#((venting))

[b0tster]

trans woman: this guy harassed me

comments: have u considered that ur wrong? maybe they just misheard him? perhaps ur just wrong? maybe he didnt mean it? maybe ur just wrong?? source?? do u have a source???

cis person: yo that trans woman is friends with a literal murderer

comments: NO WAY ARE U SERIOUS?? I 100% BELIEVE YOU.

[turtlesandfrogs]

At one point I had a housemate who had been through multiple abusive or at least unhealthy relationships, and it effected the way they interacted with the world and others around them.

One of the effects was that they couldn't admit to mistakes or accidents. They would lie when they could, and they'd try to cover it up when they could.

One day, they broke one of my glass dishes in the kitchen. I wasn't at home at the time, so they cleaned up in a hurry and then hurriedly scrambled to glue it back together. They never said anything to me, and I wouldn't have ever noticed-

Except I walk barefoot in my home and two steps into the kitchen I had a small shard of glass in my foot. Looking for a source, I noticed the dish in the drain, and looked a lot more closely at it than I normally would have, and noticed a small piece missing from where they had glued two larger pieces together.

It took me a good twenty minutes to fish that glass out of my foot. I then went and vacuumed very throughly, as two dogs and a cat lived in that house, along with the humans.

If they hadn't been stuck in the patterns they learned when they were younger, they might have told me about the glass, and I could have worn shoes until it was safe. They might have spent longer cleaning it up and making sure the floor was safe, instead of trying to cover up their mistake by gluing the dish back together.

If they could have broken out of those patterns, they would not have put those around them in harm's way.

Break out of your unhealthy patterns. They're hurting you, and they're hurting the people around you. If someone over reacts to something like a broken bowl, the answer is to remove them from your life, not to go around gluing bowls back together without saying anything.

[hel7l7]

Guess this will hurt for a while

[renrockzzzz]

"my daughter is fine"

no, your daughter isnt fine, nor your daughter. he's your son, and he's not fine either, because he can't tell you he feels this way and he's fucking tired of it.

[kaynetic]

My interaction with my brothers toddler this morning

Toddler: whats it like to grow up me: well everything hurts and nothing is fun Toddler: I said grow up not grow old me: ... Toddler: you look old already

[sophie-frm-mars]

It's been 2 years since a callout post was made that completely tore my life to shreds. This is a post about community abuse. As much as I am trying to stop talking about it, it is very present for me today and there are some things I would like to make sure I have said.

What had happened was that I had been doing extreme kink with several people despite having no proper training, while in a progressively worsening state of psychosis, and the people I was doing it with didn't feel able to tell me what they did and didn't feel comfortable with. People were telling me not only that there wasn't a problem with how I was doing kink, but that they were actively happy with what we were doing, all the way until december 2023. I caused harm to some people by not communicating well enough around forms of consensual kink that leave permanent marks on people. I deeply regret it and I have worked to make sure that I will never cause harm in the ways that have been explained to me ever again.

In between people first telling me they were upset with my behavior and the post I only communicated with the people involved once. One of my exes met up with me and told me not to say anything while she read me a letter calling me dangerous and saying that because I am in her words "beautiful and charismatic" and because of "who I am and how I am" people hadn't felt comfortable to say no to me. After this, the people involved, who it is worth saying were all part of the same polycule, talked amongst themselves and decided that I had been deliberately abusing people and that I didn't care about consent at all. From there they started calling me a rapist, abuser, predator and so on. I am none of these things. This is purely transmisogyny.

I take responsibility for my part in what happened, but I have never seen the other people do anything but shift more responsibility onto me. For example one person involved was a lot more well off than me and had been giving me money in a sexual context but has publicly mocked the idea that I might have experienced this situation as informal sex work, which I did and the others involved know I did.

One person I had broken up with earlier in the year felt deeply aggrieved by me. Our relationship was not good, and I have talked here before about the time that she assaulted me and her generally coercive behaviour. During this process she started insisting that "every time we had sex was rape" while describing nothing more extreme on my part than poor communication. I believe that her involvement with people who were discussing harm I had caused led everyone to describe everything I had done in the most sinister and extreme terms possible. One person who I never even slept with smoked weed from a bong for the first time at my house and got very high, and later signed the callout against me because of this.

When the post was made, almost all of my colleagues and my friends IRL stopped speaking to me immediately. I was banned from most queer spaces on the grounds that I was a danger to others. My income collapsed and I had to do full service sex work so that I wouldn't lose my home. My long term partner broke up with me though I'm glad to say we're still best friends and talk every day. I was suicidal for months and tried to kill myself several times. I still receive harassment and have been excluded multiple times from organizing spaces, including ones I need access to such as my local renters union, on the ground that people "feel unsafe" over the last 2 years.

When I explained publicly what had happened, my former community mocked and degraded me, insisting that I couldn't have been unwell despite everyone around me at the time knowing that I was having frequent trauma flashbacks, panic attacks, derealization and other extreme symptoms that I talked with people extensively about at the time.

I would be dead if my remaining friends hadn't intervened.

For months I believed what I had been told about myself, and tried desperately to reconcile my own memories with what I had been told. For months my friends told me over and over again that the things we were talking about were not abuse. It took me most of a year to completely see how wrong it was for them to have been using those words about me, in part because I was so distressed by the harm that I did cause. When I talk about this I am categorically not saying that I "did nothing wrong".

How I have been treated and continue to be treated is wrong.

People refuse to speak to me about this situation while insisting that I am removed from spaces, from community, from organisations and from public life generally. There seems to be a persistent idea that I am some sort of dracula who will mind control people if they speak to me at all. This is a convenient way to treat me like I am not a human being and just an object to be endlessly abused and degraded.

I need people to understand that for everyone including other trans women, turning a trans woman into an imaginary monster towards whom limitless violence is acceptable is completely trivial. I caused harm, but it was harm of a nature that required difficult conversations, breakups, and perhaps even being removed from some community spaces. What was done instead has been fueled by a transmisogynistic bogeyman that harms all trans women

I can't get back the things that I have lost over the last two years. Other people can't give them back to me and I'm not asking for them. All I am asking for is that people understand that false accusations happen to trans women all the time, including when there is an original harm being overstated, that they push back when they see people saying these untrue and violent things about me, and that they treat me like a human being. This means if you're someone who has known me and doesn't speak to me but still looks at me online (I know you are there you're not that subtle) you reach out and actually talk to me, and it means more broadly to be able to see me as a person capable of mistakes and harm like everyone else. I am not a different class of person and do not deserve to be treated differently, and as much as I am the class I am in for which I have been treated differently these last 2 years is trans woman.

I remain open to talking to anyone involved, but I find it extremely unlikely that they will ever talk to me. At some point people started not just overstating harm but straightforwardly inventing shit about me to paint me as the most hideous monster possible. I don't see how we would be able to reconcile without them admitting that they have done something to me that is wrong. I don't think that the community reconciliation and accountability ideals that everyone holds up as the way out of this kind of situation are going to happen. It is easier for them to keep imagining a monstrous version of me and eternally reacting to that without ever talking to me. I need people to see that I am human nonetheless.

[faux-stars]

Asexuals can never win because...

if you're attractive, you just "haven't found the right partner"

if you're unattractive, you're just "coping"

if you're hetero, you're a "closeted gay"

if you're homo/bi, you're just an "attention seeker"

if you're sex positive or sex neutral, you're a "liar"

if you're sex negative, you're a "prude"

if you speak out about acespec issues, you're "entitled"

if you don't speak out about acespec issues, you're "invisible"

if you're cis, you're "not queer enough"

if you date the opposite gender, you're "not queer enough"

if you're trans, your asexuality "doesn't matter"

if you date the same gender, your asexuality "doesn't matter"

if you're SA'd, it's "your fault"

if you're a sex worker, you're "deceitful"

if you write about asexuality, you're "boring"

if you write smut, you're "fake"

if you try to find community, you're "attention seeking"

if you keep to yourself, you're "narcissistic"

And those aren't even the real life issues that asexual people face on a daily basis. We can't even talk about our real life because simply trying to exist online and trying to build communities is downright near impossible all on its own.

I've been in the trenches for twelve years now, and I'm so tired.