Some people will make the mistake of asking you to prioritize their feelings over yours in a way that is so detrimental to you that it sounds absurd and they don't even realize how much they are asking if you don't communicate it to them. You have a responsibility not only to state your boundaries but to uphold them. Not everyone is purposely trying to walk all over you, but you have to stop being afraid of prioritizing your own well being because you fear that saying "no" will cause so much confrontation people will leave. And if they do leave, do you really want to be around someone who requires you to sacrifice yourself over their needs all the time? Someone who thinks you are so beneath them? Please don't think of yourself as beneath anyone else, that is a first step to not letting people be so unkind to you in name of "keeping the peace". Are you keeping your inner peace by putting your head down?
Illustrations for a trans masc chest Zine I'm making!
in honour of my first self administered t shot yesterday :)
Trans zine pt 2! Now to print and bind!
I don't know how else to explain it. If someone says something to me that initially hits as horribly transphobic, I'm going to be hurt. However, if, after I confront them about it, they go "Oh no! Jesus no, that's nowhere near what I intended to say, I mean X" - well, I now feel a hell of a lot better. I like knowing people aren't actually trying to hurt me.
So yeah - knowing someone's intent can drastically alter the impact, especially if the impact was negative. It can literally fix a horrible case of miscommunication that could've resulted in a permanent rift in a friendship.
But I've been in communities where trying to have the second half of that conversation is "abuse" and "invalidating their pain".
No! It's actually a really fucking important part of communication! And to silence that second half of the interaction results in no one learning anything, no one healing, and everyone remaining hurt.
Person 1 remains offended, thinking their friend meant to say something transphobic. Person 2 remains hurt because now everyone thinks they're transphobic.
The pain of being misinterpreted is not and should not be dismissed, and fuck anyone who tries to do so to me in the future.
No apologies.
Make no apologies for your pronouns, name, body, or any other aspect of being nonbinary that you may experience.
No more apologizing for your existence.
I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to have been in the queer movement for 20+ years, to have studied queer theory, to have contributed to you potentially enjoying the rights you have today because I was part of a groundswell of lobbying and direct action in the 1990s….
…to have a 15 year old who’s spent maybe 8 months being political and has never inquired about queer history anonymously message me, “EXCUSE ME QU**R IS A SLUR LMAO OMG EMBARRASSSING AN aCTUAL ADULT WHO THINKS IT’S OKAY TO USE QU**R!~!!!!”
Dude, we are a slur. Queer folks are a slur to conservative straight people. Everything we are will be used as a slur by everyone who hates us. Gay is a slur. Lesbian is a slur. People will try to use all of our words against us. Don’t fucking let them get into your head to the point at which you’re telling actual queer people not to use the words we’ve used to unite ourselves and empower ourselves for decades.
The notes on this are… about as bad as you’d expect, in pretty much the way you’d expect, but I want to point something out.
A lot of the people insisting that queer is a slur will also insist, sometimes in the same breath, that to claim a place under the umbrella of queer identity is to self-identify as a “freak,” as “abnormal,” as Bad and Wrong and Other. While at the same time insisting that they are normal, that not being straight does not mean they are not normal.
And like. I only started unpacking this pretty recently myself, so I guess it’s a lot to expect the same of people who seem to be mostly a decade-plus younger, but y’all. please. take a minute. sit with this thought: why do you equate “normal” with “good”?
Because I think that’s a logical fallacy that gets ingrained in most of us, unconsciously, long before we’re old enough to recognize it. We are taught, on a society-wide level, that normal = good. So the corollary to that, which does not even need to be spoken aloud most of the time, must be that not normal = not good.
But “normal” is a perfectly neutral state of being.
To be normal is to be more or less the same as those around you. Statistically average. A member of the majority group. And it is certainly easier to be normal, in most contexts, but there is no actual moral value attached to it. Unless you choose to put it there.
Normal can be confining, for many people. There are a lot more ways to not be normal, and some of them are easy and some of them are hard; but all of them change the way people treat you and the way you move through the world.
And I could throw in the Harrison Bergeron argument here: Olympic gold medalists aren’t normal! Oscar winners aren’t normal! Nobel Prize winners aren’t normal! If we insist that normal is better, we’ll squash exceptional people down to fit in normal-sized boxes!
But that’s not really how the fallacy of normal = good operates, in practice.
The way it actually operates? In a majority-white society, people of color are told they are not normal. In a mostly able-bodied society, disabled people are told they are not normal. In a majority-Christian society, every other faith (or lack thereof ) is told they are not normal. In a society that tells itself that everyone is middle class, people living in poverty are told they are not normal. In a mostly heterosexual society, queer people are told they are not normal.
And because we have all internalized the idea that normal = good, those of us who do not fit in the normal-sized box often feel a great deal of shame. We internalize self-hatred. We feel as though we have been rejected — as if, because “normal” doesn’t fit us, we are misshapen.
But if you learn to treat “normal” as a perfectly neutral state of being, it’s a lot easier to let all of that go.
Maybe that’s why, historically, the queer umbrella has often been a home for people who were already marginalized in other ways. Once you’ve let go of the need to be normal in one area of your life — or if you were never allowed it in the first place — it gets easier to claim, with pride, a title that means I am not normal. It gets easier to say that what you are is something good, in the face of a society that tells us to hate ourselves for it.
Or, I guess, you can get on social media and call people names and insist that you’re not like those other weirdos. You’re normal. So normal. See? You fit in the normal-shaped box-just fine! That means you must be good, right? Because if normal is good, then anything else must be bad. Right?
when ppl say “let men wear skirts/dresses” that also means
- without people being creepy / treating them like a fetish
- without people acting like being gnc is “”adult”” or “”private”” or somehow dirty
- without people expecting them to alter the rest of their appearance to “fit” (not everyone who wants to wear a dress also wants to wax their whole body or apply a full face of makeup)
skirts and dresses are literally just clothes. they’re just clothes. leave gnc men alone
Also men don’t need to be skinny, hairless, or white to wear dresses!!
I don't know that I've ever seen someone make the Aardman Grimace in real life.
Truly a masterclass in harrowingly strained enthusiasm!
i’m always a sucker for the “robot suddenly goes a little haywire and learns how to love” trope
guys again please please please please please please please think critically about those posts that are like “i didn’t realize [really common or nonspecific thing] was an adhd thing and doesn’t apply to neurotypicals/anyone else at all!!” bc a lot of the time they are completely unfounded (sometimes frankly insane) and give people really messed up ideas about the differences between nd and nt people and how those differences work. and that shit doesn’t help anybody in any way! you don’t have to pathologize and essentialize everything you do, and you shouldn’t build up firm definitional barriers between neurotypes that don’t really exist. i’m talking about that friendship post specifically rn which is a prime example (come on, you can’t characterize how all people of a certain neurotype manage something as infinitely complex as human friendship), but it applies to SO many other things i’ve seen floating around i feel like i make this post every other day. the mental math thing comes readily to mind too.. honestly just think about these things before u spread them like true information, check the sources or go find sources at least.. please
The people who love you Really Do love you. Your friends don’t secretly hate you. You matter to people. You are loved. Learn to believe it even if you think it isn’t true.
every mlm/nblm on this site is like: man sure is a shame *gestures to neck* that a specific part of my skin *gestures even more to neck* isnT BEING KISSED RN *gestures the hardest*