#lateral punching

[bullet-farmer]

For anyone who’s in a therapy group and whose mental problems come more from physical health, drug addiction, homelessness, time in the prison system, rather than ADHD or mental illness: I’m asking you a favor. No, I’m actually going to insist on it. Don’t dismiss ADHDers’ pain. 

Don’t say “at least it’s ADHD not what we have to deal with.” I know what you mean. But it’s still fucking hurtful.

Especially for people like me who struggled for years to see ourselves as even remotely having a Real Problem (tm) and Deserving (tm) to talk about it.

I felt like a hyperprivileged brat for even bringing up the hard time I’ve been having with my ADHD for the last few months.

I don’t think I’ll ever bring it up in that setting again. Because even though I know the person who brought it up didn’t mean it to sound like it did, and doesn’t think I don’t have “real problems,” that’s still how it came across. And my emotions aren’t able to just shrug it off. 

One step forward, fifty steps back, I guess. 

[vaspider]

asynca replied to your post “hhhhh i just saw one teen activist say that the main thing the...”

I haven't died yet, but that moaning you hear is me turning in my grave anyway

Here’s the thing: I kinda get it. You want your parents to approve of you, especially if you still live under their roof. Being seen as ‘normal’ or ‘the right kind of trans’ is your gateway to being taken care of.

And to a certain extent, that’s a necessary evil.

But it’s important to understand that it’s a necessary evil only because of anti-queer sentiment and the ‘good tr*nny’ and ‘good gay’ narratives. Those narratives that cisgender people create that say we’re defined by our pain -- by dysphoria, by loss, by self-hatred -- are pitfalls that it can take a lifetime to climb out of once you fall in.

So if you need to put forward a particular narrative in order to navigate unsafe situations and take care of yourself, then that’s what you have to do. It’s important to understand that the only reason you have to do that is because of respectability politics, and that your job is not to turn those respectability politics and narrow definitions on other members of your community, to use them as cudgels to strike laterally or punch down, but to work to break down those barriers and those harmful narratives.

[kittenscratches]

Yeah quick question. Why the fuck do people think transmascs simply existing is transmisogyny. No really what the fuck.