this morning I criticized Tara Knight's article "dump your puppygirl," and I stick by my criticisms. I was sent a pdf of the full original text of the article from before it was edited, and reading it hasn't substantively changed what I think
Tara has since released two followups, however, and the first followup, in my opinion, deftly uprooted and discarded the notions of "male behavior" from the original essay and relocated the origins of these behaviors into places that, in my opinion, begin to humanize the puppygirl and understand her behaviors not through reductive comparison to her male oppressors, but instead through a much more tangible and transfeminist lens, showing how her oppression has influenced her behaviors
I personally felt satisfied that Tara had put that issue to bed after reading this followup, but I still felt that a major thing missing from the picture was an understanding that sometimes the woman is just disabled and she really can't reciprocate labor equally, and there's no emotional manipulation going on
I've been the puppygirl before, so I recognized myself in Tara's portrait of her. but recognizing the shape of what she was describing didn't dampen the danger posed by the lack of distinction between the puppygirl's disabilities and her maladaptive behaviors. the essay didn't offer the tools for the puppygirl to adjust her behaviors, nor did it offer the tools for a woman's disabilities to be understood, respected, and accounted for within a relationship, without being dismissed as manipulative
I felt that this dangerous gap Tara left open was closed in the next followup, which addresses said gap in the original essay and offers the perspective of a woman in her life whose disabilities preclude her from reciprocating the same amount of labor as her partner
Tara also discusses in this essay how she herself has been the figure of the puppygirl that she's been painting, and through discussing her perspective from this angle she rounds out the humanization of the puppygirl. this was the point throughout all of these essays where I felt the most seen, because I too have been caught in a spiral of clinging to the first place where I feel safe and obsessing over my fear of losing it, constructing myself around trying to maintain it while failing to respect the individuality of those who do the maintaining
at the time that I was the puppygirl, the original article would have destroyed me, but taken together with the followups, I think it would have given me a difficult awakening and then gently handed me the tools to build healthier and stronger relationships, without simply asking me to do the impossible and just not be disabled
so, for my part, while I stand by my own criticisms of the original essay, I feel Tara has countered its issues and excavated a much sharper point via these followup essays. I don't mean to speak over others who have criticized the essay, only to offer my own perspective on how these followups add to the picture
