Hey, you know your favorite character? Yeah, the one with an interesting face shape and unique features? Well we put them in fandom and they’re drawing them with a basic, conventional face shape nowadays. Uh huh, no wrinkles or anything. I’m sorry dude, yeah they completely changed the nose.
The day I returned home from the championships, the blood report was leaked to the press, alongside the results of a second test conducted while I was in Berlin. There it was. The things I did not know about my body. I found out, along with the rest of the world, that I did not have a uterus or fallopian tubes. The newspapers reported I had undescended testicles that were the source of my higher than normal levels of testosterone. They went on to call me a hermaphrodite. In my culture, this term does not apply to people like me, but the world media forced that label on me and that is what I am called to this day.
It was as if some kind of bomb had exploded … and the fallout just kept getting bigger and bigger. I couldn’t escape it. My face and story was plastered across television screens and newspapers all over the world. It was as if the entirety of humanity had discovered some kind of alien that had been living amongst them. I remember thinking: “Now what? Am I going to run again? OK, so this explains why I haven’t gotten a period. All right. If these people are saying I don’t have a womb, then this means I will never be able to carry a child. I want a family.”
[…]
I kept thinking: “This thing can never be undone.” The girl I had been before I got on that plane to Berlin – happy, joking, innocent, eager, hopeful – she’d been disappeared on the way back. And in these early days of my exile, there was nothing to put in that empty space. Imagine you are told one day that because of some medical this or that, you are actually not a woman. Think about it. In the eyes of the entire world, you are now something other than what you know yourself to be. And the entire world will not stop talking about you. Ever. Until the day you die, you will be the punchline of a joke about genitals or gender or sex or whatever.
Caster Semenya found out she was being gender tested when she showed up for the test, she thought it was a doping test. She found out the results - that she’s intersex - on the news with everyone else. She was 18 years old.
What they did to this woman is evil. She’s handled it with so much grace but she shouldn’t have to. It’s so awful. I’m never going to stop being mad about this.
How many more innocent civilians have to be killed by Israel before you condemn that for it?
That is a genocide.
That this is a crime on all accounts.
And deserves to be punished to the full extent off the law.
Video transcript, because some of the video captions are inaccurate. Transcript begins:
I have a simple question for you.
How many innocent Palestinian civilians - men, women, and children - does Israel have to slaughter? How many war crimes does Israel have to commit? How much death and destruction does Israel have to visit on the people of Gaza and Palestine, before you will call for and impose sanctions on Israel, and expel the Israeli ambassador from this country, and call for the immediate referral of Israel to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity and war crimes?
Because in front of the world, by their own admission, Israel is committing war crimes. They have stated it publicly. This isn’t a matter of opinion.
Uh, they declared their intention to force through the threat of military bombardment more than a million, and it is now well more than a million, Palestinians from their homes in northern Gaza and ethnically cleanse them. A crime against humanity.
They stated publicly, and have done it in front of the eyes of the world, their intention to deny to 2.2 million people water, electricity, medicine, life saving equipment, in front of the eyes of the world, and they’re doing it.
And every minute children are being slaughtered by their artillery, the relentless bombardment of residential complexes, of hospitals, of schools, of civilian infrastructure.
They just go on and on and on, and you do nothing. Nothing. Words of concern, but no action to hold them to account. And it is clearly pre-meditated war crimes and genocide. Genocide. We have Jewish people in the United States and Canada, around the world, and Israel, calling a genocide. Scholars, academics, saying this is genocidal.
Let me quote you a few things. Israeli general, quote: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity or water, there will only be destruction.”
Uh- Yoav Gallant, a minister, says “we are fighting human animals”, we will, quote, “act accordingly”. We will remove, quote, “every restriction on the IDF.”
Smotrich, another minister, “there is no such thing as the Palestinians.”
The president of Israel refers to the people of Gaza and says they are all responsible. Before October the 7th Netanyahu appeared before the UN general assembly with a map of Israel that had removed all references to Palestine: a clear declaration of intent to destroy the Palestinian people and steal all of their land. 6000 Palestinians killed between 2008 before October the 7th. Thousands of Palestinians hostage in administrative detention without trial. When are you going to move beyond words of concern and impose sanctions and expel the Israeli ambassador of this apartheid murderous state.
Some fifty miles south of Springfield, Missouri, on the old Wire Road, the Oak Grove schoolhouse was supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a man hanged there by bushwhackers during the Civil War. Only a few years ago four men rode by the schoolhouse on the way home from a dance and saw a grinning, bald-headed fellow peering out through the window. Coming closer, they noticed that the stranger had no eyebrows or eyelashes. The hillmen addressed the man politely at first, but he made no answer. Finally one of the boys drew his six-shooter and fired six shots which smashed the glass of the window, but the stranger grinned on unmoved. Then two of the boys kicked in the door and searched the schoolhouse, but the room was empty. The two boys who remained outside, however, could still see the stranger sitting just inside the broken windowpane.
Really cool organization near me called Black in Natural History Museums needs a few more shirts sold to reach their fundraising goal! They are helping to get Black people interested and involved with museums and diversify the museum community. Plus, it’s a very beautiful shirt!
Please help out if you can, they only need to sell four more shirts to reach the goal.
