people have no idea what its like to be 14 and have everyone telling you that you’re faking and pretending to be ill for attention or to skip art class and the doctor’s telling you you’re ‘just being a teenager’ when you actually had a serious kidney disease
if someone hadn’t eventually listened to me i would have died
Please, please support self-diagnosed teenagers, don’t pretend they’re not really disabled, don’t belittle or mock them, don’t exclude them from disabled spaces and for the love of god don’t pretend you know more about them than they do
i am disabled to this day because when i was a teenage girl, my doctors didn’t take me seriously. when i said i was in extreme pain, they said i just wasn’t trying hard enough at physical therapy to repair a broken ankle. turns out they’d fucked up the surgery to fix it, and their neglect of my months of complaints meant it was damaged beyond repair. i still have mobility issues 8 years later, will have pain and require surgeries throughout my life and will, always, be disabled. because of them. because of the silencing of girls’ voices, in all spheres. because doctors do not value the voices of teenaged girls.
When I was twelve, the knee specialist I had finally convinced my mom to take me to (after years of begging) told me that my knees hurt because of my hips widening.
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I can’t walk when it happens, it hurts so bad. It’s been since I was a little kid.”
“It might twinge a bit, sure,” he told me. “Go to physical therapy for a few weeks.” I burst into tears.
My mom then refused to take me to physical therapy, because it was a long drive and the doctor said it wasn’t serious, so why should she bother? That was the start of her not listening to any complaint about my joints I ever had.
As it turns out, my knees were dislocating every couple of days. She and my doctors ignored and taught me to ignore sprains, fractures, cartilage tears, and dislocations until I moved out and learned that it wasn’t normal. I missed out on years of my life because of my doctor not only discounting the experience of a young girl, but fully blaming my pain on the fact of my being a young girl.
Listen to children when they tell you something is wrong with their bodies.
I had stomach pains for years as a kid. Almost daily. I was blamed as a faker.
I have Celiac.
People know what the hell is going on with their own bodies. If they don’t think something is right fucking listen to them.
When I was 11 I started getting really bad jerks in the morning. They started as twitches and gradually advanced into jerks where I would lose control of my limbs - I threw shampoo bottles while holding them, fell down in the shower, etc. My doctor told me they were just “morning twitches”, and lots of people get them.
They got worse to where my whole body would shake and I would fall down. I would lose periods of consciousness during the day where I’d stare off into nothing and forget what’s happening. A few times I even woke up disoriented and confused only to realize I also wet the bed. At age 15.
My doctor told me none of the symptoms were related, it was just stress, go to the bathroom before bed, and to get more sleep. He never once saw me for more than 15 minutes or offered to do any sort of testing.
One morning I had a seizure in the shower that resulted in a concussion, a scar up my back from hitting the faucet while falling down, and near drowning because my head blocked the drain. I would have died if my little brother didn’t find me.
Five years after I first complained to my doctor I was diagnosed with epilepsy. It took a near-death experience to get anyone to take my condition seriously. Fuck people who don’t listen to kids and disregard teenage girls as “making up symptoms”.
When I was 5 I had an incredible pain in my chest. I was five. A child. And my mom brought me to the hospital. My mom was a doctor. She’s currently the head of a large department at a local hospital, and one of the most respected endocrinologists nationwide. She told the doctor I might have a heart issue, right? Since, you know, she’s a doctor and knows these things. She told the doctor to get me a CAT scan. The doctor had this diagnosis: I was a drama queen, and my mom had anxiety disorder.
My mom’s not the kind of person who gives up though. She kept taking me back to the hospital. They finally diagnosed me with pneumonia, since I couldn’t breathe. My mom was not happy with this diagnosis. They put me on pneumonia meds and I still didn’t recover. My mom insisted she heard a “rub”, and the doctor said FINE, he said WE’LL TAKE HER TO GET A CAT SCAN just to make her shut up. They just wanted her, an MD, to shut up.
The CAT scan came back and I had over a liter of pericardial fluid around my heart. There was a soda-bottle-sized balloon around the heart of a five year old. That’s the reason I couldn’t breathe. I was finally diagnosed with pericarditis, inflammation of the lining around the heart (the pericardium).
I would have been dead had it not been for my mother’s persistence in the face of a doctor that refused to trust an MD simply because she was a woman.
Look at how many of these stories are on this post. They don’t stop devaluing our experiences when we grow up. Nor when we get medical degrees.
And what if they are faking? LISTEN TO THEM ANYWAY.
When I was in seventh grade, I did fake an injury once to get out of class. Specifically P.E. class. Because the other girls were bullying me so bad that I needed some way to escape.
I didn’t know what to do– kids are not always able to articulate emotional problems, and the P.E. teacher was the type who ignored bullying anyway. I didn’t want to just sit in class and sob. So I pretended to twist an ankle, so I could go to the nurse’s office, and sit there and sob, away from the bullies. The nurse let me stay there until I’d calmed down some (and until the next class had begun). She didn’t tell me there was nothing wrong with me or to get over it. I don’t know if she could tell I hadn’t twisted the ankle, but she could certainly tell that something real was wrong. After I’d rested some and said I could walk on it (I confess I faked a limp a little), she let me go to my next class with a note.
A kind adult listened to a cry for help from a kid. Sometimes a cry for help is for a different kind of help than it outwardly seems, but it’s still a cry for help. LISTEN TO KIDS WHEN THEY ASK FOR HELP.
Jurassic World, Mad Max Fury Road, and Little Girls
For her birthday, we took my soon-to-be six year-old to Jurassic World. Prior to that, she had watched a bootleg copy of Fury Road with me after I had confirmed that it fit the levels of violence I consider acceptable based on what I know of my daughter.
The most interesting thing to me was her reactions after each film.
After watching MMFR, she talked incessantly about it. (She had talked during the film as well, making observations, etc.) Her name was suddenly changed to Angry Cereal, mirroring two of her favorite characters. She made a new Sims game, spending more time than she ever had before perfecting the characters - and giving them all pets. A Lego car set was turned into a crazy car that could fit into the Mad Max world. Barbies were now the Wives and her dad’s Diablo figurine was now Immortan Joe. It’s been a little over two weeks and she still talks about it.
When the credits rolled on Jurassic World, she said, ‘Can we go see another movie?’ –And that was it. The only other comment vaguely related to the movie was her assertion she liked dinosaurs. Nothing else. No elaborate recreations, nothing.
I had thought with MMFR that my excitement had rubbed off on her but that doesn’t seem to be the case. After Jurassic World, I was excited, encouraging her to talk about her favorite parts. She asked for a Happy Meal. When we went to spend a gift card at Toys-R-Us the next day, I pointed out all the Jurassic World toys. They had Blue! She barely gave them a second glance.
It didn’t jive. She had tons of dinosaur books. Why was she infinitely more interested in an adult movie that was pretty much one big car chase rather than a movie about dinosaurs? Was it because despite the differences in ratings, Jurassic World had frightened her more? Maybe. But when she picked out a new stuffed animal to buy with her gift card, she informed us the little owl’s name was Splendid.
And that was it.
She had watched Fury Road in almost complete silence until the first shot of all the Wives. Then she turned to me and said, “There’s so many girls!” That was her takeaway from MMFR: there were lots of girls! All the girls were fighting together against the bad guy! The girls were the heroes! That was important to her, seemingly even more important than it was to me. Maybe because she’s just getting her first taste of playground culture where boys and girls are separate and the two don’t mix often and it’s been confusing. Maybe because she just really liked seeing girls on the screen. When I ask her, she just shrugs and says, “I don’t know, mommy, I liked all the girls. I liked Toast.”
As an adult, I’m aware of issues with representation. I don’t remember consciously noticing it as a child but I remember Leia and Uhura and Janeway being my favorites. I remember dressing up as Dana Scully. As a mom, I watch my daughter gravitate to girls and women on screen. A movie I thought would a sure thing because DINOSAURS! became a total miss because for her, there was no one on screen that she left the theater wanting to dress up as. There was no incentive for her to change her name to mimic favorite characters. I left grinning because holy shit, raptor squad! She left wanting a cheeseburger.
Children know when they’re being marginalized. They might have no idea what they word marginalized means, but they can still tell, instinctually, when they’ve been misrepresented in and/or excluded from the story.
honestly, who the fuck do these people think they are? and who the fuck raised them to be so fucking judgmental of everyone’s bodies?? do u realize that 170 is an average weight for women!!! and a lot of the time, the girls that guys be callin “thick” “sexy” “curvy”, weigh over 200 pounds. and think about this, what if your daughter ends up weighing that much in highschool? or anytime In her life? would you tell her those things? or your mother? or ur sister? or best friend? ***also fuck off with the referring to us as “females” u sound fucking ridiculous .
“Fatphobia isn’t a big deal, it’s just some jerks out there in the void.”
THEY ARE LITERALLY TELLING PEOPLE TO KILL THEMSELVES. SOMEONE WITH AN ED WHO’S IN A VULNERABLE PLACE WILL SEE THIS AND TAKE THEIR “ADVICE.” AND DON’T TELL ME THAT NEVER HAPPENS, I KNOW IT HAPPENS.
One of the worst things about fatphobia is that it isn’t merely tolerated, it’s encouraged – People don’t want us to exist at all. It’s better to die than to be fat.
But the saddest part is, as horrible as these tweets are, they’re far from being the worst.
(Also notice that all of these are directed towards women specifically)
Its been NINE YEARS and i still dont think anyone knows exactly why teen titans was cancelled
Same reason Young Justice and Green Lantern The Animated Series were canceled: Girls liked it. Bruce Timm finally up an’ said it out loud in an interview a while back when he was asked why in the hell GL:TAS had been canceled when it was doing so well on every front; DC’s animation department has institutionally decided that feee-males don’t/can’t/shouldn’t like superheroes, so even if a show is drawing in great viewership numbers and has great toy sales, once they find out that it’s popular with women and girls, they pull the plug on it. Cartoon Network loved Teen Titans— two million viewers for new episodes will do that— and wanted a Season Six, and the production staff was already in the planning stages for it; they were going to have a big arc about Terra and why she was Living Normal, and do a lot more with the extended Titans team members.
This is so fucked up.
To elaborate on this point a bit, the reason this happens is that modern television merchandising aims for total market segregation.
In a nutshell, it’s much more efficient to sell things to people if you can divide them up into tightly defined subcategories that have no interests in common; that way, you never risk accidentally competing with yourself.
This is why children’s toys (and toy sales channels) are actually much more strongly gendered these days than they were forty, thirty, even twenty years ago: one of the basic market segregation splits they’ve decided to use is “boys versus girls”.
Ever wonder why you see Avengers t-shirts that leave Black Widow out of the group shot, or Guardians of the Galaxy action figure lines with no Gamora? That’s market segregation in action.
The upshot is that shows with crossover appeal can actually be cancelled for being too popular with girls; they’re viewed as “stealing” the female market from the specifically girl-targeted media that rightfully “owns” it.
This is the sort of thing folks are talking about when they say gender roles are socially constructed, by the way. The gender split in media merchandising? It’s not just artificial, it’s deliberately imposed as a top-down marketing strategy. When folks try to justify it by saying “this is the ways it’s always been” or “this is just what the market wants”, they’re lying through their teeth - this is, in fact, the merchandisers dictating to the market what it wants in order to sell stuff more efficiently.
(Interestingly, the reverse isn’t always true: if a specifically girl-targeted show unexpectedly becomes popular with boys, sometimes rather than being cancelled, its merchandising will shift to court the male collector’s market. TV execs are so sexist, even their sexism is sexist.)
It gets worse.
Paul Dini, a writer/producer said this on a podcast: “ That’s the thing, you know I hate being Mr. Sour Grapes here, but I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, it’s like, ‘we need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys’—this is the network talking—’one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as boys, but right there.’”
Cartoon network and Warner brothers deliberately made the conscious decision to dumb down their female characters because they want to push female viewers away. In fact, Tower Prep was cancelled because it had too many female viewers because the writers made too many well written female characters.
So shitty representation of girls isn’t something that just happens. It’s the result of deliberate planning just so the execs can make more money.
And it’s not just cartoon network. I mean, why do you think Nick fucked over Korra so badly? Remember them telling Bryke they didn’t want a female Avatar? Why do you think there are no Korra figurines or action figures?
Physical handicaps are made the emblems of evil… . Giving disabilities to villainous characters reflects and reinforces, albeit in exaggerated fashion, three common prejudices against handicapped people: disability is a punishment for evil; disabled people are embittered by their “fate”; disabled people resent the nondisabled and would, if they could, destroy them. In historic and contemporary social fact, it is, of course, nondisabled people who have at times endeavored to destroy people with disabilities. As with popular portrayals of other minorities, the unacknowledged hostile fantasies of the stigmatizers are transferred to the stigmatized.
“
—
Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (via
Simone de Beauvoir
Emily Dickinson
Katherine Hepburn
Sappho
Billie Holiday
Grace Jones
Janis Joplin
Frida Kahlo
Cynthia Nixon
Sinead O’Connor
Eleanor Roosevelt
Virginia Woolf
I keep a list in my phone of bisexual women that I respect and admire for those days when I feel like I am a broken weirdo that belongs nowhere.
It is important to me that the women listed above had significant relationships with both men and women. To me, they are the ancestors of all queer women, but they are my closest kin. They are my particular history. It’s comforting to know that women like me have existed forever and have accomplished amazing things and will continue to exist and be amazing until there are no more humans.
Did you know that after they switched to blind auditions, major symphony orchestras hired women between 30% to 55% more? Before bringing in “blind auditions” with a screen to conceal the the candidate, women in the top 5 major orchestras made up less than 5% of the musicians performing.
so I believe it was actually more complicated than that, in interesting ways. Because at first, when they did blind auditions, they were STILL hiring more men.
…Then they put down a carpet, so that high heels didn’t clack on the floor, and BOOM women were suddenly getting hired.
The testers didn’t even know that’s what they were picking up on, which just goes to show how tiny of a cue it takes for misogyny to kick in.
It’s okay to be confused and unsure about your gender.
It is okay to not be able to name your gender.
It is okay to id as a gender for a time and realise it no longer applies to you, or that it never did,
gender can be wild af and u are okay. you will be okay. everything is gonna be totally okey dokey and you are fine no matter how confused or unsure or unsteady you are.
