here’s a post about myself, please read!!
this is a niche one but instead of "they would not fuckin say that" it's "they would not fucking use American sign language".
ASL is not the only sign language. two british characters in your fanfiction would not be using ASL. England in fact has its own kind of sign language, BSL, that forms a sign family with many other sign languages around the world.
ASL isn't even the original member of its sign family, it comes from french sign language. do you know sign languages aren't related to spoken languages? that's an important one! it's not a direct 1:1 with people speaking English around the world. people in other countries don't learn ASL just in case they run into an usamerican or Canadian (who do often use it)
i know the entire world is the USA or whatever and sign languages do sometimes borrow from ASL for signs they don't have, but please be aware that there are other sign languages and families in the world that are not in fact ASL.
and on a mostly related note, a lot of media seems to only ever depict sign language in the context of mutism instead of the WAY WAY more common deafness. especially in fanworks where they don't want to have to deal with a character being more inconveniently disabled than just "can't talk", but it's still noticeable in normal media also.
going to a collection of signing characters and going "well you can't all be hearing but mute". like the ratio of deaf to mute characters would be so disproportionately innacurate it's almost insulting. past a certain point it feels like you just don't want to deal with deaf people.
Quotes (internal links preserved)
First: Sign languages are full-fledged natural languages with their own grammar and lexicon.[1] Sign languages are not universal and are usually not mutually intelligible,[2] although there are also similarities among different sign languages.
and
Second: The number of sign languages worldwide is not precisely known. Each country generally has its own native sign language; some have more than one. The 2021 edition of Ethnologue lists 150 sign languages,[5] while the SIGN-HUB Atlas of Sign Language Structures lists over 200 and notes that there are more that have not been documented or discovered yet.[6] As of 2021, Indo-Pakistani Sign Language is the most used sign language in the world, and Ethnologue ranks it as the 151st most "spoken" language in the world.[7]
I think the topic of consent is very important, and I think as an intellectually disabled person, it’s even more important to talk about what I was taught, and what my mom did.
My mom, who was a single woman at the time, explicitly taught me about consent. Why? Because she knew that I, as an intellectually disabled person and autistic person, needed to know it. And it needed to be drilled into my head the importance of consent. Not only did she teach me this, but she taught me how to communicate to trusted people if something happened. She knew that if she didn’t, the chances of me not knowing, or not understanding certain aspects of consent and sex in general, would be profoundly higher than my peers.
She noticed, she did the research, she taught and did what she could. And I am forever grateful for that. Intellectually disabled people, who have a higher rate of things happening to them and being abused, NEED to be taught about sex education, consent, and how to communicate if something were to happen. We are at a much higher rate of being sexually abused than our peers. And it is so so important that these things are taught to us so we are aware and able to protect ourselves and know when it’s time to contact a trusted adult.
two of these fit on a sheet of cardstock to make postcards
easily printed to 11x14 for posters, wheatpaste is easy and cheap to make
fits on thermal printer labels for quick stickers
Ceasefire now, Free Palestine
"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).
Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.
What I need for White Americans (ppl in general really, but I'm talking to the U.S.) to understand about Americans of Color is that You don't know Us, but We know YOU.
We've spent generations upon generations of our entire lives learning YOUR social norms, forced to assimilate to YOUR idea of society. We live and learn entirely separate cultures, but we also learn from birth what it means to have to cater to Whiteness in America. It's why I can name so many famous movies with white casts, but most white people didn't even know where "Bye Felicia" came from. It's why I was raised to professionally Code Switch from childhood, but grown white people struggle to even grasp the basics of the grammar of AAVE. It's why people who speak different languages think they have to give up their own mother tongue just to function in this country.
It's why you all are so uncomfortable with the idea of people of color questioning and rejecting what seems "normal" to you- and to be honest, I actually think older white generations are better at admitting this than younger ones. It's because what you know as normal is usually not "normal"- it's White. Whiteness is just as loud as any other presentation of race in this country, you just don't see it that way because everyone else has been forced to maintain your comfort. The entire system is built around it, and you don't even know it.
It's why it frustrates white Americans of some marginalization- queer, disabled, neurodivergent- because you do not have access to the "norm" as it is shown to you. But that frustration- literally everyone of color (who shares those identities btw) lives under that understanding.
Idk, I didn't really have a direction. I just think it's wild how so many conversations require this... Constant Verbal Leveling of the Playing Field simply because Whiteness blinds white people to what things ACTUALLY look like out here.
Yes, it's okay for white people to reblog. You are the target audience to consider these things.
op turned off reblogs on this post for safety reasons but gave me permission to repost it because it's an important message.
[ID: screenshot of a tumblr post and subsequent reblog. the username has been removed so the op can remain anonymous.
the main post reads, "random Jews throughout online spaces and the real world have nothing to do with Israel or its crimes against humanity and to equate Every Jewish Thing with Israel is exactly what Israel wants in order to retain the idea of cultural homogeneity / the idea that Israel is the only safe place for Jews"
The reblog reads, "the colonial state of Israel wants people to think that all Jews are affiliated with Israel so that goyim feel guilted into backing it otherwise they’re “antisemitic”, or it preys on Nazi ideas of a “global elite” controlling everything. Judaism pre-dates the state of Israel, and its presence is an exploitation of our religion by (mostly) the US in order to have an excuse to send Jews somewhere else and displace the people native to that region and now Palestinians are being slaughtered in order to build condos and beachfront hotels where their homes once stood
“Never again means now. Free Palestine” end ID.]
I saw people do this & adopted it myself, and it’s actually been super helpful—set a daily reminder to do your arab.org click of the day. It has been said ad nauseam at this point, but if each person in the thousands of people who engage on palestine posts clicked on this, we’d be raising thousands in revenue towards humanitarian aid. Don’t think your one little click is unnecessary. It adds up fast—but only if you actually do it.
A lot of people asked how they can help if they don’t have funds to spare. This is the most passive way to raise donations towards Palestinian aid.
Anyway if you see this you have to reblog and tag with a delight from ur day -- even the littlest thing counts
The number of people I've had to unfollow for posting blatant anti feminist shit the last few months. The number of weird misogynistic posts written in vaguely leftist lingo with, like, hundreds or thousands of notes. The way "not all men" is back. The trans community is splitting in half depending on if you hate trans women or not. Outside of lefty queer social circles, the normies are having girl dinner. Girl math. Women shouldn't work. Women shouldn't vote. My morning routine as a tradwife. Plastic surgery is self care. Women should serve their husbands. We don't need feminism anymore. Misogyny isn't real, what are you talking about? You're crazy
I had a whole "angry dyke" rant to my roommates regarding feminism last night. So many people twist feminism into this strange self-serving "its feminist to do this thing bc I feel like doing it!" while ignoring actual feminist problems in the world (ex Women in Gaza using rags for pads, women in the US being denied abortions). I am begging women to be angry again , be angry and ugly please
gay new yorker. faggot about it!
ever since i was a little girl i knew i wanted to be a nervous young man
when the essay prompt lets me get a little autistic with it
"why can't they just be friends" not in the homophobic way but in the "their platonic relationship in the source material is far more dynamic and complex than the sanitized personalities they gain as a result of shipping" way
"why can't they just be friends" not in the homophobic way but in the "this is a valuable exploration of intimacy and vulnerability that we’re conditioned to recognize only in romantic relationships but that can exist platonically as well" way