but seriously if you see someone call themselves “proship” and you think “this person is a pedophile” without any other context, this is your sign to log off of social media. there is still time.
social media is an amazing tool for connecting with people across the world for community and solidarity, but it is also a hellscape of brainworms and horrible opinions, such as the reduction of “this is part of a complicated discussion about critical consumption and morality in media” down to “if you write/draw/think about Bad Things™️ in fiction with exclusively fictional characters then you are defending those Bad Things™️ happening to real people.”
do you see how this is an insane leap in logic? you don’t get to pick and choose what Bad Things™️ are permissible to explore and present in media, and so long as we’re talking about fictional characters—and they’ve hopefully put up some Dead Dove content warnings—no harm is being done. you are making dangerous and irresponsible accusations against people, independent of their actions.
just saw someone in a debate with vegans about milk ethics say “well living in houses, cooking food, and using electricity isn’t natural, should we stop doing that, too?”
and it made me realize that there really this perception of “natural” versus “human-designed” that needs to be utterly demolished for the good of everything. humans are toolmakers, and that is a key part of hominin evolution. there are also many animal species who make and use tools! this is significant, because tools (and knowing how to create/use them) can be passed down to new generations and can be optimized on a much faster timescale than that of evolution, which depends on many generations of reproduction and myriad other influences.
humans making and using tools, harnessing fire and electricity, is literally a natural progression of something that many other nonhuman animals are already doing. and “living in houses?” i get the point the commenter was making, but building a shelter is something you will find among most (i won’t say ‘all,’ there may be exceptions) animals across the board. we are no different, just because our shelters are tricked out with advanced forms of our invented technology!
humans have an environmental impact, sure. but so does everything else! every plant, every animal, every fungi, every living organism—and all nonliving matter—affects their environment in some way. sure, we are conscious of our impact, but frankly we don’t know enough about nonhuman intelligence to know if we’re the only ones. we are a part of these systems, not apart from them. there is no “unnatural.” there is only “refined.” there is only “tool technology.” animals refine things for their use—think of a beaver building a dam. animals use tools—corvids and many primates are infamous for this.
end the paradigm of “natural” versus “unnatural.” it’s damaging our perception of ourselves, and of the world.
listen i think it’s perfectly acceptable to be vegan as a personal choice
that said, so many of the emotional appeals that get used are all about the intelligence of the animals that get slaughtered and like. do plants not have their own form of intelligence??? we are literally baffled by the way plants can communicate with each other. it’s so fascinating, yet so alien to us. and that’s just it! we see plants as being totally fine to eat because they don’t seem to have humanlike intelligence like what we project onto pigs and dolphins and such.
but we have to draw the line somewhere, right? most vegans are reasonable people, and we can agree that harm reduction is better than not doing anything at all. so, we draw that line. vegans draw that line at any animal product, but will eat plants. some include honey in that, some don’t. vegetarians draw the line at animal meat. pescetarians will eat fish. i draw the line at humans. it’s really that simple. i firmly believe death is a natural part of life, and if humans had any more consistent natural predators, there would be no immorality in their consumption of us.
i sometimes wonder just how much in-group bigotry from marginalized people comes from a place of pain, pushed outward into hate. that’s the way i was, anyways. there was a 100% correlation between me being pushed deep, deep back into the closet as a trans person by my father and me becoming a transmed and shitting on trans people who didn’t experience dysphoria, or who were GNC, or non-binary. i took all that pain i’d felt, that experience of being denied what i truly needed, that horrible nightmare of trying to accept myself as a cis woman again. i took the pain and turned it into a weapon against my own community.
i know i’m not the only one. i know i’m far from the first, and certainly not the last. i just wonder if there’s a way to tell the difference, to identify who is speaking from a place of great pain and anguish. how do we help these people? i may sound crazy, saying that, but these are people who are hurting, too. transmeds (not cis ones, but trans ones) face transphobia, too. cis people don’t give a shit if they suck up to them, if they fawn rather than fight or flee, if they say “all the right things.” these are members of our broader queer community, even if we hate to think of them that way because of the harm they cause.
nobody ever said this was easy. if it was, it wouldn’t be called “work.” but every trans person—that includes transmeds, that includes self-hating trans YouTubers, and yes, that includes the worst trans person you can think of—deserve to live in a world free from transphobia. very likely, if they had, they wouldn’t have turned out the way they did in the first place.
i feel like the simplification of the divine in modern pagan communities (specifically those in Christian-dominant areas like the U.S.) is both an unfortunate and necessary growing pain of reclaiming a spirituality that feels right to us, and so we run as far as we can from the things that we associate with the mainstream religion. in doing so, though, we fail to see what’s specific to that religion, and what is instead simply a natural part of many paths. we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
i have no problem with people making silly TikToks where they take on the persona of a certain god and use their associated traits for humor. just the same, i see no issue with making light of the stories we know of our gods. have we not reenacted myths with imagined play in the past? have we not dressed ourselves as gods and taken on the role for storytelling purposes, or even as a sacred rite? i think it’s a bit silly to think that the gods we honor wouldn’t have a sense of humor. at least, i’ve certainly never heard of someone receiving divine retribution for posting funny memes.
what’s missing in these examples, i think, is the appropriate reverence we associate with the divine, and i think it’s good to present that side more often, to show others of our kin that it’s okay to be irreverent and silly, to honor the gods with humorous tales of their “divine shenanigans,” but i think it’s also good to say, yes, it’s okay to feel inspired, even overwhelmed, by the sheer magnitude of what we’re offering to. it’s healthy to step back and take a look at how utterly small we are, and to give the gods their due respect.
in doing so, we open ourselves up to that potent alchemy of spirit that religion is beloved for. it’s alright to have fun sometimes, but when we take a moment to step back from putting the gods in boxes so we can understand them better, we realize that true understanding will always evade us. that knowledge is lost on us, as the knowledge of economic theory is lost on an ant. we can bask in that reverence of the whole, of the unseen stream, and it does nothing to cheapen the experience, but rather allows us to see a fuller picture of what the gods are—and, certainly, what they are not.
i fucking hate the discourse over the reclamation of “queer” so much, like it’s completely okay if you don’t want to use it for yourself or be called that. that is 100% your right to choose for yourself. but you don’t get to look at other people and tell them it’s unacceptable to reclaim it, to take their own power and agency back and use queer as a way to signify that. “queer is a slur” no shit, that’s why it can be reclaimed, which marginalized communities have been doing forever. why are you pressed about it now?
you don’t get to dictate the terms of someone else’s empowerment.
the most relatable yet difficult to explain part about being a trans guy who’s attracted to women is the subtle differences in your attraction vs that of, say, a cis guy who likes women. and it’s hard for me to properly put it into words, but i can really only speak to my own life, so this may not apply to everybody, but my own narrative is that i didn’t even truly figure out i was trans until college, so i spent two decades of my life being raised as a girl, and then a young woman, and it shaped so much of my experiences with how women are treated (being treated as one myself for years) that it gave me insight cis guys just aren’t privy to. and just the same, i was never raised with those same gendered expectations as cis men, so i have no idea what it’s like to go through childhood being treated as a boy, and then as a young man.
and let me put the disclaimer right here so you don’t get any ideas: TERFS, this post is not for you to clown around on and bring your interpretations of “female socialization” onto. i’m one trans guy sharing personal experiences, and if you want to water down what i say and use it to push your bullshit narratives, save us all some time and get the fuck out. i can and will skip your kneecaps across a lake.
so here i am, having been raised with all the expectations of womanhood that i kicked off of me like heavy blankets on a summer night, and suddenly taking on the role of a man, and the expectations are completely switched. i’m painfully aware of how my presence can make women fearful when it’s just the two of us in an elevator. i was that girl in the elevator for most of my life, i know that fear personally. it breaks my heart to think that now, i’m the one causing it. i’m aware that my opinions are taken seriously more often than the women i’m with, even if they know more about the subject than i do. i experienced repeated sexual harrassment at work and nothing was done about it because it wasn’t taken seriously since we were both men, when the same was rightfully punished when it happened to women i worked with—though still not punished nearly enough. how it was viewed by the staff, even, was completely different.
and it affects my attraction, too, because all of this baggage and all of these experiences shape how i view women. i grew up on the other side of that fake binary, where it was easier to work through misogyny once i was aware of what it was because so much of it was internalized. so much of my own work on introspection and self-love also came with a side benefit of combatting that internalized misogyny. and sure, we all still have lingering biases that we actively have to work through. but most of the time when i’m talking with cis guys about women—and it doesn’t matter if these guys are straight, bi, pan—there’s always a separation there. there are things about living life as a woman that they don’t understand. things that cis and trans women alike understand, that AFAB trans people often understand for some portion of their lives, they just don’t. they’ll just say the most sexist shit like it’s normal, or make awful assumptions about women based on gender.
this isn’t to say trans men can’t be misogynistic. obviously, we are. sometimes we even play that up when we’re first transitioning because the pressure from other men to do so can be incredibly strong. the impostor syndrome is real in those moments. it’s no excuse, just one of many reasons, and it’s still just as awful. but those of us who transitioned later on can attest to the fact that our experiences being treated as a woman shaped us and affect us today. the key here, which TERFS will conveniently refuse to recognize, is that this makes us no less of men than cis men. we don’t suddenly become “fake men” because we’ve also experienced life through the lens of womanhood. that view is incredibly limiting and, when flipped the opposite way, is used by transphobes in extremely destructive ways. but i feel like so many of us are afraid to have this conversation because transphobes can so easily use it against us to fuel their bullshit. it doesn’t make it any less true for my own experiences, and i’m sure a lot of other trans men feel the same.
