Sirenium - I Will Bite For Multiple Reasons (and I Have Rabies)

it’s so difficult being someone who needs to talk to themself in public. there is no way for me to avoid looking “crazy” when im constantly shouting or whispering to myself or jerking my neck. i wish people understood this doesn’t mean im dangerous. people with many different mental illnesses or disorders face this issue as well and all situations deserve more compassion. treat people who talk to themselves loudly or quietly, continuously, repeatedly, or with pauses, the same as anyone else.

the progressive leaving people's body when they hear about mspec gays, he/him lesbians, she/her gays, multigender people, oriented aroaces, xenogenders or any other "weird" queer label:

y'all care so much about queer people until we aren't queer in a way that aligns with your binary world view

I got very loudly deadnamed and misgendered multiple times at the doctors office today. This new receptionist ignored the preferred name on my profile to deadname and misgender me loudly, louder than she talked about anyone else in the waiting room. My birth certificate says "F" nex to sex, my medical documentation reflects this, and I was still deadnamed and misgendered.

And the saving grace was a woman and her child. I wear cat-ears and the child too young to speak loved them, and kept pointing and looking at me. I'm assuming her mother kept saying "yeah, she's wearing cat-ears", "yeah, that woman has cute cat-ears", and the like. Her child was enamoured with them, and that woman didn't misgender me once. And each time my very obviously masculine deadname name came up, she looked upset at the receptionist, but not once did she give me a bad look.

It doesn't have to be much. You don't need to be a knight in shining armour, or in someones face. Simply a quiet refusal to play along with someone elses bullshit is enough. It was enough to turn a trying and tiring moment into something that put a smile on my face and joy back into my life. It wasn't a lot but it mattered to me.

Not me being too lazy to remove the bots off of my follower list💀

Thinking a lot about how exclusionary/reactionary ideology is so incredibly easy to fall into and act upon because it preys on and weaponizes people's existing insecurities. It gets people saying things like:

"I'm deeply dysphoric can't even access HRT yet because of transphobic policy so why should someone without dysphoria have access to resources before me?"

or

"I'm targeted by transmisogyny regularly. It is the biggest issue in my life. Therefore other trans people's issues are secondary and are either less important than or just side effects of transmisogyny, so why should I ally with them?"

or

"Ace people don't have laws attacking the ways they have sex like other queers because they don't have sex, why should I have community with them at all?"

or

"All men benefit from systemic privilege, even marginalized men. Men have everything handed to them by the patriarchy so why should I care about finding common ground with them when they are the ones oppressing me?"

or

"The word queer is a slur and it makes me uncomfortable so no one should use it for themself."

All of those lines of thinking follow the same pattern: "I am hurting, I am oppressed, I am beaten down, so why should I care about other people that either make me uncomfortable or I deem as having more privileges than myself"

And it is okay to hurt. It is also, genuinely, okay to only really feel passionate about issues that impact yourself. Compassion fatigue is real. It's very easy to get so swept into caring for others you forget to care for yourself.

But you can't let your pain harden you so much you stop viewing others as complex human beings trying to live their lives and start seeing them all as adversaries to your existence by virtue of existing themselves. That's no way to live.