don’t like, don’t read

"Objectivity helps counsellors avoid personal biases and allows them to focus on the client's needs without imposing their own beliefs or values." - American Counselling Association

"Therapy should feel like an inclusive and safe place for clients. Clients need to feel safe and supported in their work. And while all therapists have inherent biases and personal preferences, it is never appropriate for them to engage in discrimination, racism, sexism, or other forms of prejudice with clients." - Medcircle

Therapy is not to make people "normal" to your specifications!

Value: Dignity and Worth of the Person Ethical Principle: Social workers respect the inherent dignity and worth of the person. Social workers treat each person in a caring and respectful fashion, mindful of individual differences and cultural and ethnic diversity. Social workers promote clients’ socially responsible self-determination. Social workers seek to enhance clients’ capacity and opportunity to change and to address their own needs. Social workers are cognizant of their dual responsibility to clients and to the broader society. They seek to resolve conflicts between clients’ interests and the broader society’s interests in a socially responsible manner consistent with the values, ethical principles, and ethical standards of the profession.

Value: Integrity Ethical Principle: Social workers behave in a trustworthy manner. Social workers are continually aware of the profession’s mission, values, ethical principles, and ethical standards and practice in a manner consistent with them. Social workers should take measures to care for themselves professionally and personally. Social workers act honestly and responsibly and promote ethical practices on the part of the organizations with which they are affiliated.

When you are a therapist you accept the person for who they are--regardless of your own opinions, biases, or personal values. You have to be able to sit across from a parent who violently abuses their children and see them as a human being--you have to recognize that despite any crimes that a person has committed, they are still a human deserving of respect, to be treated with dignity. Because when you refuse to do so, when you demonize someone, when you view them as lesser and undeserving of basic human dignity and respect, you dehumanize them and step a foot on the path towards fascism.

Any anti who thinks that they can become a psychologist, psychiatrist, licensed counselor or social worker therapist and dehumanize pro-shippers or manipulate them into acting within the practitioners preferred world view are in for a rude fucking awakening. If they somehow managed to become a mental health professional, it certainly wouldn't take long before supervisors took note of their unethical behavior and reported it.

antis care about respecting peoples boundaries?

"You deserve to grow as a person and heal after trauma instead of reopening wounds because others say it's okay to" of course they think proshipping is based on trauma. It never occurs to them that someone just may like content that's taboo and that's it. And even if it's because of trauma, one doesn't get to tell people how to cope with it or not. Antis are regressive; they'll never be able to grow as people.

Sweetie... AO3 is the site for that. Y'all invaded our space.

they think the 200k fandom classic they came to the site specifically to read was written by some squeaky-clean G-rated teenager in her spare time after she got done sweating over her math homework

when it’s like

existing as a squeaky-clean G-rated teenager doesn’t generally lend itself towards developing the skills and motivation to write a complex, thematically satisfying 200k character-driven epic for fun instead of profit.

Couldn’t help but notice this reblog in a certain recent “queer is a slur” discourse post.

Beyond being ahistorical, it is significant in its third paragraph, which is almost entirely made up with TERF and alt right dog whistles. For anyone who has even a basic idea of what to look for, this blogger has just outright shown their hand.

Let’s start from the beginning of the text I’ve marked in blue:

“a pedophilia and incest apologist”

This is a very handy tactic especially prevalent in alt-right rhetoric these days. It stigmatises anything it is attached to, in this case the person who coined the term “queer theory.” Topics like pedophilia and incest are extremely taboo and emotionally laden, and attaching them to a subject will cause many people to automatically distance themselves from that term out of a semi-instinctive desire to not associate themselves with such things. Spread this attachment widely enough, and you can push entire groups into abandoning terminology, praxis, and people.

For the record, I’m not sure of the source for this claim. The woman who coined the term “queer theory” was Teresa de Laurentis, and I’ve never seen anything by her which tries to excuse pedophilia or incest. She certainly wrote about the gendered nature of incest, but this was in no way laudatory. This may also be a reference to the work of Gloria Anzaldua, who helped further popularize the term. She spoke frankly and openly about her sexual fantasies, many of them of a taboo nature, because of her firm belief in de-stigmatizing discussions about human sexual behaviour. Not only are such fantasies extremely common, they are in no way apologetics for real life abuse, nor do they predict real life behaviour.

“a straight woman with a fetish for gay men”

We’ve gotten to the transphobic dogwhistle now. This is an accusation frequently used against trans men and nonbinary AFAB people, especially those who pursue relationships with men. With the current surge in transphobic public rhetoric, it has received a new breath of life, and trans mlm are currently facing a slew of accusations of being straight women/girls who have just fetishized gay men to the point that they’re trying to “become” gay men/boys themselves (CW: link leads to transphobic hate site genderhq.org). These accusations are even being used in queer circles–including by trans people–to gatekeep who “gets” to write fiction about mlm. Just a week ago, for example, queer writer Alex Marraccini accused indie trans mlm author Ana Mardoll of fetishizing mlm, claiming that Ana’s “fetishistic” writing isn’t nearly as groundbreaking or liberating as the work of real cis gay men.

I’m not sure who the blogger is referring to here as there’s no real consensus on who first used the term “queer studies.” However, I think they may be referring to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who was most certainly not a straight woman. She was queer and came out as a trans man, though as far as I know continued to publicly prefer she/her pronouns (hence my own pronoun use here).

“use intentionally over academic language”

Ah, good old anti-intellectualism. If I can’t understand you, you must be using over-academic language just to confuse me on purpose. This dogwhistle not only gives people an excuse to dismiss anything they don’t understand straight away, it pushes the conspiracy theory that we academics are part of an ivory tower conspiracy to Queer Everything for…reasons (see below).

“to obfuscate that their founding texts and members are Marxists”

Aaaand here we are, the full show of the hand. This blogger is either alt-right or well down the pipeline to becoming one. The old chestnut that These Academics We Disagree With are all secret Marxists is one that is, you guessed it, strongly tied into antisemitism and Nazi conspiracies that push the belief that Karl Marx, Marxism, and Marxists are part of a global Jewish conspiracy that seeks to destroy the West.

And of course we have one more “incest and pedophilia” whistle to round things off, just to doubly ensure that people understandably disgusted by those things attach them to queer theorists.

We all know the "jokes" about how old bronies either came out as queer or became fascists - except they're not really jokes, and a lot of the queer ones admit to having been in the pipeline before they came out (some in a way that implies they never totally got out of said pipeline and don't understand the gravity of it),

GamerGate was an entire right-wing reactionary movement that was - and this is not hyperbole - partially responsible for turning fascism into a "legitimate" position by the American Overton window, composed entirely of people who feared losing their fan spaces,

We've had terfs right here on tumblr dot com BRAGGING about how useful fandom is as a recruiting space,

TJLC was a big pipeline for acephobia on this hellsite in particular, when people argued that headcanoning Sherlock as ace was inherently homophobic because it was denying a TOTALLY GONNA BE CANON (while the creators were promising that it wasn't going to be canon) gay pairing, and puritanical, and just HAVING that headcanon was saying that people COULDN'T ship Johnlock, all in the interest of a "fake" sexuality and "pretending to be oppressed" and oh whoops there you went,

We see people who all but center their fandom activity and identities around figuring out which people in predominantly queer fandom spaces are SECRETLY PEDOPHILES AND GROOMERS, acting consciously or otherwise under the assumption that predominantly queer fandom spaces are just massively infested with them in a way that other spaces are not for SOME reason, who twist the definition of "pedophilia" in these spaces until it covers shipping a 17-year old fictional character with an 18-year old fictional character, or a 30-year old with a 45-year old, or including an autistic character in a ship, and drawing two 17-year old characters kissing constitutes "child porn", and who unironically say we should bring back the Hays Code and Censorship Is Good Actually And Our Problem Is We Don't Do It Enough and this often becomes a pipeline to "sex ed is child abuse; people shouldn't even know what sex is until they turn 18; you need my consent to wear certain outfits in public if I see them as sexually charged, and Pride SHOULD be an assimilationist sideshow for our corporate overlords family-friendly party with no sadness or anger or ESPECIALLY acknowledgement of sex allowed",

We've seen otherwise progressive people defend literal hate symbols in fanart when pushback against the above brand of reactionaries gets corrupted into zero-nuance "it's us vs. them so anything they don't like is Good",

Even outside of those examples some of the most vicious, unapologetic, blatant queerphobic abuse I've seen in recent years hasn't come from right-wingers but from LGBT+ people, dressing their deep, violent, seething hatred for queer people who aren't exactly like them in a thin veneer of progressive language, who have become so convinced that they're the main character of the fucking universe that they think writing or enjoying a queer story that doesn't resonate with them is more queerphobic than sending a queer person who writes or enjoys such a story countless rape and death threats and denying their identity,

We've seen these examples again and again and again, and we keep seeing it again and again and again, so I am once again on my knees BEGGING people to recognize that this is not Something That Happens To Other, BAD People, or Something That Happens To People In BAD Fandoms, or Something That Happens To People On The OTHER Side Of Perennial Drama; this is something that CAN happen to you.

These things are the result of the fact that fandom is, by nature, a place of heightened emotion and if you don't know what to look out for that is very exploitable; you need to know the methods people use to do this, simply Being In The Right Fandoms or Liking The Right Ships is not enough.

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

👏 THIS 👏 IS 👏 ABOUT 👏 YOU 👏

“Proshippers” created fandom years before “proship” and “antiship” were even concepts. Antis don’t get to come in and change the narrative now that fandom is “mainstream”. This is where the weirdos (affectionate) gather and it’s always been that way.

I miss the simple days when, for the most part, people just minded their own damn business. I miss when the worst thing someone could say to me over shipping royed or something was “they’re not even gay, you freak!”, instead of immediately accusing me of literal pedophilia over a cartoon. I miss when fandom was chill and not a morality crusade.

Hey so if any of y’all are or have been volunteers for Ao3, PLEASE be careful when checking your emails

(CSAM = child sexual assault material. SWAT/SWATted = having a fake bomb or gun threat phoned in naming your address, causing a SWAT team to attack your house, damaging your place of living and risking injuring or killing you and people you live with.)

The way he was treated is horrible and disgusting for anyone at all, but John Green has for years and years (along with his brother Hank) tried to make the world a measurably better place while living with a horrific mental illness. A mental illness that makes something like being called a pedophile over and over again horrific in ways that unless you have OCD, or are very very close to someone who does, you will never understand because OCD targets whatever you value and makes your world a living hell over it.

And you know what? He still writes his novels, and he is still out here doing absolutely everything he can to make the world a measurably better place. The cock monologue was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

--

On the positive side, here’s two replies that are actually decent:

For those of you who haven’t seen this announcement, tumblr recently made some changes to the iOS version of the app, purportedly to comply with Apple’s content guidelines. These changes took effect on Dec 21, starting in version 22.5.1 of the iOS app. As some of you may recall, Apple’s strict guidelines were the driving force for the infamous Great Purge of 2018, which coincidentally also happened around this time of year, but it seems banning all of the female-presenting nipples wasn’t good enough for Apple.

Below is a summary of the important changes. Note that these changes technically ONLY affect those using the iOS app. If you’re accessing tumblr through a different app or operating system (Google Chrome, Android app, etc) it won’t affect you directly but it will affect your followers who use iOS so you should definitely be aware of it.

The list of banned tags has been expanded. As before, there’s no way to know which words or phrases have been banned until you try searching for them, in which case you’ll either get no search results or the following message: “This content has been hidden because of potentially suggestive or explicit content.” You may think this doesn’t concern you if you don’t post explicit material, but do not make the mistake of expecting the banned tags to be logical or reasonable. I’ve already encountered multiple completely innocuous posts (random fandom gifsets) that seem to be hidden on iOS for no discernible reason.

Blogs that have been flagged as explicit can no longer be viewed. Previously, flagged blogs just had their posts hidden from searches, but if you knew the username you could still visit it after clicking through a warning about sensitive content. Now you can’t access it at all.

Likes and reblogs from blogs that have been flagged will no longer show up in your notes. This one won’t affect most people’s user experience as much as the others, but it does mean you may be missing notes. It’s unclear if likes and reblogs from flagged blogs will still count towards the overall note total (and only be missing from the activity feed and note viewer) but I suspect that’s the case.

THE BIG ONE: ANY POST TAGGED WITH A BANNED TAG WILL NO LONGER SHOW UP ON YOUR DASHBOARD. Previously, if you tagged a post with a banned word or phrase (even if the words were used inside another tag), that post would not show up in searches, but your followers would still be able to see it on their dashboard. Now those posts are hidden from your own followers as well. This includes both original posts and reblogs. And if that wasn’t bad enough, here’s the real kicker: even if you don’t tag something with one of the banned words, if the OP used a banned tag, any reblogs of that post will not show up on anyone’s dashboard (on the iOS app). The only saving grace here, and I hate to even call it that, is that the blocked posts are still visible if you visit a blog directly or if you have post notifications turned on.

As usual, tumblr was extremely unclear and evasive about all of this in their official announcement. Not surprising, of course, since if more people were aware of these new draconian tactics I can’t imagine there wouldn’t be more of an uproar about it. Tumblr claims that these changes are somewhat temporary and that they are currently working on something that will allow for a less restricted iOS experience, but they refuse to say what that something is and when it will be implemented. And let’s just say, considering their track record, I’m not hopeful.

All of this is horrible and infuriating for many reasons, but the worst part is how insanely counterproductive it is to creating the “safe” environment tumblr (or more specifically Apple) supposedly wants.

Tags have always been used for both blog organization and filtering purposes. Tagging posts with triggers and content warnings is a common practice that gives users the ability to filter out content they may find upsetting or just don’t don’t want to see for whatever reason. By choosing to ban a bunch of unlisted “sensitive content” tags, all they’re doing is encouraging people who want to share that kind of content to come up with alternative less well-known tags or simply not tag that content at all anymore if they want it to show up on their follower’s dashboards, thereby making it more likely for someone to encounter it when they didn’t want to.

Want to read this fic? Okay, just wait for a quick pre-roll ad first and good luck with reading the story when it finally opens because there are other ads all over the rest of the page. Some of them have sound. All of them are moving or flashing and distracting you from the story.

Want to post a fic? Okay, just make sure it's not too gay or not too kinky and it doesn't address any of the horrors of the real world without wrapping everything up with a cheerful bow and letting the reader know that it all works out in the end.

Oh, you like this story? Such a shame that no one tags anything beyond the ships and characters and now you've been traumatized by a sudden triggering scene that you had no idea was coming.

Congratulations! You've been served a cease-and-desist by: George Lucas, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey, FOX, Viacom/Paramount, Anne Rice, JK Rowling/Warner Bros., Mercedes Lackey, Marvel, George R.R. Martin, Diana Gabaldon, and more. And on top of that, there aren't any volunteer lawyers around to help you out of this scrape!

Remember that site you loved to use for your fic? Was it Tripod? FanFiction.net? Gryffindor Tower? FanFiction.net again? Sakura Lemon FanFiction Archive? FanFiction.net again? And again? Quizilla? LiveJournal, twice in one year? GeoCities? Slash Cotillion? FanDomination.Net? GreatestJournal? Delicious? FortuneCity? Tumblr? Wattpad? Well, they decided to delete your fics without telling you. Or they decided to delete your account without warning you. Or the site itself just up and died, taking your content with it. Such a shame.

AO3 isn't perfect, and I don't think anyone out there really thinks that it is. Like everything else in this world, it grows and changes and sometimes the growth is too fast and the change is too slow. But imperfect as it is, it's still so much better than what we had before, and for that I'll always be grateful.

Thank you AO3, and all of the volunteers past and present who make you possible. I couldn't ask for a better "fan-created, fan-run, nonprofit, noncommercial archive for transformative fanworks." ❤

It's really funny because she is very young, and it honestly shows in her... lackluster attempts at actually digging into the root of fandom discourse. Like, I'm old enough to remember being in fandom before ao3 even existed, so the fact that she can just blithely talk about ao3 without even acknowledging where it came from or why it is so important to fandom as a whole is really like... the problem with her 'perspective' in microcosm.

And I would almost be inclined to cut her some slack there, because she is incredibly young (and apparently thinks she's the only Tax Paying Adult Woman in fandom which is... very lol, like I'm sorry Sarah but caring about fandom discourse doesn't make someone less likely to be holding down a job or needing to pay taxes, you sound just like those kids who are like 'omg why are you here, go pay your taxes you hag' as if filing taxes is some sort of 24/7/365 task that leaves no room for anything else--and it is incredibly rich of someone like her to say, given how she does in fact form her identity around fandom discourse and her responses to it, but apparently she thinks she's the only one who can do that and also have a life), except that it is so very easy to find out why ao3 exists, where it came from, and what the landscape of fandom was like before it existed. The same can be said, incidentally, of the fandom 'labels' that arose in recent years over this discourse.

Ao3's about page is right there. The Fandom Lore wiki is right there. Google is right there. There are so many resources she could have used to form a basis for her video since she couldn't rely on personal fandom experience (the way, for example, Melina Pendulum could, since she has a lot more personal experience with fandom and, as a result, created a much better video about the same subject [which included a thorough look at the racism in fandom spaces]), and she chose not to utilize them for... reasons. Her entire attitude is very 'these things are ok when I do them, but when anyone else does them it is a sign of being terminally online and I am therefore obligated to make fun of those people' even though she's just as 'terminally online' as any of the rest of us.