someday you'll teach me to understand it, too @robinyourcreator - Tumblr Blog

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so i made a bsky. havent done anything with it yet but.

break open in case of fire etc etc

oh im also robinyourcreator on dreamwidth still, uh, not done anything on that either but.

should rome burn,

allthingseurope

Bergen, Norway (by Clive Metcalfe)

bells-lettres

local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣

Translation by me. :))

of course, as soon as i *say* i want to not create anything for a while on purpose the contrary brain with severe mental illness wants to poke at things again.

how dare you.

thelatestkate

Shop , Patreon , Books and Cards , Mailing List

#fingers crossed

tokyoproxy

(Kyoto) The Philosopher’s Path 哲学の道 by Patrick Vierthaler

pjharvey

we have to start running a massive PSA campaign to young gay people so everyone understands there is a difference between being a dom and being a top and between being a sub and being a bottom. and also that sometimes you are neither a sub nor a bottom and you're just like shy. we need to be handing out flyers we need ads at every train station spreading the word

genderkoolaid

i don't think "being trans has a meaningful impact on your position under patriarchy, and when people talk about systemic misogyny and androcentrism and just say "men" instead of "cis men," it ignores that trans men have quite literally never been included in any of this" should be this goddamn fucking controversial tbh. but now i've got people crawling out the woodwork to um actually me about how "this study shows that trans men in the US full time work earn 10% more than trans women in full time work and also v-coding exists and also afab housing so therefore trans men as a class have male privilege and benefit from patriarchy"

genderkoolaid

#I genuinely wonder where they got lost if they think ‘access to AFAB housing’ is *male* privilege tbh#yknow. group of people who by are by definition not granted the sex marker of male on their birth certificate#and if our birth certificate and legal sex ID was changed to Male then#maybe. and hear me out here. maybe that would make it difficult. to get into. AFAB housing. whoa.#maybe this is why the term AFAB privilege began to circulate lmao#bc there’s no way of arguing this as male privilege that doesn’t come across as some form of absurdist satire

oh its like talking to a fucking funhouse mirror with these people tbh. its the same with that one guy who was like "checkmate MRA, women in the 19th century were legally property and couldn't wear pants!!" when that. is literally an example of how trans men were also directly systemically affected by misogyny.

these people never stop for one single second to think of trans men who never get to transition. they never think about the countless trans men throughout history who have lived and died as women. who have been subject to child marriage and clitorectomies and been treated as legal property. they don't think about trans men in countries right now who go through all of those things, who legally cannot be outside without a male guardian because they are legally female, who cannot even get their own passport because they are legally female. its so fucking frustrating.

radical feminism has its hooks so deep in some parts of the trans community, and frankly a lot of people have internalized trans separatist talking points. even if they don't realize it they don't seem to think of trans people as a coherent group. all trans people's experiences are seen as just a shadow cast by cis men’s privilege and cis women’s oppression, and our experiences are reducible to cis men and cis women's experiences but slightly different.

and, i have to say this again: this is literally how TERFs think, but in reverse. TERFs also ignore how trans men are worse off than cis women, and how trans women are worse off than cis men, and insist that all trans experiences are reducible to "men are privileged women are oppressed." its literally just a matter of which trans people you cram into which side of the cis binary. this is not good transfeminism and it never ever will be.

genderkoolaid

from this post:

people will tell you that people seen as men are gender-policed much more harshly than people seen as women and every little deviation towards femininity is noticed and punished, and that's why trans guys have it easier. but you'll also hear people tell you that people seen as men have so much more wiggle room, men can be all kinds of sizes and shapes meanwhile people seen as women have to fit into this tiny little box, and that's why trans guys have it easier.

these are two entirely contradictory lines of logic, but they lead to the same conclusion. because the conclusion is the point. its a backformed theory of gender. people believe, for whatever reason, that "trans guys have it easier" is an objective fact, and then storytell an explanation for why that is that sounds right to them. [...]. its about people just feeling, on a gut level, that trans guys must have it easier, by which they really mean, transmasculine suffering isn't socially visible, and it isn't natural for me to imagine it, therefore it must not exist; yet, trans suffering in general clearly exists, so there must be some reason that transmasculine suffering feels so abstract and immaterial to me and others.

once you start to see this you can't unsee it. people will just say insane bullshit that could easily be used to make the opposite point they are making

here's an example of this in action:

"if someone masculine happens to have something feminine about them, it is dissuaded"

oh so you mean cis men can be feminine and no one cares and that's why trans men have male privilege? but i thought it was the reverse, that cis women can be masculine and no one cares and that's why trans men have male privilege? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it? which is it?

onlyfangz

if a trans man needs to hide the fact that he's trans in order to access any form of male privilege, i simply do not believe that is real privilege. i will, and never will, accept that the closet is a privilege. any queer person can go into the closet to access "privilege," and it's dumb when you all try to argue that bs too. are you not tired of making the exact same arguments about recycled queer groups every 5-10 years? nothing is ever new except the New Queer Enemy really IS privileged and evil this time, we promise!

starpxp

hey so if you hate trans men specifically because they TRANSITIONED into a MAN, that is not cool and feminist that is transphobic. Hating somebody specifically because they transitioned is weird. You wouldn't hate those same trans men if they detransitioned/had never transitioned and that is transphobic.

genderkoolaid

also the thing about "we need to focus on the people most vulnerable, and transmascs may be vulnerable but not more than trans women!" is that it doesn't consider transmasc erasure as an active force.

its a take from the perspective that trans men are "vulnerable" is some vague abstract generalized way, not in a way which would behoove anyone to adjust their behavior or take action on their behalf. its the erasure of erasure; the assumption is that trans men probably have enough resources and support anyways, which could not be farther from the truth. some local communities may have more transmasc-focused resources, but many others do not. transmasculine people are left out of vital conversations, are excluded from vital resources, are ignored and forgotten when they are abused and killed.

it treats transmasc erasure as something which is passive in itself and which can be solved passively. which is erasure itself in action. i do not really give a fuck about "who has it worse," it is not about that. it is about the fact that if YOU do not make an ACTIVE EFFORT to advocate for transmascs, to make transmasc suffering and oppression visible and legible, it will not happen. it simply will not happen.

erasure is an active force. we all internalize transmasculine erasure and we can all easily contribute to it; we are expected to contribute to it. trans men&mascs cannot afford the model of "well we only need to raise awareness for the most vulnerable" because our vulnerability is defined by being ignored.

this is why unlearning anti transmasculinity has to start from (un)learning erasure. once you start to see it as an active force/tool of the patriarchy you realize it is the lynchpin that holds so much (especially intercommunity) anti-transmasculinity together. transmaculine absence is so normalized people experience our presence as an intrusion, and people genuinely do not understand why we would ever need to be more visible than we are. it is fucking everywhere.

genderkoolaid

like idk i remember reading about a trans man in India who, after he came out to his family, was literally locked in a room in their house. just shut up in a basement somewhere, out of sight and out of mind, until he managed to escape (and even then, there's also a trans man in India whose parents sent the police to track him down and kidnap him from a shelter meant specifically for trans people).

or trans men like Sophie Lederer, who was only 19 when he was arrested for "talking silly and claiming to be a boy" in the early 20th century, and the only other thing I know about him is that he spent the rest of his life, over a decade, institutionalized for his transmasculinity. god only fucking knows what was done to him in those years by his wardens.

that is the image of transmasculine erasure. it is boys and men locked in closets and basements and prison cells disguised as hospital rooms for years until they are dead and buried as women. if they even get a headstone at all. it is dead-eyed mothers with three children who have no income or job experience and are married to a cis man ten years older than them who they know would kill them, and possibly their children, if they even mentioned being trans. if you think of transmasc erasure or "invisibility" and imagine a white cis-passing guy working stealth at his office job, congrats! transmasculine erasure is already living like a fungus in your mind. i am trying to make you feel the horror the patriarchy has trained you out of feeling about the state of transmasculine oppression.

genderkoolaid

if you've followed me for any length of time you've likely already seen this quote, but i wanna talk about it in this context again:

"Unless they present hyperfeminine, butches don’t have access to the job market. You will not be considered if you don’t wear nice women’s clothes. If you set up catering, you will get told, “I am disgusted; a woman who thinks she’s a man is cooking for me.” So butch lesbians normally have an assistant, or their femme partner if they have one, who is more feminine-looking to run the front so customers don’t know a masculine-presenting person is cooking behind the curtains. Many of us become sex workers [due to lack of job opportunities].… But then when police raid brothels and homes, the masculine lesbians get treated “like men.” This means more forceful handcuffing, kneeling, and stripping their shirts off." – Rosa, lesbian and sex worker rights defender El Salvador

i was thinking about this when it comes to how we describe vulnerability in our community, specifically mentioning someone is a "femme" to indicate their need for extra support. i don't know i've ever seen the same be done for butches. i genuinely cannot remember ever really seeing people talk about butches and their economic and social vulnerability, the way i see people talk about femmes.

its not that being feminine doesn't cause genuine vulnerability! but because people have such a binary attitude towards gender (and more broadly), the way we talk about gendered vulnerability leads to this view that feminine people are always more vulnerable than masculine people, that "this femme needs help" to many queers and feminists feels more urgent than "this butch needs help."

the erasure of anti-transmasculinity is so pervasive and harmful and the erasure itself is then erased. and the thing is, the nature of benevolent sexism has always made it that femininity (mediated by race and class and social belonging, amongst other things, Its More Complicated Than That) is seen as inherently vulnerable. people seen as masculine lesbians are "treated like men" in the sense of being treated harsher with more physical violence, while still being subjected to sexual violence out of both misogyny and queerphobia, and also being economically vulnerable because of the disgust aimed at people perceived as masculine women. and who talks about it? not the people who refuse to understand gender oppression through anything other than a binary lens (while pretending that's not what they are doing).

genderkoolaid

honestly i think on a broader level, we have been seeing the erosion of genuine queer/trans theory for a while in favor of this idea that queerphobia is reducible down to misogyny. & i do think all queerphobia does innately involve misogyny. but i feel there's been this growing aversion to attributing anything to a hostility to gender non-conformity/genderqueerness itself, in favor of attributing it to a hatred of femininity. there is no true analysis of transphobia or misandrogyny as their own forces, its just a side effect of the hatred of femininity.

this is where we get the constant refrain of "the patriarchy likes masculinity, so masculine people are always seen as better than feminine people" & why people may find it incomprehensible that there may be situations where being feminine may be a protective factor in comparison to being masculine.

another example of this from this article:

The trio made their way down a busy street in the Santiago suburb of Pudahuel, close to where Carolina lived with her mother and father. Carolina and Estefania chose not to hold hands to avoid offending anyone. Suddenly, Carolina felt a force to the back of her head. Then darkness. She had fallen unconscious, and would remain in a coma for a week. She suffered a fractured skull, a broken nose, internal bleeding and permanent damage to her hearing. There were two male attackers. One had used a large wooden pole to hit her repeatedly on the back of her head, only stopping when Estefania threw herself on top of Carolina, using her body as a shield. This is significant, says Carolina's mother, Mariela. Because unlike Carolina, who identifies as a camiona and dresses accordingly, Estefania is femme - a more feminine lesbian identity. The attackers targeted Carolina and not Estefania, says Mariela, because she represented an "unacceptable" face of womanhood. It was not just her sexual orientation that prompted violence, it was her appearance as a camiona. "I want to make it very clear they were trying to kill her," she adds. "There is no other way of looking at it. The fact that she is here is a miracle." Carolina knew one of her alleged attackers. "Before this attack he threatened me. He said, 'I am going to kill you.' He said he was going to shoot me with a gun. He called me a lesbian and swore at me. He said, 'Why do you dress like a man?'"

there are people who have been nearly (or successfully) violently murdered for being seen as a masculine woman, while their femme girlfriends were not targeted or were not the main target. but if you reduce everything in patriarchy down to "m > f" you will miss this. and

even in this article, the discussion of violence focuses on lesbianism and misogyny - which, while clearly central to the violence, one has to wonder what becomes of transmasculine individuals who are targeted by this same transphobic lesbophobia, the same transphobic misogyny, whose experiences with violence cannot be made legible through the same narratives as those who identify as women? who cannot appeal to the terms "femicide" and traditional feminist narratives as easily?

genderkoolaid

i feel like the fact that there is virtually no discussion of how trans men are affected by femicide even when including trans women in the conversation, and how basically every study or systemic review of studies looking at violence against trans men will discuss how little research has been done on this topic, and how the largest global review of studies on violence against transgender people (94 studies, 65,608 participants) found that while nearly all (96%) of the studies included transgender women, just half (49%) included transgender men and less than half (37%) included nonbinary people, should lead us to understand that the picture of how transmasculine people are impacted by transphobic and misogynistic violence is itself violently incomplete.

fuckyeahchinesefashion

wooden rabbit sculpture by chinese artist 潮舒木雕

warcrimesimulator

the-bi-wonder

When I was diagnosed at age sixteen, after having one period in the eighth grade and then never again till a medically induced one my junior year of high school - my uterine lining measured in centimeters because it was so thick, my mother turned to me in the car. She was upset. Literal tears in her eyes. And she told me her friend had PCOS, but was still able to have kids. That this was still a possibility for me if I did injections and fertility treatments, etc. My mom had never asked me if I wanted kids, she just assumed.

My first conversation about PCOS with my new endocrine/OBGYN was about weight management and how that could improve my fertility when I eventually wanted kids. It wasn't asked what my goals were for my health or if I wanted kids, just assumed.

I was a hormonal, depressed mess. I hated my body. My body dysmorphia was so bad that I cloistered myself away from so much. I wore hoodies and jeans in the 90°F, 80% humidity summers. This was considered fine. I was given metformin and birth control pills and told this was all that could be done. That PCOS wouldn't affect my life until I wanted to be pregnant. I wasn't asked if I wanted to be pregnant, just assumed.

I don't know how many PCOS groups I joined on my early 20s hoping to find community and commonality for body dysmorphia and symptom management, only to be bombarded with fertility treatments and tips and 'inspirational conception' anecdotes. They never asked if I was attempting to conceive, just assumed.

It's a problem. It's been a problem. And thank god I learned to speak up and find medical professionals that would help me with *MY* goals. I shouldn't have had to, someone should have recognized the needs of that sixteen y.o. and protected her, but I can only hope the conversation changes as awareness increases.

tiktoksthataregood-ish

sweetwithheatwriting

@hellenhighwater @copperbadge

copperbadge

These popcorns are very spicy.

ordinarytalk

Recovering from autistic burnout as a high-masking adult:

To recover, you literally need to manually learn skills that most people learn as a toddler

You need to learn what makes your body uncomfortable, and what to do to fix it

If you are high-masking, that usually means that you have learned to ignore every distress signal your body sends unless it is a distress signal that a neurotypical person would recognize. People have likely been unintentionally gaslighting you about your lived experience your entire life

If you feel bad or panicked for no reason, stop and try to pay attention to your body. Are you tense? You are likely feeling physical pain somewhere. If you've been gaslit about your pain your entire life, you might not be able to identify it.

Go through a sensory checklist.

SIGHT: Try closing and covering your eyes. If this gives you relief, the lights are probably too bright. You may also need differently-colored lights

SOUND: Cover your ears. Does this give you relief? If so, you may need earplugs or noise canceling headphones. You may also benefit from a neutral or pleasant background noise, like soft music or brown noise.

TOUCH: Are your clothes uncomfortable? Your chair? Your body? Do you feel greasy, like you need a shower? Do you need softer, sensory-friendly clothing?

TASTE: Do you need to brush your teeth or tongue? Would chewing on something help?

SMELL: Is there a strong or unpleasant smell in the room? Do you need to clean or empty a trash can? Would an air purifier help? Would a pleasant smell like a candle help?

INTEROCEPTION: Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? How is your posture? Are any of your muscles tight or sore? Scan your body slowly from head to feet, tensing and loosening each group of muscles. Going for a walk or doing a series of quick stretches may help a lot.

Learning how to do this stuff is not intuitive, if you've had an entire lifetime of gaslighting telling you that everything hurting you isn't a big deal and you're being dramatic over nothing.

This takes time, it takes work, it's not intuitive, and it's hard. Most people forget how hard it is, because they learned this as toddlers.

If you want to recover, you need to relearn your whole body. And get over your idea of "normal" and just wear the damn sunglasses and put on the headphones. If people stare, fuck em. You're disabled and they can deal with that.

wizardarchetypes

person just walked into my job and said, "oh! i've seen a lot of people in masks lately. there's not something going around is there?"

baby there is always something going around

wizardarchetypes

like even if we ignore covid & the flu, which is what most people mean when they ask this sort of thing, that is just the nature of human history. there's many other things you can "get" and any of them can cause permanent injury. we are SO lax about "stomach flu" but getting norovirus multiple times is Not Good.

luckily we have power to lessen the risks, even if you're unwilling or unable to mask. Such steps include: Washing your hands.

everyone get more educated about public health NOW.

resident-idiot-simp

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someday you'll teach me to understand it, too