what’s that word?
- Spoons: Read about the spoon conceptualization of energy levels at But You Don’t Look Sick
- Ze/hir/hirself: These are gender-neutral pronouns equivalent to he/she and his/her and himself/herself. They apply when:
a) the person doesn’t have a gender or has a gender(s) too complex or nonbinary for simple he or she
b) the speaker doesn’t know the person’s gender
c) the person’s gender is irrelevant to the story
d) the person has stated that these are hir preferred pronouns
- Trigger warnings: Trigger warnings (sometimes abbreviated as “TW”) are used before a post that is potentially triggering to people who have survived the form of violence or abuse mentioned or shown in the post. These topics include but are not limited to rape, domestic violence, child abuse, cissexist violence, racist violence, and slurs against any minority. I try to always use trigger warnings and if you catch a post slip by without an appropriate trigger warning, please notify me ASAP in my ask box or submit box. Images that are triggering will always be placed under a cut with the trigger warning above the cut, so that individuals who shouldn’t see it are able to scroll by without seeing it. Again, if you see me make an error with this, please notify me ASAP.
- [Image description]: I put image descriptions on as many pictures as I can, which unfortunately is not all of them and not nearly enough of them. Image descriptions (or “square tags”, so named because of the brackets around them) are used to describe, in words, what an image portrays. This is helpful for many different people, all of whom have in common that they have trouble processing images, whether that is due to the type of computer they have, the type of eyes they have, or the type of brain they have. Words are often much more accessible to these people, and image descriptions aim to allow readers of all abilities to access and enjoy images. If I have an image description on a post and you reblog it, please do not remove the square tag. If I don’t have an image description, please feel free to add one. I try to tag these posts “accessibility request” to signify that it is lacking a needed square tag.
- AFAB or AMAB, sometimes written as DFAB/DMAB and occasionally as CAFAB/CAMAB: Assigned Female/Male At Birth, Designated Female/Male At Birth, and Coercively Assigned Female/Male At Birth. You may also see FAAB/MAAB, Female Assigned At Birth and Male Assigned At Birth. These acronyms refer to people’s birth designations of gender. I use DFAB/DMAB when talking about trans* people who are not intersex/are dyadic. I do not use CAFAB/CAMAB since the “coercively” implies that the child’s body was mutilated or operated on, as in the case of an intersex child who is assigned a gender and whose body is made to “fit” that gender through surgery. AFAB/AMAB and FAAB/MAAB should also not be used for dyadic people, as those terms were coined by and for intersex people. If you are tempted to say “biological male” or the like for a dyadic trans* person, try DMAB instead, or better yet, ask the trans* person what phrase ze prefers to use for hirself. Many trans* people prefer these acronyms to those incorrect phrases.
- Trans* with an asterisk at the end. The asterisk means that this word represents all variants of the words transgender/transsexual/etc. The asterisk method comes from Boolean logic, where adding an asterisk at the end means you intend for all words with that prefix to be included in the results.
I’m intending for this page to be updated as I see the need for it, so please check back relatively often and if you reblog this page, reblog it with the link so that people can see the updated version. Thank you.