Doctor red flags:
-Mentions weight loss, exercise, nutrition, mental wellness, before any physical examination/testing
-interrupts you
-tries to rush the appointment
-laughs at you
-says you're too young
-Touches you without warning or asking for consent (common with older male doctors unfortunately, but is becoming less common)
-accuses you of self dxing/mentions dr. Google
-mentions anything about powering through the pain
Do not be afraid to drop a doctor/caregiver and see a new one. Doctor shopping is a term made by ableds who believe every doctor is perfect. Your health is precious and you should only trust those you're comfortable with to take care of it. Do not feel bad about offending the doctor. They do not care. They won't harass you or question you (if they do then that's..probably illegal). I know its hard with some insurances or lesser served areas so don't feel bad if you can't, but if you have the option to do so do not be afraid.
Extra tip: Most doctors will behave themselves if you bring an advocate. Even just having a friend sit quietly will help.
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love when men cry about body hair bc "it's hygiene" and yet 15% of cis men leave the bathroom without washing their hands at all and an additional 35% only just wet their hands without using soap. that is nearly half of all men. that means statistically you have probably shaken hands with or been in direct contact with one of these people.
love when men say that women "only want money" when it turns out that even in equal-earning homes, women are actually adding caregiver burdens and housework from previous years, whereas men have been expanding leisure time and hobbies. in equal-earning households, men spend an average of 3.5 hours extra in leisure time per week, which is 182 hours per year - a little over a week of paid vacation time that the other partner does not receive. kinda sounds like he wants her money.
love that men have decided women are frail and weak and annoying when we scream in surprise but it turns out it's actually women who are more reliable in an emergency because men need to be convinced to actually take action and respond to the threat. like, actually, for-real: men experience such a strong sense of pride about their pre-supposed abilities that it gets them and their families killed. they are so used to dismissing women that it literally kills them.
love it. told my father this and he said there's lies, damned lies, and statistics. a year ago i tried to get him to evacuate the house during a flash flood. he ignored me and got injured. he has told me, laughing, that he never washes his hands. he has said in the last week that women are just happier when we're cooking or cleaning.
maybe i'm overly nostalgic. but it didn't used to feel so fucking bleak. it used to feel like at least a little shameful to consider women to be sheep. it just feels like the earth is round and we are still having conversations about it being flat - except these conversations are about the most obvious forms of patriarchy. like, we know about this stuff. we've known since well before the 50's.
recently andrew tate tried to justify cheating on his partner as being the "male prerogative." i don't know what the prerogative for the rest of us would be. just sitting at home, watching the slow erosion of our humanity.
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What frustrates me about disability advocacy is that...of all the people I've seen talk about it, 99% of them - even ones who are disabled themselves - have eventually proven that their support has limits. Really stupid and arbitrary ones, at that.
You support disabled people...but if you see an adult with a DIAPER BULGE in their pants in public it's ON SIGHT, get your kink out of my face! Actually, even if it's not a kink, that's still gross and, like, it's not like the diaper exists to CONTAIN waste, you're a biohazard! Just stay home!
You support disabled people...but, ugh, you're so sick of masks, they feel so icky, the CDC isn't advising them anymore so really how bad can it be, if you don't want to be permanently disabled even worse than you already are then why don't you just stay home forever?
You support disabled people...but if you see anyone using a non-conventional straw that someone's billed as "anti-aging" on TikTok you proudly declare that you'll smack them, because what do you mean it might be a motor control or sensory thing?
You support disabled people...but no one is REALLY so disabled that they can't manage their lights conventionally, clean their homes by themselves, or hold a pen for extended periods of time or at all; that's just something people make up as an excuse for Bad Tech and exploitative luxury services.
You support disabled people...but, god, control your by-definition-uncontrollable tics, they're SOOOO annoying and rude!
You support disabled people...but when someone stops masking or runs out of spoons and starts speaking in a choppy, hard-to-understand way, it's a joke.
You support disabled people...but AAC is, like, sooooo annoying and hard to understand, learn to talk like a normal person instead of pointing like a baby or whatever, geez.
You support disabled people...but you hate image descriptions and video transcriptions because they're, like, sooooo ugly and transcriptions SPOIL things. (Not to be confused with "frequently not having the spoons to translate images and videos into text, which is a skill; one which everyone should try to develop, but a skill nonetheless" - I get that, it happens to me, but if you take issue with OTHER people adding them to your posts for Aesthetic Reasons, you're...kind of a dick! I'm not sorry for saying it!)
You support disabled people...but you think teehee funny joke annotations are a much more valuable use of caption tracks than, you know, actual captions are.
You support disabled people...but you still concern-troll people with armchair diagnoses of heavily stigmatized disorders for harmless weirdness, or try to paint them as icons of some kind of horrible social ill.
You support disabled people...but you're still convinced that every asshole is mentally ill, probably A Narcissist, and what do you mean that's a loaded thing to call someone when a heavily stigmatized disorder is rudely misnamed as such too, isn't it easier to, like, change the name of the disorder throughout the whole system than it is to just stop using that word as your go-to Bad Person Pathologizing Word, which you definitely need? (Or worse, you see no problem with this clash because you're convinced it IS Bad Person Disorder...)
You support disabled people...but you see someone mumbling to themself on the bus and you get as far away from them as possible because it's "scary".
You support disabled people...but you constantly try to pull "gotcha"s about people telling you not to touch people's assistive devices.
You support disabled people...but someone being okay with their delusional disorder and talking about that is BAD and PROMOTING SELF-HARM.
You support disabled people...but your body positivity still focuses exclusively on "people can be healthy and fat at the same time!" as if people who ARE fat because of health issues and/or have health issues BECAUSE of their weight don't exist or deserve support.
You support disabled people...but you declare that advocates who want us all to have more access to things that improve your quality of life are the REAL ableists for acknowledging that those things that you currently can't do tend to improve quality of life.
You support disabled people...but your advocacy for yourself involves distancing yourself from people with more support needs than you.
You support disabled people...but you treat addiction of any kind, or use of anything with known addictive tendencies, as a moral failing.
You support disabled people...until the accommodations they need clash with your own, then it's not just a benign incompatibility that sucks just as much for them as it does for you; no, you are an innocent victim and they are a horrible ableist.
You support disabled people...until it's too inconvenient. Too weird. Too scary. Once that line is crossed, it's not a disability issue anymore, they're, conveniently, just a Bad Person.
It's fucking exhausting and I'm sick to death of it.
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It's been brought to my attention that the proposed Tumblr blackout is actually going to be harmful for disabled folks, as it removes the ability to have users fix improperly tagged content and will decrease the reach of Disability Pride Month content.
So I'm not going to be stepping away this week.
This is an issue that several people have tried to mention to the one who proposed the blackout, and the message has been repeatedly ignored. Though the blackout had an impact on Reddit, the truth of it is that Tumblr is not Reddit and so we likely need to use different methods.
Please do not join the blackout. It will actually harm those with disabilities, because it will prevent many people from seeing and spreading disability awareness content.
Sorry for the confusion, and thank you for the understanding.
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i feel passionately about the need to enfold people experiencing (or diagnosed) with "just" depression or anxiety into the mad pride project. the more people who view themselves as mad, the better. much as the rhetorical move from "neurotypical" to "neuroconforming" emphasizes the artifice & social construction of "neurotypicality," so too will expanding identification as "mad" expose the sane/mad dichotomy as a false one.
it's true that (some) people with "just" depression and/or anxiety have an easier time navigating the psych system than people who have more stigmatized diagnoses. but this is not to say that they necessarily have an easy time — the carceral psych system is hostile to everyone subsumed by it, even the most "privileged" patients. we should of course critique & examine how our experiences are shaped by various intersections of privilege, but we cannot forget or ignore how someone with "just" a depression/anxiety diagnosis can still experience the full force of the carceral psych system brought down upon them (including but not limited to involuntary institutionalization, police intervention, & forced medication or other forced treatment).
we must encourage, if not insist, that those with the least-stigmatized diagnoses view their difficult experiences navigating the psych system as bound up with the liberation of people who have more stigmatized diagnoses &, often, a more violent experience of the psych system. we need more people to drop the "i have anxiety/depression but i'm not crazy" line and say loudly, "i have anxiety/depression & i am crazy. my access to just treatment is linked to the conditions of all other crazy people, who are my allies, peers, & friends. we are united in our cause & we all deserve a more liberating system of care."
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For disability pride month (and the rest of the year) here's a shout out to
- people who have to take "scary" meds like antipsychotics, tranquilizers, schizo meds, lithium, opioids, and steroids because they're the only things that work
-people taking medicinal drugs that may be illegal in some areas
-people who have to get dangerous procedures and treatments
-people who will literally die without their meds and can't stop taking them
-people who can't afford their meds or their meds are so expensive it puts them in poverty
- people whose meds cause undesirable side effects
-people whose meds cause them to be immunocompromised
-people whose meds damage their bodies, but improve general quality of life enough that it's worth it
-people who get told to get off their meds constantly by people other than their doctors (or their doctors didn't want to put them on the med bc they're "too young")
-people who can't take medicine other than ibuprofen or Tylenol due to allergies, interactions, etc.
-people who don't want to take any medicine due to medical trauma
-people who can't take medicine at all and have to cope in other ways
-people who are addicted to their medicine and don't want to stop taking it
-people who are addicted and want to stop taking their meds
-people still suffering from unforeseen side effects that still affect them even though they got off the meds
Our relationships with our medicines/treatments are complicated and no one body is ever exactly the same. Please be respectful of people's choices and feelings about their meds.
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