sing your ships into their harbors

The one about the ship no one else cares about, or the deeply unpopular character, or the extremely unusual AU?

The fic that got no comments or kudos when you posted it?

Months or years from now, that fic might be exactly what someone is looking for in the sea of fics about all the popular characters, ships, and AUs.

Your fic might be the only fic out there that has what someone is looking for. The only fic that scratches the itch that it turns out you and that reader share.

people in general tend to assume that a person who’s been arrested is either innocent or guilty. and if they’re guilty, then they deserve fewer rights than the innocent person.

like, if the police break into an innocent person’s house and look for drugs, we recognize that it’s a bad thing and a gross violation of rights. but if the police break into someone’s house and do find drugs, well, that’s just what they deserved. we’d all be upset if the police started randomly murdering people on the street for no reason, but many wouldn’t mind if the police started randomly killing known child molesters. it’s not okay if the police plant evidence to frame an innocent man for murder, but if they know he’s the murderer and plant evidence to help the case along? well, that’s unfortunate but necessary.

there are three problems with this:

You cannot always know with certainty who’s innocent and who’s guilty;

A two-tiered “innocent” and “guilty” legal structure will always be used against innocent marginalized people;

Even guilty people have rights.

this happens a lot on tumblr. not exclusively on tumblr (it’s also a major aspect of most “gritty” police dramas and almost all comics), but it’s definitely there. like, calls to summarily execute rapists sound great in theory, because we all agree that rape is evil. except for when it’s used to kill innocent black men who looked the wrong way at a white woman. 

and there are people who will say that no, of course, the problem isn’t summarily killing rapists, the problem is summarily killing the wrong people (that is, innocent people). which, again, you can’t know who’s innocent and who’s guilty - lots of innocent people aren’t sweet old ladies who’ve never done anything wrong, or have perfect alibis and never contradict themselves. hell, being guilty of a crime in the past doesn’t mean that they committed this specific crime that they’ve been accused of.

and even if they are guilty - even if they are stone-cold, unrepentantly guilty - they still have rights. that’s what “innocent until proven guilty” means. it means that stripping someone of their legal rights is a big fucking deal, so no matter how guilty Obvious McCriminal looks, you still have to follow the rules we’ve set in place to prevent abuses. 

like, it’s not that every person who’s ever been treated shittily by police and the court system is actually innocent, so therefore the system is bad. it’s that we have a system that treats people like shit once we’ve decided they’re guilty, regardless of when the decision is made, and we’re okay with that. after conviction? definitely. after arrest? yup. before arrest, because we just have a feeling about them? sure.

and I get why people make posts or write stories about guilty people being treated badly. wanting vengeance is a powerful emotion. grief and anger are powerful emotions. it is not unnatural to want to hurt people who have hurt others. people like the idea of karma, of cosmic scales balancing out the hurt and suffering inflicted by a person by making them suffer back. I’m not saying that no one is allowed to have those feelings. 

like, we can all agree that the sentence for drug possession, drunk driving, trespassing, etc. is not execution, and even if it was, that’s after they’ve been arrested and convicted. cops are not judges, so it’s not their call to decide if someone is guilty or to punish them for it. so why does it matter if someone is “a known criminal,” or if they have drugs in their system, or if they have a gun on their person?

“well, obviously it’s to bias the public against the person who was killed,” you might say. okay, but why is that?

it’s because they know that we think of guilty people as less than human, and innocent people as blameless. therefore the murdered person deserved to die (because guilty people deserve what they get), and the cop is innocent (he was just trying to protect people!). if it didn’t work as a tactic, then they wouldn’t do it!

Where in places where binary trans identities are recognized, nonbinary ones aren't so you have to slip into one side of the binary or the other, erasing your identity and misgendering yourself just to access care or exist.

Where doctors and other trans people assume you don't want to transition in certain ways or make assumptions about the ways that you do.

Where they call everything in accordance with the binary. This surgery is for transgender men. This hormones is for MtF. These are masculinizing or feminizing. These are transfeminine surgeries and transmasculine surgeries. These templates only account for binary transgender woman she/her and transgender male he/him. This community doesn't say the word nonbinary when discussing anything. This community doesn't think about people who aren't aligned with the binary when discussing anything.

Where in the cases where this combination of hormones or that arrangement of surgery is transneutral nonbinary, it's a toss up whether the doctor or surgeon or other trans people even see it as legitimate options because it doesn't conform to the binary or makes an assumption that it is what you must want because they're still shoving you into another fucking box.

Nonbinary people of any kind of alignment can get phalloplasty, metoidioplasty, or vulvovaginoplasty. They are not inherently transmasculine or transfeminine surgeries.

Binary trans people can get nulloplasty or retain their natal parts while undergoing bottom surgery to get a bigenital set up. These are not inherently nonbinary surgeries.

Imagine you are a trans person. You were assigned female at birth. You have a uterus and vagina and went through an estrogen based puberty and have boobs. Society says you should therefore be a woman because all these things are feminine and female and woman.

You are not a woman.

You find other trans people who push back against the idea that these things are inherently tied to womanhood. That not everyone who is a woman is born with or has these things. And not everyone who has these things is a woman.

You are a trans person who is not a woman and you have to take care of basic bodily functions that are labelled as feminine hygiene and you go to a doctor for what is labelled a women's healthcare.

You are a trans person who is misgendered based on a pericis normative idea that female, afab, vagina, uterus, estrogen, feminine, woman, she/her/hers.

But at least you have your trans community that says body parts and hormones and what you were assigned at birth do not dictate your gender or pronouns.e

Now, imagine you are still the same trans person who is not a woman and also not a man, you are not transmasc or transfem. And you go to start testosterone and it gets called transmasculine hrt. You get top surgery and it gets called ftm top surgery. You go to get meta and have someone write a letter misgendering you as transfem because their template defaults to trans woman she/her. You go to get meta and have the surgeons misgender you as he/him transgender male because that is what their templates default to. You go to get meta and the surgeons think you want to keep your vagina despite saying multiple times that getting rid of it is your highest priority. You go to get gender affirming care and are misgendered as binary.

You go to seek out information in your community and are misgendered by your community. Every resource is T and phallo and meta is transsexual transsex transmasculine trans man without any mention of nonbinary people who aren't aligned with the binary.

You try to remind other trans people that penis and testosterone and trans person afab do not equal transmasculine trans man ftm male.

And you are met with silence. Because they don't think you're actually trans unless you can map to the binary. They don't think nonbinary dysphoria and misgendering is as bad as binary dysphoria and misgendering.

So, in your opinion, is it worse to use alt text? For reference, I have a fanart blog. I’ve seen it mentioned that people who don’t use a screen reader might have difficulty viewing the alt text, or that it glitchs out sometimes. I don’t like the look of putting the ID below the image, but I’d rather not sacrifice accessibility for the sake of aesthetic.

The reasons I previously said I would advocate for image descriptions in the post over ALT text were:

1) at the time, ALT text could only be picked up through screen-readers

2) ALT text usually imposed a word limit

and 3) higher visibility for those who need it and increased awareness of accessibility needs

Since then, ALT text has been updated on tumblr, twitter, and instagram, although I’m not sure if that applies to other sites. ALT text is now visible through a box announcing the picture has an ALT text image description. It is more visible now because of this marker and because the text is literally visible when you click on the box.

This means it is more visible for those who don’t use screen-readers. It is also visible for raising awareness of accessibility needs.

While alt-text has been improved a bit, I still suggest using image descriptions in the post itself. This increases visibility and reduces glitching issues. If the post doesn’t load, the image description is still available.

Since I’ve been here it’s been: nonbinary people, bisexual people, asexual and aromantic people, polyamorous people, pansexual people, people who only use the word queer for their identity, trans men/mascs, and intersex people. At least. I might’ve missed something.

(also like this isn't even limited to they/them it's just what the conversations that prompt it use bc there's so much fucking hostility to they/them. if we're assuming pronouns throwing out a xe or bun or it or another neo should be just as much an option. because guess what. people might use them.

There's an assumption of binary identities, or at most if someone does have a nonbinary identity it is still aligned enough with the binary that binary pronouns and terms are sufficient to include them. There's only the binary so no need to assume testosterone goes with anything other than he/him and estrogen goes with anything other than she/her. That any pronouns beyond that do not matter or the identities behind them are not real.

Or, that even if you do conceed there are nonbinary identities, there is the assumption that enben do not medically transition, or even require social transition in order to alleviate dysphoria and have the chance to truly grow and thrive as themselves. That even if an enby is forced into the closet and unable to transition it's not going to have a negative impact on their mental health and life. That it's somehow less bad for enbies than it is for binary trans people.

And last. Even if people were with me on pointing out the first two. The deliberate inclusion of bun here lost so many people who haven't truly unpacked their exorsexism and binary views of gender.

Also. I'm gonna go a step further. There are so many "binary" trans people who if they realized they were actually nonbinary and broke out of that narrow confines of the binary absolutely would be happier. But the same forces that stop them from saying testosterone or estrogen would have saved bun are stopping bun from going by bun.