thebeldam:

When a group of dog rescuers arrived at the market to show the dogs available for adoption, somebody had left 12 puppies on the street – 8 of them were approximately 5 weeks old.

In shock, the rescuers didn’t know what to do. The group had recently canceled several adoption days at the market because of bad weather, so they were over their capacity with puppies still needing to be adopted out. Also, the abandoned puppies were so small that they needed to be fed every two hours, including at night.

That’s when a spayed stray dog approached, lay down beside the shoe box where the puppies were sleeping, and began caring for them.

She wouldn’t let anyone get near the babies.

Very carefully, the rescuers placed the puppies closer to her.

She began caressing them and offering the warmth of her belly to the newborns.

The maternal instinct kicked in and…

after a few hours, she had milk and was feeding the puppies.

The rescue group named her Vida, which means “life” in Portuguese.

(Via animals-zone.com)

spaceykate:

This Is What Happened to CeCe

This is a guest post by Redlark. Redlark is a white, lower-middle-class queer activist working a pink collar union gig in the Twin Cities. They are working with an amazing group of friends and allies of CeCe McDonald to get CeCe’s charges dropped and help her move back into her normal life.

Cece McDonald stood up to bigots and survived a hate crime. Now she’s in the county jail waiting to be tried for second degree murder.

This is a story about intersectionality – what happens when a young trans woman of color goes up against white supremacy, misogyny and transphobia. It’s a story about what happens when you have to fight for your life.

**
It began last June, the night of the 5th, when Cece and her friends – all young, black and queer – decided that they wanted to walk to the grocery store.

The grocery store in question is in south Minneapolis just off Lake Street, the busy, polluted, vital artery running from the wealthy white neighborhoods by the lakes through blocks of working class, multiracial, immigrant businesses before it ends in upmarket gentrification at the river. The grocery store is between the police station and the the light rail in a historically contested neighborhood where communities meet, mix and sometimes contend: the older white working class who bought in during the seventies and eighties meets immigrants from Mexico, Somalia and Central America who came looking for work or for political refuge; Native people still under the gun of colonization; African-Americans who’ve lived in Minneapolis for generations or arrived from Chicago or New Orleans in the last few years; students, punks and radicals, mostly but not exclusively white, gentrifiers or born in the neighborhood.

To get to the store, the group had to walk past a dive bar called the Schooner.

Dean Schmitz and his friends were standing outside the Schooner’s side door. All were older – Dean was 47 – and all were white. When they saw CeCe and her friends walk by, they started yelling – “faggots” “chicks with dicks” “n*****s” – a litany of vile abuse targeted at a group of much younger strangers.

CeCe McDonald has a strong sense of justice – she decided to confront Dean and his friends. So she and her group walked toward the bar.

**
Before we go any further, let’s talk about CeCe.

She’s 23, a college student in fashion design, a trans woman, Black, femme, very funny and widely known to be a generous person – a woman who housed and took care of her chosen family of younger queer and trans folks. Her friends call her Honee Bea.

CeCe is someone who fights for social change who even from jail has been urging her supporters to help other victims of white supremacy – including the family of Jaime Gonzalez, who was killed by the Texas police while he was at school.

She is someone who has faith in herself, in her community, in her values. “Love is inevitable and overcomes any and all things,” she writes.

CeCe and her friends are brave and tough, strong enough to walk around being visible in a world that attacks and criminalizes you if you’re young and African-American, and doubles the assault if you’re young and African-American and trans and femme.

You probably know – if you’re trans you definitely know – that trans women of color face incredible, staggering rates of violence and homicide. In most places it is essentially legal to discriminate against trans people in housing, employment and social services. As a result, trans people, especially trans women, are socially vulnerable in all kinds of ways – and vulnerable turns into “criminalized”, whether it’s because you can’t change your legal documents to match your gender or because you’re homeless and panhandling or because you’re doing sex work to make the rent…or because you have to fight to keep yourself safe

Trans people are ten to fifteen times more likely to have been incarcerated than cis people. Nearly half of all African-American trans people have spent time in the prison system.

Seventy percent of the GLBTQ people murdered in 2010 were people of color. Forty-four percent were trans women.

If you’re vulnerable, you have to wonder – will someone assault you? Will you survive? Will anyone help you? That’s a pretty heavy thing to carry around in the back of your mind every day.

***
CeCe and her friends knew the statistics, but they still dared to rebuke hatred when it spoke. They walked up the Dean Schmitz and his group, and CeCe told him that her crew would not tolerate hate speech.

But hatred hits back. One of Dean Schmitz’s friends told them, “I’ll take you bitches on,” and smashed her glass into Cece’s face, puncturing her cheek and badly lacerating her salivary gland.

There was a fight. Multiple people were involved. At the end, CeCe was on the ground in a pool of her own blood. Dean Schmitz was dead.

***
When the cops came, Cece was the only one they arrested. They took her to jail, withheld medical treatment, and sometime in the small hours got her to sign a confession. She recanted it as soon as she was able to do so.

Later, the medical examiner discovered a swastika tattoo on Dean Schmitz’s body.

***
Let’s talk about white supremacy, because this it haunts this case.

White supremacy is a system, and it runs on routine plus terror. The routine is the dull grind of discrimination – the stop-and-frisks of youth of color in the hope of finding something to get their fingerprints are in the system, the heavy policing in black neighborhoods and the heavy discipline in schools when kids of color are involved, the biased, expensive court system, the unspoken but obvious job discrimination and always, always the white supremacist narrative in mainstream culture saying that people of color deserve what they get.

And then there’s terror. Whether it’s the Jim Crow South or the modern North, it’s the knowledge that at any time you can be attacked, hurt, killed and no one will do anything. That your body, your life, your friends’ lives could always be on the line.

Terror keeps the machine humming. If you act up – if you talk back – anything might happen to you.
***
An interesting thing about prosecutor Michael Freeman: in the last year, he’s dropped charges against three people who killed accidentally while fighting for their lives. But he’s leaning on CeCe to plead guilty, and he initially persuaded the court to set her bail at an outrageous $500,000 – as if CeCe, the injured survivor of a hate crime, was some kind of risk to her community.

The court system isn’t neutral.

If you haven’t been on the wrong end of the legal system, it’s very easy to assume that the courts will sort everything out. Privileged people – white people, middle class people, cis people – can grow up identifying with the court system and with the idea of “neutrality” – especially when articulate white men in nice suits are talking. Something happened, privileged folks think, and the courts will figure it out, they’ll assign blame correctly, someone will pay a debt to society, and all’s well that ends well.

Here is what really happens: CeCe is in jail. Visiting is severely restricted, so getting a trans activist in to see her so that her friends can find her a trans-friendly lawyer is difficult. That lawyer has to work for free, because CeCe doesn’t have enough money and neither do her friends, and all her support committee’s money is going for bail. It takes a month to get meaningful treatment for injuries from the night of the attack, so her cheek swells up with a lump the size of a golf ball. She gets put in solitary “for her own protection” – which means ‘because she’s trans’ – and the support committee has to organize call-ins to get her out.

In order for a prisoner to be able to call you, you have to pay a monthly charge to a phone security service, and her friends are struggling to get work. So money has to be found for that. And the trial date has been moved once. Every time a trial date is set, her support committee mobilizes people — thirty or forty people have taken vacation days or changed their schedules so they could show up. Will it be moved again?

It’s easier and cheaper for the court system when people plead guilty, and it results in a politically-useful higher conviction rate. In the United States, the number of plea-bargains has skyrocketed in the last two decades and the number of actual trials has gone way down.

This is how the courts get people to take a plea – prisoners get tired and worn and confused and low in spirits, so they plead guilty just for a little certainty and an end to the ordeal. And many, many of those are people of color.
***

This isn’t just about CeCe. It’s about the way young women are harassed and assaulted every day in every city. It’s about the way trans women are treated as disposable and the way black youth are criminalized. It’s about the constant social violence by which white supremacy, transphobia and misogyny are maintained.

And it’s about whose experience counts. When we believe CeCe, we’re saying that we hear trans women, we hear youth of color and we believe what they say about their own lives. We name racism, we name violence, we name prejudice – and we refuse them with all the strength we have.

***
We need to get the charges against CeCe dropped. There’s precedent, the prosecutor has the authority and a victory here would be a victory for so many people – for CeCe, for her community and friends, for youth of color and trans youth who face violence and hatred. To do this, we need to get Michael Freeman to listen. We need voices. We need media.

We need to make it clear to Michael Freeman that this case is visible – we aren’t going to forget about CeCe no matter how often the trial gets moved, and we aren’t going to forget about any miscarriage of justice, either.

You can call Michael Freeman at 612-348-5540, fax at 612-348-2042, and email at citizeninfo@co.hennepin.mn.us

Remember to remain polite but don’t be afraid to be assertive. Some key points to mention in your calls, emails, and faxes are:

*Identify yourself as a supporter, friend, family member, or community member calling about Ms. Chrishaun McDonald’s case.

*Tell the County Attorney’s Office why you’re concerned: Ms. McDonald was the target of a hate crime, but she was singled out for aggressive prosecution after the attack.

*County Attorney Freeman has declined to press charges in cases like this at least three times already this year. Remind him that he has the power to drop the charges against Ms. McDonald.

Tell Freeman not to side with Ms. McDonald’s white supremacist attackers: drop the charges against Ms. McDonald.

For more information and new developments: www.supportcece.wordpress.com. You can sign the petition calling for Michael Freeman to drop CeCe’s charges here.

thingsthatverbme:

[A person with brown hair and a pierced nose looks up at the camera. Their hands are under their chest which has soap suds and the words  “—> Fuck your standards. I am beautiful.” in red ink.]

I agree. One hundred percent.

So this blog has been making its way around www.viewsfromthecouch.com/2012/02/12/you-didnt-thank-me-for-punching-you-in-the-fac/  about how it is not cool to tell children that their bully actually likes them when the bully is committing violence against them.  It is a good post on a very important topic.  In response to this the writer has received death threats, rape threats on her and her daughter, tone arguments, victim blaming, what about the mens?, being called a c-word and a “whiney little bitch”, and of course, being told to “calm the fuck down” because there’s “no need to read 4th wave feminist bullshit into it.”

That is just from the comments she hasn’t deleted.   seriously fuck society.

thingsthatverbme:

[Two people having sex on a pink bed.]

lucypaw:

whencylonsdream:

lucypaw:

maevele:

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

maevele:

lucypaw:

transimatter:

That awkward moment when you forget that most women don’t have cocks and most men don’t have cunts.

One of the comments is like ‘oh wow so different’ but it just looks normal to me :|

Cis bodies look weird to me sometimes.  Okay, most times.

I was just trying to figure out why his clit is heart shaped? 

i really liked this picture until i saw the “internal” view on the side and now it’s just creepy and wrong and evil

yeah, that flew right past me, and then when I reblogged it I was like wait, what was THAT?

I guess I’ve seen too much of this type of porn.  The ‘internal’ view thing is a standard in it.  Not one I really like, but I suspect it’s hot for some people in much the way straight porn has ‘money shots’, so I just ignore them.  I barely even registered it was there.

I assume everyone is trans till proved otherwise, soooo ;x

I at least assume all the hot people I’m attracted to are trans.  ;)

This picture is very hot.

The (kinda binarist) assumptions of gender based on bodies? Not so much.

You mean the extremely binarist assumptions of gender and pronouns based on what their bodies look like?  Seriously? Can we stop assuming gender of female and she/her pronouns because you read them as female and they have a penis. Can we stop assuming gender of male and he/his pronouns just because you read them as male and they have a vulva? Seriously people stop being fucking busted.

PS: Learn anatomy, the heart is the person’s pubic hair.

sweetupndown:

you thought I didn’t really notice. But I did. I wanted to high-five you.

Yesterday I had a pair of brothers in my store. One was maybe between 15-17. He was a wrestler at the local high school. Kind of tall, stocky and handsome. He had a younger brother, who was maybe about 10-12 years old. Thy were talking about finding a game for the younger one, and he was absolutely insisting it be one with a female charcter. I don’t know how many of y’all play games, but that isn’t exactly easy. Eventually, I helped the brothers pick a game called Mirror’s Edge. The youngest was pretty excited about the game, and then he specifically asked me.. “Do you have any girl color controllers?”

I directed him to the only colored controllers we have which includes pink and purple ones. He grabbed the purple one, and informed me purple was his FAVORITE.

The boys had been taking awhile, so their father eventually comes in. He see’s the game, and the controller, and starts in on the youngest about how he needs to pick something different. Something more manly. Something with guns and fighting, and certainly not a purple controller. He tries to convince him to get the new Zombie game “Dead Island.” and the little boy just stands their repeating “Dad, this is what I want, ok?” Eventually it turns into a full blown argument complete with Dad threatening to whoop his son if he doesn’t choose different items.

That’s when big brother stepped in. He said to his Dad “It’s my money, it’s my gift to him, if it’s what he wants I’m getting it for him, and if your gonna hit anyone for it, it’s going to be me.”

Dad just gives his oldest son a strong stern stare down, and then leaves the store. Little brother is crying quietly, I walk over and ruffle his hair (yes this happened all in front of me.) I say “I’m a girl, and I like the color blue, and I like shooting games. There’s nothing wrong with what you like. Even if it’s different that what people think you should.”

Big brother then leans down, kisses little brother on the head, and says “Don’t worry dude.”

They check out and leave, and all I can think is how awesome big brother is, how sweet little brother is, and how Dad ought to be ashamed for trying to make his son any other way.

This is so awesome.

motionprevails:

johnnytroublee:

make-your-hips-stirr:

A tiger mother lost her cubs from premature labour. Shortly after she became depressed and her health declined, and she was diagnosed with depression. So they wrapped up piglets in tiger cloth, and gave them to the tiger. The tiger now loves these pigs and treats them like her babies.

OMG

adorable

shadowandmayhem:

shadowandmayhem:

How is it that you’re not following me or my boyfriend, yet you always seem to know when either of us posts anything?

And why is it you don’t have an ask box?

Also, why are you only following a few people, yet you reblog things from none of the places you follow?

Another…

Ah, Google. That makes sense. But I think your last sentence had too many “and”s, and I don’t get it. Enemy of an ex-friend? 

yea too many ands…  I am on vacation and my brain is kind of fried.  I found your tumblrs because of a friend at the time who turned into a major asshole to a my partner and myself and if I am reading between the lines right on crazyrower’s tumblr (which often I am not) has done the same to you.

shadowandmayhem:

How is it that you’re not following me or my boyfriend, yet you always seem to know when either of us posts anything?

And why is it you don’t have an ask box?

Also, why are you only following a few people, yet you reblog things from none of the places you follow?

Another thing, why is it that the VAST majority of your posts are reblogs from my or my boyfriend?

I’m curious.

I actually don’t use tumblr very much at all.  I use google reader to follow all my websites.  Most of my reblog stuff is when I want to respond to things that I see or really interesting things. I follow the two of you because well and the enemy of and ex-friend is a friend?

thingsthatverbme:

jakigriot:

Whenever someone says, “No Drama”, what the hell does that phrase actually mean? I hear this stated like a fact of the universe. As if there is some universal definition of what “drama” entails. This “drama” is so intensely negative that people who vow to live their life without it must have a higher level of integrity and self-respect. I’ve seen “No Drama” on internet profiles, bumper stickers and even a tattoo (or two). Drama is so apparently seductive that there is a class of people titled, “Drama whores”. What exactly does that mean? Perhaps a whore who requires drama as payment?

I would like some clarity.

- Is it drama when I challenge the assumptions you make?

If you have to think about the things you say and back them up with further information, I can understand why that is troublesome. Especially if the original statements are based on prejudice, assumptions and/or ill-intent. It’s much simpler to call someone a “drama whore” instead of explaining that they hurt your feelings by analyzing your words.

- Is it drama when I won’t shut up?

Funny thing about mouths. Everyone gets one. I’m in charge of it. So if I get all the rewards and consequences of whatever falls out of it, I get to decide when to stop flapping it. Lest we forget, there are a great many people who can’t say the things I can. Many who won’t say them. If I believe my words, I have a duty to express them.

- Is it drama when I behave differently than you’d expect?

Tough nuggets.

- Is it drama when I’m “overreacting”?

Emotions do not come out of thin air. People build emotions based on their comprehension of the current situation and their past experiences. When there is a loud outburst of “drama” that seems to you illogical, it’s safe to assume there is more fueling the fire. I am a person that tends to speak loudly and with passion. Part of this is fueled by a childhood of taught silence. Being heard is extremely important to me. Sometimes my method makes people uncomfortable. If so, the part that you aren’t realizing is that I reacted exactly the way I felt. If my volume was loud, it’s because I wanted to be VERY CLEAR IN CASE YOU MISSED MY POINT. It was not an accident.

- Is it drama when I’m “too-emotional”?

What type of backwards thinking is this? How can you be too emotional? It’s your emotion and this time you felt it strongly. Emotions overlap and perhaps that mixture is more potent. There is no set range of emotions that are “approprotate”. You are allowed to feel however you want. Unless your emotional reaction leads to a physical interaction that damages other people, it’s yours alone. It’s your brain. No one else gets to rearrange it and decorate the inside of your skull with their perspections of right and wrong.

- Is it drama when I tell my side of the story?

Something happens between two people. One person tells their point-of-view and gets applause. Other tells their point-of-view and suddenly everyone comes out of the walls quoting Gandhi and asking for a peaceful resolution. Hold on a minute! If I was involved, I’m allowed to share what happened to me. If my story painted X person in an unflattering light, then whose fault is that? If it’s true, it’s not my concern that speaking up makes their life harder. They made those actions and should have to deal with the rewards and consequences of them. This is the same behavior that lets people abuse each other and then faults the victim for speaking up. This is the same behavior that punishes the person who files a complaint at work. Unless there was a mutual agreement of silence, anything that happens in my life is mine to share as I see fit.

- Is it drama when my volume is loud?

Why does every thing need to be expressed in a conversational tone? Your vocal cords have a wide range for various levels of expression and I doubt it evolved so you can talk over the television. Even with millions of words in the dictionary (and a plethora being created every day), the tone of my voice can express my feelings a lot faster and in more universal ways than the latest SAT vocabulary word. If your child is running across the street, you’d scream out a warning without thought. Volume is a great way to convey urgency, passion, disgust and every other feeling you have. Just be prepared for strong reactions. I think it speak volumes (pun intended) about society that the cultural ways that minorities use to distinguish themselves through language (inflections, slang, volume, accents, vernacular, etc) are all used to dismiss their intelligence. To me the question is, were the words and intentions understood? Speaking loudly may not make you correct in an argument but it doesn’t necessarily imply ignorance.

So what is drama?

Drama is in everything. Drama is energy. In your story, you are the main character and the drama of it all is how you change into the hero. Plot, action, suspense, love, heartache… all of that is drama.

Truly, think about that for a moment.

A life void of drama sounds very much like being dead. How will you grow? How can you fall in love? Hell, you can’t even get properly angst-y and depressed without some drama thrown in. How will you know how you’d like to behave without someone providing you a beautiful counter example?

And you say, you want none of that? Much like the time when I was eight and I’d eaten an entire gallon of ice cream only to vomit it all later… be careful what you wish for.

But drama? I love drama. Bring it on. I learn so much about the people around me by watching the theater of life unfold. And some is so good that I’d even buy a ticket! But if the drama doesn’t interest me… if the intention doesn’t ring true… it’s time to watch a different show.

Truth.