#+its body dysphoria central now :'=/

[r1ng-w0rm]

I hate being sick >:'={

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: David Bell

Published: Apr 26, 2024

As the dust settles around Hilary Cass’s report – the most extensive and thoroughgoing evidence-based review of treatment for children experiencing gender distress ever undertaken – it is clear her findings support the grave concerns I and many others have raised. Central here was the lack of an evidential base of good quality that could back claims for the effectiveness of young people being prescribed puberty blockers or proceeding on a medical pathway to transition. I and many other clinicians were concerned about the risks of long-term damaging consequences of early medical intervention. Cass has already had to speak out against misinformation being spread about her review, and a Labour MP has admitted she “may have misled” Parliament when referring to it. The review should be defended from misrepresentation.

The policy of “affirmation” – that is, speedily agreeing with a child that they are of the wrong gender – was an inappropriate clinical stance brought about by influential activist groups and some senior gender identity development service (Gids) staff, resulting in a distortion of the clinical domain. Studies indicate that a majority of children in the absence of medical intervention will desist – that is, change their minds.

The many complex problems that affect these young people were left unaddressed once they were viewed simplistically through the prism of gender. Cass helpfully calls this “diagnostic overshadowing”. Thus children suffered thrice over: through not having all their problems properly addressed; by being put on a pathway for which there is not adequate evidence and for which there is considerable risk of harm; and lastly because children not unreasonably believed that all their problems would disappear once they transitioned. It is, I think, not possible for a child in acute states of torment to be able to think through consequences of a future medical transition. Children struggle to even imagine themselves in an adult sexual body.

Some claim that low numbers of puberty blockers were prescribed. Cass quotes figures showing around 30% of Gids patients in England discharged between April 2018 and 31 December 2022 were referred to the endocrinology service, of whom around 80% were prescribed puberty blockers; the proportion was higher for older children. But these numbers are likely to be an underestimate, as 70% of children were transferred to adult services once they were 17, and their data lost, as very regrettably they were not followed up. This is one of the most serious governance problems of Gids – also specifically addressed by the judges in Keira Bell v Tavistock. Six adult gender clinics refused to cooperate and provide data to Cass. However, having come under considerable pressure, they have now relented.

It is often claimed that puberty blockers were not experimental, as there is a long history of their use. They had been used in precocious puberty (for example where a child, sometimes because of a pituitary abnormality, develops secondary sexual characteristics before the age of eight) and in the treatment of prostate cancer. But they had not been prescribed by Gids to children experiencing gender dysphoria before 2011. The lack of long-term evidence underlies the decision of the NHS to put an end to their routine prescription for children as a treatment for gender dysphoria – that is, for those whose bodies were physically healthy.

The attempts of Gids clinicians to raise concerns about safeguarding and the medical approach were ignored or worse.The then medical director heard concerns but did not act; ditto the Speak up Guardian and the Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust management. I was a senior consultant psychiatrist, and it was in my role as staff representative on the trust council of governors that a large number of the Gids clinicians approached me with their grave concerns. This formed the basis of the report submitted to the board in 2018. The trust then conducted a “review” of Gids, based only on interviewing staff. The CEO stated that the review did not identify any “failings in the overall approach taken by the service in responding to the needs of the young people and families who access its support”. I was threatened with disciplinary action. When the child safeguarding lead, Sonia Appleby, raised her concerns before the trust’s review, the trust threatened her with an investigation; and its response, as an employment tribunal later confirmed, damaged her professional reputation and stood in the way of her safeguarding work.

Characterising a child as “being transgender” is harmful as it forecloses the situation and also implies that this is a unitary condition for which there is unitary “treatment”. It is much more helpful to use a description: that the child suffers from distress in relation to gender/sexuality, and this needs to be carefully explored in terms of the narrative of their lives, the presence of other difficulties such as autism, depression, histories of abuse and trauma, and confusion about sexuality. As the Cass report notes, studies suggest that a high proportion of these children are same-sex attracted, and many suffer from homophobia. Concerned gay and lesbian clinicians have said they experienced homophobia in the service, and that staff worked in a “climate of fear”.

It is misleading to suggest that I and others who have raised these concerns are hostile to transgender people – we believe they should be able to live their lives free of discrimination, and we want them to have safe, evidence-based holistic healthcare. What we have opposed is the precipitate placing of children on a potentially damaging medical pathway for which there is considerable evidence of risk of harm. We emphasised the need, before taking such steps, to spend considerable time exploring this complex and multifaceted clinical presentation. Young people and clinicians routinely refer to “top surgery” and “bottom surgery”, terms that serve to seriously underplay these major surgical procedures, ie double mastectomy, removal of pelvic organs and fashioning of constructed penis or vagina. These procedures carry very serious risks such as urinary incontinence, vaginal atrophy, cardiovascular complications and many others we are only beginning to learn about. There is a very serious risk of sexual dysfunction and sterility.

There are no reliable studies (for children or adults) that could support claims of low levels of regret. The studies often quoted (eg Bustos et al 2021) have been criticised for using inadequate and erroneous data. The critical issue here is the fact that children and young people who were put on a medical pathway were not followed up. Studies suggest that the majority of detransitioners, a growing population, who are having to deal with the consequences of having been put on a medical pathway, do not return to the clinics as they are very fearful of the consequences. The fact that there are no dedicated NHS services for detransitioners is symptomatic of the NHS’s lack of concern for this group. Many live very lonely and isolated lives.

Those who say a child has been “born in the wrong body”, and who have sidelined child safeguarding, bear a very heavy responsibility. Parents have been asked “Do you want a happy little girl or a dead little boy?” Cass notes that rates of suicidality are similar to rates among non-trans identified youth referred to child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS). Indeed, the NHS lead for suicide prevention, Prof Sir Louis Appleby, has said “invoking suicide in this debate is mistaken and potentially harmful”.

It has been suggested that the Cass report sought to “appease” various interests, with the implication that those who have promoted these potentially damaging treatments have been sidelined. But in reality, it is those of us who have raised these concerns who have been silenced by trans rights activists who have had considerable success in closing down debate, including preventing conferences going ahead. Doctors and scientists have said that they have been deterred from conducting studies in this area by a climate of fear, and faced great personal costs for speaking out, ranging from harassment to professional risks and even, as Cass has experienced, safety concerns in public.

The pendulum is already swinging towards a reassertion of rationality. Cass’s achievement is to give that pendulum a hugely increased momentum. In years to come we will look back at the damage done to children with incredulity and horror.

David Bell is a retired psychiatrist and former president of the British Psychoanalytic Society

==

David Bell was one of the original Tavistock whistleblowers.

No one is "born in the wrong body." You and your body are one and the same.

[newfantasy]

Evil guy at it again *prefers it when the ship & character were het

bitching below

alright look its not about kamila being A Guy and the ships becoming Gay its not that her profound issues w gender were present from the start. her central demon is her fucking cunt man like Im not an idiot and its why i related to her so much as a very angsty teen boy w heavy sex dysphoria.

but it certainly does feel like a turning point where kamila says "i wish i was a guy" and she vomits in response. then, gaueko, immediately, w/o her consent, is like Awh yeah youre a dude now let's he/him it up even though, the person who does ask her (WELT) kamila herself says i dont know i dunno what i wanna be called yet. i dont know what id like. but because gaueko is like, Mysteriously cool, bad boy, the one opening up kamila's horizons, its actually Fine when he violates her consent like this (delegating kamila's gender & pronouns) and welt is Mean. he knows better. welt is the one keeping her trapped inside.. stupid.. babysitting the Pups (that she delegated herself into doing IRL and is like. her primary motivation?)

somehow despite being A Trans Guy i related to kamila much more when she hated her body & hated being feminine rather than expressly wanted to be a man (and to this time, still, she does not say if she identifies as a man in canon... but gaueko cool mysterious omnipotent guy.. he just knows better than kamila!!! and it's DIFFERENT than WELT (WHO IS ALSO A TRANS MAN? LOL) knowing gender and sex issues!!!) like, had it just remained an internal conflict, forever, that wouldve been more poignant instead of.... THIS, APPARENTLY, IF THIS IS WHAT A "CHARACTER COMING TO TERMS W/ THEIR GENDER IDENTITY" IS IN NRD

.. also ever since... that & she's become much more fail err kosmic redrawing "he asked for no pickles" memes w kamila like, crying behind gaueko. lol. what... this is not the failgirl i saw in myself as a teen... mopes and kicks a rock. she also keeps getting. rescued by gaueko. she can't go and self-reflect in any of the worlds w/o gaueko interrupting and ~protecting~ her...

anyway yeah in my like delusional world Im jsut binning the transman bit and keeping it as a private reserved conflict for kamila that she can solve and come to terms w/ without some Fucking Guy coming along and telling her who she is. thanks. and she fucks welt instead who Isnt a bloodthirsty cult leader

[catherinekal]

How to Love Yourself

Lets talk about how to love yourself.

Why?

Well here’s why. I want to talk about many topics related to mental health and bettering your life. A process I’ve been slowly trying to do for my own life and no sense keeping any advice I’d have to myself. To even begin the process though you have to tackle what is the most important, the most central, the core of all positive mental health.

You have to love yourself.

Ok so here’s the thing. I have typed almost 7000 words about what is probably the most important thing you can do for your mental health. It’s also one of the most difficult things to do for a lot of people (myself included) and all to often people give this advice and don’t elaborate. Understandable as someone like me elaborating ends up being an entire goddamn novel, but it’s important someone does and I think people need to hear it.

I’m tired of well meaning people giving this advice only to then get disappointed, upset, mad, or frustrated when just telling someone to magically love themselves doesn’t magically fucking work. You should love yourself! Make no mistake the advice is good.

However, just telling someone, especially someone who’s going through a crisis, to love themselves and expecting that to work suddenly is stupid. Its a process. A process I myself still struggle with literally every day. Telling someone to love themselves and just wiping your hands and going “well looks like my work here is done” isn’t enough. Self love is brutally hard for many people and without certain strategies and slow steps taken it just won’t come to a lot of people.

Full disclosure, I am not a trained professional.

I don’t have a psychology degree or would ever call myself an expert on those matters. Just a silly film degree that sits in a closet not being used. I’m not therapist, but in a better life I would be. I think I’d be good at it honestly. But I am not and neither is this. This does not mean it can’t help as I wouldn’t have typed it then. Just that I don’t want anyone treating this as any replacement for professional help.

Do not take any of this as professional advice and certainly don’t use this as a shorthand for therapy.

However, remember you don’t need any degree to help people.

What I do have is an understanding of my own mind and the difficulty of self love. See here’s the thing, so much self help advice and guides come from people who are well off. They’re in good relationships. They have loved ones. They’re comfortable with their appearance. Their needs are met. Not saying those people shouldn’t give advice of course, but let’s be honest with ourselves, it can be frustrating when people who have every reason to be happy expect you to just magically change your negative thinking when your situation is well, utter shit. I get that frustration. Of course it’s easy for YOU to love yourself with your good life, but mines horrible so why should I do the same? A thought that comes all to easy.

So here’s my qualifications. I hate my appearance. I live alone. I have 1 IRL friend I basically only see at work. I only have 2 other people I consider my close friends and they live in another state across the country. I’m trans with parents who I’m dreading finding out as they won’t accept it. I have depression, borderline personality disorder, and the ever lovely dysphoria at my own body. I am extremely touched starved. I moved to another state to live with people I love who now hate me. I work a shitty retail job that pays only just enough to get by.

I frequently hate myself. I frequently feel inadequate. I’ve been abandoned on more then 1 occasion from relationships and friends. I was literally depressed and spiraling down a negative hole just recently a few days ago. Hell I think about daily and have made 3 attempts at...well.. I won’t say the word. Though unfortunately you can’t talk about self love without addressing self hate and you can’t address self hate without going into THAT topic. Rest assured I will put trigger warnings before and after when I get to that topic. Skip if you must.

So as you can see I’m perfectly unqualified to talk about how to self love, which ironically makes me very qualified in my eyes. I’m not sitting atop my mountain of a wondeful life demanding you just love yourself and be happy. I get it. I understand. Life fucking sucks and I know many obstacles that get in the way of self love. I understand how hard it is. I know that me or anyone just telling you to love yourself and all your problems will be solved won’t work.

Of course I can’t love myself Catherine! I’ve got (insert list of all my negative traits and problems in life) why would I even think I should love myself!?

Well lets get into it. Strap the fuck in because this will be a long one. You had plans tonight? Fuck em time to read about self love instead.

Part 1: Actually Wait! Let’s Address Causes For Self Hatred.

Before we even get into steps to self love we need to talk about self hatred. If you struggle to love yourself then chances are you find it really easy to hate yourself instead. I can relate to that very much.

Why would anyone hates themselves? Well that answer will change from person to person and rely on specific individual things to them. However, I can talk about why I’ve hated myself for so long and why its so easy to just be in that place. No one truly wants to be hated or hate themselves, but lets face it. Self hatred is safe and easy. There’s a certain comfort in viewing yourself as nothing but trash and thinking everyone should do the same.

Can’t disappoint anyone if you’re hated to begin with can you? Disappointment comes from love right? Someone you love hurting you creates disappointment. Creates pain. If you hate yourself you will encourage others to hate you as well so you never have to risk getting hurt by others.

I feel guilty over many past mistakes. People I’ve hurt. I hyper focus on my negatives (shouts out to my lovely depression for helping me do that, fucking bitch of a mental illness) I have no path in life, no sense of self (I blame BPD for that, the other bitch of a mental illness I have) I don’t take care of myself well. I feel like I haven’t even begun to live life and I’m 30. I have very few friends and what friends I have I’m always wondering, are they just tolerating me? Do they really care or are they just afraid of what I would do if they left me and don’t want a guilty conscious?

I have every reason to hate myself.

I could list so many names of people just in this past year alone I’ve hurt. Losing the perfect relationship I was in. The many friends I had. Getting banned from a community I loved. Joining new communities and then the cycle continues. Making friends, spiraling emotionally, pushing them away, losing them, getting banned. Repeat. Living alone and barely talking to anyone in person. Seeing my ex at work and getting the death stare that just cuts through my fucking soul. Hating myself comes all to easy for me.

So I get it. You’re talking to the fucking queen bitch bee of self hatred. Well maybe not, but I certainly understand the feeling of going the whole day just thinking your shit and that you deserve all the horrible things you’re feeling and just wishing for the worst.

Part 1.1: You Should (Not) Kill Yourself

Trigger Warning! Uncomfortable Topic Ahead

Until you see this text again the difficult and dark topic of suicide will be discussed. Skip if you must.

So yeah the worst. You know, that fun S word.

Suicide.

Personally I can talk about this topic all day and will do a deeper dive into it one of these days. For now lets just keep It simple or as simple as I can.

When you’re so absorbed in the void. So lost in it and spiraling further down this is where you’ll usually end up. How the hell do you love yourself when your mind is filled with thoughts of going back to that gun store, getting a pistol, and doing what you should have done months ago to end yourself? Very specific thoughts I’ve had many times since December when I in fact almost bought a gun to end my life with. Funny how easy it is to get one as an American.

So whats to be done when your mind is in that state? How do you stop it?

You don’t.

No really. You can’t in that specific moment. Trying to love yourself when your mood and mind are this far deep just isn’t going to work and shouldn’t be the goal then. No your goal is to

1. Let the mood pass. Go through the motions and wait to it to pass as it will

2. Survive. Seriously. Whatever you need to do to survive, do that.

I know not complicated advice or steps, but very important and needs to be said. If you can do those 2 things then you can make it to where you’re able to love yourself. Do not beat yourself up for not seeing the hope and love when you’re in the fucking deepest void. Fuck the people who do that, judge you for not just feeling better when you’re in that dark place. I’ve been on that end and it just pushes you deeper down.

If you have people who can watch over you physically in person go to them or ask them to come to you. If not (like in my case) I go to my couch and cry. I force myself to stay on there. No sharp object or pills in my immediate reach and well, let it flow. It has to pass and forcing it to just stop simply won’t work. You can’t logic your way out of suicidal thoughts when they’re happening.

It doesn’t always work as I did survive 3 attempts so far. All within this last year at that. Being abandoned by many people you love all at once will do that to you. You noticed I didn’t give the advice to reach out to a friend in my simple 2 step plan. I would love to give the advice that you should reach out to a friend, but I’ve had friends leave me for doing that. You should be able to reach out to friends, but alas people will drop you like a fucking rock out of their lives when they hear you’re suicidal. Ironic I know. This is one area I am still baffled on and can’t relate to even remotely.

So fuck It! Reach out to me if you have to! Suicide talk ain’t no problem with me. I don’t know why, but regardless it’s true. It’s not a topic that scares me and I hope you have friends or family that feel the same way. I really should make a post about how to handle suicidal friends specifically shouldn’t I? Another day perhaps.

Know that this dark hole you’re in can be escaped. Look at me. Still alive.

You are not a bad person for thinking of suicide.

You are not a bad person for attempting suicide.

You are not a bad person if people left you due to suicide.

You deserve love and to love yourself.

If there’s anything to showcase the importance of self love it’s to get as far away from suicide as possible. I believe in you!

I personally hate how people treat suicide victims as horrible people for daring to reach out or attempting it. Fucking disgust me. But what can you do, but be better for others then others were to you.

Survive and claw you’re way out. You’re not alone. Not while I’m alive.

Trigger Warning Over! Now We Can Get Back To Actually Learning How To Love Yourself :3

Part 2: Guilts A Fucking Bitch Isn’t It.

A common thought in my head when it comes to self love is why do I even deserve to? It’s easy to beat yourself up, especially when you know you’ve hurt people you care for. Isn’t that just the fucking worst. It’s one thing to hurt just someone you don’t know, but when loved ones get hurt and you are the cause. Yeah that shit causes a wave of guilt, a wave that can turn into a vortex, a spiral of guilt that you get lost in.

So the thought process is this, I did X bad thing/things. I hurt loved ones and ruined something good. Therefore I’m a piece of shit and no one should love me, including myself.

Oh hey that’s me this entire last year. Shits fucking hard to break out of and getting into a pattern of self punishment is very easy. After all you are a bad person and you do deserve to be punished right? You don’t deserve silly things like self love or any love when you’re supposed to be suffering for all the pain you caused right?

Wrong! See guilt isn’t bad. In fact you should feel guilt over things, that’s good. When you fuck up feeling guilt is a sign of growth. It means you acknowledge you fucked up and that’s far better then hurting others and just thinking you’re the only one who isn’t a problem. Hopefully you learn (its ok if you don’t soon though because I sure as hell didn’t) and do better. Thing is guilt can consume the fuck out of you. Especially when you just have a list of people you’ve hurt or ways you’ve fucked up.

I’ve done some fucked things. I have loads of guilt and it can be overwhelming. I’ve broken so many goddamn boundaries, been emotionally abusive, manipulative, used self harm as a way of hurting others, and was responsible for ending a friendship that lasted years. I could list more and if I was in a negative spiral I could go on forever for why I deserve to suffer. I feel like shit. Well I do often I should say, but hey self helps a journey and not a race.

Lets actually look at one of my “sins” as it were. When I was responsible for ending a friendship. I won’t be giving actual names, but just first letters so as not to put the names of people out there who wouldn’t want that.

Long story short I was living with my now ex-girlfriend, I’ll call her M. M eventually got tired of my bullshit and had to move out and live with her good friend, we’ll call her A, in another state. So how did I end that friendship?

I find out a month later that A had kicked M out of their place and just what in the fuck? See A and M were really really good friends. Such good friends that A drove many states over to pick up M and have her stay with them. So to then find out something happened between them and A kicked M out of their place was just a fucking shock. M is physically disabled to so like its doubly fucked what A did.

Of course my mind is thinking this whole event is my fault. After all if I was better for M, she would have never needed to leave, which then led to whatever happened between them(to this day I still have no idea what went down).

This led to me feeling even more guilt and also a hell of a lot of anger for A. I already had a rocky relationship with A for many other reasons and learning this made me want to fucking beat the shit out of them (I’m very weak and would have gotten wrecked if I tried, but irrational anger do what it will do) I hated A and I hated myself. Someone I still loved was now left homeless and its all because I wasn’t good enough for her.

Except, well… hold on... my guilt there was bullshit.

See here’s the first step with managing overwhelming guilt. Take a step back and really assess if you should feel guilt in the first place. I didn’t cause whatever fallout happened between them. I didn’t make them fight. I wasn’t the one who kicked someone out of my place. I only felt guilty because I indirectly caused a situation that could have happened irregardless of me. That guilt was misplaced. I can’t be feeling guilty over the actions of someone else just because I’m spiraling in my dark void and finding every possible reason to hate myself. The anger was justified, but you gotta stop feeling guilty for things that you simply were not responsible for. That situation was caused by them, not by me.

Another example is the guilt of being trans and knowing my parents will be disappointed. Despite what you may assume, they are good people, but also old and christian. They love me, but yes, they will not like me being trans. It will hurt them. No amount of pointing out why that’s wrong will change that reality.

However, whenever they find out and whatever they feel, is not my fault. That’s guilt I shouldn’t feel. I am who I am. I can’t be feeling guilty over every little thing that’s ultimately not my fault. That’s not healthy.

Ok Catherine maybe I can shed some guilt I have when really looking at these things, but come on. No ones perfect, what about the very real guilt I feel for the very real horrible things I did?

Regardless of what you did, or who you hurt, I am saying right now.

Forgive Yourself

But you don’t know what I did!?

I don’t care.

But I did this horrible awful!

I don’t care.

I fucked up!

I don’t care.

I don’t give a single goddamn fuck what you did. Not at all.

Forgive Yourself

You could be reading this in fucking jail cell after taking someones life. If you are genuinely working on improving yourself, bettering yourself, working to help others, helping yourself, and striving to be better then whoever you were. You deserve forgiveness and that includes forgiving yourself. I’m aware this statement might not sit well with others and I also don’t care. I cannot be changed on this stance. I feel very strongly about this.

See when we say everyone deserves forgiveness I truly do mean everyone who makes an effort.

Even if others don’t ever stop hating you, you deserve to stop hating yourself over whatever the hell you did. No one has to forgive you, but you sure as shit deserve to forgive yourself.

Forgiveness is key to end the guilt spiral. Yeah you fucked up. Yeah I fucked up. I hurt people I loved, hell people I still love. It happens. Take the time to suffer and feel bad but don’t let it consume you. You owe it to yourself to forgive yourself and let go of the guilt after enough time. Then work on being better the next time.

You deserve to love yourself.

Part 3: Lets Identify Those Positive Traits!

I don’t deserve to be loved because I’m (insert list of only negative qualities I have about myself) I’m a piece of shit! I’m not good enough! I’m a burden! Everyone who loves me can find better!

Such common phrases I’ve given about myself and people who hate themselves repeat those often. Well fuck it lets list them for me. Lets first just look at all the negative traits I have about myself.

I’m ugly, I have a shitty voice, I have intrusive thoughts, I think about death often, I am emotionally needy, I have depression, I have BPD, I’m not in the right body, I get angry fast, I am emotional, I have no skills, no talents, everyone who says they’re my friend is just tolerating me because they don’t want to deal with the guilt of what I might do if I was abandoned. I’m a burden. I’ve hurt others. Ect. Its easy to list negative traits about yourself and even easier to turn positive traits into negative ones. Seeing good in yourself is hard with depression in my experience, but even without it, exaggerating your negative traits is all to easy to do.

However, it is vital to embrace your positive traits in order to practice self love. Lets turn a positive spin or just reveal how some of those negatives aren’t as bad as I make them out to be all to often.

I’m ugly?

No I’m not tons of people have called me cute and pretty. One day I’ll even be hot and you all better be fucking prepared.

I have a shitty voice?

No I have a normal fucking voice. I’m soft spoken and mumble a bit but that can be changed with practice. My voice can only get better whenever the hell I do voice training to.

I have intrusive thoughts?

Yeah I do. Hell I’ve even acted on some of them, but do I act on most of them? I wouldn’t be alive if I did trust me. I have self doubts, my emotions can flare up and cause intensive intrusive thoughts, but guess what? So does everyone, that shit is normal. Why beat myself up over it?

I think about death often?

See above. I sure do and yet I’m still here.

I am emotionally needy?

Sure. I am. I’ve got years of trauma with a particularly horrible last year and severe abandonment issues. I have diagnosed mental illnesses. I’m just now really discovering who I am. Guess what, I’m allowed to be a little emotionally needy given the circumstances. It will get better.

I have depression?

Sure as hell do, holy shit do I! Brains a bit fucky and that’s ok. Depression isn’t a negative trait. It’s just an aspect of me. An aspect I have slowly taken steps to manage. Mental illness’s aren’t negative traits. Just how your brain works.

I have BPD?

Very much yes. Oh its fucked so much of my life and very hard to manage, but it also helps me key into negative emotions of others. Helps me be very empathetic to those like me. Helps me be non judgmental to those who feel like me. To many people abandon and hate people with BPD. Me having it allows me to empathize with others who also have it and work towards being a more positive force in their lives. Sure its very negative at times. Like depression though it’s just how my brain works.

I’m not in the right body?

True. I’m trans. Its unfortunate I have to deal with it and so many others have to as well. But I’ve taken steps to achieve the body I desire more. Very slow steps, but steps all the same. It also helps me now be more empathetic to issues as both a guy and girl being in this transitional space.

I get angry fast?

Yeah I can get angry fast at certain specific things. Anger is not a negative trait its just anger. It’s what you do while feeling it that matters. I don’t physically harm anyone or anything. I can yell and say mean things, but that's hardly enough a reason to hate myself. Sure though this one can slip through. I do get angry easily and can lash out verbally when in that state. 1 Negative trait so far.

I am emotional?

Yeah. So what? Why is this negative again? Oh right its not.

I have no skills?

Bullshit! I can type massive fucking essays about mental health no problem. That’s a skill. Fingers get fucking tired though. I can edit video. I can do basic 3D modeling. I’m a very good listener and I do list that as a skill. I can handle heavy dark uncomfortable things friends need to get off their chest. I’d honestly make a good therapist if I studied it. There’s more to list if I took the time to write it all down. Just need to really think about it and be honest with yourself.

No talents?

See above.

Everyone who says they’re my friend is just tolerating me because they don’t want to deal with the guilt of what I might do if I was abandoned?

Well that’s not really a trait about myself, but lets address it all the same. Is this true? Well I got 3 main friends and none of them are fucking dumb. None of my friends would waste their time tolerating me either so guess what? Must mean they’re genuinely my friends. Many former friends have left me but that’s on them. It’s certainly a fear I have deep within me with my current friends. An understandable and justified fear given this past year. It’s certainly not a negative trait though.

I’m a fucking burden?

Am I? I mean yeah I have been. People have left me for that. Surely this is a negative trait right? Sure. I’ll give myself that. Except well… I mean I’m trying to love myself and improve myself. I’m trying to better myself and be less of a burden on my loved ones. It’s not easy, but working to improve on this negative trait is not enough to hate myself. 2 negative traits so far.

I’ve hurt others?

See part 2 on guilt.

I’m not broken. I’m not useless. I’m not a waste of time. I deserve love.

So do you.

Here’s the thing, I get it. It’s easy to see the worst in yourself and disregard evidence to the contrary. You say your ugly? Your friends say otherwise, but the mind won’t accept or see it. You say you don’t deserve love? To someone who very clearly loves you. You still don’t accept It. Brains be fucky like that. Just not seeing whats so obvious to others. I can relate very much.

I want everyone to do this. Simply list any positive traits you can muster about yourself. You can’t? Ok just list things you’ve done. Anything you’ve done no matter how small or simple it is. Things you’ve made, people you’ve helped, and anything else you can think of.

If you can’t even do that and you can only think of the negative traits of yourself then try to spin all those negative traits you have in your head into positives like I did. Really look at them and see if you can find ways this trait isn’t as negative as you think.

Here’s some positive traits about me.

I can cook. I’m a good worker. I can open up myself to others to help them. I’m very good about texting/DMing back. I don’t mind listening to others, no matter how dark or intrusive the thoughts may be. I enjoy pleasing others. I’m caring. I’m cute as fuck. I’m very vulnerable.

That vulnerability is good. If I wasn’t vulnerable I couldn’t be typing all this now could I? There’s a risk of getting hurt myself, but that risk could very well lead to others reading this and feeling better about themselves and so vulnerable I shall be.

I’m trying to better myself and in turn better others.

It’s hard. I get it. Genuinely even trying to think of positive things about myself is still difficult and I know if I asked others they could list more good things about me. However, listing them is nothing compared to actually accepting them as true. When you’re stuck in that self hatred spiral you can’t see anything positive about yourself, therefore loving yourself is off the fucking table. So repeat them, embrace them, and accept them over and over again while you’re mood allows you to.

But even if you don’t accept them yet, list them. Ask others to give you more if you can. Just keep listing them every day if needed. Get that positive reinforcement going.

Don’t let the self hatred win.

Part 4: What Do You Want? Head Towards It

What the fuck do you want in life? Well? Ask yourself. Figure that shit out.

I know that’s not easy. I’m 30 and still fucking around trying to figure that shit out. Here’s why it’s important though to stop and just think about what you truly want. You make goals and you head towards them inch by fucking inch. Progress leads to good feelings which leads to being more open to loving yourself.

What do I want?

I want at least 1 person to truly love me, all of me. Even more would be even better. I want a job I don’t hate. I want friends nearby I could visit. I want to fully transition. Fuck it I want to be hot as fuck. I want to fuck. I want to experience more cool art. I want to learn how to cook better and begin baking. I want to travel. I want to use my past life mistakes as experience to guide others in other directions (it’s what this entire post is) I want to help others. I want to die happy.

Now I can’t focus on all of that at once and that’s ok. The point of a list like that is to get a general sense, a blueprint, of where you’re wanting to go. Find one or a couple to work towards and as you progress you’ll find self love will come just a little bit easier. May seem like obvious advice sure, but obvious doesn’t mean easy to do.

So what steps am I taking? Well I’m forced to learn cooking living on my own and I’m saving up to buy tools for baking. I’m taking hormones. I just got myself new glasses after a goddamn decade. I made a Tumblr which has helped me express myself more. I’m writing this very post to help others. Plus more planned when I can get to it.

Knowing what you want and making little goals is such obvious advice but its obvious for a reason. This shit works. Fucking crazy I know. In order to achieve any of those I have to love myself, even just a little bit, to make that progress. What’s the alternative? I’ve talked about the alternative before and I’m tired of feeling that way, even if it’s still very difficult not to.

I do want to focus a bit on body image specifically. See I’m trans. I despise how I look and since I’m sharing this on Tumblr I imagine other transwomen (or anyone else) can relate. When setting goals, especially goals relating to appearance its easy to get discouraged.

After all will I truly be able to look how I wish? I don’t know. Is that a reason to stop? Fuck no! The goal isn’t to reach 100% positive image with yourself. It’s to work towards that as much as you can. Whatever that image is, that’s up to you, but head towards it. I may never reach that 100% with how I want to look, but I will get as close as I can and the closer I get the easier it will be to love myself. As someone with dysphoria, removing that as much as I can will make loving myself far easier. Its a major hurdle for many people, but especially my trans brothers and sisters.

However being trans is by no means a requirement to have body issues and don’t let anyone say otherwise. Make no mistake, you’re body is fine and you are fine. No one should feel like they have to be ashamed for their body.

Despite that though there is nothing wrong with working towards a look you simply don’t have yet either. Get to working out! It’s what I have tried and stopped and tried and stopped and yeah it’s hard to keep committed, but vital to look how I want. Dieting is a bitch to keep going as well. Don’t beat yourself up for faltering whatever standard you have set for yourself.

Pick yourself up and try again. Work towards an appearance you can be comfortable with however you best can. It will do fucking wonders for self love.

You need shit to work towards to. You need to love yourself to best reach those goals. Its very circular in a sense, they feed into each other in a positive way.

Part 5: Treat Yourself, You Deserve It.

Treating yourself is an act of self love. An act that is unfortunately hard to do for a lot of people.

So this advice wasn’t given to me directly, but someone I follow online talked about it. There’s a guy from a group called Mega 64 I follow called Shawn Chatfield. A fan asked him for advice for finding motivation to get through a shitty week. His advice was hey, everyday at the end of the day, treat yourself. Desert one day, a dinner you enjoy the next, buy something you need/want, ect.

That resonated with me because it really is solid advice, except 1 small issue. Lets amend that advice a bit and make it more applicable to everyone. See Shawns a positive guy I think he’s a cool dude. He’s also giving advice from a more privileged place. He has his dream job, a family, kids, a house, and overall can afford to treat himself at the end of everyday by buying something. Many can’t including me.

However, it’s still important to treat yourself so what do we do?

Here’s what I do. Once a week, typically the last day I work, I either to a really nice sub sandwich place right after work or a nice hot chicken place near where I work. Far better food then any of my cooking and they’re aren’t out of the way either. Could I afford to go out to eat every single day? No. But once a week after doing my shitty retail job? Yes.

If its possible for you financially, set aside some money you can split into 4 chunks to treat yourself to something you enjoy once a week. Shits getting expensive and it’s only getting harder to do this, but if you can then you should. If you can buy yourself something 4 times a month though then please do so. Something that’s not a need, but a want. A treat for getting though this shit another week. After all no sense working most of the week to not use a least some of it to actually enjoy life as best as you’re able to.

Treats don’t always need to be things that cost money like food either. Treat yourself in other ways as best you can. Every week and every day if possible. Whatever it is. Just vibe out to your favorite album alone in your room. Go to a park or some other cool scenic place near where you live. Play D&D with your friends online. Play with any pets you have. Hell get out the magic wand and enjoy a night to yourself haha. Whatever it is be sure to not just relax, but relax in a way that shows you really do care about yourself.

What this will do is not only just be helpful for getting through each day/week, but help change your mind into thinking you deserve nice things. Good things. As you slowly feel like you deserve little treats then you’ll more clearly see you deserve self love right? It’s all about changing that negative outlook about yourself into a positive, one small tiny step at a time.

Part 6: Whats This Meditation Bullshit?

I have only started doing this for a week. So whatever long term benefits of this are I haven’t experienced yet, but the beauty of this is it cost nothing to try and everyone is capable of doing it. I’ll just link the video. This is by Dr. K who is someone I really respect. This entire post is my own attempt at helping others as he does using Twitch/YouTube/Discord. Of course as my disclaimer at the start, I’m no expert with no degree as people such as Dr. K have. Which is why I’m not going super in depth explaining what he already has. He goes into explaining Metta meditation which if nothing else, will help you have a moment of positivity towards yourself and others each day. https://youtu.be/FQ1d5rC062c

It may seem like some love beats all sappy to good to be true bullshit, but it hasn’t hurt me doing it for about a week. Changing how you’re mind thinks is a slow process and whatever helps, no matter how unusual it may seem, is worth doing.

Part 7: Oh Right Go To Therapy

Therapy you necessary but impossible to get bastard. It’s super important. It’s also super shitty to get and afford which is a shame because ITS REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT! See any future mental health bigass post I make are pretty much always going to mention therapy. It’s vital for any type of bettering yourself advice. The problem is, its hard to get, expensive, and takes fucking forever to work when you do get it.

For me I had to figure this shit out on my own this past year. I thought I was going to have help, but my ex friends/relationships didn’t really do shit to help. All I got was BetterHelp.com recommended to me and I mean if that works for you cool, but that was an overpriced waste of time for me. Then my friends left me as I was seeing therapy through that and yeah shit was not a good time for me August of 2022.

I could and should do a whole post on just therapy so for now I’ll say this.

If you know someone who needs therapy or you want them in therapy. Help them find it and if you can afford it and they can’t, pay for it. I would for people I’m close to because what the hell is the point of having money if it’s not being used to help someone after my financial needs are met?

Insurance is a fucking bitch. I don’t know how other countries are, but in America you’re either paying to much for therapy or paying to much for insurance to help pay for therapy. If you have to figure this out on your own expect a lot of pain and frustration. Then you find a place and frankly the therapist just isn’t very good for you so you gotta search again and deal with more wait times and just FUCK!

Therapy needs to be far easier to navigate, find, afford, and just overall it’s a mess to figure it out all on your own. Its super important though and I’m by no means fully well by any stretch, but it’s certainly helped me get to where I am.

Remember none of my previous advice is coming from a professional (well beyond the one professional video I shared) So talking to a professional always needs to be on the table when working to improve yourself, especially to overcome self hatred or really anything.

Part 8: Alright Lets Wrap This Shit Up.

Fiiiinnnneeee. I guess I should get to the end.

So in summary.

1. Recognize and acknowledge you’re own self hatred and survive first and foremost through those thoughts. Survive first then focus on getting better once you’re able to. Do not beat yourself up to much.

2. Truly ask yourself if you should be feeling all of the guilt you may feel and work on forgiving yourself over past mistakes.

3. Identity your positive traits and really examine any negative ones you have and ask “are these truly as negative as I make them out to be?”

4. Figure out what you even want from life. Where do you want to head to? What goals do you have and strive towards them as best as you’re able.

5. Treat yourself once a week or more to the best of your ability. You deserve it.

6. Metta Meditation. Gives yourself a little moment to wish happiness onto yourself and others.

7. Therapy. Get you’re cute self to therapy.

There you have it. Steps I’m taking for myself and steps you should take yourself if you struggle with self love like I do. I have no doubt many people far more qualified then me have given far better advice to achieving self love. Regardless, this past year these are what I’ve come to learn work best for me, even if I’m not fully there either.

Self love is important. Without it shits just not going to work out. I’ve learned that plenty in the past year and have suffered plenty for it.

Hopefully this helps someone haha. I spent days typing on it on and off. Not quite 7000 words, but close to it. And if you thought this advice was stupid or wrong or a waste of time to type! I wish you well and hope you have a good day alongside with every else.

Time to start thinking on the next one.

[devilscreekballad]

Sorry for using the term "woke" I hate using it but I was making a fair point, obviously gays,lesbians,trans people existed since the start of humanity but GENDERFLUIDISM or whatever its called is a modern thing, I support the LGBTQ+ community (one of my sisters is lesbian) but there is no such thing as you changing genders every 5 seconds, genderfluidism started some years ago when people thought that being genderfluid would make them different and "cool" so in the 1800s there is no way someone would think "uhmmm right now I'm a woman but tomorrow I'll identify as a man" they would identify as only having ONE gender forever. I don't want to come off as a troll, biagot or homophobe I'm just sharing my opinion

People, more precisely bigots, have tried spreading the same believe about gay people, lesbians, trans folks, autists, peeps with ADHD, dyslexia, and people being left-handed. While this might sound dismissive and trying to take things ad absurdum, I kid you not. All these things and then some have been declared a fad people 'pretend' to be to be 'cool' (or hip, or groovy, or sleek, or whatever the term at the time might have been).

Fighting for women's rights, fair wages, one's country's independence were considered 'fads'.

Being genderfluid (and others) is no different. It's something that's part of the human experience.

Maybe you have heard the term 'body euphoria/dysphoria' describing how 'at home' a person feels in their body (often in relation to their gender).

'Gender euphoria/dysphoria' are similar. While a person might feels okay in their body, their gender might feel 'off'. Think of it as a scale from 0-10, with five being neutral.

When it comes to being genderfluid this scale can differ from day to day, stay around the same number for a long while, or change depending on the situation and similar. As everything, it varies from person to person.

In Seán's case he's what's sometimes referred to as 'male leaning', meaning most of the time he's around a 6-9 or such.

And keep in mind, this is only from a (central-european & anglo-saxon centered) western perspective. As mentioned other cultures have entirely different views on gender that sometimes overlap with the western perspective, but are something vary different.

As for historical accuracy, the Chevalier d'Éon might be an example of someone genderfluid. (again, keep in mind folks back when didn't have terms for this stuff, so we can only speculate unless we do have clear statements from the person about things)

A lot of queer history has been lost to bigots and people believing the tales about these facettes of human life being a fad, a disease or a mental illness, and who saw it their duty to 'correct' these 'shortcomings' for the history books.

Being genderfluid isn't a smartphone in the stone ages, it's historically accurate whenever you have human(oid species) in your story. The only thing you can mess up with it is the terminology.

[originalitysquared]

ok, good faith response. (as good as i can get with how hostile my last ask was.) seriously. you're part of a community that, as part of its main agenda, wants to make it unsafe for transgender women to exist in public. how do you square that with saying you don't hate anyone? it's not like radfems are known primarily as terfs because of their deep loving kindness towards trans people. why are you okay with being a part of that?

This is a 100% good faith response, I am taking this as an actual question and will try my best to express myself succinctly without trying to offend or exacerbate any hostilities.

Ok so, a couple assumptions are being made:

What community? I will assume radical feminism as a whole. Now the problem with this assumption is that there is no centralized group of radfems. The main idea behind radical feminism is that society exists in a patriarchy and women must radically change this and center women. To clarify, Modern Liberal Feminism says that women and men should be equal. Radical feminism says women should be centered over men. To make up for the years of oppression and subjugation, but also because women are stronger and more capable than men in many aspects. (You don't have to agree with this, this is just what radfems believe).

In this aspect, some consider the decentralization of men to be "hate". I do not. I do not want to hurt men in any way, I just want them to stop being the center of everything. I don't want an all female world, I want a world where females are seen as strong and capable and no one compares them to males at all.

Fundamental aspects of living, to me, are freedom and happiness. Nowhere do I state that I think people should be hurt or denied a fundamental aspect of living. That said, Happiness at the expense of others has it's own issues. This is why I don't get mad when people think that I am being hateful. This idea that denying men makes them unhappy and is therefore hateful is a logical one to make.... if you ignore that men have such a comfortable life due to the patriarchy and oppression of women.

Then trans people come in. I do not deny the existence of transwomen, I just believe they are still biological men. Trans and cis are different, and to ignore that is to ignore reality. If trans women were exactly like cis women, they wouldn't need another term to describe themselves. TERF is a term coined by people who are not radfems, and thus, is not succinct in describing the reality of the situation. Transwomen are men who experience severe dysphoria about their own body and wish to look like women. The reality is that they are men. Transmen are women who experience severe dysphoria about their body and wish to look like men. The reality is that they are women and therefore included in feminism.

This is not a hatred movement. Radfems are brought together by a love of women and recognition of patriarchy, to frame them as simply "women who are against transwomen" is further putting women in comparison to men. It is minimalizing the ideology to a straw(wo)man.

[defilerwyrm]

I’m supposed to be packing right now but *Scott Weiland voice* a thing occurred to me so here I am to talk about the Mighty Nein again.

Today I am thinking about self-reclamation. That’s the central thesis of each of the Mighty Nein’s stories. I’ve said…somewhere, I forget where, in the past that Campaign 2 is all about freeing people, but I don’t think it clicked until a discussion on Nott that this extends to their personal character arcs as well.

(This is over 2,100 words long so yeah let’s have a read-more cut)

Nott is—I mean damn, what a trans vibe all over. As Veth 1.0, she was kept down by the assumptions of her fellow halflings who constantly told her that she was nothing special: untalented, unattractive, cowardly, simpleminded. As Nott, she was kept down by the expectations and later the reputation of the goblins, as well as by her intense dysphoria, alcoholism, and phobia of water. Yet she proved over and over that all she needed was room to grow into herself (as well as, you know, a pretty blatant parallel to transition). She wasn’t a coward: she was afraid often, and mistook that for cowardice, but she ran screaming towards her fears so many times. Far from being stupid, she started the game with the second highest Intelligence in the party, and proved herself clever and resourceful. Hell, as @mapleandgingeroatmeal pointed out on Discord, she learned a whole damn language in a single year while under extreme duress!

She was able to not only tackle and defeat her alcoholism, but her phobia as well; that final scene where she gets into the pool in the Blooming Grove and floats, alone and relaxed, unfearful, was such a powerful one. A big part of her ability to heal from her reincarnation trauma (one we trans people subjected to the wrong puberty know all too well) and the resulting coping mechanisms was reclaiming her body, the correct body, through the transmogrification spell—all the more impactful that she personally had a hand in its development. And when she reunited with Yeza, it wasn’t to return to being a housewife and assistant who left all the fun and daring things to her husband, but to be a proper partner in both family and business. She proved that she was something special, and no one was going to hold her down again.

Fjord’s journey was, in part, a parallel for internalized racism even before everything with Uk’otoa. He was made to feel bad about his body by others, and even took painful steps to modify himself in hopes of being accepted. He made himself a chameleon—someone who says at all turns, “No, really, I belong here.” He was accustomed to being kept around solely because he was useful, and afforded (affjorded?) esteem only in relation to what he could do for others. Everything was conditional. Work hard, and we’ll keep you aboard. Obey me, and I’ll power your spells. Work with me, and I won’t kill you and your crew. When he rejected Uk’otoa, he expected the Nein to abandon him. But something life-changing happened instead: they showed him unconditional love. They showed him that they wanted him around even without his magic, because they liked him—not his obedience, not his masks, but what he kept hidden behind them.

I think a big part of him coming to the point of rejecting Uk’otoa, even if it meant being rejected by the Nein as well, was seeded in his talks with Wursh some 40 episodes prior. There’s no doubt in my mind that meeting another half-orc who both saw past Fjord’s “I must be Tough around other orc-blooded people to measure up to their expectations” bluster and could model self-assurance. Fjord, an orphan, has always desperately sought role models, and it seems like he never had one who looked like him until that moment. He got to see this man who looked like him not only operating as a successful, respected, and accepted member of his society, but also carrying himself with a level of comfort with and confidence in his mixed heritage that Fjord had never thought he could achieve. (I am waving a little “representation matters” flag.) I’m not trying to infantilize him here when I say that his inner child was, in some ways, very present in Fjord’s personality, and that child was scared, ashamed, and lonely. In finally receiving unconditional love and seeing self-love modeled for him, he was able to embrace his own strengths and prove that he was more than just a servant, he was a brilliant leader, up to and including saving the Nein from a certain TPK—not by striking the final blow himself, but with a single, well-chosen utility spell.

Yasha, Breaker of Chains. Her journey of self-reclamation was as blatant as Veth’s. It was spelled out in visions, it played out in dreams. Getting mind-controlled by Obann a second time was like the worst kind of relapse. You escape your abuser, you bury the memories so deep it’s just smooth darkness in your mind, and with exactly the right words they pull you back to their side again, and this time you don’t know if you’ll ever find your way out. Another act of unconditional love saved her from that: even after Yasha killed Beau, Caduceus’s thought was not to bring her down, but to free her from the mind control spell. She will have to live with the memory of doing that for the rest of her life, but she accepts that it wasn’t her fault, and no one in her found family thinks it was either.

But the other part of Yasha’s journey, the one that’s even more poignant to me, was her reclaiming her ability to love. So much so that that’s how the revived proto-Kingsley identified her: love. In the wake of Zuala’s murder and Yasha’s exile, she hardened her heart, and trusted next to no one. She chose to open her heart to the Nein, to find strength in them, and eventually to allow herself to be in love with someone. I can’t think of a more defiant and radical act for someone who’s been hurt so badly than to allow themselves to love again.

Beau, like Veth/Nott, was held down by the expectations of others—first her father, then the Cobalt Soul—but she threw herself into railing against them with everything she had. She didn’t want responsibility. She didn’t want a title. She didn’t want family, because family hurt her, and she didn’t want romantic love, because she’d never thought she was worthy of it: a self-perpetuating cycle of acting like a fuckup reprobate and thinking of herself as a bad person because of it, so why not do it some more? She always felt like she had something to prove, but didn’t really know what that was. But she had a drive all the same. A drive to destroy that which harmed her. And when she realized that what harmed her was systemic, she found her path…and with it, the title and responsibility she’d sworn she never wanted.

I’ve said before that the most fantastical part of Critical Role was that victims of abuse were not only believed, but aided, and the powers that abused them were torn down, their abusers—regardless of status—brought to justice. It’s a power fantasy. I’m not saying that as a bad thing. On the contrary, it was as cathartic as it was shocking. And it showed Beau that her words meant something, that her pain was valid, that she wasn’t just screaming into the void. It showed her that her hard-headedness could be turned into resolve, that her nosiness could ferret out corruption and drag it out into the light of day, and that giving a damn about others meant she could spare them from going through what she was put through herself. She could break the cycle. And she could do it on her own damn terms. Her father had her abducted by the Soul in the hopes that they’d quash the rebellion in her, but instead she turned her rebellion into a towering engine for good.

It’s somewhat ironic but also perfectly fitting that Caduceus is a cleric of death when he begins his story in a state of stasis. He stays behind while everyone else in his family leaves, because that’s what he’s supposed to do. Someone has to be there. That’s how it’s always been. The others will come back. That’s how it’s always happened. But they don’t come back, and after years and years of standing still, he’s finally pushed to act. Even then, it’s because “fate willed it.” There was something he was supposed to do. He had a duty to perform. Dea vult. He spoke to the Wildmother time and again, asking for her guidance. Tell me where to go. Tell me what to do. Tell me if I’m doing this right. He put one foot in front of the other not knowing where he was going, but somehow trusting that he’d get to where he needed to be. And in the end, when all else had failed, his goddess listened to him.

He’s a lot subtler about this, in terms of this thesis. If anything I would say that Caduceus’s arc was about rejecting the stasis of blindly doing what you’re told and choosing to act, and making the world a better place for the effort. I’m forever sad that it wasn’t explored more in canon, but by the end he could at least admit that he’d been afraid his family wouldn’t come back. Had he continued to wait, his family would have remained stone; he would have died alone, and the Blooming Grove with him.

Mollymauk, on the other hand, laid out in clear terms early on that he didn’t give two shits about who was in his body before him. He began as a reclamation—or rather, staking a claim. Where others were running from their pasts, he was flat-out ignoring it. Even after meeting Cree, he affirmed that whoever he was before, that guy was gone, and Molly had no interest in revisiting that past. In light of that, Lucien’s revival after Molly’s death was a dark mirror of reclamation of the self: literally taking back what was his. After their third death, Kingsley took their place—a new person in the same body, but not so completely untethered to his previous lives, now with the support of friends who accepted that he wasn’t their Molly and welcomed him into the fold all the same.

Sometimes people remake themselves multiple times. I sure as hell have, in more ways than one. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it is a powerful thing, to declare “This is who I am now, and the past will not define me.”

Jester is where things get a little tricky again. A previous meta of mine talks about how the remarkable thing about Jester is that, while the stock story for a Bubbly Naïf character who goes through Hell and back is that they become hardened and jaded, Jester never loses the spark of joyful mischief that makes her who she is. She’s a bit of a contrast to most of the others, in this way, in that her maturation was not a reclamation of a ruined self, but a refusal to be ruined in the first place. Not in a static way, either, because she did mature and grow; she just did so in a way that refused to allow the traumas she’d experienced and the horrors she’d seen define or change her for the worst. If anything, Jester’s arc was an affirmation of the self.

And then there’s Caleb. Caleb, my beloved. Interestingly, there’s a lot to be said about his arc that I’ve already said of the others: he spent his time in stasis; he remade his own identity; he ran from his past at first, only to confront it head-on; he went from trying to remain unnoticed and just blend in to standing out from the crowd; he gained confidence and self-acceptance from seeing himself mirrored in another; he allowed his shattered heart to feel love again; he confronted and started to heal from his trauma; he broke the cycle of abuse that broke him. So many things that I love and admire about the others’ arcs are found in Caleb’s as well. And he, too, was saved by love.

That’s the recurring thread in all of these stories. The found family they created empowered each of them to become their better selves. They changed each other, the way only experiencing unconditional love can change a person. Despite their faults, their flaws, their crimes, their sins—real and imagined alike—they came to treat each other as worthy of love and support…and under that warm light, look how tall they grew.

Except Veth. She’s still short.

[tyrannuspitch]

Jumping off @kidrat​ ’s recent post on JKR, British transphobia, and transphobia against transmasculine people, after getting a bit carried away and too long to add as a comment:

A major, relatively undiscussed event in JKR’s descent into full terfery was this tweet:

[image id: a screenshot of a tweet from JK Rowling reading: “’People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Rowling attaches a link to an article titled: “Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate” /end id]

This can seem like a pretty mundane TERF talking point, just quibbling over language for the sake of it, but I think it’s worth discussing, especially in combination with the idea that cis women like JKR see transmasculine transition as a threat to their womanhood. (Recite it with horror: ”If I were young now, I might’ve transitioned...”)

A lot of people, pro- or anti-transphobe, will make this discussion about whether the term “woman” should include trans women or not, and how cis women are hostile to the inclusion of trans women. And that’s absolutely true. But the actual language cis women target is very frequently being changed for the benefit of trans men, not trans women, and most of them know this.

Cis people are used to having their identities constantly reaffirmed and grounded in their bodies. A lot of cis women, specifically, understand their social and physical identities as women as being defined by pain: misogynistic oppression is equated to the pains of menstruation or childbirth, and both are seen as the domain of cis women. They’re something cis women can bond over and build a “sisterhood” around, and the more socially aware among them can recognise that cis women’s pain being taken less seriously by medicine is not unrelated to their oppression. However, in the absence of any trans perspectives, these conversations can also easily become very territorial and very bioessentialist.

Therefore... for many cis women, seeing “female bodies” described in gender neutral language feels like stripping their pain of its meaning, and they can become very defensive and angry.

And the consequences for transmasculine people can be extremely dangerous.

Not only do transmasculine people have an equal right to cis women to define our bodies as our own... Using inclusive language in healthcare is about more than just emotional validation.

The status quo in healthcare is already non-inclusive. When seeking medical help, trans people can expect to be misgendered and to have to explain how our bodies work to the doctors. We risk harassment, pressure to detransition, pressure to sterilise ourselves, or just being outright turned away. And the conversation around pregnancy and abortion in particular is heaving with cisnormativity - both feminist and anti-feminist cis women constantly talk about pregnancy as a quintessentially female experience which men could never understand.

Using gender-neutral language is the most basic step possible to try and make transmasculine people safer in healthcare, by removing the idea that these are “women’s spaces”, that men needing these services is impossible, and that safety depends on ideas like “we’re all women here”. Not institutionally subjecting us to misgendering and removing the excuse to outright deny us treatment is, again, one of the most basic steps that can be taken. It doesn’t mean we’re allowed comfort, dignity or full autonomy, just that one major threat is being addressed. The backlash against this from cis women is defending their poorly developed senses of self... at the cost of most basic dignity and safety for transmasculine people.

Ironically, though transphobic cis women feel like decoupling “women’s experiences” from womanhood is decoupling them from gendered oppression, transmasculine people experience even more marginalisation than cis women. Our rates of suicide and assault are even higher. Our health is even less researched than cis women’s. Our bodies are even more strictly controlled. Cis women wanting to define our bodies on their terms is a significant part of that. They hold the things we need hostage as “women’s rights”, “women’s health”, “women’s discussions” and “support for violence against women”, and demand we (re-)closet ourselves or lose all of their solidarity.

Fundamentally, the problem is that transphobic cis women are possessive over their experiences and anyone who shares them. Because of their binary understanding of gender, they’re uncomfortable with another group sharing many of their experiences but defining themselves differently. They’re uncomfortable with transmasculine people identifying “with the enemy” instead of “with their sisters”, and they’re even more uncomfortable with the idea that there are men in the world who they oppress, and not the other way around. “Oppression is for women; you can’t call yourself a man and still claim women’s experiences. Pregnancy is for women; if you want to be a man so badly why haven’t already you done something about having a woman’s body? How dare you abandon the sisterhood while inhabiting one of our bodies?”

Which brings me back to the TERF line about how “If I were young now, I might have transitioned.”

I’m not saying Rowling doesn’t actually feel any personal connection to that narrative - but it is a standard line, and it’s standard for a reason. Transphobic cis women really believe that there is nothing trans men go through that cis women don’t. They equate our dysphoria to internalised misogyny, eating disorders, sexual abuse or other things they see as “female trauma”. They equate our desire to transition to a desire to escape. They want to “help us accept ourselves” and “save us” from threats to their sense of identity. The fact is, this is all projection. They refuse to consider that we really have a different internal experience from them.

There’s also a marked tendency among less overtly transphobic cis women, even self-proclaimed trans allies, to make transphobia towards trans men about cis women.

Violence against trans men is chronically misreported and redefined as “violence against women”. In activist spaces, we’re frequently told that any trauma we have with misogyny is “misdirected” and therefore “not really about us”. If we were women, we would’ve been “experiencing misogyny”, but men can’t do that, so we should shut up and stop “talking over women”. (Despite the surface difference of whether they claim to affirm our gender, this is extremely similar to how TERFs tell us that everything we experience is “just misogyny”, but that transmasculine identity is a delusion that strips us of the ability to understand gender or the right to talk about it.)

I have personally witnessed an actual N*zi writing an article about how trans men are “destroying the white race” by transitioning and therefore becoming unfit to carry children, and because the N*zi had misgendered trans men in his article, every response I saw to it was about “men controlling women’s bodies”.

All a transphobe has to do is misgender us, and the conversation about our own oppression is once again about someone else.

Transphobes will misgender us as a form of violence, and cis feminist “allies” will perpetuate our misgendering for rhetorical convenience. Yes, there is room to analyse how trans men are treated by people who see us as women - but applying a simple ��men oppressing women” dynamic that erases our maleness while refusing to even name transphobia or cissexism is not that. Trans men’s oppression is not identical to cis women’s, and forcing us to articulate it in ways that would include cis women in it means we cannot discuss the differences.

It may seem like I’ve strayed a long way from the original topic, and I kind of have, but the central reason for all of these things is the same:

Trans men challenge cis women’s self-concept. We force them to actually consider what manhood and womanhood are and to re-analyse their relationship to oppression, beyond a simple binary patriarchy. 

TERFs will tell you themselves that the acknowledgement of trans people, including trans men, is an “existential threat” that is “erasing womanhood” - not just our own, but cis women’s too. They hate the idea that biology doesn’t determine gender, and that gender does not have a strict binary relationship to oppression. They’re resentful of the idea that they could just “become men”, threatened by the assertion that doing so is not an escape, and completely indignant at the idea that their cis womanhood could give them any kind of power. They are, fundamentally, desperate not to have to face the questions we force them to consider, so they erase us, deflect from us, and talk over us at every opportunity.

Trans men are constantly redefined against our wills for the benefit of cis womanhood.

TL;DR:

Cis women find transmasculine identity threatening, because we share experiences that they see as foundational to their womanhood

The fact that transphobes target inclusive language in healthcare specifically is not a mistake - They do not want us to be able to transition safely

Cis women are uncomfortable acknowledging transphobia, so they make discussion of trans men’s oppression about “womanhood” instead

This can manifest as fully denying that trans men experience our own oppression, or as pretending trans men’s experiences are identical to cis women’s in every way

[brawltogethernow]

I'd like to hear more about your murderbot transmigrator thoughts :))

Okay obviously when I said I wasn’t going to think about a Murderbot/Scum Villain fusion that was more of a goal, which is a lot like a lie. I have pecked out ~1k of prose for it, but none of it is presentable for longer than one line. The problem with this concept is that it’s actually very good, and there are a lot of meaty ideas to dig into with it, like, too many of them.

1. Murderbot would be immedately inclined to empathize with the System and guess at its motivations. Depending on what those are this may still stay an antagonistic relationship, because the way the System leverages its cosmic powers to coerce and strongarm people stomps on a lot of Murderbot’s triggers and is generally a dick move. The points system is just a gamified governor module. But it’s still a relationship, and if the System turns out to be an antagonist, it’s in that role as a fleshed out character with a personality who has been interrogated by someone with every reason to assume somebody made it and has commanded it to act like this for their own reasons.

Murderbot asks its function and designates it NarrSystem (Narrative System) or StorySystem or something because “the System” is too generic coming from its setting.

2. Transmigrating into a human body would be badweird and transmigrating into a human brain would be absolutely horrifying. (SecUnit could transmigrate into a system, but we’ve kind of been there done that with 2.0.) Dysphoria central! Murderbot gets to address that while it has never wanted to be a human, all humans are so convinced that being human is better that on some level it WAS worried that they were right. And now it can say with absolute certainty that they are not and this sucks. But also some things that it would have thought would be fundamentally different are actually the same. It’s just a whole time.

This is part of why I’m deviating from transmigration story standard and full stop making the transmigration a temporary situation, the other main reason being that Murderbot has more going on in its own world than your standard transmigration protagonist.

3. Either Murderbot gets back by hacking the System or it intends to but it’s ultimately the System’s decision. This is a very slow process because it can’t access tech the way it’s used to and the System’s structure is very different from what it’s dealt with before (because it strongly resembles Windows Vista). It needs tech and more control over its situation stat though so it’s going to keep at it until it works. Open your damn menus. SecUnit is going to rig transmigration until it’s like playing The Sims with cheat codes.

4. (This one is for me.) The System still talks in garbled Chinese netspeak, and Murderbot is like. Wow this program speaks in the lost tongue of an ancient civilization. How old is it. I can barely understand it. (Because of the bad memes not the Chinese.)

5. Murderbot gets yeeted into The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and has to deal with the emotionally exhausting scenario of empathizing with everybody present. It likes the heroes, and it likes the other heroes they’re in conflict with, it likes the more complex villains with fleshed out motivations, and it even has a soft spot for a lot of the side characters and bit villains. This is fundamentally incompatible with how it tries to ration its empathy, assess situations by sorting people into allies/nonhostiles/hostiles, and compartmentalize by nicknaming the people it’s in conflict with things like Target 1, Target 2, and Target 3.

6. The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, as the specific transmigration variation we’re jumping off of here, was not trying to interrogate the infinity mirror effect of heteronormativity reflecting back and forth between media and people, and as such is not like, a solid narrative about this. That said, this book is basically like:

Shen Yuan reads this giant mess of a book with a lot of straight sex fantasies, not completely without appreciating the romance, but with more antipathy for it than he admits to himself. Then he ends up in the book and thinks he’s meant to enable the romances he read, which he’s so completely resigned to doing he doesn’t notice that the main character is queer and gone on him, or that he, himself, has been studiously suppressing the desires he assumes he should have while unable to perceive what he actually wants and how it affects his behavior.

So the Murderbot version of this is to subvert amatonormativity with your pretty explicitly aroace protagonist whose reaction to fictional romance is tolerant at best. Murderbot embraces its own lack of desire for romance but dances around acknowledging that it desires other relationships and seems to be working around the incorrect belief that romance and friendship are both human things and that’s why it doesn’t engage with them. So:

Murderbot ends up in the immediate leadup to the resolution of a love dodecahedron - maybe surrounding Eden, just as the only named character from TRAFOSM I think we have. And Murderbot is (internally) like...okay...I was never very moved by ANY of these people as romantic choices for you...but I might as well try to guide you to the least offensive ones, I guess. And it’s so mired in expectations based on its foreknowledge of this arc that it doesn’t notice until Eden spells it out that they’re ditching ALL their suitors and have realized they’re complete without romance and want to devote themself to finding their long lost birth mother or farming science or something, which just takes SecUnit tf out.

Possibly I will become really ungovernable and say that after seizing the System’s capabilities Murderbot just offers to take Eden on a reverse isekai right off of Sanctuary Moon, leaving ART’s crew and the Preservation team to be like, Where Did You Just Get This Entire Human.

7. Further going off svsss, there is a meta thread to interrogate by plunking Murderbot into a villain character. It's already an evil robot trope that declined to go evil, this is true in-universe and it knows it, and it has very low expectations of the morals of the group that it belongs to - informed by the same media that was a lifeline to it when it was in a very bad situation - that it is still in the process of working through. The layers.

So yeah there’s a lot going on here. Send help.

[wielderofmysteries]

Jace Beleren, Masculinity, and the Trans Experience

(This post is a Twitter thread I wrote in response to a Goblin Lore podcast episode called “Jace Beleren and Toxic Masculinity”.)

I feel I have a unique perspective on this topic as a trans man. Trans man Jace isn't my headcanon, but it's an interpretation I love. He's my favorite character of all time, and as a trans man, I feel like reading Jace's flaws as toxic masculinity isn't quite right.

There are several "pillars" of toxic masculinity that Jace doesn't have. He doesn't have the self-destructive emotional repression, worship of sex and violence, or desire to subjugate women and his peers that men who experience toxic masculinity have.

Even BEFORE Ixalan, Jace was an example of many positive masculine traits. He was curious and emotionally open. He wrongly believed he could make decisions for others, but he cared for people, wanted to protect them, and couldn't sit idly by when he knew people were in danger.

In Agents of Artifice, he financially provided for Kallist and Liliana, and in Magic Story invited the Gatewatch to live in his home. Jace wanted to heal Garruk, tried to stop his rampage and had a Hedron implanted in Garruk's shoulder to relieve the effects of the curse.

"I don't want to hurt you, Garruk."

"Lucky for me, I don't feel the same way."

"Garruk, this is not a fair fight. You've suffered enough. Please. Come with me."

[...]

Jace stood in thought. Garruk held him by the throat, could end his life in an eye blink, had already proven he was immune to Jace's illusions. Garruk laughed again. If Garruk was open to having friends, then Jace might have been a good one.

"You win," said Jace. "We will leave you alone. I will not seek you out. But please, if you change your mind, come find us on Ravnica. Something is still not right here. We can help you."

In "Revelation at the Eye" Jace tells Ugin that Zendikar isn't a puzzle to be solved, and that it didn't matter if killing the Eldrazi has consequences, there are real people on Zendikar fighting for their lives and he needs to help them.

"Zendikar isn't a puzzle to be solved," said Jace. "It's a place. It's somebody's home. And those people are out there, right now, fighting for their world and wondering if anybody's going to help them kill what's killing them."

He showed scenes of suffering, then—of families mourning the lost, of landscapes ravaged by Ulamog, of even the skies and seas teeming with the Eldrazi menace.

Ugin cocked his head. The hedron architecture of the chamber seemed to melt and flow, became a pattern of tessellating dragons mocking him from the walls.

"So certain," said Ugin, "and so young."

Ral Zarek tried to kill Jace and ruined his relationship with his close friend Emmara, but in "Project Lightning Bug", Jace forgives him. Jace is honest about his feelings with Ral even after Ral was openly rude to him.

"I don't remember home," Beleren said quietly, unbidden.

"What?"

"You talked about growing up in Ravnica. A lot of my memories from my childhood are gone. Chopped up in my head into a few impressions. Most of what I remember begins here, on Ravnica. I'll never have roots here the way you do, and I admit I'm off to other planes a lot. But I think of myself as Ravnican to the core, too."

In Kaladesh block he wanted Chandra to be able to confide in him, and didn't want to stay home when he heard she could be in trouble. He used his mind magic to help Nissa sleep when she had a sensory overload in the busy city.

Nissa looked up. Jace and Gideon were exchanging a look. Both glanced at her.

They stood as one.

Jace turned toward the coat room. "I'll head to Kaladesh. It should be easy for me to—"

Lavinia appeared in his path, one hand resting on the pommel her sword. "Again?" she said, in a weary, disappointed tone.

He frowned up at her. "You can't expect me to sit here and do paperwork!"

Across the streets, beyond the barricades, the Consulate's panharmonicons are still blaring "The Gremlin's Wedding March" at us on infinite repeat at double speed. They left them on all night, and after the moon set Nissa started crying, hands clamped over her ears.

[...]

Jace sat down with her. They talked a minute and his eyes flashed. She curled up in a big potted plant and didn't wake up until the sun fell on her.

But what does being a man mean to Jace Beleren? Well, take a look at his feelings towards Gideon. Jace saw Gideon as the male ideal. I think Jace admires (and is envious of) the way Gideon is a representation of positive masculinity.

Eyes widened, jaws set. They understood their task, he was certain of that. But were they actually prepared to perform it?

What would Gideon say?

Jace smiled. Of course.

"For Zendikar," he said, raising one fist in the air. It felt thin to him, lacking Gideon's armored fist, his baritone war cry, his iron conviction.

None of that mattered. The soldiers shouted as one voice, holding their weapons aloft.

"For Zendikar!"

Gideon is not violent or hypersexual. He's kind, not afraid to ask for help, a defender rather than an aggressor. The pillars of toxic masculinity are absent in both Jace and Gideon. So why does Gideon's mere presence make Jace insecure? I think that insecurity is dysphoria.

I'm only 5 feet tall. People treat me like a kid, think I need help, and certainly don't see me as a man because I'm very small. It feels bad knowing my looks don't inspire others or make them feel safe like big tall guys can.

Gideon is super tall, muscular, conventionally attractive. He's charismatic and a natural leader. Gideon's like a human lighthouse. Jace is average height, out-of-shape, often pale and sickly, and his telepathy makes people automatically distrust him.

It's easy to see why people follow Gideon's lead so easily rather than Jace's. As a trans man, I personally related to Jace's insecurity. He feels inadequate compared to Gideon.

"I'd rather stand," said Gideon.

Jace stood up. It was an error. He still had to crane his neck to look Gideon in the eye, and now the size difference between them was glaringly obvious. He hated feeling small. Hated it.

Jace wanting to lead the Gatewatch didn't come from a desire to dominate others and be an ~alpha male~, but from a desire for people to believe in him. What Jace really wants is to prove to himself and others that he's competent and that he can be trusted.

This vision appeared whenever the man was struggling at a task.

[...]

"Listen, you aren't really suited to this task. Let me handle it." The vision's voice was gruff but friendly.

It came off as condescending.

The man was annoyed.

"I can do it myself."

The hallucination sighed. "You and I both know you're not suited to this. Let me handle it, you go philosophize on the other end of the beach."

"I said I can do it myself." The man let his irritation reach his voice.

"No, you can't. I call the shots and execute, you stand to the side. That's how this works."

The man responded by throwing his hook at the hallucination. It went straight through the figure's eye and landed behind him on the sand.

The time he spends with Vraska is so good for him! I loved that [the podcasts hosts] talked about how he was finally happy to follow someone else's lead! He didn't need to be a leader, he needed someone to trust him. She respected and loved him and thought he was incredible for who he is.

Vraska looked him in the eye. "You're incredible. You know that, right?"

Jace returned her smile and felt his cheeks warming. "I do my best."

"Well, your best is incredible," Vraska said, turning toward the central tower and approaching a large gate on what appeared to be its back side.

Liliana never told Jace he was incredible.

Liliana would have scoffed. She would have made a dismissive joke, rolled her eyes, and called him a show-off. She would not bother to talk to him for days. She would consume the body of a demon with a crocodile's jaws and laugh over the sound of its flesh tearing off. She would do all sorts of things, but she would never call him incredible.

It was important for Jace to get that validation. Now he's not insecure about his appearance. It's not that he finally developed into someone who was caring. He was caring all along, but he was held back by insecurity about how others perceive him. He learned to love himself.

Despite all his good qualities and deeds he still felt insecure because it wasn't easy to visually see him as a "strong man". I think it's important to acknowledge positive masculinity even when the man in question isn't attractive or charismatic, and even if he makes mistakes.

As a trans person, Jace's experience reminded me of the struggle to "pass". It's frightening how easily insecurity can turn into toxic masculinity when you feel different from "real men". If you don't look the part, some people will just never acknowledge you.

Next to 'perfect' guys like Gideon, it's easy to see our own perceived weaknesses and shortcomings. Easy to feel resentment for it. But from this struggle comes the strive to be better men, to be confident in ourselves, and comfortable in our bodies.

There's SO much I wanted to talk about, like how Jace's trauma shaped his need for control, how the IRL gamer guys he was created to represent actually hate him, how he's a male victim of abuse by a female partner, etc but this thread is already terribly long.

TLDR; I think toxic masculinity as a reading of Jace is missing some perspective. The trans perspective. Not all insecurity men experience is toxic masculinity. Sorry I totally should have waited until part 2 was out, but I couldn't stop thinking about that episode.

There's a lack of trans men's voices in... basically everything, and this is something I think we should definitely be included in. I'm so grateful for the Vorthos community opening these kinds of discussions. Super excited for part 2 of the podcast!

[a-room-of-my-own]

This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Burns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.

I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.

If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.

But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).

So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’

The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.

When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.

Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

[infcstissumam]

Hey its me elfie I've decided to stop being anonymous! I would love to hear more about uour Ghost Oc!

Great for you, Elfie! Even though this doesn’t need to be said, I’m proud of you, and I’m touched that you’re willing to send asks from your main account! 

About my Dragon/Unicorn Ghoul oc, where to start... Oh! What their species is and why they’re inhuman as hell! Despite my nicknames as my ‘dragon/unicorn/ oc, the relation to these species is only in appearance. They aren’t related to either unicorns or dragons. They are a pure-blooded ghoul in the respect that they do not require a human host. They are an incorporeal summoned ghoul from a time long before the current practices of Ghoul summoning were in place. 

This means that their body is the pure essence of their element and can be shapeshifted into whatever form they desire. Which currently is this void humanoid, dragon-esc shadow that Caduceus shapeshifts as is necessary. 

(i.e. they don’t have a face, where their face should be is just shadow, as is required by the Era I vestments, but they do have human lower arms, to not scare their patients who will be well acquainted with their arms, they have the trademarked raptor-dragon legs, to keep the shapeshifter’s body dysphoria at bay. Furthermore, to uphold arguably the most important aspect of a ghoul’s identity, they have a classic unicorn tail topped with a blade that is hidden by a tuft of black, curly hair, in typical unicorn fashion, and the trademark corkscrew-esc unicorn horn.) 

Now, this shapeshifting is a trait that most ghouls don’t have, as their reliance on the human body as a host means they have constraints regarding how they can alter the body to feel more at home. 

Modern, more regulated ghouls can only grow out a tail, lower blood flow to make their skin a grayish hue, replace their teeth and grow out horns. But ancient ghouls from a time when they prized ghouls for how inhuman they could be? They’re a different breed! 

With regards to their backstory, I'm still roughing this out, but bear with me.

Caduceus was one of many ghouls summoned in the early 11th century to serve under the newly anointed Papa Infinitus, Nihil's great grandfather. During the crusades genocide on the then underground Church of Ghost, they were present and aided in guarding their parish and charge while making their absconsion to Sweden. Still, protecting their charges took a lot out of Caduceus. They lost many friends, brothers and sisters. They had to abandon those they loved to guard their Church, and they have never regretted anything as much. Upon landing it what is now Linkoping, Caduceus was a changed ghoul. They, along with their remaining ghoul brethren, built the central Abbey, and Basilica of the unholy madre and padre. When the Church was settled and the congregation able to re-establish a way of life. Infinitus reassigned their tasks to care for the sick and injured, and in that position, they have stayed for hundreds and hundreds of years. In that time, Caduceus has come to form an odd fondness for humans. They know they aren't equal to ghouls, not by a long shot, but they fascinate them with their tenacity. Despite the repression of powers outside of their control, these weak little creatures banded together and fought for their beliefs and continue to do so hundreds of years later. It's sweet and inspirational. While their loyalties will always fall with their brethren, they have a soft spot for humans as a species and seek to protect them alongside their brothers and sisters.

[ispyawildmars]

ok im mad and need to scream about some stuff but i also don’t want to make ppl scroll past some longass post soooo. tw for body image stuff, food, emotional abuse, injuries, just shit ass environments in general.

I never see anyone talking about athletes and body image and how horrible team environments can be so i’m talking about it, as a student athlete who is dealing with the mental, physical, and emotional repercussions that sports have had on me.

okay. so. I have been a competitive swimmer since I was 7 years old. From the age of 7 up until 2 years ago, I swam with the same club team. I’ll call them the Sharks.

some background before I start talking about the body image thing: One thing i don’t think many people realize is how fucking abusive of an environment club swimming teams can be. and I really don’t say that lightly. Swimming is a sport where you train together but compete separately and most club teams are just groups of people who train together, not teams. You are constantly compared to the people you practice with. You are belittled if you can’t keep up and its personal attacks on your worth as a human. I was trained to believe that my worth as a human being depended on my performance in the pool. I am still dealing with unlearning and the repercussions of this mindset. Coaches can basically say anything to you. It’s normalized for coaches to be absolutely horrible to their swimmers. I had coaches who called us lazy, stupid, worthless- who would yell and swear at us. With that in mind, lets slide over to the body image thing.

First off, as an athlete in general, nothing specific to swimming- I was conditioned to associate my body with my athletic performance. The only use that it served was to allow me to compete. I was also constantly encouraged to push through major injuries. From what I’ve heard from other athletes and from being on my school’s cross-country team, this is normal for athletes, especially those who have been competing since a young age. I have permanent damage to my shoulder because a coach decided that a rotator cuff injury that put me in a sling for months and was inches away from surgical wasn’t a good enough reason for me to have a modified workout.This same coach insisted that I (and multiple other swimmers) swim through asthma and panic attacks. I nearly passed out during his practice multiple times and even blacked out on the pool deck once, just to be told that I “needed to suck it up”. I genuinely didn’t know what it felt like to not be in some level of pain from my sport. 

Now for swimming. Obviously as a swimmer, you are half naked around random people all of the time. If you’re trans, it’s dysphoria central, but in my case i just became completely desensitized to it. (that led to a whole ton of other issues but that can wait.) The other thing that this means is that you are comparing yourself to others constantly. And if you aren’t comparing yourself, then someone else is. Other swimmers, parents, coaches, everyone. Coaches will encourage you to be unhealthy. They will encourage you to lose weight, to push yourself harder than your body can physically handle. When I finally quit my club team, I effectively had a second puberty. I was working out to such an extent that my body shut down necessary functions. I didn’t have a regular period. When I quit, within 2 months I started having regular periods, my hips got wider, and I gained weight- something that should have happened when I was going through the rest of puberty. Immediately, my self esteem dropped and people started commenting on it. My mother told me that I was getting soft. I was getting healthy but told that I was “letting myself go”. My relationship with food was fucked up. I had been telling myself since 5th grade that it didn’t matter what I ate because I would burn it off in practice. So once there wasn’t a practice to burn the food off in, I started feeling guilty about eating what I wanted. I was so used to treating my body as a machine to compete with, that I was completely alienated from it. I quietly hated myself for so long. As a swimmer I thought that I needed to be taller, be slimmer, to not have big thighs. After I quit my club team, I started hating things that I genuinely cannot change. I can’t change the width of my hips. I can’t change the way that my body fat distributes itself. 

So where am I now? I still am a competitive swimmer. I am still registered with my former club team, because that is the only way that I can compete in swim meets. But I do not go to their practices. When I go to meets, I do not participate in meet warmups with them. I will only speak to 3 coaches that work with that team. I swim with my school team and with a summer team- these teams are based on having fun and being teams. My school coach works incredibly hard to make us a team because she is a former club and college swimmer who knows how bad teams can be. I took an entire year to stop hating swimming and another year to realize that I genuinely enjoy the sport. I am still unlearning the idea that my self worth is tied to my success in school and sports. (no, swimming is not the factor that contributes to this). I am still learning that my body is fine the way that it is. But mostly, now I’m pissed off. I have healed enough to fight.

So why am I bothering to write about something that happened years ago- well first off, in order to process this trauma. And yes, it is trauma. And second off, because I want other athletes to know that they aren’t the only ones dealing with this and that it IS NOT OKAY. It has been normalized in so many sports. But that doesn’t mean what happened is okay. You are worthy of kindness and deserve to not hate yourself. Your body is fine, I promise. You are enough, as you are. You do not have to change a single thing about yourself in order to be enough. you always have been and you always will be. 

I love you. And I know that right now it doesn’t feel like it but you are a human and worthy of love. You will fuck up and you will learn to move on from it. You are human. and that is ENOUGH.

[carlyraejepstein]

potentially upsetting topics: sui, gender dysphoria, abuse and parents, sex

Elliot Page’s coming out rescued an awful day. Its wording is unbelievably powerful, a comment I have made once before and will continue to do so. In it, he so strongly encompasses the fears, the sorrow, the rage, but most importantly the determination and the defiance of not only him but every trans person. I hesitate to use the word “community” because it implies a certain connection that might just not be there; I play a bit of Counter-Strike but I don’t consider myself part of the Counter-Strike community; yet when I read Elliot’s words I feel solidarity, I feel a pull to the trans community that I often don’t feel I pay my dues to, and it feels good, really good. Like I said on Twitter once, other trans people being, existing, living, is just rad. Inspiring, even, despite how that word has been worn out by cis people.

However, there’s a certain something that Elliot didn’t write, for Elliot never wrote “I am a man”; only his name, and pronouns, how he wishes to be referred to. Of course, we cannot possibly know what this omission means or does not mean to Elliot, but it’s something that concurred with a shift in how I perceive my own gender.

I remember first properly ruminating on gender in 2012 or 2013. My understanding was primitive, coming from Wikipedia. Once I knew what transgender or, given the time period, transsexual, the curiosity never really went away. I knew at this point about transition, and I knew about deed polls because of my resentment of my parents, I knew about HRT and I even knew about the GICs. I felt compelled to be an ally in that turbulent period in both my life and in the online culture I immersed myself in from around 2015 to 2017. At this time a friend was going through their own transition and seeing them gave me pause for thought; partly pride, partly worry but a small kernel of imagination, wondering if that could ever be me. It was when I went to sixth form, with its environment permitting greater yet still constrained self expression, that I felt gender dysphoria hit me with its full weight. Thinking, wondering, worrying about being transgender has been the central dialogue of my internal and external monologue ever since. Not a day passes where I don’t think about the dysphoria I feel over my continued closet-dwelling and the malignantly gendered properties of my body. On a January morning in 2019, at my very lowest point, motionless under the covers, I gave myself a choice between transition and death, and I chose transition.

It’s been a complex journey. When I was 13 I shortened my gender neutral name to make it more masc (which I have now happily embraced as my middle name). I leant into the deepening of my voice because I thought it gave me authority, conditioned through the harsh words of people from public Team Fortress 2 servers. I’ve done almost everything under the sun that gets people to say “I’d never have known!” when you come out to them; I worry that I still do and that nothing has changed. I’ve gone and cross-dressed when my parents were out, and I’ve been traumatised by Susan’s Place. I am autistic, no one who has met me can escape that fact; not that I would want to, and as a consequence I am so much more confident in my presence on the internet than I ever have been in the flesh, despite me still not knowing how to make friends; hence I’ve ended up trying to piece my transition together through 4chan (I know, bad) and Reddit and Twitter.

Perhaps the biggest reason I am not out is the time when I decided I would come out to my mother as trans. When we were in Munich we had walked past a pride parade, and when we got back to the apartment I revealed off hand that I was bi. My mother chided me for not telling them before hand since it was “polite” to do so, as if it were not my choice to make because, as I still believe to this day, it’s not a big deal and it’s none of their business. But I decided this time it was important, and that I could trust her. It turns out that just like every other time, trusting my mother is a bad idea that is guaranteed to cause me pain every time I make that mistake. She told me that because she “knows more about [me] than [I] do”, that she thought that I was just straight up wrong, couched it in rhetoric about how she thought that I was too weak to be trans, and quoted the shockingly offensive “autism is extreme male brain” theory to me. It was really devastating at the time and I think it still affects me to this day, especially as she constantly tries to worm her tendrils back into my life after I moved out.

But enough about my mother; she is a fucking flat out abuser. She has emotionally abused me, and undoubtedly my brother, all our lives. I was relieved that my dad chose not to react aggressively as she did, but with a modicum of respect and agreement not to make such a big deal out of it, something I would never expect my mother to match. In the middle of writing this piece I had to decide that I could not do it any longer, and I would never let her back into my life again.

Where that conversation in late 2018 relates to Elliot Page’s statement is my mother’s purported belief that “you don’t have to define yourself as a man or a woman”. Going past the fact that she is lying, since her tolerance for all trans people is thinner than the grey hairs on her head going on the basis that she couldn’t bring herself to say one positive thing to her own daughter that afternoon, it struck me recently that I can more eloquently describe my gender through elimination rather than a label. I am happy to call myself a woman, a trans woman, and I don’t feel as if I really am wavering in or around the binary. But what I can say for definite is that while I have been a boy for almost all my life, and am holding onto that, I am not, and never will be, a man.

Where that leaves me is that I am not a man, but must I be a woman? If I am perhaps not a woman, am I non-binary? No; it doesn’t feel right. However, if I attach just a convenience to the label woman, I can give myself that flexibility in how I feel and how I present myself, and perhaps the biggest example of that is how in recent months I have made peace with my voice. It is not really a femme voice; I hit vocal fry just speaking normally. But I know how to be expressive with it; it is my voice that I have honed over 19 years after all. One day I want to find someone who will help me upgrade my voice (and yes, upgrade) but keeping it means I fulfil one cool thing about being trans, and that is saying fuck you to the very existence of the gender binary. I keep this voice out of necessity, but I’m still trans femme, I am still a woman and I still want my facial hair zapped off.

As well, I reserve the right to say I used to be a boy. Not a man, but a boy. That’s why they call it boymoding, right? How else can I describe the first 17 years of my life? I can be a boy all the same now, although I may be pushing it aged 20, and at the point at which I am really stretching that concept which at this point I am adhering to solely for my safety and comfort, I shouldn’t need to use it anymore. Wishful thinking, of course.

I think we should consider why we use “man” and “woman” in the first place. From my perspective they are simply words to describe people with two different sets of primary and secondary sexual characteristics, convenient because, well, being cis is unavoidably common. But they are not discrete, as we so often have to reiterate using intersex people as an unwilling crutch, where one does not occur in the other they are so often analogous and often they overlap! Supposedly 60% of teenage boys develop further breast tissue, and 40% of women have some form of facial hair. Thinking that the two are discrete gives rise to the idea of “biological sex”, a concept developed by cis people either to misgender trans people in a way they think is philosophically rigorous, or to reconcile their tenuous support for trans people with a continuing belief in the gender binary. Personally I would like to smash the concept of biological sex to bits because it is not useful to us. At the very least it may describe one’s primary sexual characteristics but bottom surgery exists, and I don’t happen to think that it is “mutilation”. I don’t need to argue that “biological sex can be changed”; they are not discrete categories, and I don’t need to move between them, or seek validation for having moved between them. It is not a helpful generalisation for bodies, diverse as they are.

I must add that as a trans woman the fact that I may have a penis doesn’t mean that I use it in the same way as a man. I use mine to pee, primarily, and it’s definitely not going inside anyone except myself any time soon; a whole zine was written about how trans women fuck and use their bits to fuck, so I definitely don’t need to anyway.

Another bullshit concept is “biological destiny” or “biological reality”, although I will give less breath to this one because at it’s core it is fundamentally misogynistic, and it so often is divorced from any sensible definition of reality. It’s like if I had to have my arm amputated and then someone came up to me and said “you’ll always have two arms, you were born with them and you’ll die with them”.

I’ve heard and thought a lot about gender abolition but it seems to me that its proponents expect that like the state, gendered differences will just disappear over time. But I don’t want that to happen. If the binary is done away with I don’t want gender to disappear I want it to flourish! Because gender is beautiful, men are beautiful, women are beautiful, and everyone in between or outwith are beautiful. On the other hand, me and you don’t need to be men, or women, or call ourselves non-binary to be beautiful. Being trans is about cultivating your own beauty and your own identity. When cissiety demands that the only identity and presentation we’re allowed is one that corresponds to what they decided was between our legs when we were born, why give ourselves only one other choice?

I don’t really know how to end this piece because I wrote one half of it one day and the other half a couple of weeks later. At the very least I’m glad I can attribute my peace with not necessarily being a woman but a femme to Elliot Page, and not my rotten bastard mother.

[ao3feed-izuku-midoriya]

Foggy's Wisps (Wips Central)

Foggy's Wisps (Wips Central) by Foggydaysahead

Welcome! I made this really fast to actually organize all my WIPS! I am a tired individual(?) so please don't try to eat me because I have an inconsistent update and your favorite fic of mine hasn't been updated in a long time...BUT! there is actually a chance Imma write these so yay! Anyhow, I regret not updating my fics but eat my ass folks. Hope y'all enjoy them! LMK if you want some to be expanded on because for now they are just gonna be little tidbits. When I have time I will write more. I am just honestly trying to clean up my google docs and notes on my phone.

The rundown is that these are different small story ideas that I have and each one will have TW and relationships at the beginning so you will know to skip or to keep reading. I will not do crossovers because I am not big-brained enough to do it. Anyways! ONWARDS!!

Words: 1426, Chapters: 3/?, Language: English

Fandoms: 僕のヒーローアカデミ�� | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia, Kingdom Hearts (Video Games), Ao no Exorcist | Blue Exorcist, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII

Rating: Not Rated

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death

Characters: Midoriya Izuku, Midoriya Hisashi, Sensei | All For One, Midoriya Inko, Dabi, Shigaraki Tomura | Shimura Tenko, Class 1-A, Class 1-B, Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Riku (Kingdom Hearts), Kairi (Kingdom Hearts), Ventus (Kingdom Hearts), Vanitas (Kingdom Hearts), Xehanort (Kingdom Hearts), Okumura Rin, Okumura Yukio, Fujimoto Shirou, Satan (Ao no Exorcist), Cloud Strife, Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII), Zack Fair, Roche (Compilation of FFVII), Genesis Rhapsodos, Angeal Hewley, Aerith Gainsborough, Tifa Lockhart

Relationships: LISTEN ITS A LOT THIS IS WIP GALOR IMMA PUT IT INFRONT OF EVERY CHAPTER

Additional Tags: Angst, Fluff and Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angst with a Bad Ending, Listen not everything can be happy, I NEED MY ANGST FUEL, Body Horror, Sorry that one is more for Kingdom Hears and FFVII, Maybe AnE, Magic, Mythology - Freeform, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Mythology References, Transgender, Body Dysphoria, Sorry that one is for the transgender tag, ill warn y'all, TW will be there have no fear, Body Changing?, Yeah thats what happens when you get cursed by a goddess, Possession, Demonic Possession, Heterochromia, Asexual Character, listen, I GOTTA PUT IT THERE, Alternate Universe - Space, Villain Midoriya Izuku, Quirkless Midoriya Izuku, Midoriya Izuku Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I mean he should, Addressed Trauma, For all my boys, more tags will be added

Read Here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27132902

[atamascolily]

more CotJ meta, because apparently I cannot be stopped

I don't understand how essence transfer works in Children of the Jedi.  It seems... wildly inconsistent depending on what is narratively convenient at the time.

I don’t know why Callista is able to make the jump from her original body to the Eye of Palpatine’s gunnery computers and then from the computers to Cray’s body without (much) issue, while poor Nichos couldn’t. Maybe it's because Callista had received secret Jedi training from her master that Nichos didn’t have access to? Or because it would interfere with Hambly’s plot to give Callista Cray’s body? 

(I think we all know the answer to this, but I’m gonna go through all the arguments anyway.)

Luke does float the idea of Cray creating a droid-body for Callista to inhabit, which Cray and Callista both reject, but for wildly different reasons.

   “You said Djinn Altis showed you—taught you—to transfer your self, your consciousness, your … your reality—to another object. You’ve done it with this ship, Callista. You’re really here, I know you are …”

   “I am,” she said softly. “There’s enough circuitry, enough size, enough power in the central core. But a thing of metal, a thing programmed and digitalized, isn’t human, and can’t be human, Luke. Not the way I’m human now.”

So Callista’s argument is basically that a giant ship is big enough to contain her spirit, but a droid wouldn't be? How did Exar Kun manage this, then? I mean, granted, he was evil, and had low standards for ethics, but still... I don’t get it.

I get her main point here: she believes she's more "human" as a ghost than she would be as a droid, or with her spirit somehow “translated” as a series of zeros and ones, as Cray was somehow able to do with Nichos. And I can see why she wouldn’t want that kind of existence for herself. But I still don’t get how consciousness works in this novel, and why Callista can’t transfer herself--her real self--into a different object, the way she did before, instead of being “translated” by Cray into a digital copy.

This also begs the question of how much Callista's HUMAN spirit is influenced by thirty years in the computer core, which the novel doesn't address, but fics like Deaka's "Blue Screen" on FFN are fortunately there to fill the gap.

Here’s Cray’s take on Luke’s request to “fix” Callista:

   “To turn her into what Nichos is? To cannibalize parts from the computers, wire together enough memory to digitalize her, so you can have the metal illusion around to remind you what isn’t yours—and can’t be yours? I can do that … if that’s what you want.”

   ...“Not the way you and I are human.” Cray came over to them, her blond hair catching fire glints in the greasy light. “Not the way Nichos was human. I should never have done it, Luke,” she went on. “Never have … tried to go up against what had to be. My motto was always ‘If it doesn’t work, get a bigger hammer.’ Or a smaller chip. Nichos …”

   She shook her head. “He doesn’t remember dying, Luke. He doesn’t remember a switchover of any kind. And as much as I love … Nichos … as much as he loves me … I keep coming back to that. It isn’t Nichos. He isn’t human. He tries to be, and he wants to be, but flesh and bone have a logic of their own, Luke, and machinery just doesn’t think the same way.”

   Her mouth twisted, her dark eyes chill and bitter as the vacuum of space. “If you want me to, I’ll make you something that’ll hold a digitalized version of her memories, her consciousness … But it won’t be the consciousness that’s alive on this vessel. And you’ll know it, and I’ll know it. And that digitalized version will know it, too.”

So Cray rejects it because she doesn’t want Luke to make the same mistake she did: of seeing a replica as the original. And she makes a point of calling herself out on her attachment to Nichos, so much so that she warped and twisted her life to try and hold onto to him when she couldn’t. And she’s telling Luke not to do the same thing with his own life--which he will of course ignore.

I'm used to thinking of identical digital files as interchangeable, but that's not the case here when you're downloading human consciousness. There's also this idea that the droid/digital versions isn't "real," which is also worth chewing on, but a whole 'nother philosophical debate in and of itself.

But Cray's other point is also worth considering: the body we inhabit has qualities of its own that are impossible to deny; they shape our experiences of the world. This is why I'm absolutely floored that nobody ever follows up on Callista's experiences in Cray's body--how she's able to just smoothly take over, and the only issue ("software bug"?) is that she can't access the Force. This is... probably not how it works. I wrote a fic about this, but it only scratched the surface of the story possibilities for dysphoria and "body-as-a-character".  

(I solve this problem of essence transfer in other fics by arguing that it only works smoothly--i.e., with minimal dysphoria and a complete transfer of Force powers--if your spirit jumps to a physical clone of your original body. This explains why clone!Palpatine can access the Force, while Callista can't, because Cray's body 'recognizes' Callista's spirit as foreign to itself and is continually fighting her, so much so that all her Force abilities are tied up in holding her in that body--which is also Force-sensitive.)

Also, re: robot bodies and human consciousness, I’m reminded of a passage in Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” here:

   Once out of nature I shall never take    My bodily form from any natural thing,    But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make    Of hammered gold and gold enamelling    To keep a drowsy Emperor awake...

"Sailing to Byzantium" is all about what it means to be old in a failing body, right from the opening line--"That is no country for old men". And while it's poetry and there are a lot of ways to interpret, one valid take is that it's about shedding your bodily form to become a robot/artificial construct so you can live forever, and I have a lot of Feels about that in relationship to Star Wars. (Paging Anakin Skywalker!) But I digress.

Going back to CotJ.  an additional problem is that any physical components will be carrying the malvirus of the Will:

   “Thank you, Cray. And don’t think I’m not tempted. I love you, Luke, and I want … I want not to have to leave you, even if it means … being what I am now, forever. Or being what Nichos is now, forever. But we don’t have the choice. We don’t have time. And any components, any computers, you take from this ship, Cray, will have the Will in them as well.

I don’t know why she can’t jump to an object unconnected with the Will--like, say, her lightsaber. Isn’t Exar Kun using a big statue of himself as an anchor? I mean, it’s kinda of impractical compared to being inside a computer, but maybe it could be a temporary thing until Luke is able to build her a ship of her own??

(A lightsaber would be a really good choice as an anchor because of the kyber crystal inside, which Callista may or may not have a working relationship with if you hold them to be sentient or partially sentient beings...? There's fic potential there, that's all I'm saying.)

(As a further aside, in my Star Wars/Portal crossover “Testing Limits,” I postulate that the Will is a GLaDOs-like uploading of a human consciousness into digital form. I still believe that holds true for canon, even though there’s not much supporting evidence other than that the Will is set up as foil to Callista and it adds to the incredibly Gothic atmosphere. Either the Will is human consciousness, or it’s modeled after human consciousness for maximum Uncanny Valley effect because Luke is always describing it as having a presence and malevolent intentions, and Callista is always fighting it.)

So Barbara Hambly spends a lot of time establishing that Cray's body is the only viable (hah!) option for Callista, which will be important later on. But let's get back to Nichos for a minute, and his failure with essence transfer. 

It's weird because at the beginning of CotJ, Cray talks about Nichos transferring his SPIRIT to the droid body using the Force and Ssi-ruuk entechment--which sounds eerily identical to what Callista did thirty years earlier--but they know something's wrong right away when Nichos can't use the Force. Cray's all "I can fix that, it's a technical difficulty!" but Luke knows better. Everyone knows, except for Cray.  

I think THAT is the moment where Luke and Cray should have had a Talk, when it was absolutely clear to everyone that whatever Cray was doing hadn't worked--that she'd succeeded in making a digital copy, and the original Nichos was actually dead.

Instead, Cray buries all her considerable energy into "fixing" Nichos mechanically. She believes with enough research, she can shape the droid Nichos into a human being... which doesn't solve the fundamental problem and misses the point entirely.

He heard her voice, its usual brisk sharpness honed to the brittleness he’d heard in it more and more in the past six months...

“It’s really just a matter of finding a way to quadruple the sensitivity of the chips to achieve a pattern, instead of a linear, generator. ... Hayvlin Vesell of the Technomic Research Foundation spoke in an article of going back to the old xylen-based chips, because of the finer divisibility of information possible. When I return to the Institute—”

“That’s what I’m trying to impress on you, Dr. Mingla—Cray.” Tomla El’s voice was a murmuring concert of woodwinds. “This may not be possible no matter how finely you partition the information. The answer may be that there is no answer. Nichos may simply not be capable of human affect.”

“Oh, I think you’re wrong about that.” She’d gained back the smooth control in her voice. She might have been speaking to a professional colleague about programmatic languages. “Certainly a great deal more work needs to be done before we can dismiss the possibility. I’m told also that in experiments with accelerated learning, at a certain number of multiples of human learning capacity, tremendous breakthroughs can occur. I’ve signed up for another accelerator course, this one in informational patterning dynamics …”

Her voice faded down the corridor. A great deal more work, thought Luke, hurting for her, pressing his hand to his brow. It was Cray’s answer to everything. With sufficient effort, sufficient maneuvering, any problem could be surmounted, no matter what the cost to herself.

And the cost to herself, he knew, had been devastating.

I actually really like Cray's arc in this novel--that she's forced to drop the perfectionism and workaholism she uses to block her considerable pain, and comes to accept the situation as it is, and finds peace in doing so. I just wish this realization didn't culminate in assisted suicide, that's all.

(That said, this scenario gets 100% creepier if you imagine flipping the genders here--if “Dr. Mingla” was a male scientist resurrecting his female lover in a droid body. I wonder if Luke would have intervened sooner in that case, instead of just assuming Cray had everything under control because she was an expert?)

While we're on the subject of "by any means necessary" and "avoiding one's problems": in contrast to Cray, Callista's original decision to transfer her spirit to gunnery computer to watch over it is framed as laudable. But even there, there are hints all is not well:

“It wasn’t … so bad, after a time. Djinn had taught us, had theoretically walked us through, the techniques of projecting the mind into something else, something that would be receptive, to hold the intelligence as well as the consciousness, but he seemed to regard it as cowardly. As being afraid or unwilling to go on to the next step, to cross over to the other side. Once I was in the computer …”

I.e., there's a reason why essence transfer is mostly practiced by the Sith--because it's a kind of clinging to life, or a version of life, rather than embracing what is and moving on...

Also, I don't see anything in this explanation that requires computing capacity, as Callista will claim later, so... *shrugs* I don't know what's happening there. CotJ has this weird relationship between the Force and tech, where Luke can physically manipulate objects with his mind, even though the Force is only generated by "life", but Irek remote-starting the Eye of Palpatine or controlling Artoo-Detoo is seen as "impossible" and novel. And yes, Irek does have special training and tech augments to help him, and I like the implication this is a specialized skill, but...like I said at the beginning, I don't get how this all works except for “narrative convenience” and “authorial fiat”. 

Anyway, CotJ strongly implies that Cray was misguided to cling to Nichos and to pursue "life" for him at all costs, for both Nichos and herself. Yet somehow when Callista does it, it's okay, because Luke loves her... even though Callista herself is way more ambivalent about what she's done, and her acknowledgment that

“Everything has to be paid for... I should have known there would be a risk... I might have guessed there would be a price.”

And I think that's one reason I like Children of the Jedi so much: that there IS a cost, that there ARE consequences, and not even magic space wizardry can fix or solve every problem. I like that Callista pays a price for the ethically dubious act she does--somewhat, but not entirely mitigated by circumstances, and by Cray's eagerness to participate in this (unprecedented?) experiment.

Also, you want more nightmare fuel? I just realized last night we only have Callista's word for what went down on the ship in its last moments--that, and it seems 100% in keeping with Cray's state of mind leading up to this, to the point where Luke was afraid to leave her alone because he was worried she was going to hurt herself. It gets even creepier when you realize Callista's ghost immediately volunteers to sit with Cray after Luke realizes this,  and I can't help but wonder what happened between the two women when Luke isn't around to witness it.

Callista's account at the end makes it sound like Cray realized at the last minute that she wanted to follow him--that it was an impulsive decision, somewhere in between stunning Luke and stuffing him into the shuttle and the destruction of the Eye of Palpatine--but I wonder. I really wonder. Cray and Callista clearly had time to plan a "what if Luke doesn't cooperate?" scenario and leave a recording for him to find in the shuttle, so I wonder how exactly the whole "you can have my body, I don't want it" conversation went down. There's a fic in there for sure.

But even taking Callista 100% at her word, I like the irony that she chooses to go along with Cray's scheme in part because she's so in love with/emotionally attached to Luke (just as Cray can't let go of Nichos and Luke can't let go of Callista)--only to eventually realize that there's something she values more than her relationship with him, namely her own life, and her own relationship to the Force, which has always been a part of her life and is now "missing". Cray chooses to die for love, Callista chooses to live for love... only to set it aside, because LIFE is more important to her than her love for one specific human being... just like she sacrificed her own life to destroy the Eye, and left her first lover in the process... PARALLELS, Y'ALL. I LOVE ME SOME NARRATIVE FOILS, YO.

Anyway, this got long and rambling, but I believe my initial thesis that essence transfer is wildly inconsistent and the results depend almost entirely on narrative convenience still stands.