I say "uguu" unironically and with pride.

Now, a lot of this is related to the restrictions that women did face in terms of career options and social respectability. Living alone and being self-supporting is a much more common option for women now than it was in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and that’s a very good thing. I think singleness and living alone has become more normalized than it was then for both men and women (modern appliances probably helped with that shift!).

OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.

Despite not knowing anything else about me, tumblr users (often white, much younger users) regularly assume that I must not be queer, trans, mentally ill, disabled etc and that I must not be knowledgeable on these topics.

Why do you think that is?

This is the mentally ill queer autistic people website. STATISTICALLY I'm probably at least one of those things!

It’s a white fragility defence thing - “in saying that I’ve been racist you have been ableist and now the conversation is about what you’ve done to me!” It’s a thing where disability, vulnerability, the need for delicate treatment is all reserved for whiteness and never for racialised people. It’s a thing where the pain of racialised people is less real, less important, where people of colour can’t possibly be as knowledgeable or educated as a white person. As OP said in a reply to my comment on the ask they got that prompted this post, it’s “stay in your racialized box and don’t make us think”.

I find this particularly obnoxious considering the overlap between these sorts of people and the people (also white) who are very prone to taking theory that was originally designed to articulate things about race-based oppression and applying it sometimes very clumsily to transness or disability. I’m not saying theory can never be applicable to multiple things, but I am saying I see an astounding amount of white people misusing the concept of intersectionality to ignore the concerns of people of colour or drawing up insanely offensive “doing x thing is just like lynching someone” analogies.

“That’s funny” said the child “because 2+4=6 and two pounds and four pounds is six pounds. It’s like the same as math!”

“What happens if you add 6+1?”

“SEVEN”

“What if we put one pound of mangos on the scale?” <mangos added>

“IT’S THE SAME!!”

“OK, what’s 7-4?”

“Three?”

“What if we take the four pound watermelon off the scale?” <watermelon removed>

“I don’t remember you.” Her lips didn’t seem to move in time with her words.

“I’m sorry,” you stuttered, “should you?”

“I don’t know.” Her hair was long and dry. You weren’t sure if you could see through to her bones, or if her whole body was just slightly transparent.

You learned that she had died, though she couldn’t remember when or where. You learned that she could not walk in the sunlight, only in the shade or at night. You learned that she could make you laugh, even if she didn’t quite understand the joke herself.

At night you went back for her. Now she could walk around freely. She said that she was still a bit confused about everything, but that talking was nice. You were happy to help her, especially if all it cost was to take a stroll with a new friend. It was a little odd how your eyes could never quite focus on her, or how she would seem to phase right through things sometimes, but she never made you feel weird. The conversation kept flowing even when she would lose her place and have to start over.

When you got too tired to continue, you invited her back home with you. She didn’t seem to have one of her own, at least anymore. It was the least you could do. She seemed to enjoy standing in the shower, even when the water wasn’t on. She wasn’t quite able to get into bed with you, but she seemed happy standing in the corner of your bedroom with her eyes wide open. It was a little harder to fall asleep that night, but not as hard as you feared.

In the morning, she was cowering in the very edge of your room from the sunlight coming through your window. As soon as you were lucid enough to realize the issue, you got up and pulled the blinds shut. When you told her that she could have woken you up to close them earlier, she said that she forgot you would ever wake up. After a second, she laughed at that. It was the first time you had heard her laugh. It was nice.

After breakfast (eggs and toast with blackberry jam), you had her help with the Saturday morning chores. Mostly that meant doing them yourself while explaining them to her, but it was still nice. She was happy to learn about how you did things. She seemed to perk up every time you spoke. Several times she would remember something, some small detail, about her previous life, which she would share with you. You learned that she liked to clean windows. She always wanted a dress like the one you had in the laundry. She used to be scared that she would fall down the drain when doing dishes.

That night, you two watched a movie together. You let her pick it out. She seemed unused to choosing, but eventually she settled on some romcom you had never heard of. It sounded terrible, but you promised she could choose it. You tried to wrap an arm around her shoulder. It didn’t quite feel like anything, but it didn’t feel like nothing, and she seemed to be appreciative of it, if also a little confused. After a minute, she slowly curled herself to be smaller and then leaned against your shoulder. Each motion was slow and cautious as if she wasn’t sure she knew why she was doing it.

The movie turned out to be better than you expected. It got both of you laughing quite a bit, and the relationship was genuinely touching by the end. You couldn’t remember how long her hand had been resting on top of yours, but you didn’t say anything.

That night, she told you that she remembered why she was a revenant. Her spirit had left her body right before being buried, and she needed to find it again to rejoin it. Only then would she be able to pass on. She even know approximately where her body was buried. She just needed to get to it. She seemed hesitant to part with you after your day together, so you agreed to accompany her there. A little sleep deprivation would be worth it. You tried not to wonder why you were disappointed that she wouldn’t watch you sleep again.

The graveyard was not hard to get to. It was odd seeing Lucy (she was so proud that she had remembered her name!) skittishly avoid the light of the streetlamps. You let her walk how she pleased and eventually you arrived at the first lines of grave stones. She guided you forward, between plastic flowers and dead flowers, toward one grave in particular. She stood in front of it with no reaction. When you caught up and looked yourself, two things caught your eye. Firstly, the name on it wasn’t “Lucy.” Secondly, the person buried was labeled as “our son.”

The two of you stood there for some time. Lucy didn’t seem to move at first. Then, she started shaking. When you unthinkingly reached out a hand to comfort her, she flinched into a smaller version of yourself.

“Is this…” you asked.

“I’m sorry.” she responded.

“It’s okay,” you said.

“I had hoped…”

“It’s okay,” you said again.

We have got to stop framing our oppression in ways that promote the idea that other people cannot relate to our struggles. Not only does it isolate comrades in the struggle, it actively diminishes recognition of other struggles--often including those even more horrific than what we are at risk of. And this happens especially between Gay and Black struggles.

"when have straight people ever had to check what states were safe for them?" Sundown towns are still a thing. Starlight tours. What states have abortion access? What states have open carry? What states have stand your ground? What states have 3-strike rules? Women, people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and more have had to be abundantly cautious where they travel to. Straight trans people have much more travel risk right now than gay cis people.

It's a new iteration of the same tired question: "imagine if straight people weren't allowed to marry" interracial marriage in the US is younger than my parents. We disgrace people of color by forgetting their history and contemporary struggles, and we abandon queer people of color, Black queer people, by segmenting their overlapping fights.