#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.

[analytickle-lezdom-in-space]

Hey everyone, I’m about to say something very political about issues relating to gender identity. If you don’t want to read it, I understand, but before you decide to skip I’d like to ask you to consider this:

I understand that people come on to tumblr because they deal with all sorts of issues in the real world ranging from poverty to systemic discrimination to the vicious cycle created by the interaction of poverty and systemic discrimination, and some come to tumblr specifically to air out those issues with other like-minded people, but others come to tumblr to escape that and instead to think about nerd shit and/or pretty subs in ballgags. To an extent I feel this myself, I occasionally talk about social issues on this blog but I don’t make them the focus because mostly I wanna think about other things. And if you really don’t wanna read posts like this, I understand, you need to focus on self-care.

But if you’re at all willing, I’d like to ask you to stay and read this, and if you’re cis, even if you’re a little uncomfortable reading about heavy social issues on tumblr, I’d like to ask you, not demand, just politely ask you, to work through that discomfort right now because what I’m about to say is important for cis people to know. This won’t be very long, and after it’s done you can, and should, go back to distracting yourself from the horrible, awful social issues you’re dealing with yourself in this corrupt, wildly unequal crapshoot of a society, and if you really don’t wanna see it, I’ve tagged it so you can block it. But again, please don’t unless you really feel you need to.

Okay, here we go

I don’t generally like to try and make things an oppression olympics or go “this marginalized group is more oppressed than this marginalized group”, we’re all suffering together. But the inescapable fact is no matter what I’d like to do, the benefits of the last few decades of gains in LGBT rights have been primarily felt by cis gay and lesbian people. Everyone else has been falling behind them, especially trans/nb people, and of course extra especially trans/nb people of color. Why does our society have so much trouble with trans rights? I think there’s a few reasons, but I’d like to highlight one in particular:

Unlike many marginalized groups in and out of the LGBT community, cis society fundamentally does not understand, on a very basic level, what we actually are. Even the most tolerant, well meaning, well-intentioned cis people, who understand in an abstract way that we are the genders we identify as and try to treat us that way, don’t get some fairly basic things about us, in a way that affects how they go about trying to support us. And to some degree, there are things you’ll never really understand without being trans, but there are still some very basic things cis people can understand, and do understand when trans people have the time and patience to explain to them, but otherwise are completely unaware of. I’m gonna tell you all those things, so if you wanna signal boost this, please reblog it:

First of all, you need to understand that gender is at its very base, a social construct. No more, no less. It has no meaning other than what we as a society assign it. It’s not about sex. Sex itself does not follow the binary idea of gender we have. Some people are born with XY chromosomes but completely feminine bodies. Some people are intersex and their genitals and larger bodies do not fully fit into either conventional sex category, like they have a clit and a pair of partially developed testicles, or breasts and a penis, etc. some people have hormone imbalances caused at birth or by accidents later in life. If gender was about sex, there would be dozens of genders, and the fact that intersex people are still labeled at birth as either male or female should tell you without a shadow of doubt that gender as society defines it isn’t about your body, it’s about what gender your doctor and parents decided you were when you were born. And don’t try to bring non-human life into this, there are animals with no sexes at all, animals that are all one sex and reproduce by cloning, animals who change sex when there aren’t enough breeding options, animals who change sex based on the weather, and more, crazier shit.

And furthermore, most of what we associate with gender has not a goddamn thing to do with sex. What colors are girly. What job positions are masculine. Whether real men show their emotions and show vulnerability. How men and women dress and are expected to cultivate their bodies. And many smaller, subtler things, some so small they’re impossible to consciously notice or define, but are always there.

This is what gender is, and every culture, era, religion, and society has defined it differently. When high heels were invented it was a form of men’s fashion. Men all over the world wear skirts. Women are seen as emotional and temperamental in some countries, and cold and stoic in others. Some cultures like ours have 2 genders. Some have many, the peoples of the First Nation for example. Gender is a construct with no inherent meaning, this is a basic fact of psychology, sociology, biology, philosophy and logic. If you disagree with this indisputable fact, you are wrong. Totally and completely, and you’d be able to see that if you could see beyond your indoctrination with western dogma. I don’t care about your high school level understanding of biology, or your westernized interpretation of a non-western holy book only considered holy by a select fraction of the human population. (And for the record I’m religious and this is not meant to denigrate the role of religion in your life or make fun of religious believers, but you have to realize how much of your understanding of religion comes from cultural practice and not genuine spirituality. And if you’re reading this and you’re not religious, that’s also cool and other people’s religious beliefs should not be allowed to determine your gender identity for you). Gender is a human invention made to try and impose order on a chaotic world even where no such order actually exists.

Now, you may be asking then, if gender is simply a construct, then why does gender identity matter at all, and what does it mean for someone like me to say they identify as a woman? Well, that’s an understandable question, but the short answer is social constructs may be fake but they still hold power. Money is a social construct, it’s only worth what we agree it to mean, but that doesn’t mean poverty is meaningless. If you don’t have the money, then societal norms and constructed rules will make you suffer for it. And gender is the same. Societal norms like gender are deeply ingrained into the psyche of everyone living in a society, and they cannot be just ignored. Human beings need validation from other people and from society, and when we feel at odds with the gender construct society has given us and the things that come with it, that causes dysphoria.

In other words, society is telling us we’re one thing, our brain is telling us that we’re something else. Something that doesn’t fit with the societal idea of the gender we’ve been assigned. That causes us to have a hard time being confident in our own identity, and a hard time trusting our own reality, and the brain starts to wonder if it’s somehow wrong about itself. Thus, it becomes difficult to retain our sense of self. The only antidote is to find a different societally constructed identity, or an identity that specifically rejects those societal constructs, and identify with that. And we can’t just identify with that to ourselves, we need other people to validate that identity. We need other people to treat us as the gender identity we see ourselves as, because society is fundamentally not fulfilling our need for validation, and we need the people around us to substitute for that.

That’s why some of us get surgery and hormone treatments. It’s not actually because our body is “male” or “female”, it’s because that body reminds us of the identity society has assigned us that we don’t want. Our own bodies cause us dysphoria, and that can lead to crippling panic attacks and dissociation from reality, and that’s why some of us need HRT and surgery. I don’t need it, I’m comfortable in the body I have and it doesn’t remind me society expects me to be a man, and many trans people don’t need to change their bodies for their comfort, but many do, and that’s why.

That’s also why we bring up being transgender so much, we need validation from other people and constant reminders that they see us as the people who we know ourselves to be, because again, society is not fulfilling our basic needs for validation. It’s the same reason insecure people constantly need attention and validation, they’ve been starved of it, but much, much worse. It’s not just about the fact that we won’t be silent about our oppression, although that is another reason, and it sure as hell isn't because we “want to be special”, it’s because we have unmet psychological needs that make it difficult to find the energy to get out of bed each day and make some trans people contemplate suicide.

So, in summary, to be trans is to find an identity, based on the social constructs we’re stuck living with, that represents us better than the social constructs we were arbitrarily assigned before we could choose for ourselves. I am not a woman because I have some inherent womanliness to me, there is no such thing as inherent womanliness, but the social construct of womanhood suits me much better than the social construct of manhood and there is no better or more concrete way to define gender than what we personally feel comfortable with, for reasons I stated earlier, thus, I identify as a woman.

And that does NOT mean being trans is a choice, the fact that I was given an identity by society that doesn’t match how I’ve naturally developed to see myself is not my choice, and it’s not like I have other alternatives on how to deal with it. Don’t let TERFs and religious nuts with no understanding of psychology tell you otherwise, there IS ABSOLUTELY NO ALTERNATIVE WAY FOR A TRANS PERSON TO FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH THEMSELVES OTHER THAN IDENTIFYING WITH THE GENDER IDENTITY THEY FEEL MOST AT HOME WITH AND OTHER PEOPLE VALIDATING THAT IDENTITY. NONE. NADA. ZIP. Anyone who tells you otherwise wants to eradicate trans people. I’m not exaggerating or lying, that is what people who argue otherwise want with absolutely no exceptions. Me identifying as a woman is not a choice, it is finding the only way I can be happy with myself and have the strength to get through the day, and accepting that. It’s not a choice if there are no other alternatives.

And on that note, when your trans friends need constant validation of their identities and need you to just not argue with them and roll with what makes them comfortable? DO THAT. I don’t care if it feels like you’re discussing the same subject a lot. Your mild inconvenience does not outweigh their need for basic emotional support through one of the most difficult situations it’s possible for a human being to be in. And I guarantee you willingly mildly inconvenience yourself for the sake of friends all the time in circumstances that aren’t about gender identity. Why is this different? Just accept that they’re being constantly starved of validation through no fault of their own and give them as much validation as you can. If you think that trans people talking about their identities is a burden to you, either you don’t fully understand what they’re going through, or you’re just a bad friend.

This may also explain some things you may be wondering about why some trans people don’t make an effort to act or dress in the way we traditionally think of when it comes to the gender they identity as, and what it means to be nonbinary, and how one can be a nonbinary lesbian when lesbianism generally means “women being into women” and nonbinary people don’t identify as women: it’s because these are not actually hard rules, just vague social constructs we’re finding a way to be comfortable in. I have a beard, and I still go by a “male-sounding” name, and I dress very masculinely, and still identify as a woman, because number one, there are cis woman who do all these things too, cis women can have facial hair, masculine sounding names, and butch styles of dress, and you never question it in the same way, and number two, my name, facial hair, and style of dress are not the things about the social construct of maleness that makes me uncomfortable so I’d rather just stop identifying as male but keep them. Likewise, a nonbinary person can’t identify with the social constructs of maleness or femaleness and thus identities as something else that they feel better about. And since gender is a social construct, lesbianism itself is too, and one that has developed over the years quite independently from womanhood with its own culture and it’s own expectations, so some people identify with the social construct of lesbianism, but not the social construct of womanhood, thus they’re nonbinary lesbians. It’s all about finding the way to identity and express yourself that matches who you feel you really are, and none of these terms have exact meanings, so they mean for you whatever helps you be comfortable with your own identity.

So with all that in mind, my closing note is this: things like this are very basic aspects of what it means to be trans, and if you can’t understand them, you cannot truly understand what we are and what it means to respect us. Please, read this, make sure you understand it, and then spread the word. People understanding this more broadly will do a world of good for all of us trans and nb people.