Transfeminist Killjoy

Polly, loves taupe, actually not all that cross (most of the time) But definitely a big fan of mathematical puns. "Pittsburgh" and "Old enough to remember when having your exact personal information demanded felt kinda weird" is all you get about me.

[crosspollytaupe]

Anyway, I think my crashout a little while ago was correct.

It was a mistake to try to transition without a support network, and I am going to rectify that by "pausing, working a support network, then restarting." I'll be back when that happens.

If this bothers you, ask yourself "Am I willing to be part of Polly's support network?" If yes, then cool, I'm leaving the account activated and you can message me to tell me that. If no, then - you were lying to yourself when you felt all that bothered. - whatever is going on in your head, don't make it my problem.

Also, posting something extremely emotionally frustrated like this and then getting "accountname liked your post" with no further interaction from that person feels real fucking shitty. If you choose to do that even though I told you it feels shitty, you're an asshole and I'm just going to block you.

[crosspollytaupe]

Okay so I am still watching PWHL and occasionally making gifs during my sabbatical.

[sky3sth3l1m1t]

Ah yes, a content label on an image with just my face, on trans day of visibility tumblr? You’re gonna be transmisongynistic on any day? Our censorship is why there’s no safe space for trans women on the internet do better tumblr

[eye0ewe]

no for real what the actual fuck @staff explain yourselves. now.

[crosspollytaupe]

Okay since I went out line dancing y’all can have a tgirl tummy twednesday.

[crosspollytaupe]

Does anyone wanna come over and lay your head in my lap as I play video games and you tell me which options to pick?

[tpwrtrmnky]

"Trans women are actually women for real, not in a metaphorical sense, not in a "anyone can be anything" sense, but genuinely actually make more taxonomic sense to classify in the category of women than any other group you could classify them in" is a position you'll find is pretty radical even in queer spaces

[taliabhattwrites]

I recently posed a question to my cis followers on Bsky about whether they could defend the idea that trans women are in fact women.

The overwhelming response was, while well-meaning, sorely disappointing and along the lines of "of course trans women are women, 'woman' is ultimately a meaningless category, you can be whatever you like".

It was such a profoundly sobering experience because I realized that most people have framed their conception of trans rights around owning bigots and dunking on them in arguments instead of an affirmative understanding of trans marginalization, a comprehension of the struggles we face in a cissexist, patriarchal society, or even a basic familiarity with how we are seen and regarded and treated institutionally.

'Woman' is not a meaningless category in a patriarchy. It is a positionality, one that trans women undoubtedly occupy, and most cis people--even allies, even the ones who believe they want to do right by us--do not fundamentally accept the premise that we actually inhabit this position and navigate society as women.

It's an epistemic chasm I don't quite know how to cross, which is unfortunate as I've inadvertently dedicated my life to doing so. Ascertaining just how wide that gap in understanding is was alarming, if necessary.

To cis readers, all I can say is that if you only think trans women can be women in a world where the word 'woman' holds no meaning, you're more aligned with the Gender-Conservative position on us than you think. You might want to unpack that.

[crosspollytaupe]

I’ve been saying this as something like “trans women are women, in all registers”

Like, people will have a “seriously discussing material conditions and politics in a detailed way” mindset and a “shitposting/memes/dunking on people with terrible politics” mindset. And to cis people, “trans women are women” is only true in the second mindset. Not in that they’ll get mad at you for saying it into the first kind of conversation (usually), but instead that they’ll understand the statement as an implicit signal to change registers. (At which point they will resist if you try to change it back)

[maryestofsues]

Trans women deserve to be cuddled whenever we want it. It's truly unfair that anybody willing to cuddle me is at minimum a few hundred miles away :(

[expertpedestrian]

I posted this to bluesky a few days ago and I’m still feeling it

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

Isn’t it kind of fun how when your life sucks you just can’t talk about it with anyone

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

I’m serious though. When your life reaches a degree of suckage, you find yourself having to look elsewhere for anything at all to talk about. The things going on in your life are trauma dumping. Your past is probably also trauma dumping. So you have to get really weird about specific things or hope that others want to talk to you, because very quickly people are going to develop an aversion to you and the way your life sucks. Unless you just don’t talk about it

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

It’s socially isolating, which is dangerous—when you’re in this sort of situation, community is the difference between life and death, housing and homelessness.

I think the collective prioritization of comfort first is hurting people in a real and material sense

[anatheyma]

unfollowed someone for announcing "we will be pirating!" regarding the new harry potter hbo show, because no we won't be. even if you don't support that hag financially, i can't have a harry potter fan in my circles. fucks up my chakras.

[cipheramnesia]

I got reminded recently about one of the reasons it took me so long to go anywhere in the BDSM scene. I'd tentatively make my way to some kind of small meet up, try to listen and learn, only to discover people tying the practice to some kind of mystical and hierarchical practice. To a limited extent this makes sense. If you're engaging in behavior fetishizing clothing, pain, etc then you want to learn how to take proper care of your people and your stuff. You generally want to know you're around people either who know what they're doing or are interested in learning, which is pretty normal for any pursuit.

But somewhere around this point I'd hit this wall of people who engaged with BDSM as something that was mandated as sacred, where general safe practices were locked into ritual practice, with inductions and semi-formal roles, and considerate privacy mutated into a kind of separatism. You had to know someone if you were remotely interested in BDSM, and then after that you have to spend who knows how long in some sort of non-negotiable apprenticeship before doing anything, and if what you like isn't within the lawful good BDSM bible you either are simply not doing anything you want after you've gone through the whole ritualistic in-group acceptance, or you are an apostate. So that was where it usually was a hard pass for me. I'm happy to sit through a thousand BDSM 101 vetting classes, but I draw the line at having to go through performative boot polishing just because I want someone to hit me until I cry. Maybe it's how I was brought up, but I seem to have a flat cap on ritual observance. I hit that line and my brain nopes the fuck out.

Largely though happenstance, and a little bit of direct approach past my anxiety, I connected with a sadist who knew good safety practices, but had zero interest in the mythologized, ritualistic elements of BDSM. I can't be completely sure, but I have a strong feeling that if I was still trying to find someone in an environment where I was supposed to have a hanky code, lock into some kind of personal identity besides queer, signal things with specific clothes or piercings or hair styles - I'd have none of this. I'd be fully excluded from BDSM practices that are very gratifying for me personally all because this set of carefully mythologized and stratified separatist practices carved out a place that only exists if you can afford to look some way, to dress some way, and are willing to be one specific thing only.

And ultimately it's like, yeah, so what. I got introduced to some new ways to play. It's not a big deal that one of the organizers was short with me and my girlfriend about being late and missing the history section, or realizing later they could hear us outside ringing the bell and knocking but ignored us for a long time, and apparently decided to assume we were just lazy assholes for being late to a thing we paid to attend and treat us like misbehaving children instead of adults where sometimes shit happens (literally why we were late). It doesn't matter that a lot of the discussion of the history was framed with ideation and mythologization and separatism as like positive for the community - because we got to learn new things safely and we can take some of that knowledge to other people who would never, never ever feel welcome in that sort of space. Like, it's fine, but it does stick in my craw, and I am just a tiny amount bitter. Again, maybe it's just how I came up, but I can't understand how a person could be any flavor of queer, trans, and kinky - but decide to enthusiastically gatekeep any of that. I just don't understand that at all.

[renthony]

If I may go on a pissy little vent for a moment, I am really fucking tired of other Americans acting like Florida has already fallen totally to fascism, there are no Floridian leftists, and Florida can just be written off entirely as a "lost cause."

There are Black and brown and indigenous and Jewish and queer and disabled and countless otherwise marginalized Floridians, all fighting tooth and nail for our home and community. But everyone acts like we don't matter or should "just leave."

And it makes me so tired, y'all. I LOVE Florida. I love its people and its environments so, so fucking much. I want better for my beloved home, and I want people to stop treating it as a fucking joke.

I want people to stop acting like there's nothing here to love and protect. Your "Florida is a nasty swamp full of Republican rednecks and crazy Florida Men" stereotyping is HURTING PEOPLE. Do better!

[renthony]

Profoundly strange to me that there are people whose reaction to this post has been to call me a stupid liberal who doesn't know anything about the state of trans rights in Florida.

I am a loud & proud union organizer and a disabled trans person, which is fairly obvious from about three seconds spent on my blog. When I say that there are marginalized people here who are fighting tooth and nail, I'm not just blowing smoke up your ass. I am talking about myself, my friends, and my community.

We're going to keep fighting, regardless of whether you think we're stupid for doing so.

[yokowan]

dealing with code written by scientists who are bad at programming? obnoxious at worst. generally simple enough that you're better off rewriting most of it.

dealing with code written by scientists who are good at programming? absolutely terrifying. you are presented with a hundred thousand lines of python code written by someone who has no formal training and whose first programming experience was teaching themselves fortran 77 on an old mainframe computer. not a single good practice convention is followed. unreadable syntax tricks you've never seen before are used to save like two or three lines here and there. there are absolutely arcane performance optimizations that have never been seen outside of like one paper published in the 90s and make the program like 5% faster. there's also freshman CS student level optimizations that they completely missed. there is basically no documentation. you are left to learn how it works with the source code and a dozen examples which have maybe three or four comments between them. good luck. may god save your soul.

[tpwrtrmnky]

The types of behavior "too online" should intuitively refer to:

Expecting everyone to be familiar with an argument that happened between two people whose total social media following is like 4000 people, which happened in an insular niche of the internet, because you're so invested in that niche it feels like the whole internet.

Starting to say shit like "we need more representation of men who like women in media" because you've literally only been reading m/m fanfic for the last decade

Constructing all your politics not based on material conditions, but in opposition to people you've argued with online, based on what gives you the most engagement.

What people mean when they say "too online":

Awareness of real-life political phenomena, viewing those through the lens of well-established theories.

[tpwrtrmnky]

Having strong negative opinions about any individual trans woman who's Tumblr Famous is orders of magnitude more "Too Online" than the women who talk about transmisogyny, a real-life phenomenon, will ever be.

[b-e-b-b-l-e]

shoutout to the hotties with chronic pain and fatigue 💖💞💝💘💕💗

[alivehouse]

no one talks about how hard it is to be a gay person who doesnt care about astrology

[bluwubewwy]

Girls love asking for each others discords and then not talking its our favourite activity