Serrated Absence

Not a minor.

[miss-wizard]

preface: do not seek out or antagonise the blog in this screenshot. if you do this, you are a cunt.

we as transfeminists simply cannot be fucking talking about each other like this. this is a ridiculously hostile way to be approaching someone's writing.

we further our collective knowledge through repeated analytical response. by looking at statements we disagree with and articulating the specific nuances of why we disagree. we do not open our responses by calling someone's contention "the worst [...] piece of shit I've ever seen"¹.

Tara Knight's article, in my opinion, does correctly recognise the fact that many transfeminine social dynamics can be abused to coerce individuals into performing unpaid feminine labour at the expense of their own wellbeing. however, I do not think that Ms. Knight sufficiently highlighted the mechanisms which facilitate this abuse, and further weakened her reach by handling comparisons to masculine weaponised incompetence without appropriate levels of tact.

However, I also feel that I now have to articulate my own critique of this article underneath a massive caveat, because of the fact that it is currently being spread throughout transfeminist circles here like it's some 16-year-old boy's manifesto against feminism instead of the complicated opinion that it is. I simply do not believe that this is a fair way to discuss the work of someone who has been extremely dedicated to the furthering of transfeminist praxis, let alone anyone. We should be so, so much better than this.

¹cutting the gratuitous declaration of bigotry, because that is an entire other can of worms that is not worth the effort at this moment.

[tankie-transfeminist]

I have received several hate asks (and will receive more, I literally got a long one while writing this) for lightly defending her (and also critiquing her but people seemed to have missed that part) earlier today, I can't imagine what Tara herself is getting.

This is what happens when you rile up hate on the internet, especially against marginalized people. You don't get discussion or even harsh criticism, you get a hate mob.

[tankie-transfeminist]

No discoursing on this post please :)

Fun fact about us, we are, and definitely used to be, a chronic liar. I'm not exactly sure why, other than a very general "it's a trauma response from being transfeminized", but it's something I've had to really put active effort into stopping.

And it sucks because lying to people, especially people close to you, is a serious harm and a breach of trust. I hate doing it, it keeps me up at night, and I know that I've genuinely hurt people. In a lot of ways I don't do it intentionally, I wish I could stop, but I can't, and it really sucks!

The best way I can explain it is to borrow a metaphor from executive dysfunction. When a stove is on, it's really difficult to make yourself touch it, even for a split second. You obviously know how to touch it, mechanically you know how to move your arm, but you just can't make yourself do it.

For me, lying was like that. I knew it was harmful, I knew I shouldn't do it, but I couldn't make myself stop.

Idk you can call me "manipulative" if you want, at points in my life it probably would have even been accurate, but if I am manipulative, it is because I was and am transfeminized in a way which made me manipulative.

The idea that lying isn't a trauma response, that "manipulation" in some forms always happens because of personal moral failures and not systemic factors, that "manipulation" is somehow past systemic critique, is one which is irreconcilable with my lived experience.

My lying is a product of my transfeminization, it is a product of gendered social relations. It's a product of how children are treated in the family. It's a product of material factors which can and should be analyzed.

[tankie-transfeminist]

All I'm saying is that most of yall hate mentally disabled people way more than you think. You are incapable of subjecting the things your puritan hearts thinks are moral failures to material analysis, and that is ableism. That refusal harms your analysis and it harms disabled people and I am sooo tired of it.

[toskarinfr]

"onee-chan". "unni". "jiejie". all meritorious terms deserving of their reputation. meanwhile, what does the yankee dialect have? "older sister"? an utterly graceless dud of a word befitting the tongue of sexually repressed catholics

it goes without saying that it is in no small part this issue that the mommy monopoly exists. in this thesis I shall

[empress-em-kaldwin]

handholds

in The Neverending Story, Michael Ende describes the Childlike Empress climbing a ladder of ice, cutting her hands on it, each rung shaped into words of warning. she spites the warnings and finishes the climb, and from the man on the mountaintop she demands obedience—her hands, presumably, still bleeding.

i have been haunted by the image of the bloody ladder since childhood. and the longer i am a woman, the more i am persuaded that refusal to be made small is the chief of a woman's virtues.

if you will, imagine a narrow stair, steep enough that it must be climbed with both hands and feet, and every step of it bears a woman's name. it is easy to imagine that every step carved in the cliff-face is a personal sacrifice, for the good of the one who comes next.

this is what the language of symbols primes us for, doubly when the names are women's names. one imagines an unbroken line of mothers, dying exhausted, exhausted like soil can be exhausted.

i reject this. to strike the rock of the cliff-face is an act of wrath, and to chisel your name into the place of your violence is an act of pride. the way out of the pit is prepared in acts of selfish joy.

so take the handholds. climb. feel each name with your fingertips, and be reminded to commit your violence in your own name.

it's what the Empress would do.

[ashenmind]

a frustration of disability to be told “it’s not about your intention, it’s about the outcome” when someone is upset with you, but “well you aren’t like that person because you try” when they are upset with someone else.

like cool, at some arbitrary point you’ll grow tired of my efforts and make me out to be evil. great.

[esthermika]

pro tip! if you're studying a new language, use children's books to train your vocabulary and increase your [Language] skill and [Age Regression] skill at the same time.

[2percentsugar]

does anyone else remember being a hapless american child looking at the prices of books on the inside flap and wondering. do we just hate canadians? this book is $8 here and $13 there, that feels..... mean somehow

[moniquill]

When I noticed this, around age 6-7, I asked about it and had international currency explained to me. I was already familiar with Canadian Pennies.

[witchpassing]

The fascist kneels beneath a cathedral sky.

Moorland stretches to the horizon, boundless, pitiless. It is a beautiful place to die, and though she'd not have chosen it, this death will be beautiful too.

"My name will be remembered," she says aloud. One of the trannies - the little ratlike thing, the one carrying the shovels - starts humming. "By my people, yes, as a leader, a theoretician, a hero. But most of all by yours." She permits herself a smile, tight and drawn, grim as fate. Wind stirs her hair. "I will--", she begins again, and is shot in the back of the head.

The sound of the gunshot wanders away across the moor, more pop than bang. The bigger of the two women puts away her gun, and her wife, shifting her ditty from hum to whistle, starts to dig.

[empress-em-kaldwin]

One knight looked, confused, at the other.

"Weren't there dozens of Ariette satellites?"

"Oh yes, scores," said the other.

"So where are the rest of—"

"She's all of them. Just be polite." The senior knight gently urged his horse back into motion.

"Oh." The junior followed after a moment.

Ancient bridge over fathomless chasm—the sound of water far below. Only at the peak of noon could the sun look deep enough to see the frothing river. Horseshoes clacked on asphalt.

At the center of the bridge, a girl, leaning over one side like she might jump, her hand tight-gripping one of the bridge's steel suspension cables. Night-blue dress on olive skin.

"Hail and well met!" bellowed the senior knight.

The girl whipped around to face the riders, snarling, wild-eyed. The unarmed members of the retinue blanched. Then she recovered her posture, smiled gently, and bowed her head in greeting.

"Milady Ariette," the knight continued, and in the back of the caravan one of the wagoneers sighed and turned to the man riding shotgun with him, axe in his belt and bow across his knees.

"How is it that a hundred computerized weapons become one little girl?" the wagoneer said in a low, gruff voice.

"Intelligent computers," the guard whispered back. "If your weapons can think, they can keep fighting when you can't send them orders anymore. You've seen the old scrap metal statue at Jorvalle Abbey? How its eyes light up sometimes? There's still a few broken pieces in there, thinking and trying to move."

"Sounds hellish." The wagoneer urged on the horses. The caravan was starting to move again.

"Last pope—Eugene, right?—said thinking computers were the sin of Sodom," the guard replied quietly, and shrugged.

"But explain the girl part," said the wagoneer, with only the barest edge of desperation in his voice for those with ears to hear. The guard shrugged again and said nothing.

Ariette stood to one side, barefoot, holding a curtsey, and watched the armed men go by, and the camp followers, expression unreadable.

"Harold," she called as the wagoneer went by, and he startled at the sound of his name. He turned his head to her.

"I'm a girl because I wanted to be," she said. Then her eyes went black. "And nobody could stop me."

The wagoneer turned in his seat as he drove past her, mouth open, unsure what to shout. Something in his chest hurt and he didn't know why. The guard snatched the reins from him in irritation.

[soup-mother]

do wish there was more trans media acknowledging that like.... when you probably didn't even grow up as a feminine boy (although in my case compared to a lot of guys I was cus i like....cook and clean and tidy up and stuff) and so the trans feelings kinda just come out of nowhere and overwhelm you and all the realising stuff is in hindsight. like in hindsight i always wanted to dress a certain way or be called a girl but i absolutely didn't know it at the time. like not everyone is that stereotype and a lot of the time you were basically a bit of a lifeless husk before realising you're trans and that makes it so difficult to navigate. like you have no aspirations, maybe 3 friends all of who suck and suddenly you're realising you wish you were a girl. semi related to how vitriolic people are about the very concept of trans girls who used 4chan and stuff. it's like... I guess a lot of people's ideas of what trans women are and were like is very different to a lot of our lived experience.

like a lot of the time, pre transition gender and personality looks like a mattress on the floor, instead of cute feminine always wanted to be a girl always played with the girls sorta thing (again, complicated in my circumstances and a lot of it was essentially not being raised as a Patriarchal asshole)

[numbersareimaginary]

I shouldn't have had to have "always known" to be trans. When I knew, I fucking came out. Before, I had no idea. I'm not a nicely fulfilled narrative arc I'm a real human being. Fuck that shit.

[puppygirllaika]

It's actually so fucking weird that your identity is absolute these days. like, it's been normalized to the point we don't think of it much, but until a hundred years ago, hell even less, you could just kinda. go somewhere else, and be a new person. and that's not a thing anymore.

[secretearthworm]

Yk this is fully untrue right? You can fully still do this if you're willing to change and let go of everything at literally any moment you want

[puppygirllaika]

since a good few people now have said this i want to be clear: you can move to a new town still and change socially, but like. the government still knows who you are. so do tons of corporations. your identity follows you.

[puppygirllaika]

13 hours later and the parade of stupid comments like this has not stopped =_=

[ratbastard69420]

a guy named Rusty cage did a video on how it's impossible to leave your identity behind unless you become a eunuch

[ratbastard69420]

fuck hermit I meant hermit

[puppygirllaika]

Identity is stored in the balls.

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

hearing voices, music, etc in white noise (static, refrigerator humming, water running) is a very common hallucination experienced by otherwise totally "sane" people, people just don't talk about it because of sanism. I hear music, it's never anything I've heard before and feels like it's being composed on the spot (which I suppose it technically is), I enjoy it a lot.

psychosis doesn't have to be a scary thing, it's literally normal.

[empress-em-kaldwin]

now you might think that in all this the artillery piece is at the top of the sexual hierarchy but actually she gets chained to a truck and towed through the mud so

[empress-em-kaldwin]

it's important that every time you clock out you shoot your manager a mad grin like you know truly and sincerely that tomorrow is the day you'll finally split his guts open with a knife

[empress-em-kaldwin]

tomorrow is my turn no more doubts no more fears

tomorrow is my turn to receive without giving to make life worth the living for it's my life i'm living

it's important to know how to sharpen a knife.

it's important to remember nina simone while you do it.

[empress-em-kaldwin]

blood on my hands (all you had to do was be nice to the brown girl) dripping from my fingers (why did it have to be like this) my knife buried in him (but honey, it's too late to regret) my vision blurred with tears (in the better world, were we friends?)

what is gone will be no more.

[alexanderwales]

Anime where there are catgirls, but 70% of the runtime is taken up with discourse about the uncomfortable fetishization that these catgirls experience, as well as the microaggressions that they face on a day-to-day basis.

[alexanderwales]

Catgirl 1: So, I got a new boyfriend. Catgirl 2: Oh? Catgirl 1: He's nice, this one is nice. Catgirl 2: Yeah, but I've met the guys you date before. Is this one, you know ... ? Catgirl 1: What do you mean? Catgirl 2: A chaser. Catgirl 1: (confused) A dog?

[girls--complex]

I am That I am (a furry)

[strawberry-crocodile]

i have a few eggposts going around and i hate soooo much how people couch their argument in cutesy metaphor like "oh you have to tap the egg you can't force it open" like okay what are you arguing against, exactly? like tell me, directly, what situation you're imagining that you need to publicly condemn. like do you think there's genuinely a plague of trans women, like, slipping estrogen in their friends' drinks and she/her-ing alleged cis men despite their protests? do you think we're going around telling people "you're a girl stop resisting"? like if you're going to argue with me about this you need to put down the fucking allegory and say what actions you think are or are not acceptable.

[strawberry-crocodile]

and if you do think "no one should tell people they might be trans and are allowed to transition" then endorse social contagion theory with your whole chest you fucking transphobe.