Warning: quite a bit of bigotry, halfway in the company switches to racism, and apparently they think that the N-word is also a funny word that is the equivalent to gimp and they are allowed to get away with that because many of their volunteers are not US citizens… You know, because the US is the only one with the problem. And the American members get a free pass because they are friends with “foreigners” apparently
Gimp is the name of a free art application run by volunteers. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of it and I have a lot of respect for projects like these that run on the support people can actually provide and not one set dollar amount.
The name is offensive. The name was chosen because they thought it would be funnier that way and the last few days whoever runs their twitter, and other volunteers, have been completely out of line when multiple disabled people tweeted them to ask for a name change. “Gimp” is continually questioned about their name and at this point are far past pretending to be professional
The justification they give for using the word gimp is that this is an acronym for their program so it’s completely coincidental
Even though they’ve already admitted they did it as a joke and the actual acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program is GNUIMP. GNU is an operating system which is its own acronym.
Handpicking letters to create a brand name that is also a slur is not how acronyms work. Logically their name should have been IMP which seems like it would work just fine because it also is an actual word and thus easy to remember. And they’ve already admitted to using gimp because they found it funny
In case you don’t know, gimp is a derogatory term for someone who is physically disabled or an otherwise “contemptible” person.
And I know the argument of “no one actually calls disabled people that anymore” is coming and once again you would be incorrect in thinking that. As someone who has spent their entire life physically disabled I can tell you it’s quite common and usually used during a hate crime. The word is also still professionally used in the medical field despite our best efforts to end that.
Whoever is running the Gimp twitter account has gone beyond being a troll, some of the highlights include:
Take notice of how few notes everything has. No one cares and the company has been behaving like this for so long they have given up justifying anything and have just started mocking people
Shout out to @Scereyaha, their responses were articulate and on point, all my replies were just backing them up which is fine because it shows that some of us still care, some of us haven’t just given up because we know there will be no accountability for things like this in our lifetime but if we want it for someone else’s lifetime we have to work now
Please tweet @GIMP_Official and say something as simple as “refusing to change your name is unacceptable” or “stop talking over disabled people”
Anything
Those of you who proclaim to be allies of disabled people or those of you who have been asking what you should do to be an appropriate ally, this is what we need. We need your privilege in situations like this to prop up our voices.
Please signal boost, especially able-bodied and neurologically typical people. Please actually do something as an ally, it’s just a simple tweet and I already hear the excuse of “I don’t have an account” but people make accounts to do nothing more than complement celebrities, it’s not hard and complaining about having to actually “do” something that is so effortless honestly makes you worse than these people at gimp. They may be fighting against us but at least they are fighting.
Mooncustafer 