#like i get it u want to take power from oppressors or whatever but using this jokingly will alienate other queers in ur life

[feralthembo]

I am BEGGING yall to remember that "gay panic" means "i killed this person because theyre gay so you cant jail me for it" and NOT "UwU too gay to function"

Yall CANNOT reclaim this one please stop trying

[nonbinaryresource]

ive been thinking abt this for a little while & have been needing to ask someone abt it. i am nb & have always considered myself trans but recently ive not been vibing with the trans label bc i am so sick of seeing ppl exclude & invalidate nb ppl. ik that i shouldnt stop doing smth just bc other ppl r being assholes but its so tiring to see ppl constantly say how u dont belong or arent valid. srry this is long & kinda rambly i just dont really know how to feel abt it

I will directly address your ask, but I’m going to start by telling you a story about my journey with identifying as asexual and queer.

.

When I was about 11, my friends suddenly started drooling over magazines and calling people hot, and I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I did not feel whatever it is my friends were feeling.

Until I was about 16/17, this part of me remained a mystery to me and to my friends. I never had crushes, I never found people hot, I never liked complimenting people physically, I was uncomfortable with sex on TV, and I didn’t even like platonic touch. Now my group of friends were all repressed and closeted queer folk, so I didn’t have to deal with “being left behind” as my friends dated. But the later we got into high school, the more my friends began discovering and exploring their sexualities.  A freshman became a part of our friend group and was openly trans and gay. One friend came out as gay. Another as bi. They started commenting more and more about other’s looks and having crushes.

Still, there was nothing on my end. My friends used to think I was just being vague and secretive because this is what I tended to be like. I don’t think they’ve ever realized how much of it was that I truly didn’t know or understand what my lack of sexual feelings meant or that it could even mean anything. I used to just consider it a “nothingness” of myself. Until, by complete chance, I came across the term asexual. I immediately connected with it. It explained so much that I didn’t even know I needed explained.

I came out quickly after that and I was really excited and happy and proud to know who I was and what how I felt meant. My friends were great and supportive. My mom was a little ignorant but overall supportive. AVEN was great and a community for me. But if I tried to talk about it anywhere else online…

Well, the effects of how people treated me would fester for years. See, I came out as asexual before exclusionism (the specific movement of anti-aro and anti-ace erasure and gatekeeping from lgbt+ spaces) was a movement or a named thing. Yet exclusionist attitudes were exactly what I faced. My queer friends all completely accepted me as one of them and I helped co-run our school’s new GSA with the rest of them. But online, as a teen, I was facing 30+ year olds telling me I wasn’t queer and that I was just trying to seem special and that I needed to shut up about my asexuality and my experiences and that I wasn’t valid and that asexuality wasn’t a real thing and that even if asexuality was a real thing it wasn’t valid and it certainly didn’t matter.

I graduated high school and went to college and was no longer really in touch with my group of friends. I therefore completely cut myself off from any lgbt+/queer community, even though a friend invited me to join the college’s queer association. I stopped participating so much in online asexual spaces. I become wrapped up in other things.

A couple of years went by and a lot of things in my life changed. By chance, mod applications for a blog about aro and ace headcanons for a fandom I enjoyed came across my dash. I had extra time on my hands and thought I could help, so I applied and was accepted. This increased my exposure to the aspec community again and thrust me back in… just around the time exclusionism was becoming a specific and named movement of bigotry.

At the same time I resisted these ideals, I was also still hurt and unhealed from what I’d gone through as a teen. I internalized a lot of the hatred and gatekeeping. I was so hurt and so tired. I just wanted to be able to exist in peace. And people I considered myself one of were harassing me and dismissing even my biromanticism. So I struggled with my identity and my asexuality. I did not specifically become an exclusionist, but I turned my back on the lgbt+ community and spaces. I did not consider myself lgbt+ because I learned that doing so only brought pain and upset and made me feel alone and isolated. I didn’t speak a lot on exclusionism or inclusionism, but at some point I did make a plea to my fellow aspecs to just let the larger community go and be our own community and accept that maybe we could be straight. I did it out of desperation and hurt, wanting to stop feeling targeted and attacked and to stop seeing the fighting on my dash and in the tags. I just wanted us all to be happy and feel accepted and supported.

On that post, one wonderfully kind and patient person opened up a discussion with me, explaining their own hurts over exclusionism and being so damn exhausted of them and fellow aspecs being targeted and excluded and written out and not supported and feeling like they had to split their asexuality from their other queer identities and how being asexual was a part of them and how it had strongly shaped their experiences, especially with realizing and coming to terms with the other parts of their queer identity. And through their raw honesty I came to realize… I had never stopped to process the harassment I had faced and the pain and hurt that cut me so deeply.

It was a changing point for me. I realized that I had handled my pain in a bad way and had ended up lashing out at other aspecs instead of the people who were actually hurting me. I realized how much I had hurt myself and held myself back and cut myself down and dismissed parts of myself trying to fit into the box exclusionists had laid out for me, as if I could ever made them happy enough to stop harassing me and just let me exist. I cut myself down for them, but the truth is that exclusionists don’t just want aspecs “out” of the community. They want to hurt us. They want us to hurt. They want us to doubt ourselves. They want to feel strong and powerful, and they feel they can achieve this through bullying us. Perhaps some, like myself, are trying to appeal to their oppressors by pointing out another vulnerable group they could target more/instead. They are passing on hurt instead of standing up to it and so they are actually festering in hurt instead of changing anything.

Today, I am a staunch inclusionist. I understand myself and the issues aspecs face much better. I am a more compassionate person regarding the confusion and upset aros and aces have over their identity and their place in the world. I feel more stable and confident regarding my identity as an asexual - and now as an aromantic - queer person who is lgbt+.

But it was a long, hard, difficult journey to get here. It was full of a lot of turmoil. I wish I would have had a happier journey where I felt more supported and accepted, and I hope I can help provide more stability and support for future generations to not have to go through what I did.

.

My point (or one among a few, anyway) is that I deeply and personally understand how you are feeling and the decision facing you now. As someone who went through a very similar experience, my advice to you is to take care of yourself and to prioritize your mental health.

It’s okay if you can’t handle identifying as trans right now. Maybe you do need some space from the label (and definitely from the hatred and gatekeeping). Maybe you need to pull back from certain communities or blogs or discussions.

However, I will say that not identifying as trans may not bring the peace you desire. It may end up making you feel even more isolated. Not identifying as LGBT+ certainly didn’t help me. It was reactionary and it only made me feel like there were less spaces for me. That said, you may find peace in this. But I think the bigger action to take is to separate yourself from those who are saying harmful things more than to separate yourself from a label you feel really suits you. Use your block button liberally. Don’t force yourself to partake in spaces where gatekeeping is allowed or encouraged. Follow and listen to more people who are inclusive.

I think burnout like this is unfortunately pretty common. You do not have to force yourself to face this hatred or exhaustion because you think it’s the right thing to do. It’s okay to pull back and just take care of yourself. Just work on some self-care. Work on building up a community of people around you who don’t resort to bigotry and hatred and exorsexism and gatekeeping and identity policing. Engage only with what you can actually, honestly handle.

We will confront and move past this bigotry only by acting as a united front. The responsibility for improving things isn’t on any one person’s shoulders. And no one needs to be on the front lines 100% of the time, especially at the cost of their own wellbeing. Take care of yourself and rest now before you completely burn out and break down.

You do not have anything to prove, okay? I have both hope and faith that there is a lot more to your journey - a lot more good things and a lot more happiness and belonging. Take whatever time it is you need to help heal yourself and recover from the hurt and harassment that’s been plaguing you. You are important and you matter, much moreso than whatever label you use at whatever point in time. It will be okay.

I am here for you.

~Pluto

[adultprivilege]

U might not wanna answer this since i'm a tcc blog and and I respect that 100%, that being said.. what age group do you think experiences ageism the hardest/most severely? toddlers? children? adolescents? people in their 20s? thanks for ur insight! nice blog btw. eye-opening.

Since I’m bored and I’d rather not work on my microcontrollers homework, I’ll answer your question, and add in a rant as to a youth rights lens as to why crushing on your teacher is bad juice.

Between 2nd and 9th grade, which is a pretty large slice of the pie, but I think they’re roughly the ones who are most oppressed under adultism. Any younger than that, and while your freedoms are much more severely restricted, your expectations are limited, and your capacity to appreciate that your freedoms are severely restricted are limited (which I guess is creepy in its own right). Once you’re past 9th grade, you have more options to escape your oppression, at 13 you gain the right to use the internet without lying (which opens you up with the ability to fight adults, such as the middle schoolers who exposed their mean principal for never having attended college), at 14 the right to work (on a limited basis, but money is indistinguishable from freedom under capitalism), at 15/16, the right to drive (this is kind of useless unless you’re like wealthy, but I’ll take what I can get). Once you’re in your 20s, while you still experience adultism, there’s a much bigger capitalism component to your adultism. If you’re 20 and you have a million dollars, you might as well be 30, whereas a person like me, I’m still living at home, and still attending college, so I’m basically the same as someone who is 18. Though really, there’s a huge intersectionality thing to all adultism, it’s a big component of the kyriarchy, like, it’s really hard to make sure that all black people grow up poor if you can’t torture them when they’re young. Ditto LGBT people, I know people in their 30s still cleaning up from the adultism-enhanced-homophobia they dealt with in their youths. And if you want to not eat today, you could look up troubled teen facilities, such as conversion therapy, the JRC, certain teen drug treatment programs, some people never grow out of adultism, because they’re killed by it. Anyways, I’m bringing that up because there are separate age components to different oppressions, like, homophobia and transphobia tend to not be deadly until puberty, so, for LGBT folks, that bracket narrows a bit to between 6th and 9th grade (if you’re not American, you might need to do some googling). Ditto people of color, you tend to not be viewed as dangerous until slightly before puberty, narrowing that bracket, between 5th and 9th grade. And if you’re Miley Cyrus, or someone supremely rich, your worse years are going to be your earlier years, because wealth gives you access to advanced education and such, so 2nd through 6th grade is probably the worst for the super-rich. And then weird circumstances, like I’ve said that adultism and capitalism are really linked, but like, parents really took 2008 out on their kids. So like [whatever age you were alive and a minor during a major recession] could be the worst year. 

And now for the callout post, why TF would you love your oppressors, fool. For those of you who don’t know, TCC is the teacher crush community, like students that have crushes on their teachers. Anyways, there’s a post somewhere out there on this site that talks about how society encourages women to view anxiety as love, and I think that applies to other groups, like, if you’re in a minority group, you’re kind of encouraged to see anxiety as love, I can’t find the post, if someone could find it, that would be great. Anyways, just like reading through the TCC tag just seems rlly Stockholmy syndrome, it’s like things like “It was within his power as a teacher to be a total asshat, but he treated me like a human uwu” Like, your teacher is only cute because the rest of your teachers are absolute shitlords, you deserve a cutie who is cute in the context of other people who have basic human decency, not a person whose only redeeming quality is that they have basic human decency. It’s not healthy to love someone whose job is to enforce adultism, in the same way that it’s not healthy for a black person to love George Zimmerman, or for a gay guy to date Milo Yiannopoulos. That’s my tea tho.

-ademainalors

[rametarin]

For real tho

As a kid, women as a sex had the capacity to support themselves by gaslighting, deferring importance to a conversation and consigning it to the waste bin of relevance, or do so by way of saying, “I don’t want any part of that conversation,” so it’d die.

When women do this, conversation literally dies, because the only thing men can do after that is refuse to drop it, in which case the issue among women mutates into, “men are FORCING US to talk about stuff we don’t want to.” And that becomes a higher priority of contention than whatever the original problem was. Women’s hypoagency takes forefront any time women decide it should, and there’s absolutely nothing an individual man can do about it, and if they decide they will not tolerate a group of men holding the issue important without relationship or familial consequences of distance or non-compliance or non-cooperation, there’s nothing we can do about it.

So posts like that one of a woman being caught snitching on the whole, “Haha. I’m using my position as a nurturer and caretaker to abuse you in the future,” when the common female complaint was, “men either don’t trust us because we’re women or they don’t open up because they’re paranoid and can’t deal with being fragile,” they’re as good as gold for the discourse.

As a kid I heard that disgusting, “Proof? :^) Do you have proof women do that? :^) Can you prove it?” thing more than once. And it’s a trap. Because you can’t. There’s no think tank a man can go to to prove anything negative about women that, at the time, women (generally the ones drawing from feminist literature and support groups and sources) would not accept any think tank pieces from, “religious fundamentalist” or “republican” sources. And since all the major academic groups tended to favor gynosupremacist narratives, like the Heritage Foundation favors big business, you either had a poisoned well to draw water from, or you had nothing at all and were but a single man.

Meanwhile they could throw all the biased sources at you they wanted, “verified by professionals and degree bearing scientists in their fields of secular study,” (what amounted to cooked-books written by Twelve Nancies Agreeing on wives tales and truisms and absolutes as facts.) and decide to play the card of talking to you like you were a fussy baby before their logical and reasonable superiority.

In fact, the distinct angry sassiness of American fedoralords and “PROOF? PROOF? U HAVE PROOF? THEN NO HAW HAW HAW IDIOT LOOK AT THE IDIOT.” really harkens back to that era. Because I remember that shit. That was just the more masculine version of social relations on those pretenses.

Rather than outwardly call you an idiot or attack you, the girls would more signal your disagreement as why you’d be excluded from their groups in the future and made fun of as a non-entity/irrelevant entity to their circles.

Just. The sheer power that comes from female socialization and being able to be defacto part of that and being UNABLE to participate in that as a male. And the power that comes from HAVING that special socialization privilege, but it not be considered any kind of privilege, because, “Men have the privilege and are the oppressors.” Your privileges get to be invisible and exempt from criticism, context or consideration. It’s uncanny. To be above reproach as a sex, and somehow still the oppressed. Individual males that challenge that lose the safety of the herd and become marked for, “whatever happens to them,” if women feel at risk or upset. So there’s always that pressure not to go get that discourse ball if it lands in too strong and entrenched of a female court.

And no similar respect is paid to discourse that lands in the male court. Because no male issue gets to exist without its interpretation as either oppression of a female issue, or be a derivative of a female issue. You can touch our stuff, we can’t touch yours.

... So yeah.

Technology has made all the difference, because it allows a greater pool of experiences and interactions and lowest common denominators, it allows time stamps, it allows the potential for accountability. Women can no longer just ignore reality until the problem goes away and pretend they didn’t see a thing, so it doesn’t exist, and will be excluded from consideration in future conversations. And hope other women don’t see it, or that other women that do see it, realize they need to participate in denying it happened. The number of weak links in the chain go up and strain the hegemony.

And I am happy.

[glowyelfboyfriend]

I want to know how you would write Trespasser if you were given the chance to change it from that bullshit that Bioware threw into our faces. Like how would you go about telling the story?

I saw this yesterday then rambled about it for at least an hour to my Hawke and got so mad and up upset about it and rolled around angry and Im gonna try to answer this without doing that.

Ok so, Im approaching this with the assumptions that DAI is complete, no edits can be made to it (-sigh-) so all the events happened, Solas is still around being a dick, etc etc etc. Some bioware god has just handed me a blank script and said “do whatever”

Im gonna bullet point so I ramble less:

I’m going to keep the exalted council because honestly I think that was one of only two great things trespasser had going for it. DAI and the inquisition fucked up so many political things and power structures and fucking burned massive holes in Thedas that being forced to be held accountable is GREAT!! Its so great! Also gives a good reason to have the gaggle back together (including the Divine etc etc)

I would hazard to push this FURTHER if I can, having the council do more than try to force you to dissolve the inquisition. I would want to see them charge the inquisitor and members of the inqusition with shit cause DANG we got away with a lot.

Additionally some PROPER conspiracy/politic interigue but I will get to that in a second.

I am gutting the Solas plot line. Gutting it. The outside hide of it is still good, I like the mirrors taking you from the council to fucking fucked up history between realms whatever place and I HAVE to keep Solas/FenHrel so like FINE but I am BURNING the concept of “dalish/elhven gods having secretly be Very Powerful Mages who kept slaves and fell to their own hubris and are just as bad as their tevinter oppressors” because no and Im not even going to explain WHY thats horrible and insulting.

INSTEAD. I would play the actual trickster god card. Like actual mythology and god pantheons.  I would have it that Solas was just around to fuck with you and get his shiny ball back and now that he’s got it he’s not gonna destory the veil to ‘restore his people’ but he’s gonna use it to wake the other elvhen gods the Fuck Up so he can cause chaos and run circles around them until he can best them like he did with Mythal.

Lets Wake Those Fuckers Up but keep them as gods please.

Have the Archon be assissate and replaced with a Venatori bastard. Seriously. We underused those shit heads in DAI and how much FUN would it be to have Tevinter go to level 20 out of no where and be like “We have dwindling resources and are a shadow of what we were so we are fucking COMING FOR YOU THEDAS WE ARE SENDING THE ARMIES OF SLAVES AND MAGES TO TAKE UR SHIT”

Fuck man have someone on the exalted council be in their pocket and be like “I for one welcome our new Tevinter overlords” and make you go “fuckin what”

Imagine reports coming in from the Anderfels, from Nevrarra, from the Free Marches that Tevinter armies are fucking SHOWING UP without warning and fucking pillaging villages for resources and enslaving/blood magicing the people there? IMAGINE.

I am also KEEPING the qunari invasion cause that was the OTHER good thing trespasser had. Like. GOOD. Thank god. Its about time we saw them go ‘we’ve had enough and we are coming to FIX SHIT forcibly if need be’ 

Why are they gonna start invading? CAUSE TEVINTER OBVS. They are gonna be like “Hey Thedas, we are gonna get to you later, but first we gotta unite to destroy this fucking magic evil, we’re doing it with or without ur help actually and fuck you if you think we arent gonna try and convert you suckers later”

Also they still hear about the Dread Wolf fuckery and are not about that either.

Combining more ideas - What if the tevinters be like “oh what you got some elvhen gods waking up and gonna start some shit? Well fuck you if you can kill corphyues we can kill them and steal their shit or enslave them like we did those elf rats anyways fucking watch us”

Exalted Council is a fuck show and the inquisition is not like, “oh we stepped down”, its “fuck u no more insquition” and the inquisitor being like “I lost a hand cause it was fucked up and broken and now I lost my crew and we are at square one and borderline criminals and we gotta fix the world now”

Like origins kinda now that I say that out loud

Anyways, FIGHT ME, this would be way fucking better.