Strangeness & Charm

someone on reddit explained 😭

While this isn't news to anyone who works in this space, it is useful to have this water-is-wet research to affirm that Indigenous knowledge and land management are extremely effective at storing carbon and protecting biodiversity.

I want to draw special attention to this part of the article:

I get a fair number of asks and comments on my posts expressing sentiments like "human beings are a plague on this Earth", "humans ruin everything, we deserve to be wiped out", "humanity is inherently selfish, evil, and irredeemable".

I don't think the folks saying these things have bad intentions, I know their words come from a place of very understandable pain, fear, and anger. But to act as though humanity's impact on nature is inherently damaging and extractive is to erase thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship of nature. These ecosystems are thriving because there are humans living there.

r/ftm about damage from binding, all posted within the past year. 

Binding is not safe. I was only on testosterone for 3 months and was relatively unscathed, but I was binding for a year and a half, 6-8 hours a day (what is considered “safe binding practice”). and that also may not sound like a lot of time, but I cannot wear bras anymore, over 2 years after I stopped binding. not even wireless, soft bralettes because if i wear one my ribs hurt and i have shooting pains when I breathe. 

I just want to say, that although my breasts appearing almost overnight made me pretty devastated, at least I got the chance to eventually get used to them. I hated them with a passion. I hid them, I slouched (I’m finally trying to get rid of that!). I’d have given anything to have a time machine and go back to before they erupted onto my unwilling body. But now I don’t feel anything about them.

If you wear a binder, you get that dreaded sinking feeling every. single. time. you. take. it. off. The breasts appear, out of nowhere, as a reminder, each time. That will fuck with your head.

So you can see transmen keeping the binder on. Because what do you see when it comes off? Destroyed breast tissue and lumpy ribs. The more you do it, the more you feel you have to do it. The more you dissociate from your own body, the more dysphoria you’re going to have, not less.

There’s no opportunity to get to relate to your own body parts as neutral. I’m not talking about some massive self-love thing, just seeing your breasts as neutral body parts. Like your ankles, or your earlobes or whatever.

You can’t do that if there’s this upsetting big reveal every time you take a binder off. And you have to take a binder off eventually. It’s just a shitty coping mechanism.

And, I hate to sound cruel, but in most cases it doesn’t make that much of a difference. A flat chested woman still looks like a woman. And there’s nothing particularly masculine about not being able to breathe. And if you do have a mastectomy, your results will be worse, because you’ve got fucked up breast tissue and deformed ribs.

Gilbert Baker added a 9th stripe shortly before his death, with the new stripe representing diversity. He added this stripe in reaction to the 2016 US election. It’s unfortunately not as well known as the 8 and 6 striped versions.

Here’s an image of him sewing together the 9 striped rainbow flag.

"Prep time: 15 minutes"

So, that's probably how long it took the writer, who has done the recipe 200 times, when they timed it for the written version.

Sex doesn't determine interests, hobbies, emotions or thoughts either. Sex isn't part of personality but it can affect personality like developing the fear of men because of bad experiences or getting conditioned into certain stereotypes but those personality changes/traits aren't triggered by biology, they're triggered by trauma and social expectations

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.