So these pictures of a “Syrian man selling pens in Beirut, Lebanon” went viral over the past few days
Activists on twitter and in Beirut decided to find the man and his daughter and wanted to help them.
Turns out that his name is Abdul, and he is a Palestinian refugee from the notorious Yarmouk camp in Syria. He is a single father with two children, Abdelillah (boy) 9 years old, and Reem (girl) 4 ½ years old.
Activists set up an indiegogo fundraiser to help out Abdul and his two children and donations came pouring in. Over the past 8 hours, almost $34,000 has been raised to help them.
both of these wonderful people taken so quickly in an act of senseless violence, during a live news broadcast…. praying for their families and loved ones and the WDBJ7 staff. so scary how close this is…. 40 min drive from here to the Smith Mountain Lake area. our world is so so broken….
VA area friends and community…. signal boost this:
Students: We really cannot handle the amount of work that schools throw at us. This amount of work is causing massive amounts of anxiety and an increased suicide rate. People are actually killing themselves because of school work. We would appreciate if the curriculum was changed to reduce the amount of work and tests or there will be serious consequences to the youth of our nation.
U.S. Education System: Okay… sounds fake… but okay…
Honestly, it’s starting to hurt every time I see someone shitting on About Ray. Like..the trailer wasn’t out for two hours before people started acting awful.
“Cis people don’t see what’s wrong with this!!!!” And I, a pre-transitioned transgender male, don’t either. The phrases used were ACCURATE to a trans person’s experience with family. “She’s not a lesbian, she’s a boy”/“I’m a boy born in a girls body”…those are very, very real things that are said! And, in context, saying “I’m a boy born in a girls body” is the easiest way to explain being transgender to a young child. That isn’t transphobic, it’s accurate. As is another line from the trailer, “Prolonging this isn’t going to keep me a girl, it’s just going to keep me from being who I already am.” The writers aren’t making this a “trans boys are still just girls” movie, they’re making it a realistic movie based on the struggles of transgender males.
“But the writers are both cis!! They wouldn’t be able to capture what it’s REALLY like to be transgender!!” That’s why writers consult people. A good writer will do a million hours of research before writing a script for a topic like this, and after that they will consult hundreds of people, REAL PEOPLE, and ask about their experiences and ask them for advice to make sure that the screenwrite isn’t horribly misinformed or offensive.
“They should have gotten a transboy to play Ray!” Okay, I don’t know how many times I have to say this: The plot of About Ray is a transboy trying to get his father’s consent to start Hormone Replacement Therapy due to a legal snag. They hired a female bodied actor to play a transboy who was still in his female-passing body. They were not going to hire a post-transition transboy to play a female bodied character. In order to have an accurate representation of what it is like to be a pre-transitioned transman in a female passing body, they would have to hire a female passing actor. Character attributes aside, even if they hired a transmale actor for the role, he would still be taking testosterone through the movie. That means deeper voice and more masculine features as filming for the movie goes on. This would be counterproductive, since About Ray is about a transman trying to START testosterone.
“They should have hired a trans boy actor who hasn’t started HRT yet!” Okay, how many of pre-t transmale actors do you think are in the world? For real? And of them, how many do you think are going to put off starting HRT just to make a movie that could cause them massive amounts of dysphoria? Are you seriously trying to make this a valid argument?
“They could have hired a trans girl to do it!” No???? NO. No. You’re wrong. Do you have any idea how traumatic that could be? How much dysphoria that actor would go through, to finally be in the body they tried to hard to get, only to spend months or years (depending on how long the movie takes to film) pretending to want to be a boy? Do you not understand how terrible that idea is?
GIVE THIS MOVIE A FUCKING CHANCE. The trailer came out a week ago and there are people already planning on boycotting the film, which is a bad idea for an entirely different reason: IF YOU BOYCOTT PROGRESSIVE MOVIES HOLLYWOOD IS GOING TO ASSUME THAT PROGRESSIVE MOVIES AREN’T GOING TO MAKE MONEY AND THEREFORE THEY’RE NOT GOING TO GET MADE. It doesn’t matter how “problematic” you think a preview of a script is. You remember the last movie we had about a transboy? How many of you have seen “Boys Don’t Cry”? Probably not very many of you. You wanna know what Boys Don’t Cry is about? A non-fictional story about the r*** and murder of a transman. You really want that to be the ONE movie that we have? About the hate crimes that we face on a daily basis?
ABOUT RAY IS GOING TO BE A GOOD MOVIE. Don’t base what you think on a few lines and an actor that you don’t think is right for the part. Please.Please go see this movie.
Thank you for changing my mind about it. This is for real. Fuck.
talking about 9/11 with white people is literally one of the most frustrating things ever because they won’t stop talking about their experiences (even if nothing happened to them personally), and when i, a middle eastern person, try to contribute to the conversation, i can’t get a fucking word in.
like what the fuck, nothing happened to you on that day – which, you know, thank goodness – so why the fuck do you insist on dominating the conversation? my daily life is still being effected by this even now, over ten years later.
but you’re not interested in hearing about how my fifth grade health teacher never again called on me or the arab girl in my class. you’re not interested in how whenever my family travels, all fourteen of us (a number that used to include young children) get “randomly” searched. you’re not interested in the fact that when i was asked to buy a propane tank for a barbecue, i spent the rest of the day stressed out and worried that the attendants at all the stores visited to inquire were all going to think i was making explosives (all stores in the neighborhood mysteriously were out of propane tanks in the middle of summer). you’re not interested in the fact that whenever my cousin prepares to fly on his own, his mother calls him to make sure he’s clean shaven so he doesn’t look “like a terrorist.” you’re not interested in the fact that when i was you’re not interested in the fact that i once witnessed a whole family of white people bypass the x-ray scanner for the old fashioned metal detector, but when i asked for the same treatment, i was denied; when i pointed out the (many) signs claiming that i had the right to refuse going through that machine, the tsa agent who mere seconds earlier berated me for my request went conveniently deaf. you’re not interested in hearing about how my sister was told “sorry about your leader” when osama bin laden was killed.
i could reference personal anecdotes until i went blue in the face.
there are countless people who have stories like this, stories that are grotesque and demeaning and terrifying. these are everyday occurrences.
but you’re not interested in any of that. frankly, you’re not even that interested when middle eastern and muslim (and sometimes non-muslim desi) people are subjected to extreme violence or killed. you guys got over chapel hill pretty damn fast. if you noticed it at all.
you don’t give a fuck about us, or our ongoing 9/11 stories. you just want to tell me about how horrible it was, sitting in class and listening to other kids get their names called on the pa system.
AngelMihe 