#they’re getting fucked over by someone else’s transphobia when they themselves don’t have a single transphobic bone in their bodies

[lycandrophile]

today, my coworkers’ refusal to see me as a man put one of our patients in a position where they felt unsafe for the third time. i’ve been at this job for less than two months total. i don’t even care about getting misgendered anymore, i just want the people we’re supposed to be taking care of to feel comfortable around me.

i work at a hospital where we have to supervise our patients in a lot of vulnerable situations. there are safeguarding rules in place for certain things that male employees aren’t allowed to be present for when it comes to female patients. and yet, the people training me and telling me what to do have repeatedly put me in situations where i’ve been forced to do things that the female patients aren’t comfortable with me doing. and because they have repeatedly failed to teach me the rules for doing my job as a man, i have no way of knowing when i’m crossing one of those lines unless one of the patients tells me.

i’ve had to watch a victim of SA stare at me in abject terror as my coworkers asked her to strip naked with me still in the room. it took several minutes for her to even be able to speak enough to ask if i could leave the room. i found out after that she broke down crying the moment i walked out. my biggest regret is that i didn’t realize what was happening fast enough to leave before she ever had to say something, because she shouldn’t have had to say it. i never should’ve been allowed in the room in the first place, because that’s not something male employees are supposed to be present for. but i didn’t know that yet, because i was training and i thought surely, they wouldn’t train me to do something that directly violated their own safeguarding rules. that moment was the first time, and it’s haunted me ever since, but it wasn’t the last time. not only did it happen for the third time today — it almost happened for the fourth, and would have if someone hadn’t spoken up to say they should pick someone else. i care for these people so deeply, it’s why i took this job, and i’m so tired of hearing the fear in their voices when they have to ask me not to do something i never should’ve been told to do.

i’m very used to the personal discomfort of being misgendered. i willingly deal with it a lot at work as well as in other situations, not because i’m in the closet (at this point in my medical transition that would be impossible), but because it’s such a frequent occurrence with my coworkers that we would never get anything done if i took the time to correct them every time. but to see it get to the point of causing such visceral discomfort in other people? people i’m supposed to be taking care of and keeping safe? that’s something else entirely, and i’m fucking exhausted.

and after all of that, some of them still look at me like i have two heads when they tell me what to do and i say “i can’t do that, only female employees can” because i’m learning now. clearly i’m already seen as a man by our patients, but my coworkers would still rather put them in an unsafe situation than just train me as a man.

[velvetvexations]

you’ll see a trans boy be like “i dont personally have the power to oppress you” and then later the same day 3 of their little trans boy friends will start calling you out for making the first trans boy cry so hard he almost died (by disagreeing with him) and then all the cis women in the space will instantly side with the fragile little boys against the scary big [t-slur] who uses intimidating words like “transmisogyny” and thats how the whisper network against you starts, leading to far reaching professional and social consequences that never leave you

This didn’t happen.

Not this way, at least. All marginalized people are at all times at risk of being canceled unfairly. Their marginalization tends to play a major part in that, obviously. Trans women get hit with it a lot and that fucking sucks, and some transmascs are in TERF-y circles and can theoretically use that against transfems should they feel the need to.

This that I’m quoting, however, is a fantasy. It’s a page from a dream journal. People are giddily imagining things like this happening because they live in a world where trans women are feared and have their reputations ruined by lies, and they want to exploit that for their own benefit. The best way of doing this is putting themselves above other trans people, because cis people don’t give enough of a fuck to care or get involved with these bullshit arguments, but if you whine about other marganalized people they will actually be affected by it and forced into the conversation you created out of thin air. It’s not so much a victimization complex as it is a death cult fascination with the misery of transfemininity identical to the TERF obsession with fymyl suffering, defining ‘trans woman’ as 'the thing that feels pain always and forever.’

It’s disgusting and I can’t imagine identifying with such a sniveling and pathetic vision of what being a trans woman is like. It’s so undignified it makes my skin crawl. It’s embarrassing. There’s nothing in this crying little effigy covered in pins and needles I can relate to. I can’t tell if these people need more self-esteem or less. I’m so fucking tired of this wounded gazelle shit.

But for the TRF, transfemininity is all about the abuse. Just look at the beyond absurd assertion, made over and over again, that trans women are maliciously called the t-slur by other trans people. That’s just. No? No. But in claiming that the t-slur can only ever refer to trans women, and that transfeminine suffering takes priority above all else because everyone forever at all times hates trans women more than anyone else, it again becomes necessary to construct this false vision of intercommunity dynamics where “scary big t-slur” is a stereotype that exists within the community in the first place, and which trans men are constantly using against trans women.

It’s just so blatantly selfish for one to act like a transfeminist when all one does every single day is bitch about other trans people. We’re all about to get fucked harder than ever and there are people who profess to sincerely believe they’re fighting the revolution by making up lies about their siblings. I’m easily triggered by transphobia outside of the community and yet even I manage to engage with actual transphobes and make them considerably less transphobic, yet people who don’t even know enough about what TERFs believe to understand they hate men too will fritter the day away on how they could theoretically be canceled if they did something bad ,and wouldn’t that be the worst thing ever? Oh, what if I broke up with someone and our mutual friends believed I was the jerk, because that’s a situation that exclusively happens to poor helpwess twans women and the mere suggestion I could possibly be a jerk in the first place is unthinkable? Hate to keep saying this, but trans women are being actually murdered and this obsessive fixation on “social murder” within the trans community exists purely to spice things up with a feeling of danger because the spaces we’ve managed to carve out for ourselves are otherwise a little too safe and it feels more authentic to the Laura Palmer Ultimate Victim narrative. Massively popular transfems with over ten thousand followers will happily sic them on people for the most upsettingly asinine reasons and then cry-type about how they’re the underdogs in every possible social situation.

But most obnoxious of all is the implication here that, because this can only happen to trans women, gossip and slander does not happen to other trans people, or other marginalized people in general.

That’s fucked, considering how much this discourse has attacked specific targets. It’s most maddening to see that “the coiner of the word transandrophobia has dykebreaking+detransitioning-of-transfems kink” has evolved to “most people who believe in transandrophobia have those kinks” because I constantly see TERFs making huge compilations of transfem blogs engaging in cis dykebreaking kink from the dom perspective. Just transfem dom blog after transfem dom blog enthusiastically into cis dykebreaking, which TERFs use to paint us in a way that fits their narrative.

Literally the only example they can ever give of a transandrophobia-connected person* being a dom for dykebreaking with transfem subs is someone who was being paid by a transfem. Detrans kink is overwhelmingly non-transfems, but almost exclusively as subs to either transfems or cis men, and those transfems aren’t getting paid for it, they actually are just in it for the love of the game. There’s nothing wrong with that, but people want to act like there is when it’s anyone else, and that’s not only weird but also setting up a bear trap to step in later.

Which gets to the point that, hey, wow, I’ve noticed a lot of cis women in particular who self-identify as TME are super into anti-shipping. You cannot possibly imagine you’re safe for trans women if your big issue with trans men articulating their oppression is “they masturbate evilly.” Popular transfem blogs will talk at length about how you shouldn’t judge transfems for their kinks but cis women are so eager to kinkshame transmascs that they not only make shit up out of thin air, but specifically copy and paste kinks almost entirely made up of transfems onto transmascs. Someday very soon a TERF is going to show them it’s much more convenient to be a general transphobe and not make special exceptions for the ones that use the same pronouns as you. They’re going to show your anti-ship cis lesbian friend one of those transfem dykebreaking blog compilations and she’ll take Trans Rights Are Human Rights out of her bio within the hour.

Like, even if you didn’t care about being monstrously inhumane to others, all of this is so against transfem self-interests in the long run, but people who consider themselves the most transfeminist transfeminists there are, of a radical nature, one might say, care more about notes than helping anyone, least of all the transfems they’re feeding into a grinder of paranoia and isolation. Especially the isolation.

It’s a little hard to take it seriously when I get accused of calling all trans women groomers for thinking it’s bad when people talk about “curing” other trans women’s “comphet,” how “TMEs” are obligated to bottom for them to compensate for transmisogyny, and writing long treatises on why it’s one’s moral responsibility to throw forcefem kink at random men because they may like it. Like, am I saying trans women are groomers, or am I saying some people use being members of a marginalized community to be kinna gross? People somehow find it in them to be angry at gay men who cross boundaries in spite of the messaging that they’re all sex abusers for the past two hundred years. Especially since 90% of the concern is for other trans women.Like, sorry, but I care enough about trans women that I’m going to say something if I think you’re putting them in a bad situation, and someone being a trans woman doesn’t make them immune to that. But oh, it does if you assume that this is all just common sense transfeminism, and I am in fact making this accusation of most trans women instead of an extremely niche group.

Never mind that in the screencap people use to accuse me of calling trans women “rapists” I was saying something a self-identified TME said was coercive, and whose identity as a Not a Trans Woman I explicitly noted.** Never mind that I’m the not the one telling people to name their blogs after the original transbian separatist group that famously fell apart after resulting in heavy sexual abuse. Never mind that I have said over and over again that TRFs act no more entitled to people’s bodies than lesbian TERFs who treat people they perceive as women the same way.

But I’m supposed to believe that those cis anti-shippers who post things like “every time someone says kinks are fine they’re just protecting predators in the LGBT community” is a great ally and I’m a traitor because they hate men and I don’t?

Sorry, no, not a traitor. A “pickme begging to be beaten to death with hammers.” Who’s probably not even actually a trans woman. Great transfeminism, yall. You’re really fighting transmisogyny.

It’s especially galling now that TRFs have taken to calling transandrophobia “reactionary,” the most bullshit possible way to call a group that includes a huge number of PoC, who they constantly accuse of tokenization, a pack of Nazis. What is transandrophobia reacting to? Bigotry? Golly gee, I guess so! Or maybe it’s “reacting” to transmisogyny as part of the completely absurd idea that trasnmascs steal everything from transfems. Like, yeah, sure girliepop, and we stole misogyny from cis women, right? Sorry you failed to not sound exactly like a TERF yet again but maybe try again tomorrow and you’ll finally earn not being called a radfem.

But isn’t it sooooo mean of me to compare a small amount of trans women to radfems? Like their oppressors? Well, first of all, they regularly refer to Jewish people as Nazis, discourse aside that they do that is simply a true fact which shows they indeed think it’s possible to justify comparisons like that, although in their case it’s just because it feels like getting off a sick burn and rhetorical W to go “ah, but what if this Jewish person…was a Nazi? Checkmate, Zionists.”

Secondly, for as much as TRFs want to claim TERFs only hate them, that’s simply not true and I have conclusively proven this with basic use of Tumblr’s search function and the tag “radblr.” Twice. If you believe they love transmascs and only want what’s best for them, congratulations dipshit, you fell for their propaganda so hard I’m surprised they haven’t managed to convince you you’re not a woman. Or is it only an obvious lie when it’s about you?

Most annoyingly, just on a personal level, is the way TRFs get pissed off at non-transfem feminine AMAB people for daring to exist. The idea that femboy is a slur for trans women would be laughable if it weren’t grotesque in it’s ignorance. The things I’ve read people say about how transmisogynistic it is for an anime character to be a crossdressing man instead of a trans woman are just infuriatingly racist. Not everything is about you and it’s not actually a big deal if people talk about others once in blue moon.

The constant posts about how non-transfems are evil for not making more transfem headcanons, or for headcanoning the TRF’s favorite canonically male character wrong, are particularly childish. I can’t even go into MY favorite blorbo’s tag without seeing people call transmasc headcanons of him inferior literary analysis completely without irony, and every single time they shit like this, they do it while making up the most convoluted and nonsensical explanations for why the character can only be transfem instead, as though the hostility is defensiveness born out of their particular blorbo requiring a lot of creativity to headcanon that way, necessitating going to war to prove they can’t really be a man to assert it as The One Truth. Then they’ll complain until the fucking heat death of the universe about how everyone loves transmasc headcanons because of transmisogyny.

It’s the same unbearable on-sight hostility as when a TERF sees a child on the subway and goes home to type up a novel of a post on how he had the eyes of a future wife-beater, and it’s so irritating to see it spread from one corner to another. Literally, TRFs say that trans men will always turn on trans women and eventually detransition to wield their wymbnly power against us, and I’m expected to not see that as having severe hang-ups about people born into what they want to transition into and have denied to them by society’s transphobia?

What about the fact that they constantly mock AFAB trans people in ways specifically targeting that trait, calling non-binary people “theyfabs,” joking it’s easy to misgender trans men when they have large breasts, and reduce transmasc stereotypes to feminine “soft bois?” Like, yeah, okay, you’re not projecting any gaping insecurities you may have about assigned sex and gender roles when you say transmasc music is ukuleles and transfem music is heavy metal, next tell me about how transmascs all enjoy tea parties and transfems all go to football games.

But it’s not even mostly trans women who keep this shit alive in the first place. A higher percentage of total trans women on this site are into this framework, but the total number of non-transfem trans people and cis women so outweighs them in the first place that it cancels that out. Like, if x is higher than y, and x% of trans women on Tumblr agree but only y% of “TME” people do, that’s still a movement mostly consisting of “TME” people. The full separatist angle would very quickly reveal how little air it has to burn if trans women truly only had themselves to watch out for each other. Unfortunately, self-identified TMEs are much more likely to get TERFier rather than simply less TRF-y when the spell breaks and they realize how fucked up this shit is, while the people who’ve been batted at continue to exercise the patience of a saint and continue to fight for trans women anyway.

And that! Is what hurts! The most! The fact that people do not care about transmascs and in particular the ones who believe in transandrophobia are constantly tripping over themselves to defend and help trans women as much as they possibly can. I wish people saw that. I wish that mattered. It’s like watching a black hole suck up an endless font of goodwill and love. And then going “lol reactionary transandrobros hate trans women.”

That’s it, though, the great irony of it all is that if it were true, it’d never have become popular in the first place. It’s kept aloft by self-identified TMEs who are well-meaning if not especially good at critical thinking, except for the the contingent that are convinced trans men are all misogynistic because they personally are, or even outright seem to get gender euphoria from the idea they have male privilege. But for whatever reason, if “TME” folks didn’t care? The people making up elaborate tales of their potential (social) murder would have to find some other way to get attention.

I suggest throwing on a big red nose and joining a circus.

*and I specify “transandrophobia-connected” but you’d have a hard time rustling up transmasc doms in general from those scenes

**also, despite it being something I saw with my own eyes, I notably did not even feel it hit the level of needing to directly name someone as being who I was basing my assessment of sexual coercive behavior on as being sexually coercive, because I think it's much more a prevalent attitude of pressure in sexual contexts than individual behavior

[kuromichad]

different subject that’s heavy on my mind rn but since i’m already being harsh let’s get into it. i wish it wasn’t automatically presumed to be some kind of truscum attitude when someone tries to express that different parts of The Trans Community have like, different needs and different risk levels and different experiences and that we have the ability to talk over each other, harm each other, etc... like when i put it that way people generally are like ‘of course that’s true!’ but is it ever really understood in practice? a number of people (not a large enough number, but still) are able to loosely understand ‘you can be trans and transphobic’ when it’s applied to the matter of transmisogyny but when a trans person tries to express distrust of or frustration with afab nb people due to how common it is that that category of person will, despite being trans/nb, espouse bioessentialist, anti-medical-transition, radfem-adjacent if not outright cryptoterf rhetoric, suddenly ‘trans people can be transphobic’ gets applied to... the person with a complaint about transphobia. 

because he’s clearly an evil truscum man! regardless of if the person making the complaint is a trans man or trans woman, oops, lol. he’s a bad person who is attacking and invalidating and totally hatecriming the heckin’ valid, equally at-risk transgender identity of “an afab woman who isn’t a woman except when she pointedly categorizes themself as a woman because being afab makes them a woman who is ‘politically aligned’ with women but she’s not an icky unwoke cis woman because they don’t like being forced into womanhood although Really When You Think About It 🤔 all women are dysphoric because obviously the pathologized medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria in transgender people is something that equally applies to cis women just default existing under patriarchy 🤔, and no, equating these things totally does not imply anything reductive about or add a bizarre moral dimension to the idea of being transgender, whaaaaat, this woman who isn’t a woman doesn’t think there’s anything immoral or cowardly or misogynist or delusional about being transgender, they would never say that because THEY’RE transgender, except when she feels it’s important (constantly) to make clear that she’s Still A Woman Deep Down Inherently Despite Not Identifying As One, and none of this ever has any effect on how they treat the concept, socially and politically, of people who actually wholly identify with (and possibly medically transition to) a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, be it ‘the opposite gender’ or abstaining from binary gender altogether or ‘politically aligning’ with the ‘opposite’ gender from their asab. never ever!”

and like maybe that sounds like a completely absurd and hateful strawman to you! but in that case you’re either like, lucky, or optimistic, or ignorant. i’m literally not looking at random nb people and declaring that in My Truscum Opinion they’re ‘really a woman’ just because they’re not medically transitioning or meeting some arbitrary standard of mine. i am looking at self-identified afab nb people, who most often use she/they because, y’know, words mean things, especially pronouns, so people who are willingly ‘aligned with womanhood’ typically intentionally use she/her (sorry that i guess that’s another truscum take now!!! that pronouns mean things!!! the bigender transmasc who deliberately uses exclusively he/him wants it to invoke a perception he’s comfortable with!), who actively say the things listed above (in a non-sarcastic manner). 

like, the line between a person who says “i don’t claim to really not be my asab because i know no one would ever perceive me as anything else” because theyve internalized a defeatist attitude due to societal transphobia, and a person who says that because they... genuinely believe it’s impossible/ridiculous/an imposition to truly be transgender (in the traditional trans sense, beyond a vague nb disidentification with gender) and are actively contributing to the former person’s self loathing... is hard to define from a distance! i think plenty of people who are, in a sense, ‘tentative’ or like ‘playing close to home’ so to speak in their identity are ‘genuinely trans’ (whatever that may mean) and just going through a process. they might arrive at a different identity or might just eventually stop saying/believing defeatist stuff, who knows. but there are enough people saying it for the latter reason, or at least not caring if they sound that way, that it’s like, dangerous. it is actively incredibly harmful to other trans people. and it’s fucking ridiculous that it’s so difficult to criticize because you’ll always get the defense of “umm but i’m literally trans” and/or “well i’m just talking about ME, this doesn’t apply to other trans people” when it’s an attitude that very clearly seeps into their politics and the way they discuss gender.

because it’s just incredibly common for afab nb people (most typically those that go by she/they! since i’m aware that uh, i am also afab nb, but we clearly are extremely different, so that’s the best categorization i’ve got) to discuss gender in moralized terms, with the excuse of patriarchy/misogyny existing, which of course adds another difficult dimension to trying to criticize this because it gets the response of “don’t act like misandry is real” (it’s not, but being a dick still is) and “boohoo, let women complain about their oppressors” (this goes beyond ‘complaining’). a deliberate revocation of empathy/sympathy/compassion from men and projection of inherently malicious/brutish/cruel intent onto men (not solely in the justified generalizations ‘men suck/are dangerous’, but in specific interactions too) underpin a whole fucking lot of popular posts/discussions online, whether they’re political or casual/social, and it absolutely influences how people conceptualize and feel about transness. 

because ‘maleness is evil’ is still shitty politics even when you’ve slightly reframed it from the terf ‘trans women are evil because they’re Really Men and can never escape being horrific soulless brutes just as women can never escape being fragile morally superior flowers’ to the tumblr shethey “trans women who are out to me/unclockable are tolerable i guess because they’re women and women are good; anyone i personally presume to be a cis man, though, is still automatically evil, and saying trans men are Just As Bad is progressive of me, and it’s totally unrelated and apolitical that i think we should expand the concept of afab lesbianism so broadly that you can now be basically indistinguishable from trans men on literally every single level except for a declaration of ‘but i would never claim to be a man because i’m secure in the Innate Womanhood of the body i was born into, even as i medically alter that body because it causes me great gendered discomfort.’ none of this at all indicates that i feel there’s an immense moral/political gap between being an afab nb lesbian vs a straight trans man! it says nothing at all about my concept of ‘maleness’ and there’s no way this rhetoric bleeds into my perception of trans women and no way loudly talking about all this could keep trans people around me self-loathing and closeted, because i’m Literally Trans and Not A Terf!”

again, if that sounds like a hateful strawman, sorry but it’s not. i guess i’m supposed to be like ‘all of the many people ive seen saying these shitty things is an evil outlier who Doesn’t Count, and it’s not fair to the broad identity of afab shethey to not believe that every person who doesn’t outright say terfy enough things is a perfectly earnest valid accepting trans person who’s beyond criticism’ but like. this cannot be about broad validation. this can’t be about discarding all the bad apples as not really part of the group. we can’t be walking on eggshells to coddle what are essentially, in the end, Cis Feelings, because in the best cases this kind of rhetoric comes from naive people who are early and uncertain in their gender journey or whatever and are in the process of unraveling internalized transphobia, and in the easily observable worst cases these people are very literally redefining shit so that ‘actually all afab women are trans, spiritually, all afabs have dysphoria, we are all Equally oppressed by Males uh i mean cis men <3’ because, let’s be honest, they know that the moment they call themselves trans they get to say whatever they want about gender no matter how harmful it is to the rest of us. and those ideas spread like wildfire through the afab shethey “woman that’s not a woman” community that frankly greatly outnumbers other types of trans people online, because many of those people just do not have the experiences that lead you to really understand this shit and have to push back against concepts of gender that actively harm you as a trans person.

like that’s all i want to be able to say, is Things Are Different For Different Groups. and a willful ignorance of these differences leads to bad rhetoric controlling the overall discourse which gets people hurt. and even when concepts arise from it that seem positive and helpful and inclusive, in practice or in origin those ideas can still be upholding shit that gets other people hurt. like, i don’t doubt that many people are very straightforwardly happy and comfortable with an identity like ‘afab nb lesbian on testosterone’ and it would be ridiculous and hypocritical for me, ‘afab nb who wants to pass as a guy so he can comfortably wear skirts again,’ to act like that’s something that can’t or shouldn’t exist. it’s not about the identity itself, it’s about the politics that are popular within its community, and how the use of identities as moral labels with like, fucking pokemon type interactions for oppression effectiveness which directly informs the moral correctness of your every opinion and your very existence, is a shitty practice that gets people hurt and leads us to revoke empathy from each other.

like. sorry this is all over the place and long and probably still sounds evil because i haven’t thought through and disclaimered every single statement. but i’m like exhausted from living with this self-conscious guilt that maybe i’ve turned into a horrible evil truscum misogynist etc etc due to feeling upset by this seemingly inescapable approach to gender in lgbt/online circles that like, actively harms me, because when i vent with my friends all the stuff i’ve tried to explain here gets condensed down to referencing ‘she/theys’ as a category and that feels mean and generalizing and i genuinely dislike generalizations but the dread i feel about that category gets proven right way too often. it’s just like. this is not truscum this is not misgendering this is not misogyny. this is not about me decreeing that all transmascs have to be manly enough or dysphoric enough and all nbs have to be neatly agender and androgynous or something, i’m especially not saying that nb gender isn’t real lmao or even that it’s automatically wrong to partially identify with your asab; this is not me saying you can only medically transition for specific traditional reasons or that you don’t get a say on anything if you aren’t medically transitioning for whatever reason, now or ever. i just. want to be allowed to be frank about how... when there’s different experiences in a community we should like. acknowledge those differences and be willing to say that sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about or that what they’re saying is harmful. without the primary concern being whether people will feel invalidated by being told so. because these are like, real issues, that are more important than politely including everyone, because that method is just getting vulnerable people drowned out constantly.

[duhragonball]

On Twitter, there’s a new movement that started up on... Thursday, I guess, with the hashtag #SpeakingOut, where women were encouraged to call out instances of sexual abuse.     I’m not sure if it started with the pro wrestling community or not, because earlier in the week I saw some stuff about comic book pros like Warren Ellis and Cameron Stewart, but maybe that was a precursor.   All I know is that right now, I’ve been seeing all sorts of names being dropped in the pro wrestling business, each of them accused of being sexual predators, or covering up for the crimes of others.    Some of the names I don’t recognize, because they’re independent wrestlers from promotions I’m not familiar with, but I’ve seen some names I do know, and that’s pretty tough to take.   I’m going to discuss this here. 

Predictably, I’ve seen some backlash to #SpeakingOut, which reminds me of the same bullshit talking points used by the #IStandWithVic crowd last year.   In case you didn’t know, Vic Mignogna was a voice actor who worked for Funimation and provided the dub performances for Broly in DBZ, and Eward Elric in Fullmetal Alchemist.   I think those were his two most famous roles.   Over the decades, Vic garnered a reputation for being a sex pest, kissing and inappropriately touching women and teenage girls at conventions, and harassing his colleagues.  I assume the release of the “Dragon Ball Super: Broly” movie in the U.S. in 2019 precipitated a newfound interest in those allegations, and fans started objecting to his bookings at 2019 conventions.    By mid-year, Vic was fired from Funimation and RoosterTeeth, and he responded to this by starting an ill-advised defamation lawsuit.   

Vic’s defenders are, to put it mildly, idiots.    There were professional lawyers on Twitter who explained, very clearly, why this lawsuit was a bad idea.   The main reason being that it was done in Texas, which has a lot of laws designed to make it harder to sue people for defamation.    I think Vic’s goal was to find some way to punish his accusers for making him look bad and getting him fired.   Winning the lawsuit, was a way for him and his supporters to feel like they “cleared his name”, except that was never how it worked.   If he had been arrested and tried for sex pest crimes, the burden of proof would be on his accusers to show that he really did bad things.   But he was suing people for slander, so that means the burden of proof was on him to show that they really were saying things that were demonstrably false and damaging to his reputation.    The main problem with that is everyone had been talking about his sex pestery for years, so it doesn’t make sense to single a few people out in 2019 and blame them for reinforcing something everyone already believed.  But the ISWV crowd kept insisting that this distinction didn’t matter, and that it was wrong to ostracize or turn against Vic without “proof”.   I see the same demands for “proof” being tossed around for all these wrestling personalities.  

I think there’s a couple of things going on with this.   One is simple denial.   If you’re a fan of someone and you find out they did something terrible, you really don’t want to believe it.   I was never that into a lot of these guys, but I know I felt pretty low when I first heard about Vic’s shenanigans, because I liked his work.    And I’m feeling that way about Warren Ellis now.   Not a huge fan, but I liked some of his stuff, and now I feel a little guilty by association for ever liking that stuff in the first place.   It would be nice, I suppose, to just pretend that I hadn’t heard those accusations, or that they weren’t real.    Then I could just go back to the way things were before, without all the uncomfortableness.   I just can’t do that, but it seems like a lot of people can and will.   It’s not about “proof”, it’s about putting up some sort of barrier that will excuse them from confronting an unpleasant truth. 

I think this is why you see people going out of their way to defend Christopher Columbus and Confederate monuments.    They want to believe that there was something noble about that stuff, because the alternative is to admit that a lot of the things they learned in school aren’t true, and a lot of the “heritage” they cling to is built on white supremacy and slavery.    I don’t think anyone really cares about a Robert E. Lee statue, but I’ve seen people go out of their way to try to say Lee opposed slavery, like he’s one of the good Confederates, so he should get a pass.   Except he did own slaves, and even if he hadn’t, he still fought to defend a nation founded on slavery as a guiding principle.    Tearing down a statue of Lee is a tacit admission that Lee never deserved a statue in the first place, and everyone who admired him was wrong, and maybe the admiration was rooted in racism all along.   That’s a bitter pill for people to swallow, and a lot of them just refuse to swallow it.   So they deny and deflect, and do anything they can to make this about something else.   

The other side of it is just plain hatred.   I don’t know if Vic’s defenders were all misogynists to begin with, but it seems like they all got there, one way or another.   The train of thought always seemed to be “He didn’t do these things, but even if he did there’s nothing wrong with it.”   From what I saw, it really seemed like Vic’s backers were all fired up about defending a man’s right to creep on women in any way he sees fit.   “What, so kissing is illegal now?” No, jackass, but when you’re fifty-fucking-five and you kiss a seventeen-year-old girl who only wanted to take a picture with you, it’s pretty damn messed up.    When you use your celebrity status to try to mack on young fans, that’s messed up.   When you’re an established wrestler and you try to take advantage of up-and-coming wrestlers, that’s messed up.    And some of that behavior is totally illegal, but the sad reality is that most of these creeps will never get prosecuted for any of it.   That’s why the calls for “proof” are so hollow, because everyone knows it’ll never end up in a courtroom.  At best, some of these guys will get fired, and guess what?  “Innocent until proven guilty” doesn’t apply to employers.   I lost a job once because my “teamwork” wasn’t good enough, and that was the closest thing to an explanation I got.    Don’t bullshit me about “proof”.

I guess I should tie this train of thought in with Black Lives Matter while I’m at it.    I find it absurd that the police in this country are so out of touch that when there’s a nationwide protest against police brutality, their immediate response is... more brutality.   This, more than anything I’ve seen, is the reason to defund the police.    They appear to only have the one mode of conduct, and they don’t even know how to do things a different way.    If the situation is this bad, we may as well scrap the police as they are and start over.   If the cops wanted to fix this situation, all they have to do is treat people with respect and hold themselves accountable, but they can’t let go of their hatred for five fucking minutes and figure that out.   This is why you hear about those guys who make up stories about restaurants spitting in their food.   They’re paranoid that everyone’s out to get them because they know they deserve to face some consequences, so they’re constantly on guard for this sort of thing.  It’s sick. 

Somehow, people who support these guys end up supporting the very behavior they were supposed to be denying.    Maybe this is why Columbus is such a sticking point.   I never gave a shit about Columbus.   One of my high school yearbooks had a Columbus theme because it just happened to come out on the 500th anniversary of his first voyage to North America, but I never understood what that had to do with my high school.   I think there’s people that want to give him tons of credit, basically thank him for everything that’s happened in the Western Hemisphere since 1500, not in spite of his atrocities, but to retroactively justify them.   What I mean is, if you can convince society that Columbus was a great man, and that his achievements outweigh his wrongdoing, then you can also convince society that the wrongdoings aren’t actually that bad.    “The price of progress,” they can say.    It’s like the idea that Robert E. Lee is admired solely for his “brilliant” military mind.   His side lost the fucking war, so I never understood how he gets all this credit for being a great general.    The point is that if you can convince people that he was a noble man in spite of the slavery thing, then you can open the door to the idea that the Confederacy as a whole wasn’t That Bad, and that only opens the door to the idea that slavery wasn’t That Bad, and so on.  

Same deal with Roman Polansky and Woody Allen.    It amazes me that people will still try to defend those fucks, but it probably has a lot to do with all the other sex pests in Hollywood, who hope that everyone will stick up for them when they get exposed.   So you have this little chesnut about how “Yeah, they did bad things, but they sure made some good movies.”     The implication is that you have to accept a few sex crimes if you want good art.    And no, that’s not true, and even if it were true, it wouldn’t be worth it.   

I don’t know where things will end up with J.K. Rowling.   I’d like to think that one of these days, she’ll wake up and apologize for all this TERF rhetoric she’s been spouting.    That would probably be the best-case scenario.   More likely, she’ll cause an entire generation of Harry Potter fans to wrestle with their loyalty to her books.   There’s no job to fire her from, no laws to punish her, no government agency to step in.    She’s got no financial stake in repairing this PR damage.   There’s going to be an audience of bigots that will still kiss up to her no matter what she says, so her ego will be well-insulated.    Maybe a hundred years from now, people will be talking about tossing her statue in a river, as society admits that we don’t need to accept transphobia in exchange for YA literature.   

I don’t know, I think I went all over the place with this one, but I had a lot to get off my chest.   I think the overall lesson from this year is that we can’t put these people on pedestals.   Some of them are just hell-bent on letting us down, and it’s just a matter of time before their misdeeds are brought to light.   I see these dopes with Thin Blue Line flags and “I stand with [X]” hashtags and I’m like “Who are you supporting here?    What is it you’re standing for, exactly?   Why should they be worthy of your loyalty?”    And I think the answer is less about loyalty to a person or group, and more about sticking it to someone else.   Women, minorities, whoever.   They just want to stand by someone to spite someone else.    And that’s awful.   

[unendeligtid]

would u mind doing 42 for davenzi ❤️ your writing is so lovely

Thank you! Here you go

Tw: internalised transphobia, dysphoria, allusions to depression, depression, and self-harm. I am not claiming to be an expert on these things, this is simply based off my experiences.

42. “You’re my home.”

David really wishes that he was cis.

He wishes that he could wake up and not have to worry about these stupid things; putting on his ridiculously tight binder, using a debit card with the wrong name on it, hoping to God that he isn’t ID’ed when he buys alcohol.

But that’s the thing, they’re stupid, but at least he passes well enough in public.

There’s one thing that he can never change, however.

It’s the childhood pictures strewn around his parents’ house, glaring at him as a reminder that he once was wrong, he wasn’t himself. That person in the pictures is not the person that he is now. That person spent their entire childhood pretending to be someone else. That person continued to pretend to be someone else into adolescence, not because it was fun, but because he couldn’t stand the person that stood in front of him in the mirror. That person wasn’t him. It was a caricature of his greatest fear.

That’s who his parents see every single time he visits. That’s who his extended family sees. That’s who David ran away from.

It’s a different person. That person has their own memories, their own childhood that David is completely distant from. That person is someone that Matteo can never see.

Matteo’s gay. He doesn’t like girls. He can’t see David the way other people see him, because if he does, he’ll never look at David the same.

He’ll get the same thinly-veiled attempts at tolerance. He’ll get the you need to stop being so sensitive, I’m trying here! He’ll get the family photos back with the smiling child in front of him that’s supposed to be David. He’ll think that David’s fake, and everything that makes David man is synthetic, just like the testosterone he injects into his thigh every week or the restrictive binder he struggles into every morning. He’ll leave.

“Is being alone so bad?” David had asked all those weeks ago, as if he could pretend he was okay with being alone for the rest of his life; as if the demons in his head didn’t devour his mind whenever he was left to his own devices.

“Yeah,” Matteo had responded as easily as breathing.

And of course Matteo was right. David’s thrown himself down the Mariana Trench repeatedly, and he’s only just been able to crawl his way out, thanks to Matteo.

And now, as he walks home from his parents’, he is at the bottom again. It’s dark, empty, and if he squints closely, he can see the sharp-toothed monsters waiting to bite into his skin; waiting to flail him alive until he’s curled on the floor, bleeding and raw.

He walks up to Matteo’s apartment in a daze, not feeling the temperature change on his bare arms into the stifling staircase. David rubs the old scars on his wrist absentmindedly. They sting.

Matteo opens the door, a warm smile on his face. His hair is a mess, and his eyes are bleary and sleepy. David supposes he’s just woken up from a nap. He’s beautiful.

“Na?” Matteo murmurs fondly, his voice deep and laced with the remnants of sleep.

“Na,” David mutters quietly, absentmindedly. He only realises that he’s spoken when he feels the vibration in his throat.

Matteo holds out his arms and collapses against David as soon as he’s close enough.

“Missed you,” Matteo whispers into the crook of David’s neck. Normally, this action would make him shiver, but David doesn’t feel a thing. “Did you have a good time with your parents?”

A lump forms at the bottom of David’s throat, blocking any words from coming out of it.

He should lie. He should lie and tell Matteo that everything was fine, that his parents were nice, and that he’d missed Matteo too. None of that is really a lie. His parents were okay, he supposes, in that passive-aggressive, we tolerate your life-decision tone.

He tries, but he can’t. He can’t lie to Matteo like this. The words get caught in his throat, as if his very vocal cords are telling him not to lie to the boy he loves.

David lets out a shuddering breath, and nuzzles into the warmth of Matteo’s neck. Despite the too-warm summer air, there is nowhere else David would rather be in the world.

Matteo freezes in David’s arms, pulling back at the too-long silence.

“Baby?” Matteo asks, his tone hushed and careful, walking on eggshells.

David collapses at those words, straight into Matteo’s arms.

Babybabybaby-

He lets out shuddering breaths, uneven, harsh. He can’t speak, can’t cry, can’t do anything. He’s done.

“Fuck,” Matteo whispers, wrapping his arms tightly around David’s shoulders in order to support the extra weight. “Baby, come here, it’s okay.”

He takes David’s duffel bag and slings it over his shoulder without breaking the hug, and then practically carries David into the apartment, to his room.

It’s the only safe place in the world.

It gives David at least a little bit of comfort, tones down some of the numbness that seeps straight down to his bones.

Matteo drops the bag with a dull thud, and guides them to his bed.

David falls down with Matteo, landing on the soft and comfortable sheets.

He nuzzles his nose into the crook of Matteo’s neck.

“What is it?” Matteo asks, his voice so soft and sweet.

David opens his mouth and almost chokes on the stifling air that enters his lungs. “I- I just,” David takes in a gasp. “Why did it have to be like this?”

“What?” Matteo wonders quietly, running his hand soothingly down David’s back.

“Why did I have to choose to be like this?” David takes in another shuddering breath.

“What? You mean be yourself?” Matteo turns his head as best as he can to face David properly.

“I was born someone else,” David whispers, his voice thick. In the midst of the numbness is a sliver of pain that chokes him right in his throat. “I’m not that person. I never was. I was just pretending.”

“You don’t have to pretend anymore,” Matteo reminds him gently.

“I know,” David sighs out longingly. “But they don’t realise that. You’ll come to realise that too, eventually, and you’ll leave.”

“Who, your parents?”

“Mhmm,” David nods in confirmation.

“Maybe they do,” Matteo concedes, placing a small kiss in David’s hair. “Maybe they can go fuck themselves, I don’t know. But I know you, the real you. That’s never going to change.”

“The real me?” David repeats in a whisper, finally moving to look up at Matteo, who has never looked more sincere in the entire time David’s known him.

“Yeah, the real you,” Matteo replies, brushing a stray strand of hair out of David’s eyes. “The boy that I fell for the very first time I saw him; the one with the beautiful smile, and the gorgeous eyes, who loves me for me, who’s a total sore loser-”

“Hey,” David interrupts, slapping Matteo’s chest lightly. “That’s not true.”

Matteo smiles. He leans in a presses a kiss to the corner of David’s mouth, and then, to his lips.

“There we go,” Matteo whispers as he pulls back. David chases his lips. “That’s the real you. Nothing’s ever going to change that, okay?”

David fidgets slightly. “Even if I wasn’t always the real me?”

“You’re my home,” Matteo replies simply. David’s stomach flutters. “You. David Schreibner. The boy I fell in love with. Because I’m like, really fucking gay-”

“Okay,” David giggles, unable to help himself. He cuts Matteo off with a gentle kiss. “Okay fine.”

Matteo pulls back, flopping onto his back dramatically. “Oh Matteo! I love you too!” he calls out mockingly, throwing his arm over his face.

“Dork,” David snorts, pushing Matteo’s arm gently away so that he can lean down and kiss him. “I love you too,” he murmurs between slow, sweet kisses. Matteo smiles against his lips.

“Whatever it is,” Matteo says softly as they part again, moving David’s hair from his forehead delicately. “We’ll deal with it. I’m not going anywhere, okay?”

“Okay.”

[flusteredmountainman]

On the insidious hypocrisy of transmedicalism and colonial conditioning

I’m going to slap down a fairly long post about how transmedicalism is Fucking Bullshit today because I’ve been trying to pin down some of my thoughts and feelings for a wee while about it and I finally feel like I’m ready to articulate it.

CWs for use of the word h*mosexual (censored bc i have friends made uncomfortable by that word who ID as gay), conversion therapy, transmedicalism, colonialism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, trauma, violence mention, classism, ableism.

First off: truscum ideology makes no sense. Transmeds will preach and scream about how being trans* has nothing to do with biology; that gender is a psychological thing (which it is) but then will go on to say that if you don’t experience severe dysphoria you aren’t trans. This literally makes No Sense because if being trans has nothing to do with your biology and your physical attributes, then why should every trans person be forced to physically change their biology to fit binarist ideas of how bodies should look in relation to gender to prove themselves?

The base ideology is hypocritical at best and boot-licking/transphobic/cisnormative at worst: the idea that you have to experience (x) amount of trauma and discomfort to be trans only feeds into the cis narractive that trans people are traumatised, disturbed, othered individuals who have something “wrong” with them or that they’re “degenerate” - this conflation of being trans as being a mental illness is literally a rhetoric used by cishets dating back decades in psychology circles to treat being gay/trans/what-have-you as a sickness that can be cured. People used to be diagnosed as h*mosexual to justify putting them through conversion therapy to cure them of what was perceived as moral degeneracy. The same can be said for being trans. By pushing this rhetoric transmeds are admitting that they agree that being trans is Abnormal - that no one could ever want to be trans or be happy being trans because it’s so far removed from everything polite society considers “normal”. To support these ideas is to incite violence against your trans brothers, sisters, and siblings: it is disgusting and ignorant and smacks of internalised transphobia.

Not only that but transmedicalism as an ideology is also inherently racist! Truscum are uplifting binarism as a structure that was introduced into many societies by colonial powers that systematically erased native and indigenous identities that have always existed - by saying that these identities as well as non-binary identities (for which terms were created in response to debunking the idea that you can only be one gender or another in specifically western contexts) aren’t valid you are literally acting as a tool of colonialism. You are contributing to the cultural destruction and ongoing colonisation of indigenous cultures and identities. By supporting these ideas you are inherently saying that you support white supremacist structures of power and oppression founded not only upon race but also gender, ability, class and oppression of LGBT+ people. You are playing into white supremacy and you are actively inciting racist and pro-colonialist violence towards trans and gender diverse people of colour. 

It’s also no coincidence that it’s classist: as I mentioned before. The idea that you have to transition to be trans hinges upon the assumption that there is equal  opportunity and access for every person to transition: which many people don’t for many reasons including that it’s expensive, in my country only one surgeon can perform surgeries at all (literally inaccessible), many people can’t afford to take time off work, many people have various disabilities or illnesses that literally mean they cannot transition if they may want to: all this not even considering that some people may not want to physically transition. When we consider that combined with the institutional oppression people face for their race that means many, many people of colour are living in poverty due to their families being trapped in the poverty cycle and intergenerational trauma from colonialism, it’s no coincidence that the people impacted by this bullshit ideology the most are trans* people of colour! Plus disabled trans* people and disabled trans* people of colour! It’s disgustingly ableist, racist and classist and just reveals how these people don’t give a single shit about any trans* person who isn’t white and ablebodied.

There is already so much prejudice and oppression that trans and gender diverse people face in our society already it just doesn’t make any sense for transmeds to play the oppression olympics. Your experiences are not universal! Just because you experience extreme dysphoria doesn’t mean that people who don’t are not valid in their identity. Gender euphoria is equally important and besides gender as a construct is a fucked up concept anyway, so why are y’all sucking up so hard to the Cissies TM! Please get over yourself and examine why the hell you feel the need to pull other trans people down with you: you are a deeply sick, sad individual if you see someone else being proud of who they are and feel the need to knock them down a peg just because you’re in pain, and you aren’t above being a transphobe just because you’re trans!

All this to say that if you proudly self-ID as a transmed/truscum you can literally choke and die and you will never in any way be welcome on my blog! Same to Terfs y’all can fuck off too.

Cis people do Not add to this or I will Come for you I do Not want to hear your opnions on this: nothing you say can meaningfully contribute to this conversation so please just reblog to amplify trans* voices. 

[cyancees]

honestly the character who deserves more hate but doesn't get any is Kaito. like he's straight up Sexist and Transphobic in full canon but nobody ever seems to care and act like he's perfect, just not smart. Himiko's that, not Kaito

you’re grasping at straws for reasons to hate a character and then go and love literal murderers and crazy characters.

rant with spoilers under cut

(yes, momota did technically “kill” someone but we all know the circumstances for that case.)

DISCLAIMER: I’M NOT JAPANESE, I’M JUST RELYING ON RESEARCH AND STUDY I’VE DONE OVER THE YEARS. IT’S 4:30 AM SO I’M NOT PROOF-READING THIS SORRY, IF I FUCK UP LEMME KNOW K.

i’ve talked about this way too much already, so let me just say everything and hopefully never have to talk about it again

as a woman, i don’t think momota is sexist. i think he’s an idiot who tries to be chivalrous. he talks about being manly, and says weapons don’t suit girls, and that’s not from hatred of girls or the belief that they’re inferior. it’s because he’s a dumbass. he definitely had room for development, but he died before ever getting an arc. kodaka is a bitch.

gender roles in japan are… kinda bad. but standing up for yourself and being loud & proud (much like momota’s character) is kinda a socially weird thing to do in their culture, which is why that kind of stuff is still in place. a man’s masculinity isn’t often questioned, and women are seen as weaker, and that’s just it. i don’t think it’s fair to blame a japanese character for acting pretty standard for the culture he was raised in. (might i also add that the writing as a whole can be misogynistic? if you hate it so much why play the games?)

i don’t think there’s any accounts of him being fucking transphobic since there are no canon trans characters in the game, but what you’re probably referring to is his use of the term “okama” when he sees shinguuji wearing lipstick.

first off, please do some research. people have been scraping at the bottom of the barrel with this remark. the term okama is not always offensive. it’s slang for effeminate gay men or drag queens, and some drag queens even use it to refer to themselves. however, many consider it to be the japanese equivalent for “faggot” and honestly, i wouldn’t put it that way. it’s more like “queer” where it isn’t really a slur but people can use it in derogatory ways. you can’t really translate some words directly, including that, and here’s why:

being gay was never an issue in japan. it was natural, and normal, and something no one thought twice about, as none of their religions said anything against it. there are plenty of famous historical gay and bisexual japanese figures. however, with the westernization of japan during the 1800s, that anti-gay culture began to affect the country. 

i’m not japanese, and i’ve never been there, but i’ve studied the language and culture for years and have done extensive research on these topics, so take it with a grain of salt, but - most japanese people do not have an issue with homosexuality still. most LGBT people in japan report their experiences of coming out as smooth, with their friends reacting mostly like “oh, okay.” the only real upset is usually with parents who want grandkids, or in the work place, particularly office jobs (which confuses me still, and has nothing to do with the scenario where momota is apparently homophobic, so i’m not gonna go into that.)

so far we know that:

- “okama,” though slang for effeminate gay men/drag queens, is not inherently offensive unless used that way (and you can say momota was angry/harsh in that sentence, but if you found out one of your friends had killed 2 people and was being weird, you’d speak harshly too.)

- for the most part, japan’s view of homosexuality is fine. most of the population supports it, and cities are beginning to legalize it and grant benefits of marriage. 

(side note - dating culture in japan isn’t really as important as it is here and in other westernized countries, so marriage is less important culturally to most people there. i mean, here in australia, homophobia is rampant as people throw around ‘faggot’ every day and bully you for it, but even we got it legalized first, because dating and marriage is just more important culturally)

so now it just brings up the question: why does momota automatically assume shinguuji is gay because he’s wearing lipstick?

three words: lack of education.

in general, education on LGBT+ topics in japan is very low. remember what i said earlier about people not going on about their rights and equality and standing up for themselves? it’s all related.

because of this need to never stand out, and dating culture being less important to most, many japanese people don’t come out just because they don’t want the attention. (that’s why characters in danganronpa might often react confused or shocked at other characters saying seemingly normal things to us - because they’re standing out, and that’s weird.) and because a lot never come out, the Straights think that there’s hardly any LGBT people in japan, and they know nothing about what they’re really like. which means they get all their education from the media.

LGBT stuff in the media, like television, is grouped into a genre called “Onee.” while onee usually means big sister, or used to refer to a young woman stranger, in this case it’s a less controversial way of saying “okama.” that means drag and other effeminate gay stuff is grouped together with everything else LGBT, so the Straights assume they’re all one and the same. 

so, that adds “lack of proper education” onto the bullet list.

let’s go over the scenario once more.

shinguuji murdered two people. he reveals he’s wearing lipstick. he talks effeminately.

momota, someone who likely knows very little about LGBT stuff, sees this, and assumes he’s gay or in drag or something. he doesn’t really know. furious that this guy killed two people, he asks if he’s queer. because in a society with heavy gender stereotypes, a guy wearing lipstick is kinda out of the ordinary.

momota’s fabled sexism/transphobia/homophobia all boils down to one simple point: he’s an idiot.

people like to overlook all the great stuff he’s done and the good guy he really is deep down because of some dumb stuff he’s said, then overlook all the terrible stuff other characters have said and done. it’s grasping at straws.

get this: you don’t need reasons to dislike a character. you’re allowed to dislike momota, i don’t care. but people need to stop going around spreading misinformation about momota being a bigot using the japanese text that most fans don’t understand to try and make everyone else hate him.

as a queer woman, the only thing i ever remember having an issue with was momota saying “weapons don’t suit girls.” but again, i’ve actually done extensive research on cultural differences, and i understand momota’s a dumbass who doesn’t think before he talks. i also think kodaka’s writing is pretty flawed in a lot of areas concerning female characters, but that’s a rant for another time because it’s now 4:35 AM. 

EDIT: if you’re interested in doing you’re own research, here are some good videos with actual japanese peoples opinions that i’ve watched (unfortunately i can’t find every single source i’ve had over the years, i’m sorry, it’s just too late rn!!)

(and here’s one that talks about masculinity and gender roles which it won’t let me embed)

EDIT x2: apparently i made a small mistake about the time momota says ‘okama,’ see me address it here.

[ollyarchive]

Olly Alexander Just Wants to Be Straight with You

BY

BRENNAN CARLEY

PHOTOGRAPHS BY

ALEX RESIDE

The Years & Years frontman is back with a new single, a new hair color, and a new outlook on straight men.

Olly Alexander walks into GQ's photo studio and removes his hat, revealing a shock of brightly dyed red hair. Whether that means something to you or not depends on how familiar you are with and fanatic about the British singer's incredibly popular band, Years & Years. The trio's already put out one incredible album (2015's Communion), picked up fans like Katy Perry, and are now gearing up for their sophomore project, coming this summer and anchored by the just-released "Sanctify", which chronicles Alexander's experience sleeping with and falling for a straight man. It's an effortless synth-pop song with vivid religious imagery, a sticky chorus, and cheeky lyrics like "You don't have to be straight with me / I see what's underneath your mask," which is sort of Years & Years' sweet spot: Just when you think you have them figured out, they take you to a deeper place than you thought pop music could go.

Alexander, who's 27, is also known both for his acting work (you may have seen him on Skins) and for his outspokenness as a member of the gay community (his 2017 BBC documentary, Growing Up Gay, is a phenomenal watch). Boyish in appearance but confident in presentation, Alexander lounges in a windowless green room in lower Manhattan, fielding our questions about self-care, new music, and—yes—straight men.

GQ: When did you start working on the album? Olly Alexander: It was September 2016. We had finished up the majority of our touring. We were gonna take a break, and I...didn't take a break. I just started working on the second album. I did take like three weeks where I just deliberately did nothing and read books and stuff at home. But I also went to Taiwan and Bali by myself. It was a really good trip. It was fun.

I love being alone. [A solo vacation's] not for everybody, but I just like how you can do your own thing at your own time. You don't have to give a shit about anyone else's preferences, what they want to do. And you make friends and stuff.

Have you always liked being alone? Solitude is very restorative for me, especially because I spend so much time around other people and performing to people. And when you're on tour, you're sharing a bus with 20 people.

How did you handle needing solitude on the road? It's tough because you're constantly traveling, and you're in this whirlwind with no stability. I definitely got better at creating my own personal alone time within the company of lots of other people. It would be like, "Don't talk to me. I'm reading my book. I'm inside my bunk on my tour bus, and it's like literally a coffin." No one can come in, and I can just close the curtain and be here and be alone. And then, also, I would do things. It's fun touring. In America, the drives are so long, and then you make a stop over in El Paso or Cleveland. In Cleveland, I remember we had a day off, and I just Googled "things to do in Cleveland," and number three was "the cemetery." So, I went! And it was a good cemetery. Spend more time in cemeteries.

Why'd you jump right back into writing after the first album cycle wrapped? In my mind, I was like, "I'll just get loads of songs out of the way because I know how this process works. It's gonna take a really, really long time to find anything good, and I just want to get a good chunk in right now. And then I'll take the rest of the year off and start again in the New Year."

Once I started doing it, I was like, "Oh, I actually really like writing music." When you're touring and promoting an album, I wasn't writing any music or necessarily being super creative at all, and I forgot how much that's very important to me. It was encouraging because there's always a part of you that thinks, "Maybe I just can't. I won't be able to do it again. I won't be able to write another song."

Where did "Sanctify" come in the process? It came pretty early. I've been having a lot of encounters with straight guys that were not being straight with me and were struggling, to put it lightly, with their sexuality. I was very fascinated by that dynamic because for starters, it's a very common experience, I think, for gay men to fall for a straight guy.

I mean, I've done it. I think for a lot of gay guys, you're at school and fall in love with your straight friends. That happened to me, and I think that's really super common. But also, now that I'm an out gay man—very out—I've noticed how some straight guys gravitate...it's weird because I've almost found myself having these encounters with straight guys and find myself playing this saint and sinner role, or like this angel and devil, because I'm leading them down the path of "sinful gayness," but also I'm helping them satisfy the sexual desire that they feel they can't get anywhere else. It's strange to have that dichotomy, and so I was like, "I'm gonna write a song about it!"

Most of my straight crushes happened when I was younger, where it's like, "Oh, I feel like I can lust after this person because it's likely never going to amount to anything because they're straight, so it's not gonna hurt me in the end." I relate to that 100 percent. That's something that I felt when I was younger. But then it happened to me recently where I was like, "Am I having feelings for this straight guy? What is that about?"

It's like you said: Putting away your emotions and investing in someone that ostensibly is never gonna give you that back. It's kind of heartbreaking. Why would anybody put themselves in that position? I think when you're a gay guy, navigating the dating world and romance, it's hard enough. If you're just stepping outside of all of that bullshit and just putting it on a straight guy, you're right: "Oh, that will never happen. My feelings aren't gonna get hurt." Even though they always kind of do. You're lying to yourself.

Have you felt from straight men—or men that present as straight, I suppose—that they've projected those angel and devil roles back on you? Yes. It's funny because it's like you feel the sense of responsibility to not fuck up this guy that's clearly struggling with his sexuality, but then resenting the fact that I had to tread on eggshells.

Is it especially hard for you to date because you're you? Yeah. It's funny because I downloaded Grindr. I was newly single toward the end of 2016, and I've been in relationships all throughout my 20s, and I was like, "I really want to be single, and I need to be alone." I think it's the right decision, but I'm literally like...I haven't seen Call Me by Your Name, and now I just cannot watch it because I'm just like, "Why would I watch depictions of two men being in love when I know I'll die alone?" I just can't handle that right now.

Anyway, when I was newly single, I downloaded Grindr because I'd been in relationships or I'd been in the band. I couldn't have Grindr, but then I was like, "Wait, but why the fuck can't I have Grindr? I want to have this experience." You know? So I downloaded it and I was on it, and then it was just weird because people would think I was catfishing myself, which was kind of a head fuck.

Grindr has some great things about it, but it also has a lot of negatives, and it's just very hard to trust anybody. It just feels like this meat market of dick pics and sex positions. "Are you a top or bottom?" It does kind of depress me a bit, even though I love to hook up as much as the next guy. It's good for that, but people would think I was catfishing myself, or they'd be like, "Oh, I'm such a big fan," and that's kind of a turnoff, so it didn't go super well for me.

You know how some people have dreams of moving to Florence or living in Seoul? You can still do all of those things, but I always think for queer people, "Well, I kind of need to live somewhere where I'm not gonna face abuse." A queer-friendly place. I think a lot of straight people forget that sometimes. They're surprised when I say that to them.

I think the assumption with straight people is that it's 2018 and even though things are better for gay people, it's not entirely true. I went to a wedding in San Antonio with my partner a couple of weeks ago, and I remember thinking, "Oh! This is the first time in a long time that I have not felt comfortable!" Yeah, I totally agree with you. Back when I had a boyfriend, if we were getting a cab together, I would a be a little uncomfortable kissing in the back of a cab. A lot of that has to do with my own issues around internalized homophobia that I grew up with, but at the same time, I do live in a really gay-friendly city. But if you leave London, half an hour away, you feel like it's a completely different landscape, and, you know, it does feel very threatening to just hold your boyfriend's hand or be yourself.

That is the reality for most queer people. I think we have made amazing strides in so many ways and we can be super happy about that, but it would be delusional to think that everything's fine. It's also because the LGBT community is so diverse, so intersectional, and I think people outside of the community forget that. But people within the community forget it, too. We don't actually reach equality unless everybody has equality, but if you're used to privilege, true equality feels like oppression. Unfortunately, we're white gay dudes, and we are a minority, and we have our own systems of oppression, but we're also at the top of the privilege tree. I think there's a lot of imbalance there.

I'm always gonna support my siblings in the community, but it does make me really sad to see how much racism, sexism, and transphobia that exists from within, and I think there are lots and lots of reasons for that, but we just can't really lose sight of the fact that we're all fighting similar battles.

You use the word "queer." A lot of people are still uncomfortable with that. Yes.

Have you had a moment where you've said to yourself, "I am comfortable using this and here's the reason why"? Yeah. Whenever I have these kind of conversations, I try and say I personally like "queer," but I understand that it's really painful for many people, and I've had a few people get offended with my use of the word, which I do completely understand. I'd like to think I have enough humility to be able to engage with that person that has the problem with that word, and I would listen and I would try and learn something from that experience.

I suppose for me, I like it because it feels very inclusive. "LGBT" is also good, and both feel separate but also similar. I don't know. I would be interested to hear what you think about the word and the use of the word.

I feel the same way. I think it's a generation who grew up knowing that word as an insult and a slur, that's hesitant to let a younger generation reclaim it. I think in 20 years, the gay twentysomethings at that time will be using "fag" as slang, but I was called it when I was younger, and I'm not comfortable yet letting that word be reclaimed. Yeah, I feel the same way about that [word], too.

It might say more about me than it says about them. Maybe I should be thrilled that they're so comfortable to take that word, especially when we're having the conversation about "queer." I'm comfortable using "queer," but it's also because the kids who were bullying me when I was 12 and 13 weren't using that as an insult. Exactly, yeah. I have not grown up with being victimized by that word. That is a super important distinction. But some gay guys feel like it diminishes a gay identity, and I love being a gay man. I identify as a gay man all the time, but I also like to identify as queer. I suppose it feels like it encompasses my gay identity, but it also encompasses some other stuff—a more fluid approach to my gender. And I feel like when I spend time with my friends who identify as genderqueer or non-binary, queer feels like the best word for us all as group. Language is so multifaceted, and these are words that we can employ in different situations, and they don't have to be fixed. If we're just carrying on these conversations, then I think we're fine.

You talked about the people that you have surrounded yourself with. Have you built up a support system within the community? Oh yeah, 100 percent. I moved away from home when I was 18 to London, and what I did was just try to find my family and people that I felt could understand the experience that I was going through. I've met amazing people. I've also lost amazing people along the way, and unfortunately that's normal.

I'm not saying that being straight is easy, but when you're gay, you don't really have a familial network or support system. You have to find that. Also, I think there's a whole erasure of queer people who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and so there's this collective anxiety about aging and who's gonna love us and who's gonna take care of us and what if we don't have kids because we don't have any rulebooks for that or any guidebooks for that. It feels completely terrifying, and I know that I'm not alone in thinking that.

Do you worry at all about getting older? For sure. Now I feel a little bit more comfortable with it and I think, "Oh my God, I'm so happy that I'm not gonna have to worry." I don't want to have kids, and that's just a personal choice. It's nothing to do with being gay or not, but I used to worry that "Oh, I'm gay, and that means I can't have a longterm relationship or get married or have kids." That was just the thing that you were supposed to have, that everybody was supposed to have. Now, of course, we do live in a world where it's totally normal for gay guys to get married and have kids.

Now I kind of feel like, "Oh well, I feel like I can just be empowered enough to make the choice to not have those things. I don't want them," and still live a full, happy life and get old and be a mad gay guy living by the sea like Grace and Frankie. That's literally all I'm aiming toward, is living like Grace and Frankie.

You just mentioned how we're meant to assume that we won't have long relationships. I've been in a relationship for almost four years, but the way that straight people talk about the length of their relationship, as if it's like...you know how when you have a dog, and it's like, "Well, he's 8 in dog years, but he's 64 in human years." People seem shocked that we're able to carry out longterm monogamy. I know. On the one hand, I think one of the great things about being gay, I find, is it's not a given that you're gonna immediately enter a monogamous relationship with somebody that just has to last as long as possible, and it fails when it ends. It's like one rule, and it's not to cheat. I love that it feels like there are more possibilities. For myself as a gay guy, I feel like, "Oh, maybe I could have a different kind of relationship," which is great but...

The rulebook is different. Exactly. But at the same time, it does show the double standard that gay people are viewed as less likely to be able to commit. I think there are lots of reasons for that, and I don't want to jump to, like, "Oh, well, straight people just think that gay guys are deviant and promiscuous," you know? There's a seed of truth to that, still, that it is kind of a surprise to see a longterm relationship.

It's crazy how we have one relationship model. I think even five years ago, people weren't super aware of what polyamory meant or being in a throuple. And I was like, "Maybe I wanna be in a throuple?" And I was like, "Actually, that seems like the best relationship ever." I just wanna be the unicorn in the throuple, and I can live in the next house to the couple. Wait, this sounds so fun. How can I arrange this?

I'm sure you can arrange that. I know. In my mind, I'm working toward the Grace and Frankie throuple situation. I'm just gonna get high by the beach all day. Maybe see my husbands or whoever they are a couple times a week.

Styling by Nick Royal

[solitarykairos]

On Preferences and Transphobia

What I did: I wrote a small post about how while preferences aren’t inherently transphobic, it is transphobic to refuse to date someone purely because they are transgender.

What happened: a bunch of gross TERF blogs reblogged the post and added some lovely transphobic comments.

Why? I don’t know. Maybe they were just feeling salty today.

I blocked the TERFs (because first and foremost, I have to take care of my mental health and I would rather not engage in that kind of discourse right now) and deleted their comments on the original post. One of the TERFs left a long list of things that they were salty about on my post. Ironically, the comment was longer than the original post. Funny how that works.

So here’s some thoughts on that list, kids:

1. You’re correct, sexual orientations are not preferences. I could have worded that better, and I apologize. While preferences was not the correct word, what I meant was simply that some people have certain genitals that they would prefer not to interact with. As a lesbian, you would likely not want to have sex with someone who had a penis.

And, small caveat, if you did, that’s totally fine, too! Because sexuality is a fluid thing, and there are women who don’t have vaginas. There are *gasp* trans women! I know that sounds terrifying to you, but honey, trans women are women. It doesn’t matter what they have in their pants, they’re women, and if you sleep with a trans woman or date a trans woman, you’re still a lesbian, don’t you worry. You’re still valid, because, again, trans women are women. So off the bat, get used to the fact that in the year of our lord twentygayteen, we support all women.

2. Yes, gay men are attracted to the same sex. They are also attracted to the same gender, because sex and gender are different things. In my original post, I stated an example. Let me explain that a little further, because I don’t think you understood it. Let’s say there’s a gay man, and let’s call him Andy. Let’s say I told Andy I was AFAB, or assigned female at birth, and had not had any trans affirming surgeries. I would be absolutely okay if Andy told me he didn’t want to sleep with me. He knows the specific details of my situation. He took the time to ask and be fully informed before declining. We go our separate ways, and stay close friends because hey, Andy’s awesome. And, yes, this is a true story! Sometimes, in the real world, people are adults and respect other people enough to be affirming of their identities. And Andy is a feminist, but he’s no TERF.

However, let’s say that this gay man tells everyone that he would never date anyone who is transgender. Blanket statement. Boo, Andy. I know, in the original post, you took offense to my talk of genitalia. I’m sorry that bothered you so much, but in the real world with real adults, you have to talk about that kind of stuff, because it’s important to know your partner well if you’re planning to sleep with them. So Andy decides he’s never going to date anyone who’s trans. Andy doesn’t understand that there’s a wide range of genitalia in the trans community. There are trans men who’ve had every surgery imaginable, and have fully transitioned to the point where you couldn’t tell (and don’t come up in here saying that you can “always tell”, because I, a trans person who is well acquainted with all sorts of genitalia and all sorts of transgender surgeries and such, slept with a transgender man a couple weeks ago and I did. not. know. until after the fact.)

Later in your reply, you called this incel logic, which, ew. Can we not compare a young trans person’s logic to the logic of a group of generally homophobic rape-apologizers? But I digress. I’m not saying that a gay man should absolutely have to sleep with every trans person he comes across or he’s transphobic. I’m saying that, if this gay man says that he won’t sleep with anyone who’s trans JUST BECAUSE they are trans? That’s transphobic. You don’t know what genitals someone has, and assuming that every single trans man has a vagina is a bad game. I’m absolutely not saying that anyone should force themselves to have sex with someone they don’t want to have sex with, because they shouldn’t. I’m saying that trans women are women, trans men are men, and you need all the information of the situation before automatically assuming that because they’re transgender, you won’t be attracted to them.

Here’s another example, just in case that one was also a little too hard for you to understand. I have another gay male friend, we’ll call him Stanley. Stanley likes to sleep around, and he’s good at it. Stanley recently slept with a trans man, and he didn’t like it as much because the trans man had not had surgery. I asked him if he would continue to sleep with trans men after the experience, and he said yes, but he would have a conversation with them beforehand about sex, genitalia, and STI protection, because that would help him decide better whether he and his partner would have a good, safe, enjoyable time. Stanley, a gay man, knows that trans men are men. Stanley also knows that genitalia come in many shapes, sizes, and variations, and understands that while he’s not attracted to vaginas, not. every. trans. man. has. a. vagina. And therefore, Stanley knows that he shouldn’t exclude trans men as an entire group.

3. This may be a revolutionary thought, but if you’re a gay man and you date a woman, you might not be gay. If you’re a lesbian and you date a man, you might not be a lesbian. And, because trans women are women and trans men are, in fact, men, guess what?

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

4. Sure. You can call me obsessed with genitals. That’s fine. As a trans person, I am obsessed with genitals. Wanna know why? Because I care about the people that I choose to have sex with. I care about informing them what they’re getting. I care about them informing me what I’m getting. If we don’t talk about genitals, if we don’t talk about sex, if we don’t talk about STIs and safe practices and contraception, someone’s going to end up getting hurt. And nope. Again, not incel logic. I’m not saying that anyone has to give me a chance in bed because I’m trans. I’m saying that if a person says that they won’t have sex with anyone who’s trans, that is a transphobic comment. Because, as we’ve already gone over multiple times, not every trans person has the same genitalia, or the genitalia you expect us to have.

Also, for the other TERF who commented that I’m probably a virgin-first of all, there’s nothing wrong with being a virgin, dude. Get off your old fashioned horse drawn carriage and stop shaming people who haven’t had sex. Secondly, I’ve done and continue to do sex work, so of all people, I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about when it comes to sex and genitalia.

5. Pump the brakes, buddy. If I were a less nice person, this is where I’d get mean. I am not a woman. I am a transmasculine person. My pronouns are not ““new””, they’re the pronouns that fit me the best. On that note, I’m not heterosexual either. I’m bisexual. I like men and women.

And you wanna talk about gay men and conversion therapy? You wanna talk about how you somehow think that, because I’m not a gay man or a lesbian woman, because I exist somewhere else on the queer spectrum, that I haven’t faced discrimination? Not that being gay should ever be a fucking discrimination marathon, but I’ve fucking been in shitty situations because of my queerness. When I came out to my parents, they told me not to come home again. I was homeless for a period of time this summer and was blessed enough to sleep on a friend’s couch. I’ve been yelled at, I’ve had people ask me what went wrong in my childhood, I’ve had letters written to the president of my university asking why I’m leading a group that makes being queer seem like an okay thing.

The last line of your post really tells me what I need to know, though. “shut the fuck up bc nobody asked you”. You’re right. You’re right, nobody asked me. Nobody asked Marsha P. Johnson. Nobody asked Harvey Milk. Nobody asked any of the other countless people who’ve given their entire lives over to make sure that people like us have the ability to walk the streets without fear. Nobody asked them, and yet? They spoke up anyways.

If you think that I’m going to shut my mouth and live in shame because people like you don’t like the fact that I, a transgender person, can live openly and with pride now, you’ve got another thing coming.

You’re right, nobody asked me. That’s exactly why I’m still talking.

[dearmyblank]

tw: heavy swearing, mentions of self harm, misogyny, transphobia, possible mental abuse.

JD,

I didn’t want to waste my time on writing a letter but I have things to say and I’m done talking to you. I’m done. One thing you’ll learn -- or not -- about me is that I keep my word. You can message me again. I’ll kindly remind you that we are not friends and we will never be. You can get pissed again if you want. But I will not have another argument with you. I will not be called names and brought down by a boy that I don’t owe a damn thing to. I am trying to be as civil as I can to you because I know that I broke your heart or whatever but that does not give you an excuse to treat me the way you have and if you continue then I will go as far to block your number and all of your social media accounts. I’m not playing games. I said I wanted no drama and I meant it. I said that I was done and I meant it.

Writing this is just a large step in making sure I get there sooner rather than later.

I don’t think that I’m being immature. Yeah, I’m mad. I’m pissed. That is my right. Yeah, I hold grudges. Just because you can move on from things in the blink of eye doesn’t mean that everyone can and that doesn’t mean they’re wrong and you’re right. People are different. When I get hurt, I get angry and I put my foot down. I say that’s enough, I’ve had it, I’m done. When you get hurt, apparently you insult people behind their back to their own family members. Do you really think I care if I have a boyfriend? You told my little sister, my fourteen year old little sister that you were blatantly harassing until she finally had to block you, that I would not find a boyfriend anytime soon if I didn’t open up. You took back saying that I was sweet and adorable and sophisticated. You turned around and called me cruel, emotionless and cold. You said I was an actor and I bought my feelings, you said that I have no regards for anyone else and that I liked playing with your feelings, you literally told my own mother that I was bullying you because I wasn’t happy in our relationship and I tried to explain that to you. You blew up on me all because I said that I didn’t want to keep having the same argument (that you always started, mind you) again and again and again -- after I’d had it with you three days in a row. You went off on me because I refused to fight with you. You went off on me because I didn’t want to hear how much you missed me and how hurt you were every single day. I felt guilty enough on my own. I explained everything to you a handful of times and you always got angry again over nothing. You think that I should forgive you because I’m being over dramatic by holding grudges -- as if you weren’t being over dramatic by telling me that you regretted ever being with me and that I was a terrible person with no heart, after I straight up told you how people had called me heartless before and it was clear it upset me. You think that I need to grow up, imagine that!

Now listen, I don’t really give a damn what you think about me, not anymore. I know that I deserve someone that is willing to wait for me to come around, someone that is patient and understanding and doesn’t try to change me. I deserve someone that doesn’t pressure me every single time they see me to have a conversation with them when I have nothing to say, when I’m anxious and I want to be left alone for five goddamn minutes. I deserve someone that doesn’t turn things around to a story about a time when they were little and got spooked over a spider when I admit to them that I just had the worst panic attack of my fucking life. I deserve someone that doesn’t make me sit through a two hour video chat when I’m tired, on the verge of tears and just want to sleep because I can’t come up with another excuse. (Apparently being exhausted and afraid I’m going to get set off again is not a good enough excuse. Damn, I should have just said no. I shouldn’t have cared if it offended you.) I deserve someone that I am excited to see, not dreading. I deserve someone that doesn’t tell me they would have asked my sister out before me if she had been old enough. I don’t think I realized how fucking toxic you were until I was free of you, until I finally broke up with you and I felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. And no amount of gifts or claims that you loved me change the fact that you made me and still make me feel like shit. So you know what, JD?

Fuck you.

I really wanted to say that when we were arguing but I didn’t. I really wanted to scream it in your face while you were at work. But I can’t. So I will say it here. Fuck you. Fuck you for slipping your hand under my bra multiple times, with my sister in the same fucking room, for trying again and again even after I yanked your arm out, for making me come right out and say that it made me uncomfortable before you stopped. It didn’t take a fucking genius to realize I was uncomfortable and you were crossing boundaries. It didn’t take a fucking genius to realize I didn’t want my sister to overhear me speaking to you and catch on. Fuck you for yelling at me in the middle of a public store. You did not get super loud, thank God, and I don’t think anyone noticed, but thanks to you I could not stop shaking as I tried to ring up my groceries and talk to the woman beside of me that was asking about my hair. Fuck you for saying that you “let me” dye my hair. It was not your fucking decision and it never was. I wasn’t asking you. I was telling you. Fuck you for trying to talk me out of it when you knew that it was something I was really excited for. Fuck you for everyone asking what you thought before they asked what I thought, which isn’t really your fault, but it made me angry. It is my hair and it is my opinion matters. Not yours. Fuck you for not wanting me to get my lip pierced because you didn’t want to taste metal when you kissed me even though it was a big step for me and I told you that I wanted to stop being afraid to do something I wanted to do because of what people might think. Fuck you for having my mom side with you over me. Fuck you for leading her to ask what I’d done when you shouted at me out of nowhere, when I smiled at you because I thought we were on okay terms, because the last I knew you weren’t angry with me.

You’re too hard to read. You know that Katy Perry song? Yeah. You’re hot and you’re cold. That’s the one.

But lately you’re just an asshole.

Maybe you always were a bit of an asshole, but not to me. Or maybe I didn’t want to see it because you were my first boyfriend and my family liked you and my aunt said I was lucky and you bought me chocolate and roses and held my hand. But you also told me that I was prettier than most of your coworkers, you said that they were jealous and you asked how that made me feel. I didn’t believe you anyway. I said neutral. I think you were trying to compliment me but that isn’t the way to do it. I think you liked pitting me against other girls. I think you thought that built up my confidence but it didn’t. You always talked about how I was nicer than the other girls, said that if I hadn’t been home schooled most of my life I would act holier than thou which really pissed me off. I am who I am, I wouldn’t have turned into an awful person just because I went to a public high school. You acted like it was such a good thing when I spent years of my life lonely, anxious and depressed, feeling like a bird in a cage, because I had no one. But thank God I didn’t think I was too good for you, right? Well. Maybe I should have thought that.

But back to the topic at hand.

It might be hard for you to believe since you have trouble opening your mind to anything at all but I actually don’t want other girls to be jealous of me. I want other girls to be happy with themselves. I want other girls to feel beautiful. I want other girls to look at me and say “hey, that girl is brave, she has cool hair” or “oh, that girl is pretty” but I don’t want them to look at me and think “wow, I wish I looked like that girl and not myself” because girls are fucking wonderful and you have no fucking right to decide any girl’s worth. Not a stranger’s. Not your girlfriend’s. Not your sister’s. Not any of them. I should have seen the signs when you said that a girl you worked with cut her hair and you told her that she looked like Justin Bieber. And you laughed about it. Like it was a joke. Like you expected me to find it funny. Like it’s not a scary thing for a girl to alter her appearance so drastically like that. Like she probably wasn’t hurt over it, like she probably could get your voice out of her head, your stupid insult when all you had to do was ignore it altogether or tell her that it looked nice. It was early on in our relationship so I just stared at you thin lipped, I didn’t say anything. I should have said something. I should have called you out for being an asshole.

I shouldn’t have waited so long to say something to you when you used a trans slur. I shouldn’t have waited so long when you looked at an article about gender identity and said “now they’re just making up words”. I should have broke up with you the moment you defended Donald Trump by saying that “he didn’t know the mic was on”, by saying that “every guy talks about women like that”. You told my fourteen year old sister that every guy says things about grabbing women by their pussies. Right. She totally needs to grow up believing that.

I shouldn’t have just said that it didn’t make it right and let you change the subject. I should have said that if every guy talked about women like that then maybe I would get myself a girlfriend instead -- but of course, I was afraid of outing myself to you because you would probably out me to everyone. It wasn’t that I didn’t want you to break up with me. I wanted out a long time before I got out. You made a joke about me not cutting myself once too. I almost told you the truth. I’m so glad I bit my tongue. You got angry I didn’t trust you? I have never made a smarter decision.

I understand that we’re supposed to forgive people and move on. I understand that you have a learning disorder that makes you act in certain ways. But I can’t be with someone I don’t want to be with. I can’t coddle you. I can't continue trying to be friends with a man that acts like a child, that has a temper that frightens me, that makes me fall back into the pit I have worked so hard to stay out of. I can’t associate myself with a man like you, a man that is so fucking closed minded and disgusting. I can’t get along with a man that makes me lay in bed at night trying not to cry, wishing against everything in me that I could grab the scissors off of my desk and slice my legs up and down until my skin was as numb as I felt inside.

You made me feel numb again. You are the first thing since the last time I put the blade down that has made me regret being clean and I hate you for that.

I know I said that I didn’t hate you. That’s a lie, I think.

I think I do hate you. I think I hate you. I hate you. I fucking hate your guts. I literally found myself wishing the other night you would enlist yourself in the army so I didn’t have to deal with you anymore, so I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. And I know that sounds awful but you think I'm awful already so I might as well be honest, right? The thing is, JD, I finally feel like I can breathe again but I can’t even fucking enjoy that because I don’t know that you won’t decide revenge tactics are more your style and come after me. I shouldn’t have to be afraid to go out in public. I shouldn’t have to worry that you’re going to show up out of the blue waving a knife around or something. I am beyond thankful that you don’t have your license. I hope that your next ex-girlfriend doesn’t have to feel this kind of fear and I hope that she doesn’t let you trap her in a relationship too. Honestly, I’m actually concerned about her. I said I want you to be happy and that’s the truth, but I wouldn’t wish you on my own worst enemy.

But maybe my own worst enemy is you.

So I’m sorry. And fuck you again, for making me feel sorry.

- AD.

[fiftyftqueenie-blog]

Jill Mikkelson

Jill is a vocalist, guitarist and promoter who has been involved in the underground/extreme music scenes in the UK and Canada for over 15 years. Her recent bands include Dysteria and hate fuck, and she currently works as in-house promoter for The Unicorn, Camden. She’s one of the organisers of Chimpyfest and Equal Fest, and makes sure her booking policy is representative. Thanks Jill!

Here she discusses internalised misogyny, effective activism as a privileged white feminist, and maintaining hope in the face of global catastrophes...

Check out the latest Dysteria album here:- https://dysteria.bandcamp.com

Photo credit Natalie Wetenhall, copyright 2017.

Are you aware of the ‘male gaze’ while performing, and does this influence any of your behaviours? I.e. the clothes you choose to perform in, the way you move your body, the things you write about.

JM I feel like I’ve always been acutely aware of this, before I’d even heard the term ‘male gaze’ or even the term ‘feminism’. You grow up reading magazines or watching television telling you “how to look cute for your crush,” giving you blanket generalizations of what guys supposedly like, listening to ruthless criticisms of women’s appearances, etc. and it adds up. Growing up in alternative rock/punk/metal amplifies that. You end up hanging around mostly boys/men at these shows and I remember the general message being very critical of women. I remember the general message being that if a woman was dressed in anything other than a t-shirt and jeans she was obviously vying for male attention, she wasn’t there for the music. No hesitation with “nice tits though!” immediately afterwards. I internalised a lot of this misogyny and looked at women through that lens as well. Girls are brought up being told we’re in competition with one another, so when I saw girls wearing an outfit I wouldn’t feel comfortable in I’d jump to the same dismissive, nasty conclusions.  I was not going to be ‘the object’, I was going to be the equal. Performing the ‘cool girl’, essentially.

When I was playing in my early twenties, I was very conscientious of not looking too ‘girly’ because I wanted to be ‘one of the dudes’, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was a schtick; “they got a girl singer so they could get more attention” is something I heard more than once. Now that I’m middle aged, I’m just mostly lazy and going for maximum comfort when it comes to clothes. I also no longer care about the approval of men, but I do think about how I take up space. I perform with the express intention of looking as intimidating and ugly as possible. If you’re commanding space in a way that women aren’t supposed to it’s generally seen as a bad thing: you’re an attention seeking bitch, you’re crazy, you’re scary, etc. Fuck that. I’m reclaiming that shit. It’s ugly music and subject matter. I am not a prop. I have something to say and you’re going to listen. That being said, if I’m playing guitar I can’t do much besides look at what I’m playing! In Dysteria we have a song that isn’t about women as objects of male pleasure per se, but that’s part of the bigger picture of living in a man’s world, and it’s about people like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Emily Davidson, women driven to extremes in large part because of the way they were denigrated and dismissed by men.

What does your internal critic say and how do you overcome this?

JM My internal critic can be very cruel and going back to what I was saying about girls being taught to be in competition with one another, I think this is another hangover from the messages we receive from culture and media, the ones saying you’re never good enough. I think it also has to do with seeing women in music criticised much more harshly than men, and in a lot of ways, not seeing any women at all. There’s this expectation I put on myself to be perfect all the time because if I’m not at my best, I feel like I will be dismissed immediately. No second chances or having a bad day, just “oh, look, there’s gimmick girl and she sucks.” It’s not as bad as it was when I was younger, partly because in the 15 years since I started playing the number of women participating has exploded. I only knew of five other women in Canada in the early 2000’s in underground heavier bands. I say underground because Kittie was big at the time and that was pretty cool. I’m sure there were others kicking around but as the saying goes, “you can’t be what you can’t see.” I didn’t see other women around me being confident and self-assured and just fully raging. Now they’re everywhere and as cheesy as it may sound, it really does give me strength. Age has also helped – I think everyone becomes more comfortable in their own skin as they grow older, learn more, and watch the ‘fucks given’ meter plummet another 20 points below zero with every year that passes.

If you could tell your younger self something to encourage her, or something you wish she’d known, what would it be?

Practice self care. Don’t waste your time. Appreciate the process. Do not compare your life to others. You are not the centre of the world. Empathy first. Listen. Set goals. Work to achieve them. REPS REPS REPS.

Tell us about three women who inspire you.

JM Candice Kucsulain –  She’s the first woman I remember hearing do a “screaming” vocal or whatever you want to call it. Not like the punk rock yell, but a proper gruff, traditionally male bark. When I saw her, I thought “I can do this” so I’d sit around and scream along to records in my room until I felt confident enough to reply to a post looking for a singer on a message board (bless the early noughties.) It’s kinda funny ‘cos I only found out recently she’s become a competitive powerlifter, which is something else I’ve come to love, and now sixteen years later she’s giving me inspiration once again. The fact that seeing her made me feel like I could do what I wanted is also a big reason: I’m a huge believer in celebrating/fighting for women to be more represented in heavy music. It makes me sad to hear people say ‘positive discrimination is still discrimination’ as if we can just brush our currently woeful state of gender affairs under the carpet and with no effort at all somehow things will correct themselves. Every single freedom women now have was hard-fought for. Those in power don’t just give it up or make space. You have to demand it and take it. The women who have come before and are existing now in any male dominated sphere are important role models for how to get this done and should be/need to be lifted up/centred. Their stories are important! Representation matters!

Courtney Love – I realise a lot of people find her distasteful but I think it’s funny how attention craving, erratic behaviour, whatever, is seen as edgy and cool when dudes do it, but if a woman dares to enter this territory she’s an unhinged bitch! She was outspoken, went after what she wanted and got it, and people hate her for it. Not to say she didn’t have problems, or do some seriously fucked up shit, but coming into adolescence in the early nineties and finding solace in rock, she personified and made into music every angsty teenage feeling I had. It felt uglier than the rest of riotgrrl stuff going on, which I didn’t really get into and still don’t really dig. Whenever I was pissed off about anything I’d listen to ‘Live Through This’ on repeat. It was amazing to see this woman who did not give a fuck about what anyone thought about her and just made really powerful, yet vulnerable music. She was out there with all her faults. She was real. If I’d come across her at this point in my life I might not be so forgiving, but she was a huge deal to teenage Jill and a big reason I wanted to play music.

Serena Williams – I’m not sure why, but I felt like I should answer with someone who wasn’t a celebrity, but I just kept coming back to her, so fuck it. I love her! I know some people would argue about whether musicians and sports folk are deserving of the social reverence/monetary compensation, and of course the world would probably be a better place if all the lady scientists/activists/authors/etc. of the world got as much attention than the three I’ve chosen, but here we are. I shouldn’t apologise really. Anyways, as mentioned in regards to Candice, I’ve recently developed a love for athletics and as far as I’m concerned, she’s the queen of athletes. I don’t even like tennis but have the utmost respect for what it takes to excel at the game. You have to be at peak levels of physical and mental fitness in terms of strength, endurance, agility, everything. The amount of work that goes into achieving this is awe inspiring. She’s the most accomplished woman in any sport really, and she’s faced down all the brutal racism and sexism she’s had to endure throughout her career. She’s always stood her ground and had no qualms about telling people to shove it when she needed to. Strength of mind and body makes her the ultimate badass in my books. Inspiration in every way!

Ask yourself some questions and tell us the answers.

JM How do I pay it forward?

-- I ask myself this question every day. I have experienced a great deal of privilege in my life and know the process of figuring out how to best acknowledge and use these advantages in hopes of making the world a more just, or at least slightly brighter place, is a journey with no end. Getting ready to start a new chapter in my life, I’ve tried to keep this at the forefront of my goals and plans and I think I might have figured out a small part of how I can begin to do this in a meaningful way, using strengths I’m only just discovering. Getting old is awesome, by the way. Stay tuned.

JM How can I participate in the ongoing resistance to oppressive state and capitalist structures of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc. most effectively?

-- “Activism is not about how many panel discussions you can do. It's about centering the stories and voices of people who are MOST affected.”  - I read this in an article by brittany t. oliver the other day about what needs to be done after the women’s marches and I think it really sums up the best mindset with which to move forward. I know a disproportionate amount of attention is given to white feminism, that solidarity is not enough and there are conversations where my opinion isn’t needed. I know the people who are leading social justice and have been putting in the work are the most marginalised. I know I need to listen and follow their lead but finding my place in helping to tip the power dynamics (building social, political and economic power for the oppressed) is something I am still trying to figure out. In the past I’ve done benefits, written songs, supported my union, blah blah blah, but I feel like those are lame cop-outs and know I can be doing more. That being said, I was listening to the Australian indigenous activist Gary Foley speak the other day, and as he said, “…all you can do is try and bring as many people with you.” I guess the fact that I’m asking myself this question at all is a start.

JM How do I maintain hope when all seems lost? What’s the point of even trying?

-- Aaaannnd another question I ask myself every day. I’m pretty sure everyone is feeling fairly hopeless these days when it comes to humanity in general. When you see governments, and what seems like most of the people around you, all looking at the short term, burrowing their heads in the sand, buying into lies peddled to maintain the status quo because it’s easier or because they don’t know any better, it’s seriously hard not to despair. So, I remind myself that most don’t have the privilege of giving up – it would literally mean death. I remind myself that even though there’s still a long way to go and that many women worldwide are still suffering, 100 years ago, I would have been considered some man’s property, so things can, and do change. I remind myself that there are millions and millions of people working tirelessly and lovingly every day to make the world around us even just a little bit better. I can’t honestly say I have hope all the time, I’m not sure anyone can, but I try to practice gratitude and really relish those moments when you can see beauty in others. Your brain is hard wired to remember negatives more than positives so hold the good ‘uns real close!

Share something with us.

JM I want everyone to put/keep the pressure on Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, and make him honour the 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee like he said he would. If you don’t know what the TRC is or what the recommendations are please read about it here:-

http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=3 

I want everyone to talk about justice for indigenous peoples and climate justice, keep it on their radar and get involved. It was great seeing so much support for Standing Rock but we need to keep listening to and amplifying their voices, and come up with realistic strategies to keep fighting. I stole this exact sentence from something I wrote for our record: it’s our responsibility to learn the truths of ‘nation building,’ to acknowledge its destructive legacy, to make space and listen to the stories and counter-narratives of survivors who continue to endure institutionalised racism and marginalisation, and to be allies in dismantling colonialism and imperialism.

“Decolonization is a lifelong struggle filled with uncertainty and risk taking.” - Paulette Regan, 'Unsettling the Settler Within.'