Latest Posts by fuckifellagain - Page 2

We need to talk about tumblr's systematic fatphobia.

Posts of fat people are being marked as "sexual content" even more frequently than they used to, but now we have this fun little addition as brought to my attention by a friend;

That's right. Not just blatant kink-shaming, but now, if you make posts about or with fat people, you can now be flagged as "promoting disordered eating"! Multiple completely innocent posts of fat people literally just existing in their own bodies have already been flagged this way.

Raise hell about it. Reblog and share fat content more than ever. Don't let this shitty website tell you that your bodies are "wrong" or that you aren't allowed to exist publicly.

Tumblr staff, if you care about eating disorders (you fucking don't), stop promoting this sense of shame and fear and disgust towards the idea of weight gain. Stop shaming and censoring people for posting about their own bodies and experiences. Fatphobia kills. Fatphobia causes disordered eating. Fatphobia is the disease you should be worried about.

This has also been disproportionately affecting fat trans people, because of course it has.

Don't stop talking about it. Don't let this bullshit ceo silence you.

Harry Potter is fucking unsalvageable at this point and it doesn't matter how much you seperate yourself from the artist/author when the author's bigotry and transmisogyny heavily overshadows anything in that mediocre book.

at this point it signifies that you are complicit in the genocide of trans people, especially trans women and that you don't care that Rowling is profiting off of HP while pushing for the removal of our existence.

love our trans sisters, especially trans sisters of color, more than this fuck ass book.

i've been participating in plein airpril! some studies so far :-)

D’you perchance have any thoughts on the morphological (for lack of a better word?) dire wolves that Colossal Biosciences just revealed to the public? 👀

Oh my god Aenocyon, you can't just ask someone why they're white!

"Morphological dire wolf" my ass. Which is coincidentally where Colossal pulled the white coats from…

Give me an example of a modern temperate/grassland predator that's white*, I'll wait. *Excluding white lions, which are an uncommon but resilient morph resulting from leucism.

I based my Aenocyon design off bushdogs and dholes. They are called Masked Wolves in Kindred's setting, because I enjoy a good pseudo hyena niche uvu-b

Extremely extremely long 'thoughts' below the cut lol c':

Preface: in this discussion the term "dire wolf" has too many meanings, as such I will be referring to them as follows:

Thrones' wolves: for the huge, white, fantasy animals from Game Of Thrones GMO wolves: for Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, Colossal's creations, Canis lupus Aenocyon: for Aenocyon dirus, the true, extinct dire wolf known from fossils across North America

----

Part 1: That's not a dire wolf-

The first question everyone has been asking is "So, are dire wolves de extinct now?" The answer is an emphatic "NO!" from anyone with knowledge of genetics, palaeontology, or taxonomy.

Aenocyon dirus were actually not wolves, nor dogs, but a secret third thing.

They are canids, but last shared a common ancestor with grey wolves and their lineage some ~5.7 million years ago.

For context, this paper suggests a similar divergence time between genus Homo (humans, Neanderthals and co) and Pan (chimps and bonobos); animals that look and behave markedly differently from each other.

The genomes of Canis lupus and Aenocyon dirus being 99.5% similar may sound like a lot, but again, humans share 98.8% with chimps, and 99.7% with Neanderthals, and yet are very distinct from both.

Skeletally, behaviourally, in soft tissue, etc, you could tell any of the three apart; the same goes for Aenocyon and Canis members.

Additionally, Colossal made 20 changes in 14 genes.

The grey wolf genome has 2,447,000,000 base pairs. Does that maths seem a bit off to you?

That's not even enough to change a grey wolf into a domestic dog, let alone an ancient outgroup!

This would be akin to modifying a lion to have bigger teeth and saying you resurrected Smilodon fatalis.

Or editing a Asian Elephant genome so they retain their juvenile hair and calling it a Woolly Mammoth.

It's a bold-faced lie.

Beth Shapiro says "they look and act like dire wolves" but that, too,simply isn't true.

Visually, the GMO wolves simply aren't what Aenocyon would have looked like. It's what a Thrones' wolf looks like.

Hmmmmm, funny about that, seeing George R R Martin helped fund the 'dire wolf project'...

As with many fossil animals, we don't know much about Aenocyon's behaviour.

You can't say the GMO wolves (who are also still pups) act like Aenocyon, because that's based off nothing.

What we do know is Aenocyon were likely pack animals (from the sheer number found in La Brea Tarpits), and crunched more bones than modern wolves (from their many broken teeth).

Also, crucially, they had Wild Sex Lives (from the many, huge, broken and healed bacula... youch).

Colossal is also being colossally shady by: doubling down on their bs use of the outdated "morphological species definition", blatantly misleading the public with their use of the words 'cloning', 'dire wolves', and 'de extinction', and refusing to share their methods in a peer reviewed paper before going public with a clickbait headline.

Do not trust them with your Red wolves either. They're using coyote hybrids and considering what they deem 'close enough' for a dire wolf, I wouldn't put any money on the quality of their GMO red wolves either...

Also can I just say, whatever genes they modified to "make the skull larger" clearly didn't impact the lower jaw...

No, I'm not sorry for this image uvu-b (But for real look at that poor pup and his overbite jfc)

Part 2: -and if it was, that wouldn't be good either.

I fundamentally do not support de extinction.

No, not even for the Thylacine, not even for passenger pigeons, nor the dodo. Even my beloved Homotherium should be left in the past.

This might be an unexpected stance because I am, surprising no one, a big fan of extinct animals, megafauna and otherwise.

But the thing is, I'm an even bigger fan of actual, living animals.

The animal ethics of de extinction are dubious at best.

The surrogate dog mothers of the GMO wolves likely won't live good lives.

I wouldn't be surprised if they were destroyed after being used, because their bodies could contain feto microchimerisms and Colossal absolutely doesn't want their special wolf genome getting out.

I doubt the GMO wolves themselves will live a full life before they outgrow their hearts, like Ligers.

This would likely be the case for any modern animal genetically modified into megafauna; a body not adapted to deal with the increased size.

Purely conjecture, but I also wouldn't be surprised if Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi have vision/hearing issues from their white coats.

White coats in wolves are associated with hearing impairments, so the gene used for these animals was from domestic dogs. Meaning Colossal has created a very expensive wolfdog.

Again, what kind of life are these wolfdogs supposed to live? As awful pets for the rich? In a zoo? Released to pollute wild wolf genomes? (assuming they're fertile; I hope not)

Regardless, it's not looking good if they ever planned to have them be 'wild animals'

Even true clones (which the GMO wolves are not) tend to have health issues.

Celia the Pyrenean Ibex (bucardo) was cloned, but the clone died after 9 minutes from a deformed lung.

So in 2003, this made the bucardo the first species to go extinct twice, yippee?

There's also the problem of genetic diversity.

How many intact genomes do you have on hand?

For dire wolves the answer is Zero!

To my knowledge, we don't have the full genome coded from one individual, just Frankenstein-ed from many. Which is fine for sequencing the canine family tree's relatedness, but not for cloning.

The absolute minimum individuals to survive a genetic bottleneck is said to be 50 in larger species. Called the 50/500 rule, it states that 50 is enough to survive, but 500 is required to prevent genetic drift.

To which I say, good luck!

Even with well preserved permafrost species (such as woolly mammoths), you'll have a hard time finding 500 individuals with prefect genomes.

And then, where will you put them?

If you were to, somehow, make a breeding population, where are they going? A national park? A zoo? Is their old habitat still available to them?

In Aenocyon, the answer is simply "they don't have a niche anymore".

Unlike the Thylacine or Dodo, humans did not directly cause the extinction of Aenocyon dirus. And even if they had, it was 10,000 years ago!

Would making room for a de extinct species impact the habitat/niche of another species?

Regular grey wolves fill Aenocyon's role as a canine mesopredator, with Puma as the apex (alongside bears as an apex omnivore).

With the loss of megafauna to prey on, a de extinct predator would just compete with other, also endangered species.

Animals also change the environment they life in.

Mammoths will clear trees like modern elephants. This would recreate the Mammoth Steppe, but those trees making up the taiga and boreal forests are themselves crucial habitat.

Other species have moved in since the mammoths' extinction. Siberian tigers, lynx, muskoxen, brown bears, elk, moose, and so many others; many endangered.

Trees also prevent erosion, which is already happening at unprecedented rates due to agriculture and deforestation.

Crucially: What's to stop an extinct animal going the same way it went out last time?

Ask yourself this:

Would the average American appreciate "flocks of Passenger pigeons big enough to darken the sky and whiten ground with their guano"?

Would people suddenly be okay with lions in Europe eating their livestock, when they are champing the bit to shoot Iberian wolves again?

Would Tasmanians suddenly feel the same about the Thylacine, when farmers in Australia still happily kill dingoes and eagles for lamb predation? [citation, I am an enviro technician and have had farmers tell me they shoot Wedge-tails, knowing I'm a toothless lion to stop them.]

I doubt it

At what cost?

Are we going to find 50 thylacine genomes?

If so (doubtful), how much will cloning and/or modifying a relative into a thylacine cost? Now that x50?

Wouldn't that money be better spent on quoll reintroduction?

What about finding 50 gestational carriers for mammoths?

Are you going to use their closest relative; the already critically endangered Asian Elephant?

Wouldn't that time and effort on those elephant mothers be better used making more elephants?

And the social cost:

If extinction isn't forever, what's to incentivize lawmakers to fund conservation?

Really, it comes down to this:

Why bring back the dire wolf when we could put this money into protecting the Iberian and Red wolves?

Why bring back the thylacine when their cousin is dying of a transmissible cancer?

We've already seen the impacts of "extinction isn't forever anymore", with those in power already trying to cut funding to conservation, because you can "just bring them back".

But as we've seen time and time again: there is no Planet B. There is no De-Extinction, not really.

Maybe what was gone should stay gone, so we can focus on what we still have.

skipping jumping AND hopping btw. if you even care.....

My car is getting serviced and this auto shop has a shop dog and he's ridiculous. Look at this guy. This is a grown ass man.

reblog to slap his bald head

idk where all of this weed-smoke discourse erupted from, but “weed is fine and you shouldn’t be a snitch about it” and “don’t burn plant matter in public spaces where someone you don’t know might have, like, a lung condition” are two sentiments that can and do coexist. i have asthma and i hang out with stoners pretty much constantly. i’ve never felt the urge to snitch and no one has ever blatantly disrespected my avoidance of smoke. they’re always eager to help keep it away from me when needed, which isn’t difficult to do. i hate to say this, but my only takeaway from a hypothetical scenario in which a stoner is blasting weed smoke in public like a dragon and an asthmatic feels the need to involve the cops is that both individuals are unpleasant and i don’t want to be around either of them lmao

Some women are conditioned to be fragile and weak, and to believe that it's a sin to outperform a man. Her feminism would involve allowing women to be strong.

Some women are expected to be strong at times when they can't. Her feminism would involve reassuring her that it's okay to not be strong.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're too stupid to ever amount to anything. Their disability activism would involve reassuring them that they're capable.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're smart and gifted, and are expected to live up to impossible standards. Their disability activism would involve allowing them to fail, make mistakes, be stupid, etc.

Some children are constantly reminded "you're the child, I'm the adult" in order to deny their autonomy. Their youth rights activism would involve treating them like an adult at times when they feel ready for it.

Some children are treated like adults in order to justify increased expectations or to downplay abuse against them. Their youth rights activism would involve allowing them to be a child.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to oppression. Each individual person's experience is different. Whatever trauma is caused by their oppression, the activism should focus on undoing it.

people have got to learn the difference between I didnt like it and It was bad

I’ve been in debilitating pain lately. I don’t talk a lot about my chronic pain online here. But I think it’s worthy of talking about.

People don’t realize just the effects of chronic pain. What it does to you, and how it affects you. Yes, I’m in pain ALWAYS. And yes, sometimes it’s worse than others. But just because my pain is worse one day, doesn’t mean my pain is gone the next. I want people to realize the extent and life with chronic pain that’s debilitating.

I use my wheelchair everyday now, and most of the time, all day, everyday. My laundry is STACKED cause I haven’t been able to do it. Mountains of clothes in my room. I don’t shower often cause it causes me even more pain and is exhausting, so I have gotten sores. From using my wheelchair so much, I’ve also started to develop mild pressure sores. It sucks!

I’m out of my pain medication currently, just took my last dose, and I’m still suffering. Every day of my life, I’m suffering. And now, more than ever. My pain has continued yk get worse, with no end in sight, and it’s sad. It’s so sad.

I hate being in pain, and I wish more people talked about debilitating pain that’s makes you stuck in bed all day.

ok i need to find the people obsessed with puppets WHERE ARE YOU BITCHES

im talking The Muppets, Fraggle Rock, Welcome Home, My Friendly Neighborhood, etc WHERE IS THE FANDOM REVEAL YOURSELVES

I can’t get into it without outing myself and my job, but damn I wish people could figure out how to break the rules on their own. If you involve me, if you tell me you’re going to violate a contract, I am required to do something. I’m not a cop! I’m not a narc! You could simply not tell me this shit! I am begging you to not tell me! Don’t send me an email to my work address that says “I’m going to violate our contract, how would you suggest I do it?” Well first things first don’t fucking tell me

The next person who uses "opposite sex" is getting stabbed like Caesar

(/nsrs bec I'm not literally going to stab someone but SHEESH why are people like this)

STOP. PROMOTING. A SEX. BINARY. IT. DOESN'T. EXIST!

If you all really hate Assigned Sex/Gender At Birth as much as you say you do, can we start putting the acronym AFTER a subject? Like, ignoring how some dummies like using them as nouns ("AFABs"/"AMABs"), "AFAB nonbinary people"—just for example— could sound so much better as "Nonbinary people (who were) AFAB".

It's an event. In the past. By a doctor(s) who made a guess, possibly multiple times if your intersexuality affected that experience, and may or may not have been wrong. Start treating it like one, instead of an immutable trait that sticks with you for life and dictates X Y and Z about you— you know, like bioessentialists do.

the bitch that threw a fit about tying with a trans woman in college swimming is actually pathetic because they weren't even tied for first. they tied for fifth. imagine joining a hate movement over a fifth place trophy

i dedicated my life to you and all you've ever done is punish me for it

Pokémon fans are literally the funniest people in the universe.

message to all physically disabled trans people

survive

Do you not believe in biological sex? I’m confused.

Hoo, boy. Apologies in advance, but this is gonna have a long answer.

The thing about "biological sex" is, it's a complicated science with a lot of nuance involved, and people who don't actually know anything about it love to use it to mean "penis is boy, vagina is girl".

Which, on the surface, makes sense to a lot of people. Its what we're taught our whole lives, and it's difficult to listen to any argument that contradicts our worldview. It's scary and confusing, and people automatically resist scary and confusing things.

The thing you need to know, though, is that what we call "Biological Sex" can actually depend on a range of factors: 

First off, primary sex characteristics: the bits directly involved in reproduction, what most people consider the defining indicator of gender.

Primary sex characteristics include the penis and testes, which are predominantly associated with men, and the vagina and uterus, associated with women.

This seems fairly simple on the surface, scientifically speaking, but bodies aren't that simple. People can and are born with combinations of these things and live long, happy, healthy lives with few or no medical complaints. Many don't even know they have undescended testes or ovaries at all, and only find out accidentally through unrelated procedures. Is a mother of three who's known herself to be a woman her whole life suddenly a man because she has 'male' sex characteristics? No? Then why should any other woman?

Someone who is still new to this might be experiencing a cognitive dissonance right now, trying to reconcile "penis is boy, vagina is girl" with "people can have both (or neither)", and they may try to do this by saying, "Well, this could be caused by mutations or deformities, so intersex people (people with mixed characteristics) are outliers, not to be included with "valid" genders."

Which brings us to the next factor: hormones.

Testosterone is Boy, Estrogen is Girl. That's what people know, so they don't want to accept any different. Different is confusing, confusing is scary, scary is bad.

But, like primary sex characteristics, these things can fly in the face of common understanding.

A woman, for example, who considers herself cisgender, who has breasts and a vagina and a uterus and all that, might have high testosterone. Because people have both! And because testosterone can give people body hair, among other things, this woman has chest hair and a beard. She LOOKS a lot like what we think of as "male", so do we tell her she's wrong about her gender? 

On the flip side, plenty of cis men with a penis and testes can have high estrogen for any number of reasons, and can develop breasts- does that mean they're women, now? 

Of course not. We have to listen to them to tell us what their pronouns are, what their gender is, and how is that any different from someone who's trans? It would be incredibly ride to tell anyone that "oh, you SAY you're a man, but you look like a woman to me, so I'm going to ignore everything you tell me and call you a woman until you can prove to my satisfaction otherwise."

So if primary sex characteristics aren't the final word on gender, and secondary characteristics aren't either, then what's left? DNA, right? Genetics don't lie, everyone knows that.

So, chromosomes, then. The barest evidence of human biological sex. XX means "female", XY means "male", forget all that mess about vaginas, breasts, and testes. Our chromosomes are the holy gospel of gender.

Except, again, nature isn't that simple.

Picture in your head a cisgender woman. She hits everything on our personal little checklist: breasts, vagina, uterus, minimal body hair, small jawline, high voice, everything. But she has XY chromosomes. 

Because, surprise! That happens! And it happens more often than you think! People can and do go their entire lives not knowing it! Because it isn't important to how we view our gender. We don't care. 

If you went to a lab today, got tested, and found that you had the "wrong" chromosomes- would you suddenly be fine with Becoming A Different Gender? Being treated like you're a different gender? Having to dress different, talk different, redefine your sexuality, because your DNA says you're wrong about your identity? How would that feel? Probably pretty shitty, huh? 

So, when we get down to it, what is the one true indicator of gender? We can't trust genitalia, because it presents on any number of variations and combinations. Secondary sex characteristics are out too, because hormones do whatever they want without rhyme or reason. Chromosomes do whatever the hell they want, fuck them, they're useless.

If we are to open our minds to what the science is telling us, then, what is it saying?

If we are to put our faith in "Biological Sex", then what does is dictate to be the truth?

That physical sex isn't just "boy or girl", it exists on a spectrum. It's not "pink or blue", it's magenta, mauve, violet, lilac, periwinkle, cyan, cobalt, or vermilion, and our idea of "boy or girl" is almost entirely a construct of our imaginations, of the society we live in. It's an illusion that dictates how we experience our lives, how we're treated, what makes us happy and comfortable or how we feel at ease.

Biological sex cannot dictate gender because they're different concepts with different rules grounded in separate realities, and no amount of pointless fussing can force them to cooperate. 

Sex is one spectrum, gender is another, and they don't know each other.

You can accept what the science says, or you can find excuses to justify the beliefs you're comfortable with. It really doesn't matter. 

Just don't be a dick about things that make you uncomfortable and the world will keep on spinning.

Man what the fuck is it that makes people think intersex advocacy is transphobia

I was explaining how this art with trans colors would go better next to a personal essay that was made by a genderfluid intersex person than my own essay because they are trans and I am not and often intersex erasure is done via sliding us into some other category plus it erases the unique experiences of trans intersex people to conflate transness and intersexuality

And my classmate, who is trans, said "it's fine if you don't want to be associated with trans people" like girl. Ma'am. I gave you TV Glow on my ONLY flash drive and you never returned it. Everyone in my life is fucking trans! Do I fucking LOOK like I'm trying to not be associated with trans people? I'm asking people who know and respect me to know and respect my fucking identity.

My partner, who is both trans and Mexican, agrees that this shit is like "Hey I'm actually Cuban, and while I have experiences in common with and solidarity with Mexicans, I'd rather be associated with Cuban culture since I am Cuban. Maybe this person who is both Cuban and Mexican is a better fit to put by the Mexican flag art." And then having someone be like "its fine if you don't wanna be associated with Mexicans." Like. Is that what was said? Is that the energy being given?

That's what's happening here. I feel fucking insane every single day. The way it's happening irl and I'm literally just asking for people to remember I am intersex and not trans. Why is saying im not trans somehow me being fucking transphobic. Please explain. Why is forcing intersex people to overexplain again and again while we face the same violence as trans folks plus extra fun medical rape and whatnot somehow FINE to so many people? This person is a fucking tutor acting like this, too. Grow up

use inclusive language when talking about abortion and reproductive rights or die.

Can I just say I have literally NEVER seen an actual intersex transfem who was AFAB put "AFAB trans woman" / an intersex transmasc who was AMAB put "AMAB trans man" in their bio?

This whole fucking discourse (in refrence to intersex trans people, not the stupid TERF dogwhistle) is literally just perisex people demanding to know intersex people's AGAB and forcing perinormative sex binarist expectations on them based on that. This is intersexist by itself, but the kicker for me is that this is being done specifically for the purpose of excluding intersex trans people from a community they have a legitimate connection to.

Anyway, why don't we go back to the time when asking what a trans person's AGAB was would get you decked. You don't need to tell anyone your AGAB. Especially you, intersex people. Perisex people are not entitled to your medical history, especially when they intend to use it against you.

I’m starting to sound like a nutcase at work because upper management keeps trying to implement AI programs and AI assistants and Chat GPT and my middle-of-the-road, don’t-infodump, don’t-engage response has been “I don’t like AI”, “I prefer to remain in control of my own tasks”, “I’d rather make my own mistakes”, and “I don’t trust any machine smarter than a toaster”

I think HCing characters with physical disabilities is good and should be done more often but whenever I do it I feel like

Pepsi distributed Dr Pepper (on the left) And Coca-Cola distributed Dr Pepper (on the right). Dr. Pepper isn’t owned by either company, it is it’s own company Keurig Doctor Pepper, BUT they don’t have a bottling facility. In an area, they use whichever bottling facility gives them the best deal. That’s why sometimes it’s Pepsi shaped and sometimes it’s Coke shaped.

[ID in alt]

Tutorial on drawing characters/OCs who have some sort of facial paralysis. It doesn't cover all possible variants because I was using mirror as my main reference lawl

Keep in mind that this is an introductory drawing tutorial and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People 👍

Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.

not to be an asshole but i think a lot of disability discourse on this website cannot comprehend the idea of being physically disabled in a way which is like. not at all negotiable or flexible. like i think it's great that we're pushing people to understand that disability is nuanced and that there are disabilities which are not visible forms of physical disability but also like. sometimes you straight up cannot climb stairs. no not even on a good day not even when you "have enough spoons" it is just not physically possible. or you cannot get on and off a bus without struggling or without help. or it is physically not possible for you to bathe yourself. and it's not about "and you force yourself to push through it because of the internalized ableism" because you literally cannot physically fucking do it. like i am not trying to be mean but i feel like it frequently strikes me that people talking about disability seemingly do not understand the concept of I Literally Cannot Do This No Matter How Much I Want To Or Try Like It Is Physically Not Possible