#competing access needs

[newhologram]

"wow im sowwy i have such low spoons i couldn't possibly put an image ID in my post, can someone else do it for me uwu"

just admit you don't give two shits about people who use screen readers. you wrote up a whole ass text post with an image but your energy magically stops when it's time to be inclusive? lmao no. if you can't spare the energy to add an ID to that then don't post it at all you fucking cunt. and you don't get to act like it's a massive fucking burden on you that you have to shove off to someone else. actually vile behaviour from someone who's literally complaining about ableism. i hate this shit ass community

^ So this is actually ableism. ^ Lots of very nasty ableist projecting here which is disappointing but quite common on this site.

Chronic pain, fatigue, and brain fog are a thing. Limitations are a thing. My pain and meds wrecking my cognitive function, my symptoms demanding I take a break so I don’t go into the red and puke are a thing. My very nerve pain from using my hands is literally why I had to give up so many things, and why I can’t edit or type that much in a given day. It’s called disability for a reason.

(I queue most posts after chipping away at them. Only some posts are spontaneous.)

This is why we even use the concept of spoons. If I need to stop and save spoons to drive an hour to my doctor appt, or even just save them to cook a meal later, then I HAVE to do that. And I’d rather post something and ask for assistance from others who feel up to it than have a post keep sitting in my drafts for months and months. I have 2 year old posts I just can’t get my brain working for.

You’re so close with “energy magically disappeared”—so close. Bc that’s actually how disability and chronic illness is. Moment to moment we don’t know how we’re going to feel or when we’ll need to take a break.

It’s so funny bc the reason my backlog has gotten so much bigger over the past 3 years is bc I take so long to subtitle clips and write ID’s.

I’m not mad at you, but boundary-wise, it isn’t okay for you to take out your frustration with the community on me just bc I’m an easy and accessible target to anon rage at. I would recommend talking about this stuff in your journal or with a trusted friend or mental health professional before running off to say mean things you may later feel bad about.

Thank you to those who have always helped to ID things without judgment or projection. It seriously means so much bc I’ve got a lot on my plate with my health and home and job rn. I’m grateful for your kindness and for you seeing me as human and not just a content creation machine. I’m glad to be part of a community that understands that it’s okay to ask for help and to help each other. I’m glad we don’t have this unhealthy mindset of “I MUST do it myself or I’m a bad person.”

🙏🏻💙🥄♿️✨

[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.

[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

[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

[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] 😏"

[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.

[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.

[bomberqueen17]

I agree with your post on tone indicators but be careful with labeling coming up with new terms/language functions as making up a conlang, you seem to know non-native english speakers so you'll know the struggles they have in getting very necessary language such as neutral gender added to their language, and even in english itself there's a lot of push against adding words to describe things like genders, and saying "nah those new things are not real [language]" is often weaponized against people who need new language (i am not saying this applies to tone indicators specifically just to be absolutely 100% clear)

There's nothing wrong with conlangs. I love them, and admire people who create them; they're perfectly valid as an art form and can be a fun and beautiful way to communicate. There's nothing wrong with inside jokes or memes; I employ them among my groups of friends, and love the glimpses of humanity I get from hearing about other people's. Sometimes the confluence of references can be the sweetest, funniest, most concise way of communicating something, and sometimes what you're communicating is just you're my people and I love you, and that is beautiful and valid. There's nothing wrong with neopronouns or any such adapted language; they're perfectly valid, I use them, whenever asked, and in fact I once assigned some to a character in a work of fiction I wrote solely to give myself practice using them, so it wouldn't be so strange to me, since the idea was new to me but I had begun to encounter people who used them. And they convey things that could not already be conveyed using existing language, and so their creation is beautiful and necessary-- as is their explanation.

The thing all these things have in common is that nobody is assuming you know them. If someone has created a conlang, they'd be excited to give me a glossary, and would not use the language with me if I had not been given an opportunity to know what the words meant.

If I am making a bunch of references to inside jokes, I will make sure that everyone in the conversation has had a chance to hear the background context, so that they are not excluded-- if it is not possible, I will apologize to the excluded person, and try to keep my references to a minimum in conversations they're part of.

If someone has neopronouns, I will happily use them, but I need to be told what they are and how to use them grammatically. Once this is done, I will do my best, just as I do with anything I'm learning, but I don't think it would be reasonable for me to know to use pronouns if I haven't been told what they are. This is why people say "she/her", "they/them", "xe/xer" and so on, by the way, instead of just saying "she"-- it's to give you what you need to use it!

So tone indicators-- fine, use them, but if you're using them in a conversation with me, understand that they are opaque to me so I will not understand them so you using them is serving absolutely no purpose, and so you will have to also, if indicating your tone is important to the meaning of the conversation, do so using language I can understand, and additionally know that if you have repurposed widely-used existing acronyms or abbreviations, you're going to have to clear up what you mean, and in fact for the ones whose older and far more common usages are actively offensive, you should avoid using them unless you're trying to cause offense.

Because this is the main point I'm getting to: It's really fucking rude to address someone using language they do not know and are excluded from.

So every single time you use a tone indicator with someone whose familiarity with the system you haven't bothered to verify, you are appending another, secret, tone indicator on the end, which just says HOSTILE, invisibly appended after every other thing you have typed, because you are using abbreviations that in broader culture mean other things, and expecting your reader, without having asked if they know them, to discard everything else they know, and put themselves out to decipher your unfamiliar jargon.

It's entitled and hostile and counterproductive. So I'm not saying don't use them, I'm saying ask first, and if the person's not familiar, then make your meaning clear in standard language. It's pretty simple. If you love this specific system a lot and talk to this person a lot, maybe drop a link to a key and ask if they'd be willing to learn them. But understand that is a big ask, because there are so many other ways to convey the same exact information that are not reliant upon a brand-new obscure code.

[vagueiish]

on the one hand, i'm sad that the unromanced companions can't romance one another bc some of those dynamics are *chef's kiss*

on the other hand, i'm glad for it, because then my tav would be fucked (or, rather, unfucked?) because there's no way anyone's choosing him over anyone else. it just wouldn't make any sense

[kingofthering]

girl i'll be honest if you don't watch f2 i don't think you can say jack doohan is a better choice than victor martins💀

Hm, I wonder where I said that Jack was a better choice than Victor.

Spoiler alert : there is a difference between disagreeing with a decision and not being able to understand it at all. In this case, one means you’re being mature and considering all the facts, the other means you’re being not objective and delusional.

[gattsuru]

... at the risk of steelmanning people harder than they steelman themselves, we’ve made pretty significant advances in movement assistance for most types of disability that are roughly compatible with walkable neighborhoods.  Even the low-end like Rascal scooters are much less expensive today and far more capable of handling the typical narrow sidewalk than even a decade ago, and the mid- or high-end options can nearly go offroad.  Vision, sun exposure, energy-focused matters, so on, aren’t as well-handled, but there have still been significant advances.

There’s certainly stuff that isn’t covered in that set, but they’re not especially well-known, often things that society largely has decided to ‘help’ with (often shitty) services rather than access, and often pretty rare.  And a lot of the disability advocates tend to focus on simple stuff like lack of sidewalks because they’re both highly present and highly relevant low-hanging fruit that a lot of walkable communities advocates take for granted.

By contrast, firefighters and paramedics are kinda stuck.  An ambulance needs to be able to move a two foot by six foot stretcher, for just one constraint that’s very hard to work around even if you fold it in half.  This list isn’t made up of things that are individually heavy or bulky, mostly, but it’s probably a couple hundred pounds, and not especially all-inclusive.  Beyond individually bulky tools like ladders or the jaws of life or full equipment or a thousand feet of hose, firefighters live and die on the ability to pump a lot of water at pretty high pressures; there are some physics reasons it may not even be possible to miniaturize those pumps to even ‘big motorcycle pack’ size.

((And, yes, there’s also the unspoken bit where “having to haul a bunch of heavy and bulky stuff“ is closer to the failure mode that a lot of non-disability advocate non-walkable-communites people readily imagine for themselves.  You need to replace a drywall panel?  Gfl.))

I mean, it's great that the "what about emergency vehicle access?" hack is so effective when pointing out the deficiencies of proposals for walkable communities, but it kind of burns my ass that you need to take that approach in the first place. I don't know how many conversations about communities planning I've seen that go like this:

Walkable communities advocate: Here's a plan for a walkable community in which only public transit will be permitted – no personal vehicles of any kind will be allowed.

Disability advocate: What about access for physically disabled people? If your options are public transit or the sidewalk and literally nothing else, any disabled person whose needs aren't fully served 100% of the time by your favoured public transit framework is fucked, and there's no such thing as a perfect public transit framework.

Walkable communities advocate, whose brain shut down the moment they heard the word "disabled" and didn't process anything past that point: Oh, you silly cripple, the term "walkable community" doesn't mean you're only allowed to walk! How quaint.

I guess pointing out "well, if only public transit is accommodated, how are firefighters and paramedics supposed to access emergencies?" works because now they can imagine themselves being affected!

[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)