#And just gender in general all influenced very much by my autism | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

chroniccoolness · 1 year

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do you know any disabled people irl? what about online?

what's something good that's come out of being disabled?

does your disability affect how you experience other parts of your identity? (gender, queerness, culture, even hobbies/life goals you're very passionate about)

how do you measure your energy? (spoons, battery, something else?)

whats something youve come up with or integrated into your life that makes disability easier, besides typical aids?

Here :]]

do you know any disabled people?:

i do ! @seagull-spouse is my irl friend (i don't remember if I've showed u this blog before.... this is Nico) and also disabled :3 additionally i have an ADHD friend, multiple autistic-ADHD friends, a friend who constantly teeters between being legally blind and not, and a general wide distribution of mental illness in my friend group (though I don't know who personally considers themselves disabled by their MI and who doesn't). my brother is also autistic, though he.... forgets that most of the time. online i have disabled friends + mutuals as well ! far too many to list lol

whats something good:

it's shown me who is willing to stick by me and who isn't. there's a world of difference between the friend I used to have who, upon finding out I was autistic, screamed in my ear on purpose and called me a "mental cripple", and my current best friend (hellooo elliott) who sits and bitches with me about the curse of Knees or my boyfriend who refuses to let me feel bad about having symptoms around him (and I've got. a Lot of symptoms).

it also makes me extremely hot /j

does disability affect other aspects of identity:

yes ! it does ! my autism affects my gender, bc it really fucks my internal perception of feelings, to the point I identify as autigender. my chronic fatigue, chronic pain and mental disorders all affect my identity as an artist, as they both influence the art I make (the subjects im called to, the things that resonate with me, what im physically capable of doing) and how often/easy it is for me to do. art is really important to me, and disability Does impact it greatly.

how do you measure your energy?:

battery ! how much battery I feel like I have when I wake up, how much each big task costs me, how much i have at the end of the day, how much i can lose before i have a flare or meltdown or fatigue crash, etc. it makes sense to me.

whats something youve come up with to make disability easier?

just. Sit On The Floor . if it's not noticeably dirty or going to get me in trouble, it is a floor I will sit on. father is in a long line in the store? i step out of the line, sit on the floor, wait for him to be done. standing in the shower is too hard? floor shower. teachers not looking in science class and standing at lab tables is making me insane? sit on the floooooor for a sec. it has improved my life tenfold. (I also sit down in chairs or on tables/counters/other flat surfaces whenever possible.)

#ask game #disabled ask game #asks #funky!

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dykeyote · 2 years

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ummmmmm,,,,,ummmmmm,,,,,,,could i have some general autistic chnt headcanons? im not sure which chnt characters you hc as autistic outside of jeddie but if you do have any id love to hear em!!!!!

OH I HAVE PLENTY!!!!! the majority if not all of that camp is riddled w the tism in my eyes . but ill giv u some specific ones that i feel aprticularly strongly about >:)

since i was just talking about it SOREN IS A BIG ONE . theres just no other explanation . i think hes had a special interest in the dark arts for a really long time but that interest has Shifted over time although necromancy has always been a focus . hence why hes also got books about demonology and whatnot (: i think he gets very VERY easily hyperfocused like if hes zeroed into something its zeroed IN you cant distract him from it especially if its related to necromancy . he also gets dysregulate really easy i think he struggles to control his emotions and his physical expressions of emotion quite a bot hes decinitely the kind of autistic that expresses too MUCH as opposed to too little . also his relationship to his gender is heavily influenced by his autism so he uses lots of xenos we kno this !!!!

JUNIPER SLOAN BABY!!!!! nobody is surprised by this one . i think theyr undiagnosed theyre aware that theyre Different in some way from other people anf its somewhat unsettling to her but shes like i do not need to address this or wonder what it is !!!!! ta ta <3 and just ignores it but eventually proximity to rowan (also autistic) helps make it a little easier to come to terms with . i think shes VERY VERY stimmy its INCREDIBLY rare to see them not moving about lots if theyre talking? theyre pacing. if theyre nervous? theyre flailing about. if theyre not feeling much of anything? theyre rocking back and forth and doing little spins and audio stimming like an idle animation. she also seems the type to struggle with conveying that things are Jokes because her joking voice and her serious voice sound a lot the same so people often think shes being fr when shes just kidsing . tho to be fair she does say DERANGED shit without a trace of comedy so its kinda fair

and lastly yvonne (: i think opposite of juniper yvonne is VERY open about being autistic she considers it a key part of her personality and identity and why would she not be open about rhat!!!! i think they have a spinterest on video games and since i think jeddy ALSO does they bond over that a lot and infodump togrther (:(: granted this means that their disagreements on games cause RABID debates but its ok theyre having fun . i think they get overwhelmed pretty easy and needs some time to unwind she loses their energy if she has too much social interaction . she LIKES spending time with people snd she LIKES hanging out with everyone shes still a pretty outgoing and charismatic person but she definitely needs a lot of time to Relax after too much time spent hanging out with the other counselors

#THANK U <333 #juniper sloan #soren baltimore #yvonne marley

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bisexualfagdyke · 2 months

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truly believe andreil would be miserable and unfulfilled without each other ANYWAYYY tell me about ur hcs for andreil as people and also their relationship :P

ur so right. Also HELLO I loveyou oh my gawd. How dare you invite me to infodump.!!!!! I hVe many thoughts of them bcuz aftg (particularly Andreil + Jean) is my spinterest and also my other spinterests (a prominent one being queer Stuff) influence how I view them too?? So I have a lot of queer, self-indulgent headcanons for them that I don't think a lot of other ppl in the fandom understand but :3c whatevz

First of all. I PASSIONATELY believe they are t4t and butch4femme. Let me just explain my identity headcanons for them: Andrew is a (soft?) butch(4femme) bear/cub, agenderflux + gender apathetic trans man, gay man (ofc), and I see him as greyromantic/demiromantic too. I FIRMLY believe he has BPD, possibly BPD with ASPD traits. Neil is a butchy femme otter, genderfluid (genderfaunet specific) trans man, he/she, unlabelled achillean, demisexual (ofc) but also demiromantic, greysexual, greyromantic, and maybe nebularomantic/sexual too. I also lowkey like foxgender + catgender for him. I think he also has BPD, and autism. WHEW!!!!

I like the idea that Allison specifically helped Neil discover his femme identity :3c like, he took interest in her makeup and feminine fashion, and she helped him explore that. This is dear to me. I am very big into Neil wearing long skirts and feminine clothing, makeup, gold jewellery, and I think Andrew fucks w some eyeliner and silver jewellery too, and maybe the occasional dark coloured long skirt >:3 . I love the idea of Andrew being goth or having a style like that, but I'm not personally part of those subcultures so idk much about them!

With their relationship..... I am big into them being cuddlers & gentle & cute with each other. Obviously, they will never be a "typical" affectionate couple bcuz of their trauma & PTSD, but I like to think of them (especially Andrew) learning the gentleness of non-sexual intimacy & touch w each other, and I think they feel a love so strongly for each other, it changes them, allows them to understand softness and gentleness in their own ways.

I think Neil constantly buys Andrew sweet little treats, Andrew constantly wears Neil's clothing & buys Neil gifts (especially fox related things), they subtly but intentionally match clothing or accessory items. I am big into the idea Andrew loves to read too, IDC!!!! I KNOW that man enjoys curling up w some blankets and hot chocolate by a fire readinf some books. Gay ass. & I think Neil loves silly little movies & tv shows and has hobbies like knitting/crocheting or some other silly gay ass shit.!!! I think they are v possessive of each other (my BPD projection here, I fear). I do not think they ever get married or kids, but I think Aaron & Katelyn have kids and they are the weird uncles.!!! The "I love you" thing, I have no strong thoughts on – I can see Neil saying it, not so much Andrew. Honestly I dont like to think of them being separated post-canon on different teams bcuz I am DEEPLY attached to the foxes and their dynamic and it makes me PANIC to think of Andrew not beinf on the same team as Neil, or the foxes beinf separated in general, so I cannot give many thoughts on that.😭 I also love thinking abt them in all sorts of AUs, my fav beinf a fantasy AU where Neil is a runaway prince and Andrew is a skilled knight recruited to find him >:3 I am not creative enough to have a whole built story around that in my mind, but it's a dynamic I love thinking about. Also them in a zombie apocalypse AU.....<3 perfection. I also love thinking abt a more developed Neil & Jean friendship, and an Andrew & Jean friendship too!! Bcuz I LOVE Jean.

I probably have so much more I could say, just little silly headcanons & the such, but I HAVE YAPPED SO BAD!!!!!!! It's just an autistic mess in my brain when it comes to Andreil oh maii gawd. I feel like I have no cool meaningful headcanons its just entirely stupid silly self-indulgent shit (I project onto them So bad. If u couldnt tell.) but YKNOW! Thank you for askinf me questions though bcux I love love talking abt my special interests and aftg YAYYY!!!!! :33333 sorry for the yapfest. Blinks.

#why did I write a 5 page essay ohmy lord #showinf them this in my autism evaluation #butch4femme andreil #asks #💬

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soundsfaebutokay · 3 years

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youtube

So I've recc'd this video before, but it deserves its own post because it's one of my favorite things on youtube. It's a Tedx Talk by comics writer, editor, and journalist Jay Edidin, and I really think that it will connect with a lot of people here.

If you live and breathe stories of all kinds, you might like this.

If you care about media representation, you might like this.

If you're neurodivergent, you might like this.

If you're interested in a gender transition story that veers from the norm, you might like this.

If you love the original Leverage and especially Parker, and understand how important it is that a character like her exists, you will definitely like this.

Transcript below the cut:

You Are Here: The Cartography of Stories

by Jay Edidin

I am autistic. And what this means in practice is that there are some things that are easier for me than they are for most people, and a great many things that are somewhat harder, and these affect my life in more or less overt ways. As it goes, I'm pretty lucky. I've been able to build a career around special interests and granular obsession. My main gig at the moment is explaining superhero comics continuity and publishing history for which work I am somehow paid in actual legal currency—which is both a triumph of the frivolous in an era of the frantically pragmatic, and a job that's really singularly suited to my strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies.

I like comics. I like stories in general, because they make sense to me in ways that the rest of the world and my own mind often don't. Self-knowledge is not an intuitive thing for me. What sense of self I have, I've built gradually and laboriously and mostly through long-term pattern recognition. For decades, I didn't even really have a self-image. If you'd asked me to draw myself, I would eventually have given you a pair of glasses and maybe a very messy scribble of hair, and that would've been about it. But what I do know—backwards, forwards, and in pretty much every way that matters—are stories. I know how they work. I understand their language, their complex inner clockwork, and I can use those things to extrapolate a sort of external compass that picks up where my internal one falls short. Stories—their forms, their structure, the sense of order inherent to them—give me the means to navigate what otherwise, at least for me, would be an impassable storm of unparsable data. Or stories are a periscope, angled to access the parts of myself I can't intuitively see. Or stories are a series of mirrors by which I can assemble a composite sketch of an identity I rarely recognize whole...which is how I worked out that I was transgender, in my early thirties, by way of a television show.

This is my story. And it's about narrative cartography, and representation, and why those things matter. It's about autism and it's about gender and it's about how they intersect. And it's about the kinds of people we know how to see, and the kinds of people we don't. It's not the kind of story that gets told a lot, you might hear a lot, because the narrative around gender transition and dysphoria in our culture is really, really prescriptive. It's basically the story of the kid who has known for their whole life that they're this and not that, and that story demands the kind of intuitive self-knowledge that I can't really do, and a kind of relationship to gender that I don't really have—which is part of why it took me so long to figure my own stuff out.

So, to what extent this story, my story has a beginning, it begins early in 2014 when I published an essay titled, "I See Your Value Now: Asperger's and the Art of Allegory." And it explored, among other things, the ways that I use narrative and narrative structures to navigate real life. And it got picked up in a number of fairly prominent places that got linked, and I casually followed the ensuing discussion. And I was surprised to discover that readers were fairly consistently assuming I was a man. Now, that in itself wasn't a new experience for me, even though at the time I was writing under a very unambiguously female byline. It had happened in the letter columns of comics I'd edited. It had happened when a parody Twitter account I'd created went viral. When I was on staff at Wired, I budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a dollar in a box every time a reader responded in a way that made it clear they were assuming I was a man in response to an article where my name was clearly visible, and then I had to stop doing that because it happened so often I couldn't afford to keep it up. But in all of those cases, the context, you know, the reasons were pretty obvious. The fields I'd worked in, the beats I covered, they were places where women had had to fight disproportionally hard for visibility and recognition. We live in a culture that assumes a male default, so given a neutral voice and a character limit, most readers will assume a male author.

But this was different, because this wasn't just a book I'd edited, it wasn't a story I'd reported—it was me, it was my story. And it made me uncomfortable, got under my skin in ways that the other stuff really hadn't. And so I did what I do when that happens, and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer it to look at the conclusions and peel them back to see the narratives behind them and the stories that made them tick. And I started this, I started this by going back to the text of the essay, and you know, examining it every way I could think of: looking at craft, looking at content. And in doing so, I was surprised to realize that while I had written about a number of characters with whom I identified closely, that every single one of those characters I'd written about was male. And that surprised me even more than the responses to the essay had, because I've spent my career writing and talking and thinking about gender and representation in popular media. In 2014, I'd been the feminist gadfly of an editorial department and multiple mastheads. I'd been a founding board member of an organization that existed to advocate for more and better representation of women and girls in comics characters and creators. And most of my favorite characters, the ones I'd actively seek out and follow, were women. Just not, apparently, the characters I saw myself in.

Now I still didn't realize it was me at this point. Remember: self-knowledge, not very intuitive for me. And while I had spent a lot of time thinking about gender, I'd never really bothered to think much about my own. I knew academically that the way other people read and interpreted my gender affected and had influenced a lifetime of social and professional interactions, and that those in turn had informed the person I'd grown up into during that time. But I really believed, like I just sort of had in the back of my head, that if you peeled away all of that social conditioning, you'd basically end up with what I got when I tried to draw a self-portrait. So: a pair of glasses, messy scribble of hair, and in this case, maybe also some very strong opinions about the X-Men. I mean, I knew something was off. I'd always known something was off, that my relationship to gender was messy and uncomfortable, but gender itself struck me as messy and uncomfortable, and it had never been a large enough part of how I defined myself to really feel like something that merited further study, and I had deadlines, and...so it was always on the back burner. So, I looked, I looked at what I had, at this improbable group of exclusively male characters. And I looked and I figured that if this wasn't me, then it had to be a result of the stories I had access to, to choose from, and the entertainment landscape I was looking at. And the funny thing is, I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just wasn't right either.

See, the characters I'd written about had one other significant trait in common aside from their gender, which is that they were all more or less explicitly, more or less heavily coded as autistic. And I thought, "Ah, yes. This explains it. This is under representation in fiction echoing under representation in life and vice versa." Because the characteristics that I'd honed in on, that I particularly identified with in these guys, were things like emotional unavailability and social awkwardness and granular obsession, and all of those are characteristics that are seen as unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable in female characters. Which is also why readers were assuming that I was a man.

Because, you see, here's the thing. I'm not the only one who uses stories to navigate the world. I'm just a little more deliberate about it. For humans, stories formed the bridge between data and understanding. They're where we look when we need to contextualize something new, or to recognize something we're pretty sure we've seen before. They're how we identify ourselves; they're how we locate ourselves and each other in the larger world. There were no fictional women like me; there weren't representations of women like me in media, and so readers were primed not to recognize women like me in real life either.

Now by this point, I had started writing a follow-up essay, and this one was also about autism and narratives, but specifically focused on how they intersected with gender and representation in media. And in context of this essay, I went about looking to see if I could find even one female character who had that cluster of traits I'd been looking for, and I was asking around in autistic communities. And I got a few more or less useful one-off suggestions, and some really, really splendid arguments about semantics and standards, and um...then I got one answer over and over and over in community after community after community. "Leverage," people told me. "You have to watch Leverage."

So I watched Leverage. Leverage is five seasons of ensemble heist drama. It's about a team of very skilled con artists who take down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and the like, and it's a lot of fun, and it's very clever, and it's clever enough that it doesn't really matter that it's pretty formulaic, and I enjoyed it a lot. But what's most important, what Leverage has is Parker.

Parker is a master thief, and she is the best of the best of the best in ways that all of Leverage's characters are the best of the best. And superficially, she looks like the kind of woman you see on TV. So she's young, and she's slender, and she's blonde, and she's attractive but in a sort of approachable way. And all of that familiarity is brilliant misdirection, because the thing is, there are no other women like Parker on TV. Because Parker—even if it's never explicitly stated in the show—Parker is coded incredibly clearly as autistic. Parker is socially awkward. Her speech tends to have limited inflection; what inflection it does have is repetitive and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time. She's not emotionally literate; she struggles with it, and the social skills she develops over the series, she learns by rote, like they're just another grift. When she's not scaling skyscrapers or cartwheeling through laser grids, she wears her body like an ill-fitting suit. Parker moves like me. And Parker, Parker was a revelation—she was a revolution unto herself. In a media landscape where unempathetic women usually exist to either be punished or "loved whole," Parker got to play the crabby savant. And she wasn't emotionally intuitive but it was never ever played as the product of abuse or trauma even though she had survived both of those—it was just part of her, as much as were her hands or her eyes. And she had a genuine character arc. My god, she had a genuine romantic arc, even. And none of that required her to turn into anything other than what she was. And in Parker I recognized a thousand tics and details of my life and my personality...but. I didn't recognize myself.

Why? What difference was there in Parker, you know, between Parker and the other characters I'd written about? Those characters, they'd spanned ethnicities and backgrounds and different media and appearances and the only other characteristic they all had in common was their gender. So that was where I started to look next, and I thought, "Well, okay, maybe, maybe it's masculinity. Maybe if Parker were less feminine, she'd click with me the way those other characters had." So then I tried to imagine a Parker with short hair, who's explicitly butch, and...nothing. So okay, I extended it in what seems like the only logical direction to extend it. I said, "Well, if it's not masculinity, what if it's actual maleness? What if Parker were a man?" Ah. Yeah.

In the end, everything changed, and nothing changed, which is often the way that it goes for me. Add a landmark, no matter how slight, and the map is irrevocably altered. Add a landmark, and paths that were invisible before open wide. Add a landmark, and you may not have moved, but suddenly you know where you are and where you can go.

I wasn't going to tell this story when I started planning this talk. I was gonna tell a similar story, it was about stories, like this is, about narratives and the ways that they influence our culture and vice versa. And it centered around a group of women at NASA who had basically rewritten the narrative around space exploration, and it was a lot more fun, and I still think it was more interesting. But it's also a story you can probably work out for yourselves. In fact it's a story some of you probably have, if you follow that kind of thing, which you probably do given that you're here. And this is a story, my story is not a story that I like to tell. It's not a fun story to talk about because it's very personal and I am a very private person. And it's not universal. And it's not always relatable, and it's definitely not aspirational. And it's not the kind of story that you tend to encounter unless you're already part of it...which is why I'm telling it now. Because the thing is, I'm not the only person who uses stories to parse the world and navigate it. I'm just a little more deliberate. Because I'm tired of having to rely on composite sketches.

Open your maps. Add a landmark. Reroute accordingly.

#Jay Edidin #LGBTQ #autism #mind and body #gender norms #why humans need stories #Leverage #Parker #Abby posts Leverage #my faves #Youtube #I did my best with the transcript #sorry for any mistakes

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goyangii · 3 years

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How did you come to identify as trans? And how did you come to the mindset to not be trans anymore and detransition?

i don't know if i've posted about it so i'll post a short summary here. (take "short" with a grain of salt as always, i can never seem to keep it short enough)

like a lot of ftms/transmacs(/tifs), i grew up sexually and physically abused (by my stepfather). in our family there were only two females (me and my mom), and we were the only ones sexually abused. my stepfather also made a point of being very misogynistic and hated me very, very much for reasons i won't elaborate on here due to length. stuff like me reading in front of him or even just being in my school uniform would make him go off, and he'd say and teach my brothers to say misogynistic things (like calling me and my mom cows, or calling us stupid, etc.)

i think this led to a desire to distance myself from female-ness for obvious reasons. i was also very much a tomboy who loved sports and didn't get along well in my all girls school (autism baybee). i had no interest in boys and that combined with being very gnc probably tipped a lot of my schoolmates off to me being ssa and i was bullied for being a dyke for years, even after transferring to a co-ed.

femininity was very foreign to me as well, and i never had an interest in makeup, "girl" clothes, shaving, etc. i identified more with boys in media, too, probs because girl characters were often The Girl Character and not just female children lmao. i was often mistaken for a boy when i had my hair cut short, in part due to how i dressed/presented, and as a boy i was treated much better. my interest in other girls was no longer gross or weird, i was considered more attractive by peers, etc. when puberty hit i, like many, felt immense discomfort. probably due to sexual trauma, the idea of being perceived as female in a sexual way was immensely, immensely disturbing to me and i hated everything about my body. i had very intense dysphoria and couldn't go anywhere without binding.

in general i think it makes sense i ended up identifying as trans tbh :")

what made me detrans was, ironically, medical transition and realizing that i could never really change sex. i could look and sound and "seem" like a man but i could never become one no matter how hard i tried. the more i passed as a man the more i realized the gap between me and men. it just became glaringly obvious to me that what i wanted wasn't possible and that the longer i tried to pretend it was the more i was hurting myself by holding myself up to an unattainable goal (being a man). i couldn't bring myself to continue taking T shots or to change my legal documents and i had to sit down and really process why, when i had wanted this my whole life.

it took 2 years to really accept it and in that time i had to work on getting to the roots of my dysphoria (internalized homophobia and misogyny, plus trauma and asd influencing how i viewed gender). i found radfem stuff around the beginning of that 2 years and it helped process a lot of the things i couldn't really square with trans ideology while i was in it.

detransition itself was easy, as far as process goes lol. i just quit T cold turkey and let my body do its own thing. the mindset/ideology was harder to quit and i'm thankful to radfem blogs for being there for me to hateread because it was immensely helpful in letting me actually critically think about what i was believing.

#mine #long post #detrans

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star-anise · 5 years

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Hi! I have a question for you that might bring Discourse and I'm sorry. But your perspective is valuable to me so I'm asking anyway and I welcome your best guesses about an answer. Question: WHY is transmedicalism a thing? WHY are so many trans people (and in particular, young binary trans men) transmeds? How did this viewpoint evolve over the past few years -- it doesn't feel very old? Has it been influenced by other shittinesses like radfem shit and fandom anti shit?

I am not an expert in trans intracommunity issues, so there are probably tons of people way more knowledgeable than me.

Tumblr keeps recommending me transmed blogs, so I keep reading them. There are a surprising number that are like “Transmeds and tucutes both have a nice day! You’re both valid but different!” and I was doing the upside-down-owl face of total confusion. It looked like?? It seemed like a community that interpreted “gender dysphoria” to mean not “unease and distress when misgendered” but simply “desire to fully medically transition”, so it made sense to them that “transmed” meant people who wanted medical treatment, and “not transmed” meant people who considered themselves trans but didn’t want to medically transition.

Which is not?? My experience of non-transmed trans people??? My experience of non-transmeds is that their understandings of “gender dysphoria” tend to lean more heavily on the “distress and impairment” part of the definition. But I’m just going on observation and other peoples’ accounts of themselves, so I’m not best-equipped to speak to that.

My experience with Generation Z transmeds is that many of them don’t even really get why people perceive them as being so hostile. Some do, but others seem genuinely confused that they’re being accused of attacking other trans people. And from what I can see, they find the DSM Gender Dysphoria diagnosis very comfortable and validating. It makes sense! They have a brain disorder! It’s all very validating. It’s like being told you’re not a sack of shit, you have depression; you’re not lazy, you have ADHD; you’re not unlovable, you have Autism; you’re not bad at being a person, you have PTSD. This thing makes sense and surely your parents would understand it if a psychologist or doctor explained it to them!

Do I think there’s a generational component to it? Eh, maybe. Maybe coming of age, or at least joining the LGBTQ+ community, after gay marriage was legalized might reduce peoples’ awareness of how much our survival as a community depends on strength in numbers and mutual defense. If somebody remembers how the DSM treated Homosexuality back in the day, the might be less likely to wholeheartedly trust it now.

I do think this is another one of those situations where the only people having active discussions about this on social media are the fringe dissidents--because the rest of us all agree with each other--so when someone new shows up and looks for their people on social media, they just find the fringe dissidents.

But eh, I’m not totally sure it could all be prevented by better education. There are a lot of really influential adult transmeds out there. I think Kat Blaque has some really good insights into the transmed mindset; her contention is that it’s basically borne out of being in a phase in your transition where you’re desperate for cis validation, and you’d rather have acceptance for being Good Enough than acceptance based on the fundamental acceptance of all people and genders as valid.

Kind of like women whose self-respect is very based on being emotionally collected, independent, levelheaded, and sexually conservative, so they can’t be called a crazy clingy tramp. It takes more self-confidence to defend everybody’s right to be a crazy clingy tramp. (The Slutwalk era feels like a very long time ago, even though it was only 2011. I feel like you’d never get away with it now)

#lgbt discourse #transmedicalism tw #cis girl talks trans issues #batbetbitbotbut #long post

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sugarmapleships · 3 years

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O/C and S/I Info

Self Insert(s):

As of now, I only have two active s/i's (one for My Hero and the other for my original universe). Both essentially look and act like me except sometimes they'll have cool powers and/or outfits. That's pretty much all you need to know.

Sage Devoe:

My BNHA self insert. I use her pretty interchangeably with how she presents herself. In the high school AU, she's in class 1-A with the quirk Panic. Her hero name is Pan and I usually use her to ship with Kirishima. She likes animals, reading, drawing, and has anxiety. Quirk: Her quirk allows her to create high frequencies that activate fear responses in the brain of her victim.

Ellowyn Grace:

My Minecraft self insert. She’s an Arctic fox/human hybrid who lives alone in her world in a little farmhouse she built herself. She has autism and is nonverbal, and all around keeps to herself. Still, she feels very lonely and wants nothing more than a friend or partner. She’s good with a bow and loves animals. She also is my official fursona and is shipped with Conor the protogen. Fun fact: Ellowyn was designed off of a Minecraft skin I found in my old downloads. So her design isn't 100% original, but I did decide to play up a few of her features and project my personality upon her. So, somewhere out there is the original designer of Ellowyn, and I thank you for uploading your design to the Skindex.

Su:

Su is my insert in my personal project called Mindspace. Not too sure how to explain it, but I guess I just made original characters out of my emotions? Anyway, she's one of the three sisters and she's sort of the middle woman between the more extreme Brenda and Connie. She represents empathy and anxiety and is very much influenced by who she's around.

Original Characters:

Brenda:

Brenda's sort of like my fictional nemesis. She's very moody and generally has a more cold, negative outlook on things. However, she's very intelligent and level-headed and mostly just wants to fit in. She's probably the most likely of the bunch to use foul language and is unafraid to speak her mind and start a fight. She denies that Su and Connie are her sisters. Brenda does not have a very positive relationship with Su but has a bit of a soft spot for Connie. She's very fun to think about (and I'd imagine, write), and despite her often questionable behavior, I love her. She usually represents my anger and depressive thoughts. Tl;Dr think of her as a gender-flipped Bakugou (I have a crack headcanon that she has a crush on Bakugou).

Side note; she has red highlights in her hair! It's hard to find picrews that'll show it, but that's just another little detail about her. Also she's quite tall (about 5'7)

Connie:

Connie is the counterpart to Brenda in the sense that she is very positive, outgoing, optimistic and carefree! She loves a good joke and laughs at just about anything. Though she can be a bit insensitive at times, she wants to make friends with everyone and tries to see the best in people. She gets along well with her peers and is very close with Su and Quatro. She is a little over five feet tall. Connie represents joy and optimism.

Little bit of lore; Connie and Brenda used to be one character! I decided that her nature could be a bit confusing, so I decided to split her into two, giving us these lovely ladies we have today! "Connie" was derived from the word "conscience", and she was the first "brain cell" I named (I created her when I was about nine years old, and now I ship with her as my sister).

Andrew (Quatro) Fischer:

Don't let his appearance fool you, he's a sweet guy. Andrew is a shapeshifter who can take on the form of any human or humanoid. It took me some time to come up with a name for him, so I called him "Quatro" as a placeholder (since he was the fourth one I named) and it stuck. He usually takes on the form of my f/os and is in a romantic relationship with Su. He usually takes on more masculine forms and prefers he/him pronouns, but will occasionally become more feminine. He represents self-love.

Fun fact; I created him so I wouldn't feel guilty or upset about dropping f/os. Rather than terminating a relationship with an individual character, he merely changes form (and personality).

I hope this wasn't too confusing! Most of the information about these guys lives permanently in my head, so it's kind of nice to get something out there! I'm not sure if I'm going to write anything about them (yet), but I might have some art show up in the future!

#original character #self insert #my art

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catubarca · 5 years

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Harry Potter Next Generation Headcanons

im bored. im full of emotions, and am rly missing the HP world... i just want to write down my headcannons for the next gen kiddos tbh.

please remember these are just my opinions? its okay if yours are different. im just bored and want to share my thoughts,,

Teddy Lupin

his name is Theodore Remus “Teddy” Lupin. it’s just what it is

I don’t care what JKR says, to me his name will always be Theodore

i can’t do this “Edward” stuff im so sorry,,,

h u f f l e p u f f

proper school uniform? never heard of it

messy hair, messy clothes

punk rock child

we’re talking like,,,at least two (2) lip piercings ok

absolutely terrible in herbology. do not leave this child alone in a greenhouse, bad things happen

fuckin hoards chocolate

its a problem

dating Victorie Weasley

random bursts of dancing

keeps a lock of hair pink for his mother

lives with the Potters, enjoys pretending to be Ginny to ground his siblings

“Lily, why aren’t you coming out of your room? Dinner’s ready?” “You said I’m grounded! You tell me!” “What? Oh, for the- THEODORE REMUS LUPIN-“

s m i r k s

effortlessly cool,,, but so so dorky,,, in a cool way

Victorie Weasley

ravenclaw!

looks a lot like her mother, Fleur, but inherited those Weasley freckles

a little confused a lot of the time

absolute sweet tooth (teddy abuses this fact a lot)

Mom Friend™

will help you with your homework

always got a book on her

super beautiful and like,,,, the absolute nicest person,,, but

cannot dance

like at all

adores Charms class

a softie you don’t want to cross

“I’m the oldest”

Dominique Weasley

inherited the Classic Weasley Red Hair™

idolises her Uncle Charlie

“I wanna save animals and work with cool dragons, just like Uncle Charlie does!”

Bill almost has a heart attack

always bringing stray animals home

(“is that a lizard in your pocket, Dominique?” “Yes! His name is Blob.” “You know how your father’s afraid of reptiles, sweetheart, you can’t bring it inside.”)

Gryffindor child

favourite class is definitely Care of Magical Creatures, she and Hagrid like to talk about proper care methods for rare creatures

perpetual dirt stains

BIG middle child vibes

doesn’t really label her sexuality… just kinda does what she wants rly

all the pets in Hogwarts love her

rumours are she’s got an innate, natural magical ability to make them all love her

(she feeds them under the table)

it’s a mystery

big advocate for animal rights

f e m i n i s t

willing to throw hands at all times

usually all smiles though

one of those people who use their whole bodies to laugh

kind of an accidental heartthrob

romcoms

Louis Weasley

looks the most like his mother

ravenclaw

absolutely filled with curiosity. always reading or talking or learning

random facts

(how do you even find that sort of information?

you don’t want to know)

coffee boy

sort of musically talented?

he and James Sirius preach the importance of skincare to all who will listen

secretly full of sass and dry wit

vry graceful and fluid

e y e r o l l

awkward smiles? can never smile properly in photos

on the ravenclaw quidditch team

Ravenclaw Prefect

(“You might be older, but I’m taller.” “Fuck off!”)

only watches High Quality™ tv shows/media

kind of a disaster, despite the gracefulness

Molly Weasley

Classic red hair

comes across as a bit uptight, like her father

I don’t care what you think. (She really cares what you think.)

E y e b r o w s

death glares

drinks like 5 cups of coffee in the morning

studies,,, like a lot

definitely a Gryffindor though

mom jeans

always ready to debate a topic. will destroy opponents.

has been trying to start a successful Debate Club for like 4 years now

naturally falls into the position of a group leader

would be a teacher’s pet, if she wasn’t ready At All Times™ to debate the relevancy of the course syllabus or outdated teaching methods

got into a fight with Severus Snape’s portrait in Headmistress McGonagall’s office.

(Dumbledore’s portrait was laughing, until she turned and ragged on him for a bit. Minerva thought it was absolutely hilarious, so she just let Molly go at it for a while).

full of rage towards everything, but wears a very careful mask of aloofness

to calm down, she likes painting her nails

she’s very good at it

she’s also very good at painting and art in general, weirdly enough

Lucy Weasley

G R Y F F I N D O R

adores shitty puns and has a terrible sense of humour

brown hair, not red

loves to prank people, which makes her Uncle George very proud

Percy complains about her behaviour, but makes sure he knows he’s proud too

(charming all the cauldrons in the potions classroom to scream whenever they’re stirred takes a more complex understanding of spell work than one would expect).

a pit of a punk streak

rly loves hip hop

high key drama queen

does she ever stop yelling? we’re yet to find out

average grades in terms of theory, but she’s the best in terms of applying information

especially for her pranks

has allies throughout the castle, from the portraits to the students

the bigger the prank, the better

but is a firm believer in “confuse, don’t abuse”

all her pranks are mostly harmless

is a surprising lover of older literature, like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, an influence of her sister

a bit rebellious

Fred Weasley II

name isn’t officially “the second”, but it sounds cooler

James Potter, Lucy Weasley, Molly Weasley and Fred Weasley are like the Marauders 2.0

says “squad” and “lit” unironically

niche humour

hipster vibes

avid music lover

smiley sunshine child

takes after his mother the most in looks, just like his sister

a chill type of gryffindor

plays quidditch, and is an excellent chaser, just like his mother

the absolute undisputed King™ of puppy-dog eyes

just,,,, beautiful

the True teacher’s pet

hands in his work on time,, asks lots of questions,,, likes helping students understand their work,, what a boy

can hella nyoom

runs so fast

look at him go

as you might expect, loves a good prank. always down for a laugh

Roxanne Weasley

Gryffindor and pROUD

absolute Queen tbh

was definitely Head Prefect or Gryffindor Prefect at some point

loved by the school

absolute legend

G I R L P O W E R

infectious laughter

has a soft spot for Louis Weasley and Scorpius Malfoy

these poor disaster children,,,, they need a Mother

M O M

big mom vibes

mothers the hell out of all the first years

a feminist through and through

can be found nodding aggressively to Molly Weasley’s semi-deranged, furious ranting

YAAAASS

loves slang. uses so much slang. always up to date with trends and memes

has all the gossip

becomes a mess around pretty girls

absolute blushing, stuttering disaster around cute girls oh my god

her eye make-up game is killer

sparkly

Distinguished Lesbian

Rosie Weasley

did someone say Weasley™?

red hair and freckles and curls oh my

on the autism spectrum, has trouble socialising sometimes

hella passionate about stuff

hangs out with Scorpius and Albus, the Golden Trio 2.0

f em ini st

her jokes are the best. high quality sense of humour.

Ravenclaw

likes to read. it’s quiet in the school library, which is nice.

abysmal at herbology

surprisingly good at Care of Magical Creatures though? Animals are just,,, so much easier to deal with

overall, really good grades though

bit of a silent type, but she’s actually a riot to hang out with

actually pretty good at quidditch? She’s not on the team, and she’s not super interested in playing, but?? She’s not bad??

She can land a solid hit with a beater’s bat

(eyes you judgementally over the top of a book)

dry wit humour

will throw hands over chess

Hugo Weasley

hufflepuff

unbeatable at chess, like his dad

a lost puppy

someone please help this child

softie

kind of low-key emotional

so supportive!! and loyal!! high-key best friend material

foodie. loves food. please feed him.

takes a bit more after his dad appearance wise

loves to cook. spends lots of time with grandma Molly and his dad in the kitchen

Professor Longbottom is his favourite professor, because he’s more chilled and laidback.

other professors and classes fill him with Distress™

loves astronomy too

maths whizz, so good at arithmancy

(“uh, actually-“)

a little bossy, like his mother

is trying so hard

maybe a little too hard

a bit insecure and nervous, but so soft

please treat this child carefully and with love

James Sirius Potter

Gryffindor

L O U D

a fucking disaster child

what’d you expect, putting “James” and “Sirius” together?

DRAMATIC GASPING

flails his hands around when he talks

s t r u t s

bisexual mess, had a crush on both the Longbottom children at some point

is better than you at everything

including being a different gender

fuck you that’s why

so pretty

he’s so pretty

is thIS CHILD EVER NOT LAUGHING AT SOMETHING OH My god

laughs at everything

all the time

always

high-key emotional

badly timed finger guns

looks like a model in photos? wtf?

gets invited to Girls Nights™

wears nail polish and makeup

loves to yell at people about gender roles and defying stereotypes

TEA SIS

not on the quidditch team surprisingly enough, even though he’s pretty good

prefers to be in the stands, doing A+ commentary on the games

if he can get Fred to stop mid-air due to unbearable, suffocating laughter at least once a game it’s a win in his books

has it OUT for the hufflepuff quidditch team and no one knows why??

definitely makes puns on his name

it drives everyone insane

harry always replies he’s just making his namesake proud

that also drives everyone insane

smug lil shit

Albus Severus Potter

“It’s just Al.”

S L Y T H E R I N

will always find a way to get what he wants, eventually

“dad, why did you name me this way?”

unimpressed

sigh

hella smart. is topping at least five classes

Aunt Hermione is his favourite. She’s the fucking Mistress of Magic! All that power, the ability to make change and improve the Magical World as a whole-

sass master

the reason headmistress mcgonagall keeps a bottle of scotch under her desk at all times

the only potter child to inherit The Eyes™

absolute insomniac

kind of emo, but turns into a fucking softie around Scorpius Malfoy it’s hilarious

adverse to violence. prefers a verbal beatdown method

really tall? despite having shorties for parents??? no one saw it coming

(especially not Teddy. He’s always scared of losing his last few inches of height)

Functional Gay

he’s on the slytherin quidditch team, as a seeker

Lily Luna Potter

Gryffindor

FEMINIST

do not mess with lily luna potter

she may seem cute and sweet, but she will destroy you

inherited her father’s black hair

disaster lesbian

transfiguration is her favourite subject, by far

has no idea what she wants to do with the rest of her life.

Existential Crisis Father-Daughter Bonding Time™

do you ever sleep?

takes after Ginny the most in personality

also, kind of the most like James Fleamont Potter in personality, too?

Loves to help her brother out with pranks, laughs at him when he gets caught and she gets away with it

The only one of the Potter Children who hasn’t got into a fight with Severus Snape’s portrait

because she just ignores him instead

loves talking to the portraits around the castle

Super good at Quidditch, is on the team as a Chaser

Quidditch Captain at some point

adores Hagrid, but who out of the Potter children doesn’t?

Idolises Minerva McGonagall

just as oblivious as her father

Scorpius Malfoy

Actually in Ravenclaw, not Slytherin, much to many people’s surprise

abSOLUTE DADDY’S BOY

super close with his dad

Draco is just so supportive of like everything he does (unlike his father)

classic blonde malfoy looks

actually really funny?

a cuddler. loves hugs. always leeching warmth off of someone

he and Rosie sometimes finger-tip-touch which is their version of a hug, because he know’s she’s not super comfortable with touch

was basically adopted by the Weasley’s and Potter’s

James Sirius will murder for this child

booknerd, always rambling to Al and Rosie about new books coming out he’s interested in reading.

has had a crush on Albus Potter since like 1st year

always worried about making his dad proud, and keeping up the Malfoy name

sweet tooth

he’s just,, soft. just a warm, happy child. he wants love, and affection. someone tell him he’s doing okay, please.

needs,,, validation,,,

he’ll tell you out loud that he has no favourite aunts or uncles, but he secretly really likes spending time with his Uncle Ron

they had a talk, once, in like the middle of the night at a sleepover with Rosie and Al, about feeling insecure in comparison to others, and learning to be proud of yourself for your achievements

there were a few tears, but it was nice

Ron was actually the third person he told, besides his dad and Rosie, about having a crush on Al

openly a disaster romantic. trash taste in romance novels.

always welcome in the Potter-Weasley households

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gaiatheorist · 4 years

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“50% Feminine.”

I’m going mad again, I’m listing probable reasons, but going mad isn’t reasonable, it’s something that just happens to me from time to time. This is one of the slow, creepy-uppy episodes, not one of the sudden, explosive ones, possibly less dangerous, but incredibly draining. It’ll pass, it always does, it had better do, it’s bloody horrible.

Standard disclaimer, I am at increased risk of harm, but I have no intent or ideation of deliberately harming myself, apart from drinking too much cheap-and-nasty wine, which is my standard maladaptive coping mechanism.

I woke up at 1.30am, and, after a brief discussion with my wonky brain, acknowledged that I was Awake-awake, and there was no chance of going back to sleep. This will have a knock-on effect for a few days, there’s a fair chance I’ll fall asleep in my dinner, but it’s mostly containable. (The madness, as well as the dinner.) Scrolling through Twitter, to see if I’d ‘missed anything’, I found a link to ‘My Gender Coordinates’, and decided to take the quiz, no better or worse use of my time than a Fakebook quiz to tell me what sort of sandwich, or shoe I am.

There are 35 questions, I can’t remember exactly how they’re worded, but it’s along the lines of “I am...” or “I consider myself...” about various character traits, or behaviours, you ‘answer’ on a sliding scale from double-thumbs-up to double-thumbs-down. There’s a ‘middle’ option, which, when I’m going mad, is always a bit tempting, I’m indifferent, I don’t care much about much when I’m in this state.(Until I do, and get all emotionally peaky, HATING an empty shampoo bottle on the bathroom floor, but refusing to move it, because it’s not mine, or finding myself close to tears because I think I’ve offended someone, and not quite knowing how to check.)

The ‘results’ come out on a quadrant-graph thingy, Masculine/Androgynous/Undifferentiated/Feminine, I deliberately didn’t look at that first, because I would have skewed my answers, aiming for ‘undifferentiated’, I’m awkward like that. My results were that I ‘fall between quadrants’, no big surprise there, my dot was bang on the line between ‘masculine’ and ‘androgynous’, all in the top half of the square, ‘68.3% Masculine, 50% Feminine’, I don’t know how that works, it’s numbers, and maths and stuff, and my brain doesn’t work like that. (Haha, because I’m a girl, and girls are better at biology than physics. Bullshit.)

What does it mean? In all likelihood, nothing, it does look kind-of scientific, which is why I answered all of the questions, instead of giving up at the first hint of a cartoon dinosaur, or a ‘pick which colour-scheme appeals to you’. (Cartoon dinosaurs are my new pet hate, I’ve recently had to wade back through the clip-art infested worksheets from the last mental health course, and I’m fairly certain I’ve imagined a cartoon dinosaur, but that’s a tangent I’ll try to avoid.) I have strong opinions on the concept of gender, for however-many years I’ve been writing on here, I’ve identified as ‘meat no-one eats’, my biological sex is female, and my uterus is certainly reminding me of that fact this week. My gender? Human. Probably.

“Identified as”, how very modern, it’s not ‘really’ a new thing, to me, or the world, what I’m trying to do here is type out a safe-release, to vent, I suppose it all boils down to my resentment of being ‘told’. There are vague childhood memories of being told “Ladies do/don’t do...”, and I have a ridiculous rage-bubble of “Yes, and sloths poo once a week, what’s your point?”, too late one thinks of what one might have said. I’m no more a lady than I am a sloth, I’m probably leaning more towards sloth at the moment, I’m overdue a bath.

Working through the statement-ratings, I noticed I was pulling a face at some of them. All of them, to be honest, which surprised me, because, with a diagnosis of autism, there’s the preconception that my response would be binary-linear, black-or-white, always/never. It wasn’t, my response was invariably “That’s a stupid question.”, and they weren’t questions, for every single statement, I decided “Unable to answer without context.”, and had to imagine a scenario to contextualise “I am generous” or “I am decisive”, or whatever. ( I *am* decisive, given sufficient context.) I need to watch that I don’t fall into a psychopath/sociopath rabbit-hole here, my sometimes-linear approach could be viewed as psychopathic, and my bending/masking could fit a sociopathic profile. Too many personality quizzes in my teen-girl magazines, and an on-going desire to name and categorize things.

I was pulling a face at the statements that are usually associated with the concept of femininity, there really isn’t a male-brain/female-brain. (All brains smell horrible, I have smelled my own brain, wasn’t pleasant.) There are some biological differences, most notably the reproductive bits, but not really a great deal else, the ex used to say that humans were evolving to be more androgynous, but I see now that he was trying to justify the societally-imposed feelings of inadequacy that I was as tall as him, with more body-hair. He ascribed to the concept of androgyny when it suited him, lauding Bowie in public, and insisting I was ‘better’ at housework in private. A product of his upbringing, but deeply coercive-toxic. He enjoyed my androgynous-atypical nature up to a point, I was a trophy in more ways than just my long legs and pretty mouth, I confused the hell out of his ‘traditional’ family, though.

The statements that made me screw up my face could have been coloured pink, they were the ones that ‘ladies do’, some, I consciously, deliberately-don’t, and some are just a natural hard-no, nature vs nurture in evidence. I have learned behaviours, and innate, natural tendencies, there was a bit of a domestic issue the other day when I noted my son being manipulative, and destroyed-devastated myself wondering if he’d learned-observed that from me. I don’t think so, my avoidance-behaviours are quite different. I was pulling faces at the stereotypical ‘female’ traits, initially an “Ew, no, I don’t do that!” response, but, as I realised I was doing it, I wondered WHY I was repulsed. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with being kind/sensitive/compassionate, they’re human responses, not ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, but even the quiz itself refers to them as “Traits commonly found in people of the ... gender.” (Androgynous is referred to as high in male- and female-typical traits, undifferentiated as low in both.) Commonly, not exclusively.

Part of the issue is that I associate femininity with vulnerability and weakness. I choose not to ‘present as’ female most of the time, my sex usually isn’t obvious until people get close, and I don’t let many people get that close. (Even before the virus-distancing.) There are ‘historical and complicating factors’ behind some of that, but there’s also the gender-conditioning I grew up with, girls-should, and boys-should, I didn’t have particularly positive experiences or role-models, but, even aside from that, the general concensus was that male was stronger, better, more important, female was secondary and subservient. To do something ‘like a girl’ was an insult, but, by the same token, I was often criticised for not being ‘girly’, ever the outlier. I’m wondering how much of the non-femininity is reactive-protective, how much could be part of the autism, and how much is just ‘how I am’?

Girly-females irritate me, vacuous conversations, hair-and-make-up, dependence on others, incessant diets and fads, I don’t ‘get’ any of it, and I don’t buy into it, I don’t see why I should, just because my genitals are in the more difficult-to-kick arrangement. (True to form, my son has more make-up and hair-stuff than I do, I can’t remember how he referred to my presentation a few weeks ago, but it might have involved goblins, and a bin.) Occasionally, people tell me I could be attractive if I made an effort, my go-to response is “What for?”, I do generally look as if I live in a tree, it doesn’t bother me. That’s not wholly a girl-thing or a boy-thing, I do know some very well-presented people of both flavours, but I’ve genuinely never overheard a group of men discussing razor-blades or underpants the way I’ve heard gaggles of women banging on about make-up and such.

Women who talk in baby-voices, women who giggle and simper around men, women who don’t even try to pick things up themselves, I think what I’m saying is that I don’t like women who ‘act as’ women, and it is an act, my mother’s phone-laugh used to make me want to scream.

Before I became annoyed at myself for placing more value on the traits more commonly associated with masculinity than femininity, I’d had a mini-argument with myself that it was impossible to rate any of the statements objectively. Am I kind? It depends on the situation, last week I helped a little old lady sort out a mis-delivered parcel, but the week before that, I’d sped up my walking pace, so I could get into the corner shop before the person behind me, it might have been the same little old lady, I wasn’t paying attention. I’d viewed the thumbs-rating as a never-always continuum, so, technically, all of the responses ‘should’ have been middle-option, for ‘sometimes’. (There might have been an explanation in the site somewhere, it was daft o’clock in the morning.) For each behaviour, I was thinking of a situation, which was wrong, I think I should have been rating least-likely to most-likely. The situation has an influence on the behaviour, if I had friends, I’d behave differently with them to the way I’d behave with a doctor, or a manager, or my son, and even that behaviour would depend on multiple external factors, it wouldn’t be static-consistent, it would be dynamic. We all do it, we’re socially conditioned to behave according to audience and environment.

I didn’t go to finishing school, I didn’t even go to university, there were no elocution or deportment classes at my rough-as-arseholes comprehensive school, and most of my childhood meals at home were eaten from a plate on my knee, on the sofa, in front of the TV. There were still expectations, though. Standing up if a teacher came into the classroom, not interrupting an adult speaking, letting elderly or otherwise infirm people on the bus first. I don’t remember my brother being given as many instructions as I was, though, and I think that was more to do with me being a girl than being two and a half years older, he did pretty much as he pleased, and was a ‘rascal’, or a ‘scamp’, whereas I was told to sit down (nicely), be quiet, smile, be helpful etc long before the wear a bra, brush your hair, show a bit of leg nonsense started.

I’m fairly certain that the gender-specific conditioning is part of the reason my autism wasn’t diagnosed until I was 42. I’d had expectations drummed, and sometimes beaten into me all my life, everything was already an act, a performance, so I just assumed everyone else was ‘faking it’ all the time, over-riding gut-instinct on everything, and acting according to these confusing social scripts. The “What for?” streak in me is problematic for other people, I’m viewed as difficult, challenging, sometimes plain rude, and overly bold ‘for a woman’. I don’t speak much, but, when I do, I make it count, I’m tenacious and determined, and, most of the time, completely exhausted trying to remember and correctly apply rules and boundaries, scripts I don’t understand the reasoning behind, and constantly-consistently assess environments and audiences, to avoid ‘getting it wrong’.

I am blunt at times. I can be articulate and eloquent, but sometimes a situation demands just-enough information to convey the salient point. I don’t tend to ‘waste words’, and am frustrated when people fanny about with “Does that make sense?” and “This might sound silly, but...” Anecdotally, I hear that from women more than men, we’re discouraged from being too much to-the-point, to go the long way around things, instead of straight at them, and to check for reassurance. I speak ‘like a man’, it’s more efficient. (”Does everyone understand what they are to do?” was my preferred meeting-closing-statement, I’m brutal.)

I sometimes see the reverse-of-me in my son, he isn’t the least bit blunt or brutal most of the time. (He did shout “Stop it!” at me quite forcefully one day last week when I was having a meltdown after getting bin-juice on my face. He saves his command-voice for emergencies.) He ties himself in knots about communicating with people, and avoids most conversation, although he’ll babble incessantly to himself to process thoughts and ideas. (I have sores inside my ears that won’t heal, because I keep putting my earphones in to drown out his waffling about D&D plots and such.) He’s nervous-anxious where I’m bold, he’s scared of a million things that I’m not in the least bit concerned by, but then, I am an idiot. Biological sex is not gender, but neither of us are really binary-gendered. (I’m not going to suggest he does the quiz, he’s so incredibly indecisive it would melt his brain.) I never conditioned him ‘male’, he’s always just been another human to me, but he has had conflicting messages from his Dad’s side of the family, boys-don’t-cry, come-and-kick-this-ball, look-at-the-tits-on-that, and the girly-girl aunts and cousins. Confusing times, but he has referred to himself as a pan-sexual trans-humanist, and I don’t really know what that is. (He hasn’t asked me to use different pronouns, or a different name, so he’s still ‘him’.)

I’m rambling. I’ve been pecking away at this for hours, but I do feel a little more settled for doing it. I didn’t go off on as many ranty tangents as I thought I might, which is reassuring, this episode of going mad has been mostly-irritable, and I don’t like it. Catch-22, there, as a female, I’m ‘supposed to’ be all pink and fluffy, and nice, but the lazy stereotype of a woman can also be a nagging old harridan, I’m straddling that line as well as the line between quadrants on the quiz. I bet you 10p that if I did the quiz again, I’d be able to skew the answers to place the dot dead-centre in the grid, but I might blow up the internet if I did that, and imagine the mess that would make.

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doodleferp · 4 years

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Okay so my brother got into an arguement with me for over an hour about sexuality and gender today. To him, apparently basic human instinct should override what people identify with. Here are the highlights from him:

“Asexual people DO feel sexual attraction, they just don’t acknowledge it.”

“There are only TWO biological genders. You are either MALE or FEMALE. If you think you’re anything else, you must have failed biology.”

Him calling the LGBT+ community the ACBDEF community because “they basically have the whole alphabet now”.

“Women have too much power thanks to the Me Too movement. We should stop campaigning for women’s rights when men are getting theirs taken away.”

* “Anorexia isn’t an eating disorder — you’re just starving yourself.”

He even pulled the good ol’ “being gay is a choice” line with me. Yes, Brother. I choose to be gay so I can get all the homophobia and ultra-religious people on my ass for loving who I love.

While I acknowledge that everyone will have their own opinions and agree with the fact that there are a lot of double-standards for men that need to be broken as well, the comments about sexuality and gender identity he made absolutely infuriated me. When I tried to explain why these opinions weren’t very open-minded for today’s generation, he started lashing out at me for being close-minded because I don’t like sports and will only eat certain foods/am resistant to trying new things. I brought these comments to my male friend, who is also asexual, and he was equally upset by these. In this arguement, he dehumanized:

Me, who is pansexual.

My male friend and my (amazing) girlfriend, who are both asexual.

My summertime buddy, who identifies as nonbinary.

My former college roommates, all three of whom identify as trans men.

A classmate of mine, who identifies as a trans woman.

And our fifty-eight y/o aunt, who has been anorexic since her late teens.

What shocks me and makes me angry-angry about this whole situation is that my brother is only fourteen. I don’t know who, where or how he’s getting such toxic opinions in his head, because we have very tolerant parents who have taught us that acceptance is key. (IMO, my best bet is either TikTok or our seventy-something grandma, neither of which are reliable sources).

My brother has also been getting very... aggressive since I got home for the quarantine. He’s been pressuring me to go outside and exercise and gets upset when I don’t want to. He berates me for only eating certain things (a factor of my autism), and lashes out at me when I don’t want to eat something different. He even lashes out at me when I don’t eat anything (which is a side-effect of my stimulant meds), saying I need to eat or my body won’t function. Last night, he made dinner for the first time and I didn’t eat because my meds hadn’t worn off yet; and he got angry and told me if I didn’t eat it I would be sleeping outside that night. I didn’t sleep outside, of course, because he doesn’t have the authority to make me do that and I doubt he would’ve enforced that anyway.

At the end of the sexuality argument, Brother and I got into a screaming match earlier — I started crying because he was actively dehumanizing so many people in my life and was so unapologetic about it, and in the heat of the moment I said some mean things. He started crying as well, and he shat on my male ace friend’s explanation of asexuality, saying he didn’t give a shit about what he had to say and that “if you’re gonna believe someone you’ve only known for a semester over someone who’s been in your life for over fourteen years, you can just go jump off a cliff”.

I’m posting this here because I really need some advice on this situation. How can someone so young have such toxic opinions on these situations? Is it me? Is it something I did wrong by coming out in high school? Is it his friends’ influence? Is it our grandma’s influence? I need advice.

#lgbt #lgbt rant #lgbtaqipd+#lgbt rights #angry thoughts #irl #angry happenings #family drama #lgbtq positivity #lgbt discourse #lgbtq community #discourse #homophobia #brothers #help #i don’t know what to do #gender positivity #sexuality positivity #advice please

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mszegedy · 4 years

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30 Days of Autism Acceptance 2020: Days 1-10

This is a list of questions by @autie-jake (full list here), where you’re supposed to answer one per day for every day of April. I learned about it a few days into April and intended to start doing it but I forgot, I guess, or maybe decided against it. But I wanna do it now, so here’s the first ten days really quick.

April 1: Introduce yourself. Talk about who you are as a person.

This is kind of a hard question for me. I think my younger sister (by 3¾ years) would say this, if she just made a new friend the same age as her and she asked about me:

“Well, she goes to college, but she’s graduating this semester. She does something with proteins, but honestly she should really be a linguist. I actually really hate discussing linguistics with her, because she gets so annoying and overbearing about it. I don’t understand why she’s doing whatever she is. She’s a pretty weird person. She has all sorts of problems with, like, depression and amnesia and stuff. Oh, but, she’s trans, so, like, that’s a thing, yeah. I don’t like talking about most things with her because she thinks she’s always right. And also, she’s kind of mean to our mom. I don’t know why she does that. But at the same time she’s, like, really sensitive, and will be offended by the stupidest things. Okay, this is making it sound like I don’t like her, but I do, okay? She’s my sister, of course I love her. We’ve bonded a lot. She’s moving to DC in October, so we’ll be able to hang out during the school year, and that’ll be really fun. I think I’m just a little fed up with her right now from having to live with her for a whole month.“

April 2: Post your red instead selfie today! Alternatively, you could talk about why you choose to go redinstead and what it means to you.

I don’t know what “redinstead” is. I googled it and it sounds like you wear differently-themed stuff from what’s recommended by Autism Speaks, to dunk on them. Like a lot of people, I’m stuck inside this April, so there’s no point in me wearing pride clothing, because nobody will see it. But I do disapprove of Autism Speaks, because they don’t treat autistic people like people, and they try to spread that ideology. If you trick them into thinking you’re a person first, they won’t change their mind; instead, they’ll say you’re not autistic. People defend them by recounting the problems that nonverbal autistic people face, as though nonverbal autistic people have an inherently worse neurotype than everyone else, and not just one that’s more difficult to accomodate for society, and as though that justifies the abuses levied against them by Autism Speaks. I could go into details, but I won’t, because it would be emotionally draining for me as a writer, and you as a reader.

Suffice to say, I love being autistic. It has inspired a lot of people to treat me very badly, and probably led to a degree of abuse and neglect in my childhood that resulted in dissociative identity disorder. But all of my autistic traits are things that I love about myself. I like how emotionally expressive my stims make me. I like how I’ve learned to dissect a lot of social stuff and I can explain it. I like how I can just dispense with all of that social stuff around autistic people. Hell, I think it gives the neurotypical people I hang out with some relief, too, when I’m straightforward and explicit all the time. I like how good I am at linguistics, and how I can use it as a way to relate to the world.

April 3: Talk about special interests. Do you have any? What are they? How long have you had them? What does it feel like to have special interests? What does having special interests mean to you? Talk about your past special interests

My special interests are unusually slow burns. I’ve had linguistics-related special interests for the past ten years. They’re peripherally useful for language learning, but mostly I’ve just accumulated academic knowledge. They’ve, however, also led me to reconnect with my Ugric heritage culture, which is very important to me. (It wouldn’t be important to me if language weren’t my primary way of relating to the world; paradox?)

I have a wide variety of other interests, but few of them are really “special”. As a kid, my special interest was marine life. Unfortunately, I haven’t retained much of that, although I do have the privilege of having a diver’s license, which I’ll use again someday when I pass better naked. I also briefly had a special interest in… building computers, or something. I didn’t have the money to make anything particularly powerful (not that I had anything at the time to use computational power for), but I did run some workshops for middle-schoolers.

I think maybe my interest as a kid in Homestuck was special? It ran pretty deep, anyway. It’s hard to say, when you can’t remember most of your life.

April 4: Do you consider your autism to be an important part of your identity?

Because we have DID (or something like it), we don’t have an identity in the traditional sense. We do have a system identity, but that’s built around our mutual goals and guidelines. However, we’d be very sad to lose our autistic traits. Also, it might mess with the standard of consistency we’ve established for ourselves; we might not be able to predict our future actions, because losing our autistic traits may interfere with our ability to follow the aforementioned goals and guidelines, which are what help keep us focused and consistent.

April 5: Talk about your living situation. Do you live with your parents? Do you live on your own? Have roommates? Etc. If you live on your own how hard was it to get used to?

Right now, I’m quarantining with my mom, my sister, and my brother (who is actually my sister’s boyfriend), at my mom’s house. The mess that’s accumulating in the house is slowly causing my mom more and more stress, I think. I’ve never really lived on my own. For a lot of college, I lived with roommates or housemates, but I don’t think I was very good at that. Also, my mom lived nearby, and I stayed at her place on the weekends. The closest I’ve come to living on my own is watching my mom’s house for up to a few weeks at a time, and that wasn’t sustainable. (To be fair, what kind of house has a lawn? When I get a house with a lawn in the future, I will make sure that it’s a wild lawn that I don’t have to mow.)

The third to last time that I house-sitted for my mom, I ended up getting hospitalized for self-harm. It took her a while to let me do it again after that. Although, not a very long while, I guess. That was at the end of last September.

April 6: Are you able to drive? If you can, was it hard for you to learn? If not, what alternatives do you use, if any

I’m not able to drive. Driving is scary and difficult for me. I went through the motions of learning it in high school, but my track was interrupted by a move across state lines (I lived in the US at the time), and I never recovered. I’ve failed the NJ written driver’s exam, which grants you a one-year permit with restrictions, a total of roughly ten times. I’ve never been this bad at a subject; it’s like I have the opposite of a special interest in driving. A special lack-of-interest. My brain won’t retain any information about NJ driving laws whatsoever. It doesn’t help that I had a traumatic car crash when I was very young.

So far, I’ve just gotten my mom and coworkers to drive me places, or taken Ubers or trains. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that if I leave NJ, I’ll probably have to get a driver’s license. Although, I’ve already got a carpool set up at my next job in October.

April 7: Talk about autism in the media. Do you think that autism is typically portayed well? Badly? Is there anything you’d like to see more of when it comes to autistic representation? Who are your favorite autistic characters? Do you have any headcanons?

The media that I consume doesn’t really have autistic characters, so I can’t comment on how autistic people are portrayed, except that I’d like us to be portrayed more, period. I’ve only really seen us in teen dramas. To be fair, one of my favorite webcomics, El Goonish Shive, is a teen drama, and has a great autistic character (Susan). I’d say I identify with her, but not really. It’s very hard for me to identify with people, fictional or nonfictional, because my neurotype is greatly influenced by autism, DID, chronic depression, and gender dysphoria, and you don’t see combinations of traits in media that come even close to that.

Speaking of another teen drama, I wish I were half as cool as Matilda from Everything’s Gonna Be Okay. I guess that makes her my favorite canon autistic character, but that’s pretty easy, because I don’t know any other ones. I can’t say that I wanna hug her, because she doesn’t like that, but her general substitute for hugs is dancing, and I can’t dance. I guess I’d learn how, to show my appreciation for her.

Archer from Archer is probably autistic. I like him a lot.

April 8: What are some misconceptions/stereotypes about autism that you hate?

“Hating” is not something I can really do, even when it’s recommended to do it. I haven’t been open about my autism, so I haven’t been exposed to too many misconceptions or stereotypes about it firsthand, anyway. I guess if I had to pick, it would be whatever made my dad call me autistic as an insult and use a bunch of ableist slurs at me a whole lot. I don’t know how he understands autism, however. He doesn’t seem to realize that he has it himself. (It’s not usually one’s place to diagnose other people like that, but one of the most degrading things that my mom says to me very often is that I’m exactly like my father. He even has some traits that I don’t, like touch-aversion and samefoods.)

April 9: How sensitive are you when it comes to touch? Are you pro hug or anti hug?

I’m hyposensitive. I’m really losing it here under this quarantine. I had a girlfriend who always made me feel so respected whenever she responded to my touch-based needs, by squeezing me, hugging me, or otherwise cuddling me very tight, but then she broke up with me because of my mental health issues, and because her parents hated me and her friends were made very uncomfortable by me.

April 10: Do you have trouble understanding when someone is being sarcastic or joking?

It depends. I think I’m as good at it as I’ll ever be, and my false negative rate is under 0.5 (and my false positive rate is very low, but not 0). But I don’t think the same thing goes on in my head as in neurotypical people’s heads when I determine something to be a joke. I almost explicitly do a Bayesian calculation; “Based on what I know about this person and this context, how well can I imagine them meaning this statement unironically in this context? How well can I imagine them meaning this statement ironically in this context?” It’s pretty automatic now, but sometimes it doesn’t work very well, when I’m not so familiar with the person and/or the context, and occasionally the intended interpretation of the statement.

#2020 #30daysofautismacceptance

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edsperegrine · 5 years

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Musings on gender

So I want to talk a little bit about gender, specifically my gender and my feels around it.

Where to begin... my external and internal bits are what you'd expect from a cis woman (breasts, vagina, uterus, ovaries, wide hips, &c). Hormonally it's a bit more complex - I have very low circulating estrogen (apparently below that of a standard postmenopausal woman, apparently this is due to being on hormonal birth control), barely menstruate (I haven't had a full-on period in probably more than a decade now), and (thank goodness) no longer have cramps. Plus my vagina is dry as a desert, and I have difficulty with penetrative sex due to vaginismus resulting from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome's effect on my pelvic floor musculature (long story short: my muscles are in permanent spasm holding my hips together, which makes penetration really hard because I physically can't relax the muscles). Pre-birth control I had heavy irregular crampy periods and I can't say I miss them much. Never been pregnant, have lactated once due to medication (fun! not actually fun).

So that's the biological side of it. I'm definitely not intersex or anything on that spectrum; the hormonal weirdness started after birth control treatment, and hasn’t been a lifelong thing for example.

When I was a teenager I wondered if I was FTM trans - oddly I grew up knowing about trans* folks before I knew about queerdom in general, mostly because my stepfather's roomie in college was an early MTF trans pioneer activist, and trans* identity was seen as a good, normal thing people could have (I was super lucky in this, most folks I know never had this as a normalized phenomenon as kids). I put it down at the time to an inadequate supply of good female role models in my fantasy/sci-fi literature and never really thought about it much. I've always been a tomboy, uncomfortable with typical performative "feminine" things like makeup, hairstyling, fashion, going to the bathroom in groups, yadda yadda. I wandered through most of my young adulthood pretty sure I was a cis woman. I certainly wasn't a trans man, and those were the only choices, right?

I met a few nonbinary folks in grad school, and it honestly took me a while to come to terms with the existence of gender as a non-binary phenomenon; I was fine with the idea that you could cross from one bank of the river to the other, but confused by the idea that you could exist somewhere in the middle, or outside the whole thing entirely. It took living with an (awesome!) nonbinary person during postdoc #1 to wrap my head around gender as a complex phenomenon rather than a simple binary switch, but now I'm firmly on board and a bit shamefaced about how long it took to get there! Whoo cis privilege.

Fast forward to postdoc #2, where I do fieldwork in Panamá. Compared with other places I've lived (USA, UK, Switzerland), the gender culture in Panamá is very different, far more 'typical' Mediterranean. Most relevantly to me, women (or anyone appearing different, actually) are subject to street harassment at a painful rate, ranging from elevator eyes, catcalls, invitations, horn honking, slow driving, and even police harassment. Very few Panamánian men are completely innocent of this behavior; the majority I interact with in person are like this, and it's disgusting. There is no good answer to this; although we talk a lot about fieldwork safety we usually discuss being targeted by other fieldwork colleagues, not being targeted by the culture as a whole. Oh well.

My months in Panamá were a whole new ball game where street harassment was concerned. In the US I'd occasionally dressed androgynously when I knew I might be a target (late night bus rides in Seattle come to mind), and I'd been a target on occasion, but it was fairly rare. In Panamá it was every day. I began to feel less and less female as time went on, and I was there for five months. When I returned to the UK it was a revelation - men on the street didn't stare, didn't catcall, and I could trust that the average man wasn't thinking about me as a sex object. Wow. I felt more comfortable being female in the UK, where being female doesn't automatically mean being sexually harassed on a daily basis.

So now, what is my gender? I'm not sure. I know I'm not male, I don't identify as trans* either. Demigirl doesn't feel quite right either (I prefer demiwoman, actually, it feels less... juvenile? patronizing? but if it's not my identity it's not really my place to say anyhow). I feel somewhere in that gray area between female and agender, with no tinge of male. I don't feel particularly fussed about pronouns; I use female ones because I'm used to them and it's what people default to based on my appearance. I am happy with singular they as well. Male pronouns feel a bit weird but not objectionable most of the time. No draw to other pronouns.

Two things influence my gender as well: my asexuality and my perhaps-autism-spectrum. As someone who is firmly asexual, I... don't get sexual attraction to people of any gender (maybe once or twice ever). I don't understand how sexual attraction even works! In some ways I feel that if I were e.g. heterosexual I would find defining my gender more easy because it would be the opposite of (or at least different to) what I was attracted to. Since I can't define my gender by my sexuality, out the door that goes. On the second point, I don't have a formal diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) but I am probably on the spectrum (it sure explains a lot of childhood & adulthood stuff). Lydia X. Z. Brown has discussed the term 'gendervague', writing:

"For many of us, gender mostly impacts our lives when projected onto us through other people’s assumptions, but holds little intrinsic meaning... For many (but certainly not all) autistic people, we can’t make heads or tails of either the widespread assumption that everyone fits neatly into categories of men and women or the nonsensical characteristics expected or assumed of womanhood and manhood." (https://www.aane.org/gendervague-intersection-autistic-trans-experiences/)

This feels close to me - in some ways I feel that I don't "get" gender the same way I don't "get" sexual attraction. What is gender anyways? What is it for, how is it useful? I sure don't use it to choose who to hit on in a bar! I don't precisely *forget* what gender an acquaintance is, but when I think of, say, Bob, the first thing that pops to mind sure isn't Bob's gender, but instead his hobbies, how we know each other, etc. I could describe Bob as a man, but it feels irrelevant somehow.

So, what am I, anyways? My body is a somewhat hormonally weird female body (in my case I am comfortable referring to my body as female for shorthand's sake, though I understand for many people this may not be an okay way to refer to their own bodies). My gender feels like it exists in some weird space between agender, female, demiwoman, and gendervague - the closest major category is probably nonbinary, with fluctuations on a daily basis (but genderfluid feels wrong, since the fluctuation space is relatively small most days).

In "Brave New World," Huxley introduces the term "freemartin" to refer to humans (as opposed to its traditional use in cattle) - XX people who are given a dose of testosterone before birth, rendering them sterile, and likely qualifying them as intersex people. In cattle, freemartinism happens when a cow is carrying twins; the female receives some cells in utero from her brother and becomes a chimera, externally female but infertile, somewhat masculinized. With my weird low estrogen levels (never had the other hormones tested), in some ways I feel like a freemartin - bodily surely female, hormonally less female. Though obviously not intersex, so maybe it's not such a great term, but it just FEELS right somehow.

So perhaps I exist as a freemartin, nonbinary human. I'm still not sure; this is a living, evolving phenomenon for me.

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stimsensory · 5 years

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I Am Autism Video

In 2009, Autism Speaks released the following video. WARNING: Ableism.

The video starts with ominous music, the kind you may expect to hear in a tacky horror movie before the minority character is killed off.

A deep voice speaks over the music. The video shows children sitting or standing alone.

The voice (representing autism) proclaims to be ‘invisible to you until it’s too late’.

Too late for what? I suppose this references Early Intervention and the fact that many professionals recommend starting therapy for autism as early as possible to help children. Implying those of us diagnosed later cannot be helped?

‘I know where you live. And guess what? I live there too’. See I find this kind of funny. It reminds me of people who describe autistic people as ‘living with autism’. I just imagine myself having a roommate (aka Autism) who stims in the corner, listens to music over and over, and often forgets to shower. That’s not what autism is. We are not neurotypical (non-autistic) people who are trapped by an autistic person. We are autistic. I’m not living with autism, autism is a part of me that influences everything I experience.

‘I hover around all of you’. Bit creepy to be honest. Also implies the whole ‘everyone’s a bit autistic’ thing. 🙄

Then the voice states that it knows no colour barrier, no religion, no morality, no currency. The first two points are actually good; autism occurs in people regardless of sex, skin colour, gender, sexuality, religion, class, income, etc. Of course, no morality… I don’t even know what they could imply there other than that autism has no morality (which is a confusing concept).

‘With every voice I take away I acquire yet another language’. Pretty sure that’s not how learning a language works. Though it would have made GCSE Spanish much easier… Plus, speech is not the only method of communication.

‘I work very quickly. I work faster than paediatric AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined’. Wow. The voice compares autism to AIDS, cancer, and diabetes. Well first of all, autism doesn’t kill you. Autism is, in my opinion, not in any way comparable to these diseases. Autism is a disorder, not a disease. Autism is a difference in your brain that can cause you to struggle in this non-autistic world. It can disable you.

It is still not comparable to those diseases. And it’s offensive to people who have gone through those diseases to suggest so.

‘If you are happily married, I will make sure that your marriage fails’. Autism can cause stress in parents of autistic people, and in the autistic people themselves. This stress could cause a marriage to become strained. People may divorce because of the stress. But autism is not a sure cause of divorce. Evidence: my parents are happily married. Whilst parents of autistic kids are more likely to get divorced, it is far from a sure thing and should not be portrayed as such. '

‘Your money will fall into my hands and I will bankrupt you for my own self gain’. Autism can be expensive due to therapies, the high rate of co-morbidities that may need treating (such as epilepsy), sensory/stim toys, and other aspects. But it’s not the fault of the autistic child. There needs to be more support for autistic people and their parents/caregivers.

‘I will make it virtually impossible for your family to easily attend a temple, a birthday party, a public park, without a struggle, without embarrassment, without pain’. So not being able to go to these places is comparable to having AIDS, cancer, or diabetes? I think not. I struggle to go to birthday parties because the loud noises cause me physical pain. So I bring headphones and make sure I have an escape plan just in case. Also, you have to love how they are focused completely on the parents pain and embarrassment, rather than the child’s physical pain from being forced to go to these places. The embarrassment is not the fault of the child, it is the fault of judgemental people who do not understand or accept autism.

‘Your neighbours are happier to pretend I don’t exist. Until of course, it’s their child’. Autism isn’t infectious… my neighbours kids aren’t gonna turn autistic just because I am. And pretending autism doesn’t exist is generally due to lack of understanding and acceptance. People don’t like to discuss horrible things, so when you phrase autism as this horrid thing that has taken your child of course they don’t want to hear it. If you talk about it openly, and if the media actually portrays it accurately then maybe it will no longer be seen as something to be ashamed of and ignored.

‘I have no interest in right or wrong’. That is actually often incorrect. Many autistic people have a strong sense of morality, and many (such as myself) deal with great anxiety over doing something ‘wrong’ or breaking rules. Gotta love the spread of misinformation.

‘I derive great pleasure out of your loneliness’.

…you can tell they didn’t consult with autistic people on this. Why on earth would someone’s loneliness bring me pleasure? If someone feels lonely, I don’t feel happy, I feel sad. Why would they even think this? Because autistic people need to be alone to calm down from sensory overload? That is not a malicious attempt to make you feel lonely. That is us taking care of our overworked sensory systems and trying to calm ourselves down.

‘And to autism I say: I am a father, mother, grandparent, brother, sister… we will spend every waking hour trying to weaken you’. Guys, autism isn’t the boss at the end of a video game. You can’t attack it and weaken it by decreasing it’s HP and then win the game. It’s a part of us.

‘Autism, you forget who we are. You forget who you are dealing with. You forget the spirits of mothers and daughters and fathers and sons…’ I honestly don’t understand this line. Autism is a part of your child, they know who you are. This is confusing.

‘We search with technology and voodoo, prayer, herbs, genetic studies’. This is how we get fake ‘cures’ and products that fool parents of autistic kids. No offence to people who believe in some of these things, but they cannot cure autism. Nothing can. So claiming they can just costs people money and energy.

‘You think that because my child lives behind a wall, I’m afraid to knock it down with my bare hands?’ We don’t live behind a wall. We live in this world, but perceive it differently. It’s overwhelming. So sometimes, we have to block it out. Destroying that block is only going to hurt us by exposing us to the overwhelming world our there. The noises and lights don’t hurt you, but they hurt me.

Stop assuming that everyone experiences the world the same way as you do, and that autistic behaviour has no purpose.

https://www.stimsensory.co.uk/blog/2019/4/1/i-am-autism-video

#autistic #autism #ActuallyAutistic #actually autistic #autism awareness #AutismAwareness #autism acceptance #AutismAcceptance #autism speaks #AutismSpeaks #blog #blogger

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bitchsexuality · 6 years

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gaycatastrophe ha respondido a tu publicación “ok so… i don’t know how to explain this, and i DEFNITELY don’t know...”

(2/2) which for me was because I felt like, just like i was focused on how my body looked as a spectator, I had to passively signal as specifically as possible my unique relation to myself and how/with whom i experienced attraction as if i were like...a product on a shelf, and working through all that at once actually made me much less aware of my body while also feeling like i exist in it w/o dissociating. Idk if that makes sense or is helpful but i had a very strong #samefeel from your post

gaycatastrophe ha respondido a tu publicación “ok so… i don’t know how to explain this, and i DEFNITELY don’t know...”

I have a theory which explains my own similar experience, that may or may not apply to you at all but here goes: i experienced a similar feeling when sorting through over a decade of mostly gender-and-sexuality-related trauma and reframing myself as subject rather than object in my head. At the same time I went through a period of micro-labeling and changing labels all the time, (1/2)

OKAY WOW YEAH that’s. actually a really interesting way of looking at it i’d never thought of before and it Resonates. like i’m not sure if that’s the entirety of it -i kinda get the feeling that there are a lot of things behind this, like general trauma, mental illness, etc etc, it’s just a jumble of fuck- but what you said about “subject rather than object” is so accurate holy shit, that’s exactly how i see myself... or rather not see myself... a lot of the time

it really is like i’m not a part of myself, i’m just something meant for the Outside, and it’s because of that that i stop perceiving myself and regarding myself as an actual person rather than a spectacle meant for others, like i have to perform Myself and there’s no Myself really because it’s all kinda created for consumption or sth god i’m just KHUDSFHGFSDKUHK

and what you said is also really accurate re.: gender-and-sexuality trauma, especially considering a) the fact that my gender is basically a nebulous, undefined, mildly girl-leaning Autism Gender, and b) how long i spent questioning myself and sort of floating in a very uncomfortable in-between where i was too scared to accept myself as bi and, most importantly, as Me without relying on outside influence and perception (which is still a work in progress lmao)

i also got a very strong #samefeel from your reply u explained this so well and i relate so much omg

#gaycatastrophe #otherworldly whispers #ask me to tag -. /#existing is just... it really is Something #but god yeah i think the 'product on a shelf' thing you mentioned is a BIG part of this #i hope i understood correctly btw!! like you explained it very well but i just have like. poor reading comprehension skills jffgsdfg especia #*especially since i'm a bit tired #also as always the replies are in the wrong order and as ALWAYS idk how to fix that

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