#i guess tbf to me i got kinda fixated on the ever given AND the titan.

[thewingedwolf]

listen i’m fully expecting the manifesto to be full of stuff about how we gotta get back to traditional gender roles or something, and he’s been missing for six months online so we don’t know what he REALLY thinks yet, because clearly the physical, emotional, and probabky financial trauma from whatever happened to his back was a radicalizing moment that caused a pretty major breakdown, but his review of the unabomber’s manifesto on goodreads (😭) basically has him saying that the main issue with the unabomber was that the unabomber killed innocent people (imo the implication here being that whatever point he was trying to make, however valid, is muddled) and well, he certainly made sure he only got The guy responsible and that his point was VERY clear. also online footprints are insane because it’s kinda crazy to be able to just go online & see that right before he disappeared, probabky in the middle of his breakdown, he was rereading the lorax & liking sad snippets of it on goodreads, which is a thing i also do with frequency.

[tomhasatransblog]

My thoughts on the detransition wave

This post is going to be so long it needs subheadings

Could this happen to me??

About a decade ago there was a huge upswing of mostly afab people transitioning, and now a lot of them seem to be detransitioning. The detrans communities on here, twitter and reddit are growing quick. And these aren't just people who just transitioned socially before changing their minds, a lot of them were on T or even had surgery. And you'd think that to embark on something as massive as medical transition you'd be certain that it's what you need. So it's just really alarming to read about, because I've always been certain in my transition, but am I just going to wake up one day and start to feel like this was all a big mistake like these people did? When I learnt about this wave of people detransitioning it really scared me.

I was scared to really look at what these people are saying, fearing that I'd poison my own mind or certainty. Ideas are contagious. But I'm very glad I did, because I've seen I don't have much in common with these people. Most of them had doubts about their medical transition, and/or thought that transitioning would make them happy or solve some problem they had in their lives, and neither of these apply to me. Not to mention that the thought of ever going back horrifies me. So I'm relieved with what I found having looked into the detrans rabbit hole on here, twitter and reddit.

I kinda saw it coming

Back in the day I thought that the whole Tumblr gender ideology was questionable to say the least because I suspected a lot of these people "trying on genders" would ultimately grow out of it, which guess means detransitioning. And I objected to it because I thought it made us "proper trans" people look like a joke, like it's just a phase and not something to be taken seriously etc. I was a selfish 16 year old back then, and I don't feel that way any more. People can call themselves whatever they want, I'll call them whatever they want; I don't care.

But it turns out that it was actually harmful, in that it seems to have sucked in a lot of unhappy gender non-conforming teenagers who latched onto the happiness they saw people experiencing from transitioning, and thought it would make them happy, too. When actually it wasn't right for them, and now they're picking up the pieces while trying to reverse mostly permanent medical interventions.

These people used to piss me off, but I can't even imagine the shame and embarrassment of having to admit that your whole transition was a mistake.. and the pain of trying to reverse it. I just feel terrible for these people now.

I disagree with the court's ruling

Here's a link to a BBC article

TL;DR: no one is going to be prescribed puberty blockers any more. If you're 16+ you technically can with permission from the court, except that in practice it'll take more than 2 years before you get a verdict, at which point you'll be old enough for actual HRT at an adult clinic anyway. So no blockers for anyone any more.

Imo this is unlikely to make a difference to the number of people who detransition. If you're fixated on transition fixing your problems and making you happy, you're not going to realise that it's not for you until after you've started. Because how could you know until you've tried? That's the trend I've noticed from most detransition stories I've read anyway.

Also, having just watched the claimant's news night interview, she seems to think that the court will now be responsible for the "are you really trans" due diligence that should have been done by the clinic, in the case of those who are 16+ and requesting blockers. Which seems to be placing that responsibility in completely the wrong place to me. Why would a judge know more about that than specialist medical clinicians? What's the point in shifting that responsibility?

Conversely, if transition is what you need, and you're lucky enough to find yourself being treated by a GIC while you're still a teenager and not all of puberty's irreversible damage has happened to you yet… blockers could just save you so much anguish. I often fantasise about having transitioned early in puberty. No need for top surgery, no awful wide hips I can never ever change. It breaks my heart that this option isn't available at all any more and it just seems monstrously unfair, I'm actually quite angry about it, it seems so unjust.

But I don't entirely disagree with the claimant

She (Kiera Bell, the claimant) put out a press release which I saw in the form of a screenshot on twitter that I now can't find, and she's got a page with a lot of info here. Across these two sources she said that society's misogyny, general disapproval of gender non-conformity, along with a lot of teenage girls having a bad time with puberty/adolescence contributes to so many of them wanting to transition, and I completely agree with her there. The massive upswing in afab young people attending the tavistock must have been caused by something, and those factors look very likely to me. It also coincided with the advent of proper smart phones & social media, and I'm sure that's another big contributing factor. I think female puberty being awful (I am biased in this opinion tbf) combined with misogyny in society explains why this uptick has been mostly afab people specifically.

Although I do a bit

On a crowd justice page linked above she also criticised the tavistock's "affirmative" approach. Meaning that if you get there and explain that you're trans, you're believed, and the clinicians take steps to help you transition. That was very much my experience there, but it's not as if I and my parents weren't interrogated about my history. (Tbh I think my experience was an edge case given how old I was when I got there (17.5, old enough to be referred to an adult clinic), the fact that I had no "associated difficulties", and that I'd been socially transitioned for 10 months).

I don't know what else they would have done? Saying to my face "we don't believe you're trans and shouldn't medically transition" would have seemed absurd and unreasonable, given that I'd been living as male for 10 months, including changing my name by deed poll. There wasn't a lot more they could expect me to do to "prove" it.

But many cases are much more complex than mine, a lot of trans youth have mental health issues, or trauma in their pasts. In those cases you'd hope the clinicians would go a lot deeper, and spend more time analysing all the other problems you have in your life, to sufficiently ensure that they're not the root cause of the desire to transition. One person who features in this podcast I listened to a while ago was transitioning to try and escape the trauma of being sexually abused as a child, for example. If you've got a complex case you wouldn't diagnose them in a single appointment, surely? I'm not a doctor obviously, but that seems pretty obvious to me. You'd need to provide therapy more broad than just issues relating to gender. I just don't know, but the fact that people are detransitioning must mean that that's the case, that in some cases insufficient due diligence is done into people's histories. So I don't agree with Kiera that the affirmative approach should be abandoned, but it seems like it should be used with more caution than it has been up until now.

So in conclusion:

The existence of a lot of people detransitioning freaked me out, but I've concluded I'm not one of them

I low key saw this coming

I feel bad for people who are detransitioning

I think the high court's ruling to ban puberty blockers is hugely unfair

I agree with Kiera Bell that society's misogyny and bullying of people who are gender non-conforming causes young women to transition when they shouldn't

I disagree with her that the GIC's "affirmative" approach should be abandoned, but I do think it should be used more cautiously

If you made it to the end of this post, thanks very much for reading it. I just had a lot of thoughts about this and wanted to get it all off my chest.

[zenosanalytic]

4/20/19 HSE 8

Ok back at it

MEAT 15

Cool Fight; Not terribly surprising.

MEAT 16

Dirk’s as much Rose’s father as Rose is his Mother. I guess maybe it’s more convenient, psychologically, to choose a causative direction and stick with it, rather than accept the Mobial nature of their genesis, but for some reason it bugs me this keeps getting overlooked.

Dirk’s over here talking about how right he is all the time and I dont think he was ever right about anything even once in canon(aside from certain aspects of his talk with Dave, and choosing not to kill Hal) XD The only “plan” of his to work was the one re: entering the Session, and 1)he outsourced it to Hal and 2)it only worked because he managed to improvise his way through every aspect of it failing to go the way he thought it would, and even that probably had more to do with their entry being part of HiC’s plan to use them, so she wasn’t trying to wipe them.

Another Thing: I dont think the Ascent Differential is Aspect so much as Personality.

Another Another Thing: That Rose, when discussing her life-long fear of knowledge as a corrupting and ruining outside force(this being a person who always felt her mother wasn’t her mother, in some sense, and responded to that fear by rejecting emotional intimacy with said mother), doesnt see the connection between that life-long fear and her fear that Ascending will be bad, damaging, and corrupting, is Notable. Perspective continues to be important, and lack of self-awareness continues to hamstring ppl in this narrative.

MEAT 17

I feel like this new narrative belligerence on Dirk’s part isn’t going to work out too well for him with a person as aware and recalcitrant to narrative meddling as John. It’s going to be John and WV all over again. This is also a wonderful example of how personal flaw and specificity isn’t solved by Godhood in HS, and can really trip you up; basically all of this, including the “impotence” applies to Dirk, too, when others disagree with the direction he’s trying to push them in, and this whole rant may be meant, ironically, as an example of dramatic irony: basically, that Dirk’s rant about total control and knowledge reveals the limits of his knowledge and will be followed by examples of how limited his control is, which he can’t be aware of, but which the “impotent” audience will.

MEAT 18

...And, almost immediately, John’s objecting to the narration and doing things before Dirk “writes” him doing them(the sigh).

MEAT 19

“So yeah, I’m gonna allow it” Notice how he asserts power over situations he does not, in fact, have power over.

Which is kind of an interesting dynamic to bring up in the context of authorship? I mean: in the realm of nonfictional works an author can’t “make” things happen, only alter for their audience what DID happen. In some respect this is being written as equivalent to that dynamic; the simple admission in M17 that Dirk is misrepresenting events also admits those events happened another way than he’d prefer, meaning it’s also an admission of his lack of power over actual events. And, of course, all the other things I’ve been talking about, and the fact that everyone’s “character” is rooted in natures established in the original work. But in a fictional work an author’s creative power is absolute, and this is a fictional work; though I suppose a derivative or transformational one, which accounts for the shortfall. Another interesting aspect of this is that the “Author” is presented as a Narrator; Narrators merely describe what happened, they don’t create it. I was going somewhere more concrete with this but it popped out of my head >:T >:T

Ok so other aspects of this: I agree that Jane’s been established as a pretty ambitious person, but she was also always a pretty moral person and the way she’s going about this so far doesn’t seem to be in keeping with that part of herself. And also: she literally wants to create shortages, and thus the suffering shortages will cause, for... what? Nostalgia? Because she think she can run Capitalism better than the adults from before all this?? Because Hierarchy is Neat??? Seems like a whole handful of really petty, selfish, and juvenile reasons to me. Also one guaranteed to cause social conflict; I doubt a civ that’s never known material want is going to react too well to sudden starvation and financially-manufactured forced-labor(which, lbr, is what most work in our world is).

Obvsl, as a snake and member of the storied gens Atheris, I agree with Roxy&Calli that patriarchal human concepts of gender are not the end-all-be-all of identity, but what really jumps out to me here is Roxy’s description of the nature of their love for, and previous sexual interest in, Dirk which I find really True. Like: the sentiment of wanting to see children of a person because you really like that person and think they should continue, or of thinking having the kids you might have with another person would be pretty interesting. Also that loneliness is a hell of a drug 8T

I’m trying to figure out why this conversation would be circumstantially simultaneous with The Furthest Ring being “destroyed”, but I got Nothing :T :T :T

MEAT 20

So yeah, Jade’s merging with her Alt!Selves, not too surprising since it was heavily foreshadowed in Endgame.

Given that Sessions are located IN the Furthest Ring, and Sessions MAKE new multiverses, I find it being made out of “negative potential. The absence of a future” pretty ironic :p I wonder if the tentacle hair bit is a nod towards the Horror-Terrors, and theories about them being Players? Rose and Dirk’s view of Ascension would seem to suggest HTs might be SUCCESSFUL players who eventually abandoned their universes out of fear of the damage they’d do misusing their godhood(as it doesnt solve your personal problems), rather than the old HC of them being failed Players.

MEAT 21

My theory about “The Economy” being code for sex doesn’t stop feeling ever more confirmed by this narrative :|

Dirk’s anger at the idea of anyone not thinking he’s right about everything is Palpable on this page. Also I’d just like to note that This:

Is being said by a person currently in the middle of metaphysically manipulating a friends towards her worst impulses(and also potentially some amounts of self-hatred, give her thoughts re: femininity) for the sake of establishing a dictatorship through which she, as his agency-dimmed puppet, will enforce his personal politico-philosophical preferences regardless of what anyone else thinks and he’s saying it about people who just said This:

which is to say: a bunch of political pluralists who are NOT seeking to impose their morality on anyone but rather to establish a system where EVERYONE can SHARE their moral understanding of policy issues and come to a consensus decision on them, within the context of a political society DEFINED by the equality of all as political actors. There’s just so much that’s wrong, weak, and easily dismissable about Dirk’s argument here. Not to mention his obvs, undisguised, physical disgust for trolls >:T

And he’s doing all this Purely because, given his fixation on “Winning”, he wants to Win. Like: he’s not actually even pursuing what he considered good policy; he is, literally, doing this all for Pure Ego, which he has the gall(and lack of self-awareness) to accuse others of acting from. And this self-deluding buffoon is a person who believes himself “Ascended” and therefore possessed of a “higher” and “clearer” perspective on matters above their “petty” concerns about, oh non-humans being allowed to live as they like, or practice any political agency at all, and all ppls being spared unnecessary and pointless suffering due to entirely manufactured shortages. So much (real, actual)Irony, of so many types, in all of this, all at once.

An aside: I am really liking the political-mindedness of these Epilogues so far; really playing to my Interests uwu

The bit about Hybrid babs and shipnames is funny, and it doesn’t read like a shot at the fandom to me at all; it’s more a joke at Dave’s expense given the obvs distress Kanaya’s in and his inability to stop making the situation more awkward(itself prob the result of Bro’s neglect/abuse)

Oh hey look: it’s Dirk the “Omniscient” being distracted, caught unawares and off-guard by the actions of others, unable to handle the role&work he’s chosen for himself(ie “out of his depth”), unable to split his attention between even just two conscious ppl at once, and not knowing what others are thinking. Given this and his handling of Jade’s thoughts in the last section, I kinda feel like it’s less he can actually sense the thoughts of others, and more that he gets some kind of inkling or hunch, or maybe that’s it’s purely just him guessing(that’d fit real well with his comments on Roxy being “inscrutable” to him), or even just having an awareness of the plot he is narrating(and thinks he’s writing). Of course it could also be some kind of Heart thing; not really even access to their thoughts at all, but a sort of awareness of their Agency? Like: Heart is The Self and The Self is expressed through Agency, so he has, in some way, developed an awareness of “Self-Action”, which is to say, Agency? Kinda like how Dave “feels” Time and Jade “feels” Space and Rose “feels” Relevance. Which, just as an asnide, would be something super-basic powers-dev wise, since Dave started having a sense of Time way back in the early Acts, long before godhood. Though I can see how Dirk developing an awareness of OTHERS intentions(and feelings, potentially, given Heart’s other associations) would seem like a big step for him, given how self-absorbed he is.

Ok that’s it for this one I think. I know I’m not being terribly kind to Dirk in all this but, tbf, he’s being kind of a huge snide Dick in basically every respect, and I also don’t have a lot of Chill in me when it comes to 1)arrogant people or 2)manipulators (:T

[onlinedatingoffline]

(listening to:)

first of many i would say,

this begins with my stories of online friendship and stories of lovers who happen to also be online. all anonymously of course!!! ~questions welcomed~ im open to sharing a lot tbf!! as i did grow up (20s now) and became more mentally aware.

(to anyone who bumps into this n got invested hi)

as someone who grew up with traumatic personal memories, my only safe space of being myself was being online and sadly at an age of minor i was almost always online and very unsupervised, many reasons to it. & all who read this if u r guessing if i am a timid person u are very correct.

yeah i had parents, and yes this all started during my middle school years when i got my very first ipod touch, where at this moment was all new to us and my generation for sure. not much of a social media influence but more of a gaming experience from the basic ass games to trying to find ways to be given itunes giftcards so i can buy songs to listen to then learning i can just illegally download my favorites onto my device. it was a special time tbf as i wasnt too fixated on my device more so at night times after my business of going to school and sport practices and church choir n some tutoring on the side.

i think we for sure grow up all a lil broken wishing we had different parents or different environments but for me i strongly desired that. yes i was a shy kid with a lot on my mind and still learning various new english common words. but passionately grew up to loving music specifically that indie alt music (not to be so familiar nowadays but that was my taste growing up) i can definitely say i loveeddd the gorillaz at the age of 5 and thats a fact! core memories with the Feel Good Inc. song. anywhom i am that generation that was in transition (97-02s) to many things and the first being preteens with social media.

it all started with being 10? possibly and deciding to get my first email and then deciding whether or not im allowed to be on facebook, to then hiding n making accounts such as myspace twitter and then later tumblr insta and snapchat. & lets not forget our founding fathers of conversation lines with no iphone like KIK, Viber, oovoo, telegram n etc. I did have a phone tho but i knew already that my blue samsung intensity ll was no good use as to my ipod touch that lasted me a good couple years! plus having a small group of good friends = texting is at a minimal.

i had one amazing best friend and honestly she was always so tru n genuine and i think sometimes i coulda been nicer but i wasnt rude or mean i just wish i was intentionally nicer bc growing up and looking back i valued that friendship more than anything! (definitely like a sister but the one u rarely ever fight with) she came into our school in 6th grade new with a bunch of other students and i actually don’t remember how we became best of friends but she was kinda like me!! a bit shy n we luved bands n music and creativeness! like u alr know that duo!!! it was one of my worst possible times personally but the way i always had my best friend to get to hang out at school everyday was the best! i never really had good friends prior to 6th grade like the connection i had with them!

i was already on social media TWITTER 2 b exact and not using it really well but kick started some small following since you could follow celebrities and have some sort of interaction with them. my interest was more of the bands groups that i enjoyed listening to daily specifically this one band that i was centered around online and irl. thankfully i never published my wattpad stories bc naw the cringe it would have today. and eventually gained a small group of people that id either DM daily or just have millions of back n forth tweets to each other. let me tell u dis shit was nationwide at first and then went out to become international. did i know these people were real, yeah most of them im still mutuals/friends to this day and some could have been fake impersonations in which they really havent gained anything from me as ive never been hacked or “exposed”. nothing detrimental or so i would’ve thought it would always be like that

to put things straight, i was part of a fandom/s and very widely known. i include multiple bc thats also true but i was always fixated on one group. i have had interactions with them and others band groups. it was a prime for me. Was it always good and safe space for me as a preteen-teenager. definitely not! no public area has yet to be a safe space online or irl especially when others are scrolling. your digital footprint is always there so just give it a thought before becoming public!

this was an intro. part 1 starts soon…