Psychoticallytrans

FAQ:

Q: What’s that flag in your pfp? A: That’s the visually safe disability pride flag, layered over the trans flag.

I am a radical inclusionist. I don’t think that people that aren’t queer go around accessing queerness for clout because I don’t think that queerness is accepted enough for it to be worth it. Same for being disabled. If someone is lying, then that’s their fault, not mine for not questioning them.

I take cults and emotional abuse seriously. I know how people can control you without ever speaking to you. I know how people can trap you while others think you’re free to leave. I know how it can be orchestrated for others to turn on you. You are safe here. You are believed.

I take medical abuse seriously, and believe that therapy can be abusive too. It’s another branch of medicine, and can be just as lifesaving and just as flawed as any other. I believe you when you say you were hurt.

I believe that restricting human rights from any group, no matter how harmful the group, causes immeasurable knock-on harm to marginalized people. It will always be easier to frame marginalized people, and those who are privileged and guilty will almost always get out of it. This is also why I think that callout culture is a net negative for marginalized communities.

I have a right to personal privacy. I may restrict information for my personal safety. I will decline to comment on situations where I feel like I do not have an informed enough opinion. I will block people that demand personal information or opinions after I have declined.

I have a blanket policy of blocking for suicide baiting. I don’t care why you did it. I don’t think it was justified. I don’t care if it was a joke. I don’t think it was funny. I do care if you regret it. I still won’t unblock you. Go think about why you’re okay with being someone’s executioner, and why you think you’re worthy of that power.

Land Back.

Reparations.

Defund the police.

Prison abolition.

Decriminalize sex work and support your local sex workers.

Decriminalize homelessness.

Criminalize rent, golf, and discrimination against fat people and hair texture.

Recriminalize monopolies.

Join a union.

Attend your local library and community center.

Universal basic income should be a living wage.

Universal healthcare and daycare.

Marriage equality for disabled people and polyamorous people.

Pass the SSI Restoration Act.

Reform the foster system.

Free college.

Children’s rights are a critical human rights issue.

End the artificial cap on medical school attendance.

Run for local office, you won’t change everything but you can shift something.

Primitivism will kill disabled people.

Recognize that issues outside of the US are often different, and that priorities may differ because of that. 

Callout posts and harassment campaigns are a cornerstone of how Tumblr moderates itself. This is in good part because the moderation Tumblr actually does ranges from useless to targeted at minorities. If you feel that someone has done something wrong, the only guaranteed way to get results is to do something yourself.

It is very easy to get them rolling. Tumblr’s format rewards spreading information and is great at preserving it. When it comes to art, memes, and writing, this is fantastic for creators. When it comes to callout posts, it means that they’ll be around for months, if not years. Anger, as many social media algorithms have found, is great for engagement.

Even if the purpose is strictly to inform, the problem is the number of people who see it. There are going to be people who are going to look at the information and go “This person needs to be punished, and nobody is going to do it. So, I’m going to be cruel to them.” This is partly because of Tumblr’s known poor moderation. It’s also because a good number of people see causing harm to someone who hurt others as just, and therefore causing that harm as righteous.

Even if you agree with that view of justice, there’s a big issue here. That issue is that the vast majority of callouts are going to result in the person being called out being hurt far beyond what they actually did. Even that assumes that they hurt anyone in the first place, which is not always the case.

So, if things are that lopsided, no callout posts, right? Just block and move on in order to minimize harm.

Not quite. There is one narrow and rare category where I would say they are actually important.

Serial abusers who are actively trawling for victims are the exception that proves the rule. Callouts that show that this person is not safe and that you should watch out for them can actively work as harm prevention.

But like I said, that’s a rare and narrow case. I have seen maybe five callout posts out of hundreds, thousands if you count individual accounts on mass blocklists, that actually fall into that category. Those don’t work because they cause harassment campaigns. They work because their value as a warning exceeds the risk to the person targeted.

That’s it.

This generally does not lead to the development of healthy methods for working with emotional pain, for the same reasons that children don’t generally know how to do first aid if you just leave them with an injury: they don’t have enough information to do that.

Emotional pain can include grief, heartbreak, and anxiety, but it also includes things people are less willing to name because they sound like moral failings instead of pain: envy, anger, and regret. Those often end up mentally relabeled as “hurt” because being hurt has no moral weight. This obscures what’s going on and makes it harder to figure out what to do. Bad managing of emotional pain leads to increased emotional pain, especially stress, frustration, and shame.

This is a system that I use that makes it easier for me to manage emotional pain. Feel free to take whatever parts of it are useful for you.

Step 1: What caused the feeling?

Figuring out why you’re upset is often easier than figuring out how you’re upset, and can help you to figure out what feelings you have about it. For instance, if the cause was in the past, then anxiety is less likely. If you know the feeling but not the cause, it can be useful to switch the order of this step and step 2.

Let’s say that I’m really upset and it’s really unclear to me how I'm upset. two questions I find useful are:

Am I upset because of something that happened in the past, is happening now, or will happen in the future? Am I upset because of a system, an event, an ongoing situation, or a person?

Let’s say for the sake of the example that I’m upset because a stranger made a passing cruel comment about my appearance. It happened in the past, and was because of a person. This helps to build the foundation for the next steps.

A common and false assumption is that the amount of emotion you’re feeling and the seriousness of the event should match up. This is untrue. Sometimes you have no real reaction to serious trauma. Sometimes you implode because you lost your shoe. It’s not useful to you to think about how much emotion you “should” have about something.

Step 2: What is the feeling?

The event was a person being cruel to me about my appearance. Knowing that can help me to narrow it down, but the answer may not be the one that seems to “make sense” for what happened. Instead, it’s one that makes sense for who you are, what you’ve experienced, and how you react.

Since they’re a stranger, it’s not betrayal. There could be rejection, but I’m not sure since I didn’t care about them before they were cruel. It’s definitely not shame- I know that’s incorrect as soon as I consider it because it’s just, wrong.

Instead, it ends up being a mixture of loneliness and frustration. Loneliness, because to me it feels more alone for someone to be cruel than to not interact with them at all, and frustration, because I am struggling with understanding why they did it.

Step 3: Is this within my control?

If what upset you was beyond your control, it’s time to take care of yourself, because the only thing you can change here is how you feel. Changing that feeling isn’t a matter of willpower. Instead, identifying the feeling informs how you take care of yourself to make that feeling lessen or go away.

I can’t control what strangers say to me. Since the appearance comment made me feel lonely and frustrated, I should address those directly. For me personally, finding someone to hang out with and to vent to about it, going for some exercise in a group, or chilling with a pet would all work. I really recommend writing down what works for you for different emotional pains, so that you’re not trying to solve what to do when you’re in emotional pain.

If it is in your control, then it’s time for Step 4: What’s between me and this being solved?

Let’s say that instead of a stranger making the comment, it was the first thing that popped up when I looked at myself in the mirror. That’s in my control. So why did it happen?

Sometimes the answer is that you hadn’t thought of it because this is the first time this has happened. Sometimes it’s that you never found the time. Sometimes it’s because you forgot. All of these are solvable. Perhaps I saw someone who looked similar get spoken to with the same cruelty, and I need to unpack that.

The tricky part here is that almost everyone has been taught that if something is in your control, and the barriers are solvable, then you should have done it already- causing shame to either show up or pile on, making the pain worse.

If shame shows up for you, the best thing you can do is put it in the queue. It’s an emotional pain that will need to be managed, but it’s not the one you’re working on right now. If you let shame derail you from figuring out your barriers, then you will struggle to reach any solutions. You cannot solve a problem you do not understand.

Sometimes the answer reveals a deeper problem. Maybe the person I heard say that is my main support, and their negative comments are affecting my emotional health, but I can’t afford to not have them.

Sometimes the barrier is that you don’t have money. That you don’t live in a safe location. That you’re too worn out to do anything. Problems that are either beyond your control, or need to be solved before you can even begin to address the problem that directly upset you. Whatever the root cause may be, not knowing it leads to frustration and shame, as you try to wrestle with something you can't do yet, or with the wrong problem entirely.

Trying to treat something you can change as something you can’t leads to frustration with the problem cropping up repeatedly. Trying to treat something you can’t change as something that you can is a recipe for shame. In both cases, stress piles on because you are using the wrong tool.

Even then, if you find an alternative source of care that can deal with their physical and emotional needs for a while (babysitter, petsitter, in-home carer), then you can be inaccessible for a period.

To women who are too tired to keep up their personal hygiene, let alone makeup.

To women who see and hear things that aren’t there.

To women who have personality disorders.

To women whose trauma doesn’t make them strong.

To women who have trouble regulating their emotions.

To women who have brain fog and memory issues.

To women whose thoughts jumble together and frustrate them.

To women who struggle to communicate.

To women who will never be able to work or live alone due to mental illness.

To women who are mad, crazy, insane.

If your vacuum loses suction, those long toothed things that you use in toilets, which usually come in packs? Sometimes referred to as drain snakes? These?

When someone is canceled, called out, and so on, the effects tend to scale directly with the privilege that they do or do not have. An independent disabled artist can have their life destroyed, while a conglomerate like Nestle likely won’t even notice.

The same thing happens with negative stereotypes about men. The more privileges a man has, the less likely on average he is to be hit with any of the negative stereotypes about men. This is because negative stereotypes about men are generally associated with men who are minorities. So when men are actually harmed by negative stereotypes about men, it is almost always specifically because of their marginalization(s). They are able to be harmed with the stereotype specifically because they are a minority and a man.

Take, for instance, the male stereotype of the creep. Many men are creeps, this is not a disputable point. But the men who get plastered with the stereotype of the creep are disabled men, queer men, fat men- men who “deviate” from what is expected of men in various ways. This means that many men who are creeps are tacitly excused because they do not fit the mold of the creep, and many men who are not creeps are labeled as creeps specifically because of the ways that they are marginalized.

These stereotypes can hit people who are not men, particularly people who are not men who are masculinized in the eyes of society (including but not limited to black women, butches, trans women and trans AMAB nonbinary people, intersex women) but stereotypes about men are, well, about men. Because of that, they primarily hit marginalized men.