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Friendly reminder that when you only talk about high masking and low masking, you throw autistics who can't mask under the bus.
We're not low masking, we DON'T mask.
This makes us no masking. Not low masking.
Ah, the few people I've had to block for telling me it's not ableist to use the term "non-verbal" and that I'm alienating allies.
Nearly the entire non-verbal/non-speaking community is asking it not to be used by reliably speaking Autistics.
Do some not mind? I'm sure! But this is a majority thing.
That is greater than any preference. And if you block me or are alienated by me for pushing the voices and wants of a part of the community that is generally ignored?
Then you're just giving me the reason to push their voices louder.
disabled people have talked already about how inappropriate it is to touch or grab their mobility aids. but less often i think do people know how to act if they were asked to hold, retrieve, or touch someone's aid (such as crutches or canes as these are the aids i have used and am familiar with)
being friends, family, or partners with a disabled person doesn't grant permission to touch their aids at any time. furthermore having permission to touch an aid - to hold it, pick it up, or retrieve it etc - doesn't give permission to touch or play with them as you please. while keeping in mind that different people's boundaries will vary, here are some things not to do with someone mobility aid:
don't fiddle, stim, or play with it
don't wave it or swing them around
don't hold it by the handle the owner uses to utilize it
do not use the device
do not "test it out"
do not lean your weight on it
[in the case of crutches] do not use them to hop or otherwise take your feet off the ground for fun
try not to drop them or make them unclean
do not adjust any settings
do not use them as a weapon or play-weapon
do not walk immediately behind the air user/out of sight
try not to flip them upside down
what you should do instead:
return the aid immediately when asked. no delays because you were not done with them
hold the aid(s) upright, out of the way from other people by the main body
ask before touching or negotiate times when it is okay to grab without asking (such as if they have been dropped or are falling)
give the aid user increased space and distance to use them safely
try to make sure you aren't forcing an aid user to walk on a sloped path (such as on the pavement/sidewalk)
most importantly, don't take someone's boundaries around their mobility device personally, regardless of how close you two are. disabled people deserve autonomy over the things that support and supplement their body functions just as much as their own body.
On the topic of new trans men figuring themselves out and how it’s not like anyone gives out a manual on how to be a man, and also on the topic of supporting more queer POC
Can we talk about the unique experience of genuinely not knowing what haircuts to even consider when you’re black??? Because like… “short hair” happens with both black men and black women, bald/shaved happens with both, long happens with both, braids and locs happen with both, afros happen with both
It took me forever to figure out that I can do all of the variations I’d been doing, just that the unique styling is different on these gender lines.
Learning to delete/mute/block before a negative comment takes root in your mind is a modern survival skill. If you're going to wander the overgrown countryside of the internet, you need to develop a quick eye for ticks.
It's deeply tempting to respond to the "well, actually," to the cruel assumption, to the unjust accusation, to the odious viewpoint. It's tempting because you're defaulting to the etiquette of dinner conversation. This isn't a dinner conversation. Someone is shouting at you from a moving car. Turn away.
Is it just me or are the new tumblr users convinced there's a penalty of some kind for using this site like it's meant to be used?
I'm so fortunate I was able to get my uterus removed, and it took so many years for any gynecologist to be willing to even have a serious conversation about it let alone refer me to a surgeon where I could discuss my options.
before I was allowed to pursue surgery, I had to prove that I had tried "less extreme" options, which in my case was an injection of a very strong hormonal birth control that led to me bleeding for three months straight (which I experienced as a constant waking nightmare of dysphoria) and, if I had remained on it for over a couple years (if it had "worked" for me as a solution) would have started to erode my bone density and was therefore not recommended for long-term use.
I know surgery is seen as the most 'extreme' option, but to be fucking honest, I don't understand why dissolving your bones is seen as the 'less extreme' option, when hysterectomies are extremely safe and routine procedures.
and previous to being able to meet with an actual surgeon, I had so many doctors tell me, "Oh, you wouldn't want a hysterectomy because then you'd go into early menopause and your bone density would begin to decrease earlier in your life" which is wild because
as I learned from an actual surgeon, you can just leave ovaries in & remove the rest, so you don't enter hormonal menopause. like it's that easy to avoid it. it's not an additional complication. a subtotal hysterectomy that leaves ovaries so as to not trigger early menopause is completely normal and common.
the "less extreme" option offered would have decreased my bone density more rapidly anyway
I'm so grateful and thankful to be on the other side of the surgery, but I still feel frustrated that there is so much fearmongering from gynecologists themselves about hysterectomies for patients who desperately need and want them. It's seen as a complete last resort, but I genuinely do not believe it should be seen that way in all cases.
If someone genuinely expresses continuous desire for a surgery, whether that be for alleviation of debilitating symptoms, or dysphoria, or both (which was my case), they should be allowed to at the very least talk with a surgeon about what that surgery actually entails and the potential risks and specifications involved. Nobody should just be immediately stopped from pursuing that information from the start with the presumptuous declaration of "Oh, you wouldn't want that."
“men’s bodies aren’t policed to the extent women’s bodies are” i hate to tell u this bestie but there are some men whose bodies are policed even more than some women’s. and i’m actually not just talking abt trans men, bc may i remind u that black men’s bodies are quite literally policed by actual police from an extremely young age, and too often that policing lands them in prison just for existing or just straight up kills them.
you guys know dragging down non-binary people isn't going to make binary trans people more liked right .. non-binary people can be trans mascs. they can also be trans fems. stop seeing us as agab lite™. it's gross.
Trans people are still allowed to be happy, still sexy, still worthy of life and prosperity, still allowed to be imperfect gross and normal people, still allowed to find themselves, still allowed to be selfish and still allowed to survive and be remembered.
Always were. That will never change.
Continuing my post about why I'm tired of TERFs: Come the fuck on. I spent most of my life back when I thought I was a cis girl being made to feel like shit because I had to get repeated surgeries on my breasts because of a chronic condition. It was other women who told me to reconsider if I wanted to "ruin my tits" and "mutilate myself" and if I couldn't just put up with the unbearable chronic pain it caused.
It was also women who told me I should consider plastic surgery if I ever needed to get a mastectomy, which is something I'll need sooner than later. I was a MINOR when I got told this.
It was ALSO a woman who told me that even if my condition has a 4% chance of turning malignant, I should not get the mastectomy that could reduce that to almost a 0%, because "So many women regret it later".
Now I decide that feminity is not for me, that I'm tired of putting up with it after being told a thousand times about how I'm doing it bad, and now I'm betraying womanhood. I have to hear how they keep talking of any breast surgery as mutilation and "ruining a perfect healthy female body" but I'm the evil one for finding that being non binary suits me better.
All while TERFs repeatedly show they'd rather work with the far right to take everything from trans people, the same groups actively also harm women. They devote their entire existence to harming trans women, who are some of the fiercest fighters for women's rights, and then go silent when pro-lifers fuck up bodily autonomy.
Who in the actual fuck is actually betraying womanhood here?
Hey, fellow fantasy nerds, I invite you to vibe along to this lesser known early 2000s fantasy banger
Wow! Here’s something incredibly personal.
This is Good Bi Gender. A comic I made to express some feelings I have about my gender. I don’t really have that much else to say about it. Here it is.
if you’re the type of person to say “be gay, do crimes” but get upset or uncomfortable when one of your friends ((or literally anyone for that matter)) has to steal food from the grocery store in order to survive, then maybe you don’t actually believe in your silly little motto.
i love being t4t I love gender nonconformity... i love girls who arent girls and women who are men and people with a million xenogenders and dykefags and femme trans men and butch trans girls. nothing is sexier than someone who spits in the face of the gender binary, and our very existence is not conforming to gender ideals
ALSO. on the concept of funky genders. "socially unacceptable" genders or "genderweird" people i love you. transmascs who are girls i love you. transfems who are men i love you. transmascs who feel transfem and transfems who feel transmasc i love you. everyone who feels like their gender is too "weird" or "complicated" or are an "oxymoron or self-contradictory" i love you and we are all trans and good and community and perfect ok.
Love bombing is not a euphemism for "too much affection too soon," or "high desire for contact."
"Love bombing" is a term originally used in the context of cults to describe a deliberate and coordinated recruitment method that involved feigning friendship and interest in a potential recruit, via flattery, flirtation, physical affection, and very directed positive attention to everything the recruit says in order to lure them into the cult.
Since cults and abusive relationships operate in similar ways and use similar tactics, love bombing in an interpersonal relationship looks like manufacturing closeness in order to trap someone into a relationship in which the abuser has all the control.
And I know these days there's a million bullshit junky articles out there that make you think this is a symptom of cluster b personality disorders, but there is no way for you to be love bombing somebody without realizing it.
If you are an affectionate person and the level of affection and attention you give makes someone uncomfortable, you are not "accidentally" abusing them.
If you are uncomfortable with the level of affection and attention someone is paying you, they are not de facto abusing you.
Love bombing is about using someone's desire for human connection to fast track them into a situation you control and will feel disinclined to leave.
sending love out tonight to everyone who is progressively losing their abilities, whether that's movement, ability to walk, eyesight, or hearing.
it's hard to come to terms with the fact that you can't do things that you used to be able to do. I'll be honest, it feels like you're losing control of your life. it can feel very isolating and hopeless. its scary and overwhelming, and it's so hard to deal with.
you are not less than just because you can do less. im proud of you for still being here, and i wish you ease with adjusting to new ways of life. please take care of yourself, i love you.
URGENT: 🚨🚨EARN IT ACT IS BACK IN THE SENATE 🚨🚨 TUMBLR’S NSFW BAN HITTING THE ENTIRE INTERNET THIS SUMMER 2023
April 28, 2023
I’m so sorry for the long post but please please please pay attention and spread this
What is the EARN IT Act?
The EARN IT Act (s. 1207) has been roundly condemned by nearly every major LGBTQ+ advocacy and human rights organization in the country.
This is the third time the Senate has been trying to force this through, and I talked about it last year. It is a bill that claims "protects children and victims against CSAM" by creating an unelected and politically appointed national commission of law enforcement specialists to dictate "best practices" that websites all across the nation will be forced to follow. (Keep in mind, most websites in the world are created in the US, so this has global ramifications). These "best practices" would include killing encryption so that any law enforcement can scan and see every single message, dm, photo, cloud storage, data, and any website you have every so much as glanced at. Contrary to popular belief, no they actually can't already do that. These "best practices" also create new laws for "removing CSAM" online, leading to mass censorship of non-CSAM content like what happened to tumblr. Keep in mind that groups like NCOSE, an anti-LGBT hate group, will be allowed on this commission. If websites don't follow these best practices, they lose their Section 230 protections, leading to mass censorship either way.
Section 230 is foundational to modern online communications. It's the entire reason social media exists. It grants legal protection to users and websites, and says that websites aren't responsible for what users upload online unless it's criminal. Without Section 230, websites are at the mercy of whatever bullshit regulatory laws any and every US state passes. Imagine if Texas and Florida were allowed to say what you can and can't publish and access online. That is what will happen if EARN IT passes. (For context, Trump wanted to get rid of Section 230 because he knew it would lead to mass govt surveillance and censorship of minorities online.)
This is really not a drill. Anyone who makes or consume anything “adult” and LGBT online has to be prepared to fight Sen. Blumenthal’s EARN IT Act, brought back from the grave by a bipartisan consensus to destroy Section 230. If this bill passes, we’re going to see most, if not all, adult content and accounts removed from mainstream platforms. This will include anything related to LGBT content, including SFW fanfiction, for example. Youtube, Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Tumblr, all of them will be completely gutted of anything related to LGBT content, abortion healthcare, resources for victims of any type of abuse, etc. It is a right-wing fascists wet dream, which is why NCOSE is behind this bill and why another name for this bill is named in reference to NCOSE.
NCOSE used to be named Morality in Media, and has rebranded into an "anti-trafficking" organization. They are a hate group that has made millions off of being "against trafficking" while helping almost no victims and pushing for homophobic laws globally. They have successfully pushing the idea that any form of sexual expression, including talking about HEALTH, leads to sex trafficking. That's how SESTA passed. Their goal is to eliminate all sex, anything gay, and everything that goes against their idea of ‘God’ from the internet and hyper disney-fy and sanitize it. This is a highly coordinated attack on multiple fronts.
The EARN IT Act will lead to mass online censorship and surveillance. Platforms will be forced to scan their users’ communications and censor all sex-related content, including sex education, literally anything lgbt, transgender or non-binary education and support systems, aything related to abortion, and sex worker communication according to the ACLU. All this in the name of “protecting kids” and “fighting CSAM”, both of which the bill does nothing of the sort. In fact it makes fighting CSEM even harder.
EARN IT will open the way for politicians to define the category of “pornography" as they — or the lobbies that fund them — please. The same way that right-wing groups have successfully banned books about race and LGBT, are banning trans people from existing, all under the guise of protecting children from "grooming and exploitation", is how they will successfully censor the internet.
As long as state legislatures can tie in "fighting CSAM" to their bullshit laws, they can use EARN IT to censor and surveill whatever they want.
This is already a nightmare enough. But the bill also DESTROYS ENCRYPTION, you know, the thing protecting literally anyone or any govt entity from going into your private messages and emails and anything on your devices and spying on you.
This bill is going to finish what FOSTA/SESTA started. And that should terrify you.
Senator Blumenthal (Same guy who said ‘Facebook should ban finsta’) pushed this bill all of 2020, literally every activist (There were more than half a million signatures on this site opposing this act!) pushed hard to stop this bill. Now he brings it back, doesn’t show the text of the bill until hours later, and it’s WORSE. Instead of fixing literally anything in the bill that might actually protect kids online, Bluemnthal is hoping to fast track this and shove it through, hoping to get little media attention other than propaganda of “protecting kids” to support this shitty legislation that will harm kids. Blumental doesn't care about protecting anyone, and only wants his name in headlines.
It will make CSAM much much worse.
One of the many reasons this bill is so dangerous: It totally misunderstands how Section 230 works, and in doing so (as with FOSTA) it is likely to make the very real problem of CSAM worse, not better. Section 230 gives companies the flexibility to try different approaches to dealing with various content moderation challenges. It allows for greater and greater experimentation and adjustments as they learn what works – without fear of liability for any “failure.” Removing Section 230 protections does the opposite. It says if you do anything, you may face crippling legal liability. This actually makes companies less willing to do anything that involves trying to seek out, take down, and report CSAM because of the greatly increased liability that comes with admitting that there is CSAM on your platform to search for and deal with. This liability would allow anyone for any reason to sue any platform they want, suing smaller ones out of existence. Look at what is happening right now with book bans across the nation with far right groups. This is going to happen to the internet if this bill passes.
(Remember, the state department released a report in December 2021 recommending that the government crack down on “obscenity” as hard the Reagan Administration did. If this bill passes, it could easily go way beyond shit red states are currently trying. It is a goldmine for the fascist right that is currently in the middle of banning every book that talks about race and sexuality across the US.)
The reason these bills keep showing up is because there is this false lie spread by organizations like NCOSE that platforms do nothing about CSEM online. However, platforms are already liable for child sexual exploitation under federal law. Tech companies sent more than 45 million+ instances of CSAM to the DOJ in 2019 alone, most of which they declined to investigate. This shows that platforms are actually doing everything in their power already to stop CSEM by following already existing laws. The Earn It Act includes zero resources for proven investigation or prevention programs. If Senator Bluementhal actually cared about protecting youth, why wouldn’t he include anything to actually protect them in his shitty horrible bill? EARN IT is actually likely to make prosecuting child molesters more difficult since evidence collected this way likely violates the Fourth Amendment and would be inadmissible in court.
I don’t know why so many Senators are eager to cosponsor the “make child pornography worse” bill, but here we are.
HOW TO FIGHT BACK
EARN IT Act was introduced just two weeks ago and is already being fast-tracked. It will be marked up the week of May 1st and head to the Senate floor immediately after. If there is no loud and consistent opposition, it will be law by JUNE! Most bills never go to markup, so this means they are putting pressure to move this through. There are already 20 co-sponsors, a fifth of the entire Senate. This is an uphill battle and it is very much all hands on deck.
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES.
This website takes you to your Senator / House members contact info. EMAIL, MESSAGE, SEND LETTERS, CALL CALL CALL CALL CALL. Calling is the BEST way to get a message through. Get your family and friends to send calls too. This is literally the end of free speech online.
(202) 224-3121 connects you to the congressional hotline. Here is a call script if you don't know what to say. Call them every day. Even on the weekends, leaving voicemails are fine.
2. Sign these petitions!
Link to Petition 1
Link to Petition 2
3. SPREAD THE WORD ONLINE
If you have any social media, spread this online. One of the best ways we fought back against this last year was MASSIVE spread online. Tiktok, reddit, twitter, discord, whatever means you have at least mention it. We could see most social media die out by this fall if we don't fight back.
Here is a linktree with more information on this bill including a masterpost of articles, the links to petitions, and the call script.
DISCORD LINK IF YOU WANT TO HELP FIGHT IT
TLDR: The EARN IT Act will lead to online censorship of any and all adult & lgbt content across the entire internet, open the floodgates to mass surveillance the likes which we haven’t seen before, lead to much more CSEM being distributed online, and destroy encryption. Call 202-224-3121 to connect to your house and senate representative and tell them to VOTE NO on this bill that does not protect anyone and harms everyone.
Okay I made a gofundme to help pay for hotel stays and the last of my top surgery fees. I’ve never done this before so I’m extremely uncomfortable and feeling Very Bad about it, but here’s the link. There is going to be absolutely no guilt-tripping here so don’t feel in any way obligated to give me money lol. Oh ew I also just realized this has my full name on it. Big yikes there
I recently colorized this c. 1910 photo of Magnus Hirschfeld's 4th, 6th, and 7th patients. They were three of the first trans men to receive medical care/legal support in Germany. I can't help but appreciate their dapper sense of fashion.
you're only 21 so i feel terrible potentially giving you this responsibility but you have a platform so please help. tumblr user cunt/boy/supremacy reblogged a reblog wherein i (0 followers, only blocked and reported bots) discuss sexual abuse that i underwent that i shared knowing my following is 0 just to add context in case he misunderstood, specifically to mock it after i clarified the type of situation that was being discussed in an example of the kinds of abuse that transmascs can undergo in my initial post. the initial post has a lot of problems and i directly admit that; my biggest worry was people assuming that it means we should advocate for more control over hrt, which I further clarify we should not do in the tags; short bullet point paragraphs aren't enough for complexity and I get that now. but, i directly asked him to delete it bc I didn't want him to share that and I kind of expect better from other trans people but he's since started going off about transmasc rights activists and it's been over a day. idk how much attention and following he has but i directly asked him to not share that in case he does have an actual following, because i was actually intending on deleting it after finally getting his attention in dms - not new to tumblr but it's been a good decade, but he's just been reblogging and posting direct antitransmasculine takes since. i hate callouts and he's really just showing how much of a douche he is on his own blog by responding the way he has even just publicly without my "please remove this" statement which is in dms, but please help. please help
I'm genuinely sorry that you had to go through that. It's absolutely cruel - especially coming from another trans person. You have all my support, including if you ever want a safe place to discuss about your issues. You might have already done this, but I suggest to block the person who is harassing you (I'll block him too), and not continue to engage.
Good luck, I wish you the best.
A very beautiful image of these smiley blackfoot. It seemed everything was alright…
Photograph by Mary T. S. Schaffer in 1907.
A long ass beginner level tutorial for all of you comic folks who want to start using sketchup for your backgrounds but don’t know how to get started.
http://www.genkigirl.com/finesometimesrain/?p=771