makeroomforthejolyghost

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

cannot emphasize enough

intellectually disabled people do often have strabismus, autism, and whatever the fuck else you're throwing them under the bus to make the ableds like you better for

intellectual disability is commonly comorbid with many disabilities, both physical and neurodevelopmental, to the point that it is considered a sign of them

you are not a better, more valuable disabled person than intellectually disabled people with the same disability as you

and someone assuming you're id is not a fucking insult to you

#same vibe as straight girls w/ short hair bein like 'ew they thought i was a lesbian' #w/ the same caveat where like. yeah if someone's infantilizing you bc they think you're ID then that IS insulting #it's just that the suorce of their bad behavior isn't 'they thought i was ID' it's 'they treat ID ppl like shit' #...to be fair tho being mistaken for something you're not always feels insulting #like i used to interrogate myself a bunch over whether it was Problematic of me to get annoyed w/ #strangers who she/her me (when ummm hello i'm so clearly projecting nonbinary trans guy energy wtf) #bc like 'oh do you not want to be associated w/ women? do you think you're better than them?' and. #no; i just want to be recognized. i feel slighted when people confidently stick the wrong box on my head #so yeah it's probably inevitably going to annoy you when ppl guess wrong abt the nature of your disability #and private irritation about that is morally neutral #just. don't fucking whine on the internet about how the ableds are using their assumption you're ID to ignore/belittle you #as if that treatment would be just fine if you really were ID??? it wouldn't. it would be the same amount bad

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

ggggod i’m still not over it sorry. rly pisses me off how common a Disabled Experience it is to ask for help and be refused because you know your own needs well enough to sound competent

like: the patient OP talks about? doesn’t sound like they knew they had an electrolyte imbalance. presumably they showed up to emergency services because their symptoms were severe and strange enough to scare them

but if you have identical symptoms and aren’t scared shitless you just?? don’t get helped? how is that fair!

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

We had a patient last night who was a textbook case of electrolytes imbalance as a result of nausea and vomiting. And I didn’t say this to the patient because I didn’t think they’d appreciate it, but it’s kinda great when the way you are so so sick is like exactly like the textbooks say it’ll be. Like not good that you’re having sudden new onset muscle weakness and tingling, but buddy this is gonna get sorted out with an efficiency you won’t believe. We fixed like 85% of the stuff wrong with this patient by midnight and we marveled the whole time about how this patient was seemingly concocted in a lab so I could walk my trainee through a highly manageable crisis

#internally shrieking w/ jealousy bc the last time i had norovirus #i sailed right past this level of dehydration w/in like... idk 4 hours? since. #y'know. pots. electrolytes don't stay in me to begin with #annnnd i called to ask for IV fluids but was denied bc i hadn't (and didn't) spend 12 hours puking #which i mean hey. did i die? no of course not #but i *knew* i could have had those symptoms taken care of quickly #and instead it took me w e e k s to recover. #for a wholly preventable reason that had nothing to do w/ the virus itself #this was almost 7 years ago but i'm still mad :') #doctors love a patient they can fix w/ One Neat Trick huh? #too bad bureaucrats on the phone don't recognize me as one of those

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

“book lovers” don’t love anything about books and it’s weird (or, defending classic novels)

kevin durant is talking about basketball fans but you’ll understand exactly what he means in a much broader sense if you’re on the basketball side of twitter and immediately recognize the mindset he’s describing — that it’s a sentiment that isn’t really about basketball fans at all, but about how we engage with all sorts of things especially in the social media era. but this tweet is just table-setting. the important thing here is that the rest of this post, about many writers and english teachers and book bloggers and overall people who describe themselves as book-lovers on the internet, can be summed up as a caption to this screenshot that just says “same energy”.

same energy. many writers and supposed booklovers on the internet actively dislike and disparage most literature. and actively dislike and disparage the entire literary tradition of the novel, and the novel as a form, and all the tools or frames of engaging with art, and many of the writers or novels known for beautiful writing, and the books that made up the history and development of the medium and inspired so many more of its writers and inspired stylistic shifts, so much fundamental context for any kind of novel… i’m losing my thread here but the point is, many people who describe themselves as book-lovers, many of them authors themselves or english teachers, will proudly and vocally announce their dislike and hatred of so many classic novels. often what seems like almost all of them.

and will not just proudly say so, but won’t shut up about it. and will bring it up constantly among themselves. it’s not a one-off thing either, this comes up con-fucking-stantly in what feels like almost any conversation about literature. often fully unprompted. and will somehow pretend it’s an original insight and that they’re being bold and brave and controversial and starting a conversation for saying it, when it’s all been discourse every two months for as long as an online commons has existed, and when we all know they got that take from endless cycles of online discourse, and when the reason they say it is because they know people will agree with them, because we’ve seen how that plays out a million times already, b e c a u s e so many other people who like to imagine themselves as brave bold original thinkers for having picked up that opinion in a previous online cycle themselves will respond enthusiastically through some kind of collective pretense that it’s a new conversation.

that’s part of it too, everyone involved in that discussion collectively performs some kind of amnesia where this is a take they’re hearing for the very first time, and speaking a truth they’ve always thought but never felt like it was socially acceptable to say. because that way, you get to feel like an original critical thinker without having to do any critical thinking, or to feel like you have a superior understanding of a piece of media without having any media literacy. and you get to feel some self-flattery about your superior insight for having the originality and courage to believe what is now a pretty mainstream view — maybe not mainstream among literati, but absolutely mainstream in the online commons, enough that you know many people agree with you already because you’ve seen the same agreement and mutual self-congratulation play out in a million online cycles already.

(it feels very disingenuous. maybe it’s not consciously and intentionally disingenuous, maybe it’s just a lack of self-awareness, but it’s like.. you know how we could say a great joke at a family function that we once read on the internet, and they wouldn’t know and would just think you’re just that witty for coming up wiht it? like that, except we’re all on the same internet and we’d all read the same joke already but we all have to pretend we’d never heard it before so we don’t break kayfabe, because that way you can convince yourself that nobody else had seen it before and they all thought you were witty. everyone just performs the exact same roles every time discourse about any given book happens every 2-6 months on the internet. next time, can we all at least not pretend like this isn’t the 26th time we’ve seen this conversation and spare all the “FINALLY someone said it!” “someone needed to start this conversation!” schtick? is that too harsh?)

but anyway. the thing is, alright. if you think jane austen is boring. and that the great gatsby is overrated. and also that the bronte sisters’ books were super problematic (bc heathcliff and rochester with mad wife in the attic are both kinda misogynistic). and also that hemingway is boring posturing. and catcher in the rye is overrated (because the abused kid processing his brother’s death is “annoying”). and that shakespeare is too old english style to be worth reading.

and that only pretentious wannabes read tolstoy or dostoevsky. and as for ursula k le guin or isaac asimov or philip k dick, sci-fi is a boring genre. and that nabokov is weird and kinda suss, and kundera seems like he has an ego and philosophizes too much (will claim to have liked one hundred years of solitude tho bc that’s still seen as fashionable). and only pretentious hipsters read david foster wallace or pynchon or franzen. none of them seem to remember that edith wharton exists. some quote george eliot as another white man, or just don’t mention her at all.

and never even mention chinua achebe or toni morrison or james baldwin or arundhati roy. and — this is something i actually saw being said on twitter in conversations between english teachers, authors, and people who call themselves book bloggers — say “kazuo ishiguro is only read by white people who want to feel smart but is actually full of weird stuff” while including a screenshot from a haruki murakami novel. even though ishiguro and murakami write very different books in very different styles, one has lived in the uk his whole life and his best known books are all set in the uk while the other is a japanese pop writer, and they have very little in common aside from a kinda sparse prose style and being ethnically asian…

at that point, do you even like literature?

having a few or couple of those opinions is one thing, people’s tastes vary and i don’t expect everyone to love every supposed literary classic, i’ll admit to not enjoying ‘a separate peace’ at all — but so many writers online proudly announce pretty much all of this. and it’s usually not even with specific justification about the specific author or book, just broad strokes commentary. a lot of it seems to be half-remembered from bored high school years, books where they barely remember what even happened during them but retained their opinions on them with full unwavering confidence, a lot of the comments that sound like someone who’s only vaguely heard of the book and not even to the level of reading the wikipedia page to check, who misunderstood the main themes and seems to not have tried to critically engage with it at all.

honestly, i know most people online’s clever opinions about books are just regurgitated from the internet. i’m pretty convinced this applies to 80% of all mentions of the catcher in the rye online, for example. fuck it, here’s the screenshot of the ishiguro/murakami incident i mentioned a couple paragraphs back:

  Keep reading

#hot damn this was cathartic to read #fwiw op it uh. at laest from my perspective is definitely not just an internet problem; #most fellow english majors i've met seem to be like this #it's like. hh. as someone who loves a lot of Old Books i 1. dread being asked by fellow Book People about what i read #MORE than i dread similar questions from less bookish folks #bc 2. in either case i can't answer honestly w/out feeling alien/unwittingly alienating #but when it's fellow Book People that's complicated by. the fact they know just enough to go 'ew really? #'i hated that book. what do you like about it?' #(or 'holy shit really? isn't that like... super long and stuffy tho?' or w/e) #(but that's less awkward) #and i'll try to explain but then. if i try to prod them on why they *didn't* like it the answer always seems to be #that it was hard. #and i just have to pretend not to notice that? or (worse) reassure them that's not what they meant? #even tho we both know it is? #and like hhh to some extent that's valid right like we don't. have infinite time #i haven't read *anything* for myself in a while bc i have so much work to do that i'm like #afraid. to get emotionally invested in something i can't afford to waste spoons on #and when you're encountering something challenging in a school setting that defensive resistance is #extra. understandable. since. well--for me at least. academia puts me in a constant state of just #resenting all my assignments for demanding more time of me than i have to give. #so when you add that on top of 'this is a story! you're supposed to enjoy it!' i cannnn def get that souring u on it #but also.......... #not to be judgey mcjudgerson but. some of the books i like *aren't* actually difficult. #they're just different. #i can't like... i can't relate to the kind of person for whom the reading experience of. like. #'this author uses words in an unexpected way' is a daunting inferential distance to have to cross #when like. that's the same experience you'll have on frickin *social media* if you step away from a platform #for a few months and then return to it. #how incurious do you have to be for that to dissuade you?? #so. yeah i kind of agree w/ op's suspicion that the real thing going on here is something like.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

differences in degree are not differences in kind. you don't need a special bespoke medical term just to say "very very"

#(this post is about Autism Moms) #(but if you're a chronically ill person who has tried fruitlessly to explain that 'fatigue'=/='tired' you could stand to hear this too. #(and i include past me in that statement.)

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

am hours late but wanted to record my thoughts on new pokemon game announcement so future me can look back and laugh

don't care about megas* but still happy to see them back. please flygon this time?

is this the future or past?? the fact that the trailer's art style leaves even this ambiguous worries me a little. but i've also seen people declare confidently that it's been "confirmed" it takes place in the past. can't tell if this is literally true or if what they actually mean is "from my analysis of the trailer i am certain of this"

lack of gameplay footage also concerning, but probably a good business decision considering how bad gameplay footage made their last few trailers look lmao

ppl seem really disappointed by the "entirely in lumiose city" thing but idg why? that's different enough from any previous game that i'm curious to see it. i guess maybe that sounds more linear and fans want more open world? but the narrow scope sounds cool to me; it implies having an Actual Objective from the start of the game, which is so different from most pokemon games (where you just kinda dick around for 80% of the game and then get told about a world-ending event you need to fix) that i'm here for it

kinda glad they skipped unova since i couldn't envision a unova remake/revisit that would have pleased me. but also... really? all unova gets is a few homages in indigo disk? indigo disk sucked tho

mildly sad no johto bc i love johto but i didn't consciously want johto, you know? like i didn't endorse my wish for johto; i just get happy whenever i see it

i got so genuinely, viscerally irritated when the trailer started with pikachu, i think bc in my mind pikachu represents reassurance/pandering to the babiest of baby fans. does anyone actually need that? is anyone really going to feel lost if pikachu's not there to guide them? (this is not an important insight i just find it funny in retrospect that my first reaction was negative for suck a nitpicky reason)

but also, i saw one guy suggest maybe we're going to switch off playing from a human and pokemon perspective? this would be cool conceptually, but i will like it only if it's nothing like the synchro feature in indigo disk. if we sometimes inhabit a pokemon protagonist with their own agenda that involves communicating with humans, that will be cool; if we as a trainer command a pokemon whom we then go complete missions as (e.g., like, the rocket hideout puzzle in let's go but in first person), no thanks

that's all assuming that the blurb about "a vision of beautiful coexistence between people and pokemon" is a hint/loadbearing detail and not just fluff? i see people hanging a lot of speculations on that line but like... aren't there lines like that in every pokemon game? it could just be fluff

thank god for 2025 release. please be november like main-series games and not, like, january

*1. most of them look dumb to me 2. seems kinda cruel? like forcing your pets into a berserker rage. idk. but most importantly 3. i like that they buffed weak pokemon but what's the point if you're also gonna buff, like, garchomp

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

Congrats?

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

pokemon fans when they have to wait another year for the next big game with no major releases in-between

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

I think the reason a lot of leftists struggle with disability justice is that they haven't moved past the concept that discrimination isn't bad because it's objectively "wrong." yes, sexists are objectively wrong when they try to claim women are dumber than men. yes, antisemites are objectively wrong that jewish people are inherently greedy and run the state. yes, racists are wrong when they try to claim that white people are the superior race. and so on.

but then with disabled people, there are a lot of objective truths to the discrimination we face. people with IDs/LDs do fall behind and struggle with certain concepts. physically disabled people are often weaker and less capable of performing demanding tasks than able bodied people. many of us with mental illnesses are more reckless and less responsible. a lot of us are dependent on others and do not contribute much "worth".

and guess what? disabled people still deserve a place in the world. disabled people still deserve the supports they need. because they are people, and that should be enough to support them and believe they deserve a place at the table.

if your only rebuttal against discrimination is its objective inaccuracies, you are meeting bigots where they are at. you are validating the very concept that if and when people are truly incapable of being equal to the majority, that means they are worth less. this causes some leftists to then try to deny the objective realities of disabled people and/or become ableist themselves.

your rallying behind marginalized groups should start and end with the fact that people are completely worthy of life and equity, because they are fellow human beings and that should, frankly, be enough.

#hm. i guess that makes sense yeah #ideologically wrong rather than factually wrong? #not wrong that disabled people struggle to Contribute to Society in ways/to degrees that meet abled standards; #just wrong that ppl's right to be supported (or just left alone) should rely on how useful those ppl are to you #but...... tbh ableists are still often objectively wrong about disabled ppl's capabilities #which. isn't to say that 'oh well if i really WERE as helpless as some ableds think i am then it'd be fine to discriminate against me' #obviously not #just. underestimating our capabilities is also a common form of ableism #so while i agree that supporting marginalized ppl should start w/ that premise idk if i agree that it should end there #like. i do also think it's important that women aren't dumber than men and white people aren't superior to other races. #and that correcting those misconceptions where you see them is a valuable way to fight bigotry #because. being loudly and proudly wrong about whole groups of ppl can be offensive in and of itself

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

it's weird tho; i keep getting a kind of impostor syndrome when i try to explain/assert that it's particularly pernicious for me bc of my neurotype

i'll want to say 'i can't do it w/out constant resentment over feeling like i'm wasting my life'

and that's true, but also, doesn't everyone hate doing bullshit jobs?

like the only proof i have that this is worse for me than for other people is that my brain refuses to do it competently. but it doesn't always refuse to do it competently! i know this because so far i have not flunked out.

it's just. idk. i find it extremely hard to believe that "i hate it" counts as a good reason not to do a thing? i've trained myself to see my emotional reaction to a thing as mattering only when it affects the outcome--e.g., i won't make myself do a thing if i know from experience that when i try i will probably just stop and melt down halfway through. "i hate it" often means "it's not a sustainable option for me; i can't trust myself to do it"

whereas here--i have almost finished it. am pretty confident i will finish it. it is possible for me.

so i don't feel confident in my right to deplore the effect this environment has had on my mental health/self-conception/&c., since i don't rly know what to call it. like i don't think i can call it an accessibility issue in good faith, since. guidance counselors always exclaim over how good my grades are? i am succeeding by the metrics that matter to them! it doesn't seem right to say "this is an unfair thing to expect of me" when i perform the task w/ above-average proficiency. it's not an environment where i can't succeed; it's just an environment whose definition of success disgusts me. i don't think that counts as a hostile or discriminatory environment, and yet my internal experience of it is "the values they're encouraging are poisonous to autistic and adhd people"

#the art green ponder #scrollege

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

like i've been trying to swallow the idea that in adult life you're just not Supposed to put real effort and passion into things; you're supposed to half-ass as many of them as you can as quickly as possible, and then pretend to your boss that you put your soul into them

and look i'm not saying that's not true; i just mean

1. this expectation is awful for probably-everyone but particularly cruel to autistic/adhd folks like me

and 2. that at this time i do actually have the privilege* to refuse to partake of it!

and i had forgotten this.

*because, while it's probably very silly that i've been operating for the past two years under the assumption that my unwillingness to swallow this bitter pill is the one barrier between me and gainful employment, it is also true that i will not starve if i remain unemployed.

#the art green ponder

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

have been realizing that the work ethic current scrollege encourages is kinda. poisonous to the way my brain works and that that's probably why i've rarely enjoyed intellectual tasks and have felt like garbage about myself as a creative entity ever since i transferred here

and also that this is my penultimate quarter here and that after i graduate in the spring i actually get to leave

as in, am not actually stuck here forever???

that whne i complain about feeling like this place disincentivizes actually engaging w/ the material we study by giving us so many assignments so fast that for someone w/ crap executive function like me, the main intellectual activity involved in school work is "sorting out which readings and assignments i actually Need to do and which ones it would be more prudent to skip for the sake of time." and other people respond like "haha yeah it sucks but you just gotta learn to bullshit! it's an important life skill"

i don't have to take for granted that they're right and i'm being an immature idealist

i can just fucking ignore them!!!!!

#scrollege #ppl often tell me this is How the Real World Works anddddd i mean. i hope they're wrong/overgeneralizing #but even if it's true i am starting to think maybe i can/should just. not. accept it. #bc i cannot make my brain work like this #i used to love school; i have been Miserable here #and for a while i kept telling myself 'oh you just miss being a big fish in a small pond. #'the work is Harder here and you're too afraid of failure to engage with it wholeheartedly' #uh #no! no actually i don't think that's it! #the problem is that there Does. Not. Exist. time to dedicate myself to anything #and yheah hhh i'm just. done. i'm done trying to be ok w/ this it's extremely not ok w/ me

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

a lot of people when they dislike a story w/ queer or disabled characters will explain this to themselves as “oh it reads like a cishet/abled person wrote this”

i am too curmudgeonly myself for this explanation to satisfy. nay—even many stories by queer/disabled authors that are explicitly about queerness/disability come off to me either as lifeless, 101-level moralizing fluff or as tragedy porn

and i finally have a guess why?

i think it’s because wanting to vent your experience=/=conducting an earnest exploration of it

and for a story about marginalized identity to interest me, marginalized reader seeking the intellectual company of similarly-marginalized thinkers, it has to prioritize the second thing

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

"don't derail" girl that post was a bus. it wasn't on rails in the first place

(if you're not specific in the original post about what you mean then it's silly to get angry at people for applying your words beyond the context you had in mind)

#yes it is annoying when a post breaches containment but #idk i just find it so. self-absorbed and oblivious to act like people are being #insensitive. appropriating your struggles/unique insight/whatever #bc they didn't correctly intuit the context behind your ONE-SENTENCE JOKE POST which does not mention that context. #come on.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

again, if you find yourself continuously drawn to internet discourse and engaging with it to the point it's hard think about anything else

read about moral ocd or ask a professional about it. i promise that is not normal or "just being chronically online". there are treatments and experts who can help navigate your obsessive tendencies

it's gonna be alright. having the most correct discourse opinions says nothing about you as a person. you're gonna be ok

#'my ocd said i should never do that bc then i would be in an echo chamber and i should listen to every opinion in the world' omg #i am also doing much better on medication (and have been for like six years) #but yeah i still struggle w/ That Thing a lot and found this description of it rly accurate and funny

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

rite-aids in my area have now instituted a policy where they're not allowed to tell a patient whether a requested med is in stock until after the doctor has sent the prescription to their specific store

this means that if i want them, not just to refill my med, but to tell me whether they have the ability to do that, then i have to call my doctor's office and leave a message with them, wait for them to call me back saying they sent the prescription to the new location, and only then call rite-aid.

(this takes hours, by the way! sometimes you call your doctor's office in the early afternoon and they don't fulfill your request until the next morning)

and then if that store doesn't have it in stock i have to do this whole process over again before i can call the other rite-aid in town.

this is brand new, to be clear. multiple times during the shortage i have done the song and dance op describes above after finding out my normal pharmacy doesn't have my meds in stock. my normal pharmacy's a cvs but i used to call the rite-aids before the other cvs in town because they were consistently more forthcoming w/ this information than anyone else

and now they're. not allowed. to tell me. having perhaps changed this specifically to deter adderall patients from making calls like this? i don't know that, though; i just...... Wonder

cvs still is allowed to tell me, thank god. but cvs themselves has recently changed their phone system such that i can't just call them to ask; i have to go through the phone tree, leave a message, and wait for a tech to call me back

and then tell me it's not in stock

only for an actual pharmacist to call me again the next day to tell me it was in stock the whole time and has already been filled?? implying the original tech who got my message looked up the medication stock, saw it had already been promised to other patients, and didn't bother to. look. at the list of other patients. to see if perhaps the name of the person requesting the fucking med was on that list

but yeah uh--notice how i did actually get my medication.* from my original, intended pharmacy. as though the shortages weren't even a thing...! and yet that did not save me from the pharmacies' incompetence to deal with the shortages!

*not adderall itself, to be fair. i've already switched to methylphenidate. and changed to a less-favored formulation my doctor said might be easier to get. and then an even-less-favored one for the same reason. i am Settling

Got hit by the Adderall shortage lads.

I raised my voice to the pharmacy technician and her boss said, "You have been yelling at her for five minutes now."

I wasn't yelling, and that just made me way angrier. Oh, is it frustrating to have to spend five minutes dealing with an unhelpful person? Is five minutes a lot of precious time that you won't get back? Wow, I'm so sorry, I'll get out of your hair and go spend half an hour calling other pharmacies individually to see if they have any supply, and when it turns out they don't I'll just wait a few days and see if the shipment you're about to get has Adderall in it. And if it doesn't I'll spend another hour or so calling around to figure out what I'm supposed to do.

Gosh, it sure must be frustrating for you to spend five minutes on this, I can't imagine.

You know what pisses me off? I get that it's not your fault that the FDA and DEA have their heads buried up their own asses.

You know what is your company's fault? The fact that you have 12 locations plausibly within driving distance of me and the procedure to see whether an alternate location can fill the prescription is for me to look up each one individually, call them, wait on hold, and then ask each individual pharmacist. There's no way to track the supply, or to find out if it's committed to other patients, and that's nothing to do with the shortage.

After talking to several pharmacists the answer I got several times was, "Yeah they can't tell us what's going to get delivered ahead of time, a lot of times they say they have stock and then when we get the shipment it just randomly doesn't have some of what we ordered."

Like, I'm not just pissed off at the shortage, I'm pissed at this really bizarre inability to track whether anybody has it or doesn't have it. Isn't this a super dangerous drug that the FDA and DEA have to monitor closely? But the warehouse you order from just... doesn't track how much they have or where it goes?

I can't emphasize this enough, I've been told by multiple pharmacies that not only do they not know when they are getting more Adderall, they don't know when they'll know if they are getting more Adderall. They can't give you a no, they can only say, "We're getting a shipment of drugs on Thursday and it might have Adderall in it or it might not, we don't know until then."

And since it's a controlled substance, your doctor has to specify which pharmacy you are getting the drug from, if you find another pharmacy that has it you have to first call your doctor and then have them send a new prescription to that particular pharmacy.

There was a lot of this during COVID also, getting tests and things. Not just a shortage of supplies, a completely decrepit infrastructure which left each individual out in the cold without information about where supplies might be or how you would find them.

Like, why is the procedure for patients, "Just call every pharmacy in the city to see if they have some"? That's not caused by supply shortages.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

I really do think that some trans people see the word “man” in trans man and their brain shuts off. Their brains go “Oh, man. Man privileged and bad. Men evil and oppressive. Therefore you, Man, equal evil and oppressive. I do not consider you a person now.” The usual acknowledgement of identities and nuance and lived experience they willingly apply to every other group flies out the fucking window. They are so blinded by gender essentialism they completely dehumanize trans men. They don’t know what to do with us in their simplistic bullshit radfem gender politics. Saying trans women are women doesn’t make you not a radfem, deconstructing bio/gender essentialism, and the belief that all masculinity and men/men-aligned/masculine people are inherently morally evil/oppressive/corruptive, and that all femininity and women/women-aligned-feminine people are inherently morally good/innocent/oppressed, THAT is what you have to do to not be a radfem, at the very least.

I am sick to death of non-trans men acting as if trans men never interrogate what it means to be a man. It is in the DEFINITION of being a trans man. We have thought about what it means to be a man more than anyone else (interestingly, trans women also have to grapple with manhood and masculinity in being raised with patriarchal expectations and realizing they don’t fit them and don’t identify with manhood). We build ourselves up from nothing (in terms of making the world acknowledge us as men instead of forcibly trapping as us “women”), we have to make our bodies match who we are, we have to figure out and be determined to be boys and men before anyone else knows we are. We are trans BECAUSE we are men. We have to figure out what being trans and what being a man means to us. Our sense of manhood and masculinity will always be rebellious (not by our own choice, but in the way any oppressed group is rebellious in existing). Trans men are inherently an anti-patriarchal concept. Obviously trans men can be misogynistic like anyone else, but the claim that transforming into a man is automatically misogynistic is radfem trash. The idea that identifying as a man suddenly erases experiences of misogyny is so inherently alien to the actual lived experience of all trans men that it can only come from people who do not interact with, care about, or view trans men as worthy of listening to, or even acknowledgment at all, or even just outright hate us for existing. Non trans men seem to legitimately think that putting on a binder will make cis people see us as men. That is not how it works, and the fact that I have to SAY THAT just shows the absolute miserable state of how rampant anti-trans man attitudes are (anti-transmasculinity more generally but specifically with trans men).

Trans men think about manhood a LOT. We think about it a lot, because manhood and masculinity are central to our identity in a way that is different from any other group of people. We are taking previous experiences and concepts, and re-framing and re-creating those concepts with what fits us. We have to completely construct both womanhood and manhood. It is also a different kind of thinking of being a man because we actually are the men in that situation, “the man” goes from being Other to Us. The complete disregard for our personal experiences, and the reliance on non-trans men and their endless parade of disgusting and bigoted options rather than US is very telling. Trans men have a unique perspective: manhood and masculinity, and the patriarchy (they are not the same thing) were likely traumatic for us, but our own masculinity and manhood are freeing and liberatory for us because we are trans, and because we are trans men. Obviously we don’t want to be what oppressed us, so our usual conclusion is to do masculinity and manhood in a different way. And yet is it so common for that to be turned against us, to assume that because we are trans men we must be willingly aligning ourselves with patriarchy without a second thought. But some trans people do not want to let us do a different form of masculinity, because they see all masculinity as inherently the same, equally oppressive, and evil.

We have a deeper understanding of misogyny and constructs of manhood than most people. We have a deeply profound awareness of how gender works, we live with it every day. Our perspective is critical for advancing any sort of gendered liberation of trans people, and to act like it isn’t, and to act as if only people who do not identify with manhood or masculinity have an inherently more valid perspective is gender essentialist nonsense. Gender is fluid and can be interpreted in many ways, the harmful ways of the patriarchy are not inherent in masculinity or femininity. Masculinity is not inherently oppressive, the patriarchy is. Of course people not allowed to be men who insist on our right to be men anyway think about our identities all the time. Far more than the people who make these nonsensical claims in the first place. Quite honestly, the only way to make this better (what we can do, because 1. It’s not our responsibility to make non-trans men not hate us and 2. Non trans men need to do their work in fixing their attitudes about us) is for trans men to use our voices and share our point of view. Anti-trans man and masc bigotry relies on silence and deliberate violent erasure, and it’s harder to do that if we never be quiet. Our identities are not morally wrong. We deserve to take up space.

#lovehate bein purple #it's kind of fascinating how many cis women are certain they understand men better than i do #like it makes sense; i know that's. a whole-ass commonplace #that oppressed people understand their oppressors better than the oppressors understand themselves and all that #but?? don't y'all think that might stop applying when you're talking to someone who's lived as both????