madcatacres

something that should be taken with a grain of salt are the statistics talking about the high rates of mental illness + neurodivergence among trans people (ocd, bpd, adhd, autism, etc)

I see both sides of the political spectrum taking these studies at face value - conservatives say we're broken, and trans people try to come up with reasons why for example autism + gender dysphoria makes sense and why one of them feeds into another

at the end of the day you have to remember that we're the one category of people on this planet who are legally required to go see a psychiatrist in order to receive non-psychiatric medication and surgeries.

more trans people are in therapy by law than any other demographic of people, and as a result, this captures more comorbidities.

if I had to look at my own family & rates of mental illness?

mom, dad, 2 maternal aunts, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother, sister, sibling, and me all have OCD.

7/9 of them are cishet, never been to therapy, never diagnosed. 2/9 are trans, required therapy for hormone treatment, and were diagnosed.

you don't have to do any math to just see that the resulting statistics end up intensely skewed.

and we can think back to how autism was virtually never diagnosed more than 50 years ago - ruling out any grandparents being included in statistics - and even my parents' generation (they're in their 60s now) wouldn't have been included either.

I don't think it's to anyone's benefit to accept these studies uncritically. a lot of these things are hereditary and far more prevalent in the overall population than people realize

PROUDLY PRESENTING:

The Unofficial OFMD AO3 Wrapped 2024

images used are either official stills or screencaps from episodes and the Vanity Fair lie detector video. everything edited by me :)

a few additional stats:

details about data collection and analysis ⤵️

downloading a fic when ao3 dies (when you have the link)

looks like ao3 is down again and i was in the middle of a multi chapter fic when it died on me.

and if that happens to you, this is what you can do to download the fic:

i'm sure a bunch of people know this and use it but in case you don't, hope this helps

building ability to draw: slow, but happening. a little. did a screencap study to try out some charcoal brushes and had a p good time actually

i love you leather i love you latex i love you rubber i love you kink i love you fetish i love you gay people

you agree. reblog

If you are a British/UK citizen, there is currently a petition running (with only 125 signatures) that ends in June 2025. The petition calls for the government to make it so that you do not need a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to change your gender.

If you are a British/UK citizen, and would like to sign:

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/701159

If you're not a British/ UK citizen it'd be much appreciated if you could share this post !! :)

clickable link

You can also sign it if you're a UK resident - you spend 6 months or more in a 12 month period living in the UK. No need to be a citizen.

This means that if you have a visa, EU settlement status, indefinite leave to remain etc. you can still sign it and it'll be valid

Ed and Stede nose appreciation post!

Unbelievably fucking cool

Between that and new preventative shot, we might be able to eradicate HIV in the near future.

Do not forget this. No matter what happens do not forget we’re this close to finally ending this awful virus

"Hey! Buttons turned into a seagull!"

Brother Gregor never spoke and often spooked the neophytes with his appearance, but he was a gentle soul and a phenomenal cook and knew more ways to prepare a fish than the abbot knew hymns

Hi all~

As some of you know, for a while now I have been compiling an Our Flag Means Death behind the scenes archive. It has consumed many, many hours of my life, but it's truly just been a labour of love.

Here is the link for OFMD S1 bts

bit.ly/4gydPAH

All contents have been sourced from various places online (instagram, twt, portfolios, etc) and I have tried my best to include the sources in each folder's description.

Here is the link for OFMD S2 bts

bit.ly/40mwSbT

There may be duplicate files - some may be of different quality, size, or shared by multiple cast/crew. When any bts drops, I will do my best to have it uploaded asap. I have NOT included any paid/patreon content shared by cast/crew for obvious reasons.

Like I said before, this archive has entirely been a labour of love and I'm happy to share it with you all. I hope you find some use for this... be it for art, writing, or just to reminisce.

Please be kind to each other and spread love.

Day 6 of @lydiajoypalmer's Note the Gusto prompts: The Gentleman Pirate (and his Man for Sale, out on the town):

Behind the scenes photos of Stede’s cabin, from a guy who worked on the set. (FB post source linked.)

I've been meaning to make this post for months now but hey, here is. Some of you may remember I made DVDs of OFMD a while ago. I rambled extensively about it here.

Quick refresher or in case you haven't seen them:

They have disc menues that play Gnossienne Number 5 and have individual episode pictures. Also there's sleeves and discs labels!

Why am I telling you this (again)? Well, I happen to have all the files you need to start your own basement pirate DVD manufacturing career on a burner Google Drive. So if you too wanted to have DVDs of our beautiful show on your shelf at home, you could download the files, grab a DVD writer drive and a bunch of empty DVDs and get right to burning them. No particular skill needed because the files are done and ready to go at a click. There's also a bit of a how-to on there that I hope is helpful for those confused. Piracy ho, friends!

if you want to understand why i'm the way i am about ofmd s2 please consider that ever since mermen first aired i have been rolling it over in my mind thinking "this feels so much like there ought to be all these very specific plot beats that are clearly set up like they're intended to be there and then got cut. but when i try to game out how long the episode would run if you put them all back in it's, like, an extra five to ten minutes of runtime for the episode at minimum. but that's impossible. surely they knew what runtime they had before they started, and nobody overwrites by ten minutes." and then over the course of the next several months samba confirmed there were WB-imposed runtime limits on s2 and djenks posted a joking-not-joking tweet about how the director's cut of mermen would be over 40 minutes long

The thing that gets me the most is thinking about how the s1 finale would look with the same restrictions. That episode was like 37 minutes long and I cannot even imagine what it would look like if it had been forced to be cut down to under 30 minutes.

Well, I say I can't imagine it, but I assume it would have super weird breakneck pacing to hit a lot of major emotional beats that really needed more time to breathe, be strung together in odd ways to cut everything possible around the absolutely essential character beats, and probably have a lot of staging issues and cuts that are uncharacteristically messy for a show and a team that's usually very polished. And that's exactly what Mermen is like. Frankly, thinking about it in terms of what s1e10 would look like if it had been cut in a similar way, I'm amazed Mermen is as good an episode as it managed to be based on pure good acting and strength of the included scenes alone. Nothing makes me angrier than thinking about the version of this episode we'll never get to see.

An eery lonesome woodland hunt for Bigfoot 🐾

"It is getting a bit dark, I'm sure we don't want your little Darby out here in the dark on his own"

via The Cryptid Factor Patreon

sorry but can we please accept that human beings are not particularly sexually dimorphic or do i have to live in the culture war until i fucking die

notable examples of sexual dimorphism among animals include: different skin/fur/feather colors and patterns, different body shapes and sizes, and body functions being so drastically different that for hundreds of years scientists had the impression they were different species.

Meanwhile in humans, neither skin nor hair color is different among sexes, body size difference has a relatively huge overlap making the averages barely distinguishable and body functions practically only differ in relation to child bearing and care. Any differences outside of that is either negligable or more influenced by local culture than people think.

so, yeah, let's get rid of gender essentialism based on outdated conceptualizations of sexual dimorphic species, please.

Happy New Year to my followers, mutuals and all the incredible people in this fandom ☠️ 🏳️‍🌈 💜

🎵BECAUSE THE 💜🦄 BELONGS TO US🎵

aka i hunted down a handful of dad's ofmd posts to fuel the clown flames even further