Day: June 7, 2018

Click here to support Help Gideon Start A New Life organized by Gideon Hawke

thebibliosphere:

Quoted from Gideon’s page:

Hi, my name is Gideon. I’m 30, black, disabled, queer. I just fled an
extremely abusive situation that became very dangerous for me physically
and mentally. I’m in a place where I’m much safer, but unfortunately,
things are not ideal. I spent everything I have moving here, and now I’m
struggling to pay things like phone, food, medication, buying things
like a bed and shelves to store my things, and a fridge to be able to
store food. I’m pursuing disability, but that will take time, and I need
these essentials as soon as possible, especially the fridge. Any help
anyone can offer would be highly appreciated. Thank you so much for
reading this!

Please signal boost fam, lets help Gideon get their fridge if we can. Their disability is made worse by not being able to eat safe foods, so any help would be appreciated ❤

Click here to support Help Gideon Start A New Life organized by Gideon Hawke

sqbr:

beeth0ven:

not to sound glib but it’s important to support “ugly” cripples, too. those of us who can’t or don’t want to dress up, do makeup, etc. those of us who aren’t conventionally attractive. those of us who don’t have an “aesthetic”

it’s easy to ooo and aah over disabled people who also model, who have perfect makeup all the time, who have a congruent aesthetic all the time- but able bodied people need to also give the same support too those of us who don’t always “look 100%.”

it’s not just with disability, either. conventionally attractive people are always recived better.

also don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a knock on anybody, it’s a knock on a society that thinks beauty = value. but that’s not that fault of any one person!

somebody who doesn’t have on good makeup, who isn’t dressed up- that person is just as valuable as a model.

Not just “not conventionally attractive” either. People with food stains, skin conditions, drool, ratty old clothes, unusually shaped faces or bodies. People who clearly haven’t shaved or had their hair cut or washed in a while. People who stim or don’t make eye contact or speak with a lisp or stutter or not at all. And people who are very fat, and other things that aren’t coming to mind right now.

Not all of us can manage “normal”, let alone dressed up. And the ones who can’t are usually the ones most in need of support.

(I usually can manage “normal”, albeit with a lot of energy I’d rather spend elsewhere. But I know what a difference it makes to how I get treated. This also ties in with gender presentation, race etc)

balioc:

Before you say “everyone thinks X” or “society expects Y” or “there is such immense pressure to be Z,” stop for a moment and think – is there an expansive, popular, readily-findable-in-mainstream-sources genre of cultural commentary that propounds the exact opposite of the thing you’re about to say? 

Because, if so, the thing you’re about to say is definitely – at the least – not uncomplicatedly true.

Chances are that “everyone” thinks both X and ~X, that “society” expects both Y and ~Y, that in fact there is immense pressure both to be Z and to be ~Z, and that how things shake out for a given individual mostly boil down to raw happenstance: the quirks of your own family, the culture of your school/town/workplace as opposed to the next one over, the habits of the particular social group in which you found yourself embedded.  You are certainly going to think it’s obvious that Everything-As-A-Whole demands X and Y and Z, it’s going to seem so very clear that anything supporting ~X and ~Y and ~Z is a flukey outlier that can be discounted for purposes of general analysis, because you are constantly drawing evidence from your own life and therefore you are hopelessly biased.  But humanity is fractally diverse.  The forces of ~X and ~Y and ~Z are likely to be mighty indeed, even if they happen to be camped outside your field of view.

Sometimes you can try to resolve this issue of total cosmic ignorance with social science.  Usually it’s not going to work.