Theme
9:08pm
December 24, 2014
Total Eclipse of the Chart
I started singing along and then I hit the caption and did a terrible sing-laugh-snort that nearly killed me. GOOD JOB.
23,082 notes
9:07pm
December 24, 2014
(Grabbed from a friend’s Facebook page)
White folks, when your friends and family repeat these anti-black sentiments online and offline we need you to speak up and collect them. I can’t have this conversation with your racist uncle for you. Deleting racists from your feed or just ignoring them isn’t making things better. The work isn’t easy, but we need you to do it.
2:35am
October 9, 2014
I didn’t think to say explicitly earlier, but the fact that there really are people trying to cope with repressed memories of abuse is one of the things that makes me angrier about that therapeutic fad of the late ’80s-’90s.
I mean, not only were a lot of people who had legitimate troubles there no doubt also treated in the same ways, the history of unethical and outright abusive “therapeutic” approaches would get their legitimate problems taken even less seriously.
Some of the ways I got done would no doubt be more distressing and harmful if you really did have a history of the kinds of trauma they were focusing on. And I have seen some examples of “skeptical” running way too far in the opposite direction, and deciding “there were a lot of abuses; therefore this was never even a real thing for anyone.” Supremely unhelpful.
Similarly, a lot of people have decided that there’s no such thing as being plural because of the “DID fad” that went along with the “repressed memory fad” and resulted in a lot of people misdiagnosed with DID (including some plural and median systems who never would’ve identified with DID in the first place, and I suspect a lot of people with temporal lobe epilepsy got misdiagnosed with DID). Note that plurality has been known to exist, outside the DID/psychiatric paradigm, for centuries. DID is only one form of plurality and only the kind recognized by (some) psychiatrists. Plural people who don’t act like “classic DID” aren’t faking anything and have been documented for literally centuries. Just wanted to add that in since so many people think they know what they’re talking about without having done any research into the history of the phenomenon of many selves one body.
(I’m not plural, but I was persuaded to act like I was, in the nineties. But I have a disproportionate number of plural friends, some of whom identify with DID and some of whom don’t, and I can assure you they are very real and were not made up by therapists, some of them have never even seen a therapist, many started asking to be called many different names by the age of five.)
2:29am
October 9, 2014
so it’s raining and i went out with my umbrella and i saw a cat and it saw me and ran towards me and i crouched down to greet it and it jumped up into my lap and started purring and drying itself and it seems so happy and i cant feel my legs send help
2:23am
October 9, 2014
A university president just gave up a lot of his salary to raise his school’s minimum wage
In some pretty awesome and uplifting news, Kentucky State University’s interim president Raymond Burse has given up more than $90,000 of his nearly $350,000 salary to help raise university workers’ minimum wage to $10.25 an hour.
Black male excellence
Amazing
1:43am
October 9, 2014
“Mad women fight back”; “Bet your ass we’re paranoid” - Psychiatric survivors during a protest in 1976
1:40am
October 9, 2014
if you want to ask a bisexual or asexual person about their sexual history to verify that they’re queer, but you don’t want them to take it the wrong way, try this useful communication technique:
give them twenty dollars and go away.
Same with lesbians who used to date men and gay men who used to date women.
1:38am
October 9, 2014
Just filled out my health insurance forms!
yeah!!! fucking around with health insurance forms!!!!
I hate when people complain about “oh health forms are stupid they want my biological sex instead of my gender!!!!” or “they only have male or female!!!”
There’s a reason for that, you dumb fucks, and they’re referring to biological sex
Different health risks are present in different sexes, and whatever gender is in your head does not change the fact that if you were born female, you have a higher risk for certain cancers and osteoporosis, and if you were born male you have a higher risk for heart disease and often a shorter lifespan than a female.
In other words, your biological sex is an important factor in health and health insurance, and your special snowflake status doesn’t change that.
Coulda said it nicer but it’s true; it’s about health.
No. There gets a point where nice doesn’t work. There’s too many stupid ass angsty teens on here that are gonna get themselves seriously hurt or sick because they wanna be a special fucking snowflake. Lemme tell you a thing. Doctors don’t give a flying fuck what you identify as. All they want to know is do you have two X chromosomes or an XY? Because cancer and lupus and certain medicines don’t give a flying fuck what pronouns you use. This is about your fucking LIFE. stop being angsty for TWELVE SECONDS because when you’re in an ambulance or going into cardiac arrest or whatever the situation may be, it’s ESSENTIAL that you get your head out of your ass long enough to tell them your BIOLOGICAL SEX that you were BORN WITH. It literally may save your life.
this is all very violent imo
It’s important
it’s not but ok lol
hi im one of those doctors you idiots keep using as an excuse to yell at trans people
every single thing you’ve said is incorrect, and you do not know what you are talking about
I may need to know what organs a patient does or does not have, their hormonal status and history of exposure, and even their karyotype. Ideas like “biological sex” can often imply a lot of this. In medicine, that isn’t good enough. We have to be able to catch exceptions, side-effects, sequelae, and anomalies that might affect only one in a million patients. Exceptions to any one or more elements of the “biological sex” paradigm are much, much, much, much more common than that.
You genuinely do not know a patient’s chromosomes until you’ve run an expensive test, and even then, who knows! they could be a mosaic. Whether this information is important, and when, and why, depends. It all completely depends. A gender/sex/whatever marker on a form is not and never will be important. No matter how you cut it, is and always will be a miniscule source of information. Frankly, by disclosing a trans background on this form, the OP has made it more diagnostically useful to a clinician than that form has ever been before - we trans people are statistically very uncommon and tend to encounter distinct hardships and challenges that are highly relevant to our medical needs. Even then, it would still be no substitute for actually interviewing the patient.
So that’s the other thing you House addicts don’t have a clue about. Good doctors do “give a flying fuck” about how the patient identifies, because a patient’s background is absolutely key to their health. Knowing a patient’s basic demographics can help me think about what may be more or less likely in terms of their care needs.
More importantly, it helps me treat my patient with respect. This is both the decent thing to do and an absolute minimum requirement for being able to get damn near anything done. You sneering choads couldn’t cure a side of beef.
also, because people are so horribly misinformed, the idea of “biological sex” is just as much a societal construct as the idea of “gender”. what does it mean to be “biologically” male and female? stop reinforcing a gender binary that leaves no room for people to be “in-between”—what does this shit mean for instance for intersex people?
historically, and presently, intersex people have been stigmatized and othered by the medical industry and by society at large. bodies that don’t conform to this binary mode of thinking are ostracized, invisibilized by society. bodies that don’t fit into these molds are altered, forced to choose to live as either a “woman” or a “man”. what do you pro-“sex is a biological truth”ers have to say to that? how do you account for bodies that don’t conform to these standards?
the dsm (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) has defined sexual ambiguity as a mental disorder. the dsm has defined sexual dysphoria as a mental disorder. the medical community and society have deemed sexual (and by sexuality i’m still only referring to “sex” and “gender”) deviance, as anything that doesn’t fit within this ridiculously narrow confine of phenotypical characteristics.
human sexuality (not synonymous with sexual orientation in this case) should be seen as a spectrum. the “ideal” model to base this spectrum off of would be the body that combines both “male” and “female” anatomical structures, which would allow more than room for ALL types of bodies to be visibilized and accounted for.
this idea that science is some objective truth needs to be stopped. bodies, like everything in the world, are composed of matter. matter means something to us because we give it meaning. bodies are matter given meaning, there is no “objective” truth to be found in human biology.
This remains my ultimate trump card to the “but biology! but chromosomes!” nitwits. If you know a bit about actual biology, this is astounding.
There are multiple documented families in which there are multiple documented generations of fertile XY cis women.
We’ve known for a long time that there were androgen insensitivity disorders that meant that children were born who had XY chromosome but had vaginas and uteruses and soforth, grew up cis, and developed secondary sexual characteristics usually associated with cis women. Breasts and hips and all. But they all appeared to be infertile, and scientists genuinely thought that there was no way at all they could produce fertile eggs.
Then a couple of scientists stumbled across, by chance, a family where the women were all karyotyped XY, and nobody would ever have guessed. All of the children they had were cis female, and all appeared to have XY chromosomes. And the scientists were astonished. So they wrote up the case study and published, and then other scientists went, “Oh, yeah, we found some other people like that a while back, here they are.”
Chromosomes do not necessarily match genitalia do not necessarily match identity do not necessarily match reproductive ability. None of the things these oiks think makes “biological sex” actually fucking does so. Genitals are not binary. Reproduction is not binary. Identity is not binary. Chromosomal sex is not binary. As the doctor above pointed out, one person can have more than one set of genes altogether.
Yes, there are circumstances in which a doctor might need to know any and all of these. And they can ask, or even put multiple questions on the questionnaire. But they should always want to know a patient’s identity, because they matters in how they treat the patient as a human being, in their most basic interactions, before the doctor touches an arm or a tissue sample or begins a diagnosis.
1:37am
October 9, 2014
Wherever there is food, there is a pug.
Photos via Animals and Delicious Noms
3:53pm
October 8, 2014
The truly inspiring story of the Chinese rubbish collector who saved and raised THIRTY babies abandoned at the roadside
A woman has been hailed a hero after details of her astonishing work with abandoned children has emerged.
Lou Xiaoying, now 88 and suffering from kidney failure, found and raised more than 30 abandoned Chinese babies from the streets of Jinhua, in the eastern Zhejiang province where she managed to make a living by recycling rubbish.
She and her late husband Li Zin, who died 17 years ago, kept four of the children and passed the others onto friends and family to start new lives.
Her youngest son Zhang Qilin - now aged just seven - was found in a dustbin by Lou when she was 82.
‘Even though I was already getting old I could not simply ignore the baby and leave him to die in the trash. He looked so sweet and so needy. I had to take him home with me,’ she said.
Why doesn’t this have more notes?
This woman is nothing short of an angel.
She has so little and gives so much, and organizations such as the government and school systems won’t do anything for this cause.
I am at loss of words at this lady’s sacrifice.
3:52pm
October 8, 2014
“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a ‘modern miracle.’ But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.”
—Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)
funny how the most popular narrative about helen keller is a harmless little girl who learns to communicate and then the story ends for some reason gee i wonder why that is
(via callmeoutis)
1:38am
October 8, 2014
Shout-out to all the disabled and chronically ill people who were misdiagnosed, refused diagnosis and generally treated like crap by so-called medical “professionals”
10:35pm
October 7, 2014
➸ Phoebe Caldwell - Autism
We cannot tell how able a child is until we have addressed their sensory processing problems. In order to reduce overloading the processing system and consequent sensory chaos, we need to scale down those inputs to which the individual’s brain is hyper (over)sensitive and increase those to which it is hypo(under)sensitive, as well as communicating through non-verbal signals that the brain can easily recognise. Stress levels are reduced and the brain starts to function more effectively. Although not every child will be able to respond positively, it is always worth exploring these options.
This makes me want to hide and scream no no no no. I don’t know why. Do you?
just the quoted bit is saying that people aren’t people until their sensory issues are gone
My sensory issues are me.
They aren’t an added-on part of me that can be resolved and taken off like an ill-fitting jacket.
It doesn’t matter how much trouble they cause me, they’re still me.
They cause me a lot of trouble and they are still me.
They can’t be removed.
They are not removable.
People have tried.
There are things that can be done to make me feel better.
But my basic perceptual makeup is who I am and I can’t imagine changing that even being possible.
Also sensory issues are not just hyper- and hypo- sensitivity. Many of my sensory issues involve scrambling, agnosia-like issues, and other things that don’t fall under the usual headings of “your senses are either too loud or too quiet”. In fact most of my sensory issues don’t fall under that. Most of my sensory issues fall under “I perceive the world so fundamentally differently than you do that it’s almost like we’re from different species, and you can’t just muck around with it as if you think you know what you’re doing, and then declare you’ve found and liberated the real me inside.”
Better people than you have tried already.