Here’s some examples awkward accessibility being a thing:
Your at a hotel that has a lift to get you from one sub-floor to another, but the lift can only be unlocked and operated by one specific person that the hotel now has to go find. Sure, they’ve made the entrance to the sub-floor is accessible, but now it’s a thing.
The buses are wheelchair accessible but the driver has to stop the bus, take 30 seconds to lower the goddamn ramp, move passengers out of their seats, hook up the straps and then secure you in the bus. Sure, they’ve made the busses accessible but now it’s a thing.
The restaurant has an accessible entrance, but it’s past the trash room and through the kitchen. Sure, the restaurant is accessible, but now it’s an insulting thing.
Here’s some great examples of accessibility not being a thing:
The train to the airport pulls up flush with the platform. I board with everyone else and sit wherever the fuck I want. Riding the train is accessible and not a thing.
In Portland, I press a button the side of the streetcar and a ramp automatically extends at the same time the door opens. I board in the same amount of time as everyone else. This is not a thing.
I get that it is difficult to design for wheelchair accessibility, but folks need to start considering the overall quality of the experience versus just thinking about meeting the minimum requirements.
For the love of all things holy please pay attention to this
This is why universal design is so important. I had a great class that focuses on applying universal design aspects of architecture into teaching. Accessibility ideally should be integral to the design in the first place, not added on as an after thought.
So every year my school has a trip for all the band and choir kids, and this year, we’re going to Washington DC. While we’re there, we’re going to go to Medieval Times. Now, I loved going to Medieval Times as a kid. It was my favorite place. But recently, it has come to my attention that they only employ males as Knights or Squires. They claim that it’s okay because they’re only being historically accurate, even though there were famous female Knights. There was even an entire order of knights that consisted only of females.
You may be thinking, “why does this matter?” Growing up, I never really fit into society’s gender norms. At my first Halloween party, everyone there was dressed as a princess, or a fairy, or a fairy princess, but I showed up as a pirate. Medieval Times was a place where I would imagine myself in the shoes (or more accurately, armor) of a knight, but even then I was always told that I should buy the tiara or the light up rose rather than a sword and a shield. That I should act like a princess rather than a knight. And it weighed on me. I would think that there was something wrong with me because I didn’t act like little girls “should”. I don’t want any little kid to feel the same way I did. I want a little girl to be able to go to Medieval Times and imagine herself as a knight, and have that be validated rather than shut down.
So I’m asking for your help with any information on female Knights (source texts and things I can bring with me) or any stories of your own. I plan on talking to the managers of the “castle” there and trying to get them on our side. Maybe they’ll pass our stories along and soon enough Knights of any gender identity can battle in the tournaments.
Yes, that is a lot of European examples, but you asked specifically for Knights. You may find it easy to expand upon the list from there for other examples.
Shoutout to every woman who has ever seen a stranger crying and stopped to help her. To women who pretend they know someone at a bar to get her away from a creep. To women who stay with a stranger who is scared and too drunk in the bathroom. To women who have put their body between a girl and someone out to harm her. To women who get a friend home after she has been roofied. To women who have been in a fistfight when a man won’t keep his hands to himself. To women who are scared but send in their friend, the bartender, the bouncer. To the fact that each of those is a woman I know, most of them several women.
My friends and I saw a man chasing a woman and screaming at her. My friend who was driving pulled over hard and we threw open the door and said, “get in!” And she looked at a group of women and threw herself in, on our laps, crying and cold. We said we would take her home. She said he was telling her how he’d rape her since he bought her a drink at the bar.
If I hear one more time that getting free drinks is a privilege I will fucking scream.
It’s time for me to tell you a story. A story I didn’t really want to tell but I’m going to tell anyway. My friends and I frequently go to this pub, a divey little place nearby our work, to have dinner and a drink. So this one time I went with my group, and while we were sitting at the table, I got sent a drink.
I’m eighteen. Not old enough to (legally) drink. To be fair, I don’t look eighteen, especially when I come from work, but anyway. I got sent this drink from this guy who was sitting at a bar. It was pretty obvious that he was about thirty or so, and when I looked up at him he waved. I felt slightly disconcerted, but reasoned that he probably didn’t realize that I was so young. So I made the mistake of going to the bar.
“Hi there,” I said. “I appreciate the compliment, but I’m actually only eighteen.” And that was when he grinned and said “Wow I really did luck out” “I’m sorry, I’m really not interested.” He gave me that look– you know the one, the one where there’s the flash of anger that suddenly disappears behind a predatory smile. “It’s rude to not accept a gift.” Unsettled, I went and sat back down. He continued to stare at me for the rest of the evening but thankfully because I was with my friends I figured he wouldn’t bother me.
I went to the bathroom (it’s just a single room, not a group of stalls), and I hear someone knock on the door. I say, “Just a minute.” and then the doorknob jiggles. “Hang on a second,” I say. I finish my business, open the door, and then I get shoved back into the bathroom by the guy from the bar. I didn’t wait, I didn’t hold on, I didn’t pause– I just let loose a full-pelt scream. Almost immediately, the bartender, a young woman about twenty-five, throws open the door and just fucking bodychecks the bar guy, grabs my hand, and hauls me out of the bathroom.
He didn’t get the chance to lay a hand on me, but it’s pretty obvious what he was looking to do. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that the bartender had been keeping an eye on him from the moment he sent me a drink that night, seen him go to the bathroom after I did, and been on high alert– well I’m not sure what would’ve happened. I’d rather not think about it.
Girls protecting girls is themost important thing
oh my god
Gals don’t just spring into action once you’ve heard or seen something. Actively be on the lookout for women who may be in danger. A lot of the times males are silently predatory; if your gut tells you something is off, listen to it. Men don’t give a fuck about us, we have to look out for each other
I usually walk everywhere with my headphones on, but I had them in my bag and I was reading a book on my phone instead (I do that when the foot traffic is light). A young Latina was coming down the street as I was coming up the avenue, and when she got to the corner a few paces ahead of me, she turned to walk in the direction I was going. We were traveling at the same speed, but since she was like ten paces ahead and it’s bright outside in the middle of the day, I didn’t feel the need to fall back or slow down to give her more space. At night, I try not to walk too close behind women just so they don’t feel like I’m any sort of threat.
We got to a corner and this dude standing outside of the bodega was like, “Slow down mama where you goin? You don’t have to work today, you can stop and speak.”
She didn’t break her stride. “I’m going to the gym.” The Walk sign was on, so I didn’t break mine either.
A block later, a young guy was coming toward us on the sidewalk riding his bike.
“What’s good shorty?”
She didn’t respond.
“Well you was lookin, you can say something, stuck up bitch.”
We kept walking.
In the middle of the next block, an older man was walking toward us and he put on a friendly smile and said, “Smile young lady, it’s a beautiful day.”
I don’t know if she smiled, but we kept walking. She went into the gym and I kept on toward where I was going thinking about how that was just five minutes of her day. How many other blocks of five minutes are just like that?
Only one of them was truly aggressive. The other two guys seemed nice enough and it felt more like a pleasant compliment. It felt like the kind of thing a guy says who argues with women online about catcalling. “We’re not all bad guys. We can’t even compliment women? We can’t even say something nice?”
No. You really can’t. I was annoyed in that five minutes and I just happened to be walking behind her with no headphones on. Can you imagine those five minutes over and over every day of your life? Nobody wants to be spoken to by strangers day in and day out forever regardless of what they’re saying.
So no. You can’t say anything. The quality of your life has not decreased because you aren’t allowed to say nice things to strange women on the sidewalk, but your silence greatly increases the quality of hers. So just be quiet, and let her go where she’s going.
“Good morning” works just fine. And that’s IF the person makes eye contact and seems open to it. Y’all KNOW when someone’s in a don’t-talk-to-me-don’t-even-look-at-me mood. It’s written all over their face and shines beacon-bright through their body language.
In that case don’t. Just leave them the fuck alone.
Also on the subject of just being nice by giving complements.
If that’s all you have in mind, then you’re complementing EVERYBODY right?
You’re saying something nice to fat women right? And butch women, and grizzled old guys, and nerdy people with zits, and homeless folks, right?
RIGHT?
Or is it just thin, conventionally attractive women and no one else?
Yeah.
I thought so.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ that last bit of tea was piping hot!
At 23 weeks chances are good that this fetus is being removed because it is:
a) Already dead b) Suffering abnormalities such as it developed no brain, or had a serious genetic condition that would kill it quickly. c) Was actively dying (not dead yet but would be within a few days, 100% guarunteed, 0 chance of saving it) d) Was actively killing the pregnant person.
Late term abortions, as shown here, make up only 1.5% of all abortions. The above four reasons are the only reasons such procedures are performed. Almost every abortion performed after 20 weeks is done on a wanted pregnancy. So you know what that means? You’re calling people who miscarried murderers. You just implied people who had a miscarriage or would have died murderers. How dare you call yourself pro life for that.
Now for the fun fact: They used to use a different procedure for these abortions in which they removed the fetus intact and allowed these people to grieve for the intact fetus, have pictures, etc. Pro lifers decided people losing a wanted pregnancy should not be allowed to grieve an intact fetus and we were left with this.
Congrats. Your movement is the reason they use this one now when people lose a wanted pregnancy late into the pregnancy. Your movement is intentionally making it harder for people to recover from the lose of a much wanted pregnancy. It’s your movement who left grieving people with this instead of allowing them something easier to deal with, something that would let them hold their deceased fetus.
Congrats. If you think you were ‘saving’ something think again. You’re hurting born people. You’re hurting people who lose a wanted pregnancy by shaming this abortion procedure. And you’re movement is the reason this is procedure doctors are forced to use now. You’re probably an awful and mean person to tell people losing a wanted pregnancy that they’re killers.
This is the post that made me pro-choice. Glad to see it still circulating.
I lost a baby brother at something like 14 weeks because he’d attached to the uterine wall backward, and when he started kicking he tore himself away and hemorrhaged to death.
You goddamn “pro-lifers” were ready to let my mother die with him rather than “killing him before God’s time.” He was already dead; it was a matter at that point of him bleeding out. My mother was bleeding with him. My mother was dying with him. And the hospital she was in? That fine pro-life hospital? Refused to let her transfer to another hospital to abort. She had a ten-year-old and an eight-month old at home, but making sure Joey didn’t die “before God’s time” was more goddamn important than making sure my mother survived.
My mother asked the nurse if she’d take pictures, saying that the ultrasound images were really blurry and she’d at least like something to remember him by. The nurse, after Joey was dead and my mom was in recovery, threw pictures on my mother’s bed. This fine pro-life nurse gave my mother pictures of a baby that was jet black where he wasn’t blood red. He didn’t even look human. And she threw the pictures in my mother’s face, like it was her fault that there was a terrible, terrible biological mistake that made it impossible for her baby to survive.
We wanted him. Not that the fact that you’ll notice he already had a name picked out would’ve clued you in. I would have had a baby brother just a year younger than me. My sophomore year in college I spent a lot of time crying alone in the student union, thinking it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, I should be taking my brother to dinner with friends or helping him study for his first midterms. I’m a big sister with no little brother to show for it, and there was a year that pain and loss came back eighteen years after the fact to wound me when I least expected it. There was a year when there were songs I couldn’t bring myself to listen to without crying because they reminded me of what I could have had. And I still wish, I still wish, they’d aborted him. Because the end result would have been the same. And my family would have been spared a world of pain believing we were losing brother and mother both. I was in ICU at the time after an allergic reaction that left me unable to breathe. How do you suppose my sister felt? Mother dying, sister dying, brother dead—just a matter of time on that one. Ten years old, watching her entire family struggling to breathe, struggling to live.
And you motherfuckers would call my mom a murderer for this. And you cared more for a baby already dying than you did for the two already born who needed their mom.
Fuck you. You’re not pro-life. You’re anti-woman, anti-family, anti-compassion and anti-love.
Someone on my FB shared this photo and I had to go sit in silence for awhile at the stupidity of her comment that went along with it. Most people don’t wait so late into a pregnancy and randomly decide ‘kill the baby’ because they want to. What the fuck is wrong with people.
Why I will always be pro choice
I’m absolutely crying right now
This really pisses me off, because last year my cousin Emily (Emmie) actually did die from not being able to abort her baby. When she was just under 20 weeks along with her second daughter they found out she had a condition which causes high blood pressure and protein in urine. The doctors gave her like a 5% chance of being able to bring the baby to term with both of them surviving. She and her husband were DEVASTATED.
She regretfully scheduled an appointment to terminate, but people found out. She went to church for comfort, so that she would have people there for her when she would need them but she got the opposite. Her church threatened to ex-communicate her, even though she tried to explain she didn’t want to abort, she had to to survive. People told her that a good mother would be willing to risk her life for her child, and sent her letters saying she was going to hell and threatening to physically attack her if she went through with it. Someone even told her four-year-old daughter, who was really excited about getting a little sister, that “You aren’t going to get a little sister because mommy is going to kill the baby.” They told that to a FOUR-YEAR-OLD! The harassment got so bad that on the day of her appointment, she didn’t go. About a later her liver started to fail, then her kidneys. Within a few days she was dead. They did deliver the baby at 23 and a half weeks, but she didn’t survive more than a few hours.
Of course the church held a big memorial for her and the baby, going on and on about hour strong she was and what a great person and mother she was. And how it was a tragedy that she was taken so young but “god works in mysterious ways.”
BULL FUCKING SHIT! Emmie was already vulnerable and distraught and she went to those people looking for comfort and they turned on her so brutally that she was too terrified and ashamed to have a necessary medical procedure. That’s NOT pro-life. That’s not even anti-choice, because she didn’t have a choice, she NEEDED that abortion to save her life. That is pro-birth. Congrats, the baby was born. She lived for 2 hours and 48 minutes, the entire time in pain, but she was born. Mission accomplished. But now the baby’s dead, Emmie’s dead at only 28 years old, her husband is a widower, and her now 5 year old daughter gets to live the rest of her life without a mother.
Unfriendly, in your face reminder that there are straight trans people and they do not have to tell you they’re trans in order to be included in the community. See a “het couple” at pride?? Shut the fuck up about it. They could be bi, pan, trans, etc etc.
Asking someone to disclose if they’re trans is rude as fuck. Don’t do it. You are NOT entitled to know someone’s sexual orientation or assigned at birth gender.
Ways to tell if somebody doesn’t belong at Pride:
1) they’re harassing the other people there
2) they’re in acute medical distress, in which case they belong at a hospital instead, and can come back to Pride when they feel better
…that’s about all I can think of, really.
3) they are a lion with a confused expression, in which case they may be in the wrong type of pride and need a lift home. Or maybe not! Maybe it is just their first time at pride and they’ll be fine.
my opinions on racism will always be limited as I’m from a position of white privilege, so whilst it’s so important to call out racial inequality and oppression when I see it, it’s also important for me to recognise that my voice should not shout over those who have actually experienced racism and have a far better understanding of how it operates then I ever will
Steel Phoenix Studios 