Thoughts on queerness, disability and marginalisation in history and culture by a 39 year old disabled and neurodivergent nonbinary person. If you would like to tip me for my work my Ko-Fi is https://ko-fi.com/thepalequeen
If you are in the UK and can take care of chickens, please consider offering a chance at an actual life to ex-battery hens who will otherwise be killed at their first moult at about six months old because it slightly reduces their egg production.
Industrial farming is a fucking dystopian nightmare. Please do your best to help the survivors.
Started sticking a doggie waste bag on my rollator and bringing the grabber stick with me when walking Cynthie, because there’s just so much rubbish about and apparently the local association would rather pay for ridiculously over-frequent petrol mowing than litter pickup or more bins.
Some pics of an outfit from last week I was just really pleased with.
Not just because I managed to dress in subtle nonbinary flag colours plus my Queer Wars tshirt (40th birthday present from my wonderful OH) but just for the whole vibe.
A whole bunch of friends have told me that I’m genuinely presenting much more androgynously at various points this year.
I know it’s not necessary to present androgynously to be nonbinary - there’s literally no single way to be nonbinary - but, absolutely honestly, androgyny is a thing I’ve been wanting my entire life. I kept presenting much more traditionally femme for literally decades because I was small curvy and round in the face and just assumed I’d never remotely manage it because I wasn’t the tall slender elven waif I always dreamed of being. I just assumed I’d look terrible if I tried to present as androgynous.
Then I got sick, and found out more and more about gender, and about *my* gender, and thought “fuck it”.
And it turned out short hair looked much better on me than I ever guessed.
And it turns out there’s more ways to present androgynously than being built like Tilda Swindon.
And it turned out that a *fuck* of a lot of the nearly-eating-disorder that has plagued me since I was about 12 was actually dysphoria, and changing my presentation did a *surprising* amount to fix it.
But hearing from other people in the wild that I’m genuinely managing this, that it’s not just something that *I *see in myself - that’s still pretty special to me.
I’m 40. The fact that I’m still finding a new way to be authentically myself that is genuinely making me happier
"Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality."
Just when you think lotr fanfic has peaked 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.
My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813
*electric guitar riff*
And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like
He did *so* well and just sat and purred as I twisted it off.
Remember to check your pets - I’ve no idea *where* he managed to get this, but the deer do wander into the gardens round here sometimes so I’m afraid I’m blaming them. And yourself too!
It’s cool to see DNA and traits move in populations in ancient DNA. It’s cool to see how that relates to modern populations, and how so many things we assumed from bits of written history, often by other peoples, are, if not dead wrong, More Complex Than That.
It is not fucking cool to see people trying to jam the dead dead horse of “race science” into this useful data. It’s fucking depressing.
This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!
All the craft groups I’m on because I like seeing people’s creations seem to be full of people making blue fucking puzzle pieces and talking about cure rhetoric.
Some of them respond well to having full facts about how fucking awful Autism $peaks, ABA and eugenics are when I drag all the trauma, the eugenicist discourse from medics I dealt with during my pregnancies, the terror I feel about how my wee brother could be treated, and why I personally would shy away from anyone wearing a blue puzzle piece for them. Others apparently would rather scream “hater”. I’ve been called a “TikTok autistic” more times than I can count.
When TS Eliot said “April is the cruellest month”, he had no fucking clue.
Seriously, if your idea of "destigmatising autism” is “it isn't an intellectual/learning disability", you are part of the fucking problem.
No, it isn't, but *many* autistic folks are intellectually/learning disabled due to co-occurring conditions and they are just as much a necessary, valuable and important part of the autistic community as any other autistic person. You do not "destigmatise" any disability by distancing it from a historically marginalised and Othered disability. That's just shifting *more* stigma to the most marginalised disability, throwing the *most* marginalised and abused people in the autistic community under the bus as you do so, and *that* is disableist as all hell.
We do *not* promote #AutisticAcceptance by buying into a disableist worldview that devalues disabled people, especially those who have historically suffered the most abuse and the most marginalisation. We promote autistic acceptance by accepting and taking pride in the broad diversity of our autistic community, with all of our needs, our co-occurring conditions and how that intersects with our other marginalisations, and by working for disabled liberation, accessibility and the end of disableism.
(Sorry, but it’s been one *fuck* of a long April already, and we’re not even halfway through yet).