drrrty little slut.

GIFs are super common in the world of tumblr. They appear on your dash every few minutes, and they even make up some people’s backgrounds. They often are posted by people in the social justice community who participate in discussions on oppression, privilege, and ableism. However, GIFs can trigger serious symptoms such as seizures and chronic pain flare ups in people with conditions such as epilepsy and fibromyalgia.

I think part of the problem is that there hasn’t been much discussion about GIFs being ableist- at least not that I’ve seen. A lot of people honestly just don’t realize that GIFs can be triggering. Earlier today, I posted that I was going to have to get off tumblr for a while because there were a lot of GIFs being posted. I recieved an anonymous question asking why GIFs were a problem for me. This was my response:

I have fibromyalgia. One of the symptoms is photosensitivity. Bright, flashing lights and colours overstimulate me and make my body attack itself, so it triggers flare ups. Flares= indigestion, nausea, muscular pain, fatigue, headaches, dizziness.

Shortly after, a friend responded by saying that she too had a problem with GIFs.

I actually have epilepsy although I don’t discuss it much on here. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to just sit with my eyes closed for a minute because of all of the flashing backgrounds and gifs.

This is something that seriously needs to be considered if we want to continue on a path of recognizing various forms of oppression, and checking our privilege, it’s vital that we ask ourselves when we post things like GIFs and image: are these things that will be oppress differently abled peopled?

It’s just something to consider and work on. Personally, I need to get WAY better about writing image descriptions. Recognize it, work on it, educate, discuss.