AVEN

AVEN, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, is a good resource. The wiki is wonderful and everything else is a pretty cool 101 resource. But the forum? Not so great. It made me uncomfortable for awhile, but I could never quite put my finger on what. Thankfully, Kaz did it for me. (emphasis added)

Because most minority groups, they have their spaces where everyone is going to be on their best behaviour and try to do educating of the clueless and then they have their spaces that are minority-and-clued-up-ally-only where people can let off steam and clueless privileged people who wander in can expect to get blasted. AVEN is trying to be *both* the great centre for education and visibility (in the name!) and the centre of the asexual community, and when you think about what that means it’s clear it can so very easily lead to shutting down of opinions that aren’t nice clean friendly we-all-love-sexuals-really and forcing all asexuals to be nice and polite.

AVEN is a Public Relations site designed to educate and spread visibility of asexuals to sexuals. It is not a support forum designed to create a safe space for asexuals to talk about their problems and experiences without fear of being silenced. Unfortunately, to the detriment of the entire community, it tries to be.

Then Why Does Misgendering Matter?

Also known as: "It must be so nice to be comfortable in either social role (even though you say you aren't)" and "I don't care about non-binaries enough to find out what things are like for you, so I'm going to make snippy digs about how I have it worse and therefore don't have to care about non-binaries".

This conversation happened on facebook in a conversation about passing: Person1: "I don't really identify as female. I identify with both sexes. It's kinda hard to explain." Person2: "okay, then why would passing as male as opposed to female be an issue?"

-men

"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" - George Santayana

"Woman" derives from the combination of the words wif (lit. woman) and man (lit. human being). "Man" , on the other hand, used to be "wer"*. Going to werman in the same pattern that took wif to wimman, then getting dropped just to "man".

Why? Most likely because, over time, the assumption that wer was the default sex/gender, that you only had to specify gender when talking about the other gender. This has actually already happened in Esperanto, a language only 100 years old (based on language forums- I don't know Esperanto myself)- so clearly whatever caused it to happen isn't out of our systems yet. The distance between "man", a gender non-specified term for people, ended up being uneven- reflecting the same idea that "generic he" carries.

What the bible says- and doesn’t say- about Homosexuality

I'm not Christian, I don't belong to any religion, I'm not an atheist. I do like Jesus- he seemed like a great guy- but I haven't had the best experience with Christians have never been into religion and still can't get interested. But, it's a big deal to people. And I have to admit- I really appreciate and respect when people look into it this much.

http://www.soulforce.org/article/homosexuality-bible-gay-christian

We gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Christians take the Bible seriously, too. Personally, I've spent more than 50 years reading, studying, memorizing, preaching, and teaching from the sacred texts. I earned my master's and doctoral degrees at a conservative biblical seminary to better equip myself to "rightly divide the word of truth." I learned Hebrew and Greek to gain a better understanding of the original words of the biblical texts. I studied the lives and times of the biblical authors to help me know what they were saying in their day so I could better apply it to my own.

The entire thing is a good- though long- read. It covers the history of how human interpretation of scriptures has led to a great deal of bloodshed and pain throughout the years and still now, how many people don't actually know what the bible says and how humans can misinterpret it, the effect homophobia it has on, well, mostly on CLG(b) people- but it effects trans people as well, and then goes on to tackle the parts of the bible that are used to attack homosexuality. It even talks about the problems that translations have caused- including two words that no one is actually sure what a literal translation would be, but that someone decided to call "homosexual" in 1958.