just a horse!

bria | they/she | 26 | biracial home

[quaintpanic]

I WAS BORN YESTERDAY. I JUST BLEW IN FROM STUPID TOWN. THIS IS MY FIRST RODEO. PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH ME.

[autistichalsin]

The test for allyship isn't how you treat an oppressed person who is your friend, family, spouse. It's how you treat an oppressed person you absolutely can't stand who is vile and loathsome in every way.

Do you gender trans people correctly even when they're being absolutely terrible people? Do you refuse to use the r-slur against someone who suicide baited you but is neurodivergent? Do you refuse to snark at a mentally ill person who is being genuinely unpleasant, "go take your meds!"

Do you allow members of marginalized groups to be terrible people without judging their entire demographic for it? One of the most invisible yet vital forms of privilege is the right to be terrible people as an individual rather than as a group. Do you acknowledge that there are bad people in every group, that it doesn't make their group less worth fighting for? Or do you shake your head if you happen to get mistreated by some who belong to a group and insist the entire group is awful and not worth your allyship?

Oppressed people can see how you treat those of us you like, but do you still treat the worst of us with the basic dignity you treat the worst of other groups with?

[what-even-is-thiss]

Health classes really ought to teach people what the beginning stages of addiction are like because a lot of people don’t realize they’re addicted to something until they’re years deep into it.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Signs you might be getting addicted to something:

If you go without it you feel unwell in a way that you never usually feel unwell. Sweating, tired, sleepy, headaches, irritable, depressed, etc. For example when I was in opium withdrawal I got incredibly depressed in a way that I’ve never been before or since. When you quit caffeine you might get super bad headaches even if you never usually get any headaches.

Thoughts of it regularly bother you and the thoughts go away once you’ve taken it but only temporarily. Unlike with a food craving which usually stays away once you’ve satisfied it or distracted yourself from it.

You find yourself rationalizing with yourself why you should break your own rules about how much you can take and how often. For example you might only let yourself drink alcohol every four days but start thinking that three days is actually close enough to four days, right? Especially if this happens regularly.

You’re using it so often that you feel the need to lie about how much you use because other people might think it’s concerning

If the substance or activity is nearby it’s genuinely difficult to not consume it or participate in it in a way that’s really frustrating.

You feel bad when you’re not on it and your brain tells you “if you just take the thing you wouldn’t feel this way”

You can only feel “whole” or “normal” when you’re on a substance even though it’s a recreational drug

And if you read this and think you might be addicted to something, don’t panic and don’t feel ashamed. Realizing you’re addicted to something isn’t a failure. It’s more information about your health that you can use to manage your condition, whether you want to get rid of your addiction or not.

[pocket-deer-belly]

it is honestly kind of funny to take the stance that BMI isn't enourmously problematic because the weight classifications have been "adjusted" since its inception when the real problem of "it is literally just your height divided by your weight, which tells you fuck all about the status of someone's health" is still fundamentally there

[pocket-deer-belly]

the problem with bmi is that it classifies me as overweight even though i'm literally skinny :(

[pocket-deer-belly]

i feel like that's what a lot of fat politics over the last decades has really amounted to though. broadening the category of what's considered socially acceptable thinness while continuing to leave the fattest of fatties subject to medical pseudoscience and neglect

[pocket-deer-belly]

really sick of people telling me "ridiculous" cases of people being marked as obese by BMI standards on a post where i explicitly argue this is not in fact the problem with BMI

[raccoonmilf]

Me, surfacing for air: “You saw that fish? That was a parrot fish that has not transed its gender. They do that, you know. Trans. Their genders. In the wild. It’s natural. It’s free. It’s in the ocean. Not all of them do it and that’s ok it’s up to them. Sometimes cis male parrotfish do it too. It’s all the same, in the end. Ok, I’m going back down.”

[hmantegazzi]

It's through the DMRT-1 gene, and we have it too! Here's an article about what it might mean for future trans health procedures, as the gene editing tools available today (the article is from 2023) aren't precise enough to manipulate it safely:

What if We Didn't Need HRT Anymore?

DMRT-1 and what medical transition might look like in the future

[raccoonmilf]

Holy shit that is so cool!!! What a wonderful world we live in where fish are providing insight into the next generation of trans healthcare

[driedrosy]

Don't sabotage your identity trying to name it. Let it be undefined, permeable, mixed, peculiar, unapologetically authentic. Be in peace with being unprecedented, with not fitting anywhere, with being adrift. Before flight, there's a free fall.

[urgetocreate]

Timothy Barr (American b.1957), Barn Owl, 2024, Oil on panel (There is an Owl in the painting)

[elbiotipo]

Also I am asking all of you, once again, to learn about ecosystem conservation and restoration instead of wallowing in "we are already past the point of no return" or that it will take "millennia" to restore ecosystems.

You have to understand that nature does not work in the same timeframe as ours. Protecting and restoring ecosystems is RIDICULOUSLY inexpensive and requires very little industrial technology; shovels and saplings are not exactly high-tech. But it takes time and long-term projects with people determined to do it. Maybe we are too focused in our "we want it now" thinking, but what you see today is not what you may see in 10, 20, 50, even 80 years if you live that long.

But it works. It's working right now, and when capitalism is replaced by socialism and we stop thinking on short-term gain, when our societies are focused into the common welfare instead of accumulation, it will even work better. Again I could point out to individual examples but instead, I encourage you to learn about ecology. We are well past from the catastrophic "Earth will die and there's nothing we can do" predictions from the 80s. We know what to do, we know it can work.

[elbiotipo]

First-of-its-kind study definitively shows that conservation actions are effective at halting and reversing biodiversity loss

A new study published online today, April 25, in the scientific journal Science provides the strongest evidence to date that not only is nat

This article talks about this very much in the "see? ecology can help the economy too!" tone that unfortunately is sort of necessary to convince people in the current capitalist system. But I don't want you to focus on this right now.

I want you to KNOW how doable this is. How inexpensive this is, how POSSIBLE THIS IS. That people working and loving the land and nature they live in is possible. That these projects WORK, THEY DO restore and preserve ecosystems. That humanity is neither a plague that destroys everything or a passive bystander on its own destruction but that these are actual things that can be, are, and will be implemented, backed by actual science and results. This is not empty #hopecore #hopepunk feel good stuff, these are things you can learn about, even work towards, and you can most certainly demand they are part of our society.

Are you listening to me?

[solarpunkcast]

"I'm just losing hope." Then get some fucking conviction. Millions of people around the globe are working their asses off and seeing results. What they are doing IS WORKING.

This orange peel story was huge years ago: https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/a-fruitful-experiment-in-land-conservation/

Beavers reintroduced to historic wetlands improve them at such a level that we can see the improvements from space: https://news.mongabay.com/2023/09/nasa-satellites-reveal-restoration-power-of-beavers/

Africa is successfully slowing desertification and restoring historic farming soil with their Green Wall project: https://welcomeafrica.org/en/africa-combats-desertification-with-a-belt-of-life/

There has even been success at regrowing coral reefs--something which I am old enough to be told was impossible. But people have been hard at work for decades since then, and this is one of the results: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240308123248.htm

REPAIRING THE DAMAGE IS ENTIRELY WITHIN THE REALM OF POSSIBILITY.

THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE IF YOU HAVE THE CONVICTION TO BACK IT UP.

[transfemininomenon]

[windup-angel]

these belong on the post imo

[tpwrtrmnky]

"Trans women are actually women for real, not in a metaphorical sense, not in a "anyone can be anything" sense, but genuinely actually make more taxonomic sense to classify in the category of women than any other group" is a position you'll find is pretty radical even in queer spaces

[tpwrtrmnky]

My cutting-edge radical queer politics: Actually meaning it instead of just saying it as an empty slogan

[tpwrtrmnky]

I am so fucking done with this post coming back to haunt me over and over, so let me explain:

"Taxonomy" does not inherently refer to biology. Because I'm a weird nerd on the internet and was thinking about the science of inventing systems of classification, the word happened to come to mind when I was firing off this post waiting for a tram or some shit.

IN PARTICULAR, I do not mean that medical transition makes you bIoLoGiCaLlY fEmAlE. Insofar as sex is a meaningful set of traits, transition can change all the ones that matter, and I don't give a shit. I mean the un-transitioned trans women too. I mean the trans women who never realize. I mean the young trans girls who know they're different, but don't know why yet. Every trans woman is a woman, for real, and is marginalized as a woman by a society that hates women.

"More than any other group" in the sense that if you're going to group trans women with anyone, you're grouping them with other women. Not in the sense that trans women have The Greatest Claim To Womanhood, you clowns.

The context of this post is that I am making a point about how ostensible allies to trans women will analyze trans women like weird type of she/her man instead of type of woman, and reach completely wrong conclusions through that analysis, which they then INSIST on despite evidence to the contrary. Whether it's employment, medical risk factors, mental health profiles, you will be wrong about your guesswork on all of them when you work from a starting point that isn't "trans women are a type of women".

It's radical because it addresses the root cause of an issue, which is that significant portions of society, including other queer people, have the wrong fundamental conception of trans women. It's also radical in the other senses of the word.

Finally: This is inward criticism. I am expressing frustration with other queer people. I don't care what Jeremy, 57 at the pub, has to say about my identity. I care that Elliot, 23, thinks I don't belong in lesbian spaces while he does.

Karma farm THIS ONE on Reddit, if you absolutely have to.

[tpwrtrmnky]

#Trans women ARE biologically female. Sex doesn't include just a single marker#and aside from chromosomes anatomy and hormones ARE a part of biological sex.#So HRT DOES make you more biologically female.

What if I told you... "biologically female" means whatever the fuck is convenient at any given moment, because sex classification is an ad-hoc methodological construct recognized as such by scientists, and therefore inevitably, necessarily useless for achieving political ends, as hegemonic power structures will be free to pick whichever definition they prefer?

You can have contradictory chromosomal, hormonal and anatomical sex characteristics for a wide variety of reasons, because classifiers of complex systems are inherently reductive. Then you see people starting to hem and haw about which traits to prioritize, which answer is the correct sex, and you're stuck in a back-and-forth where eventually you can say something like "well if you have THIS much Female along traits A, B, C and D, you're Female," and you'll then run face first into an indisputable Woman who's lived her entire life as a Woman and fails to meet the criteria.

As I said: Insofar as sex is a meaningful set of traits, transition can change all the ones that matter. I'm choosing those words deliberately, because "biological sex" in its common usage is a bad construct for understanding social phenomena.

Entertaining the notion that it's relevant for analyzing trans people's material conditions inherently cedes rhetorical ground to the idea that there is going to be some biological silver bullet that says "this one doesn't count."

Validation from a model that says "biological sex classification is correct and you're on the side you want to be" is candy with razor blades in it.

[hungwy]

I've been melting dogs down to make this thing called dog metal

[hungwy]

[energyprison]

speaking is a sort of playing where words are the toys

[i-c-stars]

[kronkk]

Taylor Swift and that football player broke up??? She's been seen with a new guy too??? Some racer???

[kronkk]

Its sebulba yeah

[queer-assthetic]

im

[queer-assthetic]

#obligated to reblog limmy on my dash but op why didn’t you post the whole rest of the clip!!!

ur so right

[chumbology]

Chuckling to myself remembering the time I completely broke a scammer's brain by telling them I use Linux.

Scammer: do you have an apple or a windows computer please?

Me: neither, I use Linux.

Scammer: no no no, I asked if you use a apple or a windows

Me: neither

Scammer: what is the sticker? Is it a four boxes or is it an apple with a bite?

Me: ... I don't use EITHER of them. There's a third operating system called Linux. It isn't a PC or a mac. Please tell me you understand

Scammer: do -- do you know what I mean about apple or windows sir?

Me: yes. I'm a software developer. I understand completely. I'm telling you that YOU don't understand. Its called Linux, spelled L-I-N-U-X, type it into google

Scammer:

Scammer: but is it an apple or a windows computer sir

[jellybeanium124]

#this is what talking to transphobes is like

@alabastermask ASDFSHBKGJLNDFASKBDHSJG

[ex-riddlecats]

it sounds stupid but nobody talks about how many years of joyful swimming transphobia and dysphoria take away from you

[hellish-undeath]

Or theraputic swimming, in the case of disabled trans people who could be reducing the effect of their conditions and/or doing more accessible strength training with swimming.