i can't yet explain how much this pisses me off

I agree with some of the main points, but there's some shit that pisses me off here. Like, bitching that straights differentiate between gay and straight, but then doing it yourself. bitching that boys differentiate between male and female, but then bitching when they get confused.

christ almighty. somebody else rant about this and relieve some stress for me.

Hey, this is something brief that I wrote that came out in this months MRR. Let me know what you think, feel free to repost.
-Gre

Stop Making Me Crazy: Tips for Straight Punx

I wanted to write something on transgender health care, but when I sat down to write it I realized that there wasn't a lot that I actually knew. I know that trans people are disrespected and brutalized in ambulances, hospitals and doctors’ offices. I know that many of us lose our lives when bigoted medical professionals become aware of our trans status and refuse to treat us. I know that I don't have enough money for hormone treatment, sex reassignment surgery or therapy. But more then anything I know what it's like to be queer and trans in a hopelessly heterosexist and third gender hating world, and am all too aware of the impact of such a world on the state of one's mental health.

Some of us seek refuge from the straight world in the rebelliousness of the punk scene. Most of us leave more bitter than before. Others stay for the time being, out of stubbornness, figuring that somebody has to stick around and write the obligatory queer and/or feminist story for the next issue of Maximum Rock and Roll, only to later see it published between two articles of worthless, sexist, punk rock bullshit.

Often times we wake up and commute to work gripping our knives tight in our hoodie pockets and with our eyes on our backs.

Once we arrive we're in for a full day of having our names and pronouns fucked up by coworkers,
customers and management alike.

We stick out like sore thumbs in an
environment of assumed heterosexuality and binary gender, making us
targets.

All the while we know that when we are not sucking it up, we are
risking unemployment or worse.

So when we head out to the show at the end of the day, we aren't going so that we can get shit on by the punk scene in the same ways that we're shit on by the dominant culture everywhere else! Here are some ways that you can be a better 'ally' or at least, less of a dick:

Stop imitating queers.

What is wrong with straight punx who go around
speaking in a lisp, slapping each others asses and pretending to be
coupled with their straight friends? What a pathetic attempt at being 'queer friendly'.

If this is your way of flirting with the idea of same sex attraction, get some fucking guts and come out already, otherwise,stop fucking mocking us!

Do you really have to call everyone 'dude'? To many people, the word dude has male connotations, regardless of how you 'meant it'.

College students
call me bro, and punx call me dude. This culture has a problem with referring to everything as male.

When you do this to me (someone who was assigned male at birth but is a genderqueer trans womyn) you are
disrespecting my gender identity.

Destroy that entire fucking genre of anti pc, white boy bands and all bands that use rape imagery for shock value. There is no place for that shit. You wanna offend people? Sing about killing straight people, white people, men. You'll get more of a rise out of people that way anyways. Stop doing their shows. Stop reviewing their records. Don't let them hangout in your town. Get the punk girls and trannies together to kick their asses when they do. Stop defending them. Stop making excuses.

Flaunting your straightness is gross.

Hetero PDA's are alienating, and
constantly being alienated is exhausting. And god help me if I see one more straight couple making out at a Limp Wrist show! Tacky fucking breeders! I can't tell you how excited I get to be in a space that is both queer and punk and how disgusting it is to see that space being infected with straight peoples constant sense of entitlement. Next time I hope youget punched in the back of the head by some fed up fag.

What's the deal with punx getting married all the time? Radical queer and
trans folx are busy denouncing marriage, which we aren't even legally
entitled to, meanwhile, straight punx are planning weddings.

Since when
was marriage 'punk'?

Educate yourself on trans issues.

Politely ask for people's pronoun
preferences and respect them.

If you can't define and pronounce the words
'ze' and 'hir', look them up online. If you can't use them comfortably, practice.

That's it for now. So now that you know what not to do, you want to know what you can do to assist in queer and trans struggle, right? Nothing. We can do the rest. It's just that, while we plan the coming queer and trans insurrection, it would be nice to not have to feel so endlessly lonely in the punk scene, and to not have to feel so fucking crazy.

contact gre//anne hirsteria at arwen_anne@hotmail.com

"Do you really have to call everyone 'dude'? To many people, the word dude has male connotations, regardless of how you 'meant it'."

Sorry, DUDE!
I didn't mean to offend you, MAN!

This piece is so up its own ass with self-righteous, over-politicized hypersensitivity its RIDICULOUS. It's the kind of shit conservatives trot out to make the left look like a reactionary bunch of nutso fuckwads.
"Politely ask for people's pronoun
preferences and respect them.

If you can't define and pronounce the words
'ze' and 'hir', look them up online. If you can't use them comfortably, practice."
NOOOOOO!!!!! I'm not fucking going to do that. It's UNNECESSARY. The only people that care about what pronoun people use to address them are ASSHOLES.

Fuck you, you anal retentive asstard. And by the way, it's WOMAN. Not womyn. Changing a fucking letter does NOT solve patriarchy, you dumb fuck.

"And god help me if I see one more straight couple making out at a Limp Wrist show! Tacky fucking breeders! I can't tell you how excited I get to be in a space that is both queer and punk and how disgusting it is to see that space being infected with straight peoples constant sense of entitlement. Next time I hope youget punched in the back of the head by some fed up fag."

Music shows are for listening to music. A punk show, even if it's "queer punk" or whatever, should be a diverse place for everyone to go and have a good time. You seem to believe this is a time for your particular sexual niche to gain supremacy. That's asinine. If you want some tolerance in life, start showing it to other people, you shrill, brainless fucking dumbass. All you do is belittle straight people, many of whom, myself included, are FOR YOU HAVING FUCKING EQUAL RIGHTS.
Even though you seem like an inane, shrill, pompous twit of a human being with the fussy, bitchy tone of a retarded ex-suburban cunt, I still feel for you living in a flawed society. But don't let adversity turn you into an asshole.
DUDE.

Peace, the fuck, out.

two little questions, though. i'm not trying to be antagonistic, i just wanted to talk about some stuff in this article.

"dude" and "man" have been used in a non-gender centric way for so long that i doubt anybody still attributes a gender to it. it's just an endearment used in casual conversation, like how "-chan" can be added to the end of any gender's name in japanese. isn't this a good thing? working towards less gender distinction and more acceptance of unity? if i walked down the street and called a male "miss" in a haze of non-gender-specific confusion, would he really have any reason to get angry? it's a part of speech, and the dialog beyond that may or may not have been more important.

why create anger and hurt where none was meant? i understand getting mad when someone is deliberately being a jerk, but now that "dude" and "man" have become simple synonyms for "human", something like that should hardly be construed as deliberate misrepresentation.

Also, do you not find the hatred of straights PDA in public hypocritical? would you get equally as mad if you saw two gays making out in public?

I think the article's good, but there are some hazy spots that do less to attract people to a less gender-centric way of thought, and more to separate them. violence has a time and a place, but that's not when you're trying to convince people to join your (our?) social march towards equality, which is what, from what i understand, your article attempted to do.

assuming all straights are homophobes is the same as assuming all blacks break into people's houses and steal their TVs. rather than be proud for what type of person we choose to mate with, cannot we simply not give a shit and go on our own way?

I liked the part about blacks and TV's.

I cannot ever imagine myself using "hir" because it makes me think of 8 foot long dicked dragons with five tits, eyeshadow, and fur.

why you do this to me, furries?

God dammit, this person had me at the beginning until the list of horse shit nit-picky butthurt. Then I just got pissed that someone like me could be so jaded.

Sounds like someone is trying to be offended. The unreasonable pronoun demands make me sad, as does the bit about hating it when straight people make out in public.

This attitude is, if anything, counter-productive. The fundies look at people who talk like this and perceive them as paranoid, crazy people who want to "force their beleifs" on them. They're really wrong on that, what they want is simply the same courtesy most of us get to make our choices, but the angry rhetoric likely doesn't help.

My message was perhaps of a similar frenzied tone, but I at least called for some degree of coherency to the dialogue.