Reblog If Its Ok To Spam You With Boops

you are so fucking gay!!!!!!!!!! and i love you!!!!!!!

Thank you random person who I definitely do not know, I am gay and I love you too!! :3c

ngl I thought the puzzle piece as an autistic symbol meant like. I am a vital puzzle piece to your society. humans would never have invented half the things they did without us. you're telling me it means I'm missing something?? buddy. listen. listen to me reeeeaal closely. no human has all the pieces to humanity. no one. no one has all the features enables no one has all the strengths weaknesses or quirks. no one has a whole puzzle. we make the freaking complete picture together. that's the freaking point.

So many people who get periods are like “Ugh it sucks that having a menstrual cycle makes you almost die every month” like no that’s not normal you need to go to the doctor

There needs to be a real discussion about how y'all cannot help but dequeer intersex people. It's not intersex kids being forced into/pressured into SRS, its lucky cis kids. it's not a trans woman, its someone who's birth sex is "too close" to being female so they are "basically cis". Some of you queers are allergic to acknowledging intersex people are their own group, with their own diverse experiences, and their own struggles that deserve conversations that do not centre you.

Overemphasizing someone as cis (even if they tell you otherwise) as a way to undermine their voice as an intersex person is erasure. Barring us from queerness is erasure of our struggles. How can you call yourself someone who is a supoorter of the LGBT when you only care about yourself? Your voice matters as much as that of a white feminist's.

I'd there anything that you'd like a prosthetic limb to be able to do? Like something that's not on the market but you could slip on to accomplish a task and then easily remove before it gets cumbersome?

I'm sorry i sat on this ask for so long, it's been very difficult to write an answer to this question that i feel is both honest and useful, but here's my best attempt at answering with what i consider to be an okayish amount of context...

I'm assuming you're asking because this post of mine blew up and got a lot of attention, and it looks like you're a maker that's keen on designing things to help disabled people and that's great! there are a lot of areas where products just don't exist but are of great help or need to people, and filling that gap is really really great! lots of people have lots of different needs, and many disabilities and situations can be helped with technological solutions, much of which need more development, both professionally and more grass roots.

but when it comes to my situation, ie upper limb amputee, i cannot stress enough: the problem is not prosthetic technology, the problem is other people, and ableism.

what i want people to focus on is that i can do almost everything i need to for myself without a prosthesis, using just my elbow, my nub (the soft squishy end of my residual limb), and a taking my time. a bit more awkward, a bit slower, more trips to the fridge and back, but i can do it. the things that i can't do myself, I'm lucky enough to have people to help me and happy to do so.

but what people actually focus on is prostheses, people love prostheses... so let's talk prostheses!

I have a myoelectric prosthetic "hand" - a big robot gripper that i can control with intentional nerve signals picked up via electrodes inside the socket that sits over my forearm; telling it to open and close on command, and controlling how fast it does so. the initial reason i wanted one was for soldering, because electronics is an on and off hobby i wanted to continue. I'm sure you know that through-hole soldering is at least a three handed job even for the regularly limbed, so i thought i needed it for that at least, and figured it would be handy (hah) to just wear all day for any task i might want two hands for.

well, in the four years of training and rehab and practice since... I'm fairly confident i don't actually need it for soldering, let alone anything else. my elbow grip and dexterity is good enough i can easily hold and aim a spool of solder without my prosthesis. i sometimes put it on to take out the trash, but that's just a time saver, it takes less trips and is faster than slinging bags over my nub arm. it has a little led flashlight in it that's useful at night outside sometimes? and as alluded to in the original post, it's got a small tip that can press little buttons that my nub can't, and that's the role i most often reach for it to fill.

but myo prostheses are a hassle to put on, often taking several attempts to get positioning right, it's hot and sweatty, there can be pressure sores, and it's real heavy in a way your shoulder never really gets used to. these are not really technological issues that need more research or smarts to solve, they're pretty fundamental limits of trying to attach any kind of medical devices to the human body. if i really had any big necessary use case for absolutely needing two hands, I'd go back to physical therapy and re-train to use a body powered prosthesis; the ones that secure with nice soft leather straps and use your opposing shoulder to control hook grip with tension wires. technology that hasn't changed in several centuries because we kinda already perfected it... it's low tech, reliable, has built in proportional control and feedback, and never features in science fiction because it's just not cool enough.

so why do i still bother? why keep my prosthesis, maintain it, have the socket padded so it keeps fitting, continue the slightly painful muscle control exercises instead of letting them atrophy and the damn robot hand sit on the shelf forever?

the problem is other people, and ableism.

when I leave the house in my natural body, nub on display for all to see (under an arm warmer because perpetually cold stump is a problem seemingly every amputee has to deal with)...

people stare. they notice me from a distance, no matter what i wear, how i carry my body. but it's not just staring. it's glaring, it's disgust, it's fear, it's dehumanisation. i have people recoil in horror, cross the street to avoid me, pull their children close to their bodies as if they might start dropping limbs if they get too close. people have stopped me in the street, from behind, demanding to know "what happened", I've had to get off trams at random stops to escape little old ladies insisting i disclose my highly traumatic medical history and that I'm being rude and uncooperative for not "educating" them on "such a fascinating curiosity"... or best yet, the one all my wheelchair using friends know inside out: forceful unwelcome "help" from strangers without even a hello, yet alone an ask. i once had a man leap to his feet and begin thrusting his hands towards my crotch because i wedged a water bottle between my thighs to unscrew the cap and he decided i was clearly incapable of doing it myself... and this isn't even getting into the ways that medical professionals treat me differently.

i go outside in my natural body, and I'm treated as a freak.

you know what happens when i go out wearing my prosthesis? children smile, adults mind their own goddamned business, leave me alone, and at absolute worst I've had a total of two people in four years talk to me about it, politely introducing themselves before saying "that's neat, how does it work?"...

because fiction and futurism have given people so many deeply ingrained fundamental ideas about prostheses and amputation that I am treated more like a human being while wearing a bulky robot claw with electrodes pressed into my skin, than when i dare to exist as i now naturally am.

this is also borne out by the hundreds of notes on my original post declaring we need to invest more, research more, design more, so that prosthetic technology is better and "works" and is cooler... and literally nobody asking why a piece of technology was designed in such a way that i needed to use my nose, needed to hold two buttons down simultaneously half a meter apart that are barely fingertip sized, when either of them being a toggle would work - a firmware fix that would take 30 seconds to implement if anyone actually thought about the real technological needs of limb different people, instead of scifi fantasies about improving prosthetic technology until its "indistinguishable from the human body", as if that goal should be self evidently desirable.

the actual technological solution to this situation, by the way, is a bracelet with a chopstick glued to it.

so.

*deep breath*

I'm sorry this was long and angry, I hope you can sense that my anger isn't directed at you, the question asker, but broadly at everyone and the way society perceives amputees/limb different people... and I hope anyone who reblogged my original post also shares this, because damn did tumblr miss the point of it!

to finish off, I'll give you the snippy snarky bitch response i originally had in consideration, before I decided to spend several hours on paragraphs of furiously slow one-thumbed attempt at shifting my audience's perception of prostheses... because legit it's great that you want to know how things can be improved for disabled people through technology! it's just that in this one particular case...

if you want to design some technology that would be most helpful to me but is totally absent from the current market, I'd like a portable pocket sized device that projects a psionic field to make ableds mind their own fucking business and just treat me like a human being when i go outside :3

the fact that pro-monarchy arguments have degenerated, over the past few centuries, from “the king rules by divine right and is accountable to nobody but god”, to “uhm the royals generate a lot of income from tourism” will never stop being extremely funny to me

cant stop thinking about this video

Literally this, as a fellow intersex person who cant really pass for either, yk without procedures i don't want anyways. I stand by you, it's bullshit that we have to identify ourselves to the government like it's some one or the other box. Stand with us because it's not just our rights we're fighting for. It's human rights. Lets all remember that.

Feeling extremely disappointed in the community response to Trump's gender order regarding X gender markers on documents. Can y'all quit with the victim-blaming and "I'm so glad I don't have an X gender marker, I knew it was a bad idea" statements for two seconds to support those of us who are targeted by this?

I have X on all of my documents. Birth certificate, passport, ID, you name it I have an X on it. I'm intersex & trans. I'm percieved as ambiguous 100% of the time and I can't pass for shit. Stealth is not an option for me, I am visibly intersex/trans no matter what.

Having either M or F on my documents wasn't any more feasible than having an X on everything at the time I got my documents. Which I had to work my ass off to get, by the way, because I was homeless and had no documents and I needed to obtain everything from scratch, which of course is made as hard as possible to do. (How do you provide proof of identity without any identity documents? How do you provide proof of address without an address? How do you pay for any of this when you can't even afford your own groceries and you get all your needs met through local mutual aid? How do you drop anything off or attend interviews or court without transportation?)

Goddamn right I was getting an X on my documents after having to go through hell to obtain them. If I had to work that hard for them, my documents were going to be how I wanted them.

Now I'm being told the president is trying to invalidate my documents, that depending on how things go I may be held if I try to go anywhere due to my passport having an X gender marker, that we don't know the ways this will be enforced and whether I will still be able to use my documents or not, and my trans community is saying it's actually my own fault for having an X gender marker in the first place and that I was just begging to be discriminated against by having one.

I am in a very vulnerable position and I should be supported by my own community when anti-trans anti-intersex discrimination targets me and people I care about. Y'all are dropping the ball and abandoning your siblings when we need each other most.

Also, for the record, I believe that no documentation should have gender markers. However, the US requires gender markers on documentation at the moment and that fucking sucks. It seems like this will be the case for the foreseeable future. The way people have been saying "nobody should get an X gender marker because gender markers shouldn't exist" just feels very "your strategy pales in comparison to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart" and then not firebombing a Walmart. While we can and should work towards gender markers not existing in the future, people with X gender markers exist right now and maybe y'all should support us instead of constantly throwing us under the bus.

As a late diagnosed autist I will say one of the most damaging but transformative experiences I've ever had was being misdiagnosed with BPD.

Everyday my heart goes out to people with BPD.

The amount of stigma and silencing they face is astonishing and sickening.

I took DBT for years. Therapists use to turn me away because of my diagnosis.

I would be having full blown autistic meltdowns, crying for help literally - but because I was labeled as BPD ANY time I cried I was treated as manipulative and unstable.

As if the only reason I could be crying was if I was out to trick someone.

95% of the books out there with Borderline in the title are named shit like 'How to get away from a person with Borderline', 'How to stop walking on eggshells (with a person who has BPD)'

I was never allowed to feel true pain or panic or need.

That was 'attention seeking behavior', not me asking for help when a disability was literally inhibiting my ability to process emotions.

There were dozens of times where I had a full meltdown and was either threatened with institutionalization or told I was doing it for attention.

My failing relationships weren't due to a communication issue, or the inability to read social cues. No, because I was labeled borderline, my unstable relationships were my fault. Me beggong nuerotypicals to just be honest and blunt with what they meant was me pestering them for validation.

Borderline patients can't win.

And the funny thing is - I asked my therapist about autism. I told her I thought I was on the spectrum.

BPD is WILDLY misdiagnosed with those with autism and I had many clear signs.

Instead - she told me 'If you were autistic we wouldn't be able to have this conversation'. She made me go through a list of autistic traits made clearly for children, citing how I didn't fit each one.

And then she told me that me identifying with the autism community was the BPD making me search for identity to be accepted - and that I wasn't autistic, just desperate to fit in somewhere.

I didn't get diagnosed for another ten years. For ten years I avoided the autism community - feeling as if I were just a broken person who wanted to steal from people who 'really needed it'.

Because of my providers - I began to doubt my identity MORE, not less.

Ten years of thinking I was borderline and being emotionally neglected and demonized by a system meant to help me.

To this day, I still don't trust neurotypicals. Not fully.

I know I'm not borderline now - but my heart aches for them. Not for the usual stuff. But for the stigma. And the asshole doctors. And the dismissiveness and threatening and the idea of institutionalization hanging over their head.

I love Borderline people. I always will. I'm not Borderline but if you are I love you and I'm sorry.

You're not a bad person. You're not a therapists worst nightmare, you are a human with valid feelings and fears.

Borderline people I'm sorry.

listen. aging into your thirties rocks. yes your joints get a little creaky. yes you can’t sleep in a pretzel on the floor anymore after a concert or a convention. and you lose some friends. but the thing is that you sort out who your real friends are and you sort out who you really are. and you get to see your friends settling into careers they like, and adopt new dogs and cats, and you find a job you can stand, and get really good at arts and crafts, and maybe that book you loved as a kid gets a movie deal and it doesn’t suck, and you learn to like new food and bake your own bread, and you realize that the great portfolio of self harm scars you all used to curate are going white with age and not updated, and half your friends are a different gender now and so much happier and maybe you are too, and you know who you are, and that it’s a journey and not a revelation. it’s a direction you’re headed, and you’re enjoying the trip.

reaching your 30′s rocks. and i’m hearing good things about what comes next, too.