Cass

This is my take on the alternative disability flag (the one that the original designer @capricorn-0mnikorn came up with because their very pretty but bright thin high-contrast zigzag one was too hard on a lot of people’s brains). I really like the muted colours and broader stripes on the new one a lot, but I don’t like the vertical lines one they came up with very much (this one)

because it reminds me of military decorations, so I thought a diagonal might work better - partly it’s more dynamic, and also because it represents the uphill struggle we all have getting accessibility and agency as disabled people.

[Image description 2: The same, except that the five-striped band is completely vertical. Description ends]

Reblogging so that more people can see it, and share their insights.

BTW, I am the one who came up with the vertical alternative; that’s the suggestion of @bigeyesspeaks​ (credit where credit is due).

BTW 2 (Between putting this post in my queue and now, I have since come up with my own straight-band take. going even stronger on the diagonal. I’ll put the image below the cut, and the image description above it, so that people can decide before they click whether they think it’s safe to do so:

[Image description: a charcoal grey flag bisected diagonally byi a band of five stripes: yellow, green, cream, red, and blue, above the dividing line. Description ends]

Cenelian (comes from “centrifugal”; moving away from the center)

-You are not making this up.

-You are not stigmatizing anything.

-Your system has a right to exist and label however they please.

-The problem is society. Not you.

Nullpronomial is when someone does not use any 3rd person pronouns (such as he, they, it, xe, thon, or bun). 

In this guide I’ll give you examples on how to refer to these people using an example nullpronomial person named Max and random example pronomial people. This guide may also be useful for referring to pronomial people when their pronouns are unknown, or if you can’t use someone’s preferred pronouns but don’t want to misgender them.

1. Try to understand and respect the person’s identity as nullpronomial. Know that being nullpronomial is not “new” or “a trend”. Examples of historical nullpronomial figures include the Public Universal Friend, who lived from 1752 to 1819.

1. Actively think of what you’re going to say, and think of something else if that sentence requires pronouns. You can (should) also do this for pronomial (pronoun-using) trans people by thinking of things that use their correct pronouns.

2A. To think of something without pronouns, try to use a different sentence structure. The passive voice may be helpful. Sentences without pronouns are sometimes longer or more complicated than those with pronouns, but not always. Remember that your sentence-building possibilities are endless due to the nature of language and think creatively. Ex: “I just looked at thon, and thon’s pretty” becomes “I just looked at that person, who is pretty” or the simpler “I just looked at that pretty person”.

2B. If the sentence requires pronouns and you can’t think of something else, use the person’s name instead of pronouns. Ex: “I just talked to him” becomes “I just talked to Max”.

3. Often it will be easier to use a combination of steps 2A and 2B in your sentences. Ex: “It is named Rot, and chose the name itself” becomes “The person is named Max, and personally chose the name”. Another example is “She looked at her face in the hand-mirror” becomes “Max looked at the mirrored face in the hand-mirror”.

4. Remember that it’s alright to mess up. You’re learning a new way to refer to someone, and it can seem hard at first. If you make a mistake, apologize quickly, correct yourself, and move on. Most people will forgive you for referring to them incorrectly as long as it was unintentional and you try to be better in the future. Don’t give up!! Over time and with practice, your new talent of referring to people without using pronouns will get easier.

5. Once you get good yourself, or even while you’re still learning, correct others if necessary. Ex: Your friend Max is out publicly as nullpronomial, but without Max there to correct xem your other friend Addison uses incorrect language (uses pronouns). You correct xem because you support Max and want people to refer to your friend correctly.

I am in an abusive situation and I need enough money to leave without being (more) homeless . I have no family or friends to fall back on and I am not in my home country.

I can do tarot readings for a price we can agree on. Feel free to DM me here or another platform

I would really appreciate any help

E tr*nsfer - [email protected]

Cash app (PLEASE do not mention abuse if using this) -

$daboynoosey

Hi folks, URGENT help needed!

So I’m approaching the ~danger zone~ financially and do not have the privilege of that being something I can just ‘weather through’.

With the way things are going w political/economic stuff right now I’m going to have to go back to sex work despite doing my best to work outside of it for the past half year. Income is just not keeping up with what I need and while it has been great being able to focus on other areas of healing and growth, it has been a steady drain in my bank account. In fact, as always healing has cost a lot, (therapy has been difficult to afford) most of which I had saved from working my ass off these past several years and I literally do not have the privilege to maintain these things without lots of extra effort. It looks like I’m going to need to go back to SW and I need your help buying time til that starts to pay off.

Some background on me for those who don’t know: NB mixed Black Afro-Caribbean/AAPI Femme DV & SA survivor who had to run away from home (and this has NO familial/generational support) and spend over a decade grinding for $$$ to pay for school and about 30k in hospital & medical bills due to C-PTSD; went into online SW to deal w that and survive capitalism, then had to quit after a while bc it’s emotionally toxic but with late-stage capitalism & colonization being what they are that’s only lasted about 6 mos and lost me around 3k in savings. In this time I’ve been able to get a lot of transitional/liberatory work done and I can’t afford to lose ground on all we’re building. I need your help.

Life rn is a constant back and forth of either being able to hustle to afford to live or stop working to recover from burnout. My rent is $2,200 and I need help with at least half of it until I can get work to pick up & my new roommates arrive at the end of the year. Please help Black ppl BEFORE we are in crisis! Donate to PayP*l.me/ellipsislux so I can afford to keep organizing without having to lose what I’ve saved and rely on exploitative work that saps my mental health.

Again, payp*l.me/ellipsislux

And if you need to get something ‘in return’ instead of just donating then please shop my site https://awingedserpent.big cartel.com

Thanks for reading this and salamat to everyone who boosts, shares & donates 🙏🏾👁🧿

The Queer Community still hates Autism Speaks!

A special Pride Month post!

The entire LGBTQIA+ Community hates Autism Speaks!

A special Pride Month post!

What you can do:

Make your undeniable, irrefutable support for trans women known.

Make posts on your blogs, your Twitter, your Facebook. Support crowdfunding for trans women, or at least spread the word about the fundraisers. Tell your friends, your family, your coworkers.

Y’know, sometimes a question comes along that exposes your biases. I’m really, really glad you asked me this.

My initial instinct was to say no. There are a lot of tasks as a paramedic that require very specific motions that are sensitive to pressure: drawing medications, spreading the skin to start IVs. There’s strength required–we do a LOT of lifting, and you need to be able to “feel” that lift.

So my first thought was, “not in the field”. There are admin tasks (working in an EMS pharmacy, equipment coordinator, supervisor, dispatcher) that came to mind as being a good fit for someone with the disability you describe, but field work….?

(By the way, I know a number of medics with leg prostheses; these are relatively common and very easy to work with. I’m all in favor of disabled medics. I just didn’t think the job was physically doable with this kind of disability.)

Then I asked. I went into an EMS group and asked some people from all across the country. And the answers I got surprised me.

They were mostly along the lines of “oh totally, there’s one in Pittsburgh, she kicks ass” or “my old partner had a prosthetic forearm and hand, she could medic circles around the rest of her class”. One instructor said they had a student with just such a prosthesis, and wasn’t sure how to teach; the student said “just let me figure it out”, and by the end of the night they were doing very sensitive skills better than their classmates.

Because of that group I know of at least a half-dozen medics here in the US with forearm and hand prostheses.

So yes. You can totally have a character with one forearm, who works as a paramedic for a living.

Thanks again for sending this in. It broadened my worldview.

xoxo, Aunt Scripty

disclaimer    

The Script Medic is supported bygenerous donations on Patreon. Have you considered donating?

Organization of nurses with disabilities: http://nond.org/

Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing: https://amphl.org/

When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldn’t do would be to be a doctor. This is because they weren’t sure how to work around the “need” to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didn’t have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didn’t really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didn’t have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit – just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.

Now flash forward to when I’m in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aids in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid.  The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point I’m starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally don’t compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds – well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didn’t exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, it’s now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When it’s processed so that it’s actually something I can hear.  But somehow this stethoscope–invented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aids–managed to be loud enough for me.

Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didn’t even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself

And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really can’t hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out that’s a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You don’t have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.

And … somehow, even though I had never personally actually wanted to be a doctor anyway, and still don’t want to, and still don’t miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.

People need to know.

PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.

That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things

THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.

Because … on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually can’t do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until that’s ready, blind people still can’t do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people can’t be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah that’s an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) can’t interpret between spoken languages on the phone. 

But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do?  Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity. 

More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more “innovative” ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because we’ve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example – As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (I’ve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because that’s what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a “gee whiz” creative answer for people who haven’t needed to adapt to life without arms, but isn’t so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually work to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lot of practice working to come up with solutions for things we haven’t tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else misses–and not just for disability related accommodations.

Are you looking at creating a disabled character? Then you need to think not about what they can or can’t do, but about how they might approach the same task with different tools at their disposal.

Don’t say “X can’t do Y or Z”. First, ask, “what is actually NEEDED to do Y? What’s the process? How could I adapt it?”

I’ll be the first to say that medicine is an ableist community. We are. We almost have to be, because the whole point of medicine is to reduce disability and disease. We assume total health is the baseline, that other states are “abnormal” and to be corrected.

And sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. Misconceptions. False assertions.

And I’m going to tell you this, because I think @andreashettle would like to know this: I am, functionally speaking, a person with “normal” hearing. (I have a very slight amount of loss from working under sirens for a decade, but functionally I do just fine).

But you know what? I’ve never heard the sound of nerves. Never. I didn’t even realize that that is a sound you can hear.

So you, with your deaf ears, just taught me something about a tool I use every. single. day. of. my. life. About a sound I’ve never heard, with my “normal” ears and my “normal” stethoscope. (Okay, it’s a pretty kick-ass stethoscope, lezzbehonest rightnow.)

And for the love of all that is holy, I want to see these characters in fiction. Deaf doctors, one-handed medics, bilateral amputees running circles around other characters just to prove that they can.

I apologize for my misconception, for assuming that disability meant “can’t”. It’s a cultural part of medicine that I dislike. But now that I know it’s a thing I want to see it everywhere.

But if you’re going to do it… do the godsdamned research. Have respect for those who live with disabilities. Write better. Write real.

And above all? Write respectfully.

If you’ve got a task that you don’t think you’d be able to do one armed, think about it like this: do you think you could do it one armed if you had 10 years to figure it out?

Most adults who were born disabled have 20+ years of experience figuring out how to do shit while disabled.

Signs that you’re living in abuse:

Behavioral patterns of living in abuse

Was I abused? Checklist

Not knowing you are a victim

Signs your family is abusive

Making excuses for your abusive parents

Experience of living in secrecy

What they taught you was abuse

Emotional experiences of living in abuse

Shame and guilt: how abused children feel

What makes parents abusers (actions)

Have I been manipulated into believing abuse was my fault? Checklist

Am I being held hostage by abusers? Checklist

You are not allowed to mention the past

Why you still love abusive parents

Parental behaviour that isn’t normal

Shit parents aren’t supposed to say to you

Experience of “not belonging anywhere”

Red flags for abusive parents

Healthy vs Abusive Chores

Was my childhood abusive or just had some bad parts?

Rules always change (unpredictable environment is abusive)

Breakdown of abusive parent’s behaviour:

“This is my house” rule

Start living in the real life!

Why all the children aren’t abused equally in an abusive home

Common abuser hypocrisies

Do your parents want you to be happy or look happy?

Why do they try to convince you that you’re worthless

Why do they pretend you’re a burden? Controlling behaviour

Why your abusers are not good people

Abusive parents are keeping you in false hope they’ll change

Are your parents preventing you from succeeding?

Abusive parents pretending “it wasn’t that bad”

Double Bind (why every choice you make ends wrong)

Incorporating trauma in raising children

Abusers will not allow you to call them out on abuse

Signs your parents are narcissistic:

Stuff delusional narcissists say

Shit narcissistis parents say

Tactics of narcissistic abuse

Recognizing emotional immaturity of narcissistic parents

Examples of narcissistic behaviours

Being punished for growing up by narcissistic parents

What children of narcissists go thru

Signs you’ve been thru sexual abuse:

CSA (Childhood Sexual Abuse) Symptoms

Signs you might have endured CSA

Was I sexually abused by adults as a child? Checklist

Signs of abusive friendship/relationship:

How to tell if a friend is not a friend

Am I in an abusive relationship/friendship? Checklist

Manufacturing insecurities

Red flags for abusers

Have I been thru social abuse? Checklist

You can recognize abusers by how they make you feel

How abusive childhood teaches you to stay in abusive relationships

Recognizing abusive friendship

Signs you’re struggling with trauma

Trauma processing information

Experiences of traumatized children

Signs you’re recovering from long term abuse

Things abuse survivors think/say

Thoughts of victims of child abuse

Your brain on trauma

How long term childhood abuse develops into complex trauma (comic)

They’re not the same thing.  Sex positive, neutral, and negative describes someone’s opinion on the morality of sex in general and its place in society.  Sex favorable, indifferent, averse, and repulsed have to do with your own interactions with sex.

Favorable, indifferent, averse, and repulsed is mostly used for asexual-spectrum people, and a lot of aromantic-spectrum people use the same scale to describe their feelings towards romance. For instance, as an aroace, I am sex averse and romance indifferent.  But allosexual (non-asexual) people might also find it helpful.  Like, there are people who feel attraction towards other people but are sex averse and don’t want to have sex with anyone they’re attracted to.  (There are also people fitting the same description who do identify as aspec, and that’s valid, too.)

Here’s the chart that’s commonly used used to explain the two scales.  I’m going to add an image description afterwards, but I’m not really familiar with doing them so it may not be great.

[Image description: A picture divided vertically into two halves.  The left half is white with black text and the right half is black with white text.  Each half has several terms written in bold with a smaller description under each one.  The text is in a handwriting-style font.

On the left side, it says, “Sex-positive: To have a positive attitude towards sex in general.  Not necessarily for yourself, but any safe sex between consenting people. Sex-neutral: to have no opinion on sex in general, neither positive nor negative. Sex-negative: to have a negative attitude towards sex in general.  To think sex is bad/wrong, even safe and between consenting people.”

On the right side, it says, “Sex-favorable: to have a positive attitude towards sex for yourself.  To desire sex.  Sex-indifferent: To have no opinion on sex for yourself, neither positive not negative.  Sex-averse: to have a negative attitude toward sex for yourself.  To not desire sex.  Sex-repulsed: To be repulsed by the thought of sex.”

End description.]

People get these two scales mixed up constantly, and/or leave out words.  Y’all, I know it’s hard.  I have to go through both of them in my head before I mention either one to make sure I’m saying the right thing.  But we can do better.  Please!  Like, one of my friends was angry at me when I came out as asexual to her because she thought I was attacking her sexuality.  And yeah, I’m sex averse, but I hadn’t told tell her that, and it has no bearing on what I think of her.  It’s actually a common myth that the concept of asexuality is inherently sex negative, and we don’t need to encourage that by conflating sex negativity with being sex averse or repulsed.

Actually, most people fit somewhere on both scales.  So I made a chart of my own that shows how they fit together.  Personally, I’m in the top right corner, sex averse and (doing my best to be) sex positive.

[Image description: A three-by-three chart, similar to an alignment chart.  The left column is labeled “sex favorable”, the middle column is labeled “sex indifferent”, and the right column is labeled “sex averse/repulsed”.  The top row is labeled “sex positive”, the middle row is labeled “sex neutral”, and the bottom row is labeled “sex negative”.

The box in the top left of the chart reads, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people having consensual sex, and I personally like to have sex.”  The box in the top middle reads, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people having consensual sex, and I personally don’t mind having sex.”  The box in the top right reads, “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people having consensual sex, but I personally don’t want to have sex.”

The middle-left box reads, “I think it’s sometimes all right for people to have sex, and I personally like to have sex.”  The center box reads, “I think it’s sometimes all right for people to have sex, and I personally don’t mind having sex.”  The middle-right box says, “I think it’s sometimes all right for people to have sex, but I personally don’t want to have sex.”

The box in the bottom left says, “I think sex is immoral (misspelled as “immortal”), but I personally like to have sex.”  The bottom middle box says, “I think sex is immoral, but I personally don’t mind having sex.”  The bottom right box says, “I think sex is immoral, and I personally don’t want to have sex.”

End description.]

So yeah, you can be sex positive and sex repulsed, or sex neutral and sex averse, or whatever!  I’d say that a lot of American politicians are both sex negative and sex favorable.  If you need more information, I added my own descriptions of the seven terms below the cut.

(I really wish I hadn’t made this so long, LOL.  It took me way too long.  Please reblog so it’s worth it?)