warning primarily to my transfem followers: this is going to be the most miserable thing you have ever read. tara knows this, which is why she says your reaction will be fun, because similarly to the antagonistic girl she wrote to be the manifestation of rot for her story, she just predicted that you were going to hate it. she knew ahead of time that you were going to hate it and prepared for you to hate it rather than trying to make something good, and now, like the character in her story, tara is going to make you the monster. because you cant have just organically hated what she wrote, its because she predicted you were going to and set you up. god, isnt she just operating two steps ahead of you at all times?
no, this one is just bad. its emotionally evocative and has plot twists and heroes and villains and betrayals and an open-ending that's so perfect you'd think a sequel was planned from the start. it also doesn't do any of that well.
a few weeks ago there was a post about puppygirls. the post asked for us to have a talk to decide on something, like a committee: are we ready to talk about the puppygirls? i didnt know we wanted to, but the author of that post, like the partner of the main character of tara knights story, had noticed a pattern. the problem, she said, was that "puppygirls cannot talk. they bark and paw and purr but they can't hold a conversation". they are socially inept. the post was received brutally for a number of reasons, the most valid one being "why would you make a post about this instead of having a private talk with whatever puppygirl made you feel this way?". but even that post, for however bad it was, had its moments. it said it wanted to have this talk in the open so the puppygirls could self-reflect without being directly called out. it said that everyone loved the puppygirls and that the criticism came from a place of wanting to help them improve. the author of that post saw puppygirls as people beaten into submission by their situations, and tried (for however flawed the attempt was) to offer them a hand.
"dump your puppygirl" is the opposite of this. whereas the post from a few weeks ago was malicious on accident, dump your puppygirl is malicious on purpose. the post from a few weeks ago was about trying to help people you loved, dump your puppygirl is about HATING them. and i mean HATE. and what makes it so much worse is that it's hate from someone who knows the pain well enough to pick it out with laser precision. tara knight wants you to know she hates you specifically, puppygirl. in this article she lays out all of the worst anxieties and fears of the puppygirl, points at each one and says: "you are doing all of this on purpose. you are wearing the skin of a woman but you are acting like a man. you are doing it to manipulate the people you claim to "love". you are acting like a man when you ask for sex nobody wants to give you. you act like a man when you use your mental health as an excuse for your inaction. we know you wear that oversized hoodie because youre insecure. we know you wear that choker because youre cosplaying as a rebellious woman while the real trans women (who want to be women, unlike you who is too scared to be seen as one) put in all this effort to help you, which you use to reproduce yourself, like a cancer, like a lame husband. every week you live you build up hundreds of hours of labor debt to the people who care for you. you are literally the embodiment of capitalism, stealing the labor from your family. and when they start measuring your activity and you are caught in your big lie, you will be excised, because you are mathematically a leech. here is a simple d/v formula for you to calculate how much of a leech you are."
but both "the post" and "dump your puppygirl" are sides of the same coin. where one tried to help and the other tried to hurt, they both are both part of a new wave of disdain for puppygirls. and not for puppygirls like "dog girls", puppygirls is just the term being used to camouflage disdain for trans women who "dont try hard enough". puppygirl is a synonym for boymoder. this post is a hate post directed at the people in our community who are paralyzed by their fear of walking into a world that wants to kill them.
in my time being subjected to the slimiest radfem rhetoric and 4chan transphobia, i have never even read something as completely fucking HATEFUL as dump your puppygirl. it stands out because you can tell she knows the exact anxieties of the puppygirls and targets them. this was a piece written to hurt. i would even go as far as to theorize that tara knights account was hacked, because the idea that someone claiming to be a transfeminist would think of making something so vile is out of the question. but it probably wasn't hacked and the reality is probably sadder: there is an epidemic among trans women where we look down on people who arent as far along as we are.
so, if you were looking for a piece that answers the age old question: "what if the horrified suicidal trans woman was actually an ungrateful cheating manipulator", Tara Knight has made something so reviling that it genuinely made my stomach drop.
for the horrified full-time boymoder thinking of reading this: dont. dont torture yourself with it. it has absolutely nothing of value to say. it aims solely to affirm the horrible things you think about yourself. you can only win this interaction by walking away.
