About the Disability Pride Flag
(its design & meaning)
Because:
A) I see it around the Internet where the proportions are off, and I think people are copy/pasting from different thumbnail images that come up in search results, and not clicking through to get the original. It's not a big deal, but it causes a hiccup in my brain whenever I see it.
and
B) There's been some discussion in the Disability Community here on Tumblr on what the precise symbolism should be, and it's changed a bit and gotten complicated. So I want to simplify and broaden it, so it can be explained to curious Normate folk -- without going into a 15 minute explanation of social constructs.
So I'm making a fresh post right now to put all that stuff together.
I'm gonna leave the detailed description of the flag design's proportions just in the alt text (so that people with screen readers know what they are, without having to listen to it twice)
The width of each colored stripe is proportional to the overall width of the flag, but I decided to leave the general proportions of the flag flexible (so it's easier for people to make one based on what materials they can find -- just in case there's a need for a protest sign for a pop-up rally).
The Meaning (Short Version -- what to tell someone who asks while you're waiting for the elevator)
6 colors represent how the Disability Community is Global
The 5 colors in the middle represent how diverse that community is
The black is inspired by pirate flags: rage at injustice, fighting back
The stripes are diagonal to represent cutting through barriers.
The in-depth reasons behind the meaning (Long Version -- If you actually want a 15+ minute discussion of social constructs and history)
The flag has all 6 'standard' colors recognized in international flags, to represent how the Disability Community is bound together by their varied, but shared, experiences, rather than geographical or political affiliation (borrowing that symbolism from Olympic Flag, which represents the global community of athletes -- also bound together by their shared experiences and aspirations).
The five colors cutting across the center of the flag represent the diversity of the Disabled Community, both in terms of physical conditions and in terms of the social-political-economic ways by which disability is understood in society. (No longer trying to assign a specific meaning to any of the individual colors)
The stripes begin centered in the top corner because that's where the "canton" of a flag is, and in flag code, that's the place of highest honor; this is where the stars are in the U.S flag, and also the stars in the flag for the People's Republic of China, and the Union Jack in Australia's flag. It cuts all the way to the end that flies in the wind to show our striving for freedom.
The field is black because Pirates!, yes. But it's also in recognition of the Black Triangle Badge (link goes to Wikipedia), which the Nazis used to mark out a wide range of people in their concentration camps, including the Disabled, that they considered "asocial." And it's in solidarity with the UK-based Black Triangle Campaign (link goes to deathbywelfare.org, from 2010), protesting cuts to disability benefits, and reclassifying disabled people "fit for work."
Reblogging the poll for more visibility, and also to reply to these Quoted tags:
#I am of the opinion that *all* disabilities don't get enough recognition as-is
[...]
#I say this as a person who can be fully able-passing (for short amounts of time)
@strangestructures made similar points in (excellent) replies to this post, especially how any disability can be made "invisible" depending on what resources a person has access to, or the context of what they're doing and when.
Back when I was still in the first stages of designing a disability pride flag (when I was still focused on the cursed zigzag design), and I was still thinking of representation in terms of different medical conditions, I only had four stripes, and someone asked me to add a fifth, for invisible disabilities.
At first, I just stuck that stripe (originally a unique purple, which was hard even for me to reproduce consistently) on top of the other stripes. But after changing it to white, and mucking around with the design, I decided to move it to the center of the design, because Invisibility is at the Center of all Disability.
Being a calm, gentle, non-reactive person is really hard work, which is probably why many people are none of these things. Personally I think it’s worth it but sometimes one does want to just roll around on the floor wailing at the top of one’s lungs
People in my notes who think I’m repressed or dissociating: you will feel better when you learn emotions are not a binary of Not Feeling It vs Being Overwhelmed By It
So my FIRST piece of information if you’re still a teen is that genuinely as you get older it will get easier to regulate your emotions. During adolescence our brains are undergoing a lot of growth and change that genuinely does make it harder to do this, on a scientific level. However, practicing emotional regulation skills can still help a lot and if you can find something that works it will make life easier going forward
This page has more information and recommendations for some basic exercises:
Discover effective strategies for teens to manage intense emotions, develop emotional awareness, and improve overall well-being. Expert tips
in Finland, it is illegal to kill a bear when it’s hibernating. If you ask a hunter why that is, a number of them will tell you it’s wrong simply because it is the law, and they don’t make a distinction between what is right, and what is legal. Most people like that are perfectly normal, decent and respectable people, just like the rest of us.
But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.
Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.
In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.
Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.
One’s waking soul is elsewhere when they sleep and dream. A bear’s soul is somewhere else when they are hibernating - there are two words for “hibernation” in finnish, one of which is talviuni, “winter sleep”, and that is the one that bears have - and if you kill a sleeping bear, their soul is not in the body, it is still out there, and it can find you, and as a revenge for killing its body, Ghost Bear will kill your entire fucking family.
when i was getting trained as a welder the guys started playing sneaky grabass with each other and with me. i almost hit a few people while holding dangerous tools in my hand because they wouldn’t stop grabbing me from behind, then laughing that i ‘almost’ hit them, so i finally had to go to the instructor and say, look, i’ve had years and years of self defense training due the fact i’m a very small weirdo who is in legitimate danger of getting hatecrimed and at some point one of these guys is going to goose me again and im going to bury a wrench in his eye. get them to stop grabbing me, because i don’t want to get kicked out for hitting people.
the next day i ended up punching someone in the face with a doughnut in my fist because she thought i was being a big fucking buzzkill who tattled to teacher about a harmless game, and, guess what, grabbed my butt. i got icing all over her hair. she complained to teacher...who let everyone know that this was why they weren’t supposed to be playing grabass in the fucking shop.
anyway don’t fucking sneak up on twitchy little queers with hypervigilance, it fucking sucks and you’re lucky if you get a doughnut to a face instead of a hammer.
I got a job at a gas station across from a casino and a guy keeps coming in to buy whole cartons of cigarettes and talks in the third person calling himself "snake eyes pete" and every time I tell him his total hes like "tell ya what if old Pete rolls a snake eyes why dont you give it to him for free?" and he rolls the same set of loaded dice on the counter and it does not matter how many times he rolls snake eyes I will not give him the cartons for free he gets so mad
Back in the day I worked at a certain very famous and very high caste art museum in the US as a junior curator. Part of my job was to catalog the objects in the museum database. This includes details like provenance, measurements, and a visual description of what the object looked like.
Like I said, the museum was a pretty snotty institution. It’s got a LOT of objects it’s way famous for possessing, but nobody knew about the absolutely massive collection of Moche erotic pottery it had because the curators were totally embarrassed by this stuff.
Some examples:
Pretty hot shit, right? They never, ever put any of this stuff on public view or published it in any catalogues but - we legit had like several hundred pieces of Moche ceramics in the “dirty pots” category. Anyway, I was left alone to just do my job with regard to the database for several years, ok? And I figured, well, these’re accessioned objects in the museum’s collection - better get down to bidness.
I catalogued every goddamn bestiality, necrophiliac, cocksucking, buttfucking, detached penis, and giant vulva drinking cup in that collection. I’d be like,
A drinking vessel in form of a standing man wearing a tunic and cap. He holds an oversized erection in his hands and stares into the distance (note I did not say “like he’s hella-constipated”). The vessel has a hole at both the tip of the penis as well as around the rim of the figure’s head, thus forcing the drinker to drink only from the penis or risk spilling wine all over themselves from the top of the vessel. Red and orange slip covers the surface of the piece.
Pretty straightforward, right? Apparently the deep seated fear of these objects that the curators exhibited was meant to spread to me as well, but - no one ever gave me that memo, because I guess Midwesterners reproduce asexually. When the curators understood that I had catalogued all of these objects in addition to the other, non-sexy pieces in the collection, they were apparently livid, but knew they had no legs to stand on in terms of getting pissed at me for it.
I visited the museum’s online public access database a few years back and - every single description I wrote of these pieces has been totally neutered to say something like Male figural vase.
Long story short? Just call a dildo a fucking dildo. It’s all gonna be ok, I swear.
Museums should have sections dedicated to artifacts like these with a warning that says “There’s a lot of private parts in here but we’re dedicated to displaying history so we won’t censor these. Enter at your own risk” or something. It’s prudish to deliberately hide history because of some ding dongs.
okay but now I really need to know which Midwestern Museum this was because if it was the Field Museum then I need to go there and ask them so many questions.
ETA: um… so not everybody got the memo about eradicating the sexy sexy records.
Which now unfortunately makes me question the validity of the story up above. :(
@taraljc isn’t it exhausting to assume the story is fake rather than considering whether a different curator in the intervening 9 years found the old sexy description saved somewhere internally and used it, especially if they needed a more detailed description for an auction sale?
Okay I see what you all were talking about when you said wait till you get to Mirror Dance. Omg.
Lord Mark Vorkosigan. What an icon. Mark who was built as a weapon while in captivity and becomes a tool on his very own initiative only needs four to seven people to care about him as a human before he remakes his entire self and becomes a goddamn hero. Mark figures out how to do Internal Family Systems therapy on himself while being tortured horribly for five days. Hobbies include personal finance, scheming, and responding "round is a shape" when Aral and Miles say to get in shape. By the end he's setting up to the the Mycroft to Miles' Sherlock.
Mark suffers so much abuse and makes So Many Bad Decisions with So Many Consequences and only to end up literally writhing on the floor in the Unprecedented Agony of Being Perceived and Loved. (This is the part that broke me… I saw it coming and was like: Oh noooo, this part is gonna break me. And then it did, and it was perfect.)
Also, the entire, pervasive, complete and total Cordelia-ness of this novel whether or not she's in the room or even on the planet. She gives Mark the assignment of figuring out how to be Mark and there we goooo. And even after Miles has died and gone amnesiac, there's Cordelia's voice: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH YOUR BABY BROTHER?? This is the thing that gets the memory cascade going! It's Cordelia. And she's got Elena too: "But mostly because someday Countess Vorkosigan will ask me what I did for her son... Mark... she'll mean you." It's Cordelia All The Way Down and I am HERE for it.
I am also really... happy for Cordelia that Mark is here. Because Mark has Cordelia's number in a way that I'm not sure either Aral or Miles does, as deeply as they do know her and adore her. Until Mark, maybe Gregor is the only other person who can even begin to read her the way she reads everybody else (and Mark clocks that too!) and Gregor is way too busy being emperor to give Cordelia the runaround she deserves.
I'm very excited to see more of Miles and Mark together. And also if there are fun consequences of Elena Bothari-Jesek casually breaking the centuries-old Barrayaran glass ceiling by swearing as an armswoman! And also I wanna meet more of the Koudelka sisters please!
It really says something that a lot of monogamous people consider polyamorous and aromantic to be "opposites" but every polyam person I know took one look at aromantics and said "they're just like me for real"
Poly folks x aro folks in the sense that "alloromantic heterosexual monogamous people view love and sex as an entirely different entity than me, and that makes life kinda strange"
when i was 8 i had a very intimidating russian woman as a music teacher- she was both my opera instructor and piano teacher. about a month into piano, she sat me down and said to my mother and i "this child- very beautiful voice, good for singing. i will not allow this child to continue piano. god did not want this child to play an instrument. he told me this in dreams. that is all."
my mom had it written down on a slip so we could remember the exact words because it was so funny. i HATED playing piano and i was definitely not good at it (i did end up having a good 5 years of opera training and ended up being a pretty accomplished choir singer though) and the idea of god sending my incredibly severe and serious russian piano teacher a dream begging her to stop teaching me piano was probably the funniest way it could have gone.
im not gonna lie it was fucking delicious i would fucking do it again. wait shit youre the fucking wizard in disguise seeing if ive learned my lesson arent you. fuck.
*Columbo voice* So you were reading posts on Tumblr? Oh, that's a great website. My wife has an account on there. She showed me one about the color of the sky? Funny stuff. Although there is one thing, sir. How could you have been reading a post when no one on Tumblr has any media literacy?
oh yes, i remember now. i was reading my own post i had just written. i'm a stickler for the details you know. here you can even see the time stamp indicating the moment of posting. clearly i was busy elsewhere when the murder happened
now if you'll excuse me, there's a callout post i've been meaning to tend to
That explains it, sir. You know, at the station they always tell me I sweat the little stuff too much. But that must be how you have... what is it, sir? 500 followers? Very impressive. Well, I'll get out of your hair. Wouldn't want to get in the way of social justice.
Oh, there is one more thing. There's this tag on the bottom of your post. Is that what you call those? Tags? I wonder where you get a name like that. Anyway, I didn't understand it. It says "queue be continued". I hope I pronounced that right. What does that mean, sir?
(hesitantly) that would be the tag i use to indicate a post was reblogged through the queue system to post at a later time, but you knew that already, didn't you?
(confidently now) yes the post was in my queue originally. i had reblogged it at the time to make some additions adn fix a few mistakes. my "keep tags!" xkit add-on must have put the tag there and i simply forgot to remove it, that is all there is to it
BotW/TotK/AoC Zelda's relationship with divinity and religion is such a dynamic. She is literally the reincarnated human form of one of their goddesses, and blessed with the power of another. And she's sitting there, praying desperately to herself and wondering why no one is answering. Praying to the other three goddesses and wondering why all they do is look at her expectantly. Of course Hylia aids and answers Link, she has loved him since he was the First Hero. But in this lifetime instead of unlocking and mastering her powers with ease, she spends literally an entire decade screaming at herself "Why don't you love me?!?!" expecting an answer from the outside, and growing increasingly frustrated with herself for this fact, and then getting mad at her boyfriend because "Why do I love you more than I love me!?!?" (While he stands there with hearteyes, wondering how she doesn't realize she's the greatest being in their universe and literally worshiping the ground she walks on)
And then, even after she unlocks her power, their history is so mythologized that she doesn't realize that the goddess she's still mad at, who makes her feel like such a failure, is literally herself.
amandla
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