i think when people talk about dsm diagnoses being 'destigmatised' it's usually the case that what they mean is the public perception of the diagnosis name (depression, anxiety, etc) has become associated with minor, temporary, or resolvable forms of distress. the experience of being so depressed you cannot get out of bed, or brush your teeth, or work -- that experience and those behaviours have never been 'destigmatised,' only associated with other diagnostic labels in certain discourses seeking to present 'depression' as treatable or minor. it's basically a semantic nosological shift, rather than any actual 'destigmatisation' of the behaviours psychiatry exists to pathologise -- widening (minimising) the diagnosis, then just moving any leftover 'scary' symptoms to a different diagnostic bucket. it's a rhetorical shell game that does not challenge, but exists symbiotically with, the ableism that causes behaviours like "not being able to get out of bed" to be stigmatised in the first place.

Be Openly Scary

Society is scared of a lot of things it shouldn't be. A lot of those things can't be helped, a lot of those things don't hurt anyone, and a lot of those things are not what people even think they truly are.

So you know what?

Talk about your hallucinations, your delusions, your psychotic symptoms. Share things about your gender identity whether it be nonconforming, trans, xenogender or anything else. Scream about your nonhumanity and animal urges. Be open and unwavering about your systems existence, presenting as more-than-one wherever you want. Use and introduce your pronouns, even if people find them weird or offputting. Rock back and forth, pace, twitch and stim in any way you please. Wear things that reflect your identity in public. Get tattoos and body mods to your heart's content. Tell people about your personality disorders.

Don't make yourself small because others can't handle you. Be open where safe. Be you. Be scary.

I am begging Mental Health Culture to stop broadening the definition of "self-harm." If you want a term to convey the concept you're trying to express, may I suggest bringing back the term "bad habit"? "Self-harm" is grounds for involuntary commitment. Do you want people to get involuntarily committed for spending too much time on the internet before bed or volunteering for too many projects? No? Then don't give coercive psychiatry ammunition by broadening the usage of their coercive terminology! When I first started out in the Mad liberation advocacy movement, one of the arguments we made against involuntary commitment and coercive intervention for "self-harm" was that neurotypical people do things that are "bad for them" all the time, like playing football, smoking tobacco, or eating candy, and they still have the bodily autonomy right to make those "unhealthy" choices. The point was to highlight the double standard that some people were denied rights because of doing things that were allegedly "bad for them," while other people were allowed the dignity of risk and freedom to choose. Our point was "The neurodivergent/Mad person picking her skin should have the same right to bodily autonomy as the neurotypical person dancing ballet, even though both are doing things to their bodies that could be described as 'bad for them.'" The argument was that neither should be pathologized. Current discourse would pathologize both, as well as even more variations on human behavior. That's a big step backwards. "But it's only self-harm if it has certain emotional motivations" -- let me stop you right there. Coercive psychiatry does not ask us what our emotional motivations are. It dictates to us what our emotional motivations are, and increases the coercion if we disagree with it (because disagreeing with their assessments of our emotional state is also A Symptom). Do you think the Parental Surveillance Industrial Complex is going to listen to their children before following through on moral panic articles about how parents should take away their children's hobbies because they're "self-harm"? Don't ascribe good faith to coercive psychiatry, because coercive psychiatry doesn't ascribe good faith to you.

Honestly, mabye self harm just isn't a good term to have. Like, it only exists to lump in behaviors that people get abused for. It might make sense to just drop it, and describe things like skin picking or cutting with the specific terms we have for them.

I absolutely would abolish the term "self-harm." Inherently "harm" is a value judgment -- maybe I don't think what I'm doing to my body is "Harmful," because it's what I want.

"Oh, but if you're objectively causing injury--" it's objectively causing injury if I let someone stab a needle through my earlobe so I can hang jewelry from it, but that's perfectly socially acceptable.

Counterpoint: what we should be saying is that it's not fucking okay for psychiatry or anything/anyone else to take away the autonomy of those who Actually Really Self-Harm.

Self-harm can be a useful term. There's a difference between me staying up late because I want to finish my painting and between me biting my arm because I need to externalize my mental pain or to punish myself (just personal examples, and the point is about the goals not the actions I just don't immediately recall an action I'd do for both). That difference should not have to necessary be erased so the latter does not get me involuntary hospitalized!!! Let's fight the taking of autonomy itself, not go "hey actually these are things Normal People Do we are Normal People so we don't deserve to have our autonomy taken away". I am not saying that you are saying that there are those who do. But you are still approaching it from the wrong side.

And I am not telling anyone how to label their experiences. But you are.

It does make me feel a little bitter that Tumblr has been suspending us with no note or possibility to appeal since early 2018, and everyone cheered, but once it's some vaguely normie big name trans bloggers, everyone is complaining about bigotry.

Bestie, look in the mirror.

I've been banned from Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Cohost, and several others for spreading educational materials about paraphilias, all while having a strong anti abuse stance. The mainstream trans community's response was to repeatedly erase my transness, presenting me as a cis male trans ally on some occasions and as a gender trending cis woman on others (which is kinda misogynistic by itself), and to claim I'm harmful for the trans community because I associate pure and innocent queerness with dirty and disordered sexual perversion.

And I'm supposed to feel sorry for you and alarmed about this situation now? I don't have the energy for caring about you. Y'all are gonna get screwed over and not even know where it came from, the fuck can I do about it? You never listen to me anyway.

I feel like the "starving artist" mentality is essentially an obstacle to class consciousness, because rather than think of themselves as exploited workers in food service or retail or whatever industry they actually work in that allows them to make rent, the "starving artist" thinks of themselves as someone who has been wronged by society because they don't receive what they see as just compensation for their skilled work as artists.

And so despite their apparent support for communism, these people are only incidentally leftists as a result of living under capitalism, which has failed to deliver what they want, and so they latch on to communism as an alternative; it's hard to imagine any economic system that gives what they really want, which is not the luxury to not have to work and to be able to pursue art in their free time, but an economic system where their art skills are rewarded as labor.

And they can't believe the truth, that no one valued this work as labor in the first place, so they have to believe instead that someone has intervened somehow to devalue their work, and that this is the reason why they've been blocked out of free admission to the petit bourgeoisie. Which is why they always fall for the most reactionary politics with a bare veneer of leftist language, or support massive increase on copyright and intellectual property; they harbor resentment towards those who they believe have denied them of what they were entitled to, and so they want to hurt those they believe wronged them as much as possible, no matter the consequences to themselves!

I'm always fascinated by the economics of art. Once you get past oral tradition, the production and consumption of art has almost always been intrinsically tied to its economics, whether those economics are determined by state/religious sponsorship, patronage by wealthy elites, or capitalistic mass market distribution.

I shake my fist at modern literary publishing for its short-sightedness in exchanging long term staying power for short term returns (an inevitable symptom of an overly efficient capitalist system, and one found in far more sectors than art - see Boeing), but then I look at independent online writers enchained by the Patreon model and see how, even with zero barriers between creator and consumer, with no meddling executives filtering or editing what gets written, authors are still at the mercy of the economics of art. Authors must churn out ceaseless deluges of content to maintain a continuous stream of monthly Patreon donations; there is little time for reflection, thought, or careful consideration, while pointless filler is worth money and thus lucrative. Even simply reaching the end of a story is a bad financial decision, so most of these stories never end.

(When researching RoyalRoad prior to posting Cleveland Quixotic, I found countless commentators who described this or that webfic as being a "Patreon trap": Stories where individual chapters keep taunting the promise that there will be narrative development soon, driving up engagement, without ever actually delivering. Another common RoyalRoad review: "Started promising, but nothing has happened in the past 200 chapters.")

No nefarious, top-hatted, mustache-twirling CEO made that happen, it's simply an inevitable outcome of how authors make money within that system. In fact, for all my issues with contemporary publishing, its willingness to dole out generous advances to authors incentivizes authors to more holistically approach their works, rather than pump out content as quickly as possible.

The side effect of this is that basically everyone today trying to write fiction for primarily artistic purposes needs to exist outside the economic system entirely. Meaning, they need to already be rich, or else willing to starve. Even the most lauded literary fiction authors of today, the people winning Pulitzers and Nobels, can rarely support themselves on their fiction alone. They were either born rich, married rich, or make most of their money as a creative fiction lecturer at some university's MFA program. This leads to "literary" fiction increasingly being generated from the narrow, myopic viewpoint of the wealthy, making it increasingly of little interest to most of the population.

When the economics of art shifted from noble patronage at the end of the Renaissance toward the emerging capitalistic/mercantile mass market in the 1700s and especially the industrialized 1800s, the literary movement of "realism" was birthed. While not without literary antecedent (Cervantes, Austen), this mostly novel new form of literature eschewed poetic form for prose and sought to depict the entire spectrum of contemporary society from the richest to the poorest. Flaubert, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, though concerned with topics of particular interest to their respective national backgrounds, all followed this basic precept. And the precept made sense, because for the first time most of the population was literate, not simply the elite, and the emerging middle class was willing to pay for literary entertainment. Realism was a reflection of the broadening economic basis for literature.

The internet has accelerated the mixing of people from all variety of not merely economic but also ethnic, religious, national, cultural, etc. backgrounds. In the 80s and 90s, when these trends began, there once again seemed to be a novel form emerging to reflect this new culture, the so-called hysterical realist novel. Big, sprawling works by authors like Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace that assaulted readers with a half-crazed melange of times, places, and peoples. In James Wood's essay Human, All Too Inhuman, which pejoratively coined the phrase, he describes these novels thus:

Information has become the new character. Isn't that line the perfect encapsulation of the internet era? Wood reads today like the reactionary he is, an old fogey upset today's newfangled material isn't like his beloved Madame Bovary (a novel written in 1857), but somehow his view has won out, at least in conventional publishing. Zadie Smith, who his essay is directly about, felt the need to respond to it directly by distancing herself from the other authors listed. Pynchon and DeLillo were already old authors near the end of their careers, Rushdie had a fatwa on him, and Wallace committed suicide. Nowadays the gigantic hysterical realist novels are few and far between in favor of smaller, MFA-style peeks into the lives of the rich (or the rich's frequent, guilt-ridden attempts to imagine what it must be like to be poor and non-white).

What happened? Where is the novel in the age of the internet? What works are grappling with the enormity of the era? Where are the works that reflect the immensity of modern society, its cross-cultural breadth?

It must boil down to the economics. Perhaps the saturation of information brought on by the internet has led to this. Not simply the popular craving for constant content, which spurs even the independent Patreon novel to a bizarre reader-writer cross-exploitation (the creator must slave away constantly to create, while the readers receive only junk). Perhaps the saturation of information has become too much, and rather than become unified, the internet era has led to a paradoxical fragmentation of niche-seekers to hole up with small groups of likeminded peers. The works that gain mass appeal today are not works that seek to grapple with the mass of humanity within the world, but works that strip away all humanity to produce the most watered-down, formulaic, and generic works: MCU movies, if you will, something that can play "in both America and China."

I don't have the answer. These are simply some thoughts I had after reading this post. I deeply apologize to the person I reblogged, because I feel as though my response has veered wildly off their original topic. Hopefully, they might still find this avenue of interest.

Appealing to psychiatric authority will not bring long term legitimacy to plural systems. We have seen the attempts to show modern pro-system and pro-endo sources to antis and cringers fail to change their minds time and time again. And even if it was an effective tactic, legitimizing psychiatry is dangerous in its own right. In order to create a society primed to accept all ways of being, we need to foster acceptance of the strange and abnormal, NOT fight to be assimilated into normality.

People have compiled impressive and comprehensive lists of sources that show how modern psychiatry and psychology is not as hostile to the idea of systems, whether traumagenic or endo, as antis believe. It has likely been very validating to the community, but has it actually changed the minds of skeptical singlets and anti-endos? I'm not seeing much evidence of that. Time and time again we see interactions where anti-endos are given the sources, but they do not read them, do not engage with them, and do not provide sources back for their own points. It might be fun to laugh at them, to feel validated in their inability to engage with sources or arguments, but aside from feeling our own validation and feel as if we ‘owned’ someone, what does it accomplish?

Anti-endos do not trust the sources that pro-endos provide. Period. Why would they? Most anti-endos already think they know what scientific authority says, and like transmeds, feel this is a situation of appropriation and delusion. Cringers don’t give a damn either. We’re all just freaks who think we’re more than one person, or a bunch of silly children pretending to have a ‘mental illness’ to them. We’re an acceptable target for them to make fun of. Both anti-endo systems and singlet cringers have entire communities at their back to affirm their existing beliefs about what science says, about what is possible. Put yourselves in their shoes. If a conservative came to you and said you were wrong about something, and provided a long laundry list of sources to prove you wrong, do you think you would read it all? Trust any of it? Or would you dismiss that information because of who is presenting it to you? Most leftists would! Because looking over sources, especially scientific sources, is difficult, it's time consuming. Trying to change people’s minds through pure evidence and logic does not work. It's not capability with how most people function.

But is this evidence maybe convincing so-called neutrals, or mainstream singlets who don't know any of this discourse yet? Possibly. But it feels less about actually educating folks on systems and plurality, and more about convincing the mainstream left to adopt plurals into their assimilated group along with gay, trans, and other queer folks, so that there is a social pressure to accept the identity. Because NOT accepting a valid identity gets you kicked out of the in-group, and accepting the wrong identity does the same. That’s the band-aid solution, make enough appeals of authority to get a seat at the valid marginalization table, and right now, the anti-endos want in on the basis of being a valid disorder, so endos aren’t allowed. But it is just as shaky a foundation to argue that all systems belong at this table BECAUSE there are scientific sources that say it is so.

But assimilation will not save systems. It will not save the freaks, or anyone with an identity strange, bizarre, and too unresearched to make the cut to the validity table. I’m done arguing for a two-pronged approach. I am done with the idea that we need to shill psych research and defend a field that is rooted in harm and has continued to do harm throughout its whole existence. I will not legitimize an institution that abuses its power, its patients, and serves capital, not people. Because that IS how it functions, no matter how good intentioned those that enter the field may be. A good intentioned cop is still a cop. A good intentioned therapist is still inside a system that works to make everyone normal, good, and productive under capitalism. Just because they’re starting to see some systems as normal, doesn’t mean the foundations of their philosophy aren’t toxic, harmful, and wrong. I will not give them any more social power by pretending I give a damn what they have to say.

Legitimizing psychiatry is dangerous. If we use their words to prove our own validity, what happens when their attitudes change, aren't radical enough, single out certain sections of our community as invalid or something that needs to be cured? If we continue to point to scientific research to prove that gay, trans, plural, and others are valid, what happens when their ideas change? What about those with neurodivergencies or other identities that aren’t validated by science or even dismissed by them? Priming the public to trust psych more does not prime them to trust peoples’ words about their own internal experiences and desires.

Being gay and transgender were disorders until activists fought to change that. It wasn’t as if cis and straight people woke up one day and decided, oh actually we should do some research to make sure these aren’t disorders.

Every time a new identity group becomes more public, they become a laughing stock to the right AND the left. People on the left compare them to being gay or trans and other marginalized groups. They’ll say, ‘you’re not oppressed like trans people, your deluded,’ or ‘you just want to be oppressed,’ to a wide range of folks including plurals, nonhumans, and more. Maybe once systems get tarred and feathered enough they’ll get that application for assimilation. Maybe we’ll see ‘We believe in science’ and ‘Trans rights are human rights’ alongside ‘Systems are real’ on someone’s lawn someday. But will accepting conditional assimilation on the basis of scientific authority pave the way for all systems to be accepted, and other fringe identities to be accepted? Or is it just continuing the cycle of assimilation and gambling our continued acceptance on the hope that psychiatry won’t come back to bite us in the ass? If we keep pandering to the institutions in place, instead of working to teach society to accept everyone’s identity based on their word, then we’re relying on a shaky foundation that is only a few conservative movements away from being swept out from under us all entirely.

-Mod Simon Metafarers

i think gay people are perverts. trans people are freaks and degenerates, queers are sexual deviants. appealing to the concept of normalcy will kill us, has killed us, is killing us. i'm not "just like everyone else," i'm a genuine threat to cisheteropatriarchy, i refuse to claim white supremacy, i think and act in fundamentally unacceptable ways under neurotypical hegemony, i pervert that which i come into contact with because the core of normalcy--of sexual normalcy--is inextricable from that which i seek to dismantle. i do not "go to work just like you" because i cannot work. i do not "have a family just like you" because i believe treating children as property is unethical. i reject the very premise that normalcy is aspirational or even ethically fucking acceptable. i embrace the fact that my queerness is sexually deviant, because that which it deviates from is something i would never be okay with conforming to.

honestly, fuck paraphiliac recovery. why are we being judged for not hating who we are. everyone is for self acceptance until you’re unpalatable and gross, then they want you to change.

I don’t want to get rid of my philias- hell if anything I want more of them. If people are disturbed by your love- let them be disturbed.

Prune the prudes; para pride!

Every so often I recognize a paraphilia in myself and every time I'm like "YES"

Some half-formed ruminations on America, Religion, and Victimhood

I didn’t know Judaism was still a thing until, like, middle school.

Seriously.

Of course, I didn’t know that other religions existed at all until I was at least 7.  There was a bumper sticker (not on our car - my mother hates bumper stickers) pinned to the wall of our garage that said “Mormons are Happy People!” And one day I finally thought to ask, “What’s a Mormon?” 

Understand, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (aka, LDS) don’t use that word to refer to themselves, except in quoting non-members (and the world is always divided for them between Members and Non-Members).  But more than that, I just didn’t know that everyone else wasn’t also LDS.  At that age, we really only talked about other religions in a historical context - ancient Hebrews, Romans, etc.; or more recently, in the nineteenth century when Joseph Smith “restored the gospel” after rejecting all the other versions of christianity.  

Judaism, in particular, was taught something along the lines of, “The Jews were the chosen people, then Jesus came along and all the Jews who didn’t believe he was the Messiah became the Lost Tribes of Israel.  The end.”  

It’s all a bit “We’re the Chosen People now.”

Keep reading

.

I also think we need to make space for people who ARE violent or agitated or aggressive or loud and threatening during psychosis in our activism, they are not evil for reacting to hallucinations or delusions in a way that is damaging, they deserve support and help and compassion, going through psychosis is traumatizing already for many of us and then being outcast from even the schizospec community is not helping!! they will not get better if they are never given the chance to connect and be accepted!!

thinkin a8t how antis say we're all white so here's a poll

ffs only vote if you're pro-transrace so the results don't get skewed!

Antis say (pro-)transid/(pro-)transrace individuals are all white by heritage. The racial identity of respondents will not make a difference to them — they will say that everyone who voted “not white” is white by heritage. And if you are making a survey about the racial heritage rather than racial identity or either — you must say that and not just race, because if you are saying just “white”/“not white” but mean specifically by heritage, you are saying that transrace individuals are not “really” their race. That could be your feeling about your own identity, or you could otherwise be okay with language like that as a transrace individual, but to talk like that about transrace individuals as a whole is transmisic.

yiddish theatre, yiddish newspapers and other yiddish cultural stuff was illegal in israel for years and actively discouraged and attempted to make obsolete, yiddish lectures were disrupted and the israeli state translated the testimonies of holocaust survivors to hebrew rather than keep them in yiddish (the language spoken by most jewish holocaust survivors) but tell me more about how israel and zionism are saving jews and making jewish cultural identity stronger rather than destroying and devaluing jewish diasporic culture 🤔

reminder that Jews from North Africa and West Asia also often spoke dialects of Judeo-Arabic as their first language and this is still heavily repressed by the Israeli state in an effort to distance Arab Jews from Palestinians and other non-Jewish Arabs

Moreover, only after the Yom Kippur war Israel allowed Holocaust survivors to openly speak about their experiences. Between 48’ and the 70’s, there was no support nor sympathy for Holocaust survivors. They were seen as weak, a “perfect example” for what a Jew or zionist shouldn’t be. The Holocaust survivors were just used as a reason to spread and justify the zionist ideology

also around 1/3 of holocaust survivors in israel live in poverty and israelis very vocally talk about how much they look down on holocaust survivors and diaspora jews

people in the notes (and myself) were wondering about any sources of Yiddish being suppressed and I found this article talking about it

i first read about this in academic papers that i dont have access to right now, but here are some more articles about it

destroying the strength of jewish diaspora culture was necessary to creating the “jewish state”

NEW YORK – The nearly 100-year-old photo features half a dozen young Jewish men all bandaged up. They appear to be victims of a pogrom.

Except, as the caption reveals, this photo was not taken in Eastern Europe. Nor were the attackers non-Jews.

In fact, these young men were beaten up in Tel Aviv by fellow Jews. Their crime? Speaking Yiddish in public.

Published in a Jewish weekly in Warsaw, this black-and-white photo, taken in 1928, is part of an exhibit that opened this week at New York’s YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, dedicated to “Palestinian Yiddish.” That is, Yiddish spoken before 1948 in the territory that encompasses the modern State of Israel.

A major focus of the exhibit is the outright hostility and disdain shown by many of the early Jewish settlers toward the Yiddish language. In creating a “new Jew” in what they called the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel), these fervent, Hebrew-speaking Zionists were determined to break away from anything that smacked of the Diaspora – first and foremost the language widely spoken by European Jews.

“Negating the Diaspora was a core part of the ideology of early 20th-century Zionism, and for this reason Yiddish had to be suppressed,” says YIVO academic adviser Eddy Portnoy, who curated the exhibit. “It was almost like a Jewish self-hatred.”

[ image one: a screenshot of text that reads “"We saw the Holocaust survivors as a very weak population,” says Nava Ein-Mor, who was born in Tel Aviv in 1945, the year World War II ended. “We were very different from them. We were strong, and we were not going to allow ourselves to be in that position.”“

image two: a screenshot of text that reads “Israel alone. Echoing the accounts of other survivors, Roth said that when she arrived, Israelis treated Holocaust survivors as if what happened to them was somehow their fault. "I heard many times that we went like sheep to the slaughter,” Roth told me. Yet, she continued, the Israeli government was happy to take money from the German government for the suffering she and millions of others endured.“ / end id ]

Queerness as a deviant identity

Queerness can be defined as presence of non normative gender preference, presentation, or identity, as well as absence of normative ones. This word can be used in three somewhat distinct ways: 1) as a general umbrella term for all LGBT and adjacent identities, 2) as a personal label, either standalone or interchangeably with some sublabels, 3) as a political declaration of (sometimes conditional) unity with other gender/sexual minorities and anti-assimilationism.

Historically the second way to use this label was the earliest. It appeared as a term of self-identity of mlm in the beginning of the 20th century (needless to say, the term “mlm” did not exist back then, but neither did “gay” or “bi”). “Queer” specifically denoted men who wanted to identify with their attraction to other men, but not feminine gender expression, which was better described by words “faggot” or “fairy” that were considered more derogatory. By mid century it lost its popularity and was replaced by “gay”. It was brought back by the activism of the 1980s, and this is where the other two ways to use this label originate. The community united around this word as a symbol of fight for their rights, much of this meaning is still retained, and many people have a very personal and emotional attitude to “queer” as an identity.

Queerness as deviant

The kinds of self expression and identity, implied by being queer, are not included in the norm. The norm demands conforming to a range of roles, associated with your assigned gender, including experiencing an exclusive attraction to people assigned the “opposite” gender, with a preference for those of them that also conform. The exact nature of these roles may vary from place to place, and so may the amount of deviation permitted. As with other kinds of deviance, the higher your total deviance score (as in, the more roles you fail), the more the society wishes to correct or destroy you. For example, a family of two married, conventionally feminine, cisgender women will be accepted in more environments than a family of five transgender and gender non-conforming women. However, that does not mean that there is a way to be queer and still meet the society’s expectations and be safe from queermisia.

Most queer people as a whole and all trans people will never reach the standard of a man or a woman that the society set. Several years ago I already presented gender dynamics in the form of the following graphic, where higher position indicates the amount of social power the person has, and the highest tier trans and significantly gender-nonconforming people may achieve is “bad man”/”bad woman”:

Note: the original bottom text used to say “animalized” because I was yet unaware of the term “degendered”. Also, this drawing is an oversimplification and does not imply trans men hold the same amount of social power as cis women, or that people of equal “level” may not have conditional privilege over each other in different spheres.

This means lacking protections and privilege the society gives to men and women that correctly perform the gender roles. In a way, being transgender means getting the worst parts of manhood and womanhood at once and none, or very little, of the benefits. The specifics of how this happens with relation to the trans person’s gender identity are covered by terms “transmisogyny” (oppression primarily targeting transfeminine people), transandrophobia (transmasculine people), exorsexism/enbyphobia (unaligned and aligned nonbinary people). Transphobia as a whole is a complex overlap of these types of oppression. It’s important to note that no trans person is exempt from any type of transphobia, and that cis people may be victimized by transphobia too.

A special emphasis must be placed on absence of normative traits as a cause of marginalization. Just like presence of non-normative traits, it is unwanted and penalized. Sometimes the line between presence of unwanted and absence of wanted is blurry. The Asexual Manifesto, the first attempt to define and explore asexuality, was published via Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance. An unmanly man may be automatically read as womanly. When it comes to traits of a similar kind, it makes sense to regard presence of deviant/absence of normative as an experience that feels like a spectrum from the point of view of a participant and like a monolith from the point of view of a bigoted onlooker, rather than two completely separate axes of marginalization that add their individual points to the total marginalization score.

Absence of the normative is where the queer experience also heavily overlaps with the paraphiliac experience. Having an exclusive paraphilia, when it isn’t a heavily stigmatized one (e.g. objectophilia, fictophilia) may be regarded as something under the aspec umbrella. In addition to that, many exclusive paraphiliacs with more stigmatized paraphilias (mapness, zoophilia) still publicly identify as ace in response to invasive questions. These people are victimized by the same conversion therapy attempts that target aspec people.

Community response and conditional anti-assimilationism

Quite a few people who do fit any common definition of “queer”, including the one presented in this post, still object to being labeled as such, and especially object to having anything about their identities considered deviant. Their vision of progress and a better future is total acceptance of queerness into the norm. For that purpose they resort to mimicking the normative lifestyle and conforming to as many gender roles as they can. They also participate in queermisia against more visibly deviant queers, both to show the majority that they’re safe and assimilated and because they genuinely believe visible deviance is a threat to queer rights.

The majority of queers who do consciously group around the queer identity oppose to such assimilationism. They create an environment, accepting of more radical role breaking, such as atypical gender and sexuality labels (e.g. fagdyke, bi lesbian) and more critical attitude towards the society.

However, this anti-assimilationism is conditional, since, when it comes to paraphilias, these people tend to accept only the least stigmatized ones, such as sadomasochism or leather fetish. Even acceptance towards ageplay is more rare to come across. Mapness, zoophilia, and necrophilia are consistently and aggressively excluded from otherwise most accepting queer spaces, and queers who have these paraphilias are at risk of abuse or even death there. Their typical script for perceiving paraphilias includes denying them their status of an attraction and identity and instead pretending these are all types of abuse, mislabeled as attractions by homophobes who want to taint queerness by association.

This violent exclusion is one of the reasons why I do not consider it suitable to use “queer” as general umbrella term for non-normative identities and opt for “deviant” as something that includes both queerness and beyond. There exists an attempt to expand the meaning of queerness once more and include paraphilias and transids – some parts of the radqueer movement are doing that – but arguing that these identities are queer from the semantic point in absence of community support and material inclusion on any level is largely a waste of time and effort. Unlike “queer”, “deviant” as a political identity is just in the building stage, and we may avoid the mistakes made by the queer community.

I'm gonna say it. calling yourself "pro-recovery" is an ableist dogwhistle to me. ""Pro-recovery"" is used often against people with stigmatized disorders like personality disorders, EDs, trauma (esp around CSA), and more to regulate and control these people into being "normal" and "palatable" and stands against everything MAD pride and radical body autonomy is about. There is no right form of recovery, there is no inherent need to "recover", and for many "recovery" does not exist.

I am the admin of that wiki.

First of all, we're not a "fandom wiki". Not every wiki is using Fandom as their source, and I actually recommend against it.

Second, we're a map wiki and not a paraphilia wiki because we want a focus on maps.

Third, paraphilias are not disorders. You can read more about my views on the concept of a paraphiliac disorder here:

Fourth, just the mere fact of documenting paraphiliac culture and self expression is not "cutesy", but even if it was, so what? Are "adhd core" people harming you? We're allowed to find beauty and grace in parts of our mind.

idk who needs to hear this this month but

legal definitions of disabillty will not be our liberation

diagnoses will not be our liberation

people whose disabilities aren't legally or medically recognised need liberation too and that liberation will not come from doctors & governments.

legal recognition and diagnosis can absolutely make life easier but please remember that governments and doctors are our oppressors, not or allies. just because you can use the system to benefit you doesn't mean it's a liberatory system. do not rely on doctors and governments to bring disabled liberation