I’m all for fighting for marriage equality in the LGBT community. But we’re so focused on that no one knows about this problem.
W…wait Thats a thing????
Yep! The man I refer to as my husband? We aren’t actually married. We can’t be.
If I married him, the government would literally expect me to care for him and be his sole source of income. He would lose all of his benefits, including SSDI. Spouses are expected to share income and that effects ALL of his benefits, even his health insurance. We simply can’t afford to be married.
But it goes even further than that. If I were disabled, our incomes would STILL be combined, meaning BOTH of us would have our benefits cut.
For people reviving supplemental income, their benefits can be cut anywhere from 25% of their current income all the way down to 0%
In fact, one of the stipulations of receiving income under the adult disabled child program (which provides benefits for people who were disabled before age 22) is that they LITERALLY never be married.
I normally don’t link to blog posts as resources, but since social service resource sites like to dress this problem up and make it seem smaller than it really is, I’m gonna call it appropriate! Check it out!
so, i gathered just a handful testimonials from replies and messages revealing just how unprofessional they are with their commission work by leaving their commissioners in silence for months. do not commission ghost-oakes unless you want to wait for months, watching them pump out other commissions and art while you twiddle your thumbs
i have my own testimonial too: i had tried to order a holiday icon back when they were offering them. weeks went by and i heard nothing, no updates. all the while, they were creating gift icons for friends for free and other such art. when i finally did hear back, the holidays were over and i still got no visual progress (but i was told it was being worked on). they said they would finish it in a week – nothing. i asked them about it again, another week – still nothing. it wasn’t until i threatened to backdraft them (which in most cases i would NEVER do, but i felt it was my only option) that i got my money back.
God, the amount of people who have mentioned getting no or rushed work from him after needling him for months. He’s apparently now blocking some people he owes.
On top of that— I dunno if he still has this policy, but his TOS on FA at one point said that if you filed a chargeback, he got to keep your character to sell off as an adoptable.
That’s. Insane. Especially considering his work ethic.
Dude was fully ambulatory and able to work when I knew him in 2014 (despite claiming things like cancer, kidney problems and sepsis THE WHOLE TIME… SEPSIS, which shoulda had him hospitalized or dead) and combined with a history of lying about being a victim of other events and people, I’m very skeptical of his ever-evolving health claims.
In my experience, under stress he will basically read half a sentence and decide what the second half means on his own. Fact-checking isn’t his thing when threatened. My theory is that once he has a worry or concern, it becomes reality to him, and he defends the lie because he finds comfort in having a confirmation that the world is out to get him with minimal responsibility on his part.
HOLY SHIT HE SAID WHAT IN HIS TOS???? He was literally out there setting things up so that he could steal characters??? Because of COURSE people are gonna try to chargeback after waiting MONTHS to receive what they paid for. Wow. WOW! Jesus christ I’ve known about this dude for years, its amazing how I can /still/ learn about vile shit he tries to pull.
So I dug around and apparently this is STILL in his TOS
Ghost-Oakes will take your commissions that he has no intention of fulfilling, and if you charge him back because He Is Not Doing His Job
He has set up his TOS to have the right to take your character(s) for himself to use and sell for his own profit
Ghost-Oakes will take your money, not do your commission, and then will steal your character if you attempt to get your money back
The screencap’s kinda hard to read since tumblr likes to mysteriously resize things so I archived the page.
WHAT THE FUCK
He’s a con-artist and a thief, and not even a subtle one.
Even if it doesn’t fit your blog, please consider boosting this. Tell everyone you know. If you hear someone supporting him, shut them down. If someone’s talking about commissioning him, warn them of this. Petitions don’t do shit, the only way to stop people like this is to stop their income. Drag his reputation through the dirt until no one would even consider speaking to him. That’s the only way to end this.
i feel like ur fave spongebob episode says a lot about you so tag this w whatever ur fave episode is….for me its the ep where spongebob thinks mr. krabs is a robot
if you identify as cis but haven’t actually taken time to sit down and examine and analyze your gender identity, it’s probably time to do that otherwise you’ve just given in to society forcing a significant part of your identity upon you.
if someones comfortable with their gender identity to the point that its not even on their mind then theres no need for them to analyse it
as someone who basically identifies as cis i think it’s very much important to examine your gender identity. it might lead to small things: e.g. after i did that i stopped shaving because i realized that i wasn’t doing it for myself. further, i’ve stopped seeing my own face as a gendered thing and this makes it easier for me to be respectful of the identities of others, and easier to be happy with the meatsack i live in. i think that it’s very important for cis people to consider what aspects of gendered existence we hold sacred. peeing in a segregated space? if so, why? i mean this is exactly the kind of question trans communities have been trying to get us to deal with forever and i think that answering it on a cultural level will come with exactly the type of introspection that OP is asking for.
some of the best advice i’ve got in college so far is “make strange what is comfortable” and hey, after you take it apart, you can put it right back together again if that’s what makes you happy but it’s still important to evaluate why you perform your gender the way you do and what rituals are essential to that? why are they essential? are they worth perpetuating? the answer might not always be yes EVEN for people comfortable with the label of their gender assigned at birth
