tired and queer

politics / discourse / queer shit / whatever i feel like putting here. i do not follow from this acc.

[swordbeliever]

about me

my views and opinions

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

Isn’t it kind of fun how when your life sucks you just can’t talk about it with anyone

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

I’m serious though. When your life reaches a degree of suckage, you find yourself having to look elsewhere for anything at all to talk about. The things going on in your life are trauma dumping. Your past is probably also trauma dumping. So you have to get really weird about specific things or hope that others want to talk to you, because very quickly people are going to develop an aversion to you and the way your life sucks. Unless you just don’t talk about it

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

It’s socially isolating, which is dangerous—when you’re in this sort of situation, community is the difference between life and death, housing and homelessness.

I think the collective prioritization of comfort first is hurting people in a real and material sense

[briannyssey]

update on some of what’s been happening in Kansas wrt the state id law

She’d Never Changed Her Gender Marker. Kansas Invalidated Her License Anyway. — Assigned

A trans Kansas resident recently changed her name but not her gender marker on her license, fearing what Kansas may do if she did. The Kansa

Folks who’ve simply gotten their names changed in the system were getting flagged to have their IDs invalidated

They are tracking trans residents of Kansas. They have already established that they can and will forcibly undocument trans kansans.

This past legislative session it’s “only” been reversion of legal ID and banning of gender affirming care for minors. What will it be next legislative session?

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

"But can you feel it?" Post-phalloplasty sensation explained.

By @ kashcolegrove, Kai Asher Colegrove (he/him).

[thepinkpestilence]

a trans guy: points out how whenever he wants to dress feminine he knows that he wouldnt pass and will be misgendered by strangers

every second comment:

the user is @ newtisafag on tiktok, he had to make another post with context how he usually doesnt dress hyper feminine but knows that when he does and goes out with his friends, he will be misgendered by people who dont know that he is trans. which is a very valid critic on how we judge gender of strangers based only on appearance but sadly some people decided to act disgusting in the comments

[man-rat]

can tboys just complain without everyone acting like we want the workd to grovel at our feet. i wanna be a lil femme dude but ppl take it to heavy on the femme and thats upsetting. people are allowed to express their upset if you dont care or dont like that theyre upset just mive on. its the internet you can so easily just remove that from your sight and mind. but people wont do that bc all they wanna do is victim blame trans people over stupid shit.

[catantennae]

I think the curb cut effect will be the death of me. Every single made-for-disabled-people thing can't be for disabled people, it has to be for abled people. Braille is good because abled people can read in the dark, blind literacy is just some side effect. Sign language is good because you can have a secret language with your friends, Deaf culture and actual communication is irrelevant. Face equality is good because abled people don't have to feel gross for having acne, "employment" or "basic respect" for someone with facial burns is uh, erm, I don't know, it's not like they actually exist right. Curb cut is good because you can move your luggage a bit easier, who cares that a wheelchair user needs it to navigate their fucking environment.

[planetarytransformation]

much hay gets made about the deep pain of childhood body dysphoria, but i spent a lot of time as a young boy wanting desperately to be accepted socially by girls: craving their friendship and affection, hoping something would happen to push me across the boundary that softly but inexorably segregated me from them.

i stood apart from boys, neglecting my friendships with them, in the hope that one of the girls would see me all forlorn and take me in. they'd release me from my obligations to be fast and strong, to be cruel; they'd teach me the chants and hand-games they played in circles on the schoolyard. of course, they didn't; why would they? i never asked. i didn't know how.

so while the boys ran and wrestled, and the girls gathered in the grass and whispered gossip in the secret languages they'd made for themselves, i built fairy houses in the tree-roots far off on the edge of the schoolyard. i hoped someone would notice how sensitive, how gentle and small, i was being, and would... well, i didn't know what it would mean. i couldn't see over that precipice.

now i'm 26, and i have the power to choose everything i want: who i am, who i befriend, who i desire. i'm surrounded by women now – brilliant, brazen, graceful, intoxicating – who will play games with me, who will braid my hair, who will sit with me in the grass and help me to speak the secret languages i never got to learn. i hope that sad, lonely boy can see me. i hope she's proud.

[endangered-justice-seeker]

Cudjo Lewis, the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the U.S. 

https://www.history.com/news/zora-neale-hurston-barracoon-slave-clotilda-survivor?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#link_time=1525373347

[revolutionarykoolaid]

It’s so significant too that this narrative was collected by Zora Neale Hurston, one of the greatest authors and anthropologists of her time. She was shunned by the “gatekeepers” of both of these professions, largely because of her Blackness, her womanhood, and her uncompromising commitment to honoring and showcasing both in her works. She died penniless and alone in a state-run institution in 1960. All of her works had gone out of publication by then. It took more than a decade before she was rediscovered. A young author by the name of Alice Walker had come across her work and was deeply inspired by it. “In 1973, after an exhaustive search, Walker came across Hurston’s unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Fla. She purchased a headstone for Hurston’s tomb and had it inscribed “A Genius of the South.“”

It is through Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneering sacrifice, and the acceptance of that inheritance by Alice Walker that we have found this missing piece of our history. Without the courageous and unfailing work of Black women, we wouldn’t have Cudjo Lewis’s story. We are slowly regaining a narrative that’s been hidden from us, one that continues to be lied about. Trust Black women to lead the way.

[fatliberation]

The reason fat cadavers are not accepted for medical programmes is that you need to cut through every layer of fat carefully. Which takes time, and lab sessions are inherentely limited in that. It's better for med students to spend that time looking at what organs actually look like in bodies. This isn't fatphobia, it's just .. the way dissecting bodies works? In the same way surgeries on fat people take longer because there's just physically more tissue. The alternative would be to force the med students who get fatter cadavers to do more lab sessions at weird times outside of the usual schedules. Or force them to stay over the holidays. Or not let them get enough time to do the lab work they need to. Which imo would be a bit fucked up especially when med school is already so difficult and time-consuming.

It’s fatphobia. Fat bodies absolutely need to be studied. To ignore an entire demographic of oppressed individuals in the medical field for the sake of convenience(?!) is violence. Did you even read the article? They called working on fat cadavers “unpleasant.” It’s fatphobia and it’s unacceptable.

[lorbanery]

lmaaooooooooo

So

The internal organs aren't the end-all be-all of medicine, even for surgeons. It is still incredibly important for med students to learn about the skin and adipose layers. The point of doing these dissection exercises isn't just to give med students a chance to poke around human guts. It is to familiarize themselves with every part of the body. I only got one semester into a nursing career that didn't work out, but in that one semester I took an Anatomy & Physiology course and we did do an animal dissection and the very first thing we spent time on was the skin layer.

Not only is the practice of dissection meant to familiarize med students with every part of the body, it's meant to give them a chance to see real human bodies. Because what you see in anatomical diagrams in text books isn't normal. Bodies aren't mass manufactured, they do not all look the same, and the practice of examining cadavers gives med students real world experience seeing different ways bodies can vary.

Purposefully rejecting a certain body type is actively detrimental to their education. When institutions refuse to teach their students how to work on certain bodies, the industry then treats those people as "difficult to work with" because they don't know how to. You see it all the time in more low-stakes industries as well — fashion institutes not teaching how to dress fat bodies, leading to designers who think creating plus size clothes is too hard; beauty schools not teaching how to work with Black hair, leading to hairdressers who think Black hair is uniquely difficult to work with rather than just a texture that requires a slightly different technique.

How much extra time are we talking here? Because Anon you make it sound like it can take HOURS, if not DAYS. And yet I, a certified Superfat, had surgery on the fattest part of my belly a couple of years ago, and the whole procedure took 90 minutes. And that, of course, included the time it took to put me to sleep and controlling the bleeding, all things that a med student working on a cadaver doesn't have to worry about.

The alternative to med students using fat cadavers is doctors working on living patients who do not have the skills to care properly for their fat patients. Which leads to them either refusing to treat those patients, or to them getting hands-on experience on living patients, instead of on a cadaver, which is the whole point of med students working on cadavers.

So, Anon, what you're arguing here, is that it's far more important and humane to save med students an extra (let's be generous) hour in lab time, than it is for fat patients to have a doctor who's willing to help them and has experience working on bodies like theirs, and therefore is less likely to cause them harm in the process.

[undead-moth]

Over and over, the argument being made, which I'm expected to agree is purely objective, logical, and unbiased is:

It doesn't matter if fat people die.

These are all arguments I've actually heard, and all by people claiming that they don't hate fat people, that they aren't fatphobic, that their argument is just common sense, and everybody knows it:

"If EpiPens aren't made with needles long enough to work on fat bodies, fat people with allergies should just lose weight." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.

"Fat people are a financial burden on the healthcare system. The NHS is wasting money on making ambulances that can accommodate fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.

"The reason firefighters shouldn't have to save fat people from burning buildings is because they aren't easy to carry out, and firefighters can get injured in the process." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.

"Covid is actually a good thing because it's mostly only killing fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.

"The reason so many doctors have patient BMI limits on who they will perform surgery on, treat, or even agree to have an appointment with, is because it's too hard to treat fat people." - It doesn't matter if fat people die.

And now: "The reason fat bodies aren't studied is because dissecting their cadavers is inconvenient."

It doesn't matter if fat people die.

There is nothing that's not more important than fat people's lives. Convenience, money, time, comfort, ease - nothing. Because fat people aren't important at all. We are expendable. We're actually not even something that gets cut because we were never being accounted for to begin with. We are worthless.

It doesn't matter if we die. Actually, if we all died it would be convenient. A bonus.

This isn't fatphobia, "it's just...the way it works?"

[fatliberation]

#It's so wild how often fatphobia is this extreme and yet always coming from someone who consideres themselves completely impartial#The most common fatphobic argument being expressed is literally that it doesn't matter if fat people die.#It is that extreme and yet so commonplace that it's entirely casual and most people don't even blink. Don't think anything of it all.#And I'm just expected to not be in a constant state of seething rage over it like how do you expect me to be normal in this world?#How do you expect me to stay sane? When literally even the most casually fatphobic people in the world can't understand why#fat people shouldn't have to die to save money or time or effort?

[noonesgaylikegatson]

Reason #13668893+316i why we are in this mess.

Democrats passed the affordable care act, passed the infrastructure bill, got rid of junk fees, lowered prescription costs, gave civil rights, protections, forgave student loans, etc.

Everything the republicans are doing is undoing the work of democrats. Yall would rather sit there on your flat asses and make these weakass centrist takes than actually have the courage to face what is happening with clarity.

But yall let these false ideas spread and become the common thought and you allow the fascist to creep in. The american apathy and aversion to the truth is why we are here!

[stele3]

Democrats have not controlled all three branches at any point in my lifetime or the lifetime of anyone on this post.

The Supreme Court has had a conservative majority since Nixon was in office. In the last 60 years, Republicans have filled 15 SCOTUS seats; Democrats have filled 5.

The only time in recent history that Democrats controlled TWO of the branches of government — both chambers of Congress and the presidency — they passed the ACA.

These Are The Lives That Obamacare Helped Save

Estimates show that the law has helped at least 20 million Americans get health insurance coverage.

Millions of people are alive because of it. No one seems to want to remember or acknowledge that people used to be denied insurance because they needed medical care.

So yes, Democrats do good things when actually given the power to do so. But no one seems to want to give them that power.

[honorarytheyfab]

(cw: sexual assault) the pedophile -as it is understood outside of academic circles- is a mythical creature. the idea that a complete stranger who kidnaps and sexually assaults kids is their biggest threat is absolutely insane; not one case of CSA (child sexual assault) in a hundred looks like that. CSA is committed almost uniformly by adults in a preestablished position of authority (such as family, family friends, clergy, or teachers) and in a way that a victim who doesn't know what sexual assault looks like will be left unsure what happened to them. without knowing concretely how sex and sexuality works, would you be able to tell the difference between molestation and the various other forms of unwanted physical touch and abuse kids are regularly subjected to? would it even seem that different? but parenthood and the submission of youth to adults as institutions are threatened by the reality of CSA. adults need to justify their ownership of children through an imagined outside threat constantly held at bay through their diligence. the truth - that putting yourself in such a position of authority over children directly enables abuse (including sexual abuse) - is thrown aside.

[watercolormagicalgirl]

i don’t know where the post this makes me think of is, but the general idea of it was that children aren’t properly taught how consent works, because if they did have a functioning framework to understand all the ways in which they’re exploited by adults—and continue to be exploited as adults, in different ways!—it would pose a serious threat to the social order, which is, i think, highly relevant here

[thelawfulchaotic]

When my clients say “but my mom hit me first!” and I have to say “legally, she’s allowed to.” As long as she doesn’t leave bruises, my old judge used to say.

“My dad made me give him my car. That’s mine, I bought it with money from my job.” And I have to say: “You’re a minor. Under the law, you don’t own property, your guardians do.”

When they say, “My mom is watching everything I do, she takes my phone every night, she made her boyfriend take the door off my room” and I have to say, with gritted fucking teeth, “You don’t have a legal right to privacy from your parent.”

You can enter into contracts, but all of them are voidable under grounds of infancy — except student loans, for some fucking reason.

You can’t leave. Your parents have the right to force you to come back.

This is not theoretical. I have seen every one of these things (except contract voiding) play out time and time again in a courtroom, with real life consequences: juvenile detention. Inpatient facilities. GPS ankle monitor. Community service. Kids are horrified to hear how little power and protection they have. And I’ve never gotten over my horror.

[luxlightly]

Student loans is not the only contract a child can enter but not void: Marriage is another.

My sister has worked in sex trafficking law for around 10 years and a the general pattern is "if they're an adult, they were trafficked by their partner. If they're a child, they were trafficked by their parent". And one of, if not THE biggest way children are trafficked(in the USA at least) is via forced marriage. Up and until 2019, this was legal in every state in the US. It still is in all but I think 8, as of 2025.

My sister drafted and fought for multiple bills to end child marriage in various US states and people fought TOOTH and NAIL against passing them. Because most states, while they allow child marriage, require the parents' consent. The child's isn't necessary, but the parents' is. The idea that parents will always have their child's best interests at heart and always have the last say in anything regarding the child's life is one that many people would not abandon in any way.

And, since a child cannot enter a legally binding agreement with a lawyer, they cannot file to get divorced, file for a restraining order, or go to a shelter for victims of domestic or sexual abuse. Running away from an abusive marriage makes them a runaway child that, legally, has to be returned to their legal guardian who, in the case of a child being married to an adult, is their abuser.

[werethropy]

"The nonbinary afab who goes by she/her, dresses femininely, and uses a push-up bra when I—" when you what? What's wrong with her?

Is she not nonbinary enough for you? Is the way she experiences her queerness and how she presents not perfect enough for you? Nonbinary people don't owe you androgyny, right? So why is she the exception? Why does she have to hate herself to appeal to your standards? Why is she any less trans—any less worthy of respect—cause it's "not visible"? Queer solidarity my ass. Don't spout this bullshit on Pride, man.

[transfemgabriellamontez]

This, but also for enby amabs going by he/him and with hairy chests and beards

[frustratedasatruar]

[thebreakfastgenie]

I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.

[sprinkledsalt]

My mom was telling me about this YouTube video she watched (I can't remember the name, sorry) where the person shared a screenshot of some MAGA voter from Florida asking for help, because his wife had been hired for a nursing job with the VA in Texas, so they sold their house and were preparing to move. But they rescinded her job offer after Trump's executive order. The post from the guy was basically like "I already contacted Senator Ted Cruz's office, and they said they couldn't do anything about this. Please help me get this story to President Trump, we love him! We voted for him 3 times! And we know this was just a mistake and he'd help us!"

Just.................a part of me laughs, and another part of me thinks about how cult followers genuinely believe that the cult leader cares about them

[kalessinsdaughter]

This is the part about believing in universal human rights that can be a bit difficult: they're universal, and should never be denied anyone, no matter who they are or what they have done.

You can be – you should be – furious with people who voted for Trump, for wilfully trying to sabotage those rights and make them conditional, a privilege for the "deserving", a privilege they can deny the "wrong" kind of people.

And when the MAGA crowd are hit by the consequences of their actions, and denied basic human rights because it turns out their Great Leader doesn't actually include his followers among the privileged, it's tempting to say that they deserve to be denied those rights, because that's what they wanted to do to others.

But if you do that, you don't truly believe that those rights should be universal; you just have a different idea than the MAGA crowd about who should be included among the privileged.

You can still tell the MAGA who's crying that the leopards ate there face that you're angry with them for letting the face-eating leopards loose. But you shouldn't be fine with their face being eaten.

[pocket-size-cthulhu]

It took me ages to find this post again but. Yeah. Same energy

[thebreakfastgenie]

This is exactly it, thank you!!

[lesboevils]

idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+ 

[lesboevils]

  mean this in the kindest possible way. if you are too young and unsafe to go to your gay community center or pride here’s some ways you can connect to gay history.

the oral history project from act up

the lesbian herstory archives

the transgender archives of the university of victoria

the digital transgender archives

glbt historical society (digital)

lgbtq digital collaboratory

[lesboevils]

since it was suggested in the tags

anything that moves

the bisexual manifesto

[lesboevils]

the Samuel Proctor oral history project

a masterpost of lesile feinberg’s works by @genderoutlaws

more to come

[lesboevils]

the queer zine archive

the dyke march compilation 

paris is burning 

how to survive a plague

united in anger: a history of ACT UP

one archives

new york public library lgbtq archives

[catboybiologist]

There's like a million interesting conversations that can be had about the trans experience that collectively, both ourselves and cis people are like three fucking giant leaps behind in terms of understanding and are too clouded by bad faith takes that they're impossible to actually talk about

[catboybiologist]

Okay so here's two things that I think are dog whistles and red flags with no further nuance or context, but have a lot of value in discussing:

"You need dysphoria to be trans". I actually, kinda genuinely think this is true, WITH THE KEY FUCKING DISCLAIMER that dysphoria is not a diagnosis, expressions of dysphoria are not intrinsically tied to medicalization, and the definition of dysphoria is WAY more extensive than any current perception. Eg, a lack of "euphoria", or happy moments, and a reduced ability to feel them, is something that, imo, can be described as dysphoria. This is mostly a linguistic thing, but I think its a good explanation for a recurring phenomena I've noted: trans people who were comforted by the "you don't need dysphoria to be trans" line pretransition, but later realized that their baseline mental state was actually dysphoric, they just had no standard for analyzing that.

Being sexualized from a REALLY early age as a cis woman is genuinely horrific. It's a different experience, but I actually do think it has a transfemme analogue- being rapidly sexualized during early transition while an adult, but without nearly as extensive of a support network for it or survival techniques for it. Genuinely a really interesting conversation to have with cis women where you both start learning extremely helpful things from each other. But, "the unique traumas of girlhood" is way too often used as a TERF dogwhistle.

And lots of others, but those are two that have been on my mind recently.

[elphrackojr]

Reminds me of the whole missed possibility of learning if there's a nuanced answer to "nature vs nurture" for sexual attraction. We all had to get in line behind people being born gay or not because of the legitimate horrors of conversion therapy and it was a decent compromise to have made culturally. However it's something that could be incredibly interesting to study and figure out how attraction actually forms if it weren't for the evils of how some people would seek to use that information.

[catboybiologist]

yuuupp

See also: the instant shutdown some people have towards the idea that HRT can change your sexuality.

[chryza]

if anyone is ever trying convince you that an entire class of people is universally unsafe and you shouldn’t interact with them “for your own safety” or that you should only interact with others in your class because that’s the only way you’ll stay safe they’re projecting past trauma or lying. Everyone is capable of harm. No one is obliged to it. We can be sympathetic to those who have been hurt without reducing people to immutable traits that prevent us from empathizing with each other.

[biokitty]

I had a patient come in the other day because she wanted her IUD replaced. It was at the end of it's life and she loved having her IUD, this was her second one. My MA let me know that the patient was very anxious about getting the IUD replaced, she'd had painful experiences in the past with her other replacements and was dreading this visit for that reason.

I spoke with the patient and she was literally shaking with anxiety. I asked her to describe her prior experiences as well as what she liked about her IUD and what she didn't like. She said that she wished she didn't have to get it replaced so often, so I recommended we place a Mirena instead of just inserting a new Kyleena IUD. She was nervous about this because she didn't want an IUD that was big. I explained that the Mirena and Kyleena are essentially the same size but the Mirena lasts 3 years longer and would likely bridge her to menopause given her age whereas with the Kyleena she'd probably need another replacement to get there. She was okay with trying the Mirena.

I then talked to her about pain control during the procedure as this was what she was most worried about. I asked about her prior experiences and then laid out what I wanted to do to try and improve her experience during this procedure. I told her I planned to give her prescription strength ibuprofen, a heating pad, and a very dense anesthetic block in her cervix to hopefully make it a better experience. If she had had someone to drive her home I would've also given her an ativan because we have studies that show patients who report higher rates of anxiety surrounding a procedure also report higher rates of pain associated with it.

She was down for this plan. I gave her a very dense block, she only felt three small injections and then nothing else. She was shocked when I told her that her old IUD was out and the new one was in. She didn't believe me when I told her it was over.

I don't tell this story because I wanna brag about how amazing of a doctor I am because I'm not. I tell this story because this is the way IUD insertions SHOULD go and I want people to know that IUD insertions do not need to be traumatic. And I want other providers who may insert IUDs to know that a paracervical block should be your standard when it comes to IUD insertions.

When people find out I'm an OBGYN, complete strangers, acquaintances, etc. , the two things they like to tell me immediately are their horrible birth trauma story and their terrible IUD insertion story and I'm trying to at least make the latter one a little less common.

If you place IUDs and aren't doing a cervical block, you need to start. This should be the standard but over 90% of OBGYNs in the US aren't doing them and it's unacceptable. We are traumatizing people and it's entirely avoidable. We are scaring people away from one of the most effective and long lasting forms of birth control in a time when people are losing their ability to end unwanted pregnancies all for no justifiable reason.

"It takes too long:" No it doesn't, that visit took me 20 minutes with a highly anxious patient from start to finish.

"It's not worth it for such a short/small procedure." It's worth it for the patient.

"It's too expensive." You can do a paracervical block with just normal saline. You don't even need lidocaine if you use a generous amount of volume. And if you place Nexplanons I know you stock lidocaine in your office, stop being fucking cheap at the expense of women's pain.

"Patient's don't need it, they'll get over it." I'm telling you they do need it and they aren't getting over it as evidenced by literally everyone wanting to tell me about their terrible IUD insertion experience as soon as they find out I'm an OBGYN.

We should do better. The cervix has nerve endings, stop acting like it doesn't.

Make cervical blocks your standard of care, there's no excuse not to.

[hawthorn-and-ivy]

My buddy does EMLA before the cervical block, that seems to help reduce pain even further.

[emi--rose]

I do 20% benzocaine and my patients almost never feel any of the 5 shots ( I do tenac site and then 2, 4, 8, 10.) Buffering the lidocaine and warming it to body temperature makes it work super fast and not hurt at all during infiltration.

Also a block makes insertion easier. No reason not to.

[cazort]

It's wild to me how some providers accept levels of pain for things involving the cervix that would never be remotely tolerated with other things, like, say, dental work.

I have had people freak out and act like it was crazy that I once let a dentist give me a (very shallow) filling without novacaine. Yet it was less painful than itching a bad mosquito bite. The norm in dentistry is to give local anaesthetic before anything that might cause much pain, and use a numbing agent before the injection.

Rarely a dentist might offer to do something without anaesthetic like that one filling, but only if they really know what they're doing and think it's highly unlikely to be painful. And even then if you yell out, they'll stop and numb you if you want. 100% of the time.

I want this to be the norm for basic gynecological care too.