in my "parents don't understand me" era

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

Abuse? Assault? Rape? Nahhhh that could never happen! The people are making it all up!

The system is flawed? Noooo, the patients are just experiencing delusions that force them to think that!

Disability isn't actually explained well by playing "body vs brain". So many different types of disability and so many types of impacts, the binary doesn't really make sense.

instead of saying "body vs brain", try:

♥️ Physical/mobility - disabilities that impact function of limb, body, organs or mobility.

Examples being SCI, cerebral palsy, limb difference, arthritis

💚 Sensory - disabilities that impact the senses.

Examples being d/Deafness, being Hard of Hearing, being blind, having low vision, auditory processing disorder

💛 Intellectual & Developmental - disabilities that impact cognitive ability, development, learning, etc.

Examples being intellectual disability, specific learning and language disorders, developmental delay, autism spectrum disorder

💜 Neurological - disabilities that impact the nervous system or brain.

Examples being epilepsy, motor neurone disease, migraine, fibromyalgia

💙 Psychosocial - disability due to mental health conditions.

Examples being OCD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders, etc - any mental health condition may potentially be disabling

🤍 Other - no classing system is ever infallible and some disabilities and chronic illnesses may not necessarily slot into one of the above categories.

Many disabilities may fall into multiple categories - like cerebral palsy being a neurological and physical disability, or auditory processing disorder impairing hearing but having a neurological root cause.

All categories have both visible and invisible disabilities in them. All categories have different levels of functional impact. Both of these are often even true across many people with one diagnosis.

But more than anything: this isn't about "physical vs mental". It's not a binary. It's many ways people experience life under one umbrella term, and it's important to be considerate and learn from each other.

We can’t be sorted into TMA or TME easily, so people who use those labels tend to sort us based on our assigned sex.

Labels commonly used by intersex trans people are called useless.

Nonbinary people aren’t even included in trans rights posts half the time.

Intersex people are used as a way to prove that trans people exist.

Nonbinary people’s identities are disregarded and we are either considered basically just our assigned gender/sex, or basically a trans man/woman, depending on which thing makes us easier to hate or disregard.

It feels like binary and perisex trans people don’t give a shit about us, and it also seems like they don’t think the specific oppression we face is real. If they do, they don’t fucking talk about it.

Accepting and supporting trans people means accepting ALL trans people. Not just the binary ones, not just the perisex ones, not just the white ones, not just the abled ones, not just the ones you’re comfortable with. ALL OF US.

And to be clear: I’m not saying Cluster B stuff isn’t “a problem” at all. The patterns that get labeled NPD, BPD, etc. can be both agonizing to live with from the inside and can absolutely lead to desperate, lashing-out behavior that hurts other people. That matters. Accountability matters. Apologies and reparations matter.

But I think we lose the plot when we frame the need itself, rather than the desperate behavior, as the problem. What gets pathologized as “manipulative,” “attention-seeking,” “excessively sensitive,” or “fear of abandonment” is very often just the survival strategies of someone whose attachment needs were chronically ignored, punished, or weaponized against them no matter how they were expressed. You grow up in a family where love is conditional, where you’re shamed or stonewalled for having emotions, where there are golden children and scapegoats, where the only real rule is “don't piss us off”, where care is inconsistent or only given when you perform a role. Then you hit adulthood, still injured, still hungry, in a culture that worships “self-sufficiency” and tells you it’s virtuous to need nothing and nobody. You reach for the thing you never got, and instead of anyone asking “hey, why are so many people this starved?”, psychiatry slaps a label on you and calls you disordered for trying.

This is where Bruce Cohen’s “Psychiatric Hegemony” is really useful to think with. He argues that modern psychiatry doesn’t just sit in hospitals handing out meds; it’s an arm of neoliberal capitalism that’s expanded into homes, schools, and workplaces to police which ways of being are acceptable. It takes distress that is deeply social - produced by isolation, exploitation, abuse, rigid gender roles, racism, economic precarity - and repackages it as an individual “brain problem” that needs to be medically managed through thought-stopping techniques. The goal isn’t liberation; it’s to turn us into “productive, self-governing citizens” who keep functioning under impossible conditions and blame ourselves when we crack.

So when we talk about Cluster B, we’re not just talking about “some people are just born bad and dramatic.” We’re talking about what happens when psychiatry and pop-psych absorb the moral code of a society that already hates need, hates dependency, hates people who won’t neatly fit the role of “stable worker” or “cheerful super-mom” or “emotionally low-maintenance friend.” The nuclear family is treated like the natural, universal container for all emotional life, even though it regularly fails people - especially kids who are weird, disabled, queer, high-need, or just inconvenient. When those kids grow up, their attempts to renegotiate intimacy, to demand reciprocity, to say “that wasn’t okay” get filtered through this psychiatric lens: oh, you’re unstable, disordered, Cluster B. You’re not trying to heal; you’re “toxic.”

Now, none of this means that people labeled Cluster B never harm anyone or that survivors of that harm don’t matter. I too have been hurt by people with Cluster B patterns that they did not reflect on or try to work on. But look at how the discourse plays out: “narcissist” and “borderline” have become all-purpose slurs on social media for “anyone whose needs overwhelm me” or “anyone who expects more emotional presence than I feel like giving.” (who's the self-centered one here, really?) We are so quick to frame the person who is clinging, panicking, conflict-seeking, or demanding as the entire problem, that the whole thing begins and ends with them, and so slow to ask what made their nervous system learn that the only way to be seen is to crank everything to eleven. And psychiatry, as Cohen points out, is structurally invested in that framing because it’s much safer for the system if we locate the “illness” in the individual than if we admit that a huge number of people are acting out the logical emotional consequences of living in lonely little boxes under permanent economic and relational threat.

To me, Cluster B makes the most sense as people whose early environment taught them they were too much and not enough at the same time. Punished for needing, punished for existing, punished for protesting, and then psychiatrically branded when they try (messily, imperfectly, sometimes harmfully) to renegotiate the terms of love and attention in adulthood. The “disorder” is not that they want closeness, reassurance, significance in others' lives, or loyalty. The “disorder” is that they were denied those things when their brains were wiring up, and then thrown into a culture that tells them it’s shameful to still want them, because their parents should have provided that, and tough titties if they didn't.

So yes, Cluster B stuff is a problem in the sense that it hurts. It hurts the person living it, and it can hurt people around them. But it’s not a supernatural evil or a random curse. It’s a socially produced pattern. It's the fallout of abuse, neglect, and systemic isolation, filtered through a psychiatric system whose job in capitalism is to declare certain forms of suffering and protest illegible, irrational, and in need of containment. Demonizing those people by turning “narcissist” or “borderline” into synonyms for “abuser” doesn’t actually protect anyone. It just helps the system wash its hands of it all.

The vape pen in question:

but the dyes used in the original lamy dark lilac are no longer even available, and it took several lamy representatives promising it was the exact same ink before anyone told the truth. and remember: THE DYES WERE NEVER AVAILABLE FROM THE START OF PRODUCTION. this is not a matter of inconsistency between batches, lamy knew that the ink would have to be completely different and they called it dark lilac anyway while several of their representatives communicated that it was the exact same ink.

people were fighting and fighting and fighting because it was obviously a different formula, it looked different, but lamy said it was the same, so the person doing the swab of the color must have been wrong, because lamy would never lie. and then when lamy admitted it was a completely different ink, there was fighting about whether or not it is wrong to call a product a re-release of the something while it is completely different. some lamy fans refuse to admit lamy can ever do anything wrong, when they do a ton of shit wrong.

there was no reason to call this ink a re-release of dark lilac other than as a cash grab for any sucker who had the gall to believe that when lamy calls something a re-release of one of the most beloved fountain pen inks of all time, that it would actually be the same ink.

I personally think that if you claim to be re-releasing one of the most famous inks in the world, it should actually be the same ink, or name it something different. lamy deep lilac. lamy new lilac. lamy green lilac because of the green sheen instead of the gold sheen lamy dark lilac became famous for. fucking, anything else

lamy is a piece of work, their quality control has been shit for years, and they make a ton of money by enshittifying their products for people who miss when they were less trash.

On *high quality* paper? The color isn't even CLOSE to the original. Like, the photo that the WSJ is using doesn't even show it off at its best. If you look at a pen retailer's review, like Goulet Pens, here, there's a really good set of photos on different paper types (because with fountain pens that makes a heck of a difference, trust me).

To pull one image from the review I linked:

Like. Can you look at that and tell me they look even CLOSE to each other? (For folk not into fountain pens, Tomoe River paper - such as this - is considered the best paper you can use)

To understand this, you need to know one thing about Tengrism: that is Tengrism differs from region to region and there is no universal one. Which means, every practitioner will have something to them unique.

I have been gaining information on Umay Ana from different areas and worship Her as all what I have found.

Firstly, Her name. In Turkic, root "umāy" meant "placenta", "afterbirth". So here comes Her one of many roles, She is the Mother Goddess, Goddess of pregnancy, motherhood, birth, children, as well as protector of children and pregnant people. It was said, that when a baby laughs, it is Umay Ana with them.

As well, as being the Goddess of children, She is the Goddess and protector of women as well. With that, comes Her role as Goddess of fertility and virginity.

Beside that, She is The Earth, The Nature. She is a Creator Goddess, wife of supreme God Kök Tengri, it was to Her hunters prayed, so that they would have a good game.

Some equate Her with other Goddess, Od Ana, which I do, which gives Her domain of marriage and fire, especially the fire that burns in the human soul.

The last I have, is Her role as carrier of the souls, psychopomp, if you will. On Her hands soul enters the world, and on Her hands it leaves. That's why, it was said, there was blue stain on newborn baby's backs, it is Her mark, that soon fades.

She is the first cry of just born child as well as first whine of a baby animal. She is the last breath of an old man, as well as last rale of and old animal.

She is the first menstruation, She is the little girl, She is the maiden, She is the mother and her children, she is the grandmother and her grandchildren.

She is the laugh of baby boy, She is the hunter, that returned from hunt with his new food.

She is the harvest we eat, She is the fields, She is the steppes.

She is your cat at your side, as well as She is a mighty bear, that could kill.

She is the mountains, She is the caves, She is the forests, She is the planes.

She is the first flowers waking up after the snow, She is the naked trees in the winter. She is the seed, that was planted in the soil, She is the most mighty trees, that hold the earth.

She is the old bones, covered in moss, She is the flowers on fruit trees, She is the new beginning in spring, She is the abundance of life in summer, She is the going to rest world in autumn, She is the calmness in winter.

She is there, when trans women realise themselves and seek their new place, She is there, when trans men realise themselves and seek new place. She is there, when two people want to spend their life together.

She is the fire, that beats inside your heart, that keeps you warm.

She is soft and full of love, She is the Mother, the creator of this world, and She wants us to love it. She can be both accepting, as well as destructive, as nature can feed you or kell you, as fire can warm you, as burn you.

She protects with bow and arrows, Her hair is long and golden, She wears three-pronged crown.

She is so many. She is everything and everywhere and everyone.

It Is As If You Were Making Love is a bizarre little game in which you move your computer’s slider to bring it to climax (after all those visits to PronHub it’s probably the least you can do for your computer!)