Not what I usually post, but I need people to see this insanely intimate moment I had with two complete strangers at the airport the other day. This was typed out in my notes app on the bus ride from the airport so I’d get every fresh little detail from my memory.
“Sitting on a Lufthansa flight, eight hours from Frankfurt to Boston. We’re a half hour ahead of time, sitting on the runway awaiting an open gate. I hear a clang, and under my seat rolls a metal water bottle. I reach under and pass it back to the kid who dropped it. They wear a soft jean jacket with a shirt underneath reading something along the lines of “I’m really a moth and this is my human costume”.
“Here you go, bud.” I say.
They thank me.
Five, ten minutes later and everybody is getting up to be deplaned. I hear behind me the same kid talking to their mom. “There’s a type of jellyfish that can live forever. If something doesn’t eat it. They go back to an earlier stage of their life…”
I turn back and pull lobsters into the conversation. They tell me they went to an away science camp where they learned about marine biology.
“I’m Moth” they draw out the “th” sound.
I repeat it back: “Moth?? That’s such a cool name dude!”
The mom jumps in. “They named themself that!”
“What’s your name?” Moth asks me.
“Sam. My pronouns are he/him, what are yours?”
“They/them!”
“That’s so cool! I’m trans too!”
The mom again: “They have older siblings, so they’ve had a lot more time to think about these things than most other nine year olds.”
There’s a pause in the conversation here, and I can feel my emotions bending. “You know you’re the luckiest kid ever, right?”
“I am?”
“Mhm..” I’ve started to get shakey now. I look away and bring my arm to my face, trying to control my emotions. The mom looks at me, and waits a moment before saying, “y’know, I give out mom hugs to anyone who needs it.” She opens her arms and I lean into the embrace.
When it’s over I find myself saying “You’re the coolest person I know. I hope you have a great life!” to Moth as I leave. I wave behind me as I get off the plane.
“Me too!”
I wait on the edge of the group as the rest of the cadets trickle off of the plane and condense beside me. I see Moth and their mom walk by, and I catch the mom’s eye. We smile at each other. Moth doesn’t see me.
They came back. To find me. And Moth asks for a hug. (Or, more accurately, if they can hug 𝘮𝘦.)
“Of course!” I bend down. We’re at an awkward height, and I shift to see if I should kneel or remain. By the end I’m kneeling.
We hug more times than I remember. Eight, nine, ten times? I don’t rightfully know. Each hug they get more emotional, and I see tears well up in their brown eyes.
The mother says “sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t know they’d start crying like this.” I tell her it’s fine, it’s okay.
Their straight, brown, a bit longer than shoulder length hair is messed up, and the mom is behind them, smoothing it behind their ear. So am I.
“It’s gonna be okay.” The mom says to them.
I tell them that they’re the coolest person I know. We hug, and each time we pull away, we hold each other’s arms, or grasp each others hands.
“Sorry about this. With the jet lag and stuff they start acting like a drunk person!”
Moth laughs through their tears, and I laugh with them.
“Sam’s gotta go with his group now,” the mother says. So I do.
The last time I saw Moth was about a half hour after our first interaction on the plane. I’m walking with my group to get my passport stamped. Moth is alone now, waiting for their mom outside a bathroom. I hug them one last time as I walk by, and file down through the seatbelt barrier maze.
I wave, and Moth smiles back.
And that’s it. That’s my whole story. As much as they’ll ever know of it, at least.”
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Edit: as hoshi9zoe pointed out, the original version of this post needlessly berated other transfems like Jennifer Coates, for which I do apologize, and I have toned it down in this edited version. The original version survives in reblogs.
Some months ago, I was searching through this transandrobro blog to see if they posted a callout of me, and i found this reblog, which I couldn't really write about for months, because what do I even write. I recently wayback machined it for posterity, and I guess this is my attempt to write a post about it.
It's saint-dyke himself, the coiner of transandrophobia, saying that the infamous (at least for me) article "I am a transwoman. I'm in the closet. I'm not coming out" is what made him coin the fucking word. It's literally bolded and underlined: "Reading this article is what made me coin “transandrophobia”.
The reason I put off writing this post is that reading that article makes me feel like i'm drinking poison. And it is poison, make no mistake, it's internalized transmisogyny brainworms dripping out of the writer's brain and onto the page.
It's a justification for why the author, known by pseudonym Jennifer Coates, doesn't want to transition, despite knowing she is a trans woman. And it's the exact kind of internalized transmisogyny that keeps trans women in repression and not transitioning. "I'm not going to pass, i'm forever going to be an ugly freak who will at best be humored by other women, the closet is uncomfortable but at least it's safe"
It's the same exact bullshit a lot of represssed trans women tell themselves because it's what society tells us about trans women, that we are freakish parodies of women, that we will never pass, and if we don't pass we have failed and are ugly freaks. It's all to scare us into staying in the closet and make others hate and fear us. Transmisogyny permeates our society, and the majority, maybe all transfems will absorb and internalize some of it.
Coates says that it all is just applicable to her, but again so many transfems believe this shit before transitioning and realizing it's a pack of lies. If this bullshit was in any way valid, a lot of trans women shouldn't transition, because before we actually transition many of us believe it word for word. And "it's only true for me" is how we justify it to ourselves. We tend to be way harsher on ourselves than others. This kind of self-hating transfem tends to think: "Other trans women are beautiful graceful goddesses, earthly manifestations of the divine feminine, always destined to be women, while I'm an ugly forever male ogre who just has a fetish."
It's all bullshit, it's poison, it's internalized transmisogyny.
And the rest of the article is bullshit too. It is not some insightful mediation on gender as some people say, it's the author confusing and mixing up actual transmisogyny with an imagined problem of misandry. She does this because she has gone full repression mode, and decided she has no other choice to live as a man, so her dysphoria and experiences of transmisogyny are actually men's problems.
It's a bad article, excusable because as Coatas points out, it's "essentially a diary entry." that was meant to be a way to "vent frustration" and she "did not intend for anyone else to actually read it." It is clearly not the product of a healthy mind.
I hope the author sometime in the past seven years eventually did transition, and that for whatever reason she didn't want to publicly repudiate her own article. Maybe she lost access to the medium account so she can't delete it.
Far worse than the article itself is the response to it. I've seen it passed around as some insightful commentary on gender by the "feminists are too mean to men, misandry is real" crowd. I have argued against this before. And other people have made insightful comments about it.
And learning that saint-dyke claiming that he was inspired to coin the word "transandrophobia" because of this article is the cherry on top of this shitcake of transmisogyny. For my thoughts on "transandrophobia" theory and how transmisogynistic it is, see here.
Of course, Saint-dyke absolutely could be bullshitting here. Claiming that Coates's article is what inspired him to coin the word might be a lie to claim that transandrophobia theory is not transmisogynistic because it came from listening to trans women.
This is why "listen to trans women" doesn't work. Because TME people will always choose a trans woman who confirms their prejudices. Blair White has made an entire career out of this. And Coates article is popular because it says that misandry is real and trans women's issues are partly caused by it, misgendering herself and other trans women.
And it's popular for another reason. Coates has thoroughly internalized transmisogyny, and thus her article presents a trans woman that is exactly as transmisogynistic patriarchal society wants her to be. She is suffering, but ultimately accepts her assigned role. She truly believes that her biological sex dooms her to forever be male. She literally "manages her dysphoria by means other than transition" as conversion therapy advocates want us to do. She never makes an social claim on womanhood by actually transitioning, so she doesn't invade the sacred women's spaces. Yet she performs the role of woman perfectly by serving men, by defending them from supposed feminist misandry. And she fulfils the ritualistic role that the rhetorical figure of "trans women" sometimes serves in progressive spaces, of giving a blessing to TME people's pre-existing views and actions, all while actual flesh-and-blood trans women are destroyed by those same deeply transmisogynistic spaces. This time it's a blessing for the same "misandry is real" soft-MRA bullshit that has infested the online left and created the transandrophobia crowd.
That is why this article and the positive response makes me sick, makes me feel like i'm drinking poison. This is what its fans want trans women to be like. I'm acutely aware this kind of self-denial is exactly what transmisogyny wants from me and tried to indoctrinate me into doing it. And I want none of it. I want to live, I want to be a woman.
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One thing I love about Lan Wangji is that how the way he’s viewed by others changes with the progression of his arc.
When we meet him in the Cloud Recesses, he’s already well known in the cultivation world. He’s known for being one of the Twin Jades of Lan – for being a model disciple, for being perfectly skilled in everything you’d expect a young master to be proficient in, for perfectly encapsulating all the Lan Sect’s principles, including their immovable adherence to the rules. And that’s immensely impressive. But the thing is, he’s not really defined by himself – it’s not his own identity he’s carving out, but the identity of a perfect disciple of a clan. That’s even echoed in his title as one of the Lan’s Twin Jades. He’s known, first and foremost, for being a son of the Lan Clan’s Sect Leader.
But as he starts to develop, as he starts to grow, what he’s known for changes, and people begin to know him for who, not what, he is. He’s not famous, first and foremost, for being Lan Wangji, one of the Twin Jades – but for being Hanguang-Jun, the ‘light bearer’, the person who goes where the chaos is, and for a title and reputation he’s carved out of his own merits. Instead of being known for perfectly embodying rules and principles, he becomes known for being righteous*, fair, and for caring about the common people; for prioritising their safety over his own reputation in a way that no other important member of a clan did. And I think it’s important to note that although doing this doesn’t break any rules, it does stand in contrast to the actions of most cultivators (and is even look down upon by some people, like Jiang Cheng, though I’m not sure how much of that is due to their personal history). Instead of being famous for embodying the values of the cultivation world, he becomes known for what he does that sets him apart from it.
People begin to define him by his actions and by everything he does that shows who he is as a person; not as somebody defined by embodying the status and clan he was born into. His reputation given to him as a Twin Jade has been carved into a reputation he’s made for himself, as himself.
And I think that’s beautiful.
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Were they each other’s first anything (kiss, relationship, etc.)?
Who’s better at comforting the other?
For any ship or selfship that you would like! :) <3
Well when left to my own devices today I'm just gonna do Mariocest because the movie has infected my brain. Thankyou very much for asking.
4. Were they each other’s first anything (kiss, relationship, etc.)?
They were each other's first everything. They've always been together. I can't imagine either of them ever had another relationship. Maybe a handful of crushes, they both probably got asked out once or twice, but they're so much more important to each other than anyone else could ever be. They're each other's everything.
8. Who’s better at comforting the other?
I could see this going either way, because they know each other so well. Mario has more experience comforting Luigi, and Luigi has a better range of emotion than Mario. Does that make sense?
I'm gonna say Luigi's better at comforting Mario. Mario faces the problem head on, where as Luigi knows how to take a moment to be upset, let that feeling out, and calm back down first.
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