Hi! It’s not finished yet, there should be two eps left, so, still waiting to see how it’ll end. The potential for a terrible and great ending are both there.
Robert Eads was a transgender man who transitioned later in life and as such it was deemed inadvisable for him to seek sex reassignment surgery. He was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 1996 but was refused treatment by more than a dozen doctors, some for personal reasons and others on the grounds that taking him on as a patient might harm their practice. When he finally found a doctor to treat him in 1997, the cancer had already metastasized to other parts of his body, rendering any further treatments futile. He passed away in 1999. His life and death was the subject of the award-winning documentary Southern Comfort (2001).
As i’m sure many of you have heard, the Trump administration just passed a ruling that would remove LGBT+ anti-discrimination protections in health care and health insurance. I immediately thought of this man’s story when I heard about the ruling. Stories like this are the reason why those protections are necessary.
It’s easy to feel hopeless with all the bad news our community has been bombarded with recently. But we have to keep fighting, and one way we can fight is through legal means.
Here are some organizations that have announced plans to take action in court. If you can donate to any of them, please do!
Lambda Legal: one of the first to announce they would take legal action against the ruling, Lambda Legal is the oldest and largest national legal organization advocating for LGBTQ+ people and people with HIV.
Transgender Law Center: the largest American transgender-led civil rights organization in the United States. The stated mission of TLC is to connect transgender people and their families to technically sound and culturally competent legal services, increase acceptance and enforcement of laws and policies that support transgender communities, and work to change laws and systems that fail to incorporate the needs and experiences of transgender people.
Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund: Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund is committed to ending discrimination based upon gender identity and expression and to achieving equality for transgender people through public education, test-case litigation, direct legal services, and public policy efforts.
UPDATE: removed one group from the list as I heard they’ve been involved in some shady stuff. Plus, I want to focus more attention on the LGBT+ specific groups
I use the current Tumblr widths, so 540px for full and 268px for half (I rarely do thirds but if so, 178px). In terms of heights, I tend to go for 268px for the full just because I like the symmetry, but I might go higher or lower depending on the source, and same for half width gifs.
Oh, hmm, I find it super hard to pick favorites and tend to chase unwatched content more than I rewatch (which is why I’m still going through Columbo and am now eyeing Murder, She Wrote) buuut, I do have some old individual eps or scenes I return to often. These are currently the file explorer windows that I’ve deliberately opened on my last couple of restarts, so for the last few months they’re always available: El Embarcadero, Mr Robot, Desenfrenadas, Halt and Catch Fire, Twenties, The Hockey Girls, and Relationship Status (just the f/f eps). I like rewatching things that make me happy, so mostly it’s the shippy stuff I go back to when the mood hits me.
Oof, that’s a question! Umm, in general or with me? Personally, I’m usually pretty mild about that kind of thing and don’t really ascribe…bad faith intentions in that way, I guess? I feel like it’s part of their job to sell a nice picture and if they make fans happy on the way, as m/f costar romances did, I don’t really see the issue. And that’s if it seems played up at all and not just a genuine good friendship from the start. And the same can be said for a lot of other fans, I’ve never seen a fandom where everyone thinks the same about everything BUT, okay, there can be a majority consensus at a certain point, and I guess that does come down to the big influential fans and as you said, the culture and bias within that fandom.
I guess if you really want to get into it, it depends what stage the ship and actor friendship is at. If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, that’s still very much on its upward trajectory, the same place other ships/friendships were at some previous point in time. People being happy with something for now doesn’t mean they always will be.
Even the actors you think who didn’t “get away with it” probably were, at some point. As long as things are all right with the ship/fandom, people will generally be happy and tolerant of whatever kind of “baiting” or “pandering” or whatever you want to call it, but I think one of two things happens and the mood turns. Either the ship has a bad end or the actors’ friendship dissolves (publicly, at least) and suddenly fans feel used and manipulated, and embarrassed for it. The more personal and emotional investment there was and the more abrupt the turn, the worse they feel, and that frustration’s gotta go somewhere.
A bunch of factors go into it, smaller fandoms will never really reach the point where they become their own self-contained content and engagement engines, so it’s harder to be as all in for them, which decreases the final disappointment. The further we get, the less inevitable the ship/friendship destruction I mentioned above seems, we’re getting some happy endings now and actors don’t seem to feel the same awkwardness and pressure about being shipped (although it still VERY much depends on the individual). Big name fans encouraging good behavior and moderation around the actors can help from things running away. More ships going on at once stops people from pinning all their hopes on the one. A lot of things. I suppose, at the end of it, fans judge how sincere the actors were, and bad ends tend to color everything that came before, but as long as everything’s all right, the fans are happy with it.
