#there are a total of 2 cis men I can tolerate being around

[justsumtransdude2000]

So tired of bitches with zero credentials trying to tell me if I'm trans or not. Like, my gender identity has been carefully observed and confirmed by multiple people with PHDs, and I'm not sure you passed middle school. Fuck off.

[psychabolition]

Hi. I was the person who sent the ask about what needs to be done instead of psychiatry. I only just read your response now. In the time between sending the ask and now I’ve done a lot more research into anti-psychiatry and psych abolition. I understand how it’s an oppressive system and how it harms people. I agree with the need to dismantle it. But as soon as I read the response to my ask I broke down crying.

You talk about the importance of community. Or being able to rely on friends in times of crisis rather than therapists and psychiatrists. I have no community. No friends. I used to think I was okay with that. But I guess I was lying to myself. I am considered distasteful to be around. Scratch that, I actively make myself distasteful to be around. Because then I can at least expect people to inevitably hate me rather than have high expectations and be let down every single time. I’m desperately waiting for my therapy appointment in two days. I know I need someone better. Someone who I can actually tell that I cut myself a couple days ago without them deciding that I need everything I love taken away from me for who knows how long. But I fear I will never have someone better. I fear that even my therapist only tolerates talking to me because they’re paid to tolerate it.

You post about the importance of community if we are to break free from oppressive systems. How do we build that community? How?

Hey !! Thank you for your ask !

I totally understand you . Like I literally know exactly what thats like , trust me.

Ik that "community" is such a vague word that it almost sounds meaningless . Like wtf is that? In my opinion most people just have work colleagues or school mates or other students in their lectures and then go home to a nuclear family or to their partner - this is not "living in community" 💀💀💀. Most people dont live in community, our society (at least western societies like in europe - idk about others) is so fucking alienating . Any emotional connection is replaced w a hierarchy - teacher, prof, therapist, the nuclear family , your boss at work, even intimate relationships with a partner are like that in our patriarchal society . And then the people who you are on the same page as, youre pit against them - you need to be better than your work colleagues to get that promotion or at least so you dont get fired, you need to be able to pass that test alone in university/school otherwise you fall behind your peers or are literally excluded from visiting school/uni , a lot of friendships between women (or FLINTA* to be more accurate) fall apart because of cis men ... FUCK this society .

And then theres those of us that dont fit into this bullshit society. I dont care for a career in a job that will definitely bore me to death or overwork me till suicide and I have 0 interest in creating my own nuclear family after all the awful bullshit Ive had to endure because of the one I was born into. Like these are the 2 life options for us . Of course I was suicidal all the time as a teenager😭I couldnt imagine a future in a world where these are the only options in life !!!! Why are so many people NOT insane ? Who actually likes living this way ????? And if we cant or dont want to submit to "career via education and/or nuclear family" we're worth nothing in this society . We're ostracized ,isolated, stigmatized .

What Im dealing w right now is also connected to all that . the nuclear family that I grew up in wants to stop supporting me financially bc I dont submit to societal expectations of career and education .💀 a lot of my friends are also struggling w literally paying rent bc their parents randomly stopped giving them money for similiar reasons, its awful . This is why the nuclear family is the opposite of community to me. I'd do anything for my friends so they dont go homeless or without food or without support no matter their life choices and especially if they struggle I want to be there for them MORE not less .FUCK our parents fuck the nuclear family . They all slowly start to cut us off and make our lives hell because they dont fucking care about us and they never did .

Anyway . You dont have to built a new community obviously. So the question you need to ask yourself is - where does community still/already exist in your area ? Especially for those of us who deviate A LOT from social norms and "normal" life experiences . I can only talk about myself - Ive found solace in Subcultures that are from and for people who deviate extremely from social norms. Ive linked another ask that Ive answered where I listed all the subcultures that Ive somehow somewhen have heard people around me be a part of. Ik that it can also be very hard to get to be a part of those subcultures if youre not used to being around people (especially groups) but literally . Just keep trying, any subculture thats made up out of outcasts is very welcoming and very accepting. Also usually (at least in my experience) the subcultures are all conntected which is really cool because once you know people from one community you start to know a lot of people from other communities too ! It can still take time though . For me it only took 1 good friendship to a person whos in a subculture in my city to get to know many other people who are all actually part of a real community.

If you have a political subject that youre passionate about like anti psych or abolishing prisons or if there are other subjects that are important to you (animal liberation, youth liberation, climate crisis, queerfeminism , ... ?) I highly recommend a political group as a way to find community and to get into the subcultures in your area . You'll finally stop feeling powerless against oppressive institutions if you manage to actually change something through activism . Any and all activism also connects you a lot to the place that youre living in and the people with similiar struggles around you. Go to Antifa or communists - they have open meetings for newcomers all the time . Or try to join any other subculture - read the ask that I linked !! If youre queer for example thats awesome - go to a queer event Now . Being queer has always had so much culture, so much community .

Also trust me youre not awful to be around . You'll realize that youre actually cool to be around when you spend time w your friends and they appreciate you . and youll also stop having thoughts and fears about not being able to trust them or about them judging you or about how it must be awful to spend time with you (or whatever else you might think) when you have fun spending time together and you regularly see each other and you value each others time. You just havent met your people yet. Dont worry , you will.

[soulvomit]

Talking back to the Geek Social Fallacies: they’re a non-intersectional analysis that doesn’t take into account how diverse our community is, and assumes we don’t have agency in our own social relationships.

Geek Social Fallacy #1: Ostracizers Are Evil

From the website:  GSF1 is one of the most common fallacies, and one of the most deeply held. Many geeks have had horrible, humiliating, and formative experiences with ostracism, and the notion of being on the other side of the transaction is repugnant to them.

I think this is true some of the time, but not all. Here is the problem with how this is framed. The biggest problem with this (like with the rest of the analysis of the GSF) is that it’s a non-intersectional viewpoint of a diverse set of spaces that have unspoken traditional power dynamics. People outside of those dynamics - women, POC, and or LGBTQ people - talk about those dynamics *all the time.* Plenty of geek social issues aren’t individual, they’re structural.

There is a lot of geek exceptionalism here: it’s as if geek culture exists in a hermetically sealed bubble apart from the rest of society or its dynamics, pissing contests, or biases, and it’s as if problems that take place within geek space, are specific to geek space.

It’s also as if geeks don’t have agency or ever choose their friends and spaces with intention, and never reject or ostracize people. Plenty of us are geeks/nerds because we don’t hang out with just *anybody* and a lot of us really do think we are smarter and or more successful than a lot of other people in our own social class (which is part of the unspoken class anxiety in nerd/geek identity). A lot of us have defensive walls up in non-geeky spaces - but there are some of us who actively think we’re more interesting, higher class, better informed, or smarter than non-nerdy/non-geeky people.

Finally, the problem with assuming that the problem is “Ostracizers Are Evil”

assumes that geeks/nerds don’t prioritize some friendships within their group over other friendships, and ignores that structural and or unconscious biases may exist in geek/nerd space just like they do in other spaces. The person asked not to be an ostracizer is so often someone who’s expected to do emotional labor/be “the Giving Tree” or who has a more subordinate status in the group. The people we’re expected to tolerate aren’t merely some elephant in the room that everyone is working around, the group is often actively prioritizing that person over the people who don’t like that person. They’re not merely tolerating them. They put up with Jason the Creeper and Cat Piss Man because they like them and/or Jason and CPM go way back in the group! 

Geek Social Fallacy #2: Friends Accept Me As I Am

The origins of GSF2 are closely allied to the origins of GSF1. After being victimized by social exclusion, many geeks experience their "tribe" as a non-judgmental haven where they can take refuge from the cruel world outside.

Well... maybe this is true for some people, but the problem is, there are power dynamics *within* geek/nerd culture. This is another case where I feel like the author isn’t seeing the forest for the trees. Plenty of people don’t find geek/nerd culture to be a haven and don’t take acceptance for granted! Just because geek/nerd culture may be a haven *for some cis het men* from some kinds of gender essentialist tropes, doesn’t mean it’s a haven for other people.  

If you’re somebody who is always fighting for space in that world because it’s the only space you get to have *anywhere*, and you’re always running into the power dynamics of other groups, then it isn’t that easy to miss in geek/nerd culture. 

Geek Social Fallacy #3: Friendship Before All

I’m not really arguing with this one as a common problem within geek space.  I do wish analysis of it would go further, because I feel there’s often an active codependent or enabling/co-addictive process. People really do get addicted to fantasy based stuff, and to video games, and to media. Even addiction specialists acknowledge this. But there are very few people doing analysis of addictive dynamics, anti-recovery, or enabling within geek/nerd space. One of the problems is that this is really pervasive in geek/nerd space and it’s almost impossible to get away from unless you completely quit geek/nerd space altogether, at least for a while. The thing is, many cases of “Friendship Before All” aren’t necessarily that the person has a broad feeling of this, as much as it reflects a specific codependent or co-addictive relationships within the group. (The fallacy I keep seeing here is again the assumption that geeks don’t have social agency, or specific social choices.) Some geeky spaces can even get into folie a deux dynamics or cult dynamics. 

The problem I had dealing with maladaptive daydreaming (which is often seen as addiction-adjacent) was that geek culture, especially tabletop gaming, was actively reinforcing it, and I actively needed to get away from that group for a while to get a handle on the maladaptive daydreaming that was taking over my life. The thing I needed to NOT do was be around people who obsessively daydreamed about their “ships,” or in any space that encouraged me to spend ten hours a day daydreaming about my RP characters. (I do RP again, but only because I’m in a space where it doesn’t take over my life.)

I had a couple of uncomfortably intense friendships that were as enmeshed as they were because they were based around us sharing the fantasy lives that neither of us could share with other people, let alone reveal to the world, and because we enabled each other’s bad escapist tendencies.

Geek Social Fallacy #4: Friendship Is Transitive

Every carrier of GSF4 has, at some point, said:"Wouldn't it be great to get all my groups of friends into one place for one big happy party?!"If you groaned at that last paragraph, you may be a recovering GSF4 carrier.GSF4 is the belief that any two of your friends ought to be friends with each other, and if they're not, something is Very Wrong.

I won’t say I’ve never seen this, but in a lot of cases, I don’t think it’s anything but the behavior of *young and socially inexperienced* people in general. It also assumes that we are talking a group of people who are all potential in-group and none of whom are ever one-down or on the business end of bias. It assumes that geeks never compartmentalize their friends, which is wrong - lots of us do, especially if we’re social climbers (which lots of geeks/nerds are and won’t admit it). (Let’s be honest, would YOU really introduce everyone you have ever gamed with, to the people at your staid/conservative job that you’re trying to get promoted at?)

GSF4 ignores the phenomenon of gatekeeping.  If you’re ever the person on the other end of gatekeeping of any kind, you certainly don’t experience every geek wanting to introduce you to all of their friends. It’s another case where I feel like the author’s viewpoint is just too narrow and that their generalizations are based upon a small set of people who are themselves always the gatekeepers.

Geek Social Fallacy #5: Friends Do Everything Together

GSF5, put simply, maintains that every friend in a circle should be included in every activity to the full extent possible. This is subtly different from GSF1; GSF1 requires that no one, friend or not, be excluded, while GSF5 requires that every friend be invited. This means that to a GSF5 carrier, not being invited to something is intrinsically a snub, and will be responded to as such.

This is another case that tries to oversimplify and lump multiple kinds of situations in geek/nerd space into one Grand Unified Field Theory: experience of *young* social spaces, experience of structural bias/gatekeeping, individual neediness (or projections coming from same) that also happens outside of geek spaces, and dynamics that happen with lots of subcultural spaces.

The biggest issue I have with the author’s analysis is about the structural bias, because GSF5 totally ignores 

ignores the existence of bias and structural stuff in geek/nerd spaces. And I don’t deny that GSF5 actually exists, but it has to be analyzed intersectionally. In adult spaces, I feel like I’ve seen people more often accused of some form of GSF5 to gaslight them about elitism, than I’ve seen actually being carriers of GSF5. 

I mean, what if you *are* being excluded and everyone around you is saying “don’t be silly, we don’t exclude people?” What if it *is* a snub and you’re told you’re imagining things? What if you’re actually not being invited to the thing?

There *is* an issue in geek space where individual cliques of friends intersect with larger groups, and friends-of-friends, and friends-of-friends-of-friends. But plenty of geeks just associate with their specific cliques.