Your daily dose of botanical drawings by Mary Vaux Walcott.

(Untitled--Flower Study) (1876)

In museum: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., United States of America.

Dimensions: height 11cm, width 9cm.

CW: Suicide, mental health, and wrong terminology. My name is Lilly Grey. I'm a #Disabled #Atheist #Lesbian #Trans #Woman from the US. I knew I didn't fit into the binary since I was 11, but being raised conservative I didn't see any other choice. Slowly though, my programming started to be shattered. In 8th grade, I met my furst non-Christian friend, a girl from Pakistan who was Muslim, who I became pretty good friends with. That set me up for high school which consisted of 99% middle eastern kids, 99% of which were from Bangladesh. Those 4 years completely changed my outlook and started my path to atheism, which is only relevant here because once I started questioning my religious upbringing, then everything else became questionable too. I met my first openly gay guy at 19, who challenged everything I thought I was. We seriously had so many experiences in common it was scary at first. That led me to start asking questions, questions which seemed to have no answer. See, I grew up with no idea about anything. In 4th grade I had a friend who everyone refered to as a “tomboy”, and although I didn't know what that refered to, I knew they meant it as a bad thing. Later on I met a guy who I would realize later was gay but who kept that pretty low profile at the time. My parents figured out he was gay and hated him with a passion though. I think that's how I knew he was gay, because they told me, but I honestly don't remember that in detail. I forget how I found out about Lesbians, and I didn't know about Bi people until highschool, when a teacher of mine called a friend a slur which I won't repeat on here. Even then someone had to explain that to me, or I looked it up, one of the 2, because I found it confusing more than offensive at the time. So by the time I started questioning my identity, I still had no idea that trans people existed. I only found that out a few years ago, when I met my first openly trans girl. Unfortunately, we met at the worse possible time for me. Years of questioning everything I ever knew, combined with an unstable home (which I've had since I can remember), led to 2 really dark times in my life, and one actual suicide attempt in 2017, from which my then partner saved me, followed by suicidal ideation 2 more times, once in 2020 and once in 2021. That led to a mental health diagnosis, and therapy. And it was somewhere in the middle of the hardest years following my diagnosis that I met her. So I was just overwhelmed at that point and didn't really want to deal with anything or anyone and we stopped talking. The five years from 2020 to 2025 really made me question everything though and as hard as it was it was something I needed as it took all my assumptions about who I was, or could be, away. Finally between 2024 to 2025, the last fragments of who I had pretended to be all this time shattered. It ended the way it had started, by me finally being who I knew I had always been and breaking away from religion completely. That was a big step because even though I had left Christianity in 2010, I still stuck around, partly either because of my family or else I felt like I had to be of one religion or another. So me finally breaking away from all that was basically breaking the thing that held me back. Once I broke with my upbringing, and my family, on that, the rest came naturally over the following months. And then this month finally, my identity cleared itself up. I had still been stuck in a bit of binary fragmentation, because I had only been looking at whether I was Gay or Bi, already knowing I was LGBT. It wasn't until I was talking with the National LGBT Help Center, where the fact I was Trans started coming to me as clearly. It was almost as if once I started describing myself, free of judgement or assumptions about who I had to be, the answer just came to me on it's own, as did my name. That last part, my accepting that I am LGBT, and then accepting that I’m trans, all happened pretty quickly this month once I had liberated myself from everything else. And if you're wondering why I have a first and last name, (Grey isn't my birth last name), it's because I want nothing to do with my bio family. Between the racism, religious ideology etc. (They are all MAGA people, so you get the idea), I just want nothing to do with them and for many years, in fact, I've wanted to change my last name. Actually the funny thing is, I have never felt comfortable with my dead name in any way, first or last name, and wanted to change it for at least the last 5 years, even before realizing I was trans, which in retrospect just proves that I never felt at home with who everyone had made me out to be. Now I am who I am meant to be, and I'm on here to make friends, to be part of the community (since I still live with my family and can't take part in one locally yet), and to support others in any way I can. #Introduction

And yet, I am still a Woman.

I exist, I cannot be legislated out of existence, to try is nonsense.

The (UK) supreme court has perpetrated a nonsense today.

I am a #Proud #Trans #woman, which is to say I am proud to be a woman.

(Edit to clarify which supreme court)

Your daily dose of botanical drawings by Mary Vaux Walcott.

Willow (Salix) (1900)

In museum: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., United States of America.

Dimensions: height 25cm, width 17cm.

UK Supreme Court: 'Woman' means biological female under law.

The ruling entails that a transgender person with a certificate that recognises them as female should not be considered a woman for equality purposes, since UK law defines a woman as someone born biologically female.

https://mediafaro.org/article/20250416-uk-supreme-court-woman-means-biological-female-under-law?mf_channel=mastodon&action=forward

Your daily dose of botanical drawings by Mary Vaux Walcott.

Lloyd's Strawberry Cactus (Echinocereus lloydii) (1925)

Dimensions: height 25cm, width 17cm.

𝗟𝗔𝗜𝗦𝗦𝗘𝗥 𝗟'𝗘𝗙𝗙𝗘𝗧 𝗦𝗣𝗛𝗘̀𝗥𝗘𝗦
𝗖𝗛𝗘𝗘𝗞𝗬 𝗘𝗙𝗙𝗘𝗖𝗧 𝗦𝗣𝗘𝗔𝗞𝗦
Ryan McGinley
Le voyage américain / American Roadtrip
2009
•
#LaisserLEffetSphère #CheekyEffectSpeaks #photographie #photography #femme #woman #fesses #butt #art

50 years ago Freda Josephine Baker (née McDonald) died in #Paris #france

She was an #artist, #singer, #dancer, #actress, and a #fighter for #freedom

During #WW2 she fought against #facism as part of the #resistance and always fought against #racism

She was an #independent #woman that resisted inequality of her time

Her life was not easy, she did not inherit fortunes she could build on

She did it herself

Let's borrow some of her courage & build a society she'd liked