#it's not that feeling dubious abt yr body changing *can't* be a Cis Female Experience— | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

aeide-thea · 2 years ago

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the thing abt this website (and probably other websites as well) is that like. posters will complain that readers get mad at posts for not encompassing Everyone's Experiences, when they were just talking about their own experiences

and it's like. okay but did you phrase your post in the universalizing second person or.

cue janet-with-cactus gifset.

#this is specifically a vagueblog of a post that describes 'being a girl and hitting puberty' as #'you spend years hating being a girl and hating everything puberty did to you'#which is like. i KNOW i read some personal essay by some famous female screenwriter whose name i'm blanking on #that was *entirely* about her adolescent Desire to Grow Breasts #it's not that feeling dubious abt yr body changing *can't* be a Cis Female Experience—#[bc ultimately i do believe like. Gender is a bunch of different things in uneasy harness #(more on this another time probably)#but definitely one of those things is 'the particular lens we personally choose to view our own experiences through'#so if afab!you decide yr a woman? yr experiences are those of a cis woman‚ even if they're statistically speaking uncommon for cis women]#—but it definitely is not a universal one #(and tbh i rather suspect not even a common one‚ although i don't remotely pretend to have data on that point?)#anyway like. if you aren't trying to make claims abt the universality of an experience: first person is a tool available to you!#consider using it!#i think honestly people deploy the universalizing 'you' in ways that are totally invisible to them and it's often alienating-to-harmful #but like. we're so primed to Seek Social Validation that we often phrase things in ways that are like. subtle equivalents of latin nonne #and it's like. this is a power move actually! you don't even realize you're making it!#anyway i'm just a lobbyist for like. understanding what you're doing and doing it on purpose #language #metatumbling

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