A true champion of free speech. 🙄

“A copy of the UN application says his refugee claim was denied because the adjudicator did not find Mwangi, who is married and has two children, to be a credible bisexual man“

Bi erasure strikes yet again. Bi and pan folks in supposedly “straight” relationships are still LGBTQ+, the letter “B” is right effing there. Bi and pan folks absolutely face discrimination and oppression, even if it doesn’t necessarily manifest in the same ways other queer folks experience.

I’m glad he has a temporary reprieve from deportation, at least.

Thank you for sharing this. I was absolutely FURIOUS with news outlets who thought her name change (and ESPECIALLY her deadname) was “newsworthy” in 2022, because she made it crystal clear that she wanted NOTHING to do with this man. She is NOT a public figure. It was nothing but gossip. And having myself been outed against my wishes in a well-known publication for the sake of gossip (albeit with WAY less publicity) I can tell you that can REALLY fuck someone up for a long time.

And now that manbaby Elon is publicly and explicitly dragging her through the mud, deadnaming and misgendering her to millions, and blaming her for his right-wing shitlording. She shouldn’t have to give an interview like this, though I certainly understand why she opted to. She should just be able to live her damn life in quiet peace. I feel for her so much.

After reading the community’s pinned “Rules Breakdown” post, I can easily see how Your post violated their rules. 🤷‍♀️ And as another poster in this thread points out, it appears You’re just on a time-out, not a perma-ban.

Also, I will capitalize “you” for You as an act of politeness, but I very strongly disagree with characterizing this as “misgendering”, even after reading Your “Introduction to capitalised pronouns” post. Yes, grammar is socially defined and arbitrary. For example, the only reason African-American Vernacular English is labelled “improper” is because so many (white) people with power say so — there’s nothing inherently worse or better about it. However, it’s still necessary to reach consensus on the meaning of words, else no one could be understood.

Capitalization of Your pronoun is clearly very important to You, and it would be thus be unkind of me to refuse to accommodate You when it’s pointed out, but English is not a language where every pronoun is gendered. The capitalized version is an honorific form of the same pronoun, not a different pronoun altogether. And generally speaking, the use of honorifics (“sir” and “ma’am” being the most common ones) is becoming far less common these days. Perhaps it’s because honorifics are most frequently used to establish dominance and subservience roles, whether that be in customer service roles (“yes, sir”) or governing roles (“yes, Your Honour” or “yes, Your Majesty”). To borrow Your own example, even many Christians now refer to their god as “he” rather than “He” in written language. And of course, those of us who totally reject the notion of gods certainly don’t. Your insistence on capitalization as respect for Your divinity makes me genuinely uncomfortable as someone who doesn’t believe in divinity at all and certainly shouldn’t feel subservient to You.

The name is way too similar to the Firefox trademark and could create the impression that Firefish is associated with Mozilla. I suspect some lawyers are currently in a huddle trying to figure out how to send a Cease and Desist letter that won’t completely piss off the community.

(Trademark law, at least in the US where Mozilla is headquartered, requires organizations to actively defend their trademarks. So just ignoring Firefish would be risky, even if they don’t actually mind the similarity.)

💯 A cishet person who treats “ally” as a verb is WAY more helpful than one who only wears it as a noun.

Other people here are already doing a great job of covering the “what we think” and “whether welcome in queer spaces or not” aspects of your question, so let me dive into this part instead:

…someone who’s not in the space or actively an ally. I would more accurately describe myself currently as a “don’t care” person in the sense that to me it genuinely does not matter what someone identifies as or who someone is attracted to.

Ever watch the TV show Ted Lasso? There was a scene in the final season where one of the players on the football (soccer) team came out as gay. The other players tell him they “don’t care”, meaning to be supportive but not actually succeeding. Ted gives a speech and, as his character admits afterward, makes a poor comparison — but still does a good job of communicating to the others that they should care. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcaUZ9R0y2c

So, like… I’m glad you’re not antagonizing any of us, but that’s just kind of the bare minimum for being decent, you know? And that is somewhat similar to racial discrimination: as a white person in North America, telling Black people I “don’t care that they’re Black” would tell them I haven’t considered that being Black is something core to their identity and how they experience the world because of the way society works. It would tell them I still see whiteness as the “default” but it’s “okay” to be something else. It would tell them that I might say something if I witnessed blatant racism happening, but they shouldn’t count on me to do so because I haven’t made any effort to learn how racism actually works and I might back down if I feel speaking up would put myself at any risk. But I do care, so I try to educate myself, and I look for opportunities to practice anti-racism. I absolutely make mistakes, but they tend to be easily forgiven so long as I show a willingness to listen, learn, and try.

But hey… I freely admit that I was way older than 18 when I finally started listening to people and began understanding all of this! So I absolutely don’t mean to “rake you over the coals” or anything. I just tell you these things because I hope you grow into a better person faster than I managed to. 🙂💜

Sounds like your boss was spouting some rubbish. Maybe they were having a bad day, but it’s no excuse for treating you like that (assuming — and I think it’s safe to do so — that you don’t have a history of repeatedly making this same mistake). Bosses are human too, but it’s still fair for you to be peeved about that.

Whenever an employee somewhere is apologizing to me (as a customer) for a mistake, I almost always reply “no worries, heaven knows I make my share of them too”. 🙂

I used to think along similar lines, but later came to understand structural inequality. You see, we don’t all start on an even playing field. The children of wealthy adults have far more opportunity than children of working-class adults, for example. Children from families living in poverty may struggle to keep up with their peers in school if they aren’t getting adequate nutrition. (School lunch programs help, but don’t fully address the problem.) Our lineage and our luck play a large role in what we might think of as “merit”.

When it comes to racial equity programs for college admissions or the like, these programs exist because we acknowledge that people of colour — especially Black people — have been systematically oppressed for generations in ways that impact the following generations.

• Chattel slavery in the US wasn’t all that long ago, and when it finally ended, the former slaves didn’t receive any reparations — the slaveholders did, and Black people with no wealth and no land were essentially forced to work for what we’d call pennies in today’s money.
• The Jim Crow era is still part of living memory. The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was literally just a single lifetime ago and decimated one of the few communities were Black people had managed to accumulate wealth, killing an estimated 150 to 300 Black people and caused massive economic losses for the survivors, not to mention the immense trauma and the implicit threat it sent to similar communities.
• The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s is quite recent history, and there are still many people alive today who remember when Dr. King was assassinated while advocating and organizing for equal protection under the law.
• The War On Drugs was predominantly focused on Black communities in its 1980s heyday. Plenty of white people used the same drugs at the same time, but law enforcement disproportionately targeted people of colour. Aggressive policing of Black communities continues today, resulting in a lot of children with jailed parents.

Try to imagine being a Black child growing up today. You’re more likely to be in poverty and going hungry than your white peers, more likely to need to drop out of school to earn money, more likely to have a parent jailed, the list goes on, all while constantly getting subtle (and sometimes blatant) messages that you’re “inferior”.

You and I obviously didn’t create this situation, but the fact remains that we don’t all start life on equal footing. Yes, there are plenty of white people who grow up in poverty, have parents in jail, etc… but it’s not systematic for white people. Affirmative action in education is a way we can ensure more of the most talented Black minds can access the education and experiences they need to help break this repeating cycle and someday, hopefully, build a society without such immense barriers beginning from birth.

(edit: I’m Canadian now, but I grew up in the US so I’m much more informed about its history.)

In my view, systems without an HDMI output or which default to a 4:3 aspect ratio are retro. But I don’t expect everyone else to share this opinion, and that’s totally fine. 🙂

Don’t worry, Google is bluffing. They don’t want other countries to do anything similar so they have to make a big show of fighting it, but their massive power to fight it is exactly why C-18 is necessary. Google backed down in Australia, and sooner or later, they’ll back down here — there’s still a lot of money for them to rake in even after paying to use the news outlets’ work.