goddammit this is my blog and I'm gonna say things

[sciatrix]

The anxiety weasels have returned, but I should manage a linkspam this week. It has not been a great mental health week for me, but I think I have identified the issues with my sound chambers for now (need more base-line microphone amps, peering at the chambers I )

Made the mistake of accidentally kicking off my own exclusionist trauma issues on a Metafilter post, and will be taking a break from there (have locked myself out of my account for the rest of the week). I am reminded why I tend to view lesbians with guarded suspicion until they demonstrate that they don't hold with the TERFy and SWERFy corners of queerpolitik, and regret bringing up both that particular article and tensions in queer-female-and-adjacent communities more generally.

No, seriously, the word lesbophobia is a dog whistle, and doubling down on it when I go "are you--are you intending to communicate this?" and insisting I'm speaking in bad faith is, ah. Fun.

Also today, I had a horrifically-ill student attempt to isolate his own DNA with a cheek rinse and fill it with so much phlegm that I couldn't figure out what the hell he was doing wrong when he showed me his sample. I did not, however, find this out before that student helpfully tried to dip a micropipette with no fucking tip into his cup of filthy sick spit-water and draw up a milliliter of fluid, and then get confused when the tip didn't fit on the micropipette afterwards. I think I got it dried out enough not to bleed everywhere, but I'm not sure. I definitely went back and splashed ethanol all over that sucker after he left.

I can only hope he had the same nasty bug I did a few weeks ago, so maybe I can fight it off before he infects everyone else.

Comments

[havocthecat]

I am reminded again why, even in fandom spaces, I am not particularly involved in discussions of queerness as a bisexual woman married to a man, because I have run into that sexuality-policing bullshit over and over again. Sometimes even in the femslash spaces where I thought I was, well, safer to be a bisexual woman married to a man, but whoops, nope, sometimes you trip and stand up and discover it's all LESBIANS ONLY up in this femslash arena, and you just have to say fuck you and the lesbian horse you rode in on.

It's honestly just exhausting and offensive. This is why I tend to keep my fandom activities concentrated to people who don't give a damn about questioning my sexuality or my relationships. Do I deserve to be where I say I am? Yes. Can I and should I write what I say I want to write? Yes. It's just so much healthier and less exhausting that way.

I hope your Metafilter break does you good - and I hope you don't catch anything from your student. I am certain he screwed up because he was sick. Probably the boringness of the film was not holding his attention because of the tiredness from the sick? I hope.

[sciatrix]

I mean, this is a non-zero part of why I sort of faded back from the f/f ship I was writing in very actively (for... me) and started avoiding almost all of the content/discussion, because most of it got very much like "yes they are lesbians" (using that word very specifically) and often sort of... softly and without a lot of focus on the characters themselves or the complicated parts of them I liked.

The thing is, I do understand the trauma that people there are talking about! I just don't understand why there's a certain class of person who can't acknowledge trauma that's orthogonal to theirs, or even understand (and own) that saying "this traumatic response caused this other trauma and if we're ever going to stop it we need to listen" is important. I think that's the thing I always wind up breaking my heart over, and I need to just stop it and start losing my temper, or at least not blame myself for that being the choice some people make.