I FINALLY FOUND OUT WHY THIS HAPPENS. You see this all the time when there’s a fight or a scrum and suddenly everyone pairs up with a member of the opposite team and they just sort of …hold each other.
Someone on reddit asked about it. And it turns out there’s a logical-ish reason:
all of the other players pair off with their man to prevent anyone else entering into the fight … so it’s a form of self policing.
[…] The players basically want to prevent 2 on 1, etc. fights and by finding a “hugging” partner so there’s no ganging up on one guy, even on accident. They do it because it’s fair. And it’s kind of cute sometimes.
so now we know! it’s fair…and cute.
Aw best part is no ones left out at this dance
hugging partners to keep each other safe. day made.
The real glo up is when you stop waiting to turn into some perfect hypothetical version of yourself and consciously enjoy being who you are in the present moment.
Thing that has me cranky today: genderbend/genderswap art and fic is transphobic and wrong, and if you like it you are wrong and bad. Why do you not listen to every trans person in the world telling you how wrong it is?
Like. Dude. You do realize that a decent number of the people who make and consume that sort of content end up being trans folk, right?
(Okay, let me preface: I am a trans woman. This is absolutely me talking about myself, and me talking about people I have known or seen in person.)
Like, let’s be straightforward. Genderswap art is a usually rough, imperfect, messed up thing, with a lot of problems.
Often squarely rooted in binary gender notions.
Often obsessed with specific physiological features as *defining* gender (i.e. you are a girl if you have boobs and hips and a vagina, etc).
A good chunk of it does come from real grody sources. I was a 4chan teen, once upon a decade. I am aware of the “what if [male character] was a hot chick, so I could fuck them without it being gay” phenomenon. That’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.
These are all big gross problems, rooted in deep cultural cissexism. There are wrongheaded ideas here, and ideally people grow out of them. But:
There are still eggmode kids who use the fantasy of genderswap to cope with dysphoria.
And I guess that’s what gets my panties in a wad. Because no one comes into their gender shit clean and pure. We gotta crawl through a mountain of cissexist cultural shit to get there. It’s slow, and its messy, and it has messy detritus. And then some folks go up to kids crawling through the shit mountain and get all huffy like, Wow why are you getting all this shit everywhere, you gross shit-person!
Not. Helping.
Is genderswap material messed up? It can be, yeah. Should we as a culture push towards better and more fluid understanding of gender? Abso-fucking-lutely. Do you have a right to dislike it, or take issue with its permutations. Sure, I certainly do.
But maybe don’t roll up on some kid already disgusted with herself and her body, and tell her that her coping mechanism, the thing that helps her swallow a bit of the disgust, is disgusting and makes her disgusting. K?
you can have genderswaps when you pry them from my cold dead fucked-up hands
I had a very David Lynch-inspired dream… I was offered a cup of coffee by A Mysterious Entity that I remember nothing about, and was pleasantly surprised by the flavor.
“Funny,” I said. “I don’t usually drink my coffee black, but this isn’t bad.”
The Entity began to laugh. “That’s not coffee you’re drinking,” it said, darkly.
I paused with the mug to my lips as horror slowly dawned on me. Then something inside my head shrugged, said ‘fuck it’, and tipped the mug back. I did not blink or break eye contact with The Entity as I slowly chugged whatever nightmarish substance it had given me.
There was an awkward silence, and The Entity cleared its throat uncomfortably.
Random Headcanon: Link’s androgyny isn’t just an artefact of the Zelda franchise’s art direction – and neither is it particularly unusual. Sexual dimorphism among Hylians is legitimately much lower than among real-world humans; if Link and Zelda swapped clothes, you’d never be able to tell who was the girl and who was the boy.
Consequently, Hylian society depends heavily on clothing to establish gender roles, to the extent that it’s a severe faux pas to question someone’s gender presentation. If they’re dressed like a girl, then they’re a girl – even if they were dressed like a boy yesterday. That’s why nobody ever remarks upon the fact that Zelda and her heroic alter-ego Sheik are different genders; it’d be gauche at best to bring it up.
Here’s the thing about being a professional who works with people in any kind of health or social care job:
We go through years and years of training. We are constantly urged to update our knowledge and skills. We amass knowledge in the hope it will service our clients well and ultimately we are driven by a strong desire to help people to improve their lives. We are often highly qualified, overworked and underpaid and I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone who’s in it for the money.
But that does not make us unchallengeable “experts.” And it is dangerous for us to pretend that we have a more valid understanding of our client’s experiences than they have themselves.
If you look at the history of this sector, you can see that we’ve come a long way in a short time. It’s not that long ago that a lot more people were confined to asylums for no real reason. It’s not that long ago that people were put through countless painful operations in order to “improve” their physical disabilities, with no real consideration given to the person’s wishes. It’s still legal in most countries (everywhere except Malta) to operate on an intersex child without parental permission. Even in the early days of medicine, doctors set themselves up as “experts” and a lot of unsafe practice went unchallenged for decades as a result.
This sector has a dark history of abuse and the best professionals work with an awareness of this and a desire to avoid repeating those mistakes. Which means putting the clients’s experiences at the heart of everything, because when things are forced on people without their wishes being considered, that’s when it becomes abusive. You cannot work effectively with a person if you let your view of their situation override their own. My qualifications do not take precedence over first-hand experience.
Like a lot of allistic professionals, I was taught that “person with autism” is a preferable label to “autistic person.” To some extent, I can see there was good intent behind this. However, out of the classroom, most autistic people I’ve encountered disagree. So I have to defer to them, and if it’s uncomfortable to apply the same rule to everyone on the spectrum, I can simply ask people what they prefer. For me to presume that my classroom learning has more validity than the experiences of autistic people would be dangerously arrogant.
I’m not claiming to be the perfect professional or anything, but I am highly shocked when I see professionals on tumblr claiming that their professional knowledge is more legit than knowledge than comes from first-hand experiences. First of all, it’s highly unprofessional for you to be arguing about this in ALL CAPS WRITING on a social network. Secondly, all professionals have to be open to challenge. If an autistic person challenges you on your person-first language, hostility is a completely inappropriate reaction. As a professional, you have obligations that continue after you finish work for the evening. Respecting other people is the most basic one.
It is good to see a not-autistic say the things we are saying.
