Dedicated to those who live in spite of the horrors
Spent a whole month working on this project and here it is just in time for my city's indie comic artist fest. Wanted to write something profound here but I think the comic says it all. Hope y'all enjoy.
Just so we’re all clear, it is okay to miss people you no longer want in your life.
this is so important
some people genuinely have trouble with never being told this. i am reblogging this post in case that includes any of you in my audience.
You’re missing the memories, not the person them self
You miss the person you thought they were, not who they turned out to be, and that’s okay.
Sometimes you just miss the person you were around them, or the things that happened when you were with them, and you don’t really miss them, and that’s okay, too.
the city where we live doesn't allow public barbecues so my brother fucking welded a grill to a handcart and now hosts "chill and grill sessions" where he sends all his friends his live location so they can hunt him down on their bikes with sausages in their backpacks while he carts it around evading the police like some sort of barbecue vigilante, grilling on the run. i have never been prouder of him
vent post. There are two stories i was told in my teenage years that even before i had a real concept of trans issues made me uninterested in discussing the supposed sacredness and safety of separated sex-based spaces.
First, when i was like 13 or 14 my PE teacher told us about a time she went to a women's public restroom, some guy was hanging out outside the bathrooms, she didn't think anything of it, went to the bathroom, and he walked in after her and like, creeped on her over the top of the stall. She was ok, she wasn't telling us this to scare us, just telling us what to do in situations like that (and iirc she was telling the whole co-ed class this, not just girls, bc it's useful for everyone), but this taught me immediately and forever that there's nothing actually keeping these spaces separate really, that anyone can be a creep in any space, and that establishing a space like that as for women only isn't actually particularly useful for safety.
Second, when i was 16 i was at an anime convention, a friendly acquaintance of mine and i ended up in conversation outside, and he showed me his bare wrist and told me he'd been kicked out. A female friend of his had stepped in dog poop outside, and between that and the stress of the convention she'd had a bit of an emotional breakdown, so being her friend, he started comforting her and ushered her into the women's restroom so they could wash the poop off her shoe together. And because he was a man who went into the women's bathroom, he got kicked out, no matter that he was doing something that was actually beneficial to a woman. Punishing a woman's friend for supporting her was supposed to... protect her somehow? This made it clear to me that a no-exceptions rule separating the sexes like that wasn't actually inherently good for everyone.
And this isn't even getting into me as a child needing to accompany my younger sister to the restroom when we were out with just my dad because she had certain support needs past the age he felt comfortable bringing her into the men's room with him. And what if I'd been born a boy, or she'd been the first born? Who's helping her then?
And of course even putting all this aside, we should always prioritize compassion and support anyway. But i never even needed to meet a trans person to know that "keeping men out of women's bathrooms" is silly nonsense. But trans people also need to pee anyway and as humans they have that right, so leave them the fuck alone. your precious women's restroom is just a fucking room with a door, holy shit give it a fucking rest, if someone is attacking you in the bathroom that's bad and if someone is in there to pee that's good and it doesn't fucking matter what their junk is or was when they were born.
a woman could have done the exact same thing to my PE teacher and it would have also been bad no matter how "supposed" to be in the restroom she was, and no one should ever be punished for helping a crying friend wash their shoe.
Anyway i know I'm speaking to like-minded folks here, i just think about those two stories literally every time bathroom gender shit comes up and it pisses me off.
I fucking knew it, I SAID it: they're making ADHD people the next culture war targets. They will 'just ask questions' until we lose every scrap of ground we've gained in the last decade and more. We may not quite inspire the same level of hatred as a sexual minority, but we can very easily be made to inspire disdain and that also works.
They will strip us of our accomodations and our medications and try to stifle any sense of shared identity, and if that kills some of us, oh well. So long as it fuels another outrage cycle, fine.
So many of the tropes they've been using on trans people work extremely well on ADHD people too! "There are too many of these people suddenly! It must be a fad! It spreads through friend groups! And online! People are going private for diagnoses and that's bad! They are using pOwERfUl medical interventions and we think it's freaky!"
I saw the first ripples of this in terf circles about two years ago. And of course it's spread.
6% of British ADHD people lost their jobs in the last year thanks to the meds shortage. SIX PER CENT! And that just made these ghouls go "ooh, tasty, what else can we do?"
Recently an 'expert' was on the BBC saying people see ADHD diagnosis as a "golden ticket." Laurence Fox has been ranting that the condition doesn't exist and threatening "'you won't poison my child's body [with ADHD meds] against my consent"
People need to be aware this is going to get worse. Maybe, if we're lucky, it won't get really bad. But it's going to get worse than it is now.
Fuck. This came along sooner than I thought.
Un-fucking-herd.
Motherfuckers.
I got diagnosed at 36, got prescribed adderall, and went from continually dependent on men in order to to afford housing for myself, to able to hold a steady job for the first time in my life, and even to achieve promotions.
Late diagnoses are a sign of people realizing that they don't need to suffer. It's not a fad, it's a cultural shift toward rejection of pointless, unnecessary struggle.
We seriously need the boomers to get the fuck out of legislation.
Pour one out for a real one.
Reading up on him, he was a pretty cool guy. He was one of the first people to stand up to John Money about his theories of gender development and position that intersex infants should receive surgery and never be told about it using his abuse of David Reimer as ‘proof’, asserting that Money didn’t have the evidence and standing his ground even when Money straight up started screaming at him. And then later he was proven right when he got into contact with David Reimer, not only discovering proof that Money was wrong but also how abusive and horrific Money had been. He then went on to write advocating for intersex and trans rights and to avoid unnecessary procedures on intersex people without full informed consent and that intersex people are part of natural human variation and that we deserve acceptance and not to be treated like a disorder.
A quote I really like from him: ‘Nature loves diversity, society hates it’
excuse me I'mtearing up a bit
When someone has a chronic illness or is disabled and can't work, they say a few common things.
It must be nice to sit around all day/sleep all day.
I wish I could sit around all day and not work.
I wish I could sleep all the time.
They don't want to sleep as much as we have to. They'd feel sick and sluggish.
They don't want to sit around the house all day not doing anything. They'd be bored out of their fucking skull.
It's so unbelievably fucking frustrating, but there's a fundamental lack of understanding.
They liken our lives to a vacation, imagining that it's fun and relaxing and we can do whatever fun things we want to all the time.
In reality, it should be likened to an extended hospital stay. You can't do anything and you feel like shit.
My biggest needlefelt project ever!! I'm so happy with how she came out and she's so fun to wear. I wanted to look like an art doll myself, so I used copper wire for the whiskers and made big handpainted eyes. this is the first fursuit head I've made, but I'd like to make something with even more color since this material is so flexible that you can essentially "paint" with it.
reblogging SPECIFICALLY for the End Note which is widely applicable
For any trans (or really any queer) kids who are struggling through this right now, I want you to know
This is not your fault,
you are not wrong,
it wouldn’t be fixed if you were just somehow a different person
Because this guy is right, love is unconditional and this type of parent only loves you on the condition that you are exactly what they want you to be
Reblogging this because it definitely didn't make me cry.
And I'm gonna say jt right here
This doesn't just apply to parents. Your spouse reacts like this? Your friends? Same issue.
"Be exactly how I want you to be or I won't love you" isn't love, it's abuse. From whoever, to whoever, that's abuse. When you've reached the point where someone you love, who you want to love you, is laying down that line that's abuse.
“Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.”
— Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)
Can I just say I love how every tumblr weaver looks at inkle/tablet weaving and goes “Hm… pride flag band.”
I went out and bought all the colours today!!
There’s no pink or green in this picture because they were already in my stash. And I have black and white and cream, too.
I went out today because I wanted to do a light blue diamond pattern, but what if… rainbow hearts in Baltic pickup on a black background…
I do like the light purple but I’m leaning towards the dark purple to match all the vibrant tones. The other option is to use both purples and get rid of the pink, but I’m actually not fond of that pink so this is a great way to use it.
I’ve never actually seen Baltic pickup where the pattern threads are different colours but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work, right?
Rainbow hearts!!
Vincent van Gogh, from a letter to his brother Theo
Trans furry fantasies
ive found that partially treated mental illness can sometimes look to uninvolved onlookers like faked mental illness.
"someone who really has pOCD would be disgusted and horrified at their intrusive thoughts" or maybe i'm in therapy & am going by the books, being radically ambivalent to my intrusive thoughts instead of wasting energy mentally washing my paws of sin. i'm not going to perform my rock bottom for you for the sake of being believed.
also like... something something, being afraid of healing because you're afraid of letting go of the stability of misery, letting go of the narrative you made up to feel worthy of attention, letting go of your "sympathy cred," this narrative has probably killed a few ppl.
