#competing access needs

[defectivegembrain]

You are the type of neurodivergent person who races ahead in conversation jumping uncontrollably from topic to topic. I am the type of neurodivergent person who is still stuck in the ditch of the first topic you brought up. We are not the same, and that's nobody's fault, but we need to work out a way to not turn each other's brains into mashed potatoes.

[fierceawakening]

Do I just have a super weird reaction to a term or does anyone else feel vaguely terrified when they read the term “rejection sensitive dysphoria?”

Like it’s probably my brain but I always get this foreboding sense like, “don’t make friends with anyone with ADHD. If you do, and it turns out you need to end the friendship or block them or socmed or otherwise opt out of the relationship, they’ll get DYSPHORIA and it will be YOUR FAULT.”

[mikami1992]

I just saw a post of a FanArt of Richard Greyson winning gold medals at the Olympics…

so an idea comes to mind…

A crazy guy is stalking the US Olympic team, at first the classic letters from a disturbing stalker, worrying but not enough to do anything more than increase security and start an investigation, after all they are in the middle of the inauguration and there is not much that can be done…

they don't plan to cancel anything… until the truck where the athletes are leaving the event is sabotaged/attacked…

despite the vehicle overturning, most of them had a scare and some bruises… but there are several of them who were left with injuries that prevent them from continuing in the competition.

which should end with the withdrawal of some competitions by the United States… but luckily they meet some of the Wayne boys who came to see the event and they are willing to be substitutes, even if it's just to fill in the spots…

Meanwhile, the Batkids are taking some time off, and by unanimous decision (no one votes against Cas) they decide to go see the opening and some events of the Olympics, what they didn't expect was to find a case involving the Olympic team, where everything seems to point to someone within it, targeting other athletes.

So they decide to investigate from within.

[ransomdemands]

yknow sometimes the way trans women talk about testosterone and being on estrogen is indistinguishable from the way terfs try to convince afab people not to start hrt

this is not a criticism mind you, their experiences are their own and completely legitimate, it's just a matter of competing needs - they need a safe space to talk about their dysphoria and how testosterone makes them feel and i need to not hear about how i am destroying my body with hrt

ordinarily these things are pretty insular to transfem circles but since instagram has been feeding me transfem content i'm seeing it more and more and yet again the algorithm is fucking me

[izvmimi]

getting older is losing your mind when you’re not even responsible for the work but you’re still responsible for the knowledge and are just on the verge of losing it because the software is not cooperating

[starfieldcanvas]

to be fair, some of us want them turned off because we ARE neurodivergent

subtitles should be on automatically. people who don’t want them should have to turn them off

[noisytenant]

there are therapists who specialize in cptsd. you dont need to go to inexperienced talk therapy or cbt or dbt ever again if you dont want to. there are options

[contagious-watermelon]

It's interesting to me that understandings of transsexuality have been almost exclusively filtered through the lens of queerness and the social aspects of gender. In other words, that the "T" was added to "LGBT." I've thought for a while that in a lot of cases, transness — and specifically dysphoria — makes a lot more sense when analyzed through the lens of disability rather than through queerness. (Personally I see it as being at the intersection between those things.)

I think that a theory of transsexuality would be incomplete without taking into account the societal aspects of gender, yes, but it seems to be similarly incomplete in the popular understanding of it.

I've seen a lot of discussion in the stuff I've read by disabled people about the contention between being objectively harmed or, well, disabled, by your disability, but still wanting to be proud of it or finding identity in it regardless. A lot of autistic communities, I've noticed, talk a lot about the fact that being autistic is difficult; it's made worse by other people's reactions to it, but it still is hard on its own (e.g. auditory overstimulation); yet people still can say that they'd rather be autistic than not. Or they may say they wish they weren't, but that they've come to terms with it because it's not exactly changeable.

Point is, there's open discussion about the differences between inherent challenges to your disability regardless of society, the ways which ableism makes things more difficult, and the contention of finding identity and community in your disability despite that. (And I use autism as an example because I'm autistic; I don't want to speak for, say, a physically disabled community as I'm able-bodied. But I have seen similar discussions there as well.)

The trans community, as I've seen, doesn't really have that. We're polarized between the extremely self-hating people who think that being trans is a curse and that people who like being trans are just fakers co-opting transness, and the toxically positive contingent who refuse to engage with the fact that sometimes dysphoria really does just hurt. And also that transphobia exists.

There's also the fact that in many ways, dysphoria is actually disabling. It isn't for everyone, and part of the problem is that transness as a concept covers so many things that analyzing it through just one lens will always be incomplete, but for me at least it caused me a lot of depression and dissociation, and made it difficult-to-impossible to interact with other people or function at my classes. Back before I medically transitioned, I related a lot to some descriptions by disabled people about their chronic pain, because my dysphoria effectively was chronic psychological pain. I don't want to say it's the same thing, because obviously I've only experienced one of those things, and dysphoria has a treatment while many (all?) chronic illnesses don't, but nevertheless it was a comforting lens to think of my dysphoria through in the time before I got top surgery.

Also of note is the way both our communities are treated by the medical establishment. I've heard many horror stories by disabled people of how doctors simply refuse to diagnose them or give them issues with their meds. Trans people obviously also have to deal with the shit that doctors put out in order to get access to HRT and any necessary surgeries. People deride HRT, saying that we shouldn't take it because it'll "make you a medical patient for life." People act like mental pain isn't real — calling depression fake, acting like because things like fibromyalgia aren't "real pain" that it shouldn't bother you so much, etc. — and that extends too into the way they dismiss the pain of gender dysphoria.

So, I don't really understand why the trans community has taken so many pains to disavow themselves from being considered even remotely similar to disabled people. I know that the common refrain, "we're not mentally ill!" is meant to combat the idea that we're deluded into thinking that we're a "different gender" than we really are, but the effect is throwing actually mentally ill trans people under the bus. The insistence that there's no way that dysphoria should be considered a disorder because there's nothing wrong with us — I just think that we could take a hint or two from the way that disabled people theorize about this subject.

[captious-solarian]

I like it when people do that. I like watching a group of people take an absurd situation perfectly seriously for the bit, I like extremely detailed analyses of things that don't need any, I like getting new information about obscure cases.

Therefore, we should have a child and ask them what they think.

tumblr is actually the least usable social media because its userbase is 99% people who need to be the smartest person in the room at all times, which leads to a phenomenon i call "no-anding," where people are only able to engage with a joke post by being like "ummmm actually op [smugly attempts to refute the premise of the joke for some reason] 😏"

[arctic-hands]

Oh the bane of wanting shoes that fit your vibe but you're disabled and need to prioritize comfort over aesthetics and also you're at sub-sub-poverty levels of our abysmal SSI

[melancholic-pigeon]

Bringing this back for disability pride month, since once again the notes are completely full of people insisting it's "not that hard" to repeat yourself and making the same ableist bad-faith reading of anyone who doesn't find it as easy as they do!

The irony is palpable.

How about we DON'T do this to each other when ableds do it to us all the time already?

Just something I really want to share on here because it’s important.

[primordialchoice]

I'm starting to warm up to the idea that Lilith and Adam were created as a metaphor for ying and yang. I used to dislike it back when I first read about it because it was incredibly sexist, but now that I'm older I feel I can draw new parallels that make more sense in my mind.

With Lilith being an avatar of evil and Adam being an avatar for good, the role of the forbidden tree of knowledge makes a lot more sense to me. Knowing the difference between good and evil would make for a greyer outlook on life, which Lilith might have had a tiny grasp over because she had actually struggled against her nature prior to leaving Eden. Meanwhile, Adam had to eat the fruit in order to gain sight over it, which was something that Lilith did not indulge in.

Lilith is a vessel for evil. She rounds her world view over time as she spends more time with those who have a grey outlook on life because it's easier to relate to someone with a little bit of darkness in them. This is why she is only willing to compromise when she can meet someone in the middle.

I would say that she is greyer than she started, but her natural way of being still has a dark core that would probably never change (unless she is fundamentally altered in some way, like if she were to consume the forbidden fruit)

[haveievermentioned]

So hey! For my followers, a cult game is finally getting a sequel - Alan Wake 2 - but buried in the annoucment was the reveal that this game from a large and old studio was going to go Digital Only. This is bad. This is tumblr, I know we all love physical media. And I do enjoy some of the benefits of a digital future, but we need physical options for so many reasons. If you are at all interested in VERY Meta games about writers, depression, misshappen realities, doubles, secret government organizations, reality altering due to writers, legal dramas getting meta, and just... physical media. Please contact THQ Nordic and Remedy enterntainment saying you would love the game, but want a physical copy. Then, if one is made, pre order it to show you mean it. Also, seriously, Alan Wake is really good and the remastered came out a few years ago so you can pick it up easily. Control is more actiony but heads much deeper into the weirdness. You don't need to play either to play Alan Wake 2, but it does help.

[allalrightagain]

The irony of an “is this accessible?” website being inaccessible (for me) is not lost on me

[lastoneout]

this is def a case of competing access needs and also I'm not about to suggest anyone actually change anything, this is just me, but man the new disability pride flag just like....it makes my eyes hurt?? it's so low contrast all the colors blend together and I have to like, focus really hard to See It correctly and isdfklsdlkfsdlkfj

it's not a big deal and I'd prefer to protect people who have seizures but yeah I just get frustrated sometimes bcs it's so hard to look at my eyes just slide right off it, and like it's made that way to stop people from getting migraines but looking at something like that for a long time honestly triggers my migraines and it kinda sucks a little sometimes

[586ondisability]

Language and accessibility on tumblr

Before we talk about language, it is important to recognize that accessibility is not universal, and competing needs are part of disabled life. Competing needs is when the thing that makes something accessible for one person, also makes it inaccessible for another. With language, we can try to manage this by having multiple formats. This may include plain language translations, large typeset versions, images and/or image descriptions, or audio recordings of the text. These are just a few examples. However, including multiple formats takes time and effort. This can also be a barrier for disabled people. Sometimes other people can help, but sometimes we can’t avoid these competing needs. All we can do is try our best, and give each other understanding when we have to compromise.

I will try to write this post in as plain language as I can. In Kelsie Acton’s chapter ‘Plain Language for Disability Culture’1, she writes in what she calls ‘semi-plain language style’. She defines this as:

Use an active voice

Mostly use the 6000 most common words in the English language

Use short sentences

Use 14 point font

Use “I” and “you”

Plain language is important, because it makes ideas easy and clear to understand for the most people.

I do not have a lot of experience writing in plain language. I have ADHD. Part of having ADHD for me (and others like me 2) means my writing uses a lot of long sentences, brackets, and dashes, because that is how I think. Writing in plain language requires me to slow down and be intentional about what I say and how I say it. Many disabled authors have written about how we can use language to challenge ideas about time, speed, and efficiency(1). Writing in the way that is natural to me challenges the idea that narratives should be linear and efficient. For me, writing in plain language challenges the idea that adding more information will make an idea clearer. Both these ways of communicating are valid and important for accessibility. Both are necessary for understanding the world as disabled people do.

It is not always necessary to use complicated language to discuss complicated ideas. We can all try to accommodate each other.

On tumblr, writing in plain language is not common. Some people write with ‘correct’ grammar and punctuation. Many people write using punctuation rarely, or only for effect. This is sometimes referred to as ‘tumblr vernacular’. This can be difficult for some people to follow, especially if they are not familiar with it. However, it also removes barriers for some people who struggle with strict punctuation and grammar rules. It can also give people more flexibility in how they express their thoughts (like me), and makes it easier to include tone indicators (Examples: 3, 4).

Writing conventions on tumblr are flexible. People can use the way works best for them, or for the content they are posting. We can't always be accessible to everyone at the same time, but having flexibility helps.

1: Plain Language for Disability Culture (Kelsie Acton in Crip Authorship, 2023) https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/89491

2: Learning Disability Justice through Critical Participatory Action Research (Laura J. Wernickin in Crip Authorship, 2023) https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/89491

3: https://www.tumblr.com/hunterofhestia/770103242897096704/the-amount-of-times-people-have-gotten-mad-at-me?source=share

4: https://www.tumblr.com/chronicpaingirlie/732639202587574272/shaking-myself-very-gently-being-in-pain-takes?source=share