Trans men are asking to be included in discussions about abortion access, where they, transmascs, and enbies (particularly if they're racialised) are THE most vulnerable group.
Trans men from the global south are talking about their specific vulnerabilities and the horrific violence they face.
Trans men are asking the rest of the community to please care more about the fact that their hormones are a controlled drug and their identities are already on a controlled drug registry that can be very easily cross-referenced with agab to Pick Out The Trannies.
Trans men are talking about how TMOC have been targeted for sexual & physical harrassment because of their transmasculinitiy in detention centres.
Trans men are asking the queer community to stop claiming they have made 'no historical contributions' when 1) they have, and 2) they have been violently erased, institutionalised, and forced into marriage throughout history, and even those lucky few who went stealth were often discovered through forcible outing.
Trans men are begging the queer community to stop spreading transphobic lies that predatorjacket them as dangerous, violent rapists.
Trans men are mentioning that they are often ENTIRELY banned from playing on men's OR women's high-level sport teams, because those teams are allowed to 'make their own decisions' on whether to permit them while using a banned steroid, which usually, you guessed it, means they can't compete.
If you wanna call me a Trans Men's Rights Activist because I care about the rights of trans men, along with every other member of the trans community... go right ahead, I guess.
So this is a callout post. If you want to stop reading there that's cool, but I cannot let a raging misogynist, biphobe, transphobe, lesbophobe person parading as an upstanding queer artist keep getting platformed when he's said some heinous things, behaved terribly and begs for likes as if life is a popularity contest. Block me if you disagree but I'm writing this here as Tumblr is less ephemeral than other channels. Part of this post was originally posted here as a reply.
fragments/nights-at-crystarium/Jay have been posting misogynistic, biphobic, transphobic, lesbophobic, entitled comments and then claiming people are homophobic when they criticise him back. Please rethink if you want to keep supporting him.
A/N: warning this is a LONG POST and I have truncated it under the break. I have also added the most recent misogynistic rant at the top just below the biphobia.
Context: an anon send him a message about how Emet can only be gay, Japanese people don't understand queercoding and that people who ship femme character with him are delusional.
See here for why his Emet-Selch comment was biphobic at worst and misguided at best. (thank you @birues for bringing this to everyone's attention)
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Misogyny and Trans-exclusionary language
Jay HATES the idea that women want to share this space too. In addition to the Tumblr post above he posted this to his Patreon discord, which is not private as his patrons can access it. He laments that people make fem characters because it's default and he wishes they all would transition to men. He also jumps in to insult two artists with m/f Emet ships @nipuni and @ja-ck-du and calling their art hetslop:
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(continued with more of his terrible behaviour after the break)
Pattern of rancid behaviour over the years
Let's start with the laundry list of all the bad behaviour he's expressed through the YEARS. You can read this better on my reddit comment here which I posted in reply to a shill thread made by what most people agree as Jay's sockpuppet account on the ffxiv subreddit. All of these I had the displeasure of witnessing myself or have been corroborated by multiple people:
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Self-aggrandising behaviour
Here is Jay claiming that there aren't many queer creators in xiv which is INSANE because this is the queerest fandom I have ever seen. You can't sneeze without hitting a queer artist. He also calls himself a pillar of the community, which is HILARIOUS because I have never seen him uplift other creators. You can't be a pillar of the community if you don't engage with the community. Your sycophants don't count.
How can you victimise yourself to such a degree?
He also claimed that if he was a lesbian, all of these callout of his rancid behaviour won't happen, which is laughable because you ask any lesbian in this space what being femme entails, they'd tell you straight up that they have experienced misogyny, no less from people like you Jay.
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Entitlement
Jay being ungrateful that ONLY 25 people have shared his post, and then saying you deserve to not be helped when you need it unless you share his post because he's a poor comic artist earning $1.2k from patreon every month. Because not sharing a post from a popular artist is obviously equivalent to not helping someone in dire straits. If you have been around, you'd know that times are hard, especially when you're queer. He's wishing you ill for the offence of not pressing that repost button.
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Being ungrateful with a sprinkling of misogyny
Jay straight up insulting anon's wife because how dare she reads his comic when she hasn't played ShB because her mind would not comprehend the complexity of his plot. And this is AFTER he begs for followers, as he does with every single one of his goddamn post.
So which is it, are you going to appreciate people who read your comic or are you going to put up so many qualifiers you only deem them worthy of following you when they've ticked all of them?
Hey Jay, maybe you should connect to your readers in a genuine manner and not in bad faith where all you want is for them to stroke your ego whilst giving a facade of appreciation.
And maybe, just maybe, you should start uplifting your fellow queer creators before demanding everyone support you.
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If you've read this far, thank you. I hope if you have ever supported him in the past that you rethink if you want to still support him after this. I do not care how big his following is; I do care that mask off misogyny is being let loose in our space. It doesn't matter if you're queer or a woman, we should not sweep this under the rug especially during Pride Month.
The lack of boomer LGBTQ+ people isn't because it's "more popular now." Many were murdered by their peers, died from government inaction during the AIDS crisis, committed suicide due to lack of social supports, or have had to live in the closet due to their peers' cruelty.
Vampire girl explaining that vampires don’t necessarily have to kill someone to drink their blood, but she did kind of kill a lot of people back when she was all depressed pre-transition: “when I was an egg I ate four dozen lads”
wish ppl understood the power nowadays in not giving something attention. things today are so focused on attention and reaction and #memes that the best way to shut literally anything down is simply not give it exactly what it wants. like you arent going to own that bigot on twitter youre going to boost their original message whether thats your intent or not and you arent just playing with ai for shits and giggles you are giving it free learning and data. just stop engaging with things that dont deserve it
as we say in the entertainment and specifically the clown biz, "a knock is a plug". The best way to keep a rival down is to simply not mention them at all, because any publicity is good publicity.
#i feel as though a lot of people on the internet are like those puppies who DEMAND to meet every single dog they see#as though interaction is their god-given right#when really a well-trained and socialized dog will often ignore others#stop wriggling on your leashes barking madly y'all#just keep walking (via @watchful-heart)
- guy at work "Yes, and -" ing the bit me and my coworker were doing where we pretended to be owners of a fantasy medieval tavern not minimum wage retail staff
- at the gay club when Die Young by Kesha came on and two hundred people, all dancing and drinking separately, jumped up and down to make the "- beat of the drums *STOMP STOMP*" as loud as possible
- person who watched me stomp round the beach singing a made up song about breakfast foods to name a cat after and suggested more breakfast foods that would be good cat names
- guy who started a dance off with everyone across the road while waiting for the lights to change
- very tiny girl at the pharmacy interviewing everyone in the queue and every single one of us in turn sat down and answered this toddler's questions like we were on Letterman
Having depression is fun because one of the main symptoms is that you want to kill yourself and one of the side effects of the meds is you want to kill yourself but if you at any point even IMPLY you want to kill yourself to your doctors in charge of making you not want to kill yourself, you are forcibly put in "wanting to kill yourself jail".
And I have news that may not surprise you about how "wanting to kill yourself jail" affects your mental state and what it may make you want to do.
If you actually want to help someone with mental health issues, come to their house and wash the dishes in their sink. I promise they have them. This is 1000% more effective than locking them up against their will.
Best way to make someone who wants to die not want to die is to give them a reason to live. (…not verbally.) Often that just means taking things off their plate that are too big or too heavy, and then sticking around for the fallout as they try to paradoxically claw that weight back onto them. Because they got comfortable being smothered whether they knew it or not and feel naked without their rock.
Also. Controversially, and contrary to my point above….dont try to reassure them if they tell you they want to die. Don’t try to list off the reasons they should stay, cause they’ll just double down on why they don’t want to or feel like they can’t. Agree with them, to a fault. People who want to die want to euthanize themselves, effectively. They want to not suffer. That’s the goal. Causing more suffering or trying to be emotionally manipulative doesn’t do shit.
So agree, from that premise. “Oh, I see. How kind of you, to want to end your own suffering. No, truly, it IS a kindness. Do we not call it so when we put our pets to sleep, or let grandma die with dignity on hospice? You are trying to offer yourself that grace, and that is about the kindest thing I think anyone could do for themselves.”
I have repeated some version of the above to most the friends I’ve had call me at 3am, clinging to one last thread of hope and desperation to be seen. I have acknowledged this desperation, too, with more mixed results… depends on the person and what attachment they had to me.
But EVERY SINGLE PERSON I have told this has had an epiphanous reaction, a realization that if they can do that much kindness for themselves, then maybe they can be open to other kinds of self-compassion too. Like letting themselves rest. Like letting themselves be human.
On the record, I did not learn this from therapy, but lived experience. I WISH someone had told me that, and I didn’t need to put those pieces together by trial and error and, yes, being put on a very unhelpful lockdown to divest me of even more autonomy and control of my life…which did the very opposite of help.
Anyways. Three things usually are at the root of most suicide attempts:
1. Feeling overwhelmed, too much going on in life or you don’t have the mental or physical energy to make decisions or think clearly and critically
2. Feeling helpless to control yourself, your life, or your environment. Often tied to the first, but not always.
3. Lack of social bonds. Which is why social attention doesn’t work for long. As my husband puts it, “You need the oxytocin, gremble.” Oxytocin is THE bonding hormone. Every human alive makes it. Some don’t have receptors capable of receiving it, or that don’t process it correctly (psychopathy, and to an extent, sociopathy/ASPD, NPD, certain types of Dementia, and Schizophrenia) but every human brain produces it.
The last one is probably the most significant one, or at least has the largest margin of predictability in terms of outcome. I can’t find the damn study because google is being stupid about it (is it just me or have they gotten worse about burying scientific data lately?) But people with one or more significant social bonds are not only less likely to commit suicide, but they’re far FAR more likely to choose less “violently lethal” methods like guns or jumping in front of a train.
I dug into that research after looking at a facebook reel that mentioned that women attempt to comit suicide more often than men do (true) but are less likely to succeed because they choose “softer” methods. (Also true). But something about that didn’t quite add up to me, (nor the implication that women just don’t have access to those violent ends…literally 90% of the hunters and handgun owners I know are women) so I looked into it, and the truth was simply that women are more likely to have pets, children, or significant others when they do attempt. Men that commit suicide successfully overwhelmingly come from single-parent homes, are 20-40, and live alone, with a close follow up on 40-60 year old men that are recently divorced or separated. There was no data on that for the type of work they did, but blue-collar men are far more likely to commit suicide than white collar ones and that’s been true for a very long time.
Point is.
Don’t add to the weight. Don’t add to the pressure (unless and until they ask for it.) I understand how distressing that can be, especially when you’re trying to convince someone to leave a bad situation. But it is also true: you can not reason someone out of something they did not reason themselves into, and that you can not save someone who doesn’t want to be saved.
This is a super confronting addition that is a little uncomfortable, but I'm reblogging it because the fundamental truth - "I'm just trying to give myself release" - is the central truth to every consideration of suicide I've had. The only piece of media, ever, that I have found that talks about it from a remotely relatable and loving point of view is this song.
This is also why arguing that it is selfish and using guilt is so terrible. Great.
I'm not saying this was always an accurate assessment of the situation, but here's what I felt every time; You want me alive so you can use me. Fucking fantastic. Glad to be your pet, your toy, your comfort object, your duty you're being so good at fulfilling, your need not to feel pain even if I'm hurting worse, your favorite thing. In the short run, guilt can work sometimes. And it can for sure work if it's a thought that the person naturally and organically. But it feels like shit, long run. If you are suicidal and someone comes at you with guilt, you aren't the priority, are you? Them losing something is. Their pain over yours, always. That's the mindset of (at least some) suicidal people.
If you cannot understand the horror of being forced to stay alive because of what other people want or believe or are uncomfortable with, until you understand how soul-wrenchingly horrible it feels to be told you have to stay when doing so just means you have to see them suffering over your misery, which makes you feel like you have to stifle and hide everything so they aren't Big Sad (which is extra unpleasant when their Big Sad comes with a side of them being willing to call the cops) and stifling it only makes it worse, you can't fully get it. It makes you feel utterly disrespected and ignored and not understood and like they aren't listening at all.
I'm not saying suicidality isn't often riddled with thought distortions, it often super is, just that you cannot snap them out of it in the ways people seem to like to try.
I don't have an answer for what TO do. I just don't. But I do know it doesn't involve attaching a threat to every last line defense offered to me, or discouraging me from talking to other people in a bad place about it because the Bad Selfish Action might be made too tempting by someone understanding and not spending all their effort trying to get me to not do it instead of really hearing me.
Don't force someone into inpatient. Those places are trauma factories and genuinely statistically result in more suicides and often in total cessation in attempts to seek help that might actually help.
Yes, reach out, for God's sake reach out, don't leave them alone with it if they don't want to be. But please be a safe person to talk to or just Be Near. We can have incarceration and abuse on demand, or inflicted on us in minutes, but have really fucking few safe people and safe spaces. Which one are you going to commit to facilitating?
Caesar has grown too ambitious and knives are flying in the senate!
Select a trio of coordinates below and click (keep reading) to see how you contributed to his assassination!
why does this have 32k notes? it’s just a picture of a knife in a ranch bottle, is there some unspoken joke that 32 thousand people share? what is going on here, i dont get it. it’s just a fucking picture of a knife in a ranch bottle. is there some spiritual connection people have to this picture? is there some ominous and mystical reasoning that this has 32 thousand notes? do people reblog this because it makes them look like some indie blogger? or is there just something funny to this? someone please explain
Pick a topic you like, and that's what you're going to read about. Set a minimum word count, and read until you get to it. Start small. Smart easy. First try, it might actually be agonizing.
That's it for the day. Just hit the word count.
Next day, read to the word count again. Read something new! It will be easier today.
And easier the next.
And you will naturally find yourself extending how much you read per day.
yes! the brain must be exercised like any other part of the body to get stronger! no matter what place you’re at you can do stimulating activities to exercise your brain!
The answer to 'how are they going to function' is, and I say this as someone whose mom was a social worker in Appalachia for 20 years: they're going to get scammed. They're going to be victims of fraud, scams, and exploitation, due to their low literacy making them easier targets for others. And then they're going to be unable to read and write well enough to advocate for themselves in a court of law or fight back in any meaningful way.
"I ain't reading that" becomes "I can't read that" which becomes "I didn't read before I signed it because the guy telling me to was convincing and now I don't have anything".
I think this might be the most beautiful meme I've ever seen. I just spent five minutes extolling all its virtues to my husband:
It doesn't even mention Julius Caesar or the Ides of March.
It's from a very different segment of the play
It's not even the famous part of that segment that everyone knows by heart
The "I'm just sayin'" attitude of all the Seinfeldians in the screenshot (although if memory serves, what they're actually saying is, "not that there's anything wrong with that")
It just comes at the whole situation in such an oblique fashion
I don't think I've ever seen an Ides of March meme do anything like this before
I dunno, maybe it's just me and it's too wild of a concept... but if someone shoved their foot in their mouth YEARS ago, and has long since apologized, learned from their mistake, and has tremendously grown since then?
If you still feel the need to punish them, years later, go to fucking therapy because that is some nonsensical abusive bullshit is what it is.
You can't sit there and scream shit like "we have to fight generational trauma! Don't punish the behavior you wish to see!" then turn around and grab a pitchfork when made aware or reminded of someone's past mistake.
There is no if's, and's or but's about it.
You can't soapbox about stopping abuse, how being abused/trauma explains actions but doesn't always excuse them, how it's important to forgive yourself for your mistakes even if toxic abusive parents will never let you forget, only to turn around and punish someone who has busted ass to be a better person and succeeded.
Absolutely disgusting how often I see people behaving like this. There's a bloody difference between someone always being a terrible person who refuses to learn, and someone who isn't awful, just shoves their foot in their mouth every so often or maybe only once, and it's been years after a lesson well learned.
Maybe if some of you learned the fucking difference social media wouldn't feel like a toxic waste heap every twenty minutes.
Some people definitely need to work harder on making up for what they said or did, but again, when you say "Don't punish the behavior you want to see!" That INCLUDES EVERYONE.
Not just your favorite oomfies and yourself.
Practice what you fucking preach.
"you don't know what you have until you lose it" works for things that suck too btw. sometimes you need to experience life without something for a while to realise oh damn that was some bullshit
Oh, a human being is seeking a social response? Human being, the social animal wired to make and track social connection? A human desires the vital blood that permitted their species to survive for millennia? The human being who was born completely helpless and primed in every way by nature to seek attention and help from their community?
Wow that’s crazy. How embarrassing. Humiliating even. Should we isolate them from community? Should we call Wire Mother?