#autism moment level 5000

[truecorvid]

gang i'm unwell abt unicorns

[crewneck]

literally at my moms watching a fancam of a full show of Peter Gabriel’s current tour and im sitting there trying to figure out the name of each song in like 5 seconds annoying the ever-loving hell outta my mom. this is a certified level 5000 autism moment.

[montanacarson]

**personal rant space** Seeing as I can’t have closure with the person this is aimed at, it’s going on my personal blog to get lost with all the other stuff. I was there for you through everything. I was your rock, I was your go to person when things were shit. I listened. I cared. I loved you with every single piece of me. I did everything in my power to make our relationship the best it could be. You cheated. You lied. You make me feel small. You called me crazy, insane and psycho. You manipulated me and at the end of it all I still offered my kind heart out to you for friendship. You went out slept with a girl then one hour later get home call me, put your ring back on and tell me how you want to love me forever and still be with me and how you want me to book a flight out to see you. You seemed to care at one point. You actually showed me love to start with, and all the way through I was in love with the idea of the love you could give me and there was one instance in June where you did show me love by leaving work early to help me when I fucked my ankle up but that was quickly forgotten with your comment ‘who even goes skateboarding on vacation, it’s stupid". The relationship quickly became one sided. Very quickly you began to control situations. Made it so that if you had an opinion, I felt my opinion was wrong. You told me I was wrong and it wasn’t the American way if I did something different because I’m British. You said that it ‘isn’t in your culture’ to be friends after a relationship. I am by no means saying I was perfect. No one is perfect, I yelled and got mean in heated arguments but I know truly that deep down I did everything in my power for you and I respected you and I loved you with every bit of my heart. I never lied, not once, and I never even so much as looked at another girl. Ive had you tell me you pity me, you don’t love me then you do love me. You’ve fallen out of love with me then you’re still in love with me. You told me to get over it when I almost had t cancel my £5000 summer trip. You call me mentally incapable when you’re more than aware I’ve got depression and currently being diagnosed with autism. You controlled who I could and couldn’t be friends with. You tell me I’m not a priority in your life anymore like I owe you something. You offer friendship like it’s on a level and I’m at the lowest friendship group level. You tell me that you need to protect Stephanie because she was sad today because she saw a text from me. What happened to protecting the girl who put wholeheartedly a year of her life into you? You went behind my back for 4 months! I took a brave step for myself today. I deleted my Instagram posts that showed the love and happiness we once had. I did this for myself as a sign of moving forward which is what you had asked me to do. You call me at 3am yelling at me for deleting memories but the only thing I deleted was the sadness when a photo pops up on my time hop. You’re mad I cropped you out of a photo that I posted 2 days ago. The fact I cropped you out doesn’t delete the memory that I was with you at that moment. It simply let me start to believe I could have a life without you. You block me, you tell me about dates with the girl you cheated on me with, you tell me how you nap with her when you knew the one thing I wanted in our relationship was to fall asleep with you but we couldn’t because of your parents rules. I stuck by you. You say things knowing they will hurt me and yet I STILL offered friendship. Mid conversation you stop texting and call the girl you cheated on me with. You say you can’t respect me right now because you’re on the phone and then going to sleep. You get off the phone and I ask you to call me. You say ‘I’m asleep’ and you block me completely because you needed sleep. You woke me up at 3am to yell at me for something that you can’t control anymore. No memories were deleted. I simply deleted my sadness of seeing our relationship everytime i went on the app. . I don’t care anymore. You are the lucky winner of breaking me to the point where I do not care anymore. I surely hope you manage to show some respect to other people in your life. You’re pretty. Yes. Although, you have no respect for people who truly only wanted to give you the world and you treat people like they owe you something. News flash. Nobody owes you a thing. Just because you have a new romantic interest in your life, it doesn't give you the right to so harshly treat another person (which you had 2 week before promised to marry) and with so much hateful behaviour. When someone dies nobody says “aww I’ll miss them, they were so pretty”. They say “aww I’ll miss them, they were such a nice person”. I wish people could see behind closed doors because, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. You aren’t what you appear to be. There are people who make mistakes and then there are vile people who continuously go out of their way to treat people and hurt people the way you do. Humans are flawed and do make mistakes but the amount of ‘mistakes’ you’ve made is not the doing of a flawed human. You got what you wanted, so whilst you go and run into the arms of the girl that wormed her way into our relationship, you can stop telling me how bad you feel and how sorry you are because you’ve done absolutely nothing to prove that’s the truth. I had accepted the fact the relationship was over and I only fought for friendship and that's all I asked for. In the end, all I asked for was closure and you couldn't even respect me enough to give me that.

Now, I have two words for you. Fuck. You.

[imreviewblog]

Six Facts About Gender

In the past few months there have been an increasing number of attacks on the legitimacy of transgender and gender non-conforming people coming from both the left and the right. Most of these attacks stem from either a flawed understanding of gender, misrepresentation of evidence, or deliberate obtuseness. The responses to these attacks have generally failed to address these underlying problems.

Gender and gender expression are complicated, but not nearly so much as critics would like to claim. They are also not inherently contradictory, nor anti-feminist. Indeed, they can be liberating for everyone. Here are the things you need to know about gender and gender identity in this blizzard of misinformation.

1. Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t invalidate it

Many of the most recent attacks by right wing outlets can be summarized as, “This gender theory stuff doesn’t fit my worldview; I totally can’t wrap my head around it, so it must be wrong.” However, an inability to understand something doesn’t make it wrong.

I can’t explain the physics of black holes. Our family dog will never understand the internal combustion engine either. Unlike members of the right wing media though, I’m not out there picking fights with Stephen Hawking, and my dog still likes to go for a ride in the car. The fact that transgender people seem to exist throughout human history is enough to demonstrate that gender, and transgender people, are a reality.

This brings me to my second point.

2. It is not a fad: gender non-conforming people have been around for millennia

There is extensive archaeological evidence that transgender and gender non-conforming people have existed for millennia. In Eastern Europe, 5000 year old graves were found with female skeletons buried with male warrior accoutrements. There are records of Norse women going Viking (raiding). Joan of Arc was burned for wearing men’s clothing. The Kama Sutra describes a third sex, and the Bible talks of “self-made eunuchs.” The kathoey of Thailand have a place within Buddhist writings. Other cultures have long traditions of gender non-conforming individuals, such as the hijra of Hinduism and India, the fa’a’fa’fine of the Pacific Islands, and two-spirits in Native American culture.

The reason we see more of it now is a combination of greater cultural awareness of such people, and because of changing cultural norms which allow transgender people to be more visible. For a reducto ad absurdum example, there are a lot more out gay people in California than there are in Iran or Saudi Arabia, because the difference in how they are treated. Similarly, people are much more likely to identify as LGBT in socially tolerant US states than in conservative ones.

The most cutting edge of cultural change right now is coming in the form of gender fluid and non-binary people. This is the part that conservatives have the hardest time with, but is actually just an extension of something a lot of people already do subconsciously already.

3. Gender fluid expression is something a lot of straight cisgender people do (to a degree) already

Women in American society can (and do) express their gender in ways that that can change from day to day, if not hour to hour. They can put on a business suit to feel commanding and strong at work or an interview, both of which are stereotyped as masculine traits. Or mix a jacket with a dress to keep it at a business level, but more feminine. Other times they can dress in ways that make them feel attractive, which often means much more stereotypically feminine attire.

Alternately, there are times when gender expression is completely irrelevant or gender neutral. Most every mom I know has had days when everyone in the house has the flu, and their gender expression is, “screw it I’m wearing tennis shoes, sweat pants, and a sweat shirt to the drug store for more Pedialyte.”

Women in our culture have much greater room to express their gender than men do, but this bolsters the underlying point. Given the option, straight cisgender people will change their gender expression to fit how they want to feel about themselves in that moment, whether it is sexy, strong, or comfortable. While these feelings may be tied to stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, they are deeply ingrained into how we see ourselves.

Gender-fluid people simply take this day-to-day and moment-to-moment variance in expression we see in cisgender people, and expand upon it. Thus, this is not something new, but an evolution due to increased cultural space for such expression.

So, is how we see ourselves based on nature or nurture? Conservative pundits like to ask this as a black or white, yes or no, one or the other question. The truth is more complicated, but not by much.

4. Gender has components of both nature and nurture

Demonstrating that gender has components that are social constructs is relatively easy. The colors pink and blue are not intrinsically gendered; they are merely frequencies of light. Dresses and skirts are not either; they are simply bits of fabric any human being can drape over themselves. (The fact that some people are willing to defend the morality of hurting or killing someone for wearing the “wrong” bit of fabric says a lot more about us than it does the fabric.)

At the same time, people seem to have an innate gender identity, whether female, male, or somewhere in between. Anecdotally, we can see this in Dr. John Money’s failed experiment with David Remer, who was raised as a girl but never identified as such. The guevodoces of the Caribbean similarly appear female until puberty and are raised as such as a result of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. However, at puberty their genitals descend, and are treated as male thereafter. While usually infertile, guevodoces almost universally identify as male, despite their upbringing.

A recent meta-study at Boston University looked at the peer reviewed evidence, and concluded that gender identity has biological origins, though the exact biological mechanisms remain unknown. This conclusion is not uncommon; it is effectively the same conclusion we have reached about sexual orientation and autism; namely that these have biological origins which are not fully understood.

These examples effectively contradict the notion that gender, and gender identity, are purely social construct as well. However, neither is it purely biological; there are components that are cultural. Both are significant, and observing transgender children helps square this circle. Transgender children often assert from a very early age what their gender is, and choose cultural artifacts (e.g. using a towel to make a dress) to express how they see themselves.

Thus, gender has interacting biological and social components.

5. How you were raised does not determine the reality of your gender identity

One line of argument that tries to further segregate transgender people is that they are not “real” women or men because they do not have the exact same experiences as most cisgender people. This is dangerous in the sense that it invalidates the lived experiences of a threatened minority group, while othering them and opening the door for “separate but equal” legal marginalization. It’s also wrong on a number of levels.

Transgender people are held to a double (read impossible) standard for asserting the validity of their gender identities. David Reimer was raised as a girl, but no one questioned whether he was a “real” boy when he asserted gender identity. The same is true for the guevodoces. In this, we can see that when someone asserts a gender other than the one they were raised in, it is only treated as valid if the individual’s eventual identity is cisgender.

Similarly, many transgender children are now socially transitioning at an early enough age that they will likely have almost no memory of having lived in a different gender role. Even in my case, as a “late” transitioner (mid-30’s), when I die I will likely have spent more than half my life being treated as a woman. On top of that, there’s the issue that male privilege is not monolithic.

Finally, the argument that you’re only a “real” woman if you have menstruated, are fertile, or have had children is reductionist and vaguely creepy, in a Handmaiden’s Tale kind of way. There are cisgender women who never have a period, are infertile, or choose not to have children and don’t have to defend the validity of their gender identity and expression.

6. Transgender people do not intrinsically reinforce gender stereotypes

Transgender people, by definition, go directly against societal norms for how a person should dress or act based on their assigned gender. Virtually every Circuit Court in the US has agreed with this interpretation of what it is to be transgender. However, the argument made by anti-transgender conservatives attempting to appeal to women and feminists is that when transgender people transition, they do so by adopting cultural norms and stereotypes of their target gender, thus reinforcing them.

Both cisgender and transgender people change their gender expression to match how they feel about their gender, and themselves, at any given moment. However, transgender people have traditionally had even less space to express their gender than others.

In the past, transgender people (particularly transgender women) were not allowed to medically transition unless they looked, sounded, and acted in a stereotypically feminine manner. In recent years, people who are visibly gender non-conforming have been at a much higher risk of violence than those who blend in. Religious conservatives have urged violence against transgender people; and the easiest way to avoid this is to adopt an appearance and mannerisms which blend in.

As such, if transgender people have done anything to reinforce stereotypes, it is a result of a patriarchal culture which we have no control over which severely punishes anyone who is seen to violate these stereotypes.

The final nail in the coffin of this flawed argument is that as medical culture reduced gatekeeping, and our culture is making more room for diverse gender expressions, gender non-conforming transgender people are becoming more common. This is perhaps one of the most gender transgressive developments in our culture today, and is a direct result of the work of transgender activists to begin opening this space up.

Far from reinforcing the gender binary and gender stereotypes the transgender movement is actively working against it.

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from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2qIw7Hc