Me: I’m chronically ill which makes me disabled. I managed to adjust my life so I can live as comfortably as possible, which means I don’t work, being poor, and not doing much. Sometimes I have to sleep all day, sometimes I go on hikes with my dog, sometimes I exist, sometimes I want to kill myself. That’s my life and I’m okay with it.
Ppl: BbUuuTTt — ThAt soUndS dEpreSSinNngG!
Ppl: buTtT — I COulDn'TttT lIvE liKe thIsS!
Ppl: BbuUUTtTtT — iSn’T tHEre ANyThiNg THaT caNn bE DoNe tO chAnGe YOur depREssIng stAte?
Ppl: bUuuUtT — LivE iS abOUt LIVING, NOT EXISTING!
Ppl: buTT — hOw cAn yOu LIvee LikE tHat?
Ppl: buTttTTTTT — DoNt be So neGaTiVe, if IT wAsS mE, I WouLd bE mORe HopEFuLl, That thEre WiLL Be a CuRe, AND My dePreSsIng LIfesTyLe WoUlD eNd.
Ppl: BUttT — YOure SUCH AN INSPIRATION!!! I wOuLdvE kIlleD MYsElf By NoW!
Me: Well, at this point we should think about who is the really negative person in this conversation.
Ppl:
Ppl:
Ppl:
Ppl: Yeah, no, you’re negative, saying you’re disabled is negative, disability is okay in and of itself, but don’t call yourself disabled, because that’s so negative, not having goals and not accomplishing anything in life is a wasted life, contributing to society is important, you’re so poor for not seeing how you’re wasting your life, you should really try to change something, although I admire you, because I would have killed myself by now, just saying.
[Image Description: Screenshots of a series of tweets by a user named @valeriehalla that read
ok: i’m scared to exist online right now, even in what we should be able to consider safe spaces for queer folks
i’m scared because we are all watching continually as more and more of us are violently picked off and destroyed
by other queer folks, and by people who claim to be sympathetic to us, utilizing the same rhetoric that should be helping and empowering us
the word “discourse”, at this point, is only ever used sarcastically and with a kind of quiet dread by my friends
we joke about being problematic, but me, my peers and maybe you too, live in a state of constant low anxiety
over the fact that we don’t get second chances to make mistakes. if you’re a queer person of any kind of visibility, it’s one and done
the well of patience and compassion runs deep for our cis/straight allies, and we reserve NOTHING for ourselves
this is assuming you even make a mistake. we target each other for complete bullshit just as often
weeks ago i was chased off twitter for using the word “queer”, before that i was getting death threats over fabricated purity politics
friends of mine have been targeted with callout posts over things they didn’t do or for weird fandom drama with zero material impact
i’m not trying to absolve any of us of guilt. we’ve all done and will do wrong things, we’ll hurt each other, again and again
it’s easy, because we’re all a little bit fucked up over here. we’re carrying wounds we’re weird, we’re not always presentable
but that’s exactly why we need patience and compassion for each other more than anything else
because those wounds make it so easy for us to destroy eachother, and some of y'all may be tempted
it’s easier. when it’s some 20-something queer artist struggling to meet half the poverty line, it’s easy to run them off for hurting you
i GET why it’s tempting for some folks, because this is power that you can exert, a situation you can change
when we’re all so tired and so used to being powerless
but please understand that the folks you’re targeting may not come back from it. they may not ever come back. it’s happened, it will happen
when you mark someone as unsaveable and irredeemable in the only space they have to exist in, they can’t exist anymore
End of tweets.]
Just to make something about this crystal clear, and this is something that I think many people will recognize about these tweets, the situations that valeriehalla is describing aren’t just the result of people punishing honest mistakes. Some of these things are straight up authoritarian bullshit perpetrated by people who are trying to create power structures in the LGBTQ+ community.
This is what it means to be a TERF, a transmedicalist/truscum, or an ace exclusionist. This is the environment they’re trying to build, one where other people in the LGBTQ+ community have to live with fear and anxiety of the kind of authoritarian bullying that these people try to create.
It’s really important to push back on this stuff anytime we see it, because authoritarians actively work to spread their malfeasant ideology. They lie and manipulate in order to spread their message because they honestly believe that anything, no matter how immoral, is justified in pursuit of their core goals. And their core goals always involve hurting us, all of us. They only see three types of people; those that agree with them and are allies, those that don’t agree with them and are enemies, and those people who they hate and will only ever attack.
We fight them by not letting them get away with it. We fight them by educating people about their tactics and their evil. We fight them by protecting those of us who are young enough or immature enough to still be vulnerable to their recruitment tactics. And we win by never giving them an inch, ever.
In a fight where one side believes only in the oppression and eventual destruction of the other, there’s no middle ground to be found, they are wholly wrong in their beliefs and they’re willing to hurt people in service to them.
so i’ve been on a comic reading binge lately and recently read alan moore’s “lost girls” (which if you have never heard of it is basically the kind of Problematic Queer Porn antis would tell you to kill yourself for writing, starring fairy tale characters in all their E for Explicit glory) and it wasn’t really to my tastes but because i’d heard it was regarded as a controversial work, i wanted to read over some reviews of it and see what other people’s opinions were and i found this review by Arthur Graham in particular that i read and loved and found extremely relevant to the kind of shit we constantly talk about in fandom discourse.
i’m not going to copy/paste the whole thing because it’s long but three parts that stand out are:
“Any furor that might erupt over Lost Girls is down to the fact that it has pictures,” argues Moore. “After all, far more violent and brutal pornographic prose novels, like those by the Marquis de Sade, are still in print, and no one is currently trying to prosecute them in court.” And though Lost Girls did manage to overcome its initial legal difficulties, it was still refused by several book sellers on the grounds that its visual content was too offensive. This tendency to censor images more strictly than words has been a characteristic of our culture ever since Moses supposedly stepped down from Mt. Sinai with the Second Commandment, which, when taken literally, seems to prohibit images of any kind. In the realm of the sexual image, however, censorship has been even more virulent.
As one example Moore cites William Blake, whose well-meaning followers, upon his death, “completely excised all of the erotic work that he’d done, because they didn’t want people to get the wrong idea of him.” Illustrating the tendency towards self-censorship, Moore reminds us that even Aubrey Beardsley, one of the finest British artists of the late Victorian era, requested on his deathbed that his beautiful illustrations of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata be committed to the flames, along with his many other “obscene” works. In both cases, however, the motivating force behind the censorship was essentially the same: moral pressures of the time simply did not foster a very high tolerance for sex or sexual imagery. And, according to Moore:
the moral pressures of [Beardsley’s] time, looked back on from a more enlightened future, were simply wrong. The moral pressures of his time were what destroyed Oscar Wilde and everybody and every publication that Oscar Wilde had been associated with. I can see why Beardsley was nervous, but he shouldn’t have been, because he’d done nothing wrong. And if that applies to 1820, it certainly applies today.
The prohibitions against sex and sexual imagery, though certainly relaxed two centuries later, nevertheless continue to contribute to the denigration of pornography as inherently dirty, shameful, and generally undeserving of the status accorded to most other forms of art and literature. In response to this, Moore asks, “Why must these often very tender pieces of artwork be damned, consigned to this grubby under-the-counter genre, where there is a miasma hanging over the very word? That is another reason for stubbornly calling [Lost Girls] ‘pornography’, because I wanted to reclaim the word.”
and:
It may be hard to find a single image in all three volumes of Lost Girls that isn’t being used to explore deeper sexual themes and issues, but for the reader who finds sex and sexuality inherently offensive, this may not be enough to affect a pardon. “If we couldn’t offend anybody,” jokes Moore, “then how could it be a transgressive work of pornography? We would have been rightly accused of having done something that was a literary work, which dodged the real issues that it set out to address.”
However, before judging the book’s content or presentation, it is important to remember that the authors aren’t necessarily condoning or advocating all or even any of the sex acts they portray, any more so than the writer of a murder mystery is necessarily advocating the act of murder. “As a work of pornography,” Moore explains, “Lost Girls follows a basic tenet of the genre, which is the thrill of vicariously experiencing something taboo or transgressive.” He continues:
We don’t seem to have much of a problem in distinguishing between fact and fantasy except for when it comes to sex, and I’m not entirely sure why that is, why we make a special case for sexuality. It’s okay to show murders in most of our great art, it’s perfectly okay to show how life can be ended, but there is something suspect in showing the ways in which life can be begun, or just showing people enjoying themselves.
and third:
“The sexual imagination, which is the biggest part of sexuality, is not well served in our culture,” explains Moore, “and I really don’t understand why that should be.” It is this lack of sexual imagination, according to Moore, that limits the ways in which we’re allowed to view, think about, and practice sex. However, if the millennia of erotic art between the Venus of Villendorf and Lost Girls is any indication, “Pornography has always been with us and always will be with us, and nothing’s going to change that. The only question is, ‘Is it going to be good pornography or is it going to be bad pornography?’ And given that most pornography today is very bad indeed, it’s probably about time that people make a serious effort to reclaim this despised genre.”
If bad pornography limits and constricts sex into a very narrow, ultimately hollow commodity, then good pornography should enlarge and challenge our ideas concerning sex and sexuality, finally doing justice to the rich sexual universe we live in. By refusing to cater exclusively to any one sex, gender, or orientation, by refusing to portray the sex act as separate from the deepest self, and by refusing the bounds of physical reality their puritanical reign over the limitless sexual imagination, Lost Girls has done precisely this. Even if it breaks a thousand taboos along the way, so be it: as a work of pure fiction, it could break every sexual taboo known to man and never hurt a thing.
you can read the full review here(TW for NSFW images and topics in the review, keeping in mind that it’s for a piece of NSFW media).
the general gist of it being that there is a difference between fiction and reality and fiction is a safe and healthy place to explore one’s fantasies and take one’s imagination to wherever it can possibly go without harming anyone because that is what what fiction is for.
also,nota point by the reviewer but by myself: if an author as talented and well respected as alan moore can write thiskind story with thiskind of content without it defining his worth as either a writer or a human being and without it ruining his reputation or his life, then all of you fic writers and fanartists and smaller original content creators out there who create work with similar themes certainly don’t deserve to be treated any differently. despite current fandom climate, please don’t believe otherwise.
Something you start to notice after seeing transphobia and transphobic rhetoric is this: transphobes refuse to refute trans people. They would rather stoop to “41% lul” jokes than actually engaging in intelligent amd informed discussions about trans people, our transitions, and even surrounding detransition. This is because they know there is no argument to be had on their side. This is because they prioritize their disgust response overpeoples’ lives and well-being.
Every now and again, I see that a post of mine winds up on transphobes’ radars, and time and time again, what I said above remains true. When somebody would rather “joke” about trans suicide, you aren’t the good guys anymore. You are not righteous or fighting for other peoples’ rights.
not every hobby is a special interest. not every interest is a hyperfixation. not every time you have trouble doing something is executive dysfunction. stop misusing terminology stop pathologising every aspect of your life
every offended person in the notes like “i actually have adhd so how dare you tell me to xyz” bestie this is not about you. this is about the ppl who went from saying “omg i hate messy people im so ocd” to “omg this show is such a hyperfixation of mine”. if this makes you uncomfortable either work on your reading comprehension or think hard abt why the idea of something not being a Symptom is so unpleasant to you
This. Remember mislabelling things using ND terms if you’re NT adds to the stigma of those disabilities. If you have a lazy day, (Perfecly fine and valid, glad you’re taking care of yourself) you still have executive function. You don’t have a disability that causes ongoing executive dysfunction. Making it seem like you do promotes the idea that you can just turn function on and off willingly, and thus makes it seem as if people with ADHD, Autism, etc, are choosing to not do the things they want/need to, which feeds into the negative stereotype of us being lazy, rather than having a disability we can’t control. For every term that you missuse, it is going to create more stigma for the people who actually deals with those symptoms.They’re symptoms, not new trend words, so please don’t use them unless you are ND and you do actually struggle with them.
Chi: Thank God!!! My luck isn’t that terrible. But it seems like Hoang Nhat Minh has never known how to be not rich though, I envy is life
Chi: I still remember the first day we met, mom kept nagging me to befriend hm cause our friendship would have benefited me after graduation
Chi’s mom (Huyen): This outfit looks great on you
Chi: Let’s skip the formality, I know your name, I know we study in the same school, I know your class. Most importantly, I think your best friend likes me
Chi [thinking]: I approached him with ulterior motive. I did run a background check on him, so I could tell him exactly what he wanted to hear
Minh: is he that obvious?
Chi: It’s easy to tell, he isn’t exactly discreet about it. Bao told me his ideal type is Tran Vu Lan Chi though
Chi [thinking]: I ended up using his best friend’s crush to bond with Nhat Minh. I wasn’t interested in Gia Bao at first but I still gave him signals, but thanks to this method I successfully became close friend with the rich guy. Eventually, I genuinely cared about them and I was devastated when they died, our relationships weren’t 100% fake
Chi [thinking]: Is this the afterlife? I guess my soul was transferred into my new body
Chi [thinking]: But mom wasn’t wrong. I do need our friendship after graduation after all
Hoang Nhat Minh (past life) - Park Eun Woo [thinking]: Why do I feel like something important must have happened
Chi: Thank God!!! My luck isn’t that terrible. But it seems like Hoang Nhat Minh has never known how to be not rich though, I envy is life
Chi: I still remember the first day we met, mom kept nagging me to befriend hm cause our friendship would have benefited me after graduation
Chi’s mom (Huyen): This outfit looks great on you
Chi: Let’s skip the formality, I know your name, I know we study in the same school, I know your class. Most importantly, I think your best friend likes me
Chi [thinking]: I approached him with ulterior motive. I did run a background check on him, so I could tell him exactly what he wanted to hear
Minh: is he that obvious?
Chi: It’s easy to tell, he isn’t exactly discreet about it. Bao told me his ideal type is Tran Vu Lan Chi though
Chi [thinking]: I ended up using his best friend’s crush to bond with Nhat Minh. I wasn’t interested in Gia Bao at first but I still gave him signals, but thanks to this method I successfully became close friend with the rich guy. Eventually, I genuinely cared about them and I was devastated when they died, our relationships weren’t 100% fake
Chi [thinking]: Is this the afterlife? I guess my soul was transferred into my new body
Chi [thinking]: But mom wasn’t wrong. I do need our friendship after graduation after all
Hoang Nhat Minh (past life) - Park Eun Woo [thinking]: Why do I feel like something important must have happened
growing up on the internet is talking people out of self harm and suicide from states and sometimes countries away. having grown up on the internet is remembering that and panicking when somebody is AFK when they usually aren’t, and also running some dumb joking convo with another mutual as you desperately try to get in touch with your buddy trying to mask your fear. Having anxiety and living in this awful loop is just your stomach and head hurting during all of this, and the cherry on top of the cake is that I can’t turn my lights off because my brain hasn’t forgotten the image of the henocied face (do not google) for two weeks and as a result i have NOT slept soundly.
not to post worrying shit online but Hyde being all “I’ll kill myself just to destroy you” @ Jekyll but then panicking because he’s actually terrified of death shouldn’t speak to me the way it does
❛❛ four centuries? ❜❜ a mildly impressed, if not incredulous look flashed tommy’s features for a moment. (he certainly wouldn’t have guessed that. ) and he couldn’t even begin to imagine living that long, and not necessarily because the idea of immortality itself was difficult to grasp. but one lifetime seemed more than long enough, if not at times toolong.four centuries from now… that would be the year 2320, if he ever ended up living as long as his namesake has.
perhaps it was strange of him, but he found the idea of eternal life was more discomforting than the thought of death itself. to outlive your friends, your family… did he really want to live so long that he had to see his siblings’ funerals? his nephews? did he want to live a life, constantly on the move every other decade to prevent anyone from noticing he was no longer aging? what life could he possibly create for himself now, like this? all his ambitions, for himself, for his family… what was he to do with all of that now?
his brows furrowed as he pondered this, looking over at thomas. ❛❛ that’s what, five, maybe six lifetimes? so that means you must be born around the early 1500s… ❜❜ a quiet chuckle in disbelief, a slight shake of his head to himself. ❛❛ and it hasn’t gotten tiring? ❜❜
“i’m hoping that means you think i look good for my age,” he teases softly. tommy was far from the first person to be surprised at how old he was. but some of the surprise came from the very fact that he was still… well, alive seemed an ironic way to put it. many didn’t live so long, either dying by their own hand or at another’s. for such a small population that they were compared to humans, they certainly got into many arguments amongst each other. some lethal.
“born 1485,” he specifies nostalgically. but the smile he wore slightly dropped off at the question that he was asked. “the life i lived while i was alive was far more exhausting…” he chuckles bitterly. but that isn’t exactly his whole answer to the specific question. “compared to the live i lived, i’m free… i can go where i want, do what i want… enjoy art and music and all the best that being a human has to offer.” he tries to look at the positive side of things.
“do i get lonely?” is the question that he imagines is really being asked. “of course. knowing what our existence means, if we should bond with other humans… or to anyone, really… the grief is great for those we lose. but i…” even in his darkest hours he couldn’t bring himself to take his own life. “i make the most of what i am now.”
