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@minusnegativezer0 / minusnegativezer0.tumblr.com

minus | they/them

Is anyone else just... exhausted?

Everyone living in the USA needs to inform themselves about "crisis pregnancy centers." They're not legitimate medical facilities and typically only have a nurse on staff, if even that.

"Crisis pregnancy centers" are UNREGULATED organizations that present themselves like medical facilities and often offer medical advice and information, but they are staffed by volunteers many of whom are not medical professionals, typically funded by churches and pro-life orgs, and exist to convince people not to have abortions. They often give "patients" misinformation and lies about abortion, contraception, and pregnancy.

A "crisis pregnancy center" in Kentucky was recently in the news because a nurse who volunteered there found that trans-vaginal ultrasound probes were being sanitized using disinfectant that was both expired and totally ineffective against HPV, a common sexually transmitted infection, meaning the clinic could have given their clients STIs with their shitty unregulated sanitation practices.

My MOM visited one of these "centers" when she was pregnant with me (a planned and wanted pregnancy) because she didn't know it was fake and unregulated!

People deserve real healthcare, not lies, randos dressed up in white coats, and disease-spreading, unsterilized equipment like it's the 1700s.

Fun fact, a lot of these places receive government funding 🙃

Really fucked up actually that the “you are valid” culture which, usefulness and uh, validity thereof aside, was intended to provide some some perspective for people who may have been blamed for harmless things they could not control morphed into “if strangers on the internet do not constantly tell me I’m good and perfect they are the oppressor” and “even constructively and gently telling me that I hold some power and responsibility to seek a better situation is an unspeakably cruel act.”

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Once, in an argument with my therapist about a decision I made to antagonize my mother, I snapped, “My feelings are valid,” and he shot back, “They’re valid because they’re real, but that doesn’t make them rational.”

It was a more nuanced and tailored conversation after that, but that particular quote struck me especially and made me realize how often I was conflating “valid” with “reasonable” or “justified.”

your feelings are valid == you are allowed to feel what you feel

your feelings are valid =/= whatever actions you take based purely on your emotions is reasonable and right

your feelings are valid. that doesn’t mean your understanding of a situation is correct; it doesn’t mean you haven’t misunderstood something; it doesn’t mean you have the right to hurt someone else because you feel hurt, or unhappy, or sad, or angry, even if they obviously ‘deserve’ it for how they made you feel

your feelings are valid; you are not wrong for feeling whatever way you feel. But just because you feel something doesn’t make it true

CREATE AMBITIOUS PIECES OF ART EVEN IF YOU DO NOT THINK YOU HAVE THE APPROPRIATE LEVEL OF ARTISTIC SKILL IT IS THE ONLY WAY YOU WILL IMPROVE IT IS THE ONLY WAY YOU WILL ACHIEVE THAT LEVEL

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It's also interesting how many times I've told someone that I'm not trans, I'm intersex and technically cis, and then they turn on this sort of "I'm talking to an idiot who doesn't know anything about complex gender shit" baby mode

As if being intersex and starting to grow a beard as an eleven year old little girl didn't force me to develop complex thoughts and ideas and opinions on gender and sex

As if I'm not in my thirties now and have been out of the intersex closet for almost five years and it took years of work to even accept my intersex body

As if I'm not a woman who has intentionally passed as a man for my own safety. For years. In Texas. And lived with the discomfort and dysphoria of hating being perceived as male despite needing to for my safety

But yeah. I don't know shit about gender, please be condescending to me and treat me like an idiot bc you don't know anything about intersex people or our experiences

[Image ID: tags that read,

“#intersex perspectives should be an integral part of queer and trans education #not because they can benefit perisex people #but because perisex people owe it to intersex people to include them in their worldview #intersex perspectives matter because intersex people matter #it's not an optional or bonus thing #to unlock Gender Nirvana #it is required so you don't end up being an asshole to intersex people”

End of ID]

Being a kid was so fucking funny we’d just go around lying to each other’s faces constantly to impress each other one of my classmates told me he was the first person to visit the sun and when I asked him what it was like to prove he was lying he said he didn’t remember because they sent him there when he was just a baby and to this day the mental image of NASA launching an unsupervised baby into the sun still makes me crack up