(((I Will Outlive)))

I really wish we’d collectively decide to stop pushing the whole “brains aren’t fully developed until age 25” thing.

I’ve seen this three separate times this week and two of those came from TERF’s arguing that 1) no one under the age of 25 should be allowed to medically transition, and 2) that puberty blockers also block brain development and prevent trans youth from becoming adults/developing adult brains.

Is this really the direction that we want to go here? 24 year olds not considered fully adults, not allowed to make their own medical decisions? Because this is what anti-trans people are pushing for in regards to gender affirming healthcare.

Maybe it’s the pissed off millennial in me sick of the infantilization of my generation. Maybe it’s because I’m transmasc and I’ve seen repeatedly how TERFs infantilize trans men and transmasc people. Maybe I’m just too neurodivergent for this bullshit and entirely creeped out and disgusted by the concept of mental age in every form. But this is not the damned way.

It’s not even an entirely accurate statement–We already know that brain development continues well into our 30’s and beyond, and it varies by person.

Personally I’m glad that I can’t relate to that nonsense. I’ll be 30 later this year and my very neurodivergent self is still becoming, still learning, and still doing new things all the time that I never thought I’d be capable of doing. I’m worthy of bodily autonomy and respect now, and I was before 25 and before 18 too.

People don’t have to have “fully developed brains” in order to be deserving of bodily autonomy and the freedom to make their own medical decisions.

People don’t have to be adults–in any way–to be worthy of having their gender identity respected.

And we don’t have to be neurotypical to be worthy of having access to gender affirming health care.

Okay guys, I’m going to say this once and then I’m going to go back to ignoring the people I’m saying it to, which is a small but insanely irritating minority of readers:

When you try to come up in my comments or asks and say anything about how nonprofits are funded or operated I need you to understand that you are talking with someone who works for a nonprofit and has for longer than many of you have been alive. When you talk about theft of donation, the perfidious villainous “staff” you’re talking about are me. I am Staff. 

I have worked in the nonprofit space in some form or other my literal entire adult life, from the age of 18 onward, almost 25 years. Libraries, higher education, arts and medical organizations, I have worked either as service staff or fundraising staff or both for all of the above. Studying wealth and the donation of wealth is literally my job. So when I say something it has the weight of twenty five years of experience behind it. 

You couldn’t know that, of course, but you know how I know you’re just repeating ignorant cant you’ve seen in tumblr posts? Because it’s very easy to discover what a nonprofit is doing for the public. We have websites, annual reports, public 990 filings, all of which demonstrate very plainly how much we spend and on what. It’s so easy that if you want to enter into a conversation on philanthropy it’s pretty much step #1. And yet none of you solipsistic chucklefucks have done it. You just look at one of those “big three” everyone can name as “bad charities” and assume all charities are that size or that malevolence because those are the only ones you’ve heard about, because you won’t stir yourself to learn more.

You’re not fact checking and I’m not sure what insults me more, what you say about the work I do or that you didn’t even bother to do the most basic level research first. Not one of you assholes talking about big charities stealing money has ever come up with any kind of alternative to the ones you’re mad about; none of you ever has recommendations, just the same tired old party line. Which means either you want to lecture me to feel superior or you want to justify not giving, and I’m not here for it.  

You want to know why the government promised to pay off my student loans tax-free if I worked for a nonprofit for 10 years? Because burnout in the nonprofit space due to low pay, grueling hours, and assholes like you is super common. The only other people who get that promise from the US government are soldiers. 

If you don’t want to give to charity just don’t give. You don’t have to, and nobody will think less of you, because most people a) don’t talk about their giving and b) don’t care about yours. I didn’t give regularly for many years because I was working for nonprofits who didn’t pay me very much. But if you’re not going to give you need to shut the fuck up about it. The industry in which I have spent my career is not the newest purity stick for you to use on people you want to bully, especially if you’re just going to repeat bullshit you heard from someone who’s internalized some real evangelical-level guilt over not giving. 

And most especially you need to shut the fuck up about it to me. 

And most especially

you need to shut the fuck up

about it to me.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

This is the finest haiku I have ever written. I might need to commission a cross-stitch. 

"Pansexuality is biphobic, go read the bisexual manifesto!" The. The bisexual manifesto. Published by the Bay Area Bi+ & Pan Network.

The bisexual manifesto ain't some panphobic Bible and yall really need to stop fucking acting like it is.

If you see an alarming post, please make sure it is true before you reblog.

We’re in terrifying times but lets make sure we’re mad at and taking action against the right things, and not sensationalist bullshit made to distract us or make ad money off of our fear. 

Exclusionists will make up all kinds of lies about aces, call the split attraction model homophobic and transphobic, deliberately misdefine asexuality, and then demand aces explain their inclusion in the community and claim they’re doing it in good faith.

don’t know who needs to hear this but uh…supporting pan people doesn’t come with conditions, because identifying as pan is not inherently problematic. so please stop with the “i don’t care if you identify as pan, but *insert various misinformation/hate/generalization here*” because it’s not fooling anyone into thinking you genuinely support and accept pan people okay thanks bye happy pan week

There is no Central LGBTQ+ Identity Validation Committee, and there should not be.

All this questioning about “Is this identity valid?” or “Can these people use this word?” and sometimes I’m afraid that I’ve played into it by using historical examples or sociological surveys to prove that it is valid, because the more important thing is:

YOU DON’T GET TO POLICE SOMEONE ELSE’S IDENTITY. EVER.

If we’re afraid a certain identity will lead to murder, mayhem, predators, or assault, we need to combat that. If you’d only consider a certain behaviour bad or weird or creepy if a cishet man did it… you need to think really hard about why you think that. (And then, to be crystal clear, revise your rules to stop letting shit pass from LGBT people you think ~*magically cannot*~ be problematic or harmful, because honey, they totally can.)

If we allow our fellow LGBTQ+ to police our identities–to say whose gender or sexuality or anything else is valid–then we have not actually moved much further from the days we let cishet people do it. You still have to submit your application to the Central Validation Committee, which tells you what clothing you’re allowed to wear or who you’re supposed to fuck.  All that’s changed is who the committee members are.

If we allow these structures of identity policing to continue to exist, the system will reabsorb them in time. You’ll still need someone to sign off on whether you’re validly allowed surgery, but instead of a cisgender psychiatrist, it’ll be a trans psychiatrist. You’ll still get shamed and ostracized for sleeping with the wrong person, but instead of straight church elders, it’ll be your LGBT friends. Before too long, cishets will learn to enforce the LGBT community’s established norms. “You don’t qualify as a woman, so that isn’t really sexism.” “You’re not actually gay, so you can’t be in our club.” “In the Court’s judgment, this identity does not qualify as a protected class under anti-discrimination law.”

Don’t you see how much this still harms us? We cannot reshape society’s tools for our own purposes without living under the constant risk that they will be used on us again as soon as it’s convenient. These tools are too dangerous to leave lying around. We need to destroy them permanently.

since Elon musk’s snl skit thing (?) ive been seeing a ton of posts talking about the asperger’s label and how evil it is and i would just like to say

like, there are problems with the label, but I feel weird about throwing around “aspergers was coined by a Nazi!” as the reason it’s bad. It just does not get into any of the reasons why it might be a harmful label and it really makes me uncomfortable because it feels like another “this word is Bad because it’s associated with bad things” argument with no actual substance to it and if you want to help autistic people you have to go deeper than “this word is Bad, this other word is Good,” like please

It’s not common knowledge at all that Hans Asperger was a Nazi, and I can say this because I am autistic, I read Neurotribes a couple years ago, which is 500+ pages and talks extensively about him, and still didn’t come away with that. Which, according to some quick googling, might be because that Asperger’s involvement in the Nazi eugenics program has only been known since 2018? That is from Wikipedia so there’s definitely deeper to delve, but I don’t think it helps anyone to act like anyone who says “Asperger’s” is a eugenicist who is using it as a dogwhistle or something? Like what the fuck.

There are many people who use it because that was their initial diagnosis. (it was mine??) What does it DO for autistic people to label anyone who refers to themselves with the “asperger’s” label as a eugenicist and Nazi. Who does that benefit. Not us.

I have also seen claims that Asperger used the term to “distinguish the autistic children he deemed worth keeping alive” which is just straight up misinformation???? He never used the term “Asperger’s” himself at all. “Asperger’s” was legitimately not a thing until after he was dead.

There’s definitely a problem with how people use “Asperger’s” to distinguish more “Normal/‘High Functioning’” autistic people. It’s an outdated label that has not been in use since 2013. but people are largely not talking thoughtfully about that and instead speaking as if “Asperger’s” is Definitely a Nazi Dogwhistle which is just so wild???

There’s a saying that’s like “assume incompetence before you assume malice” and that definitely applies here. There are many many autistic people who have no idea that using the diagnosis they received when they were diagnosed to refer to themselves is seen as some kind of eugenicist statement??? That makes no sense at all wtf please

Like it really feels like ppl are so fixated on hating Elon musk that they have to read malicious, evil meanings into every word he says and for the love of god accept that every word a person says is not a cue to some kind of master narrative of their secret intentions. We don’t have to fit the fact that he said “asperger’s” into some over-arching schema that confirms that he is a Horrible Person.

I don’t think the man puts that much thought into all the words that he speaks collectively in a day tbh

in general I find the fixation on non-problematic vocabulary at the expense of everything else to be endlessly frustrating! a while back I followed a blog run by an intellectually disabled autistic teenager who was straight up ostracized by the rest of autistic tumblr for describing himself as “severely autistic.” He literally could not post about his experiences without people replying to his posts “correcting” his language and talking down to him about how problematic it was. I don’t want “aspergers” to become the new version of this garbage

seriously y’all need to stop

you’re not intellectually superior, you’re just a panphobe who misunderstands the bisexual manifesto

If there is one thing I ask from tumblr, one thing- it’s that y'all fucking source check. Just because a post has 200,000 notes doesn’t mean it’s reliable. This site is an echochamber of so much false information it’s ridiculous. Please. Do this one thing for me.