Today I was talking to my therapist and we came across some of the shitty things I’ve had to deal with and I went into my very habitual “it could have been worse” routine, and he said something that no one else EVER has. Thank god it wasn’t.
Thank god it wasn’t.
No one has ever said that to me before. No one has even said anything similar. People love “it could have been worse” because it gives them an excuse to move away from an uncomfortable topic. They love to move on and forget. But in those four words, he conveyed to me that he cared, that the things I went through were valid, and that I didn’t have to talk about it any more than I wanted to.
Thank god it wasn’t
That’s how you should respond when people say that it could have been worse. That’s how you validate someone’s trauma without being invasive.
I made these in response to hate crimes in my community. They are full size and free to download and print if you’d like to use them, too.
Since these are going around, I wanted to fill in some of the gaps! Here are seven more posters for communities under threat. As with the first set, these are completely free to download, print, share, repost, etc with no credit needed. This is open source activism.
queer people of faith have probably spent their entire life feeling excluded from their faith community “because you can’t be both” so let’s not make them feel excluded from the queer community “because you can’t be both”
The Oxford English Dictionary recently announced it will include the gender-neutral honorific “Mx.” (pronounced “mix” or “mux”) to represent transgender people, as well as those who do not wish to be identified by gender. Adapting titles to recognize different identities is not new: In the 18th Century, “Ms.,” as an abbreviation for “Miss,” originally shortened from “Mistress” was incorporated to the general lexicon, as there was no longer a need to specify whether a woman was married or not. This way, the formal title unties a woman’s identity from her marital status. “Language changes on a social level, to reflect evolutions in identity and different ways individuals and communities define themselves,” said Tey Meadow, an assistant professor in both the Department of Sociology and the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. Sweden has also recently officially adopted the gender-neutral pronoun “hen,” which can be used to describe transgender people as well as individuals whose gender is irrelevant or unknown.
My friend has had to fight so hard for years so for people to respect/use Mx as their title. This is pretty cool.
reckless & terribly gay 