One Of The Things That Make Us Personally Uncomfortable With The Notion That Child-appearing Or Young-appearing

it is so important that you are a little bit ugly. please get comfortable with having unplucked eyebrows and nonexistent jawlines and wrinkles. let your blue hair grow out into an uneven pale green and your clothes be old and mend them and modify them until they’re unique to you. wear lipstick which doesnt compliment your skintone and mismatched outfits which went out of fashion 5 years ago. be a little bit too loud and a little bit too passionate and as weird as you can be because oh my god there is nothing more disturbing to me than perfection. beauty is manufactured and sold to us and you need to realise that you are a fucking animal to live a joyful life I am so serious. you cant obsess over aesthetics forever please just live messily and make your body your home however you please.

if you dont do it for you, do it for all the teenagers who will see u in the street and know that they are not obligated to be attractive

Ice cold takes from a Transgender Woman:

Men are not inherently Evil

Everyone has the capacity for evil

Transgender Men are men

Transgender Women are women

Excluding Cisgender Men from your spaces requires Transgender Men to out themselves if they want to engage (Same for Women)

Anyone can be Non-Binary, there is no "look" or requirement

Non-binary masculine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces, many are just treated as men and predators

Non-binary feminine presenting people should be welcome in queer spaces without being seen as "Woman-Lite"

Edited the wording on the first point because too many terfs keep thinking I'm their friend.

survey on inner worlds in plurality

important edit:

REMEMBER TO READ THE SECTION DESCRIPTIONS CAREFULLY. Many of you have told me there are no options for “N/A” on the rating questions, however we have stated that you should use the lowest rating (one) in that case.

🩵🩵🩵

the interstellar cluster presents to you...

a survey on inner worlds in plurality!

Google Docs

ᯓ★ survey on inner worlds in plurality

please answer all questions to the best of your ability. make sure to read each question and section description carefully to avoid inaccura

this is our first plural survey but we hope y'all have fun answering these questions.

results will be posted after submissions end in three weeks (30th of May), so give or take a few days around that date to organise the data.

it's quite long, but we put the questions in sections so hopefully it doesn't feel as long as it is.

please reblog to push this further, we're aiming for at least 25 responses! :D

The flag situation

It's been brought to our attention that the original versions of the quidditism flags hel a lot of resemblance to the flag from a queer facsist group rising to "fame" lately.

At first, we elected to ignore it, but alas, nobody wants to be conflated with these people.

The flag has therefore been changed.

The old designs will stay up on this post and can of course still be used, but the main flag is now the one on the pinned/coining post.

Old flag designs:

New flag design:

eci.ec.europa.eu

European Citizens' Initiative

Give your support !

EUROPEAN CITIZEN INITIATIVE (ECI) : Ban of conversion practices in the European union. Just 762.726 more signatures

for this campaign to reach its goal before May 17th !!!!

I'm so serious about being kind above all else. it has genuinely changed the way I interact with the world on a fundamental level and has made me so so much happier.

"guys we're so cooked" "it's wraps" "the end is near" shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up. i say that with love because you are probably saying it out of distress and hopelessness, but for your own well-being and for everyone else's, please stop saying this shit.

no we are not "cooked." and by saying that, by the way, you are giving more power to the neo-nazi oligarchy in charge.

they want you to abandon all hope of a better life. they want you to believe "oh well, it's over, we might as well stop trying to fight back and just resign ourselves to despair forever."

every time you get on tiktok and comment "guys we're so cooked haha it's over," you are feeding into the mindset of hopeless compliance. you are, unknowingly, spreading this infectious idea that just because we've lost one battle, we've lost the entire war.

your words matter. i am saying this out of love and concern for our future, but please stop choosing words of defeat.

I can just imagine saying “lobotomies are bad” in like 1949 and having someone say “you’re wrong, the science is settled, lobotomies are the best way to treat mental illness” and guess what? In 1949 I might be the unpopular and socially wrong one. The person with the backwards, conservative thinking. That is the year that António Egas Moniz won the Nobel Prize for lobotomies.

Lobotomies are still bad, but a lot of people have now understood that it’s a deeply harmful and anti-human practice. It was often performed on women (60% of cases were women in the US, a study in Ontario put women patients at 72%) and on gay men. Societal mores have changed on what is psychiatrically appropriate—many of these women were depressed and repressed housewives, or were not naturally submissive to their husbands and considered “combative”.

Many lobotomies were called “ice pick lobotomies” because they involved inserting an ice pick through the eye to sever the part of your brain that feels emotions. There were different techniques, largely dependent on which surgeon you saw. Norbert Wiener said in 1948, "Prefrontal lobotomy... has recently been having a certain vogue, probably not unconnected with the fact that it makes the custodial care of many patients easier. Let me remark in passing that killing them makes their custodial care still easier."

In 1944, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease ran an article saying, “The history of prefrontal lobotomy has been brief and stormy. Its course has been dotted with both violent opposition and with slavish, unquestioning acceptance."

Walter Freeman called the practice “surgically induced childhood”—he specialized in lobotomies and performed them until 1967, so he found this to be a good outcome. In fact, he worked on an “assembly line” process where he could lobotomies 20 people a day, and even did a surgical procedure face-off with another doctor in 1948 to compete in an operating theatre to show an audience of doctors that his technique was superior. The other professor was a professor at Yale, William Beecher Scoville, another famous lobotomist known for proliferating the procedure. They called it a miracle cure, and the gold standard for psychiatric treatment.

Scoville’s most famous patient, Henry Molaison, was a 7-year old boy with epilepsy after a fall from his bike. Scoville couldn’t find the problem, so he just destroyed all three regions of Henry’s temporal lobes. Afterwards, the surgeon noted memory loss “so severe as to prevent the patient from remembering the location of the rooms in which he lives, the names of his close associates, or even the way to the toilet or the urinal.”

Scoville’s wife sought psychiatric care after her husband cheated on her and she had a breakdown. Her husband lobotomized her himself.

In the 1960s, when schizophrenia became a radicalized charged diagnosis that was often used against Black people, especially those involved in the civil rights struggle. Walter Freeman did several pushes to lobotomize Black people, including as young as five, for “hyperactive and aggressive behavior”.

The practice continued in some places until the 1980s. It was used to treat schizophrenia, affective disturbance (mood disorders and people reacting in non-mainstream ways like being an opinionated woman or gay), and OCD, chronic neurosis (anxiety), psychopathic disorders, and depression, among other things. You may notice the old names for these things—things that we might not consider the same way now. Being gay was a mental disorder. Women who wanted independence or respect were often diagnosed. Not fulfilling your traditional societal role was a good way to end up institutionalized.

It was considered, at time of invention, to be an humane alternative to insulin comas and shock therapy (ECT). Many people considered it lifesaving and gold standard treatment for mental illness. Some reports believe that about a third of patients found the procedure beneficial. Others faced dementia, death, incontinence, inability to speak, paralysis, and other effects. Many people were unable to ever leave care again afterwards, though they were more complacent.

I don’t think any scientist who tells you that science is settled is a good scientist. I think that treatments that target people who don’t fit the mold of society, people who are countercultural, and people from marginalized groups should be especially criticized. Psychiatry is a very new field. Part of the phasing out of lobotomies had to do with the development of the first medications for psychiatric use—which in turn have had their own social, political, and ethical conundrums and misuse. Many could consider Valium (“mother’s little helper”) the spiritual successor to the lobotomy.

But in 1949, if I said lobotomies are bad—I might have been met with “Do you hate mentally ill people?” “It works great for most people!” “Without it, she will just be depressed and kill herself” or “My friend did it and all her problems seem better now”.

Lobotomies were bad the whole time.

You CAN be eco friendly with tech!!

Use energy saver mode

Dont keep your pc and chargers plugged in when not in use. Better yet, get outlets that can switch off.

Buy energy efficient products

Replace parts instead of scrapping the whole product, and when it is beyond repair, recycle or sell for parts

Replace your phone battery instead of buying a new phone

Buy used/refurbished. They’re just as good as new, but youre not contributing to more demand

Try to buy local

Buy sustainably sourced accessories or ones that can be easily composted or properly disposed of

Use Ecosia to plant trees while you search

Use wildhero to plant trees with your email

Limit AI usage