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her name was Marsha P Johnson, and we have her to thank for so much.

remember, the first Pride was a riot, and she was one of the brave souls who endured it to help carve the path which so many of us walk today. she helped found several activist groups regarding LGBT safety and wellbeing. and she was absolutely radiant, too.

"Mfinda", an upcoming African-American-Japanese feature film produced by N LITE.

And that's not bad! It's true for a lot of people! You CAN go back later! You can apply to university, you can get your GED, you can pursue whatever level of education you want. It's not bad to share that message. If you dropped out and want to go back eventually, there is zero timeline. You can go back at any age, with any life experience. You do not have to graduate by a specific age.

But as someone who dropped out of college over a decade ago, sometimes "you can always go back!" starts to feel a little like an empty platitude. Sometimes it starts to feel grating instead of hopeful. Even when it might technically be true, sometimes it still feels like a hollow sentiment.

I just want to say, to anyone else out there who feels that way, who dropped out and CAN'T go back, potentially EVER, whether it's due to poverty or disability or any other reason:

It's okay to drop out and never go back. It might feel shitty, and you may even feel grief over it. That's real, and painful, and allowed. But you are not lesser. Even if you never go back, you are not a failure or a loser. Academics do not define your worth. You are not stupid. And it is almost certain that the system actually failed YOU.

With love,

They will say “don’t you want them to go to the grave without debt”, they will try to guilt you, they will take advantage of your vulnerability.

Source: when my father died, he had some credit cards that my mom wasn’t on that she had no access to. The companies contacted her while she was sorting through the bills and getting a handle on how to run the house alone, badgering her with his credit card debt.

She wasn’t liable for any of it, but if she had ever agreed to pay before finding out that she didn’t need to, she would have been considered to have taken on his debt and would have HAD to pay it. It’s slimy, it’s predatory, and it’s entirely legal for them to do this.

and that constantly putting the onus on the people who have to live with these illnesses to simply "get better" is an incredibly shitty thing to do

and that it's not "toxic" for chronically ill and disabled people to feel down, and occasionally talk about how down they feel, in a world which continually disregards their suffering and makes their lives much more difficult than they need to be, sometimes deliberately

and that telling these people that they continue to be ill only because they haven't tried a certain exercise, supplement, therapy or diet will only further damage their health by causing them stress

and that doctors are not only not infallible magic-workers, but are very often actively prejudiced against their patients; especially female patients and patients who belong to marginalised and minority groups

please just understand this and accept that the chronically-ill and disabled people you speak to know more about their health and their limitations and what works or doesn't work for them than you ever could

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness. 

The air was polluted so badly we had "smog days" during which it was unsafe to go outside. The sky was frequently yellow.

The water was so polluted you couldn't eat any fish you caught. Rivers routinely caught fire. Gasoline contained lead which got turned into exhaust fumes we all breathed.

No-fault divorce wasn't a thing yet, and many women were trapped in dangerous relationships. Marital rape was legal most places until the mid 1990s.

Being openly gay, bi, or transgender (or just looking non-heterosexual) was extremely dangerous. Most states had anti-sodomy laws on their books throughout the 1980s. Same sex marriage was not legal.

Corporal punishment (hitting your children) was widely accepted as normal and good. Public schools routinely beat children for minor rules violations.

Automobile safety sucked; no airbags, ABS braking, and crumple zones were a new concept. Seatbelts existed but people routinely "protested" by refusing to wear them. Even minor accidents resulted in death & dismemberment.

Long distance phone calls cost $3+ dollars per minute, and in many cases "long distance" was calling somebody in the next zip code. 911 service wouldn't be adopted nationwide for most of the decade. If you had an emergency, you needed to know the local numbers to call because simply dialing 0 meant having to trust a telephone operator (an AT&T employee) to know what they're doing. Also, they had no way to know your location. GPS would not exist until the 1980s.

There were three (3) television channels, with maybe two (2) more "local" channels, and you looked at them on tiny, fuzzy CRT screens. The largest made at the time were 25". All channels went off the air every night around 1am, and there was no easy way to avoid or skip commercials. VCRs started becoming available, but cost many thousands of dollars adjusted for inflation. There would not be video rental stores until the 1980s, so no easy way to rewatch shows or movies.

Air travel cost thousands of dollars adjusted for inflation, and planes were so routinely hijacked by terrorists it became a meme.

And so on.

Over 90% of parents of visibly intersex children opt for cosmetic surgery on their infants.

The ones that don't experience medical violence then, likely experience it as a teenager.

I didn't.

I am very rare in that I did not experience medical violence.

Why? Because I learned what intersexuality was as a young age, and I actively fought against what doctors wanted to do to me. All the way down to legal research on what medical care minors can be forced into. I remember walking into that doctor's appointment with the state law written down that proved that if I did not consent they could not do surgery.