Alone Stuck in the Stars @alonestuckinthestars - Tumblr Blog

Being a trans man just puts you in such a weird space.

"I hope if they find a new roommate it won't be a cis man".

Well, the wording is better than what we've talked about in the past and thank you for being specific, and I get where you're coming from, but how about not all men are predatory in the first place?

You know that everyone else who thinks this way and doesn't know or care that I'm trans wouldn't want me to be roommates with them? I'm perhaps more "acceptable" because I'm "softer" in presenting my masculinity, how about passing trans guys with full-on beards and lots of muscle/fat etc? Would you truly be able to wire your brain to feel safe around them, because they ARE men, and look such?

How about cis gay men? You wouldn't room with [insert name]? As if you two haven't talked about being roommates before.

How about a cis man who would later turn out to be a trans woman? How would you even know?

It's just wack as hell, you know. It's like a backhanded compliment because it's simultaneously othering me from other men but also implying I'm deemed safe to be around. I get it, women face a lot of violence at the hands of men, and it's fair to want to live in a space with only women if that's what you're comfortable with. But enough with the disgusted faces and "men gross" shit, and othering me from men.

I wouldn't want to be roommates with people who don't accept cis men, because the moment I get too masculine for them I won't be "acceptable and safe".

shitborderlinesdo

Autism Spectrum Disorder Checklist

This is a checklist to help one understand Autism Spectrum Disorder. One may use it to self-diagnose or as a worksheet to present to a doctor or therapist and better communicate symptoms they are experiencing. All information is taken from the DSM-5, and I have received help from people diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in order to create this checklist.

Section I Must check ALL of the following:

I have trouble communicating with others.

I feel I have odd social habits, such as an inability to participate in normal back-and-forth conversation, reduced sharing of interests and emotions, and/or a failure to initiate or respond to social interactions.

I’m bad at picking up on nonverbal forms of communication, such as body language, gestures, and facial expressions.

I have difficulty developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships.

I have experienced these symptoms since I was a minor.

My symptoms have caused distress for me in social, occupational, and/or other areas of functioning.

My symptoms are not better explained by another mental disorder, substance use, or a medical condition.

Section II Must check TWO or more of the following:

I use repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech when communicating with others.

I prefer sameness, and I rely on routines. Small changes can cause me a lot of stress.

When I become interested in something, I experience it intensely and can become very attached and focused.

I am hypersensitive to the world around me.

__ / 4

Section III Common Symptoms and Behaviors (not required for diagnosis):

I have difficulty picking up on sarcasm.

I often use overly literal language.

I have difficulty opening up to others and sharing my emotions.

I feel anxiety in social situations.

I am uncomfortable with making eye contact with others.

I am clumsy.

I self-harm.

Sometimes I shut down and just don’t want to speak at all.

I have trouble with perspective and understanding others’ viewpoints.

I have difficulty self-analyzing and therefore have difficulty letting people know how I’m feeling and expressing my needs.

I often find myself at a loss for words.

I am easily overwhelmed when there are too many people.

I participate in self-stimulation (or “stimming”), flapping hands/arms, spinning, or needing to apply pressure to certain parts of my body.

I come off as harsh sometimes because I have difficulty understanding others.

If someone upsets my routine, it triggers my anxiety.

I have a sensitivity to light and sound.

I have difficulty with “me” vs “we” thinking.

__ / 17

snakeskinass

5/7

2/4

8/17

dailydivergent

There’s no such thing as work-life balance for neurodivergent & chronically ill people.

This is because everything in my life requires work:

maintaining friendships

keeping up with my hygiene

managing bills

making money

remembering my basic needs

sleeping regularly

outputting creatively

All requires some aspect of work for me.

And when everything in your life requires work, your balance goes out the window.

If you're neurodivergent and overwhelmed — I see you.

If you're chronically ill and overwhelmed — I see you.

You're not dysfunctional.

You're not incapable.

You're doing your best.

etherealspacejelly

this is your gentle reminder to stop fighting against your adhd and instead structure your life around it

buy a pack of chapsticks and put one in the pocket of all of your coats and jackets because you always forget to bring one and chapped lips is sensory hell

leave important things where you can see them. if they go in a box or a drawer you will forget they exist

put any appointments or deadlines in your phone calendar As Soon As you get them. set a reminder for a week before, a day before, an hour before, as many as you need as often as you need them.

when that little voice in your head says "i dont need to write that down, ill remember it" that is the devil talking!!! write it down anyway!!

plan for down time. have a few hours at the end of every day to just do fun stuff like engage in your hyperfixations. even if you didnt get all of your work done that day, have the rest anyway. you probably spent the whole day beating yourself up for not doing what you Should be doing, so you still need the break.

if you never eat vegetables because its too much effort to chop and cook them, get the frozen or canned shit. it doesnt go off for ages and you just have to microwave it. theres no point buying fresh vegetables if they just keep going off and being left to rot in the bottom of your fridge

if you struggle to decide what to have for dinner every day, take the decision out of it. choose a set of meals and eat those on rotation until you get sick of them, then choose some new ones and do it again.

its not stupid if it works! our brains literally have a chemical deficiency. you are allowed to accommodate yourself. go forth and stop making your life more difficult than it has to be because "this shouldn't be this hard". it is hard, so make it easier.

Connected so deeply with the nerdy loser guy characters in media growing up only to find out I /am/ the nerdy loser guy

chainmail-butch

hi I would actually be super interested in your thoughts on in what ways butch=/=masc!! I've recently been toying more with the butch label but I'm a little lost I feel. I would really appreciate it, but no pressure! thanks for your awesome blog

Okay, so I've been thinking about this ask for months.

The easiest and simplest answer is that masc is an adjective and Butch is a noun. You can identify any stranger on the street as masc, but Butch only comes with self-identification. Butch is a non-binary label that relies purely on self-identification.

That's the most widely applicable answer.

If you've studied Butch literature then you know that there are generally 4 kinds of Butches; Cis Butches, Transmasc Butches, Nonbinary Butches, and Transfem Butches. There's also the secret 5th Category of Gay Man Butches but I'm not gonna cover them.

Butch is a gender all on its own, and it is almost completely self defined. Take, for example, the life of Leslie Feinberg. She started as a cis butch and then he transitioned to a transmasc butch. Utimately, zie settled on being non-binary. Hir gender, presentation, and self understanding radically changed over the course of hir life, but zie remained butch because zie said zie was.

That's the important part.

I think one of the issues that plagues (amateur) academic studies of Butchness is the gender binary. I've seen Butch get defined as both 'Masculine Femininity' and 'Feminine Masculinity.' In my opinion, Butch is Butch and its closest cousin is masculinity.

This answer is useless to baby butches. If you're a baby and looking for answers, hit the books or the bars or the home depot. If you can't find an elder to talk to, read. Once you've read, do what feels right to you. No two butches are the same. And butchness is not tied to your sexuality. There are lesbian butches, ace butches, bisexual butches, and straight butches. It doesn't matter who you fuck, it matters who you are.

In conclusion, you know masc when you see it and if you ask someone nicely you'll find out whether they are butch or not.

butchesanddykesandqueersohmy

Baby butches feel free to reach out I've got reading recommendations and I'm open to questions

whatwwwwwww

I'd love some reading recommendations!

butchesanddykesandqueersohmy

Okay so starting with the obvious

Stone butch blues by Leslie feinberg

- I'm going to give the warning that I wish I'd gotten it is a difficult read, it took me years to complete because of how triggering some parts of it are especially with regard to SA and things of that nature. But that being said it was the first time I felt my life was somewhat understood by someone from the past.

Female masculinity by jack halberstem- try to get a more recent copy because this is one that jack wrote well before coming out and has added and edited and changed along his journey

Butch is a noun by S. bear Bergman- a series of essays that fundamentally changed how I see my place in my community.

Well of loneliness by Radclyffe hall - my advice for this one is read it then read about Radclyffe as a person she was very complicated and often times a contradiction but still it is worth learning.

These next few I can't directly vouch for as they're on my to be read pile but they come highly enough recommended

Hijab butch blues: a memoir by lamya h. - was told is a must read by a beloved butch elder and so it is going to be read.

Burning butch by r/b mertz - one for those of us who have religious trauma of the catholic variety apparently but widely relatable to anyone from a more conservative background

enbyzombies

"haha every transmasc had a transmed phase" no the fuck we did not

#literally initially came out as non-binary #any transmedicalist bullshit I came across online at the beginning of coming into my identity #i figured out pretty quickly transmeds were NOT it

alonestuckinthestars

I'm watching Blue Eye Samurai and I adoooorrreeee Mizu.

I have 2 episodes left to watch but so far at no point does Mizu say explicitly that they're a woman- they just perform whatever gender they need to perform at any given time. And when they're by themselves gender is just pointless. And even if they do end up explicitly saying they're a woman they're still fucking with gender in a way everyone else in the series doesn't. And I love that.

I love them for many other reasons also but this one is a pretty big one. Lmfao. I love how firm and badass they are, I love their anger at everyone and the world cause same, etc

alonestuckinthestars

Mizu when they get even angrier almost everytime they get called a girl (by other men) but still feeling kinship with women even when these women perceive them as a man.

Also they just bind almost all the time??? There's moments where they definitely could have taken off the binder but nope.

I'm watching Blue Eye Samurai and I adoooorrreeee Mizu.

I have 2 episodes left to watch but so far at no point does Mizu say explicitly that they're a woman- they just perform whatever gender they need to perform at any given time. And when they're by themselves gender is just pointless. And even if they do end up explicitly saying they're a woman they're still fucking with gender in a way everyone else in the series doesn't. And I love that.

I love them for many other reasons also but this one is a pretty big one. Lmfao. I love how firm and badass they are, I love their anger at everyone and the world cause same, etc

kit-catrock

I just discovered that there was a person who was afab and ended up joining the russian army by the name of Alexander Durov in 1806.

Born a woman, Nadezhda Durova (birth name) ran away from home and joined a light cavallery regiment dressed as a man.

After his identity was uncovered, the russian tsar summoned him to the palace at St. Petersburg, where he impressed the tsar so much that he awarded Durov the Cross of St. George and promoted him to lieutenant in a hussar unit.

He always referred to himself as a man and was upset when people called him a woman.

He signed letters with his male last name.

He expressed feelings of disgust towards his sex and how that worried him a lot.

He never married willingly and adopted many dogs and cats.

He only danced with women when attending a ball.

He asked to be buried under his male name Alexander Andreevich Alexandrov but the church did not agree to that.

I never saw him in "historical transmasculine people" compilations and only discovered his story coincidentally.

Unfortunately, historians still adress him with female pronouns, although he did not want that.

Let's remember him together. We won't allow him to be forgotten.

I'll probably add onto this post later or make a better one but you can read a lot on this wikipedia article:

snakeautistic

People underestimate how much it fucks you up to be subtly excluded as a kid. I would try to talk to my classmates and be met with disinterest or annoyance. The one friend I had, who I clung to and nodded along to his every word, had other friends he liked just as much or more. And his other friends didn’t care for me at all.

I look back at pictures from the time and see how separated I was from them. I remember knowing I was different. I remember posing questions about the world to the girls playing next to me and realizing that they had never asked the same ones to themselves. That the ways we thought couldn’t be more different.

I kept myself amused with my own fanatical stories and musings in my head. I would wander the playground on a circular path, imagining a friend and being sorely disappointed when it didn’t feel as real as I’d hoped.

There was a bubble separating me from everyone else, thin, and nearly invisible, but with a pearly sheen you could catch under the right conditions. I knew it was there, they knew it was there, and it changed me

Realized this week I might be a repressed gay trans man considering I used to engage in mlm fics / ships and all as a teen and connected to gay male characters more than literally anything else, envied gay men and all that and then dropped that shit cold when I realized I ''should stop doing that cause I'm a cis straight girl'' later on :)))))))))))

spitblaze

considering how many transmascs were legitimately way angrier BEFORE starting T and have since calmed down significantly have we perhaps considered that maybe the reason so many cis dudes are angry and aggressive isn't because of testosterone but maybe. like. personal issues. unmet needs. a social climate that teaches them that there are only like three acceptable social outlets for men max and one of them is being angry and shouting

#I was so much angrier and generally frustrated before starting T #Except I had to keep that shit inside so people couldnt necessarily always tell #But now that I've been on T for 2 years im much less angry bc it's lessened my dysphoria #obviously i still struggle w my mental health but like #it's one less thing to negatively impact me yk

anticmiscellaney

Edit: at the suggestion of @fritzllang, I have made a playlist! It has these fifteen songs, but I might add some others too.

my-autism-adhd-blog

Early Warning Signs of Autistic Shutdowns

Neurodivergent_lou

Meltdowns and shutdowns

For the longest time I've been trying to figure out what meltdowns and shutdowns look like for me now as an adult and I think I'm starting to get somewhere with more clarity lmfao.

#neurodivergence #neurodivergent #undiagnosed autistic #undiagnosed autism #autism #autistic adult #autistic #self diagnosed autism #meltdown #shutdown

genderkoolaid

hey i was wondering something and i wanted to know your opinion on it

Why is it problematic to say i hate men but not white people or straight people

(i'm a trans south east asian man btw)

I'd say on, like, a casual exasperated level, its not problematic to say "I hate [x]." It gets problematic when your venting about a group becomes your sole lens of viewing + interacting with that group.

Like, its entirely alright to be frustrated with behaviors common to cishet white men and express that in a vent by saying you hate them. But... its like how people make the correct point that they shouldn't be expected or obligated to give all their energy to coddling people with power over them, but translate that into "i never have to care about a member of this group at all" which directly conflicts with just. being in a community? Like women should not be expected to be caretakers for men, but people in a community need to take care of each other. When the only way you engage with a group of people is by expressing hatred and asserting how much you aren't obligated to care about them, its easier than people think to find yourself dehumanizing them.

Which does not mean "you are just as bad as a racist/misogynist" or "you are oppressing them"; you are An Individual whose biases are not necessarily backed up by powerful systemic powers. But, for one, its very easy for those biases to be used by systemic forces: with men, misandry is very easily used to justify all kinds of violence towards marginalized men & people perceived as men. You also have situations where people will say the Holocaust "wasn't as bad" as, say, US slavery, because it was "white on white violence," or saying the Armenian genocide also wasn't that big of a deal because "it was done to Christians and Christians are always killing people" (two real things I have seen been said). And, again: if you are going to care about community and restorative/transformative justice and all that, you need to be able to give a shit about all kinds of people who you live with. You need to be able to see them as whole beings you are capable of connecting with on some level. You don't personally need to date or befriend men, but you do need to be able to give a shit about men in your community.

Its fine to feel annoyance and anger and use "hatred" to express that. But the problem occurs when people take "its okay to be angry with your oppressors and not spend all your energy coddling them" and make that the end-all be-all of their relationship with people of whatever group; revolutions can't accomplish compassionate goals when they are run on hatred. Very hooksian concept but "love" (as in "a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust", not in a strictly emotional sense but as an action) is a skill that is as vital as understanding class dynamics and protest tactics. Maybe you don't need to love everyone, but try to have the capacity to love anyone; the ability to physically care for someone you don't emotionally like is, I think, a vital step towards truly challenging and bringing down the kyriarchy.

Basically its about recognizing when your venting stops being an outlet and starts being a way for unproductive feelings to shape how you view other people.

doberbutts

Also personally I think it is also an issue to hate straight people and white people 🤷‍♂️

My core friend group is largely queers and questionings, yes. But hating straight people also means hating my family members. Hating *their* family members. Hating people who are genuinely kind to me and have never done anything to hurt me. I might be frustrated at times with Straight People (tm) as a social group, but to write off literally every heterosexual because I have some frustrations isn't good for anyone.

I'm a black person living and working in an area that's roughly only 10% black. There are days I don't see a single black person besides myself in the mirror. Hating all the white people around me would be a miserable experience. And for what? A white person made me, nursed me, parented me, and while I may have some disagreements about some of her behavior, she does love me. Hating white people would mean hating my mother. Would mean hating a significant portion of my day-to-day interactions. Hating many of my friends.

What a miserable and lonely experience, to hate everyone around you. No men, no straights, no whites. I wouldn't feel a single moment of happiness, just hate all day every day. That's not good for you. Besides the building community aspect, it's just not good for your mental health to live life so full of anger and hate 24/7.

You can be wary around people in demographics that have hurt you- put up your walls, protect yourself. Sometimes that's for the best. But constant hatred? Well. Good luck, I guess.

alonestuckinthestars

Just to add on cause I've been thinking about this recently:

There's a difference between venting about common problematic behaviours influenced by white supremacist patriarchy and dehumanizing a whole group of people because of your frustrations.

For instance there's a difference between genuinely venting about men mansplaining or committing sexual violence, and making sweeping generalizations like "men have no depth / men are simple-minded".

The first is calling out problematic behaviours, while the latter is dehumanizing a whole group of people and further alienating yourself from them.

If it would be unacceptable said about women, why should it be acceptable said about men?

Essentially to reiterate on what has already been said; there's a difference between "I hate men" (the abstract figure representing patriarchal violence) and "I hate men" (the living and breathing humans as capable of thought and feeling as you in your community)

-

On a personal note as someone who used to say "I hate men/cis/straight people" just a few years ago I've since subconsciously done away with the concept because it ultimately does nothing but bring more negativity into my life like @doberbutts explained. Even saying it in the "abstract figure representing x oppressive violence" way.

If I'm going to vent about oppression I'll be specific about it instead of just "I hate men". Instead I'll say, for example, "I hate when cis people do (transphobic/ignorant behaviour)". That way I'm acknowledging the problem and validating my frustrations without generalizing and alienating myself from a whole group of people.

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