This is your pleasant and kindly reminder from your kindly older trans gal that tucking is not good and also bad for you and your body and should not be done.
Seriously. Don't tuck. It's so bad for you and your body.
I know some folks, eventually, will tag or add comments like "HELL YEAH GIRL! SLANG THAT THANG!" and yes, that's cool and fine and slang that thang etc etc...
But also, imagine I am your trans mom for a moment. I am gently grabbing your face, telling you I care about you and your body and your health, and that tucking can be very dangerous and hurt you and that I care very much if you get hurt and I do not want you to be hurt.
So please do not tuck. Don't do it. Okay? Good girl.
People are saying “wait I never heard it was bad, what!?” and asking “what can happen?”
So here’s just a small (non-comprehensive) rundown:
Testicular Torsion which can cause even more complications and health risks and requires immediate medical attention/surgery to fix. If not fixed quickly it can cause tissue death/necrosis and do even worse damage to the entire area surrounding it.
Permanent skin irritation and tearing that can lead to infection which can, again, if left untreated turn into way worse things that will quickly turn life threatening.
It can also cause inguinal hernias, which increases additional risks, and must -again- be handled with surgery. And if you’re looking to get bottom surgery down the line you -cannot- get bottom surgery until all the inguinal hernias are handled and you recover from them. AND once you get a hernia you are now predisposition to get more at an increased rate afterward even IF you’re careful from then on.
Tucking can also cause urinary tract infections, which can lead to a kidney infection if left unchecked or improperly handled. Which, even if it doesn’t lead to kidney infection, will greatly increase your risks of bladder and prostate cancer.
… and again, these are just the tip of the iceberg, there’s lots of lower risk issues and other things and depending on preexisting conditions AND even if you’re even able to see a doctor, you have no guarantee that they’ll know how to or even care to examine you properly due to their own biases.
As for the final question I got, “What about safe alternatives for those of us with major dysphoria?”, I don’t really have a good answer… the best I can say is get breathable but slightly tighter underwear or light compression shorts… but even THEN wearing those for extended periods (even just a couple hours, 4 or less) can lead to risk of heath issues or problems. There really isn’t a “good solution or alternative” that is actually fully safe-safe.
Again, please, take care of yourselves and your body.
Ainu culture, an indigenous group originating from Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands.
The intricate, geometric patterns on their robes are emblematic of Ainu heritage, often created through embroidery or appliqué.
Traditional Ritual: The individuals are captured performing a traditional gesture, possibly part of a ceremony like the iyomante, a ritual aimed at sending spirits back to the kamuy realm.
Historical Context: The Ainu are the indigenous people of northern Japan, traditionally living in harmony with nature as hunter-gatherers, though they faced significant assimilation policies in the 19th and 20th centuries.
art block is your brain telling you to do studies.
draw a still life. practice some poses. sketch some naked people. do a color study. try out a different technique on a basic shape.
art block doesnt stop you from drawing, it stops you from making your drawings look the way you want them to. and thats because you need to push your skills to the next level so you can preform at that standard
As a scientific illustrator- this is 100% true and going to review your basics will fix it every goddamn time. Not only does it keep your skills sharp, when you’re not emotionally invested in the final product of a piece, you relax and your brain makes more/better art juice for you. So, when you get back to that big/important piece? You’ll know what to do and how to do it.
Nothing in nature blooms all year round. Rest, and take care of yourself.
Write a description of an object. write the weather today. Write a made up characterization of a random photo of an actor from the internet as to the character they are in that picture. Write a little story about your pet’s day. Write about spilling soup and make it super dramatic and tragic. Write about someone’s day being ruined and make it funny. Write a meetcute coffeeshop AU of two OCs you’d never put together- maybe from different stories. Write them breaking up.
Write a bunch of short stuff meant for no audience ever and super duper self indulgent.
I found out relatively recently that it really helps if I write short fiction surrounding the novels I write. Like oh? I’m stuck for a bit? Ooh there was that section I wanted to explore but doesn’t fit in the plot really. There was that what-if that could never happen in the actual story but would be fun to explore. It keeps me in the characters’ headspace (tho that’s not always what I’m needing) but not right where they are exactly.
Yes! I have gotten past writers’ block multiple times by writing drabble collections. Making something coherent happen in just 100 words is a very different challenge from writing a long story and it also lets me get past plot points that I don’t want to explore in-depth.
I am also going to have to start drawing studies now…
My landlord pasted an ai generated ass eviction notice on my door because you have to cite a reason and he doesn’t have one so he just chopped that section out brother you cannot be serious
Would you like the added layer that he did this right after I tested for mold in my house and it was quite literally in every room and he came here to check out the hole in my ceiling that he has left unrepaired for two years
im gonna fight this in any way I can obviously but I want out of here as soon as possible I can’t get a new place until the end of this month but I do need to save for movers and a moving truck and a deposit. I also live with my mom who is severely disabled and I take care of which makes things more complicated. If you want to help my Cash App and Venmo are @ ishaanjs obviously nobody is obligated to give anything and thank you if you do
Backed by a conservative legal group, a white doctor is suing “Find A Black Doctor” for allegedly discriminating against non-Black physician
A white doctor based in Colorado has teamed up with a conservative legal group to sue the online directory, “Find A Black Doctor,” for allegedly discriminating against physicians based on their race.
The lawsuit was filed May 19 in a Manhattan federal court by dermatologist Dr. Travis Morrell and Do No Harm, an organization founded in 2022 that publicly condemns DEI. The complaint accuses the directory of excluding non-Black physicians by restricting eligibility to “Black physicians and dentists in active clinical practice.” The suit also alleges that the online platform “robs” non-Black physicians of “advertising exposure” and promotes “racial concordance,” the notion that patients receive better care from doctors of the same race.
“Find A Black Doctor indefensibly robs some physicians of valuable advertising exposure and deprives patients of the opportunity to discover capable providers without regard to race,” reads a statement from a Do No Harm rep in a press release.
According to the complaint, Morrell, a double board-certified physician and member of Do No Harm, says he applied to join the directory on Dec. 23, 2025. However, he didn’t receive a response and followed up by email months later, but was met with silence. The suit, which targets the website and its founder, claims Morrell’s application was “constructively rejected because he is white.”
“Do No Harm and Dr. Morrell are entitled to relief,” reads the legal complaint.
Also links for those studies mentioned in the screenshots:
This paper assesses the impacts of physician-patient race-match, especially Black patients paired with Black physicians, on patient mortality. We draw on administrative data from Florida, linking hospital encounters from mid-2011 through 2014 to information from the Florida Physician Workforce Survey. Focusing on uninsured patients experiencing unscheduled hospital admissions who are conditionally randomly assigned to physicians, we find that physician-patient race-match for Black patients reduces the likelihood of within-hospital mortality by 0.28 percentage points, a 27% reduction relative to the overall mortality rate. An alternative identification strategy relying on instrumental variables provides a similar finding.
Black Representation in the Primary Care Physician Workforce and Its Association With Population Life Expectancy and Mortality Rates in the US
In this cohort study of survival outcomes for 1618 US counties, Black PCPs operated in less than half of all counties during each of 3 time points assessed (2009, 2014, and 2019). On average, every 10-percent increase in county-level Black PCP representation was associated with 31-day higher age-standardized life expectancy among Black individuals. Higher Black PCP representation levels were also associated with lower all-cause mortality rates among Black individuals and with reduced mortality rate disparities between Black and White individuals.
So the doctor who is filing this racist lawsuit is named Dr. Travis J. Morrell. Here is a link to contact him directly: https://www.travismorrell.com/contact
Here is a link to contact the organization that is backing his lawsuit: https://donoharmmedicine.org/contact-us/
And here is the phone number to Mountain West Dermatology P.C., the dermatology office he works at: 970-242-7273
Just in case anyone else also felt like reaching out to let them know what you think of their transparently racist lawsuit.
(Remember kids! No real names + emails, and no direct actionable threats! Just let them know how pathetic and hated they are!)
Like say 'feel free to include your pronouns in your cover letter' sure! 'your cover letter must include your pronouns' 🙅♀️🙅♀️🙅♀️ friend you have not thought this through.
It is a similar issue to when they ask for a photo up front I think. Like no matter how well intentioned you are there's an obvious opening for discrimination. & You don't have to be consciously prejudiced to discriminate.
Also like with photos I do get it bcos obviously they want to publish author photographs in the magazine and don't want to be chasing them down (many magazines ask for your bio up front for this reason) but with pronouns it's like what do you need them for so badly?
Also literally what is stopping them from taking the way better, way easier, and more effective route of asking for data that could open them up to a discrimination lawsuit after they have made their hiring decisions?????
Every study I've seen has shown that the number one easiest most effective way to avoid racial discrimination in hiring is to blank out the candidate's names on their resume
If literary magazines actually want to fix racism or transphobia in publishing or the literary scene, they need to not require people give them information that will blatantly and unavoidably force many, many job candidates to reveal themselves as part of legally protected classes!!!
(aka: it's harder to reject a submission because someone is Black if you are given no information that could indicate their race besides the contents of their submission. every study shows you can't just Decide to Not Be Racist, that's not how prejudice works, as a great many people of color can tell you. whyyyyyyyy would we want to ask for more identity / physical appearance information as part of the hiring process we're trying to make LESS racist. etc. other bigotries. WHY)
You read Wretched of the Earth and how the colonizer has PTSD from torturing the colonized and the former has a panic attack upon seeing a former victim while the latter desperately tries to kill himself to avoid recapture and I think it's right to ask: Am I really supposed to pity the former?
[Speaking slowly, gently, as though trying not to scare a startled horse] Now. Consider. The US military
To be clear I am not saying Fanon is attempting to elicit sympathy for the colonizer. I mean "Am I supposed to feel sorry for them" in an aghast way because the colonizer, who is suffering, feels he deserves sympathy. You see it again and again, all throughout history, and even now people complain about how traumatized they are from murdering civilians. How even in the end, in their eyes, the true victim is the perpetrator who lives rather than the dead person who is "at peace." As though any number of extenuating personal circumstances is supposed to make your guilt weigh more than the actual harms other people have experienced at your hands. As though people overseas wouldn't also like to go to college, would like to afford a house, would like to escape poverty. It's infuriating!
So remember to brush and floss, friends! Not bc you're worried about what shade they are. But for your oral health. It will make such a difference to your overall health to do your best to take care of your teeth!
Outdoor cat owners have no concept of basic ecology and it shows. "You're saying my kitty is EVIL for following its instincts???????" obviously not, you idiot, its an animal. I don't blame it because it is designed to hunt and doesn't understand human morality. The cat's human owner, though, should stop pretending that millions of people letting their pets hunt native species for fun WON'T make their ecossystem collapse. If you stop hearing birdsong in your neighborhood its your fault 👍.
Also cats are domestic animals????? Its your pet. Its your responsability to take care of it and it certainly doesn't look like you are doing this if your pet spends 90% of the day on the streets. Outside cats are in great risk for being ran over, stolen, beaten, poisoned, mauled or eaten by wild animals. A mildly bored cat is way better than a dead one and besides? Just offer your pet enrichment. You don't need to risk its life to keep it happy. You can even let it outside with supervision!! Look how many options we have. Insisting the only way to keep your cat happy is allowing it to wreck the environment and possibly die is not only fucking irresponsible, but also lazy and shows that you don't really care for the wildlife around you.
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
Also like do go ahead and ask an archaeologist/anthropologist. Ask them about the healed broken bones they've seen that is evidence of humans caring for one another since we became human. Ask them about the hearths they've found for humans to gather around, and the cookware they've seen crafted by human hands. Ask them about the small circle of bricks in front of hearths that confounded them until someone realized it was to keep chicken chicks in the house where children could play with them. Ask them about the tools of creation they've seen. Ask them about the musical instruments, and the artwork spanning back to when we lived in caves. Ask them about the children's footsteps, their play preserved in mud. Ask them about the clothing they've seen and the hands that stitched them or wove them.
Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.
Ask them why they put their hands on the earth searching for history and spend hours digging through archives and talking to other humans about the past. Archaeologists and Anthropologists are like the #1 people to love humans so much they want to know everything about all of the humans across history, and IMO the questions you ask them are a bigger reflection of the person asking them than anything else.
We are a social species. In order to cooperate enough to hunt meat, to find enough food, we have to work TOGETHER. We have to make a together.
The Thin Veneer Theory--the Christian one, the one that says humans are inherently violent--falls completely the fuck apart when you realise that we would not have survived if we were that violent. We just would not have! If you kill someone in your very small group--because we lived in very small groups at first, under 10 people--then you've lost someone's knowledge, their hands, their legs, their eyes, their HELP. Help that you are going to need! Makes no sense. Not even chimps, our most violent cousins, are this violent to one another across their species. Because it's impractical for a social animal.
But the data says otherwise as well. Humans help. From birth. Other social animals also help--not just their immediately family or their group, but even other species of animal from them. Helping is inherent to being an intelligent animal that lives in groups, it seems.
But if you don't want to believe all those experiments and data, that's fine. Believe your own DNA then. Unless you are from Subsaharan African peoples, you have more than one species of human in your DNA. This means at some point, your grandmother and grandfather found someone of a whole other species attractive. That's a fact. And we keep finding more species hidden in our DNA even now--I think the most recent one was Denisovian! I don't know HOW you could interpret THAT information as "humans are violent and hate strangers" because it wouldn't be there if two people of two different species hadn't fucked enough to make a baby that survived long enough to make another and so on down the millions of years to now. That's incredible stuff. That means MILLIONS of humans had cross-species relationships! That means our species is SO friendly that we willing to reach across species and make babies with someone else! That is an incredibly high amount of friendliness!!!
We are a motley of many species of human being. That alone should be proof enough that we are inherently so full up with the desire to Make Friends that we will do it over and over to strangers and other animals unlike ourselves. We domesticated one of our main predators. We were so friendly and kind to cats they decided to bring us their babies and we were so friendly and kind we took care of those babies and now we make images of cats and put them everywhere and share them with one another. Even animals we eat, we are kind to and even decide that some of our gods are in their image, and make rules that say "it is Forbidden to kill this animal in a way that brings it suffering, it is Forbidden by the gods to make this animal suffer while it is alive" in MANY religions.
I do not fucking know what kind fo miserable attitude makes you say that you truly believe your species--your species, which has buildings and roads, maps and schools, books and movies, holidays and parades, sports and medicine and everything ELSE that requires lots of cooperation--is inherently NOT cooperative, altruistic, friendly in nature. We wouldn't HAVE society if we weren't a species that LIKES to cooperate with others! We wouldn't have agriculture! We wouldn't have ANYTHING! It ALL required cooperation!
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