#not trying to invalidate anyones experiences and i know this kind of language means something else in the DID/OSDD community

[posletsvet]

Thoughts on Geto Suguru's Psychology Pre-Defection

There's something that I've been meaning to talk about for a while now, and that is Geto's apparent tendency to conceal his negative impulses that allows for, in my view, faulty interpretations stating that he was faking his righteous beliefs all along just because assuming high moral ground gave him a sense of superiority and fed his ego. Meanwhile I would argue that, on contrary, this habit is more indicative of Geto's insecurities and heightened sense of self-awareness.

My thoughts on this underneath the cut, but beware: it's going to be long!

To begin with, I think there are two major factors playing into the misconception that I mentioned. The first one boils down to prejudice forcing people to look upon younger Geto through the lense of a person he would go on to become. The kind of cautious logic that says that a deeply empathetic, caring highschooler couldn't have turned into a murderous cult leader preaching the merits of genocide, and thus seeks ways to dehumanize him from the very beginning (because that's a terrible concept to wrap your mind around, I agree). And the second factor being... well, that Suguru's behaviour really does come off as fake at times.

We experience 'negative' emotions as naturally as 'positive' ones, and despite some of them are conventionally accepted as 'good' whereas others are painted as 'bad', no emotion is inherently harmful or invalid; they all are a part of what makes us human. While it's undoubtedly a chilly and ominous concept for someone to be completely devoid of any positive traits, just as unnatural it is to display positive responses only. Perfection is stored away at museums, no living breathing human being can go through their life without being affected by negative impulses or thinking. But more often than not negative emotions are condemned and stigmatized (in the end, we still refer to them as 'negative'), and self-consciousness can make one ashamed or guilty of experiencing them. The end result of this would be trying to hide your feelings under one more appealing appearance, creating a warp between what's intuitive and what's manifest, an inadequate emotional response.

Gojo (at least in his teenage years) is widely outspoken and doesn't hesitate to outwardly express himself, whether verbally or via body language. It probably takes root in Gojo's upbringing: he was spoilt rotten, revered for being born with a silver spoon in his mouth, his every whim indulged and tended to. There simply wasn't any need for him to try and make a good impression by faking docility and emotions that are more pleasant and easier to digest. Gojo may be boisterous and bratty and obnoxious, but he isn't trying to 'trick' anyone into thinking he's better than he really is, and this paints a more sincere, believable picture to the audience.

On the other hand, Geto's emotions, partly due to his more solemn demeanour, are often toned down or consciously concealed. For instance, when Riko manages to strike a nerve in him, his response is to immediately plaster on mawkish 'customer service' smile to not give away his annoyance. This scene is especially interesting to me because of how Amanai's reaction gives voice to the audience's concerns. Referring to Suguru, she says, 'You look like a liar!' -- and by doing so calls him out on his tendency to mask negative emotions. Intuitively, she can still read his feelings in his body language, in the delay in his expression rearranging itself into a smile, and so can the viewer. We know he's annoyed, and his words about having no intention to harm Riko don't exactly align with how he behaves (even if in a playful manner) a moment after saying them. It creates a tangible contradiction between what he says his intentions are and what his actions speak of, between the appearances and what lies behind them. And this contradiction raises suspicion, in a way that if somebody's making an effort to hide something, then there must be something to hide.

In retrospect this doubt might seem reinforced and justified. I see how it's easy to fall into thinking that Geto, having become a criminal who's done unspeakably cruel things and who backs up his delusional ideals with bigoted reasoning, should've been hiding darker parts of himself behind all those fake smiles and talks about righteousness. But pinning the blame on Geto alone by claiming that he had violent tendencies to begin with is essentially disregarding systematic issues that the story strives so much to convey to the audience. Holding innate individual qualities accountable for the catastrophe is basically the sort of thinking that the higher-ups display, whose main strategy for dealing with problems is public scapegoating and disposing of every single threat to the current order by giving out one death sentence after the other. I don't think we as the viewers are supposed to reach the conclusion that Suguru is at fault for what happened, which is not to say he's faultless, nonetheless the narrative goes to great lengths to make us sympathize with him, not the other way around.

Now, there's really a handful of ways in which Geto's character seems to contradict himself. He shares overspilling empathy for the people around him, that is his character's core trait, but that very empathy spells out his downfall when it degrades into resentment and hate. He displays a largely considerate and sympathetic demeanour, but he's first introduced to the audience as someone who backhandedly bad-mouths Utahime for being weak. He's one half of the strongest duo, but whereas Gojo is a natural-born genius, Geto evidently struggles with his powers. His entire career as a curse user is based on the mentality which justifies the means to an end, but reaching the end goal is impossible for him as he is, Geto himself as much as admits to it during his last conversation with Satoru. He sets on his wild-goose chase for power, but ends up stagnating to the point where his use of Curse Manipulation in the Hidden Inventory Arc is much more inventive and creative than in Jujutsu Kaisen 0. The list goes on, but you got the gist.

To live for the purpose of being yourself. And for that goal, Geto could only continue to pursue his twisted dream, drowning himself in a curse that lies in the gap between ideal and reality.

I believe this to be such a poignant phrase when it comes to Geto's characterization because of how well, in my view, it encapsulates the conflict of his character -- or, if you will, the contradiction of it. It succinctly expresses his outlook on things, where he views the world how it's ideally supposed to be rather than how it realistically is. I've actually somewhat already elaborated on this in my very first rambling on here:

To me, Geto seems to be a type of person who needs something to guide him, some clear-cut ideal to make it possible for him to navigate through his life. He is pedantic in that sense: the sharp outlines of his views define his surroundings, the very way he looks at things and perceives them. He needs everything to fall precisely in line with his own set of ideals, which seems to be quite verified and well-adjusted within his mind, like a strict and refined concept he constructed for himself, like a routine he's used to following out of pure principal. His own belief system being so defined, it's that which makes him indulge in excessive discourse on the subject of morality and responsibility, like he's patiently laying out the basics in front of a disobedient child to help them wrap their mind around some fundamental truth that is so obvious and natural for him.

In a way, Geto concealing his negative emotions is not a false front put up against scrutinizing looks that could reveal his 'true nature'. Quite the opposite, I think it speaks more of his well-meaning intentions. When trying to change the way things are, start at yourself, and I guess this is the principle Geto's trying to apply here. By following through his own ideal, Geto does his best to be an upright person he believes himself obliged to be, whether that means forcing himself to absorb curses or putting on a customary smile. It might be juvenile and wishful thinking on his part, probably akin to 'fake it till you make it', but it's important to keep in mind that at that time he was still but a teenager. Moreover, he was put on par with somebody as praised within jujutsu society as Gojo, he must've felt on top of the world, too entranced by their warm spring of youth to care too much about the occasional slips. With Satoru by his side, I imagine Geto could afford to cut some slack and participate in the mischief. Later we see post-defection Geto drop his frivolous facade only when he's entirely alone -- another hint at how Gojo was really the only person Suguru allowed himself to confide in, that is untill the SPVI put uncrossable distance between them.

While I do say that Geto's intentions are well-meaning, the way he positions himself actually reveals some quite problematic aspects of his mindset. Namely, his attitude towards non-sorcerers, whom he clearly sets into a different category from himself and his fellow sorcerers. Regular people lack crucial understanding, they are weak because they are helpless, therefore they have to be shielded from the source of harm. This is a largely patronizing concept of empathy, since it's based on the notion that the 'weak' are inherently inferior to Geto himself and others involved in jujutsu society. It's interesting how it's reflected in Geto's insistence on the necessity of curtains. The use of curtains furthers the extent of non-sorcerers' ignorance, they never learn how to stay out of harm's way as they are deprived even of as much as their perception of the existing danger. It reminds me of how a parent would brush a child's concerns aside because they're too young and naive and do not need to be aware of adult life's hardships. Just like Geto's paternalistic outlook, it does not come from malice or negligence, it's just an attempt to keep someone less experienced and skilled safe. Nonetheless it's harmful as it puts that person in a position which denies them agency.

In my view, Suguru's fake smiles are an extension of his acute sense of responsibility. In front of those over whom he assumes responsibility, he presents himself as calm, collected and dependable as if it's supposed to reassure them. It's his job to protect them and make them feel safe, so there's no need showing them his own struggle. Even if such thinking is condescending, it's not in any way malicious. Geto's entire character arc would be simply non-existent if he wasn't completely genuine in his sentiments.

So why do I talk about Geto's insecurities when first introducing the topic of this post? Well, I'm about to take a deep dive into the field of speculation and theories and finally get to the point why I'm writing all this in the first place (took me long enough, lmao). There's also a reason why I brought up Gojo's upbringing when talking about his personality and how it contrasts Geto's. You see, like Satoru's way of dealing with his emotions can be linked to his childhood experience, Suguru's behaviour might also give us some clues about the circumstances he grew up in.

The more I look into it, the more convinced I become that Geto was in one way or another exposed to emotional trauma in his childhood. Remember when I mentioned inadequate emotional responses? While being one, smiling in reaction to stress may act as a defense mechanism of sorts, shielding the person from the chronic nature of the unpleasant experience. It also may serve as a way to avoid alienation by others who are not privy to the source of your distress or are not comfortable with it. Affiliative smiles are motivated by social factors, it's a tool used to create and maintain social connections. Human beings are hardwired to connect with others, feeling alienated by the people around us causes us great pain.

The thing us, we must assume that Geto is relatively new to the jujutsu world in the flashback arc. Given his non-sorcerer background, chances are he was the only one in his immediate surroundings with the ability to see and exterminate curses. There couldn't have been a way for him to confide in someone with his concerns and fears born from interacting with something only he could see. So I assume that eventually that resulted in Suguru developing an unhealthy habit of masking his emotions before the ones he cared about. And as over time he grew more aware of his abilities and got a grasp on how his CT works, I imagine Geto committed to exorcising curses in order to protect ordinary people from them -- all by himself. This, in turn, must have solidified that conception in Suguru's head which ultimately othered him from the people around him and put them in a position inferior to him since they were the ones depending on him and his powers.

As Geto should've mostly kept to himself, I also see how he might have grown heavily reliant on his analytical mind. Overthinking is a habit developed early on in life as a way to wade through feeling uncertain or unsafe. It's an attempt to make sense of confusing reality by applying an analytical lense to it and compartmentalizing it into neat, easily understandable categories. And also a way to regain sense of self when you find yourself in a situation you otherwhise have little to no control over. And while over-analyzing can create a sense of security, it may also interfere with a person's emotional responses. I guess it's something that could be applied to Geto, too, because for such a self-reflective character he always struck me as someone with oddly little regard of his own feelings.

As a side note, I like how Geto's tendency to over-analyze things is shown in that one scene when Yaga's briefing him and Gojo on the upcoming mission. Suguru's clearly presented as someone who's very mindful of how the world around him works. Understanding helps him assign meaning to different aspects of life, and he relies upon it heavily. Also, as someone who's been uprooted from his former society and introduced instead to an entirely different world, I guess it's important for Geto to fit in. Him being highly knowledgeable about such essential details is, in my view, indicative of such effort on his part. Whereas Satoru simply does not care about such details, the reality makes sense to him as it is as he was born perfectly fit into it.

Last but not least, Geto's infamously guilty of a dichotomous, or black-and-white, outlook on things. This is the all-or-nothing mentality that leaves little to no room for nuance and does not allow two opposite statements to be true at once. It's a common cognitive distortion that manifests immature thought; a rigid mindset more often than not bordering on extreme. Meanwhile the very foundation of Geto's downfall is the inability to adapt to the complicated reality which doesn't align perfectly with his idealistic vision. He ultimately failed to wrap his head around the world with grey areas, his black-and-white thinking thinking prevented him from doing so.

The development of such maladaptive personality traits has been repeatedly linked to the effects of childhood trauma. If the environment which a person grew up in was traumatic and chaotic, black-and-white thinking might have given them a sense of control through rationalization. That's why a mentality which doesn't allow for nuance and doesn't reflect life in its intricate complexity comes off as childishly simplistic. Seeing the world in all-or-nothing terms in some way means reverting to your inner child. And this is actually something that Shoko accuses Geto of during their brief conversation in Shinjuku. In his thinking Geto doesn't grow past his traumatic experience, whether it was his parents actively abusing his abilities for their own gain or the ache of being alienated at such an early age.

If the nature of Geto's relationship with his parents was abusive, it would also explain his altruism. Suguru goes out of his way to express his concern for well-being of those around him, and he does genuinely care, but all the while it could be a way for him to tend to his own unsatisfied needs by helping others. He seems to be highly attuned to others through his empathy, but also somewhat has trouble advocating for himself, resulting in harmful patterns of self-sacrifice or self-neglect.

It's true, there is a lot of contradictions housed within Geto's character, which are evident in his mindset and his actions. But I don't believe this to be due to sloppy writing, on contrary -- it's the kind of writing that speaks through detail and nuance and invites the reader to ponder why is this or that character the way they are.

#jjk #jujutsu kaisen #jjk analysis #jjk meta #geto suguru #gojo satoru #might as well tag him #i'm so sorry it's way too long for something so irrelevent considering all the recent events #and it probably needs proper structuring #i guess i'll edit it some time eventually #maybe

[idyllic-affections]

🌻 its cruel of anyone to push someone away from their own culture just cuz they dont fit the "standards" or whatever other shit 💔 ohhh u dont know the language— stfu first of all learning a language is hard. im bilingual and its hard for ME to learn any other language. i had german and spanish in school and i simply could not learn any of them and same goes for any other language i tried to learn on my own!! i learned nothing in the end even tho ive been learning english since first primary, meaning i already should have some experience in learning a new language. but i dont. and second of all no one should ever demand proof from anyone that they are a part of this culture or whatever like!!

it’s not only annoying but also fucked up that people have the sheer audacity to set stupid requirements for OTHER PEOPLE'S identity. one's identity can be so hard and sensitive of a topic and having someone try to police u in this matter, try to tell u that no sorry u dont know the language/culture so u cant call urself that— i genuinely have no respect for people who act like this

and third of all idk man if someone came to me and said "hi i want to learn more about poland and the culture because i have polish family" (because suurprise!! im polish too!!!!) id be more than happy to tell them everything i know. even if i might not be the best knowledge source AHAJSJDKDK they dont know polish? or anything abt poland?? they just learned their family is polish??? it simply doesnt matter this person wants to learn more about themselves and im more than happy to cheer on them and hope that theyll learn everything they want. and that theyll never feel excluded out of something they deserve to have place in

this got a little long but as u can tell i got very passionate about this topic 😭😭😭 it annoys me so hard how unhuman some people can be

SOO TRUE it's so invalidating ESPECIALLYYYYY when it's always other latino or hispanic people telling me. bro please. i am doing my best here 🙏🙏

i tried for years to learn spanish and it NEVER clicked in my brain. i know basic spanish and basic french (i had to take a foreign language class a few years back so i took french 1) that's it. Please. learning a language takes so much practice and patience and the issue with learning spanish is that my pronounciation will inherently be more "white" because erm. yeahh. english is the only language i've ever spoken fluently. and for some reason, there are many native spanish speakers think it's funny to make fun of mispronounciations? so now i'm scared to practice because of that. 🫶 it's not cute or funny and it's never been in intended an affectionate way. but i am also mentally ill and neurodivergent so that probably doesn't help AJKSFBJSLSHNFM idk man but it is NOT "all in good fun" it's EMBARRASSING!!!!!

IT'S GENUINELY SO FRUSTRATING why should i have to prove my ancestry to you? like. first of all that's really none of your business and second of all i literally do not have to prove anything?!?!?!?! no-one does?!?!?!?! no-one is somehow any less of their heritage simply because they don't know much about it. literally. it is so upsetting why can we not just let people live peacefully fr.

SOOO REALL i need to ask about it again because my maternal family is generally very open about this kind of thing, and it's easy to communicate with them because there is no language barrier between us. i would love to know more about myself. because my culture is something i deserve to have a part in, you know? it's literally in my blood. it is something i always was and always will be, and i feel like i have a right to want to learn about it.

nooo it's okay!!!! i completely get it. i feel like it's becoming very common for people to be less and less human. and it makes sense, given... you know. politics and everything lately. not to be political /lh but there is just a little too much hate being spread and i dislike that so much. many people have forgotten how to be kind and it's just???? very sad and upsetting.

#aphelion replies: 🌻 anon 🌸

[fite-club]

i find absolutely NOTHING wrong with people identifying themselves as demisexual, or alloaro, or a “sex favorable ace”. what i do take issue with, however, is people with those labels behaving as if no one else could possibly understand them or relate to them in any way. everyone has a unique experience when it comes to relationships— yes, even allocishets— and distancing yourself from everyone else because you made the choice to label yourself is actually a step backwards in terms of normalizing these different kinds of experiences. there are hundreds of thousands of people who fit the exact definitions of the previously listed labels who will never identify themselves as so, simply because they haven’t heard of them or find no reason to. media representation is not an accurate reflection of real life, and there are plenty of characters who do have similar experiences even if they aren’t explicitly labeled as so.

i don’t know why “you are normal” is such a controversial statement in these communities. i am not trying to invalidate the feelings of people who feel different or isolated, it’s totally fair to have those feelings! but it seems like some of you are isolating yourselves because you think you’re fundamentally misunderstood and incapable of relating to others over this ONE aspect of your life (that probably isn’t as rare as you think it is)!

but this is all coming from someone who is gay and trans and grew up having to defend myself from othering by using “we all bleed red” stuff. “we aren’t that different, we’re normal everyday people just like you” is what we had to preach to people who treated us like perverted, dangerous, and dirty criminals. “desperately wanting to seem normal” wasn’t something we did because we wanted to assimilate into cishet culture and hide our identities, it’s something we did because we wanted what we were already doing to be seen as normal.

i guess a better example of what i’m talking about is aros or people on the “aspec” who express anger and disgust at phrases like “love is love” or “love unites us all”. for starters, the reason why these phrases became popular was because there literally has been legislation outlawing things like interracial or same-sex marriage; so have some respect for those who have faced (or are still facing) those struggles. but by assuming that the “love” in those statements is only in reference to romantic love… you’re contributing to amatonormativity! if you truly believe that platonic or familial love is just as important as romantic love, wouldn’t you agree with those kinds of statements? you can love your pet, your favorite song, anyone or anything that means something special to you. many languages other than english have different words for these different kinds of love! that’s what you should take away from those phrases, not an insistence that you’re being erased by society

#lgbt discourse #loveless #lovepunk

[ipnop]

A Letter to Myself: INTS-1141 FINAL

For starters, you really need to stop thinking so much. Seriously, stop. 

And I already know what you’re going to say… 

“But all I do is think! It’s the only thing I can do!”

Trust me, I know; I’m you, you’re me. Don’t forget that.

And I think that makes me more than qualified to tell you that, sometimes, you think yourself into these deep, dark holes that you just can’t un-think yourself back out of. And you know that better than anyone. 

You don’t need this great, scientific explanation for everything; some things just… are. 

Hearing something like that would definitely make your head spin (and it still does), but the sooner you begin to understand and accept that, the sooner you’ll begin to understand and accept yourself. And we really, really need to start doing that. 

Now, one thing you really need to understand is…

Being half-White? It doesn’t invalidate your heritage.

I know, we’ve struggled with that concept a lot growing up. And it doesn’t help that people would just love to call you things like “fake latina” because of it. Honestly (and, please, pardon my language) fuck everyone who said that.

You’re equally as Hispanic as you are White. Period. One can’t dilute the other because that’s now how it works; you’re even split, 50/50, just like everyone else. You’re smart, you know that. 

And there’s no such thing as being or acting “too white” to be something else.

What does that even mean, anyway? Acting “too white”? 

I think that would imply there’s this giant list of “social criteria” that people have to meet to be considered something or not. And that sounds pretty absurd, doesn’t it?

Your personality, your demeanor, all those things… that’s your upbringing, not your skin color or where your ancestors happened to be from. 

Another thing you need to understand is that your struggles, your traumas… they’re all valid. 

You don’t need to have these awful, awful traumas with somehow even more awful stories attached to them for your pain to be valid. Pain is… pain. 

We all experience it in different ways and to different extremes; what may be absolutely agonizing to some is just a little irritating to others. The same goes for trauma. 

You’re worthy of help, of kindness, of support because you are in pain. Not because of the type of pain you are in. 

And it certainly, certainly doesn’t make you weak to need help or support. 

I think it’s quite the opposite, actually.

True strength? It’s the ability to be vulnerable when you need to be.

Now, even though there’s probably a lot more I could get into, I’ll end with this;

Learn to be comfortable with your own skin, in your own skin. 

People? They’re fickle. They’ll change their opinion on you more times than you can count. 

So, don’t try to win over the people. 

Win over yourself instead. 

[fijimoon]

i keep trying to write a post about how im feeling but its too hard. i dont know what im feeling. im just gonna ramble here for a sec

i hate being like this. i got triggered. its weird now that i can recognize when im triggered. like i know the difference now between my general anxiety/panic stuff and being triggered and like? honestly not sure if im enjoying this new awareness. i thought the whole point of all this therapy shit is that u gain insight and awareness and in that your symptoms decrease???? but i think it just makes me sadder. im tuned in more deeply with myself which is really overwhelming and frightening because theres a fucking LOT of bullshit in here. 

i feel sad for this little girl and i feel helpless about it. i feel that intense panic because its inside me. it just repeats: its out of control its out of control its out of control. im not safe im not safe im not safe. and i want to honor that. i want to be able to hear that. i know thats a part of me, a part of my story, that for whatever reason is trapped in a different time. but it is so painful and overwhelming to feel that and i just want to scream STOP. nothings wrong nothings wrong nothings wrong. but thats exactly what happened the first time i had those big scary feelings. no would would listen to me. so i want to try to not do that to her again.

but its so hard. it does feel like all of this is an overreaction. the hardest part about having C-PTSD is that its a lot of gunk about feelings but not a lot of proof, content, corroborating the story. i can recognize that i felt unsafe and that things felt out of control. but i also...i dont know. i dont remember things. i dont remember what i felt as a child. theres a nothingness there. its just snapshots ive seen in pictures. i know that i felt unsafe and out of control because i know what my family history is, and i can imagine that for any child that would feel scary, but i dont remember i myself feeling these things.

i dont know what to do with any of this im just really tired.

#i feel like its improtant to note that #when i mention like parts stuff #im not referring to like literal parts in a OSDD/DID way #more meaning like feelings/experiences that i havent integrated into my understanding of self #and like flashbacks of feelings/experiences #not trying to invalidate anyones experiences and i know this kind of language means something else in the DID/OSDD community #personal #cptsd #so fun

[yasminbenoit]

What Is Asexuality? Yasmin Benoit for Teen Vogue

For Asexuality Awareness Week, model Yasmin Benoit answers the question ‘what is asexuality’, and busts some common myths about what it means to be asexual.

I realized I was asexual around the same time my peers seemed to realize that they were not. Once the hormones kicked in, so did a nearly universal interest in sex for those around me. I thought sex was intriguing, but never so much that I wanted to express my sexuality with someone else. I had no sexual desire towards other people, I did not experience sexual attraction, and that hasn't changed.

I didn't learn that there was a word for my sexuality until I was 15, after being interrogated for the millionth time at school about my orientation, or lack of it. After doing some Googling as soon as I got home, I realized for the first time in my life that I might not be broken, that I wasn't alone in my experience, and that it wasn't a defect I had somehow brought on myself. I had spent the entirety of my adolescent life trying to answer people's invasive questions without having the language to explain that I was just an asexual girl.

But even after I found the language, I had only solved half of the problem. We are taught in grade school that we'll become sexually interested in others, but never that not being sexually attracted to anyone is an option. Because we're not taught about it, no one else knew what I was talking about when I tried to come out to them as asexual.

Many don't believe asexuality is real,  and that makes the experience of navigating our heteronormative, hyper-sexualized society as an asexual person even harder. I've spent my life battling misconceptions about it and so have many other asexual people. Now, I try to use my work as a model and activist to raise awareness and change the way our society perceives asexuality and asexual people. This Asexual Awareness Week, I'm busting some of those myths about my orientation.

Now, let's separate fact from fiction:

Myth: Asexual people have no sexuality ✘

Truth: Asexuality is considered a sexuality, just like bisexuality, heterosexuality, and homosexuality. I often phrase it as being a sexual orientation where your sexuality isn’t oriented anywhere—because it isn't actually the same as having no sexuality or sexual feelings. Asexual people have hormones like everyone else. It isn’t uncommon for asexual people to masturbate and there are asexual people who still have sex for various reasons and gain enjoyment from it. Some asexual people are romantically attracted to others, but not sexually attracted. Since asexuality is a spectrum, the ways in which asexuality is experienced can vary in different ways.

Myth: Asexuality is a lifestyle choice ✘

Truth: This misconception stems from the idea that asexuality is a choice and not a legitimate sexual orientation. Asexuality is often confused with celibacy or abstinence, probably because they can manifest in similar ways. In contemporary society, celibacy is often defined as being sexually abstinent, often for religious reasons. Sure, for many asexual people, their asexuality means that they aren’t interested in having sex with other people, but that’s a result of their orientation—not their beliefs about sexual behavior. Celibacy is a lifestyle choice, asexuality is not. Asexuality also shouldn't be confused with being an incel. People don't decide to become asexual because they can't find sexual partners or because of any other circumstances. It isn't a state of being when you're going through a "dry spell," nor is it a choice any more than being gay or straight is a choice. It's just the way we are.\

Myth: Asexuality is an illness ✘

Truth: The assertion that asexuality is a mental or physical disorder is incredibly harmful to asexual people and has led to false diagnoses, unnecessary medication, and attempts at converting asexual people. For example, Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder and Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder — which are characterized by low or absent sex drive — are in the DSM-5 and have been thought of as a medical diagnosis for asexuality. But the difference is that people who have HSDD are bothered by their lack of sexual drive, while asexual people are not. But even the inclusion of HSDD as a diagnosis is controversial — some argue that people who are asexual might feel distress at their lack of sexual desire because of lack of acceptance in society. Asexuality is not the result of a hormone deficiency, or a syndrome, or a physical or psychological ailment. Research has said as much. We don't need to be treated or fixed.

Myth: Asexual people have anti-sex attitudes ✘

Truth: There are asexual people who are repulsed by the thought of sex, or by the thought of having sex themselves. I fall into the latter category. However, that feeling does not necessarily extend to what other people are doing. The misconception that asexual people are against other people expressing their sexuality, and that all asexual people can’t stomach conversations about sex, is quite an alienating one. It leads to asexual people being left out of important discussions about sexuality. It is entirely possible and incredibly common to have sex-positive attitudes and be asexual.

Myth: There are barely any asexual people ✘

Truth: Don't let our lack of visibility and representation fool you. There are a lot of asexual people out there, but many of us aren't entirely out, and some haven't realized that there's a word for what they're experiencing due to that lack of visibility. While research into the asexual population is lacking, its estimated that around 1% of the population is asexual—but that's based on a studies where the participants have likely known what asexuality was and been out enough to identify that way. It's likely there are more asexual people than we know of, but even if we did only comprise 1% of the population, that's still tens of millions of asexual people.

Myth: Asexual people just haven’t found the right person yet ✘

Truth: The idea that asexual people just need to meet the ‘right person’ who will unlock their sexual desire and ‘fix’ their asexuality is one I’ve always found quite perplexing. It’s an argument that seems to be applied to asexuality more than other orientations. You wouldn’t tell a straight guy that they just “hadn’t met the right man yet" as an explanation of why he's attracted to women. I’d like to think that most wouldn’t tell a gay man that they “hadn’t met the right woman yet” either. It suggests that our sexuality is reflective of our company, that no one we have ever seen or encountered has met our standards, and thus we haven’t experienced sexual attraction to the extent that the term ‘asexual’ could be applied.

This assumption ignores and invalidates all of the asexual people who have found the ‘right’ person—the asexual people in happy, fulfilling, loving relationships or who have had them in the past. Because, yes, asexual people can still have romantic relationships, or any other kind of relationship. The validity of a relationship is not and should not be based on how sexually attracted you are to that person. This statement also plays into the notion that asexual people are “missing out” on something and haven’t truly discovered our entire selves, that we are incomplete because of our innate characteristics or our life experiences. This isn’t true either.\

Myth: There’s an asexual demographic ✘

Truth: Even though most people don’t know much about asexuality, they still have quite a specific idea about what asexual people are like. I’ve often heard that, as a black woman and a model, I don’t look or seem asexual. We’re stereotyped as being awkward white kids who spend too much time on social media and probably aren’t attractive enough to find a sexual partner if we wanted to. And if we are attractive enough, then we should tone that down as not to ‘give mixed signals.’ But there is no asexual way to look or dress. Asexual people have varying ages, backgrounds, interests, appearances, and experiences, just like those belonging to any other sexual orientation. So please don't use the term "asexual" as an adjective to describe someone you think is sexually unappealing or as an insult, because that's only perpetuating this harmful stereotype.

Makeup: Margherita Lascala

Photography: Becky Gannon

Hair: Kayla Idowu

Styling: Diesel, Cheimsee, Sixth June, Northskull, Lamoda

#yasmin benoit #asexuality #ace week #ace week 2020 #asexual awareness week #asexual #aromantic #lgbt #pride #asexual pride #this is what asexual looks like #lgbtqia #lgbtqa #acephobia #aphobia #alternative black girl #alternative model #black model

[wilwheaton]

an apology I don’t expect you to read

I'm going to put the important bit at the top, without context, so if that's all you see before you tl;dr, at least you'll see it:

Without meaning to, without realizing it, I haven't given the next generation after mine the respect it deserves. I've behaved exactly the way the Boomers were with me: like my experience is the only one that's valid. And that's not helpful, if I hope to share whatever my experience is.

So if you're one of the younger-than-me people who's felt disrespected by me, and to those who I have treated like their experiences aren't valid: I am sincerely sorry.

I'm sorry. I talk to my generation in a way I shouldn't talk to yours. Some of you have been trying to tell me that, and I haven't been able to hear you. That's entirely on me, and I'm very sorry for treating you EXACTLY the way shitty middle-aged dickheads treated me when I was around your age.

Thanks for listening.

 Okay, if you want all the long-winded context, read on.

All day, I've been having this slow, dawning, realization about how to talk to and listen to teenagers and twentysomethings who are politically and intellectually aware and engaged.

I have a reflexive tendency to imagine the anonymous person who posted that thing at me as someone from my own peer group, because we all unconsciously identify people that way online, unless we explicitly have a reason not to.

So, without realizing it, I have been responding to young, politically-active people as if they are my peer group: forty-somethings who have the same amount of life experience I have. As a result, I've just been a shitty middle-aged guy to well-meaning kids, and when I was a kid, I *hated* that.

In fact, I vowed as a twenty-something that when I was older, I would take kids seriously, which I think means at least hearing them out, rather than just shutting them down because they're young.

I've been trying, and I thought I was nailing it. But I realized today that, for years, when I've had rare occasion to interact with someone who is, to me, a kid, I've been talking to, say, 18 year-old me, or 23 year-old, me, and so on. What I _should_ have been doing is listening to 18 year-old _whoever that person is_, and allowing them to be heard on their own terms, as their own people, and not as a reflection of who I was, or who my peers were, at their stage of life.

So I'm going to talk to a person my age very differently than I'm going to talk to a younger person, since the person my age has the same life experience and same life-shaping events I had. So I just don't have any patience for someone who is in their 40s and is STILL going on about The Greens.

It's like, listen, you fortysomething, when I was a kid, I thought the Greens were great, and I supported them, too. I don't know how they are in the rest of the world, but at the presidential level in America all they do is help Republicans by taking votes away from Democrats. And Republicans (and their ideological allies in Russia, China, Saudi Arabia) start grooming kids when they are teens to believe that "the lesser of two evils is still evil". I know this because they did it to me and my generation (OUR GENERATION), too. I (WE)know this from personal experience in 2000, so even though a lot of Green positions appeal to me, I won't support them at the presidential level. But I come to thsi conclusion this based on 30 years of political experience. And I know it is condescending to say "when you're older you'll understand", so please know I hear it when I say that you're going to grow out of this and realize the Democrats, as imperfect as they are, aren't your enemy. I know this because I and millions of others in my generation went through this same transformation. It's why the Democratic Party has moved so far to the Left, so that candidates like AOC and The Squad are on their way to changing things in the House.

I know that is probably TOTALLY condescending, and likely turned off everyone I was hoping to apologize to. Good thing I already did that.

Look. I don't know how to say it any other way. Greens hurt America at the presidential level. Always have, always will.

I've gotten sidetracked. Let me try to come back around:

In some of these asks, I don't regret the argument I've made, but deeply regret the _way_ I made it. I've ended up being a condescending, impatient, tone-deaf ass to a lot of kids, when they absolutely did not deserve to be treated that way.

I hated it when adults treated me that way. I hated being dismissed and unheard when I felt strongly about something. I felt like my ideas deserved to at least be heard. Even though I now know those adults were (fairly) reacting to my lack of life experience, they could have expressed that better, in a more compassionate and empathetic way.

The reality is, we aren't going to be listened to very much when we're young, because we simply do not have the life experience to make huge decisions. But that doesn't mean our feelings are, by default, invalid.

I vowed to not treat kids the way adults treated me, so when I interact with these young men and women, I reflexively talk to whoever I was at their age, saying the things and hearing the things that he would have said and heard.

That's like ... oh, I don't know, a 50 year-old in 1988 trying to convince 14 year-old me of anything. Or a 48 year-old in 1993, lecturing 23 year-old me, who is REALLY smart and has A LOT figured out, like he's an idiot who has no agency or valid opinions.

The thing I needed to do, so I could fulfill the vow I made when I was young, is to give young people the _respect_ they deserve. I need to recognize that, though their experience is limited compared to mine, that doesn't mean their experience is invalid or wrong. The thing I need to do is to actually listen to what someone is saying, and recognize that, because of our relative ages, we may be speaking the same language but not communicating. And because I have more experience, it's incumbent upon _me_, not them, to bridge that gap.

Without meaning to, without realizing it, I haven't given the next generation after mine the respect it deserves. I've behaved exactly the way the Boomers were with me: like my experience is the only one that's valid. And that's not helpful, if I hope to share whatever my experience is.

So if you're one of the younger-than-me people who's felt disrespected by me, and to those who I have treated like their experiences aren't valid: I am sincerely sorry.

I have been nothing more than a cranky old man to any kid who shows up on my internet lawn, and I just want you to know that (as of about two hours ago) I'm aware of it, I'm sorry for being rude.

Even if I don't agree with you on something, even if I don't think that something REALLY important to you isn't as important as that thing is going to seem in 20 years, WHAT I THINK DOES NOT MATTER, because I'm halfway through my ride on this planet, and you're all just beginning. I fully believe that if the generation ahead of us had listened to us, we would all be better off. I know that a lot of you feel that way about me and other Xers, and you're totally right to feel that way. We're borrowing your planet, now, and we're doing our best (at least I am) to give you a better culture than the Boomers gave us. And I STILL know that it isn't enough, because it wasn't enough for me when I was in my twenties. (I will gently tell you that when we're in our twenties, a lot of what we want will eventually be tempered with age, and you'll be like, "I can't believe I fought so hard for that thing," but that doesn't mean the fight, and the experience of the fight, isn't worth it.)

I had a whole thing here to wrap this up that ultimately ended up being about me and my feelings. I deleted it because what I really just want to say is: I'm sorry. I talk to my generation in a way I shouldn't talk to yours. Some of you have been trying to tell me that, and I haven't been able to hear you. That's entirely on me, and I'm very sorry for treating you EXACTLY the way shitty middle-aged dickheads treated me when I was around your age.

This has been, honestly, a huge revelation to me about who I am in this moment, and who I wanted to be at this point. It makes me reconsider and just ... rethink, I guess? a lot of things. I'm going to grow from this, and I want to end by saying thank you to those of you who tried to communicate to me with kindness. I didn't hear you directly or explicitly, but I think I eventually got there.

So, sidebar you can ignore because it's at the end: Politically, I have a ton of experience. I've spent my life in it, more years than a lot of the people who drag me have been alive. I don't take that personally, because I know how kids are, and I know how kids view adults (and vice/versa). Politically, especially at this specific moment, I don't have a lot of patience for anyone who isn't willing to do the ONE thing that can end Trump: vote for Biden, and vote for Democrats all the way down. I get it. I get that you want someone to win your heart, but if you don't vote with your head, there will not be another election in your lifetime that matters. When Democracy in America is not at stake, I will 100% listen to all of your arguments and all of your reasons you hated voting for Biden, and what we can all do together to make your world better and more fair. But I promise you. I beg you to hear me: the ONLY way we stop Trump and his Fascists is to elect Biden in a LANDSLIDE. Anything less and you're going to spend the best years of your life in an autocracy.

[northlight14]

A love for love

Description: Roman loved love. He always had, even as a small child. So why was it so different whenever he was involved?

TW: panic attack, mention of making out but nothing is actually shown, cursing, questioning, unrequited love, let me know if I should add anything else

Ships: unrequited royality, platonic roceit, dukeceit

Genre: high school au

Prompt: prompt 6, aromantic (prompt by @pridewrite2021)

Roman loved love. He always had. Even as a small child, he'd watch wide eyed as Prince Charming leaned down and gave sleeping beauty true loves kiss, something so powerful that it was able to break an evil witches curse. He'd stayed up till early hours in the morning, squealing with excitement as he read about two warriors able to take on an entire army, motivated by their want to keep the other safe and stealing glances at each other as their metal swords collided with the enemies weapon. He'd sing his heart out when a romance song came on the radio, gushing about their love interest with such emotion that Roman adored.

Yes, Roman loved love.

So why was it so different whenever he was involved?

The earliest memory Roman had of this was when he was in first grade. Two of his classmates ran up to him giggling as they sang "Savannah has a crush on you!" Instead of feeling that overwhelming joy like the ones described in his books and music, he felt a deep cutting disgust in his stomach. Roman felt less like he could conquer the world and more like the world was going to swallow him whole. Rather than singing any great love song that he'd sang so many times in his room or in the car, he began crying instead while the two girls looked at him in confusion.

"It was just because I don't like her." Roman told himself.

But this feeling of being out of place only grew as his fellow classmates gushed about their boyfriends and girlfriends, crushes and which cartoon character they find cute. Granted, they were in second and third grade, so the terms "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" roughly translated to "they let me borrow their crayon at break once and now we're in love and going to get married." However, this love for love spread like a virus and Romans desire to fit in only grew. So, during a sleepover with his friends, Roman looked upon the TV, at the princess Aurora and decided 'She'd make a good crush.' Before announcing it to the crowd of toddlers, the words immediately sounding wrong as he spoke them, as if he'd spoken them in a foreign language. He decided that night to never speak of his supposed "crush" ever again. Roman liked Aurora with Prince Philip much more, anyway.

Roman was in fifth grade when he was talking to one of his best friends, Valorie. The two of them just laughing and joking when his friends approached.

"Who's your girlfriend, Ro?" one laughed, putting his arm around Roman. And he knew it was a joke. He knew that. But it still felt like the arm hadn't wrapped around his shoulders and instead knocked all the air out his lungs in one hard punch. This moment lingered in his mind like a haunting apparition, quickly causing any friendships with girls to become strained. First only talking occasionally while in class or on the yard, to only talking when his guy friends weren't around, to only texting outside of school to nothing at all. Roman mourned these friendships but it had been made clear that boys and girls couldn't just be friends and the idea of people thinking he was dating any of these people made him feel like a caged bird.

Later that year Roman decided, despite his love for love, he didn't want to date. The reason for this being...

"I'm just more focused on my career."

"I just don't see the point in dating right now."

"I've never really liked anyone so what's the point?"

"I just like being more focused on myself."

And any other excuse he could possibly come up with, repeating them as many times as he needed to to believe them. Roman had always been a good actor, after all. But, of coarse, with this supposed decision came "reassurance" from adults, as if they had the ability to see the future.

"You just haven't met the right person, yet."

"You'll change your mind one day, when you get a bit older."

"All kids say that at your age."

"Roman isn't interested in dating YET."

These invalidating promises made Romans blood boil the more he heard them. It was as if he was yelling while trapped in a soundproof box, unable to escape. But, despite what seemingly everyone around him was saying, Roman knew deep down that romance just wasn't for him.

He also remained thankful that this love for love hadn't infected his friendship too much.

That was until seventh grade when what was originally a few cases of a love for love became an epidemic. It seemed that all anyone wanted to know was "do you have a crush on her?" "Did you hear that Lily and Reese are going out?" "Do you find her attractive?" This soon made its way over to his friends as they talked about how hot the girls were and teased each other relentlessly about who they liked. Roman once again felt like an outsider in his friend group. His friends conversations about their girlfriends may as well have been spoken in Latin.

Then the day came when his twin brother, Remus, came out as gay and started dating a guy named Janus. It then occurred to Roman.

"Maybe the reason I haven't been feeling anything for all these girls was because they were girls! Maybe I like boys instead!" Roman had never been a very logical person but this definitely seemed to make more sense. If he didn't like women then that surely must mean that he liked men instead, right? Because otherwise...otherwise Roman didn't know what that meant.

So Roman tried. Really God damn tried to find boys cute, to fantasize about dating them, to relate to gay experiences. But all he was met with was the same foreign and hollow feeling he'd felt when he lied about having a crush back in 2nd grade. Roman quickly began feeling his love for the concept of love diminish.

So when Roman entered grade 9, he decided to put anything to do with his romantic feelings (or lack there of) in a little box in the back of his mind to deal with later. Instead putting his passion and good acting skills to use by joining his schools drama department. The moment he stepped foot on stage, he felt himself come alive. The crowd, the praise, the creativity, it was addicting.

And it was only made better with the more friends he made. There was one person who he grew partially close to. Patton Heart. The two quickly became best friends, often hanging out outside of rehearsals and texting non stop. And, for the first time in what seemed like years, Roman was happy and comfortable.

That was until 10th grade. Roman way lying on his bed watching Netflix on his phone when a message from Patton came through. Roman clicked on the message and was caught massively off guard as he read it.

Patton: hey, Roman. So I've been thinking a lot lately. In particular about us and about you. And over the past few months I've started to realize that I have a really big crush on you. You're really handsome, funny and talented and I love spending time with you. It's totally ok if you don't like me back, but I figured it's better to be honest.

It should've been it. The moment when one of the main characters confesses their feelings for the love interest and they proclaim they feel the same way. Sparks fly and their hearts beat faster with excitement. It all becomes so clear when they hear that confession in movies and books.

But this wasn't a movie.

Roman felt time stand still as he read the message, his hands shaking so much he didn't think he would be able to respond even if he knew how to answer.

He couldn't breath. Why couldn't he breath?! The edges of his vision went fuzzy as he desperately gasped for air.

"Patton's great." He thought through his suffocating panic. "He's funny and charming and sweet. You should like him. Why don't you like him? What's wrong with you?!" Romans thoughts yelled as he tried desperately to hold back the tears threatening to spill over.

Not sure of what else to do, Roman ran to Remus' room, hoping he'd know how to respond.

Roman knocked on his brothers door and Remus responded with a very annoyed "come in" after a few beats of silence. Remus and Janus were sat on Remus' bed and Roman could tell from their slightly red lips that the two had been making out. But he wasn't in the headspace to even pretend to care that he'd interrupted them right now.

"Ugh, what do you want?" Remus said, clearly too irritated by his brothers presence to notice his distress.

"P-Patton just messaged me s-saying he likes me and I don't know what to say." Roman barely stuttered out, trying desperately not to cry in front of Remus and his boyfriend.

"Aw, cute. Roro finally got a man." Remus joked but Roman was definitely not in the mood for that kind of humor.

"Do you like him back?" Janus asked, calmly, clearly taking more notice of Romans distress.

"Well, I do. But not like that."

"Ok, so just tell him that. It doesn't have to be this whole thing. Why are you getting so upset?" Remus said, looking at Roman as if he was stupid.

Which, to be fair, Roman did feel very stupid right now.

"He's my best friend. I don't want to upset him." Yeah, that was the reason Roman was freaking out. He just didn't want to hurt Patton. That was it.

"Well, just say you don't want a relationship right now or some shit. Besides, he's probably more worried now because you've taken so long to answer." Remus pointed out. Yeah, Roman was never coming to Remus with his problems ever again.

"Yeah...ok." Roman said. Slowly, he walked out the room, noticing Janus looking at him curiously but deciding not to focus on it.

Roman: I'm really sorry Patton, but I don't feel the same way. We can still be friends tho. It doesn't have to be awkward between us. Especially because I really like being friends with you.

Patton: Yeah, that's ok. This is kinda what I was expecting to be honest. But yeah, I still wanna stay friends.

A few days later Janus came over again for dinner. Afterwards, Roman went into the living room and sat on the couch, scrolling through Instagram.

To his surprise, Janus followed after him and sat next to him. "So, how are you feeling after a few days ok. Broken his heart yet?" Janus teased.

Roman huffed out a laugh. "Uh, yeah, we agreed to just stay friends. Which I'm happy about but it's also really weird. I honestly don't know where we go from here which sucks because I really like Patton. Just not like...that." Janus nodded in understanding.

"You must care about him a lot if you had a panic attack just because you didn't want to hurt his feelings." Janus said. Roman just shrugged in response. "So, does that mean you like someone else?" Janus asked.

"No...I. I don't know. I've...I've never really liked anyone. I don't think I ever will. And people say I'll change my mind but...it isn't like I've made a choice. I've felt like this my whole life and everyone around me has had a crush on someone by now. I just... don't think I was built for romance. Which I know probably sounds stupid but that's just how I feel." He said, so honest it almost hurt.

Janus nodded slowly, taking in what Roman was saying. "It doesn't sound stupid." He said before pausing, as if considering his next choice of words. "Roman...have you ever heard of the term aromantic?" He asked.

"No." Roman answered, looking at Janus curiously.

"It basically means someone who experiences little to no romantic attraction. So they don't get crushes and stuff like that." He explained.

Roman felt his heart leap and for once it wasn't because of a fight or flight reflex. "Wait, that's a thing?" He asked in disbelief.

"Yeah, a surprising number of people identify with it. I don't want to assume anything but I thought I might mention it just from what you've told me and what Remus has said in the past. Plus that panic on your face yesterday reminded me a bit of when I tried to force myself into romantic situations with girls." Janus smirked to himself.

That night Roman researched more on aromanticism than he did for his science test. The more he searched, the more it just made sense. Of coarse, he still had a long way to go towards self acceptance. Roman could feel himself already starting to mourn the idea that this was a choice he'd made ages ago and he was going to feel romantic love one day. It was an odd feeling, realizing that even though he knew deep down it wasn't a decision and he'd always hated when people made those comments, a part of him took comfort in adults promising that he'd change his mind one day. He was also horrified to realize that he didn't know what his future was supposed to look like now without romance. After all, media seemed to show single middle aged adults exclusively as depressed and lonely. But as he scoured through wiki articles to tumblr pages to memes, he knew this was a good start to unlearning any nonsense society had been shoving down his throat.

The more Roman learned and the more people he talked to online about it, the more he started to feel his love for love increase. But instead of it being centered on a prince and princess in a movie, two in love warriors keeping each other alive in a book or a cheesy love song on the radio, it was a different type of love Roman was finally starting to feel the more he accepted himself.

Self love.

Reblog’s >>>> likes

#ya'll really thought you'd get through pride month without me projecting onto roman? #while not everything in this story applies to me the vast majority of this is based of my irl experience #so this was a lot of fun for me to write #and if you're aro and have a different experience that's so valid #sander sides #pridewrite2021 #fanfic #pw 6 #tw panic attack #tw cursing #tw questioning #tw unrequited love #roman sanders #janus sanders #remus sanders #patton sanders #unrequited royality #platonic roceit #dukeceit #demus #romantic dukeceit #romantic demus #aro roman #aromantic roman

[dustbinflower0]

*I might delete this soon as people may not get my point and get angry. It's a sensitive topic but this is what's on my mind at midnight. I'm fine with constructive discussion and open to others' experience of the topic. *

I know that "gatekeeping" has a negative connotation of course, but I think some things in the mental health world might need more of it; Not in a bad or judgmental way...but more like, can people please stop with the self-diagnosing on tik tok and in general promoting the idea that every negative emotion or quirk is a "trauma response" or a mental illness? All of us go through struggles. But someone with, like, normal anxiety is not the same as some of us chronically mentally ill and suicidal and institutionalized, stigmatized. I am definitely not invalidating anyone's difficulties at all. But there seems to be this push of identifying everyone's struggles as being on the same level, and that's not exactly true. Not because anyone's experience is any less real or valid or important. But along with not everyone having the same protective factors in life, a person experiencing, say, their parents' divorce, however painful or sad, is not like suffering from something out of the realm of normal human experience, such as abuse or threat to one's life. There is a general definition in the DSM of what trauma encompasses, though of course there are variations:

"The DSM-5 definition of trauma requires “actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence” [10] (p. 271). Stressful events not involving an immediate threat to life or physical injury such as psychosocial stressors [4] (e.g., divorce or job loss) are not considered trauma in this definition."

I'm rambling a bit now, but going off from my post on triggers, it bothers me a lot when individuals cry "trigger" to, for example, something like my total limb scarring from self-harm, even more so when they have insecurities that their own scars are perceived as not "bad enough", or when cutting isn't even a behavior they struggle with. It starts to feel like a way to erase something about me that some feel is frightening or jarring to see, a very visible reminder that yes, very bad things have happened in my life. People in treatment sometimes seem to feel threatened that they will be overshadowed by other patients. Obviously especially in eating disorder treatment. This kind of thing seems to happen a lot just in general when someone is sharing something traumatic that happened, and another person feels insecure about their own past "mattering" or them being 'sick enough..." then feel the need to alert others that THEY TOO have pain, make sure it's known that it's just as "serious." Announcing "I'm triggered" is used so frequently as a language of saying that one wants to be recognized also as "sick," mattering, or worthy of attention.

When I feel "triggered," which is not a word I use to describe what happens to me, it is something I have to take care of personally in whatever way. Or it is a flashback or dissociation or something like that and I don't have the wherewithal to call out trigger.

"Trigger" for me means something is set off in me that sends me into the past or the sudden compulsion go act on a harmful behavior. But it's a very internal experience that is not about someone else really. I've just never blamed another person's expression of what they're dealing with on what comes up for me. It's really about ME, not them.

But calling out feeling triggered is so often like a subtle competition of whose pain is more visible, more noticed, more important. Who is worse. Constant comparing. And it is EVERYWHERE in social media accounts. It's become this endless struggle of trying to get validation at the expense of invalidating another individual sharing their suffering.

I'm so tired of it.

#personal

[chaotically-cas]

29 Things I Think Allistic People Need To Hear

From an autistic person

Not my usual content but I felt it needed to be said.

Saying “everyone is a little autistic” is really hurtful. Yes, everyone has their struggles but these struggles are far different for autistic people. Saying everyone experiences it is invalidating & harmful.

Being graded on eye contact & standing still is wrong. I’m pretty sure at one point or another we’ve had a project we were graded on & one of the grades was eye contact & not fidgeting. These things are extremely hard for autistic people & they are practically second nature. It’s like holding in a sneeze.

Stim & figget toys in schools. Of course fidget spinner’s & stim cubes can be bought & should be bought by anyone. If you want one, get one. But the way schools are banning them is crazy. They are very necessary for autistic people & it’s so much harder for them when schools ban their use.

QUITTTTT BABYING US!! We aren’t ‘uwu babies’. We are humans. We are perfectly capable of functioning without allistic people’s pity & looking down on us. We are our own people that don’t need a hand to hold in every damn situation. We aren’t cute because of it. 

Listen to autistic people. Everyone is all for advocating for people until that group of people want to advocate for themselves. So shut up & listen once & maybe you can learn something you didn’t know.

Creative writing in class is difficult. You don’t know how many bad grades I’ve gotten on because I can’t think of a good story out of my ass. It’s extremely hard for autistic people. Please give us a prompt it’s more helpful than you know.

Role playing in class. I think we’ve all had to do something where we research a famous person & have to assume their identity. This is again, so hard for autistic people. It’s hard enough for us to be ourselves. Most of us can’t understand these actives enough.

Slurs. Quit saying retard. It’s not an insult. It’s not funny. It’s offensive & every time you use it you’re hurting a disabled person & spreading harmful stereotypes. It’s not just a word. It’s not just a bad word. It’s a slur. Same as the f word or any other slur. Don’t use it.

People talking over us. No I dont mean just in conversations. Although that is another issue. I mean organizations like autism speaks that put words into autistic peoples mouths instead of letting them speak for themselves.

Stop making fun of our special interests. Whether you find anime cringey or think an adult loving Aladdin is childish just stop it. These things being extreme joy to us. They make us happy in a word that we don’t understand. So just leave us alone & let us be happy.

Don’t stare at us if we’re stimming. Especially in public. If you see me flapping my hands. Don’t stare. If you hear me humming quietly, don’t judge. These activities aren’t for your viewing pleasure. They’re for autistic people to regulate & express how they’re feeling.

Normalizing ableism. It’s so normalized. Whether it’s phrased like “suffers from autism” or how regularly ‘retard’ is used in classe; ableism is so often over looked especially by adults. There are no many micro aggressions they are just passed off as us not having a thick enough skin. When in reality it’s really damaging.

People first language. If you ever correct someone by saying “no, they’re a PERSON with autism. Not an autistic person”. Literally shut up. We’re autistic. We’re people. Being autistic doesn’t make us any less human so you don’t need to make it seem like it does. We’re still human no matter our disably. People don’t have to be reminded of this.

Using words like psychopath & sociopath. Calling autistic people these things just because you don’t understand us is disgusting. If you don’t understand these terms don’t use them. Just because we aren’t good at showing empathy in some cases doesn’t make us ‘psychopaths’.

Tone indicators. This is both the over use & not using them that’s an issue. Saying things like “/j /hj /sarcasm /srs /lh” all in one post defeats the whole damn purpose of them. & not using any at all especially when joking around or using sarcasm can lead to a lot of misunderstanding. It’s not that hard to use one or two at the end of a post. /srs

Picky eating. Literally stop making fun of autistic people for not liking a lot of foods or ordering the same thing at every restaurant. A lot of textures & flavors are very bothersome to autistic people. They can cause overstimulation or even panic. Just let us be. So I eat mac & cheese 4 times a week. I didn’t know it effected you so much.

“Ugh you’re so annoying you can’t ever get a joke”. No hearing that is what’s annoying. Tones are hard for us to understand so while most people pick up on it autistic people are more likely to read too much into it or take it seriously. It’s simple to use tone indicators in text or even to say “I’m joking”. It won’t make your joke less funny. It’ll just help us understand more.

Be specific if you want things from us. Don’t just say “hey I need a pencil”. Or “the dishwasher needs put away”. Most likely we’ll just be like, yeah, ok, and? Be specific please. Say things like “can I borrow a pencil?” or “can you undo the dishwasher?”.

Faces seeming to look weird. A lot of us having facial stims that can alter our faces. Whether it’s excessive blinking, eyebrow raising, or face scrunches. Don’t ask us what’s wrong with our face or what we are doing. For me, because of my facial stims & tics my eyes/eyebrows are permanently uneven. Don’t bring it up.

Classroom behavior charts are horrible. Autistic people don’t behave the same as allistic people. Simple as that. What they see as ok behavior, others don’t. & some times they don’t realize these behaviors will get them in trouble.

Police brutality. Especially in black or brown autistic people. It’s so common that people call the police on autistic people stimming in public because they are seen as dangerous. & when these autistic people can’t understand what’s going on or can’t make eye contact they are labeled as more suspicious. Especially black autistic people. Just look at Elijah McLean.

Feeling dumb. Especially in schools or other scholarly conversations. Some autistic people aren’t able to keep up or fully understand everything that’s being said or presented. Which leads to us feeling dumb. Give us time to process or aso questions please.

Feeling robotic. You’ve most likely heard autistic people being compared to robots at one point or another. Whether that’s for the impaired ability to establish empathy or something else it’s an extremely negative & hurtful stereotype. Especially in media.

Saying ‘I forgot’ is a valid excuse. There is so much going on in our heads. So much to process & remember. We forget things. Everyone forgets things. Especially autistic people. Please don’t yell at us for always forgetting to do the dishes. It’s not like we chose to forget.

The harmful effects of the vaccines cause autism jokes. Aside from the whole anti vaxers debate, perpetually the idea that we shouldn’t be vaccinated because it causes autism is disgusting. It’s treating autism like a disease. Like the person who has it isn’t worthy. Or that autism is so chronic it will ruin everything. It’s like people avoiding cheese burgers because it’s rumored they make you ginger. It’s preposterous. 

Yelling at autistic people for struggling to want to learn new concepts/concepts at all. This not only goes for in school but in just normal conversation. It’s hard for autistic people to grasp things they don’t have an interest in learning. So please don’t yell at us for not understanding everything about a band that we don’t care about, we would if we could. It might not seem like a big issue but it happens more than you’d think.

Intrusive thoughts. (Tw: rape mention & violence) Most of the time autistic people experience extreme spells of intrusive thoughts “omg he’s going to rape you image him raping you” or “stab yourself in the side right now” or much worse. & when autistic (and other) people try to talk about it they are labeled crazy or insane. It’s a normal occurrence to have these kinds of thoughts. We don’t want to. But they happen. That’s why they’re called intrusive.

Executive disfunction. This is basically when autistic people are views as lazy but we physically & mentally just can’t. Where tasks as seemingly simple as going to get a glass of water feels like a mountain to autistic people. It’s not that we are lazy. We physically & mentally can’t work up to it.

Class rank & graduation requirements are unfair. Autistic people socialize differently. It’s just a fact. Our brains work differently in classes & outside of it. We could be working our asses off to understand our English class book, but we get an F. Not to mention how most schools require community service hours to graduate. Yes community service is good but it can be very hard for autistic people.

Please feel free to add on but a lot of these are drawn from personal frustrations. Please listen to autistic & other disabled people more. All these also applies to those with ADHD/ADD or any other mental illness where the situations apply. You’re all valid & amazing.

I love you all. 💕

#autistic #actually autistic #autism psa #listen to autistic people #rant #the outsiders

[quillquiver]

Alex’s Big Nerdy Destiel Canon Rant

I love talking about canon: what it is, what gets to be part of canon, etc. so I want to add my two cents to all the discourse! To my mind, yeah, literary theory uses the word ‘canon’ to describe the complete text (including subtext), but like... that definition isn’t necessarily useful in a fannish context, and it’s certainly not useful in the Destiel fandom.

Just hear me out: even deciding what is part of SPN canon text-wise is a mine-field. Are we counting what Jensen and Misha have said at cons? Are we counting tweets? What about the series of SPN tie-in books that exist? If all these things are paratext, and we’re really only looking at what has been said on the show that’s cool, but I suspect that many people have differing opinions on what SPN canon even consists of! And this makes a lot of sense: the show has been around for 15 years, and the fandom is composed of a whole bunch of people whose ideas about canon, even coming into the fandom, are probably pretty different. Plus, we’re an online fandom, so things are de-centralized and it’s wayyyy harder to even agree on or establish a definition of what the actual, canonical source text even consists of. 

Setting that aside, language has also always evolved to suit the needs of the community using it. Queer culture, for example, re-appropriates, reclaims and creates new terms all the time (that then may get picked up in mainstream media, where the meaning may change yet again!). Because fandoms can sometimes drastically differ in terms of language usage, I can’t speak to other fandoms besides the ones I’m in. But! By my reckoning, Destiel fandom took the word canon, (which in a perfect world refers to a single, total, indisputable source text, subtext included), and changed its meaning. In the linguistics world, this is called a semantic change! We’ve largely removed ‘subtext’ from one of the things we consider canon, because that doesn’t suit our purposes - due to the really fraught history between SPN creators and DeanCas fans, canon for us has come to mean something different. But more on that later.

At this point, I know a lot of people are gonna argue with me. BUT THAT MAKES IT SOUND LIKE THERE’S AN AGENDA! LANGUAGE IS OBJECTIVE! IT’S A TOOL! To which I say: language has never ever been objective, because people aren’t objective. If you think that language does not exist to serve a purpose, consider the assimilation of Indigenous peoples through the use of English. Or the fact that the Ancient Greeks used to describe colour differently than we do, because that served them better. Language always exists so we can better communicate and understand each other, and policing it has always been a form of subjugation, whether that be through the policing of what language or dialect you are/are not allowed to speak, or how to speak it. One of my profs loved to remind us that grammar is classist - as long as we can understand each other, how something is spelled really shouldn’t matter. 

But back to SPN. We as a general fandom have a really unique relationship to our content producers. We always have. It’s the reason we’re the go-to case study when fan studies scholars want to look at the fan/producer relationship in western media fandom. Destiel fandom? An even more fraught relationship, because for a very long time, the producers did not consider Destiel as part of the canon of their own show. If they had, we wouldn’t be having this conversation! But the first time SPNs narrative even deigned entertain the idea of Destiel as existing seriously and explicitly in the narrative, it was during their 200th episode, and it was a “you have your interpretation, we have ours”, which super invalidates the mocking hell they put us through beforehand. The fact that DeanCas fans have been condescended to and queerbaited for so long means that, largely, we’ve decided that DeanCas canon cannot and does not include subtext... even though, yes, the existence of Destiel romantic subtext technically means the ship is, was and has always been canon (i.e. part of the complete episodic source text). After being told you’re delusional, you’re wrong, you’re crazy for so many years, the idea of a canon DeanCas became entwined with the idea of explicit, incontrovertible romantic text in the show, because it’s not only about Dean and Cas... it’s about the recognition that our reading is also correct. That we were right all along.

People will argue with me here, but don’t misunderstand me: I’m not saying that fandom needs approval or validation from the creators - we really, really don’t. Whatever we see in any show is canon just by virtue of it being there, and so is a valid reading, and that is definitely enough. But SPN is nothing if not the exception to almost every rule, because context: 12 years of being told you’re insane by the people in the diver’s seat, and 15 years of having this on-and-off fraught relationship with creators in a way that had previously never happened. SPN fans are close to the writers and producers and actors in a way that very few other shows are, and we have been for a long-ass time. The writer’s room is an authority, for sure, but they’re also like a group of fans we're constantly at odds with, and that means we treat them like we would other fans. We discuss, we ask questions, we argue. And yeah, the mentality of fighting over ownership of the narrative is one that is very early 2000s, but considering that’s when the show started, it’s not a surprise that it never really left us. In other words: because of our closeness to TPTB and our history with them, there’s a desire for recognition and validation (vindication?) that is unique, but nonetheless there and important.

Back to canon. In the literary world, canon is used to describe a complete text (which again, people have a hard time agreeing on what that even consists of), but it’s also used to describe a complete body of literature. For example, you often hear literary scholars talking about “British literary canon”. Here, canon is used as a way of organizing the most important, worthwhile works of a community, and so is also used as a tool of exclusion and subjugation. Canon excludes people, like BIPOC and women writers, to serve the most powerful culture’s interests - it has a very specific purpose. In this same way, I’ve seen people using their own definitions of canon to invalidate the feelings, experiences and definitions of other fans. For example, there have been a couple posts floating around saying that we absolutely and in no uncertain terms need to use the canonical definition of literary theory (one single, subtext-included source text to rule them all) and I have an issue with that because first of all, not everyone knows literary theory, and second of all... why? Canon is and always has been a polysemic term - it has multiple meanings. The OG example of this is religious canon: it eventually stabilized, but like, I’m Greek Orthodox, and my bible does not look the same as that of a Catholic Christian. But to hear both sides talk, they each have the real canon. So canon can mean something different depending on who you’re talking to, even when you’re talking about the same thing. The important thing is that whatever a community decides is canon, that’s it. That’s what canon becomes. 

But what if your community doesn’t have one single definition, because canon means something slightly different to everyone? Well, that’s also fine! Because again, language is only there to allow us to understand each other. If we’ve all been talking about canon and largely understanding one another for the past 12 years, that means we actually never had to have these kinds of conversations, because we largely agreed that subtext was not canon, and destiel never really left the subtext. But we just had Castiel confess his love to Dean (still reeling from that), and so the minutiae of what constitutes canon (a kiss, a hand-hold, a love confession) is suddenly pertinent and important - because we’re all on the same side, but we all have slightly different ideas regarding the details, and who the heck knows what we’re gonna get in the finale, if we even get anything. So we’re all talking and yelling at each other, all trying to say my very specific definition is the right one because xyz when in reality... all of us are right. 

Believe it or not, this discourse about what the minutiae of canon is, is actually how we come to a more specific definition. That takes years, and will be infinitely more difficult in a community that is so de-centralized and whose members are always changing, but it’ll eventually happen. Maybe. For now, though: your definition? That’s the right one for you. 

Do not let anyone shame you for thinking Destiel was already canon, or not thinking it is by the end, or insisting their definition is the best, right and only one. Canon is a polysemic term, and that means your reading is in there. But that also means everyone else’s is, too. 

#fan studies #canon #how do i even tag this #canon discourse #? #destiel #linguistics #literary theory #i'm a big nerd #alex attempts to be a lady and a scholar #long post

[pinkchaosart]

On transphobia towards our Sisters (not just our cis-ters)

(TW: talk of transphobia, misogyny, gender and sex-based violence)

So I went and took a look at the post by @persistentlyfem that’s causing a major fuss, and I thought I’d address it as a lesbian femme myself. I see a lot of the common talking points that get thrown around and I’m seeing some truly toxic replies being thrown in her direction. Eight years ago I might have agreed with the replies, but I think it’s more useful to engage those talking points and maybe we can meet with some kind of understanding.

Now I want to get a few things out of the way first. Persistentlyfem says, if not in the main post then elsewhere on her blog, that she doesn’t identify as a radfem (radical feminist), so I won’t assume that she is one. I will however address the points she raises as being part of the trans-exclusionist radical feminist ideology, as that’s where the ideas seem to have come from.

One of the biggest misunderstanding between radical feminists and liberal feminists is the concept of gender vs. sex and their importance when speaking of identities. TERF ideology is rooted in second-wave feminism of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, which was a necessary step in the feminist school of thought and is the reason we have a lot of our modern rights. Most people who are trans-exclusionary would describe themselves as gender-critical, but in my opinion, I believe that being exclusionary towards trans women is rooted in the resistance to third-wave feminist ideas of individualism and diversity. But we’ll hold that thought for now.

The ideal of radical feminism is to liberate women by tearing down the concept of gender, abolishing it all together. The ideal of liberal feminism is to create equality by creating safe and inclusive spaces for everyone, regardless of gender, via social and legal reform. Basically the main difference between the two schools of thought is one seeks to destroy gender as a construct and the other seeks to expand it to be more inclusive. It’s important to note that being a radical feminist does not automatically mean that you must be trans-exclusionary.

So I’d like to talk about some specific talking points. I took a little stroll down Persistentlyfem’s blog to see what her experience has been and so that I can understand where she’s coming from. Normally I wouldn’t engage in this kind of conversation because I’m disabled so I have very little energy to spare, but as a fellow butch-attracted femme, I thought it might be useful to respond to her  thoughts. I won’t respond to all the points in her recent post, but I will try to talk about the core ideas.

I see that she’s concerned with misogyny in LGBTQ2S+ spaces. I agree it’s widespread, often in ways that are covert. I see it in how butches treat femmes, how gay men talk about women, and how we speak to fellow gay women who disagree with our opinions. And, If I understand correctly, it’s that internalized misogyny that she believes is responsible for trans women believing they should be included in women-only spaces. I argue that it’s quite the opposite, and that it’s actually misogyny that keeps trans-women from being fully accepted.

What I mean is that I find the argument for “female-only spaces” (assigned female at birth, cisgendered women) quite reductive. It implies that there is only one way to be a woman and it reduces us to our genitalia. I don’t think anyone would say they’re a woman because they have a vagina and mean it fully (maybe you would, I don’t really know you). They would also say that their experiences shape them as a woman as well. And I agree, what makes a woman involves quite a lot of factors, and no two women’s experiences are the same. Persistentlyfem has argued that trans women are raised and socialized as male, but I disagree. Setting aside that trans women aren’t a monolith and have completely different socializations between individuals, I would agree that most trans women are treated as male growing up, but for the most part, it doesn’t quite….fit them. More accurately I would say our culture attempts to socialize them as men.

When I think back to my own experience growing up, I, like a lot of girls, had a “not like other girls” period. Internalized misogyny, great right? Because the socialization of “girl” didn’t quite right, the definition being narrow and rigid. Based on stereotypes. So I found my femininity later in my teens. I argue that this is something that most women go through in some way or another. We find our socialization as women uncomfortable and constraining. Not quite right.

As I said, you can’t speak of trans women as a monolith, but from the stories and dialogue I’ve been involved in, countless stories sound exactly like that. Being socialized into a Gender Box that doesn’t suit you is like watching a video in a language you don’t speak. Internalized misogyny is a universal experience between girls growing up, cis and trans, and it is internalized misogyny that keeps trans women from accepting who they truly are. In fact, for them to run away from woman as their identity would inherently be internalized misogyny.

The idea that trans ideology is based in “regressive stereotypes about ‘boys and girls’” isn’t wholly incorrect. I think we all agree that gender is a social construct. But that doesn’t make my identity as a women more valid than someone who transitioned later in life. It doesn’t follow that a trans’ person’s gender is less real than a cis person’s gender. And while we live in our culture and our current society, gender is something that we interact with on a daily basis, which makes it real in a very real sense. We could argue whether it should be that way, but the situation is currently that gender is an important construct in our culture. Not to mention, the thought that all trans people fall in a strict “man” or “woman” binary is incorrect as there are plenty of people that embody other gender identities. Indeed, there are many wonderful trans people that we could argue are the radfem ideal of aegender and/or non binary.

Now the idea that “lesbians and straight men like vaginas. Gays and straight women like penises” is a bit of a stretch. Again, I think a statement like this is pretty oversimplified, but I don’t think that you’re inherently wrong. Generally speaking, sure. Although, again, I’ve met plenty of straight women dating trans men, and there are plenty of straight men that date trans women. But the inherent flaw in this argument isn’t that you’re wrong, but that it implies that attraction equals validity. Am I a woman because a man is attracted to my vagina? No. Am I less of a woman if men aren’t attracted to me? Again, no. My gender isn’t contingent on other’s attraction to me, and that is the same for trans individuals. I think this kind of argument comes from the pressure that is sometimes felt within our community, that if you’re not open to dating trans people then you’re inherently transphobic. I am not going to get into that argument, as this is a whole other can of worms. But what I am going to say is that nobody is going to force you to date a trans person. You don’t have to date someone if you don’t want to. You don’t have to tell everyone why you don’t want to date them, you can just politely decline. 

I’m going to be blatantly honest: I am predominantly attract to butch women and afab non binary masculine people. I have never dated someone who was amab, and generally speaking I don’t find myself attracted to them. But that doesn’t mean I think that trans women aren’t women just because I generally don’t find myself attracted to them. 

On top of this I’m going to agree with you: sex based oppression does exist. So does gender-based oppression. I know I have experienced bullying in my own time based on my own gender, my ability, my weight, all that good stuff. Maybe some of it was based around embarrassing period episodes (which I would file under sex-based bullying). But misogyny is not just sex-based, it is also inherently gendered. And if we know anything about trans women, it’s that they are overly targeted with violence based on their gender. Especially if they’re BIPOC. And it’s because their gender is feminine that they’re perceived as being targets; is that not the epitome of misogyny? To hate a person because they’re not perceived as the patriarchal male ideal?

Something else I would like to talk about is the concept that trans women are inherently misogynistic. I would argue that every woman, regardless of what they were assigned at birth, carries internalized misogyny. Cis women, however, have years to grapple with it before becoming women. Trans women tend to not have as much time to unlearn internalized misogyny before they become women. That doesn’t invalidate them as women, it just means that we should be more supportive of them, not less. All of this trans-exclusionary rhetoric only serves to increase their self-hatred and I argue that that kind of talk is a contributing factor to the poor mental health we see in the trans community. Instead of supporting some of the people with the greatest insight into the patriarchy, trans-exclusionists push women away and inflict them with even more gendered violence and gender-based discrimination. 

The other thing I want to address is the idea that trans women transitioning is rooted in homophobia. Which seems to make sense if you think of trans women being only attracted to men. The idea that a man decides to be a woman because he can’t deal with being gay doesn’t make a lot of sense, though. Homophobia tends to be rooted in misogyny too, a fear of being less of a man. So it doesn’t follow that the solution would be to “become a woman” much like the solution to put out a fire isn’t to light more things on fire. Piggybacking off of this point, a lot of trans exclusionists will accuse trans women of being predators. In fact, often, they’ll hold these two ideas at the same time. But the reality is that, if a man wants to prey on women, he doesn’t need to become a woman. The sign on the bathroom door isn’t actually a deterrent if a man wants to follow a woman in. And again, it’s a counter-intuitive idea, that a man who wants to prey on women would go through all the legal hurdles, all the social stigma, even some medical treatments just to gain access to women’s only spaces. Besides the fact that this type of behaviour is a myth created by conservative right-wing christian groups to stir up fear, it doesn’t happen and assault is still illegal regardless of what your gender marker is. 

I am not going to address anything about surgery or hormones. Those points are only ever brought up as enforcing points, they’re not the main issues. Most of the rhetoric is based in fear-mongering conservative right-wing christian groups drum up and it is, again, a whole other topic that requires nuance that most people don’t acknowledge.

The main point I see Persistantlyfem talk about, and something we can agree on, is the misogyny in LGBTQ2S+ spaces. We all like to think that, somehow through our journeys of discovering our true selves, we shed the misogyny along the way, that our spaces are truly accepting of all genders and presentations. That’s not the case. Misogyny is still a problem in every letter of our community and it will be for a long time. We see it when butches treat femmes as “high maintenance” or like property, we see it in how gay men talk about female bodies. We see it the self-hatred trans people of all gender identities feel towards themselves. We see it when lesbians reject bisexual women. 

Throwing around “terf” helps nobody. Calling each other stupid and pretentious is not useful. I know this is a painful topic to many on both sides, but the infighting in the queer community is toxic and needs to come down from a boil if we’re going to make any progress. Most people that sling insults are younger and therefor are more hot-headed. I used to be too, and still can be sometimes but like I said, limited energy means that you tend to focus it more consciously and I hope that this time I’ve spent here can help.

@Persistantlyfem, I see that you were hurt, and I respect and honour your experiences. I suspect that some of those that hurt you were trans women. I understand, I’ve had trans partners hurt me as well. But those experiences don’t allow us to revoke someone else’s right to their own interpretation of themselves. And I’m sorry about all of the toxicity you’ve experienced in these last few weeks, you don’t deserve it. I hope that we can have a conversation in a respectable way, worthy of two adult gays who’ve been through a lot.

#femimism #transgender #terf #trans-exlusionary #gender critical #lgbtq #lgbtqia #lgbt #femme #lesbian #butch #transwoman #queer #misogyny #internalized sexism #trans day of visibility #persistantlyfem #@persistantlyfem #JK Rowling #i wrote an essay #wooooooow

[gettin-bi-bi-bi]

im really confused with (my) gender :( I wish I knew what gender even means, because for people outside the queer community it is just your genials, your boobs, your clothing, your hair, and your height. Are those things gendered or are humans gendered ? and if something is gendered what makes it gendered, what does men and women mean ? Ive been thinking about this and I just don't know, the only thing I know is that I love wearing big clothes, looking like a mushroom on a suit and I love being called bonito (means pretty boy in spanish because spanish adjectifs are gendered:( )

my main struggle is that, I don't even know what gender is or means, how I'm I supposed to apply something that I don't understand to my daily life ? how am I supposed to explore my gender identity if I don't know what gender is/means?

Hi anon. I can only answer from my experiences here and other people can probably input with other ideas from their perspectives too, but perhaps you are a binary trans person, perhaps you are non binary. But perhaps you’re neither, I mean questioning and wondering about gender doesn’t HAVE to mean you’re not actually cisgender. Also I am wondering, are you neurodivergent maybe? Because this struggling to understand gender is especially common I think amongst many neurodivergent people. Not that neurotypical people necessarily can easily make sense of it either but it often seems to be even more difficult for neurodivergent people to figure it out. That is probably a big part of the reason why a lot of newer gender labels exist (the sort that bigots love to mock and invalidate) not because all of them are actually describing the person’s gender but because in some cases they’re describing the vagueness of it and a person’s inability to describe it in any more specific terms often because of their neurodivergency (things like autism, various mental illnesses or even some physical illnesses which can impact on the brain and its functioning). There are the terms like genderqueer and non binary or queer used specifically in reference to gender, which can be used as umbrella terms or they can be used just as labels in themselves and these can be used by anyone, neurodivergent or neurotypical. But there are loads of other terms people have come up with for genders and people are inventing new words for them all the time and some of those do relate to specific things like autism or chronic illness which can affect a person’s understanding of gender.

I’m not saying by the way just because you’re confused that automatically makes you non binary - you might be, or you might be a binary trans person, or you might be cis and just confused. But if you think perhaps you might be non binary I will say that you may be better trying to find some sort of blog/group/forum that is specifically for non binary people so you can get input from a wider range of non binary people and see if any of their experiences resonate with you.

In the end though only you can really say what you are as well as what gender means (or doesn’t mean) to you. I think probably gender means different things to different people and how they work out what they are, probably it can be difficult for a lot of people to figure out, quite probably even a lot of cisgender people. I think really ultimately gender is just a feeling, and sometimes I think perhaps it’s as much a feeling about what you aren’t as about what you actually are. Like, if you feel for example you’re not a woman, well that might be a starting point to work out what you are. It might mean you’re a man, or it might mean you’re something else entirely. Maybe you’re agender/genderless and can’t figure it out for that reason? Although you’d probably be best asking agender people about that if you think that might be the case for you, because I’m not agender myself.

Also for some people, they don’t stick with one term all the time. Their gender itself might change (because they’re genderfluid or something like that). Or they might just find a better term or label after a period of using one label. Changing labels for whatever reason is fine, you don’t have to pick one and then just stick with it forever if it’s not right for you or your ideas about your gender change over time.

Society and the culture that we all live in, whatever society and culture that is, will usually tend to gender things like clothing, hairstyles, colours even, as well as genitals and body shapes/types and that sort of thing. And course the more obvious transphobes love reducing gender down to “biological sex” and, essentially just what genitalia you were born with. That’s probably not going to change any time soon unfortunately, but it doesn’t mean those things inherently have a gender, it’s just society in general and these bigoted individuals and small groups as well projecting onto them. You can be any gender and have any body type/body features, wear any kind of clothing, have any hairstyle, etc. Obviously in many cases realistically it’s not going to be perceived that way by the rest of society and that fact is going to put off both many binary trans and non binary people from expressing themselves in the way they’d truly like to because they can’t deal with all the inevitable misgendering and perhaps even worse than that from society. Likely that even puts off many cis people from dressing and appearing the way they truly want to, because of society’s reactions to it. But really, what you wear, how you present yourself to the world, it is your decision, and in terms of things like the clothing you wear, just do what feels comfortable and right to you.  

I can’t really answer though what gender means or is, not even for me. Gender is a human construct, a product of us having a brain and a mind and feeling things, emotions, thoughts, and creating language and words and having a need to communicate with others. But it is a very vague thing really and it’s hard probably for anyone to define what it actually is. I certainly can’t say how cis people know what gender they are because I’m not cis. I am non binary and also I am neurodivergent (probably in multiple ways), and I know what binary gender I am not and feel no connection at all with and I know which binary gender I lean more towards and connect with a lot but... it’s still hard to pin down in more concrete terms. I don’t really feel a need myself to be more specific though but everyone’s different, some people might need more specific terms. It’s OK to want those but it’s OK too to be fine with using more vague terms, and it’s OK to not actually care much about what you are or how people perceive you. And it’s also OK to be confused and question things and take a long time to work it out and it’s OK to change labels too so I mean, please don’t get too into thinking this stuff over to the point where it’s actually causing you distress and worry, in the grand scheme of things it’s really not that important to the state of the world or the universe or anything what gender you are, and whatever label(s) you pick is your choice and something that should be meaningful and useful to you and if questioning all of this is not useful to you then you don’t have to do it.

I’m sorry if this is pretty vague but I really don’t think there is a proper definition of what gender is, or one obvious way of working it out. It’s a very vague and abstract thing relating to very abstract things (thoughts, feelings) and it is also a very personal thing that almost certainly varies wildly from person to person.

- Tiger

#Anonymous

[magic-pistachio]

advice for anyone who has a tough time with self-love

a lot has changed for the better for me lately physically and mentally and on the subject of self-love, and I just wanna share some fun little thoughts that have helped me immensely with just feeling okay with myself.  this is coming from someone that still has an issue with the ideal of self-love, but I’m starting to understand for myself a little more, so here’s some thoughts.

-please, please, be nice to yourself just as you are nice to other people.  listen. there’s literally no reason for you to be so harsh on yourself. while I was language learning today, I messed up something simple, and my brain instinct is to say “are you KIDDING you’re such an IDIOT.” 

I’ve had to stop that thought in my tracks for no other reason than...what’s the purpose of that? why am I doing this? this literally does not help anyone.  if you yelled that at someone else, you’d be such a jerk. and you know that the other person wouldn’t get better at what they’re trying to do if you called them an idiot.  you don’t have to love yourself right now to acknowledge that there’s no reason to be so harsh.  please be as nice to yourself as you’d be to someone else.  you are cultivating an identity and a lived experience that is a work in progress, and you’ll only achieve your ideal if you are kind to yourself.  you can’t expect a plant to grow if you don’t water it, or, like, if you punch it on the daily.

-acknowledge that this is all a work in progress.  I personally have such difficulty handling the phrase “love yourself,” as too many years of hating myself doesn’t allow for such a drastic change; it actually just feels like it’s impossible.  what I’ve learned to do is just value your self.  You have value as every other human being has value; none of your talents or your flaws or your personality traits can change the fact that you have value.  your friends have value.  if you don’t acknowledge your own value granted to you as your exist as a human being, then you are invalidating the value of everyone else around you.  if this makes sense, value is a collective thing, kind of like human rights.  we all share it together; it doesn’t make sense for someone to just...not have value.

-so, just as your self has value, your identity has meaning.  you have an ideal identity that you are trying to achieve; for me, I want to grow into someone that is confident, kind, and artistic, and I have many long-term artistic projects and skills to build that I want to be able to complete before I die.  I LOVE that ideal identity that I want to grow into; and you know what? this ideal identity is so achievable.  start to map out what skills you need to build, what traits you want to emulate more, and just try to work towards that.  you’ll feel so freaking good as you get better and better at even minor things, and ALLOW YOURSELF TO CELEBRATE YOUR TINY VICTORIES! If I’m allowed to celebrate going to the grocery store by myself for the first time at 20, you’re allowed to celebrate literally anything that took a lot of effort for you to do! 

I think we have this idea that at like, 15 years old we have already developed an unchanging identity and therefore anything we inspire to after that is impossible.  therefore if we are not our personal ideal at the present time then we are worthless.  listen, bud.  we are constantly changing in every second, and it can be for the better.  to love yourself is to love being alive, and to love the ideal that you have set, and to value your journey to get there.  it’s gonna be tough often, but don’t make it even harder by being an unnecessary jerk to yourself.  you’ll get there.  

love, luck, and groovy vibes to you all.

#kat rambles #i swear i'll post art again soon

[criticallyalexandrite]

wait I'm kind of confused by that post about "if you use the word squick you're a freak" thing. I almost always see it used to mean something that's not a trigger but is off limits for reading/writing. Like, certain things are triggers for my OCD and trauma but certain forms of gore is just something that makes me uncomfortable. So I would call that a squick. is there another explanation I'm not aware of? (sincerely asking because I obviously don't want to use it if it's bad)

(Tw: CSA trauma, child abuse, abuse and personal abuse story)I don’t think anarchist-queer was trying to bash people who personally choose to use the term and find it helpful. I personally don’t hate the the term inherently either despite my ranty addition to that thread. I don’t know if I can fully speak for OP there. But what I was trying to get across in my post was my personal issue with the origin of the term and the way some popular anti antis are using it. A lot of popular anti antis are literally trying to haze people with fiction based triggers into using that term INSTEAD of trigger.Which is you know very ableist. I wouldn’t have an issue with the term otherwise if the attitude of the anti antis who coined the term was like “You can use it if you want but if you don’t that’s ok too.” In one of the most popular threads I saw on the manner the tone OP was using sounded very dismissive of fiction based triggers. Like they thought the very idea of fiction based triggers was “too discoursey” and that’s why we should just bring back the term squick instead. It was prioritizing “less discourse” over the mental health of antis. I haven’t checked the OP of that particular thread but I wouldn’t be shocked if they thought that antis are lying about being triggered by fictional scenarios (many anti antis legit believe this.)I know this is the case for many anti antis who platform the promotion of the term. Not just from my experience of being called out by theassholeantiarchive for daring to be raped by a NOMAP. (Seriously, theassholeantiarchive initially called me out over that. The mod who did immediately assumed i was lying.) But also due to my experience with the NOMAP in question, best0utthere. He’s a long time advocate for the anti anti community. He even talked a lot about directly experiencing the Anne Rice discourse himself which suggests he’s pretty old. Anyways, how that’s connected to my discomfort with how and why the term squick was coined is this. It’s because the anti antis who made it initially wanted to shut down antis who said they’re triggered by fictional characters/stories/scenarios. Didn’t matter the full context or even if the trauma related to the trigger was real. Anti antis like Best believe that people who claim to be triggered by anything fictional are just using  triggers to “trollbait” people into not embracing their full creativity.He legit believes that and due to how much social influence he’s had on the anti anti community, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was one of the people who helped coin the term. Or was at least around when the term was originally made. (Btw I don’t suggest actually asking him yourself, cuz he’s a dangerous person who doesn’t respect  nsfw boundaries.) I even have a retraumatization experience surrounding him insisting that was why I’m traumatized by pedo ships/pedophilia AU’s (Pedo AU’s are basically…taking a character who isn’t a pedo and making them into one.)Even though he’s literally the reason that I have that trigger in the first place.But he didn’t know that at the time he demonized my trigger. Still regardless, that was triggering for me in itself. This happened between us in a Wander Over Yonder discord server. One that was run by slogbait on tumblr. It’s not up anymore because me leaving the server over Best doing that apparently killed the server or something. (Not that I’m remorseful of that lol.) But yeah that experience of mine is I can’t help but side eye people who are so against using the term trigger to refer to fictional characters/stories/scenarios that trigger someone.It’s one thing if you (and by you I mean generally referring to anyone who prefers the term squick) prefer the term squick  for whatever reason. I can definitely see how it can be a legit helpful term to people. If it helps you, more power to you. This is definitely a situation where you can separate the idea from the creator. So I’m not gonna bash on people who use it. But I will absolutely be suspicious if someone intends to pressure others to use it when talking about fictional scenarios and ideas that cause them panic attacks or flashbacks or any other form of debilitating breakdowns. Because that IS different from just choosing to use the term squick for yourself. That’s both invalidating necessary language people need to use to explain how something is a trauma reminder and also demonizing people who don’t want to say squick in place of trigger. I think whichever word someone chooses to use to describe that, squick or trigger, should be up to the person. Some bitter and way too paranoid anti anti blogger shouldn't’ be allowed to haze and guilt trip people into choosing them for them.Does that make sense?Also to clarify in case my tone comes across that way…I’m not mad at you Connie. My tone just might sound kinda intense right now because this is a topic matter I take really seriously. And I’m also trying to put all the effort I can into using the right wording and tone. Sometimes that can result in me using a more intense tone with my posts than I intended to.

[ambidexterous-lesbian]

A different approach to gender

Hi, here is the low-down on who I am and why I’m posting this: I’m a 22 year old trans woman from North Carolina. I grew up in a backwards ass town, and I got into philosophy when I was about 15. When I was 20, I had several things happen (life events, surfacing memories) that lead me to the conclusion that I was transgender. I’ve been in transition since then, and the whole time I have searched for some sort of philosophical justification about why I am this way. Why it is that I can have this identity, and it be respected. I’ve been through all the iterations of transpolitics, talked to other trans people, talked to GC feminist, and turned ideas over again and again in my head. Ultimately I don’t aim to invalidate anyone, in fact the opposite is true. We, the trans community, aim to welcome and validate all identities, and yet, the current state of discourse is appalling. We’re arguing left and right, and the thing that we all want to believe, that we are all valid, often gets fucked and twisted by the people who stand against us. It is truly my belief that this is because the most progressive policy (that people simply *are* what they identify as) has no philosophical backbone. So, this post is going to try to take you through my own reasonings on the matter, and how I did in fact arrive at the conclusion that people are what they say they are.

### Part One: The Female Brain/Soul or some other shit

When I first came out, I latched onto the classic narrative of being “trapped in the wrong body” it was simple, it was to the point, and it provided a since of validity by staking some claim that gender exist in the soul. Now there are other variations of this stance, some of which argue the same from a biological stand point. Regardless, most of these views break down into some kind of essentialist thinking. In my case, I believed I was a woman, on some plane of existence was my soul, and that was the soul of a woman, but what does that even mean? What are the essential qualities of womanhood? Was it the fact that I liked doing dishes? That I saw myself as weak? Or was it that I liked to be held? I do not see how any answer to that question doesn’t harken back to the olden days where white men wrote books about “the fragility of womanhood”.

Now, there are other issues here. For example, let us say that sometime in the next few years I reexamine my life and come to the conclusion that all this trans shit was hogwash and detransition. I wouldn’t be the first, and I wouldn’t be the last. Hypothetically, every trans person could come to the conclusion that they were wrong about their identity, and change it. They apply some other label to themselves then what they currently use, and hell every cis perosn could do the same and become trans. Here is what I know, I spent twenty years shamelessly living as a man. For a lot of that time I was happy, and I was secure in my identity. Now, because I identify as a woman *now*, some trans activist will argue that I was ALWAYS a woman, and therefore invalidate my identity as a man. Alternatively I could start identifying as non-binary, by doing that do I retroactively invalidate myself as a woman? Is the conclusion to be drawn that I was just trying to figure things out? Now, all of these are possibilities, so how is it that we can make the assertion that the “X is a Y” in any immutable sense? We simply can’t.

There are also some arguments in this vain that propose that there is some inherent biological thing that makes one trans. Conveniently, this mystical structure has yet to be identified. Even if it was I find it hard to believe that the trans community will accept it, because inevitably someone, lacking in the component, will identify as trans, and then we’d make up some other reason as to why they’re valid. So, here’s the skinny: arguing that transness, or gender, is anything more than something socially constructed has some pretty terrible implications. Either it breaks down into something sexist, or some kind of unenforceable gate keepery that we have fought so hard against.

### Part Two: Whateverism and Performativity

Performativity is a school of thought that was originally presented by Judith Butler in 1991, the basic premise being this: Gender exist as a set of socially constructed roles and expectations, and ones gender is determined by how they fit into and fill those roles. When co-opted by trans people though, this creates a bit of an issue. A trans woman is only valid assuming she fills the societal ideal of womanhood, thus reinforcing the sexist ideas found in that ideal. Meaning that when asking a trans woman why she is a woman, she parrots back all these sexist ideas about fragility, and daintiness, it is because, according to this paradigm, that is what being a woman is.

There are a lot of trans people that recognise the sexism here, and the fact that it invalidates many trans people who fail to live up to a societal ideal, as well as non-binary individuals. Because of this, there is a new school of thought that I've dubbed whateverism. This is the one that makes little sense to most people. The idea that it's whatever, that it doesn't matter what people wear or look like, but simply that they say they are a thing and are therefore a thing. This is the one I take the most issue with, because as of right now it exist as a liberal attempt to be all inclusive, and in doing so renders language almost entirely meaningless. This is the school of thought that 52 genders exist in, not as 52 cumulative categories and sub-categories, but as a multitude of distinct separate entities. This is the biggest divide among trans individuals right now, and for that reason it is what I'd like to argue for.

### Part Three: Pragmatism

There is a school of epistemological thought known as pragmatism. It preaches that a thing is true if it is beneficial to consider that thing true. The best example of it being used is in the field of psychology. A person is not schizophrenic because of some inherent brain issue, or because they simply present the symptoms of schizophrenia, rather they are schizophrenic because they do have a set of experiences, and it is *beneficial* to consider them schizophrenic. Put another way: We label someone as schizophrenic because it allows us to contextualise their experience a certain way, an prescribe treatment based on that experience.

In the same way, gender exist as a framework through which we contexualise our experience, it is a tool that provides us with a way of understanding ourselves. Most of us have had that framework handed to us at birth, and conditioned to think and behave in a way that conforms to the behaviours and experiences in societies framework of that gender. Now, I'm not arguing that this isn't bad, or that society wouldn't be better off without it, instead I am simply saying that everyone, trans and cis alike, uses the framework of gender to think about themselves. Some people are able to overcome the worse aspects of whichever set of ideas they've been handed, and some people are not. For some people the act of labeling themselves non-binary, allows them to think of themself outside of the shitty framework they've been handed. This is the source of all the female non-binaries, of all the people who choose this label and profess themselves to be enby, without changing much about their presentation or physiology.

So, it's obvious that I agree that gender is bullshit, that it's a made up thing that is oppressive, and yet I still identify as a woman, and see my identity as valid. The reason being is that for some reason, the framework of masculinity is not something I can overcome. Maybe it's because I like to wear dresses, maybe it's because I like dick and harbour some internalised homophobia, but ultimately it doesn't matter because it is healthier for me to identify as a woman, that identity conflicts less with the person I find myself to be, and all the hormones and the dress-up serve to validate that view of myself, and put me in a better state for fighting the oppression that all of us face under gender.

#trans #transgender #gender critical #queer stuff #queer theory #philosophy #critism please