April 2012
15 posts
Right now, young people in Iraq are being murdered systematically - for the clothes they wear, or because they are perceived as “gay” or simply different from their peers.
For 2 months, the killing has gone under the radar and more than 50 people have faced a brutal death. We call on you to speak out publicly against the violence and use all tools in your control to condemn the killings and push Iraqi officials to investigate now.
Update: 11 year old trans girl lost appeal
The above article is an update. Her mother went to appeal to keep her out of the psychiatric ward and lost. She will be institutionalized because of her expression of her gender. She will be held until she conforms to male gender and then released to foster care, not her mother who was supporting her.
Please, if you haven’t signed the petition, sign it, reblog it, ask your friends to sign it. We’ve managed to get 40K signatures for a pageant model, we’ve only gotten 11K for a little girl about to have her life ruined. Lets get on the ball and spread the word.
In reference to calling Black children beautiful:
I’ve heard lots of white feminists say that people shouldn’t call children—specifically girls—beautiful, and this is where (among many, many other places) white women show how little they understand the plight of Black women/darker skinned women/WOC.
Black children are never told we’re beautiful. The best that we get from mainstream society is being ignored—never seeing a semblance of our face anywhere. We need to be told we’re beautiful, and talented, and amazing, because everywhere we turn, we’re being told that we are not human and that we are ugly. And that gets into us, that can seep deep and it will hurt for years. And undoing that damage is difficult.
And…something else that I’ve been thinking about: Black children need to be told we’re beautiful because beautiful is usually associated with the face, right? And we are rarely told that our faces can be beautiful. Usually, our bodies are objectified and hypersexualized, especially when we’re darker-skinned. People will compliment our asses and our bodies, but never our faces—and that does something to us. (I’ve even heard people say things like “dark-skinned girls are never attractive, but they do have nice bodies.”) That affects us, and because there are all of these factors waiting to psychologically mess us up, we need positive reinforcements before we can even be exposed to all the other stuff so that we can be mentally and emotionally able to combat them.
word. i spent my whole childhood, 6 years of age and onward feeling ugly. the only input i received about my appearance was that i looked like a boy. i’d see adults praising my little white friends and their cute curls and overalls and whatever but the compliments ended at me. i was also poor and wore my moms (awful) homemade clothes and dresses so that didnt help things either. i work and volunteer with kids a lot and i always compliment the little girls of colour. i once told a cute four year old mixed black girl who came to my workplace that she had really pretty hair and her face lit up and she smiled wide as she touched it and said thanks. i almost cried. i will shower every brown child with a thousand compliments and opposing white feminists can fuck right off.