lowkey'the

make homelessness an inevitable consequence for many many many disabled people; expand this inevitability by constantly cutting funding to disability services and stigmatising the disabled as too expensive to keep alive.

make homelessness a crime resulting in prison or institutionalisation.

make compelled labour normal in prisons and institutions.

"etymologynerd" is at it again and this time i do feel i have to say something. the disability advocates have it covered on addressing the impact, but there's also a serious problem with the linguistics.

in a video shared on may 16, adam aleksic begins by saying: "i think we have to accept the fact that the 'r-word' [retard/retarded] is permanently coming back and it's functionally changed meanings to no longer directly refer to disabled people."

this first sentence alone betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of language change in several points.

this word never went away. what we're seeing now is an attempt at re-normalization by people who sense that they will not be socially punished by openly using this term.

we actually don't have to "accept" its return to mainstream use. for decades, disability advocates have worked to inform the public of the harm caused by casual use of this term. the harm has not disappeared, and neither will this advocacy and its impacts.

now i'm just mad. how tf does it NOT refer to disabled people? the entire point of a pejorative term is that it negatively invokes comparison to a person, group, etc. the assertion that the r-word has changed meanings is categorically false. at most, its primary context has changed from clinical to casually pejorative, but the insult fundamentally rests upon the original reference.

he goes on to refer to the "euphemism treadmill," another concept he misrepresents by extending the metaphor to say that terms which have been sufficiently distanced from their original reference are no longer pejorative. to quote: "...once we sufficiently distance a word from its historical usage, it stops taking on the same offensive power and just becomes colloquial instead."

which... what? what the fuck is he talking about? the words he uses as examples – idiot, imbecile, and moron – are definitely still offensive, if perhaps less impactful. "just becomes colloquial instead" is a nonsense phrase. are offensive words not colloquial? the only english word that comes to mind as having changed so much in definition as to no longer be offensive is "nice," which has been shifting in meaning for more than 700 years and was never a weaponized clinical term.

he ends by saying, "it is undeniably true that the people who are afraid to say the r-word right now are going to get old and die out, while younger generations keep saying it with no knowledge of where it came from." again, fundamentally misunderstanding language change in society over time. it rests on the assumption that we're all going to start or re-start using this slur and never have a conversation about its harms, which just completely ignores both the abovementioned disability advocacy and the fact that people tell each other not to use offensive words. you think i'm just not gonna teach my kids that using slurs is bad??

the whole video is devoid of both empathy and an understanding of long-term semantic change.

linked tree (includes options to donate to Ghanaian projects)

It's like, either you're a feminine cis man who is still cis, like a femboy, or cross-dresser, or you're a binary transgender woman 'gender conformist' who has an absolutely uncomplicated relationship to her gender. There's no in-between, and any sign that a transgender woman might have a more complicated relationship to her gender is grounds to exile her to the former category of femboy or cross-dresser.

Being nonbinary is only socially permissible in transgender spaces when you're transmasculine, because transfemininity is subjected to such intense scrutiny that that anything short of swearing an oath of undying loyalty to Artemis that you will forever and exclusively be a woman is grounds to treat you as a male cross-dresser.

You can see this in a lot "androgynous" fashion styles as well, especially in what bodies get to be counted as androgynous. Typically, the bodies are white, thin, and (stereotypically) feminine, save for the absence of boobs, while the clothing is (stereotypically) masculine. The fact that this is an idealization of transmasculinity is not an accident, and it makes transfeminine nonbinary people hoping to be socially read as such extremely difficult.

The only alternative for them is the 'man in dresses' stereotype, which not only reduces them to the status of a cross-dresser, but which is constantly fetishized and repackaged as "gender fuckery" by TME people who think it's exotic. And I know some transfem nonbinary people get a lot out of this, I know a few of them, but for the vast majority of us, it's a complete misrepresentation of how we actually want to present.

These fashion and body standards are not the cause of this pattern so much as the shared effect of the pervasive transmisogyny directed against transfemininity which constructed transfemininity and nonbinary identity as anathema to begin with.

This anathema is typically employed against transfeminists as well. I am nonbinary, and yet I could not tell you the massive stream of people accusing me of being a binary trans woman who denies the existence of nonbinary people and who do not believe me when I try to explain otherwise.

When people say transfeminism is "exorsexist", what they mean is that they can't understand transfeminine people as nonbinary, that they refuse to recognize our identities, or to understand our experiences.

I remember queer and trans groups that copied TERF rhetoric and scribbled "amab enby" where "trans woman" used to be - when I mean "copied" I don't mean just "shared the same ideas," I mean I literally read the sentence "yeah and if you accept them then a man will put on a dress to get in."

Thankfully that helped me start noticing that things were wrong with my groomer, but that's a whole other story. When I confronted her about this she started going on about how really I was the one hurting her and by the time I understood what she was trying to do with that bullshit I had cut her out of my life entirely.

The fact that the white standard of androgyny looks more masculine was actually blamed on transfems and especially transfem enbies as well. The "vile invaders just now appearing that must be driven out" are also "responsible for the entire social norm around us." Simultaneously responsible for everything and weak enough to cast away. Abusing a position of norm-defining power but also just appeared yesterday and going to change everything for the worse.

So I asked my guy Felipe @feliville , master of color, to make me a Whitewashed™ Patroclus. You heard right! I wanted to see what he looked like, and as an aside I said it'd probably prove that he was a white guy painted brown. And y'all-

Tbh, I almost miss the original 🤣🤣🤣 das a Hwite Man, all right!

To quote 🎤:

"ALRIGHTY, SO, From time to time I make simple Black edits on mediocre or bad Black character designs for funsies, but whitewashing a character on purpouse felt Vile and Horrible to do, it even made my stomach hurt 👎🏽 ,, I hate the end result and I hate that his design is so bad that once the dark grey skintone is gone, there's no traces left that he's Supposed to be Black."

What's wild to me is how good this looks. Not as in attractiveness, but as in this is such a sufficient white guy character design. It's why I be saying I wish people would just... Draw another white man if they're not gonna put in the effort to depict us. No one would have flinched if this was the millionth white Patroclus in the rotation. Well I would have, but no one that companies care about would have.

Anyway, when I asked what he did and if it was possible to use the same technique for Black character design:

"I ONLY CHANGED THE COLORS, NOTHING ELSE... OKI, I MEAN, I DID LIGHTEN IT UP, I used 3 effect?blending? layers.

[from left to right; Patroclus edited to have an Actual Brown Skintone, the Original sprite, and the whitewashed edit.]

Happy to help with this Fucked up Painful edit🫡🫡!! I'll be sure to see white Patroclus in my nightmares

hi im yasha you may have seen my post going around! long story short, i am really really close to securing an apartment with a friend, but i do need another 170$ to pay my part for the first and last month. i'm so so close to getting out but i just don't know where to look, so i'm opening up comms a little earlier than i planned! you can find examples of my work in my art tag (listed in bio) or through my ko-fi!

contact me here on this blog or through my ko-fi dms :) and if you would like to just donate to the cause of me GETTING OUT!! GETTING OUTTTT i would really appreciate that too <3 thank you to everyone!