transapphic:

That said, blood quantum, being “white-passing,” etc is meaningless. These are weapons colonizers have employed in they’re slow genocide of our people. In no other context do you hear people reluctant to claim their own culture, and we shouldn’t be either.

Embrace your heritage. Listen and learn respectfully from your elders

transapphic:

lgbt-for-poc:

So I’m not sure what you mean by having “Indigenous ancestry but not directly” so I’m just going to gloss over that for now.

Now I feel like I need to start with a disclaimer that I am not Two Spirit. I don’t feel connected enough to my culture to use it. So if any Two Spirit people want to add on here go ahead.

I also grew up in a white environment, surrounded by white people so I sometimes feel not Native enough. Two Spirit is a term exclusively for the Indigenous people of North America and was actually coined as a replacement for an offensive term that was in use at the time.

I know a white passing person who is Two Spirit, but they are also Native.

Basically what I’m trying to say is that, the term Two Spirit is for Native people and I can’t tell you if you’re “Native Enough” I have no right to. I hope that made some amount of sense and if it didn’t, I’m sorry and feel free to re ask your question.

Keep in mind two spirit is an umbrella term that covers a wide variety of identities that vary from culture to culture. In some cultures being two spirit involves certain responsibilities or ceremonies, in which case you wouldn’t want to just assume the label on your own.

I suggest getting in touch with others who are more familiar with your culture and talking to them about it. Unfortunately colonization has made it that much more difficult for us to get in touch with our cultures by making LGBT issues taboo, though

tmitransitioning:

@anxioushufflepuffsstuff says:

tmitransitioning:

dysmorphia is a dissatisfaction with something about your body’s appearance.  dysphoria (in general) is a feeling of dissatisfaction or upset/sadness in general.  When we talk about dysphoria here though, we’re using it as shorthand for /gender/ dysphoria, which is the feeling of dissatisfaction/upset/sadness as it relates to our sex assigned at birth. 

It could be:

physical gender dysphoria (which could be a dysmorphia), 

social gender dysphoria (like being upset about being called the wrong pronouns or being forced to use the wrong toilets), 

emotional gender dysphoria (feeling repressed emotions because you were trained that only certain people can cry or show that they are angry), 

or mental gender dysphoria (feeling that you are internally X gender even though people know you as Z gender, regardless of what your body presents as). 

Sometimes people may say they have no gender dysphoria, when they mean they have no physical dysphoria (they’re happy with their body), but they have forms of non-physical gender dysphoria. 
Other times, people who have no dysphoria actually don’t have dysphoria and experience their trans identity only in terms of gender euphoria, a feeling of happiness, completeness and elation when their gender is correct (on one or more of these 4 above levels).  it’s as if something was missing before and they didn’t recognize it until they felt whole. 

mod mayhem

Correct me if im wrong but I was pretty sure that dysmorphia isnt just dissatisfaction with appearance but actually seeing your body differently than it actually looks, like when you’re skinny but you look in the mirror and see yourself as far heavier than you are

You’re also right—what’s coming into play here is the difference between denotative meaning and connotative meaning. Denotative meanings are the precise, literal definition of a word that you find in a dictionary; connotative meanings are the social, contextual, and emotional contexts that a word has. Some words have multiple denotative meanings that all get rolled into the same connotative meaning, and some words have one denotative meaning that everyone brings up in arguments online but nobody actually uses, like people who look up “racism” in the dictionary to prove a point.

“Dysmorphia” denotatively means “characterized by malformation”. In psych contexts, which is essentially what we’re talking about here, it has multiple connotative meanings—Mayhem is talking about the general concept of dysmorphia, and it’s used in exactly that wording by clinicians. There’s also the context of body dysmorphic disorder, which is an obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorder where you obsess over a “flaw” in your appearance that may not actually exist. The key distinguishing characteristics of BDD are that the flaw either isn’t apparent to other people or is really, really exaggerated by your mind, and your whole day is consumed by thinking about it and trying to conceal it. That’s why it’s put on the OCD spectrum: You have an obsession about something, and compulsively conceal or “fix” it. It’s similar in a lot of ways to skin picking.

There is also dysmorphia used in the context of eating disorders, where it means that you have a distorted view of your body’s shape or weight—the example you give here is a really good one, and really common among people with eating disorders. However, it isn’t present in everyone with an eating disorder; BDD is likely associated with specific abnormalities in how you process visual information, but eating disorders can be more accurately thought of as anxiety activated by food. There’s definitely a subset of people with EDs who have dysmorphia in the sense that they perceive themselves as a different weight or shape than they are, but there’s also a subset who just have a nonspecific and non-obsessive dissatisfaction with something about their bodies, and clinicians call that dysmorphia as well.

“Dysphoria” has the same kind of thing going on with multiple meanings. On here, we’re pretty much always referring to gender dysphoria, sometimes in a clinical sense and sometimes in a non-clinical sense. Dysphoria in the denotative sense just means unease and dissatisfaction, though, and it’s considered a symptom of a lot of different psychiatric disorders that don’t have anything to do with gender—not just mood disorders but also things like borderline PD, dependent PD, dissociative-spectrum disorders, and ADHD. It’s kind of a catch-all for “distress”, so you can think of “gender dysphoria”, the definition that clinicians use to evaluate trans people for healthcare access, as distress associated with the mismatch between your assigned sex, or any aspect of social life attached to that assignment, and your gender identity.

Scientifically, gender dysphoria isn’t the same thing as dysmorphia-in-general for the reasons Mayhem talks about above, but it’s also not the same thing as dysmorphia-in-the-BDD-context because we straight-up haven’t identified a part of the brain responsible for gender dysphoria related to your body and the behaviours people may use to minimize physical dysphoria (binding, tucking, seeking medical care) aren’t compulsive and actually help. For people with BDD, things like surgery or cosmetically disguising their “flaws” doesn’t stop the obsession or distress; for people with, say, chest dysphoria, growing breasts or getting top surgery actually makes things better.

- Mod Wolf

yeah, so definition speedrun: otherkin is identifying in some way as other-than-human. plantkin is identifying in some way as a plant. if a pronoun set (or gender, etc) are exclusive to (x)kin, it just means that only (x)kin can use them.

you’re right in a way, that otherkin isn’t on the same level as ethnicity or intersex status, and personally (as someone who is otherkin) i wouldn’t make a pronoun set or identity exclusive to otherkin (unless it was something like, a term for dragonkin who experience their gender as a dragon version of gender, which non-kin would inherently probably not be able to experience) (nonhumans in systems notwithstanding)

i guess that the coiner of bloomself had their own reasons why bloomself would be exclusive, and regardless of whether or not we agree why, we should still respect their wishes and not use them if you’re not plantkin.