you’re missing how the motivation behind whitesplaining is influenced by white supremacy. So let’s unpack the most common reasons why whitesplaining happens, to examine why it’s so misguided.
Our understandings of which feminine bodies are worthy of desire, are worthy of being deemed beautiful must change
As a disabled sexologist, looking back on my teenage years I, like many folks undoubtedly, wish I had the chance to go say a few things to myself. Perhaps had I had the chance to read this or hear this story, I could have many avoided years of self-hatred and emotional turmoil from feeling lack of desirability and the belief that would never change.
Surviving is enough, and you should not feel bad if that is all you can manage sometimes.
It isn’t an exaggeration to say that there is a mild totalitarian undercurrent not just in call-out culture but also in how progressive communities police and define the bounds of who’s in and who’s out. More often than not, this boundary is constructed through the use of appropriate language and terminology – a language and terminology that are forever shifting and almost impossible to keep up with. In such a context, it is impossible not to fail at least some of the time.
Bodies are all different from each other and I’m sure there are some assistive devices or accessibility hacks or other things that almost anyone can use to make their lives better and enable them to do more of the things they want to do.
Victims of childhood abuse, rape survivors, and victims of domestic violence – or what I prefer to call domestic terrorism – are really good at one thing: feeling guilty. We can feel guilty about everything, particularly things that aren’t our responsibility. Victims are taught to feel responsible for the actions of perpetrators and, as a result, feel guilty about everything. And I mean everything.
Colorism is the preferential treatment given to light-skinned people. The existence of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter is proof that discrimination based on skin color is very much alive. This kind of discrimination plays itself out within and against communities of people of color.
Male feminists are not immune to their masculine socialization – which is categorically toxic. They’re supposed to seek to dismantle it.
“I just wanna offer my voice to those who don’t have one!” Translates to: Silencing others who never asked you to voice for them in the first place.
