They are so chibi.

Had to illustrate what I envision literally every time I see this text post

i’ve stopped being mentally ill in the unhappy and always in a crisis way, I am now mentally ill in the mostly stable and happy but there’s clearly something weird going on way

the kind where no one is worried about me anymore but everyone knows there’s something wrong with me

Happy APAHM and here’s a poem comic about my experiences being trans and Chinese I did in three days for my English class! 

Hey everyone!! I just wanted to say thank you so much for 17k+ notes. This is the farthest my art has ever reached, and out of all my pieces, I’m so glad it could have been this one. It’s been so so so nice to read the tags and find it connecting with so many other people, and it’s been so so so nice to see other trans Chinese people finding the comic? It’s so comforting to see other people having similar experiences to mine and it’s just such a good feeling to know we’re not alone in this :) So thank you all!!!!

Oh and- Bodhisattva Guanshiyin is transfem but to clarify, she is traditionally nonbinary!!

MORE CHINESE TRANS CONTENT BLEASE

Did you know that Humble Bundle currently has a bundle where you can get the entire Murderbots Diaries series in audio for only $20?

ends June 17th

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love (via queenofattolia)

Not ironically, not unironically, but in a secret third way, I really find that spite poetry by k-12 and equivalent students about how much they hate poetry is some of the best poetry out there

It is the poetry of malicious compliance.

It expresses a timeless emotion - being young, in school, frustrated with that one subject that you just find so boring it makes you want to chew through the drywall and run off into the woods.

You've got an assignment that you hate. The rubric doesn't say anything against saying exactly where you want the teacher/principal/school board to stick this damned assignment - only that you must write in a certain format.

And some of these students really go above and beyond! They not only stick to the format demanded by the assignment, they figure out how to cram another structure in there flawlessly! I saw someone make a series of RHYMING haiku for this purpose!

All to say - "I hate poetry," or at least, "I hate everything English class is telling me about poetry".

And it's genuinely good.

Good/terrible news! There's audio!

Oh yeah, this is absolutely true! The area of the North of England where they grow most of it is sometimes referred to as the Rhubarb Triangle. The centre of it is the city of Wakefield, which holds an annual Rhubarb Festival.

pet peeve time

it's ghoulish that we turn making fun of unusual baby names into some kind of sport. why is this the one area of culture where pedantic, hypercritical conservatism is fine and cool? there used to be an epidemic of so-called comedians in the US making fun of black names (because they thought black people were stupid!) and then when blatant racism became a faux pas in certain circles of white society they were all just like "we meant women are stupid, actually, as well as all white people in different social classes than us" and so far we've all gone "oh, that's fine!" and passed around memes of pregnant women naming their kids "Arson" or "Kayleieiigh" or whatever the fuck is supposed to be funny at the time.

I just looked at the top ten baby names in the US by binary gender and guess what, most of them date back to at least the 14th century if not much further, because again, naming conventions are astonishingly conservative. the exceptions? "Lily", because flower names for girls weren't popularized until the 1800s, and possibly "Mia" and "Aiden", which are, respectively, a diminutive version of a much older name, and an anglicized spelling of a much older name. your cousin who named their kid something weird is not necessarily indicative of a widespread societal collapse that must by guarded against by those wise preservers of our culture, internet trolls.

you are not being oppressed because somewhere a baby has a name that's spelled weird or sounds weird. in fact, that baby's name affects you in no way whatsoever, and fixating on it is deranged, "fall of civilization" behavior that makes you sound like you spent the 90s forwarding chain e-mails about ghetto kids named Oranjello and Lemonjello, because you're a tool. that's my hot take today!

adults can in fact change their names if they hate them. kids who dislike their names often end up going by nicknames. it is not child abuse to give your kid an unusual name! sometimes kids hate their traditional names, even, because names are super personal. sometimes kids are trans! The Public Universal Friend was born in 1752, you literally cannot stop people given traditional names from renaming themselves something weirder as an adult, and you still have to treat them with respect if they choose to do so!

naming a kid a nearly unpronounceable string of characters may in fact be the only remotely cool thing Elon Musk has ever done in his life, but it was almost certainly Grimes' idea

it’s not enough to romanticize mobility aids. we have to eroticize them

btw i am talking about all mobility aids. canes of course, but walkers. wheelchairs. power chairs. crutches. even transfer slings

aids become very real parts of not only how we move through our world but also how we sense it, and sex is about kinetics and sensing at its core, isn’t it?

for me, movement with my aids is a very deliberate, thoughtful thing. with my low proprioception i often get more neurofeedback from the way my aids move than from my limbs themselves. with my cane i notice deeply the barest change in pressure against the ground; with my walker i am so aware of the texture of the terrain; with my manual wheelchair i am engaged in every part of my limbs as something that works in tandem to propel me, or as a function of the terrain along which i move. to say nothing of the intimacy of being pushed by someone else (someone you trust) in a manual chair. to entrust your movement, your body, to them.

this post was ultimately brought to you by two things:

1. a porno that was presented by one of its actors at a disability & sexuality conference i presented at in 2019. one of the actors was a full time wheelchair user and used a transfer sling to get in and out of bed. the wheelchair - its wheels, its metal skeleton, its arms - was touched and worshiped and pleasured like any other part of his body; the transfer was tender and savored, not just a barrier to getting him naked in bed but a crucial part of his movement, something to enjoy in and of itself. i will never forget watching that film. it was the difference between fetishizing and worshiping, the difference between excluding and integrating.

2. you can use mobility aids in kink as much as you can in vanilla sex. they are a part of your body. they carry motion and weight and sensation and messages. you do not have to see your mobility aid as something that is secondary to you, as an obstacle in being confident or aloof or obedient or naughty. imagine the ways that your mobility aid can be a part of the messages you are already sending, a part of the person that you are allowing yourself to be and inhabit. to realize that your mobility aid can be a part of the scene, not just prop, not just annoyance, but part of the scene as much as you and your body are, is to open up a doorway into an entirely new world, one where you are and always have been whole

partnered sex with mobility aids is particularly incredible, because you get to share the world-sensing that was previously uniquely yours with a partner. it is indescribably intimate and unbelievably cool. it is fucking thrilling.

write more, draw more, fuck more with mobility aids.

an eloquent take down of the "people are self diagnosing autism to be trendy and for attention" take that morons have been echoing on tiktok

[Start Video Transcription:

Clip 1 is of someone responding to a comment that reads “Exactly!!!! (Repeated exclamation marks) My sister is convinced she’s autistic and even if the psychiatrist doesn’t agree with that, she said that the diagnosis were misogynistic”.

The person says, “It’s very strange that all the girls that have “autism” (in air quotes) on here have like, extremely high-functioning Aspergers but it’s barely detectable.”

Clip 2: “Hi I’m Bree, and this is my DSM (holding up a copy of the DSM-5) and I’m diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and I’m going to tell you everything wrong with what you just said. But first, I have to say I’m pretty intrigued by you because I think that you’re one of those people who speaks really articulately but without any substance or knowledge and you get away with giving hot takes like this on the Internet because people just don’t know the difference between someone who speaks well and someone who speaks intelligently. But I digress. Your use of functioning labels and the term “Aspergers” lets me know that you have never been within spitting distance of this book, let alone read and comprehended the current diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder. And if you’re going to give takes like this on the Internet, you should probably spend about 10 seconds Googling so that you can make sure that your terminology isn’t outdated by about a decade.

First and foremost, yes. The diagnostic criteria for autism is misogynistic in the sense that it was based on boys. In fact, the literal Nazi that you are naming – Hans Asperger – believed that it only occurred in boys. We have a wealth of research now to let us know that isn’t true. The problem is, research is continuous and always evolving, and it takes a really long time for research to be reflected in the diagnostic criteria and for psychiatrists and psychologists to update their own education and begin to apply the knowledge to their autism assessments.

The DSM-5 text revision, which just came out at the end of 2022, is the first version of the DSM to contain a section about sex and gender related diagnostic issues, which clearly states (here, an underlined section of the DSM-5 is shown) “Girls without intellectual impairments or language delays may go unrecognized, perhaps because of subtler manifestation of social and communication difficulties. In comparison with males with autism spectrum disorder, females may have better reciprocal conversation, and be more likely to share interests, to integrate verbal and nonverbal behaviour, and to modify their behaviour by situation despite having similar social understanding difficulties as males.” So, this “barely detectable” (in air quotes) autism that you’re referring to is clearly reflected in the DSM as something called masking, and should be taken into consideration during diagnostic evaluation. Due to the fact that this was just added to the DSM, we’re going to have to catch up a little bit, meaning that a lot of teenage girls and adult women are going to be diagnosed with autism even though they went undetected as a child.

And a lot of us didn’t go undetected and just don’t know it. I ordered my medical records and found out that my paediatrician had made a note that he suspected I was autistic, and my mental health records from an agency between the ages of 11 and 19 had also documented multiple times that I was displaying traits of autism, but nobody at the agency was qualified to diagnose me, so I never got the diagnosis. I am lucky that when I was diagnosed at the age of 20, my evaluator was competent enough to know that my social deficit was impacted by masking, even before this version of the DSM was released. But not all psychiatrists and psychologists are that competent, and they also don’t all specialise in autism diagnosis. If you go see your regular psychiatrist who was treating you for something like bipolar disorder or OCD, and you tell them that you suspect you might actually be autistic instead, they probably are not qualified to evaluate you for autism, which is why you often leave without the diagnosis.

Being unable to find a qualified, professional who can evaluate you accurately does not mean that you are not autistic.  

Now that we’ve talked about professional diagnosis, let’s talk about self-diagnosis, which is recognised and supported by the autistic community and requires a whole lot more than just going on the internet and seeing videos of people and saying “Hey, I relate to that! I must be autistic.” People who are self-diagnosed get a copy of the diagnostic criteria and they compile somewhat of a binder that includes all of the autistic traits that they do have, and other behaviours. They interview family members to make sure that the onset was at the correct developmental stage. They tend to take tests like autism screening questionnaires, or the AQ, or the RAADS-R, to see if they are scoring within the range that autistic people score in, and most importantly, most of them seek out peer approval. Meaning they go to a person who is professionally diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, provide this binder to them, and say “What do you think?” Although there’s no research on this yet, I have been told by several professionals who evaluate for autism, that almost everybody who comes in self-diagnosed, leaves with a professional diagnosis.

Your theory that people with anxiety and ADHD are just using the autism label or are just getting diagnosed with autism because they feel like anxiety and ADHD are not being taken seriously anymore is not only absurd, but tells me that you know nothing about autism, because there is very little overlap between autism spectrum disorder, ADHD, and anxiety in terms of diagnostic criteria. There is a high rate of comorbidity though. Autistic people experience a very specific kind of anxiety, and a lot of autistic people have ADHD, so it’s not unusual for a person diagnosed with anxiety and diagnosed with ADHD to then be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. That’s actually quite a normal progression of things.

Another thing that has caused a delay in identifying autistic girls is that autism wasn’t added to the DSM until the DSM-3, which was published in 1980. Now, autism has a genetic link, and it is pretty common if one person in your family is autistic, that there are other autistic people in your family as well. But my parents were born in the 60’s, and I was born in the 90’s, so my parents would not have been diagnosed autistic as children if either of them were, because it wasn’t added to the DSM until they were adults. For most of my generation, we didn’t have a documented genetic link, whereas for the generations that come after me as the first person in my family to be diagnosed autistic, they will have a documented, identifiable link to autism which will then make diagnosis easier for them if they are exhibiting traits of autism. Like, our awareness of autism is so new, that we’re still catching up from that, let alone catching up to additional research and changes to the diagnostic criteria.

Now, let’s talk about your follow-up video where you said that teens want to be autistic so they have a sense of community, but I can assure you as an autistic person, that community in my real everyday life is very limited. And I know what you’re thinking, “well, they want to have a community on the internet. But having community on the internet is no match for having community in person. And I know that because I came out as queer at the age of 12, having had zero community in person but I was a Tumblr kid. So I had a community on the internet, and I guarantee you it never once made me feel more loved, supported, or like I had a legitimate community to rely on. So, I’m not sure why anybody would intentionally other themselves in real life in order to have “community” on the internet.

What I think that you don’t understand and maybe your take is coming from being chronically online, but autism isn’t “trendy” in person. There is so much stigma attached to the diagnosis, and being openly autistic affects your education, your relationships, it affects everything and it others you.

Diagnosis is not an exact science, and there probably is a small number of people, both professionally diagnosed and self-diagnosed, that are not actually autistic. However, misdiagnosis, more frequently happens the other way around, where people, specifically women, tend to be diagnosed with things like bipolar disorder, BPD, OCD, anxiety, or ADHD, when in reality they’re just autistic.

Diagnosis is a privilege, and there are so many barriers to diagnosis that include things like race, sex, class etc. I’m sorry that we don’t present “autistic” enough for you on the internet, but I would love to see in a room with me while I have a meltdown and then try to tell me that my autism is “undetectable”.

If you’re wondering why you tend to see only low support need autistic people on this app, it’s because this app is most accessible to us, and the platform tends to push out our content more than the content of other people in the autistic community, which is really a shame because we want you to hear all of the voices of the community.

I swear, from now on, people that want to talk about autism like this on the internet, better be able to tell me off the top of their head what the diagnostic code for autism spectrum disorder is, and what changes were made to the diagnostic criteria for the DSM-5-TR, because if you cant do that, you just shouldn’t fucking be speaking on it.

I have heard a lot of uneducated takes about autism on the internet, but yours is by far the worst. And you’re doing a lot more harm to the actually autistic community than people who are self-diagnosing, so maybe just be quiet.

/End Video Transcription]

Massive Minnesota W read em for yourself

I was planning to drop the items from the linked tweet thread onto this post, but there are SO MANY new bills that it became a wall of text - line after line after line of incredible things Minnesota has enacted in a single session.

I'm.... actually blown away. the political landscape often feels so hopeless, but the DFL pulled themselves together, getting every member on board for these changes - real changes that are going to protect health, keep people out of jail and housed, and improve work conditions massively. this should be a beacon for every other state democratic party - change doesn't have to be incremental. things can get better and they can get better right now. get crackin'.

feeling bored i’m gonna dox a fish

ok here goes

ocean

what the fub

No one: Tumblr gif makers: *downloads a 70GB video file just to make one gifset of some blorbo that’ll only get 120 notes*

@ all my American friends and followers: change IS possible!!!! It is happening, it is imminent, KEEP FIGHTING!!! KEEP SHOUTING!!! KEEP IT UP!!!!

I know so many loud people make fun of you but we are ROOTING FOR YOU ACROSS THE WORLD!!! SOCIALISM IS REACHING YOU, A LOT OF YOUR POLITICIANS ARE FIGHTING!!! VOTE AND FIGHT WITH THEM!!!

Disabled people actually do matter more than ecofascist ideas about green living