[“The reason to do repentance work is not because you are BAD BAD BAD until you DO THESE THINGS but because we should care about each other, about taking care of each other, about making sure we’re all OK. Taking seriously that I might have hurt you—even inadvertently! even because I wasn’t at my best!—is an act of love and care. It is an opportunity to open my heart wider than it has been, to let in more empathy, more curiosity about how my choices or knee-jerk reactions have impacted you, have impacted others. To care about others’ perspectives. To let your experience matter, deeply, to me. To look at another person—or a community, or a team of people—and say: Where are you? What are you feeling and experiencing now, and how might I have (even unwittingly) brought you pain or difficulty? And to care about making that as right as I can. It’s an act of concern. And facing the harm that I caused is an act of profound optimism. It is a choice to grow, to learn, to become someone who is more open and empathetic.

It’s also important to remember that sincere repentance work isn’t the same as self-flagellation—in fact, the latter can become a convenient way to stay stuck in inaction. We probably all know at least one person who, when told they have done something harmful, will go deep into their feelings and their reasons and the ways they were acting out of their pain, and they feel so bad and they know that it’s so not OK and on and on. And yet—they don’t focus on the needs of the person they hurt, and they don’t do the work to change.

It’s also useful to note that accountability and punishment are not the same thing. (Sometimes being accountable involves facing significant consequences, to be sure, but they are two distinct concepts.) As Danielle Sered notes in her powerful book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, “Forms of punishment that do not include the human reckoning of accountability and the human grappling of remorse rely exclusively on extrinsic motivation—a threat from outside. One of the effects of accountability is to help foster people’s intrinsic motivation, which manifests in part as remorse.” That is to say, we can think of punishment as coming only from the outside, and accountability as inviting or pushing people to do the work from within.

Accountability can feel vulnerable, scary, and even painful, but it has integrity and allows us to move forward. It moves us out of avoidance, blame, and denial, and into the reality of what we’ve done—we finally face it bravely and begin to learn and grow from the experience. It’s not always easy or comfortable, but it’s crucially important—for us, for those we’ve hurt, and for anyone we meet in the future.”]

rabbi danya ruttenberg, from on repentance and repair: making amends in an unapologetic world, 2022

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cat inspecting a fallen star outside in the garden

in the US we only have 3 genders. american beauty, american psycho, and american pie

What about American idiot

well we all know which gender i am for forgetting this one

filling my journal w/ more van Gogh, peaches & bees 🐝🍑🌻

Simultaneously trying to balance "talking about the occult in a way that's simple and accessible for my audience of people who think I'm funny" and "talking about the occult in a deep enough way that other practicioners don't think I'm an idiot"

There is a shared core of truth to revolutionary politics, the occult, and breast image. The wise understand this.

Aleshia Brevard (December 9, 1937 - July 2, 2017)

The first transgender actress to portray a DC comics super villain was Aleshia Brevard, who appeared as Giganta in Legends of the Super Heroes in 1979. She passed in 2017 at the age of 73.

The Orion Bar Region in the Orion Nebula

This pride and all year long, I want to give a shout out to us fat queer people

To fat queer people who never get to see representation of themselves because the vast majority of queer representation is of thin people

To fat queer people who have to put ten times the effort into their gender expression just to be viewed as 10% of their gender

To fat queer people who get misgendered no matter how they look

To fat queer people who can never present how they want to anyway because affirming clothes in their size are either nonexistent, triple the price, or terrible quality

To fat asexuals who are believed even less about their identity because they're told it's just a matter of "no one wanting to have sex with them"

To fat aromantics who aren't respected because their aromanticism is viewed as "No one loved you anyway"

To fat gay people who have their identities denied because "You just couldn't find a man/woman who wanted you"

To fat nonbinary people whose bodies are viewed in the queer community as inherently gendered and incapable of being androgynous

To fat binary trans people who are always viewed as whatever gender hurts them most

To fat trans people who are denied surgeries due to medical fatphobia, have difficulty finding products like binders in their size, are told that thinness is a must to "pass" as their gender, and have their bodies weaponized by terfs

To fat queer people who are viewed as "cringe" for the crime of existing as fat and queer

To fat queer people who can't even buy pride merchandise without having to worry if their size will be offered and then have to pay more than thin queer people just to show their queer pride

To fat queer people who developed eating disorders due to the fatphobia peddled by their own communities

To fat queer people whose identities are partially influenced or entirely caused by the fatphobia they have experienced for years and decades

To fat queer people who are forced by fellow queer people into sexual positions they're uncomfortable with, such as topping, just because they're bigger and have stereotypes forced onto their body

To fat queer people who joined a relationship and experienced sexual trauma because their partner only wanted to humiliate a fat person and ignore your boundaries

To fat queer people who only see themselves in queer porn as a tool for the humiliation of thin queer people who dared to have sex with a fat person or never see your body in sexual content at all

To fat femmes who are viewed as butch no matter what they do because their fatness is gendered against their will

To fat butches who don't feel able to experiment with femininity if they want to

To fat queer people who have an even harder time finding a partner in the queer community because of rampant fatphobia

To fat queer people who have had to hear "No fats, no femmes"

To fat queer people who are constantly told they're not "truly oppressed" because they "don't have it as bad as [X queer identity]"

To fat intersex people who have to deal with strangers believing they're an expert on your body because fat people can't have knowledge about how their own bodies work

To fat queer people who can't even trust that other queer people fighting for equality won't use fat bodies as symbolism for immoral behaviors and beliefs

To fat queer people who can't rely on doctors who accept queer identities to not still discriminate against them because of medical fatphobia

To fat queer people who don't believe they can be loved without being fetishized

To fat queer people whose queer identities are viewed even more as a fetish because their bodies are viewed as a fetish

To fat queer people who took way longer to realize they're queer because they never saw any queer representation that included them

And to so, so, so many other fat people with experiences of fatphobia in the queer community

You all belong. You are the identities you say you are. You do not make the queer community "look bad" just because fatphobes want to use our bodies as weapons for fatphobia and queerphobia. You deserve to be respected and have representation. You deserve to not be treated as an afterthought.

We are queer, and our experiences matter.

you forgot the best one

his name is ice maker