carolinejroth

[carolinejroth]

I found this post from over seven years ago, and even more relevant than it has ever been.

It’s absolute absurdity that I feel intimidated to have any presence at all on the internet just because I’ve seen my own favorite creators get chased off their platforms for cringe stuff they said or did (that they apologized for) when they were underage minors sh*tposting in 2011.

It’s discouraging and disheartening.

I’m really tired of seeing people broken up into labels of absolutes.

People are not just “good” or “bad”.

People are not a list of labels. 

People are complex, situations are complex.

I know, that makes it a lot harder when you want to just write off everything someone’s ever done as bad – but that’s not how people actually are, and it would do everyone good to stop pretending they are.

I am tired of hearing about the fear people have in putting themselves out there. And it is a scary thing! Putting yourself out there means subjecting yourself to people who want a really good reason to tear you down, who will jump at the first chance to feel “good” by labeling someone else as “bad”.

I reject this. I reject the idea that there should be fear in speaking up and talking about experiences and trying to reach an understanding of a situation.

I’m unhappy to see people spitefully urging others to cut off ties with their friends under the guise of “well, that person’s just inherently bad, so if you talk to them you’re bad too.” That is fucked up. You definitely have the right to let the friend know you don’t want to hear about whoever troubles you, but you do not at all have the right to decide who their friends should be. This includes guilt trips.

Anyway, just try to be more aware of others. Everyone else is a person like you. They might not have the same experiences as you. They might not understand how their words are harmful, or how what they’re doing is wrong. They certainly won’t if you never tell them.

Most people are trying to be good, but they’re going to mess it up sometimes. Try to keep that in mind. Even when people do really fucked up shit, sometimes they are trying to do good. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” and all that.

Nothing gets solved, no growth happens when you put people into a box from which you’ll never let them escape.

Yes, you absolutely must be careful about people who have tendencies and patterns that are harmful to you. Sometimes people try to overcome those patterns and they fail, and you have to distance yourself from them: that is the sad reality of life. Sometimes though, they can overcome it. But they certainly won’t if the first thing you do is write them off after a fuck up. 

Be sincere. Use your best judgment.

[carolinejroth]

cripple punk wallpapers for your disabled desires ♿️

ID: six images. the first image has a dark red background and says in all capital white letters, “no more spoons, only knives” with a picture of a sketched/clipart black knife below it. the second image has a black background and is the same as the first, except the knife is red. the third image has a very dark grey background that says in all caps, “my pain may be chronic but my ass is iconic”. the letters are white except for the words “chronic” and “iconic,” which are written in red. behind the words is a faded clipart of a syringe filled with red liquid. the fourth image is the same as the previous except without the syringe. the fifth and sixth images have dark red backgrounds and white letters of varying fonts that say, “crip punk” on a pill bottle. the fifth image has a lighter red pill bottle with light pastel red pills in it. the sixth image has a black pill bottle with bright red pills. end description.

[carolinejroth]

Disabled Queer Flags - Part 3

Sapphic, Diamoric, & Achillean

Flags for disabled peeps who want to show their pride!

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4 | Part 5

Credits: @dpargyle​ for his original disabled trans design and permission to create flags inspired by it, @whimsy-flags​ for his more eye-friendly palettes, and The Accessible Icon Project.

[carolinejroth]

I was talking to my wife this morning about all the political attacks going on against LGBT people in Texas, in Florida and in other states and the fact of the matter is, even though we live in a “safe” state we have absolutely no guarantees about how long that safety will last. All it takes is a reasonably charismatic Republican who can stoke the fires to get elected governor and what protections and rights I have could be gone in a matter of weeks to months. 

Think about that, under the right circumstances at best I would have to hide my transness at worst, lose my access to my HRT medication and go back into the closet, which to be blunt, would be the end of me. 

When you don’t vote, you’re saying that having a Democrat or Republican running things won’t change your life significantly but I can tell you this, it’s a matter of life or death for many of us.

[carolinejroth]

Trans women need money for rent

Hi I'm Agie I'm a disabled trans woman and this month we really need help with rent. We are supposed to get some assistance with rent 🤞 but even with that assistance we need to cover $721.29 we just don't have because both disability and unemployment are being terrible right now. Please please help and share.

Cash app: $cmder

Venmo: deepseaprincess

PayPal: https://PayPal.me/deepseabun

$0/$721.29 raised

[carolinejroth]

Thank you so much for saying this

I’m so f*cking tired of people saying it’s “a trendy thing for straight people to do.”

When people say it’s “just something trendy,” it’s incredibly invalidating, hurtful and disrespectful, and pushes all of our poor baby Aspecs (people who are identifying as under the asexual spectrum) right back into the closet where they will continue to suffer like they had before.

I’ve had people tell me that popular people on social media only come out as Aspec for attention, and this has been making me so furious, I had no idea what to say.

To allies and straight people: Please stop trying to invalidate us. It’s not your place to decide what our identities are. We do not need to justify ourselves and our Aspec identities to you.

being aspec is not a trend. aspec people have always existed. the only difference now is that we're finding others like us and making terms to describe it

[carolinejroth]

support lgbtq POC.

inspired by this post.

image descriptions below

[ID: A set of 9 square images with gradient backgrounds that relate to the respective L.G.B.T. flag colors. All of them have phrases written in identical italic white letters in all caps. The first image says "Support lesbians of color" with a soft red, orange, and purple background. The second says "Support gay men of color" with a bright, soft gradient of green, cyan, blue, and deep purple. The third says "Support bisexual people of color" with a pink, purple, and blue background. The fourth says "Support trans people of color" with a bright blue, pink and white gradient background. The fifth says "Support asexual people of color" with a gradient of a soft dark purple, lighter purple, and pinkish purple. The sixth says "Support aromantic people of color" with a dark and light green background. The seventh says "Support nonbinary people of color" with a yellow, purple, and black gradient. The eighth says "Support intersex people of color" with a yellow and purple gradient. The ninth and final image says "Support queer people of color" with a gradient rainbow background. End ID.]

[ID: one long, rectangular image with a caption written in lowercase white letters and a bright, colorful gradient background. it says, "this post is for LGBTQ people of color. please reblog but do not derail. end ID.]

[carolinejroth]

Disabled Queer Flags - Part 1

Gay, Bi, Lesbian, Aro, Pan, Ace, Trans, Nonbinary, & Genderqueer

Flags for disabled peeps who want to show their pride!

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Credits: @dpargyle​ for his original disabled trans design and permission to create flags inspired by it, @whimsy-flags​ for his more eye-friendly palettes, and The Accessible Icon Project.

[carolinejroth]

Help two trans disabled people very close to escaping homelessness!!

Feb. 20

My roomate and I got news that the final paperwork we need to fill out to get the check from my relatives will has arrived. This means its about 2 weeks at most till we get the check and about a month at most, till we will be in an apartment.

We were able to get food, so I'm no longer starving to keep my roomate fed while he's so sick. His antibiotics arrived so hopefully he'll improve soon.

We are already behind on the hotel bill again though, and we have barely gotten d0nations at all in the past few days. Things are urgent again, and we are desperately trying to stay safe until we get into an apartment. All d0nations will go to food and hotel/storage bills, or when possible other necessities, like masks, because we have needed to replace our masks for over a month now and we are both severely immunoconpromised. Please d0nate or share if you can't!!! We are so close to being okay. And please do not speculate about this being a scam, just ask me for fucking proof, I can get pics of the hotel billing, have storage billing screenshots, etc etc.

@hostile-flower is still doing tattoo designs for people who d0nate $50 or more!

Ca$happ: $creepiecrippl

Venm0: @ tab-99

https://www.paypal.me/creepiecrpple

[carolinejroth]

a big issue with companies cutting corners and making budget cuts is that it most often affects disabled people the worst. cutting costs almost always leads to accessibility features becoming inaccessible and generally making disabled peoples lives harder because they’re seen as unnecessary or expendable addendums. when accessibility isn’t profitable, we’re written off and no one bats an eye.

[carolinejroth]

idk if it’s the mental illness but sharing literally any information feels like oversharing. i’ll be like “i skipped breakfast this morning” and immediately im like “i might as well have told them where i buried the money”

[carolinejroth]

All of these depictions look normal and fine. These are just people being people.

Cis-het whitefolks and Westernized ideals projected entitlement and corruption upon naked bodies and sought to control and police bodies that were not their own.

Varying degrees of skin exposure is conditional and set to the standard of what a fragile straight white man thinks is acceptable, because he doesn’t have the maturity or emotional fortitude to control his own sexual desires or perversions.

I’m not saying all men (trans mascs included) are like this, and I’m not saying all men are to blame for this pervasive attitude towards nudity and intimacy being conflated with sexuality and/or sexual deviance.

I want to make it clear who I’m referring too in this post:

This is about teachers who tell you you’re distracting the class when you’re 12

This is about middle-aged doctors who flirted with me when I came in with a neck injury from dance practice when I was 17

This is about people who honk at me and my friends when we’re crossing the street in -10 degree weather, bundled up in winter clothes at 15

This is about white uncles in extended family asking me pervasive questions about whether or not if I have a boyfriend yet when I was 16

This is about chiropractors telling me to be nice to short guys when I’m older when I was 13

white people ruined the non sexual intimacy of nakedness methinks

[carolinejroth]

Nedra Tawwab

[carolinejroth]

This helps me a lot.

Thank you for writing this post.

I’m autistic and aspec too.

I relate to a lot of this.

I've been thinking a lot about friendships and morality. I don't know if it's a universal experience, but for much of my life, how good of a friend I could be felt directly tied to how good of a person I am. And I've always felt that I fell short no matter how much I sacrificed myself for my friendships.

Aromantic communities do a lot in debunking amatonormativity, in challenging the norm and asking, "Why? Why do people have to be monogamous? Why do partners have to have sex? Why do people have to have partners?" And I think these conversations have opened a wonderful side dialogue on friendships and whether or not love is what makes someone "human" or "good." As someone both neurodivergent and on the aroace spectrum, I've always occupied the unique intersection of being particularly affected by that message that perpetrates everything in media: "To be good is to be human, and to be human is to love."

Lately, I've been unlearning this thinking. And reading about aplatonic experiences and applying arguments against amatonormativity to my perspective on friendships has helped me so much. I've always limited myself to a model for friendships that I perceived as the "good" one. I never trust my own instincts for what I want because I'm half convinced that, as a neurodivergent person, I'm broken. I don't understand real friendship, I can only hope to imitate it by paying careful attention to how neurotypical people describe the ideal friendship. And I thought it was okay to feel so off kilter all of the time because this was my punishment for being an inherently bad person who didn't enjoy or desire my "good" friendships.

And I'm realizing that this absolute thinking is incredibly unhealthy. Just like in every other part of life, how good or bad of a person you are is entirely subjective. How good or bad of a friend you are is also subjective. And if you and your friend desire different friendships, that isn't a sign that you are bad friends who are bad people failing to make it work. You're just incompatible. Even more than that, you're just seeking entirely different things.

We use the word "friend" to describe so many things. It captures a breadth of relationships. That's beautiful, but it also leads to this confusion and breakdown in communication. You wouldn't expect someone who wants a romantic relationship to stay friends with someone who wants a platonic one. In that same vein, you shouldn't force yourself to fit your desires from a friendship to someone else's. You have to recognize the gap, and then you have to compromise or walk away.

I'm trying to teach myself the following: There isn't morality in friendship. There isn't a good or bad way to have friends. There's just the kind of relationship you want with someone and the kind of relationship they want with you and what you make of it together. And that's not necessarily going to look like friendship to someone else, but it will be yours.

[carolinejroth]

I feel like there should be more of an autistic community irl. There should be autistic spaces. There should be events for autistic people that aren’t centered around “therapy”. There should be spaces for autistic adults.

[carolinejroth]

People have and will always make fun of girls being interested in boybands. (Or having hobbies at all.)

Earnest enjoyment of something (such as fandom) is persecuted and beaten out of girls in every stage of their life, and they are forced to explain and justify their interests and hobbies.

Mainly because the West and cis-men’s egos are fragile, and we hold nearly everything to the standard of conventional patriarchy to measure what is acceptable and what isn’t.

We generalize Girls Who Are Fans into this corrupted amalgamation of shallowness, foolish naïveté, and so full of unrealistic delusion that we dismiss them outright, and scoff at and devalue the thing they’re fans of.

And everything else? 

National Sporting Events? (With celebrity sports players, passionate fanbases, expensive live stadium events, and national television specials with premium advertisement?)

Super hero movies?

Professional wrestling and boxing?

Monster trucks and monster truck jams?

Generally, perfectly acceptable and never beholden to the scrutiny of the aforementioned patriarchy. It is a double standard and it’s “too political” to mention it.

And I’m not saying these things are bad. I’m glad these things exist to support fan culture for all ages and genders. It’s one of the only spaces where I could see my elderly uncles and younger cousins genuinely be so happy that they cried when their favorite underdog team won a game. Earnest enjoyment of fandom is important and precious.

It just frustrates me when the majority of people who harass young girls and other fans online are usually men and boys policing what is and isn’t cool, or what is and isn’t cringe. It’s so absurd to me that generally short, shallow and harmless songs are SOOOO OFFENSIVELY TERRIBAD AWFUL to these men that they feel the need to invade fan spaces and bully and harass them for not only their music taste, but their sensibilities and personhood as well.

This policing of music was true for the Beatles, The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, Avril Lavigne, P!nk, old-school western boy bands from the 90s and early 2000s, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, and this bullying is very prominent now with K-Pop groups like BTS as mentioned, but Seventeen, NCT and BlackPink as well, starting around 2014 and rising through 2018 when K-Pop picked up in the west.

It astounds me how many similarities can be drawn from boyband fan-culture and professional sports fan-culture, at least in terms of how it’s engaged with on the fan’s side of things.

Obviously, a sports team is NOT DIRECTLY COMPARABLE to a boy band.

But you buy premium tickets to watch your favorite thing in person in a stadium,

you become a loyal fan of one particular version of that thing

you can track how far back their professional career goes and what hardships your favorites faced,

you can watch that thing on tv

and there’s premium advertising and sponsorships themed around that thing

But sports is fine and boy bands are terrabad awful because girls like it and girls are stupid and delusional, apparently. /sarcasm.

Or rather, the people who feel the need to uphold the patriarchy are just weirdly sensitive and like to control what girls should and shouldn't’ like by bullying them and their hobbies, and I don’t think it’s cool or okay. 

So you're telling me for decades people from all walks of life made fun of teenage girls for being stans, from the Beatles to BTS, and made teenage girls out to be these wild out of pocket intense fans of Cute Boys, all for turning red to come out and people to act like they have never heard of of a girl being into anything in their entire life???

[carolinejroth]

I cannot stress enough that I fundamentally distrust callout posts, and I will distrust you if you send them to me.

Don't get me wrong: I investigate warnings, and I act on them if they're true and relevant. But callout posts are, on a very fundamental level, not about what people say they're about. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they're made for one or more of the following reasons:

OP didn't like the subject to begin with (often for bigoted reasons), and they wanted a reason, and a following, to justify and validate that.

OP wanted to gain popularity, so they made themselves look like either a victim, a hero, or both.

OP wanted to claim victim status in a private falling-out in order to preserve good standing with their own friends/their community.

OP didn't like what the subject was saying, and wanted to silence them (often for bigoted reasons).

OP genuinely just wants "revenge" on the subject, or otherwise wants to ruin their reputation and have them sent harassment.

Again, there are exceptions: there are "callouts" that just unravel a subject's lies, or point out problems in already public actions. If OP is claiming to have been personally victimized in a legitimately serious way, and especially one that indicates the subject might be a danger to others, I'm definitely more willing to believe it- one obvious example being sexual violence.

But oftentimes, callouts are incredibly personal, misleading, emotionally manipulative, blatantly untrue, or all of the above.

This person came to me on anon; I have absolutely no way of knowing what their motives are or how trustworthy they are. There is no credibility or accountability here.

And I did read the post. Lo and behold, it's riddled with emotionally manipulative language, false accusations, and the biggest reaches I've ever seen:

"DON'T READ THIS CALLOUT, IT'S SO TRIGGERING TO EVERYONE, JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. But the proof is here if you REALLY don't believe me"

"Proof" is a scarce handful of screenshots taken out of context that contain emotionally evocative language, but do not support the accusations at all.

Some accusations are genuinely just weird logic leaps with no support, others are matters of personal opinion obviously driven by bigoted motives.

OP themselves expresses very publicly that they believe people who are marginalized in the ways the subject are, who speak on that marginalization, should be silenced.

I try to assume good faith here, and I want to believe this anon was just guilt-tripped and manipulated by the post in question. I don't hold any ill will here.

But anon, I want you to ask yourself:

Are the accusations you're making something you have personally investigated and found to be true?

Does this person deserve the harassment and ostracization they will likely receive as a result of your accusations?

Will you hold yourself accountable for the damage you've caused if you're wrong?

And if you're absolutely certain you're right, come off anon and talk to me as a human being; because I can't believe you're ready to be accountable for these accusations if you won't even put your Tumblr blog behind them.