Greek travelers and writers from the ancient world mythologized the Amazons, but these legendary female warriors were very real. They hailed from the ferocious nomadic Scythian tribes that controlled a huge swath of Central Asia and kept the great powers of Greece, Persia, and China at bay. With the help of recent archaeological findings, uncover the lives of these Amazons through the tale of a Scythian who grows up to become a horse warrior and leader of her tribe in a defining battle against the Persians in 6th century BC. Smithsonian Episode 1
Je suis l'esprit de follet. Miss Viola Swamp.
I'm a cybergirl without a face a heart or a mind. When life gives me lemons, I wear yellow.
Disclaimer: If you post something racist, homophobic, bigoted, misogynistic, or plain old ignorant, I will unfollow you. Simple as that.
You may know me from fuckyeahethnicwomen / women of the rainbow / FYEW. and FYEM. +
I have never understood the phrase “power move” as clearly as I do in this very moment.
(via seriesofnonsequiturs)
I’ve learned so much but not enough
I also fell away from the world and I’m not quite sure if I still exist
But the world isn’t the same
But of course it’s not the same
If it was stagnant
Well
I couldn’t say
There’s really no such thing
Everything in constant motion
Even when it feels long
The only constant we know right now is the continued existence of everything entirely
Inside of myself and just me there are galaxies within galaxies, if a galaxy is a system in continuum
Functionality and destructiv(ism) is fitting enough —- creation begets destruction and so forth. Cycles and circles and living a thousand lives
A thousand is an infant
A hiccup
A constant
( of infinity )
into repeating patterns
I disappear but I continue
I stop but into dust
Interstellar dust into
Intersex patients 'routinely lied to by doctors' - BBC News
“Ieuan Hughes, emeritus professor of paediatrics at the University of Cambridge and an expert in hormone disorders, says cover-ups used to be routine in cases such as this.
“In those days the consensus in the medical profession was that the truth would not be disclosed to the patient… and the general advice was for parents not to disclose the true diagnoses to the children.
“The explanation for why the person could not have periods, could not have children - a story was spun that the ovaries had not developed properly and were at risk of developing cancer, therefore they needed to be removed.”
He says a number of women who had been told “a pack of lies” by the medical profession have since contacted the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group (AISSG), with which he works.
“Apparently there had been a couple of examples where patients had been so upset they had taken their own lives - sadly.”
A AISSG representative told the BBC the practice of routinely withholding the truth from patients didn’t stop until 2012…”
Hello! I was wondering if you have any sources, articles or the like about the sex binary applied to animals and plants and why its wrong and outdated? I'm a 1st year zoology student in Denmark and boy do we like to gender stuff...
Sure!
Though you can’t really talk about sex as a social construct and how it’s applied (incorrectly) onto animals/plants without knowing the social context behind it:
- Colonialism, Two-Spirit Identity, and the Logics of White Supremacy
- Gender and Genitals: Constructs of Sex and Gender
- Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y
- sex is not a biological reality article
- Bilaterally Gynandromorphic Chickens, and Why I’m Not “Scientifically” Male
- Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud by Thomas Laqueur (book about how sex/gender came to be a social construct
- allosomes (or sex chromosomes) aneuploidies in humans
- allosomes in animals
- allosomes in some land plants
- Androgen insensitivity syndrome
Example of animals that don’t fit “female”/”male” (there’s alot of them but here’s just a few)
To double check ref l8r
Just gonna leave this here…
This applies to cis people as well as trans people
Edit: I’ve had to explain this multiple times and Im getting bored of it now. In an attempt to try and avoid any more uneducated ‘yes they do’ comments, go and read THIS
“Solidarity is not the same as support. To experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be occasional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn. Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.”— Bell Hooks
RENCONTRES
Les Bajau // Nomades de la Mer // Indonésie
Groupe ethnique d'Indonésie qui font partie des populations qu'on appelle les « Nomades de la mer ». Les Bajau d'Indonésie vivent principalement sur les petites îles et les côtes de l'île de Sulawesi.
📷 Jonathon Collins
This is just getting silly…
Why is nobody discussing the autism-archaic DNA link? You don’t even have to check multiple newspapers:
Immune Disorders and Autism (NYT)
In autistic individuals, the immune system fails at this balancing act. Inflammatory signals dominate. Anti-inflammatory ones are inadequate. A state of chronic activation prevails. And the more skewed toward inflammation, the more acute the autistic symptoms.
The downside of archaic immune material is that it may be responsible for autoimmune diseases like diabetes, arthritis and multiple sclerosis, Dr. Parham said, stressing that these are preliminary results.New technologies overturn past paradigms and reveal initially dismissed truths. The people whose careers suffer the most will be the ones that turn out, in retrospect, to have actively deceived people. In medicine, being silent can be as destructive as being wrong. I just wish more medical researchers realized this.
Something that really grinds my gears: stereotyping ‘cavemen’ as talking ‘primitively’ like they didn’t have the capacity for complex language. Since homo sapiens speciated we have had the FOXP2 gene which is a big part of our capacity for complex language. So yes, ‘primitive cavemen’ COULD speak to each other in complex ways. You know what other species could as well? Our cousin species, homo neanderthalensis because they ALSO had the gene, and the Denisovans another human cousin species also most likely had it. Hell, there’s a chance that the ancestor species of us and our cousin species may have had it too ~400,000 years ago.
Stop it with this stupid caveman shit, they were definitely not unintelligent because of their ‘primitive’ technology. They were hunter gatherers that used their environments efficiently. Equating technological capacity with intelligence ignores so much context that gave rise to new forms of tech, and sees societies through a Western lens in which there is the belief that all human societies value exactly the same things (like technology and a ‘march towards progress’). There are Hunter-Gatherer societies in the world today, are they stupid? The correct answer to that is no.
This is a map of Asia. North Americans, you may notice this map is not solely comprised of Japan, Korea, China and Thailand. People in the UK, you may notice India is not a continent. That is, if those of you who generalize entire continents can even pinpoint India on a map.
Indians are Asian, gasp! And not all brown skinned people are Indian, also, gasp! There are an alarming amount of people, of all ages, from all backgrounds, who seem to be unable to process this.
I’m ethnically Asian. Since Asia is an extremely large continent, I could be from any number of countries. I am neither from India, China, Korea, Japan or Pakistan, yet not so surprisingly, I am still Asian.
Yes, there are commonalities across regions, through the conflation of cultures, colonialism, globalization, transnationalism and movement of diasporas. Sometimes these are all the same thing. Rickshaws, rice and curry can be found across the continent.
But let’s not overgeneralize. You can also find Buddhists, Catholics, Muslims and Hindus across Asia. Cantonese Speaking Chinese Muslims! English Speaking Indian Jews!
No, we are not all the same. Orientalism? (Please look up Edward Said for basic concepts) No thank you.
So let’s not use umbrella terms, regarding Asians as a monolith while simultaneously denying the regional identity of millions of people- and how about we also not engage in xenophobia?
Are you someone that thinks this way? Shame on you! You should perhaps invest in buying a map, and take a look at what countries are you know, where.
Geography, people. It’s important.
Holy mother it’s been years and I love all the commentary. I’ve learned a lot a lot since this original post and I can break down how stupid conflating all of us is down to DNA. ~ancient- DNA and not so ancient. Because we’re, er, all the same and also not, I will follow up at some point with admixtures / flow, steppe warriors, science, science, history, transnational, migration, everyone breeding things. Mind blowing things.
That said, the way we look now, is quite a recent development; over the last 400 years. Lines blurring in genetics but that said, current society and years of diasporas forming means that it’s time we start reexamining identities and racial paradigms, all over again.
Tldr I will write some long thing about denisovans stuff or y’all should peruse Razib Khan’s blog, twitter and Goodreads for intros to genetics (and history etc). Keep in mind that his very early posts are quite typical internalized, but watching his perspective shift with age and learning, curious thing.
http://www.razib.com/wordpress/ also at
unz review, gnxp
Bagan by Patrick Foto ;)
Via Flickr:
Beautiful scenery during sunrise at the pagoda of Bagan, Myanmar
When you’ve been sick for a time
you give up all your secrets, you give up
the lies.*
from “When You’ve Been Sick For A Time” by SUSAN AUSTIN
Everything becomes clear in a great light.
You shed revulsion and resistance,
a great love germinates within you —*
from “I have never needed God” by MIRI BEN-SIMHON (translated by LISA KATZ)