(Image description: six square images with purple backgrounds and white borders, every image has bold white text in the center. All together this text reads: “I don’t care if testosterone therapy makes me sterile. I am allowed to live a life that does not revolve around childbearing or parenthood. I do not have to prioritize childbearing or parenthood in my life. My bodily autonomy and freedom of choice are worth more than potential fertility. I don’t give a fuck what you believe my "biological purpose” is. This body is mine to do with as I will.“)
Possibly controversial, but I don’t care if testosterone therapy makes me sterile.
I’m allowed to live a life that does not revolve around possible future childbearing or parenthood. My own bodily autonomy and freedom of choice are worth more than potential fertility.
I don’t care what anyone believes my "biological purpose” is. My body is not your “earthen vessel”. I am not here to “be fruitful and multiply”. I don’t want to join your womban only arts and crafts circle and finger-paint with period blood. I don’t have to find any kind of special meaning or spiritual significance in the reproductive organs that I was born with.
The only reason I am here right now with this body that is mine is to do whatever I want with it.
I’m allowed to not want pregnancy and childbirth, or the possibility of them. I’m allowed to not want parenthood in any form. I don’t have to prioritize those things in my life.
The potential loss of my fertility on testosterone is not a loss for me, it is a benefit. For more than half of my life now I’ve known that I never want to experience pregnancy or childbirth, and yet I am clearly expected to value my potential ability to do those things above my own actual wants and needs? No chance.
No trans person should be required to delay medically transitioning because of concerns about future fertility, if the trans person themselves isn’t concerned with the ability to have biological children.
I resent the notion that medically transitioning is harmful because we’re–allegedly–choosing to sterilize ourselves*. Choosing sterilization is not harmful. The ability to choose sterilization should be the right of every person, regardless of gender, who is of an age capable of reproducing.
(*Contrary to popular belief, testosterone therapy is not a contraceptive and does not always result in a person being sterile; it is entirely possible for a person to become pregnant while using testosterone therapy or after stopping it.)
aggressive reminder that while y’all don’t have to headcanon any unlabeled multisexual characters as pan, y’all need to start acknowledging that there are more than three sexualities and that bi isn’t the default for “not straight or gay”, therefor they could very well be pan. stop erasing us.
Being disabled is expensive and I don’t think abled people (unless they live with a disabled person) realise how expensive it is. Even the people who are fourtunate enough to get full benefits (and many people don’t even when they are entitled to it and need it) and state support are still struggling and can’t afford everything they need.
And yet, Disabled people still have to deal with people saying how lucky they are or how unfair it is that they get “all that extra money” when in reality they are struggling and can’t afford all the care or accessibility they actually need.
I really hate on this website that we erased the term monosexism as it was a very useful term m-spec people have being using for years but terfs decided it was bad becuse it group them with straight people and all of you believed it.
Monosexism is the belief that people who are only attracted to one gender is somehow better or more superior to those who are not monosexual.
Monosexism seeing everything as only gay or straight and if your not you either lying or making things up.
Monosexism is erasing multisexual people are seeing them as less memebers in tge community.
Monosexism is seeing multisexual people are dangerous and dirty
Monosexism is seeing m-spec men as gay men who havent fully accepted themselves as gay.
Monosexism is seeing m-spec women as either lesbians or straight women depending on who your talking to
Monosexism is not seeing multisexual as a full identity and only half of something or on the way of realizing our ‘true’ sexuality.
But you guys all decided it was bad becuase terfs said it ‘group gays with the straights and that it was inherently evil for that.’ And you believed it.
I’ve seen discussions sometimes about how fanfiction-based fandom culture is heavily influenced and dominated by people who are not cis men.
One thing I haven’t seen discussed as much though is how much of fandom in general is shaped by neurodivergent people.
I mean, you have autistic and ADHD people with special interests or hyperfixations collecting information and writing detailed meta, connecting very strongly with characters and fandoms. I would not be surprised if the percentage of autistics in fandom communities was significantly higher than in the general public.
And that’s not even getting into other types of neurodivergencies and how they influence fandom culture.
I sometimes see people try to divorce fandom culture from the idea of being a “geek”, and I understand that this is sometimes because of the association with the sexist geek stereotype, but I also know that there is a connection between the two concepts, and it’s probably us neurodivergent people.
I also think this is why at first I was like “my fandoms can’t be special interests, that’s just how fandom is”
Yeah, because a lot of people in fandom have special interests
I’ll go slightly further here, and say this (well. this plus ableism) is the root of a lot of current issues in fandom.
Back when I started being in fandom, a couple decades ago, I’d argue that damn near every single person in fandom was autistic or ADHD. You’d only join fandom if you were obsessive and were chill with doing things that weren’t socially acceptable. (Because being a fan absolutely was not socially acceptable at the time! We went to ridiculous amounts of effort to hide that we were fans!)
And fandom culture was absolutely shaped by this. The standard behaviors in fandom were those of happy autistics. That’s how you were expected to act. You remember “squeeing”? The visual image of it is generally someone so happy and excited they can’t physically contain it so they make a high-pitched noise and flap their hands and - a squee is literally just a happy stim. And so many fans at the time did happy stims that we gave it a special fandom name! So even if a neurotypical person happened to stumble in, they’d learn that the “social norm” in a fandom space is basically just “act autistic/ADHD” and assimilate.
But then… fandom got mainstreamed. It became socially acceptable. And then the neurotypicals started showing up in large numbers. And instead of assimilating like they did before, when they were the minority, now that there were a lot of them they started going “what the heck is this! why are people here acting so weird! this is embarrassing!”
…and then we got cringe culture within fandom.
No one says “squee” anymore not because fans don’t squee anymore - happy stims don’t just go away - but because the neurotypicals showed up and told us “squee” is a cringy word and concept. Which they had ALWAYS told us out in public, but we used to have fandom as an insular autistic/ADHD-dominated space where we were safe and free to be ourselves.
You know how everybody talks about how cringy and embarrassing 2012 tumblr was? Dude. We were literally just acting like happy autistics, because that’s what we were. It’s just that - like you always have - you think autistic/ADHD behavior is cringy and embarrassing.
This isn’t new. “Cringe culture” isn’t new. It’s just a new euphemism for the exact same ableism that’s always existed, with the only difference that now it’s coming from insidefandom.
All those posts saying “if these people were bullied more they wouldn’t act like this”? They’re not just bizarrely tasteless jokes. They’re because the people making those posts werebullies. Are bullies. Fandom used to be where the sort of people who were victims of peer abuse went - where we went to be safe from bullies and be openly ourselves - but now the bullies are in here with us.
On the happier side, while mainstreaming has resulted in a lot of neurotypicals showing up, autistic/ADHD people are absolutely still the backbone of fandom. We’re the ones collecting tiny bits of info and connecting the dots to write galaxy brain meta. We’re the ones churning out new content every single day, rain or shine. We’re the hyper-verbal ones writing 250k fics and the ones who hyper-relate with the characters and make incorrect quote posts so spot-on they sound canon. They may think we’re embarrassing - but they still need us.
SO MUCH THIS!!!
Fandom would be nothingwithout neurodivergent people. Because there’s nothing on this earth that can rival the white-hot intensity of an Autistic or ADHD person in full-blown hyperfocus or special interest mode.
