someone said “your art is never a waste of time” and i thought that was such a beautiful and truthful sentiment that i should share.
anyway. onto better things
onto better things thursday
do you all remember in the early 2010s where people were talking about freeing the nipple and that mixed-gender sports should become a thing and the removal of period tax and all of that and then some people realised that would mean trans people too ans they instantly decided to revert to bioessentialism 101 and now i have to see grating sentences like Well maybe jeopardy should be gender-segregated because males have a biological advantage in pressing a button
"queer spaces are for everyone but cis men! safe spaces include everyone but cis men!"
okay
- that will require stealth trans men to out themselves in order to receive help
- that will require closeted trans women to out themselves in order to receive help
- that will require nonbinary people who don't ""look nonbinary"" because they look too masculine to out themselves in order to receive help
- it will also alienate transfems & trans people who were AMAB who haven't realized they're trans yet from spaces that could provide them a safe place to explore gender & sexuality and be introduced to the idea of being trans
- trans people are eventually going to get uncomfortable with your hatred for cis men, because people who were AMAB are gonna wonder if you secretly hate them for being "actually men" and trans mascs are gonna wonder if you hate them for being men at all
- people attracted to cis men are going to feel uncomfortable when they try and bring up their love for men including cis men or bring their cis boyfriends/partners/friends to your spaces
- there are cis queer men & queer men who blur the lines between cis and trans and they have just as much a right to queer spaces as you do
- ^ intersex men also exist including intersex cis men
- there is never going to be a group of people who it is alright to blindly hate just because of circumstances of their birth or identity and every time you try you are going to end up hurting people. embrace compassion and nuance
noo don’t cry about july ending and the time passing, just remember the july poem :)
End tweet: “…I would probably be somewhere in the middle” and like. WHAT.”
Here’s the google books screenshot:
thinking about all the “small” art that’s ever existed. songs that were only ever sung in one village. stories written by children that got lost in the shuffle. personal paintings that didn’t survive the test of time. how they affected the lives of just a few, but still existed, still mattered to someone.
this is not a sad post!!!! this is a celebration!!!!! art is part of the human condition!!!!!!! we were born to create and share!!!!!!!!!!!
What y’all think ‘gifted child’ discourse is saying: I used to be special and now I’m not and that makes me sad.
What ‘gifted child’ discourse is ACTUALLY saying: The way many educational systems treat children who’ve been identified as ‘gifted’ is actively harmful in that it a. obliges kids to give up socialising with their same-age peers in favour of constantly courting the approval of adult ‘mentors’ who mostly don’t give a shit about them, b. demands that they tie their entire identity to a set of standards that’s not merely unsustainable, but intentionally so, because its unstated purpose is to weed out the ‘unworthy’ rather than to provide useful goals for self-improvement, and c. denies them opportunities to learn useful life skills in favour of training them up in an excruciatingly narrow academic skill-set that’s basically useless outside of an institutional career path that the vast majority of them will never be allowed to pursue.
also: the way “gifted” children are taught largely just rewards them for already knowing things or having a specific skill come easily to them, and thus not only gives them severe anxiety about asking for help or not knowing something right away for fear of disappointing those adult mentors, but also actively discourages them from learning HOW to learn things and pick up new skills, thus sabotaging any life they might try to pursue outside of that institutional career.
Plus, not only is it possible to be “twice exceptional” - aka “gifted” and have a disability that can make learning more difficult - if you’re “gifted”, people usually don’t notice you have a disability.
So you spend your life split between being academically smart and then also unable to do basic, day-to-day functions and being told that you’re “too smart to struggle with this”.
Like, I do believe that neurotypical “gifted” kids are also fucked up by the system, but the majority of people who I personally know who complained about the system turned out to be neurodivergent in some way but didn’t know when they originally started in “gifted child” discourse.
And I’m going to take a stab and say that the people hit the hardest by this are probably women with ADHD, as their presentation usually looks like their life falling apart at/post-uni.
So you can spend your entire life being told you’re definitely going to succeed - and usually you’re pushed to specific career/life goals - and then overnight, your life falls apart and you can’t figure out why.
And I’m going to take a stab and say that the people hit the hardest by this are probably women with ADHD, as their presentation usually looks like their life falling apart at/post-uni.
And women with autism.
Loved being treated like I was gifted while obviously and desperately struggling with math. When I was really little I was in a class for children who sucked at math. I never got better at math, ever. But they took me out of that class. teachers just hand waved it away and forced me into harder and harder classes. Even when I managed not to get forced into a higher level class, they still grouped me in the “smart” class. Which was just mortifying because all the kids who uniformly had high grades saw how much I could t get it. Teachers were pissed I wasn’t doing well in their class when I could do well in other classes.
I am STILL bad at math (too gay). which doesn’t actually matter when you’re an adult, it’s FINE! It’s FINE to suck at math! But no one tells you that it’s okay to suck at math, or that it’s ok to suck at some things and excel at others. Even in college I had to take math classes (FOR WHAT?! )
No one tells you that it’s not impossible or weird to be good at some things and not others. Oh and surprise, I’m a woman and didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD until I was in my 20s.
You can bend over backwards trying not to be one of “those” cringey queers who wears pride everywhere and goes by arson and has they/it/fluff/pixel/boo pronouns on a catgender pin they wear everywhere and suppress everything “extra” unlikable about your identity and pass as a “normal” cishet and mock everyone who dyes their hair for pride and wears rainbow nail polish and guess what? Conservatives will still want you dead. There is no appeasing them. Stand by your community. Maybe you’ll find that arson (they/it/fluff/pixel/boo) is going to be the best goddamn person to have in your corner when the republicans you’ve given up your life to placate inevitably turn on you and try to sentence you to death because any amount of queer is too damn queer. Maybe you’ll find that we are a community for a reason. We’re all equally degenerate in the eyes in conservatives and equally worthy of joy and life in the eyes of the “weird” queer community you shun.
Wild how the queer community has been fighting tooth and nail for generations to have some semblance of inclusion and just the desire to not be beaten, arrested, or killed for existing.
Then there is less than 10 years of policies put in place to help us start being treated more humanely and the Conservative party is like “Actually we rather you die again” openly and proudly.
Wild how allowing ppl to live has made them so angry and more open about their fascism.
Meanwhile half of the younger queers online are too preoccupied with terminology and gatekeeping fandom engagement while our country actively works to eradicate the community honing social media to propagate propaganda.
It is going to sound mean and im not gonna sugarcoat it:
Telling other lgbtqia members that using the term “queer” is problematic and bad is more aligned with conservative’s views of hiding and destroying queerness. When you get that gatekeeping towards your own community you are making it easier to break us apart.
They aren't going to stop with "don't say gay", they aren't going to stop with "no trans healthcare", they aren't going to stop with bathrooms or sports teams or "parental rights". They want to revoke your marriage, they want to take away your kids, they want to fire you for being gay, they want to arrest you for being GNC, they want to re-educate you for being ace, they want you poor, homeless, despairing and dead--and they want all that as an example to the next generation of queer people, so they stay closeted and paranoid.
And if they get everything on that wish list, they'll come for more. You're not safe as a rich white gay man; you're not safe as a middle-class femme lesbian; you're not safe as a "passing" transperson with all your paperwork legally sealed. Stand with the entire queer community or sooner or later you'll be on the right's chopping block.
Being openly not-straight, of any variety, was punishable as a CRIME in much of the US until 20 years ago. Lawrence v Texas was in 2003.
We've had 20 years of safety - based on a SCOTUS ruling based, in large part, on Roe v Wade.
Which, y'know, they overthrew recently, just before it could reach its 50 year mark. And in doing so, Alito mentioned that Lawrence and Griswold were both potential future targets.
Griswold v Connecticut is the 1965 case giving married people the right to access to birth control. They want to overturn that, too.
The conservative & alt-right movements are thrilled to see so much infighting among leftists and the queer communities; it'll make it so much easier for them to drive in the wedges they'll use to go after all of us.
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
Hell yeah moon holiday
Don't forget to leave oatmeal out on the roof for Buzz tonight!
i think if we’re going to have conversations about consent we should talk about how consenting to something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be a good experience, and having a bad experience doesn’t necessarily mean someone violated your consent. this can apply to a lot of situations but the two i’m thinking of right now are sex and transition.
you’re getting it on with someone. you enthusiastically consent to having sex with them. afterward, you feel a little weird about it. maybe even distressed. maybe they did something you didn’t enjoy and in the moment you just didn’t say anything. maybe you just realized after the fact that you were not in a good headspace for sex and now your mental health is declining. that doesn’t inherently mean the person you had sex with violated your consent. sometimes it just means you need to take a break from sex or work on communicating your needs or boundaries better during sex.
and with transition, i feel like this is something that gets consistently overlooked but like. there will never be zero detransitioners. there will always be people who decide that actually transition wasn’t right for them. they could have had the best most thorough doctors in the world who did everything by the book and got full informed consent at every step. and some people are still going to decide they don’t like the changes and wish they hadn’t transitioned. that doesn’t mean that the doctors violated their consent, and that doesn’t mean that transition shouldn’t be available to anyone. it just means that we need to have more resources available for folks who detransition.
regret does not automatically mean someone did something wrong. regret is simply one possible result of having bodily autonomy, and i think we need to get more comfortable with that.
“women love inherently different from men…oh but btw trans women are still women and included in this!!:)))” you are still boxing people into 2 distinct immutable categories
you seriously limit yourself when you claim that women and men are inherently different in the way we love, the way we fuck, the way we appreciate the world. there will always be people who defy the binary, always people who didn’t have the “typical” youth of their assigned gender. what do you say to people who feel like both, to trans people who can’t completely reject the gender they’ve lived previously? to the genderqueer and the genderfluid? have you considered that the effort to make gender more nuanced isn’t to claim that trans people are still like their agab, but because those experiences as our agab still mean a lot to some of us? you are so quick to shoo in trans folks into gender essentialism that you forget we have lived our whole lives with an ill-fitting gender suit, and casually throwing us into another category does not erase the liminality we feel. i can’t speak for everyone, but i know a lot of people feel this way.
did my love for women, as a bisexual, inherently change when i realized i was trans? is it different when one day i feel like a woman and another a man? is my love for men lesser than what i feel for woman? why do you limit yourself like this?????
Analysis of data from dozens of foraging societies around the world shows that women hunt in at least 79% of these societies, opposing the widespread belief that men exclusively hunt and women exclusively gather. Abigail Anderson of Seattle Pacific University, US, and colleagues presented these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on June 28, 2023. A common belief holds that, among foraging populations, men have typically hunted animals while women gathered plant products for food. However, mounting archaeological evidence from across human history and prehistory is challenging this paradigm; for instance, women in many societies have been found buried alongside big-game hunting tools. Some researchers have suggested that women's role as hunters was confined to the past, with more recent foraging societies following the paradigm of men as hunters and women as gatherers. To investigate that possibility, Anderson and colleagues analyzed data from the past 100 years on 63 foraging societies around the world, including societies in North and South America, Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Oceanic region. They found that women hunt in 79% of the analyzed societies, regardless of their status as mothers. More than 70% of female hunting appears to be intentional—as opposed to opportunistic killing of animals encountered while performing other activities, and intentional hunting by women appears to target game of all sizes, most often large game. The analysis also revealed that women are actively involved in teaching hunting practices and that they often employ a greater variety of weapon choice and hunting strategies than men. These findings suggest that, in many foraging societies, women are skilled hunters and play an instrumental role in the practice, adding to the evidence opposing long-held perceptions about gender roles in foraging societies. The authors note that these stereotypes have influenced previous archaeological studies, with, for instance, some researchers reluctant to interpret objects buried with women as hunting tools. They call for reevaluation of such evidence and caution against misapplying the idea of men as hunters and women as gatherers in future research. The authors add, "Evidence from around the world shows that women participate in subsistence hunting in the majority of cultures."
Source: phys.org
nice-worm-deactivated20200906
reblog the money pigeon for a financially stable future
I reblog the money pigeon because I love him.
I reblog the money pigeon because its a dinosaur
Some rando: You should think about stopping your prescription
Me: My pills make me not want to die tho
They: You shouldn’t want to die, that’s not normal
Me: Yeah that’s why I’m taking my pills
Again: But you aren’t the *real* you when you’re on your pills
Me: I’m the alive version of me
An actual doctor, once: “Relying On A Chemical Crutch For A Hormonal Imbalance Denies The Fortitude Of The Human Soul”
Me: Cool so like I’m agnostic
They: “But you might be on pills the rest of your life!”
Me: “So?”
Good! That means that I have a “rest of” my life to continue living!
Thanks to the pills.
Meanwhile, no person ever: “You should think about giving up your insulin/antiretrovirals/beta blockers/anti-rejection drugs/prosthetic legs/daily multivitamin, because using those your whole life is bad for some reason”
Oh no, they do that too.
we-are-not-ok
I have a kidney transplant. A woman once told me she didn’t believe in organ transplants and that people should just die when they’re meant to.
Sounds like a great set-up for a murder
People who are fully healthy, fit and neurotypical seem to think they are that way because they’re doing something right that the rest of us haven’t thought of, and not just because they got lucky
Speaking of the luck of the non-disabled…I once terrorized a Karen who was using me to teach her entitled kid that disabled people are Other and should not be treated with respect. I told her (truthfully) that until I was twenty-eight, I wasn’t visibly disabled. Then a defective chromosome that I hadn’t known about kicked in. So my luck ran out. But until then, I had been normal–just…like…her.
The sheer terror on her face as the concept of “You mean I’ve just been lucky so far?” seeped into her brain was a thing of beauty.
People who are fully healthy, fit and neurotypical seem to think they are that way because they’re doing something right that the rest of us haven’t thought of, and not just because they got lucky
deeksspeaksandsneaks
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“You are one stroke of bad luck, common viral illness, or traumatic event away from being just like me” is honestly the most terrifying thing you can tell an abled person - and you should. I was healthy and fit and doing everything ‘right’ too - right up until some inner switch flipped and my body crumbled right out from under me.
For those that don't know, David Leatherwood is a former official for the anti-trans LGB organization Gays Against Groomers (GAG) who just left because it came out that the leader, Jaimee Michell, of the organization is on DeSantis's payroll and the organization is now essentially acting as an arm of DeSantis's campaign.
In his parting statement, he reiterated he is still extremely anti-trans and anti-drag, "there is a MAJOR difference between regular gay people who love America and Alphabet extremists who push radical woke ideology."
He's still a bigot, still an asshole, and he just shifted from the Leopard's Eating People's Faces Party to the Cheetah's Eating People's Faces Party.
Yall wanna be gnc and androgynous but hate intersex people and the idea of being intersex so much, I remember reading about PCOS potentially being considered an intersex disorder and having 100s of people dismiss it because "we can't just be calling 1 in 10 women intersex" or being in transmasc spaces and constantly being told that bottom growth and T dicks are undesirable and that people find non standard genetalia gross, in a GENDER INCLUSIVE SPACE.
The lgbt Community seriously needs to grapple with its hatred of intersex features and stop seeing androgyny that isn't pretty waify white person. You all love femme presenting androgyny but hate when people are androgynous in a broad or hairy way.
kind of disapointed to see people once again seeing straight past the point of this post being about intersex people to talk about androgyny in a gender identity way, and whilst thats extremely cool and valid to explore, there are a million posts talking about this. for once i am asking people to listen to and care about intersex people as they exist on their own, we exist outside of intersectionality for trans people as well.