not just A southern pansy

The sixth knight to join the Pride Knights–Deimos!

They are so strong they can uproot fully grown trees with their bare hands and Roderick personally forged their armor.

Together with the other knights, they fight for equality across the land of Estria. Here they stand in front of a slightly tattered non-binary pride flag and they guard it proudly.

It all began with a study in which the rats refused to press a lever to obtain food when that lever also delivered a shock to a fellow rat in an adjacent cage. The rats would rather starve than witness a rat suffering. Follow-up studies found that rats would press a lever to lower a rat who was suspended from a harness; that they would refuse to walk down a path in a maze if it resulted in a shock delivered to another rat; and that rats who had been shocked themselves were less likely to allow other rats to be shocked, having been through the discomfort themselves. Rats care for one another.

But the discovery of rat empathy was also met with incredulity. How could a rat be empathic? Surely, there must have been something wrong with the experimental procedures. So the rat empathy research programme languished for some 50 years.

[…]

The results of these studies are compelling, but they don’t show us much more than what we already suspected from the work done in the 1950s and ’60s – that rats are empathic; meanwhile, the studies have inflicted, and continue to inflict, significant fear and distress on the rats.

[…]

Scientists are now tinkering with rats’ empathy in order to find ways of treating human psychopathologies. In some cases, rats are given treatments that temporarily disable their empathic capabilities, such as anxiolytics, paracetamol, heroin or electric shocks. In other cases, the harm is permanent. Rats are separated from their mothers at birth and raised in social isolation. In some studies, their amygdalae (the brain area responsible for emotion and affiliation) are permanently damaged. The explicit goal of this research is to create populations of mentally ill, traumatised, emotionally suffering rats. 

[…]

I’m so embarrassed to have to type this out but this is the last place I can turn for the support of my friends and community. I’m a struggling Latina lesbian trying to make my way in the world, and with COVID19 my financial situation deteriorated until I was forced to move back in with my parents. 

A few nights ago a person I once considered a friend outed me to my parents because he was upset I rejected his romantic advances. Upon finding out my parents decided to kick me out, and I’ve had to stay with a friend. Now that she can no longer house me, I’m trying to find an apartment and need help staying at a motel and paying for food and gas.

I just need a few hundred dollars to cover the cost of living until I get my next pay cheque and find a place to lease. If you want to help a struggling sapphic Latina, my paypal is paypal.me/ant0nella