You! Tumblr User!

hey, I know these are just words on your screen, but I really want you to know that everything is going to be okay. life is weird, brains are weird, and it seems like everything is just overwhelming. all the time.

no matter how hectic things get around you, I know that you'll be okay. things will get easier, and all of these things stressing you out will be so much easier to manage as time goes on. you're capable of pushing through any hurdles you might face because I know you've already made it to the point you are at today, and even though everyone acts like living day to day is easy, I know that it's incredibly difficult to do.

take things easy, you are loved, and everything is going to be all right

seeing everyone just mindlessly sign up for threads despite all the clear warning signs feels like I’m living in Sailor Moon or a magical girl anime episode where the Monster of the Day just set up shop over night and their product is literally draining your lifeforce for the Dark Kingdom but people keep going there

the theme i'm seeing re: furiosa is people seem to think it's just a corporate cash grab/milking of a series, which is an absolute shame because nothing could be further from the truth. george miller's love and passion for his world and characters is so evident in it. it recontextualizes entire scenes and relationships in Fury Road, gives new meanings and depths to specific scenes, and im going crazy thinking people are gonna pass it over because they think it's just the equivalent of an overblown straight to dvd sequel.

Engaged in some drawpile therapy with @maddlong after we both finished SIGNALIS - I was particularly happy with the sleepy MYNAH. The game is a beautiful and finely crafted survival horror, I can’t recommend it enough.

Minor spoilers maybe? It’s mostly just gags and memery based around in-game lore.

I’m seeing a bunch of posts that make me think most USAmericans don’t know about The No Surprises Act.

It was passed in 2021 (thank you Biden) and essentially states that if you don’t have insurance or your insurance doesn’t cover a service you need (or want) you are entitled to a Good Faith Estimate of the cost of care. (If your insurance does cover the service, you should be able to estimate the cost of care based on your deductible and co-pay.)

As a healthcare provider who does not accept any insurance, I am very careful to not violate The No Surprises Act. Why? Because for every penny more than $400 that the Good Faith Estimate was “off” (or if it wasn’t provided), you are entitled to a refund for that amount.

Y’all. Ask for a Good Faith Estimate. Get it in writing. Compare it to what you are paying. If you are not provided an estimate or if it’s wrong by more than $400, demand a refund.

I'm sorry that the terfs made their way onto your blog but it does feel good to see you support trans people. Thank you for that

Always.

I think, charitably, that the discourse going down on that post is an extrapolation and over-focus on one element of the point I was making: that for me, determining with certainty that I was cis was a rather fraught process. I was presented with many alternatives, but underlying their imposition on me was the oddly regressive idea that the things I liked, the principles I valued, the parts of myself I was proud of were not permitted of women. My whole life I got smacked with the background radiation that I couldn't like being strong because women aren't allowed to be stronger than men. I couldn't like being loud and boistrous because women aren't allowed to take up space. I couldn't be a math geek because women aren't smart. It was all deeply regressive misogyny from day one, but I started getting hit with it slathered in a fresh coat of paint - all those assumptions still held to be true, but now there was the out that I could do all those things if I just wasn't a woman.

Concluding that the underlying bioessentialist premise was wrong was very important. Absolutely none of those statements were true, and were only ever maintained by cultural saturation, goalpost-readjustment when they were actively disproven, and the occasional bout of lying with statistics to pretend they weren't just Shit All The Way Down. The core premise that certain things were only permitted of or possible for men was bullshit, and I didn't need to surrender the gender I liked best in order to play in the spaces I wanted to. I could simply exist the way I was already existing. I didn't need anything else.

The misinterpretation is the assumption that this being true of me means this is everybody's relationship with gender. I turned out to be cis, so for me, feeling that holding onto my assigned gender wasn't allowed was distressing - just another invocation of the same bioessentialist bullshit I'd been dealing with since the preschool playground. This is because misgendering is fundamentally denying that a person has the right to express themself the way they want. When aimed at me, it says I'm not performing traditional femininity well enough to deserve my pronouns. The same disrespect is the root of misgendering when aimed at trans people. "Perform your gender to my satisfaction or I will confiscate it."

The problem is, bioessentialism is 100% ingrained into the terf playbook, which is why, for instance, all their shitty talking points about trans athletes eventually boil down to "no woman can ever defeat a man in any contest because we are simply naturally weak and stupid and there is nothing we can do about it" and quite frankly nothing disgusts me more than the defeatist acceptance of the very lie that feminism is dedicated to overcoming. Instead of accepting that the paradigm of bioessentialism is a false dichotomy right from the jump, they embrace and weaponize it against the people whose existence proves the dichotomy is a lie. If gender essentialism is fundamentally false, then it is nobody's fucking business what anybody does with their gender. If the lines don't exist, nobody needs to enforce them. And yet there the terfs go, hunting down people whose lives are none of their business and trying to argue that they represent some great and terrible evil, some downfall of society made flesh, something that makes it totally correct and normal for them to spend so much time thinking about strangers' genitalia. They want this to be a noble crusade so badly they won't even examine what flag they're flying.

I love and support the trans people in my life and will always, always stand on the side of your right to exist, but alongside that, terf rhetoric especially disgusts and infuriates me because it is, at its heart, utter cowardice. The world told them they were weak and stupid and inferior and they fucking believed it. And now they think Fighting The Good Fight For Women means turning around and using the same paradigmatic weapon that hurt them to hurt the people whose existence outside the binary proves the weapon is a lie. They're the same shithead schoolyard bullies who made me believe my entire existence was foundationally wrong for years of my life and I will never, ever side with them or the shitty, cowardly rhetoric that contributed to the loneliest years of my life.

Figure out who you are and do it on purpose. Find the real source of the misery in your life and try fighting that instead of the other crabs in the bucket. Trans rights.

"this userbase is aging" good