Hey y'all

One of the only asexual activists is Yasmin Benoit, a Black woman. She has raised so much awareness for the community. She was the first asexual person to lead Pride in London, she started the #thisiswhatasexuallookslike movement and is THE leading voice for the community.

And you all will celebrate international asexuality day on April 6th but we wouldn't even have that if she hadn't cofounded it.

thing thats bad: aww

thing that has both genuinely amazing pieces of storytelling and abysmal dogshit slop both happening like entirely interchangably:

this is not even the half of it. somehow every single sentence has what i can only describe as pure unadulterated hate for an incredibly vulnerable group of people. i dont think i could even cover how all of this is terrible. comparing a trans woman to that of a masculine opppressor. framing her as a parody of a woman that exploits the feminized labor of others like a goddamn businessman. very clearly stating that receiving labor you can't reciprocate is a bad thing. very clearly stating that being supported financially is a moral failing. very clearly stating that having emotional breakdowns is manipulative.

this article was written about the worst caricature of a "crippled leech on society", and rather than address the obvious communication issues displayed in the dynamics present the proposed solution is to oust (kill) the most vulnerable, marginalized party.

as a woman who relies on a caregiver to survive, who identifies with being a puppygirl and functionally inhabits the social position of a child, upset is an understatement with regards to how i feel. if my caregiver took this advice for either me or our mutual girlfriend we would both die. if the people in this hypothetical scenario took this advice the puppygirl would die. systemically if people absorb this information and act according to what it says those who rely on them will die. this is not just a shitty mistake. it's not an understatement to say this is violent and could have terrible consequences.

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, then you are not the puppygirl. the puppygirl is someone who is not safe to be in a relationship with because she makes it impossible for her partners to have boundaries and needs of their own, not because she needs to be taken care of. Yeah, it is "on both of you" to communicate and work through issues. Did you not read the part of the article where the puppygirl makes such communication impossible? Where example after example is given of the author trying to have conversations, trying to make it work, and being met with breakdowns and guilt and being told she's "being snippy" or "just needs to understand more"?

having dysregulated emotional responses is not evil, but it is something people need to be aware of and finding ways to cope with if they want to be in healthy relationships. It is on both of you to communicate. but if the puppygirl will not communicate, and breaks down every time you try until your concerns are lost in the act of repairing, then it is not a healthy relationship, and you have every right to leave.

but frankly there was a lack of communication on the part of the caregiver too. i know what it's like to feel like your attempts at conversation are being shut down, i know how hard it is to deal with because i was THERE. i have been in several relationships where someone was too dependent on me and using me without caring for my needs. a large part of why those were bad were because they were controlling and abusing me and had leverage over me as people in positions of power (white) and not even remotely solely because they were relying on me. this puppygirl has no such position of power. while there is a point where you need to detach in some way, the consequences of leaving the puppygirl are very different than that of my leaving. trauma informed methods may be necessary to properly engage here and ironically in this specific situation i think it removes accountability on the part of the caregiver to suggest that they had no hand in the issues with miscommunication.

there are better people and better situations to use to illustrate this point, the mentally ill disabled girl in need of a caregiver did not need to be one this was about.

on a further note, this article is basically a document about a situation of miscommunication that was wrongly formulated as theory and structural analysis when it should have been a private vent among close friends. just because a situation was bad doesn't mean it needs to be theorized about through a political lens like this and CERTAINLY not publicly.

finally, and this is my main and most important part, it doesn't matter if you can correctly identify which trans girls are avoiding accountability intentionally and which are simply suffering. for one there is no such clean line, people frequently hurt people accidentally and all of those situations deserve their own case by case approach. the biggest problem with this essay is it doesn't give people the tools to deal with the situation, people are going to come away from it thinking that if they feel someone is a burden they should drop them because their labour is being exploited. it doesn't matter even a little how you or anyone individually chooses to interpret the article, it matters what people are likely to interpret based on societal understandings that already prime us to think of disabled people as burdens who are better off dead. this just contributes to that rhetoric and did not need to be said so loud, there are millions of examples of caregivers being prioritized in their emotional and physical burden to the extent that some people think it's understandable when they kill us. remember that, hundreds of us die a year at the hand of our caregivers because they can't shoulder the burden, this dynamic exists already and didn't need to be fed into. we already fucking get it and know it and hear it everyday.

the caregiver's position is that they are suffering from the emotional and financial burden of caring for someone who is not good at communication due to a variety of disabilities and conditions. it is hard to be in that position. i know. my caregiver experiences this. i hear about it weekly. however, just like in my case, there are no material consequences for the caregiver if they choose to drop this puppygirl.

the puppygirl's position is that of an extremely poor person who has likely been severely traumatized by multiple past experiences and suffers with several disabilities as a result. she is clearly coded as autistic here. if people chose to stop caring for her, she would die, that is a fact and it is a completely different position. and sorry i do think a lot more weight should be given to than undeniable fact.

i know the caregiver probably didn't sign up to be one, mine didn't either, but that doesn't change the fact that they have become one and with such responsibility comes a lot of power that is impossible and irresponsible to ignore.

i also think that attributing this puppygirl to any masculine exploitation of labor dynamic is transmisogynistic, inexcusable and unjustifiable, there's nothing you could say that would ever make that even remotely a worthwhile or accurate interpretation of this situation.

by the way, while it's fair to withdraw emotionally, removing her from your living space or to stop taking care of her is not guiltless because like i said, she will die. that's the material reality. no matter the emotional or relationship dynamics involved, the fact of the matter is in real life she'd die if people stopped helping her. and the implication that anyone should die for "being a burden" or EVEN being manipulative is one I'll never support and actively push back against for the sake of my survival and the survival of those in my position or worse.

If you know what you'd have to do to solve a problem, but you just don't want to do it, your main problem isn't the problem itself. Your problem is figuring out how to get yourself to do the solution.

If your problem is not eating enough vegetables, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make vegetables stop being yucky". If your problem is not getting enough exercise, the problem you should be solving is "how do I make exercise stop sucking ass". You're not supposed to just be doing things that are awful and suck all the time forever, you're supposed to figure out how to make it stop being so awful all the time.

I used to hate wearing sunscreen because it's sticky and slimy and disgusting and it feels bad and it smells bad, so I neglected to wear it even if I needed to. Then I found one that isn't like that, and doesn't smell and feel gross. Problem solved.

YES!!! gladly!!!

Here’s a quick handy reference list or anyone who isn’t sure:

Homosexuality does exist in almost all social species.

“Alpha males” are not a real phenomenon and in fact the most aggressive males tend to be the least reproductively successful.

“Survival of the fittest” simply means that the success of a species hinges on how well it “fits” its environment. It does not mean that stronger or smarter individuals are supposed to succeed. Those things can even be a detriment in nature by wasting too many resources.

“Race” is not a biological concept. Someone who looks different from you has the same human genes, just a different grab-bag of dominant traits.

Evolution is not a march towards higher complexity, more intelligence or even more adaptability. It’s just a fluctuation of characteristics dictated by environmental pressures and mutation. A slime mold isn’t “less evolved” than a hawk, just adapted for success under different parameters.

People didn’t evolve “from apes.” It’s more complicated than that. We are a category of ape, sharing a common ancestor with the other apes.

No human on Earth is “closer” to an evolutionary ancestor than any other. We all descended from the same one.

Neanderthals were also a “sibling” species of ours. We didn’t evolve from them.

Humans are actually more genetically homogeneous than most people suspect. This is possibly due to a population bottleneck at some point in our evolutionary past. Two chimpanzees from different sides of a jungle are likely more genetically different to each other than any two human beings in the world.

Our big brains may help us use tools, but what was really principal in their development was the need for empathy, communication, and cooperation.

Humans. Are. Social. So social it drove an incredibly energetically costly increase in our brain size.  Don’t believe anyone who says its our nature to fight “every man for themself.” We’re humans, not bears. We fight for each other.

And we always have. Fossil remains are found of ancient humans who bore signs of crucial mobility impairments that lived to notable ages. Some even have sticks or other mobility aids – community care and support is our way. We don’t cast off those with impairments, we stand by them.

Human sexual dimorphism is on a decreasing trend. Our ancestors had greater difference in canine size and overall size. Our dimorphism gap has gotten smaller.

Occam’s razor is the principal that whatever is the simplest explanation is probably the most likely one. Don’t believe someone who says the reason we evolved bipedalism is so that males could carry gifts to females to woo them. Yes, this is a real ‘theory’ on how bipedalism evolved.

Skin tone is an adaptation of UV levels vs vitamin D levels. Both come from the sun. UV is harmful, so where sun is plentiful populations develop a darker skin tone for more protection. The skin needs sun to create vitamin D, so where sun is scarce, the skin tone lightens to allow more sun in. This is literally all it is.

Final thing: No one’s mind is really equipped to fully understand how long a billion years is, or a million, or even tens of thousands of years. Evolution takes place over a loooong time. Its very, very, slow, slower than we can really comprehend. We can’t “stand in the way” of natural selection by caring for our ill. We don’t need to “help” evolution in any way. It inevitably happens, but not on any sort of timescale we could possibly affect, so don’t fall for anyone that tells you not to “stand in the way” of natural selection. That’s fascism, and its utterly pseudo-scientific.