tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86275346847406060752023-06-29T05:03:59.739-07:00Julia BrightlyAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-68473254620643839772013-12-21T05:01:00.004-08:002013-12-22T14:03:13.019-08:00Three Unwise Men<div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yet another bawbag is frothing at the mouth.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This latest cretinous oaf, a Russian actor of whom this reporter at least has never heard, says he would "stuff queers into an oven and burn them alive."</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not exactly an original thought, but that he is capable of any thought, clearly being way down on the evolutionary scale, is something I suppose.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I am a tolerant woman, I meditate, I try to see the best in all people and I am trying so hard to find something, anything, redeeming about this man.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Nope, I got nothing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What is it about two men in a loving relationship that men like this are so terrified of?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Well, jealousy for one, as anyone who can come out with a statement like this you can bet your bottom dollar does not have and never has had love from another human.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Couple that with scant education and fear of the unknown and there I guess you have it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They are fine with two women fucking so long as they can join in, but not their woman, oh no.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She is his property, shackled to his kitchen.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It puzzles me how these he-men want to hang around women at all.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">50 Cent Tweeted "If you a man and your over 25 and you don't eat pussy just kill yourself damn it. Lol.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Clearly not the best educated of men.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That ‘lol’ at the end sounds a nervous laugh, as if he's trotting out a well practiced hetero line he really has no faith in whatsoever.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mister Cent, you hate ‘pussy’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You're a violent misogynist.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Surely for you hanging out with women is faggy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I don't understand why you wouldn't embrace hunk on hunk love.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What could be more macho than that?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I can see how you and our Russian toss pot would be great together.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Imagine it, hitting metal with hammers, necking bourbon, hoovering up lines of coke, wrestling naked in front of a log fire, then, coated in musty man sweat, fucking each other for Jesus till the early hours.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s weird that you have so much hate yet call yourselves men of God.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What God?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I guess it's the almighty Old Testament God, the fire and brimstone one, the it's Yahweh or the highway God.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The kind of men you hate so vociferously is exactly the kind of man Jesus would have been.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A peaceful, awake, aware, gay man.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Oh come on, of course Jesus was gay!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">FYI, that does not mean he fucked sheep.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Why is it you guys when talking about homosexuality go immediately to bestiality?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The bearded beast from Duck Dynasty is the latest case in point.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For him sin “Morphs out from homosexuality to bestiality, then to sleeping around with this woman and that woman.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yes, women are less than than dogs in this world view.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Actually I had no idea who or what Duck Dynasty was so googled it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Seems he invented a device which enables humans to enact a holocaust on a species.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What an ass.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Another thing I cannot understand with you guys is your obsession with buggery.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You hate the idea of sticking your cock in a man’s anus but almost pathologically cannot wait to ram it up a woman’s.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">News flash, not all gay men have penetrative sex.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Get the fuck out!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I know, it’s true, bet that blows your minds.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is so easy to trot out the most idiotic nonsense as fact if you have never really got your brain in gear.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If it caused no harm it would just not be good enough, not where we are well into the 21st century, with all that human history to learn from.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Oh but it does cause harm, harm to those it is directly aimed at, and harm to the rest of us who have psychically to take it on board.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">See, you rain this bilge down on us and we have to cleanse cleanse cleanse, scrub away, hose down the dirt, and atone for all your ignorant blather.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is a heavy psychological burden.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is unconscionable.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Knowing you have such paucity of thought I guess you imagine you speak for us all when you spout such tosh.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Well, you don't.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There will be a few lobotomised thugs that might try to canonise you, and really you are welcome to each other.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m sure by now you’ll be opining that everyone is entitled to their own opinion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No sirs, they are not, not if that opinion incites violence, is a hate crime, which pretty much everything that oozes out of your mealy mouths is.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You are an anachronism, anathema.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We are evolving and you’re stuck, flailing in the primordial soup.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At some point in our lives we must take time to stop learning and start thinking.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We must question everything we have been taught in our own unique way, and through critical examination based on all the research we can muster come to conclusions.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is the way to enlightenment, to cast off our primitive beliefs, understand all we know, and advance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This however requires there to have been some learning in the first place, and I am absolutely naming names.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Everything we know is a process of elimination arriving at the least wrong of all the options, and we must strive to get to the next level of least wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That is our path, that is how we survive as a species.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Staying stuck at the most wrong level is not big, not clever, and really no-one is laughing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;">If you three unwise men have read this I expect you'll be frothing at the mouth once more.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If on the other hand you manage to read a book, see a little lightbulb go off over your head, or have an epiphany and come to terms with your own latent homosexuality, then we’ll welcome you.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What you each need is a hug, love and guidance.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Until you realise that and drag yourself out of the mire, then please, for the love of humanity, shut the fuck up.</span></div>
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Julia Brightly<br />
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December 21st 2013</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-24535122592754618222013-10-22T06:02:00.001-07:002013-10-22T06:02:23.993-07:00PWA<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In nineteen eighty nine I wrote a song called ‘PWA’.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was in part inspired by American playwright and activist Larry Kramer and his efforts to get the then POTUS George Bush Senior to release plant based drugs without the hold up of trials to people who were dying from HIV and AIDS.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Instead of tackling this problem head on people in power began to talk instead of God’s biblical wrath against homosexuals, and in Britain a series of government TV commercials were produced showing commandment like tablets crashing to the ground in slow motion, espousing safe sex.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bush memorably referred to ‘the giggle factor’ when he thought about gay men as many lay emaciated at death’s door.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I still don’t get the joke.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Thirty years on we as a species have come a long way, but unfortunately not always in the right direction.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Here in Britain, since adopting and repealing the notorious Clause 28 which made illegal the promotion of homosexuality, we have passed same sex marriage into law whereas in Russia, a short hop away, buggery obsessed men with self-imposed ignorance would have homosexuality made illegal or, as in Iran, punishable by death.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They see a queer conspiracy lead by packs of limp-wristed nancy boys who lurk around school playgrounds luring children into lives of butt-fucked depravity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Feel sorry for these poor fools, their heads filled with all this hogwash.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Homosexuality equals emasculation, they’ll say.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Oh how could there be anything worse for a man than to be in touch with his emotions?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Men are strong, hit things with hammers, blow stuff up, are kings of the castle, whereas women are chattel, here to give birth to and look after their spawn, while in desperation pop valium washed down with gin in Tupperware cups, having “walked into another door”.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The traditional roles.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">How people love to waffle on about tradition.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Men destroy while women cower, that’s tradition.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Nazi Germany, in living memory, homosexual men were rounded up and murdered, although some high ranking male officers were indeed homosexual themselves.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They hypocritically didn’t see themselves as such, they were ‘real men’ who just happened to like a spot of sword swallowing, taking warm showers, riding the top deck of the bus.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lesbians were deemed first and foremost asocial as their predilections fostered ideas outside of bondage, but were also slain after men tried and failed to fuck the perversion out of them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Pink for a boy, black for a girl, triangles that is.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The concentration camp, another Great British invention.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Long before Hitler cottoned on we had them in South Africa during the Boer War.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was born just 14 years after the end of WW2 and it would be another 8 years before homosexuality in Britain became legal, when we entered the age of enlightenment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sadly a leap forward is often followed by a backlash.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">HIV and AIDS were like manna from heaven to the unreconstructed bigots amongst us.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the time of writing ‘PWA’ it was predicted that 5,000,000 Africans would be dead from HIV and AIDS by 1991.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This was roundly ignored.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That figure today is 30,000,000 and rising.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You see so long as it was blacks and gays dying we were fine with it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span>It's as much a black disease or gay plague as measles.</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is a hangover from white Christian Missionary in Africa that gives vent to the absurd idea that homosexuality is against God, is not natural, brings nothing but misery and disease, and that sodomy, intrinsically connected in the minds of the vacuous, is the work of the Devil.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With over 400 animal species known to have homosexual behavior, what’s natural?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is more anal sex amongst heterosexual couples that homosexual.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As for all that religious hokum, there is no God.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We in Britain are responsible for much of the backward thinking in the world as we once spread ignorance and hate throughout the Empire.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now we know better we must continue to lead by example.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In India they have thrown off those shackles, though their treatment of transgender people leaves much to be desired.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">America, land of the free, home of the brave, shelterer of huddled masses, has categorically rejected the stupidity of uptight short sighted pig headed politicians and their wish to drag us all into to the mire.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Stephen Fry’s TV documentary ‘Out There’ recently showed us where we are at globally and where we are in danger of going if we allow the most dim witted control.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The awake and aware people of the world know that sexual orientation is something we are born with, that it is not black or white but a rainbow, a beautiful multicolored rainbow.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ignorance and fear are inexcusable in this day and age, and the perpetration of those two states of being on mass populations by spiteful God Botherers is abhorrent.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As both the L and the T in LGBT I feel it keenly.</span></div>
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If you think that these issues have nothing to do with you, think again.</div>
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Ignore the knocks on doors at your peril as one day the knock will be on yours.</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We are your sons and we are your daughters,</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All we bring is love, don’t turn your backs on us.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Julia Brightly </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">October 22nd, 2013</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Link to the song ‘PWA’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">http://youtu.be/Rn1R0Oco3kA</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-78722487591154141142013-10-09T03:41:00.004-07:002013-10-13T08:02:42.623-07:00What It Feels like For A Girl<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was born in the wrong body.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is my earliest memory.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I lived with all the wrong people.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is a close second.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When Doctor Who came along in 1963 I was four years old and knew both those things to be true.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I wished I was his granddaughter and he’d whisk me away, not to go fight monsters but to get as far away as possible from the horror of home, a home full of abuse, physical, mental, sexual.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fortunately The Beatles came along. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They were like beautiful creatures from another planet and for the next few years saved me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The abuse didn’t stop but they were always there, smiling, shaking their mop tops, twanging their guitars, being sane.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Eventually though they had to go but joy of joys along came Marc Bolan.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Suddenly boys wore girls clothes and make-up, and I embraced it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My father had other ideas.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One day I came home from school to find he’d covered up the pictures of Marc that adorned my walls with heterosexual soft core porn.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was 12.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For four long miserable years I endured hell on earth, not helped at all by the likes of Gary Glitter and Jonathan King, though fortunately Jim didn’t get to Fix It for me in his own special way.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At 16, with all the hutzpah I could muster, I reinvented myself as a would be pop star and blasted my way out of there as far as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After a bumpy ride I landed in The Passions, fell in love with a German Film Star, and started on the path to discovery.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It took another 34 years till I saw the signpost and took the right fork.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In July 2009 I was living in New York City.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I called Callen-Lorde, the LGBT clinic in the West Village of Manhattan and booked an appointment to talk about becoming a woman.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They said sure, October.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I wondered why it would take so long.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Were there really that many big girls blouses out there?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Making that initial call was euphoric.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Something that had been on my mind my whole life, that I had pushed back and back and back was now out in the open, and I had at last taken the first step in making what I had dreamed about become reality.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I figured they’d given me a three month cooling down period, and that if I was serious I would wait.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">October came around and I was a bag of nerves.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Although for the past year I had been living as a woman it had been in private.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now there I was in a dress and make-up opening the door to a new life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I went to the receptionist and barely able to speak conveyed that I was there for gender reassignment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No one turned to me, pointed and laughed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No one screamed I was sick.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No one tried to pummel me to the ground.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Instead very matter of fact she gave me a few forms to fill out and sent me forth to the fourth floor.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Coming out of the elevator I expected to find myself surrounded by a gaggle of overly made-up men in twin sets and pearls sitting pinched but no, it was a waiting room like another, just a few ordinary people peering into their devices.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No-one looked up when I entered.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was taken to a nurse to get my blood tested.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then, after all those years of inner turmoil, there right in front of me was The Doctor who was about to change my life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He was gentle, kind, open, warm, asked me the same questions any medic would ask a new patient, told me I would need to see a psychiatrist and if that went OK would start me on hormone treatment straight away.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Within two weeks I got the green light and on November 2nd 2009 received my first scrip.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For 50 years I had tried to live in the gender my body said I was and failed miserably.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I felt like an alien.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But I had to survive and back then there was no possibility at all of doing anything other than invent a male persona.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Transitioning is not a matter of becoming a woman, it is becoming ones true self, and fifty years of living as a man, living a lie, took a lot of stripping away.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Many things had to be unlearned, like walking.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As a child I watched other boys and copied them, settling on something they accepted.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’d developed a deep voice and it took me a year of consciously training it to be in a higher register with a different resonance.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I thought I’d never manage it but with perseverance I did.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The phone is hardest.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Hi can I get room service?” I’d enquire in my best female voice.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Certainly sir.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first time someone said madam I jumped up and down on the bed whooping.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Other things too take a while to adjust, things you wouldn’t immediately think of.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Clothes buttoning, for example.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Before I started transitioning if someone would call unexpectedly I would be like a whirling dervish getting out of make-up.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After I started transitioning and someone called I would be like a whirling dervish getting into make-up.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now, four years on, I feel I’ve made it, at last, finally, hurray, deep breath, and relax.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">However, nothing fully prepared me for misogyny.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have been a lifelong feminist, ever since I witnessed my father beating seven bells of hell out of my mother.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But unless you are a woman you cannot fully comprehend how a man can hate you for being who you are.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We see sexism everywhere, from the myriad photoshopped magazines to Page Three, from billboards to plastic pop stars, treating women as disposable objects, male fantasy meat, cum sluts.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In my work as a touring sound engineer I have come up against much discrimination, mostly from trolls sporting mullet hair cuts, dubious metal band tour T-shirts, and homemade tape holders strapped to utility belts, posture perpetually at a slant due to the copious rolls of gaffa hanging off them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When they see its me, a middle aged woman, come to mix a band at their venue, they grunt and shuffle away, knuckles dragging the floor, cursing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">More insidious is the outright hatred that can rear it’s ugly head when a woman dares stand up for herself.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once a man employed to help me screamed in my ear that I was a fucking bitch and he was going to fuck me up, this during a song I was endeavoring to mix.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Then there are the comments men write on social media sites, in anonymity of course.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lauren Mayberry is the latest victim.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lauren is the singer in pop group Chvrches, friends of mine, and she has men posting on Twitter threatening to rape her, saying things like they will find out where she lives and fuck her anally, and she would love it, or that, being Scottish, they’d fuck the accent out of her.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I shit you not.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Who are these people, what makes them sink to these depths of human depravity?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Would they be so bold if their mothers found out?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The man screaming in my ear was a bully and clearly extremely unhappy with me being there, doing what I know he considered men’s work.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What made it worse was denying it when confronted with what he had done in front of another man, my boss.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He fully expected some kind of secret male bonding to occur where they would both raise their eyes, snigger, and go get a beer together.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I felt sorry for him, the poor insecure frightened fool.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fortunately my boss was a decent human being having none of it and stuck up for me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Should I have to put up with this as I try to do my job?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Should women like Lauren Mayberry accept filth smeared all over their lives because they are in the public eye?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s abuse.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Stop it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We are the other half of the sky.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I spent last year with a touring group of twelve in which there were five women, a rare and wonderful thing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was privileged and honored to be included as one of the five, and I thank the men for that too.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We talked about anything and everything with openness and love, yet there were some topics I could not fully engage in.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’ve never menstruated so cannot say what it was like to get my first period; I went straight to menopause.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I don’t know what it would be like to be able to give birth, to be a mother.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I missed out on so much.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was born in the wrong body.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I knew that from the very start.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Parents, if you have a child who knows this too help them as soon as possible, preferably before puberty.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You will never regret it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That I have become a woman, albeit at this late stage of my life, is the best thing that ever happened to me, because I am finally me, happy in my skin.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">People have said oh you are so brave.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Well, yes, coming out was terrifying, but once it was done the feeling of wellness was overwhelming.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What was hardest, I now know, was for 50 years staying trapped in that body, cold and alone.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Boys, it is not weak to be loving, open, compassionate, kind.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is essential.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Don’t hate what you don’t understand.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There’s no need to be afraid.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Do I know what it feels like for a girl?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I am figuring that out more and more each day.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m on a wonderful adventure, and now my feet are firmly on the ground.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Julia Brightly</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">October 9th 2013</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-36418811668491606062013-09-04T07:23:00.002-07:002013-09-06T01:36:20.411-07:00The Children of The Revolution<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That was the week that was for Operation Yewtree.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">First Dave Lee Travis went to court to face 12 counts of sexual assault, then Rolf Harris was charged with 9, along with 4 counts of making obscene pictures of children.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yewtree, in case you’d gone to the moon, is a police operation carried out initially to investigate reports of sexual abuse of children by Jimmy Savile, radio DJ, TV personality, tireless worker for charity, friend of politicians and royalty, loving son to his dear old mum, The Duchess.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As we now know the reports turned out to be true and for 40 years he preyed on the most vulnerable people in society.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yes, we all knew the rumours but no-one had proof, other than his victims, who were so young, so alone, so traumatised that they could not speak out.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When Louis Theroux met him he denied being a pedophile when asked outright to camera, a denial that fooled no-one.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What’s more it seemed clear that he’d indulged in more than one bout of necrophilia with The Duchess’ corpse.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now every shot of him has been expunged.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the BBC run old Top Of The Pops episodes it’s like he didn’t exist.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But happen upon one on youtube and everything he said and did show him for what he was.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Once he was outed the rest of them began toppling like dominos, but there were already signs that all was not well in that world of weird men.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jonathan King was an incredibly successful songwriter and record producer of such inane but huge selling hits as ‘Loop Di Love’ by Shag, and ‘Leap Up And Down And Wave Your Knickers in The Air’, and presenter of long running BBC TV show ‘Entertainment USA’ where he’d report on what was happening in New York, although what was really happening for him was not captured on film, or certainly not broadcastable.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1997 he was awarded the BPI’s Man Of The Year award, with a personal endorsement from Tony Blair.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 2001he was arrested for sexually abusing countless young boys.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He was released on bail stumped up by Simon Cowell.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">His innocence was protested by the likes of Simon Bates and Max Clifford.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He was found guilty on all charges, sentenced to seven years in jail, and put on the sex offender register for life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The one thing we repeatedly hear from his and the others apologists is that in those days it was just how things were, it was in the culture, it was acceptable.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By those days they mean the 1970’s and dark days they were.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Men ruled everything everywhere, women were chattel, children slaves.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Misogyny and racism were institutionalised.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If in doubt watch any clip of TV show The Comedians for a stark reality check.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Whist Marc Bolan and David Bowie showed us that there was a new way, a light out of the darkness, we had to at first see through the glitter, Gary Glitter to be exact.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">‘D'Ya Wanna Be In My Gang?’ he asked.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not really, Gary.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">‘Do You Wanna Touch Me There, Where, There?’</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No, Gary, absolutely not.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 1999 he put his computer in for repair at PC World and the tech servicing it found 4000 images of hardcore child pornography, for which he served time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Since then he’s repeatedly offended and has miraculously escaped with his life. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">For example, in Vietnam, to where he once fled, there were allegations of rape of 11 year old girls, and had they lead to a conviction would have carried a mandatory death sentence.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He is currently out on bail having been arrested in London for sexually abusing 14 year old girls with Jimmy Savile in Savile’s ‘Clunk Click’ dressing room.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That dressing room was the setting for many of his conquests and it is said involved numerous TV personalities of the time, some of whom have been arrested lately, such as Freddie Starr.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Freddie Starr, like so many of his peers, pleads his innocence, yet they somewhat contradictorily say that the offences for which they are being accused were such a long time ago that they should not be pursued, or, fumbling, that they cannot remember that far back.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Scared shitless they ran into the arms of Max Clifford, solicitor to the stars.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Max Clifford has now himself been charged with 11 counts of sexual assault.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Is their assertion that the offences took place way back in the dark ages a defence?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is no statute of limitations.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Even if it was a defence how does that account for Max Clifford whose alleged reign of terror continued to the mid eighties, or Dave Lee Travis’ latest in 2007?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The argument that it was in the culture, that everyone was up to it, that it was acceptable, will just not wash.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the same time as these men were sticking their dicks into every available orifice Esther Rantzen started Childline, and John Lennon no less said that after women’s rights must come children’s as children had none.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is about power, and it is not just the preserve of celebrities.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My own mother was sexually abused by her father from the age of 8.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was systematic, calculated, relentless.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He held court in the Magic Kingdom, where the secret potion that all good little girls drank was administered.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I had no idea.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He to me seemed a gentle, warm, caring man who occasionally touched me in a way I didn’t like, who died when I was a child.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s shocking when someone in the public eye who we revere is proven to be abhorrent.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s horrifying when it’s one's own family.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It makes us wonder how on earth we didn’t see it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We didn’t see it because they are cunning predators who work hard sub rosa.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I don’t know anyone who was surprised when the revelations about Jimmy Savile started to appear, but we are all staggered by the scale of it, and by what we can now see as his and others brash hiding in plain sight.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But The Hairy Cornflake, our cuddly breakfast time DJ friend, or Rolf Harris, everybody’s grandfather?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now when I think of DLT’s jingle ‘whack whack oops’ I don’t think of sunny breakfast mornings before gaily hopping off to school, I think of it being him whacking off over an 8 year old.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I think of Rolf Harris I don’t think of him happily painting pictures on TV, the meaning slowly revealing itself, I think of him wanking his flaccid penis to an erect state and asking his victim “Do you know what it is yet?”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of the others who’ve been arrested under Yewtree, Jim Davidson, well known racist, is not going to be prosecuted, not because he has been proved innocent, but because there was insufficient evidence, not none, to guarantee a prosecution.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sure, he was not on everyone’s favourite person list from the get go, but what about Ken Barlow, aka William Roache, longest serving and most beloved star of Corrie?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Or Tarby?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I suppose I mustn’t forget Stuart Hall, laughing gnome on ritual humiliation TV show ‘It’s A Knockout’, but I’d like to.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There are a slew of outer circle people who have been arrested, TV show producers, staff drivers, all caught up in modern day Rome, a debauched, despicable coterie.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s big stuff, big ugly soul destroying stuff.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Is it an aberration or is it truly part of what we are?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is undeniable that this behaviour was accepted back then, it is all there to see on youtube and no, it was not black and white but full blown in-your-face colour at prime time.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is there today too and you don’t have to look far as in every issue of The Sun men are encouraged to leer over topless girls, or in The Daily Mail where they continually gush over 14 year old curves.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have heard pedophiles proffering the argument that they have a right to be what they are in the same way as homosexuals.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Let’s be clear, homosexuality is a loving union in mutual appreciation, respect, and consent in exactly the same way as heterosexuality, whereas the likes of my grandfather raped children and scarred them for life.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He knew exactly what he was doing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To call it pedophilia somehow excuses it, and listing it in the DSM as a mental health disorder somehow legitimises it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I do not believe that any of the people mentioned here acted beyond their mental capacity to distinguish right from wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They boasted, they swaggered, they felt it was their right, they lived by their own code of justice, they made up the rules in their own warped world.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But they are not aliens, they are human, and we feel it deeply as it defiles each of us.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They took our children, our beautiful loving children, who looked up to them for guidance, hope, security, protection, and fucked them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With enormous strength and courage the victims are speaking out, they are the children of the revolution.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At last we are saying no, you will not do this anymore and you will you not get away with what you have done, as we evolve, open our eyes, and heal.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Julia Brightly</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">September 4th 2013</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-32443231596080470542013-08-22T08:14:00.002-07:002013-08-24T03:29:13.033-07:00Shrink Wrapped<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This morning I went to see a shrink.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I walked into the empty reception area and, through what seemed like bullet proof glass, told the receptionist I had an appointment, handing him through a slit the letter I’d been sent to confirm it.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He looked it up down, tapped some keys on his computer, scratched his head, sat back in his chair and read the letter again, a look of consternation crossing his already mardy face.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He thrust it back through the aperture and without looking up mumbled “Take a seat.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A few minutes later another man popped up in the glass cage and sat next to him.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They had a little confab and both shook their heads.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This second man came out to the water cooler next to where I was sitting.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I looked up at him and smiled as he ambled by.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He snarled.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Wow, I thought, these two are the grumpiest patient care people I have ever seen.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Having been looking for employment the past couple of months I would happily do it better.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I took out my iPad to read while I waited.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I heard a door opening and looking up was surprised to see the area full of people waiting for appointments, in varying degrees of distress.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We all looked over, like meerkats.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A woman called out a man’s name.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We looked around but no-one got up.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She said the name again, louder.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With dread and horror as I realized it was my old name, the name I had when I was a man.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I closed my eyes hoping she’d figure out the error and get it right, or would just give up after which, letting enough time pass so no-one made a connection, I could get up quietly and leave.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She said it for a third time, this time loud enough that people on the street turned their heads.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I opened my eyes, steeled myself, stood up and walked the gauntlet over to her.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“That’s not my name” I hissed as she fumbled with the combination lock on the door.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I could feel all eyes burning into the back of my head, my mouth so dry it literally felt like there was a sock in it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’d rather have walked on hot coals back to that water cooler.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She was mortified too, poor thing, trying to apologize as she finally punched in the correct sequence of numbers and we both fell through the doorway in relief.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We entered a little cubicle where she and another young woman quizzed me.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was clear they were in training and more than a little out of their depth, but I smiled and we carried on.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“How did you do at school?”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The words Eleven Plus, Grammar, and GCE gave them cause for concern, as if I was speaking gibberish.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Do you ever feel like you are a famous person?”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I mentioned this to a friend after and she said, “Did you just tell them you were in The Passions?”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Do you ever feel like people are talking about you behind your back?”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not the best time to mention the receptionists I figured, so kept mum.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After fifteen minutes trying to catch me out they told me to wait in reception while they spoke with the head honcho, then they’d give me their assessment.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cautiously I opened the door and was relieved to find it again empty, and the receptionists replaced, presumably their shifts over rather than turfed out for their narrow mindedness callousness.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">With barely enough time to regain my composure I was called back in, this time to a spacious office where sat a man, mid forties, leaning back in his chair behind a large desk, the two students seated to one side looking very down in the mouth.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I feared the worst.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Do you know why you’re here?” he asked, eyes piercing my skull.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I glanced over at the girls hoping for a clue but their heads were bowed, looking at their trembling hands.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Well” he continued, “I am a psychiatrist and your GP has asked me to assess your mental health before referring you on to hospital.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I expected the door to open and men in white coats strap me into a straight jacket.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“I’m not sure why they sent you here as Charing Cross have their own psychiatrists, but as far as we’re concerned you clearly have no mental health issues so I see no reason why you cannot be treated for gender reassignment on the NHS and I’ll be writing to your GP in the next week or two informing them of this. Goodbye.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I know.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Two weeks to write a letter!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The girls showed me out in silence.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I concluded they must’ve had a dressing down for using the wrong name and putting me into an awfully embarrassing situation which I thought particularly unfair seeing as it was most likely his error.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was a kind of surreal and not altogether pleasant experience, my first and hopefully last encounter with the NHS mental health department.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the UK one can have gender reassignment on the National Health Service but there are a number of hoops to jump through.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The psych eval was number two, the first being to register with a GP, a family doctor.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Step three is referral to a Gender Clinic for primary care such as hormone therapy, and for me this will be Charing Cross hospital.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To qualify for this one has to live full time in one’s chosen gender for a period of one year.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is cruel as it is the hormones that give the confidence and body shape to do that successfully.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">These hormones are Estradiol, estrogen, the female hormone, forms the breasts, redistributes fat, alters body shape, and Spironolactone, an androgen blocker, stops the production of testosterone.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the US, where I lived from 2002 until recently, hormones are prescribed immediately after registering with a clinic and being assessed by a psychiatrist, something I did in 2009, and for which of course I had to stump up cash.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No, Obamacare doesn’t cover it, though it is now tax deductible.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fortunately because I had been on hormones over there for nearly four years my GP over here prescribed them straight off the bat.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Lucky.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The final step, the one I am most keen to complete, is SRS or GRS, sex/gender reassignment surgery, turning my bits around, a procedure that would cost me upwards of thirty grand in the US.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m no medical tourist, before you reach for your green pen.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’ve paid taxes and national insurance here for over thirty years and do so now.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SRS for many but not all transgender people, is the final stage, the last piece of the jigsaw.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After years of hormones, the gradual reshaping of the body and mind, after laser or electrolysis hair removal, after voice training, after trachea shaving, comes the vagina.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Those of a nervous disposition look away now - for male to female surgery the glans of the penis, the head, is turned into a clitoris, the penis itself turned inside out to form the vagina, the testicles removed, the labia formed, and the urethra repositioned.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We’re talking major surgery.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not everybody chooses to have it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some people do not want to have to go through the pain, discomfort, and the three months minimum recovery.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some simply cannot afford it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I have had done and paid for everything so far, including the trachea shave, where an incision is made under the chin and the trachea, the Adam’s apple cartilage, is shaved to reduce or remove its prominence, feminizing the neck.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s a long journey, a gender journey, and one not to be taken lightly.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yes, it has been wonderful, calming, life affirming, to be able to at last admit to myself who I truly am and, most importantly, to feel good about it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But there are pitfalls, should you, reader, be thinking about choosing this path.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is not uncommon to find that the thing that makes you feel complete makes other people run for the hills, or want to beat you to a pulp.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Within the blink of an eye home, job, friends, can all disappear.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’ve been lucky in that most of my friends have stuck with me.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not all though, and not all those who’ve stuck around have found it easy.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It must be quite a thing to have a friend you’ve known for 30 years seemingly out of the blue declare themselves female and start wearing dresses and make up in public.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After the initial shock and embarrassment most folks come around.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Those that don’t, well were they really friends?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I travel a lot as a touring sound mixer, and in early transition found myself in some tricky situations, with my name change papers in one hand, and my old passport in the other, trying to get into, for example, Russia.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The thing is to stand your ground, be open, sincere, smiling just enough, not too much that you look insane, or more than they already think you are.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In Japan one time the immigration official looked at me, a woman, looked at my passport, a man, put a hand to his forehead, exhaled deeply, and waved me on, shaking his head.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In China I had five men in uniform all looking at my face, then my passport, up and down, up and down for 20 minutes, jut-jawed, grimacing, then begrudgingly letting me pass. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I walked through with all the dignity I could muster.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One thing it’s worth bearing in mind at these situations, should you ever find yourself there, is to remember that sometimes the straightest looking people cross dress.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Oh yes, it’s a lot more common than you’d think.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most who transition do so later in life, when it is hardest.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When the skeleton has formed, the voice dropped, the beard thick, the head bald, all the will and pills in the world may not produce the effects society deems appropriate.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The best time for anyone to change gender is before puberty, and thankfully that is beginning to happen now.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I was eight years old I would go to sleep every night hoping I would wake up a girl, and cry every morning.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This was the nineteen sixties, when homosexuality was illegal, men were men and women were terrified.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Just the other day I saw an article in a national newspaper about a happy heterosexual couple who had both changed gender.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We’ve come a long way since I was eight.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But there are people who would’ve looked at that happy couple and called them freaks, or worse, much worse.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We can have two happy people who don’t fit into a warped nonsensical bigoted hateful view of humanity or two miserable people who do.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I ‘pass’.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This really helps, as no gang of uncouth youths have tried to hospitalise me.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But I am now a middle aged woman which presents me with a whole new slew of discrimination, not least that I am failing to get work.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A friend who is still struggling a bit said to me recently “I don’t understand why anybody would chose to be a middle aged woman.”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There’s nothing I can do about being middle aged.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Gender is not black and white.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s a rainbow.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fortunately I am a citizen of a country that recognizes my condition as something essential to treat, that will do so for free at point of need, and will allow me to become my gender of choice legally whether I have had SRS or not.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now, gis a job.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Julia Brightly</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">August 22, 2013</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-12738634938729004612013-08-09T15:19:00.000-07:002013-08-09T15:38:43.593-07:00Oh Obama<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I saw a headline on Democracy Now’s website this morning that started ‘Obama cancels Putin summit...’ and thought for a hopeful second that it was going to continue ‘...because of his barbaric treatment of LGBT people in Russia.’ </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Sadly no, Obama is miffed at Putin giving asylum to Snowden, a man who has had to run for his life after telling the American people that their President is spying on them, much the same way as.... wait..... The KGB once did.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Oh Obama.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We had such high hopes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Remember all the people gathered together, singing, crying, believing that a real change was going to come.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It seems like such a long time ago, doesn’t it?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It was eight months.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You promised us that business in the White House would not be business as usual.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Well, that’s a promise you’ve kept.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">How many people have you killed so far?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Let’s make it easier and say just with drones?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Of course your reputation as a cold blooded killer was sealed the day you strode up to the camera like a gunslinger and announced, with steely-eyed relish, that you’d killed Osama Bin Laden, the boogeyman.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not merely found, taken into custody, but taken out.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">No more covert operations for you.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not even Dub-Ya had those cojones.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It left you jonesing for more.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Who next?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Everyone, it seems.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Remember when you were a young idealistic senator in Chicago?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If someone back then blew the whistle on say illegal wire tapping, such as, let’s see, Watergate, would you have backed tracking the blower to the ends of the earth?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What’s the difference between 8 years of Bush and 8 years of Obama?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Things got a whole lot worse.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s not a joke.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yes you showed a lot of promise but somehow you lost the plot, took the wrong turn, got in with the wrong crowd.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I hope that very soon, like tomorrow, you will wake up, look at Michele and your beautiful children, realize you have been <i>such</i> a fool, and start to do the things you have a huge mandate for.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Here are a few ideas to get you started.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Close down Guantanamo immediately.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Set the detainees free, put them on the witness protection plan.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They are not going to hurt anyone.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s shameful.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Stop killing innocent people abroad and at home by (a) stopping all drone strikes and (b) taking some of the huge amounts of money away from the death squads, or the military as they prefer to be called, and feed the millions of people starving in America right now.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ban guns, all of them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I know, it’s so simple, it’s brilliant.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Imagine.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Pull out of Afghanistan.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You’ve destroyed so many lives over there, decimated so many families, that foul spot will not wash away, but you have the power to heal the misery right now.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Drastically, and I mean drastically, cut back the obscene amount of nuclear weapons you’ve got pointed around the world, and go for complete disarmament in your lifetime.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">How much of a deterrent do you need?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Look, size really doesn’t matter.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Force the Olympic Committee to pull out of holding the winter games in Russia, don’t ask them or urge them, force them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You’re the POTUS, you can do what the hell you like!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you need more info on this read Stephen Fry’s letter to Cameron, or watch George Takei on youtube.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If ever there was a clear cut choice between right and wrong this is it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Just do it, you’ll feel so much better.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you must have a war, I know what you boys are like, then have it with the Corporations who are screwing it up for the rest of us, and really deal with Global Climate Change.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">If you don’t then none of the above will matter anyhoo.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So, go on, give it a go.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Yes, the anally retentive around you will blow off so hard shit will literally fly out of them, but ignore them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They’re idiots, and they’re wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I know in your heart you are a good person and that when you were running in ’08 you really believed that you were going to make a change.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Well you did, but boy did you ever take a wrong turn.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Get up, stand up, we are in dire need for you to do what we hoped, make the world a better place, and yes, you can.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In 2012 the old world that Romney and his ilk propounded was roundly rejected.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">You have the power, you have the brain, you have the choice.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Make it the right one before it’s too late, and do it now because the shit is inches away from the fan and there will be no turning back.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Julia Brightly</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">August 9, 2013</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-49579489732533533512013-08-03T05:09:00.001-07:002013-08-13T02:20:19.259-07:00Kick Out The Pricks<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’ve been boning up on the protest over so called Lads Mags and the stiff pressure to cover up their covers and wrap them in cellophane at grocery stores.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s created quite a round of comment, from young feminists who say they are disgusting and degrading, to the magazine owners who say they purely reflect the views of millions of young men, from those who feel the cover up is an attack on freedom of speech, to those who feel it doesn’t go far enough.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Well, let’s clear this up.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These publications should not be covered at all, nor should they be hidden on the top shelf to keep them away from the prying eyes of toddlers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">No.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They should be piled on high and set afire.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There should be no place for this kind of abusive trash in an evolved society.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These rags are despicable, meretricious, without a mitigating feature.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They do not reflect the view of millions of young men, they feed on baseness and force them to remain in a state of mental bondage.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It doesn’t matter whether your argument is for or against these publications.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They are wrong and should have been banished from our collective psyche long ago.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We must stop this outmoded and sick mindset and not let a bunch of unprincipled meatheads stuff any more filthy lucre into their cum drenched fists.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These magazines are not a bit of fun, they are about perpetrating the idea that the objectification and subjugation of women is perfectly acceptable.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Well it’s not.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s painful, hurtful, morally reprehensible, fucked up.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is not a pornography issue, let’s be clear.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is not about soft core as in Mags Fags and Shags shops.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">No, this is about misogynistic bile vomited up by the likes of Loaded.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There was a boy a few days ago who with bravado egged on by the editorial content of all that bilge Tweeted in scatter gun pattern callow thoughts about the sight, size, and smell of a middle aged woman’s vagina.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When threatened to have the beans spilled to his mother he was forced to examine his actions through her eyes, a <i>middle aged woman</i>, and was terrified, appalled, contrite.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">People cry that every one is entitled to their opinion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Well no, they are not, not when it's dripping in hate.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It isn't big, it isn't clever, and the only people laughing are the nervous under peer pressure and the profiteers, be they from Loaded, Twitter, Facebook, the local Co-op.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is no altruism in this cover up, not when there are bucks to be made.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I am heartened to see that young feminists have taken this up.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was beginning to think that there were no young feminists.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you are someone who thinks that there is no need for feminism today, then please think again.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is one clear example of why you are wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now look around you.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Those billboards bursting with photoshopped shots of barely clad girls selling us stuff we neither need or want are part and parcel.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is slavery.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I am not one for censorship.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On the contrary I believe in the maxim ban nothing, question everything, with the proviso it causes no harm.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A bald man being called bald may feel uncomfortable, though it's true.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A woman threatened of rape in her own home for being a woman is a crime.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Degrading women is about control, power, based on fear, insecurity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As an evolved, mature, enlightened species which we know in our hearts we are, we must not, cannot stand for it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We are so much better than this.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Kick out the pricks!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Julia Brightly</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">August 3, 2013</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-31936509644214752792013-07-26T11:21:00.002-07:002013-07-28T08:31:29.823-07:00Community Spirit<br />
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At the behest of a friend’s daughter I recently attended a free concert by a bunch of performers from a local high school.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’m not sure what I expected but it was most definitely not to be as absolutely blown away by the amount of talent, joy, and love that burst off that little stage as I was.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There were three bands who were the match of many I’ve seen at major festivals around the world, and I’ve been to them all touring as I do with the likes of M83, Mogwai, and Caribou.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There was a singer with an acoustic guitar whose songs made me cry.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There was a human beatbox dancer who I wanted to wrap up in cotton wool and take home with me, that cute!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What makes this all the more incredible is that these performers were all aged 14 or under, were 50/50 girls and boys, and were from all races, creeds, religions, and backgrounds.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The school, Morpeth, and the organization that put on the show, Community Music, are in Tower Hamlets, the London borough that is one of the most culturally diverse in the country, if not the world.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is exactly what the EDL want to smash.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Having not been living in the UK for the past decade I was unaware of the EDL.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They are the continuation of a cancer that we should by now have eradicated from our psyche.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The letters EDL do not as I thought stand for Extremely Dense Lumps, but should.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The members of this cretinous collective seem somehow unfinished, like a vital piece of their brains was omitted when they were cleaved from bulldog chalk.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They are I suspect the kind of people that in childhood pulled wings off gnats, drowned kittens, bullied peers mercilessly, failed to get exam points for spelling their name correctly.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">They are white, predominately male, and so riddled with fear that they pummel anything they don’t understands with fists till it’s dead.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Queers, coons, pakis, slags, and poofs.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Translated that’s homosexuals, anyone of African descent, anyone from Asia, women, and the people they seem to fear more than anyone else, men in women’s clothing.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As a man who used to wear women’s clothing I have come face to face with the look of confusion turning to fear, to dread, and to hate in their eyes.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s very hard to comprehend that someone would want to beat you to a pulp for just being you.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Fortunately I don’t have to put up with that particular abuse any more as I am now a woman.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This behavior is passed down through generations, the abused becomes the abuser.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I’ve seen it in my own family.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My father was a violent sot who failed to come to terms with the pain inflicted on him by his own father and so carried it on by battering me.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When it became obvious that I was the most terrifying person in the world, a boy who wanted to be a girl, and he was not going to be able to punch me into shape, he disowned me.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">He hasn’t spoken to me in 30 years.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After a while this blaming on the past for ones acts is a smokescreen, a copout.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ultimately we must be responsible for our own patterns of behaviour.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What I witnessed at that performance the other day, from all those children, from all their parents, relatives, friends, was the complete rejection of this nonsense, embracing community, love, and acceptance of all people, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, colour, background.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is the true human condition, this is what we are, this is the next level of our evolution.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">To those who preach hate, who would denying us our rights as individuals to be ourselves, to be joyous human beings expressing love, it’s time to put your knuckles down, hug each other, open up, try reading a book even, and begin to truly live.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When I see children embracing the differences in us like this with love, with compassion, I know we have a future.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Community spirit is alive and well.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now, let’s save the planet too.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Julia Brightly</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">July 26, 2013</span></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-68680075907237581042013-07-20T06:54:00.002-07:002013-07-26T11:22:28.167-07:00The Heart of Westminster<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A couple of weeks ago I applied for the post of Production Assistant at a well known English Shakespearian theatre company.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not Production Manager, just a mere assistant.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There were 220 applicants.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">220!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Feeling up a gumtree I browsed some online general job sites and was flabbergasted to see that while the number of posts on offer totaled just 1900, the number of people looking were 33,000.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">33,000, and on just one site!</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What jobs where they, you may wonder?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Gofer mostly, paying minimum wage which in London won't cover rent in a shared hovel.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Full employment, it will never ever happen again.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Instead of dealing with this head on successive governments have head spent their time putting their fingers in their ears and their heads up their bottoms.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Why?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This week some bright spark took it upon themselves to check the Houses of Parliament toilets for cocaine traces.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">9 proved positive.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">9!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So, people with the power to literally decide who lives and who dies by what legislation they devise and pass into law are doing so coked up.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“I’ve got an idea, bedroom tax!”</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Brilliant!” (hoovers up line the size of arm and leg)</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Let’s be clear about this, politicians may be wily, but they are far from smart.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Not having our best interests at heart their decisions are questionable at the best of times.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Under the influence of cocaine they are mad I tell you, mad.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There is something very wrong in the heart of Westminster.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s a private club, its members peeing on us from a great stoned height, clutching bags of our cash as they sell off what’s left of the family silver.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Britain’s not working.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Oh sure, wander around vast swathes of London chock full of restaurants stuffed with diners pigging out on overpriced offal and you’ll think recession, what recession?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But try and find somewhere to live as a homeless single person over the age of 40 and reality will hit you like a steam train driven by a blond buffoon.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What will you do when <i>your</i> boss texts you in the morning to say you’ve been fired, and with no explanation or recompense?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ragged Trousered Philanthropist anyone?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">One thing we don’t have to worry about right now is being blasted back into the Stone Age by North Korea as we seem to be dismantling all we’ve held dear since the formation of the Welfare State quite nicely on our own thank you.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Do we really want to go back to soup kitchens, work houses, rickets, back street abortions, plague and pestilence?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A bunch of immoral chancers backed by barely elected tosspots gambled our history away in a casino, then stole all our savings, climbed up their towers, kicked away the ladders, laughing like drains, and they are laughing still.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; min-height: 14px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">We have spent so long looking up the backsides of people who deserve not a jiffy of our time that we’ve gone blind.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Well it really is time to squeegee our eyes and wake the hell up from this infant state before, as Flaubert memorably warned us, the edge of the crapper on which we stand crumbles and we plummet headlong into a century of shit.</span></div>
<div style="font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-size: 16px; min-height: 19px;">
<br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Julia Brightly</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">July 20, 2013</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-86048844436753094862013-07-07T08:47:00.002-07:002013-07-20T06:55:58.488-07:00One Step Ahead Of The G-Man<br />
<br />
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The past four years of my life have been remarkable.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I came out as transgender and started hormone treatment to transition from male to female, and toured the world several times over with the bands Mogwai and M83 as their Front of House sound engineer. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I moved from New York City, where I had been for a decade, to Los Angeles, into a fabulous little modern house with orange and lemon trees in the garden, and a little white car parked out back, christened Snowflake by one of my beautiful friends.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At Christmas last I and M83 finished off a triumphant year with a little run of arena shows, ending at The Gibson Theater in LA.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The after show party was, shall we say, legendary.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">All was right with the world.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; min-height: 17px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">New Year came and went and I along with all my friends was confident that twenty thirteen was going to be amazing.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Easter arrived bringing still no work, but I was settling into my new home, relying on savings and credit cards to get me through what seemed just a sticky patch. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I knew a couple of groups that were looking to hire and guessed I’d be high on the list.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Unfortunately they passed me over for young men, but I was still sure it was all going to be fine, though my savings had all but run out and my cards were getting close to being maxed.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">By the middle of June things were getting fairly desperate.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It was looking like nothing was going to come my way.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I began to look around my little house with trepidation, with a feeling that I was mad to think it would all work out, that this life could be mine.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I started to feel like a fraud.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then at the eleventh hour came an email with the offer of a high profile tour starting immediately.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I said yes yes yes.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A week later and I hadn’t heard back.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’d been passed over again.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now all my cards <i>were</i> maxed out, my bank account in the red, my rent and bills overdue.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Reality hit me like a punch in the guts.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The dream was over.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What to do?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’d become the person I always should have been, a woman, living in a place I’d aways wanted to live, LA, and had seen the world.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It was time to go.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’ve been meditating for a year and realized that I’d let go of my ego, was at peace with the world and myself, had been awestruck at the beauty of our little planet, had found the inner light, and was ready. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I decided that I would drive out to Malibu to stand for one last time on the golden sands looking out at the mighty Pacific before heading up to Topanga national park where, at sunset, I was going to cut my wrists.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It seemed to make complete sense. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I said my goodbyes online to my friends, being careful not to let them suspect anything as I didn’t want to be stopped, and went to sleep in my own bed for the last time.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Just as I was about to walk out the door the next morning my cell phone rang.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It was an old friend from London, England, who had clearly seen through my obfuscated farewell message and begged me to stay, saying she would wire me money for a flight, and that I should hot foot it post haste to London and stay with her till I sorted myself out.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It took some convincing, not because I didn’t want to see her or appreciate the love she was sending, but because I really had decided to go.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was at peace, I was ready to leave this place.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She persuaded me to stay.</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’ve been in London for two weeks now, sleeping on my friend’s couch, trying to figure out what the hell to do.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I abandoned everything in LA, just walked away with a suitcase and guitar in hand.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is not the first time I’ve been here.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In 1991 I was playing guitar and singing in a band and we all decided to move to Amsterdam.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">After nearly a year of living in a squat, stealing food from the local supermarket because I didn’t have any money, I sold my guitar getting just enough cash for a bus ticket to London, turning up at the same friend’s house, this time with only a suitcase.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But now I’m 54, a middle aged woman, and it’s really hard.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Capitalism is going through its inevitable collapse and leaving millions of us by the wayside.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I have no money, no home, no history here for a decade so zero credit, and still no job.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My friend, my angel, is helping all she can but the reality has me still gasping for breath.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Being a freelance worker, self-employed, one is always one pay check away from the street, and I’ve lived like that for 20 years.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This time though the paycheck didn’t arrive.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So here I am, one step ahead of the G-Man.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Just.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; margin-bottom: 10px; text-align: justify;">
<br />
Julia Brightly<br />
July 7, 2013<br />
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03990193067583338259noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627534684740606075.post-77129364100561323752013-07-03T04:43:00.001-07:002013-07-20T06:56:51.364-07:00Whatever Happened To The East End Of London?<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Where are the litter strewn streets, the pavements smeared with dog shit, the piss soaked phone boxes, the beaten up Cortinas and Jags belching unchecked emissions into pushchair strapped toddlers, the gangs of roaming racists, the queer bashers, gawd s’truth, strike a light?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was born here in 1959, an epoch ago, moved to New York City, and after a decade have just come back.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">OK, the days of Cortinas are long gone, but when I left it was a scary, miserable, grumpy, cold, grey, hateful place.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I decided to venture out and investigate, starting just the other day in Stratford east.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now I know the 2012 Olympics generated bucket loads of cash with which to transform that part of the world, and in a hurry, but it’s beyond recognition.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The first thing one will notice upon exiting the much revamped but peculiarly painted in snot green underground station is the enormous shopping mall that has been plonked right next to it, like the result of a giant child playing with lego.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; min-height: 17px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">My initial thought was one of amazement, that maybe this paean to consumerism might be a good thing, especially as I was need of underwear, toiletries, a mobile phone, and fish and chips, all of which were located within spitting distance from each other.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">After 30 minutes I felt like I had been scooped up by the giant child and dropped into a human ant farm.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At 3 on a Tuesday afternoon it was choc-a-bloc with folk all scurrying around on their particular missions, none of whom seemed to care a jot who or what they trampled over to fulfill.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I scampered out with bruised limbs and scrunched toes to survey the main street.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I attended school at Stratford Grammar from 1970, so this was my stomping ground.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s all gone.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The old shopping center across the way looked dejected, a bargain basement relic.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I remember before even it was built, before indeed the bus station was there, when Angel Lane existed in its place, full of two-up-two-down terraced houses, condemned then as slums, which now would have been absurdly high rent des reses.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; min-height: 17px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As I looked out at the bijou coffee shops and restaurants my mind superimposed the old place, like Bobby Moore’s pub Mooro’s, previously The Two Puddings, a notorious watering hole full of stories of violence, where my old schoolfriend Carlton Leach worked as a bouncer before becoming a gangster proper.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Suddenly the clock chimes of the modern art inspired timepiece on the station forecourt brought me back with a jolt.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The good old days, they say.....</span></div>
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<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I jumped back on the tube to Bethnal Green, where I am staying, and went for a walk around Victoria Park, to clear my head.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Last time I was there the lake was brown.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now it’s been dredged and is so clear it looks drinkable, with a brand new Chinese pagoda on the island in the middle, a cute little bridge to it.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I wonder when the lake was dredged if the bodies of all the war time aborted babies were found.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The Pavillion, once a rarely open workers caff selling mugs of PG tips and Mother’s Pride white toast, is now overrun with what appear to be trust fund couples paying ridiculous amounts of money for thin white lattes and soy cappucinos.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I mean, there’s even a bookshop!</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When did Eastenders start to read?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Well, thing is you’d be hard pressed to find an Eastender around these days.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Is that a bad thing?</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Eastenders to me were racist, homophobic bigots, with the IQ of an amoeba.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">That was my family in fact, coming as I do from the East End, a cockney born and bred.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I hated the filthy dump and could not wait to get out.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But now I find myself back I’m more than happy to sit with the yummy mummies and sip a ginseng and cauliflower iced tea whilst perusing Kant.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It’s beats watching kids on a lager induced rage smashing up bus shelters any day.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Julia Brightly</span></div>
<div style="font-family: Thonburi; font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">July 2, 2013</span></div>
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