thewritingcoroner

[thewritingcoroner]

Was talking with one of my very lesbian friends about body dysmorphia and how you can look at a fucking gorgeous woman who has a lot of the same qualities as yourself and not realize that the complement also applies to yourself. I asked her if she'd been watching Dancing With The Stars this season and she said no.

So i showed her a picture of Ilona Maher from this week's episode.

Her response:

"Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh."

So anyway, the takeaway here is that one person's 'too masculine' is another person's 'thigh.'

[thewritingcoroner]

in all seriousness it's very alienating knowing theres Something Wrong With You. like seeing your mental illness come through in your behaviour and thought processes and knowing it's irrational and unhealthy, knowing other people are reading you as weird or stupid, and not being able to do anything about it is such a lonely experience

[thewritingcoroner]

I made a bluesky 🤔 thinking long and hard about deleting my Tumblr account. I'd keep my Fandom connects on my sideblog but that's about it

[thewritingcoroner]

"Before You Write/View That Violent or Villainous Scene With That Black Character, Consider:"

A list of things to ask yourself to better comprehend your own motivations while writing, or to comprehend the potential racist bias you may feel about or see in someone else's writing! Whole lesson linked here.

[thewritingcoroner]

you said you were stuck in a time loop, which was fine. i feel like late-stage capitalism has us all in a time loop, ammiright? you came barging in at 5:33. in the morning. i hadn't even processed the idea of coffee.

but you had this look of utter panic in your eyes. terror like the ocean. you grabbed my cheeks. im in a time loop.

i don't know why in movies the first reaction is to deny it. when someone is panicking like that, it's not appropriate to ask them to calm down. it didn't matter if i believed it, what mattered was that you believed it so much that it was consuming you.

so here we are. i pour you some of the dark roast. "you look like utter and entire hell," i say.

you push your fingers into your eyes. "you always say that."

i try to think of something funny to say that i wouldn't have said on previous time loops, but jokes don't land without the proper timing (lol). "remind me to think -"

"-yeah, of a joke that only works in the future. and before you say anything, i know you're pissed i just stole your punchline." you bolt the coffee, which is wild. it's very hot. you don't seem to notice.

i blow on mine to cool it down. i both am very pissed at you and also i can't see you in this amount of panic without wanting to help. but i'm also not really sure what we are, not since i saw you kiss her like that, no offense. it just was like, kind of rude when you knew i liked you.

and besides. i'm just like, barely a person. i write omegaverse fanfiction. i love the concept of a time loop, but what the fuck am i gonna do? send an alpha in there? i open my mouth.

you point at me. "you're about to ask why me. and then say some disparaging shit about yourself. i'm just a nerd who plays dnd or something. that self-own is slightly different each time." you sigh. "i know you think you can't really help me. i don't know who can help me. i only came to you because you fucking believe me." you check your watch, sigh, and throw your head back. you cover your eyes with one hand. "i've come here on 26 separate revolutions," you say. "you have believed me every time. and yeah, i have no idea how you fit into this but i just -" you sigh again. "i just like fucking talking to someone about it."

"do you need more cof-" i start, but you're already holding the empty cup out. i frown at it. "you're not getting any more until you promise not to bolt this one like an animal."

you laugh a little and sit up, pushing your hair out of your face. "okay, that's new dialogue. but to be fair to you, i'm not usually this rude. i'm still pretty new at all of this." you check your watch again. another sigh. i guess you're cruising for a personal best in the Sigh Olympics.

i almost tell you im not an NPC but i've played enough video games. to know i'm very much an NPC. i pour you another cup. "so what happens in the loop?"

"really bad explosion." you mutter into the mug. you put your elbows on the table (rude) and bury your face in your arms like an angsty teenager. one hand floats up while you talk, because evidently you literally can't talk without your hands. "i have to save the day and there's this bomb and i have no bomb training and it keeps moving, you know."

"do i die?"

you peek up from your arms. "yeah. bigtime. you keep trying to run or stay or do anything and you always super die."

"oh."

"to be fair, like, everyone dies in it though.... so you're in good company."

i hate that you make me laugh. i hate that being around you always feels tingly and strange, this electric tension between us. something that is evidently (given how you stuck your tongue down a stranger's throat literally 3 days ago) (well. 3 for me) super one-sided. i take a sip of my coffee and close my eyes.

i die today, i guess. a little spark of panic starts at the top of my hands and starts whipping up my wrists.

"shit," you say. you look at your watch and jump to your feet. "i have to go. if i can come back, i will. i am still trying to figure out when is best to do everything, you know? the order of stuff. maybe morning isn't good for us."

i look up at you and think about how you keep kissing me in the back of my car and in alleyways and in the dark. and i can never fucking get a read on you. and i also think about how incredibly panicked you look. how broken. how long have you been doing this? "i don't want to die," i say.

you glance downwards. "well, you're not really dead, you'll come back in the loop."

"but i will have died." my hands are shaking. i am trying really hard to stay calm.

you push your hands through your hair again. "i really have to go. i will have this discussion with the next version of you, though. it is like, something i am thinking about."

"but i don't get a next version," i say. i don't really have the language for this, because i haven't had 26 tries with you. i only have my memories: you, a week ago. drunk and telling me you loved me in my ear. you, kissing her anyway. you, months ago, throwing up on my birthday, whispering to me i ruin everything i touch, always, over and over. please don't ask. i can't ever fucking have that be you.

i run my finger along the rim of the mug. "i don't want to die in this one."

you seem baffled by this. "i get that but - time will reset, you'll be fine, you won't even remember we talked about this."

"but i know now." i stand up too. "i have to live the rest of this day knowing i could die. knowing i probably am going to."

"you could always die, to be fair."

i feel my hands get out of control. "earlier, you said i always say a different insult about myself. what if you're just going through different parallel universes and those are all just different - but real - versions of myself? what if you're not in a time loop, you're in a fucking universe loop?"

"if it helps, i've wondered this too. also, you're hot in all of them. if that helps."

i point at you. "no flirting. i'm trying to figure out if i die today."

"who's flirting?" you catch my wild hands and give me that long, perfect smile. like we're in this together. "i won't let ya die." you check your watch and sigh again. "well. maybe not this time."

i grit my teeth. you are so not making quips at me while i try to explain the existential dread i'm having. "does the time loop reset if i fucking kill you?"

"honestly i don't know how long it continues after i die, because i just wake up. it could be that the loop goes until the explosion for everyone, and we're all in the loop, or it could be that when i die, the loop restarts. when i die i wake up, is all."

i pull away from you and stalk into the kitchen and start doing all 3 of my dishes. "okay, first, you know i was joking. and secondly, this is exactly my point. you don't know if this is just a parallel universe. maybe in the ones where you died, the explosion happened and nobody reset and it's just you travelling." i have to stop and push my heel into my eyeball. "... how often have you died?"

i look at you. you look at me. you give me this very sad, halfway smile and a little what can ya do shrug. something in that action seems so old and weary that i want to burst into tears.

"i have to go," you say. "really. for real. there's this family of five i save from getting into a car crash. and i know it's like oh but we're all gonna die in the explosion anyway, what's the point. and..." you shrug again. "it matters to me, is all. at least i saved them for now. at least i saved anything."

you pad over to me and wrap me in a tight hug. you always seem so tall against me. i feel your cheek rest against the top of my head for a moment. for a second, it's just us, and the space is warm, and my heart is a little broken hare.

you leave me there, and i stand in my stupid badly lit kitchen with my stupid mugs. i think about you. i start texting my mom that she needs to get out of the city, but it feels pointless.

i don't know what to do. tomorrow is the same day for you. but i have to prepare to die in my today.

[thewritingcoroner]

the author’s barely-disguised stigmatized mental health condition

[thewritingcoroner]

Today marks the 25th Transgender Day of Remembrance, a time for us pause and mourn the transgender and gender-expansive people whose lives were lost to transphobic violence.

From Gwendolyn Anne Smith, founder of Transgender Day of Remembrance: “Transgender Day of Remembrance seeks to highlight the losses we face due to anti-transgender bigotry and violence. I am no stranger to the need to fight for our rights, and the right to simply exist is first and foremost. With so many seeking to erase transgender people — sometimes in the most brutal ways possible — it is vitally important that those we lose are remembered, and that we continue to fight for justice.”

To my trans friends and followers; I will continue to fight for trans rights, trans justice, and a joyful trans existence.

[thewritingcoroner]

Always fascinated by a very certain group of Tumblr users who insist the media is lying to you (sure, i guess they are) but then in the next breath say "that's why you should listen to me, a random anarchist micro blogger on Tumblr dot com."

And it's less those guys that interest me and more of the thousands of followers they have that believe every word they say re: political theory. You honestly believe everyone is reading political theory at the suggestion of their favorite blogger? Buddy those books are BORING. They really really are. And they're tough to get through and tough to understand without an already excellent educational background.

And then they treat "reading theory" as like, research and they forget it's also theory.. you draw your own conclusions afterwards based on the argument you read and the arguments of previous theorists you have also read.

I guess all I really wanted to say is that if you don't trust the media breakdown of how Kamala Harris lost the election, you REALLY should not trust Tumblrs analysis either.

[thewritingcoroner]

Folding her clothes to buy herself time, [Bree] dug deeper into her memories. Vale had only opened brief windows to life in the castle, but none of it sounded pleasant. The archmage, the lack of familiars, the celebrations she didn’t miss. The scars on her hands. Bree had assumed parades and luxury awaited Vale’s return. Now, she wasn’t so sure. She resolved to ask about this when she emerged, but the beginning of the makeup process immediately tore away her thoughts. Vale set her down on the blankets, wiped her face with warm cloths and flower-scented cream… Then instructed her to lie down on the bedroll. “It’ll be easier to draw the lines this way,” she said. “You’ll fidget less.” Taking her word for it, Bree lay down, skin swathed in both silk and furs— And Vale’s robe as the witch straddled her, brush in hand. 

you ever go "oh my crush might be traumatized, actually" then suddenly find yourself in this meme:

[ID: the meme photo of a woman in the red dress straddling a woman in a black dress, who's laying down while the first woman does her eye makeup. end ID]

[thewritingcoroner]

chipped

[thewritingcoroner]

[thewritingcoroner]

Writeblr Introduction

Hello,

I am Cannibal Pixie, or Simply pixie. I am in my mid-twenties and I am a writer. I love to write for New Adults, people 18+ as I find it easier to dive into deeper and darker subjects without the limitations that would come with writing for children or teens. I am a dark fantasy writer with a little mystery and romance sprinkled in.

I have been writing since I was six years old, but didn’t truly get into it until I was seven years of age. I have a few books that I have written and are to be rewritten soon. I will make a separate post about the WIPS that I am working on as well as the world building.

I would love to make writing friends on here, people that I can talk to and swap ideas with—bouncing them off of each other. While writing is a solitary activity, I don’t think we need to be completely alone in the process. So if you are into:

Fantasy

Horror

Mystery

Dark academia spaces within books (dark academia at all)

Found Family

Cursed families

Extensive world building

Queer represention

Geeking out over your stories

And much much more, give me a follow and I will give you one as well.

Happy writing!

[thewritingcoroner]

One of my favourite questions for figuring out a character’s motivations is which qualities they most fear being assigned to them. Are they afraid (consciously or unconsciously) of being seen as stupid? Ungrateful? Weak? Incompetent? Lazy? Cowardly? Intimidating? Like they actually care? etc.

It’s such a fun way to explore into who they are, why they do what they do, what they don’t do out of fear, and how they might be affected by the events of the story. And I love when characters have negative motivations—trying to avoid something (in this case, being seen a particular way) as much as they’re trying to achieve a goal.

[thewritingcoroner]

Hi, I'm Nox and I'm the host of the Author Games! The Author Games is a dynamic writing competition where creativity meets strategy, inspired by The Hunger Games! Participants create original characters to compete through evolving challenges. Each week, the Gamemaker assigns a task and participants will complete an entry in their character's POV. Entries are scored based on writing quality and how well the task requirements are met. Weaker entries face elimination votes until only one competitor remains: the victor! Whether set in a dystopian arena, a fantasy realm, or a futuristic world, the Author Games is a place to unleash your creativity and immerse yourself in the joy of writing. With alliances, sponsorships, and in-entry deaths impacting scores, only those with the sharpest storytelling and strategic skills will survive. Will you outwrite the rest and claim victory? -----------

[thewritingcoroner]

Kurt Cobain Will Have His Revenge on the Straights

Had a video call with my brother Chuck the other day.  Things got heavy:

KATE: Was Kurt Cobain a trans woman?

CHUCK: What?

Kurt Cobain.  Rock musician.  He was in a band called Nirvana.

I’m familiar with him, yes.

Was he a trans woman?

Um.  No?

OK.  Why not?

I mean, he wasn’t.  It’s like asking why he wasn’t an astronaut.

He wasn’t an astronaut because he never went to space.  Why wasn’t he a trans woman?

Because he didn’t transition.  I mean, he didn’t ever say he was a woman, didn’t ever say he was trans.  So no.  Kurt Cobain wasn’t a trans woman.

So someone is trans if they say they’re trans.  Self-determination.

That’s what you’ve told me.  Is that wrong?

No, that’s right.  We know ourselves better than anybody else can know us.  If we say we’re trans, nobody can say we aren’t.

And Kurt Cobain never said he was trans.

So was I trans in 1994?

I don’t know, were you?

Yes, but if you’d asked me in 1994, I would have told you “no”.

So if I tell you I’m trans, I’m trans…

Right.

But if I tell you I’m cis, I might still be trans?

If you tell me you’re cis, I believe you.

That’s not the same thing as “I’m cis”.

That’s a really good point.  This is sort of what some queer people are getting at when they say “gender is a construct”.

Come again?

Well, you’re cisgender, right?

As far as I know, yes.

Aha.

Hmmm?

You hedged.  “As far as I know” isn’t the same thing as “yes”.  “As far as I know” opens up the possibility that you could be trans and not know it.

It doesn’t seem terribly likely.

That’s an interesting statement.  Early on in transition one of the biggest problems I had was dealing with the sheer unlikelihood of my being trans.  I mean, I knew trans people existed.  I knew somebody had to be trans.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that it would be me.

Do you think this is why you’re on this whole “Kurt Cobain was a trans woman” kick?

Hey now, I’m just asking questions.  You know.  Like J.K. Rowling is “just asking questions”.

Kate, you are literally wearing a T-shirt that says “KURT COBAIN WAS A TRANS WOMAN” on it right now.

Am I?  Oh, shit.  I thought I was wearing my “Skip school, take hormones, kill God” T-shirt.  To your question, though - yeah, I do think that’s part of it.  Honestly, the hardest thing about growing up trans was believing that nobody in the world had ever experienced what I was experiencing.  I didn’t have any role models.  I didn’t wonder if I was the only one.  I was convinced of it.

So being able to say that this incredibly gifted songwriter, the voice of a generation, was a trans woman like you…

I need someone like that.  I need to not be the first of my kind.

Of course you’re not the first trans woman.

No, but before a couple of years ago almost every trans woman would tell you they always knew, unquestionably and innately, that they were women.

So it’s not just about him being trans, but specifically his being a trans woman who didn’t know he was a trans woman.

An egg.  Right.

Why Kurt Cobain, anyway?  What’s so special about him that you’re trying to induct him into the Egg Hall of Fame?

He knew things.  Things cis guys don’t know.  Things I didn’t know until after I started transition.  He understood women, what we’re like, what we experience.  “Pennyroyal Tea”.  “Rape Me”.  I just have a hard time thinking of a cis man who could write songs like that.

It wouldn’t be the only way in which he was exceptional.

True.  Ahhh.  I don’t know.  I mean, I know, I can give you all the reasons, but there’s something in his eyes.

Something in his eyes.

All the pictures of him.  No matter what he’s doing.  If he’s grinning, or sad, whatever he’s doing, you can see something trapped there.  Trapped and in pain, wanting to get out but not quite knowing how.

Huh.  You, uh, know that what you’re doing is pretty much the textbook definition of projection, right?

Maybe.  Chuck, do you think I’m happier?

Since you transitioned?

Yeah.

Of course.  Absolutely.  Night and day.

Everyone says that, and honestly, I see it.  Even in pictures, you know?  I see it.  You’ve seen some of my transition timelines, right?

You do look really different.

It’s not just me.  Every single person who transitions looks like that.  We look so much happier, so much more alive, so much more us.  I don’t understand how anybody can hate us.

I don’t get it either, Kate.

And when I look at any timelines, I look at the before photos… and I see something in their eyes.  Transmasc, transfem, doesn’t matter.  There’s something trapped wanting to get out.  Every picture I’ve ever seen of Kurt Cobain looks like the “before” picture on a transition timeline.  It’s just that with him, there aren’t any after pictures.

And it’s not just the eyes, either.  The way he dressed, the whole “grunge look”.  It’s just literally egg fashion.  We dress with total disregard for our appearance or how we look because no matter what we do it’s wrong.

“Egg fashion”, egg this, egg that… isn’t it a little bit anachronistic, judging him by 2022 standards, 2022 values?

Is it?  Chuck, I was alive in 1994.  I was an 18 year old egg.  I know what that feels like.  I know what that looks like.  I lived that.  Why didn’t I come out as trans in 1994?  Because I didn’t have the opportunity.  Because self-determination needs to be informed, and none of us were.  None of us.  Look.  You know what he said to Melody Maker in 1991?  “I knew I was different. I thought that I might be gay or something because I couldn't identify with any of the guys at all.”  That’s what he said.

Holy shit.  Really?

Really.  September 14, 1991.

Hold on, let me look that up.  Oh, yeah, I see it.  Look, if you look at the full quote he’s just saying he’s not a jock.  Like he didn’t fit in with the jocks. 

Well, what about the dresses?

What dresses?

Kurt Cobain wore a lot of dresses.  Like, a lot, both onstage and off.  On MTV in 1991, he said “It’s ‘Headbanger’s Ball’ so I thought I’d wear a gown.”  He said in a 1993 interview, “I personally like to wear dresses.  I wear them around the house sometimes.”  This is not some shameful secret he kept hidden from the world.  He was open about this.  He was proud about this.

Yeah, but… it’s just clothes.

Except it’s not just clothes.  Listen to his songs.  Listen to his lyrics.  “Should have been a son”.  “I’m a lady, can you save me?”  “Everyone is gay.”  The original lyrics to “All Apologies” from his journals – “Boys write songs for girls.  Let me grow some breasts.”

I mean they’re song lyrics.  There are all kinds of ways to interpret song lyrics.

Sure.  All kinds of ways.  You ever read Michael Azerrad’s biography of Cobain, Come As You Are?

Nope.

Azerrad spent weeks talking to Cobain.  He was Cobain’s biographer, but also his friend.  And he has his own interpretation of the lyrics.  For instance, Azerrad talks about all the lyrics about guns, and to me, now, I look at that, and I think of how he died, but Azerrad, when Kurt was alive, he looked at it another way.  He thought it’s about dicks.  “To paraphrase Dr. Freud,” he says, “sometimes a gun is just a gun.  But not this time.”  He talks about “Come As You Are”, where Kurt keeps singing “I swear I don’t have a gun.”  That’s not my interpretation.  That’s never been my interpretation.  That’s what this cis man says.  More than one cis man.  Kurt says Dave Grohl’s dad, he said the same thing.  Yeah.  There are all kinds of ways to interpret lyrics.

“By this time,” Azerrad wrote, “one begins to wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man at all.  His first response is revealing.  ‘I don’t know,’ he says.  ‘Castration.’”  I don’t wonder how Kurt rationalizes being a man.  I rationalized “being a man” in all kinds of ways.  What strikes me is that he needed to rationalize being a man.  Had to come up with some kind of excuse.  It just strikes me kind of funny.

Kurt’s songs have meanings.   The lyrics to “In Bloom”, Kurt was pretty explicit about that.  The lyrics he wrote have meanings.  “Heart-Shaped Box”.  You know what that refers to?  When Courtney Love was flirting with Kurt, Michael Azerrad says in Come As You Are, “She gave Dave (Grohl) a package to give to Kurt – little sea shells and miniature teacups and a tiny doll, all packed into a small heart-shaped box.”  A tiny doll locked away inside a box shaped like a heart.  That was what I felt like before I came out.  A tiny phantom doll.  Kurt and Courtney first kissed after a show at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago.  Rumor was that they fucked against the bar, but they denied it.  What actually happened, Azerrad says, is that “Courtney had a bag of lingerie with her for some reason and Kurt ended up modeling the contents.”  And then they went to Kurt’s hotel room and they fucked.

You’re making it sound…

Maybe it was.  Because you look at that and you think that if it was like that, it was perverted and wrong, because that’s what you were told, that it’s a sick fetish thing, and I look at it and it isn’t.  To me, that’s normal.  That Kurt Cobain was sexually aroused while wearing Courtney Love’s lingerie, that’s normal.

Kate, he was a punk!  He hated jocks, and wearing a dress pissed off jocks, so he wore dresses.  He talked about wanting to wear a dress and piss on a redneck A&R man’s desk!  You think that was some kind of sex thing?

Sexuality is part of being a woman.  Part.  Rage – and Kurt Cobain had a lot of rage inside him – that’s another part.  Am I interpreting, am I looking at things from my perspective as a trans woman?  Yes, certainly, just like you’re interpreting, looking at it from your perspective as a cis man.  When cis people interpret things, their conclusion is never “they were trans”.  Never.

Ed Wood wasn’t a trans woman.  He was just a transvestite.  He was a man.

Pete Burns from Dead or Alive wasn’t a trans woman.  Sure, he got all sorts of feminizing surgeries, but he never said he was a woman.  Man.

Prince Nelson adopted a female persona, feminized his voice, and recorded a song about wanting to be a woman's girlfriend, but he was also a Christian and believed that being queer was wicked and sinful, and that's the identity of his we need to respect.  Man.

Richard Wright, who wrote the Phish song “Halley’s Comet”, spent most of the 1980s telling everyone he knew he was a transsexual lesbian named Nancy, but after being consistently treated like shit changed his mind about that, so none of that counts for anything.  Man.

Dave Carter was on HRT when he died, but he was just questioning.  He didn’t tell anybody for sure that he was a woman.  Man.

Quentin Crisp said just before he died that if he was younger, he absolutely would have transitioned, but wanting to transition isn’t the same as actually transitioning.  Man.

All men.  Always, always men, whatever they do, whatever they say.  I know how that works.  I was told all these same things about myself for decades, all these same reasons, and now, I don’t know, I guess people will make a personal exception for me, but for everybody else, the same old assumptions, the same old arguments, they still apply.  They’re still legitimate.

I thought we were talking about Kurt Cobain.

And the only way to do that is to talk about him in isolation.  There’s no larger context to consider, no bigger picture.  I can’t really know.  I can’t really judge.

I mean, everybody else does.  I guess I can’t tell you not to.  But all of this circumstantial evidence, all of the dresses and the lyrics that you I guess know the real meaning of – none of that makes him a girl.

Sure.  And nothing can make him a girl.  Because he’s dead.  Because he killed himself.

Oh, here we go.  After thirty years and countless speculation, you have at last uncovered the real reason Kurt Cobain killed himself – gender dysphoria.  Do you have a book deal yet?

Working on it.  And yes, people say a lot of stupid things about Cobain’s death, like it’s this big shock that this guy who hated himself and wanted to die killed himself.

Right.  He was pretty well-known for being a heroin addict, which isn’t exactly something that improves one’s quality of life.

Sure, but why did he start heroin?

I don’t know.  Why does anybody start heroin?

To help him cope with his eating disorder.

Wait, what?  Eating disorder?

You don’t know about that?  He had stomach problems, for a long, long time.  He could only eat certain kinds of food, certain kinds of food that wouldn’t make his stomach hurt.  Doctors looked but they could never find any organic cause for it.  Nobody took it seriously.  So he self-medicated with heroin.  “It was my choice,” he told Azerrad.  “I don’t regret it at all because it was such a relief from not having stomach pain every day.”  I know, though.  Lots of cis guys have eating disorders.  Doesn’t mean anything.

Kate there’s a lot of interpreting going on here.

Yeah, I guess there is.  Is that necessarily a bad thing, though?  Is that necessarily wrong?  Like.  You’ve seen The Matrix, right?

Only the first one.

Yeah, that’s fine.  So you know how important The Matrix is to a lot of trans women, right?

Yes, but I’m not really sure why.  Just seems like a retelling of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” with extra fight scenes.

It’s pretty trans, though, right?

Clearly.  It was directed by two trans women.

And trans women who watch it – eggs or otherwise – find their own lives and experiences reflected in it in ways that cis people, like you, don’t.

I guess, but the fact that it was actually made by two trans women carries a little more weight with me.

OK, but what if the Wachowskis had died in 2000?  In, like… a car crash or something?  Does that mean The Matrix isn’t a trans film?

Well, no, because it’s still a film made by two trans women.

A film made by two trans women that speaks to the trans experience, and that is recognized by living trans women as speaking specifically to the trans experience.  The only difference is that, in this scenario, nobody knows the Wachowski Sisters are trans women.  And we can’t prove it.  We can’t possibly prove it, and nobody is going to just believe us when we say it’s a trans movie, that the Wachowskis were trans women, because they didn’t say it, they didn’t say the special magic words.  Self-determination.  You know what self-determination meant to Kurt Cobain?  I remember seeing Courtney Love on television reading his note, I remember her interrupting to say that he was an asshole, that what he was saying was bullshit.  She didn’t respect his self-determination.

Um…

“Pennyroyal Tea”.  Cobain told Azerrad “It's a cleansing theme where I’m trying to get all my bad evil spirits out of me and drinking Pennyroyal tea would cleanse that away.”  Pennyroyal is an abortifacient – but, Azerrad notes, only in lethal doses. 

Hell, not just that song.  The whole album.  In Utero.  The collage on the back cover, the one Cobain described to Azerrad as “Sex and woman and In Utero and vaginas and birth and death".  The occult symbols surrounding it, taken from Barbara G. Walker’s The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects1.  There was something inside Kurt Cobain, something inside him waiting to be born, but he was told, over and over, that it was a monster, so he killed it, the only way he could.  By killing himself.

That could have been me.  That could so easily have been me.  I was told all the same things he was.  We all were.  When I was 27?  When I was 27, I was addicted to benzos, benzos they prescribed me because I was trying to bury, trying to kill this thing, this thing I had inside of me.  I was a zombie.  Walking dead.  When I quit, I quit cold turkey.  Nobody told me about the withdrawal syndrome.  Nobody told me it could have killed me.  And if it had, everybody would remember me, everybody would think of me, as a cis man.  Forever.  They would perpetuate the Lie.  That’s why I transitioned, why I chose to go through all the shit I went through.  The writer and musician Margaret Killjoy, in 2017 she talked about what she went through the day before she came out:

“All I could think was: ‘Oh god, I don’t want to die a boy.’”2

I felt the same way, came out for the same reason.  I figured no matter what I did, I was dead.  I didn’t do it live, but to at least have an honest death.  I genuinely believed transition would kill me.

It didn’t, though!  You’re alive and you’re beautiful and I’m so, so glad for that.  It didn’t kill you.

It could have.  Still could.  Transition has helped, has made it easier­ for me, but it’s not that way with everyone.  People have been kind to me, in ways that they aren’t kind to other trans women.  Others of us… aren’t so lucky.

Who are we respecting, exactly, by remaining silent about our shared experiences, our shared perspectives, things we see that you fucking don’t, that you can’t see?  Of course I can’t prove it.  I can’t prove that I’m trans.  You can’t prove that you’re cis.  Cis people, though, cis people never have to prove anything.  Their prejudices are the null hypothesis3.  If I was to go out there and say that Kurt Cobain was a cisgender man, would anybody say I was wrong?  Would anybody object or complain?  Even though my saying that is an anachronism, is meaningless.  The word, the concept, it literally didn’t exist when Cobain died.  Have you ever heard the word “agnotology”?

No?

It means making a false claim to ignorance.  Claiming that we don’t know something that we do.  That we can’t know something that we can.  We know things now, Chuck.  We know what the symptoms of gender dysphoria are.  We know what it does to people.  How eggs think.  How eggs act.  How eggs die.  But we pretend we don’t.  We still pretend.  We pretend suicide is an individual act, even when we know it’s not, that the reasons for it are wholly personal.  We pretend that when someone dies by suicide, their reasons for doing so die with them.  And they don’t, Chuck.  We’re still dying, still dying for the same reasons Kurt Cobain did.  It’s not just that we aren’t allowed to recognize ourselves.  We aren’t allowed to recognize each other.  Individual choice or social contagion.  Those are the options we’re given.  And neither of them are right.  Neither of them are who we are.

Kurt Cobain wrote, thought, talked, died like eggs do.  I don’t care if he never said the magic fucking words.  We know our own.  We recognize each other.  And if someone is alive?  If someone is alive I will go my whole life without ever breathing a word.  Because as long as we’re alive, we do choose, and that means we can choose ignorance.  What I think, what I want, for someone else, for us, it doesn’t matter.  I do that, I follow that code, for the benefit of one person – the egg themselves.  Once they die, all bets are off.  Omerta no longer applies.  Kayfabe no longer applies.

To be queer is to be erased, to experience erasure.  I still hear straight men arguing, as if they have any right to argue, as if they know, that Emily Dickinson was not a lesbian.  Emily Dickinson!  I’m supposed to listen to people who say this shit?  I’m supposed to take them seriously when they say well, actually, calling Dickinson a “lesbian” is historically anachronistic, we can’t apply the standards of the present to the past, and Jesus fuck have you read her letters?  She liked girls.  She really liked girls.  Kurt Cobain was a trans woman.  Kurt Cobain was every bit as much a trans woman as Emily Dickinson was a lesbian.  Refusing to say it isn’t “respect”.  It’s perpetuating the crime perpetrated against Cobain, against every other trans woman who ever killed herself because of the lies we were told about ourselves.  No more.  Kurt Cobain was a trans woman.  I can’t, as an individual, say that.  I don’t have the right.  No trans woman can say that, individually.  But collectively?  All of us together?  The things we see in each other, we see those things in him too.  Not all of them, and not all of us.  Absolutely not all of us.  But enough of us.  Enough that we have the right.  We have the right, and I will fucking say it, and if you don’t like that, you can go fuck yourself.

Kate, are you ok?

I’m fine.

Do you want a hug?

Fuck you, Chuck.

OK, well.  I’m, uh.  Gonna go to the other room.  You should, uh.  Drink some water.  Stay hydrated.  Love you, Kate.

Love you too, Chuck.  Sorry.

Shhh.  It’s OK, Kate.  It’s OK.

1 Diane Purkiss criticizes the occult nature of Walker’s encyclopedia in "Women's Rewriting of Myth", in Carolyne Larrington (ed), The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London, 1992, p. 444: “In Donna Haraway's influential terms, these women may wish to be goddesses, but they are cyborgs all the same”. The work she’s referencing is Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto”.  Haraway was, it happens, an academic advisor to the trans woman Sandy Stone, and her “Cyborg Manifesto” was a pivotal influence on Stone’s “The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”, one of the foundational works of transgender theory.

2 Margaret Killjoy, https://birdsbeforethestorm.net/2017/06/im-not-even-going-to-try-to-pass/

3 Natalie Reed, https://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/17/the-null-hypothecis/

[thewritingcoroner]

This so succinctly explains what frustrates and gives me pause about fans of villains that I also like.

I don't see this as often with female villains (but that doesn't mean I don't see it) and it really is rough out here man.

I think there's also enough people out there who loudly and genuinely believe that liking villains DOES cause harm and means you're a bad person, that all defense and any defense must be said to justify liking a villain. And thus the cycle of harm perpetuates itself. Because this rhetoric of victim blaming in fiction does have some impact on how people navigate reality and that impact is genuinely harmful.

It (the rhetoric itself) helps to prop up the status quo that rl villains (especially/almost exclusively white men) are to be sympathized with because of mitigating circumstances only granted to them (like op said in the first post). It's not the liking the villain that causes harm, it's the justification that they were right to do what they did that is harmful, and it's a somewhat nuanced distinction that doesn't fit into a short, interesting text post very well.

And i think op brings up a great point about not reading people's minds and believing other people when they say they believe something. Ultimately it doesn't matter if the fan carries over their justification for Hannibal into the real world explicitly, more than likely, their justification for the villain is also an unconscious bias they hold already.

It's not just frustrating because it perpetuates the status quo, but because this sort of attitude IS the status quo. The fictional nature of these villains gives us, as a community, the chance to remove personal stakes to discuss more nuanced and complicated concepts. It would be interesting to interrogate the rhetoric people use to justify liking villains vs the rhetoric justifying the villains and their actions vs how that reflects in how our society is built and maintains itself. They're all three easily conflated conversations but all very different.

I was thinking about this substack essay I wrote a couple years ago and about my feelings about villain fans, and I think what I've realized is that so much of my ick from villain fans in fandom comes from the fact that the language used to defend the character or defend liking the character is often a straight reproduction of language used to defend hurting real people.

This obviously isn't from everyone, and this isn't a judgment at all on the idea of liking a villain character, but many times I've seen people try to "redeem" villain characters or defend the characters or defend their own support for the characters, and it ends up being done in a way that replicates real-world rhetoric justifying or defending real-world harm.

"He was bullied/had a bad childhood/was hurt as a child/didn't get help for his mental illness so him being angry and violent is justifiable/reasonable/an inevitable result that erases his culpability" is a common one that I've seen, for example.

A lot of it often ends up tipping oddly into victim blaming, justifying or rationalizing someone's violence or the harm that they do because of neglect or slights from the people they are violent towards.

There's also versions of "they had a bad childhood so ipso facto the fascism was inevitable" or "the fascism is just because they want to bring peace and order which is a good thing because the status quo is bad" that pop up as well.

I think I just always find this sort of rhetoric uncomfortable because it perpetuates the same arguments used in the real world to deflect blame from people (generally white men) when they commit actual violence.

None of this is to say that there's a problem with being a fan of villain characters. I, for the most part, don't care who you like (if you start talking about how much you like literal Nazi/KKK/etc. characters, I will in fact judge you heavily for it). I think that there are all sorts of reasons to like villain characters--they can have interesting characterization and story arcs. Like whoever you want! Do whatever!

But I will probably never get past my instinctual flinch every time I see people defending their favorite (almost always white/male) villain character with the same rhetoric people use to deflect blame from or justify the actions of people committing real life violence.

[thewritingcoroner]

having online friends who are busy is just like. I LOVE YOU. I miss you. YOU GOT THIS. I'm giving you space to work. I LOVE YOU.