Jun 23
The way some people are interpreting Jax's abstraction as the righteous suicide of an irredeemable monster is really making me think you'd feel the same about me.
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The way some people are interpreting Jax's abstraction as the righteous suicide of an irredeemable monster is really making me think you'd feel the same about me.
I need to find a real communist org that isn't the DSA (they're not communists)
Something I noticed: while Caine and Jax hurt people for pretty much opposite reasons, Caine asks the question Jax couldn't: "do I deserve to be forgiven?" Which is responded to by the moon, played by Gooseworx, telling Caine that it might take time, but she still loves him anyways.
Gooseworx is very online and knows what people can be like. She put a lot of herself into Caine and Jax in different ways. A lot of fandomites have been freaking out about Jax being "redeemed" when she wasn't. She abstracted and understood she did it to herself. And while intent does matter to an extent, the consequences of Caine's actions were pretty much the same. It's pretty evident (to me at least) that the show is self aware enough to understand how people would react to Jax simply because she's a trans woman. I sort of think Gooseworx might've been trying to bait audiences into how a lot of them are reacting to Jax — with disgust and hatred — while giving Caine more grace. All art is political. Every trans woman on earth is keenly aware of our own politicized existence.
There is a third story aside from Jax and Caine that transcends the medium of a YouTube indie animation series. It serves as a poignant reminder of how transfems are treated by the rest of society. I don't know if it was intentional, but the subtext definitely points to it.
@mousegirlheart is raiding the dumpster at my job
So. Jax.
I don't really know where to begin. I'm just gonna spitball and hope it ends up semi-coherent. I'm also a bit sleep deprived.
Disclaimer: these are my own personal interpretations of textual and subtextual storytelling, as well as a TON of personal lore. I am not attempting to derive any objective truth from @gooseworx 's story, since it's hers, and was not made with me in mind. Also, it goes without saying that there will be spoilers.
I watched TADC E9 yesterday, and as you can probably tell by my current pfp (a drawing of Jax with her bow), and by the posts I've been reblogging recently, I really liked it. But it's more than that. I can't boil it down to just liking Jax or just liking the show, because it's so much more than that. Incoming lore dump.
I was Jax. More or less. My dad left when I was 8, and don't remember my relationship with my mom before that since it wasn't something I ever thought about. But since then I have. My mom, like Jax's, constantly compared me to him. My dad is very likely where I inherited my ADHD, Autism, and depression, all of which heavily influence/influenced both of our behaviors. I haven't seen or spoken to my dad since he left. But my mom has talked about him a decent amount. Whenever my mom was angry at me and I tried to block out my emotions to remain somewhat level headed she told me I was reminding her of him. When I would tell her, honestly, that I didn't know why I did certain things like procrastinating or forgetting things I'd been told multiple times, I was blaming other people for my problems like he did. I was never enough, or I was too much. She called me abrasive when I told her someone who was bullying me said it. Granted, I was at the time, but in my opinion a mom shouldn't agree with her kid's bully.
My mom would often talk at length about how women navigate the world terrified of men. Justifiably so, of course, but she told me this while expecting me to become one, and essentially telling me that I would always be seen as a threat by default.
This was evident to me once puberty hit. My friendships with girls my age vanished. When I tried to make girl friends, I was rejected, which of course only made me more desperate, which made them think I was a creep. And to an extent I think I was. I'm not proud of that. But then again, who is proud of their middle school selves? This went on until mid high school. I didn't understand why everything had become so weird all of a sudden, and why everyone was so afraid of me. Why my attempts to find understanding and belonging were met with fear and rejection. I didn't recognize the gender dysphoria staring me in the face, even though I refused to go shirtless, felt a knife twist into my stomach every time I was reminded that I was supposed to be a man, with every voice crack, with every facial hair.
I never had a moment like Jax where I was directly confronted with my own transness and tried to push it down and forget about it. But I did try and repress the idea that I was anything but what I was supposed to be. After all, boys will be bugs, right?
The first time I met a trans person was 7th grade when I was 12. He was a trans guy, so opposite of me, but I was still intrigued. I never talked to him about gender dysphoria or anything. The only things I'd ever heard about trans people at the time were that they were supposed to know from birth that they were born in the wrong body. I didn't really know what that meant, and my incongruency only developed when I started going through puberty. It would be years before I identified it. Subconsciously, I began to put two and two together though.
Everything my mom told me about how women have to navigate the world stung. It felt like I was being told I would be feared and hated for something I wasn't. I didn't know that I wasn't a man, but I did know I wasn't a rapist or murderer. Looking back, I know now that I was feeling dread over becoming a man, but it didn't make sense to me. I began to envy trans people unknowingly. People who in my mind just got to choose who they were instead of being told. I was jealous of women who were treated more kindly than I was. Even if it wasn't reality. I tried to talk to girls again but was bullied by several upperclasswomen who only made me feel more vindicated in my belief that girls were just mean. I became a stupid edgy teenager, making bad gay jokes and calling people attention seekers for changing their pronouns and experimenting with themselves. The two trans men I knew at the time (I knew zero trans women or transfem individuals at all) became something of a spectacle to me. A joke. I was the butt of it all. It was all just a sick joke meant to give me false hope that I could ever change what I was told I would be. A man who makes everyone afraid of me, who's cold, mean, and frankly just bigoted in a lot of ways as a way to cope with the dysphoria eating me away inside. There was one girl who treated me like she treated other girls. Maybe she got the egg vibes from me. I don't know. She was distant with other boys, but not me. She moved to Colorado and I never saw her again after my sophomore year.
I would daydream of freaky Friday scenarios with some of the girls I knew. I had vivid dreams of waking up as a girl. I brushed them off. I didn't think about them. I was too busy most of the time between marching band, track and cross country, and my school work. I continued to retreat into my shell, never letting anyone get too close. Even my closest male friends at the time noticed, but they didn't want to pry. I left every hangout and social event feeling drained from my performance. I would get in my car and feel the mask drop. My smile left my face. I felt nothing. I was just a shell. The pandemic exacerbated the process. I did do some thinking at the time, but really only on the front that I should lighten up a bit and let people be what they want to be. But I still believed they'd eventually fall into their pre-decided archetypes and gender roles, I just kept those thoughts inside.
After high school, I thought that there was a chance my female peers would be more mature and I'd be able to actually talk to them without them being afraid of me or assuming things about me that weren't true. I was wrong. At first, I did have some success, meeting a few girls during my orientation who seemed nice, and we even hit it off. I had my first kiss that September. But it didn't last. I bared my soul to the wrong people. I felt like I was getting close with one of the girls in my budding friend group especially well, and I decided to get us breakfast after she'd had a long red eye flight back from her home in Texas. We ate in her room at her request, and she insisted on taking me on a date the next day. I, in my immense autistic wisdom, was completely oblivious to this fact, and so didn't reciprocate the way she wanted. A couple nights later she texted me at 1AM with practically an essay on how I'd made her uncomfortable. She insinuated I'd imposed myself on her, which I hadn't. Suddenly all of my friends were gone. I'm guessing she told them I did something worse, but she couldn't tell me since the lie would be more obvious. But the idea that being vulnerable, trying to be one of the girls, would just get me hurt emotionally or worse was vindicated. I won't lie, I kinda became an incel in the year and a half that followed. Not in a conservative way, l never thought women's rights were dumb, but I refused to trust women and was open about this with a couple friends who annoyingly (looking back) didn't call me on my bullshit. But I can't blame them for my shitty attitude.
You're probably seeing a lot of parallels at this point. The projection onto other queer people and women my age, the casual misogyny, the jealousy, the anger. People who got too close ended up leaving me and destroying multiple of my friendships in the process. I became self destructive. I started to "test" my few friends by not texting them to see if they'd ever talk to me of their own accord. They were busy with school too, but in my immense insecurity I just assumed they didn't care about me. I secluded myself again. I started getting more involved in online groups. I figured that since they didn't know me irl, they couldn't hurt me the same way. After all, they weren't real friends, were they?
It was the fall of 2021 when I talked to a trans woman for the first time. Funny enough, despite some initial issues, she's now one of my girlfriends, @frailnails . I didn't talk to her about her transness either since it wasn't something I thought was really relevant. I just assumed that she, like I'd heard, had always known she was trans from the beginning. I enjoyed the friend group I had with her and a few guys, and we played War Thunder and SimplePlanes together. As usual, I put on a mask. I tried to be the funny one. In reality, I would just parrot the others' bits and be really annoying, since I found other people's annoyance funny. But in Spring of 2022 they'd had enough of me, and were just all very (rightfully) annoyed with me. I don't talk to any of them aside from June anymore. Even my attempts to find belonging online, where nothing was real, had failed.
Later that spring I came to the realization I was pan, and had a little bit of a boycrazy phase. I was really apprehensive though, and I didn't want to try too hard to date any guys since I didn't want to out myself to too many people. It feels inconsequential now. I knew a couple gay guys I thought were cute at the time, but they didn't reciprocate. I started to realize that maybe the issue wasn't that women saw me as an innate threat.
That summer, I had the single worst experience of my life. I had a double orthographic surgery that left me barely able to speak and unable to eat solid food for around 2 months. I would still have difficulties for a year, despite my surgeon telling me for months prior that the recovery would be no more than 3 months.
I had never studied myself in the mirror much, though I had drawn self portraits occasionally. After the surgery, I could no longer see myself. I never really felt like I looked the way I wanted, but it went from just a little off to horrible. The swelling was the main issue, but my new facial structure made me look more masculine, as my bite was fixed and made more "normal", the way a man should look. Being unable to shave for like 2 months did not help.
Since I'd burned most of my online bridges, and only had one friend at my school I could hang out with, I spent most of my time alone that fall. Nobody could understand a thing I said through all of the swelling. I was miserable. I would go down to the train tracks every few days to watch trains, and I'd think about what would happen if I stepped in front of one frequently. But I still pretended to be happy with the few friends I had left. I still kept up the mask. All of the energy I was devoting to maintaining the image of "me" was being drained from other areas. I stopped going to class. I spent entire days in bed. I barely ate, I barely slept.
One day, out of many I had spent entirely on my computer playing games and messaging people on discord, I made a joke about a plane having the NATO reporting code "Femboy". It's technically valid, since NATO classifies Soviet/Russian jet fighters with F words with two syllables. Think the MiG-15 "Fagot", Su-15 "Flagon", MiG-25 "Foxbat", etc. In order to do "research" I started browsing femboy subreddits (vile, I know). At some point, I thought about ordering fem stuff, you know, as a bit. So I did. I bought the classic Amazon skirt and thigh highs. I tied up a flannel to make a crop top. There was one point, I remember, where I looked in the mirror and saw myself for the first time, ever. I don't remember what happened after that, but I think I cried. I tried to hide it for over a month. From my mom, from my friends, from everyone except a couple people online I could show select fits to as a "joke", including another closeted trans woman who'd come out shortly after me who was experimenting the same way, though not "ironically". My mom had already been kind of weird about my coming out as bi (I'm pan now, there is a distinction to me, even if it's not really material), telling me that gay sex was dangerous and that eventually I would have to choose a man or woman to settle down with. She also dropped that she used to date women, but chose men in the end because that's what she was supposed to do. So that was weird.
Anyways, come November 29th, and I'm in my room again. At this point I was going by they/them, and considered myself to just be a genderfuck who was doing whatever for fun and kind of for the bit. I was in my room, alone as always. I had on a pink skirt and a very much not matching orange, white and blue flannel. I had tied it like a bralette. I put socks in it to make it look like I had boobs. Foundational transfem experience fr. It felt good. It felt right. I told my closest friend at the time, the one queer guy I was friends with in real life at the time (we're still very close). I asked him if he'd ever dreamt of being a girl. He said no. I asked some other friends. Same answer. I had never brought up the dreams, day and night, that I'd had with anyone before then. I was afraid they'd think I was weird or gross or something. But the few guys with whom my trust hadn't been broken with, I asked, and they all said no. They were confused why I was even asking, as if the thought of imagining themselves as women was absurd.
This is where I differ a lot from Jax. I was never met with acceptance I then squandered and rejected in order to protect myself. But I've met several transfems who did and made it out alive, some of whom were or are still working through dropping the defense mechanisms they relied on for years before coming out. Some of them I loved, some of them I hurt, some of them hurt me, some all of the above. I know intimately what it's like to hate yourself so deeply, to be so angry at the world, at yourself for what you've done or what you think you've done, that you think you never deserve to be happy. Even after transitioning, I didn't forgive myself for the ways I hurt some people as a boy. I hurt a few people after I transitioned, too. I struggled to work through that too.
It's not my place to ask them to forgive me. They don't have to. I don't even think I really deserve it in most cases. But I can't hate myself. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the constant energy I devoted to hating myself. That's why I can't hate Jax. If I hate her, then I hate a lot of things about myself that I don't want to. I want to forgive myself. I want to forgive the scared little girl who was trying to not be found out, who wanted belonging at any cost, who didn't know what she was feeling or how to express it. Fear makes people lash out. I can't fault people for reacting to it. I hurt people, and I'm sure I'll accidentally hurt people again. It's just part of life. Sometimes we do things we don't mean. I spent so much energy trying to repent or atone and apologize to the people I hurt, sometimes obsessively, and it never helped. People we hurt shouldn't have to forgive us, but we have to forgive ourselves or we'll just be wallowing in regret forever.
My relationship with my mom has deteriorated since I came out. Not because she's necessarily transphobic, but because she just doesn't understand. She never really made much of an effort to understand me, but the more I've deviated from the path she thinks is the only way to success and fulfillment, the more disappointed she's been with me. She cried when I told her I didn't want to keep my deadname. She made it about her. She's moved past it to an extent, but I feel she only makes an effort when there's something in it for her. We only got a snippet of Jax's relationship with her mom, and her incredibly traumatic coming out and subsequent recloseting, but I imagine it was similarly transactional.
I understand why Jax felt like she couldn't trust anyone. I was shown from a young age that my vulnerability would be, in one way or another, used against me often. I was never a particularly astute judge of character. And even when I judged somewhat correctly, good people can still hurt you. One of my former friends at my second university was brilliant, funny, and ultimately a good person, but we just weren't compatible. We couldn't have a relationship where we didn't hurt each other. Neither of us were in a place to be having a complicated friendship/situationship. We trusted each other and hurt each other as a result. I still think she deserves to be happy. Maybe she'll read this, who knows. I hope she watched the finale and got what I got out of it.
There is a deep understanding I think every trans woman/transfem has with Jax and Ribbit's bedroom scene together. The moment you cross the threshold. The instant it clicks. That you can change yourself, your life, your future. That you deserve better. You deserve to be happy. No matter what you've done or what you think you've done. Nobody deserves to suffer the way we suffer before we learn the language to understand ourselves. Nobody deserves to languish in it alone. Even if you can only tell one person, you will be happier. It's terrifying. It's visceral. Some people won't understand, some people will. Others will try their best to help, even if they don't fully grasp the feeling. But you can't go back. You can't die wondering. There is still time.
Jax might be one of the most heart wrenching, understandable characters I've ever encountered. TADC is, at least to me, one of the only stories I've seen that encapsulates my feelings about transness so succinctly. It's definitely one of the only I've felt truly seen in. Obviously it wasn't written for me. But it's my story. It's a lot of our stories. And hopefully, it'll become other girls' stories too. I'd put money on this show having cracked at least a few trans girls' eggs.
I know she'll probably never read this, but I wish I could thank Gooseworx for this directly. I can't express how happy I am this show was made. I know she kind of hates it and that famdomites can be insufferable, but I want her to know how appreciative I am. I love this show. I'm going to continue to go back to it. I don't think I'll be able to watch the finale again without crying, and I hope I never am. It's clear how much love and vulnerability you put into this project, and it's absolutely beautiful. Thank you for this lovely story. I hope you can get some well deserved rest.
I've never felt so overjoyed, so heartbroken, and so inspired by media and its artist. I've never felt so understood by a story. And to have it be a global sensation gives me hope that our stories can be told this way again and again to everyone who needs to hear them. Our stories are important. Our stories change and save lives. I'm so grateful I got to live in a time where something like this was possible for me to interact with. I'm so happy I get to bond with my girlfriends and other transfem friends over it. I hope it inspires more artists to share their stories with all their love, pain, and passion.
Thanks for reading, if you got all the way down here without me boring you half to death. I appreciate you taking the time to read.
There's a difference between men (social class) and men (sexgender alignment). I feel like a decent amount of trans men don't think they belong to both even though they do. Being otherwise marginalized doesn't make you not a man or not male. It just makes you a marginalized man. And a marginalized woman will always be in a lower position of power than a man who is marginalized for the same reasons, whether that be race, sexuality or transness
The concept of "oppression Olympics" is probably decent in theory, but in practice it's always used by groups with some structural power to tell groups with less that they're the same. All liberation movements must be centered around those with the least structural power. Humans don't have unequal inherent worth. Everyone is fundamentally the same. Society, capital and the state however enforce certain hierarchies that create marginalized groups. It would behove you to know where you've been placed so you don't look like a piece of shit telling someone more vulnerable than you to shut up
Obviously the liberation of the Global South is more important than the liberation of citizens of the imperial core nations, but I'd still like to be able to live and not just survive. How the hell are we supposed to actually improve stuff when every effort is either watered down into nothing (DSA, popular "socialist" candidates, non-disruptive protests), or just slaughtered (the Black Panther Party, UFW, Battle of Blair Mountain, Tulsa Race Massacre). How are we supposed to organize when all means of doing so are surveilled by corporate interests? We can't even leave our homes without them knowing exactly who we are and where we're going. I just want to stop feeling like the Sword of Damocles is hanging over me and everyone I love because I dared to be born lower middle class and trans.