Liberals are really great at standing up for the rights of the innocent. The rights of the guilty, most especially the guilty of violence, not so much. They have a tendency to melt back into the woodwork when they can’t construe the object of concern as an innocent victim, e.g. the Laverne Cox/Synthia China Blast controversy. So, when it comes up, liberals will change the topic of discussion from reducing the US prison population to the topic of releasing non-violent offenders, in a kind of wishful thinking that the problem is just that people who never needed to be removed from society were incarcerated, and once that is rectified by releasing the not-really-all-that-guilty, we can declare civil rights victory and go right on as we were towards the deserving-their-fate-wicked.
We can see this same pattern in how advocacy for the mentally ill functions: great, so long as the mentally ill in question aren’t violent.
Thus we see the horrid spectacle of activists for the rights of the mentally ill do everything in their power to distance themselves from the mentally ill who have committed or are at risk of committing violence. From those people. The bad mentally ill. The mentally ill who in some way are like the stereotypes. The ones who make the mentally ill look bad.
There’s a term for it when a minority tries to erase some of their members to make the rest of the minority look good. That would be an example of respectability politics.
Tag: THIS
Teenager 2000 : I love you
Teenager 2015 : I want to fuck youteenager 1854: the government cut off my hands because i stole a piece of bread
Teenager 1354: all the townspeople are shitting on themselves and dying
Fuck i love a good historical joke
The fact that we’ve already gotten to the point where people think that things were more innocent in the early ‘00s makes me feel like I’m typing from my deathbed.
I was a teenager in 2000 and there was absolutely zero difference except I think 2000’s teenagers actually made somewhat more aggressive sexual references and dropped way more slurs to boot.
I was 15 in 2000 and I said both “I love you” and “I want to fuck you,” and I gotta tell you, the first one screwed up my life a lot more.
^^^^
Saying that a disabled child or adult “will never live independently” is such a slap in the face. I think it’s unacceptable and I think it’s lazy. No one will ever live independently! No one is living independent of medical care, emotional support, and goods/services provided by others. Humans are a deeply interdependent species. Disabled people are sometimes rendered ~dependent~ specifically on a state or family apparatus in a way that makes them vulnerable to abuse or exploitation, but this isn’t the only way to experience “"dependency.”“
Some people are just told that they are “independent” because their lives and needs are normalized to such an extent that the enormous amount of support they receive is invisible.
heyyo here’s a fun fact for y’all
trans women don’t experience male socialization before we come out
we experience closeted trans woman socialization which is an entirely different and extremely toxic monster
thank and have a terrible day if you disagree
hi if you’re safe to do so you should probably be reblogging this
the idea that trans women are socialized as anything but women is one of the most potent arguments for stripping us of our humanity
Please remember that this fight has been a long one, dating back well over two decades and arguably far longer.
Please remember that one of the impetuses for this fight was the AIDS crisis, which remains not truly over. The still vastly imperfect way health insurance has functioned in this country has been another.
Please recognize that this is one piece in a complex puzzle – when we can die for our country, and when our love can be legally recognized as equal, it gets much harder for rationales for other forms of discrimination (e.g., employment, housing) to hold up.
Please consider that this is not just a victory for LGBTQ Americans, but for all of us, recognizing our worth regardless of the potentials of desire.
Please acknowledge that LGBTQ rights are a global battle, and that people local to each fight know the best ways to fight that fight. Let’s support them however it is most helpful to them to do so.
Please do not consider marriage as a way of erasing the very queerness of LGBTQ culture. Instead, consider the ways we can help queer all marriage, the ways we can help equalize it, by helping to break down gender stereotypes and expectations.
So many people did not get to this finish line today. There are other finish lines that so many more will not see.
Be mindful. Be urgent. And above all, today, be joyful anyway.
I’ve also been uncomfortable with how much emphasis has been placed on Caitlyn Jenner’s beauty by cis people.
Yes she is beautiful.
But a woman doesn’t have to be beautiful to deserve respect or to be a woman.
And when I see the emphasis being placed on a trans woman’s beauty when she comes out with comments like “wow she really pulled herself together,” it makes me wonder if what my fellow cis people are really saying is “she looks like what I think a woman should look like.” And where does that leave trans women who don’t meet normative (and especially cisnormative) standards of beauty?
I just want to make sure we are celebrating the beauty and worth of all trans women, not just those who are white, famous, and wealthy enough to afford any form of physical transition they desire. And that as cis people we’re being self-critical of the ways we think and speak about trans people.
PTSD and Trigger Warnings
PTSD is bad, but I doubt that telling students that an old novel has some form of graphic description is anything bit coddling. Most victims of PTSD probably feel horrified that anybody would think so low of them as to force university professors to add trigger warnings on books like The Great Gatsby!
When I was in school, which was several years ago, my high school teachers had us read stories like Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum and
Huxley’s Brave New World. Nobody ran out of the classroom, nobody ever got sick. The only time a student ever got sick in class due to the material is during health class when they showed an open-heart operation on a human.
About 8% of Americans have PTSD, and before now, required literature has never been a severely triggering effect for ANYONE as far as my knowledge goes. I have read and researched on how schools deal with PTSD in the classroom, and never was “warn your student if there is any scene in a book where their issue is even remotely related to their trauma” mentioned.
It’s infantilizing to people to have severe mental illnesses.We are supposed to help them, not coddle them. And this is coming from someone who suffers from anxiety, depression, and recurring thoughts. I think we need to help those who suffer from PTSD, but Trigger Warnings are not the way to do it. It just makes a mockery of the sufferers of PTSD.
If you don’t have PTSD- Don’t talk over us?
Who do you think is pushing for trigger warnings /if not the people with the disorder/
and no not all of us need them or want them.
but it’s no more infantalizing trauma survivors to offer trigger warnings, which give us the ability to choose to engage with the material (it’d be infantalizing if they just said ‘NO! You can’t interact with this!!) than it is to offer an elevator to a cane user who would prefer to take the stairs.
/Tons of people with PTSD have had severe triggered effects due to required literature/
/I literally used to go catatonic/ and it caused a break down to the point I was /younger than 13 and cutting in class because it was the only way for me to stay in the present/ At 18 a required reading in a class pushed me over the ledge of a psychotic break down that would eventually wind up with me in a mental hospital because I thought tiny men were trying to break open my chest cavity during class. I know other PTSD suffers who it caused a. panic attacks b. psychotic issues c. uptick in self harm d. dissociation or e. repressed memories to come back and that’s a whole nother ball game.
and I don’t like trigger warnings (for me personally.) I don’t use them, not for me at least. But I fully respect my fellow -trauma survivors right- to use whatever tools they need and the fact that yeah, schools need to provide tools to be accessible.
/Stop speaking over people/ You don’t have PTSD. You don’t get to talk about what mocks us. What mocks us? is people like you thinking you can speak for us.
The fact that you think your experience, the people in your classes, who you don’t know if any of them even had PTSD- somehow speaks for people who have it…. is so ridiculous.
/Can you not?/
^^
How about huge tradition-oriented institutions haven’t accommodated PTSD with trigger warnings before because PTSD didn’t exist as a medical condition until 1973 and the concept of a ‘trigger warning’ only gained wide use when a critical mass of people with PTSD began using social media to talk to each other in places non-disabled people could hear us?
“Nobody accommodated this mental illness in this way before, so the accommodation isn’t necessary” is like the ouroboros of ableist inertia. Wow.
Also: FOR FUCK’S SAKE.
IT’S JUST A NOTE SAYING THERE’S SOMETHING POTENTIALLY UPSETTING IN THE BOOK.
They are not ripping the book out of your hands. They are not telling you not to read it. They are not telling you it’s bad. They are not burning the book.
It’s putting a fucking note in syllabus saying “book contains $thing”.
And you know what else?
Some of us are fine … if we know what we’re getting into. The warning doesn’t mean we don’t read the book. It just means we read it prepared and braced, with coping mechanisms in place.
And that means we make it out okay. Whereas if it just fucking dropped on us, we might not be.
And it’s a fucking note.
I guess this is stupid, but I’ve always wondered: Do you ever get jealous about your partners having sex with or being in love with other people? How do you deal with it without forbidding them to do so or ignoring your own feelings? It seems like some poly people (at least on the Internet) are like: “I never get jealous, I just want my partners to have as much sex and love in their lives as possible, too bad for the partner of jealous controlling you!” which I don’t believe.
I get jealous.
What I don’t get is so jealous I can’t tolerate it, or so jealous I have to act on it. I get jealous the way I’m jealous of a friend who does fun things without me–I might feel mopey about it or need to talk it through, especially if I’m already feeling emotionally shaky for other reasons, but I don’t actually want to stop them. I may be jealous of them, but I’m also happy for them. Especially when they’re so goshdarn cute together.
(I’m expressing my personal experience via analogy, not saying “a lover with other lovers is literally just like a friend with other friends so you’re a possessive jerk if you aren’t okay with that.” If you experience jealousy differently from me, that’s just a difference, not proof that one or the other of us must be evil.)
It’s tough to admit publicly that this isn’t always painless. It feels too much like opening myself up to all the accusations of being a doormat who lets my boyfriend sleep around because I can’t say no, of just putting a nice face on cheating, of my lifestyle being inherently unstable. But I don’t believe in facing those accusations by pretending the lifestyle is all sunshine and roses. It’s sunshine and roses and cuddles and family and sometimes jealousy and sometimes pain and sometimes it works out in the end and sometimes it doesn’t.
Like any kind of love.
Kimchi and Justice 