Trans rights are human rights. Intersectional feminist, lover of multiple fandoms. Warnings for lots of gifs, some nsfw content, and triggers. Pronouns: she/her
my notifications are once again devolving into a spirited debate about the ethics of actions that could potentially make someone uncomfortable, and at risk of sounding like someone about to get a lot of irate anons I think we're frankly giving way too to much moral weight to hypothetical discomfort
the thing about discomfort is that it's an extremely nebulous category that can be triggered by virtually anything and that's far too broad a category to have any inherent moral quality to it. like. my mom was mad uncomfortable when I stopped shaving. that didn't mean I was doing violence against my mom it just meant she needed to get over herself. many such cases it must be said.
Baran Al-Hashimi (The Pitt) vs. Mary Winchester (Supernatural)
Baran Al-Hashimi
Mary Winchester
Remaining time: 6 days 8 hours
Propaganda below the cut:
Baran Al-Hashimi:
Hated by many fans for calling out the main character (Dr Robby) when he's being unkind to staff and patients
Dr Al Hashimi my beloved!!!
She shows up in s2 as the person who’ll be taking over running the emergency department while the previous head (Robby, a white man) goes on sabbatical. While the Pitt intentionally tries to portray complicated characters who have both high and low points, people were going “oh she’s the villain I guess” from minute one (Spoiler: she’s not. She’s just a lady who wants to do her job)
Like I usually stay out of the Pitt tags bc there’s so many bad takes there and I still saw so much “oh she needs to get taken down a peg, she’s going to have a horrific screw up to prove Robby is right about everything, she’s eeeeevil and wants to take over the ED forever” type shit
And she is a very cool and complex character! She’s always watching out for people in vulnerable positions, which includes both her patients and her subordinates; she’s largely a rule follower for better and worse; she’s a very good doctor; she has a really interesting plot wrt her seizure disorder
I Just Think She’s Neat
First of all. I love her. I love her SO MUCH. Second of all let's think about how her day went: she spent months preparing for a new job as an ED head, came up with proposals, emailed current ED head to try and get his take on the proposals and see if they would work since she's never been head of an ED before. He does not read the emails. He does not get back to her. She comes in early on her first day with bagels and to run a practice code to see where the med students are at and get a feel for the place. She politely but firmly guides everyone. She doesn't play favorites and is interested in both patient care and making sure her staff can have a life outside of work. She can do a procedure to save a child's life that nobody else in the ED has even heard of. She worked with MSF (Drs without borders) at a maternity ward in Kabul. (It is implied she witnessed a massacre there). Throughout all this, Dr Robby (WHO IS CHOOSING TO GO ON SABBATICAL! did he just not want anyone running the dept while he was gone??) belittles her, ignores her, doesn't want to discuss suggestions, leaves out crucial information about one of the residents having a history of stealing meds from the dept, tells her TO HER FACE he thinks the place will fall apart without him, literally makes her cry, and she handles it with grace.
But SO MANY people in the fandom are like "wow she's a bitch" or "ugh she's pro AI" (first of all, it's a transcription service so that's on the writers for calling it AI, second of all fan favorite Dr Robby goes on an emotional rampage and yells at a resident having a panic attack and he's still beloved but God forbid she have a flaw) (which comes from a place of wanting her patients to be seen more quickly and her staff to spend less time charting and more time at home! I'm not pro AI but it's not like she's just being lazy!)
Dr Al Hashimi is better than me because if I went through all that on my FIRST DAY of work I would go after Dr Robby with a scalpel. And instead she continues to treat him with respect even when she openly acknowledges he is treating her like a resident, not a fellow attending.
In season 1, a male doctor steals drugs from the ED. A female doctor reports him to the ED chief (also male) and, rather than report him to admin, the chief covers it up. Season 2 begins with the guy returning from rehab. Not knowing the full story, Al-Hashimi is supportive of him and his decision to get help. She asks about his tension with the woman who reported him and he says she doesn’t like him because he was a dick to her (he was and still is in season 2). He makes it sound like she has a petty grudge against him and he’s the bigger person.
Al-Hashimi is angry upon finding out the truth and treats him differently (i.e. doesn’t let him talk over students and the like, but she’s not a raging asshole). I can’t stress enough how she’s still cordial and appropriate with him, she’s just acting in light of new information. She knows he stole drugs, got away with it, and lied to her which made the woman who reported him look bad.
This made her the devil incarnate to his fans. They woobified him and acted like he was an innocent victim in all this. They called her an ableist addict hater (mind you she’s disabled and was kind about his addiction). People were loud and vile about it and I’m sure that if she was the white man and he was the brown woman it would’ve been crickets.
Mary Winchester:
The show brought her back to show she has flaws and wasn't a perfect mother and people act like this was a stupid decision and dislike her character for being messy and not acting like a mother to her now adult sons when that is literally the point of her character.
The fandom largely adopts the show’s misogyny towards Mary and all of its female characters. I don’t actually see very much of this first hand because I am good at curating my online experience, but I do know that people tend to think she should have been a better mom and blame her for things that it makes no sense to blame her for. The vast majority of the fandom also just generally takes Dean’s/the show runners’ perceptions of all the events in the show to be accurate, and all of those views that they take to be accurate are misogynistic.
Mary is a fascinating part of the dead girl genre, especially in how similar to Laura Palmer she is. They both had men trying to solve/avenge their murder as the whole plot of their show, but they also were both entirely misunderstood by these men. Nobody knew about Laura’s sex life/drug use/etc. and nobody knew about Mary being a hunter. Considering that SPN drew some inspiration from Twin Peaks, I would almost think that this is on purpose, but the show itself is so misogynistic that I wonder if they could have done commentary on misogyny on purpose. Mary is the most interesting character in the show imo and I’m sad that the fandom at large doesn’t have more intelligent discussions about her.
Hated for her choices, for wanting to be her own person and not babying her adult children
She was a badass, who was thrown into an impossible situation and did the best she could with it
EVERYTHING she gets hate for is something sam and/or dean have also done or would do in the same scenario! she gets hate for making a demon deal to save her (not yet) husband. dean and john both made demon deals to save family members and they don't get hate regardless of the aftermath! (we also see what happened in a world where she didn't make the demon deal and she gets hate for it anyways.) she gets hate for joining the british men of letters, but sam (who was tortured by them) joins them too in the episode following her confession that she joined them! she hid the hunting life from john and sam did the same thing with EVERY PARTNER he had! she left her ADULT sons behind so that she could cope with being brought back to life 30 years in the future and the fandom acts like she's guilty of child neglect. you know who else repeatedly left family behind to deal with things on his own and doesn't get the same level of vitriol? SAM!
She was brought back into a world where everything she knew was gone, her sons were adults (and older than her at this point), after being violently killed, and somehow she’s the bad one for not immediately adjusting and wanting space? Dean throws several tantrums, giving her the cold shoulder and generally being passive aggressive the entire season and then blaming her for dying and his childhood as if that’s her fault. And Sam and the other characters support him and centre the brothers’ pain over hers when again she was brought back into this new scary world with these men who she doesn’t know. Both fandom and show punish her for not immediately wanting to baby these grown men. And she has to apologise and repent by sacrificing herself. And fandom ofc eats it up, at times even calling worse than their abusive father, blaming her for everything that happens in the show and ofc the million bashing fics where Dean gets to yell at her, because SPN fans and writers love when men get to yell at women. Also they shame her a lot for having casual sex with one of the characters, because mothers aren’t supposed to have sexual relationships 🙄
Okay, so there's a scene in Supernatural where Mary tells Dean, her son, "I am not just your mother and you are no longer a child." This is a perfectly reasonable sentiment, as Dean is, literally, 38 years old at this point. It's also an interesting statement for Mary to make imo, because it suggests that both Mary and Dean should grapple with the idea that she was never the perfect wife/mother that her husband and children thought of her as.
Dean responds to her statement with, "I never was." And there's many analyses of this scene out there written by people who use this as evidence of Dean's manpain, and his sad childhood, and how Mary was actually a bad mother all along - instead of engaging with the implications of her original statement and how that makes HER character more complex. She's a nuanced character! She's been through a lot, and that informs the complicated, sometimes good-sometimes bad decisions she makes!! Except many SPN fans are obsessed with hating Mary for "being a bad mother" (read: dying and not getting to raise her children, then coming back to life and not fitting into the perfect motherly ideal her children have constructed of her).
And the thing is: SPN is famously bad with women, right? SPN is like, the Misogyny Show, and the show kind of has a Madonna/whore complex about the female characters where they're either perfect or irredeemable. But I would actually consider Mary to be one of the better-handled female characters on the show? The show starts with her dying, and her husband going on this quest to avenge her death and find her killer, etc etc, and there's this idea that Mary was this beautiful, perfect wife/mother. But the show actually works to deconstruct this idea somewhat, and late in the show we start to see that Mary was never a perfect wife, and she had her own life, and her own secrets, and real interiority. And this really nuances her character! It's interesting!
And yet, even though the writers actually did want (for once) the audience to view Mary as a complicated character, lots of fans STILL refuse to engage with this idea. People want her to be a bad mother to act as fuel for Sam and Dean's (mostly Dean) manpain. It drives me fucking crazy.
God I could yap about Mary Winchester for HOURS. Like we all know that supernatural is misogynistic as fuck but usually it's the writers doing the heavy lifting. But in Mary's case the vast majority of the misogyny is coming straight from the fans.
Like Mary started out as a classic case of fridged woman to drive man pain. Then the writers gave her a little more depth and nuance and intrigue through time travel shenanigans but that was mostly just setting up convoluted parallels and backstory stuff rather than actually exploring her as a character. But then they did something genuinely interesting. They. Unfridged. Her. They plucked her straight out of that fridge, plonked her down into the narrative over 30 years after she initially died, then said have fun. And that is so cool!
Mary comes back to life and she gets to exist as an actual character! She gets to be more than a perfect mother and perfect wife placed on some fantasy pedestal that no one could ever live up to. She gets to be badass. She gets to be messy. She gets to be flawed and complex while still being a genuinely kind person trying to do the right thing in a terrible situation. I mean, from her perspective she literally just woke up one day and her 6 month and 4 year old sons were suddenly older than her! That is an insane situation to be in! Of course it takes her a little time to adjust.
And how does the fandom react to a genuinely complex character in a fairly unique and fascinating situation? Pure hatred of course. Her many "crimes" include: making a dodgy deal as a teenager immediately after her parents and (then) boyfriend were murdered, being dead so unable to raise her children, not magically knowing that her husband decided to neglect and abuse their children while she was dead, taking more than 5 minutes to adjust to suddenly being alive and 33 years in the future and younger than her children, not dropping everything to coddle her two FULL GROWN ADULT CHILDREN (mid & late 30s) WHO. ARE. OLDER. THAN. HER. And talking to the British (yeah that was a whole thing I'm not gonna get into just know that the writing was shit)
As punishment for those truly heinous crimes, the fandom consistently treats her with the same level of disdain as John Winchester (has several documented cases of canon child abuse and over 6000 AO3 fics dedicated to his terrible parenting) if not more. And they will only talk about her to complain.
Oh yeah. And then the writers decided to re-fridge her.
Free all the women in supernatural but most of all free my girl Mary.
You literally have to understand that ur closest friends and loved ones may very well have kinks or fetishes that gross or freak you out and they simply won’t tell you because they know it grosses or freaks you out. Like you have no way of knowing if your best friend is into necro roleplay if she doesn’t wanna tell you. Sometimes you date someone for years before finding out they have a thing for incest. Maybe your coworker likes ageplay and diapers. Who gives a fuck. Nothing changes between you knowing and not knowing except your own constructed moral outrage.
Everyone's talking about Artemis II, the first humans to travel to the moon in 50 years
Historic, right? BUT nobody's talking about the Deaf people who made it possible.
In the late 1950's, NASA had a problem.
They needed to understand what weightlessness did to the human body but every test subject kept getting violently motion sick
NASA needed to figure out FAST during the space race!
So, they went to Gallaudet University. They recruited 11 Deaf people.
Because a number of Deaf people had lost their hearing to spinal meningitis as children which also damaged their vestibular system.
Their inner ears couldn't be overwhelmed. They were immune to motion sickness.
NASA put them in centrifuges. Put them on zero gravity flights. A room for 12 straight days.
(All caps) It rotated the entire time.
One experiment on a ferry in choppy Nova Scotia waters, the researchers got so seasick they had to cancel it. The Gallaudet Eleven? They were playing cards.
Their bodies gave NASA the data and research it needed to send humans into space.
No Gallaudet Eleven? No Mercury. No Apollo. No Artemis II.
They stood on the shoulders of 11 Deaf people most people have never heard of.
These gentle, 400-pound giants are splashing back from the brink of extinction.
Green sea turtles have been an iconic endangered species since the 1980s, mostly due to bycatch in fishing nets and taking adults and eggs for food. I have core childhood memories of watching Steve Irwin talk about sea turtle conservation in front of a beach full of nesting green sea turtles.
After 45 years of conservation efforts, their population now meets the IUCN criteria for Least Concern rather than Endangered.
For a species with such a slow life history (it takes green sea turtles decades to reach sexual maturity) and a nearly global population, this is a Really Big Deal. This is the kind of long term conservation victory that many of the amazing humans who started working on green sea turtle conservation back in the 80s didn't live to see.
Just because something isn't fixed right away doesn't mean it won't ever be fixed. Just because the work is slow doesn't mean it isn't worth doing.
I am saying this as a Gen Z queer, before y’all get your guns out to fucking shoot me.
But I need y’all to understand that if someone doesn’t give you their government name in a queer space, it’s not because they’re “mysterious,” and you do not have permission to take it upon yourself to figure out their “real identity” and go digging for them online like a private investigator. First, that’s creepy and a violation of privacy and reasonable boundaries. Second, some of us keep our private and professional lives very separate because we need to keep food on the fucking table and a roof over our heads, and our private life could jeopardize that.
“Why won’t you tell me about your parents?” “Why can’t I know your real name?” “Where do you work?”
1.) Not all our parents would bake us a fucking cake when we come out. Some of us are closeted. Surely you understand this? You also do not need to know my parent’s names or occupations; we are both adults. I do not need nor want to mix you and my private life with my parents and my public life.
2.) Trans people do not owe you their dead name or government name
3.) I’m not telling you for the sake of job security. I am a government fucking caseworker working amidst a fucking lavender panic!
“There’s no way you’re a different person outside this; you’re still you at your core. What harm is there—”
No, I am a completely different person. A different person with a different personality and different interests and a different name and presentation. I am a completely different person because I keep this life and my public life private to avoid fracturing 90% of my interpersonal relationships and 100% of my professional ones.
“You’re not out? But you’re so confident.”
See— that’s part of the issue. Y’all assume someone is in the closet because they hate themselves or lack self-identity. Some of us know exactly who we are, but need to prioritize financial stability or else our entire life gets exponentially harder immediately.
You meet queer people over the age of 40 and one of the first/earliest questions is “who knows?”
I need y’all to start bringing that energy. Because it’s not always safe for someone to be out and not everyone is safe to be out around.
There is a misnomer that “the closet” inherently means “doesn’t know they’re queer” and not “isn’t out widely and publicly.” “Outness” is often a patchwork.
Closely related is: Just because you know that your friend is trans, that doesn't mean that their other friends know they're trans, or that the general public are welcome to know that. So many people, especially ones who transitioned medically before the tipping point, are really selective about who knows they're trans.
Hey, if anyone’s curious, this IS making a serious impact — this handbook was taught as standard practice for my EMT license course, as well as several other programs. A lot of new providers are being taught this as a matter of course.
ok so this is another long shot but a few years ago there was a twitter post (in japanese i think?) that had measurememts for how to make this book stand thing out of cardboard that you could use to double up books and use up more space on shelves
back then i made a bunch of these but by now i lost the pic and dont know how to find the original post anymore
if it comes down to it i can just take one apart and get the measurements from there but i would be very grateful if anyone happens to have the original post or something similar??
don't mind how long it's been since i made this post, anyway i realized that i don't even need to take one apart to get the measurements when i can literally just unfold it and refold it /FACEPALM
so anyway here is the diagram for anyone else who is interested!!
this requires pretty big carboard pieces, if you have a really big box or something you can make it from one piece, but if you don't, you can also just make each of the pieces individually and then tape them together
and then in the end you put it together like this!!
and then when you make a bunch you can put them all next to each other and stack your books like crazy
EVERYONE START GETTING MORE USE OUT OF YOUR SPACE NOW!!!!
sleep apnea isn't even unique to fat people and has plenty to do with genetics and windpipe shape but in my opinion, being "overweight" and bringing it up in disability spaces can be a really good litmus test for how fatphobic and slimy someone actually is and where their disability advocacy begins and ends
the leftism leaving disability advocates' bodies when fat people have a disorder ppl characterize as their fault etc
i know this sounds like I'm making up a guy but other ppl who are "Overweight" and have sleep apnea will get it. people treat us like shit lol
This is what I was alluding to when I discussed that the volume of name changes you have to make as a trans person highlights the ridiculous amount of documentation attached to you.
in a world where happy rich people sell the discontent lower class the lie that money cant buy you happiness it is at least reassuring to know that our sole trillionaire is the most pathetic, unloved, miserable, alone human being on the planet, and that NOTHING could make him happy. get fuckeddd lol
people who are like "but with universal healthcare you'll have to pay taxes!!! Up to 8%!!!" Are so funny. Like as opposed to the 16% of my gross paycheck that goes to private insurance, that won't cover shit unless i call my insurance company, then my doctor, then my pharmacy, then my doctor again because theyre pretty sure insurance got approved then my insurance company because they didn't get the letter, then my doctor again, then the pharmacy again, and then the copay i still am on the hook for.
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