this post hasn’t left my mind since i’ve first saw it
people jest but this is literally how i worked out i was gaslit for like 15 years of my life
People who “want trauma” are recognizing, on some level, that they were traumatized but in a way that’s not “socially recognized” as trauma. What they really want is for people to see that they’ve been traumatized and be on their side
Hold up
I think it’s also important to talk about mental illness, and how the pain and trauma of being mentally ill as a kid is often diminished because of the lack of outside actors. If you spent your childhood being suicidally depressed because your wee little kiddo brain decided to be a chemical shitshow, it doesn’t matter how much mom and dad loved you, that kinda thing fucks you up. And having people only look at your external surroundings and argue that “nothing bad happened” ignores all the pain you went through internally. So wishing you could have something external you could point to in order to justify that pain and enduring stress – just so people could understand – makes sense.
Also, trauma isn’t always caused by your family or in your household? Sometimes it’s outside factors like losing friends, bullying at school, abuse by teachers or other adults in your life, etc. You can have the most wonderful family and great home life and still be traumatized. Trauma can happen anywhere.
And no amount of familial love and stability is a substitute for having your mental illness recognized and treated. Childhood mental illness can be traumatic enough for the reasons noted above, but if you didn’t grow up in a time and place where average people even recognized that kids could experience clinically significant levels of, say, anxiety and depression, then those things were left to grow and compound themselves unchecked AS YOUR BRAIN DEVELOPED. That’s not only a recipe for trauma, but for complex trauma - the kind your brain forms around over time and incorporates into your routines. It might not be the kind where you can point to one discrete event and say “I’m fucked up from this” and everyone accepts it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. It just means it doesn’t fit into the easy narratives people demand when they’re already looking for a reason not to care.
when I’m just walking around and something makes me screech to a halt and my eyeballs shoot out like binoculars and I gotta drop everything to take photos
Wild how the queer community has been fighting tooth and nail for generations to have some semblance of inclusion and just the desire to not be beaten, arrested, or killed for existing.
Then there is less than 10 years of policies put in place to help us start being treated more humanely and the Conservative party is like “Actually we rather you die again” openly and proudly.
Wild how allowing ppl to live has made them so angry and more open about their fascism.
Meanwhile half of the younger queers online are too preoccupied with terminology and gatekeeping fandom engagement while our country actively works to eradicate the community honing social media to propagate propaganda.
It is going to sound mean and im not gonna sugarcoat it:
Telling other lgbtqia members that using the term “queer” is problematic and bad is more aligned with conservative’s views of hiding and destroying queerness. When you get that gatekeeping towards your own community you are making it easier to break us apart.
They aren’t going to stop with “don’t say gay”, they aren’t going to stop with “no trans healthcare”, they aren’t going to stop with bathrooms or sports teams or “parental rights”. They want to revoke your marriage, they want to take away your kids, they want to fire you for being gay, they want to arrest you for being GNC, they want to re-educate you for being ace, they want you poor, homeless, despairing and dead–and they want all that as an example to the next generation of queer people, so they stay closeted and paranoid.
And if they get everything on that wish list, they’ll come for more. You’re not safe as a rich white gay man; you’re not safe as a middle-class femme lesbian; you’re not safe as a “passing” transperson with all your paperwork legally sealed. Stand with the entire queer community or sooner or later you’ll be on the right’s chopping block.
Being openly not-straight, of any variety, was punishable as a CRIME in much of the US until 20 years ago. Lawrence v Texas was in 2003.
We’ve had 20 years of safety - based on a SCOTUS ruling based, in large part, on Roe v Wade.
Which, y'know, they overthrew recently, just before it could reach its 50 year mark. And in doing so, Alito mentioned that Lawrence and Griswold were both potential future targets.
Griswold v Connecticut is the 1965 case giving married people the right to access to birth control. They want to overturn that, too.
The conservative & alt-right movements are thrilled to see so much infighting among leftists and the queer communities; it’ll make it so much easier for them to drive in the wedges they’ll use to go after all of us.
