Able bodied parents I’m begging you to teach your kids about disabled people. Not just because they could become disabled themselves one day but also because even if they don’t, they have a very real chance of being rude to us if you don’t teach them.
Yes, kids just say shit. They have no filter. That doesn’t make it any less humiliating when your child sits near me on the bus and incessantly grills me on why I have a stick when I’m not old. Or laughs at us for things our disability causes. It doesn’t take away the hurt when they bully a disabled classmate. For a large part these things could be avoided if you just taught your kids to respect us. It’s really not that hard.
ID from alt text: A yellow image with black text that reads ‘ablebodied people can reblog but dont add anything’. To the left of the text is a black silhouette of a wheelchair user and to the right is a black silhouette of a person with a cane. End of ID.
[ID: An image with the title: “Happy lesbian visibility week to…”. Below there is a big heart in the colors of the lesbian flag, with arrows in different shapes pointing to 12 different phrases, which read:
“Lesbians who are trans”
“Lesbians who are femme”
“Lesbians of color”
“Butch lesbians”
“Masc and/or androgynous lesbians”
“Lesbians with disabilities”
“Lesbians who don’t feel safe to come out”
“Lesbians who are not out yet”
“Lesbians of all generations”
“Lesbians who just discovered their sexuality”
“Lesbians who are asexual”
“Lesbians who are non-binary”
Below this, there is text reading, in all caps: “All lesbians!”
s,ƃuᴉɥʇǝɯos terrơͮͫ̑͑ͭ̐̀̀r̸̎ͭ̉ͬ̉ized my ǝ̭͉͈͙̘̬̾ͮͫͦͩ͑̂̓͞ɥ̧̛͎̝̱̙͚͓͙͖̋̽ͮͥɔ̨̗̟͑͛͆̌ͪʎ̡̱̝̗̩̟͚ͩ̔͆̔ͤ͒ͪ̂̑ͅs̢͈̼͎͖̻͍̳̟̉̏̉̎̽͘d̈́͋ͩ̈̈͑̀͗̀͏͚̼͚͟ to get even!!¡¡! lately ’yͯ͊̌̉͛o̴͐̇̓̓͆u̒ͩ’re the only human I believe in!!!¡ [x]
[ID: A digital drawing of the Distortion from the Magnus Archives while it was merged with Michael Shelley. Michael is a humanoid with long curly blonde hair. Where his face should be is simply a spiral shaded and colored with a mix of hues. In the midst of this is a toothy grin blended into the curves of the spiral. He is wearing a pair of black pants and bright blue sweater with swirls of hot pink, bright orange, mint green and indigo. He has his monstrously large left hand lifted in an idle gesture, all fingers but his index and thumb curling in toward his forearm. Behind him is a bright yellow door with a swirling orange wood grain pattern interspersed with eye shapes. The background is black and has sections of contour hatching in different colors with no real intentional shape to them. The overall image is a discomforting, overwhelming eyestrain.]
(A digital drawing of the artist’s original D&D character, Valadrian. Val is a tall nonbinary transfeminine person with pale skin and long dark blonde hair streaked with pinkish-grey. She has violet eyes, a large aquline nose, freckles and thick dark brows. She has two piercings in her earlobe and a septum piercing. She is smiling softly. Their hair is in a loose ponytail that drapes over their left shoulder. They are wearing a salmon top with a high collar that buttons twice at the neck and has a pale pink lining, as well as a corset of brown leather with gold symbols etched into it. It is wearing a pale blue sash with a slightly darker blue pattern at the hips. Finally, it is wearing a dark peacock blue coat with puffy sleeves, a gold and blue trim visible on the collar and dark brown fur at the collar.)
Description: [A stitch with @/jordanoccasionally playing a remix of the song Own Brand Freestyle (feat. Finch Fetti) by FelixThe 1st & Dreya Mac plays while text reads “All I’m saying is, there’s a CERTAIN DEMOGRAPHIC using this sound and trying to pretend that Dreya Mac isn’t already a WLW! yes they are (white hand emoji)”.
Dray Mac: “Okay I didn’t even want to say anything when I first saw this girl’s video on my for you page. But like I was scrolling through the comments on the woman that made the remix.
I was scrolling through the comments and there was just loads of predominantly white people, white gay people saying, "This is the representation we need! This is the wlw representation we need in music!”.
I’m literally gay bro. Like why am I not okay representation? I think we know why. Regardless of whether it’s subconscious or not like, we need to call it what it is. And it’s subconscious racism, even if you don’t know what that is.
Don’t call people haters, no one’s hating. We have to be honest like, most of words she used, are the words I’ve used in the original verse. She just like puts filler words in between. No hate it just wasn’t all that".]
There’s a particular attitude I often see on the internet that goes something like “If you aren’t part of a particular marginalized group, then you could never understand their experience, so don’t pretend to relate.” And while obviously you’re never going to relate to every aspect of that identity unless you are also of that identity, I feel like this attitude really diminishes opportunities for finding kinship and bonding in similar experiences even if those experiences aren’t exactly the same and/or are the result of different identities.
For example, I’m white and neurodivergent, and I was talking to a Black neurotypical friend about masking, and how I feel like I have to change the entire way I present myself in order to not be considered weird in public. She responded with “Oh, some of that sounds kind of like code-switching— how I have to switch away from using AAVE in white-dominated settings in order to be accepted.” And then we bonded over how frustrating and ridiculousit is that AAVE and stimming are both considered unacceptable in “professional” settings.
Another time, a straight Jewish friend was telling me about a book she had just finished reading, which was written by a Jewish author and had a Jewish main character. She was saying that it was really nice to read a book written by a Jewish author, because even when gentile authors do their research and write a pretty accurate Jewish character, they never quite feel Jewish— you can always tell the author was a gentile. And I said “Oh that sounds kind of like when I read queer characters written by straight authors— you can always tell the author was straight even if they do their research and get things fairly right. So even though I’m happy when any book features queer characters, it’s really especially nice to read queer characters written by queer authors.” And we bonded over this similar experience, and we were both excited that the other understood even if we were coming to this experience from different angles, and then we swapped book recommendations. This conversation is also a great example of when that internet attitude DOES apply— when someone outside of a particular group is trying to understand that group’s entire experience well enough to accurately write the world as seen through their eyes. They’re never quite going to get it right, and that’s ok! It just means it’s important to also have Own Voices authors writing those types of stories also.
Sometimes it seems like people who have been in internet circles exhibiting this attitude for too long are afraid to ever try to relate to the experiences of anyone in any groups other than their own for fear of causing offense, which is honestly pretty counterproductive. Understanding each other and bonding across groups should be the goal! Relating to each other is not a bad thing!
i’d add that these points of what COULD be solidarity are also used AGAINST others by malevolent anti-worker racist forces, and you hate to see it. see: some thumbfaced cop yutz whining about how the irish were slaves* but you don’t see THEM complaining, THEY pulled themselves up and never asked for handouts. :( they could instead be going “hey wow we both got screwed over, and we could have banded together as workers, and yet”
*they weren’t but they were discriminated against in other ways i guess
They certainly were, and that actually adds to the point of this post-
When the Irish were suffering through the potato famine(the English being a major facet to how badly they suffered), the Choctaw sent what they could to help, $170, because they empathized with their plight.
There is a sculpture in Ireland commemorating this, called Kindred Spirits.
And recently Irish donors cited that gesture as they raised $2 million in aid for the Navajo and Hopi tribes for the fight against COVID.
This post is great because goddamn is this a problem in internet social justice stuff, and I wanted to add one of the best takedowns of it that I’ve encountered. It’s from an anthropology paper from the 80s where the author is working through four “pitfalls” of performing materials from a culture other than your own, mostly with an eye to white anthropologists performing materials from nonwhite cultures. One of the “pitfalls” he lays out is exactly this – the refusal to even try and engage with another culture, because you believe you couldn’t possibly understand or relate and so therefore you shouldn’t bother:
Instead of facing up to and struggling with the ethical tensions and moral ambiguities of performing culturally sensitive materials, the skeptic, with chilling aloofness, flatly declares, “I am neither black nor female: I will not perform from The Colour Purple.”
When this strange coupling of naive empiricism and sociobiology – only blacks can understand and perform black literature, only while males John Cheever’s short stories – is deconstructed to expose the absurdity of the major premise, then the “No Trespassing” disclaimer is unmasked as cowardice or imperialism of the worst kind.
[…]
In my view, the “Skeptic’s Cop-Out is the most morally reprehensible corner of the map because it forecloses dialogue. […] The skeptic, however, shuts down the very idea of entering into conversation with the other before the attempt, however problematic, begins.
[…]
The skeptic, detached and estranged, with no sense of the other, sits alone in an echo chamber of his own making, with only the sound of his own scoffing laughter ringing in his ears.
– Dwight Conquergood, Performance As A Moral Act (1985)
(I would also generally recommend this paper for anyone who’s trying to talk to anxious white liberals, because I think the framework is really useful for people who’ve never had to think about intercultural communication before and are worried about fucking up. Showing them the major ways of fucking up, including that refusing to try is fucking up, means that they can direct that anxiety to looking for whether they’re falling into the pitfalls.)
[ID= sculpture of multiple large metal feathers /end ID]
The thing, though, is a lot of “you wouldn’t understand” gets used as a weapon to silence debate. It’s just another form of the Oppression Olympics where the team that wins the gold gets to control the debate, and the team that wins the silver… is just another villain.
It’s a particular favorite tactic of TERFs where you’ll hear them say shit like “Well, I’m a lesbian, so you shouldn’t be arguing with me about the use of the word ‘butch’”.
You’ll see this sort of thing in the extreme fringes of all sorts of movements, and it’s a wonderful way to get people to insulate themselves from “the enemy”, which is really everyone who’s not specifically of the same identity… and of course, those people of the same identity who are willing to interact with “the enemy”.
[BEGIN ID: Screenshots from Twitter, then from the Pink News article linked above.
TWEET 1: a tweet from Discussing Film (@DiscussingFilm). Text reads: ‘THEY/THEM’, starring Kevin Bacon, will release on August 5 on Peacock.
The slasher film is set at an LGBTQIA+ conversion camp where the campers work together to protect themselves. But when a mysterious killer starts claiming victims, things get even more dangerous.
TWEET 2: a tweet from laurie strode lovebot (knife emoji) (@bihetbarbie) replying to @blumhouseand@peacocktv. Text reads: this is either gonna be a major moment for queer horror fans or a two hour long hate crime and I am so excited to find out which
ARTICLE 1: The Peacock film will explore the horrors of LGBT+ conversion therapy camps, the extreme methods the counsellors go to, and will see the campers fight to protect themselves from an axe murderer.
Screenwriter John Logan, the brains behind Penny Dreadful, lends his expertise in the horror genre to They/Them, in his directorial debut.
Logan said in a statement at NBC: “They/Them has been germinating within me my whole life. I’ve loved horror movies as long as I can remember, I think because monsters represent ‘the other’ and as gay kid I felt a powerful sense of kinship with those characters who were different, outlawed, or forbidden.”
ARTICLE 2: He added: “I wanted to make a movie that celebrates queerness, with characters that I never saw when I was growing up. When people walk away from the movie, I hope they’re going to remember the incredible love that these kids have for each other and how that love needs to be protected and celebrated.”
ARTICLE 3: Val Boreland, an executive vice president at NBCUniversal, which owns Peacock, said: “The film is not only entertaining and thrilling, but also empowers its audience with its message of acceptance in a way that only a creator like John Logan could imagine and then bring to life.”
As Boreland said, the film isn’t simply about “entertainment”.
Conversion therapy is a harmful practice which is carried out in the US, UK and all over the world.
It has been banned in 16 countries including Brazil, Canada and Germany, with Greece introducing its own ban on Thursday (12 May).
They/Them looks like a aptly horrific take on the topic, and if the cast and first look images are anything to go by audiences will be in for a wild ride, albeit unsettling ride on August 5.
A good friend of mine could really use some community support to survive the month & can’t post himself rn for safety reasons, so I’m posting this on his behalf
Image Description: Image has a purple background with glitter and stars. Image reads:
“Community Care Ask: Help a Disabled AfroNative Survive!
A disabled afronative bigender lesbian is urgently in need of $1,100 to cover rent, bills, and other monthly expenses!
**Rent: $700
Phone Bill + New Phone: $210
New Bedframe: $200
(Rent is most pressing!)
Cash App - $asteronauts
Pay-pal - @/asteronauts
Ven-Mo - @/asteronauts”. End ID
He’s also in need of about $115 for compression socks to help manage POTs! To reiterate, rent is the priority & anything helps! Thank you somuch for sharing. I’ll update on what’s been raised in the replies.
Haha more text posts cause y’all. REALLY liked that
[Image description: A Tumblr thread edited across ten images. Each reply to the thread has been edited onto screenshots of The Owl House characters.
Principal Bump: tag what you’re majoring in/intend on majoring in
Willow: Respecting Women
Gus: bat man
Mattholomule: minecraft
Boscha: youtube
Hunter: in the tags guys
King: fuckin weed
Amity: criminal justice and psychology
Luz: i’m terrified that i’ll lock myself into an interest that i’ll no longer be passionate about in a few years like all the other areas of study i’ve pursued over my life!
Emira: minecraft. Edric (in the same image): minecraft as well. End description]
Image: A photo of a lion crouched defensively in front of her very young cubs, mouth open in a ferocious snarl. The cubs are labeled “autistic youth” and “autistic kids” and the lion is labeled “me.”
I mostly post on my twitter these days, and I’ve been enjoying making memes like this one.
ID: digital colored portraits of Thara Celehar and Iäna Pel-Thenhior from The Witness for the Dead. Thara is a thin, pale elven man. He has sunken cheeks, a square jaw, a curved nose, thin lips, and bright blue eyes. He has deep purple lines under his eyes and frown lines around his mouth. His hair is curly and white and pulled back into a queue. He is wearing a black high collared robe fastened with a crescent moon shape, and simple silver earrings. His expression is weary. The background is a light blue gradient. Iäna is a slim goblin-elven man with light gray skin and rich golden eyes. He has high cheekbones, a long nose, full lips, thick arched eyebrows, a strong chin, dimples, and crows feet around his eyes. He has thick dark hair pulled back in braids that fall down past his shoulders. He is wearing a scarlet coat, a light orange cravat, a gold hoop earring, and two gold cuffs with a small chain dangling between them. He has kohl around his eyes and is smiling confidently. The background is a golden gradient. End ID.
(Please click for better quality!)
Getting pumped for Grief of Stones!! I will definitely be re-reading Witness
ID: several full body colored digital drawings of chenelo from the goblin emperor with different clothing designs. she is a young, thin goblin woman with gray skin and dark, long, voluminous curly hair 1) wearing a scarlet long-sleeved dress with a deep orange kirtle layer. she wears blue earrings and her hair is pinned at the sides, the rest down. 2) wearing an all-white outfit, a billowing dress with a high waistline, embroidered bodice, cape, and train. there is a blue jewel at her collar, and she wears blue drop earrings and a blue head piece. 3) wearing a simple light blue dress that ends above the ankle, barefoot, and a darker blue open coat that comes to the waist. her hair is in a simple ponytail. 4) wearing a red dress with embroidered trim that comes above the ankle. over this she wears a deep blue cape bordered in gold thread embellishments and tassels. she is barefoot and her hair is down. end ID.
ID: 10 cropped images of digital drawings of characters from the goblin emperor and witness for the dead. 1) csevet leaning over maia, flushed and watching his face. maia with his head thrown back. 2) csethiro and vedero with their foreheads pressed together, vedero seen from behind, csethiro flushed and gripping vedero’s shoulder 3) csethiro laying down, eyes closed, and blushing, knuckles pressed to her mouth 4) vedero’s face pressed into a pillow, supporting herself on her forearms, flushed and mouth open 5) csethiro with her hair down, looking down, smiling and blushing 6) csevet looking over his shoulder, hair down, blushing deeply 7) maia on his back slightly propped up, blushing and looking up in deep adoration 8) csethiro sitting upright, hair braided, looking down flustered and biting her lip 9) csethiro leaning over maia head bent in concentration. maia with his head thrown back gripping her arm with one hand and the sheets behind him with the other. 10) iäna leaning over thara, their foreheads pressed together, his braids cascading over him, looking lovingly into each others eyes. one of thara’s legs folded up, toes curling. end ID
(I’m using twitter for the time being! I have everything filtered because I’m extra paranoid, so you will need an account to view. BUT I may end up throwing these onto ao3, now that there’s a place I can host the images!)
ID: several colored digital drawings of cala athmaza from the goblin emperor. cala is a tall lanky fair-skinned elf with messy braided white hair, blue eyes, a high arched nose, and circular glasses. 1) from the knees up, hands crossed in front of him wearing baggy wide-sleeved robes in a faded greenish blue. he has a sash around his waist and a red drazhada baldric with an embroidered cat design. he is looking to the side and smiling. 2) two full-body drawings, with different outfits. the first is slightly open robes that come to the knee in a green color scheme. the second are blue robes with a middle closure coming to the knee. he wears footwraps in both, his heels and toes exposed in the second. 3) full body drawing, wearing gray robes that come to the knee, with wide sleeves that fasten tight at the forearms. end ID
