The take is one I hear a lot and react to very strongly. The assumption that all PhD students *can* take a clock-in/clock-out approach is toxic and disregards the realities of marginalized grad students.
I see this take most frequently from a particular demographic and I wonder why tf the people saying this aren't investing some of that relative free time and energy into making academia more equitable rather than shaming their classmates and colleagues?
It's always interesting to see what circumstances allow a person to 9-to-5 their PhD. 🤔🧐
Also I encountered one of these "I don't know what is wrong with you; I treat my degree like a job and take holidays and weekends" types in their office on campus at 10 pm on a Sunday, so... grain of salt...
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Just thinking about the time when, more than a year before my EDS diagnosis, I saw an awareness post describing the signs of EDS and I was like "no way that's a real 'condition'; all bodies are like that."
Dear reader, all bodies are not in fact like that.
My n=1 understanding of what "all bodies are like" was... flawed. 😅
Gentle reminder that ADHD is a legitimate disability and not a reflection of how much an ADHDer cares about something or someone. 🙂
We can't help what things we struggle with, but you can choose to shift your expectations of what we "should" be able to do or how we "should" be able to do it.
Please don't set up ADHDers to fail in our relationships with you.
ADHDers carry so much shame about not being able to meet expectations that never took into account our literal disability -- or, worse, were a litmus test for the importance we place on something or someone.
The rampant ableism among gay men on dating apps in Vancouver is actually a bit of a relief relative to my experiences dating queer women here. Hear me out...
The guys who just can't fucking deal see the wheelchair and weed themselves out. I also see their profiles with shit like "must be of sound body and mind" and swipe ALL THE WAY LEFT.
Saves us both time and energy.
By contrast...
When I was dating mostly queer women, I kept ending up in situations in which the other party clearly wanted to see themselves as/be seen as the sort of person who would date a disabled person, which meant using our interactions as a measure of their "good person-ness".
I have been leaning more into connections with gay/queer men, and masculine intimacies/intimate masculinities feel somehow like... coming home?
I am still trying to find language for it... There's a very gentle sort of grief (how did it take so long?!) but also immense gratitude and joy and just... ✨🤗✨
(And I hear about cis gays being shitty to trans guys, but so far folks have been absolutely lovely, so maybe the wheelchair is doing its job as dickhead repellent?)
So I've been trying to think about ways to discuss the cognitive and emotional changes I've experienced on testosterone while also being very careful not to play into essentializing explanations of gendered behaviours, and this is the best description I've got so far:
It's like a library in which the systems for cataloguing and retrieving items have changed, but the volumes on the shelves are still the same.
The material is all still there, I just have to go into the stacks for some stuff that was previously easier to access while other things are now on display with librarian recommendations right when you walk in.
I want to talk about the *accessibility* mental load. 🧵
Feminists define "mental load" as the cognitive labour of managing a household. This is often very gendered. Even when tasks are shared equitably, women are often expected to shoulder a greater portion of the mental load.
But I also find this concept very helpful for thinking about the difference in how disabled and nondisabled people approach accessibility...