I am a deeply sensory person who cares about love and ethics. Hufflepuff to the core. The redwoods were my first home and my heart will live there forever. I live in the sensory world, I am only a visitor to ideas and words. Oh, and my alignment? Chaotic-good.
Trans girl Albus Severus Potter changing her name and consulting Professor Longbottom because she thinks that by doing that she’ll be insulting the bravest men her father ever knew. Neville reassures her they weren’t that great anyways.
and then she calls herself ‘Ruby’ and the moment Hagrid hears this he bursts into tears because he adores this little girl so much and to her this big giant of a man is one of the greatest she ever knew
gaaaaaaah. also, maybe it’s time to consider fanfiction writing…
I don’t think people I disagree with about language are automatically wrong about other things. They’re often right on about things that are also really important to the people language policing hurts most. I seriously question the priorities of people who make language their main thing, but usually even those people are right on some things.
Both groups are big enough that if we shut people out I’m afraid we’ll end up losing a lot. And there are a lot of overlapping priorities. But there’s still a fundamental underlying problem that both groups view the other as a threat, and I don’t know how to resolve that.
I went to a thing at MIT where the entire premise was that assistive technology becomes technology for everyone. The teacher should be forced to watch the entire video of that conference.
I have been googling and reading more about why people don’t read, and what they choose to read when they do read, and the vast culture of snobbery and judging that I did not know about before I had internet access, and only slowly cottoned on to when strangers on the internet flamed me for what books I talked about and what I said about writing and I tried to figure out why they said those things.
I don’t know. Maybe I am just ignorant as a result of being born with…certain cognitive privileges, I guess you could say?
I’ve never found a book to be “hard” or “dense” or “challenging”. On the flipside I’ve never found a book to be “easy” or “fluff”. I just read things, and if I don’t like them I usually stop reading them.
I guess some stuff that I don’t like could maybe be called “dense” by some people, but to me it came across as bad writing and someone trying way way too hard to sound all complex and deep and intellectual when really they were just dressing up tiny bite sized unimpressive ideas.
This all goes back to my neverending angst about other humans perceiving reality through all these weird filters that I don’t get, and it upsets me because I feel like what I have to say can’t get past those filters.
Also there’s the whole thing where I feel extremely existentially terrified about sharing a planet with these people who have a tendency to act out their very idiosyncratic perception of reality on reality, which ends in things like other living beings suffering greatly because some humans took some silly notion into their heads about people with their skin tone or their genitals or their same species being superior to all other living beings.
Also I am writing this at work with a browser that does not play well with Tumblr and does not allow editing or even going to another tab because when I come back I won’t be able to type in the box anymore, so what I write at work is extremely unedited.
But anyway, yeah. Where do people get these ideas about “status” or “hierarchy” or whatever, and why do they apply them to books? And why do they assume that everyone else is just like them, and that therefore I must be lying or pretentious or a snob or something when I share what books I’ve read and enjoyed?
Testing??????
I’ve typed up and lost a response to this twice. The tumblr app doesn’t want me to talk about this, I guess…
You may need to put it in a separate post. :/ The app loves to eat longer commentary on reblogs, but it should work fine as a text post with a link back to the OP.
Very annoying, though.
I was an early/fast reader and never thought much about it because it didn’t really occur to me why someone wouldn’t read.
And then I experienced skill loss in college and I can’t read well anymore.
Reading stopped being fun. It’s hard now, it’s a chore. It takes me several times longer to read things and I never absorb the whole thing correctly. It’s not a disaster with like a post on tumblr, but it means novels are suddenly inaccessible because i can’t even keep track of what is going on.
And then I realized how snobby people were. It’s bad enough to deal with people who think they are better then you over a hobby but it’s a whole different level when it’s a hobby you used to love and can’t do anymore and they are still shaming you. It hurts enough one of my favorite things to do isn’t fun anymore, but it hurts on a whole different level when you are basically mocked for not being able to enjoy it anymore.
Like I would rather people make fun of me for being in a wheelchair at least I never loved to walk. Making fun of me for being unable to read books tv shows and movies I like are based on when I WANT to read them just kills me.
I’m a mentally ill, disabled person living on my own. Right now I’m applying for SSI, and it will be months before I get my evaluation. In the meantime, I can’t afford my basic living expenses without help.
If you can, please donate to desertlily777@hotmail.com on Paypal. This is my friend’s Paypal, so please leave a note saying that this is ‘for Skeleton.’*
Signal boosts would be greatly appreciated, too. Thank you.
*It was formerly ‘for lichgem’ before I changed my URL.
My name is Ellyn (@skoltinctures). I am working with Maria Andazola (@la-grenuda), former co-editor of the Trans Latina Anthology, and Jamie (@desdeotromar), current co-editor, to put together an anthology of fiction writing by trans women of color and people of color who experience transmisogyny. We’re currently looking for contributing writers to submit their work.
We understand that many people who are interested may be new to writing, unsure of themselves, or only have partially completed work, and as such we are committed to working with writers to assist them in developing their stories. If your work is incomplete or unpolished, we will do what we can to help you edit it.
We would also like to encourage submissions of stories or excerpts of longer fiction that has been self-published or posted to a personal blog, as long as it hasn’t been otherwise published in a magazine/journal/book before. This is because we are also aware that there are many writers who have completed work, but have been unable to find a publisher.
The submission deadline will be July 1st. We will try to be flexible about submissions sent after the deadline, but our ability to respond to these submissions will depend on the number of works sent to us during our reading period.
Once submissions are closed, we will take three weeks to edit the stories and format the book; and we will publish digital copies of this anthology by the end of July.
In terms of payment, royalties from sales of the book will be divided evenly between the designer, editors, and contributing writers each month.
[Summary: Seeking fiction writing by Trans women of color and dmab non-cis people of color for anthology. Deadline July 1. Keep reading for guidelines.]
I don’t think people I disagree with about language are automatically wrong about other things. They’re often right on about things that are also really important to the people language policing hurts most. I seriously question the priorities of people who make language their main thing, but usually even those people are right on some things.
Both groups are big enough that if we shut people out I’m afraid we’ll end up losing a lot. And there are a lot of overlapping priorities. But there’s still a fundamental underlying problem that both groups view the other as a threat, and I don’t know how to resolve that.
I really wish I did.
Yes!!! That’s some of what I’ve been thinking but not knowing how to put into words. Also I wish it was ok for more people to disagree about stuff but still see common goals and not shut each other out or get explody about things. Like we’re personally on the side of not caring about specific language too much, but it’s not like people who do care about language are a threat, it’s the groups ending up thinking each other are threats and tearing each other apart even though they’ve got a lot in common and should be joined together even with disagreements… like it’s how it turns stuff into infighting that feels like the big threat.
-Jim
I think… there are ways of caring about it that make it into a threat. Like thinking that use of words like “stupid” and “crazy” is what causes murder and institutionalization. Of course people who sincerely think that think people who disagree or who just can’t follow their rules are a threat and want us out of advocacy. And to the extent that they have power within a community, that does make them a threat to people who can’t follow the rules.
I’m not sure how to even start on addressing that issue.
But I also don’t think that describes everyone who cares about language.
The dogged determination and patience of one person to do what is Right and Necessary may not always win the day or even be noticed, but it will tip the balance just a little in the direction of good.
“[T]he innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”
Help when you can, lift when you can, work as you can, but never be afraid to ask ‘will I get paid for this?’
Everyone’s got hidden depths. Some people have beautiful hidden mountain glades filled with adorable doe-eyed bunnies. Some people have black oubliettes filled with nightmares and worse. Endeavor to be the sort of person that has both sorts of depths as neighbors. Plumb them with caution.
Find a place to call home, and know it so well you can tell what street you’re on by the feel of cobblestones through your boots.
You can always come home again, but that doesn’t mean you’re moving backwards.
There is never a bad time for a pun.
There’s also never really a good time for a pun.
You might as well just stay braced for a pun at all times, and ride them when they come with as much grace as you can manage.
The fact that you can replace ‘pun’ with ‘disaster’ in the last three rules says a lot about the human race.
Many people can survive absolutely anything as long as they know where their next meal is coming from. Others can not survive much, no matter how many meals they know about, and there’s no shame in that, nor admitting that, nor leaning on others to get there.
You can protect children and you can teach children, but never perfectly in either case.
You may not be able to change the world, but that doesn’t mean you have to stand for any sort of nonsense in your personal life.
Everybody has somebody. It could be a friend, a lover, a spouse, a writing partner, or even That One Person You See At The Coffee Shop each day. Sometimes they exist to comfort you. Sometimes they exist to drive you absolutely mad. Be open to either as a form of self-improvement.
Death comes to us all, but memory is long and time is tricky. The end for you is, most likely, not really the end for everyone else.
If you know the end, if you can see the end, there’s no need to be resigned. Keep walking on cheerfully, whistling right up to the precipice, and let people remember you by the beautiful song you leave in the air.
I notice that talking about cyberbullying has led to an increase in anon hate.
Including anon hate on the very topics the bullying was about.
Someone trying to silence me? Doesn’t want me talking about cyberbullying?
Too fucking bad. I’ll talk about what I want. You think I’ve never been bullied before? Think I can’t handle jut? To bad.
I get my strength from somewhere inexhaustible. Somewhere you bullies can’t even imagine. When you do think of it, it terrifies you, though you’d never admit it. Because it terrifies anyone who is actively being evil. And bullying is as evil as it gets.
Speaking of things bullies can’t imagine. They think they’re destroying mine. They delight in that thought. Always have. But they can’t. They can’t even see me. They don’t know who I am. If they did, they’d never dare bully me or anyone else. Because who we are, for real, is something so powerful they can’t imagine it from inside their world of hate.
The only people they destroy are themselves. When they bully they are cutting themselves off from everything that matters, including love. Cutting themselves kid from love has devastating consequences. Even when they drive people to suicide, they are not destroying that person as thoroughly as they are destroying themselves by being bullies.
I have the power in this situation and they hate me for it. I had the power to yell them if they give up bullying and apologize fyi their current and former victims and make a commitment never to bully again, they will be turning their hate into love. And changing their self destructive bullying behavior. But few will do out sincerely. I know a bully who apologises just to fuck with his victims, that’s not what I mean obviously.
Cyberbullying won’t stop me discussing cyberbullying.
I still remember getting diagnosed with adrenal insufficiency.
My doctor was extremely cautious about interpreting the initial cortisol results, which said there was not enough cortisol to measure. He sat me down, got very serious, and told me I might have this thing called adrenal insufficiency which would be a very serious problem if I did. But first he would have to replicate the test results, then do further testing.
He told me if I went on steroids, we could expect minor improvements in several areas. He asked a lot of random seeming questions, like when was my last period (age 28). And he sent me off for further testing which only confirmed that not only did I have it but it was pretty severe.
The steroids got me out of bed and able to exercise for the first time in years. Understand these are the Josie if the steroids athletes use. This mind can actually cause lots of muscle mass. But when they replace a near total lack of cortisol they can get rid of exercise intolerance,.
Exercise intolerance is when your body responds to even minor everyday exercise with symptoms like going limp, nausea, vomiting, shaking, temperature changes, etc. That is gone now. Within weeks I was doing fifty jumping Jack’s (but injured myself due to lacking the muscles to back up my loose joints) and climbing eleven flights of stairs. Prior to this I could not jump even with a grab bar and could not climb one flight of stairs.
I haven’t used wheelchair in a year or so. I’d gotten a manual one not dreaming that even that would be mostly unnecessary. Even with bruised ribs I’ve been walking long distances.
I know this is still serious because they insist on me carrying emergency steroids in injectable form, wearing a medical bracelet, and always informing EMTs I have adrenal insufficiency no matter why I called them. And they said I’ll be on steroids the test of my life. But thanks to my GO and my endocrinologist, the rest of my life could mean 40 to 60 more years when we were expecting more like single digits, low single digits, before this.
And yes I’ve actually posted the test results before.
I still have trouble believing it went from “you may have something really serious but likely don’t” to completely changing my life. I used to wake yup at the times of day cortisol is the lowest, so limp my neck hurt from holding into my floppy head, unable to move my arms far enough to call for help and unable to stay awake, but waking up again and again totally limp, until it passed within hours. That went away on steroids. But I’m told it meant my life was in immediate danger at the time. I’m glad it’s gone.
But the adrenal insufficiency?. Very real. No question even among the doctors who hate me the most. They can’t argue with test results any more than the myasthenia anymore. My GP meanwhile is so excited that he is trying to fix everything now.
Make these 2 things clear to everyone you know: 1) We MUST vote in primaries. If we do not vote in primaries corporatists, oil, and lobbyists win. You will be told by the under-educated that “A vote for bernie is a vote for the Republicans” - this is because they don’t understand the difference between the primary elections, and the actual elections.
The primary decides whether our *THIRD PARTY CANDIDATE* Bernie GETS to replace one of the 2 “parties”, with a man who is against the 2 party system. - That’s the most important part.
Second – Make sure that everyone you know understand this: The youth decide this election. – For the first time in history, there are MORE PEOPLE interested in a 3rd party person breaking the system, than are interested in supporting either of the two parties. 45% of american voters want a win from a third party. Which means that 1) They are within a 3% margin of a totally smashing defeat of the 2-party system, and the establishment’s ACTUAL plan to defeat it is: Hope that nobody notices. All the adults are trained into their stupidity.
When Barak Obama ran he almost doubled young voter turnout. We need just HALF of that to happen again, and for the 3rd-party believers to be united. United. From Anarchists to Libertarians, we need them all to agree to start out, by breaking the system.
THAT’S the primary. - If he gets the votes on the floor, and they REFUSE to give him the nomination? Then we’re at war. Period. We are no longer ruled by consent.
THEN, after he has the nomination, he will have a campaign team. A good one. We want to know who they are and then call them and ask them what they want and then do what they say. To the finish line. That’s about it.
Spread the info, guys. Bernie Sanders COULD actually change America. We need him. Please don’t take a lackadaisical approach to info spreading for the next year - get as many people on board as you have the time to convince!
I cannot stress this enough, vote in the primaries!!!
Predictably, I got anon hate from my posts about cyberbullying, why should this be surprising?
Telling me I am not autistic, have no medical problems, and should “get help”.
Funny, I got help a long time ago. I was put into the system and assigned a doctor at random who took one look at me and saw autism. He told my mother after taking a developmental history that I was autistic and an idiot savant. I was later examined by the regional center system in California, the SSI system, and the Vermont Developmental disability system, alkyl found me to be autistic/DD. And those are systems that deny as many autistic people as they can get away with. I have watched it happen to both children and adults but especially adults with no childhood diagnosis. My childhood diagnosis saved me.
The team of psychiatrists and psychologists and neurologists who diagnosed autism knew me throughout my entire teenage years, and one psychiatrist into adulthood.
I sought help for medical problems as well. I had more trouble with this as some of my diseases were rare and autistic people present differently than nonautistic people in Medical settings. We also face more medical discrimination (which anon hater perpetuated by saying I fake things for attention) than either nondisabled people or nondisabled autistic people. I know because I co-wrote a study on that topic which has made it into peer reviewed journals.
So it took awhile. But I now have more concrete documentation of the reality of my physical illnesses and disabilities than most online chronically ill people are able to say they have.
I have bronchiectasis. Diagnosed by high resolution CT scan.
I have severe secondary adrenal insufficiency. Diagnosed by repeated blood levels of cortisol and ACTH (finding not enough to measure of either, at a time when I was near death) and an ACTH stimulation test.
I have either myasthenia gravis, hereditary myasthenia, or hereditary myasthenia gravis. Diagnosed by a single fiber EMG. My mom has it too diagnosed the same way after I was diagnosed. We were both also tentatively diagnosed by response to Mestinon before our battery of testing was complete.
Early onset gallbladder disease and post cholecystectomy syndrome, diagnosed by ultrasound and surgery. It had gotten so bad because of years of doctors blowing me off that the gallbladder was looking dead by the time the surgeon took it out. He was angry.
I have autistic catatonia (which accounts for loss of most speech among other things). The symptoms matched exactly what my doctor had seen my whole adolescence. All he had to do was read the Wing and Shah (2000) paper and I was diagnosed in a heartbeat it was so obvious. I couldn’t possibly have been faking it because the one paper out when I first showed signs was unavailable to me and would not have resembled me as it was a single case study of a very different sort of presentation. The 2000 study was about lots of people and provided general criteria that I more than fit.
I have gastroparesis diagnosed by gastric emptying study. You swallow radioactive eggs and they track how fast they travel through your stomach.
I have TMJ dysfunction tied to a jaw deformity found in a panoramic scan and a hypermobility syndrome diagnosed by joints bending in ways that are impossible to fake. People who are not hypermobile can’t put a thumb parallel to their forearm or a foot behind their head.
i have a straight neck as found in xrays and cat scans, it lacks normal curvature.
I have exotropia. They look at the position of your eyes.
That’s just a sampling.
Not only that but my father was and brother is autistic so why would I be likely not to be?
Anyway I have ample proof of all of these things. They don’t give out power chairs, communicating devices, hospital beds, Hoyer lifts, feeding tubes, oxygen machines, or much of my other adaptive equipment (some of which I don’t need anymore due to treatment of my belt diagnosed conditions) to people who don’t need them. Hell, some people who do need them have a hard time getting them. So I had to have a lot of proof to get these things.
I have more proof of my autism diagnosis than many autistic people in the autistic community whose diagnosis is never equated by people like this anon.
I have far more proof through objective medical tests of my medical conditions, than most chronically ill people I meet online. They may occasionally get questioned but few of them are singled out for cyberbullying campaigns with the main target takeaway message being that they have a mental illness that makes them fake their condition.
There are people running around exactly like me who do not get cyberbullied and shunned and treated like shit. Even when they directly point out to the bullies that they are just like me yet the bullies are not targeting them.
The reason the bullies do not target most people just like me? They are not, as they claim, about exposing the truth. If they were, Anne for instance would be as heavily targeted as I am and Shi would many of my online friends. Because all of us have the traits that are signaled out on me for picking on relentlessly.
The reason?. This is not about exposing the “truth” about me out people like me. It is a personal vendetta targeted at me and only me. The reasons each person has for bullying me are different but they are united in hating me. They find me an easy target because certain of my traits make it easy to play on people’s prejudices. They picked those ableist prejudices to play on because they know ableism is utterly unexamined in the minds our most people (most people have never heard of ableism). It’s easy to paint me as fake because everyone likes to look for fake disabled people due to deeply rooted disability, racial, and class prejudices intertwined. So they are targeting me not because I am truly a fake disabled person. Even they know I’m real. Some of them used to admit I was real, back when calling me disabled was a way to call me broken, and therefore another acceptable bullying technique. Some of them even urged me to act out things I didn’t have then blamed me for “faking” them later.
So make no mistake: When you read bullshit about me not being disabled, you are not reading people determined to find the truth about me. You are reading people who wanted to attack me – and only me– as hard as they could. Accusing me of faking my disabilities is the easiest way to do it. That’s how cyberbullying works. The surface level concern trolling bullshit is just bullshit designed to rope bystanders in and make them take the side of the bullies, making their work easier.
I posted many of my medical records online once. They contained both proof of my initial diagnosis of atypical autism (just autism really but PDDNOS in the nineties was used in many people who like me fit full criteria, you can read about it in Unstrange Minds – it was switched to autism by the same doctor after the danger of long term institutionalization had passed). And also evidence that my current cyberbullies, some of them anyway, were known to my psychiatrist to encourage me to act out pathologies I didn’t have for their own amusement and that I should avoid them at all costs. A far cry from their claim of being super close friends who were not at all involved inn making me do those things.)
It helped not at all. In fact it just gave them more personal info about me. I suggest anyone considering doing their records online reconsider. It won’t make bullies Stup bullying you because they don’t want the truth. They want to hurt you. And they can get more info out off those records than you might imagine. Then they can hurt you worse. The only records I’ve posted recently are screenshots of my adrenal lab test results, because they contain no identifying information and are just a bunch of numbers.
Anyway I am sick of this. I am sick of being singled out while people with far less proof than me are accepted instantly. I don’t want them singled out either but it rankles to see these bullies accepting the reality of people who have no proof at all while all my proof means nothing. They even have accepted some of the few people I have secretly doubted. No I won’t say who. That would be gossiping and my doubts are best kept to myself. They serve no purpose except in my personal relations and how I choose to be wary at times.
But this anon hater is not after the truth about me. They just want to bully and hurt me and calling me a fake is, as they see it, the easiest way to do so. They say I’m not autistic and have no medical conditions. I was diagnosed with autism when I barely heard of it. There may be no objective tests for autism but I was given tests in which scored in very typical patterns for an autie. But Medical conditions?. Objective testing galore, most of which can’t be faked, and I “passed” tests for practically all of my diagnoses. Very objective unbiased tests. Shi claiming I don’t have Medical conditions it’s laughable to anyone who’s seen my medical records.
Which, by the way, fact checkers insist upon. If they hadn’t seen my test results they might not have believe me, because of my stalkers. Seeing the test results, as well as objective proof stalkers were lying about really basic information, meant I’ve never been denounced as a fraud by the media. I fact CNN’s Sanjay Gupta addressed this manufactured controversy and strongly endorsed my diagnosis. They required tons of proof including interviews with people who knew me in childhood and childhood records. They could have easily denounced me if they had any sense I wasn’t real. They didn’t. They said I may be atypical (never claimed otherwise) but I’m definitely autistic.
All that and some people still believe cyberbullies over objective testing. If that’s you, leave me alone until you’re willing to become a decent human being. Because all this stuff is hate and you are hateful if you get mired in it and act on it by approaching me about it.
And the suggested replacement for “crazy” is usually “mentally ill” which may be accurate and useful for some people, but it doesn’t describe everyone’s experience. And it ignores that other cultures can see this stuff way differently. and it also can encourage fucked-up shit like forced drugging (because it’s “just like a physical disease” right?) and can actually increase stigma.
And terms like “schizophrenia” and “autism” are generally accepted as ok. When schizophrenia literally means “split/broken mind” and autism literally means “too self-absorbed” and horrible things have been done to people in the name of those terms. Not that I’m suggesting that we stop using any of those words. (I personally don’t think I have a choice, they’re too common. I think I personally have to help *reclaim* them.)
Just because something is in latin, or was thought up by doctors doesn’t mean it isn’t a slur. Just because something is in the vernacular doesn’t mean it *is*.
Much better than I could have put it.
I was never treated anywhere near as badly under the idea of “craziness”, as under a heavily medicalized (and very culturally inappropriate) view of “mental illness”. Crazy people are generally afforded more agency, with less condescension and infantilization supposedly for their own good, IME.
Definitely not saying that anyone else needs to agree, or to view and describe their own experiences in the same terms.
Theme
3:42am
June 25, 2015
71,170 notes
