I love fat trans men. Fat trans men with hairy tummies, fat trans men with belly rolls and stretch marks and cellulite. They’re so unique and special in their own ways and their bodies are radient.
For people who haven’t heard: this month, the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) are planning on updating the criteria for getting an autism diagnosis. On paper, this sounds like a good thing. It’s not.
The DSM is the handbook used by healthcare workers worldwide, for diagnosing mental disorders and the like. You may have read that the autistic diagnosis criteria is getting updated and, like many in the autistic community, hoped that this meant that it would be expanded, to make it easier for AFAB, transgender, and non-white people to be diagnosed (as it is notoriously hard for anyone except for white, cisgender men to obtain an autism diagnosis). However, they recently released a statement saying that they were not expanding the criteria, but were instead making it more ‘conservative’, as they feel autism is being ‘over-diagnosed’. (Which is, of course, bullshit for a whole plethora of reasons which I’m sure you’ve heard before.)
As-of my posting this, they have not released the official, updated criteria yet, so there is not much we can do right now. But there is one thing that we must agree upon: DO NOT SHAME PEOPLE FOR SELF-DIAGNOSING WITH AUTISM. Because obtaining an autism diagnosis is, quite literally, only getting harder.
Here is the longest Sdefa text to date, written for a conlang relay and performed by me and my friend on viola and cello!
Last week was the premiere of this video, the presentation for the relay. The above is included in that, but there’ll be better audio and video quality if you watch it here instead. You can also check out this amazing website that Keras (one of the relay participants) put together with the relay results and even some statistics!
There’s a translation in the video, but here it is as well. This translation is slightly different, as the one in the video has some awkward phrasings to accommodate Sdefa’s word order, so that the English translation can match what’s happening in the music at any given time.
Long long ago there was a person who lived here and learned to respect their ancestors. Listen as I tell you their story!
Their parent took them into these woods so they could gather blueberries together. They saw a plant with many berries, so they very happily began to collect them.
The parent knocked down a beehive, causing the bees to emerge and swarm around them! The two quickly ran away from the bees, dropping the berries they had gathered.
The child asked, “Why do we gather blueberries?”
The parent responded, “Don’t say that! By gathering blueberries, we are connected with our ancestors.”
After this, the two gathered blueberries for many days.
Now I have told you the story of the person who learned to respect their ancestors.
I posted the text in both of Sdefa’s orthographies last week but here it is again: