#curative

[isfjmel-phleg]

"Curative" (one of the earliest Elystan stories, in which his father teaches him to smoke) is one of the short stories I'm eventually going to revisit. I'm not particularly satisfied with it, especially its portrayal of the effects of stramonium (my research was shoddy), so there would have to be some significant changes. One possible alteration that occurred to me recently is...what if it were no longer from Elystan's POV, but Talfrin's? I'm not sure I'll do it, but it would certainly be something different from anything else I've written, and allowing Talfrin a more human side (yes, he's horrible, but he is still a father, and he genuinely is concerned about Elystan and wants to connect with him) would be an intriguing challenge.

[sciencesolutions]

[agreenroad]

Jesus Healed Using Cannabis - God Provided Use Of All Plants And Herbs For Curative Care

GERMANS CELEBRATE LEGALIZATION OF MARIJUANA The growing of an herb called marijuana should be legal in all states, with no restrictions on whether it is cannabis or marijuana. Why? Because God provided this and all other herbs in the Garden Of Eden, as part of Heaven on Earth. GOD PROVIDED ALL HERBS AND PLANTS FOR CURATIVE CARE In addition, God gives us the use of plants and herbs for curative…

[conquerhermind]

Spend the night with me <3

[pebblegalaxy]

The Curative and Addictive Nature of Religion and Drugs: Exploring the Parallels

The Parallels Between Religion and Drugs: The Curative and Addictive Nature Explored Religion and drugs have long been subjects of fascination and study due to their profound impact on individuals and societies. This article delves into the intriguing analogy between religion and drugs, exploring how they can be curative in small doses but potentially addictive when taken to extremes. We will…

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[romanticatheartt]

I die for these soft, domestic moments...

I laughed in earnest, and squeezed his face as I pressed a swift kiss to his mouth. “Shameless flirt.” The warmth returned to his eyes at last. ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ I kissed his bare neck, and he reached back to drag a finger down my cheek. ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ Rhys came over and handed me a hairpin. We worked in unison, pinning my hair into place. Rhys pinned a hard-to-reach section of my hair. ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ He leaned down, nuzzling my throat. “Don’t you want to comfort your mate, who has missed you terribly these weeks?” I planted a hand on his face and pushed him back, scowling. “I want my mate to tell me where the hell he was. Then he can get his comfort.” Rhys nipped at my fingers, teeth snapping playfully. “Cruel, beautiful female.” ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ I studied the hand, the ravaged face. Such pain lingered there—and exhaustion. The face he never let anyone see. I pushed up onto my knees and kissed his cheek, his skin warm and soft beneath my mouth. ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ So I wrote back, At least you make up for your shameless flirting by being one hell of a High Lord. He’d returned that evening, smirking like a cat, and had merely said “One hell of a High Lord?” by way of greeting. I’d sent a bucket’s worth of water splashing into his face. Rhys hadn’t bothered to shield against it. And instead shook his wet hair like a dog, spraying me until I yelped and darted away. His laughter had chased me up the stairs. ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ A half smile that had me walking toward him, stopping between his legs. He braced his hands idly on my hips. He rested his brow against my chest, right between my breasts, and wrapped his arms around my waist. For a long minute, he only breathed in the scent of me, as if taking it deep into his lungs. ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ “You look exhausted, that’s why.” He put a dramatic hand over his heart. “Your concern warms me more than any winter fire, my love.” I rolled my eyes and sat up. “Did you at least eat?” He shrugged, his dark shirt straining across his broad shoulders. “I’m fine.” His gaze slid over my bare legs as I pushed back the covers. Heat bloomed in me, but I shoved my feet into slippers. “I’ll get you food.” “I don’t want—” “When did you last eat?” A sullen silence. “I thought so.” I hauled a fleece-lined robe around my shoulders... “You don’t need to—” “I want to, and I’m going to.”... “Did you eat at all today?” “I had an apple this morning.” “Rhys.” He set down his fork, his mouth twitching toward a smile. “Feyre.” I crossed my arms. “No one is too busy to eat.” “You’re fussing.” “It’s my job to fuss. And besides, you fuss plenty. Over far more trivial things.” ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ “You look beautiful tonight.” His words were low, rough. I stroked a hand down the lap of my gown, the fabric shimmering beneath my fingers. “You say that every night.” “And mean it.” ₊✩‧₊˚౨ৎ˚₊✩‧₊ His fingers threaded through my hair, tilting my face up. That wicked smile grew, and my toes curled in their boots. “There’s my darling Feyre.”

[georgeromeros]

The Three Stooges - Calling All Curs (1939)

[zimtlees]

Gay and Oral looking happy❤️ Booberta is missing🙏🏻

[alibinashes]

NANCY DREW 11.  CURSE OF BLACKMOOR MANOR.

"dear ned, greetings from jolly old england! although now i'm not too sure about the jolly part. [...] i can't tell whether the butterflies in my stomach are because i'm excited, or just a tad creeped out."

[just-a-madrigal]

Brigitte with her eyes so bright

Looks toward heaven at midnight

On the longest night of year

That’s the one she holds most dear

“Starry friends,” she’s often heard to say

“How I wish that I could make you stay”

She knows though they can’t remain

Time will bring them round again

[beckycocker]

reblog if you want me to take my hands off

[plaguedocboi]

What the fuck did you just say to me tumblr????

[trans-axolotl2]

I've been reading Cripping Intersex by Celeste Orr and one concept that I think is absolutely crucial and one of the best resources I've found for understanding my own experiences as an intersex person is the term Compulsory Dyadism.

Dr. Orr coins the term: "I propose the expression 'compulsory dyadism' to describe the instituted cultural mandate that people cannot violate the sex dyad, have intersex traits, or 'house the spectre of intersex' (Sparrow 2013, 29). Said spectre must be, according to the mandate, exorcised. However, trying to definitively cast out the spectre via curative violence always fails. The spectre always returns: a new intersex baby is born; one learns that they have intersex traits in adulthood; and/or medical procedures cannot cast out the spectre fully, as evidenced by life-long medical interventions, routines, or patienthood status. And the effects of compulsory dyadism haunt in the form of disabilities, scars, memories, trauma, and medical regimens (e.g., HRT routines). Compulsory dyadism, therefore, is not simply an event or a set of instituted policies but is an ongoing exorcising process and structure of pathologization, curative violence, erasure, trauma, and oppression." (Orr 19-20).

They continue on in their book to explore compulsory dyadism as it shows up in medical interventions, racializing intersex + sports sex testing, and eugenic and prenatal interventions on intersex fetuses. This term makes so much sense to me and puts words to an experience I've been struggling to comprehend--how can it be that so many endosex* people express such revulsion and fear of intersex bodies and traits, yet at the same time don't even know that intersex people exist? Why is it that people understand when I refer to my body in the terms used by freak shows, call myself a hermaphrodite, remember bearded ladies and laugh at interphobic jokes--yet do not even know that intersex people are as common as redheads? Understanding the term compulsory dyadism elucidates this for me. Endosex people might not comprehend what intersex actually is or know anything about our advocacy, but they do grow up in a cultural environment that indoctrinates them into false ideas about the sex binary and cultivates a fear of anything that lies outside of it.

From birth, compulsory dyadism affects every one of us, whether you're intersex or not. Intersex people carry the heaviest burden and often the most visible wounds that compulsory dyadism inflicts, as shown through often the very literal scars of violent, "curative" surgery, but the whole process of sex assignment at birth is a manifestation of compulsory dyadism. Ideas entrenched in the medical system that assign gender to the hormones testosterone and estrogen although neither of those hormones have anything to do with gender, a society that starts selling hair removal products to girls at puberty, and the historical legacy of things like sexual inversion theory are all manifestations of compulsory dyadism. For intersex people, facing compulsory dyadism often means that we are subjected to curative violence, institutionalized medical malpractice that sometimes includes aspects of ritualized sexual abuse, and means that we are left "haunted by, for instance, traumatic memories, acquires body-mind disabilities, an ability that was taken, or a 'paradoxical nostalgia....for all the futures that were lost' (Fisher 2013,45)." (Orr 26).

Compulsory dyadism works in tandem with concepts like compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality to create mindsets and systems that tie together ideas to suggest that the only "normal" body is a cisgender one that meets capitalist standards of function, is capable of heterosexual sex and reproduction, and has chromosomes, hormones, genitalia, reproductive system, and sex traits that all line up. Part of compulsory dyadism is convincing the public that this is the only way for a body to function, erasing intersex people both by excluding us from public perception and by actively utilizing curative violence as a way to actively erasure intersex traits from our body. Compulsory dyadism works by getting both the endosex and intersex public to buy into the idea that intersex doesn't exist, and if it does exist then it needs to be treated as a freakshow, either exploiting us to put us on display as an aberration or by delegating us to the medical freakshow of experimentation and violence.

Until we all start to fully understand the many, many ways that compulsory dyadism is showing up in our lives, I don't think we're going to be able to achieve true intersex liberation. And in fact, I think many causes are tied into intersex liberation and affected by compulsory dyadism in ways that endosex people don't understand. Take the intense revulsion that some trans people express about the thought of medical transition, for example. Although transitioning does not make people intersex and never will, and the only way to be intersex is to have an intersex variation, I think that compulsory dyadism affects a lot more of that rhetoric than is expressed. The disgust I see some people talking about when they think about medical transition causing them to live in a body that has XX chromosomes, a vagina, but also more hair, a larger clitoris--I think a lot of this rhetoric is born in compulsory dyadism that teaches us to view anything that steps outside the sex dyad with intense fear and violence. I'm thinking about transphobic legislation blocking medical transition and how there's intersex exceptions in almost every one of those bills, and how having an understanding of compulsory dyadism would actually help us understand the ways in which our struggles overlap and choose to build meaningful solidarity, instead of just sitting together by default.

I have so much more to say about this topic, and will probably continue to write about it for a while, but I want to end by just saying: I think this is going to be one of the most important concepts for intersex advocacy going into the next decade. With all due respect and much love to intersex activists both current and present,I think that it's time for a new strategy, not one where we medicalize ourselves and distance ourselves from queer liberation, not one where we sort of just end up as an add on to LGBTQ community by default, not even one where we use a human rights framework, nonprofits, and try to negotiate with the government. I agree with so much of what Dr. Orr says in Cripping Intersex and I think the intersex and/as/is/with disability framework, along with these foundational ideas for understanding our own oppression with the language of compulsory dyadism and curative violence, are providing us with the tools to start laying a foundation for a truly liberatory mode of intersex community building and liberation.

*Endosex means not intersex

Endosex people, please feel free to reblog!