I can’t even open my own front door.

My experience of being poor is nothing near as severe as this, but I have panic attacks every time a new bill arrives. I have bought treats for my niece, and partner but got nothing for myself because I can’t justify having a bar of chocolate, or a bag of chips.

I live on a set income, a very small set income. Anything good I have, I have thanks to the generosity of my friends and family…yeah this piece speaks very loudly to me.

COOKING ON A BOOTSTRAP

This is an article that I wrote for the Guardian in December that I didn’t post on my blog, because I hadn’t done anything ‘political’ on here for so long that I didn’t want to scare people away. But I am who I am, and this is a very big part of who I am, so if you’re here for just the cheap recipes, then I make no apology for talking a little about why I started writing them in the first place.

TRIGGER WARNINGS: Anxiety, trauma, mental health, PTSD, debt, poverty.

My head in my hands, choking out words, tears rushing down hot, humiliated cheeks, I raised my head to look at the array of varying expressions looking back from the other side of the room; a Labour MP, two Conservative peers, and a Conservative MP looked back, a mixture of horror and sympathy as I publicly crashed and…

View original post 764 more words

No, I will not help Sundog make a documentary on trans “regret”

Dr Ruth Pearce

This afternoon I received an unsolicited email in my work account from an employee of Sundog Pictures. An excerpt follows:

I’m currently working on an idea alongside Channel 4 following transgender individuals who have come to regret their sex changes and are keen to undergo further treatment / operations to reverse the change. The doc will be insightful and sensitive and will look at the way in which transgender individuals are treated in society and whether the process before someone is permitted an operation is robust enough.

I’m currently looking for real life cases to include in my pitch document and was wondering whether you might be able to recommend people I could speak to, or places I could contact to find individuals who are currently thinking about a reverse sex change. Any help would be really appreciated.

Given the email account used, I feel that I can safely…

View original post 1,297 more words

Men’s Rights Activists: Video gaming should be a “safe space” for male nerds.

we hunted the mammoth

Safe space! No girls allowed!

Though Men’s Rights activists devote an enormous amount of their time denouncing feminism – or at least the imaginary version of feminism that exists only in their own heads – they’re happy to appropriate feminist concepts when it suits them. One that many MRAs seem especially eager to claim for themselves is the idea of the “safe space.”

Of course, their version of the “safe space” bears only a slight resemblance to the feminist original. Feminists seek to create spaces for discussion in which say, rape survivors can discuss their experiences without being triggered by insensitive arguers and trolls and mansplainers in general.

When MRAs talk about “safe spaces,” by contrast, their goal is often to exclude women not just from discussion spaces but from full participation in society, essentially declaring giant arenas of work and play, from STEM fields to video games, to…

View original post 1,202 more words

Yeah strike what I just said…

A couple of days ago I said that I hoped to have the next page of my webcomic up today…not happening. Yesterday was too busy and tiring to do any work on it. And I’ve spent most of today locked in a panic attack, crying, and vomiting. Gotta love how those three go together for me.

Anyway I do have a really nice page shaping up, but it’ll go up when I’m able to work on it again.

Sorry about that.

How My Eleven Year Old Son Taught Me That Having a Gay Character in ‘Train Your Dragon’ is Important

evoL =

Guest post by Mindy Forsythe.  Mindy is also the adoptive mom in the evolequals story   The Real True Story About How Parents Adopted Out Their Child When He Told Them He Was Gay

 

My eleven year old son Mason has been a big fan of DreamWork’s “How to Train Your Dragon”. In the new sequel, DreamWorks plans for Gobber the Belch to reveal his homosexuality.  Dean DeBlois, writer-director and openly gay himself, told E! News that the character’s acknowledgement will be subtle.  Subtle or not, this is exciting news for our family.  We have four beautiful children aged eleven to nineteen.  They are typical siblings…fighting one minute and best friends the next.  Two of our children, however, have a relationship that has shown me just how important and influential DreamWorks’s decision to include gay characters really is.

Mason, the baby in our family, is athletic, intelligent, tough as nails…

View original post 1,244 more words

No country for young women: Honour crimes and infanticide in Ireland

People forget that Ireland was, and often still is a nasty small-minded, parochial country. And people seem to wilfully ignore that Ireland may say “We treasure our children”, but the truth is completely different.

As an abuse survivor, I’ve had people tell me to shut up about it. That’s it’s in the past and should be left there. Never mind that it is my past, my present and something I will never escape in my future.

The people who tell you to shut up are the same ones who will turn around and use that information to destroy you given a chance.

Yes Ireland, such a beautiful country, until you scratch the surface of that lovely veneer…

Feminist Ire

When I was in first year in secondary school in 1997, a girl in the year above me was pregnant. She was 14. The only people who I ever heard say anything negative about her were a group of older girls who wore their tiny feet “pro-life” pins on their uniforms with pride. They slagged her behind her back, and said she would be a bad mother. They positioned themselves as the morally superior ones who cared for the baby, but not the unmarried mother. They are the remnants of an Ireland, a quasi-clerical fascist state, that we’d like to believe is in the past, but still lingers on.

The news broke last week of a septic tank filled with the remains of 796 children and babies in Galway. The remains were accumulated from the years 1925 to 1961 and a common cause of death was malnutrition and preventable disease…

View original post 2,094 more words

I Don’t Consider Myself a Misogynist

This guy just gets it…

Poorly Edited

I used to identify myself as a maleist. That is, I believed that the rights of men were being whittled away by American women. I believed that we were raising a generation of men to be pussies. We were stamping out natural male instincts in an attempt to keep them subdued. We were telling American men that they should be ashamed of their sex and instincts.

I’m sure Fight Club had something to do with this.

I don’t identify as a maleist anymore. I find myself thinking these thoughts from time to time. I realize that they are misguided. But, they’re still lingering.

I don’t consider myself a misogynist… but….

View original post 730 more words

#YesAllWomen: What difference does it make?

This…

Feminist Ire

Finola Meredith has a piece in The Irish Times today bemoaning the #yesallwomen hashtag on twitter. When I saw the headline “The Twittersurge #YesAllWomen is a useless weapon against endemic misogyny” I laughed. What’s a better weapon? An Irish Times feature with a Breda O’Brien riposte the following day?

May the liberal force of Fintan O’Toole be strong in you, Irish Times Columnists.

Meredith’s issue with the hashtag is that she believes that tweeting that is about as useful as going outside in the street and shouting “sexist men are bastards” and it will make no difference. Tempted as I am to go and stand outside Coppers this Saturday night to disprove her point (Just imagine the real life “NOT ALL MEN!!” screams you’d hear afterwards), there is an important point hidden in here concerning major media outlets that dominate, such as The Irish Times, who have a role…

View original post 635 more words

The Frozen Problem Pt.1: Elsa

Read this, it’s AWESOME!

The sexist vocal minority in gaming are not a minority

This is in fact precisely why there are so few women on multiplayer servers.