#ableism cw

[write-with-will]

Is your joke actually funny or is it just making fun of disabled people

[chelledoggo]

boomers be like "nobody had autism or ADHD when I was a kid!"

probably because back then, neurodivergent folks were dismissed as "insane" or "r-worded" and were thrown into mental asylums. and before that they were straight up just given hard drugs or lobotomies.

it's almost like as time goes on and technology/research evolves, so does our understanding of human beings and the inner workings of the mind.

WEIRD, RIGHT?

[collaredfrank]

Excerpts from Mel Gordon's The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror + Nancy Martinez photography (one of which comes from her stories) from Long Live the Black Parade Argentina

[the-moogle-of-your-nightmares]

project: keep moogle housed

If you've been following me for a while you may be aware of my current housing issues; if not, here is a thread going into the situation so far in more detail.

The high points:

I am a queer trans disabled person with no current source of reliable income. I am working to get on SNAP and see if I can secure a WFH job and/or freelance work, and maybe eventually get SSI if I can swing it, but for now I am almost entirely reliant on donations to survive.

I recently escaped a years-long stretch of living with abusive caregivers who wrecked my physical and mental health, drained my finances, and isolated me from most of my support system--either by turning them against me, or simply leaving me too traumatized and exhausted to keep in touch with anyone--before they finally attempted to kill me last month by putting me on the street.

I am extremely frail and currently without glasses, though I am trying to get them replaced, and have nerve damage--primarily of the hands and spine--from a severe, heat-sensitive, as-yet-undiagnosed autoimmune disorder; even sitting up causes nerve compression in my spine, and riding in cars is playing russian roulette with further permanent nerve damage. It's happened before, multiple times, and makes leaving the house actively dangerous.

Being even slightly too hot for too long is also a nasty inflammation trigger that makes my entire body go into slow cascading breakdown mode, up to and including having gotten pneumonia more than once during summer months.

It is brutally cold here in the winters and brutally hot in the summer, and I live in a deep red state with very little social safety net.

All this together means that if I am without A/C, heating, or a safe bed to lie down for even a day, I risk--at best--losing partial or full use of my hands, legs, and ability to use the bathroom without surgical intervention. Much more likely is that if I end up on the street I will die, in short order and in agony the whole time.

If you are able and willing to offer a safe, stable place to stay medium-to-longterm, please contact me. In the meantime donations are the next best thing you can do to help, and it means the world. Thank you all so much for your kindness so far; I would not be alive right now without you.

My monthly rent for the place where I'm staying is $950, and I will need to raise at least $650 by February 15th at the very latest to stay housed for another month. Please help me survive and get on my feet; I don't want to leave my best friend alone, and I don't want to die.

-

0/$650

pypl: manymogs

[roughentumble]

god i gotta stop getting into the weeds on this i just. its so funny to me that isff said "i am going to forcedisable you, you'd be sexier if you walked with a cane" (<-direct quote) and someone replied "i want to force knock you unconscious" and she IMMEDIATELY went "oh my GOD, wow, WOW, violence against trans women. you fucking monsters cant give it a rest, can you. all trans men are the same"

ok ma'am.

[gloriousmonsters]

this post has some good/interesting points but god i got blindsided by this one line

I'll take 'things that would instantly trigger a wave of violence against vampires' for 100, holy fucking shit. Like I know this is casual and joking but. No actually that's not how people work. You would get less people donating blood ('I don't want it to go to a vampire') and a lot of people hauling out stakes and garlic ('they're threatening us now? well there's another way to prevent them attacking us!')

Vampirism as a disability can be a powerful metaphor/way to play it, but I feel like this 'oh an ethical solution could be worked out!' approach is ignoring an unavoidable and painful likeness to some disabilities built into that approach - the more support you need, the more likely it is some people think you should just die. Like we're taking that and turbocharging it!

You are not really alive, so why don't you just want to die, insert the huge amount of specifically religious stigma, insert the hell of being a religious person who becomes a vampire, insert piles of dogwhistle-ready language about 'unnatural' conditions

Vampires either do pose a threat to people if they don't have their needs met, or there's a massive societal perception and legends built around the fact they do, or like. If you take that away, why are you even doing vampires lol. This is where the 'it's better than them attacking us' comes in - and the damage that would do. Here come the 'every vampire is inherently an abusive narcissist because you have to be to be OKAY with the fact that either you demand blood that could be used by actually morally pure sick people, or you start attacking people to drink their blood'. This would be next level violence incitement and suicide baiting. Your partner gives you blood? 'You're manipulative and a selfish burden and should die so they don't have to harm themselves to feed the grotesque monster you've become.' Your kid becomes a vampire? 'This might be hard but you HAVE to kill them, this will destroy your family, it's not them anymore, if they were really themselves they'd thank you for not letting them become a leech on society or a murderer'.

But. Seriously. This is taking the societal ableism flavor of 'disabled people are parasites' and making it luridly literal, therefore asking: Assuming that yes, your existence depended on a constant need for a vital essence you cannot produce yourself, should you live? Especially since - depending on where you go with vampire details - you can play with Is that life worth living? Because of course the answer is yeah, it is, because even if you're not living a 'normal' life and need more support than a lot of people your life can be good and worthwhile and you can be alive and a person and shit, but it feeds right back into the first two points. You're continuing to place a burden on everyone around you, be a danger to society, for.... what? 'If I got turned I would immediately kill myself like what's the point if I can't go to the beach lmao'. 'You can really tell vampires can't see themselves in mirrors because of how gross they all look'. 'You KNOW vampires aren't human is bc they don't care they can't eat real food anymore'.

And it extends to your loved ones. 'My neighbor's 'husband' is a vampire and it's her own fault for being a bloodbag* but it breaks my heart how tired she is... she confessed she used to be a morning person and have a good job but because that thing is nocturnal her sleeping schedule is just naps now. That's no way to live'. * <- yes, I needed to invent a 'supports vampires' slur on the fly, the line called for it. 'Saw a post saying that people who get enthralled by vamps don't get pale and sickly because they're being fed on, but because 'vamps can't do sunlight so they spend more time indoors'. First off, suuuuuure lmao, and secondly what's the difference? You're still losing your life to a bloodsucker, staying out of the sun is actually really bad for you. Open the curtains. :)'

Suicide baiting and violence inciting in 'funny' or veiled terms so that it can't be reported! 'Open the curtains'/'eat something (garlic emoji)'/'go to church'. Sun emojis, sunflowers, crosses in social media handles indicating that this person wants you dead. Weighing whether to call it out or let it be.

The final, most horrifying in implication Vampire Lore: Vampires make more vampires. And they turn normal, healthy people. Every vampire means a vampire bit a human and - at least in popular belief - chose consciously to make them a vampire as well. No disability, obviously, works like this. (Although you could invoke elements of 'disabled people shouldn't breed', etc.) It's almost bringing in an element of 'queerness as a social contagion', but Worse. You know you'd never bite someone and change them, maybe you know it's different than the popular myth, maybe vampires don't even actually make other vampires - that's still the legend. To those who don't know and care, you are a disease vector, an agent of evil, and the easiest way to prevent more vampires... In most depictions, a dead-for-good vampire just dissipates to dust. It's never been easier to kill a 'drain on society' and get away with it.

...I usually don't care about vampires, I swear. It's just that if you want to treat them as akin to sick/disabled people, I think it's seriously missing something to not then reckon with how horrifying the ableism and general societal opposition would be.

[glitchdollmemoria]

please can we stop describing bigots as delusional. please. im so fucking tired. someone being sucked into a hate group surrounded by others who believe minorities should be oppressed and encouraging them to believe in conspiracy theories that the rest of the group believes, is fundamentally different from someone having a mental illness that causes delusions.

delusions, by definition, cannot be explained by things like cultural background - such as having a belief constantly reinforced by intentional attempts to rationalize it for the sake of maintaining power over minorities. yes, someone can be both delusional and a bigot, and yes conspiracy theories can feed into delusions, but the two are not fucking synonymous.

i did not spend my teen years convinced that i was being stalked by demons just to hear so many of you people equate my disability with incel behavior and genocidal propaganda. stop reinforcing harmful connotations about mental health struggles.

[ojamajodoremisharp]

I’ve only been browsing the TIODM tags for a little over a day and a fair amount of you guys have uhhhhh. Really Interesting takes on characters that can easily be read as being cluster B