My new meds make my skin throw a fit. It’s not terribly bad, just a few things here and there, but it’s bumming me out because I’ve never really had too many run-ins with acne.
My four-year-old sister, however, is under the impression that it’s just “3D freckles”, and that they look very, very pretty. She wants all of my freckles to “pop out”, especially the ones across my nose; they’re her favourite.
And it puts me in this weird position where I can’t say, “No, this is acne, and it’s bad,” because I don’t want to teach her that it’s a bad to have unclear skin, you know?
Because the more I think about interactions I have with children, the more I realise that children will consistently compliment “flaws” until they’ve been taught not to.
Like, a kid at the library, whose sister has vitiligo, saw my scars once and suggested that his sister and I should be cats for Halloween, since I have “tabby skin” and she has “calico skin”. “I can be a black cat,” he immediately added. “It’s not AS cool, but they’re the spookiest.”
When I started losing weight, my little brother immediately demanded that I gain it back, because I wasn’t as comfortable to cuddle with anymore.
And my other little sister always wants to wear her paint-stained clothes to school so that “everyone can tell [she’s] an artist”.
I don’t know. I guess talking to little kids just reminds me that all of this superficial shit we worry about really is 100% made up.
You know what I love about Ron Swanson? He’s a straight, white (bear with me, I’m going somewhere with this) traditionalist, government hating, steak eating, pipe smoking red-blooded American and you know what? He’s not racist, sexist or homophobic! His best friends are two women and a gay man for whom he was the best man for at his wedding! He accepts everyone as long as they’re “Never late and speak honestly.” He’s the pinnacle of traditional values and being a self-made man, but he’s also a really good person! We should all strive to be more like Ron Swanson. Except for his hatred of Europe. And vegetables.
The medical community on literally every female specific health issue ever: “very common condition” “no known cause” “no known cure” :))))))
What the fuck is tumblr? Like honestly what is this? Do you guys pull shit out of the inner most depths of your rectum and then just throw it on your keyboard and have it turn into a post???? This site is something else what the fuck is wrong with you people????!?!?
Endemetriosis
Vaginal Thrush
Menorrhagia
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome
Fibroids
Very common conditions, causes are unknown or only speculated, long term cures have not been found. Most can cause chronic pain or discomfort, all can seriously impact your quality of life.
Men are so damn privileged they can’t even imagine female bodies have different healthcare needs than theirs and that our healthcare needs are important even if they can’t be affected by one of these conditions.
Endometriosis causes excruciating pain and is a leading cause of infertility. Thrush is extremely
uncomfortable, and expensive to treat repeatedly; over-the-counter preparations rarely completely eradicate it. Menorrhagia, which I
have, makes you anæmic. PCOS causes hormonal symptoms that are socially
difficult (facial hair, acne, hair loss, weight gain). Fibroids are so common, and are often treated with a hysterectomy.
Add in fibromylgia, which affects 8x as many women as men, as well as lupus (and almost any other autoimmune condition), systemic exertion intolerance disorder (SEID), iron deficiency anæmia (all of which affect more women than men), and you have well over 25% of childbearing-age women globally living with chronic pain and tiredness.
Basically, this is a huge problem, and also one of the reasons I have been considering medical school.
Don’t forget that most pharmaceuticals go to market without ever having been tested on people with a uterus, lest someone get pregnant… seriously that is the whole rationale behind not testing >50% of the population. This has been legislated against in some countries, but still persists in the of majority drug development because of other regulations, and traditions and laziness. The use of a drug is of course monitored in the population after release, but the people “trying” it in this capacity get none of the insurance, close and regular medical examination or monetary benefit of essentially being in a late stage drug trial. Drugs that are pulled from market after release are sometimes done so on the basis that the dosage is just too high for females/afab people and this is, of course, after they’ve experienced the adverse affects.
This is why if you get pregnant your doctor will take you off basically any and all medication you’re taking (including mental health medication, can’t imagine any implications/dire consequences there), not because they know it will have an adverse affect on the foetus but because they have no idea. How wonderfully kind of them to prioritise the health and life of an unborn foetus over that of a living person, let’s just hope they don’t become ill whilst pregnant. How charmingly logical it is that they wouldn’t even bother to test drugs in people with a uterus because it’s all too difficult and gosh, darn what an ethical conundrum we’ve been faced with, let’s just not! Which is so in the spirit of capital S, Science!
Indeed, the issue is so severe that, in many cases, folks with uteruses are routinely told that their diseases and disorders are not, in fact, disorders at all, and are just a normal part of having a uterus.
Take menstrual cramps, for example. Everybody knows that cramps are a normal part of menstruation, and that virtually all people who menstruate experience them throughout their lives, right?
Except that’s not right at all.
Yes, it’s true that about two-thirds of individuals who menstruate begin to experience menstrual pain during adolescence, but it’s basically a side effect of puberty, and normally subsides by your late teens. Only about 20-40% of menstruating adults experience menstrual pain on a regular basis – and according to some estimates, as much as 80% of that figure is due to undiagnosed endometriosis or some other underlying medical condition.
Yeah, roll those numbers around in your head: if you’re an adult who experiences menstrual cramps, it’s overwhelmingly likely that your pain is a symptom of some potentially serious medical condition.
And yet we tell folks it’s just a normal thing that everybody has to deal with.
Bonus round: Look up PCOS and gender identity.
Then look up PCOS and diabetes.
Ok, to show how incredibly important this post fucking is, I just looked up endometriosis and I match just about every sympton, and it would explain not just my incredibly painful periods but many other things as well. I had no idea this existed.
Please, read this post and reblog this so others can learn.
I will reblog this every time because my cousin (a cis girl) went through seven years of pain without being taken seriously until SHE suggested it was endometriosis. And that’s not even unusual – that’s the average amount of time it takes between first symptoms and a diagnosis of endometriosis.
Okay, this is in incredibly petty nitpick, but: if you’re writing a fantasy setting with same-sex marriage, a same-sex noble or royal couple typically would not have titles of the same rank – e.g., a prince and a prince, or two queens.
It depends on which system of ranking you use, of course (there are several), but in most systems there’s actually a rule covering this scenario: in the event that a consort’s courtesy title being of the same rank as their spouse’s would potentially create confusion over who holds the title by right and who by courtesy, the consort instead receives the next-highest title on the ladder.
So the husband of a prince would be a duke; the wife of a queen, a princess; and so forth.
(You actually see this rule in practice in the United Kingdom, albeit not in the context of a same-sex marriage; the Queen’s husband is styled a prince because if he were a king, folks might get confused about which of them was the reigning monarch.)
The only common situation where you’d expect to see, for example, two queens in the same marriage is if the reigning monarchs of two different realms married each other – and even then, you’d more likely end up with a complicated arrangement where each party is technically a princess of the other’s realm in addition to being queen of her own.
You’ve gotta keep it nice and unambiguous who’s actually in charge!
Okay, I’ve received a whole lot of asks about this post, so I’m going to cover all of the responses in one go:
1. The system described above is, admittedly, merely one of the most common. Other historically popular alternatives include:
The consort’s courtesy title is of the same rank as their spouse’s, with “-consort” appended to it: prince and prince-consort, queen and queen-consort, etc. This is how, e.g., present-day Monaco does it.
The consort is simply styled Lord or Lady So-and-so, and receives no specific title. I can’t think of any country that still does it this way, off the top of my head, but historically it was a thing.
(Naturally, your setting needn’t adhere to any of these, but it would be highly irregular for it to lack some mechanism for clarifying the chain of command.)
2. The reason why the consort of a prince is historically a princess even though those titles are the same rank is basically sexism. This can go a couple of ways:
In many realms, there was no such thing as being a princess by right; the daughter of a monarch would be styled Lady So-and-so and receive no specific title, so the only way to be a princess was to marry a prince.
In realms where women could hold titles by right, typically a masculine title was informally presumed to outrank its feminine counterpart. So, e.g., kings outrank queens, princes outrank princesses, etc.
In either case, no ambiguity exists.
(Interestingly, this suggests that in a more egalitarian setting where masculine titles are not presumed to outrank their feminine counterparts, or vice versa, you’d need to explicitly disambiguate rankings even outside the context of same-sex marriages. Food for thought!)
3. It would also be possible to have two kings or two queens in the same marriage without multiple realms being involved in the case of a true co-monarchy. However, true co-monarchies are highly irregular and, from a political standpoint, immensely complicated affairs. If you’re planning on writing one of those, be prepared to do your research!
4. The next rank down from “countess” is either “viscountess” or “baroness”, depending on which peerage system you’re using.
(Yes, that last one actually came up multiple times. Apparently there are a lot of stories about gay countesses out there!)
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