in light of the current "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" moral panic re unsuitable literature, i'd like to share an anecdote.

my thirteen-year-old cousin came to visit a few months back. he saw my copy of american psycho and asked if he could borrow it, because his friend had seen the movie and said it was really good. i said okay, sure, but just so you know, it's a lot more graphic than the movie and there's some stuff in there that you might find really upsetting. he asked what kind of stuff. i gave him a bare-bones outline of the contents (gore, sexual violence, cannibalism, etc). he said he would think about it.

a few days later, he came back to me and said, "it doesn't sound like my kind of thing. i think i might wait until i'm a bit older to read it." alright, i said, good call, and that was the end of it. i am 99% sure that if i'd just said "no, you can't have it, you're not old enough," he would have felt patronised and found a way to read it anyway, just to prove a point.

you can draw whatever conclusions you want from that, but i feel it's a pretty good indicator that giving kids the information they need to curate their own experience is way more effective than telling them what they are and aren't allowed to read. that's just my two cents, though.

Conflating having dating/sexual experience with maturity/being an adult is gross as all hell.  It’s not “infantilizing” to headcanon a character as being inexperienced.  Doesn’t matter if a character is ace or allo, if you come at people saying a character isn’t pathetic enough to be sexually inexperienced that’s not just acephobia, that is just not how life works.

On top of that, asexuality isn’t some sort of “oh well you have an excuse for why this doesn’t make you pathetic” sort of thing.  A lot of us didn’t realize we were ace until well into adulthood, and dealt with that constant shaming of “normal people have lots of sex, normal people date all the time, why am I so wrong and broken.”  Enforcing these attitudes still harms us even if you magnanimously bestow a “get out of my mockery free!!” exception, and know what??  I care about the allo people this hurts too.

⚠️SCAM ALERT⚠️

soo scams have been on the rise lately. i was recently approached by a woman saying she wanted a portrait of her daughter for $200. she “accidentally” wrote a check for $2000 instead, wanting me to send back $1800.

i almost did it, because i assumed a faulty check wouldn’t deposit. luckily i looked up mobile banking check scams. YOU CAN STILL BE SCAMMED WITH A BAD CHECK. it won’t flag it till later, leaving you owing money.

i just wanted to share this because i could’ve been totally fucked over if i didn’t look it up. stay safe out there guys

Thank you, OP, it is always good to see awareness being spread about scams! Knowledge and skepticism are the best ways to fight them.

This one’s a popular variation on what’s called an ‘overpayment’ scam. Any time anybody sends (general) you money and then asks you to send some of that money back, you should be looking out for this. 

Also, because apparently a lot of younger people don’t know this: cheques aren’t immediate payments. It can take five to ten days for a cheque to clear - that is, for the other bank or credit union to get notified about the cheque trying to be withdrawn from the account they hold, determine whether or not the cheque is legit and the funds are available, and either let the cheque go through or ask for the money back if the cheque is bad. Yes, you can see your account balance go up immediately, but that money gets taken right back out of your account if the cheque is bad.

On an episode of Bar Rescue I saw once, the bar owners hadn’t paid their staff for several months, and Jon Taffer insisted that they pay their staff before he’d help them. However, he had the bar owners write the manager a cheque for the back wages, and then go and deposit the cheque to her account that same day, and then when she came back the same day and said she’d been able to deposit the cheque, he went ahead. That cheque could easily have bounced three days later and the staff still wouldn’t have been paid their back wages. 

It’s a good rule of thumb, if you’re accepting a cheque, to assume the money isn’t actually there until at least a week has passed. (Some banks or credit unions will have what’s called a ‘standard hold’ on certain types of cheque deposits, so that you actually can’t access those funds until after the cheque clears. If you’ve ever deposited a cheque at an ATM, you’ve probably run into this.)

And finally, before I get off my soapbox again, if anybody ever emails you an image of a cheque, it’s fake. End of. You can’t email cheques and then deposit them any more than you can email dollar bills and then print them out and spend them. 

Need a therapist letter for trans surgery?

Check the GALAP Directory! The Gender Affirming Letter Access Project is a directory of US based therapists organized by state that are willing to write surgery support letters without gatekeeping! Short appointments, generally free letters.

The site lists out therapist names and locations as well as open trans/non-binary status & whether or not a therapist is a PoC.

https://thegalap.org/directory

Shout out to gay people who are aromantic. Shout out to trans people who are aromantic. Shout out to asexual aromantics. Shout out to allosexual aromantics. Shout out to lesbain aromantics. Shout out to bisexual aromantics. Shout out to arospecs. Shout out to people who say queer when they mean aromantic because its easier to explain. Shout out to aplatonic aromantics.

Being aromantic is great.

idk what introvert needs to hear this but please check yourself when ur saying stuf like “staying in your room all weekend by yourself watching netflix is much better than going out and being social” because speaking from experience it’s very easy to confuse being introverted with isolating yourself to cope with anxiety and depression please reach out to your friends and make an effort to live your life and say yes to things, there’s no harm in enjoying your own company but please try to avoid shutting yourself away because you’ve convinced yourself that you’re better alone it’s seriously a recipe for loneliness and will really fuck with your self worth

at the end of the day I don’t understand people who don’t understand trans people because they don’t understand why they are trans. Nobody understands why anyone does or is anything. Often vessels themselves don’t fully understand. I don’t understand why I hate meatloaf but love meatballs. Make peace with the mystery of other peoples experiences and don’t support political movements that lead to the active harm of other human beings even ones doing things you don’t understand

Alex Hirsch reminding us all to go buy the Gravity Falls complete series set since streaming services are untrustworthy now

Link to original tweet: https://twitter.com/aidanctweets/status/1131864744690900993?s=21

What the shit did I just read?

A parody of a conversation that every trans person faces when coming across bigoted arseholes.

I mean I get OP is trying to create a ridiculous parody to prove a point, but I overheard this conversation as written multiple times growing up in conservative circles because my mother’s best friend didn’t take her husband’s last name. People who knew full well she didn’t change her name would pointedly call her Mrs Y because they thought it was wrong for her to keep her own name. I don’t want to reconstruct the amazing logic at play here because it makes my brain hurt, but it was 100% a thing that keeping your own name was a danger to all women everywhere and only someone who hated women would do so.

I remember my mother explaining to child-me very seriously that not taking your husband’s name was indeed wrong, but since this woman was her lifelong best friend, to be polite I should only call her by her first name to avoid “confusion” about the last name.

Yes. Part of the point of the example is that it IS a real thing that happens, and that used to happen more, but modern society more or less recognizes it as unambiguously conservative. The OP of the twitter thread wants this point to get through to “radical feminists” who fully understand why the hypothetical Mrs. X/Mrs. Y exchange is misogynistic but haven’t made the logical connection that it’s transphobic to do the same to trans people.

I'm telling you you guys have to stop buying into the propaganda about disability fakers. EVEN if fakers exist to the extent that it is a massive problem, disabled people still should be given proper support. If governments and other organizations fail to deliver that it does not matter what their excuse is; they have still failed disabled people and that is unacceptable. If their solution to so-called fakers is one that harms disabled people then they have not actually solved anything, but it sure as hell is a convenient scapegoat.

It also CANNOT be overstated that many people with legitimate needs are and will continue to be labeled as fakers, a sentence which is hurtful at best and deadly at worst.

@incarnon

Because I'm a bit older (late 40s) I have a different view on the whole debate about whether autism is a disability or not.

I wasn't diagnosed with autism until a year ago (and ADHD 6 months ago), but let's pretend for a moment that I had been diagnosed as a child or as a teenager. And then let's pretend that someone had asked me in my early twenties if I thought autism was a disability.

I would have absolutely denied that. I would have stepped on top of the biggest soap box I could find and shouted that autism was most certainly NOT a disability.

Because in my early twenties I was living my best life. I was married, we'd bought a house, I worked full time, I had good friends and interesting hobbies. I might be autistic, but that didn't stop me from living a perfectly normal life.

Except that it was. I just didn't realize it yet. I was constantly overstimulated without realizing it. And even when I did realize it I just pushed through it, because after all I wasn't disabled.

But your brain can only take so much chronic overstimulation before it just shuts down. I was in my mid twenties when I had my first nervous breakdown. Suddenly I couldn't do the things anymore that I wanted to.

It took me 9 months to recover from that, and that was far too fast, mostly driven by my ADHD which demanded I get my brain back online asap. So I went back to work because I was a perfectly abled young woman after all.

But I didn't change anything that had caused me such overstimulation in the first place, and thus it came back full force and after 18 months I once again reached my breaking point and had a nervous breakdown, this time with added depression.

I haven't worked again since that second breakdown over 20 years ago. I'm officially declared disabled, yet it took me another decade (!) to accept that yes, I really am disabled. The autism and ADHD was a mystery still at that point, but I had officially been diagnosed with depression, anxiety disorder and PTSD. All courtesy of me desperately trying to lead a perfectly normal life for a few years in my early twenties.

Now I know what's going on in my brain. Now I'm starting to understand what my limitations are. And now I know that yes, I really am disabled and that there are plenty of things I can't do like most people can. Certain noises scramble my brain, people exhaust me and it takes me all the energy I have to get myself through a day in one piece. I know this and I accept this.

But now, every time I see a neurodivergent someone in their late teens or their early twenties step up onto a soapbox to loudly proclaim they're not disabled, my heart aches for them because I was once where they are now.

And I hope with all my heart that they will be able to live their lives without ever breaking down, but I also know that there's a chance they'll meet their mental limits sooner or later and learn what it means to be autistic in a very confrontational and devastating way.

Because to be neurodivergent means that you have a brain that needs more attention and care than that of a NT person. You need to learn your limitations, because if you don't those limitations will catch up with you when you least expect it.

And because of that extra care that our brains need, autism is a disability, whether it affects you now or in the future or hopefully never at all.

transphobia is truly such a miserable mindset. to live in a world where no one is mutable and nothing can be abstract. no one can change or decide who they want to be or enjoy the wonders of modern medicine. everyone has to live and die by pointless kindergarten rules, but no one can reimagine themselves or create a different world. don’t you get tired of black and white and making up boxes and plugging your ears to the reality that nature is complicated and funny, and human hearts can feel infinitely?

it annoys me when sapphic women see an attractive woman and are like “i’m no better than a man 😳😔” like BABE you are allowed to see an attractive woman and want to fuck her!!! free yourself from the cottagecore PG13 narrative of sapphic attraction, look at her with lust in your heart!!!

#also men wanting to have sex with women is not disrespectful either! what’s disrespectful is crossing boundaries on purpose

if something confirms your biases, that's when you REALLY NEED to fact check it!

if it scratches an angry little itch, fact check it!

if it gives you petty satisfaction, fact check it!

if it feels like revenge, fact check it!

ESPECIALLY if it's about a group or demographic rather than named individuals, FACT. CHECK. IT.

i'm serious there are people out there who have salaried careers crafting misinformation posts designed to sneak past your critical thinking by activating your angrybrain and if we are mutuals i have seen you reblog them yes you.

This quiz by the News Literacy project is a great and way of assessing how easily you fall for (and how to critically assess social media posts to avoid falling for) emotionally-charged misinformation that confirms your personal biases.

I wish everyone on this site would spend 7 minutes and take it.

(ID: eight black and white images in the style of Little Miss memes, but the little miss characters have been replaced with a picture of autism creature, each image has black text. The text on each image reads:

1) "Little Mx. autistic burnout"

2) "Little Mx. is exhausted but can't sleep"

3) "Little Mx. is experiencing an intrusive thought"

4) "Little Mx. stims by skin picking"

5) "Little Mx. empathizes with inanimate objects"

6) "Little Mx. echos phrases from TV commercials"

7) "Little Mx. is stuck between special interests"

8) "Little Mx. is recovering from a meltdown")

(***Obviously not all of these are traits exclusive to autistic people but to me they feel like they fit my experiences and the meme.)

TIL that the reason lead levels in children’s blood have dropped 85% in the past thirty years is because of an unknown scientist who fought car companies to end leaded gasoline. He also removed it from paint, suggested its removal from pipes, and campaigned for the removal of lead solder from cans.

via ift.tt

Yep.  It also correlates extremely strongly with an increasing decrease of violent crime.  One of the symptoms of low level constant lead exposure is increased aggression and volatility. 

“Unknown scientist”? That was Clair Cameron Patterson.

Gas companies are still so mad at him he’s “unknown scientist”, know his name

Daily reminder that health and safety standards like these are what politicians mean when they talk about “deregulation.”

Full stop, I hate how disabled people are ripped off when it comes to buying basic items. Why the fuck is an electric wheelchair $4000, ableds can buy a used car cheaper than that. Ableds get everything catered to them yet I’m trying to get a new wheelchair and can’t afford it. That’s my fucking legs. This also applies to things that disabled people want, like I shouldn’t have to pay $1000 for an adapted guitar. You’re ripping one of the poorest population in the world.

There needs to be a cap on how much vendors can charge for equipment rentals and items that are needed or wanted by disabled people but y’all not ready to talk about that.

Ableds, stop monopolizing off disabled people. (Ableds can reblog this - actually it’s encouraged - but don’t comment!)

this was a great read. “Laziness Does Not Exist” by Devon Price