I just generally think that if more "mental health advocates" actually experienced institutionalization at a psychiatric facility they would stop advocating for people to be put in them. Far too many of them are actively as bad as asylums "back in the day" and the ones that are better aren't THAT much better. As it turns out, robbing someone who is already going through severe mental distress of their autonomy and shoving them in a place filled with strangers who treat them as a potential threat and are constantly monitoring them is not actually conducive to mental healing.

things I've been learning since moving out of my (abusive) family home:

it's okay not to trust other people overnight, it's hard to stand down your defences after living in abusive situations - but it's very good to entertain the possibility that you can trust

home is supposed to feel safe. it can feel safe. and that feels weird at first, it feels uncomfortable and weirdly quiet/still like something that's supposed to be there is missing but not in the same way that an abusive household feels when its quiet, its quiet/still because that tension is gone

tomboyism is so funny to me. gender non-conformity for girls is acceptable for like two minutes between the ages of 8 and 10. beyond that it’s appalling and you’re a freak but for those two years…… they could’ve had it all

I took that sugar cube as a child. I also remember the March of Dimes sign on the easel at many stores, all with dimes stuck on them.

I've told this story more than once, and I'm telling it again because it changed my life. When I was a kid I was terrified of needles, and hated getting all my shots. I was a sick kid with a lot of undiagnosed disabilities, and my gramp picked up on the anxiety I had and decided to talk to me about it. He offered to take me to get my flu shot for a christmas gift that year, and when I grumbled about getting a flu shot he said, "well, I had scarlet fever when I was your age. My parents didn't believe in doctors so I wasn't allowed to get my shots, and so I got very sick and almost died."

It stopped me in my tracks. I was 6. I had heard from adults my whole life that shots were important, but I didn't really understand the consequences of not getting them. I asked him to tell me why his parents didn't believe in doctors. He said he grew up out in the midwest on a farm, and his parents were "a type of christian" that believed people got sick because god wanted them to get sick, and going to the doctor was going against what god wanted. His parents were terrified of making god angry, which was something I could understand considering I was raised evangelical. But I was confused because he HADN'T died. I asked him how he'd made it this far if he had never been allowed to go to the doctor and he'd been so sick.

And he told me that when he turned 15 he'd run away from home, hopped on a train that took him all the way up to New York, and started asking door to door where he could get these new vaccines he'd heard about. Everyone told him the air force base was the place to go. He went in, asked around, and got his vaccines. At 16, he had his very first annual physical. Shortly after he met my gram, who was the telephone operator for the doctors office he went to every year for his checkups. And he told me as we sat there in the doctor's office that he was the ONLY person on both sides of his family to live past the age of 60.

I was both horrified and amazed. I went in, got my shot, and he held my hand and said he was proud of me because what I was doing was important. I was still very scared of needles, but it was easier to deal with the sore arm knowing I was keeping myself safe. He lived to be 90 years old, and he was proud to be the first person in his assisted living facility to be vaccinated for covid. When we went to visit him for his 90th birthday just before he died I asked him what he was proud of doing now that he was 90, and he said he was proud of living this long because as a child no one believed anyone could survive the things he could. He said he was perfectly happy to have married, had kids and grandkids, and eat his Applebees knowing he'd cheated death 15 times over.

.......... totally unprecedented, eh?

whooooooooops! it was already the de facto policy for Palestinians!

So tired of getting political emails begging for cash...

it's very important that disabled people are allowed to make bad decisions actually. that we're allowed to do things which cause flare-ups. that we're allowed to take a risk and get it wrong. that not every single second of our day has to be about playing it safe and being well-behaved and staying within our limits

and on the days when we deal with the consequences of those mistakes and bad decisions we're still worthy of a) sympathy and b) pain relief. just as we are if our illness or disability is the result of our choices in the first place

also tbh sometimes it is MEDICALLY important that you take risks and fuck it up because playing it safe can cause "safety" to shrink. can convince your brain that everything outside of those bounds is forbidden. can increase your body's response to threat because everything unfamiliar becomes threat because you've taught it that it's not allowed to do those things because they're dangerous. and if they're dangerous then they're painful and the pain gets worse and the limits get smaller and your life SHRINKS

this is not true of all conditions (for some, pushing through can have a lasting negative impact, i'm not disputing that) but maybe trust people to know whether it's true for their own condition and allow them the autonomy to weigh up the risk and the benefit

just gonna drop this here also to point out that this is not a new concept

cannot stress enough that i literally didnt do anything at all. my fiancee mentioned on one of his posts that it's kind of messed up to not mention that a man is venezuelan in a post about how he was "deported solely for an autism tattoo" and he immediately pivoted to blaming everything on me, a totally unrelated person, because i happened to be a "white trans girl" in the general vicinity. you could not make this shit up.

genuinely gobsmacked that a white guy called me “trans girly eva braun” because my puerto rican girlfriend politely asked him to stop spreading misinformation about who is getting deported & being intellectually dishonest about why. and he assumed that my fiancee was me because he saw her pinned post about my immigration fund. and now he’s posting vile transmisogynistic creeds about how nobody wants to donate to me because im ugly and just spend all my money on makeup and clothes. and now he’s calling me a sexual abuser because somebody said something to the level of “she’s not gonna fuck you bro” in his inbox and, of course, he is blaming it on me.

am i going crazy. am i the only person who can see this guy going on a blatantly transmisogynistic rampage because he happaneed to SEE a trans girl near somebody who criticised him. fucking unbelievable???

genuinely gobsmacked that a white guy called me “trans girly eva braun” because my puerto rican girlfriend politely asked him to stop spreading misinformation about who is getting deported & being intellectually dishonest about why. and he assumed that my fiancee was me because he saw her pinned post about my immigration fund. and now he’s posting vile transmisogynistic creeds about how nobody wants to donate to me because im ugly and just spend all my money on makeup and clothes. and now he’s calling me a sexual abuser because somebody said something to the level of “she’s not gonna fuck you bro” in his inbox and, of course, he is blaming it on me.

yeah i feel like i’m going insane here 😭 like. literally Why i was just Sitting There

i was missing context. he's being an ass.

the craziest thing about all of this is how obviously it underlines some of the broader dynamics at play. enter, white trans guy being spreading racially charged misinformation. a puerto rican cis woman responds, telling him as such and so of course he starts having a racist meltdown about how she’s the real racist for criticising him for sharing an article he didn’t read because at least he is “spreading the news” (read: racially charged misinformation).

even though he is a white guy who will face no consequence for racism, he identifies that it will “look bad” if he starts screaming at a Latina woman for correcting how he frames news stories about deportation, so he makes the conscious decision to instead pretend that she is her white fiancee (me) so he can throw a tantrum about “white trans woman” daring to call him white (he is) and how she (me?) actually hates brown men AND disabled men (because he is disabled, which is apparently why he didn’t read the article).

to recap: he played the same “shut up you’re just a white tranny who doesn’t know real oppression” that everybody pulls on trans women of color… on a cis woman of color.

i think it couldn’t be any more obvious how TME people complaining about “white trans women” is almost always just a racist & transmisogynistic shorthand for “anybody i can get away with dismissing by calling them a white trans woman”

this guy is like a perfect cross section case study into how white trans men treat trans women & women of color.

like, look at this, i think it’s safe to say he’s actively making the intentional conscious choice to a pretend it was me criticising him and not Sef, (in this case, in fact, an anon that wasn’t sent by either of us, because again! i’ve never interacted with him) because he has correctly identified that he would probably appear more sympathetic to an outside perspective if his tantrum was about “trans girly eva brauns” (direct quote) instead of a cisgender woman of color. the rhetorical spectre of white trans womanhood is, as ever, evoked as an acceptable target. it doesn’t matter if the person in question is white, or even a trans woman. all that matters is placing a socially acceptable punching bag around your target.

Crippledpeeper used to be Bering-strait in the 2019ish era of transandrobros along with gentleman-luke or whatever his name was and he was classist and mean to a bunch of people for pointing out that yes, Keith Haring DID sleep with poc minors.