why-are-humans-like-this

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When I say “school should be disability accessible”, I don’t just mean we need handicap rails and EAs. Kids should be able to miss a day without failing out of school. You shouldn’t be dismissed from clubs because your attendance record is “spotty” (true story). I once missed an entire week of school because of a terrible, unending migraine. I was expected to keep up with my studies despite the blinding pain that came with working on my computer. When I heard my teachers say that you couldn’t miss exams, I asked what I would have to do to be excused from them. Their response? “Either get a doctor’s note an hour before the exam or death of an immediate family member.”

I cannot express how rigid this expectation was. First of all, with my condition, I wouldn’t have enough warning about my sickness to go to the doctor and request a note. For many people, this is exceptionally difficult, especially with the current shortage of medical professionals. Next, it ignores the fact that my schedule may not line with theirs because of my medical needs. Once, I had to visit a hospital a province away (which I was on the waiting list of for over a year) on the same day as an exam. I begged my mother not to take me because I was so nervous that I would be marked as an automatic fail. I was lucky enough to make it work, but that’s only because of my spectacular support system consisting of family members and wonderful doctors.

Disabilities aren’t always about needing a bus that can accommodate wheelchairs. It’s already difficult enough for many of us to maintain school attendance without the harsh punishments involved for skipping a day. We need to be able to miss school without being punished. Only than can you claim that the school is “accessible”

[why-are-humans-like-this]

[why-are-humans-like-this]

For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

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civic and moral duty to save and repost this image <3

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somebody will rightfully notice that europeans are really fucking weird about romani people and there will always be 1 person in the comments going "okay it's not racist, you just don't understand, bleeding heart americans, i promise my brother tony had an experience which proves they're all raping theives and hitler was right about them" and not seem to be aware of how much they sound like americans talking about black ppl

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i’ve mentioned this here before, but it will remain one of the most ideologically influential experiences of my life: when i was in fifth grade i did a report on post traumatic stress as manifested in veterans of the vietnam war, and my father did me the huge favor of connecting me w/ a vietnam vet friend of his who was diagnosed with PTSD, assuring him that while i was only ten i was bright and curious and he should be as honest with me about his experience as possible. 

i remember entering his office with my tape recorder, sitting in a chair that was too big, and asking him questions about war, and his life after war, while swinging my legs over the edge of the chair. i remember being very, very quiet as he spoke of pulling the car over on the highway for fear of crashing when his hands would shake uncontrollably in response to song on the radio or a smell that he couldn’t be sure was real or sense-memory. and of ruined relationships and anger and american hypocrisy. 

and i also remember that was the day i learned what “valor” meant. he used “valor” in a sentence and i didn’t know that word, and when i asked him to explain “valor” he became very quiet. and i can’t remember precisely what he said, if he ever offered me the dictionary definition or not, but i do remember him looking very sad, and saying something about our country’s idea of “valor”, and also something about a broken promise. and there was an edge to his words that i couldn’t parse at the time that i would later come to understand was bitterness, that he sounded bitter. 

to this day i can’t hear or read the word “valor” without seeing sunlight coming through his office window at a slant, close-to-sunset light, and feeling the kind of quiet, confused, completely internalized panic a child feels when they sense that a grown up is trying very hard not to weep in their presence. 

[why-are-humans-like-this]

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god i hate how normalized diet culture and shit like bmi and calories are. bmi is based on eugenics. calories are a measurement of how much energy something gives u and not at all of how much weight or fat ull gain. diets have been proven to be harmful and ultimately unhelpful in actually losing weight. fatness has been largely proven to not be inherently unhealthy and doesnt inherently cause health issues.

if anyone has more good links to add on then please do and if anyone knows more on this stuff than me then dont hesitate to correct me!

[why-are-humans-like-this]

god i hate how normalized diet culture and shit like bmi and calories are. bmi is based on eugenics. calories are a measurement of how much energy something gives u and not at all of how much weight or fat ull gain. diets have been proven to be harmful and ultimately unhelpful in actually losing weight. fatness has been largely proven to not be inherently unhealthy and doesnt inherently cause health issues.

if anyone has more good links to add on then please do and if anyone knows more on this stuff than me then dont hesitate to correct me!

[why-are-humans-like-this]

If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.

Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.

We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.

The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.

Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.

[why-are-humans-like-this]

i’ve been thinking a lot about the insane dehumanization of north koreans lately (they’re not allowed to smile, they’re all brainwashed, they would let their family die to save a picture of their “dear” leader etc) so here’s another post with pictures from the dprk of north koreans just… being people

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I'm in awe of how we ran historical revisionism on the civil rights movement so bad that people truly believe it was quiet self-sacrifcial non-disruptive christ-like activism that forced progress and not — like — the incredible economic pressure of boycotts and outbreaks of illegal civil disobedience

Yapping to the choir but eughhh it burns me up girl effective protests have to be loud and inconvenient for change to happen because silent cries die in the dark that's the entire pointtt

[why-are-humans-like-this]

— Mahmoud Darwish

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Disabled people have to live somewhere poor people have to live somewhere you cant just exclude us from everywhere

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Wow wtf HIV/AIDS was discovered by Flossie Wong-Staal, an Chinese-American woman, and she’s the reason the HIV test even exists. AND THEN she invented the molecular knife that lead to treatments for HIV/AIDS. And she’s STILL ALIVE. We don’t hear about the contributions of Women of Color enough, my word. Madness.

[why-are-humans-like-this]

One: a Nazi promotes her own speech about The Great Replacement (core Nazi doctrine)

Two: Musk promotes the post and says the problem with [Nazi doctrine] is that it doesn’t center enough in [Nazi historical doctrine]

Three: my ex-boss and automattic and Tumblr CEO jumps in to recommend Elon a book about [Nazi doctrine]

So yeah, my ex-boss seems to be full in the movement.

Now let me remind you about this thing called reality:

US population grew 0.4% last year

EU population grew 0.1% last year

World Population? +0.8%

None of those figures has gone under 0 in the last 50 years (and probably before, I just don’t want to look for more data). The population collapse the are talking about is about WHITE population. If someone talks about population decline, they are a white supremacist.

Good fucking grief.