my professor spent our entire seminar whining about how there’s too many girls in our group and not enough boys. he was like “i’m not saying women can’t be good surgeons but we need more men” no, we don’t. men suck. deal with it.
CRY ALL YOU FUCKING WANT YOUR TEARS DON’T MEAN SHIT TO ME. YOUR TEARS MEAN DICK TO ME JUST SO YOU KNOW
Okay so not to be that person who adds on to a post with their own story but my mom is a doctor and when I was eleven she took me to these all-female seminar led by a woman who was the head of a hospital because my mom is an empowered and independent woman who wanted her daughter to be the same way and so there’s like thirty females surgeons in the room, all sitting around his huge circlular confrenece table and talking about their experiences in becoming surgeons
most of them were like “everyone told me I should become a nurse or a pediatrician” and “people assume that I don’t know what I’m doing” you know, your average sexist bs
one of the women’s last name was starboard (yeah I know great name) and she was talking about how even though now she was one of the most accomplished surgeons at the hospital, the male scrub techs (read: guys who didn’t go to fucking medical school) and some of the male doctors call her starbitch in the OR because they (scrub techs mostly, strangely enough) try to suggest different ways to care for the patient and she always tells them no you didn’t go to med school and I did and so they would go out of their way to get the male doctors to treat the patient differently and then she would have to argue with him to prove what she was doing es right but sometimes the male doctor would come and take over the case anyway and this went on for a while
but then the hospital statistics changed bc this woman was literally being prevented from treating her patients bc the men were interfering and so the administrative head heard about this (she was female) and she was like y’all better stop or y’all better start looking for new jobs and then starboard was allowed to work on her patients and got the scrub techs replaced and all of the sudden, the patients were suddenly doing much better during and after surgery.
when she told this story she was like “people still call me a bitch, and maybe I am because I won’t let them walk all over me, but when you’ve got something to do, when you’ve got a life to save, you have to ignore their bullshit so that you can save someone’s fuckin life. Sexism should never stop you from accomplishing that”
and little eleven-year-old me still remembers that bc I was insecure and awkward and here was this woman who just did what she had to do and ignored all the people trying to stop here and she really was better than all the male doctors (like her patient stats were better) and I thought I should share with you this inspiring woman with the cool last name
I’ve been deliberately requesting only female doctors throughout my entire transition cause I am not interested in death
Lately I’ve been seeing people discuss why ‘genderbending’ isn’t transphobic, or why it’s something that’s fine and should be accepted. Most of the people who have been discussing this are cis, which is an issue right off the bat, so I’m going to preface this post by saying that if you are not trans, you do not have the right to determine what is or is not transphobic. Full. Stop. So if you’re cis, and your first instinct is to argue with me on this, I would like for you to consider why you believe that you can recognize transphobia better than someone who is routinely subject to it. That being said, let’s get into this.
To start off, what is ‘genderbending?’ Most fansites will define it as the act of ‘switching’ a character’s gender, but there’s already an issue with this. ‘Genderbending’, or ‘rule 63’ as is called in some circles, it not just about switching a character’s gender, it is about changing that character’s body as well. I have yet to see a ‘genderbent’ version of a male character who lacked breasts and a dfab body. This the first and most obvious reason why ‘genderbending’ is inherently transphobic – it assumes that physical traits and gender are the same thing, and that you cannot be female without also being dfab.This is cissexism, and this is transphobic. The message that ‘genderbending’ says is that you must have breasts and a vagina to be female, and you must have a penis and a flat chest to be male. I should not have to explain why that message is transphobic.
However, the way ‘genderbends’ are carried out also has distinctly transphobic implications in how it switches out the physical traits of characters to make them ‘the opposite gender’ ( the notion of there being ‘opposite genders’ is some fresh bullshit that I’ll cover later in this post ). For example, by giving a male character breasts and curves when ‘genderbending’ him, the message is clear that this character was cis to begin with. ‘Genderbending’ inherently implies that all characters are cisgender by default, and erases any possibility of these characters being trans.This is not as overtly transphobic as the first point, but it is harmful to trans people within fandom spaces, as the assumption that all characters are cis until explicitly stated otherwise pushes us out of media and removes whatever representation we might try to make for ourselves.
The third issue with ‘genderbending’ is that it is always cis male <—> cis female, and nothing else. I have never seen people ‘genderbend’ characters by making them nonbinary or intersex. I have never seen a genderbend of a female character which made her a trans male instead. ‘Genderbending’ implies that there are only two options when it comes to gender: cis male and cis female. There is no such thing as nonbinary people within this ideology. Intersex people are laughable at best. Agender people are little better than a distant myth. ‘Genderbending’ ignores that it is impossible to make a character ‘the opposite gender’, because there is no such thing as an ‘opposite gender’. Gender is a spectrum, not a binary, but you wouldn’t know that from the way fandom spaces treat it.
Of course, there are some reasons for ‘genderbending’ cis male characters into cis females that will always get brought up in discussions on the politics of ‘genderbending.’ The most frequent is that cis girls, who only see themselves as one-dimensional characters in media, want to have characters like them who are just as multifaceted and developed as the male characters that we are given, so they make their male faves female to give themselves the representation they desire. This is a decent reason for ‘genderbending’, but it does not excuse the fact that the way in which ‘genderbending’ is done is inherently transphobic, and it gives fans yet another excuse to ignore female characters in favor of focusing on their male faves.
Another reason for ‘genderbending’ that I’ve heard is ‘it’s for the sake of character exploration – like, what if this character had been born as male/female instead?’ This excuse is cissexist and transphobic from first blush. The idea behind it is that someone ‘born as female’, aka with breasts/vagina will automatically be a cis female, allowing fans to explore what that character’s life would have been like if they were female. Why not explore the possibility of a character being designated female at birth, but still identifying as male? Why do you need a character to be cis for you to find their personality and life interesting to explore? Why do you automatically reject the notion of your fave being trans? If you want to explore what it would have been like for your male fave to have struggled with sexism, consider them being a trans woman, or a closeted dfab trans person.
As a closing statement, I want to make one thing very clear. ‘Genderbending’ does harm trans people. It perpetuates dangerous cissexist notions and the idea of a gender binary being a valid construct, erases nonbinary and intersex people, and others trans people. These are what we call microaggressions – they are not as dangerous as outright harassment and assault, but they enforce and support a system and ideology in which we are other, and we are worthy of hate and violence because we do not fit in.
‘Genderbending’ is a transphobic practice, and if you engage in it, you need to be aware of and acknowledge this.
as ur friendly Neighborhood Nursing Student™ i feel somewhat compelled to remind everyone with the hot weather:
every liquid except sea water and alcohol hydrates you. It’s not CHUG WATER OR DIE. in fact, gatorade and the like are designed to hydrate you efficiently.
yeah, this includes coffee and tea and soda. the diuretic is not enough to cancel out the liquid. juices and milk have solids in them, sure, but they’re also mostly liquid! it counts.
your body can only absorb so much water at a time, so chugging 64 oz of water at noon and calling it good will do a wonderful job of flushing your kidneys, but not so much of hydrating your tissues. it’s more important that you’re getting consistent fluid throughout the day.
there’s a lot of fancy ways to determine How Much Water (Liquid) I Should Drink but honestly? 8 oz (1 cup) every other hour on cool days and 8 oz every hour on hot days should be fine (assuming you sleep for a normal amount of time per day…. i’m assuming ur awake 16 hours a day.)
figure out how many oz each of ur favorite cups is. it’ll help your guesstimation.
if ur urine is darker than light yellow, you’re dehydrated.
if u pinch the skin on the back of ur hand for a couple seconds and it takes more than a second or two go to back to normal then ur dehydrated.
In regards to #1, don’t take this as an excuse to drink the sugar water that they call sports drinks. They aren’t bad for you per se, but please choose water.
actually this entire post was written in the spirit of ppl using it as an excuse to drink sports drinks and soda etc
ppl have been commenting abt sodium levels in soda and sugar levels in sports drinks and thats all well and good but what i’ve noticed is that people who internalize “well, ONLY WATER hydrates me” but who HATE WATER remain horrifically dehydrated cause they dont drink anything.
so like. if ur a person who haaaaates tap water, this is absolutely me giving you permission to drink whatever fluid you can stomach. please take this as a direct excuse to drink nothing but gatorade if that’s what it takes to get enough fluid into ur body.
it’s not the healthiest for you, sure, but you’re a smart enough person to know that. please drink fluids anyways.
if u like water thats gr8. if you can stomach water that’s gr8. if you can’t, that’s okay too, and you need to stay hydrated just as much as anyone else, so pleasedrink.
reblogging because it’s so common for chronically ill people (especially us with chronic nausea) to have trouble drinking enough water – drinking stuff with sodium is great for those of us with POTS or adrenal insufficiency, and sugar helps with nausea. I always dehydrate quickly if I don’t keep juice, sodas, and popsicles around.
oh, and one more note: if you get nauseated drinking tap water but not bottled drinks, you may be allergic or sensitive to something in tap water. I’m mildly allergic to fluoride, so I drink (and cook with) Crystal Geyser brand water, which is fluoride-free.
“Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet.”
pathologizing their body sizes does not make kids healthier. “childhood obesity” is not a disease. kids are body diverse. it’s true that certain environmental factors – stress, food insecurity, endocrine disrupting chemicals, contaminated water, etc. – can increase body size but by what logic would we then say that their body size is the problem rather than their environment?
pathologizing their body sizes makes kids sicker and is a form of social control
i actually looked at the links this time and i keep re-reading the post and feeling incredibly validated and also crying because i didn’t deserve to be treated like that and it was wrong
THIS. I saw a post the other day that literally said if you do it to a fictional character, you’ll do it in real life.
No. Just NO.
I’m so glad someone put it into words.
Post reads:
“I find that, for me, the work is a safe place to put all the stuff you don’t want to put in your real life. I don’t want to be a crazy, manic asshole. I don’t want to have an affair. I don’t want to have a fucking gunfight. But! There’s a prt of your brain that wants to experience everything, and so work’s a safe place to explore it all. Both in the writing and in the performing. I get to write bout an affair. I get to have the guilt and the feeling of that without having to fuck my life up. [laughs] Art is the place to safely explore all those other sides of you, because the side you want to bring home is the side that wants to be a good father and be a good husband and be a good son. In art we can be fucking nuts.”
– Lin-Manuel Miranda pretty much nailing why all art and means of creative expression is so important
My petty ass when someone skinny buys something XXXL from a thrift store to ~transform~ it into a cute tailored cocktail dress: how about you leave the XXXL section alone so poor fat women out there can retain some sense of variety out of the 7 things that actually fit them in the god damn goodwill
Just to be clear I’m not talking about “I bought something a couple sizes larger than me and I’m taking it in”
I’m very specifically talking about THIS SORT OF THING
ugh the top and bottom ones make me especially furious because she removed the interesting part of the dress! those would both look adorable on me as is.
she could make an ugly black dress like that herself without chopping up a cool vintage dress in a rare larger size
@maryburgers would you have gone to that specific theft store to buy that specific vintage dress? If you would have never gotten it then why would you degrade her for doing cute and interesting to a dress that probably would have just sat at the thrift store forever.
Hey you know what’s actually degrading? Making a habit, and by that I mean an entire blog, where you buy all the plus size clothes in a thrift store and then take pictures of yourself contrasting your tiny body against the IMPLLLAAAUSIBLY OUTRAGEOUSLY HUUUUGE clothing. That is degrading.
Also like, fat people live everywhere SOMEONE would have gone to that specific store and fit into those dresses as is and loved them, there are so little options for fat people everywhere, none of the alterations they made are special or unique, like they could easily find something similar in a thrift store at the same price point.
plus size clothes DON’T sit at the thrift store forever. general size clothes do. our donated clothes last maybe a few weeks tops at a thrift store because there’s a larger demand for them than supply, that’s why the sections are so damn small despite the average us woman being a size 14, because they’re picked over constantly by people who need clothes. i was not expecting to do this but i’m gonna go into deep detail so you understand why exactly this is fucked up.
poor people are more likely to be plus size because of lack of access to healthy food, which is the target demographic of a damn thrift store in the first place. thrift shopping is trendy now, which is fine, except when you buy clothes for projects like this that are in high demand but low supply: maternity clothes, plus size clothes, pajamas, etc. if you need clothing, buy it. but you can make any of these projects from clothes without poaching from low supply areas and taking comical pictures that mock fat bodies.
now here’s why there’s a ridiculously low supply of plus size clothes: fat people don’t have as many places to buy clothes and all of them have poor selection so we don’t buy a lot of them to begin with. the shopping pattern of a plus size person is very different from that of a straight size person as well. i know this from working in plus size retail. overwhelmingly, we shop when we desperately need clothes. and i mean desperately like hole the size of a basketball in the thigh of your jeans desperately. wearing a bra from 1998 desperately. work blazer held together with scotch tape and safety pins desperately. we can’t donate our clothes because we wear them until the point where we physically cannot anymore.
we also don’t cycle through trends as much as smaller sizes because a) shopping is a huge ordeal for a plus size person and b) our clothes cost WAY MORE so we can’t afford to wear an article of clothing once and then give it to goodwill. then on top of that none of the places that give you money for clothes EVER want your fatass clothes. skinny people can pop over to any secondhand clothing store that pays for donations and get some of that investment back. we can’t do that EVEN THOUGH our clothes cost way more than straight sizes. oh, and we get paid less than thinner women btw 🙂 that’s always great.
so if we can’t regain any of our investment, we’re just gonna put up with clothes we don’t like until we can’t wear them anymore or we give them away in the case of weight loss (when ur fat you know a lot of other fatties, and if ur a queer/trans fatty someone is always having a clothing swap you can give to).
all of this adds up to make it so that thrift stores are in low supply of plus size clothes that more and more people need because us fatties? if we don’t look good we don’t get jobs. you cannot look even the slightest bit unkempt or you come off as lazy or bitchy, and if you have a family to support you can’t spend weeks looking for a job where they won’t judge your competence based upon whether your clothes are trendy or not. when you’re not plus size and you take away these clothes from needy women you are in small part enabling their suffering.
it shouldn’t be that way. women should have access to affordable, well fitting, professional clothing regardless of size. but that’s not the world we live in so you can’t just cover your ears and pretend that it is.
@a-lames-adventure please fucking read all the replies on this and get the fuck @ me
Perspective.
I understand both sides of this issue, but the majority of the replies are the ethically sound side.
Having gone from a size 4 to a size 14 due to weight gain from medication, I can tell you that there is absolutely NO NEED to destroy plus-size clothing in order to get cute cocktail dresses or whatever in a thrift store. There are TONS of adorable petite cocktail dresses, formal dresses, etc, for smaller women. And there is a huge lack of cute dresses for anyone larger than a 10. I’m not even considered ‘plus size’, and I still struggle to find dresses that don’t make me look like the Goodyear blimp, because I’m pretty sure designers give up once you get beyond a certain size and intentionally make the dresses as ugly as possible.
If you want to make your own dress, buy the fucking fabric and do it from a pattern. You can even make it from a ~*~vintage~*~ pattern if you want extra Twee Points. Don’t buy, cut up, and ruin a perfectly good plus-size dress, while taking mocking pictures of how OMGHUGE it is, in order to make a rather bland cocktail dress. There’s literally no need to do that other than that you’re unimaginative, selfish, and don’t care about plus-size women.
This time x1000 Do you know how infuriating it is to try and find maternity clothes at a thrift store, find nothing, have to rely on you mom to spend $200 for 5 fucking items, and then go on pintrest and see some girl who would fit 90% of the clothes at the thrift store cutting up a maternity dress to make a blouse that looks like one you can by at urban Forever 21?
wupacing 