What is Lift Up Others Fridays?

Hi there!

I’m a sex educator. We have Share Our Shit Saturdays in the our community. It’s a way to share pieces we’d love others to read and share with their audiences. To get included, we use the tag #SOSS on Twitter.

Recently, many sex educators have come under fire for not being as intersectional as they could be. There is a lot of drama and judgment within the community that shouldn’t exist. Many marginalized people within our community face a lot of push-back from those who refuse to listen to them — and others are told their marginalizations don’t matter by people with privilege in that area. I want our community — and society at large — to be more inclusive and learn more about the world around them directly from those affected by issues. Most of all, I want us to stop listening to celebrities or politicians who aren’t well-versed in issues. We can only do that when we pay attention to others.

In short, it’s a way to learn more about our world and use our own privileges to be able to share issues with others.

With all of this in mind, I decided to start Lift Up Others Fridays. The premise is simple — at some point each weekend, I will gather things shared on Twitter with the tag #LUOF and culminate these things in a post here on Medium. To fight stigma, increase awareness, and promote social justice is the main goal.

Stay tuned for the first collection of LUOF links!

What can you do in the meantime?

Follow people that aren’t a part of your privileged groups. Are you abled? Follow disabled and chronically ill activists. White? Follow people of color. Cis? Follow trans/GNC peeps. (But also remember that doesn’t mean we need to follow or befriend people who would do us harm unlike major newspapers would have us believe.)

When you find people speaking on issues that matter — share their writing, their fundraising sites, their appearances. RT them. Include them in appreciative things like FF. Share these things on your own sites and podcasts, etc. Don’t do this once, but every single time you can.

[pic of Kirsten, hands on her head as thought she wants to pull out her hair; she is somewhere between screaming and laughing, and only visible from the chest up; she has on black jeans, a gray tee shirt with white text “Let’s talk about sex — Vibrant”; her hair is reddish-purpleish]

Kirsten is a genderfluid writer, sexuality educator, and chronic illness/disability activist in Wisconsin. She runs Chronic Sex which highlights how illnesses and disabilities affect ‘Quality of Life’ issues such as self-love, self-care, relationships, sexuality, and sex.

Interested in helping with Kirsten’s work? Visit our ‘support us’ page or shoot her some tasty coffee money.