#that boy should have been in therapy from ages 2 on up like.

[lesbiradshaw]

just started thinking about bradley as a teenager struggling with his emotions both pre and post his mother’s death/fall out with maverick but not wanting to reach out for help because a history of mental health problems can get you disqualified from enlisting in the service. happy saturday guys.

#that boy should have been in therapy from ages 2 on up like. #i def hc that carole took him to someone when he was younger but bradley probably stopped going once he was older and was given the choice #but like. idk. picturing carole trying to bring up him going back after she gets sick because she KNOWS he needs to talk to someone #and maverick cant be there all the time. but bradley says no because hes a teenager and hes started thinking about how to make himself + #appealing to the navy and that opens a whole other can of worms where carole sees that but doesnt want to deny him #because she can see hes already having a hard time with things as they are. #mav trying to convince him to go and bradley pointing out it’s hypocritical because maverick doesnt like talking about his feelings either #i just think people ignore his trauma So Much. they only pay attention to the maverick and goose bits #but they fail to consider how even before the maverick stuff happened bradley had a lot to deal with from a very young age #he spent most of his life on his own! he lost the people he loved most OVER and OVER… #the amount of trauma that must have come flooding back when phoenix (&bob but phoenix is clearly bradleys closest friend) had to eject #i think thats why people painting him as angry & agressive because of the scene where he yells at mav never sits right w me #that moment is so incredibly raw for both of them. bradley lashing out when hes just been triggered is not that surprising???? #anyways. #carolcore #bradley rooster bradshaw

[vavandeveresfan]

Holy shit, the New York Times is FINALLY interviewing and listening to detransistioners.

The tide is turning.

Opinion by Pamela Paul

As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.

Feb. 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike some of the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The larger threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

*~*~*~*~*~*

For those who want tor ead more by those fighting the cancellation forquestioning, read:

Graham Lineham, who's been fighting since the beginning and paid the price, but is not seeing things turn around.

The Glinner Update, Grahan Linehan's Substack.

Kellie-Jay Keen @ThePosieParker, who's been physically attacked for organizing events for women demanding women-only spaces.

REDUXX, Feminst news & opinion.

Gays Against Groomers @againstgrmrs, A nonprofit of gay people and others within the community against the sexualization, indoctrination and medicalization of children under the guise of "LGBTQIA+"

#detransitioners #detransition #gender critical #New York Times #gays #lesbians #trans #trans insanity #long post #article #detrans #transgender #post trans #desisted

[oneatlatime]

The Guru

Happy 2024 everyone and welcome to the first time I managed to type 2024 without first typing 2023! Oh and also a write up of The Guru. That too.

Me too Iroh. Me too.

So Zuko is riding high on that post-crisis 'time to get my life together' buzz that, similar to 3 am life plans, should absolutely not be listened to. Wonder how long before he crashes and burns? There's literally 2 episodes left, so I'm guessing one and a half?

Poor Sokka. My boy's got anxiety.

I don't know if it's a monk thing, an airbender thing, an Avatar thing, or an Aang thing, but I envy his complete lack of nerves.

How is Appa ok with them splitting up for a week after JUST getting them back?

I paused in a funny place. Have bonk-eyed Appa.

I love them comparing heights. What do you want to bet that that guy on the right was one of the youngest allowed to go fight, and Sokka made a big deal about how they're almost the same age and surely that means he can go too, right?

A lot of these Southern Water Tribe people have dreads or braids. That's neat.

Bato's arm is still messed up. That's some good continuity.

I've found the source of Katara's cheek bones. I guess Sokka takes after his mum.

Ok I know this is a really emotional moment (and it is! Sokka's spent two seasons earning this!) but my brain fixated on the furs and briefly thought they were sky bison pelts.

"It's been a difficult week for me." This guy thinks the Kyoshi Warriors are there to provide him therapy. Someone please just crown the bear instead.

He just gave away literally every relevant plot point AND outlined how to make sure all these plot points don't succeed. Crown. The. Bear.

Maybe if these generals spent less time playing with their giant model Earth Kingdom and more time general-ing, the war wouldn't suck so much?

Pretty.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the designs, the colour palette, the music, the sound design of this air temple. I love everything about it. If I had the chance to live anywhere in the Avatar universe, it would be here. Even in its ruined state it's such a refreshing contrast to the claustrophobia of Ba Sing Se. I can feel the freshness of the breeze through the screen.

"A spiritual brother of your people" an adult perspective on a near extinct culture! What a resource!

"and a personal friend of Monk Gyatso" an old as balls perspective. He's got to be at least 130.

Anthropology cul de sac time: this guy is so valuable as a resource on the Air Nomads. There's probably parts of Air Nomad culture that Aang can't ever accurately talk about, because he was a kid when he left, and there was almost certainly stuff that the adults kept to themselves, or only shared with the older Air Nomads. This Guru doesn't seem to be an Air Nomad himself, but there's a good chance that there is knowledge that he has, that Aang doesn't. Aang should be nerding out more about this. I'll do the nerding out for him.

Aang just breezes right by that Gyatso name drop like it's nothing. Huh.

Oh hey Toph. I'd forgotten she was in a box. Tweedle dum and Tweedle dumber really are quite the pair. What's their plan for keeping her fed and watered? Actually, these guys apparently don't know that maps exist, so it's probably never occurred to them that humans need sustenance. They'll rock up to the Bei Fong estate with corpse Toph and wonder why they aren't getting the reward money.

Mai gets called out in-universe for shopping at Hot Topic.

Ty Lee's buttering up of Azula is getting less and less subtle as the season progresses. It's a testament to Azula's lack of awareness that she's hasn't noticed that, and that Ty Lee can get away with it.

Azula's right that it's an extraordinary opportunity. The King gave them quite literally every piece of info required to overthrow his kingdom in a 25 second conversation. I can't blame her for taking advantage of such an easy win.

That's a very effective unimpressed face. And a very impressive beard.

It's funny to see a spiritual concept from the real world pop up in a show that includes things like bending and giant fish possession. The mention of Chakras kind of sticks out. They couldn't invent a Avatar universe version?

"Once you begin this process, you cannot stop until all seven are open." Well that doesn't feel like foreshadowing at all.

This episode should be called "Aang's self-care Journey." It's about time the kid had a me day that wasn't avoidance-based.

Fear: Losing Katara - makes sense. Losing control of his powers via fish possession - makes sense. The Fire Lord - makes sense. But the Blue Spirit? He helped. Doesn't make sense.

Guilt: Running away - makes sense, although I thought he'd worked through that with Katara in the storm. Nuking that idiot General's base - makes sense, but boy did he quite literally ask for it.

This guru is saying some wonderfully accurate, and realistic, things. I love that he's not taking the Katara route of denying anything is wrong. He's going for the acknowledge, then heal route. And yes, it's unfair of me to compare the emotional maturity of Katara to a century+ old spiritual expert.

I'm going to ruin the immersion here and point out that Sokka's dad's voice actor voiced a bunch of characters in season 1. He's doing an excellent job, but couldn't they get a unique voice for a character that's so important (albeit offscreen) to Sokka?

That's an incredibly roundabout way of avoiding pointing out that the Southern Water Tribe are active participants in a bloody war. Sure, we can show multiple characters with visible scarring from horrific burns, but heaven forbid we imply that the Southern Water Tribe sinks ships. The parameters for what is and isn't appropriate on this show sometimes make no sense.

"Aren't you listening? I said the rest of you men get ready for battle." He hasn't seen his boy in two years, but fifteen minutes in his company and he knows exactly what needs to be said and how. That's some top tier parenting. Dad of the year. Dad of the century. Only decent Dad in this show that isn't technically an uncle.

"Follow your passion Zuko, and life will reward you." Great advice for your eight year old audience. Also a great way to end up unemployed.

Positive Sokka creeped me out a few episodes ago. Now positive Zuko is freaking me out too.

Pretty.

Back to Chakras! Shame: Burning Katara - makes sense. But that's it? To have the inner peace of mind of a twelve year old who's somehow only ever done one thing that he's ashamed of.

Is there anyone in the earth kingdom who isn't stupid? Once again wondering at the network's standards. Visible burn injuries are fine, but Mai can't say 'Shut up." It's got to be Shush up. Although I do seem to recall of brief time in the early 2000s when Shut Up was treated as a curse on par with Shit or Fuck. Maybe that was just at my school.

Chakras again! Even for a show that often has an A, B, and C plot, this narrative is ping ponging around a bit much.

Grief: nothing major, just a whole nation. Makes a horrific amount of sense. but I don't buy that he can get over grieving the whole world as he knew it by thinking about his crush. That's way too high a pedestal for Katara to be placed on.

Lies: Not accepting he's the Avatar. Interesting that not accepting that he's the Avatar and not accepting that he's a firebender are two different problems.

I see you reusing the opening credits footage. Your blue filters can't fool me.

PRETTY

Illusion: So we're relearning what we learned in The Swamp. Aang's probably the person currently alive least likely to believe in the rigid separation of the nations anyway. This doesn't feel like an illusion he's subject to?

The way this episode dances between its narrative threads is so great. It's all woven in so beautifully. And this makes perfect sense! Toph's spent her life secretly doing things excellently that everyone says are completely beyond her capabilities. Life has taught her that the statement "you are not able to" doesn't apply. Of course immutable laws of bending physics are treated with the same respect as an adult telling the champion of the Earth Rumble that she's can't earthbend beyond breathing exercises. If you told her that humans can't fly, she'd figure out how within the week.

Plot collision incoming.

Interesting that Katara initially recognises Zuko by his voice rather than his scar.

I'm pretty sure that Zuko and Iroh don't know about the whole brainwashing thing, but wouldn't it be hilarious if Zuko introduced himself to Katara as Joo Dee, and his uncle Joo Dee, welcome to the Jasmine Dragon, can I take your order? That would throw Katara into one hell of a moral quandary.

Katara being framed as the solution for Chakra number four comes back to bite Aang, as she's the problem in Chakra number seven. I knew that pedestal was too high.

I've changed my mind. This episode should actually be called "Half a dozen reasons why everyone should just learn to keep their goddamn mouths shut already."

So is anyone going to let Zuko and Iroh know that they're now in immediate danger and need to leave, like, yesterday?

I think the Guru is going for the whole 'if you love them, let them go, and they'll come back to you' thing. Don't cling, in other words. But for the sake of the plot he's suddenly lost his ability to explain Chakras in a way that makes them seem like the logical thing to do. The only clunky bit of this episode so far.

May I introduce you to our Lord and Saviour Toph?

"I am the greatest earthbender in the world." Yes. Yep. Yeah. That's now a quantifiable fact, and it's correct. Look on ye mighty and despair. She's even got Bumi beat.

Earth Tongue Running is a bit wonky looking but it covers a crazy amount of distance.

What's the range on Toph's earth sense? Can she sense what direction Ba Sing Se is?

I hope those two idiots' horse bird is ok.

"You don't know how much this means to me dad." He does. Very much so.

Every word out of this guy's mouth is precision engineered to make Sokka feel like a million bucks and I for one think it's about time someone built him up. Also, seeing this makes me realise how few good parents there are in this show. It's a trope of kids' adventure shows that the parents fundamentally can't be there, but I also think it's a commentary on yet another thing that this war has messed up.

Hey look! Being a man is knowing where you're needed the most, and right now that's in Ba Sing Se, protecting your sister! I love narratives that tie their themes up with a pretty bow on top.

This is Azula laying a trap, right? Which means that Katara squealed to someone about the exact location of Iroh and Zuko's tea shop. Don't like the implications of that.

Photos taken seconds before disaster.

Final Thoughts

This episode was a lot! I mean that in a good way! But I felt a bit like the Maxell Blown Away Guy, the way I kept getting assaulted by yet another plot thread. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a criticism. I think the switching between plot threads and the amount of info in this episode worked 99% of the time. But I'm kind of in awe at the balancing act the writers pulled off and I'm sort of sitting here blinking a bit trying to fit all this stuff in my head. I'm probably going to forget half the stuff I wanted to talk about in this write up, so here goes nothing.

Given the Azula reveal in at the end of last episode, I thought that this would be the episode where the shit hits the fan. I was wrong. I'm glad I was wrong. An episode of set up is required and is nice breathing room, even an episode as busy as this. And I got to leave Ba Sing Se! But this does mean that next episode is going to be calamity after calamity.

Aang and his Chakras: I'm fascinated by this guru. I hope he comes back. That brings the total number of people who were alive before the war started up to three: Aang, Bumi, Guru Patik.

I'm impressed that the run through of the Chakras rarely felt like an info dump. The onion and banana juice thing didn't work for me, but I'm sure it worked for people in the target age bracket. Kids love burp jokes.

So many shows sprinkle in tragic backstories for flavour and then never have them influence the character in the present. It was a nice contrast to see a show take a whole episode to tell Aang "yeah all that sucked. It's ok to feel down about it. Here's how you move forward."

Sokka and his dad: Love it. Love it so much. I love seeing Sokka built up, and he definitely deserves it, but I wonder if this is the reward for a character arc well done, or the set up for a character arc that's about to start? Is his dad's praise his prize for crossing the finish line, or is it so he's built up with farther to fall?

I loved seeing more of the Southern Water Tribe. I loved the fashion. There's a lot of variety in accessories and variations on a few basic elements like those knee guard things. I loved their hairstyles. I loved how cozy and communal that command tent felt. I loved their ships. I wonder how often these guys work out, that they can make loading ramps that are presumably deployed and stashed out of the way frequently, out of whole logs rather than planks. I have a bone to pick with the child-friendly sea mine. But it provides a good set up for a dad joke, so I'll let it slide.

Zuko and Iroh: Of course the one time Zuko is allowed to be in a good place, it's so that he and Iroh both have farther to fall when the inevitable happens. Poor guy just can't catch a break. I'd be mad at Azula for the party crashing that I'm assuming she'll do next episode, but it's been established that Zuko has all nice things taken away from him as soon as he gets them, and I can't blame Azula for being a tool of the universe.

Azula & Long Feng: Azula's acting in Long Feng's prison cell was miles ahead of what Long Feng was doing in front of the Earth King, so I'm wondering if Long Feng has bitten off more than he can chew. Also: conspiring with the enemy to bring down your own city just so you can reinstall yourself as the power behind the throne that will presumably cease to exist as soon as the Fire Nation takes control? That is both treasonous beyond description and an incredible case of shooting yourself in the foot. What's Long Feng's plan here?

Toph and the Dunderheads: it says something about the consistency of Toph's characterisation from her introduction onwards that she breaks the universe this episode and my reaction was "that's neat." It's obviously a huge moment, but of course Toph can do that. Toph can do anything. More importantly, Toph knows that Toph can do anything, so Toph routinely does do anything, especially things she shouldn't be able to do. If you had asked me a few episodes back which character would be most likely to fundamentally redefine bending, I would have said Toph, since she's already fundamentally redefined bending with her earth sense sonar vision.

Also Toph just breaks stuff. Things that come into contact with her cease to function as intended and instead function as Toph requires. Look at the two idiots: both successful business owners, one also a successful hoodwinker of the richest family around. But they come into contact with Toph and their brains take an extended vacation.

Katara & the Generals: this plot was more like an extension of Azula's plot than its own standalone thing. You can't blame her for spilling the news about Zuko and Iroh to someone she honestly thought was Suki. Not much else to say about it, although it's cute that she asks for a table for two at the tea shop. Momo gets a chair!

I like that there's a theme this episode of things going wrong despite the best intentions. No one's acting maliciously here apart from the Antagonists. The Earth King is having an honest chat with people he thought were friends. Sokka vouched for people he honestly thought were the Kyoshi Warriors. Katara shares information about a presumed threat with people she honestly thought were her allies. You can quibble with the wisdom of some of these decisions, but there were all done with good intentions. The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry and all that. It brings to mind that Star Trek quote about how you can do everything right and still lose. And this set up is going to hit harder when whatever goes wrong next episode happens. And something will go wrong. A few months ago I figured that the Season 2 finale would be a triumph, but all signs are pointing towards a tragedy instead.

This episode was visually stunning, the soundtrack in the Air Temple sections especially was very evocative, and I applaud the minds that could juggle that many plot threads at once without dropping any. This one is definitely going on my rewatch list.

#atla #avatar: the last airbender #avatar the last airbender #the guru

[hairstevington]

Stranger Therapy

Eddie Munson x Steve Harrington

Summary: Based on this text post, Steve and Eddie match on Tinder and decide to go to couple's counseling on a first date to see how long it takes the therapist (Murray) to figure them out. Link to Ao3

Word Count: 3K, check out part 2 part 3 part 4 and epilogue!

Warnings: Nothing too serious, Steve/Eddie went to high school together but don't know each other, modern day AU, aged up, brief Robin cameo, Matchmaker Murray, and my fav tag of all - gay scheming!

A/N: I'm a counselor in training currently but I don't specialize in couple's counseling so this may or may not be accurate? Idk man it's just fun and silly I love our stupid boys sm. Original post by @hxneyfarms

It’s a match!

“Robin, it worked!” Steve shouted from the couch. She ran from the kitchen and joined him, peering over to stare at his screen.

“I told you it would! It’s funny!” she insisted. Steve rolled his eyes and anxiously pulled up the profile of his new match. 

“Oh, shit,” Steve said. “I remember swiping right on this guy. Didn’t think I had a shot.” He looked through the pictures. They were all candids, slightly blurry, or shots of him with his friends, but due to his distinguished look it was easy to pick him out even in a crowd. 

“Show me his bio,” Robin ordered. Steve closed out the pictures and scrolled until the bio was in full view.

Eddie, 25. Shit at bios.

“Well that’s kind of boring,” Steve said. 

“Yeah. You think he’s a bot?” Robin asked.

 “Or a catfish, maybe,” Steve mused. “Either way, I still think I should take your joke down. I don’t talk like that in real life, and people might get confused.”

Robin had convinced him earlier to change his bio and replace it with - let’s go to couple’s counseling and see how long it takes the therapist to realize we don’t know each other. Steve had been a little tipsy when he agreed, and he assumed nothing would come of it. But then, Eddie matched with him. 

“You’re thinking way too hard about this, Dingus,” Robin replied. “People write weird shit in their Tinder bios all the time.” 

“Eddie didn’t,” Steve countered. 

“Yeah, but look at him,” Robin responded. “He’s distinctive. It’s attention-grabbing in itself.”

“And I’m not?” Steve asked. Robin chuckled.

“You’re the kind of pretty where if you don’t have something witty in the bio, people will think you’re just some ignorant surface-level airhead who’s never worked a day in his life, and that’s not cute.”

“Okay, ouch,” Steve said. 

“It’s a compliment!” she insisted. “Like, you need to show that you’re witty and funny and able to poke fun at yourself, otherwise you’re going to attract the wrong kind of people.”

“And this guy’s the right kind, huh?” Steve opened one of the pictures back up - one where Eddie was passed out on the couch with a beer still in his hand. As they looked at the screen, a notification popped up. Eddie sent you a message.

“Let’s find out,” Robin said. 

-

Eddie: If your bio is serious, I’m in

Steve: Wait, really?

Eddie: Yeah xD sounds fun

Eddie: You got a therapist in mind?

Steve: Honestly didn’t think I’d get this far

Eddie: Boo. 

Eddie: You’re lucky I know just the guy

Steve: Okay…

Steve: So how do we do this?

Eddie: Dude, it was YOUR idea

Steve: Ok but I’ve never done it before!

Eddie: Steve! I’m your first? <3

Steve: Yeah, yeah. I’ve never pranked a therapist before. 

Eddie: I hope you’re either rich or have really good insurance. Otherwise this is gonna be an expensive first date.

Steve: I got it covered. 

Eddie: I figured you did. I’ll call the guy in the morning and get back to you with the appointment time. 

Steve: Okay. How’s your night going by the way?

Eddie: Nope!

Eddie: That’s not part of the deal, Steve. We go into this blind or not at all.

Steve: This is insane.

Eddie: Once again, your idea. I’m excited. Are you excited?

Steve: Thrilled.

Steve: I’m still concerned about how you know the perfect guy for this.

Eddie: 😛

Eddie: Don’t worry about it.

-

“I don’t even think he’s serious,” Steve said after he recounted the entire interaction to Robin.

“I don’t know, Steve. Sounds serious to me.” 

“What if he’s like - not right in the head?” Steve wondered, reading the interaction over and over again. “Like, who is this therapist and why does he know him? Is he actually going to make an appointment? What if this whole thing crashes and burns?”

“I honestly think he plans on it crashing and burning,” Robin replied. “And then after, the both of you either hit it off and laugh about it forever, or you have an amazing failed date story to tell your friends until the end of time.”

“That’s…actually genius.” 

“I know.” 

Steve read the messages one last time, focusing on the bits where Eddie was mildly flirtatious. Steve! I’m your first? He could tell if Eddie was being condescending, or what vibe he was going to bring to this absolute insane first date. But, as Robin said, it would be a story no matter what. 

He tried to focus on that and not the anxiety that started brewing in his veins.

-

The appointment was set for two weeks later. Eddie still refused to talk to Steve other than for details on where to go and at what time, so for the whole fourteen days, Steve assumed he was being pranked right back. Eddie was messing with him, or he’d cancel, or Dr. Bauman didn’t actually exist, or he’d be murdered, or, or, or -

None of that happened. Instead, on a Tuesday afternoon, Steve pulled up to an office building about fifteen minutes from his apartment. He’d passed by it several times and never once wondered what went on inside. 

Apparently, really weird first dates.

They had decided to meet up in the parking lot and walk in together. The whole thing was crazy, but having one of them pick the other up so they could drive in together was way over what was needed to commit to the bit. 

Steve got there first. They needed to be fifteen minutes early to fill out paperwork. It was twenty minutes prior to their appointment time. 

This was weird. It felt a lot different than all the times he’d met someone for coffee. In another world, that’s how he and Eddie would have met. But no. He had to agree to this stupid thing, and now he was too far into it to back out. Jesus Christ. 

Eddie’s car pulled in a few spaces down. Steve knew it was him from the hair alone - unmistakable. He got out of his car and walked towards his date, his palms sweaty. Eddie got out of his car a moment later, eyeing Steve as he approached him and smirking. 

“What gave me away?” Eddie asked. 

“You think I wouldn’t recognize my boyfriend?” Steve snapped back, pleased at the way he was able to take Eddie off guard. 

“Touche. Well, come on, then. Let’s do this.” 

-

Before they knew it, they were sitting in a cramped waiting room, alone, filling out paperwork. It consisted of insurance information first, followed by names and some quick background questions about the “couple.” Steve began filling it out, thankful that he was still on his dad’s fancy rich-person insurance. It covered basically everything, even fucked-up couples fraud with Dr. Bauman.

“Are you not worried I’m gonna, like, steal your information or something?” Eddie asked as Steve wrote down his policy number.

“I mean…should I be?” Steve responded. 

“No,” Eddie answered with a shrug. “I gotta say, though, you’re way more trusting than I am. It’s ballsy. I like it.” 

“Uhh…” Steve was trying to concentrate on the paperwork, but the compliment was throwing him off. “Thank you, I think.” He continued filling out the paperwork.

“You’re from Hawkins?” he asked. Steve nodded, absentmindedly. “I’m from Hawkins.” This caught Steve’s attention. 

“No shit.” 

“Yeah, seriously.”

“Small world,” Steve replied before turning his attention back to the form.

“You have a cute middle name,” Eddie teased. 

“Shut up,” Steve responded. He wanted to find Eddie’s pestering annoying, but instead he found himself smirking, even giggling a little bit. This whole thing was so ridiculous. He shoved the clipboard onto Eddie’s lap. “Your turn, lover.”

“Euch,” Eddie groaned. “That is not one of our pet names, no way.” 

“Noted,” Steve chuckled. He was…kind of enjoying this way more than he expected, as weird as it was. He’d grown accustomed to a lot of even stranger things in his life, so this didn’t feel as shocking as he’d initially thought. 

“Don’t look,” Eddie said as he covered the paper.

“What? Why not?” Steve asked, confused. 

“Because not all of us are as blindly trusting, Steven,” Eddie responded. Steve shook his head and looked away. 

“Good thing we’re in therapy to work that shit out, Edward Munson.”

“You looked!” Eddie exclaimed. 

“It was right in front of me!” Steve pointed out. 

“Fair enough,” Eddie sighed. “Okay, now we gotta put down a reason for doing this.”

-

Fast forward ten minutes, Eddie and Steve were seated next to each other on a relatively small but cozy burnt orange couch. The color was ugly, but the seats were comfortable. Steve noticed the cushions had a natural dip that kept inching him closer to the person sitting on the opposite side. He figured this was certainly intentional. 

The doctor sat in front of them, reviewing the papers the pair had just filled out.

“Hello, my name is Dr. Bauman, and one day I may let you call me Murray,” he began, his eyes fixed on the papers in front of him. “I see here on your sheet that you’ve been feeling distant from each other, and that you’re looking to feel more connected, right? Can you tell me more about that?”

“We’re just launching right into it, huh?” Eddie asked. 

“Well, we are on a time crunch here. Your decision how you spend it,” Dr. Bauman answered. 

The man was immediately intimidating.

“Ooookay,” Steve said, taking a deep breath. “Yeah, I guess it just feels like - like he and I don’t even know each other anymore.” Eddie stifled a laugh, covering his mouth with his hand to make it seem like he was maybe getting emotional or perhaps trying not to sneeze. 

“I see,” Dr. Bauman said, eyeing them both suspiciously. “Let’s begin with how you two met and we’ll go from there, okay?”

“We were high school sweethearts,” Eddie replied with a grin.

“Wow,” Dr. Bauman commented. “Well, it’s common for a lot of development to happen from then to now. How did you two get together?” Eddie looked to Steve, as if to say, you’re up.

“It just kinda…happened, I guess,” Steve began. “We were assigned as partners for a project and really clicked.”

“Yeah, and then we snuck around for a while. Sneaking kisses in janitor's closets and empty classrooms, you know the drill.” Steve tried not to blush at the thought of sneaking around with high school Eddie. If they were both from Hawkins, did they actually go to high school together?

“Snuck around for the thrill?” Dr. Bauman asked.

“No,” Steve responded. “I wasn’t out yet.” Eddie looked at him curiously, as if he wasn’t expecting Steve to say something so serious. He wondered if it was actually true. 

“Well, that and -” Eddie added. “- he was a popular jock and I was kind of a freak.” This time, Steve looked at Eddie curiously. Steve was a popular jock. Eddie could have assumed that, or made a lucky guess, but something told him that wasn’t the case. 

Eddie Munson. Munson. 

Oh.

Oh!

It took Steve a minute to recover from that information. They did in fact go to school together, they just had never interacted. Eddie obviously remembered, and he obviously knew that Steve didn’t. So what was the goal here? Was Steve being punked or something just so Eddie could get free therapy?

“Steve, you look a little pale there,” Dr. Bauman noticed. “Did that trigger something?”

“Yeah -” Steve croaked, now unable to look at Eddie. If he had, he would have noticed Eddie didn’t look as smug as Steve assumed he was. “Yeah, I just don’t think about high school that much anymore.”

“Why not?” the doctor asked. 

“Because, I - I’ve changed so much since then. I’m not that guy anymore, and I don’t want to be that guy.”

“Ah, I see,” he hummed. “So, Eddie fell for someone who no longer exists. I think I’m understanding the problem here. Eddie, do you feel that you’ve changed?”

Damn. This guy’s kinda good.

“Uhhh -” Eddie began. Neither of them expected this to get so serious so quickly. It didn’t even feel like it was about their imagined relationship anymore. “N-no, I don’t think I have.”

“And Steve, do you think Eddie has changed?”

Steve thought about the limited memories he had of Eddie in high school. Cocky, slightly unhinged, just as he was now. But there was something different, he just couldn’t really pinpoint what. Maybe if he’d talked to Eddie for longer than like ten minutes total in his life, he’d have a better idea. 

Then, he realized the point of this wasn’t to be serious. It was to make shit up. Steve pivoted back to the original plan. 

“Yeah, I mean -” He shifted in his seat, finding himself now thigh to thigh with Eddie, despite not meaning to be. “He’s, uh - it just feels like we don’t have anything in common anymore?” It was something he’d heard lots of couples say.

“Do you want to make this work?” Dr. Bauman asked. 

“Why else would we be here?” Eddie answered. Dr. Bauman narrowed his eyes. 

“You tell me.”

Eddie and Steve were kind of not good at this. Their story was based in truth and not very exciting. They both seemed to realize this at the same time.

“Steve slept with the dogwalker,” Eddie proclaimed. Steve scoffed, half-amused, half-offended. 

“Yeah, well you sold drugs to my mom!” he shot back. The two guys looked at each other, pretending to look angry while simultaneously wanting to laugh. 

“Woooah, there,” Dr. Bauman responded. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Do we want to begin with Steve’s infidelity or Eddie’s illegal activity?”

“That’s not gonna, like, go on record or anything, right?” Steve asked, suddenly anxious. “Like, the cops aren’t gonna show up at Eddie’s door?”

“Our door, babe,” Eddie clarified, not the least bit nervous. 

“Depends on how long ago this happened, I suppose,” Dr. Bauman answered.

“Long time ago,” Eddie said. 

“Are you still currently dealing?”

“No, I don’t even do drugs anymore. Well, like, except pot - but that’s legal now so it doesn’t really count, I think.”

“Dude,” Steve whispered. 

“You brought it up,” Eddie replied just as softly. 

“Right,” Dr. Bauman responded, taking it all in. “No report needed, then. Let’s move onto the dogwalker.” 

They continued to add to their lore as the appointment went on. At one point, Eddie even faked tears. His acting was…decent enough to avoid suspicion, thankfully. When the clock hit 1:45, their time was up, and they’d successfully managed to fool Dr. Bauman. Mission accomplished, date over. Right?

“Well, thank you so much, Dr. Bauman,” Eddie said. “I think you’ve really helped us out today.”

“Yeah, seriously,” Steve said, smiling. “We feel so much better.”

“Now hold on a minute,” Dr. Bauman said with his hands up. “There’s still a lot of work to be done, in my professional opinion.”

“There is?” Eddie asked, confused. 

“Oh, definitely. Most couples go to a minimum of four sessions, and that’s still a low average. Plus, this was only intake. I mean, unless you guys weren’t happy with the counseling I gave you today…”

It felt like a challenge, and Eddie loved challenges. Meanwhile, Steve was too awkward to come clean or tell the doctor they weren’t interested. 

They made another appointment.

-

“Well, that went pretty well, I think,” Eddie said as they left the building. 

“You knew me already?” Steve asked once they were a safe enough distance from the office and Dr. Bauman. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I just knew your name and face, man. And, like, your vibe,” Eddie answered. “Back in high school, anyway.” 

“You should have told me,” Steve said. 

“You should have remembered,” Eddie shot back. “Whatever, it was fun. Right?”

“Eddie, I have no idea what that was,” Steve replied. “We have to cancel that appointment.”

“Why? You don’t want to see me again?” Eddie grinned. Steve rolled his eyes.

“No, I - I mean, I don’t want to waste his time. That spot should go to other couples who need it. Meanwhile, we could go get coffee like normal adults.” 

“I dunno,” Eddie said, kicking a pebble in the road as they walked. “I kinda liked it. You can’t tell me you didn’t.”

It was true. Steve couldn’t say that he didn’t.

“Doesn’t matter.” Steve unlocked his car and made his way to the door. “We’re canceling.”

“He’s the one that wanted to see us again, Steve,” Eddie reminded him. 

“Yeah, because he thought we were an actual couple.” Steve was getting frustrated at Eddie’s antics, and the way he refused to back down. “I don’t know if this is gonna work, man. This has been, uh - well, it’s been weird, but I think -”

“We have to go, otherwise you’ll be charged a cancellation fee,” Eddie blurted out. It was a lie, a bold-faced lie, and yet -

“So, I’ll pay the fee. Can’t be more than the cost of a full session,” Steve figured. 

“Ugh!” Eddie groaned in frustration. “Okay, fine. Look - I’m annoying as hell, I’m a mess, I’m broke, and I could never afford someone like Dr. Bauman. I don’t know about you, but some of the things he said actually made me think and I kind of want to ask him about, like, real shit.” 

Steve stared at him blankly for a minute. 

“You - you want me to keep going to fake couple’s counseling with you so you can get actual therapy?” Steve asked, stunned. 

“I mean, you could work your shit out, too,” Eddie suggested.

“What shit? I don’t have shit,” Steve insisted. 

“Of course you do! Everyone does!” Eddie yelled. 

“You’re insane,” Steve muttered. The thing was, he wasn’t saying it out of anger. He was saying it in understanding. 

Because the thing was, Eddie had a point. Dr. Bauman was good at what he did, and Steve knew he’d never sign up for individual counseling. He already had the appointment. Eddie smirked. 

“You’re with me, aren’t you?”

Fuck.

“Fine,” Steve agreed. 

-

Notes from Dr. Bauman - 3/18

Eddie and Steve

Together since high school

Feelings of disconnect

Steve/dogwalker

Eddie/mom/drugs

Clearly lying

Clients are faking their relationship for me, for some reason. Will continue to work with them to figure out why. 

They aren’t dating…but they should be

(next chapter)

------------------------------------

@ofherscarlettwitchways @livvyshmiv @paintballkid711 @abraca-fxckyou @allbimyself26 @jellybabiesforall @allbymyselfexceptformycactus @justaloadofgarbage-blog @alliemunsonsstuff @undreamingscatworld @thefruityfours @hobbitnarwhal @calivanus @wreckmyplans-thatsmyman @antheia @goodolefashionedloverboi @lillemilly @missmagillicuddy @steviesbicrisis @gamerdano @menamesniall @eyeslikewildflowers111 @callmesirkay @stringischeese @eds-trashmouth @mnl-enuh @redfreckledwolf @itsanarrum @soulsofstarsliveinyourveins @gregre369 @stevesbipanic @momotonescreaming @aryakanojiaa @wrenisflying @comicmadlover @lilacrobin @itch-my-b0nez @anonymousbandgirl @disastardly @Dang_Dirty_Demons @daisyellsong @val-from-lawrence @starryeyedpoet17 @taikawaiteatea @samthemissfit @chaoticvictorianspirit @elizbaehth @despoenaandpyromania @bagofgreentea

#steddie #this is honestly so wild haha #nobody do this irl #but it's fun to read and write about! #steve harrington x eddie munson #eddie munson x steve harrington #stranger things fanfiction #steddie fanfic #stranger things au #writing #st fanfic

[drolly-rolly]

Ghost Soap: Berlin, a club, a dark room

(CW: age gap, unrequited SoapGaz, kink/BDSM, experience gap, eventual Ghoap is 100% consensual BUT definitely could be considered rushed/too fast by the fault of either/both of these dumb, horny men) Gaz and Soap are traveling during a uni holiday break, bumping through the continent before they have to go back and properly crack down: Kyle’s has a real shot at the Olympic team and Soap’s crammed his upcoming term with more courses than anyone should in an effort to save the dwindling funds from his scholarship. The only reason Soap’s along at all is Kyle’s charity and he tries not to think too much about how much, and exactly why, he’s going to miss him. They’re in Berlin when they meet up with this goth chick that Soap is desperately trying to impress. She goes along with it and invites them both to the club: It's overwhelming in the way that they are for first timers, which both of them absolutely are. Soap definitely lied about how experienced he was (or deliberately left out how green he is) to impress this girl so naturally the situation once they’re inside goes all tits up in the wrong way. The girl ends up making out with Gaz in the hallway instead of Soap and he can’t blame her, look at the guy. Or maybe she was hoping she’d get both of them, way she’s looking at him, but that’s definitely too close to those things Soap doesn’t want to think concerning Gaz so he wishes them well, despite the hollow gnawing in his chest and wanders.

He ends up talking to a woman who’s a little older, beautiful and attractive but she laughs and just pats him on the head when he thinks that CBT means Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, he took Intro Psych his first year, and suggests he find someone more his speed to play with. 

“Play? I’m not a kid.” He says. He’s been with older women and they’ve liked him and there’s definitely something about this one that he likes.

“Not that kind of play.” She just smiles at him with perfectly painted lips. Then asks him if she can help him find his friends, but he’s a stubborn little idiot with bruised pride so of course he tells her it's fine.

After that he just wants a place to curl up and be the fuck alone and have his sad, confused boy- man, adult man, feelings. But he’s sort of lost and doesn’t know where he’s supposed to go and definitely doesn’t speak enough German to really properly navigate this place that is so much bigger than it looked from the outside.. Naturally ends up where he shouldn’t be.

Enter Ghost, full gear. Mask, of course. Not currently with anyone per se but assisting another pair. Hears Soap before he sees him. Rolls his eyes, figures he should probably get this stupid kid out of here. Soap’s not expecting the massive man in the skull mask and the whole… outfit… to speak english. Isn’t expecting his knees to turn into pudding when he hears the voice. “I don’t think you’re supposed to be back here, sweetheart.” He stalks forward and Soap can’t look away. “Why not?” Soap says. It's stupid. But right now he’d do anything to keep those dark, almost black eyes on him. Keep him saying ‘sweetheart’ instead of ‘kid’. “Door wasn’t locked.”

“I think you know why.”  Ghost says. “If I don’t…Would you teach me?””

And the way he bats his eyelashes has to be intentional, has to know what he’s doing. Testing Ghost’s self control. “You definitely don’t know what you’re asking for.”

(Part 1, already working on Part 2!) Special kudos to @leathfaic for our silly chit chats that lead to this.

#Ghoap #soapghost #ghostsoap

[pure-oddity]

I TOUCHED ON THIS IN THE TAGS OF LAST POST BUT I WANNA GO MORE IN DEPTH

Butcher/slasher au! Part 2. It's loooong I have ideas

Pt.1 Part.3

Trigger warning: suicidal ideation(brief but there) and possible depression

Dude legitimately thought retirement was like

A pipe dream. He fully expected to die on a mission one day. Hes had his will written and notarized for ages now. A lot of its donated, no family to give anything to really (he's made additions so that the 141 get things from him, sentimental bastard).

So when he's discharged, he's like a fish out of water. No plans for the future, no social network, no support system aside from the 141 who are busy and also not going through this. Hell dude doesn't even have a liscense cause he's legally dead. Laswell made him an alias that he's adopted, so he can get these things but, why? What's he gonna do with that?

Treats it like leave at first, does what he normally does. Trains, goes on nightly jogs, maybe pays for someone's time(lowkey thinking that he'll get a call and this will all have been a bad dream).

But then a week becomes two, then three, then it's a month, 2 months - and he still has no idea what to do. Like he's stuck like that, can't go back and can't go forward. Contemplates ending it himself, had given his life and name to the armed forces - doesn't know who he is without it.

It's Price who helps snap him out of it. One of the very few people he trusts and will follow into hell. He helps reframe Simon's thinking. Like yes its new and scary but also a once in a lifetime kind of opportunity?? Most will die in the force, Price worries endlessly about the looming threat of saying goodbye to any of the 141 - but simon got out. His ghost is out and can stay out. He knows if he pulls some strings he can get the man back in (unafraid to pull some less than legal shit) but he doesn't want to. In his head he can protect 1 of his boys, so you bet he's gonna.

So instead of like, coming back - why not make the most of it? Be Simon Riley again, make some friends, get in a relationship, adopt a dog, build a house, start a buisness, anything! The possibilities are endless and Price tells Simon that he'd be a fool not to jump at this opportunity.

And while he doesn't IMMEDIATELY jump into something, Simon warms up to the idea. He sits and considers, writes things down and then - finally- makes a plan.

He goes with his own butcher shop, something familiar, knows what to do how to do it. Spends a little time in college learning buisness shit (mainly online but he attended a course in person like once-didnt haaaaate it, didn't love it tho)

And from there he kinda just, starts ticking boxes. He's got the buisness, starts looking into land and is trying to see if he should hire a contractor or just build his house with his own hands -mfer might even look into architecture courses.

Now it's the last 3 he's nervous about, friend, relationship and dog. All are commitments that involve another creature, and it's got him lowkey stressed.

He's fairly sure he can train a dog, confident he can learn. But make a friend??? With a civilian??? Who likely shares non of his life experiences?? Dude wonders if there's like an ex vet convention or some shit cause woof.

And let's not get on the topic of romance. Dudes out of his depth. But he told his Captain he'd try. So he gets back into therapy (nervous as fuck) and slowly works himself up into trying.

#simon ghost riley #simon riley au #simon riley headcanons #butcher/slasher au #odd blurbs

[descendantofthesparrow]

What’s your timeline for the movies?

I’m trying to write something of my own but I can’t figure the timeline out

hooooooooooooooo boy yeah i had a whole mental breakdown over this lol, i made my own for my rewrite fic because canon makes no sense. so the only CONFIRMED timeline is the time between d1 and d2, six months 'six months ago i was stealing candy from babies-Mal during the 'talk scene' between the c4. D3 is implied to be about two weeks? so vk day-aka the start-one week later-vk pick up day, hades attacks, Audrey steals the scepter-the next day, Jnaes birthday, the meeting, the whole adventure, and then a week later is the engagement party/the end of the movie.

but blah blah blah-so my timeline was, starts in January, though it should at the very least start in October considering a side book that mentions the coronation/the maleficent incident happening on October 18th, BUT-with d2 being six months later, and another side book says cotillion happened June 24/5th, so the end of the school year, and six months before that is January.(i know some people don't like using the side books as a timeline calculator but it helps to make my brain hurt less so shush(love you dani))

okay anyway, starts in January, takes about-two three weeks to go through the movie, ends on a Friday-the coronation, which in January 2015-when the movie 'takes place', makes sense for me so-

this is my d1 timeline, aligned with January 2015. and Ben's birthday for me is January 16th, his coronation day, since its implied his birthday is coronation day in the movie.

D2-Six months later, in June, in the movie-its kind unclear just how the timeline spans, but it is 3 days, so start-which is on a Thursday since their picnic date is on a Thursday, Mal runs away that Thursday afternoon, vks and Ben come after her late Thursday/early Friday, Mal makes deal with Uma Friday and either the wand trade happens Friday at noon or Saturday at noon-but either way in the movie, the wand trade is the same day as cotillion-but i exnayed that and made cotillion the next day, Saturday, so Evie had time to actually change Mal's dress.

D3---whooo boy, this is where it gets confusing-so D3~! there is no clear thoughts of how long its been since 3, it's either been less than a year, OR its been NEARLY 3 YEARS, no in-between-but! the vks, minus Carlos, according to Escape from the isle, have graduated from Auradon prep-Ben, Mal, Evie, and Jay are all 18-19 at the very least, with Carlos at 17 and now a senior-and they were all 16 in the first movie, minus Carlos at 14, Jane is his age as well, so they're both 14-17 in d1 to D3, so that implies it's been at LEAST 2 years if not 2 and a half. so, from d1 to d3-its been 3 years, at least my version was, because it was the only way to make sense of their age jumps, how the vks graduated, and to give Mal and Ben just a bit more time to make their engagement make more sense because WOW she just had a mental breakdown over becoming lady of the court?! she does not need to be queen yet dear god no, she needs therapy not a crown.

that also allows for the visual changes of everything, like the new bridge plaza in both Auradon and the isle, along with giving Evie her starter castle-to which Doug says in d2to evie 'maybe in the next 3 years, you'll get that castle you always wanted(paraphrased)

but yeah the timeline is a whole mess, you'll be better off just making your own like i did, there is no timeline, only zuul.

but yeah, short version, D1-six months later-D2-2 and a half years alter-D3.

#disney descendants #rewrite

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Pamela Paul

Published: Feb 2, 2024

Grace Powell was 12 or 13 when she discovered she could be a boy.

Growing up in a relatively conservative community in Grand Rapids, Mich., Powell, like many teenagers, didn’t feel comfortable in her own skin. She was unpopular and frequently bullied. Puberty made everything worse. She suffered from depression and was in and out of therapy.

“I felt so detached from my body, and the way it was developing felt hostile to me,” Powell told me. It was classic gender dysphoria, a feeling of discomfort with your sex.

Reading about transgender people online, Powell believed that the reason she didn’t feel comfortable in her body was that she was in the wrong body. Transitioning seemed like the obvious solution. The narrative she had heard and absorbed was that if you don’t transition, you’ll kill yourself.

At 17, desperate to begin hormone therapy, Powell broke the news to her parents. They sent her to a gender specialist to make sure she was serious. In the fall of her senior year of high school, she started cross-sex hormones. She had a double mastectomy the summer before college, then went off as a transgender man named Grayson to Sarah Lawrence College, where she was paired with a male roommate on a men’s floor. At 5-foot-3, she felt she came across as a very effeminate gay man.

At no point during her medical or surgical transition, Powell says, did anyone ask her about the reasons behind her gender dysphoria or her depression. At no point was she asked about her sexual orientation. And at no point was she asked about any previous trauma, and so neither the therapists nor the doctors ever learned that she’d been sexually abused as a child.

“I wish there had been more open conversations,” Powell, now 23 and detransitioned, told me. “But I was told there is one cure and one thing to do if this is your problem, and this will help you.”

Progressives often portray the heated debate over childhood transgender care as a clash between those who are trying to help growing numbers of children express what they believe their genders to be and conservative politicians who won’t let kids be themselves.

But right-wing demagogues are not the only ones who have inflamed this debate. Transgender activists have pushed their own ideological extremism, especially by pressing for a treatment orthodoxy that has faced increased scrutiny in recent years. Under that model of care, clinicians are expected to affirm a young person’s assertion of gender identity and even provide medical treatment before, or even without, exploring other possible sources of distress.

Many who think there needs to be a more cautious approach — including well-meaning liberal parents, doctors and people who have undergone gender transition and subsequently regretted their procedures — have been attacked as anti-trans and intimidated into silencing their concerns.

And while Donald Trump denounces “left-wing gender insanity” and many trans activists describe any opposition as transphobic, parents in America’s vast ideological middle can find little dispassionate discussion of the genuine risks or trade-offs involved in what proponents call gender-affirming care.

Powell’s story shows how easy it is for young people to get caught up by the pull of ideology in this atmosphere.

“What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one,” Powell lamented during our conversation. “It’s a mess.”

A New and Growing Group of Patients

Many transgender adults are happy with their transitions and, whether they began to transition as adults or adolescents, feel it was life changing, even lifesaving. The small but rapidly growing number of children who express gender dysphoria and who transition at an early age, according to clinicians, is a recent and more controversial phenomenon.

Laura Edwards-Leeper, the founding psychologist of the first pediatric gender clinic in the United States, said that when she started her practice in 2007, most of her patients had longstanding and deep-seated gender dysphoria. Transitioning clearly made sense for almost all of them, and any mental health issues they had were generally resolved through gender transition.

“But that is just not the case anymore,” she told me recently. While she doesn’t regret transitioning the earlier cohort of patients and opposes government bans on transgender medical care, she said, “As far as I can tell, there are no professional organizations who are stepping in to regulate what’s going on.”

Most of her patients now, she said, have no history of childhood gender dysphoria. Others refer to this phenomenon, with some controversy, as rapid onset gender dysphoria, in which adolescents, particularly tween and teenage girls, express gender dysphoria despite never having done so when they were younger. Frequently, they have mental health issues unrelated to gender. While professional associations say there is a lack of quality research on rapid onset gender dysphoria, several researchers have documented the phenomenon, and many health care providers have seen evidence of it in their practices.

“The population has changed drastically,” said Edwards-Leeper, a former head of the Child and Adolescent Committee for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization responsible for setting gender transition guidelines for medical professionals.

For these young people, she told me, “you have to take time to really assess what’s going on and hear the timeline and get the parents’ perspective in order to create an individualized treatment plan. Many providers are completely missing that step.”

Yet those health care professionals and scientists who do not think clinicians should automatically agree to a young person’s self-diagnosis are often afraid to speak out. A report commissioned by the National Health Service about Britain’s Tavistock gender clinic, which, until it was ordered to be shut down, was the country’s only health center dedicated to gender identity, noted that “primary and secondary care staff have told us that they feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach and that this is at odds with the standard process of clinical assessment and diagnosis that they have been trained to undertake in all other clinical encounters.”

Of the dozens of students she’s trained as psychologists, Edwards-Leeper said, few still seem to be providing gender-related care. While her students have left the field for various reasons, “some have told me that they didn’t feel they could continue because of the pushback, the accusations of being transphobic, from being pro-assessment and wanting a more thorough process,” she said.

They have good reasons to be wary. Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Oregon, was trained in gender-affirming care and treated multiple transgender patients. But in 2020, after coming across detransition videos online, she began to doubt the gender-affirming model. In 2021 she spoke out in favor of approaching gender dysphoria in a more considered way, urging others in the field to pay attention to detransitioners, people who no longer consider themselves transgender after undergoing medical or surgical interventions. She has since been attacked by transgender activists. Some threatened to send complaints to her licensing board saying that she was trying to make trans kids change their minds through conversion therapy.

In April 2022, the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists told Winn that she was under investigation. Her case was ultimately dismissed, but Winn no longer treats minors and practices only online, where many of her patients are worried parents of trans-identifying children.

“I don’t feel safe having a location where people can find me,” she said.

Detransitioners say that only conservative media outlets seem interested in telling their stories, which has left them open to attacks as hapless tools of the right, something that frustrated and dismayed every detransitioner I interviewed. These are people who were once the trans-identified kids that so many organizations say they’re trying to protect — but when they change their minds, they say, they feel abandoned.

Most parents and clinicians are simply trying to do what they think is best for the children involved. But parents with qualms about the current model of care are frustrated by what they see as a lack of options.

Parents told me it was a struggle to balance the desire to compassionately support a child with gender dysphoria while seeking the best psychological and medical care. Many believed their kids were gay or dealing with an array of complicated issues. But all said they felt compelled by gender clinicians, doctors, schools and social pressure to accede to their child’s declared gender identity even if they had serious doubts. They feared it would tear apart their family if they didn’t unquestioningly support social transition and medical treatment. All asked to speak anonymously, so desperate were they to maintain or repair any relationship with their children, some of whom were currently estranged.

Several of those who questioned their child’s self-diagnosis told me it had ruined their relationship. A few parents said simply, “I feel like I’ve lost my daughter.”

One mother described a meeting with 12 other parents in a support group for relatives of trans-identified youth where all of the participants described their children as autistic or otherwise neurodivergent. To all questions, the woman running the meeting replied, “Just let them transition.” The mother left in shock. How would hormones help a child with obsessive-compulsive disorder or depression? she wondered.

Some parents have found refuge in anonymous online support groups. There, people share tips on finding caregivers who will explore the causes of their children’s distress or tend to their overall emotional and developmental health and well-being without automatically acceding to their children’s self-diagnosis.

Many parents of kids who consider themselves trans say their children were introduced to transgender influencers on YouTube or TikTok, a phenomenon intensified for some by the isolation and online cocoon of Covid. Others say their kids learned these ideas in the classroom, as early as elementary school, often in child-friendly ways through curriculums supplied by trans rights organizations, with concepts like the gender unicorn or the Genderbread person.

‘Do You Want a Dead Son or a Live Daughter?’

After Kathleen’s 15-year-old son, whom she described as an obsessive child, abruptly told his parents he was trans, the doctor who was going to assess whether he had A.D.H.D. referred him instead to someone who specialized in both A.D.H.D. and gender. Kathleen, who asked to be identified only by her first name to protect her son’s privacy, assumed that the specialist would do some kind of evaluation or assessment. That was not the case.

The meeting was brief and began on a shocking note. “In front of my son, the therapist said, ‘Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?’” Kathleen recounted.

Parents are routinely warned that to pursue any path outside of agreeing with a child’s self-declared gender identity is to put a gender dysphoric youth at risk for suicide, which feels to many people like emotional blackmail. Proponents of the gender-affirming model have cited studies showing an association between that standard of care and a lower risk of suicide. But those studies were found to have methodological flaws or have been deemed not entirely conclusive. A survey of studies on the psychological effects of cross-sex hormones, published three years ago in The Journal of the Endocrine Society, the professional organization for hormone specialists, found it “could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.” In a letter to The Wall Street Journal last year, 21 experts from nine countries said that survey was one reason they believed there was “no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide prevention measure.”

Moreover, the incidence of suicidal thoughts and attempts among gender dysphoric youth is complicated by the high incidence of accompanying conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder. As one systematic overview put it, “Children with gender dysphoria often experience a range of psychiatric comorbidities, with a high prevalence of mood and anxiety disorders, trauma, eating disorders and autism spectrum conditions, suicidality and self-harm.”

But rather than being treated as patients who deserve unbiased professional help, children with gender dysphoria often become political pawns.

Conservative lawmakers are working to ban access to gender care for minors and occasionally for adults as well. On the other side, however, many medical and mental health practitioners feel their hands have been tied by activist pressure and organizational capture. They say that it has become difficult to practice responsible mental health care or medicine for these young people.

Pediatricians, psychologists and other clinicians who dissent from this orthodoxy, believing that it is not based on reliable evidence, feel frustrated by their professional organizations. The American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics have wholeheartedly backed the gender-affirming model.

In 2021, Aaron Kimberly, a 50-year-old trans man and registered nurse, left the clinic in British Columbia where his job focused on the intake and assessment of gender-dysphoric youth. Kimberly received a comprehensive screening when he embarked on his own successful transition at age 33, which resolved the gender dysphoria he experienced from an early age.

But when the gender-affirming model was introduced at his clinic, he was instructed to support the initiation of hormone treatment for incoming patients regardless of whether they had complex mental problems, experiences with trauma or were otherwise “severely unwell,” Kimberly said. When he referred patients for further mental health care rather than immediate hormone treatment, he said he was accused of what they called gatekeeping and had to change jobs.

“I realized something had gone totally off the rails,” Kimberly, who subsequently founded the Gender Dysphoria Alliance and the L.G.B.T. Courage Coalition to advocate better gender care, told me.

Gay men and women often told me they fear that same-sex-attracted kids, especially effeminate boys and tomboy girls who are gender nonconforming, will be transitioned during a normal phase of childhood and before sexual maturation — and that gender ideology can mask and even abet homophobia.

As one detransitioned man, now in a gay relationship, put it, “I was a gay man pumped up to look like a woman and dated a lesbian who was pumped up to look like a man. If that’s not conversion therapy, I don’t know what is.”

“I transitioned because I didn’t want to be gay,” Kasey Emerick, a 23-year-old woman and detransitioner from Pennsylvania, told me. Raised in a conservative Christian church, she said, “I believed homosexuality was a sin.”

When she was 15, Emerick confessed her homosexuality to her mother. Her mother attributed her sexual orientation to trauma — Emerick’s father was convicted of raping and assaulting her repeatedly when she was between the ages of 4 and 7 — but after catching Emerick texting with another girl at age 16, she took away her phone. When Emerick melted down, her mother admitted her to a psychiatric hospital. While there, Emerick told herself, “If I was a boy, none of this would have happened.”

In May 2017, Emerick began searching “gender” online and encountered trans advocacy websites. After realizing she could “pick the other side,” she told her mother, “I’m sick of being called a dyke and not a real girl.” If she were a man, she’d be free to pursue relationships with women.

That September, she and her mother met with a licensed professional counselor for the first of two 90-minute consultations. She told the counselor that she had wished to be a Boy Scout rather than a Girl Scout. She said she didn’t like being gay or a butch lesbian. She also told the counselor that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation. The clinic recommended testosterone, which was prescribed by a nearby L.G.B.T.Q. health clinic. Shortly thereafter, she was also diagnosed with A.D.H.D. She developed panic attacks. At age 17, she was cleared for a double mastectomy.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m having my breasts removed. I’m 17. I’m too young for this,’” she recalled. But she went ahead with the operation.

“Transition felt like a way to control something when I couldn’t control anything in my life,” Emerick explained. But after living as a trans man for five years, Emerick realized her mental health symptoms were only getting worse. In the fall of 2022, she came out as a detransitioner on Twitter and was immediately attacked. Transgender influencers told her she was bald and ugly. She received multiple threats.

“I thought my life was over,” she said. “I realized that I had lived a lie for over five years.”

Today Emerick’s voice, permanently altered by testosterone, is that of a man. When she tells people she’s a detransitioner, they ask when she plans to stop taking T and live as a woman. “I’ve been off it for a year,” she replies.

Once, after she recounted her story to a therapist, the therapist tried to reassure her. If it’s any consolation, the therapist remarked, “I would never have guessed that you were once a trans woman.” Emerick replied, “Wait, what sex do you think I am?”

To the trans activist dictum that children know their gender best, it is important to add something all parents know from experience: Children change their minds all the time. One mother told me that after her teenage son desisted — pulled back from a trans identity before any irreversible medical procedures — he explained, “I was just rebelling. I look at it like a subculture, like being goth.”

“The job of children and adolescents is to experiment and explore where they fit into the world, and a big part of that exploration, especially during adolescence, is around their sense of identity,” Sasha Ayad, a licensed professional counselor based in Phoenix, told me. “Children at that age often present with a great deal of certainty and urgency about who they believe they are at the time and things they would like to do in order to enact that sense of identity.”

Ayad, a co-author of “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Thoughtful Parents,” advises parents to be wary of the gender affirmation model. “We’ve always known that adolescents are particularly malleable in relationship to their peers and their social context and that exploration is often an attempt to navigate difficulties of that stage, such as puberty, coming to terms with the responsibilities and complications of young adulthood, romance and solidifying their sexual orientation,” she told me. For providing this kind of exploratory approach in her own practice with gender dysphoric youth, Ayad has had her license challenged twice, both times by adults who were not her patients. Both times, the charges were dismissed.

Studies show that around eight in 10 cases of childhood gender dysphoria resolve themselves by puberty and 30 percent of people on hormone therapy discontinue its use within four years, though the effects, including infertility, are often irreversible.

Proponents of early social transition and medical interventions for gender dysphoric youth cite a 2022 study showing that 98 percent of children who took both puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones continued treatment for short periods, and another study that tracked 317 children who socially transitioned between the ages of 3 and 12, which found that 94 percent of them still identified as transgender five years later. But such early interventions may cement children’s self-conceptions without giving them time to think or sexually mature.

‘The Process of Transition Didn’t Make Me Feel Better’

At the end of her freshman year of college, Grace Powell, horrifically depressed, began dissociating, feeling detached from her body and from reality, which had never happened to her before. Ultimately, she said, “the process of transition didn’t make me feel better. It magnified what I found was wrong with myself.”

“I expected it to change everything, but I was just me, with a slightly deeper voice,” she added. “It took me two years to start detransitioning and living as Grace again.”

She tried in vain to find a therapist who would treat her underlying issues, but they kept asking her: How do you want to be seen? Do you want to be nonbinary? Powell wanted to talk about her trauma, not her identity or her gender presentation. She ended up getting online therapy from a former employee of the Tavistock clinic in Britain. This therapist, a woman who has broken from the gender-affirming model, talked Grace through what she sees as her failure to launch and her efforts to reset. The therapist asked questions like: Who is Grace? What do you want from your life? For the first time, Powell felt someone was seeing and helping her as a person, not simply looking to slot her into an identity category.

Many detransitioners say they face ostracism and silencing because of the toxic politics around transgender issues.

“It is extraordinarily frustrating to feel that something I am is inherently political,” Powell told me. “I’ve been accused multiple times that I’m some right-winger who’s making a fake narrative to discredit transgender people, which is just crazy.”

While she believes there are people who benefit from transitioning, “I wish more people would understand that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution,” she said. “I wish we could have that conversation.”

In a recent study in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, about 40 young detransitioners out of 78 surveyed said they had suffered from rapid onset gender dysphoria. Trans activists have fought hard to suppress any discussion of rapid onset gender dysphoria, despite evidence that the condition is real. In its guide for journalists, the activist organization GLAAD warns the media against using the term, as it is not “a formal condition or diagnosis.” Human Rights Campaign, another activist group, calls it “a right-wing theory.” A group of professional organizations put out a statement urging clinicians to eliminate the term from use.

Nobody knows how many young people desist after social, medical or surgical transitions. Trans activists often cite low regret rates for gender transition, along with low figures for detransition. But those studies, which often rely on self-reported cases to gender clinics, likely understate the actual numbers. None of the seven detransitioners I interviewed, for instance, even considered reporting back to the gender clinics that prescribed them medication they now consider to have been a mistake. Nor did they know any other detransitioners who had done so.

As Americans furiously debate the basis of transgender care, a number of advances in understanding have taken place in Europe, where the early Dutch studies that became the underpinning of gender-affirming care have been broadly questioned and criticized. Unlike the current population of gender dysphoric youth, the Dutch study participants had no serious psychological conditions. Those studies were riddled with methodological flaws and weaknesses. There was no evidence that any intervention was lifesaving. There was no long-term follow-up with any of the study’s 55 participants or the 15 who dropped out. A British effort to replicate the study said that it “identified no changes in psychological function” and that more studies were needed.

In countries like Sweden, Norway, France, the Netherlands and Britain — long considered exemplars of gender progress — medical professionals have recognized that early research on medical interventions for childhood gender dysphoria was either faulty or incomplete. Last month, the World Health Organization, in explaining why it is developing “a guideline on the health of trans and gender diverse people,” said it will cover only adults because “the evidence base for children and adolescents is limited and variable regarding the longer-term outcomes of gender-affirming care for children and adolescents.”

But in America, and Canada, the results of those widely criticized Dutch studies are falsely presented to the public as settled science.

Other countries have recently halted or limited the medical and surgical treatment of gender dysphoric youth, pending further study. Britain’s Tavistock clinic was ordered to be shut down next month, after a National Health Service-commissioned investigation found deficiencies in service and “a lack of consensus and open discussion about the nature of gender dysphoria and therefore about the appropriate clinical response.”

Meanwhile, the American medical establishment has hunkered down, stuck in an outdated model of gender affirmation. The American Academy of Pediatrics only just agreed to conduct more research in response to yearslong efforts by dissenting experts, including Dr. Julia Mason, a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal.”

The real threat to transgender people comes from Republicans who wish to deny them rights and protections. But the doctrinal rigidity of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is disappointing, frustrating and counterproductive.

“I was always a liberal Democrat,” one woman whose son desisted after social transition and hormone therapy told me. “Now I feel politically homeless.”

She noted that the Biden administration has “unequivocally” supported gender-affirming care for minors, in cases in which it deems it “medically appropriate and necessary.” Rachel Levine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera — about the value and the importance of gender-affirming care.”

Of course, politics should not influence medical practice, whether the issue is birth control, abortion or gender medicine. But unfortunately, politics has gotten in the way of progress. Last year The Economist published a thorough investigation into America’s approach to gender medicine. Zanny Minton Beddoes, the editor, put the issue into political context. “If you look internationally at countries in Europe, the U.K. included, their medical establishments are much more concerned,” Beddoes told Vanity Fair. “But here — in part because this has become wrapped up in the culture wars where you have, you know, crazy extremes from the Republican right — if you want to be an upstanding liberal, you feel like you can’t say anything.”

Some people are trying to open up that dialogue, or at least provide outlets for kids and families to seek a more therapeutic approach to gender dysphoria.

Paul Garcia-Ryan is a psychotherapist in New York who cares for kids and families seeking holistic, exploratory care for gender dysphoria. He is also a detransitioner who from ages 15 to 30 fully believed he was a woman.

Garcia-Ryan is gay, but as a boy, he said, “it was much less threatening to my psyche to think that I was a straight girl born into the wrong body — that I had a medical condition that could be tended to.” When he visited a clinic at 15, the clinician immediately affirmed he was female, and rather than explore the reasons for his mental distress, simply confirmed Garcia-Ryan’s belief that he was not meant to be a man.

Once in college, he began medically transitioning and eventually had surgery on his genitals. Severe medical complications from both the surgery and hormone medication led him to reconsider what he had done, and to detransition. He also reconsidered the basis of gender affirmation, which, as a licensed clinical social worker at a gender clinic, he had been trained in and provided to clients.

“You’re made to believe these slogans,” he said. “ Evidence-based, lifesaving care, safe and effective, medically necessary, the science is settled — and none of that is evidence based.”

Garcia-Ryan, 32, is now the board president of Therapy First, an organization that supports therapists who do not agree with the gender affirmation model. He thinks transition can help some people manage the symptoms of gender dysphoria but no longer believes anyone under 25 should socially, medically or surgically transition without exploratory psychotherapy first.

“When a professional affirms a gender identity for a younger person, what they are doing is implementing a psychological intervention that narrows a person’s sense of self and closes off their options for considering what’s possible for them,” Garcia-Ryan told me.

Instead of promoting unproven treatments for children, which surveys show many Americans are uncomfortable with, transgender activists would be more effective if they focused on a shared agenda. Most Americans across the political spectrum can agree on the need for legal protections for transgender adults. They would also probably support additional research on the needs of young people reporting gender dysphoria so that kids could get the best treatment possible.

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

[ Via: https://archive.md/ercav ]

==

A shift in this direction would model tolerance and acceptance. It would prioritize compassion over demonization. It would require rising above culture-war politics and returning to reason. It would be the most humane path forward. And it would be the right thing to do.

It would, but that's also why activists won't do it. This isn't about "healthcare" and it's not even about "rights." As Duchess Lois of Alberta asked "what rights do I not have as a transsexual?"

It's about conducting a social revolution, and revolutionaries don't compromise.

#Leor Sapir #Pamela Paul #detrans #detransition #gender ideology #queer theory #gender affirming care #gender affirming healthcare #gender affirmation #gender identity #pseudoscience #gender pseudoscience #genderwang #religion is a mental illness

[madsworld15]

Part 1 of Chapter 2: "May" from Heal Me, Hold Me, Make Me, Know Me fic.

QAF, BrianxJustin, Asexual Spectrum Representation, Series Re-telling

Brian stood outside the therapy room and watched as Justin struggled to walk the five feet necessary to reach his physical therapist. The teen was sweating and looked like he was about ready to give up. This was the first time since Justin had moved to the rehab center two weeks ago that Brian was visiting during one of his therapy sessions. Brian still didn’t come to see Justin every day, but the days he did come it was usually in the evening when Justin was back in his shared room.

Justin’s roommate was this smart-mouthed boy a few years younger whose leg had been crushed in an automobile accident. Brian secretly liked the kid and hoped that his enthusiasm and determination would rub off on Justin. Lately, Justin had been struggling to increase his abilities with his hand, so he was refusing to give his all in all areas of his rehab, both physical and occupational.

Justin collapsed against the guiding rail to his left about halfway to his therapist. From the look on his face, Brian could tell he was frustrated and about ready to give up completely. Brian bit his lip as he debated whether or not he should enter the room. He had heard from Jennifer that Justin hated it when she would come to his sessions, so she had stopped coming during those hours. He still hadn’t made a final decision when a kindly middle-aged, Black woman in a white jacket, a doctor, approached him.

“He works so hard, but he expects too much,” the woman said to Brian without introducing herself or looking at him.

“Well, he’s stubborn like that,” Brian smirked but tightened up his stance nonetheless. Her words concerned him because he knew what could come from expecting too much.

“I’m Dr. Brown,” the doctor finally extended her hand toward Brian for a handshake. “I know, very on the nose.” She had a smirk as strong as Brian’s; he could appreciate that in a doctor.

“Brian.” Brian returned the handshake and then motioned toward Justin, “He’s my, uh. My…”

“Boyfriend?” Dr. Brown gave him a knowing look, “He mentions you every day during group.”

“Group?”

“Justin is in Group and Individual counseling. There is more to rehab than just the physical. There is also a mental aspect to recovery.” 

Brian wasn’t sure how he felt about Justin being in counseling, mostly because he didn’t quite believe in psychiatrists, but he would support the young man in whatever he felt he needed. 

“So, you’re his shrink?”

“Psychiatrist, but yes.” She nodded at Brian before she turned back to the view of Justin struggling through his physical therapy. “He expects to be able to be good as new within a week or so.”

“Didn’t you guys explain to him that his hand recovery alone would take months?” Brian couldn’t believe this counselor had the audacity to pin this hope on Justin. 

“We have.” Dr. Brown took a deep breath. “I know you come to see him a couple times a week, but do you actually talk to him? Manage his expectations?”

“Why is that my responsibility? He’s an adult let him believe what he wants. Besides, you’re his doctors. You should tell him.” Brian wanted so badly to pull out a cigarette for a smoke. But, the medical professionals around here frowned upon that.

“Brian, it’s fine to have hope.” She started, but Brian cut her off.

“If it’s not harming anyone, then leave him be.”

“Mr. Kinney. His determination is great. We always encourage our patients to have as much faith and hope as possible. However, Justin is setting himself up for further frustration and depression if he keeps pushing himself beyond his abilities.”

Brian didn’t respond, how could he? The one thing he’d always found so wonderful about Justin was turning into the kid's worst nightmare. He’d always been determined to make things work out for himself, not to have to rely on anyone else. Now, Justin was being forced into a small box that restricted his independent spirit and insisted he rely on someone else all the time. The idea that Justin couldn’t just be himself broke Brian’s heart. He’d always avoided Justin’s therapy hours because he didn’t know if he could handle it if he saw the young man stumble in any way. Right before his very eyes, Justin was putting his all into accomplishing the simplest of tasks – walking a few feet without assistance. And he could barely do that.

“He’s making tremendous progress, both with me and his physical rehab. But it's a marathon, not a sprint. It might help if you remind him of that.” Dr. Brown added, and then she was gone.

Brian stood by and continued to watch Justin’s progress. Soon enough, the physical therapist stopped him and allowed Justin to sit down for a bit. It was at that moment that Brian decided to make his presence known. He walked through the door with a smirk on his face and a glint in his eyes.

“Great job, Sunshine.” Brian clapped him on the back and leaned on the back of the wheelchair Justin currently uses.

“I barely walked five feet without help.” Justin groused, his mood in the gutter.

“Okay. But, think when you left the ICU, you couldn’t walk without dragging your feet and the support of a nurse. This is progress.” Brian tried to encourage him. “What do you say I break you out of this joint for a couple hours, and we go see Emmett at work?”

“You can’t.” Justin didn’t even perk up.

“Sure I can. I discussed it with your doctors and the head of this place. They said I could as long as I promised to return you.” Brian leaned over Justin’s shoulder to whisper directly in his ear, “It’s as if they don’t trust me.”

“Damn. That must be a record.” Justin’s mood improved exponentially, “It took them all of two minutes to distrust you. I feel it usually takes a few days.”

“Except you.” Brian gave Justin a quick kiss on his temple and playfully pushed him toward the exit.

“What’s that supposed to mean? I don’t trust you in the slightest. Never have.” Justin rolled his eyes and gave a small, wicked grin.

“I have it on the best authority, Emmett and Debbe, that you’ve always bet for the house instead of against it. Even when you first met me and saw through my bullshit.” Brian stopped by Justin’s room so he could grab a sweatshirt to put on over his t-shirt and clean up from his therapy session.

A few minutes later, Justin determined that he’d done all he could to be ready for an outing. Brian had helped him wipe his face with a washcloth since his dominant hand was still out of commission. It crossed his mind that he’d never been willing to do such things for anyone else, not even Michael. These thoughts weren’t something he wished to unpack at the moment, so he pushed them down.

“Let’s go!” Brian stated. “Do you want to bring the chair? Or would you rather just lean on me the whole time?”

Justin looked down at his lap as if determining how determined he was going to be in front of the man he cared about and his close friend. 

“The chair is fine.” 

Brian didn’t say anything. The words of the doctor rang in his head. He felt Justin choosing the chair was a win in the right direction toward managing expectations. See, I don’t need to tell him anything. He knows his own body.

Justin sat in the chair and looked up at Brian, silently telling him he was ready to go. Brian couldn’t believe he was doing this. Taking Justin out of the rehab center so he could see Emmett, and probably boost his mood, wasn’t in his usual wheelhouse of accepted Brian Kinney behavior.

“What? Is there something wrong? Did you change your mind?” Justin’s tone was overly concerned, a hint of insecurity around the edges.

Brian grabbed the handles of the chair and started to push him toward the door. 

“Keep all hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times.” Brian quipped, instead of actually answering or reassuring the young man.

If he was being honest with himself Brian was seconds away from bolting out the door and leaving Justin behind. He didn’t let people get behind his walls very often and if he wasn’t careful Justin would completely tear them down. It would leave him in a world of hurt. He had to be careful.

As they drove over to the store where Emmett worked, Brian finally gave Justin some kind of closure about the nature of their excursion.

“I paused back there because you seemed tired. I was contemplating which would be worse, you potentially overdoing it but enjoying your friend or letting you rest and facing the wrath of Emmett, who thinks your mom and I are keeping you from him.” Brian smiled toward Justin, who was staring out the window, expressionless.

Part of him knew the right thing to do was push Justin to engage in conversation with him, but Brian wasn’t a pushy person. So, he let silence fall between them. The closer they got to their destination Brian could feel the tension building up between them. He parallel parked and then turned off the Jeep. Instead of opening the door to climb out he waited for Justin to make a move. When he didn’t, Brian spoke.

“Wanna get out?” He kept the question open-ended because he knew Justin was having anxiety about something. He just wasn’t sure what.

Justin sucked his bottom lip between his teeth and shrugged. His eyes darted between outside the window and his lap. At that moment, it dawned on Brian exactly what the problem was.

“We can wait here until the people pass by. We're in no rush.” Brian reached across the console to try and touch Justin’s shoulder, but he flinched away from it.

A few minutes later, Brian’s cell phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hey, I thought you were bringing Justin by.” Emmett’s voice rang through the phone. Justin perked up a bit at the sound.

“I am. We are outside still in the Jeep. Justin needs a minute.” Brian looked toward Justin.

“Let him know there’s no shame if he’s not ready. I’ll just have to find a way to get my fabulous ass into the rehab center. Perhaps there’s a hot beefy top of a nurse I can charm.”

“Do you always think with your dick?” Brian shook his head.

“You’re one to talk.” Emmett chirped back. “Don’t think I don’t hear the hot goss about you and your hosting skills most every night.”

Brian knew without looking that Justin heard Emmett through the phone. The blonde put the tip of his thumb into his mouth and bit down.

“I’ll let you know.” Brian ended his conversation with Emmett abruptly and hung up.

“We can just go back.” Brian went to put the keys back in the ignition when Justin reached his left hand across his torso and pulled open the passenger door.

Justin pulled himself out of the Jeep and leaned heavily on his left hand, which was still propped against the frame of the vehicle.

“Jesus.” Brian rushed out of the Jeep and came around to the other side to stand in front of the blonde. “You could’ve waited til I got the chair out.”

“I don’t…” Justin started. Instead of finishing he just grabbed onto Brian’s arm with his good hand and leaned his weight on the older man.

“Are you sure?” Brian whispered.

Justin nodded, “Let’s go. I miss Emmett. It’ll be great to see him.”

The two slowly made their way a few feet to the front door and went inside. Once they were inside, Brian insisted Justin sit down on one of the benches throughout the smallish store. Even without words he conveyed to the young man, it wasn’t seen as weakness for him to sit the whole time they visited the flamboyant Southerner.

“BABYYY!” Emmett immediately flew to where Justin was sitting and sat down next to him in what could only be described as a graceful movement. He immediately wrapped Justin up in a hug.

Brian tried not to be jealous of Justin’s immediate acceptance of Emmett’s love, comfort, and touch. The young man was still extremely skittish around Brian and barely ever let the man touch him. You could forget letting the brunette embrace him. Brian sucked in his bottom lip and turned his attention to the clothes on the shelves as his hands clenched and unclenched by his side.

What did he care? He barely knew this kid. Sure, he was concerned about his condition, considering what happened to him. He wasn’t a monster. But why did it matter so much or make his chest ache to see Justin embrace Emmett without a second thought? Was it because Justin knew what Brian tried to hide, that it was his fault the kid was bashed in the first place? Did Justin equate him to his attackers? Or was this it for them? Was Justin going to move on and find someone who didn’t cause him frustration, pain, and heartache? It wouldn’t be surprising. No one stuck around in Brian’s life; no one gave him a chance. It was only a matter of time before he lost Justin too.

“Brian.” Emmett was suddenly right next to him, and Brian shook his head to clear his pervasive thoughts. 

He looked around and saw that Justin was sitting very tensely, his eyes flitting all around, never really focusing. Something had happened while Brian zoned out, and now he had to play clean up or at least get Justin back to the rehab center so they could help him relax.

“What happened?” Brian barely held back his anger at Emmett for Justin’s discomfort. 

“A customer had come in to ask me a question, and they got too close too fast. Justin just went…” Emmett waved his hand toward Justin’s current state in explanation.

The color drained from Brian’s face, “Did they touch him?” 

“No, they just stood too close. I managed to pull their attention from him and get them out of the store quickly, but I can’t seem to help him.” Emmett looked so concerned that if Brian were a naturally hugging man, he would’ve reassured his friend with one.

“He’s still really skittish around people. Mostly because he doesn’t remember the attack, so in his mind, everyone is a potential danger.” Brian rubbed his brow, “I shouldn’t have brought him here. He wasn’t ready.”

“Brian,” Emmett’s hand reached up and pulled Brian’s from his face, “You can’t just lock him away and hope that will make him better.”

“Why not?” The words were out of Brian’s mouth before he could stop them.

“You have to push him to challenge his fears. Or else, the Justin we all know and love will never come back.” Emmett gave Brian a knowing look and challenged him to object to the word love.

He didn’t. Instead, Brian squatted down in front of Justin, completely facing him, with a bit of distance between them, and waited for the blonde to notice him.

Once Justin’s gaze settled on Brian, he tentatively placed his hand out, palm up for Justin to take with his good hand. The blonde hesitated but then placed his hand on top of Brian’s but didn’t squeeze or interlock their fingers in any way. It just sat there, making the barest of skin contact.

“Hey,” Brian whispered. “Do you want to go back to the rehab center?”

Justin nodded, unshed tears in his eyes, fear evident in all the features of his face. But, the longer his hand made contact with Brian’s, the more he seemed to relax. Brian didn’t move from his position until all the remnants of Justin’s minor freak-out were gone from his features and posture. 

“Do you want me to get the chair from the Jeep?” Brian asked, still in his squatting position.

Justin shook his head. “I can walk.” He whispered.

Brian gave him a small smile and nodded in understanding.

*****

An hour later, Brian sat in Justin’s room at the rehab center as the young man slept. The excursion to visit Emmett had been extremely short-lived and had zapped all of Justin’s energy. He had crawled out of his chair and into his bed the minute they arrived back. Brian had chosen to stay with Justin and quietly called the office for an update on one of his clients from Cynthia. He had just hung up the phone when Jennifer arrived.

She looked from Justin’s sleeping form to Brian and cocked her eyebrow.

“Your excursion not work out?”

“It did. He just freaked out a few minutes in, and we came back here so he could rest.” Brian stretched his arms and legs out in front of himself before he stood up.

“I’ll let you have some quality alone time with him.” He said and was almost to the door when a woman in a suit, carrying a file folder and clipboard came into the room.

“Mrs. Taylor?” The stern woman with red hair pulled into a tight bun looked directly at Jennifer, ignoring Brian’s presence entirely.

Brian hung quietly by the door and surreptitiously listened in as the woman explained to Jennifer about Justin’s bill. The fact that Jennifer hadn’t dismissed him from the room told him she didn’t mind Brian hearing that she owed the center some money. The stern redhead handed Jennifer a leaflet about payment options before she turned around to leave.

“Come see me later, and we can discuss your options.”

The moment she was gone, Brian looked toward Jennifer. She had crumpled into the seat Brian had recently vacated and had her head in her hand as she looked over the leaflet. The stress of not knowing what to do was evident all over her face. Brian crossed back to her and placed his hand on her shoulder. 

“It’ll all work out.” He wasn’t sure where the words came from or why he even said them, but he couldn’t find it in himself to regret them.

“I’m not sure how. My ex-husband is behind on paying me child support for Molly. And my job as a real estate agent hasn’t really taken off just yet. The bill from his first surgery alone wiped out my entire savings account.” Jennifer paused as if she suddenly realized what she had said, “Please ignore my ramblings. Thank you for being here for him. It really does make a difference. He’s so depressed when it’s just me here visiting him.”

Brian looked away from the woman, unable to truly take the appreciation for what it was. Without another word, he slipped out of the room. Once the door was closed, Brian leaned against the wall briefly and let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He was almost all the way out of the lobby when he saw the admittance desk and thought better of it. He approached the elderly woman behind the desk.

“Hello, I’m Brian Kinney. I was wondering where I could find the billing department.” He flashed her his most charming smile and she was like butter in his hands.

“Ahh, yes. The young man who visits Justin all the time. We all love Justin, such a sweet young man. Such a shame what happened to him.”

“Yeah. It’s a tragedy.” Brian tried his best to keep the sarcasm from dripping too much into his words. “The billing department?”

“Yes, of course. You go down that hall and make a left. Her office is the third door on the right.” She motioned with her hand to show him where to go.

“Thank you.” Brian tapped the desk and walked off in the direction she had indicated.

#queer as folk #brian kinney #justin taylor #fanfiction #alternate universe #asexual spectrum representation

[soothingmelody]

Video Essays, Jealousy, Melancholy and Lies

Have you ever found yourself living a lie?

This question has been stuck in my head ever since I started therapy earlier this year. And I don't mean it in some grand way of being a kind of double agent or stringing an elaborate web of lies to trick your childhood friend into playing sudoku to save your past self from burning down in an incinerator, but... Something much more mundane. 

I guess I should start from the beginning, cause otherwise the title of this post won't make too much sense. 

It is interesting how much we can experience through communication. Be it a Discord message, a Tumblr blog post like this, a tweet or a meticulously put together video essay, finding out about other people's experiences has been one of my favorite things throughout my life. I find people endlessly fascinating. I love it when people talk about their lives and their life experiences, so to me, the long winded, sort of pretentious format of the video essay is right up my alley. 

So, this morning, while enjoying a bowl of instant-ramen with some haphazardly cut green onions and a creamy eggy broth, I was watching this one video essay that one of my good friends had recommended to me the night before. Said video essay was about the appeal of Elfen Leid and the video itself, I found quite entertaining and very interesting. But, it did leave me feeling a tinge melancholic and I realized that this is far from the only video essay that has had that sort of effect on me. 

Growing up in Ukraine, a land ravaged by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of uncontrolled capitalism, where you could easily find syringes behind a children's playground and your average neighborhood screamed "Half-Life 2 Level", I was a pretty quiet kid, despite my extremely extroverted nature. I do think a lot of these issues start here, which is why I wanted to mention this. I was bullied from a pretty young age, disregarded by people I found important to me and disregarded by people I called friends. To me, it was always a feeling of being not "cool enough". I wasn't into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I wasn't into Transformers, being "girly" for a "boy" such as myself was seen as disgusting, was met with slurs and even more bullying. And in this environment, I was just a quiet kid, with a big heart, who'd sit at the back of the class and draw his funny Sonic the Hedgehog comics.

All of this is to say that I grew up in a pretty cynical place, where cringe culture was way more commonplace and I could only find respite in the internet, mainly the russian Sonic forums of the era, where plenty of judgemental people remained still. That cynicism has really seeped through me and followed me through so much of my life. There were so many times when I would do something that felt natural to me, that didn’t hurt anyone and I would be shut down even by people I trusted the most and I would once again retreat into my own shell. 

This constant environment led me to not really participate in many subcultures actively in fear of being seen as weird and cringy, this constant environment led me to not stand out to much, to not take opportunities that would’ve led me to a more interesting life and left me with barely any skills to express myself, besides music or art. It made me afraid of my own queerness that I had to come to terms with and understand for many many years, dealing with my own toxic masculinity, finding out that I was not really straight or that I am not even truly a “man”.

And now looking back, when I am more mature and have changed and grown so much, that I finally managed to open myself up somewhat and “be cringe and free”, honestly, there is a strong melancholy there. There’s a regret. I wish I’ve done so much over my teens that I sadly cannot turn back anymore. To please those people that were holding me back, I gave up so much. That I am having my self indulgent phase when I am in my early 20s and not my early 10s. And I am still a work in progress, I have no idea if I am still living some sort of lie, cause that is stuff you admit to yourself down the road and figure out with hindsight. But I am happier today. But, for how sad this all may sound, I wanted to tell you, the reader, that it is never really too late to change and open up a bit.

It is however interesting, that even with all of this said and this regret that I do bear, I consider that my experience was still rather valuable. I met many people, I developed in my own way and now I love who I am. Maybe that regret, a desire for a better teenage life is yet just another lie, me trying to conform. But, that will be for future me to decide in hindsight. 

If you relate to anything I’ve said in this little self indulgent post, please remember, that no matter what, if you are not hurting anyone, you should be free to do whatever you want and nobody has the right to take that away from you. If they laugh, let them, you are the master of your own life, so go and be cringe. Go buy that anime figurine. Go write poetry. Go ask out someone you like. Do something that will make you happy today and maybe you won’t be stuck writing long Tumblr posts. 

Stop living a lie. Be yourself.

#random thoughts #I felt like writing #sorry this is a really personal post

[bisluthq]

Obviously Taylor has dated her fair share of people (which there should be no shame in), but based on her lyrics these are the relationships that seemed to be the most meaningful to her:

1. Drew Dunlap AKA 1st Boyfriend AKA Mr. Tim McGraw/Our Song/Fifteen (kinda)/Midnight Rain (probably) and a bunch of others

Was (in her mind) her first boyfriend!

Had her first kiss, first date, and first.. whatever else with

Mentions in multiple songs that she thought she was gonna/wanted to marry him

Based on Midnight Rain he seems to represent the idea of what could've been if she hadn't pursued a music career (or I guess succeeded in having a music career, since if she hadn't wanted to be a musician she wouldn't have moved to Nashville)

Has always described him as being super nice

Dated him for like a year

2. Joe Jonas AKA Disney's Resident Virginal Fuckboi AKA Mr. Perfectly Fine (and like SO many others)

In all her songs about him she says that she thought they were gonna be together forever because he... told her that they were gonna be together forever

Was clearly VERY hurt by the whole Joe thing. Back in the day she said it was her first true heartbreak (though it obviously paled in comparison to what was to come)

Did not get over it for a WHILE (6 months gone and I'm still reaching... Etc)

She also referred to him as her first love in the original Speak Now album booklet which I don't think was entirely accurate but girlie was trying to tell a story

"he will try to take away my pain, and he just might make me smile but the whole time I'm wishing he was you instead"

3. John Mayer AKA Sleazy Douchebag AKA Mr. Dear John (and co)

She has SO many lyrics about how she just loved. Him. So. Damn. Much (also this is outside of a musical context but she also said she loved him in interviews so..)

For better or for worse (definitely worse) it had a VERY big impact on her

Threw all logic out the window in the relationship and chose to actively ignore every red flag, or better yet turn them into little quirks (for example: the 2nd verse of Superman)

"don't forget where I'll be. Right here wishing the flowers were from you, wishing the card was from you, wishing the call was from you" (poor TL)

Wrote "I'd tell you I miss you but I don't know how/I'd lay my armour down if you'd say you'd rather love than fight" AFTER writing dear john

"I used to think one day we'd tell the story of us, how we met and the Sparks flew instantly"

4. Jake Gyllenhaal AKA Indie Douchebag AKA Mr. All Too Well (and basically all of Red, and honestly also probably elements of 1989)

Fell HARD and FAST

Was like *romantic?

Kept crawling his way back

Kept letting him crawl his way back

Wrote (in her own words) an entire album about it

"I never saw you coming and I'll never be the same"

"you're my Achilles heel"

Literally redefined her perception of love

Taylor at TIFF when talking about All Too Well "I don't see myself continuing to make stuff about extreme guttural heartbreak at your most formative age, that debilitates you emotionally for years, and you have to develop a scar tissue to move on with your life, and write a novel about, cause you're still..." (also it is things like this that make me mildly concerned about the fact that she's never gone to therapy)

We're meeting each other's families within less than 3 months (which I know is a Jake staple but still, Jesus)

"I used to think that we were forever and I used to say never say never"

5. Harry Styles AKA Teenage Boy who can't keep it in his pants (who would've thought???) AKA Mr. Out Of The Woods (and like others but DEFINITELY that one)

Knew it wasn't going to last but still seemed to enjoy it while it lasted

Put up with all that fangirl shit

Seemed to find it inspirational, if only aesthetically

Only person on this list that she seemingly didn't think she would end up with (though she apparently thought he may interrupt her wedding???)

We're apparently on-and-off for ages

Was a key player in sending her into one of many Identity Crisis'

6. Joe Alwyn AKA Golden Boy AKA Mr. 50-something songs (or something like that)

Was with him for 6 years

Very clearly thought he was the love of her life

Once again redefined her perception of love ("I once believed love would be burning red but it's golden" which I know is like a general concept but she applies red to Jake and gold to Joe for the most part)

I really don't think I should have to explain this one. She literally did it herself

Obviously we can't know for sure, but let me know if you agree or disagree. (Also sorry this is so long. I have a lot of thoughts and I don't know where else to put them xx)

I think you’re missing Calvin. I don’t like Calvin erasure lol. I know she didn’t write much about it and I think that’s where the idea that it wasn’t significant stems from but like I think that was a far more defining relationship than like Haylor tbh. He was the first boyfriend she lived with. I think there were very serious plans in place for them. It just started to suck at the end. But I think if he sucked just slightly less and if that time period sucked slightly less, she’d have married him tbh. She’s referring to him as the “good husband” in songs so like… she did think that was very serious. I also think that’s sorta why there weren’t that many songs. It was all just fine and then it sucked and none of it was crazy inspiring but it was also obviously super deep.

[krazykiki05]

There’s Not Enough Hours in the Day

Zemo accidentally had a daughter at 16 with a 17 year old. When she found out what he was doing back in 2016, she teamed up with the Avengers to help fight her father at the age of 19. During this time, she helped Bucky and they grew close.. She moved to Wakanda to help him readjust to modern life. When Bucky came back from the blip, he lived with her. He would miss therapy if it wasn’t for her. She would have never seen her father again if it wasn’t for him.  I I PART 2 I I

“So our first move is grand theft auto?” Sam says as the lights to the garage turns on.  “These are mine.” Papa says with slight malice to the tone. I ran to my favorite car, the red jeep. Bucky follows me. I ignore what my father says and I reach into the backseat by crawling, leaving my ass hanging out for Bucky to look at. Pulling out my personal weapons, I remember my father letting my drive this car for my 18th birthday. I set the duffel bag on the driver’s seat, sifting through it to make sure everything was in there. “Babe…” Bucky muttered, pushing my hand away to rummage through it himself. “All this yours?” I nod proudly.  “Ever since I was 11, that man could buy me some kind of self defense weapon, when I hit 15, they started becoming more like these.” I explain before pulling out a pocket knife from a set I remember getting for my 15th birthday. I see my father walking away, I go to follow him.  “First stop is a woman named Selby. Mid-level fence I still have a line on. From there, we climb.” Papa says. 

~~~~~~~~~ As we get closer to the plane, Sam speaks up. “So all this time you’ve been rich?”  “I’m a baron, Sam. My family was royalty until your friends destroyed our country.”  “So if you’re a baron, and she’s your daughter, that makes her-” I finish Sam’s sentence.  “Baroness.” “How come you never told me?” Bucky asks, sounding a bit hurt.  “It didn’t seem to matter.” I answer.  “Hello, Oeznik.” My father greets the old man in Sokovian.  “Welcome, gentlemen, and lady.” Oez says back. I smile at him.  “Old friend.” Papa says, pulling him in for a hug. After they pull away I hug Oez, him kissing my cheek.  “Please.” papa ushered the men into the plane. 

Once we are in the air, I make myself comfortable in the seat across from my father since the boys were sitting on the other side of the plane across from each other. My knees were tucked up to my chest, overcoat being used as a makeshift blanket. My father chuckles softly as Oeznik comes in with two glasses of champagne. “Apologies if it’s a little warm.” He starts while handing the glasses to my father and I. “The fridge is out. But I will see if there is good food in the galley.” “If it doesn’t pass the smell test,” My father says in Sokovian. I roll my eyes. “Give it to them.” Oeznik chuckles.  “It’s good to have you back sir.” He says before turning to me. “Let me see if I can make your favorite.” He says. I stop him before he exits.  You don’t have to, I’m not hungry.” I say in Sokovian, trying to sharpen my skill. Oeznik was getting older, not as young as he used to be when I would ride this plane as a small child. Oez’s smile drops and my father snaps his head at me. I look at him. “I’m not!” I defend in English. Father tilts his head.  “You should eat something.” He orders in Sokovian.  “I ate before I came.” Father scoffs. “Don’t lie to me. I’ve been with you all day.” Father’s face grows darker in order to ask the next question. “Is it back?” I felt Oeznik lean in closer too. I swallow. I couldn’t tell him the truth. Not right now.  “No.” Father tilts his head back to relax.  “Oeznik, just make her something small, then.” Papa orders, eyes locked with mine the whole sentence.  “Yes, sir.” He responds in English before walking away.  “The hell was that?” Sam asks. Oh shit, I forgot they were there. My father continues to study me.  “Nothing that concerns you.” He answers. I glanced at Bucky who had a suspicious look on his face.  “Okay, then why don’t you tell us about where we are going?”  “I’m sorry.” Father mumbles, looking back down at his book. “I was just fascinated by this. I don’t know what to call it, but this part seems important.” He reaches in his book and pulls out a smaller one. I recognize it to be Bucky’s from its days of sitting on the mudroom table. “Who is Nakajima?” Papa asks. Bucky Is quick to get up, slamming him against his seat, holding him by his throat. I stand up myself.  “Buck, stop!” I plead, placing a hand on the arm around my father’s neck.  “If you touch that again, I’ll kill you.” He growls, I yank on his arm again.  “Okay, James, he gets it.” I snap. Bucky’s eyes snap towards me, before his hand releases their grip. He knows when I say his real name, I’m pissed. Bucky immediately softens going back to his seat, pulling me with him until I sit on the arm of his chair. I drape my legs over his and his metal arms hooks around my waist to keep me from falling.  “Sorry.” He mutters, barely audible.  “I’m sorry. I understand that list of names. People you’ve wronged as the Winter Soldier.” Papa said. I glare at my father.  “Don’t push it.” My boyfriend growls before nuzzling his face into my torso. I keep his head there by hooking my arm around, and running my fingers through his hair.  “You must have really looked up to Steve.” Papa acknowledged. “But I realized something when I met him. The danger with people like him,” He starts. My hand slides down to Bucky’s shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “America's Super Soldier is that we put them on pedestals.” Sam and I both noticed Bucky get antsy, shifting in his seat.  “Papa.” I warned.  “Watch your step, Zemo.” Sam did the same.  “They become symbols. Icons.” He did heed our warnings. “ Then we start to forget about their flaws. From there, cities fly, innocent people die. Movements are formed, wars are fought.” He looks at the man I’m trying to protect. “You remember that right? As a young soldier sent to Germany to stop a mad icon. Do we want to live in a world full of people like Red Skull? That’s why we are going to Madripoor.” I don’t know why my father has to make short answers long.  “What’s up with Madripoor? You guys talk about it like it’s Skull Island.” Sam asks. Bucky speaks up.  “It's an island nation in the Indonesian archipelago.”  “It was a pirate sanctuary in the 1800s.” I add.  “It’s kept its lawless ways but we cannot exactly walk in as ourselves.” Papa explains. “James, you will have to become someone you claim is long gone.” My eyes widened.  “No.”  “Annika, please-” “There has to be another person!”  “Annika, it’s fine.” Bucky says, placing a hand on my thigh. I look down at him as he looks up at me. He sucks at hiding the pain in his eyes.  “Bucky…” I mutter. He sends me a fake reassuring smile.  “Oeznik will be back soon. He will be very mad if he does not find you safe in your own seat.” Papa calls. Sam was taken back by the tone of his voice. A tone he saved just for me, I rolled my eyes and sat back in my own seat. Just in time for Oez to come out with three platters. One for me, Papa, and Sam and Bucky to split. I didn’t make any sign to move. Papa glares at me. “Eat.” He commands in sokovian. I ignore him. 

#bucky #Bucky Barnes #buckybarnes #bucky imagine #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes fluff #zemo #zemo imagine #daddy zemo #helmut zemo #sam wilson #captain america #tfatws #sebastian #Sebastian Stan #sebastianstan #sebastian stan imagine #daniel brühl #daniel brul #daniel bruhl imagine

[crowning-art]

TGCF SPOILERS BOOK 4

---------------------------------------------

enfkjenkenfe so turns out I forgot a lot of important incidents and had to go back and reread a bunch of book 2 (heart breaking experience even when you know what's gonna happen T-T) and there's this one line that made me laugh tho where Fengxin describes Hua Cheng when he was younger

“That brat will definitely grow up to be a good man!” Feng Xin commented.

lmao dude has noooo idea that this 'good man' will the bane of his existence in the future lmao

ok ok now for the actual reading!!

Everything here feels so sad like Xie Lian here is rejecting the steamed buns, the very same steamed buns that years later, he will happily eat off the ground....

Feng Xin and Mu Qing were already waiting for him outside. Feng Xin had brought back steaming-hot buns, and Mu Qing was slowly munching at them. Feng Xin passed two over to Xie Lian, but when Xie Lian saw those dull and dry crude buns he lost his appetite. He shook his head, refusing them.

My heaaart! Xie Lian gets his cooking skills from his mom T-T that's so cute but so heart breaking considering the circumstances.

I reread book 2 and saw it happen but to see the origins of this tradition is just....sad (gotta increase my vocab, something says Im going to need more words to describe sad soon lol)

“Now, none of you understand. Worshipping a God of Misfortune would certainly bring bad luck, but this statue isn’t for worshipping, it’s for stepping. If you step on a God of Misfortune, doesn’t that mean it’d ensure your everlasting good fortune?”

NOOOOO BABYYYYYYY MY BELOVED DONT GOOOOOO I LOVE YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

Mu Qing replied, “The king and the queen are His Highness’ parents, and I have my own mother. She needs my care too. I can’t say I need to go take care of someone else and someone else’s parents, and neglect my own mother. So, I pray Your Highness will understand, I cannot continue to follow by your side.”

but also....I get it.....he's justified to leave....but dooooon't

You're kidding me. You're absolutely kidding me

YOU MEAN TO TELL ME HUA CHENG DIED IN THE XIANLE BATTLES AGAINST YONG'AN??? AT SUCH A YOUNG AGE??? WHAT WAS HE? 17? 21???

Within the lanterns were all the wandering feral spirits that the elder had captured from the barren battlefield, so the one before him now must also be a young warrior.

He said quietly, “This war separated you from your beloved…I’m sorry. I didn’t win.”

However, the nameless ghost declared, “To die in battle for you is my greatest honour.

MY HEART IS BREAKING SO MUCH THINKING ABOUT THIS cuz little Hua Cheng was out there, alone, trying his best to bring comfort to Xie Lian from a distance, and fighting in a fierce battle, and then he dies. and it must have been a painful and brutal death...and no one knew...and he was alone...but he wasn't alone cuz Xie Lian never left his mind....but this little boy was all alone when he took his last breathe...

Ouch....pls someone give him therapy

The ghost was insistent, “Believe me, Your Highness.”

“I don’t believe you,” Xie Lian said.

He no longer believed anyone, and he no longer believed in himself either.

God I absolutely love Feng Xin so much, like my boi went out of his way and was willing to do something so humiliating to help Xie Lian and you can see how difficult it was....this is so sad

Feng Xin removed the bow on his back and boldly pulled at it. “My…My nickname is ‘Godly Archer’; I can shoot a bullseye from a hundred feet away. I will show off my embarrassing skill for everyone to see. If you all enjoy the show, will you p-please grant some coins!”

Lmao at this point, I should have a sad counter considering how many times I said it hahahaha

#tian guan ci fu #tgcf #xie lian #heaven’s official blessings #hua cheng #heaven's official blessings spoilers #tgcf spoilers #tgcf journey #ch 181-183

[fitrahgolden]

There's A World You Need to Know: 2 - I see myself as people see me

Before opening the door to her mother’s house, Kate ran through her checklist. Ed’s uni applications, Mum’s health check, family calendar, find out which arsehole Ed is romanticizing a future with, check–

The door swung open before she could finish. “How long were you going to stand out there, weirdo?” Simon grabbed the two bags of groceries Kate was holding and made his way back inside, Kate following.

“I was going for a loitering record, Si. Thanks a lot. How long have you been here?”

“Ages. Mary’s cooking.”

“Mooch much?”

“When I can.”

They made it into the kitchen, where Mary and Edwina were sitting at the breakfast table looking at Edwina’s phone.

“Didi!”

“Hey, Bon.”

“Come look.”

Kate moved to the table as Simon put the groceries away.

“Mummy.” Kate bent down and kissed Mary on the cheek before moving behind Edwina and putting her arms around her shoulders. “What are we looking at?” Before she even finished her sentence, her face dropped. “Who’s this, then?”

“His name is Jake. He’s fit, isn’t he? We’re going out tonight.”

“What time? And where are you going? Where did you even meet him?”

“Christ, Kate!” Simon laughed from the stove, where he was “sampling” absolutely everything. Edwina rolled her eyes before sharing a look with Mary.

“I thought you were putting away the shopping? And you should want to know, too, Si. Aren’t you supposed to be scaring these tossers off?”

“No, love. That’s my mum’s job.”

“Indeed, it is.” A voice boomed from the doorway.

Kate mumbled, “Speak of the–”

“Of whom are we speaking, darling?”

Damn, that woman moves fast with that cane. Kate opened her arms as she moved across the kitchen to Agatha. “Only the best godmother in the whole, wide world.”

“I’m sure,” Agatha eyed Kate as she neared but hugged her warmly. Over Kate’s shoulder, she narrowed her eyes at Simon, who froze with a spoon in his mouth.

“Mum! Move over, Kate! My mum is here!” He made a big show of shoving Kate to the side, but Agatha pointed her cane into his chest before he could hug her, which had Kate cackling.

“I assumed I would find you here when you didn’t grace me with your presence after letting me know you would ‘be there in a mo.’”

She offered her cheek, which Simon kissed before saying, “I’m sorry. I crossed the street to drop off a book for Ed and, well…” He gestured towards the stove. “I am a weak man.”

“Yes, I know. One would think I didn’t raise you.” Agatha patted Simon’s cheek with a tender smile.

“Agatha, please sit down. I put the kettle on.” Mary got up to make tea while Agatha settled in next to Edwina.

“Now, my girl, show me this prince with whom you are going to ride off into the sunset.”

Simon nudged Kate with his shoulder. “So…”

“What?”

“Had drinks with a mate last night.”

“Si, I do not want to hear about your latest conquest. I’m about to eat.”

“No, no, I’ll save that for later. Don’t you want to know who I was with?”

“When do I ever want to know that? I hate your friends.”

“Fair. But I thought you may like to know that I know one Lord Anthony Bridgerton.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? How? Wait, don’t tell me.”

She rolled her eyes before they said in tandem, “Oxford.”

“Of course. You fucking Oxford boys. I should ask Tom if he knows him, too, when we go to Ireland.”

“He does, we were all roommates.”

“Fuck off!”

“Kate!”

“Sorry, Mummy!”

—

Anthony didn’t contact Tom. He had realized he was way more interested in Kate’s life than the merits of art and music therapy, so he decided it was best to leave it alone. He definitely shouldn’t think too hard about that revelation.

He heard Gregory and Hyacinth laughing and talking excitedly down the hall. So, Kate’s here. So what? I’m just gonna walk right by the door and–

“Ooh, Anthony, you should try it!”

Anthony peered into the room. Kate and the kids all were painting their faces, supplies strewn all over.

“Um, I don’t think I should interrupt.”

“You can come in, if you’d like.” Kate spoke up. “We’re done, we’re just playing around. Don’t worry, I’m not charging your mother for this.”

Did she just wink at me? Anthony’s ears turned red. “I didn’t think–”

“It’s fine, I’m messing with you. You make it too easy.”

“I’ve been told.” There was something sad in his voice that made Kate soften.

“Anthony, pick an animal already!” Hyacinth, who was presumably a…giraffe, maybe…was handing him paint and brushes. “You’ll need a mirror.”

“I, uh… Maybe you can do it for me?”

“Sorry, I’m perfecting my antelope.”

An antelope. Right.

“Kate can do it! She’s really good!” Gregory, a killer whale, chimed in.

Kate’s moth wings on either side of her huge brown eyes did look immaculate, more fitting for some kind of film production than a private face painting session. She cleverly worked her nose and eyebrows into the moth’s body and antennae. Her eyes met Anthony’s.

“You don’t have to. I can go.” Anthony turned toward the hallway.

“I don’t mind. Really. The kids would love it if you participated.”

Anthony couldn’t help but wonder if that statement stemmed from something Greg or Hy had said in a session. He shook the thought out of his head. “OK, let’s do it.”

Kate gestured to an open chair and Anthony dutifully sat down. Kate pulled up a chair in front of him and scooted it up close. Their knees almost touched.

“So, Lord Bridgerton, which animal best represents you right now?”

“Make him a parrot!” Gregory said and Hyacinth seconded the idea.

Kate raised an eyebrow at Anthony, “Feeling like a parrot?”

“Yeah, I guess I feel like a parrot, sure.”

“Excellent, I love using bright colors.”

The fact that Kate genuinely seemed excited to do this was endearing. She took a lot of care, as if this wasn’t silly at all. As she touched Anthony’s face and moved between colors, Anthony realized how good she smelled. Stop it, stop it, stop it.

“So, why a moth for you today, then?” He figured talking would keep his mind from wandering.

Kate shrugged and smiled. I love that smile. The thought entered Anthony’s mind unbidden, followed quickly by, What the actual fuck, Anthony?

“Moths have a subtlety to their appeal. I mean, most do. Those big green motherfuckers love to show off, don’t they?”

Anthony chuckled and looked back at Gregory and Hyacinth. “You speak that way around all your clients?”

“Actually, yeah, until they snitch and their parents tell me to stop.”

“I won’t say a word.”

“I appreciate it. You need to close your eyes for this last bit if I’m gonna do it properly.” Anthony did as he was told.

“Anyway, moths are also pretty clever when it comes to escaping predators.”

“You feel the need for those skills right now?” He opened his eyes when she didn’t answer and her hand stilled on his face. “Kate?”

She blinked rapidly. “Sorry. Um… I think we’re done. Take a look.”

She held up the mirror to him. Of course, it was very well done, but that didn’t stop him from feeling thoroughly foolish. “Yep, that’s a parrot.” Anthony turned to show his siblings but they weren’t there. When he and Kate looked to the door, they saw a flash of brown hair before hearing peals of laughter as the kids ran down the hall. He turned back to Kate who was spraying a hand towel with water before she handed it to him with a smile.

“It’ll wipe right off. Just make sure you show them before you do.”

“They don’t seem interested in the end result.”

“Not as much as you just being here and being silly with them, no. But just in case.”

Anthony helped her clean up. Once Kate had collected her things, she made her way to the door.

“Kate?”

She turned. “Yes?”

Anthony pointed to his own face, miming a circle. “Are you just gonna wear that?”

“Oh. Um, yeah, why not? I’m just going home.”

“Ha, OK. Uh… Have a good night.”

Kate regarded him for a moment before responding, “Good night, Viscount.”

That evening, when Anthony was home and getting ready for bed, he noticed there was still just a little bit of blue paint on the tip of his nose. He left it there and went to sleep.

#anthony x kate #bridgerton #kanthony #kanthonyedit #kate and anthony #kate sharma #kate sheffield #kate x anthony #kate bridgerton #bridgerton au #anthony bridgerton #anthony and kate #lord bridgerton #the viscount who loved me #there's a world you need to know au #there's a world you need to know #therapist au

[greenjacketwhitehatdocmui]

Jon Kent--Needs Therapy Badly

OK, folks.  I’m of the opinion that Jon Kent, Son of Kal-El, should have had therapy after his ordeals.  More details are behind the cut.

 I believe that what Brian Michael Bendis did to Jon Kent could be described as cruel.  At 11 years old, he was given permission (albeit grudgingly) to accompany his grandfather, Jor-El, on trip to see the universe.  Ostensibly, it was to give Jon greater control over his powers. However, it was later revealed that an increasingly erratic Jor-El had no such insight.

Since Lois had departed earlier, Jon felt abandoned and alone.  Faced with an unstable grandfather and no support, he struck out on his own.  This was a mistake, as Jon ran afoul of a black hole, transporting him to Earth 3. He was then imprisoned in a volcano by Ultraman, a moral inversion of Superman.  After an extended period, Jon escaped from the volcano and wandered Earth 3 as a fugitive. It was only after several subjective years had passed that Jor-El had managed to retrieve Jon.  By then, he was roughly 17 years old.  After a stint with the Legion of Superheroes (including a short and very flawed relationship with Saturn Girl), he takes up the mantle of Superman when his father goes to Warworld.  Furthermore, he no longer has a secret identity, as his father has revealed himself to the world.

The thing is, Bendis tries to present this aging-up as a good thing.  Jon’s personality after his ordeal is still the same, optimistic, happy-go-lucky boy he was before the trip.  It’s as if he’s saying, “yeah, I took away years of his life, but he’s just fine!  He’s Superboy!  How can he not be fine?”

I submit the idea that Jon Kent is really a mess inside.  He’s been portrayed as a very sensitive young man, but not without inner strength.  Saying that he’s “just fine” does the character a disservice.  Many readers will wonder why this wasn’t addressed—in fact, avoided during the Bendis run.  Almost as soon as he’s returned to his parents, he’s off with the Legion—leaving no time to really decompress.

Jon has lost 6-7 years of his life.  While stranded on Earth 3, he has missed large milestones in his psychosocial development.  He had to learn to be independent and not trust anyone, especially on a world where evil is rewarded over good.  As a result, he had no peers to confide in, much less pursue relationships with.  Are we to believe that there are no lasting psychological repercussions after all this?

Well, of course not.  Bendis says so, and what he writes must be unquestioningly correct in every way.  The onus is upon the reader as to whether or not the story rings true.  *ahem*

Had Bendis been less concerned with getting to the next plot point and explored the ramifications, some readers may not have reacted so badly to the changes. However, he was off to write Jon’s adventures with the Legion.  Young Jon couldn’t go, so he was aged up.  His dual identity was stripped from him, eliminating the normality that his father had—a refuge from being the hero all the time.

Jon’s trauma should have been acknowledged.  He should have sought out help from a therapist.  It’s puzzling that Bendis didn’t go down this route, as he has significant experience with characters overcoming trauma.  This would have been a remarkably rich vein of storytelling. But instead, it’s brushed off. Off to the next title, the next writer can deal with it—or not.

Regrettably, Tom Taylor has not addressed this issue, either. Furthermore, he seems to believe Jon doesn’t need therapy.  In fact, in “Son of Kal-El” # 2, Lois comments that she’s done the therapy—but nothing from Jon.  This would have been an excellent time for her to mention a therapist for his issues (PTSD would be a reasonable one).  There could have been a “breather” issue where Jon relates his recent actions to a therapist.  Damian Wayne and Dick Grayson are good friends (though the latter relationship feels like a retcon and shoehorned in), but neither of them are truly objective. A therapist’s job is to offer that objectivity, one that a friend cannot due to being emotionally invested.  Even Jon’s sense of identity and his relationships could have been slowly unpacked in the session—things that he never really had time to process while, well, saving the world.  What we are given is a hastily constructed story that should not be examined closely, lest you be blocked by the author for any criticism.

Young Justice:  Phantoms had an excellent scene where Beast Boy was undergoing therapy with Black Canary. Superman and Lois has treated mental health with respect, especially when it came to Lois’s past or Jordan’s anxiety.  It’s a pity that Jon Kent will never get the same treatment in the comics.  The writer seems to think that by not acknowledging trauma, the story will go on.  “Ignore/block the critics and they’ll go away,” seems to be the theme.  It somehow seems fitting that this maladaptive thought pattern is indicative of the overall quality of Jon Kent’s story after his age-up.

I mean, he’s only a kid with unresolved issues with the power of Superman.  What could possibly go wrong?

--Doc

#jon kent #superman #Brian Michael Bendis #tom taylor #rant

[mediaevalmusereads]

Never Look Back. By Lilliam Rivera. Bloomsbury, 2020.

Rating: 4/5 stars

Genre: YA contemporary romance, mythological retelling

Series: N/A

Summary: Eury comes to the Bronx as a girl haunted. Haunted by losing everything in Hurricane Maria--and by an evil spirit, Ato. She fully expects the tragedy that befell her and her family in Puerto Rico to catch up with her in New York. Yet, for a time, she can almost set this fear aside, because there's this boy . . .

Pheus is a golden-voiced, bachata-singing charmer, ready to spend the summer on the beach with his friends, serenading his on-again, off-again flame. That changes when he meets Eury. All he wants is to put a smile on her face and fight off her demons. But some dangers are too powerful for even the strongest love, and as the world threatens to tear them apart, Eury and Pheus must fight for each other and their lives.

***Full review below.***

CONTENT WARNINGS: teen drug/alcohol use, attempted sexual assault, blood

OVERVIEW: I was looking around for interesting Greek myth retelling when I stumbled upon this book. I wanted something different than just a historical fiction, something other than the same story told from the woman's perspective or something. When I saw this book, it seemed perfect, and in a lot of ways, I loved Rivera's rendering of the Orpheus myth into the modern day. The main reason why this book is getting 4 stars is because the writing style is not for me and the narrative shifts in tone rather abruptly at the 2/3 mark. But other than those things, this is a lovely retelling, and a good choice if you're drawn to literary movements like #ownvoices.

WRITING: Before I say anything specific, I should point out that this book is not written for me. It's aimed at a younger audience, so take anything I say with a huge grain of salt. I will be biased because of my age.

Overall, I liked that Rivera wrote with such honesty, making characters aware of things and emotions in ways that felt very real. For example, Pheus is constantly thinking about how Black people have to act to avoid scrutiny in public, and Eury has a difficult relationship with therapy for many race-related reasons. I liked that Rivera wrote them in a way that felt natural and relevant to what was happening, and it added depth to the characters and their internal monologs.

There are, however, some aspects of the writing that simply did not work for me (but again, I am biased). For one, Rivera writes with a lot of short, simple sentences that privilege telling over showing. Perhaps this style is common for books aimed at younger readers, so it's not necessarily a bad thing. It was confusing to me, however, because the style made the prose feel "younger," perhaps akin to something for middle school readers. I may be a poor judge of that, however.

For two, Pheus's perspective is written using a lot of slang (not dialect - there is that too, but it's different). While I didn't find the slang confusing, I so worry that it will age the book after a few years, and the setting isn't central enough to the narrative (in the way something like historical fiction centralizes setting) to make the slang feel like Pheus and Eury's story is entertained with its situation in time and space. Perhaps that's asking too much, but given that a huge part of Eury's story involves Puerto Rico's destruction by Hurricane Maria, I think time period could have been more important.

PLOT: This book is a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, where our protagonists are teenagers living in the Bronx. Pheus is a popular local musician with Afro-Carribean roots; Eury has relocated from Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria and is pursued by a mysterious spirit named Ato.

I liked the way Rivera took the main beats from the myth and constructed a teen romance that clearly interfaced with themes such as race, mental health, etc. in the modern day.

The connection between spirits and colonialism, capitalism, and pain was also intriguing. I liked the idea of these concepts as things that "haunted" the living, giving shape to people and places while also doing damage. It was a clever way of conceiving of the more mythical elements of Greek myth, and it did a good job of mirroring the way myth tends to personify abstract concepts.

Along similar lines, I liked the magical realism of the first half of the story, with Ato only popping up in Eury's POV. It really made me doubt whether the spirit was real or some sort of trauma response, and I actually found the ambiguity to be a great way to keep some suspense in the story.

However, I do think that in the last third, magical realism tips firmly into fantasy, and while I enjoyed the fantasy narrative, it also felt abrupt and jarring when I got there. Personally, I would have liked the whole story to be magical realism, but I do respect what Rivera was doing.

Lastly, I just was not a fan of the attempted sexual assault. I know why it was included, but it didn't have to be there.

CHARACTERS: Eury, our heroine, is sympathetic in that she is terrified of the spirit pursuing her. It's easy to want her to be free of Ato, and her desperation combined with her lack of trust is heart-wrenching, to say the least. But Eury is also more than her suffering; I loved her love for Prince and birds and the sisterly affection for her cousin, Penelope. Eury might also appeal to a lot of readers because she's shy and awkward, but makes a brave effort to go places with her friends and with Pheus.

TL;DR: Never Look Back is a touching retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, focusing on things such as identity, trauma/mental health, happiness vs suffering, and so on. Though this book was written for a younger audience (and thus didn't resonate with me as much as it might with a teen reader), I still enjoyed the way Rivera played with the myth while introducing themes of her own that make the story resonate with a modern audience.

Pheus, our hero, is charismatic and a little bit of a flirt, but he finds himself in deep when Eury fails to fall for him immediately. I liked that though Pheus is a charmer, he does genuinely care about people and doesn't stop from criticizing friends who are unfair or unkind. I also liked Pheus's struggle to believe in the supernatural; he had a strong belief in what he can see and what he can do with his own hands, and that ethic is not only admirable, but also makes for an interesting stumbling block in his relationship with Eury. He must struggle to overcome it so that the two can grow closer, and I appreciated this kind of development.

Supporting characters are fine and did their jobs well. I liked the friendship between Pheus and Jaysen and the closeness between Eury and Penelope. I also liked the bond between Pheus and his father and the honesty they gave to one another. Melaina was probably the one that puzzled me most in that she was poised to be a jealous rival (and, in fact, was that), but Pheus came to recognize the way he was hurting her. I kind of wish more was done with this, but then again, it might have distracted from the main story.

Ato, our antagonist, is a little hard to understand, and personally, I wanted to see Rivera explore him more. I wasn't entirely clear or even sold on why he was so attached to Eury - the given explanation of her "light" felt a little vague to me. When his background was revealed, I liked that there were a lot of implications about what suffering and hate could do to people, and I would have liked to see those aspects pushed more.