#exemplia gratis:

[frogeyedape]

I am so unbelievably pissed off. FUCK HOAs

Oh, my trash/recycling bin can't be visible except on pickup day? Ok whatever fine I hate you but I can deal with this

Weekly inspections?????? FU FU FU FU FU

SECOND NOTICE ALSO WE'RE CHARGING YOU MONEY TO SEND YOU CERTIFIED MAIL OF THIS TOTALLY LEGIT TOTALLY SECOND NOTICE OF WHAT IS ACTUALLY A VIOLATION cue me: checks notes. Hmm. My recycling bin was. on the curb. on recycling pickup day. You know. The day it has to be out. The day it is motherfucking ALLOWED TO BE FUCKING OUT AND VISIBLE.

so. 1) not a violation

I have sent them the trash AND recycling pickup schedules, which are DIFFERENT, btw

I have disputed the fact of the violation

I have disputed the linking of this "violation" to a previous violation MONTHS AGO--their "first notice" in this case was a "Courtesy Notice" LITERALLY 5 MONTHS AGO and they've done so many inspections since then and my bin CLEARLY WASN'T OUT IN THOSE INTERVENING MONTHS so WTMFH

So I am posting like a crazy person here instead of sending the absolutely deranged email I almost sent (I did send a slightly less deranged version with the disputes, and requesting a hearing)

OMG. It has been. Less than one hour since I learned this fun fun news. My bin was out YESTERDAY, y'all. YESTERDAY. I am going to blow a gasket

[frogeyedape]

There's something odd in the phrasing between the people who agree vs disagree with OP here. Notice:

OP: if you do a bad/harmful thing, your victim doesn't need to forgive you, but you need to forgive yourself

Disagreer: if you do a bad/harmful thing, even if your victim forgives you, you should never forgive what you did

Do you [generic you] see? OP: forgive the transgressor. Disagreer: never forgive the transgression!

It's like the disagreer thinks they're saying the same thing ([do/don't] forgive transgressor), but they're stuck on forgiving *the transgression,* which OP did not mention or explicitly address as needing forgiveness. This is one of those things where I think people sometimes have difficulty separating the DOER from the DEED, where they equate "did X" with "X-doer." But the reality is anyone can do X, and having done X once doesn't mean you'll always do X, or that you were destined to do X, or even that you'll ever do X again.

Exemplia gratis: A person committed a crime and was sentenced for it. The word for crime-doer is criminal. Is this person (forever and always and immutably) a criminal? For one criminal act? For, shall we say, jaywalking?

Lemme give you my answer: no! A person is a person is a person, and a person can do good and bad and stupid and smart and helpful and hurtful and wonderful and terrible things--and none of the things they do prevents them from choosing to do something else good or bad or...etc. A "criminal" can be 99.9% law-abiding, and never commit any grave crimes. An absolute asshat murderer can still be a loving parent to a kid who thinks the world of them.

Doing one good deed doesn't erase a bad deed; it puts both deeds out there. No action cancels out or balances any other action; you just end up with a bunch of actions that change the world in various ways. Someone who does wrong needs to know they can still do good in order to do better, and that, shockingly, may require them to admit to themself they're not irredeamably evil, that they did a bad thing but they themself can move forward and not do that bad thing again. "Forgive yourself" does not equal "absolve yourself of all responsibility;" it means "stop wallowing in guilt and focus on actually doing better."

the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can't make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that's non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese

[frogeyedape]

I was just going to rant in tags (hard agree with op btw) but I need long sentences that I can look at to talk this out properly.

Why do so many people collectively refuse to believe that there is any bias, stigma, or oppression against trans men? It comes down to 2 things, really. 1) There's a widely held belief that men are inherently privileged and powerful. 2) People fail to take more than one level of power dynamics into account when they talk so generally about male power.

Here's the breakdown:

1) The sticky, slightly true part of the belief that all men have power and privilege is that, given any random man, he very likely does have more power and privilege than a woman who is identical except for her sex.

2) The only reason #1 feels true is the all else being equal part. But men don't exist in a weird vacuum where they're only comparable to otherwise equivalent women! There are other men to compare them to! And women more powerful and privileged to them! You HAVE to take into the multiple levels of interaction/comparison, the multiple identities every individual holds.

Back to 1) That all men are privileged and powerful is easily disproven. Racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, philosophical, and political minority men are constantly at risk due to their minority status. BUT IT GOES FURTHER THAN THAT, because they're not just at risk for being minorities. They are risk precisely because they are MALE minorities.

Exemplia gratis: There's a special kind of vitriol reserved for Black men, born of stereotypes rooted in slavery (USA persepctive here). The stereotype of sexual power and aggression and disinhibition that makes a white person's cry of "rape" an instant threat against the accused. The sterotype of physical prowess and power, of insensibility to pain, that leads to complete overkill in punishments.

Black men are stereotypically more threatening, more violent, more dangerous, less reformable than Black women. They are discriminated against because they are Black, and because they are Black MEN.

I don't think I'm saying anything new. Intersectionality is something everyone needs to take note of yesterday, or lacking that, NOW. As you read this.

Okay. So. Longass post while I eat dinner and wait for my controller to charge and then I’m going back to my game.

The problem is it’s never actually been about the word itself.

We tried transandrophobia. Transmisandry. Isomisogyny. Transmascphobia. Anti-transmasculinity. People fought about literally all of them, saying they don’t exist, that they legitimize incel and terf language, that they’re some power grab, that they’re inherently transmisogynistic.

We tried transmisogyny and were told it was just for trans women and that we couldn’t use it.

We tried “transphobia specific to trans mascs”. We were told there is no such thing. That other demographics experience it and thus it’s actually theirs and not ours to discuss. We brought up trans mascs with genders marked M or X being denied abortions, pap smears, and other reproductive care. Trans mascs correctively raped by their significant others and spouses they were forced by their families to marry. Trans mascs who were targeted specifically because they were trans mascs, often buried as women under their dead names to be forever misgendered by history. We were told we were making it up and that we were weaponizing our womanhood by discussing these lived experiences.

We tried “just” misogyny. We were told that as men, we weren’t allowed to say that we experienced misogyny because trans men are men and men never experience misogyny and thus our very real experiences weren’t really ours and they weren’t that bad.

We tried “just” transphobia. We were told that as trans men, we don’t really experience transphobia because any transphobia we do experience is actually transphobia about trans women and thus our very real experiences weren’t really ours and they weren’t that bad.

You don’t have to take my word for it. You can go into the tags of any of those words and see exactly that being discussed in real time right now in 2023. I’ve even got screenshots from @baeddel-txt if you want to give yourself psychic damage by reading truly the worst takes ever from 2014 onwards.

At some point, one has to admit what it’s actually about is stopping trans mascs from discussing the way they’ve been treated by society, and stopping others from considering that maybe the way they’ve been treating us is a problem.

And make no mistake- while some of it is coming from trans fems and it’s impossible to say it’s not, just as there’s shit-flinging in reverse from trans mascs to trans fems as well, because for some reason we prefer to blame each other rather than working together to solve our problems as a collective- if you take a scroll through these tags a lot of it is coming from cis people and fellow trans mascs. A lot of it is coming from other LGBT or otherwise queer-identified people and a lot of it matches previous attempts at killing the ace, bi, and pansexual communities using the same arguments that the internet likes to cycle through every couple of years and has been doing since online communities began to exist.

So, I ask you, if you got through this and still want to write a witty retort, what have you done to help us fix the staggering amounts of suicide, sexual assault, and beatings we face? What have you done to help us fix the staggering amounts of us being denied necessary healthcare? What is your solution to all this, besides to sit at your computer or scroll through your phone and quibble about whether or not the specific word is allowed to be used this week?