where are your gloves and your helmet?

Went through the listings in my Pride category on Etsy and I think I got them all. Various items in that category will generate donations to:

the Bisexual Resource Center, biresource.org
Advocates for Trans Equality (formerly the two separate organizations, National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) and Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (TLDEF)) - transequality.org
the National LGBTQ Task Force, thetaskforce.org
the National Women's Law Center, https://nwlc.org/

Wasn't really sure of who to back with the ace/aro ones so I just have them pointed at thetaskforce.org


Let me know if I have accidentally chosen anything horribly inappropriate



sorry about the tone of this post, I've been going without coffee for several days due to blood pressure, and while brewed cacao is nice stuff it is not coffee and I have been awake since 8:30

Language usage question:

If two guys are married, and one guy dies, is the remaining guy considered a widow, a widower, or some other word with less gender-specific associations? The question also applies to two women being married but it came up in the context of discussing Steve Cortez, an NPC in Mass Effect 3 whose husband died sometime before the game began.

Today's lesson in color theory: just because it looks like the right color on a white background doesn't mean it's gonna look good in situ.

( Ace pride climbers test 1: Swarovski colors jet, graphite, crystal moonlight shimmer, and iris. )

I'll be trying the purple velvet beads next. That's the dark purple color that I had for the enby flag climbers. It's a really nice purple, but next to black it looks so dark that it's hard to say it's purple. Next to the crystal beads it may be a different story. If this doesn't work I have a lighter clear purple, I think it was called lilac or violet, and if that doesn't work out either - especially against darker skin than mine, because I am a very poor Italian-American when it comes to melanin - I may need to see about one of the milky colors like cyclamen opal or a coated color like amethyst with double AB coating (the problem with that is that the AB makes it so iridescent you can't guarantee seeing that it's purple).

Looking for some books for one of my young relatives for Christmas. He put What if It's Us by Becky Albertalli and Red, White, and Royal Blue: A Novel by Casey McQuiston on the list, and in the past has expressed a fondness for Hallmark Channel movies because the girl always gets the boy. Also fond of Steven Universe and k-pop. The only other book on the Amazon wishlist is a cookbook from Homeroom, the mac & cheese restaurant. I'm having a little trouble using the Smart Bitches Trashy Books bookfinder to turn up something that hits both Teen Reader and LGBTQ categories; anybody have any suggestions?

(In between yesterday and today, the She-Ra With Pride Flag sticker he had on the list appears to have been either bought for him or removed.)

The Forgotten Trans History of the Wild West

It was a frontier in more ways than one.
by Sabrina Imbler June 21, 2019

From 1900 to 1922, Harry Allen was one of the most notorious men in the Pacific Northwest. The West was still wide and wild then, a place where people went to find their fortunes, escape the law, or start a new life. Allen did all three. Starting in the 1890s, he became known as a rabble-rouser, in and out of jail for theft, vagrancy, bootlegging, or worse. Whatever the crime, Allen always seemed to be a suspect because he refused to wear women’s clothes, and instead dressed as a cowboy, kept his hair trim, and spoke in a baritone. Allen, who was assigned female at birth, was actually far from the only trans* man who took refuge on the frontier.

Despite a seeming absence from the historical record, people who did not conform to traditional gender norms were a part of daily life in the Old West, according to Peter Boag, a historian at Washington State University and the author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past. While researching a book about the gay history of Portland, Boag stumbled upon hundreds and hundreds of stories concerning people who dressed against their assigned gender, he says. He was shocked at the size of this population, which he’d never before encountered in his time as a queer historian of the American West. Trans people have always existed all over the world. So how had they escaped notice in the annals of the Old West?...

... From 1880 to 1930, Seattle’s population ballooned from around 3,500 to more than 350,000, a testament to the opportunities the town presented. According to Boag, local papers offer some of the most thorough, extensive records of people who were likely trans on the frontier. Naturally these publications lacked the language or understanding of gender we have today, and the papers paid their bills with sensation, scandal, and shock. So they got a lot of milage out of encounters between “civilized” society and gender non-conforming individuals.

Allen’s identity was notable for how public it was. On the other hand, many trans people lived out their lives without drawing the attention of local papers. In Boag’s research, a trans person’s assigned sex was most likely to be discovered upon death or serious illness. When 80-year-old lumberjack Sammy Williams died in Montana in 1908, the undertaker discovered his assigned sex, dumbfounding the community that had only ever known him as a man....

*As the term “transgender” did not emerge until the late 20th century, it was not a category these people would have used themselves, writes Emily Skidmore in True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. But Skidmore sees trans, rather than transgender, as a helpful umbrella term to acknowledge and encompass the gender variance expressed by historical individuals, and so we use the same terminology in this article.