Usually during Pride month, but especially this Pride month before the clusterfuck of a current Presidental Administation dominated all of our times, I see a lot of posts on how we should reject Marriage as a large victory because it is for the “mainstream” gay movement to show straights we are “just like them,” and that it took resources from other, more seemingly “radical,” issues we could be fighting. All of that is then followed by a, justified, flood
I never know where to fall on this, because, here’s the thing, both sides of this argument are kind of right here. People, especially LGBTQ people old enough remeber the peak of the AIDS crisis, are absolutely correct that the reason we even made marriage a priority is because gay people weren’t even allowed visitation rights during the AIDS crisis or life insurance benefits. That it only exacerbated insituitonal homophobia. These are all true, absolutely, and a lot of younger gay and trans people would benefit from learning our history between Stonewall and Obergefell.
But, even with its radical roots, the marriage issue, like much of the gay rights movement, was absoutely highjacked by the ‘just like you" neoliberal crowd for their own purposes. One of those purposes was to push people that didn’t fit what they wanted as their image. By the white upper middle class gay men who felt slighted and didn’t want to be associated with the “wrong” kind of gays. To these people any inch given to the undesirable gay people, from butch lesbiand to trans people, would force conservatives to “Take away” the thing that made them feel normal.
Consider Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan is a “moderate” (who just a day ago said, in an article in which he advocated giving Trump his Wall to Appease him, he supports banning access to health care for trans kids and compared it conversion therapy) just this past Janurary blamed a 2% drop in popular support for gay rights on the expsure of trans people in politics and the “far left” taking (back) over the Gay rights movment. This is why people too young to remeber AIDS think Marriage was a bougie “just like you” politics:
Like, yes, we should absoluely know the history of why marriage became such a central issue for us, but we should also remember how it was highjacked and used to strip the movment of any radical aspects and make it a white gay male centric movement.
i feel like the most important piece of wisdom i can impart on teenagers is that no one–no one–knows what the fuck they’re doing
my brother is 26 years old, makes $200k a year, and just bought a house with his fiance. he’s the success story you hear about but never actually meet in person, but it all happened by accident. he wanted to go to college for clarinet performance, but he got rejected from all the top schools. so he decided to major in physics instead, and then went on to get a doctorate to put off being an adult for a few more years. but then he ended up dropping out halfway through the program and accepting a job with google as a software engineer. so to reiterate: my brother majored in something he was not interested in, and then he got a job that had nothing to do with his degree.
he isn’t successful because he had some master plan he followed, he just stumbled around blindly until something worked out. and that’s what we’re all doing–i majored in political science and now i do customer service for a company that makes industrial-sized gas detection monitors. the marketing director at my company has a degree in biology, and my mom has an MBA and works at a middle school. no one knows what they’re doing, we’re all just trying different things until something works out.
so if you don’t have a plan, that’s fine. most of us don’t. and even those of us who do, don’t usually end up doing the thing they thought they would. it’s okay to relax and let life carry you wherever it’s gonna carry you. because even though a lot of us don’t end up doing the thing we wanted, most of us end up happy anyway.
I’ve been thinking about this post since I made it a few hours ago, and I realized that I literally don’t know anyone who’s doing what they thought they’d be doing at this point in their life. I know a girl that has a degree in neuroscience and works in a restaurant (and makes quite a bit more money than I do, might I add), and a guy who wanted to be a parole officer but is now a security guard. I know people who wanted to be lawyers but ended up not having the grades for law school. I have a friend who’s 24 and just finished her bachelor’s, and two friends who decided to go to grad school because the idea of joining the adult world terrified them.
When I was seventeen, I was 100% sure that I was going to get a job as a bureaucrat and save the world. When I was a 21-year-old recent college grad, I found out that it’s impossible to get a government job unless you know someone. So I gave up and found something else. I know my teenage self would be disappointed if she could see where I’m at, but you know what? I don’t care. Because teenage me was an idiot. She didn’t know anything about the world or how it worked, and she couldn’t have possibly predicted the curveballs that life would throw at her. And because I don’t know a single person who’s doing the thing they wanted to do when they were teenagers.
I know a thousand people who aren’t where they thought they’d be, and zero people who are following the path they set out for themselves. All of us are confused and all of us are scared, and it’s okay if you are too.
Honestly thank u, i needed to hear this again
Looking back at my closest friends in college, only one is doing exactly what she thought she’d be doing, and she’s considering changing career paths.
Looking at the most successful and happiest people I know, they’ve all gone through serious career changes before the age of 30. Most of them have done crazy things like cross-country moves or quitting a successful career to try something new.
how is trump alive?? like hes rlly gone thru his whole life like That …. and no one has ever just fuckin decked him?? gave him the ole one two? knocked his lights out??? incredible
I feel like I understand this in general, but I don’t know that it makes sense to me personally.
For me, knowing that I have a language related gift and that I don’t seem to have it for any reason but how my brain is, makes me WANT to use it. I try various things in life but I always go back not just to wanting to tell stories and use my gifts, but also to the sense that I know I have a purpose and can always be sure it’s there in the background.
This SEEMS positive to me personally, not negative. I see so many people around me who feel like they don’t know whether their life means anything or what they should do with it, talking about how they’ll never have what they really want, and they seem… terribly sad, to me.
So when I read posts like this it confuses me. The stuff on the right sounds positive and nice, and yes I have struggled with a few of the things on the left, but it really seems like a competing access needs thing to me.
Where if I want the good stuff on the right, I have to give up my purpose, because it’s on the left.
I think graphics like that are meant to describe neurotypicals.
That makes sense.
It’s just… I dunno, it’s weird. A LOT of writing is just run of the mill annoying as fuck hard work—commitment to finishing a huge project; ability to pace oneself or manage time; careful cultivation of responding to critique, harsh betas, or editors without emotional overload, etc.
But sometimes when people say “how did you make those words flow like that,” or things of that sort… I have no idea. My mind did the thing.”
So I absolutely don’t think “I’m a genius” (or whatever) means “I can do difficult stuff.” It 100% doesn’t.
But for me, “you have a gift but you won’t be able to publicly use it/succeed without working hard and carefully cultivating skills to GO WITH IT” is WAY more useful than “talent and skill are actually the same thing.”
Trump is notorious for his “filing system”: when he is finished with a
piece of paper, he tears it into tiny pieces and throws it away, which
is fine if you’re a CEO (maybe), but is radioactively illegal under the
Presidential Records Act, because the President works for the public,
and is required by law to archive their official papers and save them
for public scrutiny.
White House staffers gave up on trying to explain this to Trump, who
just kept on tearing up everything, from official letters from Senators
to letters from constituents to notes and other paperwork.
The staffers – paid nearly $70,000 year – ended up with full-time jobs
retrieving scraps of paper from Trump’s trash-can and piecing them back
together with clear tape so they can be filed in the National Archives.
Some of these staffers were eventually fired; they’ve spoken to
Politico about their year in the Trump administration as paper-tapers.
fishkeeping is such a trap, because you think it’ll be a fun little hobby where you get your hands wet and then just watch your fish for hours; but in actuality, it forces you to learn about chemistry and biology and gardening and plumbing and electricity and woodworking and even latin bc you’ve unconsciously memorized hundreds of scientific names, and a couple months later, you’ll find yourself in aisle 13 of lowe’s picking up another box of #0 x 2-7/8" structural lag screws, smelling like algae and sawdust while you rack your brain trying to remember what aquatic plant species naturally occur in the peat bogs of northern kalimantan
What that series looks like to me is a man willing to take insults and punches to his face while remaining calm. Is really not how nazi-wannabes should be shown. Makes them look like martyrs. Isn’t even how most nazi-wannabes reacts to simplest insults. If you needs to punch a nazi-wannabe, hit one that is being actively offensive (more than the salute). One of the majority rabid bigots what gets the dog snarl on his face for just seeing peoples protest his bigotry. How someone got a calm nazi-wannabe is a mystery (since most is rabid hate-mongers), and is more a mystery why it was chosen as symbolic, since it makes the nazi-wannabe puncher look worse.
Come on, can do better. There is lots of ways to make nazi-wannabes look bad (they does it to themselves so often). Punching them while they stand and take it calmly is not one of them.
Recognizing that the Stonewall riots were started by bisexual trans women and street queens of colour who did sex work (and not just the ones in this source, lots of trans and gendernonconforming queer sex workers of colour) is about more than preventing whitewashing and celebrating the real heroes (even though that is very important)
You also really can not understand the Stonewall riots without knowing these facts.
If you don’t know how the civil rights movement politicized queer people of colour, who marched and protested and rioted for their rights as people of colour or were influenced by what happened,
If you don’t know how the Vietnam War and the draft simultaneously caused a boom of the sex industry and a crack down on sex worker by conservative politicians,
If you don’t know how the publishing of The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966 and the availability on physical transition in Harry Benjamin’s practice in New York gave transgender women hope of a better future and an uncompromising approach towards transphobia,
If you don’t know how news of the riot of trans women and street queens at the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco traveled to trans people in New York,
Then you can’t understand what happened on June 28th, 1969 when queer trans sex workers of colour decided they had had enough, that now was their time to fight back.
The identities of the people who started this riot are vital to understanding why they had that mixture of political awareness, anger,
courage and hope to riot in the first place.
I would loooooooove it if we all talked a bit more about every OTHER part of our history besides Stonewall and acknowledged our long history fighting cops and how necessary that still is.
But if we are gonnna talk about it over and over again this month, let’s at least not reduce it to 2 or 3 or 5 names or decontexualize it.
Screen readers are software programs that allow blind or visually impaired users to read the text that is displayed on the computer screen with a speech synthesizer or braille display.
The problem is, these programs can only help a person access written text. They aren’t able to describe images. This means that a lot of the internet is inaccessible to people with vision problems.
(Think about how many images there are on Tumblr alone. How often does a post rely on someone being able to read or understand an image? Every post of a screenshot from Twitter or of a text convo or anything else is inaccessible)
Image descriptions are a way to make the internet more accessible.
Image descriptions allows blind and visually impaired people to know what is being talked about in a post.
Further, image descriptions can be helpful to people with other disabilities as well.
For instance, a lot of Autistic people have difficulty with visual processing. Though it’s not talked about as much as auditory processing difficulties, visual processing difficulties are a similar concept.
Visual processing problems are not a problem with vision* (the eyes) but rather with the part of the brain that processes visual information. This can mean taking longer to process visual information than is typical or having difficulty understanding what’s going on in busy images or all sorts of other difficulties processing visual information.
Visual processing problems can make it difficult or impossible to understand what is going on in an image, particularly busy images or images with a lot of similar colors or very bright colors. Gifs can be particularly difficult to process due to the movement.
Image descriptions can help a person with visual processing difficulties to comprehend an image.
I’ve had times when being able to read an image description made it so that, when I looked back at the image, I was able to process it better. Often, image descriptions will make note of things I hadn’t noticed in busy images.
Image descriptions can also be used to help guide the viewer to notice particular things. For instance, in the gifs I posted, I wasn’t able to list every single detail of the background. Not only would it be overwhelming for someone to try to read, but it would also have made it difficult to remember the point of the image. Instead, I described details that I thought helped capture the feel of the picture. Even for people who can see and process the images ok, these captions may guide them to notice details they would have missed otherwise.
Image descriptions are a highly useful, and under-utilized, tool for making the internet more accessible to everyone.
Right now, there are too many disabled people who unable to access the internet fully due to accessibility issues. We’ve talked about the ways that blind or visually impaired people may be limited when accessing the internet, as well as people with visual processing difficulties, but these are only a slice of the accessibility pie. d/Deaf and HoH people often struggle with a lack of reliable captioning on videos** which also affects people with auditory processing difficulties (and, most of the time, auto-captions don’t cut it. auto-captions are often riddled with errors ranging from amusing to impossible understand what’s going on). Far too many podcasts lack transcripts, which, again, limits access for people with any form of difficulty with hearing or auditory processing.
This post could go on and on if I were to go through every accessibility issue that prevents disabled people from fully accessing the internet.
And, it’s important to remember when thinking about things like accessibility that the internet is not simply a means of entertainment. The internet has become a vital tool in this day and age. Society exists at least as much online as it does in meatspace. Our world has quickly evolved to one in which the internet is an integral aspect of daily life.
To be cut off from the internet, to be denied equal access from this tool, is to be cut off from full participation in society.
Barriers that stop people from accessing the internet are barriers to employment, barriers to housing, barriers to socialization, barriers to culture, barriers to accessing medicine, and so, so much more.
Internet accessibility is important, and the more we can all do to make the internet more accessible for the, the closer we are able to get to a future in which all people can participate fully in society.
If you have the time, energy, and ability to do so and want to do something to help others:
Please consider adding image descriptions to posts you create or reblog!
(If someone sends me an ask to remind me, I’ll make a post with some tips on writing image descriptions as I know it can seem overwhelming at first)
This small investment of your time helps to make the internet a more accessible place. Further, just as you came to me to find out why I add image descriptions, others who see your posts will be curious and will learn more. As posts with image descriptions spread more and more, more people become aware of this. Hopefully, one day, image descriptions will be the norm rather than the exception.
Thank you for coming to me with this question! I hope you have a lovely day!
-Sabrina
*as a note, you can have both vision problems and visual processing difficulties. For instance, my vision is pretty terrible (like 20/400 without my contacts) and I have visual processing difficulties as well
**and, SERIOUSLY, the captions of a video are NOT a place to leave “witty” remarks or commentary! First, you’re probably not as funny/witty as you think. Second, but most importantly, these are an accessibility tool. Imagine if anyone watching a YouTube video could add voice clips on top of the video whenever they felt like it and it would block out the audio of the video, making it impossible to understand. That’s what you’re doing when you add remarks to the captions. You’re not being funny; you’re just an asshole
(also, not only is ok to reblog this, but I encourage you to. Please help more people learn about accessibility and image descriptions)
True in Europe too. You don’t need proof of just how bad the human rights violations of deportations are and how many refugees die. Many Nazis didn’t have that proof either.
If you would call the state to take away your ‘illegal’ neighbours to some unknown place where they may or may not survive… yeah. people like you actively made the Holocaust possible and might do it again.
So excuse me if I don’t care for your opinions, your actions are pretty clear.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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