#External Identities

[etoilesombre]

[re flint talking to the maroon queen in 3.5] ok it fucking sucks, but this is how solidarity works a lot of the time. white man proposes widespread slave revolts for his own tactical reasons, and then afterward grows to give a care while working toward his own ends. it doesn't make the caring not genuine, but wow that is clearly the trajectory.

[thecorvidforest]

being an alter who internally has a significant height difference to the body is so fucked. i stand up expecting to be like 7 inches taller than the body’s partner and instead i’m eye level. i can’t even reach the top shelf. sick and twisted i tell you

[wardensantoineandevka]

[blows a kiss out to sea] for the Mighty Nein pirates arc

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jon Haidt

Published: Mar 9, 2023

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT. 

I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions.” He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title.

After our essay came out, things on campus got much worse. The fall of 2015 marked the beginning of a period of protests and high-profile conflicts on campus that led many or most universities to implement policies that embedded this new way of thinking into campus culture with administrative expansions such as “bias response teams” to investigate reports of “microaggressions.” Surveys began to show that most students and professors felt that they had to self-censor. The phrase “walking on eggshells” became common. Trust in higher ed plummeted, along with the joy of intellectual discovery and sense of goodwill that had marked university life throughout my career. 

Greg and I decided to expand our original essay into a book in which we delved into the many causes of the sudden change in campus culture. Our book focused on three “great untruths” that seemed to be widely believed by the students who were trying to shut down speech and prosecute dissent:

1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker 2. Always trust your feelings 3. Life is a battle between good people and evil people. 

Each of these untruths was the exact opposite of a chapter in my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, which explored ten Great Truths passed down to us from ancient societies east and west. We published our book in 2018 with the title, once again, of The Coddling of the American Mind. Once again, Greg did not like the title. He wanted the book to be called “Disempowered,” to capture the way that students who embrace the three great untruths lose their sense of agency. He wanted to capture reverse CBT. 

The Discovery of the Gender-by-Politics Interaction

In September 2020, Zach Goldberg, who was then a graduate student at Georgia State University, discovered something interesting in a dataset made public by Pew Research. Pew surveyed about 12,000 people in March 2020, during the first month of the Covid shutdowns. The survey included this item: “Has a doctor or other healthcare provider EVER told you that you have a mental health condition?” Goldberg graphed the percentage of respondents who said “yes” to that item as a function of their self-placement on the liberal-conservative 5-point scale and found that white liberals were much more likely to say yes than white moderates and conservatives. (His analyses for non-white groups generally found small or inconsistent relationships with politics.) 

I wrote to Goldberg and asked him to redo it for men and women separately, and for young vs. old separately. He did, and he found that the relationship to politics was much stronger for young (white) women. You can see Goldberg’s graph here, but I find it hard to interpret a three-way interaction using bar charts, so I downloaded the Pew dataset and created line graphs, which make it easier to interpret. 

Here’s the same data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition. 

Figure 1.  Data from Pew Research, American Trends Panel Wave 64. The survey was fielded March 19-24, 2020. Graphed by Jon Haidt.

In recent weeks—since the publication of the CDC’s report on the high and rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens—there has been a lot of attention to a different study that shows the gender-by-politics interaction: Gimbrone, Bates, Prins, & Keyes (2022), titled: “The politics of depression: Diverging trends in internalizing symptoms among US adolescents by political beliefs.” Gimbrone et al. examined trends in the Monitoring the Future dataset, which is the only major US survey of adolescents that asks high school students (seniors) to self-identify as liberal or conservative (using a 5-point scale). The survey asks four items about mood/depression. Gimbrone et al. found that prior to 2012 there were no sex differences and only a small difference between liberals and conservatives. But beginning in 2012, the liberal girls began to rise, and they rose the most. The other three groups followed suit, although none rose as much, in absolute terms, as did the liberal girls (who rose .73 points since 2010, on a 5-point scale where the standard deviation is .89). 

Figure 2. Data from Monitoring the Future, graphed by Gimbrone et al. (2022). The scale runs from 1 (minimum) to 5 (maximum).

The authors of the study try to explain the fact that liberals rise first and most in terms of the terrible things that conservatives were doing during Obama’s second term, e.g., 

Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing.

The progressive New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg took up the question and wrote a superb essay making the argument that teen mental health is not and must not become a partisan issue. She dismissed Gimbrone et al.’s explanation as having a poor fit with their own data: 

Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today.

After examining the evidence, including the fact that the same trends happened at the same time in Britain, Canada, and Australia, Goldberg concluded that “Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.”

Journalist Matt Yglesias also took up the puzzle of why liberal girls became more depressed than others, and in a long and self-reflective Substack post, he described what he has learned about depression from his own struggles involving many kinds of treatment. Like Michelle Goldberg, he briefly considered the hypothesis that liberals are depressed because they’re the only ones who see that “we’re living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world,” to quote a tweet from the Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz. Yglesias agreed with Goldberg and other writers that the Lorenz explanation—reality makes Gen Z depressed—doesn’t fit the data, and, because of his knowledge of depression, he focused on the reverse path: depression makes reality look terrible. As he put it: “Mentally processing ambiguous events with a negative spin is just what depression is.”

Yglesias tells us what he has learned from years of therapy, which clearly involved CBT:

It’s important to reframe your emotional response as something that’s under your control: • Stop saying “so-and-so made me angry by doing X.” • Instead say “so-and-so did X, and I reacted by becoming angry.” And the question you then ask yourself is whether becoming angry made things better? Did it solve the problem? 

Yglesias wrote that “part of helping people get out of their trap is teaching them not to catastrophize.” He then described an essay by progressive journalist Jill Filipovic that argued, in Yglesias’s words, that “progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.”

Yglesias quoted a passage from Filipovic that expressed exactly the concern that Greg had expressed to me back in 2014: 

I am increasingly convinced that there are tremendously negative long-term consequences, especially to young people, coming from this reliance on the language of harm and accusations that things one finds offensive are “deeply problematic” or even violent. Just about everything researchers understand about resilience and mental well-being suggests that people who feel like they are the chief architects of their own life — to mix metaphors, that they captain their own ship, not that they are simply being tossed around by an uncontrollable ocean — are vastly better off than people whose default position is victimization, hurt, and a sense that life simply happens to them and they have no control over their response. 

I have italicized Filipovic’s text about the benefits of feeling like you captain your own ship because it points to a psychological construct with a long history of research and measurement: Locus of control. As first laid out by Julian Rotter in the 1950s, this is a malleable personality trait referring to the fact that some people have an internal locus of control—they feel as if they have the power to choose a course of action and make it happen, while other people have an external locus of control—they have little sense of agency and they believe that strong forces or agents outside of themselves will determine what happens to them. Sixty years of research show that people with an internal locus of control are happier and achieve more. People with an external locus of control are more passive and more likely to become depressed.

How a Phone-Based Childhood Breeds Passivity

There are at least two ways to explain why liberal girls became depressed faster than other groups at the exact time (around 2012) when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones and the girls joined Instagram en masse. The first and simplest explanation is that liberal girls simply used social media more than any other group. Jean Twenge’s forthcoming book, Generations, is full of amazing graphs and insightful explanations of generational differences. In her chapter on Gen Z, she shows that liberal teen girls are by far the most likely to report that they spend five or more hours a day on social media (31% in recent years, compared to 22% for conservative girls, 18% for liberal boys, and just 13% for conservative boys). Being an ultra-heavy user means that you have less time available for everything else, including time “in real life” with your friends. Twenge shows in another graph that from the 1970s through the early 2000s, liberal girls spent more time with friends than conservative girls. But after 2010 their time with friends drops so fast that by 2016 they are spending less time with friends than are conservative girls. So part of the story may be that social media took over the lives of liberal girls more than any other group, and it is now clear that heavy use of social media damages mental health, especially during early puberty. 

But I think there’s more going on here than the quantity of time on social media. Like Filipovic, Yglesias, Goldberg, and Lukianoff, I think there’s something about the messages liberal girls consume that is more damaging to mental health than those consumed by other groups. 

The Monitoring the Future dataset happens to have within it an 8-item Locus of Control scale. With Twenge’s permission, I reprint one such graph from Generations showing responses to one of the items: “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” This item is a good proxy for Filipovic’s hypothesis about the disempowering effects of progressive institutions. If you agree with that item, you have a more external locus of control. As you can see in Figure 3, from the 1970s until the mid-2000s, boys were a bit more likely to agree with that item, but then girls rose to match boys, and then both sexes rose continuously throughout the 2010s—the era when teen social life became far more heavily phone-based. 

Figure 3. Percentage of boys and girls (high school seniors) who agree with (or are neutral about) the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Jean Twenge in her forthcoming book Generations.

When the discussion of the gender-by-politics interaction broke out a few weeks ago, I thought back to Twenge’s graph and wondered what would happen if we broke up the sexes by politics. Would it give us the pattern in the Gimbrone et al. graphs, where the liberal girls rise first and most? Twenge sent me her data file (it’s a tricky one to assemble, across the many years), and Zach Rausch and I started looking for the interaction. We found some exciting hints, and I began writing this post on the assumption that we had a major discovery. For example, Figure 4 shows the item that Twenge analyzed. We see something like the Gimbrone et al. pattern in which it’s the liberal girls who depart from everyone else, in the unhealthy (external) direction, starting in the early 2000s. 

Figure 4. Percentage of liberal and conservative high school senior boys (left panel) and girls (right panel) who agree with the statement “Every time I try to get ahead, something or somebody stops me.” From Monitoring the Future, graphed by Zach Rausch.

It sure looks like the liberal girls are getting more external while the conservative girls are, if anything, trending slightly more internal in the last decade, and the boys are just bouncing around randomly. But that was just for this one item. We also found a similar pattern for a second item, “People like me don’t have much of a chance at a successful life.” (You can see graphs of all 8 items here.) 

We were excited to have found such clear evidence of the interaction, but when we plotted responses to the whole scale, we found only a hint of the predicted interaction, and only in the last few years, as you can see in Figure 5. After trying a few different graphing strategies, and after seeing if there was a good statistical justification for dropping any items, we reached the tentative conclusion that the big story about locus of control is not about liberal girls, it’s about Gen Z as a whole. Everyone—boys and girls, left and right—developed a more external locus of control gradually, beginning in the 1990s. I’ll come back to this finding in future posts as I explore the second strand of the After Babel Substack: the loss of “play-based childhood” which happened in the 1990s when American parents (and British, and Canadian) stopped letting their children out to play and explore, unsupervised. (See Frank Furedi’s important book Paranoid Parenting. I believe that the loss of free play and self-supervised risk-taking blocked the development of a healthy, normal, internal locus of control. That is the reason I teamed up with Lenore Skenazy, Peter Gray, and Daniel Shuchman to found LetGrow.org.) 

Figure 5. Locus of Control has shifted slightly but steadily toward external since the 1990s. Scores are on a 5-point scale from 1 = most internal to 5 = most external. 

We kept looking in the Monitoring the Future dataset and the Gimbrone et al. paper for other items that would allow us to test Filipovic’s hypothesis. We found an ideal second set of variables: The Monitoring the Future dataset has a set of items on “self derogation” which is closely related to disempowerment, as you can see from the four statements that comprise the scale:

I feel I do not have much to be proud of. Sometimes I think I am no good at all. I feel that I can't do anything right. I feel that my life is not very useful.

Gimbrone et al. had graphed the self-derogation scale, as you can see in their appendix (Figure  A.4). But Zach and I re-graphed the original data so that we could show a larger range of years, from 1977 through 2021. As you can see in Figure 6, we find the gender-by-politics interaction. Once again, and as with nearly all of the mental health indicators I examined in a previous post, there’s no sign of trouble before 2010. But right around 2012 the line for liberal girls starts to rise. It rises first, and it rises most, with liberal boys not far behind (as in Gimbrone et al.).

Figure 6. Self-derogation scale, averaging four items from the Monitoring the Future study. Graphed by Zach Rausch. The scale runs from 1 (strongly disagree with each statement) to 5 (strongly agree). 

In other words, we have support for Filipovic’s “captain their own ship” concern, and for Lukianoff’s disempowerment concern: Gen Z has become more external in its locus of control, and Gen Z liberals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating. They are more likely to agree that they “can’t do anything right.” Furthermore, most of the young people in the progressive institutions that Filipovic mentioned are women, and that has become even more true since 2014 when, according to Gallup data, young women began to move to the left while young men did not move either way. As Gen Z women became more progressive and more involved in political activism in the 2010s, it seems to have changed them psychologically. It wasn’t just that their locus of control shifted toward external—that happened to all subsets of Gen Z.  Rather, young liberals (including young men) seem to have taken into themselves the specific depressive cognitions and distorted ways of thinking that CBT is designed to expunge.

But where did they learn to think this way? And why did it start so suddenly around 2012 or 2013, as Greg observed, and as Figures 2 and 6 confirm?

Tumblr Was the Petri Dish for Disempowering Beliefs

I recently listened to a brilliant podcast series, The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, created within Bari Weiss’s Free Press. Phelps-Roper interviews Rowling about her difficult years developing the Harry Potter stories in the early 1990s, before the internet; her rollout of the books in the late 90s and early 2000s, during the early years of the internet; and her observations about the Harry Potter superfan communities that the internet fostered. These groups had streaks of cruelty and exclusion in them from the beginning, along with a great deal of love, joy, and community. But in the stunning third episode, Phelps-Roper and Rowling take us through the dizzying events of the early 2010s as the social media site Tumblr exploded in popularity (reaching its peak in early 2014), and also in viciousness. Tumblr was different from Facebook and other sites because it was not based on anyone’s social network; it brought together people from anywhere in the world who shared an interest, and often an obsession.

Phelps-Roper interviewed several experts who all pointed to Tumblr as the main petri dish in which nascent ideas of identity, fragility, language, harm, and victimhood evolved and intermixed. Angela Nagle (author of Kill All Normies) described the culture that emerged among young activists on Tumblr, especially around gender identity, in this way:

There was a culture that was encouraged on Tumblr, which was to be able to describe your unique non-normative self… And that’s to some extent a feature of modern society anyway. But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake [referring to the idea that each snowflake is unique], the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity. 

Nagle described how on the other side of the political spectrum, there was “the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan.” The communities involved in gender activism on Tumblr were mostly young progressive women while 4Chan was mostly used by right-leaning young men, so there was an increasingly gendered nature to the online conflict. The two communities supercharged each other with their mutual hatred, as often happens in a culture war. The young identity activists on Tumblr embraced their new notions of identity, fragility, and trauma all the more tightly, increasingly saying that words are a form of violence, while the young men on 4chan moved in the opposite direction: they brandished a rough and rude masculinity in which status was gained by using words more insensitively than the next guy. It was out of this reciprocal dynamic, the experts on the podcast suggest, that today’s cancel culture was born in the early 2010s. Then, in 2013, it escaped from Tumblr into the much larger Twitterverse. Once on Twitter, it went national and even global (at least within the English-speaking countries), producing the mess we all live with today.

I don’t want to tell that entire story here; please listen to the Witch Trials podcast for yourself. It is among the most enlightening things I’ve read or heard in all my years studying the American culture war (along with Jon Ronson’s podcast Things Fell Apart). I just want to note that this story fits perfectly with both the timing and the psychology of Greg’s reverse CBT hypothesis. 

Implications and Policy Changes

In conclusion, I believe that Greg Lukianoff was exactly right in the diagnosis he shared with me in 2014. Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1). 

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. Just as Greg had feared, many universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them. 

I welcome challenges to this conclusion from scholars, journalists, and subscribers, and I will address such challenges in future posts. I must also repeat that I don’t blame everything on smartphones and social media; the other strand of my story is the loss of play-based childhood, with its free play and self-governed risk-taking. But if this conclusion stands (along with my conclusions in previous posts), then I think there are two big policy changes that should be implemented as soon as possible: 

1) Universities and other schools should stop performing reverse CBT on their students

As Greg and I showed in The Coddling of the American Mind, most of the programs put in place after the campus protests of 2015 are based on one or more of the three Great Untruths, and these programs have been imported into many K-12 schools. From mandatory diversity training to bias response teams and trigger warnings, there is little evidence that these programs do what they say they do, and there are some findings that they backfire. In any case, there are reasons, as I have shown, to worry that they teach children and adolescents to embrace harmful, depressogenic cognitive distortions.

One initiative that has become popular in the last few years is particularly suspect: efforts to tell college students to avoid common English words and phrases that are said to be “harmful.” Brandeis University took the lead in 2021 with its “oppressive language list.” Brandeis urged its students to stop saying that they would “take a stab at” something because it was unnecessarily violent. For the same reason, they urged that nobody ask for a “trigger warning” because, well, guns. Students should ask for “content warnings” instead, to keep themselves safe from violent words like “stab.” Many universities have followed suit, including Colorado State University, The University of British Columbia, The University of Washington, and Stanford, which eventually withdrew its “harmful language list” because of the adverse publicity. Stanford had urged students to avoid words like “American,” “Immigrant,” and “submit,” as in “submit your homework.” Why? because the word “submit��� can “imply allowing others to have power over you.” The irony here is that it may be these very programs that are causing liberal students to feel disempowered, as if they are floating in a sea of harmful words and people when, in reality, they are living in some of the most welcoming and safe environments ever created.

2) The US Congress should raise the age of “internet adulthood” from 13 to 16 or 18

What do you think should be the minimum age at which children can sign a legally binding contract to give away their data and their rights,  and expose themselves to harmful content, without the consent or knowledge of their parents? I asked that question as a Twitter poll, and you can see the results here:

Image: See my original tweet.

Of course, this poll of my own Twitter followers is far from a valid survey, and I phrased my question in a leading way, but my phrasing was an accurate statement of today’s status quo. I think that most people now understand that the age of 13, which was set back in 1998 when we didn’t know what the internet would become, is just too low, and it is not even enforced. When my kids started 6th grade in NYC public schools, they each told me that “everyone” was on Instagram.

We are now 11 years into the largest epidemic of adolescent mental illness ever recorded. I know so many families that have been thrown into fear and turmoil by a child’s suicide attempt. You probably do too, given that the recent CDC report tells us that one in ten adolescents now say they have made an attempt to kill themselves. It is hitting all political and demographic groups. The evidence is abundant that social media is a major cause of the epidemic, and perhaps the major cause. It's time we started treating social media and other apps designed for “engagement” (i.e., addiction) like alcohol, tobacco, and gambling, or, because they can harm society as well as their users, perhaps like automobiles and firearms. Adults should have wide latitude to make their own choices, but legislators and governors who care about mental health, women’s health, or children’s health need to step up.

It’s not enough to find more money for mental health services, although that is sorely needed. In addition, we must shut down the conveyer belt so that today’s toddlers will not suffer the same fate in twelve years. Congress should set a reasonable minimum age for minors to sign contracts and open accounts without explicit parental consent, and the age needs to be after teens have progressed most of the way through puberty. (The harm caused by social media seems to be greatest during puberty.) If Congress won’t do it then state legislatures should act. There are many ways to rapidly verify people’s ages online, and I’ll discuss age verification processes in a future post. 

In conclusion: All of Gen Z got more anxious and depressed after 2012. But Lukianoff’s reverse CBT hypothesis is the best explanation I have found for Why the mental health of liberal girls sank first and fastest.

[starburstsystem]

When we switch fronts it's rarely super obvious, I'd say. However, there are a few clues.

The black boots are what Calix and I wear, and Gracie likes the lighter pair of boots. We also have converse sneakers that we can both agree on. Most of us like sweaters and hoodies, Mouse prefers tees and open button ups. Tubbo likes the green button up while Mouse prefers the blue one a little more. Calix likes the black and red striped shirt we have, while Mouse absolutely hates it.

Mouse likes to have our hair up in a pony tail and wear a baseball cap if we can. Uzi and Robyn like the black beanie. Mouse likes wearing our glasses while most of us do not. Robyn and Calix like really dark makeup, and Mouse prefers light makeup.

When we take walks, Calix prefers the graveyard and Mouse prefers the train tracks or the trail.

These are just the things we've noticed so far with our most frequent fronters :)

-Mouse/Ro

[happysaddca]

The poll ended with 7 folks saying they're chill with me posting nsfw so I'm making it @wyervan's problem now. :P

This is called "Moon Bites" in the google doc, and the CW is as follows: choking (mostly the aftermath of), biting (ofc), suicidal ideation, a touch of dubious consent that gets cleared up later, grinding/dry humping, shirtlessness. It's not full penetrative sex but I'm trying to be fairly comprehensive in my notes here.

Moon watches Ellis after. They're surprisingly normal despite everything. A turtleneck hides the bruising on their throat, and they lie about being sick to explain away their voice and change in wardrobe. They're completely and utterly themself, except for where they avoid Moon. 

Sun is the first to bring that up. “What did you do to Nova?” he asks, dropping a box of napkins into Moon’s arms. “I told them they needed to help restock with you and they looked ready to smack me with their broom. Even volunteered to clean the play structure on their own.” 

Moon doesn't immediately answer, instead freeing one arm to open the box. The feeling of Ellis’s neck against his palm is a white hot memory, the temptation of more mere feet away in the other room. They probably aren't wearing a choker under the turtleneck either. It would be just lovely brown flesh and 

And their lips against his. He nearly drops the box, Sun stepping in to catch. “Moon, what on earth is wrong?” 

There is no way Sun reacts well to this. Moon takes the box and sets it on a table, grabbing a napkin dispenser to keep his hands busy. He can see Sun from the corner of his eye. “I tried to choke Nova out,” he says, and, predictably, Sun draws up. “And they kissed me.” 

“What?” The word is a violent exhalation. Moon isn't surprised when Sun thumps a closed fist against his shoulder, hard. “What is the matter with you? You tried to kill an employee? The one who lives here?” The words come out in an angry whisper, and Sun hits Moon once more. “Are you trying to get us caught?”

Moon doesn't fight or avoid Sun’s blows, filling the dispenser even as his shoulder began to ache. It was a welcome distraction from the tingling in his fingers. “They kissed me,” he said slowly. 

“We already know Nova’s got brain damage!” That got a sharp look from Moon. Sun is drawn up like a snake ready to strike, his always wild hair somehow twice as voluminous as normal. His face is different though. Something like grief and fear is mixed with that anger, and expression Moon’s only seen a few times. Usually when Moon pushed against rules that defined Sun’s entire universe. Sun finds himself caught and looks away. 

“Do you like them?” came the question. Expected, though the tone was far too soft for Sun. 

“Don't know.” Moon slowly moves to the next table, fiddling with the dispenser til it pops open. “Liked… touching them. Might like kissing them too but they hit me with their bat right after and I left.” 

Sun laughs at that, and Moon’s grip on the dispenser slips. He catches his thumb on the metal, drawing blood. It's popped into his mouth, making Sun shake his head, taking over. “Gross. We have first aid kits. Multiple. Get a bandaid.” 

“Minute.” Moon drops his head into Sun’s hair, ignoring the way Sun tenses before continuing. There's no other touch, just the warmth from his scalp and the deceptive coarseness of the curls making his vision into a sea of orange. 

He can still taste the blood when they kissed. 

Sun talks. He doesn't know how not to, and Moon is good at blocking most of it out. There's no heartbeat in his head blocking it all out. Just memories. Want. 

“If you kill them,” Sun says, breaking Moon out of his daydream. He lifts his head slightly before sighing and dropping back down. 

“I think… I don't know. Need to talk to them.” Which is hard when they have managed to avoid him the past few days. 

Sun sighs and twists in place, freeing himself from Moon’s hold. Hands grip Moon's face, Sun looking him in the eye. “They will only hurt you. Everyone does remember? We only have each other.” 

Moon remembers. He doesn't reply. Sun holds him, waiting, wondering why Icarus doesn't have his voice inherent in their head but I keep writing setup and not actual so skip and come back later. 

After work, Moon debates waiting in Sue, but he's done that once already and Ellis hadn't come in for hours. Either they had moved to sleeping inside or they knew he would be waiting. And he couldn't risk it happening again. So he waited instead for Ellis to step behind the prize counter in the arcade to clean and pull expired candy, following behind. 

The door clicks, but they don't turn around. Their hearing aids must be on low. He doesn't want to scare them and risk them fighting. Moon looks around, knocking on the glass counter. 

That gets their attention and they spin in place, holding a handful of erasers like that could protect them. When they see Moon, they only tense more, looking immediately to his hands. “What do you want?” they ask. 

“Talk. Check on you.” Moon’s hands are out slightly, palms up. He can feel the fear from Ellis. It's a good fear, a righteous fear. 

“Oh you mean after you choked me?” They give a little laugh, slightly manic, and Moon can't help but smile. Do they know how like Sun they sound right now? 

“Yes. Does it hurt?” 

Ellis looks… confused by the question. Their hands are still full of erasers, so they can only gesture minutely lest they risk losing the barnyard animals to the abyss. “Yeah it still hurts. My voice is still—why did you do that Moon? Moon. Wait, stop.” 

Moon ignores the edge of panic in their voice, blocking Ellis in the corner so he can peel the turtleneck down and finally see. They twitch when he touches them, but they seem stuck holding the cheap prizes and Moon isn't going to overthink it. Mostly because the bruising is beautiful, deep purplish-black in the middle but starting to yellow out along the edges. Healing, letting him see the stages of recovery his victims don't usually go through. Moon presses a finger against the largest of the bruises, listens to Ellis draw in a quick breath. 

“Don't,” they whisper, voice catching on the edges. Moon doesn't. The urge to choke isn't strong, a residual desire to mark the soft brown skin of their throat once more mostly sated on finally seeing his handiwork. But there is a new urge, and Ellis is holding so very nicely still. 

He kisses their throat, feeling them jerk back in surprise and grabbing their shoulder before they can hit their head on one of the lower shelves. His lips trace over the bruising until he's found the most tender spot, and he bites, hearing them gasp, sinking down. Falling? He braces them with his arms, feeling multiple somethings, the erasers, hit his shoe. 

“Moon,” Ellis whispers and groans when he bites again, sucking against the mark. A hand grabs at his beanie, tugging it down, then his hair, pulling to get his attention. When Moon looks up, Ellis is crying. “What're you doing?” they ask. 

The tears are no good, no good at all, and he kisses them away, gentle except for the brush of sharpened teeth against their cheek. They're warm and solid in his arms and they're not fighting him. They want this? The hand in his hair clings as he avoids their mouth, kissing down their jaw to bite again. 

This time there's a moan, proper and small and that hand pulls hard, forcing some space for Ellis to look at Moon. There's still tears, but they're looking at his face properly, at his mouth, and they finally kiss him and he thinks he can taste blood again. 

He pulls at their turtleneck, but pulling it off means separating and there's no way he can manage that, not with their mouth still mashed awkwardly against his. They clearly don't know how to kiss, but that's okay because he does and he can guide them, nipping at their mouth with his teeth. He pushes his hands up their shirt, feeling their stomach tense and relax under his hands. They're solid under a soft layer of fat, and he can squeeze, leaving more bruises. Less deadly bruises as he helps Ellis open their mouth to him. 

They are extremely bad at kissing. But they are trying, and that pushes Moon more, hands slipping around and behind, scooping them up to push against the wall. Ellis gasps, grabbing at his shoulders. “Put me down, Moon, n—oh.” Their throat is bite level again, and he does, mutilating their neck until there's no sign of the choking from days ago. Only then does Moon slow down enough that Ellis can push him away. They're breathing hard, and the hand on Moon's chest doesn't move. He watches, waiting, pleased at the fresh marks on their throat. 

“Wh-what was that?” they ask. One hand moves to touch against their artery. It comes away wet with saliva and blood. “Moon?” 

They're frightened again, he realizes, and there's a deliciousness to that too. He wants to take them, to the couch, to their bed, pull that turtleneck off to mark them all the way down but. But but but it's hard to remember the reasons why to stop when they're right there. 

They needed to talk. To decide. But he wants to touch, to kiss, to press his hands deep and pull Ellis apart. The hand on his chest curls into his shirt, keeping him at a distance. He could touch them if he wanted. His arms are longer. 

Ellis is still breathing hard, a soft wheeze with every exhale, but the moment Moon moves, body twitching towards them, they shove him against the counter. “Stop,” they order, and he stares, wondering briefly if it's better with them in control. Ellis closes their eyes and steadies themself, letting go of Moon slowly. “Pick up the erasers asshole and. Come to Sue when you're done. To talk.” They take a step back, fixing the collar of their turtleneck, hiding the new bruises. “I can't believe you drew blood. How sharp are your teeth?” 

Moon grins, slow and lazy, in response. “The better to bite you with.” The eye roll was worth it, though the prize counter feels too big and empty with Ellis gone. Moon decides to leave the erasers, kicking a pig under the counter as he walks away. Sun can yell at him later for it. 

He can barely lock up, wanting to skip ahead. Instead, he retreats to the bathroom, washing his face with cold water, checking that he smells and looks semi-decent. There's lettuce in his teeth. He could kill Sun for letting him walk around like that. 

For once, Moon knocks at the door instead of letting himself in. It's quiet inside, but he can see Ellis's shadow before they open the door. They'd changed. A tanktop, showing off the bruising around their neck. No collar, no chest compression. Moon steps inside and Ellis backpedals. Still scared. Of him? 

Of course of him. 

“Moon.” They sound nearly normal. The smell of tobacco is thick, swirled around by a cool breeze. Moon sees a lit cigarette and a couple butts balanced on an ash tray on the counter, the emergency exit on the roof cracked open. Ellis follows his gaze, picking up the lit cigarette to inhale deeply. Smoke leaves through their nostrils before they finally exhale. “We need to talk.” 

Moon takes the cigarette for a drag. The menthol bites back, but he hides his surprise at the taste. Ellis is frowning, so he smiles. “It's rude not to share.” 

“It's gross is what it is.” 

“My tongue was in your mouth twenty minutes ago.” Moon’s smile grows as Ellis turns the most delightful shade of red. “Think you can share.” 

“Fine well.” Ellis steps back again, a hand going up to their neck before they flinch. A scrap of concern flits through Moon’s mind before he closes it off. “Why… why did you choke me? No touching til you answer.” Moon sees them move for the all too familiar shape of their bat. Of course they would have it. 

Moon is slow to respond, pretending to savor the last of this cigarette. “You know what I am.” 

“Kind of.” Moon expects Ellis to tiptoe around the subject. “You… you killed Helen. You said to protect me.” Silence. They swallow, flinch, and continue. “I get the feeling she's not the only person you've killed.” More silence. Moon finds himself staring at the mole under their eye, not wanting to see what Ellis is feeling. They can be so easy to read. “Do you want to kill me?” 

“No.” It's almost entirely true. Their mouth opens and he puts down what's left of the cigarette. “I… do not want to kill you. But.” He finds himself staring at their neck. 

“But,” Ellis echoes. They touch their neck, more gently. “Do you like seeing me like this?” 

Moon is slow to answer. “Yes.” His voice is soft. Ellis's fingers curl, hiding the bruising.  “But I like seeing you too. Just you. Don't know what it means.” 

Ellis's chin drops. They're clearly thinking about something when they step forward. Moon is blocked again, though it's an easy break if he wanted to leave. Ellis takes his hands, bringing it back to their throat. 

It burns, the skin raw from injury, and when Moon’s hand closes, Ellis flinches again.  They look up to Moon, watching his face. He wonders what they see. The killer, their employer, the nuisance that constantly breaks into their home to nap? He gives a soft squeeze before reaching up, pulling their glasses off and setting them aside. 

“Would it be bad if I asked for you to kill me? Not Sun. If I'm to die… I would rather it be by your hands.” 

Moon tucks his hand against their cheek, watching them lean into it. Could he really kill them? Maybe. Did he want to? 

He couldn't answer that. 

“Why?” 

Ellis leans into his space pulling him down to close the distance. Another kiss, their third one if he was keeping count. They're still terrible at it, but they're trying to keep it soft, and he allows it, letting Ellis pull him back and to the bed. He's made to sit, Ellis staring at him. 

“Because if it's you… I don't know. I've thought about dying a lot and at least if you're the one to do it… I know something's come of me.” They're standing in front of him, between his legs, not looking him in the eye once again.  

It's not a very good reason; Moon can acknowledge that much. But why would he look too deeply when Ellis is offering themselves to him this way. He holds up a hand, and they take it, needing help to climb into his lap. They sit against his arousal and freeze again. 

“Moon,” they say in a very small voice. “I've never…” 

“Easy enough to guess.” He holds their hand with one of his, the other sliding up their back. He finds the back of their head, bringing them down so both their foreheads touch. “You are horrible at it.” 

“Rude!” They push him down, and Moon drags them with him, laughing as he traps them against his chest. Kissing their hair, down over their eyes and back to their mouth. Terrible, terrible kisser, but they are heavy against him and it's too easy to press a leg between theirs, breaking their concentration. “Moon.” Another little moan, with Ellis grabbing back, hands curling in his hair. “We aren't done.” 

“Aren't we?” Despite their grip, Moon is able to move his head down nuzzling into their jaw. “Don't want to kill you but… it'll be me.” 

“You?” He nods into their skin. Ellis sighs before squeaking in surprise when his hand goes down to squeeze their ass. “Moon, please.” 

“Want to touch,” he replies, but he moves his hands up slowly. Tucking them under their shirt instead and grinning when they shiver. “Better?” 

“Worse. Your hands are cold.” They move to kiss him again. A little better. Moon closes his eyes, feeling his way up their back even as they open up to him. They taste strongly of menthol and tobacco, and he can smell only their cigarettes and shampoo. When they pull back again, he rolls them over, pinning them to the bed. 

Ellis stares up with wide eyes, and Moon swears he can feel their quick pulse in their wrist against the palm of his hand. It's tempting, and their neck is so lovingly exposed, as is plenty of unmarked dark skin just past their collarbones. Moon leans down and they kiss again, but he overwhelms, biting at their lips until they feel raw, his leg pushing between theirs again. The physicality overwhelms Ellis, and they whimper into Moon’s mouth. He eats up the sound, releasing their wrists to grab the hem of their shirt and pull up. 

It's too quick, and Ellis fights back, pushing at his face and shoulders and trying to work their legs up to shove him back. Moon uses the tank top to block their arms, tugging it over their face and dropping his hips against theirs. He grinds against them, the sharp point of pleasure amplified as he presses another kiss against the hollow of their throat, feeling Ellis squirm and moan his name. They are slow to pull the shirt off, more watching him as he continues to kiss down their sternum. 

“Moon.” Their voice is small again, the wheeze just behind their words. They struggle to sit up and Moon finds himself buried in the warmth of their chest. Hands pull on the back of his shirt and it's Moon’s turn to hesitate, not given the chance before his shirt and beanie have been tossed to the side, leaving his hair wild. Three fingers push at one shoulder. “Sit up.” 

Moon obeys, curious as Ellis pulls their legs under themself and wraps an arm over their chest. Hiding. He reaches out, but they shove his hand away. “No, it's my turn,” they say, and Moon drops his hand into his lap. They're staring at his chest, biting the inside of their lip so hard it's drawing the flesh inside, and Moon waits. Ellis seems frozen in place though. 

Right, they've never done this before. It's cute, in a small frightened creature sort of way, how they freeze up. But Moon wants to touch, to be touched, so he slowly reaches out again. Ellis starts to protest, but he only takes their free hand and returns it to his shoulder. 

“You won't break me,” he promises, and Ellis squeezes, holding tight. He wonders if this is too fast, if they need to be prompted to move, but they relax their grip, tracing the pattern of body hair over his chest, circling a nipple before skipping down to the lean line of his stomach. Their other arm drops so they can scoot closer, and Moon expects a kiss. Ellis tucks their head against Moon’s neck and there's a bite instead. 

Their teeth can't cause much damage on their own, but the pressure is sharp, and Moon moans softly, dropping his head back as Ellis pushes into his space. There's a hand in his hair again, pinning him in place, open to their continued worrying over his skin. The other is holding their balance against his upper arm. Ellis gnaws at the point where light becomes dark, testing the flexibility of his Adam's apple, and Moon can only hold onto himself, unsure if he likes this or wants to pin Ellis down and take control again. 

The answer seems to be both, thinking of pinning them down like a collected butterfly, free to use at his discretion. Movement against him refocuses his attention and he finds Ellis in his arms, his hands temptingly close to the button of their jeans. 

“No.” Ellis grabs at his arm when he pulls at their zipper, squeezing tight when he doesn't immediately stop. “No Moon it's—no. Wait. Please.” 

It's frustrating to stop. Moon knows he can overpower them, knows it'll be a fight. But he lets them back away, fixing their jeans and breathing deeply, and he mimics them. Calming down. He can feel his heart racing where they'd bitten down. It's tempting to touch, but he focuses on their hands instead, watching them flutter up and down in their own rhythm. 

And Ellis is watching him again, wary, but Moon holds still, letting them relax. He wants nothing more than to push past their limits and lose himself in them but the idea of watching Ellis heal too is a curious one. To stay long enough in place. But they would have to stay too. 

“Can I hold you?” That is new. Ellis hasn't pulled their shirt back on, but they hold their arms out in offering. 

Moon slides into their arms, Ellis pulling them both into the bed. His head rests on their shoulder, and he shifts to get comfortable, closing his eyes. Their chest is warm, their skin soft against his nose. This is nice. When Ellis wraps their arms around him, a hand in his hair, he sighs. The bite mark on his throat throbs. He needs to call Sun, to take care of the pressure in his pants, to figure out what they're both doing with this. 

But not right now. Right now, he's tucked against their chest, and there's a new weight as Eos jumps up to investigate what they're doing. Everything else can wait, just a little longer. 

[pluralprompts]

Prompt #628

"Why is there someone lying face-first on the ground in the fronting room?"

"We told them they didn't have to stick to their original name and pronouns and they've been having an identity/questioning crisis ever since."

"That's got to be the most dramatic reaction to being told about trans stuff I've ever seen in my life. ... That being said, big mood."

[rivetgoth]

The weaponizing of detransition / detransitioners as political ammo by the anti-trans crowd genuinely blows my mind. I’m kinda stunned that so many people are stupid enough to fall for it honestly. How is this relevant to anything? People choose to modify their bodies and end up regretting it, this is proof that people should be denied autonomy of their own bodies? To whom is this fearmongering targeted? How are so many self-identified pro-choice feminists able to sleep at night pushing the idea that one’s personal regrets about the choices they made that 9 times out of 10 had no long term negative effect but aesthetic masculinization or feminization that they realized did not suit them means that people should be given less right to their body, less medical autonomy, less choice in how they present and the shapes their bodies take on? So many of these stories—if they are even true and not entirely fictitious, which many of them are—are comprised of detransitioners listing either well known and DESIRED effects of HRT & SRS that any actual trans person openly wants and does not feel the same way about as these people who found it wasn’t for them (ex. FTM detransitioners talking about how “disgusting” their bottom growth is, an extremely highly desired effect for the vast majority of transitioning trans men), or well known side effects that actual trans people have long since learned to manage and mitigate and/or find worth enduring for the other benefits of their medication, a choice that anyone on any medication will make (ex. vaginal atrophy, which has an extremely simple treatment process if it even gets bad enough to need it)… Like, characterizing these things in such a way means nothing to any actually happy transitioning trans person and the entire argument relies on the complete and total suppression of our voices. Ntm all of it is deeply rooted in furthering disgust of sex nonconformity that impacts all people, cis and trans, though arguably especially intersex people. To characterize the great risk of detransition as “being a woman with the effects of heightened testosterone” or “being a man with the effects of heightened estrogen,” like this is a fucking world-ending, society-shattering risk that must be ceaselessly warned about so that the trans cult doesn’t RUIN your body by enlarging your clit or giving you more body hair… insanity. Even the “side effects” they cry on and on about are natural bodily functions—atrophy treatment was developed for menopausal cis women. The ideological dissonance, the authoritarianism, the paternalism, the willingness to evoke disgust response at the idea of having the right to autonomy over your own body and the natural variation and nonconformity of the human body. Women shouldn’t have to shave but women’s bodies are being ruined by their 2 years on low dose testosterone causing them to develop some chest hair. What a fucking joke.

[granulesofsand]

Nursery Rhymes

🗝️🏷️ RAMCOA programming examples

I never made the connection that the nursery rhymes I was raised with were cultish. I thought the criteria were themes of A) obvious violence; B) obvious sexuality; and C) better-not-tell. I can think of one or two songs that meet those standards, plus a few lesser known songs to teach us specific occult information. (Un Elefante Se Balanceaba, for example, was not about elephants or spiderwebs)

But I’ve been looking up some of these children’s songs, and they’re… not the same. Knowing what a few of them mean, I’ll give the name/chorus and leave out the intention.

One was Silver and the Others Gold: apparently it’s about retaining friendships. We also had the values of silver and gold reversed in this song for training purposes.

London Bridge: our version had different materials in every verse than any I’ve seen. The oldest mothers along our maternal line held their arms up, and getting trapped meant getting locked up in the innerworld.

Skip to My Lou: the words were almost the same, but the dance was used for something else.

Shoo Fly: more verses than usual, different than what I’ve read. The main point is the same, and it was about staying with the handler.

Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree: different lyrics except for the namesake. There were good and bad roles to fill, and you had to rank into the good.

There’s so many. I don’t know how to find some of them, none of the lyrics match. They repeat, have innerworld locations, carry life lessons. I’ve noticed different ones at certain times where they seem to have no connection. We’ve got a few pop and metal songs that have meaning, but not to the same depth these do. The cues have objects and words that don’t work unless the handler is right in front of us (plus we can’t hear or see well enough to notice it peripherally) so it’s safe enough to go this far.

Our system is huge, but the right side is made up of folktales and rhymes. That’s about 2-3k people, grouped up by ‘source’. We know that side mirrors our left continent, so it could be a few dozen areas fleshed out. This is fine. (We are mapping out that side more fully than ever, and we have a few higherups already onboard.)

[pawao]

its weird i have had so many big life changes happen over the past year, but i really dont feel any different

[shining-scion]

A version of me that no longer exists

[sable-dream]

the 'not like the other girls'-ififcation of therianthropy on tiktok was truly fucking bonkers. it was weirdly hostile towards anyone presenting in a mainstream feminine style for a while there.

[lieblogger]

lin lie seemingly doesn't have a secret identity due to how the government knew his face as sword master and he just walks around with his mask off as iron fist but it'd be fun if he did (i guess he does but he just doesn't care)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Eva Kurilova

Published: Jan 13, 2024

Locus of control is a term used to describe an individual’s belief about what factors control their lives. Those with an internal locus of control have a strong sense of agency and believe that their lives are influenced by their own actions and abilities. Those with an external locus of control feel that they are subject to luck, environmental factors, and other people’s actions.

Most people fall somewhere on the spectrum between an internal and an external locus of control, as this is reflective of life itself. There is a lot that we can control but a lot that we can’t as well. However, regardless of what is objectively true in any given situation, our preference for one view or the other has a major impact on our lives.

Those with an internal locus of control are more resilient, motivated, and independent, have a higher capacity for self-control, are better able to manage stress, and enjoy overall higher levels of mental and physical health. Those with an external locus of control, on the other hand, lack self-confidence and self-efficacy, blame others for their shortcomings, are less likely to take accountability, and experience worse mental and physical health outcomes. They are also more likely to have a mindset of victimhood.

Research abounds expounding the positive associations between an internal locus of control and factors like academic success and favorable work outcomes, as well as between an external locus of control and negative outcomes, like criminal offending. Helping people develop a greater internal locus of control has long been a goal of psychotherapy.

And yet, when it comes to the concept of gender identity, all of this knowledge and research is thrown out the window. After all, what is gender identity but just another term for an external locus of control?

Those who claim to have a gender identity that conflicts with their sex require participation from others. Their gender identity depends entirely on other people’s perceptions and on the way people treat them. They cannot concretize their identity simply by going about their lives, doing their job, practicing their hobbies, and fulfilling their roles as friends and family members—which is what an identity really is.

Instead, trans-identified individuals often try to artificially manifest a fantasy in their heads by forcing others to call them by a different name and pronouns and to pretend they see them as anything other than their sex. Some aren’t even satisfied knowing that others are merely playing along—they go further and demand others actually brainwash themselves into perceiving them as they wish to be perceived.

Furthermore, when someone is trying to manifest a gender identity, their locus of control sits not just in other people but in the rest of the world at large. They rely on external accouterments like clothing and makeup to signal what “gender” they are trying to appear as. They may go as far as to rely on external hormones to try and change how their body looks and even rely on surgeons to physically alter their body parts.

Obviously, all of us rely on the external world. None of us are entirely self-sufficient, and even if we have a strong internal locus of control, there is still much that is out of our control. But this is not the same as relying solely on the external world to recognize and manifest your identity for you.

I should also add that not all trans-identified people are like this. I think the locus of control is one of the main differences people implicitly note between trans-identified people who cause problems and those who don’t. This then gets clumsily translated into speaking about trans people with an internal locus of control as “real” or “actual” or “good” trans people.

I don’t believe there is any such thing as “true” trans. But I do believe there is a big difference between people who decide to transition and consider the onus to be on themselves to pass and be treated as the opposite sex and those who think the onus is on the rest of the world to make them feel like the opposite sex. I think this is the split that people pick up on when differentiating between the trans-identified people who really do just want to live their lives and those who want to tear the world down while paradoxically relying on it for their entire sense of identity.

(It is also my experience that trans-identified people in the former camp are less likely to insist that they have a “gender identity” and more likely to view themselves as having a mental disorder—gender dysphoria—that they are managing as best as they can).

Unfortunately, trans activists, doctors, teachers, counselors, politicians, and “experts” of all stripes are encouraging all trans-identified people to take on the latter mindset. They encourage an entirely external locus of control which then invariably develops into a victimhood mentality. Trans-identified people with an external locus of control come to believe that because they have no power to improve anything for themselves the world owes it to them.

This is what makes it all the more pernicious that this ideology is being pushed on children. Introducing the concept of gender identity to kids is the same as showing approval for an external locus of control. Where children should be taught self-efficacy and resilience, they are instead being taught that their very sense of self requires others to act a certain way and the world to comport itself to their whims. It’s a disaster that isn’t just waiting to happen but that is already well in progress.

There is no way to continue teaching the concept of gender identity to children and spreading it throughout society while encouraging people to develop an internal locus of control at the same time. The two pathways are mutually exclusive. If we want to encourage good health and happy lives, we need to drop the concept of gender identity entirely.

==

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if your "gender" can be invalidated by others not participating, like gods, it was never real in the first place. You can't claim "an internal sense of self," and then also claim it requires external validation. That's "I have a personal relationship with Jesus" and "I want to pass laws based on what Jesus wants." It's either a private personal matter, or a matter of public interest. You can't have both.

And in both cases, attempting to do both results in authoritarianism.

[lacefuneral]

i'm glad the stigma around the ocean flag is starting to fade. a lot of you were VERY homophobic for no reason about it

[musical-chick-13]

Fandom understand the narrative significance of Jaime/Cersei challenge (impossible).