Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.
Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.
You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.
That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?
You really want a human.
“Looks like someone for you.”
Jon kicked Ginna’s boots, which were currently resting on the table, and she glanced over toward the door. A clump of knee-high aliens, plump and round and covered in golden fur, were lifting their little pink noses into the air - scenting the air in the bar.
Sashrans. Perfect.
Ginna quickly downed the last of her drink and dropped her feet to the floor. The Gentleman of Fortune was full to the gills of professional companions looking for work, she wouldn’t be the only one in here with a fondness for sashrans. She needed to work quickly if she wanted a chance at whatever job these ones were hiring for. The sound and vibration of her boots caught the attention of the group, and Ginna followed it quickly with a greeting in the quiet shushing sounds of their own language.
A universal translator would take care of most of the talking, but by knowing a little of their language Ginna proved she had worked with their kind before and cared enough to learn it. Caring was probably the most important skill a companion could cultivate.
It paid off. The group of sashrans centered quickly on her and darted over, still in their clump.
“I am human Ginna, companion for hire,” Ginna introduced, tapping the side of her visor to activate the display.
“Sala and Rini, with crew. Spice collectors,” the largest of the sashrans introduced, tapping at their own earbud. Their information began to stream onto Ginna’s display, while her own would be playing in their ear. She was proficient in everything from weapons to mechanics to medicine, xenobiology to politics, and of course survival in any kind of situation from atmosphere decompression in space to a tsunami on a planet. The more varied the knowledge they had the better a companion a human could make, and Ginna prided herself on being one of the best.
As for the sashrans, they’d found a jungle planet with a plant that was delicious to their senses. Cultivation efforts had failed thus far, so the price was high enough to support the risk of hunting for it on its home range. A six-month tour was on offer. It seemed they’d contracted with another professional companion a few times, a man named Drix, and Ginna quickly switched over to the guild’s internal records to see what he had to say of these sashrans and the planet they were harvesting from.
The sashrans themselves would be able to check what Ginna’s former employers had to say about her too.
Drix had enjoyed working with Sala and Rini’s crew, it dripped out of every line of his reports. He’d included good detail about life aboard their ship and the risks of the planet, that Ginna would have to look into closer later to be prepared.
All she needed to know at the moment was that they paid well, the risks were not unacceptably high, and that they treated their human companions well. It sounded like a job for her.
“Sala and Rini and crew, I would take this job,” Ginna told them.
The sashrans shushed and buzzed together, their tones sounding happy to Ginna’s relatively untrained ear, and she hoped she was reading them right. They were such beautiful little creatures, and she’d always enjoyed working for their kind before. They were close enough she could have reached out to touch them, pet their soft velvet fur, but she resisted. Touching them uninvited would be rude.
Finally they turned back to her. “Sala and Rini and crew will, with joy, contract to hire companion Ginna,” the lead one answered.
Contract negotiations went quickly enough, using the standard guild template and modifying it here or there as both parties preferred and agreed upon. Sashrans were easy to haggle with, not like the argumentative akskar. Soon enough Ginna had a contract and three days to prepare her effects for travel.
“It has been a pleasure,” Ginna told the sashrans. “I look forward to being your companion.”
She would have expected them to leave, then, go get their own things ready for launch. Instead the smallest one pushed forward - all wrapped in pale gold velvet fur and their sweet little pink forepaws resting on Ginna’s knee.
“Companion Ginna will now engage in petting for promotion of pack bonding?” they asked hopefully.
“Of course,” Ginna reached out toward the sashran, let them smell her palm, but it seemed this sashran wasn’t shy at all. They immediately pushed their head into her hand. There was nothing in the galaxy so soft as a sashran’s fur. Ginna dug her fingers in around the ruff of the sashran’s neck, gently scratching, and then smoothed the fur all the way down their back.
The sashran made a dreamy-soft pleasure sound, and Ginna mimicked it back. “Oh you sweetheart,” she murmured. Already she could feel that little melting tug in her heart, that protective urge that set some humans on the path to professional companionship.
Come hell or high water, Ginna was going to keep these sashrans safe.
Aw, yes. Look at the adorable scifi! I’m proud to have inspired it.
(I’m so glad you enjoyed it!)
Six months was just about right for a jungle planet tour with a group of sashrans. Ginna loved Sala and Rini and the crew to distraction, and there was still nothing in the galaxy softer than sashran fur, but she was ready to move on. Being regarded as furniture a lot of the time, once they were used to her presence, got tiring after a while. Sala and Rini weren’t looking for a permanent companion, and Ginna wasn’t looking for that either. She’d joined the guild because she wanted to see the universe and meet all the peoples in it, after all.
The spice expedition had been a great success. The sashrans’ hold was full to bursting of dried twigs and leaves, and Ginna had gotten a healthy bonus on top of her already generous pay. There’s only been the one incident with a large angry herbivore who decided the sashrans were infringing too close on its breeding grounds. Still, Ginna had thwacked it in the face with a dead branch and distracted it long enough for the sashrans to make their escape, and only gotten the one cracked rib for her trouble when it tried to run her down.
Ginna hugged and kissed each sashran on the crew one last time. “If you ever need me, don’t hesitate to call,” Ginna told them, wiping a stray tear. Sala and Rini and crew endured this human foible, and were off to sell their goods.
The Gentleman of Fortune was the same as ever, serving interesting foods and drinks from across the galaxy and full of professional companions between tours. Her friend Jon had shipped out with a hunting pack of akskar, but May was finally back from er three-year stint in a lintran colony and they had a lot of catching up to do.
It was great to be back among humans, it really was. Ginna sent some money home and laughed and drank and celebrated with people who had the same base template and urges she did. For about two weeks, it was great. Then Ginna got that itch again and started watching the door of the Gentleman of Fortune, scoping out her options.
Vivid jehes, stolid orhides, hovering mellisugans - none of them felt quite right, and Ginna didn’t approach any of them. Other companions gladly worked up contracts and left for exploration expeditions and disaster relief efforts and new colonies.
Then a big bull barbax pushed into the bar, weight resting on xir heavy knuckles and ducking far far down to fit but still scraping xir cracked and weathered shoulder-spikes on the frame. The barbax swung xir heavy head from side to side, small beady eyes - well protected under a heavy brow - sweeping the space.
Perfect.
Ginna jumped up to stand on top of her chair and screamed as loud as she possibly could. The barbax rocked back, then sprang forward toward her, slamming xir knuckles hard against the floor in pleased approval.
.
Three days later Ginna was shipping out for a nine month tour with a crew of barbax miners. The desert planet they were headed for would be a nice change of pace from the muggy humidity of her last tour, and the barbax being so much bigger and heavier-armored than she was meant she didn’t have to worry about being a body guard on this trip. Much more relaxing.
Barbax liked shiny things, and already they’d bought Ginna a cute cropped jacket with imitation shoulder spikes to match them, and several bracelets and necklaces. It would have been rude not to wear them, and Ginna had to admit she looked good even if it wasn’t her usual style.
The bull barbax, Zab, absently grabbed Ginna by the waist and settled her on xir shoulder. Ginna easily settled in between the big spikes - they made good handholds as she was carried onward to the ship.
“Twisted xeno freak!” some human snarled after Ginna and the barbax crew. “You’re a traitor to human-kind. You make me sick!”
Gina laughed. “Jealous you lack the emotional capacity to cut it as a companion?” she mocked.
The xenophobe’s embarrassed and angry expression was the last thing Ginna saw of the station. Then the ship doors closed behind them, and she turned to face her next adventure with a smile.
Ginna returned to her home base at the Gentleman of Fortune absolutely glittering with platinum and rough citrine.
A fact - For all their strength, a barbax is not fast enough to evade a nest of sand snakes. For all their armor, a sand snake’s teeth can still pierce them.
A human companion, fueled by adrenaline, is more than fast enough to evade. But they might instead dive in between the panicking barbax and destroy the sand snakes attacking them.
Another fact - a sand snake’s venom is deadly to a barbax. Their blood coagulants are destroyed and they bleed out from even such a tiny wound. Their armored hide is too strong for the tourniquet that might save them. A human, bitten by a sand snake, gets off with a painful wound and some bruising.
Ginna tied her bandana around the bleeding wound on her thigh and got to work. Zeb and Gnar and Agi were bitten. The crew, their family, piled around them, drumming against their hides in mourning. They had two hours to live, according to the barbax medic.
Ginna delivered a cure in 30 minutes. Thirty minutes with the clock racing. Thirty minutes far too long, with death creeping up on her friends. She drew a liter of her own blood, repurposed a mining centrifuge to separate it, and filled three big syringes with plasma. Her red blood cells would be toxic, foreign to the barbaxes bodies. She could only hope her plasma was less so.
They might die of it; but they would die if she didn’t try.
Facts - the only place a barbax is tender enough to be injected by even the strongest medical needle is in the vein along their gumline.
- it takes five minutes for blood to circulate all the way through a barbax’s body.
- it takes another minute after that for a sand snake wound to clot, and the blood loss to cease.
The barbax crew trumpeted and pounded their knuckles against the floor with surprised joy. And only then, only when the slow bleeding had finally stopped, did Ginna sit down and cry with relief. She was shaky and dizzy from drawing so much blood, and badly bruised from getting jostled by the panicking barbaxes, and the wound on her own thigh was very painful now that she had nothing else to focus her mind away from it, but she’d done her companion’s duty and saved her friends.
She was fussed over, tended to and praised. She explained what she had done, and was given far more sweets and water than she could possibly consume to replenish herself when she explained that’s what she needed to recover.
Zeb and Gnar and Agi were sick for a week, with the aftereffects of the sand snake poison and purging their bodies of her alien plasma, but they lived. That was the important part.
It turned out that having given a part of herself into the barbax (nevermind that it was just plasma and their bodies purged it afterward) Ginna had done literally what was done symbolically for a barbax crew-bond. She was now crew-bond to the barbax she’d saved, and since Zeb was the senior bull and crew-bond to the entire crew, that meant she was too. She was family - married to the whole lot of them, in essence.
Ginna was not exactly sure how she was going to break that to her moms.
Thankfully the barbax had a laze faire concept of marriage. None of them thought it odd that Ginna planned to leave still at the end of her contract. They would have gladly kept her if she wanted to stay, but she didn’t.
They would have weighed her down with a quarter ton of jewelry, to be decorated the same as one of them, but thankfully Ginna talked them out of it. Her crew were miners by trade, but they were craftspeople by inclination, and they made her beautiful sets from the platinum they were mining that weren’t too heavy for her fragile human limbs. The style was armor-like and spiky and set with beautiful rough citrine that would have been discarded as mining waste otherwise.
Ginna wore it proudly. She spent one last evening drumming with the barbax crew, and then she was back among humans, back at the good old Gentleman of Fortune. Elizabeth was fresh back from the jungles of Shur with a lathan colony, and they had a lot of catching up to do.
Ginna was in no rush to head out again. She took some classes offered through the guild, brushing up on her knowledge base, and pondered her options carefully. She wanted something new, something different.
Late one evening - or maybe it was early morning by that point - a faint high note echoed through the Gentleman of Fortune. There was a collective intake of breath, an uncomfortable quiet, and Ginna looked to where everyone else was looking. A roughly human-sized shimmer was drifting deeper into the bar.
A tintillian. Ginna had never actually met one, she’d only ever heard of the telepathic aliens. They were not strictly corporeal in the same way most contacted species were.
The tintillian chimed again, hopeful, almost plaintive. And no one was answering.
Ginna was singing back the tintillian’s note before she really thought it through. It chimed again, a lower note thankfully or Ginna might not have been able to hit it, and Ginna again mimicked it. As Ginna held the note, it chimed a double note in harmony with her, and drifted closer.
The note Ginna was singing cut off, her heart in her throat, but the tintillian recoiled and drew back before it touched her. Began to drift away.
Metal. Right. They couldn’t abide concentrations of heavy metals and Ginna was encased in platinum. Ginna began ripping all her jewelry off, stacking it in a loose pile on the table. What had possessed her to wear so much of it?
“Help!” Ginna pleaded, turning her other ear toward Elizabeth as she struggled with the earrings. “Liz, please.”
Elizabeth laughed and relented, quick to help her out of all her platinum. Ginna took her boots off too, they had metal eyelets. And her pants had zippers, so they had to go. And her bra had an underwire, so Ginna wrestled that out through her sleeve and finally stepped toward the tintillian in just her shirt and boxers.
No one else was trying to approach the still-chiming tintillian. Telepathy was beyond what most of them were comfortable with. There would be no universal translator for this interaction, it would be direct. Mind to mind.
At least Ginna halfway stripping was far from the weirdest thing that had ever happened in the Gentleman of Fortune.
Ginna sang the note again, and the tintillian harmonized and moved back toward her. It changed as it got closer, until Ginna was almost looking at a mirror - a transparent shining woman. It lifted its hand, and Ginna echoed the motion. Her fingers were shaking, but Ginna cleared her mind and was full of only curiosity and affection when the tintillian merged hands with her. Like a point of golden light.
Suddenly, through it, Ginna was weightless, boundariless, her self wrapped around by the fear and curiosity of the others in the bar. Ginna laughed aloud, that joy echoed, rebounded, and strengthened as the tintillian drifted forward to merge completely.
Ginna’s affections were bare, all the connections she’d made with her contracts exposed, her trainings mulled over, her self weighed and judged and found adequate. The burning curiosity that had made her approach it pushed Ginna to delve into the tintillian in turn. It was all starlight and nebulas, ancient and brand new.
The job on offer was midway between exploration and rescue - a star nursery where an expedition of the tintillian’s mind-mates had disappeared. They had two months to map what they could, and recover the lost mind-mates if possible.
Ginna’s physical and psychological needs would be met, and the terms of her regular contract were seen as acceptable.
The merge faded, and the tintillian winkled out - off back to its vessel to prepare. Ginna dropped back into her own body and sagged into her chair.
“So?” she was asked, people crowding around. She didn’t need the tintillian to practically feel their burning curiosity.
“I got a two-month contract,” Ginna said.
She took a small seated bow for the cheers that echoed through the bar, and accepted the celebratory drinks that were passed her way.
First professional companion to contract with a tintillian. This was definitely going to be one for the history books.
[ THE END ]
I will write no more of these. Thank you! I’ve had a lot of fun in this ‘verse.
If you want to read about Elizabeth, please turn your eyes toward the very cool fill that Chrissy did utilizing the Gentleman of Fortune and companions guild concept. [link]
(if anyone else uses these headcanons please let me know I’d love to read it!)
(lol I lied have another Ginna fic)
Loren’s first run as an apprentice companion was supposed to be an easy one. A short contract, with low danger and a seasoned companion of the guild as mentor. Loren got along great with both Jon and the akskar crew. Every conversation was an argument, a test of skill and ingenuity. Some humans found akskar to be exhausting, but Loren felt right at home. It was just like being back at the old shipyards with er sibs.
So it was great, it was really great until they ran into danger way above Loren’s paygrade. Space was dangerous, vast and unexplored and unpredictable. So on Loren’s first practice run e ended up stranded with a dead ship on a dead planet. At least Jon and the akskar weren’t dead too.
Theirs wasn’t the only ship downed.
“Jon? That you?” A voice crackled faintly in through their companion visors while the akskar were still folding their long limbs into their own protective gear.
“Ginna!” Jon answered, relief obvious in his voice as he tapped the side of it to answer. “I’ve got an apprentice and a family of young akskar politicians. What have you got?”
“Jehe musicians and a dead ship. My scans show a cave we can shelter in near enough to both ships for scavenge. Coordinates incoming.”
Loren had no idea how this Ginna had managed to scan for a cave through the radiation bursts, but e was glad of it. Loren was surprised the coms were still working when everything else was totally fried–but they did say that companions guild coms and universal translators were always the last thing to go. They could pass through the pinch of a black hole undamaged, they said.
Jon relayed instructions, which Loren and the akskar followed, so they were weighed down heavy with emergency supplies and broken ship bits when they headed out onto the planet’s ravaged surface.
Ginna and her crew had already made it to the cave and were sealing it into a habitable zone by the time Loren’s group arrived. Loren couldn’t tell much about Ginna other than that she was tall and she’d managed to keep her jehes from fluttering and panicking, which was impressive.
Once they were sealed in, and the akskar were comfortable enough to start a circular argument and the jehes to rest, Jon pulled Loren over to conference with Ginna. Ginna’s hair was all tight corkscrew curls tied back with a bandana, her smile big and friendly, when she took off her helmet.
“We’ve got food, we’ve got water, we’ve got radiation shielding - but we’ve only got about a day’s worth of air,” Jon started, once brief introductions were over.
“A day and a half,” Ginna corrected. “The akskar and jehes balance each other out a little bit.”
“And I can give us another two or three if I can repair the jehe and akskar air filters, or splice them together. There’s got to be enough working parts between them to make one functional filter.” Loren volunteered. It wasn’t so different from tech splice e’d done as a kid, just to see if something could be made from what was supposedly junk. Loren had grown up doing this stuff.
“Air first.” Ginna nodded. “Then we need to get word out, let people know where we are. It’s time to call in favors. What are our best contacts, other than the main guild office?”
“These akskar are offshoots of the grand trunk,” Jon said, which Loren had not known. They were practically royalty! Minor royalty, but still. “If we get word to the trunk, they’ll send help. And their line is allied to the fruiting bough consortium. One of their main officers owes me a favor.”
“Good,” Ginna nodded and turned toward Loren as if expecting em to chime in.
Ginna’s expression softened. “First time out?“ she patted Loren’s shoulder when e nodded. “Don’t worry. Jon and I have both been in tighter spots and lived to tell. I’m thinking my best contact will be the barbax miners. A little radiation storm like this is nothing to them, and they’ll send people if I call. I’m kind of married to over fifty of them now, they keep expanding the crew.”
“Married? To fifty barbax?” Loren boggled, but Ginna and Jon just laughed.
“It’s the kind of thing that happens on accident,” Jon said. “It far from the weirdest thing you’ll see if you stick with the guild.”
Loren kind of hoped e’d live to see weirder things. Being stranded on a dead world with two dead ships was bad. Really bad. But Jon and Ginna kept joking back and forth with each other, smiling and laughing. And if experienced companions like them were in good spirits that had to be a good sign.
Loren worked on the air filters. E worked on the air filters for a very long time. Loren got one working at about 31% to give them another half day, and then went back to the ship to scavenge parts from the kitchen to get the other one up to 67%, and that was the best e could do with what was available.
“I couldn’t have done better myself,” Jon praised. He and Ginna were working on cobbling together a communications array that would punch through the radiation storm, which was difficult with everything fried. They tried and tested and argued companionably back and forth–when they weren’t looking out for the crews they were contracted to. The emotional labor of keeping the akskar from falling into despondency while confined and the jehes from fretting themselves sick, and keeping them from antagonizing each other with their different needs and ways of being, was weightier than Loren would have expected.
Jon and Lauren had their work cut out for them figuring out new arguments and games to play with the akskar to keep them entertained. Ginna spent a lot of her time grooming and singing to the jehes in their own chirping language to keep them calm.
That was what being a professional companion was all about.
Not that Loren was all that sure e was going to get the chance to earn professional status. One day became two, became three, and nothing any of them tried was working to get a message out. Loren scavenged from both ships over and over again, with Jon and Ginna and alone, but nothing e brought back helped.
Loren couldn’t give up, though. That was why peoples from all over the galaxy hired human companions. Because humans didn’t give up, not until their last breath. Loren repurposed parts of a water filtration unit to get the more broken air filter to 72%, but that was only going to give them a few more days, and e went back to figuring out ways to make a stronger emergency beacon with Jon.
Ginna didn’t.
Loren found her up in the top of the cave, right by the entrance where their radiation shielding was weakest. She’d stripped down to her underthings, her body marked with scars here and there, and decorated over and around them with gleaming ivory-white tattoos against the warm brown of her skin. Loren could see the languages of akskar, sashrans, barbax, and others she wasn’t familiar with. Ginna was sitting cross-legged on the ground, eyes closed and face turned up to the dark sky. She was humming a long droning note under her breath.
“What are you doing?” Loren demanded.
“Trying to think in tintillian,” Ginna answered in a faraway voice, not opening her eyes.
“What? Why?”
“We can’t send a pulse, ping, or beacon out of here strong enough. So tintillian.”
Loren stamped er foot. “What good is thinking like another species going to do!? You could be helping us brainstorm better ideas. You can’t just stop. You can’t give up and die. We’re companions! Our contracts are counting on us!” Loren’s voice broke, tears far too close to the surface, and Ginna finally opened her eyes.
“Nothing in the galaxy can communicate better than a tintillian. They are connection,” Ginna explained, very gently. “They’re not individual. They’re like… fractals. Music where each note is a symphony and what we perceive as an individual is just the echo of a single riff. I contracted with them, once. I was inside it for two months, like a misplaced f flat in a nebula-choir of angels and starlight, and sometimes I can still feel it. Connect.”
Loren’s breath caught at the realization. “Stars and galaxies. You’re that Ginna,” e breathed. She was only one of the highest ranked professional companions, and came up in dozens of case studies. She’d provided the baseline measurements for companionship in more new species than anyone else. There wasn’t a species she’d shun, or a challenge she’d back down from.
Ginna smiled, that warm friendly smile that immediately forgave Loren for interrupting and being suddenly starstruck. “I’m that Ginna.” She tapped her visor where it was laying beside her. “And I’ve got two hours left before I have to do a radiation decontam, so I’m going to spend them being a very loud f flat.”
“Right. Sorry,” Loren backed away as Ginna’s eyes closed and she took her hum back up. “Thank you.”
Loren retreated, awkward stumbling back over er boots, and hyperventilated at Jon for a little bit. Jon just laughed.
“Careful with that puppy-crush, kid,” he teased. “Ginna’s ace. She doesn’t go for anybody.”
About an hour and a half later–when Loren was in the middle of a spirited game of leapfrog with the akskar crew to keep them entertained–Ginna returned. There was a pinging sound, like metal heating under the sun, a faint smell of ozone, and Ginna walked into the main part of the cave haloed in a shimmering glow. There was music, vast and incomprehensible under her voice when she spoke.
“Strip to your skivvies, Jon, and figure out what you want to say to the guild! We’re in contact.”
Imagine, guns are illegal, someone breaks into your house with a gun, they’re a criminal so they don’t care that they’re not allowed to have a gun. They shoot you and your entire family because as a law abiding citizen you don’t have a gun to defend yourself. Sounds like a good idea, huh?
I grab my 500 dollar short sword and kill the fucker with that. Guns are shit in CQC.
Also! If you own a gun, you are more likely to be shot with it!
ALSO! Unless you keep your gun loaded and ON YOUR PERSON AT ALL TIMES, and not with your gun safely unloaded and locked up in your gun safe, you’re still likely to get shot by your hypothetical home invader.
Oddly, I am American and do not own a gun. I also recognize that I neither NEED a gun, nor do I know how to use one safely, so I sure as shit should not HAVE a gun.
If guns are illegal, there are fewer of them to be bought, and ammunition is far more difficult to obtain, and most criminals who are going to randomly break into a house aren’t going to have the resources to acquire both.
And you’re assuming that the people inside this theoretical house don’t know how to use at least something in their house as a weapon that isn’t a gun. Which is not a terribly good attitude to have. Everything can be a weapon, if you have the right mind set.
So you know, yeah, making guns illegal sounds like an excellent idea.
Like, shit, dude, I know a half-dozen ways to kill someone on purpose with the little kitchen knife in my drawer, and a solid baker’s dozen ways that I could manage it accidentally, and as a result I’m careful as shit. And that’s something with real actual applications beyond killing things, that’s a cooking implement and I’m careful as shit.
The thing I’ve always kept in mind is this: a gun has no other uses. A gun exists to kill things, that is why you’re taught to never, ever point a gun at something you don’t intend to shoot, whether it’s loaded or not (and yes, I do know how to use a gun, I have training). A gun exists solely to kill. Even if you’re using a gun to protect yourself, you’re protecting yourself with lethal force.
So…uh, yeah, I wouldn’t be too upset about at least something to limit the availability of a gun.
Hey, everyone! Dysphoria is a real pain in the butt to deal with, and I know it can be difficult to find ways to lessen it or distract yourself from it. Since we get a lot of asks from people who are looking for tips to help manage their dysphoria, I thought I would make a masterpost to help everyone out. Here we go!
General Tips
-making a music playlist of your favorite songs
-cleaning and/or doing laundry
-name and pronoun affirmations (you can make yourself some cards with your name and pronouns on them and carry them with you and/or ask supportive friends and family to verbally participate in these affirmations)
-wearing clothes that you feel good in (shoes, hats, dresses, sweaters, accessories etc.)
-taking up a hobby that you find enjoyable (skateboarding, making bracelets, writing, learning a new language, playing an instrument, joining a tabletop gaming club, etc.)
-watching YouTube videos (let’s-plays are my fav!)
-dyeing your hair and/or getting a haircut (this can make you feel like a million bucks)
Tips For When Dysphoria Makes You Want To Self-Harm
-holding an ice cube in your hand
-writing in a journal (it can be extremely therapeutic)
-listening to music
-taking a hair tie or rubber band and lightly snapping it against your wrist (it provides stimulation without causing you any harm)
-playing a video game (a puzzle game or fighting game might be particularly helpful since they require a lot of concentration)
-going for a walk (exercise can produce feel-good endorphins in your brain)
-watching a funny youtube video or doing tongue-twisters (laughter also produces endorphins)
-taking a hot shower (they’re particularly great for relieving tension)
-practicing breathing techniques (inhale for 8 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, exhale for 8 seconds)
-
drinking tea (something like chamomile, mint, or peppermint is best)
-
coloring (I personally really like ones that feature Disney characters!)
YouTube Videos That Talk About Dysphoria
-FTM ~ what is dysphoria (uppercaseCHASE1, white transman YouTuber)
-NON-BINARY DYSPHORIA?? (OutOfThisBinary, a channel run by several nonbinary YouTubers)
-HOW I MANAGED DYSPHORIA (Kat Blaque, black trans woman YouTuber)
-QAC 26 - Gender Dsyphoria: It’s Complicated. (a rant) (QueerAsCat, black afab nonbinary YouTuber)
-DRAW MY LIFE (princessjoules, Vietnamese trans woman YouTuber) Tw: mentions of transphobia and abuse
Articles About How To Deal With Dysphoria
-5 Ways to Support a Trans Person Experiencing Body Dysphoria (everydayfeminism.com) Tw: mentions of alcohol abuse and suicidal ideation
-20 Small Things To Do When Gender Dysphoria Gets You Down (buzzfeed.com) Tw: self-harm mention, period mention, “biological sex” mention
-How do I deal with dysphoria (Neutrois Nonsense) Tw: use of trans*
Charlie and Lee say:
You don’t need to have dysphoria to be transgender, but many trans people do have dysphoria. And, gender dysphoria (for those who have it) sucks. So, this is some added advice from the mods on coping with it!! (The key is distraction, and trying to remember that it will get better one day)
Check out our dysphoria tag! You’ll see other suggestions on things to do, and Qs from other people who are dysphoric. Remember, you aren’t alone.
Journal about how you feel.
You could have one journal for negative things, because it feels good to get them out, and another journal for positivity and notes to yourself. Or you could write everything all in one place, it’s up to you.
You could also post on a private sideblog, or type in notes on your phone if you don’t have access to a physical journal
Take deep breaths + practice some grounding/calming/meditation techniques.
It’s a good idea to do something that makes you feel extra valid as your gender, like packing, binding, tucking, and wearing breast forms.
Maybe trans feminine individuals could put on makeup, or clear nail polish, or use flower-scented body wash when they shower.
Trans masculine people could put on a button up, or masculine-coded clothing, or make a beard with makeup.
We had a whole assortment of recommendations a while ago for music that helps people when they feel dysphoric because they can sing along. You could try to sing along to music, or lip synch if that makes you feel better.
Practicing self care, ex. taking a bath with a bath bomb (if that doesn’t induce dysphoria) to wind down. Maybe having tea and going to bed early?
Talking to and getting in touch with other trans friends/people you may know, who will understand what you’re going through and are willing to support you
Take a walk and/or exercise a bit!! Even if you’re unable to do that because of disabilities, get some fresh air and new scenery!
Find little things to appreciate about your body, or try not to think about it at all. Remember, this is about what helps you best, and it’s different for everyone.
Spend time with a pet, if you have one!
Try to work on planning your transition. Have a goal, and plan how you’ll get there.
This could make you feel worse, or make you feel hopeful, like it’s more real and you’ll be ready for it.
Gather information about legally changing your name where you live when you turn 18 or the age of legal adulthood, read up on the effects of hormones, look at different surgery techniques and surgeons and prices, etc.
Start saving money now, even if it’s only a few dollars a month, or a few coins. When you turn 18, you’ll be informed and ready to start your transition, even if it involves saving money for a few years after to be able to afford it. It’s possible, and you can do it!
Watch other people’s transition videos, and read their transition blogs. Again, this may help or make it worse, but you will be better prepared.
Go to your local public library and read a book, if you can! That might distract you, and it’s fun.
Listen to music, wear comfy clothes, curl up with a blanket, and chill out. Be cozy!
Have a countdown until you’re 18 (you could use an app or write it in a calendar) or a countdown until you’re able to get a new shirt or whatever you’re looking forward to.
Get organized! Clean things, sort through your things, make lists of what you need to do, color code, or whatever you want. It’ll help take your mind off things, and you’ll be helping yourself later.
Distract yourself! Watch TV, play video games, or waste a few minutes on one of the websites below, or do crafts:
Here is a list of places you could contact to talk to someone if you’re feeling suicidal. Please, reach out and get help. We can’t answer suicidal asks for legal reasons, but we care about you.
Reblog this to tell us how you deal with dysphoria!
Do you mean doctors who spent years learning about abled white cis men’s bodies
do you know anything about the world besides what you read on tumblr
Okay but this is true?? Shut up with your bullshit, the medical industry for a very very long time has used the able bodied white cis male as their standard and that has very real healthcare consequences for a lot of people.
Do you know why most women don’t know when they’re having heart attacks? Why heart attacks kill more women than men? Because symptoms of a heart attack are different for women and the ones that doctors usually recognize and publicize are the symptoms experienced by men. Do you know why it’s so difficult for Black and Brown people to get diagnosed if they have skin cancer? Because doctors have been taught to recognize it on white people. People of size are constantly told that their problems are entirely because of their weight and doctors don’t even bother to look beyond that to be sure that’s the case. So those people have medical conditions go undiagnosed properly for years, and die in the process. Fuck, even just the fact that people think it’s okay to charge women more for healthcare because “they have extra parts” (?????) is indicative of the way the male body has been considered the standard for fucking ever. And the healthcare needs of disabled people or trans people? Forget about it.
OP is 1000% right. The medical industry has used the able cis white male body as their standard of care for CENTURIES and that has real consequences for the rest of us today. It’s getting better but it’s not where it should be. So fuck off with your snarky commentary, you’re wrong. The healthcare industry is not equipped to handle the needs of people with disabilities, women, PoC, trans people, people of size, etc. and that’s in large part due to the fact that the established body of medical knowledge was created by studying able, cis, white male bodies almost exclusively.
Hey there folks, speaking as a trained EMT and a pre-med student, I can confirm that the above person is approximately 7000% accurate. In my EMT training, I would repeatedly ask ‘’but what if my patent is a woman” or “what is my patient is a person of color” and at first all I got was shock. Then I got confused bumbling. I got some answers–basic symptoms of a heart attack in women, how to recognize cyanosis in someone of color, the basics of how to work with an autistic patient or someone who for whatever reason can’t communicate well with you. In fact, EMTs and other EMS workers are getting a lot better at learning the differences between the health care for a person of color or someone disabled. We were even told that we would need to ask our patients for their biological sex (I know, I’m really sorry, I know that there are people who find this intensely uncomfortable or even harmful, but there are real medical reasons for this and most decent EMTs will use whatever pronouns you ask them to). But most if not all of the answers we were given about women were directly related to gynecological issues. The guys teaching me? They were good guys. Nice. Funny. Smart. Devoted to caring for patients. Impassioned about protecting people, especially women and teenaged girls, from assault. Largely not sexist toward me or their coworkers. Hell, they were even smart enough to say “listen, boys, the women in this class have a higher pain tolerance than you, they just do, and as a rule if a women says their pain is a 5 on a scale of 1-10, assume it’s somewhere around an 8” when a kid laughed during the gyno unit. But they just didn’t know what to say when I asked “so if you’re supposed to palpate the patient’s chest, what do you do if your patient’s a triple-D” or when I asked “so if your patient gets menstrual migraines, how do you know if this headache is a stroke or not.” They had never been taught. This is a real problem, one that many medical professionals work hard to remedy once they start practicing. But this is not bullshit. At all. The standard patient is a cis white guy with no disabilities or chronic illnesses. It’s a huge fucking problem and I’m going to need you to step down with your bullshit, there, friend.
This is an issue with mental health too, where people of color (black and Hispanic people especially) are less likely to be taken seriously with mental issues, and where community outreach for these groups is very very different from the kinds of programs that might be effective for white people.
Autism is rarely diagnosed in women because the symptoms doctors look for are all specific to men. Doctors used to blame depression and other mental illnesses in women on a misbehaving uterus, and it’s still a struggle for women to get their symptoms taken seriously enough to merit proper treatment.
Mental health for LGBT people has a long history of being an oppressive shitshow, given how long it took the medical community to stop pathologizing sexuality and gender identity. (Conversion therapy is still legal!)
As well as autism rarely being diagnosed in women, it’s also harder for a person of colour to be diagnosed, as it’s perceived as being a middle-class+ white man’s disease.
And! We didn’t know how large the clitoris was until THE NINETIES because no-one thought it was worth investigating. Thanks to a female researcher in Melbourne, Australia, we know that it’s roughly a wishbone shape, and has two ‘legs’ that extend down under the labia majora.
Okay, so he’s got a girly face, and he wears tights and some high boots. Sure.
But check out that noble steed. That’s one ready-to-kick-ass-and-take-names steed.
While other princesses just run away and leave nothing, Philip gets AN INVITE TO HER HOUSE. He gets a song, a dance, and a first date.
He comes home, just to tell his dad he’s not going to marry the princess because he’s in love.
No. Other. Reason. He rides in and is just like, “I met the girl I’m going to marry. Now I’ve got a birthday party to be at. Bye Dad.”
Now how much do you think his dad weighs? That short fat little man? Probably pretty heavy.Not a problem for Prince Philip.
And then he gets jumped by goblins, both hands tied behind his back
But that’s not enough to stop Prince Philip.Oh no.
He breaks his hands free and starts chuckinggoblins.
Look at that face. That face. The “BITCH JUST YOU WAIT” face. He may be tied down by a dozen goblins but he’s not gonna take no shit from this witch.
In fact, he’s so strong, she ends up keeping him chained to the wall, but he still fights back.
Now when he finally does get free–
He’s ready to go into battle UNARMED. He don’t need no shield or sword, he’s going to go punch Maleficent’s face in with his fist. If Flora didn’t stop him, he probably would have, too.
Backed up against a cliff edge, nowhere to go. Fighting off goblins. But there’s so many and just one Philip.
NBD I’LL JUST JUMP AND SLIDE DOWN THE ROCK PILE IN MY SKIN-TIGHT TIGHTS.
Gate closing?
who gives a fuck? certainly not prince philip.
Lighting hitting rocks around me?
NBD BRO
Giant forest of thorns?
Bitch, get out of my way. I’ve got a princess to save.
Here's something I've been wondering that you might be able to tell me based on one of your Wezuru protags; How would I express being non-binary in Welsh, and does Welsh have a singular non-gender-specific personal pronoun?
This is such weird timing! I literally just spent yesterday and today talking to someone about this, and I genuinely just had a moment of “But I’m sure you read my blog” before remembering that the whole conversation was actually in Welsh. What a fool I feel.
So, Steff and I put our heads together over a term for ‘non-binary’, because you’ll be unamazed to learn that Welsh has not yet had to form a lexicon on this subject. We’ve come up with “anddeuaidd”, which more or less literally means ‘non-binary’ but also kind of has to cover all forms of atypical gender identity because the language does not yet have the nuance to cover it all. That includes ‘agender’ - Welsh doesn’t have a word for ‘gender’, only ‘sex’, and so ‘agender’ literally - “diryw” - would actually mean ‘sexless’, and have all the same connotations that word has in English.
“Anddeuaidd” isn’t in common parlance or anything, of course. That’s literally just what Steff and I came up with, using his authority as a Translator and Guardian of the Language. And, just like if you said “I’m non-binary” to most people in English, the majority of your audience won’t have a clue what it means, so you’ll still have to follow it up with a brief explanation. But, it’s a word, and I feel a pretty good one.
Pronouns, though. Trickier. Because, you see, Welsh is a more heavily gendered language than English anyway, so there’s no neutral pronouns, but… well.
So, without getting too deep into the grammatical quirks of the Welsh ‘to be’, we’re looking at three pronoun sets rather than the two in English - so while English would have ‘she/her’, for example, Welsh would have ‘she is/her/her (possessive)’. So the trick is something different for each.
With the first, “mae e’n” is “he is” and “mae hi’n” is “she is”. So, for a truly gender-neutral experience, you go for “mae’n”. Which I suppose translates to “_ is”. This is also pretty well ensconced in oral Welsh these days, actually, which is handy. To be hyper correct and formal, for example, “it’s sunny” would traditionally be “mae hi’n heulog” (because weather is feminine), but these days almost everyone would say “mae’n heulog”. So, you just apply that to a human. Simple enough.
The second - starts getting a bit trickier. There’s just no equivalent of “it”. But, that’s fine, really, because you can use “nhw” (“they”), like you would in English. It’s slightly more odd than it is in English, but only slightly. These things get normal with use, anyway.
But, the third! So this one is great, and really fucking Welsh, okay get this. So in Welsh, the word for “his” is “ei”. The word for “her” is “ei”. They’re both “ei”! Hooray! Hoorei! Eh? Ei?
Problem: Welsh mutates. The way in which you distinguish between a masculine “ei” and a feminine “ei” is through the mutations that immediately follow them. Masculine “ei” gets a soft mutation, feminine “ei” gets an aspirate mutation. That’s not foolproof, actually, because some letters are immune to both of those - “ei sanau”, for example, means who the fuck knows the gender of whoever owns those socks. But “ei gi” is “his dog”, while “ei chi” is “her dog”, so. You work it out?
What this means is, mutations are sometimes pronouns. Just to make everything really nice and clear. Sigh.
SO, when you ask people to use your new pronouns, you also have to request the mutations of your choice. Personally, I think the easiest way here must be to just drop all mutations after your possessive pronouns. Given that most people struggle with mutations anyway, that’s probably for the best. But hey, fuck it, if you identify as a third gender, why not use the third mutation type? Nasal mutation! “Ei nghi”! I mean, that’s awful, and no one will do it. But. Philosophically. Pretty cool.
So, TL;DR:
“Non-binary” = “anddeuaidd”
“NB he/she is” = “Mae’n”
“They” = “nhw”
“NB his/her” = “ei” + mutation of your choice (probably drop the mutation).
So there’s a blind kid in my class, and today we were having really bad thunderstorms in our area. All of the sudden there’s a huge crack of thunder and all the lights go out. Some girl screamed “Oh my god i can’t see anything!” and the blind kid goes “Me either!!” and i just lost it
Guys, seriously. Signal boost. I needed this the other night, and a few weeks ago I was talking with someone who needed it. This is the best freaking thing ever.
This is awesome. I know picking up the phone and calling someone can be dreadfully intimidating, so here you lovely darlings go. Talk to someone!
“if trump loses will clinton really be any better?” YES. yes holy shit why is this even a question yes she will fucking be better!!!! have you read her policy!!!! have you paid attention to what she’s saying!! you may not like her but she wants women to have access to abortion, she wants gun control, she doesn’t want to overturn same-sex marriage. she doesn’t want to ban muslims from immigrating to the country. like the amount of hatred for hillary clinton is honestly insane when your other option is donald trump
He wakes up and the first word he hears is wait! and his lips start to form the word burr? but then he sees the speaker: a woman with red hair wearing something obscenely, splendidly tight and he wonders if this is heaven and God is more of a tomcat that he suspected – but then he tries to move and pain flares down his spine, one greedy white jag, and he amends his original assessment: this is Hell, surely. “Pray tell,” he says, “where am I?” and the woman is joined by a sandy-haired man with some strange flesh-coloured apparatus curling around his ears. “New York,” says the man, “who’re you?” The man has a bow. The arrow is notched and aimed at Hamilton’s face. It is frightfully, laughably primitive – but then again the Indian braves have done much damage to westbound farmers with less and so Hamilton bites his tongue on some of his more hysterical questions and says, “My name is Alexander Hamilton. I’m at your service, sir.”
They tell him where he is. He does not believe them. They tell him when he is and he does not believe them – just a moment ago, just a moment ago, there was Burr, the gunshot, the smoke and the blood and I died I died I heard my heart lurch to a stop I saw God, the great beyond and –
They say a lot of words. There is a man in a slim black suit with obnoxious facial hair and he talks far too much and Hamilton is too quivery and out-of-place to understand the absurdity of such a condemnation (Hamilton says Tony Stark talks too much; in other news, a garden pond accuses the Atlantic of being overly wet.) He understands. He weeps. His children are dead, his grandchildren are dead. His legacy is –
there’s a musical, says Stark in a hush to Captain America (tall and blonde and how ridiculous, how perfectly absurd, this nation should not have saints or idols or – )
“A musical?”
There is a musical. There are books and television and the internet – God help the modern world, Hamilton learns about the internet and the first thing he does is write a twenty five thousand word blog on why the memory of Jefferson is overrated and false. He gets Jarvis to proofread it. He gets Jarvis to stick it on the New York Times and there’s a mass panic about someone hacking into the website for the sole purpose of slagging off a long-dead Founding Father. Nick Fury explains about firewalls and internet security. Hamilton rants at him – the Avengers listen through the door, hear things like Sally Hemings and how would you feel if the worst person you knew was remembered a hero and the article is taken down but somehow, somehow Hamilton learns what a blog is.
Things Hamilton loves about the modern world: twitter, blogging, Lin Manuel Miranda, swearing, loose sexual morality, Starbucks, minimal slavery (it still counts, he says hotly, in Africa and Asian it’s still there it isn’t gone yet – )
Yes he meets Lin Manuel Miranda. He rebukes him at length about inaccuracies. He thanks him. He sees his own play fifteen times and starts thinking about a sequel.
Oh yes. There’s a sequel.
Because the fact of the matter is this: Clinton’s corrupt and Sanders is well-meaning but doesn’t have the support and Trump is just…well. Hamilton breaks his nose and writes op-eds for every paper in the country declaring why he was right to do so.
Look: American politics is a mess. And in comes the Founding Father Without A Father, the Bastard Son of a Whore and he says: so what did I miss?
And he claps his hands and grins and says I’m not throwing away my shot and the internet goes mad and the public goes mad and no one is saying he’ll win this election but the next one, oh the next one. Four years is an eternity in politics and Senator Hamilton has the one thing he needed most: more time.
The thing about the rich of this country is that billionaires have more money than is humanly possible to spend. So like, I really do not give any amount of a shit if increasing their taxes is “faaair” because I care more about no one starving to death or going without medical care in fucking 2015 than I do about the great grandson of the guy who invented some crappy toy being able to buy his 17th yacht. We can fucking print out organs and we have people dying of the flu because they are too poor to go to the er. Like??? Tax the shit outta the rich. Take half their money. Idgaf.
And like conservatives are so quick to say its not fair to tax the fuck out of the rich, but then they say to people struggling that “life isn’t fair” like??? If anyone is getting screwed here I want it to be the guy who owns four mc mansions not the family of four living out of their car.
Welcome to the midpoint of 2016, in which this is STILL A FUCKING PROBLEM.
the main reason I can’t buy the “rey is anakin skywalker reincarnated” theory is that I can’t accept that anakin skywalker’s soul could exist on another sand planet for 15 years without immediately going to the dark side
Thing #1 that frustrates me about ADHD/Executive Dysfunction advice:
“Oh, you have a mental/neurological issue that makes it difficult for you to be organized, follow routines, stick with systems, maintain a schedule, do your work, etc.? Well, what you need to do is GET ORGANIZED! Schedule everything! Find a system and stick with it! Maintain a schedule! Do your work as it comes in!”
It’s like that Allie Brosh comic where her fish are dead, and everyone’s offering to help find them, or advice like “feed them!” Or “make puppets out of them!” And she says, “No, see, that solution is for a different problem than the one I have.”
Yes, I would love to do those things! I have tried to do those things! I am still trying to do those things! But it’s like that post about how you’re going through an invisible obstacle course, and what looks like a block to everyone else seems like a wall to you. Instead of saying, “it’s a block! Go around!” It would be much more useful to hand me a bag of flour so I can see the obstacles for myself and how to get around them.
I keep looking for something I can do. I can’t maintain an agenda- closest I can do is lot appointments into Google Calendar. I can’t use to-do lists- they overwhelm and freak me out and I end up doing less than before. Breaking down a task into a bunch of tiny pieces should work in theory, but again, freaks me out, and I usually end up spending an hour planning and then I never actually do. I can’t set deadlines for myself. Whatever part of the brain allows other people to say, “yes, it’s due on the 29th, but I want to be done on the 25th” just doesn’t work. I can’t make my brain think something needs to be done until the last minute. This is especially bad in classes where everything is due at the end of the semester. I end up doing what I just did, and having to do two whole classes worth of work in two days. Oddly, once that level of desperation kicks in, I’m capable of sitting down and pounding through the material- but for some reason, I can’t tap into that level of focus without a short, urgent, important deadline. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out.
Thing #2 that bugs me about all self help: Don’t wait for motivation! Just do it!
I think my definition of “motivation” is different from the usual. Most people see “motivation” as meaning something like “wanting to do something, looking forward to doing something, doing the thing with energy and happiness because it is the thing you want to do.”
My definition is closer to “having enough willpower to make myself do the thing despite everything in my brain begging me to go watch Netflix instead.” So when people say, “you don’t need motivation!” What I hear is “everyone else seems to have this source of willpower they can eventually learn to tap into that just doesn’t exist for me.” My best technique for doing stuff is having other people make me do it. Which freaks out my social anxiety because then I feel like I’m intruding on their time to make them help me with mine.
The thing is, I’m not lazy. If I were just lazy this would all be easier to cope with. I WANT to be doing things, I WANT to be successful, I WANT to be productive. I even try, really hard, and the effort that exhausts me seems to be so much lower than the typical threshold. But every time I try to be as productive as I want to be, I burn out in a couple days.
I want to take a moment to send my love and solidarity to LGBT Muslims in light of what’s going on. I know the pressure on you is already so high. Your faith is not to blame for this, you are not to blame for this. You’re allowed to mourn, too.
quick question for all the fuckboys and rape apologists: why is it when alcohol is involved in rape, the female victim drinking makes her more culpable for the crime committed against her, but the male rapist drinking makes him less accountable for his crime?
-(Heard over the phone) “I don’t care WHAT is in your pants or what you identify as, GET THE FUCKING PISS OFF THE TOILET SEAT”
- “I don’t get why some men like to call themselves straight and then say they’d never date a Trans woman because honestly if you’re willing to exclude an entire subsection of women based on something so stupid you’re probably not worth their time anyways”
-“I don’t know why some guys worry about gay men in the locker rooms because if I was a gay guy, even I wouldn’t date me. I’ve been wearing the same shirt for three days.“
-(Over spring break) “How the fuck do you make Kraft mac&cheese”
-“What do you mean it’s written on the box– WAIT SHIT IT IS”
-“I hit on a lesbian two weeks ago in the SU without knowing it and I still feel bad about it”
-“I honestly think I’d prefer living with a (Trans) person at this point because if they’re even as half as cool as you then it’s got to be better than living with two 19 year old boys who have fucking competitions of who can piss farther on the ceiling”
-“For some reason even in college guys don’t seem to get that the only reason I get so many girls’ numbers is because I treat them like I would treat anyone else”
-“No seriously they think you have to act uninterested or like a dick for some reason”
-“No I don’t know why they think hitting on a lesbian is anything but a lot of secondhand embarrassment for the rest of us”
-“My roommate came into the room looking really dejected and when I asked why he said that he spent hours talking to this girl just to find out that she had a boyfriend the whole time and didn’t say anything” (And after me asking why it mattered) “I dunno, apparently he doesn’t understand the concept of friends”
-(After me saying I don’t get heterosexuals sometimes) “Even I don’t understand straight guys little dude, and I am one”
Also: “I’m actually really glad you’re a boy because now I can do THIS” (pretends to full on body slam me into the couch and then carries me around over his shoulder in a fit of laughter)
omg this warms my heart
Holy shit this got 1K notes you’re all gonna make my brother cocky
If he’s as chill as the last item in the original post indicates to me, that shouldn’t be a problem. I only hope I can someday ally as well as he does.
Where can I find such a quality human being? Are they collectible?
it’s cool that nate and sophie are the ones, out of the main cast, who have a very passionate, tempestuous, evolving relationship. they’re older characters, by tv standards, and normally their romance would be pg because people past 30 can’t have sex what are you talking about??? but they do, more than once before they get together, and sophie is even pushing for a casual sex kind of relationship for a bit and isn’t cast as the bad guy for it and it’s just like. so nice? such a different dynamic. i love this show so much
Would any LGBT Jews in the NYC/Queens area be interested in holding a vigil/saying Kaddish for the Orlando shooting? People of other faiths can come too.
s/o to every closeted person hearing about the pulse shooting who has to act normal and unconcerned so as not too act ‘suspiciously upset’ I see you & I understand
All right, yeah, you know what, I’m fucking sick of watching these news stories scroll past. I’ve kept my mouth shut for a while now and I am fucking DONE.
Fun story about me that you may not know: I’ve been sexually assaulted six times. That number might be one up or one down depending on how you want to quantify sexual assault. Is it a forced kiss? Being held down? Being poked and prodded? Being felt up? Where do you want to draw the line at “I didn’t say yes to this”? According to the statistics, it’s not an ‘if’ for me on something like this, it’s a 'when.’
And let me be perfectly fucking clear. Not one of those occasions happened when I was wearing less than my usual uniform of a t-shirt and jeans. These were guys I knew. More often than not, this happened in public, at school, with more witnesses than I could shake a stick at. In front of peers, friends, teachers, whatever. The first time it happened, I was in the fourth grade. I was eight. I punched the kid in the face and I was the one who went to detention. From a teacher who had watched the entire thing, every day for a month. I was the one who was punished, and the boy was taken to get an ice pack for his cheek.
Because “violence is never the answer,” right?
Because “boys will be boys,” right?
Because “well, sweetie, he just has a crush on you,” right?
Because hush, honey, this is the price I pay to live in this world. Because being pretty is the rent I pay, because if a guy doesn’t think I look “damn fine” at any given moment, then I’m not a person to them, but if I do look good, then I was asking for it. Because when I take a guy to the ground for laying hands on me in an unwelcome way, I’m taking it too far, and he’s the victim. Because it’s all about how “he’s a young man with such potential” but “well, see, she’s had a lot of boyfriends,” so it’s all okay. Because boys are all about their sparkling future, but girls are all about their past.
Because this isn’t about some hypothetical situation, when you say things like “well, but is it really all HIS fault?” It’s not. It’s about a human being whose life was destroyed, and it sure as shit wasn’t the rapist.
Because, hey, let me ask you a question.
If it’s me–in two, five, seven years, if it’s my picture under a headline with the work RAPE in bold, are you going to blame me? Are you going to ask me if I was 'dressed slutty,’ or if I was drunk, or if I was walking alone? Are you going to be asking if it was my fault, and talking about how the person who attacked me was 'such a nice boy’?
Because if your answer is yes, I don’t trust you now, and I sure as hell won’t trust you then.
here’s the official gofundme page created by the glbt community center of central florida raising money to assist victims of the orlando shooting
60k raised already, that’s amazing but every little bit will help. These families will be receiving bills for the ambulances that transported their loved ones to the coroner’s, other will have huge medical bills.
i love every single lgbt person who follows me and i hope you all stay safe and take care of yourselves today. if seeing the news about the shooting is too much please dont feel like you have to reblog/look at everything. do whatever you need for your health, whether its blacklisting everything or going offline. i hope everyone has a nice day regardless of the news this morning. i love all of you
In light of a few messages I’ve received, please remember to take care yourself and log off if you need to. Participation in post-tragedy online reactions is not mandatory to be a good person. There’s plenty you can do as an individual without compromising your own mental state. And if you’re reading this right now, I’m sure you already know the steps you can take to make a difference in a way that works best for you. Namely voting, contacting your local representatives (local, state and national), and donating blood if you are able (in Orlando and just as a general good deed).
