An Itty Bitty Robo Kitty Committee

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Restricting the definition of who a label/concept can be applied to falls under the same philosophy that the systems that oppress the disabled fall under.

That is to say - restricting access so that imagined invaders and "appropriators" won't get in.

The endo "invaders" are not oppressors in any fashion. Hating them because our oppressors "won't take us seriously because of them" is joining the war on the side of the oppressors. It's only fighting ableism until the oppressors call out a target that's easy enough to punch down on.

We, as a community, can be better, more compassionate than that. Is this truly what being "radical" is? Stop punching down. For your own sake, too. Is this really the "good fight" you want to win? To remove all the "weirdos who don't belong?"

To my friends who still feel hurt, I understand. But the people you are fighting do not want to hurt you. They just want to understand their own individual human experience. If they are angry at us, they are not in the wrong. You know that rage, too, at being told that what you are is not real, or is impossible to take seriously.

You have been taught to value an idea of a "real" experience based in science. But that science is so limited. The DSM-5 is not a bible, it is written with the intent of treating us, making us more palatable, "worth our place in society". It is not something we should be thumping to ward off "impure" things. We do not need purity. We do not need sanctity. We need safety and community, so we need to build it.

If we view endos, willos, or any type of system as a pest, we will choke ourselves with pesticide to eradicate them. This is not kindness. This is not acceptance. It is cruelty.

I decided at some point that reading (new) books is hard for me now (since 2020, not actually for pandemic reasons but the pandemic didn't help). I have a teetering TBR and I keep adding things to it out of habit and almost never take anything off of it to read. I have narratives in my head about what will happen if I try to read: "I'll be constantly interrupted and the only enjoyable way to read is to hyperfocus." "If I do hyperfocus, I'll stay up too late when I really need to sleep." "I really struggle to get into anything new, so it's going to feel like hard work rather than fun." "It might make me have feelings and the only way I'm surviving right now is by dissociating from my feelings." I read PWP smut because it's quick and easy and undemanding and none of those narratives applies to it. But the TBR pile of novels — including novels by friends, novels by favorite authors, novels I would actually very much like to read — stays untouched.

I think all those narratives about reading are reasonably accurate. But you know... maybe I can try anyway. Be interrupted, or stay up late. Struggle. Cry. Read suboptimally. Read anyway.

me, pausing the video we're watching:

River and Sonya: *laughing*

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.