GrimoireGhost @grimoire--ghost - Tumblr Blog

who gave me all this autism

common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day

beaft

recent example. lady at my careers appointment had a post-it with her name on it stuck to the monitor, so i introduced myself by saying "hello, i'm eliot! you must be [name], it's nice to meet you!" and she stared at me as if i was the stupidest person alive and said icily, "yeah, i'm [name]. congratulations, you can read."

in bygone times this would have reduced me to a sort of quivering blancmange. thankfully i am now in a place where i was able to pull back, calmly evaluate this interaction, and say to myself "this woman should probably not be working in a customer-facing job"

beaft

important additions!!!!

vaspider

Sometimes learning "wow, that person is a DICK" is the best thing for your social anxiety.

memorycycle

first thing id do as a skeleton is drink red wine from a goblet and have it spill out everywhere . second thing id do is play my ribs like a xylophone

screampotato

Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.

glitched-out-mess

theramblingvoid

Hit "view post" and lost it

tax--payer

well it seems like she lemon on my pig till im hog

tax--payer

somethibg bad happen

tax--payer

uh oh

tax--payer

she seems to be having a wonderful time

tax--payer

ohhhh hog is not well

tax--payer

shes shrinking

tax--payer

she strives on due to my motherly love and care ^_^

tax--payer

she got lost but i found her on a shelf

tax--payer

she perseveres through the seasons

tax--payer

sealed her for transport so she can be witnessed by my two friends when i visit them

tax--payer

i took her to see my friends and only tripped and ate shit and hit my head on the pavement once ^_^

tax--payer

i finally took her out after 4 hog nightmares and 10 days and when i unsealed the jar a visible cloud puffed out and i feel unwell now ^_^

tax--payer

my cute pig has remained in her stasis jar for the last 4 months and only has been visibly wet several times ^_^

tax--payer

she still persists, almost 1 and a half years old now. soon i will have the funding to encase her in resin ^_^

tax--payer

my awesome stupid as fuck daughter gains power each baleful day

balcklion

A circulating video of sisters who bought the same clothes for their husbands 😂❤️

g1sunstreaker

this gag NEVER fails to make me laugh. watching them all file in one by one and collectively laugh harder every time the next guy walks in…i could watch videos of this practical joke all day

cumaeansibyl

Their faces as they collectively realize they’re married to the funniest women on the planet

the-real-seebs

whenever people say “it’s just a prank” about minor cruelty, remember: the people laughing hardest here are the people being pranked. you’ll notice that they aren’t hurt, or upset. they’re enjoying it. they feel loved and included.

that’s how you make a good prank.

serenitynerd

I keep putting this back in my queue because it means I restumble upon it and it always makes me laugh. So delightful

lostxanadu

the thing about being bullied for being weird as a kid is that even if you've always embraced being weird your brain is still always looking for the line where it's too much. you can be as proudly and intentionally weird as you want and you can love being weird but your mind is still convinced there's a point where you get too weird and people start treating you like a weird looking bug again. also it feels like you reach that point 500 times a day even if everyone you've spoken to today found you pleasant and likable and even if you're completely alone in your house with nobody looking at you at all.

teaboot

I don't share videos very often but this belongs in the MoMA

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

gentle reminder that if u feel hungry soon after eating, it might be bc you’re eating mostly carbs without adding enough protein. try eating a handful of nuts or smthing alongside your next meal.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

and you don’t have to change the recipe or anything! you can eat what you were going to, just add some cheese cubes or a handful of nuts or salami slices on the side. u don’t have to change your meals, just add a little extra protein

kreature-ofthenight

thats nice but what do I need to do If I wake up around 3 am every other night with an unquenchable hunger for flesh even tho I ate normal balanced meals trough the day?

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

spoonful of peanut butter

trustworthymedicaladvice

another way to manage the undying hunger for flesh is to eat 15-20 live crickets. their souls are weaker than most other animals that size but they are easy to get a hold of and have the best flavor

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

this checks out!

adamsmasher

WE WERE ON JEOPARDY!!!!!!!!!!

rouge-the-bat

thank you for coming to my this #mythis

houndmother

many of you just. genuinely don’t believe that people can grow and change.

houndmother

this is about the death penalty and its also about call out posts about people who have already apologized for things they did a long time ago and it’s also about using ‘toxic’ or ‘abuser’ as if its an immutable class of person, and its also about any other circumstance with permanent consequences or wherein you assume someone is still the same person they were.

luckyladylily

So I have a point to make, but I think it is going to take a bit of a journey to get there. Lets start with a quote from Whipping Girl (Julia Serano).

When the majority of violence and sexual assaults committed against trans people is directed at trans women, that is not transphobia—it is trans-misogyny.

I think it is important to understand that for many trans women, Whipping Girl is formative. It is hard to overstate how important of a work it is to how trans femme people as a whole understand and view the world. With that in mind.

That quote is predicated on a false assumption. The best current data is that violence is directed across trans gender identities fairly equally. That is, trans men and non binary people suffer about as much violence as trans women. However, up until recently almost all studies of violence against trans people have been focused on trans women. Trans men and nonbinary people have been critically under represented and violence against them critically unreported. And yet many trans women continue to assume that trans women are the most targeted gender identity, largely because of an over reliance on a twenty year old manifesto that made a very strong claim based on bad data (which was the best data available at the time).

This is not a Julia Serano hit piece. I think Whipping Girl is fine. But I also think that Whipping Girl is not perfect. There are ideas and statements I personally disagree with. There are ideas and statements in there that are objectively wrong, like the above quote. And there is a least one statement I simply find indefensible.

While trans people on the female-to-male (FTM) spectrum face discrimination for breaking gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism), their expressions of maleness or masculinity themselves are not targeted for ridicule—to do so would require one to question masculinity itself.

This statement does not line up with what I have observed. I have observed trans men's masculinity being ridiculed, though not in the same way as trans women's femininity is ridiculed. She is wrong. I think this is an ignorant statement made by a trans woman motivated to overlook discrimination because she was pushing a particular narrative and therefore failed to recognize discrimination as it is experienced by another group, assuming that because it is not like the discrimination she experiences it does not exist. I believe this statement is indefensible. It was ignorant then, it is ignorant now.

Again, this is not a hit piece. I don't think she is a bad person, I don't think we need to throw out all of Whipping Girl. Lots of people make mistakes like this, it is an occupational hazard of making these kind of strong theories and statements.

But how many trans women take this statement as gospel and build their understanding of trans masculinity around Julia Serano's dismissive, factually incorrect, and at times even ignorant statements?

And this is Julia Serano's Whipping Girl. One of the most respected trans feminine texts there is. If we should be able to trust any text, it is Whipping Girl.

And that's the point. It is dangerous to view these sorts of texts as objective sources of information. And it's not just trans women and whipping girl, I am just most familiar with texts relating to trans women because I am one.

The queer community has a problem where we view authority figures in the movement as sources of objectively correct information. And when you do this eventually some authority figure you respect is going to say something that's ignorant and wrong and you will adopt that incorrect idea.

You have to be critical of your sources. Especially sources that speak to you on an emotional level.

yearst

Do you know where someone could find the best current data about violence against trans people? Because every time I try to look, I find data that says trans women are significantly more at risk of violence than trans men.

I am not trying to kick the hornets nest here, but if you’re telling people to question their sources and then making a big claim without any links to data… people are going to question where you got that.

luckyladylily

So let's start with a critically flawed, if well meaning, source, to demonstrate why you have to be careful and the type of misinformation that is extremely easy to happen. The human rights campaign is one of the first sources people are going to come up against here. They also horribly mangle the data in ways that are, frankly, shocking. I'm pretty sure that they didn't have anyone qualified to do statistical analysis look over their claims. Maybe not even anyone with basic training.

So the hrc bases a lot of their claims on identified homicide numbers. Which, of course, introduces massive selective bias. Using a pool of 372 identified trans victims of homicide, the hrc claims that 83% of trans victims of homicide were women.

The problem being that identified victims are not the same as all victims. Especially when you are comparing a known highly visible demographic to demographics known for low visibility.

The discrepancy in those claims is subtle to those who are not trained in data analysis, but it is such a basic and major error as to call into question the ability of the HRC to do effective data analysis at all. It's classic survivorship bias, I'm sure you've seen the story of the WW2 planes with bullet holes, it's that sort of thing.

And it is true that all sources agree that trans women (especially black trans women) are far more often identified. We have more names of murdered trans women than other demographics. You might be forgiven thinking this means trans women suffer the most violence.

But competent data analysis paints a different picture.

Lets look at "Global Burden of Violence Against Transgender and Gender-Diverse Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis".

The first thing you will notice is that this source spends a huge amount of time going into exact methodology, what data was used, the source, what data was not used and why, and how and why it was analyzed in the way it was. This is what competent data analysis looks like. Lets pull some critical quotes from the source:

"Disproportionate violence burdens are experienced by transgender and gender-diverse people who are multiply marginalized.13 For example, transphobia, racism, and classism intersect to compound violence exposure for transgender women of color.14,15 According to the Trans Murder Monitoring project, 94% of the 321 identified transgender and gender-diverse people who were murdered in 2023 were transgender women or transgender feminine people, and the majority were Black, women of color, and engaged in sex work.16 Such disparities suggest the importance of considering intersecting identities in violence research and intervention strategies.13"

You will notice they acknowledge the data on identified victims is almost entirely trans women. What they do not do is suggest that this means trans women are the primary victims of anti trans violence, instead drawing the conclusion that intersecting identities are a key factor. This is important because of the results of the actual data of properly conducted data gathering. Here is their conclusion about violence across trans gender identities: "Our meta-analyses did not show significantly different levels of violence globally among transgender women, transgender men, and nonbinary adults."

"While we would have included homicide, we identified no studies that reported its prevalence." The first part is pretty plain. There is not a statistically significant difference in violence levels between trans identities, according to the data that was collected in a scientific manner.

However, homicide data has been completely neglected to be collected in a scientific manner (likely due to the difficulty of doing so). Instead reports are anecdotal - that is, we identify trans homicide victims after the fact, which means it is entirely based on demographic visibility. The source does suggest that it seems likely that black trans women in particular are disproportional victims of homicide, but no real conclusion can be drawn without further studies.

Given that general violence against trans people seems fairly flat across identity, and that intersectional factors seem to play a critical part in violence against trans people, I would suggest that anecdotally gathered evidence is the source of the discrepancy. Between a demographic known for hyper visibility (trans women), and demographics known for being practically invisible (other trans identities), it draws a very obvious picture of why the anecdotal evidence looks the way it does.

As a side note and purely my own opinion, I think there is a tendency for white trans women to claim the violence experienced by trans women of color, especially black trans women, and report it as general violence against trans women. But the data suggests that race (and class, which are often intertwined) play such a massive role in violence against trans women that I feel it is honestly kind of racist how the trans women community so often glosses over it, if it is even discussed at all. The simple fact is that a white trans woman like myself is much, much less likely to experience violence than a black trans woman, and that is a key part of the discussion.

Getting back to data, there is one more important piece I want to highlight. Specifically, how data has been gathered, and on who.

"Of the 94 studies, nearly all (90 studies [96%]) included transgender women, whereas 49% (46 studies) included transgender men, and 37% (35 studies) included nonbinary adults"

This is a massive discrepancy in visibility. It seems almost laughable that a study would include trans women specifically but not bother with trans men, a staggering display of systematic bias against trans men, and yet it appears that half of available studies that passed the minimum bar of quality to be included in the meta analysis did just that. And nonbinary people have it even worse. It is no wonder that violence against trans demographics other than trans women is less well understood and under reported in anecdotal analysis. Even the people actively looking for violence against trans people are heavily biasing their studies towards discovering violence against trans women.

I could go on for a long, long time breaking down this one meta analysis, but I think you get the point, and in particular how important proper data analysis is. The simple fact of the matter is many "reputable" sources are clearly not conducting proper data analysis when breaking down anti trans violence by demographic and making wildly incorrect claims because of it.

I have one more source I will be brief with. "Gender Identity Disparities in Criminal Victimization: National Crime Victimization Survey, 2017–2018". The critical quote for our purpose:

"Transgender women and men had higher rates of violent victimization (86.1 and 107.5 per 1000 persons, respectively) than did cisgender women (23.7 per 1000 persons; OR = 3.88; 90% CI = 0, 8.55) and cisgender men (19.8 per 1000 persons; OR = 5.98, 90% CI = 2.09, 9.87), but there were no differences between transgender men and women (Δ = 21.4; SE = 68.7; P = .76)."

You will note that the raw data shows higher violence against trans men, but with proper data analysis it is revealed to not be statistically significant. This is something you have to be careful of, there are tools experts use for data analysis that reveal that obvious conclusions from raw numbers are not always correct.

There are more sources out there, but I am not going to bother tracking them down. It was not hard to find these sources, these two major sources I found through simple internet searches on the first page (duck duck go, in my case). I don't know why you had problems, for me it was as simple as searching for something like "trans violence by gender identity" and looking for actual studies that talk about methodology.

This is a skill people really need to develop, but its not something I know how to teach. I personally think the queer community on tumblr is very over reliant on being spoon fed sources, and on top of that is really terrible at evaluating sources. I think it is genuinely quite likely that most trans people go straight to the HRC page, see their big bold graphics proclaiming that 83% of trans homicide victims are trans women, and don't even consider that it could be bad information.

genderkoolaid

#reading list#julia serano#also ! the 2015 US National trans survey showed that approx. 70% of native trans male and nonbinary people afab respondents have been#sexually assaulted - a staggering 10-20% more than any other racial demographic

^^ its genuinely fucking insane how high the rates are for native trans men & nonbinary people assigned female. iirc its 74% for enben assigned female, 71% for trans men, higher than the already high rates for native cis women (the 2016/2017 NISVS found 63.9% of native cis women experienced contact sexual violence) & as you mentioned, higher than any other racial group looked at on the USTS. & the lack of discussion around this when it comes to discussing misogynistic colonial violence feels really dangerous tbh (thinking abt the above remark on how racism is sidelined in the discussion of trans women being murdered).

resetmyfeelings

estrogenesis-evangelion

the invention of pokémon, c. 1996

pokemonheritageposts

Pokemon Heritage Post

i-am-a-fish

whose dumb ass idiot fuck idea was it to make medicine cost money

i-am-a-fish

go to triple hell

thelibrawrian-deactivated201912

i was thinking about the weirdest phone calls i got when i still worked at the public library and i remembered this one phone call. it was probably less than 20 seconds long, but it still makes me laugh.

anyways, this woman called and without even saying hello after i said the usual “public library, how can i help you?” spiel, she said, “i have a very important question: when you shelve books, do you push them all to the front of the shelf or all the way back?”

it took me a second to process the question and then i answered that, at the library, we always shelve them so that they are even with the front edge so they’re easier to grab and see. she was obviously delighted by this answer and then, as if an afterthought, she asked, “okay, what about you? what do you do at home with your books?” i said i did the same thing. she hummed in obvious agreement and then just like that she said “thank you!” and hung up.

i never heard from her again. i hope she won whatever argument she was having.

tehzii

for about a year, i worked at a call center for sprint. i have a similar kind of story. a woman called, and said she had a question about the call history on her bill. “sure, let me just pull up your account-” and she cut me off going, “no, no, it’s not anything specific, it’s just. so, if you change the time on your phone, does that change the time on the bill?” “uh… no? the time on the phone doesn’t matter, the call history is recorded by the towers.” “ohhhh” she said in the saltiest voice i have ever heard “so even if you changed the timezone it wouldn’t change the time on the bill? to, say, the middle of the night?” i stg yall i looked into the camera like i was on the office. “um… no? it would still be the local time of the tower. is there anything else i can help you with?” to me, overly chipper: “nope! thank you! have a great day!” turning on someone as she hung up: “she says yoU’RE A LYING SACK OF-” i still mean-snicker every time i think about it.

ladyzolstice

i used to work in a call center for a roadside assistance company, from late 2015 to early 2016. it was easily the most miserable job i’ve ever had, and the turnover rate was very high. people stuck on the side of the road tend to be quick to anger - understandably so - and it wears on you after awhile.

so i had been having a string of very time-consuming, draining calls. my line rings again, i steel myself for another angry caller, and i pick up. “[redacted] roadside assistance, how can i help you?” i chirp, in my Customer Service Voice.

“yeah, hi,” a gentleman with a thick southern accent responds. “my motorcycle won’t start.”

i brace immediately for another long call. motorcycles were notoriously difficult to work with - a lot of insurance companies wouldn’t insure them, and a lot of tow companies refused to pick them up because they require a specific sort of trailer.

“i’m sorry to hear that, sir. what’s your current location?”

“oh, i’m just at my house. i was wondering if it would be okay for me to just load it into my trailer and take it to my buddy’s shop. would that interfere with my insurance?”

i click through his account and am Relieved to discover he’s in the clear. “No sir, it looks like you’re good to go. Can I help you with anything else?”

A pause. “Have you heard the good news?”

My Anxiety, which had been receding, suddenly spikes into the fucking stratosphere. I live in the rural south. The “good news” usually means “Jesus” and i was in no mood to be proselytized to for god knows how long.

i steel myself for the Religious Talk. “What news, sir?”

“McDonald’s is now serving breakfast all day!”

I laughed so hard I almost cried. I hope that guy ate as many hashbrowns as he could.