Yet Another Socially Awkward Human

The first pride was a riot, more specifically a riot against police violence. Trans women of colour like Marsha P. Johnson paved the way for the celebration of pride today. You cannot celebrate your pride this month, or any month if you aren’t also supporting Black Lives Matter and the riots going on against police violence right now. Us white LGBTQ+ need to stand up for our black siblings and their rights, their struggles. We need to amplify their voices and show any support we can.Hey! Better yet, reblog this version:

Extensive BLM Google doc including places to donate to, education resources, etc

List of 75 things white people can do right now

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5

Me: My pills make me not want to die tho

They: You shouldn’t want to die, that’s not normal

What does “The Spectrum” mean? Do some people have “more Autism” than others?

I covered these topics in a comic to help explain the extremely individual and incomparable nature of the autism spectrum!

Facebook User: I wish my posts reached further, then I’d get famous.

Instagram User: I wish I had more followers so I can unlock more basic features for my account.

TikTok User: I wish I had more views then I’d be a real influencer.

And yes, it does:

Nim Chimpsky.

Fucking monkey pun.

And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But

There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous.  The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs.  And then someone decided to get clever and name one “sonic hedgehog” because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.

Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.

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you’re free to take a ouija board out to the cemetery and try to explain the dizzying array of current queer terms and get a solid answer as to how he identifies within that framework but 

until then, I’m going to continue NOT definitively assigning someone identity terms they didn’t self-identify with, and might not have even known, when I’m responsible for representing them faithfully and they’re not here to correct me. even more so when they’re part of my own community

There was a time when “heterosexuality” as we know it did not exist.  People who identified themselves as men and people who identified themselves as women still had relationships (marriages, romances, infidelities and so on) but there wasn’t a word for this way of being, because there hadn’t been a word created for it.  There didn’t need to be.  It was the way the world was. 

Then someone noticed that some men preferred to get into relationships with other men, and some women preferred to get into relationships with other women, and they had to create a word to describe it (so it could be banned properly as being “not the way the world should be”).  The creation of a word for the “other” (”homosexual”) led inevitably to the creation of a word for the “normal” (and this happened around the end of the nineteenth century).  But yeah, prior to that, there were no heterosexuals.

I was born in the same year as the term “Asperger’s Syndrome” (which is why I wasn’t diagnosed with it as a child… because until I was in my thirties, the term wasn’t widely known in the public domain - knowledge spread a lot slower in the pre-internet age).  I have a strong suspicion my paternal grandmother was autistic - but she was never diagnosed with autism, because she was born in about 1900… and the term “autism” (for a particular type of psychosocial condition recognised mostly in boys) is first recorded in about 1911.  She died when I was in my early twenties (she was in her nineties). 

She takes a oldest-to-newest approach that builds each new generation of writings on top of the older ones, including the influence of forgotten past writings that, nevertheless, left a social (and often medical) imprint on the condition we now call migraine, and on those who suffer from it.

One of the things she emphasizes often is how modern scholarship of historic migraine records assigns them to a specific modern medical category and, frequently, to the scholar’s specific branch of learning in migraine study. Her goal is, as much as possible, to put these historic writings into their contemporary social and medical context. And the sheer volume of words it takes for her to explain the cultural context of a specific historic document should make any reader aware of the ease of simply applying my understanding and moving on, thus robbing historical persons of their agency, identification, and genuine lived experience.

It didn't start out simply meaning "attracted to the opposite sex".

From 1869 (when it was coined alongside "homosexual", "monosexual", and "heterogenit") to 1934 it was a medical diagnosis, an "abnormal or perverted attraction to the opposite sex" (Dorland's Medical Dictionary, 1901), a "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex" (Merriam-Webster, 1923).

In 1934, Merriam-Webster changed the definition to "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality."

I based this mostly off of The invention of 'heterosexuality' (which I read for a gender studies class), other sources seem to back it up as well.