just found out in my paperwork that im not diagnosed with JUST sepsis but apparently SEVERE sepsis. so thats cute 😀

uh so if anyone wants to help me afford housing until + after the literally LIFE SAVING surgery i will be getting in march it would be so incredibly appreciated. im probably going to need some level of caregiving after the surgery too and i have no idea how to even approach that because its uh. insanely expensive

pypal | cshapp | kof1 | my friend's venmo bc yeah im still locked out of mine 😭 haven't had the energy to get back in

If T makes you gain weight and E and antidepressants do it too, and so does enjoying good food and not being hungry all the time, then perhaps maybe sometimes joy & weight gain come hand in hand and that's good

Because I was now a man, I could not speak about what it was like to be a woman. Because I had been a woman, I could never really speak about what it was like to be a man. Do the math: I could not speak. It was a double erasure, a double bind, in which every experience I had was false, and so nothing I said was credible. I could no longer derive authority from my experiences before transition, and shouldn’t even cite them — I had never “really” been a woman, so those things hadn’t happened — but those experiences could always be weaponized against me to prove I wasn’t “really” the man I claimed to be.

They call it erasure, when this happens. I wasn’t prepared for how literal the term was. Every day, I could feel myself disappear.

— Eraserhead: On writer's block and being a gender traitor by Jude Doyle

There are many good paragraphs but this stuck out the most:

"If “man” and “woman” are opposed and mutually exclusive categories, if men can only ever be predators and women can only ever be prey, then trans men can’t exist. We are logically impossible under the terms of the current system. You either “treat us like men” by voiding out half our lives, or you write us back into womanhood by denying our male identities. I knew all that, at least in theory, but when I came out, I actually saw my life story disappearing into other people’s blind spots. I watched myself become unthinkable in real time."

Also these:

"This wasn’t about accountability. This was people tactically forgetting my entire life,including incidents from my life they had personally witnessed or been involved in, so that they could shame me for transitioning. It was bad for me to be a man; if I was a man, I was a bad man, I was all the worst things men are. I was hulking, I was threatening, I was predatory, I was violent."

"I was treated as both genders, but only the most monstrous stereotype of each one."

Because that is exactly it. Anti-transmasculinity is being both erased and vilified, and then gaslit out of speaking about those experiences by the people who are erasing and vilifying you.

This resonated:

"The idea that I had always occupied a privileged position within patriarchy was, frankly, untrue; nor did it seem to me that a trans person was any less gender-marginalized than your average cis woman. What privilege I had was conditional, and these books were no guide. Men who wanted to “forge a positive masculinity” (and everyone was very clear that I needed one of those) were encouraged to get in touch with their “feminine sides.” Maybe that was healthy for cis guys, but I had been forced to do feminine things, and present in feminine ways, for the entirety of my young life. Whatever liberation I had achieved came from giving myself permission to stop."

As did the ending:

"When I write these days, I try to remind myself that whatever I’m afraid of saying is already true, and denial will not change it. I remind myself that the wrong people benefit from my silence, and will use it to write a version of my life I can’t recognize, or just write me out of the world. There is no established story or role for me; I belong to a category the world is still learning to imagine. I cannot account for the world as other people imagine it. I cannot give you every man’s story, every trans man’s story, every trans person’s story; I don't know them. What I do know is that every new story helps map the territory. All I can do for you, from where I'm standing, is tell you how things are." 

So wait are livestock guardian dogs to their flocks like… Clark Kent among the residents of Smallville? He’s been here since he was a baby, we all know him, and he’s… generally one-of-us shaped, uh, approximately. And then when something goes wrong he suddenly leaps into action and does some terrifying impossible shit none of us could do. And then comes back home and settles in like nothing happened and he’s one of us again.

Hmm.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

Actual answer: the sheep know the dogs are not sheep, and they also know the dog is protecting them and take their cues from the dog about whether they need to run for the barn or can just ignore anything scary that approaches.

However, a friend once had an extremely premature orphan lamb born in December who had to live in the house for a couple of months with leg braces and all that, who due to spending her lambhood with dogs instead of sheep came out of the whole experience convinced she was a livestock guardian dog! She would patrol the perimeter of the fields every evening with the actual dog, stand watch in the barn door at night like the dog, and was more than willing to throw down if she saw something scary coming towards the flock the way the guard dog did. Tragically orphaned lamb did a convincing job at being a guard dog without actually having any of the biological advantages a dog has over a sheep.

Which I suppose made her Sheep Batman.

we should never let sanism slide, no matter how common it is or how it's integrated into so much modern vocabulary. if someone uses mental illness as an insult, let it irritate you. don't get used to it, don't let it be normal. be so annoying about it. be the one friend who is too woke because otherwise it can never end.

be annoyed when "delusional" is said as an insult. be annoyed when the words "narcissist" & "abuser" are used interchangeably. be annoyed when "psychotic" is used to mean "dangerous."

this behavior is not cool & we need to stop letting it slide. get obnoxious.

white americans when you tell them that the idea of climate change as an impending disaster is a reductive first world perspective because it’s a tangible reality for many in the global south already:

maybe if you see south and southeast asians dying in the heat and latin americans dying in floods and all you think of is imagining a reality where YOU are affected, then you should rethink how you see people of color. if you cannot see climate change as a real disaster until it is other americans dying in the heat and the floods and not just black and brown people, then don’t talk about climate change until you can acknowledge the grim reality of climate change for everyone.

everyone give thanks to the middle eastern and north african people of over ten thousand years ago for domesticating the african wildcat and providing the entire world with some of the best pets ever 🙏🙏🙏 it was probably the best idea any human has ever had.

ALT

you can honestly tell that this is the ancestor of all domestic cats. look at it. just a lil tabby cat. with long long legs.

in the whole greenland conversation i feel like there's not nearly enough acknowledgement of the fact that greenland is already suffering under imperial rule. seeing wayyyyy too much tacit validation of denmark's possession of greenland on socials today. look into reproductive abuse against greenland inuit women by the danish state. US acquisition of greenland would be bad but the status quo is not good. this is not a matter of sovereignty, i only wish it were a matter of sovereignty, it's just a bunch of imperial powers playing RISK with indigenous people's lives again

“The tests cover attachment, personality traits, cognitive abilities and psychopathology, and take about 15-20 hours. It is almost impossible to pass them, says Nellemann; even he and his colleagues have failed to do so. Questions can include “What is glass made of?” and “What is the name of the big staircase in Rome?” 

[Kiera] was nervous going to the doctor, because she says she had previously been given the ultimatum either to have an abortion or face the baby being taken away after the birth. She agreed to undergo another parenting competency test in an attempt to cooperate. But in the session, the psychologist brought up her previous abortions and asked her to show her parenting skills by playing, singing and talking with a doll, checking whether she made eye contact. “The problem is, I didn’t grow up with a doll,” she says, adding that her real baby, Zammi, was busy kicking in her stomach. “They made me draw and they were criticising it, that I didn’t draw a face. I drew a mum and baby.”

On Friday morning, I walk through Keira’s open front door as rain falls in torrents outside, to find her sitting in her living room under soft fairy lights and the silently flickering television, arranging flowers. Every week she takes a different arrangement to Zammi so that she will associate them with her mother’s visits. This ceremonial act of devotion is part of how Keira survives.

While she is there, she thinks only of Zammi. Her own feelings can wait till she gets home. It is always hard. Before she gets out of the car, she puts into words the pressure she is under. “It feels like somebody holding your throat. And they decide how much you can breathe.”

this is an example of a symbiotic relationship

come back my scarab

please come back my scarab

i,m so fuckign sorryy my scarab