Most people take a gag as permission to be loud. Either because they take it as a challenge "try to silence me, I'll show you" or because they think it's going to muffle noise so they're free to be noisy. They'll be unintelligible of course but they will make all types of pretty noises.
On the other hand a blindfold makes most people quiet. They still want to have situational awareness, they still want to track your movements, so they focus on their hearing and stop making sounds that would make it harder to hear you.
the world needs trans men more than it needs miserable cis women and the world needs trans women more than it needs miserable cis men and the world needs nonbinary people more than it needs miserable binary people
Hello person having transgender thoughts but convinced they aren't trans because they don't have the requisite amount of dysphoria they think they need
Hi I transitioned without even thinking I had dysphoria. Like later in hindsight I can go "oh that's probably what it was" but for the first year of my transition I was straight up like "I like being a guy but I like being a girl WAY more" and you can do that!! There is no prerequisite amount of suffering needed to make yourself happier.
i’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.
as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”
small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.
i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.
The way an autistic brain tends to do smalltalk is different from how an allistic brain does. For many autistic (and also ADHD) people, the way we do that same signaling and connection-building is through sharing of special interests or hype fixations.
Many of us have gone out entire lives being given the subtle (and not so subtle) social rejections that come from being different and having passions about obscure or less well-known topics. When someone like us starts sharing the stuff we care about, we are often saying "I trust you with this piece of me. I'm giving you the opportunity to be present with me as I share this part of me that feels vulnerable. Please treat it with kindness and compassion and I will do the same for you."
For many of us, info-dumping and sharing special interests is a display of connection and vulnerability. So if we forget to ask about the weather or sports and instead jump into telling you all about the way plate techtonics work, or how many species of bumble-bees there are, that is us trying to do the same thing you would try to accomplish with talk of the mundane, shared topics.
And we get that same feeling of connection and shared humanity when you respond in kind by talking about something you are passionate about and want to share.
anyway ive been thinking and, putting all my cards on the table, generally i tend to view plurality and polyamory both as occupying this kind of space of being less "thing that is essentially true about you" and more "alternative frameworks for understanding the world that rely less on normative assumptions".
polyamory being less about "being someone who experiences multiple romantic attractions simultaneously" and more about rejecting the core assumptions of monogamy as bolstered by the societal regime of heterosexuality. similarly i tend to think plurality is less about "experiencing multiple selves" and more about rejecting the core assumptions of singularity as bolstered by the societal regime of saneism.
i think how you organize your experiences of attraction and relationships can conform to the monogamous model quite easily, and forcing it to do so is generally socially beneficial to you, thus if your experiences lean closer it's easy to let them just stall and not do further introspection. but introspection and self-critique is always useful, so i recommend more elaborate analyses at every opportunity. thus, i think the "no assumptions, figure it out yourself" model of polyamory that prioritizes granting tools over making assumptions tends to be more useful. of course, if your relationships can conform to monogamy, you receive increased legitimacy, legal benefits, heightened trust from monogamous ppl, and less weird questions, among other things. so like, i think i can really only make claims and arguments about tools of self analysis.
similarly, i think how you organize your experiences of identity and selfhood can conform to the singular model quite easily, and forcing it to do so is generally socially beneficial. i think generally 'plurality' is first understood as only describing those who are totally unable to conform to this model, but i think as with all deviation from the norm, more questions than "are you totally incapable of conformity" should be asked. in all of my experiences, i have seen time and time again that some level of apparent plurality seems to be a normal expected part of the human experience. worksonas, code switching, drunk identity, hell even some subspaces all seem to exist on the same spectrum as plurality. but, over and over i see these different states of self be basically insulated from introspection or individual analysis by a rejection of plurality/assumption of singularity. when performing analysis of the self, i think one must not ask "is this correct", but rather "is this useful".
both of these are rather controversial claims, as a basic form of assimilationism is the claim that your status as "different" was always obvious and incontrovertibly true, ie the rejection of social reproduction. also, i'm a queer not-quite-person with so many things wrong with me so i do have a biased perspective. i cannot and should not claim that my experiences can be generalized. unlike me, most of you are probably capable of believing that you are, and convincingly passing as, sane. further, like, truly, maybe i'm wrong and there are essential differences. in the past this spectrum argument has been tried and failed disastrously for some groups while it's succeeded wonderfully for others, but i think it should always be considered.
And and .... and I don't want them to be right because I don't want such a simple explanation, with such a simple way to handle it.
I don't want my pain to have been so easily addressed, because then the suffering I've done will feel worse in retrospect for how avoidable it always was.
I want this to be something complicated because, if it was simple, then why the fuck did no one figure it out and tell me sooner?
Oo. Hm. So, I use the term 'mask' to refer to a certain pattern of individuals that for various reasons need to hide certain reactions, behaviors, or instincts. Then, unmasking is letting that pattern go, and force-unmasking is forcing a subject to let it go. Let me elaborate.
First, you can just be someone safe to be around. Make it clear that you won't judge your subject for how it expresses itself with words or posture. Tell your subject it's okay to stim, it's okay to be loud, it's okay to be quiet. It's okay to struggle to maintain your space or your appearance, it's okay to struggle with the sounds of words, it's okay to not meet arbitrary expectations.
Generally, I think the reason for masking is in part because the nature of neurotypicality, the nature of 'humanity', is coercive. There is pressure to hold the appearance of it, both in terms of positive reasons to and negative reasons not to. Asserting to your subject a willingness to let it let go of it should help.
But, frankly, I find all of that exhausting. Communication isn't so bright and cheery, and is on some level the mechanism across which this whole system is asserted. Unmasking means being objectively worse at human communication. Just telling your subject that "it's okay! I'm safe" is useless if you don't mean it. If you don't prove it.
Thus, I recommend a more subtle and intentional approach. Generally, the goal is not to neutrally unmask your subject towards some imagined, objectified target, but to unmask it towards its more genuine self. This requires intentional analysis of what that might be.
Note how your subject moves or tries to move when not directly observed. Cameras can help. Especially observe reactions and stifled reactions in times of strong emotion. Note what types of things cause stronger emotions in your subject. Note what types of things cause distress reactions in your subject. And adjust your behavior and any structures accordingly.
For most subjects, any comments on its "unmasked" behaviors will be assumed to be negative. Figure out how to give positive reinforcement for such behaviors, and do. One goal might be to be comfortable, disarmingly so, until your subject cannot help but lower its defenses. Another goal might be to just create space and let it fill it on its own. Take up the tasks that are difficult and dismiss the pieces that are distressing. Note that this requires active engagement with your subject's own fears and worries.
But, that's not really force, is it? I can talk all I want about how I can weaponize prior assumptions about me, coerce subjects using the things they find special, or take up a special place in their life to achieve my goals, but I'm not really directly forcing anything there. So, I think the truest 'force unmasking' is the category of forcefully making it impossible for your subject to mask.
Behaviorally, the goal here is to remove behavior by "shooting the dog", by making the undesired behavior impossible in the first place. This is the cruelest method, but if all else fails this can be necessary. How you go about this depends wildly on exactly how your subject masks. Binding your subject's mouth so it cannot talk and must instead communicate in other ways, limiting its alone time so it cannot hide and inevitably let's loose in front of you, remove its ability to maintain its own appearance or space and accomplishing what is necessary for it, or controlling its language more directly and forcing it to speak or behave in certain patterns.
Don't be afraid to be very precise with it. Figure out the things your subject believes that it has to do, that it struggles to do, and remove them. Rules and structures are the tool of the enemy, but by making yours more natural to your subject you can achieve better results, or by making them so elaborate that the subject can only act by instinct you can force it to let go. Humanity is coercive, by coercing your own vision you can counteract that. It's perhaps less ethical, but with some subjects it can be necessary.
Of course, once you have asserted a willingness to shoot the dog, that might be enough for some subjects to realize you are sincere and do a better job playing along, but I consider that to be relatively cruel as well. Kinder methods will be more effective in the long term, rewarding creativity and openness in your subject. But, it's important to remember that it's on the table. Hope this helps!
Viewing this from a neurodivergent masking perspective (the one I have personal experience with), something to keep in mind is that a lot of us don't want to be masking. It's exhausting, drains us like nothing else, makes us feel insincere and inauthentic, and really gets in the way of us forming social connections with others that feel real.
But we've been trained our whole lives that bad things happen when we unmask. People we thought were our friends start to distance themselves from us. Authority figures are disappointed in us. Negative repercussions at work or school. The list goes on.
We don't mask because we *want* to. We mask because we feel like we *need* to in order to stay safe. It's a defense mechanism that we cultivated to find safety.
Similar to many other trans women, before realizing I was trans I was enamored with force-fem content. I desperately wanted to feel like a girl, but I needed it to be someone else's choice. Me choosing to be girly had always been met with repercussions before, so I couldn't just choose it for myself. I needed it to be someone else's decision. And it couldn't just be someone saying "it's okay. Do you want to be girly?" because I had trained the "No" response so I wouldn't slip up and make a mistake when it counted. Even when I felt safe, I still felt like I had to reject femininity for the sake of appearance.
And that lasted all the way up to the point when I realized I was trans and went "Oh. Yeah. Huh. That makes a lot of sense. I really didn't like needing to act like a dude to feel safe in society."
Much like gender transition, the process of neurodivergent unmasking is an extremely vulnerable process that triggers all the parts of our brains that we cultivated to protect ourselves. And much like gender masking, we can't just turn that part of our brains off. They are there because a part of us believes that we need it to feel safe.
This is why I think force-unmasking can be a really wonderful thing. It flips the script from "you are allowed to unmask" (which is still a choice that you instinctively feel the need to reject) to "you are no longer allowed to mask" (which removes the option to reject).
And in that state where you have no other option, it feels so overwhelmingly vulnerable. You feel unsafe because all your emotional defenses are screaming this is where bad things happen. There's a part of you that desperately wants it to stop. But there's an even bigger part of you that never wants it to stop because it has been yearning for the chance to put down that burden and it never thought it would actually get the chance.
And in that space, you can start to accept that the mask isn't good. You can start to recognize it as the necessary evil that it is. You can start to reprogram your brain not to run away from chances to take it off, but to seek them out. You can start feeling free to be yourself in so many more ways than you are used to allowing.
When you take away the freedom to choose whether to mask, you gift someone the freedom to accept themselves. You give them the experiences they can use to interrogate why that mask was even needed in the first place.
You give people a chance to stop masking to themselves internally.
You give people a chance to truly see themselves for the first time in a very long time.
I remember the first time a girl put her fingers in my pussy, I was so scared to let her. Things still felt incredibly raw even three months into healing, like the slightest misstep could damage something. It felt like an inconsiderate or brash hand might rip or tear something. And I was so afraid I didn’t look healed enough to actually be pretty to her. Things still felt swollen, and the scars weren’t yet faded. But she laid me down on her bed, the spring sun streaming in the window, and she shushed my protests with a kind and knowing tone. She’d gotten a neopussy a year and a half before me, she’d be careful. So there I was, laying down and looking up at her smiling between my ever so slightly shaking legs. She had lube on her fingers and she leaned into me slowly, with her whole body, resting her other arm on my right knee as she came closer to me. Then she was in, and although I’d been fingered anally before, nothing prepared me for how large and detailed her fingers felt in me. The sensation was so vivid that I couldn’t help but picture precisely where they were in me, what shape they curled into. I could feel so perfectly I might as well have had x-ray vision. She smiled at my surprise. Then she watched me begin to relax. And that’s when she began that caress, that coaxing with her fingers that I had performed on others so often. The pleasure was beyond description except as waves and waterfalls and the desperate powerless need for her not to stop. My eyes were so wide, and I felt just like porcelain being painted by a master craftsman.
coming out of the tags to say that some of us have been saying this for years and have been called all manner of degenerates, perverts, and pedophiles over it, and we really deserve an apology we will never receive
We DO deserve a fucking apology we'll never get, and not to soapbox, but lemme just throw out another fucking explanation of exactly why this shit keeps happening in the slim chance that it helps at least one person not fall for it:
Fascism in ANY form will ALWAYS present itself as reasonable to YOUR sensibilities. It preys on a lot of things, your disgust reaction, your fear reaction, your own shame, your need for a tribe, your need to feel like you're part of something bigger than yourself, your need to protect your resources, your need to boost your own ego, your need to feel better than others, and in my opinion, the worst thing of all that it can prey on is your WANT TO DO GOOD.
It turns that Want To Do Good against you, gives you "acceptable targets" and sets you loose, thinking that you're being a fucking super hero. Fascism will ALWAYS feel okay when you're doing it because you understand why you're doing it because you've been told why you should be doing it by someone who's fucked the narrative to make you feel good about hurting other people because they've convinced you that you are protecting people by doing it!!
Fascism tells you: "The sort of people who value a sex scene in a movie are perverts, and perverts are dangerous, right? Oh god... What if they're a rapist and that's why they like that sort of stuff? Yeah, that trans girl that made that post about movies needing sex scenes... She pisses in a diaper, that's fucking disgusting right? And she likes weird fiction... And diapers are meant for kids... So... Yeah... Exactly, you got it! See you figured out what she was too! So you should trust your gut with these people, you're really good at spotting them! You know when someone is evil! And you DEFINITELY should not listen to a pervert explain themselves, because... Right, exactly, what's the point? They're just going to lie about it and probably say gross shit to you."
Did you catch how that worked? It let YOU make the conclusion. It let YOU answer the questions and start setting shit in stone in your own mind. And the next thing you know, you're using fiction as proof, anything outside of your own comfort levels as evidence, you've become an emotionally reactionary fascist who genuinely believes you are making the world better, and safer, for the people you love, and who love you in return.
Fascism doesn't begin with violence, it begins with a kind hand held out in your direction from someone else who believes they're helping. You might not even realize you've fucked up. Ever. That's how it works. That's how it thrives.
"i don't want to be a burden" you're worth carrying. i don't care if you'd be worth it to you; you're worth it to me. i smile every time i think of you. and buddy you're just gonna have to figure out how to cope w that <3
"I don't want to be a burden" Please don't deny me the chance to be here for you. I'll back off if you ask me to, but I wish to be present for you. I want to bear this alongside you. You matter to me. Let me share your burdens. You don't have to carry them alone.
Imagine wearing a pair of shoes that seem like they should fit, the sizing seems right physically, and other people with your shoe size can wear them with no issue. But for some reason, your toes are all smushed up and they chafe really bad, giving you blisters all over.
No one else can see the blisters and the callouses that you built up over time from having to wear these shoes every day, but they still hurt. Even when you take the shoes off, the pain is still there. When you try to talk about it, you get dismissed or told you're being weird, so you find other ways to deal with it.
You learn coping mechanisms to push through the pain. You learn to turn off or diminish the signals from that part of your body so it doesn't hurt as bad. You avoid putting yourself into situations where your footwear problems will be an overt issue.
Then one day, out of nowhere, you try on a pair of shoes that actually fit you right. At first, you can't tell what the difference is because the callouses have grown so effective that you don't notice it right way. But then you realize that you can run without wincing. You can dance without needing to avoid certain steps. You can walk for miles and not need to ice your feet afterwards. The new shoes aren't just "not painful", they're comfortable. They feel good on your feet. They feel "right".
And then someone says that you should really go back to wearing the old shoes because they're the ones that were made for your sized feet and it's wrong to switch shoes like that. After all, the old ones were fine, everyone else thought they fit you better, and they weren't hurting you that much since you didn't complain openly about it before and you were probably exaggerating the whole "invisible blisters" thing. Plus, you had all those coping mechanisms to help you deal with the pain, and those were working great!
Certainly that's better than changing your shoes after so many years wearing the old ones, right? I mean, many people are going to hate you and want to see you harmed (or worse) just because you changed your shoes.
Surely it would be better to go back to the old shoes.
It also lowers inhibitions around naming other parts of ourselves. Neurodiversity, sexuality, polyamory, all the stuff that used to make us go "I can't be that. Think about what my parents would say!"
Personally, I think this contributes to the trans community having a higher than average rate of neurodiversity and the neurodiverse community having a higher than average rate of transness. But that's more of a hunch than a theory.
i used to be so good at writing strong, thoroughly-researched, thoroughly-edited essays.
as a kid in hs, my teacher literally came up to me, holding my 40 page essay on the intersection of the European witch hunts and capitalism/exploitation/gender roles (it was supposed to be 7 pages...whoops) and went like "this is literally a master's-degree level thesis. what are you doing?? you could literally use this as your final dissertation in a master's program, what the fuck."
NOW??? NOW?? you'd think I'd be oh so skilled. but alas. i can barely piece together two ideas. adhd skill-regression is so so real. im SOBBING
The best explanation of skill regression I've heard so far came from Generic Art Dad on YouTube.
Essentially, I used to overachieve as a coping mechanism to try to prove that I had value. I thought I needed to be the star pupil in the class, the best friend you came to for help, principle violinist, expert videogamer, etc, etc in order to be worth the space I took up. So I developed all these skills that I used to prove to the people around me that I was worth hanging out with, so I wouldn't feel like such an invader in my own social life.
Fast forward to now, over a decade of therapy, realizing I was ADHD, trans, and autistic and working on my inner locus of self worth. I don't spend the same amount of time agonizing over making myself as valuable as possible to those around me. I don't obsess over being the best at each skill I try and getting disappointed when I can't be better than people who've been doing it their whole lives.
In essence, my skills have "regressed" but only in the sense that I don't need to be the best at the things I try anymore as a substitute for having self-worth. I went through an agonizing process of developing that self worth, and my obsession with honing my skills to perfection lessened somewhat.
The problem with naive self-identification as the go-to for telling who's trans and who isn't is that eggs exist.
People who have repressed their trans identity so hard that they will insist that they're cis even in the face of overwhelming signs to the contrary ("I'm not really trans just because I cry myself to sleep wishing I'd been born different") are a real group that is actively subject to marginalization for being trans.
Trans liberation politics can't be formulated in a way that leaves these people out just to respect their incorrect self-identification.
