From https://kazoop.blogspot.com/2015/12/christmas-celebrations-at-scream-inn.html
Imagine if in The Muppet Christmas Carol, Scrooge responded to "When Love Is Gone" by laughing and saying, 'Well, at least Bob Cratchit isn't here.' Imagine if he chortled at the Cratchits' small goose all throughout "Bless Us All" and was all 'Sucks to be you, Cratchit' during Tim's death.
Just found out that my storage unit was broken into and all of my toys stolen.
My entire childhood was in there.
All of my Pokemon. Neopets. My entire new in box Barbie collection, my Disney dolls. Final Fantasy action figures. Everything you see on this blog, gone.
The thieves left, for whatever reason, left behind three very specific things: a box of unicorns, my box of horses, and two knockoff American girl dolls.
My heart is broken. My whole childhood was in there. And someone kicked in a wall and took it. My own kids will never get to play with these things I saved and loved for thirty years.
Just found out that my storage unit was broken into and all of my toys stolen.
My entire childhood was in there.
All of my Pokemon. Neopets. My entire new in box Barbie collection, my Disney dolls. Final Fantasy action figures. Everything you see on this blog, gone.
The thieves left, for whatever reason, left behind three very specific things: a box of unicorns, my box of horses, and two knockoff American girl dolls.
My heart is broken. My whole childhood was in there. And someone kicked in a wall and took it. My own kids will never get to play with these things I saved and loved for thirty years.
"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).
Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general.
You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.
Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.
If (when) you repost this on pinterest at least put a link to the original post somewhere..
There is a very specific kind of sadness in realizing your parents loved you, and still did not always know how to meet your emotional needs.
Because it is confusing. It would almost feel easier if there was no love there at all. But sometimes there was love. In the way they tried to protect you. In the sacrifices they made. In the ways they worried about you, cared for you, wanted a good life for you.
And at the same time, there were still things missing.
Maybe comfort did not come in the way you needed it to. Maybe your feelings were not always understood, or noticed, or handled gently. Maybe you learned to keep certain parts of yourself quiet because it felt easier than trying to explain them.
That kind of hurt is difficult because it does not always come from cruelty. Sometimes it comes from people who loved you deeply, but did not know how to emotionally connect in the ways you needed. People carrying their own wounds, limitations, fears, or ways of surviving.
And you are allowed to acknowledge both truths at once.
You are allowed to recognize their love and still grieve what you needed but did not receive. Those things do not cancel each other out.
Forgiveness, for a lot of people, is not pretending nothing hurt you. It is slowly accepting that someone can love you and still fall short of understanding you completely.
That does not make your pain dramatic. It does not make them monsters either. Sometimes it just means everyone was trying with the emotional tools they had, and some of those tools were not enough.
And I think many people quietly carry guilt for still feeling hurt by parents they know tried their best. But being loved imperfectly can still leave wounds. It makes sense that it affected you.
At the same time, you do not have to stay trapped only in anger forever either. Sometimes healing looks like understanding that your parents were human before they were parents. People shaped by their own experiences, their own upbringing, their own emotional gaps.
That understanding does not erase your feelings. It just softens the sharp edges around them a little.
You deserved emotional safety. You deserved gentleness. You deserved to feel understood, comforted, and emotionally close to the people raising you.
And if they could not fully give that to you, it is okay to mourn it.
But I hope you also know this: the love you needed is still something you can experience in your life. Through other people. Through chosen family. Through the way you learn to treat yourself now.
The story does not end at what you did or did not receive growing up.
We need desperately to start celebrating the overlap of identity instead of hyper-scrutinizing whether or not someone overlaps fully.
Marsha P. Johnson never called herself a trans woman--she called herself a drag queen, or a transvestite--yet we recognize the impact she had as part of trans history. Of trans women's history. There is so much effort to re-imagine her influence as being the one who "threw the first brick" at Stonewall and less effort to remember her as one of the co-founders of STAR, an org dedicated to the protection of sex working transvestites. (Which took influence from both queer orgs and revolutionary orgs like the Black Panthers). Whether it's a lack of terminology or her transness was not under such a narrow definition (the P. in her name stands for "pay it no mind" because when people asked if she was a man or woman she told them to mind their business, and said "I think of myself as me.")--she is part of trans history because drag history, transvestite history, female impersonator history, gnc history is trans history whether the participants would consider themselves trans women or not. It's transfeminine history.
Stormé DeLarverie, the person whose violent arrest sparked the Stonewall uprising, is described as a drag king, and as such, every publication--including queer coverage of her involvement--lump her in with cis women's history and never also transmasculine, despite the fact that while she didn't identify as anything to those who knew her, she preferred to be assumed to be a Black man. That's transmasculine history. That's lesbian history. These two histories are not mutually exclusive, yet we act like they are.
Leslie Feinberg described hirself as a trans woman--zie was trans and a woman. Queer coverage tries to decide whether that makes Feinberg a cis woman or a trans man. Neither. Leslie has influenced transmasculine history and transfeminine history, and has been part of women's history with hir feminism. Leslie was a pivotal voice in trans movements, and focused much of hir work on the overlap with "female" identity. Leslie has arguably moved the needle more for trans women than trans men due to hir focus on women, but those are not separate categories--victory for trans people of any type is a win for us all. Transmasculine history is not wholly separate from "women's" history.
Emi Koyama is responsible for popularizing the word "transfeminist" and was (and still is) a deeply influential voice in the trans and transfeminist movements. Emi is also intersex, and her identity has been used to discredit her status as a "real" trans woman. Her influence is in intersex history and trans history and women's history. These communities are not non-overlapping--Emi occupies all three!
Kate Bornstein has been one of the most influential trans theorists since the 90s, yet her work has been largely erased as time goes on. Her focus on nonbinary identity and attempts to break us out of a binary seems to be the cause of the strife. A writer, speaker, poet, whose work focuses on the overlap of many trans identities and the empowerment of the individual to find the language that suits them ought to be the single most talked-about style of transfeminism...and it isn't. Her name is fading from people's reading lists.
Riki Anne Wilchins created one of the most influential groups fighting against the exclusion of trans people from pride--and other queer events--alongside Denise Norris: Transexual Menace. She created the term genderqueer. She has written countless influential pieces about trans life and those of us who exist even in the margins of trans identity--and she wrote often about the overlap with nonconforming cis people, whether they later come out or not. She even founded GenderPAC.
Nonbinary people, intersex people, gnc people, genderweird--those who never had the language and those who didn't use it for whatever reason--are part of TRANS history. We do no one any favors to assign labels to people who didn't use them to legitimize their already-legitimate existence in our minds as part of the movement. And we do no favors to narrow our eyes and block the door until the folks who bled, cried, fought, and died for us--the trans community--call themselves what we prefer to hear.
The murder of Brandon Teena galvanized countless trans women. Trans men were some of the first to issue fundraisers for Miss Major when she first fell ill. There are so many trans people who do not see separate niche groups but recognize the collective under this big umbrella of transness--we desperately need for those groups to not be in the minority. Trans is a collective, not a club.
And what does trans men? Anyone who doesn't fit the cis narrative of gender.
Quotes from trans folks about what transgender means to them:
Dana Turner: "...you are a person that feels, in your spirit, your mind, your soul...different than your physical anatomy--your biological anatomy."
Leslie Feinberg: "--whether that be transexual women and men, or masculine women and feminine men, or bearded women who allow their beards to grow, or women weightlifters who can't use the women's bathroom because they've been pumping iron--it can mean everyone who doesn't fit that Ozzie and Harriet paradigm of sex and gender."
Kate Bornstein: "Transgender is just a big ol' umbrella term that includes just about everybody I know.
Martine Rothblatt: "To me, the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, the gay and lesbian and transgender movements all really are one and the same. These are all movements to respect people as individuals rather than as a body type that their genes determine for them."
Think of a general who deserved more... @justice-for-general-schmitz - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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