#and i believe MOST people are inherently good

[sorin-sunchild]

Transphobes do very much want trans men dead though. This is still very much a thing they want. Trans men are in fact murdered by transphobes. See, your average queerphobe either wants us to never, ever, come out of the closet or to just be dead. We are not people to these bigots. We are problems which need to be gotten rid of, and very few have the imagination to think of 'fixing' us when killing us or otherwise preventing us from being is much easier. If they do extend their vision to 'fixing us' be it for gender or sexuality, it's very often violent and can/does still lead to death in many cases.

It's not about 'which kind of trans person they think is more dangerous' you get real for a second. Bigotry does not work like that. They're not tier-listing the different genders and targetting us one by one. We're all dangers to them. They don't like the fake rules they set up around sex/gender being broken. They will use any angle they've got to convince more people that whatever they do to oppress us is a good thing because we're all dangerous.

The detransitioning angle for example. It's insincere (insofar as they don't actually care about us and want to 'help' us even in a misguided way) and never represented correctly in these silly discourses. They don't want to specifically detransition trans men only due to viewing us as somehow more special, more pure, more worthy of being alive or something.

They'd happily detransition ALL trans people (why do you think trans women in prisons and other institutions are regularly denied HRT? this is an attempt to detransition them!) if they could. Misogyny just makes 'precious little girls mutilating themselves when they just need help' and/or 'misled Autistic (code for 'stupid' to them) girls being convinced because of Patriarchy that they have to be men' (really gets the radfems) the easiest and most effective angle to take against trans men/mascs and AFAB transneu and nonbinary people.

But you see all trans men reach a threshold in which we're not precious ickle girls any more, in which we too are just predatory wannabe women-men convincing other little girls to multilate themselves (by virture of openly existing) as well as trying to turn straight girls into lesbians but also trying to turn gay men into straight men. We reach that threshold when we get to a stage in our transition where they see us as lost causes (i.e. can no longer be controlled and convinced to detransition and haven't been murdered yet), just another kind of inherently predatory gender freak.

As for the drag ban which yes, did disproportionately effect trans women/femmes as well as cis drag queens, this was done for much the same reason. Many people believe that men are inherently sexual predators, and any behaviour that they can paint as 'deviant' or 'weird' is therefore easily seen to support this idea. Transphobes pick the angles that work but they hate us all equally.

Neither the young trans man nor the young trans woman being sent to conversion therapy is worse or better off than the other - it really doesn't matter the specific reasons and fears the transphobes who sent them there have.

We're all corrupted forms of our assigned gender to these people. If we can't be 'convinced' to 'stop all this nonsense' or 'corrected' into 'accepting the truth' then we are part of the problem, we're predators, we're cult members spreading dangerous 'gender ideology', each targetting a specific sex of child (because 'think of the children' logical falacy is so popular with transphobes) and we're all better off dead to them.

So yeah, I really don't know where anyone got the idea that transphobes don't want to and don't kill trans men. They don't treat different kinds of trans people that differently. They very much do murder trans men and a great many of us get written down as murdered women and buried as such which might be why you hear about it a lot less. It is very much happening though.

"Trans men aren't targeted by anti trans rhetoric and law."

Trumps executive order to ban gender affirming care mainly fearmongers about trans boys not being able to give birth or breast feed and calls transitional surgery "female genital mutilation".

When we say we are invisible, it's not that we are invisible to the people who hate us. It's that our struggles are invisible to the people who should be advocating for us.

[strangesmallbard]

i do think it’s interesting that severance fans often default to discussing the outties and innies as two separate people—like yes, functionally, they are right now. lumon does its best in-universe to separate outties and innies. for example: banning contact between outties and their innies’ coworkers, banning contact between outties and innies themselves. they create that distance and the fantastic acting also helps create that distance. it’s fundamentally important to the show that we acknowledge that difference.

and like. yes it’s a philosophy question: at what point do outties and innies become truly different people? is a person stored in their memories, their upbringing, or their instincts? etc. as we’ve seen so far, this separation creates some of the most fucked up consent issues you’ve ever seen. but also, and this is so easy to forget, there is also no separation. mark scout is mark s, helena eagan is helly r, and visa-versa. one is just missing necessary history and context to be the other person, but the vestiges remain. essentially: i don’t think they can truly become two different people and therein lies some tension.

for example: mark s has mark scout’s frankly impressive ability to repress any and all grief-related emotions. (i was wondering yesterday, actually, whether an innie who experiences some of the same life events as their outtie will eventually morph into them. like a manual reintegration.) another example someone else brought up: helly r has helena eagan’s entitlement and strong belief in her own personhood.

the outtie vs innie conception is particularly interesting when it comes to how fans discuss helly r/helena eagan. many people love helly and hate helena and it has me going “huh!” because, like. that could be the same gal! in different fonts. they both want to believe they’re completely different and want everyone else to believe that too. but we’ve been shown differently.

i’ve also seen some cognitive dissonance in discussing helly r/helena’s actions, which is also very interesting. there’s a very human urge to paint one as evil, the other good. but that’s never how it goes. yeah irving says “helly was never cruel” but he’s biased! (which is a good thing! i love when characters are biased). helly tried to kill helena last season (i know i just said they’re not separate people, but helly doesn’t agree with me). in season 2, helena stole her body and assaulted mark s. again, absolutely insane consent issues inherent in the severance process. (maybe it doesn’t come down to the good/evil dichotomy at all but rather: power. who has the power and when are they justified to wield or fight it)

anyway! no tl;dr. just food for thought. please try to enjoy each sentence equally etc

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Misanthropy and Reconciliation

Sometimes I wonder if we need other words to describe various levels of misanthropy. I distrust humans - I fear humans - though I do not hate them or believe it is their inherent nature to be evil and hurt others. Often when this topic comes up people bring up discussion of eco-fascism or a philosophy of misanthropy, and often the idea of human nature as evil and destructive. Perhaps those posts are not meant for me, at least that part does not apply to me.

Though often in the same post or from others will talk about the distrust and fear of humans. It is as well part of misanthropy, or at least one of the definitions of misanthropy to have that distrust and fear of humans. When we talk about that fear and distrust of humans for trauma and what the humans have done to us, often I see people write that it is our own problem, something we have to work on. I have to wonder "why?". I think few people would judge a dog who fears men. They may not know the story of why, but understand something must have happened. Our fear and distrust of humans is not something innate any more than the hurt humans do to us is innate to them. In our case though the hurt still goes on - we are still being actively hurt. We are forced onto medicines that destroy us, we are isolated and ostracised from the wider therian community, and have our own communities interfered with or tried to be destroyed by self appointed saviours doing it in what they believe is for our own good in the most charitable interpretation. My podmate Ike once said, it isn't all humans but it -is- always a human. Only a few humans hurt us in the hospitals and turned us this way directly - but how many humans were needed to facilitate those actions, how many humans support what was done to us as either a gift or necessary? It is very many, even among therians.

Still, I desire very much reconciliation. I do not wish to fear the humans and wish I could be comfortable with them. In a rather cruel twist, my freedom and salvation lays essentially with the same group that has done to me so much harm and made me this way. I will never be able to return to the sea and I will always live in human captivity, for now as what looks like a human, and later in a tank. There is often a lot of human positivity posts floating around to try to counter the misanthropy posts; and perhaps it is just who I follow, I see far more of the former than the latter. Humans are pretty neat creatures at points in the things they do and create. Perhaps someday I can come to fully appreciate them without fear or concern they will hurt or kill me if I do not do precisely what they wish. I admit though it is difficult to believe I could ever exist without some amount of fear and distrust to the humans.

People often say that it is our responsibility to move on from the hurt that causes our fear and distrust. It is true most humans did not design the world they live in and are just as much victims of circumstance as myself. I was born into a world dominated by the humans and my life is dominated by the machinations of the humans. I know the humans are in charge and I do not mind that I am lesser than them. Still if the humans want for me to not fear and distrust them, it is their responsibility to show they are safe and they are trustworthy and they won't hurt us.

At points I can make bits of progress. I may not trust humans, but I can learn to trust -a- human. I can learn to connect and feel some level of safety around them. It takes a very long time though, and that trust is easily shattered. When I go to live in a tank we will have to put a huge amount of trust in our trainers and caregivers. I imagine at first we will be a bit nervous with our trainers and with the humans around us but I hope in the end we can form a tight bond with them and feel safe and secure, that even if we can never feel truly safe around humans we do not have that relationship with, we will feel comfortable still because we know our humans will make sure that others won't hurt us. Perhaps that is for us the best outcome we can have.

[schwarzwelter]

you ever start reading lenin and feel the most catharsis you've felt as a disabled fuck from a blue collar family at risd?

apologies to all my cutesy art school associates who think anarchism is trendy but it is an unsustainable ideology that actively promotes the destruction of systems that many disabled people could not live without.

you cannot mutual aid into making insulin. you cannot mutual aid chemotherapy. you cannot mutual aid disability out of society. we cannot undo colonialism.

if anarchism was a sustainable fucking ideology, we would still be cavemen. what supplants your revolution? basement raves and ketamine, or solidarity with the people mommy and daddy said were subhuman?

[shorthaltsjester]

the mighty nein - critical role

this is a place where i don't feel alone. this is a place where i feel at home.

[pidgydraws]

i was too fucked up at the time to be able to take part in this fandom during season 1 and WHAT (O A O) i am realizing is that there was a really loud subsection of peeps who were SO MEAN to the goodest, saddest, most pathetic boy in Piltover. and i do NOT get it????

bullying him? valid. hella valid. everyone should bully Jayce. but vilifying him?!?! WUHH???? when everyone was up-in-arms after episode 6 i thought it was just people being incensed over Viktor~ but NAH! some people really wanted to hate him! (and how could literally everyone not have been sobbing their eyes out on his behalf at the time??????)

Everyone in Arcane is fucked up~ but the idea that people would see this foolish idealist - this brilliant, naive boy - who's so full of love that he'd rather DIE than be unable to effect positive change in the world... some would see him be manipulated, make bad choices, be blinded by his own place in the world, and struggle and claw to find a way to be good, do good, and save the people he loves~ see him LEARN from and GRIEVE his every wrong turn, and would still VILIFY HIM???? dammmnnnn~

((O v O)) i'm glad i wasn't here for that. Jayce isn't even my favourite character, but i'm dumbfounded on his behalf. i was NOT watching the same show as a percentage of people. and that's WILD to me.

If anything~ learning that just makes me love him even more now. I was always, and will always be, on team: "Jayce did everything wrong and he is still the most good boy."

[flipocrite]

I feel like it was in the best interests of America (’s elite) to be deliberately vague about the way our country educated its younger generations about fascism. I went to a magnet high school that did in fact go off-curriculum with a whole year spent analyzing 1984 in English class, but I don’t recall too much of a description of fascism in history class besides “authoritarian”, “censorship/book burning”, and “the bad guys in WWII”. This incomplete education conveys three incomplete ideas:

Authoritarian: fascism is when someone tells me I have to obey rules I don’t like, or that I will face consequences for disregarding them.

Censorship/book-burning: fascism is when people tell me I can’t use hate speech.

The bad guys in WWII: it was a thing of the past, so don’t worry about it.

Now we were smart students, we knew there was more to it. But fascism has a long, shameful, predictable history for which we as a country could have formally prepared, but chose not to. Not, I feel, because it wasn’t important, but because too many powerful people thought “hey, we might want to use some of these authoritarian tools someday, and we won’t be able to do that if people recognized where they came from”.

Maybe things would have been different if the key takeaways had been something like:

Fascism promises good things. It begins as populism, promising a return (i.e. inherently right-wing, reactionary, and not progressive) to economic normalcy/prosperity for the working-class. It promises safety, security, and comfort, like a old friend or… “older sibling”. It might introduce itself as a nationalist (or a patriot if the audience recognizes the former as a red flag), but it will not introduce itself with a handshake and “Hi, I’m evil and I like hurting people.” Historically, however, it has introduced itself bearing a flag and a catchy slogan, “Make Germany Great Again”.

Fascism preys on emotion and exploits it. It takes not just logical, but emotionally intelligent people to recognize this as it’s happening. It justifies division, violence, and distrust by stoking one’s senses of fear, anger and disgust (the three of which combine to create hate). The first thing fascism tells you is “You are fearful and angry and you need someone to blame”, and the second is “These people are disgusting, let us give them what they deserve”. Everyone believes in human rights until someone is an alleged terrorist or pedophile, after which “I’m so fearful, angry, and disgusted that I will actively disengage the rational part of myself that would otherwise seek to verify these allegations. In fact, I won’t even pause to logically acknowledge the dangers of allowing the state to torture or execute anyone subject to unverifiable accusations”. This is where English classes have a duty to drive home the fact that propaganda works best on self-proclaimed “logical/rational/unemotional thinkers”; they have simply chosen to identify their emotions as logical reasoning (e.g. conflating facts and opinions) and that makes them dangerous. Emotions are like assholes, in that everyone has them, you won’t see your own without some self-reflection, and the people who claim they don’t have one definitely have some kind of serious unexamined problem.

Fascism preys on logical thinking and destroys it. It requires a strict control of information and the narrative, and is an enemy of art, science, and journalism (c.f. lügenpresse). Its most powerful enemy, however, is truth itself, which means all institutions dedicated to credibility must be thoroughly discredited. Without truth, there can be no basis upon which logic can stand. This will manifest of course as book-banning/burning, but more subtly (and perhaps more importantly) as flooding political discourse with conspiracy theories and lies, ranging from a constant stream of small ones to the DISTRACTINGLY BLATANT. These may either be doubled down on, serve as a foot-in-the-door, or be hand-waved/forgotten as “They didn’t really mean that”. It would take dedicated teams of experts operating 24/7 to investigate and debunk such a constant stream of lies… if not for the lies “the experts can’t be trusted” and “Everyone lies anyways so it doesn’t matter”. The most effective propaganda has a clear direction and an unverifiable amount of truth. This includes the legendary “All politicians are corrupt” – i.e. “If no one is trustworthy, a logical choice is impossible… so vote with your emotions or stay home”. When fascism appears on your doorstep, it will be selling logical fallacies, and they will be emotionally justified. So when you turn on MSNBC or FOX, ask yourself even before if it is factually true: “Are they trying to tell me what I should think happened? Or are they trying to tell me how to feel about it?”

There are other signs and symptoms of a sick democracy, of course, such as “Suppression of sexuality and deviation from traditional gender roles” or “Obsession with law and order to the extent of sacrificing all privacy to a surveillance state for the promise of security”. But I am no expert to be cited with scholarly authority. This is mostly wishful thinking on my part, since none of this would be able to happen without America also recognizing the dangers of and taking protections against wealth inequality. In that sense, a nation like this was doomed from the very beginning, like watching the life cycle of a dying star.

Dictators in History:

- Hitler – “The good of the state stands above the law.”

- Mussolini – “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”

- Napoleon Bonaparte – “I am the revolution.”

- Francisco Franco – “I am responsible only to God and to history.”

Trump:

"He who saves his country does not violate any law"

[lesbiansplaining]

not to bring tiktok drama on tumblr but like every time a ‘scandal’ comes out with one of these ‘production companies’ that make fan films i always hope we’re finally gonna discuss how they professionalize something that should be an hobbyist endeavor… and yet every single time i’m disappointed.

[magnus-and-the-dragon]

I keep thinking how sad it is that Liam’s story ended where it did. People are ‘supposed to’ hit rock bottom and then recover; to use these moments to turn their lives around instead.

It’s so sad for him that he couldn’t see how loved he was or how much he still had to lose. It’s so sad for the people who loved him, whose last memories will be of him struggling.

I think Liam was just a normal kid who was victimized and exploited. He ended up being someone who took that suffering and turned it on the people around him, who was made to feel powerless and dealt with it by seeking power over others. That isn’t right. The things he is accused are horrible. But I don’t think he would have become that sort of person if he had been protected when he needed it. We should all mourn the loss of the kind and decent person he was once, and could have been.

He deserved the chance to recover, to climb out of the hole he was in, to get sober and make amends and find happiness. Everyone deserves that chance. And I am sad for all of us that we will never know who he could have been on the other side of healing.

[smile-files]

this might be a hot take... but if you care about disavowing media made by bad people out of fear of looking like a bad person yourself more than you care about actually doing good things... you might have your priorities (and your morals) screwed up a bit :/

(see my tags for more of my thoughts on this topic! please try to avoid making make bad-faith assumptions about what i mean!)

[skiagraphe0]

The way I've always seen good and bad is that those are not things you are inherently, they're things you become via actions you take and words you speak. You have choices in life and you can always become better, regardless of what choices you've made in the past and what you've said. If you want to, you can change. I was not a good person in high school. I am a good person now.

But also I think a lot of people need to cut themselves some slack when it comes to this. Why you said/did something matters. There's a difference between "I wanted to hurt someone and I, being of sound mind and body, knowingly said/did that in order to accomplish that" and "I'm stressed, mentally ill, exhausted, I blurted something out and I didn't realize it was hurtful".

My ex-roommate said some truly heinous things to me while in a manic episode. They have BPD and their dad had just been diagnosed with brain cancer. They were very confused when I talked to the RA about switching rooms but also advocated for them keeping the old room solo. What I explained to them, which I honestly believe even now, is that if I were in their shoes, I'd probably be doing worse. I'd be saying worse, I'd be panicking worse, I'd be a mess. I do not consider them a bad person. I consider them someone who was extremely overwhelmed who needed some space to themselves to create a calm place where they could try to process /gestures to the above/ all of that.

And in the years since, they've been much nicer to me on the whole than they were that day. That one bad day does not define them. Even if it did, though, I wouldn't view them as bad, I would view them as struggling. I cannot imagine what Borderline Personality Disorder in general is like. It sounds like Hell. It sounds like Hell inside their brain and the fact that they have to live with that is already painful. Then add on a personal tragedy to it that's something out of my worst nightmares. Yeah, they snapped, and yes, it was hurtful - and how much of that is really their fault, honestly?

I've had people with no such excuses or explanations say/do things far worse for the sole purpose of being antagonistic. That is when it crosses over into 'you're actually kind of a jackass' territory. But even with those people, I don't view this as an either-or thing. Good and bad are a gradient scale. You can inch your way back over into the middle and then the other side of the scale. All you have to do is try. Try to do better, try to be kinder, try not to be a jerk - it's a process. And it's a process anyone can undergo.

I'm not as far over into the end of that gradient as I'd like. I've got a way to go. I'm also very far from where I used to be and I'm very happy about that.

Am I a bad person? Nuance. Most of us - if not all - are nuanced.

And the answer isn't set in stone.

Do you believe you are a bad person? Yes No Yes but won't admit it Nuance

[the-abyssal-system]

Singlets stop talking about systems as if you’re an expert because you follow some on tumblr challenge (also warning the tags here are a huge rant so feel free to ignore that)

[fionnaskyborn]

one day when i am not busy dying on the inside and out i will write an honest-to-god essay about how people are, for the lack of a better descriptor but simultaneously for the lack of a more perfect one, too edgy about five.

[starscay]

It’s hard being a pragmatic bitch and an optimistic loser but somebody’s gotta do it

[catboyfurina]

I hate being a 'gets mad when I'm scared' person but also like. At least I know so I can make sure to not do anything until I've calmed down....

[steveyockey]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.