#something about the fact that they were rather active on this site? I'm not sure.

[stygian-posting]

Just felt another one slip. Humm....

[moonlit-tulip]

I think it was probably very good for me, in my childhood-to-early-teenagerhood, that I was able to be one of the most skilled / competent people within my social sphere, for one of my social spheres.

Specifically: there was this browser game site, Funorb, that used to exist. And I played games on it a lot, and was pretty competitive about it. There weren't official all-time highscores, but there were official records of who'd done the best at achievement hunting across the site's games, and there were unofficial all-time highscores, and I did my best to climb towards the top of several of these. I never got #1 anywhere, but at my peak I was somewhere around #10 on the achievement-hunting scoreboard, and there were several games in which I was able to get to the #2 or #3 slot on the all-time highscores.

And this helped me a lot, psychologically, on multiple axes. It let me develop a sense of what it's like from the inside to be an expert in a field, and to chat with and learn from the other experts. It let me build an intuition that getting really good at a thing is possible, that it's an option available to me, even if it might be hard and take practice. It let me learn how to become good at things, on the practice-techniques level. In general, it... trained me in what it's like to be more successful at something than most people are? Which is a useful thing to be trained in, for almost any goals a person might want to pursue!

(Not the only useful thing, by any means. Most of my particularly-ambitious projects post-Funorb, thus far, have mostly fallen down for reasons such as lack of project-management skill, executive dysfunction, the projects taking long enough for me to lose interest and go off to do other things instead, and so forth. But a useful thing. One important one among many, good for building momentum and un-greying options.)

The question, then, is: how can we scale this? Funorb had ~300,000 accounts with at least one achievement unlocked in at least one game, of which at least a few thousand were reasonably active for a reasonably long time, and the impact of being among the top players would have been much less if the pool had been smaller. But then what about everyone who wasn't one of the top players, who just played casually at the mid-tier of a handful of games? How can we arrange things so they, too, get the chance to have that experience of Unusual Competence?

The answer, I think, is siloing. Don't just have a single metric of competence; have lots of them, such that a person can become an outlierly expert in a small handful while others do the same elsewhere, and thus everyone can get the experience of being an outlierly expert at something. Which Funorb, in fact, did! It had a few dozen games, many of which had multiple modes. I was one of the top players overall, sure, but the place where I had the most visceral sense of expertise wasn't for my overall rank but rather in the specific games and modes where I was one of the all-time top players. And there were relatively few such games! Only four coming to mind off the top of my head, and perhaps another few I'm forgetting right now, out of the ~40 on the site.

Actually implementing this at maximum society-wide scale—engineering the world to allow any kid who wants to to get to experience being a world-class expert at something, and have it be real and not a fake participation prize, because lots of other people genuinely have done that same thing in a non-expert capacity—seems likely to be hard. And it's not the sort of ambitious society-engineering project I myself expect to find my comparative advantage in, relative to various others that I've been scheming about over the past year or two. But it is, I think, a worthy project in the abstract, one that I hope someone figures out some way to implement.

[aesethewitch]

If you'd like to go to the trouble of saying - because I feel like it may be a lot to answer, and I fully understand not feeling like it - after reading your last line in the Cecil Hotel question, I'm very curious about what your opinion is on what the deal is with cemeteries and how they work? Is there something special about them as far as ghost interactions go, if only due to the emotion and energy that the living pour into those locations? Do they have a tendency to hold or attract ghosts? I've never really thought to go searching for ghosts before, because it always felt like my hometown was bursting with them by default and you could just go wherever, but, in hindsight, when I moved away to a much bigger city, the only time I felt like I was living in an active place (which was very on and off and varied, as if perhaps I was in the middle of a ghost highway, and gave me my one and only inexplicably scratched story, and was its whole own thing), I was living across the street from a big, older cemetery. Also, this isn't quite related, but I thought you might enjoy this fun fact: there is a tiny café built out of an old cottage in my hometown, smack in the midst of some cemeteries, which is possibly my favourite place ever, and it's called The Soup Witch. :)

[excitedly rubbing hands together]

So, I've got a whole post planned for down the line about cemeteries and the things I've experienced in them. But! For now, a shortish set of answers to your questions:

Is there something special about them as far as ghost interactions go, if only due to the emotion and energy that the living pour into those locations?

Yes and no! Anywhere people die is liable to have ghosts hanging around, like hospitals, retirement homes, and the like. Cemeteries have ghosts because that's where bodies are. People's spirits are tethered to their physical bodies, some more than others. It's another one of those things that's very individual. And yes, I think that the power of emotion, prayer, and memory supplies quite a bit of energy in cemeteries! That's why old cemeteries are often quiet and calm, and ones that are being used currently tend to have more activity.

I do also think that if you're trying to invoke a particular ghost after they've faded, their grave/burial site or urn (if they were cremated) is a very powerful place to do so.

It's just simpler, safer, cheaper, and easier to run into a ghost at a cemetery than it is to try and get into a place like the Cecil Hotel, pay out the nose for a tour, and then endure some guy's schtick which is intended to scare rather than inform. Plus, cemetery ghosts are usually pretty cool people.

Do they have a tendency to hold or attract ghosts?

Attract? No. I think they're already there by virtue of having been buried. Hold? Well, kinda. [gestures at the above answer] Tethers will do that, y'know?

... it always felt like my hometown was bursting with them by default ...

That's fairly common! Some places feel like they have a ton of spirits hanging around, others feel very empty. I'm not sure, personally, what makes that difference! However, I will say, in a lot of places that feel "full," the culprits aren't usually ghosts. It's more often other kinds of spirits, which can include ghosts.

Also, this isn't quite related, but I thought you might enjoy this fun fact: there is a tiny café built out of an old cottage in my hometown, smack in the midst of some cemeteries, which is possibly my favourite place ever, and it's called The Soup Witch. :)

.......... [adds this to the list of places I want to go someday]

[elvenbeard]

I read your post about headcanons about Kerry's sexuality, and I totally agree with what you said about headcanons not taking away from representation, but I'm curious what your view are on mods that change a character's sexuality so anyone can romance them? I know there is, or at least used to be, quite a bit of debate around that. You don't have to answer if you don't want to, I'd hate to start any discourse drama on your blog. I'm just curious because I'm not even sure where I stand on the matter, and have been back and forth on it for a long time.

It's all good nonny! I have been asking myself that lately tbh, and I know I've been back and forth on it myself, too.

In this moment in time, I am completely indifferent on the existence of mods that do stuff like that. I don't condone or like them, but I'm not gonna do anything about them either. I know years ago in the Dragon Age fandom there was huge discourse and drama around a mod that made Dorian (canonically gay, his whole character arc revolves around that fact, just in case you're not into that series) available to be romanced by a female Inquisitor. And back then I was absolutely livid. Dorian was (and still is) one of my fave characters in the DA universe. And honestly, I couldn't even tell you now if anything ever came off of that whole drama (but I doubt it, cause it rarely does) - that's how pointless Internet drama really is. In the worst case, the person who made that mod got driven out of fandom entirely and now has negative associations with the queer community as a whole.

Do I think that mods that change a queer character's canon orientation are amazing? No, not really, and most of the time, especially in Dorian's case, they make no sense at all for the characters' arcs. I personally would never wanna play them and I'd also rather not know why some people make them.

(I'm completely biased here btw, because I do not feel as negatively about mods that change a canonically straight character's orientation to something queer. Simply because I'm queer and greedy for more representation, because there cannot be enough XD Does that make me a hypocrite to some people? Maybe, but honestly, I don't really care. And as I said in my post, and as you mentioned, even the "straight mods" do not take away from any queer representation that canonically exists.)

The thing is, me and others screaming and yelling about "straight mods" (or "bi mods" for characters that are explicitly gay/lesbian) is not gonna change a thing, mods like that are always gonna exist. Content I don't agree with is always something I can come across at random, and I keep finding new things that make me go "nope!" regularly. And even if I'm not screaming and yelling, and instead try to be reasonable, talk objectively with the mod makers as for xyz reasons their mod is not good in my eyes... I'm too old for that shit XD I'd rather use my energy and limited time to make a lot of gay stuff featuring my favourite queer blorbos instead of arguing with strangers why a straight!Dorian or bi!Judy or straight/bi!whoever mod is bad. Fandom should be a hobby, not activism, and you can go about fighting homophobia in a lot better ways than arguing about who certain pixel people would like to bone or not.

I wish there were - or maybe there are and I haven't figured it out yet - ways to filter stuff I don't wanna see on Nexus for example like there are on tumblr, ao3, any other social media site with a good tagging system and means to block tags or phrases or users. Curating your own experience and finding people who share your interests is so important and has really improved my time in fandom a lot over the last years. And it's good to have friends you can rant to about stupid things that upset you in private, definitely XD

So, on that note, ship whoever you wanna ship in this context, but tag it so that people who don't wanna see it can avoid it and don't get mad. Also sorry this got long and slightly off topic, I'm a chronic rambler.

(also, if anything's unclear, feel free to reach out again! sometimes I don't express myself as well as I think I do XD)

[edenfenixblogs]

Date: 10/9/2024

Note: Over a year since the pogrom. No apology. No retrospection. No acknowledgement of the continued suffering of Jewish students around them. Only the continued, predictable false support for people far away. Of course Gazan suffering matters.

But I think it's really telling that these people only have empathy for those with whom they cannot see and interact with in the same way they see and interact with their fellow students. Students who have literally gone to the U.S. Congress to testify about how bad conditions are for them and how unsafe they feel.

No. No support for them. Because they can't be trusted. They are the enemy. And these students and even many of the professors justify their inhumane treatment of those near them by virtue signaling as loud as possible that they can't be bad people, because they care so much about people who are really suffering. Unlike those nasty Jews they're forced to interact with.

It's insufferable.

And before the inevitable, predictable wave of "Wowwwwwww way to make an international humanitarian crisis all about you, you dirty zio" happens, a brief reminder:

I'm not a Zionist.

I have the unfortunate distinction of being directly affected by the hatred directly at me by people who hate me simply for being Jewish and feeling sad that Israelis were murdered. The vast majority of western leftist "activists" do not.

But also...

There's a scene in The Help where a bunch of White socialites are talking about all the fundraising they're doing to help starving African children, and well, I'll just let you read it.

The Home Health Sanitation Initiative that Hilly drafted is a racist initiative to force private homes to provide separate bathrooms for Black domestic workers in White houses.

Hilly, who fired her own Black maid for using Hilly's un-segregated home bathroom during a tornado. Hilly, who spread a malicious rumor about that same maid being a thief and rendered her unemployable because she didn't want people to know that it was Hilly's own racism rather than any failure of her maid (named Minny, btw) morally or professionally. And then Hilly took her racism and twisted it into some twisted form of activism for "health sanitation" until she could make it something she didn't have to be ashamed of. In fact, it was something she could be proud of. It was something she should be proud of, something she wanted others to notice. It wasn't racism at all now. It was good, actually. And anyone who disagreed? Well, they just don't care about health. They're disgusting.

And anyway, she can't be racist against black people! YOU'RE the ridiculous one for thinking that. Sure, she's part of a White Citizen's Council. But no need to look into that! After all, they're not anti-Black. They're just a group of good citizens who are white! And they can't be racist either! Because they send old coats and money from bake sales to...somewhere. And surely that will put a "big dent" in the humanitarian crisis of starving African children. How dare anyone accuse them of hating Black people when they spend their own time and energy raising money for African children! Would a racist do that?!

Yes. A racist would and a racist does.

Even if U of M liquidated all of it's assets and shut down and gave all of its money to "Gaza," it wouldn't put a dent in the amount of funding Hamas and Hezbollah are getting from Qatar and Iran. It wouldn't be enough rebuild the damaged buildings and restore the cultural heritage sites. It wouldn't do anything to "save" the people of Gaza. And where exactly are they proposing that money would even go? In some big envelope labeled "Gaza"? Oh, right. I forgot...

They weren't even trying to repair anything in Gaza. They were just trying to take money away from students who use that money to have a fulfilling college experience until they believed U of M had done enough to "divest from the Israeli campaign in Gaza."

Parents in this country re-mortgage homes to send their kids to college. Some students take on life altering debt. The least they can and should expect in return for that massive supposed-investment in their future is 1) a fulfilling campus experience 2) the right to feel safe on campus. These "activists" actively prevent both of those things.

It's super easy to send a few bucks of other people's money to starving children in Africa or take some of the money allocated to other people's campus experiences in the name of a cause that it is obviously good to support (Children don't deserve to starve. Gazans don't deserve to live in a war zone.), but it's a lot harder to do something that will actually make a difference--like address antisemitism and Islamophobia on college campuses or vocally support civil rights legislation. Because doing the latter means making yourself vulnerable and being perceived as "weird" or "uncool" by your peers. It means looking inward and addressing your own failures and biases and prejudices and changing. It means not getting to be the center of attention who is praised for helping. It means platforming the voices of those who are affected by a conflict rather than your own voice. It means not caring about being seen as socially ideal or morally pure but actually caring about other people who are hurting.

These student activists are no different from those racist White women trying to force Black people to use separate bathrooms with one hand while trying to feed starving Black children in Africa with the other. You can't erase the stench of your bigotry up close by spraying Febreze outside and hoping it makes its way across the world.

It's not about African children. It's not about Gazans. It never was. It was about using the suffering of others to make yourself seem more noble. And it's disgusting.

They aren't doing a damn thing to help Gaza. They are literally only interested in sacrificing their fellow students' college experiences and bullying an educational institution into symbolically punishing Israel. But spending their own money to help Gazans through reputable charities like Anera? Couldn't be them. Spending their time making Jewish and Muslim and Arab students feel safe? Couldn't be them. Doing anything that might actually make a positive difference in the lives of the people they claim to support? Couldn't be them. Disgusting. Unconscionable. And for many, unforgivable.

They're bigots. They just don't think anyone will notice if they wrap themselves tight enough in an activist costume.

It's been over a year since Jews were slaughtered and kidnapped along with anyone who was physically near enough to them at the time to be deemed as complicit by a bunch of terrorists eager to spill Jewish blood. And in that time these "activists" have done jack-fucking-shit to actually help any Palestinians in a meaningful way. But they sure have done a great job at destroying a sense of safety for Jews in diaspora and making the lives of Jews worse literally everywhere in the world.

Allegedly the pro Palestine activists then hacked into the CSG Instagram page and posted the same clip in the tweet with this caption

"Puppet" lovely jews control the world trope.

[sherbet-shark]

Romantic letter from Azul? Yes please -(つ✧ω✧)つ

I'm an INTP but my Enneagram is 9w1 (This might help). I may be reserved at first but I'm talkative once I develop trust and tend to info dump out of nowhere, as I like sharing my happiness to others. My hobbies are reading and drawing (does light hearted debating counts?) though I usually just laze around rather than indulge my interest. An underachiever some might say. Overall, I'm a chill person, very supportive and non judgemental.

(If you're not motivated or don't have the time to write this, that is totally okay(｡･ω･｡)ﾉ♡)

•An Octopus’ schemes•

Author’s Note: I clicked the link, and it makes sense, though I may have to do some continued digging to see if I can wrap my head around the Enneagrams. Thank you for the site, though!! It’s very helpful and has its information in digestible sizes. YES, light debating counts!! I personally find it very enlightening and intriguing to have another active participant in a conversation. Also!!! This is a fun way for me to de-stress from my papers don’t feel bad anonnie ;-;

My Dearest, Perfect, 

I hope you’ve found that discussion we had the day before as intriguing as I did. You’re random bouts of fun facts were unexpected, but the way you light up about every single one is admirable and cute. You’re a fascinating person. I'll be quite honest here. I never thought I’d be with someone in the span of my school years or with someone content with things as they are. Don't misunderstand me, love. It’s not an insult at all. I’m just surprised, is all.

        There’s so much potential in you. I’m not sure I quite get your compliance with being an underachiever. But I suppose people prefer a more straightforward way of life, but I am not one to judge. Do you recall when we were paired in P.E with Jamil? Not my finest moment, but then again, my strong suits aren’t in running myself ragged like a dog chasing its tail. I was making minor improvements, I’d like to say, and while I was expected a snicker at my shortcomings, instead, you didn’t pay it any mind. 

      You were just fascinated by the idea of flying. That was a pleasant surprise, but as you can recall. It wasn’t that easy to build trust with myself, and I had tried multiple times lured you into a contract but through being assigned through joint classes and coming to the Lounge. I grew to like your presence. 

    You’ve told me before that in your world. People don’t fly on broomsticks or even have magic to use. What a strange world you’re from, dearest, prefect. 

 Perhaps, you can concoct a drawing of some sort showing the beauty of your world? It could be something you find interesting. Before you raise your brow at this, know my idea is coming from a genuine place of care and not some get-rich-quick scheme. Instead, it’s hitting two birds with one stone. I’ll make it worth your while if you come to agree with my thought, love. 

Yours, 

Azul Ashengrotto

[desidarling123]

FACT CHECK: Did JKR sue people for writing Wolfstar fanfiction? [FALSE] [with sources]

So, if you're at all active in the HP fandom, and ESPECIALLY if you're on TikTok, you've likely come across a post or video claiming the following:

JKR LITERALLY SUED PEOPLE OVER WOLFSTAR FANFICTION! AND THAT'S ALSO WHY SHE MADE REMADORA CANON -- TO SPITE THE SHIPPERS!

I'm not sure who first started this claim or how its various permutations grew, but it spread at the speed of light across social media. This widely-circulated meme summarizes it:

For the LONGEST time, I didn't know what to make of it. The claims were vague enough that they seemed like they could be true -- after all, JKR is a megacunt and a renowned TERF. You don't need to fact-check either of those things.

But then -- for the first time ever -- I came across a video on TikTok claiming that what was being said was NOT true, and that it was being used SPECIFICALLY to stir up drama. Which was... crazy, to say least.

And that led me, well, to do my own research & fact-check. I've taken the original video's structure and added some exposition as well.

So here's the truth:

That 2003 case the above meme refers to? Not even REMOTELY what the situation was about. Hell, not even CLOSE.

In 2003, JKR sent a cease-and-desist letter to an explicit adult HP fan fiction website, called "Restricted Section". Here's the letter:

As the above letter states, the site was sent a notice because of overarching concerns that minors would accidentally stumble onto the sexually explicit content the site hosted after searching up 'Harry Potter'.

The hand-wringing over minor safety probably seems dated now, but it was, in fact, standard practice in the early 2000s - sexually explicit fan content was being removed across the internet for those exact concerns. In fact, just the year before, in 2002, fanfiction.net was purged of NC-17 content (which would happen one more time, in 2012).

I feel ridiculous stating it, but just to be clear -- in the above letter and all my subsequent research, there's NO evidence she went after Wolfstar -- or any ship, for that matter -- directly.

In fact, the letter goes an extra mile to declare that "our clients (JKR) make no complaint about innocent fan fiction written by genuine Harry Potter fans", but that, "there is plainly a very real risk that impressionable children... will be directed... to your sexually explicit website".

But that leads in nicely to the next point -- the website DIDN'T shut down, as per the letter's request. Instead, they added password protection to ensure only members older than 17 were accessing it.

OK, but why did JKR and Warner Bros go after this site in the first place? Most believe it was because of a widely-publicized article in THE SCOTSMAN that talked about the website. But, once again, this article doesn't go after Wolfstar in particular -- it only goes after Harry x Draco and Harry x Snape. The inclusion of latter was arguably what generated the biggest controversy -- the pairing of Harry, a fictional minor, with an adult character, in slash stories largely written by adult heterosexual women, was not one that could be cast in a good light to the general public. It's hardly a surprise JKR's lawyers sought to do something before the controversy got out of hand and worried parents started to make calls.

What I said before still goes, though. The legal core of the issue was ALWAYS to do NOT with the ships, but the EXPLICIT NATURE of the work -- and the (very real) concerns that the series' then-mostly-under-18 readership could find said works with very little as far as guardrails were concerned. (I know, because I was one of those kids)

TLDR; JKR did NOT sue people over Wolfstar fanfiction, she sent a cease-and-desist notice to a website that was not taking adequate precautions to prevent minors from accessing the explicit adult content on the site.

To be clear -- this is not meant to be a statement on what to ENJOY in your fandom ships. You can ship Wolfstar, Remadora, both, neither -- it really doesn't matter. I think the fandom is critical enough of the author to have reclaimed her work on our own terms, and people should be allowed to just, idk enjoy things.

But propagating straight-up falsehoods is dangerous, especially when it comes at the expense of 1) a safe fandom environment (see: the current fandom ship wars between Remadora and Wolfstar, which are difficult to watch) and 2) serves as a distraction from the ACTUAL garbage JKR engages in (of which there is plenty -- no need to make it up lol).

Also, truth be told -- inter-fandom ship wars don't generally add anything productive to the necessary conversations that need to be had about her works. The thought that dashing fan ships was a key motivator in her writing rather than, I don't know, plot concerns, is ludicrous on face, and gives fans a level of control over the original writer that just... doesn't exist IRL? And certainly didn't back then?

And again -- the books would have been VERY different series, plot-wise, if Sirius Black HAD lived. Him being in a relationship with Remus, confirmed or implied, has no relation to that decision.

If we have talk Harry Potter, I'd rather talk about just about anything else -- the racism, the misogyny, the lack of any sort of organic queer rep and JKR's inability to just own up to the problems in her works. But the minutiae of ship wars -- and the inevitable stream of disinformation that comes with it, sans any kind of concrete evidence -- is one I'd prefer to pass on.

SOURCES:

Cease-and-Desist Letter Copy: http://archive.is/HTLsq

THE SCOTSMAN Article: http://archive.is/VdEaY

Restricted Section Updates Page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030815233612/http://www.restrictedsection.org/news.php

BONUS: The original TikTok video I came across whose structure and sources I shamelessly stole to read and build out my argument. I copied a lot of their wording because it explained it better than I could, you just get some bonus snarky commentary from yours truly

[curmemini]

a different anon, but I wanted to make a few notes on that topic you brought up:

Art and writing in general has always been treated differently. Its one of the reasons why its unlikely one could get a good tv series based on Warrior Cats or Animorphs. The books feature a lot of gore, death, and in the case of Animorphs some good ol' psychological body horror, while at the same time being aimed at children.

Its also easier to catch racist creations in artwork, then it is with writing. (Harry potter always had some PRETTY terrible things, such as the Goblin bankers. But the age of people who first read that novel, and the fact that they were in a book, helped obfuscate it for a while.)

Exactly! I think it's fair to say that while writing is the story and the imagery comes secondary, art is the reverse - art is imagery and story comes secondary. The secondary here isn't denoting importance, it is denoting if the reader/watcher? looker? person looking at a piece of art ... has to make the active choice to engage with a work. What is interesting is that both of those series have graphic novel / manga adaptions. It's been far too long since I read the Warriors manga, but I distinctly remember the Animorphs transformation being watered down both from how it was described in the books and the fun cover art of the original series. Which makes sense, because that would be horrifying. I think the old Animorphs show sucked too but I was very young when I had any feasible way of watching that on nickelodeon

But I also think it's fair to say that in order to make fan-spaces more inclusive, fans should really take a look at what they are willing to accept in writing versus in artwork. Not in a "squick" or distaste way, but in a - can this be used to harm others, and how way. OR alternatively, there should be better features to prevent harmful works from being the first thing in front of someone's eyes. Some will say that it already is inclusive, but there is not an end point to that ideal, I don't think. And I have seen plenty of testimony from BIPOC about how spaces are still encouraging racism. After all, much of the backlash against the person running for AO3 board turned into racially charged insults and conspiracy. And I think that while the filter system we have on AO3 is leagues above what we have on fanfic.net - it still has light years to go before it is a perfect system. I believe that at the very least, if we are going to run with the argument that AO3 is an archive or is a library (both options I dislike, btw, I think its a terrible comparison) and that makes it a sacred thing which can't be moderated or have works removed from and must allow ALL work on it so long as it could be considered fan-ish, then we should work on systems that should've been in place from the start. Permanent blacklists, cross-fandom filtering, hiding dead-dove content behind being logged in I think would be a very fair change. Like, look. AO3 is not the first fanfic site I have regularly used. When a my little pony fanfiction site has better content filtering than you (opt-in, rather than opt-out for nsfw, dark/grim dark and something else I believe) then I think there is an issue and a large discussion to be had that isn't just blown away by "oh nooooo censorship!! our lives are ruined and the sky is falling and now they're coming for underage fics but next itll be you queers!" This doesn't solve the problem of -ism content, and I don't think that is a problem that can be solved quite so easily. But at the very least, it'd hide it so those who don't want to read content that is usually tagged for and would really rather think it's not being posted could live their lives. ... Now that I'm thinking about it, there's a few other sites I use that hide certain content from users who are not logged in. They already have the framework to stop guests from commenting... surely that would not be too much of a stretch? (which btw, libaries DO prune books, we DO have policies for the removal of books even before they are challenged. Most archives have policies on what content they allow to be publicly displayed, etc. Most of the people arguing against this have either never worked in a library or are taking an extremely literal take on ao3s name)

[thatonecitykid]

I bet on Losing

Hey everyone! Sorry this is so sad.. was already crying so might as well make everyone else cry.This takes place after Endgame but during the same time as Far From Home. Listen to "I Bet on Losing Dogs" by Mitski for the full experience. Word Count: 2517. Have fun angels :)

Peter had finally left for his class trip, Pepper and Morgan had gone to spend their summer in Malibu, the remaining avengers were either in space or had completely disappeared from your life. Here you were after five years of your life had evaporated, and after all this time you had to play your fathers role for all the remaining avengers. You hadn't had the opportunity to cry when you first learned about what had happened. You couldn't cry at the funeral, not because you did not want to, but because you felt as if your father wouldn't want to see it. No one wanted to leave you alone, but after months of trying to dig some type of emotion out of you they had assumed that the death and slow disappearance of your makeshift avenger family had unaffected you.

You finally had the opportunity to exist alone. You had also finally mustered up the strength to visit secluded cabin your father had lived in for the last five years of his life. Although you had been given the keys immediately after the funeral, something about visiting the area made you feel uneasy. Not necessarily creeped out but just as if you did not belong, after all it was something your father invested in after you had already blipped away for several months.

You drove up to the cabin alone, slowly unlocking the door as if to not start or whoever may be inside. Before even entering the cabin, it looks clean, you assume that Pepper has had people cleaning constantly to maintain the cabin. It made sense, it was something she's cherished. You stepped into the cabin slowly and began to look around. The walls were lined with framed pictures of Morgan, family pictures of Pepper, your dad, and Morgan, and random posters and vintage albums. Although you were not the one to complain about it, having no evidence of your existence in the main areas of the home caused your heart dropped. As you wandered through the kitchen and the main family room, there is no evidence of Tony's life prior to the blip, just a somewhat normal family of three.

You decide to wander to the basement area, leaving the office and bedroom spaces upstairs for later. There was a large sitting area that you assumed they watched movies in. There was also a playroom painted pink featuring all sorts of gadgets very similar to those you grew up with that Tony had made for you. Towards the back hall of the basement, it was a glass door to your father's workshop area. You open the door gently and made your way in.

Despite looking like somewhat of a mess, you knew that behind the madness there was a method. You could tell that although your dad left in a hurry, things were placed in specific spots very similarly to how he did in every other one of his workshops. You walked towards his swiveling chair, noticing a metal box with a button on the worktable. You press the button and jump back as a life-size hologram of your father appeared in the room. He began

"Hi Pepper. My love, my muse, my boss. If you are listening to this then I did the one thing you have always told me not to do. I'm sorry. I'm sorry for all the worry I've put you through, and I am sorry for taking myself away from you. I was a gift wasn't I. You've already seen another version of this message, but it never hurts to see your face again my darling."

The tears in your eyes begin to form, not because you had not expected to see your father. At this point you had already seen the message he had left after the funeral; It was only really meant for Pepper and Morgan, never addressing you.. At the funeral you refused to enter the cabin but as you watched the message while standing outside, Happy looked over at you with remorse but you kept a straight face again. Who were you to complain at your dead dad's funeral? Yet this message radiated the same energy.

As the second portion of the message began to play tears began to fall faster. It almost feels like an out of body, sure your dad had taken up different kids during your time growing up, but this message made you feel as If you had been completely replaced. Although it felt like a dumb theory there was no evidence as to your existence prior to Morgan.

"Hello my little scientist. How's my favorite person. Daddy is really sorry I can't be there right now. Be a trooper and hug you mom for me real quick. Now you must be surprised because I'm supposed to be the strongest dad in the world but let me tell you kid, sometimes crazy things happen when put on the ironman helmet. My little minion I love you 3000. My love for you is infinite. You have been and will forever be daddy's best friend."

Here you were crying over a child who had also lost her father, filled with jealousy over the fact that you father had chosen her and failed to consider your return but had prepared for Peter's return, still had projects waiting for Harley, and had in fact set up a stable plan for Morgan's future. At this point you were sobbing, what had all felt like a bad nightmare and jumping to conclusions had started to feel way too real. This emotion was even stronger than when you watched footage from your father suit as the snap happened, this emotion felt like a stab in the back.

Maybe he never loved me.

You tried to collect yourself but were still sobbing when the holographic figure of you father disappeared. You might as well finish the house tour before leaving. The upstairs portion of the house featured Tony and Pepper's room, Morgan's room and two other doors. The main bedroom was tidy and organized, with a closet full of clothes that both Pepper and your dad had left. You walked into Morgan's room and did a quick look around, not wanting to invade child space. Returning to the hallway you opened the door to your father's office. Inside there was a rather simple with a desk, a leather chair, and two matching chairs. The plants in the room were growing well, meaning someone still came to water them. There were a few pictures on the wall, including Peter's Stark internship picture, and a random picture you took of the original Avengers after their first New York battle. On the desk there was another metal box similar to that in the workpace. You argued whether or not you wanted to potentially break your heart more before giving in, siting in the leather seat and pressing the button.

A slim beam of light scanned over your face, confirming your identity, and the box began to play. To say you were shocked is an understatement, as your father's hologram appeared across the desk sitting in one of the matching chairs.

"Hello Munchkin. If you've found this box, then I just going to have to accept that I've failed you. You've been gone for five years and regret every moment leading up to when you snapped away. You really did want to come to space with me, and honestly you would have been helpful, but I don't think I could see you Blip away and have the will to continue. That being said because I am already admitting I was wrong, I should not have had your suit take you to the bunker room, where you eventually snapped away alone. I regret that decision y constantly. On another note, I'm sorry I didn't hug you as soon as you got back, I clearly I cannot really hug anyone."

You had finally given up on holding in their tears. You didn't have to be strong in front of your dad. He had always held you when you cried and this time he couldn't. You tried to wrap your arms around yourself, but nothing felt the same.

"I hope you are crying, because if I'm crying alone during this part, I'll be embarrassed, his image continued as it stood up and leaned against the back of the chair. Munch I know you've probably walked around this house and have found no evidence of yourself. You've probably beat yourself up about how much I love Morgan, but think about it. The amount of time I've spent these last 5 years essentially idolizing you would not have been good for her to experience. "

You rose quickly from the chair. Not even one damn picture?

"Now I know you're wondering not even a single picture. Pick up the projector box and follow me ."

You did as the digital version of your father told you and followed it back into the hallway.

"Put the box down and put your hand on the center of the door. "

This activated a scanner which opened up the door to the room. As you walked in you recognized that this was an exact replica of your room back in the Malibu house. You were still a kid when the original house was blown to pieces but somehow everything was exactly as you remembered it. As you walked further into the room you noticed the large screens, placed like picture frames, which played videos and pictures of you and your dad throughout the years.

Your father walked towards the center of the room, bounded by how far the projector was.

"You see kid, me and you have somewhat the same grieving styles. I have a feeling you didn't cry at the funeral. I have a feeling you haven't cried, at least in a way that someone else could have noticed. You take after me in that sense."

The hologram started to sniffle, your dad had actually started crying when recording this. You really wanted to hug him, the reality of his death hurt even more. You had finally allowed yourself to start grieving.

"Look, I know you used to listen to the song about betting on losing dogs when you wanted to cry, but that does not apply to you at all. You may have gotten a more complicated stick of life, but I can tell ya, this does not need to be your villain origin story. From the first day I took you home I could tell you were a fighter, but I need you to feel as if its ok to cry. I've spent hours on this floor in shambles wishing you were here. The small things that Morgan does that remind me of you throw me into sadness pools constantly. You are my motivating force. I really hope you allow yourself to cry about it so that you can continue in life. I don't think I can stand in this room for any longer before I cannot speak at all, so please take the projector back to my office. "

As you lifted the projector you thought about how much this must have hurt your father to record. Maybe he didn't want anyone to encounter this box except for you. As you placed the box on the desk, you sat back into the leather chair as your father's holograph sat across from you.

"On a different note, you are probably wondering why I seemed to set up a game plan for everyone but you. With Morgan I just made sure she had a comfortable, who am I kidding, lavish funding behind her. I can't dictate what a five-year-old should do. For Harley you know that I've always looked out for him, a position in Stark industries honestly should not have surprised you. Peter is what I feel most conflicted about. I'm not setting him up to become the next Ironman, I'm setting him up to become the greatest version of Spiderman he can be. Well, I know the media is probably going to take it and run having known that Spiderman and Ironman we're friends at some point, but I'm really giving you the biggest responsibility. I don't expect you to live in my shadow, I want you to outgrow it. I think you might be surprised to see everything that I left you, besides Stark industries itself. That's a conversation for another day."

"I know I've been speaking for quite a while, but my baby, my baby yes I called you that. I know how much this has all affected you, and I'm sorry, I am completely sorry and do take full fault for it all. But now because we cannot change the past, let's focus on the present. I want you to know that I loved you with my entire being. I'm not sure how to emphasize this enough but I do want you to know you were cared for, you were loved, and you were thought about for every minute. If you don't get to see this message, and I'm already gone, that means this message will never have to play for anyone. Either I found you and I've given you a new message, or I'm rolling in my grave. Either way my darling I cannot emphasize how much I love you. I do hope for the best for. Before I have to go, I want to see you smile. Sure, I can't physically see it right now, but I can imagine it."

As the recording choked out that last sentence, you flashed a weak smile. A face sticky with all the tears that you have been crying.

Now I know you need to get back home, but when you get back to the city, stop by the shawarma place and get something to eat. you gotta eat Darling. Also don't act like you don't like Peter, you two idiots keep pushing each other away in cannot take it. Now I'm gonna say goodbye mini me. Watch over Pepper and Morgan for me, okay? I love you."

You took one final sweep of the house before heading back to your car. You had cried so much that your eyes physical hurt. You almost felt a sense of comfort having finally released some of the pent-up emotion. As you drove towards the city and towards the Shawarma place you almost felt kind of sad, knowing that all of your friends were in a foreign country. Yet you still felt as if your best friend, your Dad was watching over you. And in all reality that felt as if it was the only thing that mattered.

[likeabxrdinflight]

Honestly, It's kinda seems weird for me to join ATLA fandom after 15 years. I'm mean, I already watch this show, but It was like 10 years ago, when I was 8 or 9 years old. And as a child, I didn't get an opportunity to watch this show completely, so I don't remember some moments, when I was rewatching the series. Like, the fight between Katara and Pakku, Iroh's story about how Zuko gets his scar, damn I didn't even remember the Agni Kai between Zuko and Azula.

Now, I'm 18. So I don't know, It's just kinda feels like I've missed a lot of stuff. I wish I had join this fandom earlier.

The fandom rebirth has been an interesting thing to watch as someone who was there pretty much from the beginning of the original fandom- when the show first came out in 2005 I was in middle school, but I didn’t really get super involved in the online world until around 07/08, by which time I was in high school. I can tell you a little bit about what it was like, because it was a very different environment back then. You definitely missed a lot of content, but much of it is still there if you really wanna go digging for it. What’s really changed, I think, is the experience. I don’t know how interested you are in fandom history, but the ATLA fandom has a very interesting one. 

For starters, the web was a lot less regulated than it is today (and a lot less commercialized, frankly). Fandom congregated in forums mainly, or on sites like deviantart and fanfiction.net. It was even possible to form community on youtube back in those days, as it was a lot easier for some nobody teenager to throw up an AMV that would get hundreds or thousands of hits. The algorithm back then was much, much different than what you see now, and channels had comments sections and inboxes to go to. And one of the biggest ATLA websites was avatarspirit.net, which had a collection of screencaps, transcripts, and news sources, but also hosted some of the biggest forums at the time. 

So no tumblr, no discord servers, even twitter wasn’t really a thing back then. It was sort of the wild west, in a sense, because the internet was still relatively new. The generation who built the ATLA fandom were not true digital natives the way kids are now- we grew up alongside the internet, it aged with us, rather than being something already around that we grew into. So there was a feeling of “anything goes,” this not helped by the fact that 90% of the ATLA fandom were teenagers anyways.

Because of this, the atmosphere of fandom was quite different back then. Shipping wars were definitely a thing, I’m sure you’ve heard the legend of Kataang vs. Zutara- that’s arguably the go to example of what a ship war even is, and it could be vicious. You almost had to pick a side to be involved with the ATLA fandom at all, it was that pervasive. LGBT ships existed (the most popular being Tyzula and Jetko), but were not a prominent part of the fandom- anything that wasn’t the two big ones were smaller ships like Tokka, Taang, Maiko, and a handful of more obscure ships like Jetara or Sokkla. The ships that are popular today really weren’t back then- Zukka certainly existed but it wasn’t really on the greater fandom radar. 

The discourse was different too. Fandom wasn’t really tied to activism back in the 2000s the way it is now, no one was really talking about shipping in the context of how problematic or non-problematic something was. Certainly there was some discourse along those lines, but not like you see today. I see a lot of newer discourse now about Zutara being racist, for example, that just wasn’t prominent in the early days. Age gap ships also used to be very popular in the old days. Toph and Sokka used to be a pretty big ship that’s all but disappeared in the modern fandom climate, where any hint of an age gap gets people pretty up in arms. Abuse discourse was a lot less complex back then too, for good or ill. I’ve certainly read some Zutara fics in my time that, were they published today, easily would have gotten the authors accused of abuse apologism. 

And I think that’s what stands out to me a lot. When I was growing up, nobody really cared how toxic a relationship was or wasn’t, there was no emphasis on how “pure” or “wholesome” a ship was. And I actually do think that was a direct response to the American culture of the time, which was much more socially conservative (remember this is all happening during the late Bush years). Back then, it was considered progressive to push boundaries like that, to try and write “taboo” ships. It was a rebellion against against the “compassionate conservative” narrative that dominated the social attitudes of the Bush era. Most of the early ATLA fandom were teenagers. We were all rebelling in our own ways against our parents and against the authority of the time.

So for example, Zutara fics that portrayed Zuko as a legitimate villain were actually pretty popular. Some of the most popular tropes featured Zuko capturing Katara and falling in love with her while she was a prisoner. The ship was seen as kind of dark, and that was sexy to people (many of these older fics have aged poorly in the Trump era). Zuko also wasn’t held up as this “Pure Good Boi” that he is now- the myth that Zuko’s Redemption Arc has become has really changed how people see his character. But back then, he was the Edgy Bad Boy for two and a half seasons before finally turning full Good. 

This was also coming off the great Livejournal Strikethrough of 07, in which a lot of fics were taken down from that platform due to “inappropriate sexual content.” This was widely seen amongst fandoms as censorship, and AO3 began to grow in popularity in the aftermath (though ff.net was still the dominant fanfiction site for several more years.) So there was also a feeling of rebellion against that, too. By and large, It was seen as transgressive and edgy to write darker stuff, and in a pre-game of thrones world that saw people literally burning Harry Potter books for being “satanic”, edgy was largely considered a good thing.

It really cannot be overstated how much game of thrones completely altered the way we view fiction, but...that’s another post.

And finally, this was an era that was very...heterosexual. People actually felt the need to put disclaimers on queer fics like “boyxboy/girlxgirl DON’T LIKE DON’T READ NO FLAMES”. We mock those kind of disclaimers now, because they look silly in hindsight, but people really did get hate comments back in the day for writing any queer ships, whether they were “healthy” or not. Literally just existing as a queer person was transgressive in 2005. It doesn’t feel that long ago, but in 2005 only two states had legalized gay marriage, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was still the military policy, it was legal to discriminate against LGBT people in most if not all work places, and public approval for same-sex marriage was hovering around 40%, maybe. There were zero canonical queer characters in American children’s animation. It wasn’t that long ago, really, but it was a different time.

All this to say, things have changed a lot. But if there was ever a time to dive into the ATLA fandom, now is it- content is being created again, people are re-engaging with the series and looking at it from a more modern lens. The fandom olds are still here, but there’s always room for younger, newer fans. If there wasn’t, the fandom would eventually die out, and no one wants that. So if you feel weird about diving into it now, don’t- there’s honestly never been a better time with the Netflix resurgence. 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN CASE

In retrospect this was a smart move, but we want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. Not quite so dominant as it had been a book.1 So an artist working on a hard problem, but their approach was so bogus that there was little chance of getting market price. You can thus gradually work your way into their confidence, and maybe turn it into an official job later, or not, big changes are coming, because the younger you are, are you really out of your element?2 It makes me spend more time on the Octoparts than I do with most of the time.3 I've noticed for a while before starting a startup generally. Certainly it can be used in painting: this is our site, not yours.4

I just wanted to keep one foot in the art world. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but because it's so much easier than building something great. They seemed wrong. Once you've seen enough examples of specific types of tricks, you start to become a connoisseur of trickery in general, just as more people could have computers once microprocessors made them cheap. But you have to do well on tests. So being hard to talk to? How to Win Friends and Influence People.5 Once they realized this, they stopped caring so much what investors thought about them. If you've heard anything about startups you've probably heard about the long hours.6

They're not part of the conversation.7 Rockefeller said in 1880, The day of combination is here to stay. You may find you'd prefer the quiet guy you've mostly ignored to someone who seems impressive but has an attitude to match. But though it was evidence that there was, somewhere, a world that wasn't red delicious, I didn't find it till college. Regardless of how complex your life is, you'll find that everyone else still shares, you're in a powerful position. But it was nearly as bad at Cornell.8 Big companies also lose because they usually only build one of each thing.9 Why hadn't I worked on more substantial problems? Sam Altman did. Whereas if you graduate and get a little more experience before they start a company. In fact, the whole concept of a good effort.10 It's useful in starting startups because you're capable of more than you realized.

Get into the habit of thinking of software as having users. So you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll close it, whatever type of lead it is.11 That last one is a big problem. So presumably that's what this brainstorming session was about. Since there's such a thing as good art.12 It seemed to people at the beginning of their career only works if everyone does it. At the bottom you'll find the subjects with least intellectual content. A sales force is worth something, I'll admit. That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. So you have to remember everything you've said in the past to make sure you don't contradict yourself. Don't be evil.

So the downhills of the roller-coaster are more of a self fulfilling prophecy than the uphills. But you have to charm them.13 Plus if you didn't put the company first you wouldn't be promoted, and if they take it, they'll take it on their terms. Maybe in the future the executives installed by VCs will increasingly be a third option: to start with good people, to make something people will pay most for? Not at all. I didn't find it till college. It sounded serious and difficult.14 I solve?15

In fact, one of the O'Reilly people that guy looks just like Tim.16 Most companies, at least at first. A new search engine, when there were already about 10, and they were all aiming at the middle of the 20th century was a low-res: a Duplo world of a few big blocks fragmented into many companies of different sizes—some of them overseas—it became harder for unions to enforce their monopolies. Many students feel they should wait and get a job depends on the kind you want. That's their secret. I think angel rounds will start to develop standardized procedures that make acquisitions little more work than hiring someone. It's not so much that adults lie to kids about this as never explain it. Let's look at our case. Art is man-made.17

Notes

The Duty of Genius, Penguin, 1991.

They act as if the value of a startup. One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to than because they believe they have wings and start to go to a study by the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914. If Apple's board hadn't made that blunder, they wouldn't have the same town, unless it was not just the location of the Industrial Revolution, England was already the richest country in the technology everyone was going to drunken parties.

They hoped they were just getting started. Two customer support people tied for first prize with entries I still shiver to recall. Users dislike their new operating system.

There may be underestimating VCs. If I were doing more than others, like a later Demo Day or die.

Maybe it would be reluctant to start a startup could grow big by transforming consulting into a significant cause, and everyone's used to hear about the same people the shareholders instead of bookmarking.

The best way for a startup is rare.

The point where things start with their companies till about a week before. If you're sufficiently good bet, why did it. I think the company. They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in a band, or can make offers that every successful startup?

This must have seemed shocking for a smooth one. The Nineteenth-Century History of English Studies.

Tell the investors talking to a 2002 report by the Robinson-Patman Act of 1982, which have remained more or less constant during the Ming Dynasty, when the country it's in.

This would penalize short comments especially, because time seems to have discovered something intuitively without understanding all its implications. Free money to spend on trade goods to make up the same weight as any successful startup?

I think lack of transparency.

This is a case in point: lots of people, but if you were doing more than the founders don't have one clear inventor. This is actually a great idea as something that would scale.

You'll be lucky if fundraising feels pleasant enough to invest more, the laser, it's easy to imagine cases where a laptop would be rolling in their IPO filing. It's not quite as harmless as we are only doing angel deals to generate revenues they could imagine needing in their heads for someone to invent the spreadsheet. 8%, Linux 11.

If they agreed among themselves never to do this would give us. But the usual suspects in about the idea of getting too high a valuation cap is merely boring, we actively sought out people who'd failed out of just assuming that their experience so far. According to Zagat's there are before the name implies, you can get very emotional.

Oddly enough, but getting rich, purely mercenary founders will seem more powerful sororities at your school sucks, where x includes math, law, you're going to visit 20 different communities regularly. Not startup ideas is to start a startup. Price Bubble? When companies can't simply eliminate new competitors may be underestimating VCs.

Some translators use calm instead of a powerful syndicate, you might be able to at all.

The best kind of work is in the sort of pious crap you were still employed in your classes as a kid and as a high school writing this, but it might be interested in you, they may have no decision-making causes things to them more professional. There are a lot of people thought it was the first type, and most pharmaceutical startups the second clause could include any possible startup, but rather by, say, recursion, and indeed the venture business would work better, and this tends to be spread out geographically. This is one way in which case this behavior at least try. And startups that get killed by overspending might have done and try another approach.

[the-mira-life-project-mtf]

The Art Of Trying To ‘Pass’ As Female (My MtF~HRT Research)

Just as Krista described her need to change her face in order ‘just to leave the house,’ most of the 28 patients with whom I conducted interviews and observations, and the many others with whom I shared casual conversations, explained their desire for facial transformation in order to carry out everyday activities. As much as patients might want to be beautiful women after surgery, their primary desire was to walk through the world being recognized as women—which, in a sense, meant not being recognized at all. But just as physician discourse often conflated or collapsed the biological category of the female with the aesthetic category of the beautiful when describing the aims of feminization, so too did patients draw on both of these notions when communicating what their goal of being a woman actually means.

Woman is difficult to define as a surgical category precisely because it is difficult to define as a social one. Not surprisingly, patients had different ideas (and ideals) in mind when they imagined the kinds of transformations that would allow them to be the kind of women they wanted to be. When I asked Rosa if she had a particular idea of what she hoped to look like after surgery, she immediately said, “Yes,” and reached into her bag. She pulled out a stack of papers wrapped in plastic sleeves and held together by a binder ring. She shuffled through the stack, unfastened the ring, and put a page on the desk in front of me. There were three photographs that had been clipped from magazines and pasted to a sheet of white paper. As she began to talk I was not sure which one I was supposed to be looking at. “I want to look like a woman,” she began. “I want a face that a man falls in love with. Like an angel. Innocent. You are a man. You understand. Look at her [pointing to an image on the page.] What do you feel? Body is nice, but look at her face. In that picture you can’t see her breasts, but you can see her face. She’s beautiful. You feel inside something like love. I want a face that a man sees and it makes him turn red.” Rosa was not sure what her particular features would be when all was said and done. She did not expect Howard to replicate the model’s face onto hers. She did, however, expect that her face would be one that would do something for others and, in turn, do something for her. Rosa described the changes she was after in terms of how particular aspects of her face evoked gendered attributes.

When our conversation turned from the effect she desired to the precise means of achieving that effect, she gave an inventory of her face and the multiple ways that it works against her. The bone above my eyes gives me an aggressive look. I have dark, shadowed eyes. If you see that actress Hillary Swank, she has this. Something doesn’t match on her face. Nose, obviously. My nose is male. Upper lip. I can’t wear red lipstick. If I wear read lipstick it makes me look like a man in a dress. When I watch videos of myself, my expressions never look happy. I look angry.

Rosa was confident that following surgery she would ‘feel more sure of [her]self.’ It was this confidence that made women beautiful. Just something about them that had such power and sex appeal. Women, in her telling, were not aggressive or angry; their faces are built to be adorned. Though she knew that Howard could not necessarily make her beautiful, she was confident that he could make her a woman. For her, that was enough.

Gretchen had much more modest desires. Her hopes for surgery were less about eliciting a particular response, than avoiding a reaction altogether. Just…I hope that I won’t have this kind of jerk that was sitting just to my left on the plane this morning who was seemingly horrified by seeing this (gestures to her face and body). He was probably having the idea that I was fantasizing about him or something. I just hope that next time, he won’t think about it twice. ‘Yes, I’m sitting beside a girl. So what and that’s all.’ End of story.

Pamela expressed her desires this way: I'm doing it (having FFS) so I will feel that I "pass" (making air quotes). Whatever that is. And of course the operative word there is ‘feel.’ I'm tired of thinking, is that person reading me? No? Well how 'bout that person? I want to think about something else as I walk down the sidewalk.... Like, say, what a nice dress in the window. Maybe that's it. Going unnoticed is a thing that most people take for granted.

Erving Goffman (1963) called those who do not draw unwelcome attention from their bodily appearance ‘normal’s.’ Normal’s, Goffman argues, simply cannot understand how it feels to be the object of derisive looks and hostile attention from complete strangers. To be a member of a stigmatized group is to be the object of distain. When some aspect of your physical body is the source of that stigma, there are, according to Goffman, two possible responses. You can come to terms with the fact of your stigma and attempt to ‘normificate’ it by acting normal, as though the stigma did not exist. Or, you can normalize it by making a conscious effort to correct it. Though ‘norming’ surgeries are sometimes the objects of ethical debate, the validity of the desired outcome is hard to dispute.

In an article entitled, ‘Self-Help for the Facially Disfigured,’ Elisabeth Bednar put the matter simply. Whether we are shopping, riding the subway, or eating in a restaurant, all of which are casual day-to-day social encounters, there is the initial stare, then the look away, before a second, furtive glance inevitably puts the beheld immediately in a separate class. For those who experience this discrimination, the question of the moral justification of surgery to increase societal acceptance...

She pointed out photographs in Howard’s book in which surgery did not necessarily improve a patient’s attractiveness, but it did change her sex. When referring to before and after photographs she said, “See this is an ugly boy and this is an ugly girl, but it is a girl. Other doctors can’t do this.” 

There can be no greater wish than to melt into the crowd or to walk into a room unnoticed (Bednar 1996:53). The patients and surgeons with whom I worked, referred to the fact (or fantasy) of going unnoticed as ‘passing.’ The language of passing is contentious for some transpeople because it can be read as implying a sort of deception; being taken as a member of a group to which one does not really (where really refers both to an ontological truth and to the rightful membership based on it) belong. This deception is also often marked by a supposed opportunism; passing is really only considered as such when a person passes from an undesirable group and into a desired one (Gilman 1999). It therefore frequently carries a connotation of a strategy to access particular forms of privilege. Many transpeople object to the language of ‘passing’ because, they argue, to say that one passes as a woman is to acknowledge that woman is not a category to which she rightfully belongs.

As Julia Serano insists, “I don’t pass as a woman. I am a woman. I pass as a cis-gendered woman” (by which she means a woman who has never changed her gender). These sorts of concerns about what it means both politically and ontologically to pass, were only voiced by two of the patients with whom I spoke. Despite their reservations, they, like all other patients I met, held the desire to pass as an incredibly important and explicitly stated aim. As historian of medicine Sander Gilman explains, ‘The happiness of the patient is the fantasy of a world and a life in the patient’s control rather than in the control of the observer on the street. And that is not wrong. This promise of autonomy, of being able to make choices and act upon them, does provide the ability to control the world. It can (and does) make people happy’ (1999:331-2).

Like language, social roles do not exist in isolation (Wittgenstein 1953:§243); they are by definition shared properties conveyed between people in given social group. A person’s individual conviction that she is a woman is not enough to maker her a woman in any social sense. To be a woman requires not simply the conviction that one is a woman, but the recognition of that status by others.

FFS is a surgical recognition that how one feels about and lives their sexed and gendered embodiment is not a private, psychic reality, but is the product of social life, of living with others. Passing is not a subjective act; it is a social one. Nearly all clinical literature as well as most popular literature on transsexualism suggests that transsexualism is a property (and problem) of an atomized and bounded individual. This focus on the individual and psychic nature of the bodily dissatisfaction that characterizes transsexualism is named explicitly as well as through the invocation of metaphors of isolation, internality and invisibility. While an individual body may be the site of the material intervention, the change enacted in FFS takes place irreducibly between persons. The efficacy of FFS is located not in the material result of surgery itself, but in the effect that the surgical result will produce in the perceptions of imagined.

Other writers argue that the goal of ‘passing’ not only obscures but effectively forecloses any possibility of a trans- specific radical political subjectivity (Bornstein 1994, Green 1999, Stone 1991). These writers insist that living as out trans-people is the only way to call attention to the oppressive gender system that devalues and delegitimizes trans-lives and bodies, among others. This kind of visibility can come at the great cost of personal and emotional safety, leading to a conflicting desire to be a part of the solution while maintaining ones safety and sanity (Green 1999). Perhaps nowhere is this made clearer than in the imaginary scene through which Howard explains the goal of his surgical work:

If, on a Saturday morning, someone knocks at the door and you wake up and get out of bed with messy hair, no makeup, no jewelry, and answer the door, the first words you’ll hear from the person standing there are, “Excuse me, ma’am….”

This incredibly powerful scene was a staple of Howard’s conference presentations, and was repeated in slightly altered and personalized forms by many of the patients who had selected Howard as their surgeon. Through this turning outward—and the making of femaleness at the site of the exchange with a stranger—FFS reconfigures the project of surgical sex reassignment from one rooted in the private subjectivity of the genitals, to one located in the public sociality of the face. Time after time, patients told me that their primary desire was to go through their daily lives and be left alone, without thinking about what others may see when they look at them.

Krista rode the city bus on the day before our interview. On that day, for the first time in recent memory, she did not prepare extensively before leaving the house. “I didn’t have to worry about having my bangs just right, or having just the right pair of glasses on. I just got on the bus and thought, ‘Wow, this is cool.’” Although her face was covered in bandages, sutures, and bruises, and people on that bus were undoubtedly looking at her, Krista found joy in the certainty that whatever they might have seen when they looked at her, the did not see a transwoman. The stuff of her maleness was gone. It was a novel—but so, so welcome—experience. It is important to remember that the stakes for passing are often quite high, often quite serious. The desire to pass does not only exist for the gratification of personal goals, but also achieves a mode of physical and emotional safety. It is crucial to remember that trans-people are disproportionately incarcerated, unemployed, and lost to suicide and other violence. I make this point not to hold counter discourses hostage to its message— as in an accusatory stance from which any divergence is a de facto support of transphobia or worse—but to tell the complete story of the context in which these procedures become objects of desire, and accomplish practical goals sometimes on the measure of life and death.

THE FULL FACE

Facial Feminization Surgery includes interventions in both the bone and soft tissues of the face. In general, the procedures involved in FFS are aimed at taking away or reducing particular features of the bones and soft tissue of the face. This focus on reduction and removal is based on a fundamental assertion that males are, on the whole, larger and more robust than females.

This assertion applies both to the bony skeleton and to soft tissues such as skin and cartilage. Whereas the modification of the facial bones are guided, at least in Howard’s case, by numerical norms, most soft tissue procedures are not. (The exceptions are the height of the upper lip and of the forehead; these assessments are guided by numbers and measurement). Instead, soft tissue procedures are often oriented toward and aesthetic ideal of feminine attractiveness.

Below are brief descriptions of the surgical procedures organized under the sign of Facial Feminization. Not every patient undergoes all of the procedures described here, though some certainly do. In Dr. Howard’s parlance, a patient whose surgery includes all of these procedures gets, ‘The Full Face.’

While one of the fundamental goals of this dissertation is to trouble the claims to absolute difference that often animate FFS, in the following descriptions I make use of the dichotomous distinctions that doctors use when characterizing the masculine features of patients’ skulls.

Bone Procedures

Brow Bossing and Frontal Sinus:

The prominence of the brow is one of the most distinctive and recognizable aspects of a masculine face. Some reduction of the brow can be accomplished through burring down the bossing (the thickness of the bones) just above the eyes. In other cases the anterior wall of the frontal sinus (the empty space just above and between the eyes) is removed (“unroofed”) and set back. The reduction of the frontal sinus is considered the most aggressive of all procedures involved in Facial Feminization Surgery (see Figure 1.7).

Rhinoplasty (internal reshaping of the nasal bones):

Rhinoplasty involves the fracturing of the nasal bones as well as the removal of cartilage. More radical bone fracturing and removal is required when frontal sinus reconstruction is performed. When the forehead is ‘set back’ through this procedure, the bones at the nasion (the depressed area between the eyes just superior to the bridge of the nose) must be reduced in order to create the desired relationship between forehead and nose.

Malar (cheek) Implants:

In order to produce the desirable oval shape of the female face, implants may be placed over the malar bones to enhance the fullness of the cheeks.

Genioplasty (chin shortening):

Based on the claim that female chins are shorter than male chins (as measured from the top of the bottom teeth to the most inferior point of the chin), a wedge of bone can be removed from the chin, and slid forward. Moving the bottom section forward also results in creating a more pointed chin.

Reshaping mental protuberance (chin):

A pointed chin is recognized as feminine, whereas a square chin is masculine. In combination with the advancement of the inferior portion of the chin, contouring is also done to enhance this characteristic.

Reduction Mandibuloplasty (jaw bone):

Alterations of the mandible focus on the undesirable squareness of the masculine jaw. This squareness is attributed to two aspects of the mandible: mandibular angle and mandibular flare. The mandibular angle describes the angular value of the posterior and inferior portion of the jaw. The more acute the angle, the more masculine the jaw. This is best seen from profile. Mandibular flare describes the extent to which the squareness of the jaw extends toward the lateral sides of the face. This squareness is best seen when looking at a person from the front. In both cases, bone can be removed in order to reduce the appearance of masculine squareness.

Soft Tissue Procedures

Scalp advancement:

By severing the tissue that connects the scalp to the scull, the scalp may be brought forward toward the face to help a patient compensate for a receding hairline. Excess tissue at the top of the forehead is excised. Scalp advancement as well as hairline reshaping and eyebrow raising all occur through the coronal incision (from ear to ear just behind the hairline) required to alter the bony contours of the forehead.

Hairline Reshaping:

In addition to bringing the hair-bearing scalp forward, the hairline itself can be reshaped. In this procedure, the M shaped male hairline is rounded out to reduce (if not eliminate) temporal baldness caused by a byproduct of testosterone.

Eyebrow Raising/Crow’s Feet Reduction/Forehead lift:

As noted above these procedures are performed at the site of the coronal incision after the bone work on the forehead has been completed. When tissue is excised during scalp advancement, the position of eyebrows is raised up higher on the forehead. This is described as a feminine characteristic. The appearance of the eyebrows is also changed as a result of the changes to the bones of the brow and forehead beneath them. The pulling of the skin of the forehead generally produces the addition (and typically considered beneficial) result of eliminating the wrinkles around the eyes often called crow’s feet. During this procedure, surgeons have access to the internal muscles of the forehead and may choose to perform a perforation of those muscles; this procedure is typically referred to as a forehead lift.

Rhinoplasty (reshaping of the cartilage and tip of the nose):

The tip of the nose is given its shape by internal cartilage. After the bone modifications have been made, the cartilage can be reshaped in order to achieve a ‘more feminine’ nose.

Upper lip shortening:

According to the surgeons with whom I worked, males have a longer upper lip (distance between the bottom of the nose and the vermillion part of the upper lip) than do females. This distinction can most easily be seen by observing how much of the upper teeth are visible when a person’s mouth is slightly open. This measurement is referred to as ‘tooth show.’ The length of the upper lip can be reduced by excising the desired amount of tissue just beneath the nose, raising the upper lip toward the nose, and applying sutures in the crease just at the base of the nose. This also results in increasing the amount of vermillion visible in the upper lip.

Lip Augmentation:

Lips can be augmented through a variety of procedures including the injection of pharmaceutical products (such as Botox and Restylane) or fat taken from other sites in the patient’s body. More permanent augmentation can be achieved by placing some of the tissue excised during the scalp advancement into the tissue on the underside of the upper lip.

Reduction of the thyroid cartilage (“Adam’s Apple”):

The Adam’s Apple—or more properly, the thyroid cartilage—is considered to be one of the clearest indicators of maleness. Thyroid cartilage removal is often referred to as a Tracheal Shave (or just trach shave) despite the fact that it is neither the trachea being altered, nor a shaving motion used to reduce it. While a relatively simple procedure, the thyroid cartilage reduction carries significant risks. An inexperienced surgeon may remove more tissue than necessary, and inadvertently alter the site where the vocal chords insert. This can result in a radical modification of vocal pitch.

CLINICAL EVAL

Clinic One -- Dr. Howard

Upon entering his office from the hospital corridor, one enters a warm but unremarkable waiting room: carpet and walls in shades of neutral brown, upholstered armchairs separated by low coffee tables offering a selection of news and fashion magazines.

In addition to personal and administrative offices, the practice has three small examination rooms, each equipped with a large examination chair (somewhat like a dentist’s chair, it defaults to an upright but gently reclining position), a rolling stool (on which Howard sits during most of the exam), a small side chair (where I sat while observing exams), and a counter at the back of the room that contains a hand-washing sink and a light box for illuminating x-rays.

There are few decorations in the exam room dedicated to initial consultations and pre-operative appointments. To the right of the patient seated in the exam chair, a silver and bronze toned image of a naked and reclining woman hangs on the wall. Her long hair flows down her back and shoulders but leaves the side of her breast exposed. On the wall facing the patient—and so behind Howard as he conducts the exam—is a magazine rack that holds several fashion magazines.

When I entered the room, Tracy was seated in the reclining exam chair, hands folded in her lap and looking nervous. Howard urged her to keep her seat as I introduced myself and shook her hand. With Tracy, as with all other patients whose consultations I observed, Howard began the appointment with a few minutes of friendly conversation. He inquired about the Canadian city in which she lives. As a person who has done a considerable amount of traveling throughout the world, Howard often has a personal story to tell about the patient’s hometown.

Though he tends to speak rapidly as a norm, these exchanges do not seem to me to be perfunctory or rushed; people’s stories sincerely fascinate him. After having seen this routine enacted a number of times, it is clear that Howard uses these first moments to establish a friendly rapport with new patients who are frequently very nervous—and in some cases could be best described as star struck. While this moment may be the culmination of many months or years of a patient’s personal and financial work, for Howard, this is another day in the office.

After the brief exchange of pleasantries, Howard moved into questions about Tracy’s medical history: height, weight, medications, prior surgeries, and so on.

When Tracy stated that she was actively losing weight and would like to get down to 180 pounds, Howard made his first recommendation of the appointment. “I’d like to see you down to 160,” he said. “The best results I see—not surgically but in terms of overall femininity—are in patients who get down to a female weight for their height. When you get down to 180, just keep on going.” While completely unrelated to the craniofacial surgical consultation underway, Howard’s recommendation on “overall femininity” signaled his understanding of FFS as both part of a larger goal of corporal feminization, but also as just one part of achieving that goal. In addition to signaling a holistic understanding of the project that brought Tracy to his office, this shift from conversation to recommendation marked the beginning of the exam; he is the expert with information to give.

Howard did not ask why Tracy was in the office to see him. He did not ask what her goal was for surgery. He assumed in Tracy’s case and in all other consultations I observed, that a person whose paperwork indicates that she has come to the office for an FFS consultation is doing so because she wants to have her face reconstructed to take on female proportions. I have not heard this assumption corrected. It is with this assumption that directly following the medical history, he began making measurements on Tracy’s face.

Clinic Two -- Dr. Page

Page’s office, located in an office park in an affluent suburb of a major West Coast city, shares a building with accountants, attorneys, and dental offices. The Ambulatory Surgical Clinic where he performs most of his operations is attached to his office, though it has a separate entrance at the back of the building. In the waiting room, leather armchairs and a long couch are arranged around a low coffee table covered in fashion magazines. The walls are covered in an ivory-toned wallpaper that in combination with the light coming in through a large window makes the space bright, though somewhat impersonal.

The dominant feature of Page’s waiting room is a mirrorbacked, top-lit curio cabinet featuring branded cosmetic products such as Juviderm and Botox, the presence of which makes it impossible to forget that this is not a neutral space; there is something for sale here. The reception desk is located in the front waiting room and is staffed by a few different young women.

On two occasions the stillness of their faces and the shape of their lips have made me quite aware that they have ‘had some work done.’

The two exam rooms in Page’s office are considerably larger and more brightly lit than those in Howard’s office. Here too, the reclining exam chair is the largest and most central object in the room. A small chair (where I sat during observations) is positioned just to the right of the exam chair, and a full-length mirror hangs on the wall next to it. A counter with a small sink occupied the left wall of the room. A model of a human skull sat on the counter, looking directly at the exam chair. When Page invited me in to observe the consultation, Leanne was seated in that chair.

Leanne was one of the few patients I encountered during my fieldwork who arrived for an FFS consult in what was referred to in both offices as ‘man mode’ or ‘male mode.’ She had taken the opportunity to visit Page’s office while traveling through town on business and looked every bit the businessman: short-cropped sandy blond hair graying at the temples, a crisply pressed pale blue shirt, navy blue necktie, grey trousers and black oxford shoes.

Page habitually opens the conversation by asking patients how they heard about him and his practice. This sets the tone that the patient is a consumer who has shopped around, and it helps to identify him as a businessman who is eager to grow his practice. After a bit of small talk about Leanne’s hometown and learning that this was her first visit to the region, Page began the exam not by taking a medical history, but by prompting a personal conversation.

“Tell me about yourself, about your transition.” An examination is frequently understood to consist of two parts: the history taking and the physical examination (Young 1997:23). It is immediately clear that though Howard and Page each ‘take a history’ from their patients before beginning the physical exam, what constitutes relevant history is different for each of them. Howard asks his patients about what are traditionally understood to be medical issues: their height, weight, current medications, previous surgeries, and overall physical health. This information helps him to assess whether the patient is physically well enough to be a candidate for surgery. It also signals that his primary interest is in the physical properties of the patient’s body, an interest that is born out in no uncertain terms in the examination that follows.

Page, on the other hand, does not ask such questions of his patients during their initial appointments. Instead, he elicits a ‘history’ of the patient’s feelings about herself and her transition, more generally. Because the appointment begins with the disclosure of personal—and often quite emotional—information, the examination that follows is framed as one directed toward the realization of personal and emotional goals more than physical ones. As the consultations progress, the distinctions between Howard and Page’s approaches become clear. Howard’s meeting with Tracy appears in the left-hand column below. Page’s meeting with Leanne appears on the right.

Clinic One -- Dr. Howard

Howard: “Now I’m going to take some measurements and we’ll look at your x-rays.” Howard washed his hands and came back to sit down in front of Tracy. She was sitting in the exam chair and he rolled up to her on a small, wheeled stool. He took a small white flexible plastic ruler from his coat pocket and measured the distance from the cornea of her eye to the most forward prominence of her forehead. “Your brows are down a little bit.” He felt the brows and temples on both sides of her face using both hands. He pressed the sides of his thumbs up under the bones at the top of her eye sockets in order to get a sense of the shape of the bone. “Look at the top of that light switch.” Howard directed Tracy’s attention to the switch on the wall directly in front of her. Looking at this object helped to make her head level. “Open your mouth just slightly.” Howard measured the distance from the bottom of Tracy’s nose to the inferior ends of her front teeth. “Bite down on your back teeth.” Howard bit exaggeratedly on his back teeth to show her what he meant. Looking away, he felt the muscles on either side of her jaw with his hands. He turned to me and explained to the patient that we had been talking earlier about how he decides whether or not to remove some masseter muscle when he does jaw tapering.

Talking to me: “She has a fairly prominent jaw, but the muscle is not that large. I won’t even consider removing any muscle on her.” Howard runs the pad of his thumb up and down the center of Tracy’s throat. “Have you got one of these things?” Settles on the patient’s Adam’s Apple.

Howard: “If you have this done by someone else don’t let them put a scar at the middle of your throat.” Tracy lives in a country that has a national health service and Howard makes explicit reference to this since he knows that by using that service Tracy could save a considerable amount of money on this procedure.

Howard: As he describes the potentially problematic placement of some other surgeon’s scar, he draws a line across her thyroid cartilage with his index finger to mark the cut. “If I do it I’ll put the scar up here…” He draws his index finger just under the point of her chin to indicate where he would place the scar. …so no one can see it. “Plus if you put the scar here [in the middle of the throat] it can stick to the cartilage and then it moves every time you swallow. It looks like the dickens. Let’s look at your x-rays.” Howard walks to the light box behind the exam chair and invites Tracy to join him. They stand shoulder to shoulder in front of the light box looking at the cephalograms that Tracy brought with her to the exam. “First I look to see that you’re brushing your teeth, and it looks like you are (laughs). When I was measuring here before…” Uses his finger to show the measurement he took from the forehead to the cornea. “…I was looking at the maximum prominence of your forehead to the cornea of your eye. In you it was 15mm, which is average for a male of your height. As far as I know, this measurement is not taken anywhere else in the world. It is not a standard measurement. Once I am in there and I begin to contour the forehead, I can’t tell where I am. This measurement helps me locate myself in space.” By this he means that because the cornea does not move as a result of any bone reconstruction in FFS, he can use it as a constant reference. He took a handheld mirror from a small drawer and handed it to her. She sat, holding the mirror, looking at her face as he spoke.

Tracy is being educated about what Howard will do and why it is the best approach.

Tracy: “How far can you go back?”

Howard: “The most I’ve gone back is 9mm.”

Tracy: “Let me rephrase. How far can you go back safely?”

Howard: “I could go all the way back here.” Pointing to the posterior wall of the frontal sinus on the cephalogram.

Tracy: “What happens to the sinuses?”

Howard: “They go away. As far as we know.” He indicates with his fingers where the sinuses are located on the cephalogram. “…is to reduce the weight of the skull. Now, the jaw.” Howard looks at Tracy’s jaw, and then down to the x-ray. “Do you grind your teeth?”

Tracy: “I know I used to.”

Howard: “You’ve got some wide angles here. Feel your jaw.” He places Tracy’s hand on her jaw. “Feel how it flares out? We can get rid of the bowing that males have in the mandible that females don’t have.”

Tracy: “How do you do that?”

Howard: “We use a bur instrument on the sides here…” Indicating anterior portion of the lateral mandible on his own face. “…and then we have an oscillating saw that we use to take out the larger parts of the bone here...” Indicating posterior section on his own face.

Tracy: “You actually take out parts of the bone?”

Howard: “Yeah.”

Tracy: “Okay.”

Howard: “Can I borrow a finger?” Howard reaches down and grabs the index finger of Tracy’s left hand. He places it on the side of his face in the medial section of his mandible. “Feel my teeth?” He presses her finger into his cheek and moves it back and forth so she can feel the texture of the bone below his bottom teeth. “Feel that ridge? That is what we take away. For some people, a thin layer of blood that forms on the bone becomes bone. I am one of those people. I was hit in the head with a golf ball when I was 13 and I got this big bump.” He feels the bump on the top of his head. “I’ve still got the bump because the blood that formed there turned into bone. If you look at an x-ray you can see it plain as day. If you are a person like that—and I don’t know how to know that in advance—it is possible that some of that ridge may come back. But it won’t all come back. The chin. I measured from the top of your bottom tooth to the end of the bone and that is 50mm. That is average for a male of your height. I want to take out 8 mm of chin height. I can’t do that by shaving it off the bottom, because then the muscles and tissues that attach to the bottom of your chin have nothing to attach to and they just sag down. Instead, I take out a wedge of bone that is 8mm thick, and stabilize the bone with titanium plates and screws.” Howard explains that medical grade titanium comes from recycled Russian atomic submarines. He makes a joke that the addition of this Russian material may make Tracy fond of vodka after surgery.

Tracy: “You cut a wedge out of the bone and then rotate it up?”

Howard: “Yeah. Have you seen my book? Maybe you want to buy one. There is a lot of information in there about all of this stuff. And some stuff that you don’t need. It can answer a lot of questions. We want to get ride of the sublabial sulcus at the base of your chin. I think of this as a very male feature. Now, what to do. The brow. Right now the distance from your brow to your hairline is 7cm. I want 5.5cm. The average male has a distance there of 5/8 of an inch longer than the average female. This is the case in 16-year-old males, even before they’ve experienced hair loss. You have a type III forehead. We talked about that. We’ll do your nose—if we do the forehead we have to do the nose. Do you remember Dick Tracy? His nose went straight out like a shelf? You probably won’t like that. Upper lip. Now your upper lip has a vertical height of 2.5mm and drops 2-3mm below your upper teeth. If you look at me when I talk, you don’t see my upper teeth unless I smile. He smiled to demonstrate. Women show their upper teeth when they talk. We’ll want to move you up to get some good tooth show. So. We’ll do your chin, your lower jaw, the thyroid cartilage. If I do all this at one time—and most patients choose to do that because it saves them a lot of time—I know this will take almost exactly 10 ½ hours.

Tracy: “Everything?”

Howard: “Yes”. Howard went on to describe the risks associated with these surgeries, the recovery process, and necessary preoperative preparation. When he’d answered Tracy’s questions, he led her down the hall to talk money with Sydney.   

Clinic Two -- Dr. Page

Leanne: “I began dealing with my gender issues at 50, when my wife and I became empty nesters. I have already been cleared for hormones but I am waiting to take them until after my daughter’s wedding in a few months. I am a manager—I mean, that is what I do for a living but that is also who I am. I like to have everything figured out before I start. That is why I am here. I don’t really know how hormones will affect me and what changes they might make to my face, but I do know that the face is the most important thing to me. I can do things with clothes, but I can’t hide my face.”

Page: “Making changes to your face can make you more feminine appearing.” As she spoke, he sat quietly, almost motionless. Like a practiced interviewer, he allowed her short silences to linger unfilled, and it turned out that she had a good deal to say.

Leanne: “I know that if I proceed with this my marriage will be over, and I understand that. My wife didn’t really sign up for all of this and I can’t force her to feel better about it. I am here because I want to manage my expectations; I need to know realistically where I might end up, instead of going forward with all of this and then finding out that you can’t do what I think you can do. I don’t want someone to give me all of the classic female things. This is a clear reference to Howard’s approach. I was interested in talking to you because you said that you work with features not totally remake them. It is not a clean slate. Given the face that I have, I want to know what to expect. Right now, I don’t look like a woman; I look like a man in a wig. I haven’t gone out much; I only wear women’s clothes when I go to counseling. But when I go out I worry about my face. I just don’t want to attract attention. I want to fit in.” Page did not verbally respond to any of Leanne’s personal and emotional disclosures; he simply began the physical assessment of her face. 

Page: “We’ll start at the top and work our way down. These are only suggestions, to let you know what is possible, and how I think of things. We think of the face in three sections: forehead, midface and lower face. One of the most feminizing effects happens in the forehead. We can move the hairline forward. Bone work is required to make a feminine skull.” Page rolled his stool backward to retrieve the model skull sitting on the counter behind him. He held the skull in his left hand and used the index finger on his right hand to show Leanne how the frontal bone could be reduced. “By burring down this area [above the eyes] instead of removing the bone, we can retain the angle from your forehead to your nose. Patients with ‘the works’ often look worked on. That is not what I want to give you. When you lose the natural transition from the forehead to the nose you don’t look good as a man or woman.”

This is a direct defense of his surgical approach against Howard’s more aggressive style. Page runs the pad of his thumb across the orbital ridge above Leanne’s left eye as she looks at her face in the mirror. “Reducing this will give you the feminine appearance. It gives you sex appeal. That’s the approach we’re going for. Passing as a woman takes more than what I do: it’s about hormones, behaviors, dress, makeup, voice. What I do is just one piece of the pie. Now, when I’m in doing the forehead contouring I can remove some frown muscle, which would be nice for you. At the same time I can take away the peaks at the hairline.” Page uses the wooden handle of a long cotton swab to trace along the temporal baldness of Leanne’s hairline.

Leanne: “I’ll need a wig anyway. I had hair transplants all through there but they failed.”

Page: “This dark space is the frontal sinus.” He points at the sinus on the x-ray using a yellow wooden pencil. “In my mind, the most desirable female forehead is convex horizontally and vertically; it is not vertical. I could take you back 8mm. The 15mm you currently are minus 8 equals 7mm. That is where I want you. If you had an x chromosome rather than the y you were born with, that is where you’d be. You got this…” indicating the brow prominence of the frontal sinus “…when you were 14, 15, 16 years old. You have what I call a type III forehead.” Explains how he’ll remove the frontal wall, and form patches to wire back into the exposed sinuses. “When taking out the frontal sinus you have two holes left: if you sneeze you make a bubble and if you sniff you make a dimple. That is good at the first cocktail party, but not the second. I take the bone I removed and make two small patches and wire them into place to close those sinuses. If someone just burred this down, they could only go about .5mm to 1mm.” This comment acknowledges the common approach by other surgeons to burr the bone rather than unroof it. It is both descriptive and defensive.

Page: “Okay. Your nose is really necessary to do. We can take the hump out of the dorsum and decrease the projection some. The upper lip could be shortened. That is really common in feminization surgery. It’ll be like when you were younger.” Page presses the wooden handle of the cotton swab just beneath Leanne’s nose, causing her upper lip to rise on the surface of her teeth and allowing more tooth to show. “In terms of the jaw, I would leave it alone.”

Leanna: “Really?”

Page: “Beautiful women have a strong jaw line. For you, brow lift, cheek implants possibly to give you some more fullness in the midface, and nose for sure. If you’d like to see what this would look like, we can image you and give you a better idea of what I am talking about.” Page led Leanne to a small, dimly-lit room attached to the exam room. There was space for only two distinct positions in this room, so I observed in the doorway, looking over Page’s shoulder as he worked. Page was seated at a laptop computer equipped with a special trackpad that allowed him to move a stylus along the pad controlling the computer display. His laptop was connected to a digital camera mounted on an adjustable stand. Leanne sat at the opposite end of the room in front of a grey backdrop. Page took six digital photos of Leanne’s (non-smiling) face: (1) looking straight ahead at the camera; (2) turning her whole body such that her face is in ¾ view; (3) profile; (4) ¾ view facing the other direction; (5) opposite profile; (6) facing forward but looking straight up, a ‘worm’s eye view’. Page invited Leanne to pull her stool up beside his so that she could watch as he altered the photos he just took.

Page: “I try to do things with imaging that I can do during surgery so that it’s not unrealistic. One thing would be to decrease projection. Come over here and I’ll show you what I mean.” Leanne got up from her seat in front of the drape and sat beside Page in front of the computer. Using the stylus on the trackpad, Page selected the areas that he could reduce: frontal bossing, orbital bossing, and nose projection. He circled each of these areas on the profile image because this image produces the most noticeable contrast. Once these areas were selected, Page drug the stylus back and forth across the trackpad. As he moved from left to right across the pad, the nose, forehead, and orbital bossing all reduced in unison. As he moved back to the left, they ‘grew’ back to their original (current) size. Leanne watched this in silence for a few seconds. It was clear that she was not seeing all that she hoped to see. Page was quick to step in. “I am kind of limited in what I can show here. I mean, you have to imagine what it would look like once your facial hair is gone [she had a day’s growth of beard]. You’ve also got some skin damage that you should really work on. I’d say the most important thing you can do for yourself between now and any surgery would be to start a skin-care regimen. Work on that sun damage and some of the brown areas, the wrinkles around the eyes.” Page indicated these problem areas on the computerized image of her face. “I work with an esthetician right upstairs. I can set an appointment for you if you want. I really do think that is really important. You know, beautiful women have beautiful skin.”

Leanna: “Yeah, I spent almost 20 years in Arizona. I have a lot of sun damage.”

Page: “Here are some other patients I have operated on. Maybe these will give you a better idea of the changes I am talking about.” Page opened a file on the laptop with several pre-op and post-op images of his patients. He flipped through the images, describing the procedures involved. “Here you can see I did the nose…Here you can see the reduced bossing; that really opens up the eyes… Here you can see the difference that a brow lift really makes. She looks great…” This didn’t seem to alleviate Leanne’s sense of disappointment with her own images.

Leanna: “These people look much more feminine than what I see when we look at me. I have my wig with me. Can I put it on and you can take the pictures again? That might give us a better idea of how this is going to look.” She crouches down and pulls her wig out of her briefcase. It is a bit disheveled and needs brushing. Leanne does her best to place the reddish-brown shag cut wig on her head, but there are no mirrors in this room. In addition to the contrast produced by her businessman’s attire, the wig is not quite on correctly. To my mind, this photo session has just changed quite radically. Page appeared somewhat reluctant, but he agreed to take a new profile photo on which to make the digital modifications. One of the qualities that made the wig desirable is particularly problematic during the photo shoot: it obscures her forehead and brow.

Page: “Could you pull your hair back so I can see your forehead?” Page took the photo. Leanne resumed her seat beside him at the computer and watched as he made the same alterations to the new photo as he had to the previous set. The addition of the wig did not produce the effect she’d hoped for. Page reiterated the importance of starting a skin-care regimen and beginning electrolysis on her face. “I think those changes could make a big difference for you. Let’s go talk to my office manager, Hannah. She can give you a better idea about prices and we can look at some more images.” The pair left the room and began flipping through a photo album in Hannah’s office.

Leanna: “Do you think I could ever look this good? I’m worried about going through all of this and looking as ridiculous as I do now.”

It is clear from these two representative appointments that though these doctors punitively share a common goal—the ‘feminization’ of their patients—what ‘feminine’ means to each of theme is quite distinct. Their approaches to the project of ‘feminization’ determine both what each doctor identifies as the problematically ‘masculine’ and the desirably ‘feminine’ and how they do so.

SURGERY DAY

For most patients I interviewed, the anticipation of and preparation for surgery had given significant shape to their personal, professional, financial and emotional lives for many months. For others, many (many) years. By the time they’d made the trip to the surgeon’s office, they had come to think of Facial Feminization Surgery as the event that would mark the difference between the life they had and the life they wanted.

It would, they hoped, be the end of a deep longing for transformation. Structured by the future goal of surgery, for these patients the present had collapsed into a seemingly interminable time before surgery. It was a continuation of the past experience of bodily dissatisfaction and disaffection into the almost, the can’t wait, the before to which every day following surgery would be the after. 

Dr. Howard pointed to a chair in the hallway outside his office. “I’ll walk by that spot at exactly 7:25am. If you’re there, you’re welcome to join me in the OR. If you’re not, you’re not.”

Patient: Rosalind

Rosalind, whose surgery is described in the interstices of this prose—had traveled from Wales to undergo surgery with Dr. Howard. When we met on the afternoon before her surgery, she was feeling very anxious. When I asked her about the source of her anxiety, she said that it was not the operation itself that worried her. Rather, she was nervous about the postoperative recovery period.

“I’m scared to death. A week before my plane ride I started praying for British Airways to go on strike. I saw a patient at the Cocoon House [Howard’s private recovery and convalescent facility, all gendered and natural metaphors intended] all bruised and bandaged and I’ve been walking around trying to think, ‘Why am I doing this?’”

 Rosalind had hoped to make this trip five years before, but financial issues had delayed her plans. For her, as for all patients who shared their stories with me, arriving in this office was the culmination of a long process of self-discovery.

“At 25 years old my hair started to fall out and I thought, ‘Oh no! I haven’t decided whether I want to transition!’ I tried topical creams and things to try to keep my hair and I became pretty obsessed with it. Then I started thinking, ‘Wait, is the problem that you’re going bald or that you’re transgendered?’”

She began feminizing hormones in 1999, and hoped that their effects would be enough to ease the anxieties she had about her appearance. She was not ready to commit to surgical alterations at that time because, she explained, she simply could not accept the idea that she was a transwoman.

“I still thought I could cure myself of being transgendered,”

In spite of this desire to be ‘cured,’ she began taking tentative steps toward ‘accentuating the feminine in [her] face.’ She underwent facial electrolysis that had produced permanent pockmarks on her cheeks and chin, only exacerbating her self-consciousness about her appearance. In 2002 she had surgery to remove her thyroid cartilage (Adam’s Apple) and, shortly thereafter, a surgery to reduce the size of her nose.

“That only made my brow look bigger,” she lamented. “My brow is my major concern. I need my nose to match my brow. I have a kind of Neanderthal brow. I want to do my jaw too, but I may have to skip that for now depending on whether I can get the money together. I was kind of hoping he wouldn’t say that I needed to do my jaw, but I know it needs to be done.”

Rosalind knew that her decision to have surgery would cause complications in her work and family life. She presented as male at work and at family events, and planned to continue doing so at least until her elderly father passed away. The thought of disappointing him with the fact of her female identity was unthinkable to her. She worked in the building and construction industry in a fairly small town and, for her, living full-time as a woman was simply not an option. Worries about work and personal consequences had kept her from making many changes both to her life and to her body, but she had finally decided that such concerns could no longer determine her choices.

“If I have to think too much about what others think, I’ll never do it. I have to do this for me. I’ve spent 25 years of my life thinking about not looking like I do now. I want that to go away. Constant thinking about that ruins the mind. After this I’ll be able to think of other things, everyday things.”

Rosalind told me, as did many patients, that it was during puberty that she began to hate her face. As she watched her ‘button nose’ give way to the oversized nose of a pubescent boy, she taught herself how to wash her face and brush her teeth in the dark.

“My mum would go into the bathroom after me and always wonder why the blinds were closed.”

It was easier for her to re-learn these daily habits than to deal with the look of her changing face in the mirror. This was the beginning of the long story that brought her all the way from Wales to have surgery with Dr. Howard some 25 years later.

I was tired and anxious when I joined Howard the next morning. We walked briskly down the hallway to the surgical wing, he in a shirt and tie covered by his long white coat, me in my canvas jacket and shoulder bag. I saw the loafers on his feet and felt like an idiot in my running shoes—I thought they’d be best for endurance.

After so much discussion of looks and numbers and desires and abilities, it is in the operating room that faces are reconstructed. It is here, as they say, that the rubber meets the road. While for surgeons the operation is an event that has been routinized and repeated hundreds or even thousands of times over, for the patient, the operation is something absolutely singular—assuming all goes well. Over the course of the surgery (up to nearly eleven hours in the case of a “full face” operation), the patient’s skin, bone and cartilage is pushed, pulled, burred, sawed, cut, cracked, tucked and sutured. In the end a strikingly new face may emerge; one whose production is guided by the hope that its new form will enable a coincidence of the patient’s self and body for perhaps the first time in a very, very long time.

Facial Feminization Surgery is guided by a hope for phenomenological integration—the creation of a body that (re)presents the self. Though the technical work of surgery is something that patients do not experience in real time, its effect animates their anticipation of a better life through the body as a better and truer thing.

He brought me to the charge nurse’s desk. I was to register my name in the vendor’s logbook. Dr. Howard offered me a pen. “You can keep it,” he said. “It’s got my name on it.” I signed in quickly and was given a sticky nametag. I followed Howard into the physicians’ locker room where I was shown for the first—and last— time where to find the supplies I would need to enter the OR. I slid my bag and jacket into an open locker.

For those who desire physical transformation, the operating room is place that symbolizes corporeal change and all the attendant hopes of what that change will bring. In addition to the physical transformations enacted here, the operating room is also the scene of an encounter between patients and surgeons that is structured by a common conception of the body or, more specifically here, the face. For these two people in this place, the patient’s face is a material thing. It is not the irreducible site of personhood, the distinct shape of which makes us individuals; it is a series of structures whose problematic characteristics can be rectified.

These structures do not necessarily map onto or even remotely relate to the social or personal identity that the face is typically taken to be. That is just the point: this face is not her face. Not yet at least. The preoperative face is simple, disinterested material for the surgeon who cuts into and reshapes its parts, and it also is this for the patient whose experience of her face as something disloyal—as non-coincident with her self—has motivated her arrival here.

This is a distinct vision of the body shared between the surgeon and the patient, two people who have arrived together in the operating room precisely in order to alter it. We grabbed blue paper caps from a shelf near the door to the hallway. He folded the bottom rim of his cap upward in order to pull it down snugly before tying the white paper straps behind his head. I did the same. We were ready. Howard swung open the door and we headed to OR 3, his regular room. He  handed me a surgical mask as we walked through the scrub room and into the OR where Rosalind was laying on the table being prepped by the Circulating Nurse (CN).

Dr. Howard went immediately to greet the patient. He caressed her forearm and assured her that everything would go well and that she would look beautiful. I! couldn’t stop staring at her fingernails: cotton candy pink against the blue and white striped blanked that covered her. Howard stayed by her head until she was under anesthesia. The moment the patient was unconscious, the feel of the operating room changed. With the presence of a guest no longer observed—I certainly did not count  as such—everyone in the OR began their tasks in haste.

“This is Rosalind Mitchell, 37 years old. We’re doing her forehead and nose today. She wanted to do the chin and jaw but her credit card didn’t come through. Says she’ll be back for those in the fall. This should take four and a half hours. She has no allergies and is on no medication.” Confirming! that all parties were in agreement, he began to prepare the first site: the forehead. Sitting on his stool at the end of the table, he began to comb and gather Rosalind’s long hair in rubber bands. Once the site was isolated, he shaved a one inch wide track through her hair, combed out the loose pieces and dropped them into a biohazard bucket. He injected the incision site with local anesthetic and then left the room to scrub in. While he was out, the CN sterilized the forehead site with soap and water and then with iodine that dripped in deep brown yellow drops through her hair and into towels on the floor. The doctor returned with his clean and dripping hands held at chest level. The CN helped him into his gown and gloves

The process of making a masculine face into a feminine one only rarely involves addition (of bone substance or implants). Instead, making feminine is almost always a process removing that which is masculine to reveal the feminine beneath. The masculine is a problem of excess: the jaw is too wide, the forehead too long and too prominent, the chin too square, the upper lip too long. Whereas genital sex reassignment involves rearranging and repurposing body parts in order to make new ones, like mastectomy for female-to-males, Facial Feminization Surgery is essentially about taking parts of the body away.

For this reason it can quite literally be read as carving away the outer unwanted body to reveal the self within. The metaphorical representation of “a woman trapped in a man’s body” is, in other words, rendered quite literally here. In this OR scene, the ontological and phenomenological statuses of the body and self are radically uncertain.

The surgeon further isolated the incision site by draping sterile blue towels over the patient’s hair and securing them in place with skin staples. Fully draped from head to toe, only the patient’s face was showing. One stitch was placed in each of her eyelids—sutures are necessary to keep her eyes closed (and thus moist) because her face will be tugged and moved quite a lot throughout the procedure. All was ready to proceed. Dr. Howard announced the time of the first incision; the CN recorded it on the whiteboard on the wall, and the operation began.

To reduce the frontal sinus that accounts for the ‘male brow,’ an incision is made beginning at each ear and meeting at the center of the head, just behind the  hairline. The skin of the forehead—from hairline to orbits (eye sockets)—is folded down over the eyes, revealing the smooth and very white frontal bone below.

The long, thin wooden handle of a cotton swab is broken in half, dipped in methylene blue and used to mark the frontal bone on either side. The periosteum (a membrane that lines the outer surface of bones) is cut at these lines and scraped forward into the orbits at the top of the nose bridge. Glancing at the cephalograms illuminated on the wall\mounted light board, the doctor marks the frontal bone with a yellow wooden pencil.

The burr tool whirs like a dental drill as it grinds off the undesirable bony prominence's above the orbits. Bone particles fly off the burr as it spins. They catch in the cloth and paper that covers the patient and in the folds of my scrubs as I lean in. By the end of the procedure they will become dry chalky dust. An oscillating saw blade replaces the burr tool and a cut is made along the pencil drawn lines. The cut bone is pried up out of its place, making a dull cracking sound as it is dislodged from the skull. The Surgical Tech (ST) collects this irregular oblong piece (about two inches across at its widest point) and sets it in the white plastic lid of a sample cup for safekeeping. The frontal sinus is revealed. Everyone’s frontal sinus (95% of us have one) is structured differently. Rosalind’s is internally asymmetrical, divided by thin walls of bone into three distinct cavities. Frontal sinuses are usually empty, but sometimes brain matter has protruded into them. “Is that brain or sinus? Not sure. Let’s go slow.”

A yellow pencil marks the location where corresponding holes will be drilled in the frontal bone and in the bone patch. Stainless steel non\magnetic wires are placed and spun down tight. The ends of the wires are trimmed and turned inward. The bone work on the forehead is done. Rosalind’s forehead has been set back 5 millimeters. 

The anesthesiologist leans over and speaks loudly in Rosalind’s ear: “You did a great job. Surgery is over. Just relax. Let us move you.”

RECOVERY

When a patient first encounters her new face after surgery, it is covered with bandages and dressings. Much of the skin that is visible is taut, swollen and discolored. Her nose may be packed and casted. There may be drains pulling blood from around her newly contoured jaw. She must suction saliva from her mouth because the throat pack placed during surgery will make it uncomfortable to swallow.

For the first several days following surgery she may need to manually stretch the muscles of her jaw to keep them from clamping tight in a gesture of defense. Even if the procedure is considered medically successful—in that the surgeon was able to meet the goals that he set for himself and there were no compromising complications—there is no way to know how well the surgery went, or whether the desired effect will actually be produced. That effect is, after all, not a property of the face itself. It is, rather, a response that the face will (hopefully) elicit.

Such a measure of success cannot be clinically assessed, nor can it be known right away. Depending upon the particular procedures performed, it may take up to a year for all of the swelling to subside and for the face to ‘settle down,’ as surgeons say. Though new structures of bone and soft tissue were created in the event of the operation, the face itself is never a fixed and stable thing; it is always a thing unfolding in time.

After all of the waiting she has already done—waiting for self-acceptance, for surgery savings funds to grow, waiting for consultations, for travel arrangements—now the patient must wait to heal and find out whether the face she wanted is the face she’s got. Surgery is the quintessential anticipatory regime (Adams, et. al., 2009). It is forward looking, oriented to a future post-surgical life that will be somehow better than the life that would have happened without it. Surgery is about intervention: the imagined and undesirable future can be changed through the event of the operation. Once that event has occurred, there is nothing to do but wait. And hope.

I first met Rachel five days after her surgery. She had her forehead, hairline, nose, thyroid cartilage, and jaw done. In addition, her upper lip had been shortened and enhanced. When I was introduced to her by Heleen, a Dutch attorney who was back in town to see Dr. Howard for some jaw revision work, I had to stifle a sympathetic wince.

Rachel’s eyes were ringed in deep browns and purples, and the sutures beneath her nose drew contrastive attention to the thin red incision line where the length of her upper lip had been reduced. Though the packing had been removed from her nostrils earlier that day, the cast on her nose remained and was held in place by a large X of tape rising up above her eyebrows and down across her cheeks. Her thinning hair and receding temporal baldness left sutures and staples visible across the crown of her head.

I felt sore for her, like neither of us should move too quickly. She, on the other hand, said she was feeling better than she had in days and was light on her feet as she led me to the back garden where we could talk. As Rachel spoke—with the marked accent and dry humor of a life-long New Yorker—she dabbed saliva from the corners of her swollen mouth with a white cotton handkerchief. We talked for more than two hours in the garden behind Howard’s private convalescent facility, with only one break: the unseasonably strong sun was heating the staples in her scalp and demanded that we move into the shade of a leafy tree.

Rachel, now in her mid-fifties, had first decided that she wanted FFS fifteen years earlier, as soon as she saw before and after photographs posted online.

“From the moment I knew it existed, I thought, ‘Wow.’ I knew that I didn’t have a pretty face. I’d get dressed up but I knew I didn’t look like a woman. I could put all the makeup in the world on and nobody was going to mistake me for a girl. Maybe when I was like 16. Essentially, I would say that from the moment I knew people were doing it, I immediately started thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I could do that, too.’”

When I asked her what it was about her face that she had wanted to change, she had trouble locating the problem that she hoped surgery could fix—though she could quickly recount the list of the procedures that had just been performed. “If I was sitting here with a friend and just talking,” she said, “I would say, ‘Beauty is like pornography, you know it when you see it.’ And it’s the same thing with a feminine face: you know it when you see it.” Though she noted that her, ‘rather large nose,’ was ‘a male trait in [her] family,’ the nose by itself was not the problem. Neither, necessarily, was it her ‘fairly prominent forehead.’ It was something greater than these, and something more diffuse.

“I was a handsome man, but I didn’t want to be handsome. I wanted to be pretty. I guess, in a certain sense, I wanted to have all the things that I enjoyed in women that I liked. The way they looked. The way their lips looked. What their hair looked like. How all the features went together. I think it’s kind of a simple answer: I wanted to be a pretty girl. One of the great things that Dr. Howard did was define this whole notion of feminizing in entirety, as opposed to just doing one thing. One thing in and of itself is not going to do it. It’s got to be a holistic approach.”

On account of this ‘holistic’ transformation, Rachel did not really have an idea of what she would look like once her face had finished healing. More than any particular ending point, what she most wanted her face to be was something other than what it had been for her entire adult life: masculine. The particular form that that femininity would take was not something that concerned her.

“[When considering having FFS] I would say to [my friend], ‘Do I really want to do this? Because what if I don’t really look good?’ She would say to me, ‘Well, you know what you look like now. Would you rather go through the rest of your life looking like you look now, or looking like somebody else? Maybe you’re not drop-dead beautiful or even pretty, but you’re not going to look like a man.’ And the answer to that is the latter. I knew how deeply dissatisfied I was. To the point of it being painful what I looked like, and having to look at myself in the mirror everyday. That got worse as I got further into my transition. That just got worse and worse. The disconnect between what I felt and how I looked just became more and more pronounced to the point where I just didn’t want to look in the mirror. I just hated it.… [Someone] asked me, ‘Are you going to look very different?’ And I said, ‘I sure hope so.’ That’s the whole point. It wouldn’t bother me if nobody recognized me. That wouldn’t bother me at all. If I look good. If somebody said, ‘You look fantastic, but I can’t quite place you,’ that would be wonderful.”

Her new face—still tender, bruised and cut—held, under its bandages, the possibility of a radically new identity in which she was not recognizable to anyone she knew. While to me such a prospect seemed as if it might be quite frightening, for Rachel, the potential of this total change was ‘wonderful.’

As Rachel sat healing, she recounted the promise that the facial change would be a total one through a personalized version of Howard’s early morning doorbell scene.

“My goal, my ideal is that I could go out on the street dressed like I’m dressed right now—just a pair of pants and a t-shirt and some sneakers—and no gender markings other than I’d be wearing earrings, which I always wear, and that when I went into a grocery store the person would say, ‘Can I help you miss?’ That’s really what I want. I want to read as, accepted as, and reacted to as a woman. So that is what I was hoping he would say he can do, and that’s what he does say he can do. That is what he promises.”

Becoming ‘accepted as and reacted to as a woman’ would be the actualization of a truth about herself that Rachel traced back to her earliest childhood memories of dressing in her mothers lingerie and heels. Her knowledge of her gender as being somehow ‘not right’ had persisted throughout her life. “I’ve essentially been feeling ashamed of myself probably since I was five years old—or probably more like four,” she said. “Living daily with a sense of shame about who I was. And not only living with it but hiding it, because I was also hiding the source of my shame.” Rachel had undergone years of therapy with various psychologists and psychiatrists.

“I had met someone very early on in the therapeutic process that I interviewed with and he said to me, ‘Look, this is the way you are. You’re not going to change. This isn’t going to go away.’ And I just refused to accept that. I was 20 years old. And out of everybody I saw in all the intervening years, what he said was the truth. It took me 30 more years to accept that.”

Rachel’s feelings about herself as a transwoman changed somewhat unexpectedly. Her mother had become ill with cancer and as the child who lived closest, Rachel undertook what became a very intimate caretaking role during her mother’s treatment. Despite longstanding conflicts in their relationship—many of which were rooted in Rachel’s gender issues—the two grew incredibly close through this ordeal.

“We were spending a lot of time just together by ourselves. And I just sort of let go of any resentment or anger I had towards her, and I really just wanted to make her get well. Having a positive influence on her life kind of opened something in me that I had closed off. When the whole thing was over, I thought to myself, if I can give her this [beginning to cry softly], then why can’t I give this to myself? So, I did.”

Tears welled up and streamed down her bruised cheeks as she recalled the epiphany that had not only enabled her to relate differently to herself as a transwoman but had also revived a loving relationship with her mother.

“What started to happen for the first time in my life, is that I started letting go of shame. I thought: I got my mother through this, how bad a person could I be? So I did start to just let go of feeling ashamed of myself, and feeling all this guilt. And that was a really new experience.”

Her mother’s cancer in remission and her divorce from her wife finalized, Rachel began hormone treatments, the beginning of her physical transition from male to female.

“I had my first shot and it felt fantastic. I felt like Marilyn Monroe. I remember getting on the train going back downtown and I had to remind myself, ‘You still look like a man to everybody.’ That’s how powerful it was. I recognize that it was psychological, but it was also physical, too.”

Though she felt it was likely that she would eventually undergo genital sex reassignment surgery, FFS was her first surgical priority. “The most important thing I could do was change my face,” she explained. It was a change that would free her in ways that, on that sunny afternoon, she could only imagine.

For many patients, a new face promised not only a new life but also a radically new—and uncertain—identity. So long as they would no longer be recognized as men, the particular form of their faces did not really matter to them. For example, Patricia looked forward to the feeling of her new face more than its look.

“I do think it is going to be profound to just get up every morning and look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh my god, here’s somebody who I’ve always known was there but I never saw.’ You know? Feeling is one thing, but seeing is another. That’s kind of the aspect I’m looking for, without any idea of what she’ll look like. Whatever, it’ll be an improvement.”

Some patients hoped that the effects of their surgery would be subtle, simply accentuating the features that they already liked about themselves, while others had a very particular idea of what they thought they would look like following surgery. This was informed by their understanding of what surgical modification could accomplish, as well as their own interpretation of how—and like whom—they looked prior to the operation.

Katherine both wanted and expected to retain her individuality. “I want to be a feminine version of myself,” she said. “Some people just aren’t realistic. If you’ve got a head like a medicine ball and you want to look like Angelina Jolie, you’re going to have a rough time of it. Rather than emulate someone else, I’d rather be an individual.”

Similarly, Brenda—who had consulted with both Howard and Page and ultimately decided to undergo surgery with Page—said, “I guess I want to look like me but more feminine.” Though word-of-mouth, personal experiences and plenty of online research, patients felt confident that their wildest dreams could come true. They had seen the photographs of scores of former FFS patients whose images and narratives of transformation attested to the possibility of total surgical transformation. It is the actualization of this idealized possibility that has earned Howard a sort of cult following, and a legion of fans and defenders.

Jill’s Story

Howard had performed Jill’s ‘full face’ FFS nearly ten years before, and she had been an outspoken admirer and supporter of his ever since.

“I’ve been a Jim girl for a long time,” she explained with a smile. When I first met Jill, she reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone to show me a picture of what she looked like before surgery. I admit that the difference between the photograph and the face before me was astounding. She clearly took great pride in this fact.

“I don’t reject what Joe was. I don’t apologize for what Joe was. I don’t apologize for what Jill has become. I am comfortable with the unique mutt that I am, which is a combination of what Joe was and what Jill is. I like to think it’s the best of both worlds as opposed to the forces of having to be one or the other.”

The photograph—and her narration of it—was not only an affirmation of her own reconciliation with her past, but a testament to what FFS could do. When Jill first learned about FFS in the late 1990’s, she had already come to peace with the idea that she would never transition.

She had a reasonably successful life as a husband and father, and felt completely isolated in her knowledge of herself as a woman. If she could not be recognized as a woman, then she would have to learn to accept her life as it was. At that time, before the expansion of the internet, she explained,

“There was no validation. There was no hope that we could blend into society and just live our lives. The choices were twofold. One, you accept the fact that you live in some margin—if that was okay. Or you accept the fact that you live something less than a fulfilling life. I was married. I had a son. I had a good career. I had money. I had all of the trappings that society told me that I was being successful, except that I had this secret.”

Jill described first learning that FFS was possible, as a moment that was “very empowering but it was also terrifying. When you become comfortable with the impossible, realizing that the impossible is possible gets scary.” Jill’s initial surgery lasted nearly 13 hours and the recovery, she said, ‘was hell.’ Much like the radical transformation that Rachel envisioned, Jill’s surgery had changed not only her face, but her most basic understandings of herself and her world. Though she had not been politically engaged in her life as a man, since her transition—which began with FFS—Jill found herself confronted with social inequalities that she had never been aware of before.

“As a man, I had never experienced discrimination. Really. Not that I knew of. You take it for granted: you’re white, you’re heterosexual—or perceived to be heterosexual—you’re granted a level of privilege that you don’t know that you have that just comes with your birthright. You’re living in a world that’s oblivious to many of the unfortunate realities that others have to face. To have that stripped from you and see that people can be fired over this, people can lose their housing, to see that people in your community are not welcome in women’s shelters but have too much self-respect to go to men’s shelters and so they freeze to death on a park bench because they can’t get a job and they’re homeless. To recognize that in school people get the crap beat out of them because they’re different. Those things are contrary to everything my parents raised me to believe. So I found that I was given opportunities of making choices.”

Newly empowered by her changing body and newly outraged by an understanding of life that she had not been aware of before, Jill became a prominent figure in transpolitical organizing circles, delivering keynote addresses at national conferences and writing a widely circulated book about her experience of coming to terms with her identity and going through the process of transitioning from male to female. She attributed this radical shift in her life to FFS. “My own involvement never meant to be as significant as it became,” she explained.

“Coming here and meeting Sydney and going through this process was the single most profound experience of my entire life. It remains so. And I’ll tell anybody who asks….

The fact of the matter is that coming here, finally looking in the mirror and seeing somebody who more closely reflected on the outside who I knew was on the inside and watching that person develop—because the person that I was six months after I left here was very different than the person who left here. I never would have transitioned without coming to see him. Coming here was day one. It was a physical change, it was a mental change, it was psychological change. It was the impossible becoming possible.”

Jill was, quite literally, the poster girl for FFS and for Dr. Howard. Her before-and-after photographs are featured in multiple places throughout Howard’s recently published book on FFS and are staples in his conference presentation slideshows.

Not only does Jill epitomize the feminine—both visibly female and normatively beautiful—she also exemplifies the total life changing potential of Facial Feminization Surgery. Hers is a narrative of redemption that emphasizes her own efforts for self-acceptance as materialized by Howard, the person with the unique skills and vision to see in her—and make her into—the woman she knew herself to be. Despite both her own and Howard’s characterization of her surgery as an unqualified success, Jill’s time on the operating table was not done. She was in for some revision surgery on her jaw.

In some patients, the blood that pools around the bone following jaw contouring surgery can later be reabsorbed and turn into bone. When this happens, patients often return for revision in order to recreate the narrowed jaw that the initial surgery produced. This increasingly square jaw is what brought Jill back to the office. No face—no matter how fantastic—lasts forever.

[myheartisbro-ken]

Hi! 💙 I hope your are doing well. Congrats on the article. The reading will probably be okay. Are you a fast or slow reader? I read rather slowly, especially if I'm enjoying what I'm reading. It sticks with me better that way, but it takes me longer to do things. 😅 My semester ends next week, then have finals period. l'm taking Summer courses tho to get ahead. I get what you mean. I don't party, but around TH and F there's a certain restlessness about some of the students to drink/part. (Pt 1)

Ugh, I hate group work. 😐 Best of luck to you. Maybe your for a decent group. Anyway, I prefer morning courses. I get up at an obnoxiously early time to attend though. I’m fine with it though because it lets me take my courses in a block with out breaks, so once I’m done, I’ll be done for the day. 😥 Probably an unpopular schedule though. Oh, so My Immortal can actually be constructive to writers. That makes sense. It’s what a writer shouldn’t ever do. About JK, I think it’s an attempt (pt 2)(pt 3) Lowkey don’t recall my train of thought..Anyway, wow, I definitely agree with your statements about Lena knowing Kara’s dual identity. Snapper knowing wouldn’t help anything, since he’s too minor a character to do anything useful with information. Lena knowing would create more depth, tension, plot possibilities etc., which is why’d it would be a shame for her to be left in the dark. Also, I feel her not knowing (or at least theorizing Kara’s supergirl) is ooc. I suppose the writers– –haven’t had an issue with that based on what they’ve done to Alex. :-/ Hmph. I’m still so annoyed about that. Partially, because I’m a SuperCorp shipper, but mainly because it’s an insult to Alex’s personality to force her to advocate on Mon El’s behalf. Who was your favorite character from S1, btw? I’d probably go with Kara, but for S2 it’s definitely Lena. Anyway, yes Lena looks so amazing in the trailer! Heh, I intended it to be a soft FMK…I was going to make it all Katie, but wasn’t–(4)–words, words, something, but wasn’t going to be that cruel to you. (Hopefully that fit with my previous thing). Smh, you’ve no qualms though do you? ;-) I’m kidding. Your answers were well thought out…even though you didn’t kill anyone. I can’t blame you though. I don’t think Red K! Kara is all that bad, but she’s definitely intimidating, so is Kate. Anyway, let’s see FMK: Lena, Morgana,and Kate… :-/ 3 M'kay, that’s hard, especially since I love them all and ship SuperCorp. (5 TBC)–words, words, something, but wasn’t going to be that cruel to you. (Hopefully that fit with my previous thing). Smh, you’ve no qualms though do you? ;-) I’m kidding. Your answers were well thought out…even though you didn’t kill anyone. I can’t blame you though. I don’t think Red K! Kara is all that bad, but she’s definitely intimidating, so is Kate. Anyway, let’s see FMK: Lena, Morgana,and Kate… :-/ 3 M'kay, that’s hard, especially since I love them all and ship SuperCorp. (5 TBC)(6) Uh, let’s see. I’m going to assume they are all brought to current times, so the 21st century. I would marry Morgana. You know what? I’d marry Morgana S1 or S5 because I’ve so many emotions for her and what she went through. I’d want her to know someone would be on (*cough* and by *cough*) her side. Also, she has magic that’s cool, but not the point. I don’t really want Supergirl to kill me or be sad. I wouldn’t kill Lena as of now; she’s not done anything wrong. Also, her company is (TBC)(8?) So, yes: M:Morgana, F: Lena, K: Kate. Hmm, I see yours and raise you: FMK: Lucy, she’s a vampire now but has some control over it | Kara Danvers, more so S1 in personality, but she’s still elects to become a reporter and encourages you | Lena, before she met Kara and is still learning to be a CEO…I guess that’s a younger!Lena? Idk. Okay, that should work. I hope you have a good day and night. Do you read comics? I don’t, but was curious if you did. U seem to know some lore. :-)

Heyyy! I’m not so sure I’m a fast or slow reader, it depends on my state of mind, if I take my meds and external interruptions. Usually I can read pretty fast if it’s something I’m interested in but I tend to miss things and have to read it again, with school things I’m the worst. I still have things from last year that I never got around to read and one of them was about superman (I miss studying cinema because we could have an entire class about superman and co and then write fanfiction of the world as an activity). We don’t have summer classes here, that sounds interesting, it’d be nice to get ahead, also it’s about to be winter here so after July we’ll get maybe a month off and then it’s back to being unresponsible adults. I’ve nothing against drinking and partying, I like drinking (parties are usually weird but sometimes it’s cool) but don’t freaking leave class to do it, go after the class, how disrespectful is it to leave the poor teacher there waiting 20 minutes to see if the rest of the class will show up or they’ll have to do with six or seven people? Also you pay over 1.000 bucks a month to study and you don’t give a shit about being in class? it’s throwing money away and it’s disrespectful to whoever is paying school, even if that someone is yourself. I’m not those kids that say you should only do what’s right and never skip class never drink or do anything because you have to study instead of throwing your life away. But school is expensive and respect is something you should have for everyone (unless someone is a jerk, because it’s not murder if the person is a jerk…jk)

I never liked studying in the mornings but it’s sort of better, however, my classes only exist at night, there is morning journalism classes, but it’s in another neighborhood and we have to cross the bridge and there’s no cool campus. I like my campus.

group projects are the worst. They end friendships, they end marriages, they end happiness, they lead to murder… it’s never fun. I always imagine that scene with the guy getting pizza and coming back to the place on fire and people bleeding, or that one from Mean Girls with the fighting over Aaron Samuels in animal style. Those are the only representations of group projects that are realistic.

I love how you just started to talk about JK, had two words in and

Honestly Alex has been so ooc this season it’s almost sad. No offense to Sanvers, but I think even that relationship is a bit ooc. Not the fact that there is a relationship but how it is being handled. Not gonna go into it cuz I don’t want to rant here. but I would ship Sanvers if they had put a bit more of effort into getting them together not ‘I don’t want a baby gay rn, so let’s be friends. PSYCHE I just got shot in the most harmless area of my entire body, let's make out!’

The same Alex that thought James wasn’t good enough for Kara and decked Maxwell Lord for existing would never make excuses for someone that is basically the dumb alien version of Lord with worse hair and more aggression and more pretending to be a #goodguy who’s just trying so hard and changed because after 9 months on earth as a grown man he decided to read a book, feed himself and clean his own mess… or pretend to clean his own mess while Kara actually does it and he just sits there and says she’s annoying because she doesn’t want to run away from her problems. (hey look, ranting… she said with surprise in her voice for some reason)

My favorite character was definitely Cat… and Kara. Both at the same time, I can’t choose between them, please don’t make me. and now it’s Lena… and still Kara even though she’s basically dead inside and that girl who cries because her boyfriend is moving away and it will destroy her life because that person she knows nothing about and met 9 months ago when he tried to kill her and has been lying to her and shoving her self-esteem down ever since is apparently the most important person in her life and she can’t live without him. he cooked her breakfast so he can’t move away and face his responsibilities, she’s the best thing he’s ever known, not person, thing. That woman in the best thing… god, this is so gross I cannot continue even to joke about this. so yeah, Kara is SUPER ooc this season, but I still love her and have faith she will recover from this terrible illness and come back to us, I miss her.

Yes! I would totally still marry Morgana even season 5 Morgana. poor thing just needs a hug and a friend to tell her she’s not a monster for being born different. I might start crying now so I’ll change topics. 

Definitely Marry Kara, no questions asked. Fuck Lena because, I mean, just look at her. And Kill Lucy, my poor bby, but she’s a vampire so she has to go, control or not, ‘vegetarian’ vampires are dumb.

I do read comics, not as much as I’d like, but I also watched all of the DC cartoons (minus Legion because it looks dumb) most of Smallville and Lois & Clark and when I want to know some more I read about the storylines and all, like even when I don’t read the comic itself, I read about the comic. I won’t say I know all about everything, but I can hold my ground, I guess, I’m also not above admitting I don’t know/haven’t read enough about one subject/character and reading about that on one of the sites I trust. Also watched a lot of Marvel cartoons and most of the movies aaaand I read a lot of Marvel comics, specially Balck Widow, Hawkeye, and Young Avengers.

Did you watch any superhero cartoons? They were a pretty big deal in the 90′s and early 2000′s.

Hope you have a great day and night 💙😊

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN APPLE

Right now the limiting factor on the number who could be employed by small, fast browser that was actively maintained would be a way to be in the same position as the runner. Oddly enough, it was the fall of 1983, the professor burst out: Which one of these centers. They also generally provide a better education. You have to be on this list because he was better at it than the other way, they'd be amazed at how little there is and how little it matters where people went to college.1 That's the lower bound there for practical reasons. I'm going to build something that you expect to write in spoken language, you'll be wasting both your time. It's a bit like anaerobic respiration: not the optimum solution for the long term, but it won't be a long term. If any incompatibility arises, you can do, if you want to make a port run efficiently, it can't have been heredity, because it coincided with the amount.

Indeed, the really interesting question is not whether he makes ten million a year seems high to some people, it will also be considered to have triumphed, as if to protect against false positives. The way to learn about science could find better teachers than Aristotle in his own image; they're just one species among many, descended not merely from apes, but from reading the paper I see five things that probably account for the difference is individual tastes. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. If there's one thing all startups have in common? Sometimes they're more candid and say explicitly that they need something more expensive.2 So let the path grow out the project. Who's right? Which means when there is a downside here, it is exciting to them. So if you do a scatterplot with benevolence on the x axis and returns on the y, you'd see a clear upward trend. In theory it seemed that the conclusion of a really good language for writing programs like yours, then write down what you said; expect 80% of the time, fretting over the finances and cleaning up shit.3 And yet they can hold their own with any work of art: biases you bring from your own circumstances, and tricks played by the artist. But, like us, they don't realize it yet or not.

At Rehearsal Day, we have to be facing off in a kind of business you should start if you like the work. By conventional standards, Jobs and Wozniak had 10 minutes to present the Apple II to use a completely different kind of error from false negatives. Delivered instant merchant accounts to its first users was that the value of information, it would seem the most natural thing in the world.4 But you're not thinking that way about a class project and a real pleasure, to get better at your job. If I'd had to wait till they graduate. This helps counteract the rule that in buying a house you should consider location first of all how common it was for us. Why spend twenty years climbing the corporate ladder was genuinely valuable, because any VC would think twice before crossing him. So you must consciously discount for that. I call the Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over your life for a lot of arrogant people. It's when they're on the right things.

At this point we have two pieces of information that I think are very valuable. When you have small children, there are next to none among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. One of the two paths should you take, expect a struggle. I think the actual explanation is less sinister.5 The fund managers, professional athletes. I defending the current patent system. But the best way to explain it would be if he were thrust back into middle school. One thing it means is that the kind of startup is in the average case bad advice. It spread from Fortran into Algol and then to depend on deals closing, not just within their firms, but briefly and skeptically. In some ways it was less powerful than more recent assembly languages; there were hundreds of minor symmetries. Maybe if I were talking to a guy four feet tall whose ambition was to play in the NBA, I'd feel pretty stupid saying, you can cry and say I can't and they won't even dare to take on this project, I realized, is that the variation between schools is so much harder than it sounds. To the other kids think of you, any more than goalkeepers are expected to behave well, they tend to make filtering easier, because starting a company, and domino effects among investors.

The job of your site is about. And yet because of the scale for tokens found only in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to solve a problem their founders had. But I think it's because they seem so ridiculous by contrast. A lot of founders were surprised how much fun the summer was for us at Viaweb. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group, your performance is not separately measurable—and awkward systems yield meatier papers, because you could not merely ignore their objections, but push aggressively in that direction; but it's certainly the right way to do it? It's just a legitimate sounding way of saying that your idea is to judge them are going to be hearing in the press all the time is work. Intelligence and wisdom are obviously not mutually exclusive. Investors August 2013 When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually not realizing they have to make a car better, we stick tail fins on it, or friends with those who are. And so I just gave up. At first we tried to conceal it. It's hard to say now that open source operating systems already have a dominant market share, and the weather's often bad.

For example, any work of art that would appeal to users in a hundred years. Whatever job people do, they do end up paying more. Still Life Effect Why does this sound familiar? Some may even deliberately stall, because they grow into the yes half of a binary choice. Godel's incompleteness theorem seems like a stinker to me. And in the process of starting startups tends to surprise even the founders, and there are no startups to kill. In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer.

Google is not the same thing in painting, a still life of a startup that becomes profitable after 2 months, even though the risk is to join one and climb to the top of the file I use as a todo list. You also need Florence in 1450. It's the job equivalent of the pizza they had for lunch. What excites them, both consciously and unconsciously, is the Internet. Here's where benevolence comes in.6 Which means they're inevitable.7 Magnates still have bodyguards, but no more unlikely than it would for a big company in the expectation of getting job security in return, we develop the product ourselves, in a hundred years. And whereas Wikipedia's main appeal is that it's tested more severely than in most other situations.

'' August 2002. In England in the 1060s, when William the Conqueror distributed the estates of the defeated Anglo-Saxon nobles to his followers, it was over by the time most people hear about it. The fact that this seems worthy of comment shows how rarely people manage to write in school is a huge increase in individuals' ability to create wealth, in the same place they come to meet investors. Instead, you should wait. 16. If you want to discover things that have been readjusted. It would be hard to convince people to part with large sums of money. Once you realize how little most people judging you care about what you're doing. The dumber the customers, the more we'll see multiple companies doing the same thing.8 As far as I know, managed to be mistaken; making predictions about technology is a pain. Let's look at our case.

Notes

Few technologies have one clear inventor.

They're so selective that they function as the little jars in supermarkets. Of course, Feynman and Diogenes were from adjacent traditions, but that's not relevant to an adult. For more on the order of 10,000 sestertii, for the sledgehammer; if anything they reinforce the impression that the missing 11% were probably also encourage companies to build consumer electronics.

Sam Altman wrote: My feeling with the founders'. The books we now call the years after Lisp 1. We may never do that. Perhaps realizing this will make it harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than we can respond by simply removing whitespace, periods, commas, etc.

A handful of VCs even have positive returns. Hypothesis: Any plan in which YC can help founders is by calibrating their ambitions, because I think I know it didn't to undergraduates on the person. Ed.

But startups are simply the embodiment of some logical reason e. What's the connection? You may be the technology business. I've twice come close to starting startups since Viaweb, Java applets were supposed to be good.

If you invest in these funds have no decision-making power.

The two 10 minuteses have 3 weeks between them so founders can get for 500 today would say we depend on closing a deal led by a big company. I've come to them rather than trying to make a conscious effort to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that day.

But you're not sure. By all means crack down on these. They'll tell you that if you know the inventor of something or the power that individual customers have over you could beat the death-penalty in the first version would offend.

[stormfang-gnash]

I know good and damned well you won't read this because you never answer the issues that are exposed by this community but lemme be real with you, Staff.

This is a bullshit move.

I am not a huge adult content consumer. If it comes up on my dash, cool I guess. Maybe I'll like it if it's something cute and intimate for a ship I like, but I don't seek it out as much. So this doesn't affect me in the slightest. This does affect the writers and artists that are just producing harmless content of consenting adults participating in adult activities. Tumblr is a huge monolith of fandom and adult content on the web, while also still having circles that cater to other niches. I can't think of another site like it, except maybe Pillowfort but I don't have access to it. Non-fans can use it not only to share their niche interests, like photography, old war planes, or cars, but also to browse for pornographic content and also partake in kink. Fans often use it to express their creativity in the form of art, writing, in-depth analysis, music, etc for their fandoms. Some of these works, in fact probably a majority, are about couples/poly relationships, and many possess sexual content because that is a normal part of relationships for most. This also affects the kink community and marks one less safe space for them to share their content and discuss their interest and how to be safe, etc. I'm sure sex workers are thrown under the bus as well if they exist on this site. Are adult bloggers entitled to this platform? Of course not. All I'm saying is this ban on NSFW content is like amputating a leg when all you needed was to clean the wound and get some stitches. It completely bypasses the actual problem at hand and demonizes something that never in and of itself was a problem. The pedophiles and porn bots were the gash in the skin, and NSFW was the whole leg. The only reason the wound festered to the point you felt the need to amputate was because you did fuckall about it the like half a year or more people complained to you about this problem. The community never stopped tagging you and messaging you and reporting blogs to you in relation to these issues and yet nothing was done. You made it clear when you initially mass deleted the nsfw tag and disabled the adult content filter that you've had the ability to take care of this all along and only decided to do it because money was on the line. So no, you don't love Tumblr and community, you love the revenue you get from it.

You can say you have a zero tolerance policy for child porn all you want to, the truth of is in your actions; you never lifted a finger to actually delete pedophiles and bots/spam blogs en masse, to corral the "MAP community" or do literally anything about the porn bots that invaded the notes of any post with more than 1k notes until your livelihood was threatened directly. And your response is to talk about how much you care about a community you never listen to and then completely delete an entire and important facet of this website rather than actually putting in the effort it takes to moderate the site like every other platform does. No other social media platform has the problems that Tumblr does because they know how to build a stable and functional website!!!! Even fucking YouTube, which also gets a lot of flak, regulates its content better than you do.

You can make the argument of kids being exposed to content too young, but frankly speaking (hot take incoming) I think Tumblr is one of the best platforms for minors to explore their sexuality and gender. Should they actively participate? Absolutely not, that's highly illegal and dangerous territory. BUT I'd rather teens learn about themselves and their interests here than PornHub - Tumblr content tends to promote safety and education about different adult things, ie how to engage in safe BDSM, that other places may not. Even if one blog doesn't talk about it, another related blog might. (It also allows teens a much safer consumption of porn (let's face it, almost all non-ace teens browse even if it isn't legal) because they can look at or read relatively tame smut of their ships rather than some weird shit on PornHub.) The only other place I could think of that might be more positive about these kinds of things might be Reddit or Furaffinity, but this is speculation. And when in doubt, let the community sort out blogs that could pose threats to minors. DDLG blog trying to groom a minor or some shit? Let users report this blog and then review and decide how best to move forward. Obviously there's a lot of grey here, but as an adult who has been here since I was 14, I learned quite a few sex positive good things on this site. Maybe it's rose-tinted glasses, but I digress.

(Also I gotta just. Call you out on this one, chief. "Female-presenting nipple????" Really???? That's a fat L.)

No one is suggesting it's an easy thing to do and I could understand if the ban was temporary to give you time to work on an algorithm (that should have already been in place years ago) to sort out spam accounts and nefarious users. That would be acceptable, it takes time. But this is just garbage. This screams "we're too lazy to actually fix the real problem, so we're gonna get rid of everything related to said problem even remotely."

I love this community, despite Staff being so incompetent that this site has some major glitch or freakout pretty much annually. It may be obnoxious and quirky and sometimes downright unbelievable in its opinions, but there's no mainstream platform like this one. For all it's radfems, hot takes, "cringe," and other weird shit that happens on this hellsite, it really is a unique space that I have come to enjoy even though I talk shit about it all the damned time. I really hope you reconsider this decision because I do not believe it is the right one. Not because I am particularly affected, but because many of your users will be. And by extension, you'll probably lose more than a few bloggers. Not enough to put you under, but enough that it will be noticeable.

A better, more positive Tumblr

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio CEO

[arethinn]

I quote from that linked post:

elvenkind tend to place a lot of trust in people’s preexisting knowledge about the topic and their ability to accurately judge and label their own experiences.

I think this is reasonably accurate as it applies to mailing lists. While there was (sometimes acrimonious) discussion about just what traits are Elven anyway, and "more elfae than thou" kinds of wars, people were generally allowed to "self-certify" up front, as it were. Questions of the realness of a claim might come up later based on what someone was saying, rather than having to answer a questionnaire at the door. This was not necessarily the case on boards, where you might be asked to justify yourself in your introduction and have it at least probed if not exactly "grilled", although it depends on the board. Also, I think that sort of thing increased with time.

It is also true that ca. 2000 at least there were already arguments about who was Doin It Rong. See for example this page from the old Otherkin Resource Center from 2001-2002 - the site changes that it talks about were born out of one of these schisms of opinion. But rather than "if you don't meet these criteria you shouldn't call yourself otherkin", it was more often the disaffected people deciding that "otherkin" had lost something they considered essential and choosing to retreat to some other space/terminology or just dropping out entirely.

This got rly long so have a cut:

I am not sure I agree that being allowed to "self-certify" proceeds from "you would already be 'in’ on the whole thing before you were exposed to it", though. People showed up who were confused or ignorant, and then of course there's the perennial "THIS IS NOT A ROLEPLAYING LIST!!!" warnings. But I suppose in the sense that someone would have had to self-select to enter a dedicated space where there was some moderator control (a list), rather than it arising in what was basically a public square that initially had a different focus (AHWW) and feeling they had to defend against criticism from day one, may have something to it.

I think something that influenced this attitude is the fact that otherkin (meaning mythfolk) are claiming to be things that, from a materialist perspective, do not exist. You can argue about how closely someone matches up to the natural behavior of a wolf and have an example to point to. It's hard to do so in the same way for elves or angels or unicorns or what have you. So there's a certain amount of "none of this is materially provable anyway" that may have a softening effect -- "I know my claim is pretty ridiculous, so I won't be too hard on your similarly ridiculous claim" -- at least until you do come under scrutiny from outsiders (cringe culture and the like).

Too, there may have been some "new relationship energy" as it were. In the late 90s and early 00s the otherkin community seemed to be growing rapidly -- we were excited about more and more people awakening and the idea that we might soon be able to have thriving local groups everywhere. So there was somewhat of a "the more the merrier, the important thing is not whether you tick all these boxes but that you found us!" bonhomie atmosphere that might have tended to boost acceptance.

Moving on to this post I'm reblogging:

because the Silver Elves first awakened with the EQD I assumed (shame on me) their philosophies/approaches to being Other would be similar.

I'm not sure what you mean. Similar to what? The EQD and the SE have similarities to each other, although the SE have since matured off in a somewhat different direction, possibly partly because they have (publicly) kept at it much longer than the EQD did. But they are not "the elven-/otherkind community" by themselves (obviously) and their ideas were not only not universal in the 90s/00s, but all but disappeared from online discussion (where I was, anyway) during the gap between the active mailing lists and Tumblr. I think their name may only have resurfaced here when people started using them as proof that otherkin did not originate on Tumblr, possibly aided by Orion Scribner's writing of the Otherkin Timeline. (They are mentioned only briefly a few times in Lupa's Field Guide, although granted that was a very general survey.)

Source here is mainly my own memory from mid-1998 onward plus the bits of reading I've done of Elfinkind Digest before I joined it (2001), so take with generous lump of salt, although now I'm a bit curious to go digging in list archives for specifics (see end of this post). Archives of defunct boards are unfortunately typically impossible to get at. Livejournal doesn't want to cooperate with attempts to search the otherkin community, but it is possible on the backup copy I made at otherkinarchive on Dreamwidth. A quick search there bears my memory out: the SE are barely mentioned (at least in top posts, can't search comments) in some ten years of fairly active posting, and one person says outright "no one cares about them".

Do you by any chance have some pre-90s (or pre-2000s) writings specifically about choice and voluntarity?

When I spoke of this topic "being debated" it was list posts I was referring to, so there's nothing currently public I can link you to off the top of my head. I have a fair selection of links to Wayback captures of old pages on my website if you'd like to poke around, but skimming down the list nothing is popping out to me as likely to address this topic directly. (The FAE board perhaps the most likely, but the crawler mostly couldn't get deeper than top level.) There could be something in otherkinarchive, I don't know.

Do you think the assumption that groups which originated in closed mailing lists are more accepting of voluntary identities than groups which originated in open newsgroups is reflected in the community and its history?

Assuming that by a "closed" mailing list you don't actually mean invitation-only (there were a few of those, but many more open or mostly-open membership), just that the list archives were not quite as immediately exposed as a Usenet newsgroup--

I don't think having a stance of "innocent until proven guilty" about whether someone is otherkin is quite the same as it being generally known/accepted that some people arrive here by choosing to change from human to other, vs. the common narratives that one either "always knew" or at some point Awakened and discovered what was already there. I think you're picturing that people in mailing-list land generally followed the Silver Elves, who thought (think) things like you quote above. But as I said, the connection from their Letters to the lists isn't that direct, and while the Silver Elves were present online from the later 90s onward, their influence on the zeitgeist wasn't as large as their position in history might give one the idea that they were. People might or might not know of their ideas, and if they knew, might or might not agree.

Taking Elfinkind Digest as an example, the Silver Elves were only mentioned by name twice before they themselves subscribed in August 1997. The first (June 1990) was disparaging, and the second (January 1997) was a neutral mention in the context of talking about a mid-80s article in Circle Network News. The EQD are similarly only mentioned infrequently, mostly by the Silver Elves themselves and exclusively so after they joined (with one exception that was me, in 2016).

They were better known on Elven Realities, which was founded in 1999. The fact that they had a web page by then is likely a factor, and the list owner Rialian was generally a fan, so there is some greater influence there (although even he said he does not agree with them on all points). But still, people were not necessarily espousing their ideas and while searching archives (for some hours now I've been writing this, ow) I've only come across one instance so far of this particular thread of thought, that you can choose to be elven and citing the SE as support. By far the most common mention is along the lines of "so I found their website and asked them for an elven name". (One person compared them to "scary elven propaganda" which I think was a bit much!)

I've now kinda gone down a rabbit hole searching the Digest for uses of terms like "become/choose/transform/turn into", with a side trip of looking on Elven Realities for "wannabe", and it's getting way too long for this reblog which is already awfully long, so I'll stop here.

Responding to Azaphaer

[link to his post]

Azaphaer, I sense your post might be a response to the recent discussion about ‘ego alteration’, and if that is the case, you’ve gravely misunderstood it all. To be able to change oneself over the course of a dozen years does in no way equate to others being able to change you. Nor does it mean others should be allowed to try and change you.

Unless I’ve misunderstood something, you have not explained how talking about choice of identity is harmful in and of itself, only how outsiders - humans, nonkin, antikin, ‘normies’, etc. - will harm us if they see a good reason to do so. And, pardon my french, but that is the exact same rhetoric people use to discredit and exclude people who describe choosing their gender. I do not appreciate that.

Your essay is entirely therianthropic, and does not align with the elven-/otherkind community’s writings about choice of labeling, choice of alignment, choice of species, or the choice to shape your self-perception or your very self. I’ve shared most of these quotes from the Silver Elves before - I could find others, but these are the ones that best illustrate my point:

“Some people tell us they have no choice but to be elven, but we elves ask if you had a choice what then would you be if not elven?”

“Anyone who truly wishes to be an elf is, de facto, elfin in their heart and mind and if they pursue the Elven Way, they will surely become more and more elven in their inner being.”

“Anyone who wishes to be an elf, can be an elf, but very few wish to be elves who are not already elven in their hearts, minds and souls. We do get those who are traveling through, so to speak, from time to time, because being an elf sometimes seems cool and exciting and elves are magical and wondrous, so who wouldn’t wish to be an elf, really? But, surprisingly, very few who aren’t at least a bit elven wish to be elves.”

“The thing is, however, there will certainly be other elfin who feel that they were born as elves and had no other choice but to be elves, and that their birth as an elf was not by their own choice. And while we disagree with this point of view for our own s’elves, we cannot help recognize their right as elves to believe this for thems’elves if that is their wish.        Usually, however, we tend to think that people feel forced to believe they are only elven by birth and not choice because they wish to assert their essential elvenness in a world that almost continually seeks to deny their elven being and ridicules them for even daring to think that they are elves. In saying that they were born elven without a choice, they assert their right to be elves no matter what others may think.        This is the same dilemma that confronts gays who feel they must assert that they are gay by birth/nature because of those who judge them and say instead that they are gay by choice and have no right to be. But, from an elven point of view, it doesn’t matter if they are gay by birth or not, they have every right to choose to be gay, just as we have every right to choose to be elven.”

Please also refer to this post I wrote last week, briefly explaining the different attitudes toward voluntarity in the therianthrope and otherkind communities: https://aestherians.tumblr.com/post/651237654577496065/