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Warning: Just in case you haven't read my blog before, I swear. Deal with it. Also, this rant is a mess. Deal with that, too. A little while ago I came across a post on Facebook in which some Gen Z kid or another was saying how great it was to be under 21, because people older than that don't understand memes. (There was other stuff, too, but that was my takeaway.) And, I just, what? Who do these kids think they are? First of all, the word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in the fucking 70s, so don't come here and say that older people don't know what memes are. Secondly, my generation invented that white text over a picture meme format that you are all using. Dude, I was making memes before you knew how to use a computer. Ceiling Cat was watching me masturbate while some of you were still in nappies. You think you know memes? You weren't there when the Internet invented lolcats. You think you're an Internet aficionado? b37 y00 c4n'7 r34d 1337 5p34k. We had shit that went viral before social media even existed. We didn't have Facebook. We lived on forums, in irc chatrooms, livejournal. Man, livejournal... We didn't even call them blogs yet. We had podcasts before they were called podcasts. We had crappy flash animated web series, like Neurotically Yours (I think they still make it, but I remember it when it was truly shit and oh so wonderful). We didn't even have YouTube, all we had was flash player. You want viral video? I'll give you viral video: Bet you've never even heard of Albino Black Sheep, have you? 2003 that video was made. Don't know if it was the first video to go viral, but it must have been damn close. Go back further to Homestar Runner, Strong Bad e-mails, and Trogdor the Burninator. And I'm sure there's a fucktonne of stuff that I'm too young to remember, but I remember 4chan when it was just a bunch of 13-year-olds with a bad sense of humour telling rape jokes, instead of the toxic cesspool of web-terrorists it's become. And you're gonna come here and tell me that folks of my generation don't understand the Internet? That we don't understand memes? You don't know Jack Schitt. Piss off! Go home to your mum! You've never played a point and click flash game where you beat the shit out of the Teletubbies. TL;DR: Get off my fucking lawn!

I've been censoring myself. We all do, here on GA, those are the rules. No political discussion outside The Pit. But what's political? When someone complains about a public figure bringing politics into what they're doing (like Wil Weaton's fans losing their shit when he posted a picture on Instagram of his hand giving Trump Tower the finger), what they're really complaining about is them bringing the wrong kind of politics into it. There's no such thing as apolitical. Everything's political. Whether you see it that way is just a question of what your own views are, because we all like to think of ourselves as unbiased. Queer identities are inherently political. We fight daily for our rights, and if not for our own then for those of our siblings elsewhere. We've always been able to talk about homophobia on GA, we've been able to talk about Pride. There have been posts in The Lounge about marriage equality. And that's not because these things aren't political, but because they're politics we agree on. But I censor myself on things to do with my own identity. There are issues trans people face that I don't feel like I'm allowed to post about because it might violate the rules of no politics. We don't talk about transphobia the same way we talk about homophobia here. We talk about Pride, because of course we do. But Stonewall was a riot, and Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender sex worker of colour, threw the first brick. Marsha's entire existence was political. Pride is at its core political activism, but it's okay to talk about because it's all pink washed and dressed up in glitter. Can I talk about Marsha in The Lounge? This isn't a dig at GA. The rules are there for a reason, and I understand that. But some of these lines are pretty blurry. When do queer issues become too political to be talked about in a queer online community? Which prominent LGBTQ+ individuals throughout history have to be excluded because they were too political? A while back, a quote by Harvey Milk was shared in The Pit. I wanted to share it in the quote thread in the lounge but was cautioned against it. Because even though it was a message that literally all of us can agree on (can't remember exactly what at present, but it was lovely), Harvey Milk is in and of himself political and someone might take issue with that. Better safe than sorry. I exist as a trans person in a world where people want to deny people like me the right to go to the bathroom that corresponds with our gender. Where trans people are being excluded from protections against discrimination. Where trans people (especially trans women, especially trans women of colour) are murdered just because they're trans. I exist as a trans person in a world where many modern, developed countries won't let trans people change their legal gender without being sterilised first. Where in many more countries they can't change legal gender at all. I exist as a trans person in a world where prominent figures defend their right to misgender me because 'I can't tell them which words to use'. Which of these things can I talk about? Which of these things are political? The answer is, all of them. These things and everything else to do with every other queer identity. Everything about existing as a queer person is political because the world has made it so. Everything, everything is political. It's only a question of to whom.