#this was an irresponsible and harmful and deeply hurtful and upsetting choice for that narrative

[altschmerzes]

Im like. Seething in rage about that episode lol. Like five episodes ago we have jamie detailing a story of james sanctioning him being sexual assaulted (because that’s what it was!!!!!!!!!!! james could literally be convicted of sexual abuse) and now we have the show saying “well actually jamie should forgive his dad and he should explicitly reach out to him and invite him back into his life” like????? I believe in forgiveness but there are limits. And those limits are important.

yeah literally, everything about jamie’s dad in that episode was nothing short of infuriating and extremely painful to watch. like yeah, the violent asshole who arranged for his fourteen year old to be assaulted is exactly who we should be pushing the Forgive Them <3 For YOU <3 shit with, i guess. as if it’s a universal truth that forgiving someone who profoundly harmed you is healthy for every single person ever. especially still actively in the midst of a pretty serious trauma-induced mental health episode.

like that’s what gets me about this - or a couple of things that do ig. we get an (absolutely infuriating) ‘feel good’ shot of james in rehab smiling and proud or whatever watching the match but he has not said fuck-all to jamie. he has not made any kind of effort to apologize or take accountability for everything he did. what they showed jamie doing, reaching out like that? that’s extremely dangerous for him to be doing with no information about how it’s gonna go especially given the last time they interacted went the way it did. i KNOW that because ive BEEN THERE and it’s shit like this being the only narrative society at large will endorse that led me to being there and it fucked me up worse than id already been by an order of magnitude.

forgiveness is for YOU <3 is not a one size fits all maxim. sometimes it hurts people to do that. especially when they’re doing it because they’ve been told that’s the only way to be healthy or free or whatever. sometimes forgiving someone is dangerous and toxic and harmful. and there’s nothing showing THAT story. it’s all this one. it’s all ‘everyone’s needs are exactly the same and they’re ‘forgive your abuser, no it doesn’t matter if they’ve done anything to demonstrate they understand or regret what they did, after all it’s for YOU! no i will not be asking if that’s what you need or doing any work to verify that, just blanket prescribing it and this will be portrayed as the correct and good thing to do.’

it’s not that i think it’s inherently wrong to show someone wanting a relationship with an abusive parent as an adult. i still talk to two of mine, not that i have much of a choice, and i get that it’s very complicated and everyone has the right to make those choices for themselves. but once again i'm at the place of like, characters are not human people making complex decisions for their own reasons, they are narrative figures that are being written by writers making choices, and writers do not ever make a different choice with that narrative and it is blatantly transparent to me that this is largely because society at large does not give one fuck about abuse victims and is stuck in the perspective of the parent and going ‘what makes a good, happy ending here? oh i know! if this person gets their kid back and improves their life <3’ no thought at all as to what a happy ending for the abused adult child might be, or if that’s even a safe situation, which it often is not.

just. disappointing and hurtful and awful but not at all surprising. i keep seeing people expressing surprise that the show would extend its radical forgiveness and second chance approach to james sr of all people and without a fucking minute of work for it because apparently we lost sight of ‘accountability’ somewhere along that road, but i wasn’t surprised at all. because every show does this. every single one, every single time. abused children do not GET the luxury of walking away from their abusers, or saying fuck it, no forgiveness, that’s NOT what i need actually. and characters choosing to reconcile or forgive wouldn’t be nearly as troubling and upsetting to me as a survivor who got pressured by people in my life and by society at large to trying to do that and suffering a lot more for it if there was literally any depiction of other choices existing and being healthy and permitted.

combining the stuff with james in the same episode with the stuff with beard and nate and with ted and his mom was irresponsible, messy storytelling at best. these things are not the same and they are not comparable. people are complicated, and so are parents, and we deserve grace and understanding but abuse changes that equation significantly and that is a hill im going to die on every time.

#gav gab #gav answers #sorry this is so long lmao I have thoughts. on this. #this was an irresponsible and harmful and deeply hurtful and upsetting choice for that narrative #and it hurt me a lot to watch #especially because it was just. tossed in there with no thought or gravity #just oh yeah obviously! #man. there were some really great parts of that episode but fuck that shit so much #they did jamie dirty in that ep. again. #this show does not do abuse justice at this point #ted lasso spoilers #abuse cw #long post #rape mention #csa mention

[mmikmmik2]

As my personal interpretation and preference, I really strongly prefer the idea that Lucy has a safe, loving family back on Earth, who she wanted to return to before Apex indoctrination and still misses. I think it works way better with Grace's character arc.

Who is Lucy?

Lucy is the Apex kid with the eyepatch. She's the most prominent Apex kid; she has the most dialogue and seems closest with Grace.

Every kid in the Apex has been hurt by Grace and Simon, but Lucy is visibly harmed, 'cause she shot her dang eye out with a harpoon they irresponsibly gave her. Even pre-redemption-arc Grace couldn't deny it - she looks away and frowns sadly during the harpoon lesson as she's telling Jesse "you don't want to end up like Lucy".

When Grace comes back to the mall car in The New Apex, she's immediately confronted by an accusing Lucy pushing her away.

But Lucy looks upset when another kid raises the alarm to Simon, initiating Simon's rehearsed public execution of Grace. My read on this scene at the moment is that whatever Simon said to the kids did turn Lucy against Grace, though not as much as he wanted it to. She still cared about Grace and didn't want Grace to get hurt, but she wanted some kind of vindication here - a chance to vent, or to make Grace explain or apologize - something.

What do I conclude from this?

Grace's relationship with Lucy serves two purposes. First, it's singling out one of the Apex kids to be more prominent, as a narrative stand-in for the Apex and Grace's relationship to the Apex in general. Second, it's representing Grace's accountability to the Apex kids. Lucy tangibly carries the proof of how Grace (indirectly, unintentionally) harmed her on her face. Lucy is the Apex kid we see confronting Grace (...although for the wrong reason).

So, as a kind of prototype Apex kid, and/or the Apex kid that Grace owes the most, it feels deeply unsatisfying to me if Lucy's character does not fully explore the harm that Grace did to these kids. If Grace really did "rescue" Lucy from danger or unhappiness, in the sense of giving Lucy a new and relatively safe home on the train so Lucy didn't need to go back - it feels like letting Grace off the hook.

Grace did not care what kind of home life the Apex kids had. She did not care whether they wanted to go home or not. She never asked Jesse about that stuff and she didn't ask Hazel until it coincidentally came up at a time when Grace was feeling nostalgic and slipped out of her "Apex leader" headspace. I do think Grace really believed the kids were better off on the train and tried to provide them with a fulfilling childhood in her own extremely messed up way, but she did everything she could to stop them from making an informed choice about going home or not.

I don't have a problem with the idea that there are some kids who are safer or happier with the Apex than they were with their families or guardians, but I don't think that would be more than a handful of the kids, and as a personal interpretation I really hate the idea that Lucy would be one of them. I love the idea of Grace bonding with the kids more and becoming a genuinely positive and supportive presence in Lucy's life going forward from the S3 finale, but I don't want Lucy joining the Apex to have been anything but bad for Lucy.

#again this is something /i personally/ think as my /personal/ reading of S3 #infinity train #grace monroe #lucy IT #the apex IT

[skinfeeler]

between good posts, miscellaneous aesthetic content, and astounding selfies, sometimes the mask slips and it becomes obvious that i am an extraordinarily troubled person. why? well, there are many reasons. but i can give you a microcosm from the sort of things that are done to me to make me this way, even by other trans women.

this is a vaguepost about me with zero notes. let’s break it down! but before we break it down, let’s take it at face value. the kind of picture she’s painting here insinuates that perhaps i horribly mistreated her and then, in HAL fashion, made sure she was exiled from all the communities we shared using vague accusations and extremely loaded language. something like that.

factually, the opposite happened. we’re all familiar with reversal of accusations done by people who hold power over these they hurt, aren’t we? so here are the disturbing and crude circumstances from which this disgusting screed emerged:

we initially shared an online space together. at some point we started conversing privately. as almost the first thing she said to me, she confided to me that she used to hate women like me: brash. assertive. confident. self-loving. not afraid to take up space or to refuse to put up with mistreatment. the product of a ceaseless struggle against conditioning to let people exploit me, abuse me. one of two directions each trans woman can take, the other one to become fragile and let oneself stay fragile.

she said that once she met me and got to know me, she dropped this worldview and seemed embarrassed she ever held it. in response, i, simply grateful to not have someone reject me for being the wrong kind of trans woman — an etymological baeddel, if you will — told her that i understood, since i know people like me aren’t allowed to exist. i wish i hadn’t.

because she didn’t drop it forever. she only dropped it conditionally.

we had a dalliance of sorts, and eventually it turned out to be deeply unhealthy for both of us, so i broke it off for both our sakes. i told her that it was probably for the best that we ‘stopped talking’, by which i meant to not contact me individually and to refrain from using group environments specifically to solicit me. i hoped that this reduction of contact, while making room to share the same spaces, would be better for both of us than our unhealthy and mutually damaging association.

then soon after day her girlfriend who shared the same space and who i still spoke to told me — as part of a larger diatribe concerning a reciprocally harmful situation — the following.“It’s ridiculous - it’s a completely irresponsible way to handle a sitution with someone you're supposed to share a community with. You completely disposed of her. You forced her out.”

alongside this, a series of quotes from hot allostatic load on her blog, very clearly meant for me.

apparently respect for the dignity of trans women like me ceased the moment i denied someone access to me— respect from her, and the people i thought were close to me but who were apparently still quite willing to suddenly assume the worst when i was simply trying to set boundaries. i wasn’t setting boundaries as a real trans woman may be entitled to, i was forcing people out, i was made the aggressor simply for daring to set boundaries based on a prior judgement that was made the moment people met me and the way i talk, the particular trauma responses i have. what might be praised in a more feminine and mild-mannered (trans) woman was in me, proof of guilt and evil.

it didn’t matter what actually happened, what exactly both of us respectively did to each other. what mattered is how she felt. how she felt aggressed against by the wrong kind of trans women daring to deny her access to her body and person.

other people got involved and other conflicts got aggravated. she kept stoking the fires— other situations, if they were resolvable beforehand, weren’t because of the poison she put in people’s heads about me. through all of this, neither she nor her girlfriend were ever in the slightest genuinely repentant for the way they made it difficult for me to set boundaries.

all of this happened in the acute aftermath of me being raped in an alleyway — an event they had knowledge of — during the few months after. i was so, so carefully trying out if it was even possible for me to be intimate with others. it was, briefly, until i pulled out, until i told people that i felt violated by things that happened.

and all of that, all of my attempts to set boundaries and to protest against violations committed, were not even met with direct answers or where not possible, dignified resignations to that fact and attempts to atone. instead, what happened is that they leveled narratives at their friends and girlfriends until they felt so overwhelmed that people refused to sincerely listen to my side of things and i was put in a position where all i was to do to make amends for my own actions, with everyone else completely protected. i was told people are very upset, that i had made them feel very bad, and this hurt is what ended up mattering, not what they did to me.

it broke me, for some time. i behaved disrespectfully and harmfully to a number of people in the months after. i was in such an aggravated state of trauma from having it be repeatedly proven to me that my body is fair game for anyone’s carnal drives that i was oblivious to the ways that i was exhausting people by trying to play politics in a vain attempt to get some recognition for what happened to me and how it was enabled, facilitated by both perpetrators and others in that space.

and then, eventually, after months of building tension and stress which nobody felt able to resolve, nothing could have happened but that i was forced out of the one space where i was told that the bad kind of trans woman could belong and be treated well, too.

that we could ‘build alternatives’ to the traumatic things that are done to us and then do to ‘each other’ (although really, just to those among us who aren’t deemed worthy of protection).

---

i do not believe she is actually a predator— i am not from an english-speaking country, and my throwaway post in which i said “no sympathy for sex pests who got rejected months ago and still whine about it” was based on an understanding that it meant someone who harmed others in the context of sexual interactions, but not necessarily an actual ‘predator’, insofar that essentialist, individual, reactionary idea of one who does harm actually holds meaning to me. certainly she is not as bad as actual literal alleyway rapists, not that it is fair or reasonable to have it fall to me to reassure anyone of that.

however, she is oblivious to the fact that reacting to people setting boundaries in this way and that projecting transmisogyny on them along the lines she did damages their ability to set boundaries in the future, especially since i was recently raped, which she and everyone else involved knew about. she’s not a predator, but her behavior chipped away at my ability to set boundaries and is completely irreverent of them regardless of context or intent. most consent guides have vile things to say about those who hear that they hurt others, freak out in an emotionally incontinent way and make it everyone else’s problem instead of working towards taking responsibility. unfortunately, she made it so that this behavior ended up being enabled and rewarded, simply because the way in which she was violent is not seen as violence by many in our circles.

i stopped taking progesterone. i refused to be intimate with people. i wanted to be sexless and recoiled at all expressions of attraction from others, experiencing them as a prelude to violation since i couldn’t conceive of people being into me and acting on that in a way that wouldn’t end up humiliating, traumatising, heartbreaking. i didn’t feel like i could exist with other people anymore, and believed that never, ever would i be treated in an equitable way where my hurt matters just as much as theirs.

i don’t want to be sanctified over my own mistakes i just want to get treated as all the other people who made awful, horrible ones— i wasn’t, people refused to level with me about it until they had already made up their minds about me and cut me off first individually, then collectively. i was treated as a perpetrator by default.

even with what i did and my role in all of this, i did not deserve to be treated this way.

---

i didn’t make any actual threats. what i did was the following.

if i don’t stop it from happening, a payload of information about the actions and identities of people who violated my boundaries will be released, with the understanding that this only happens if i don’t periodically reset a timer when it will be uploaded, with the understanding that this will only happen if i die. this gives me some sort of comfort that if i kill myself, i’ll at least get to finally have the voice which people with immense amounts of social capital are preventing me from having, inadvertently or on purpose. if all of this kills me, does she really believe she deserves to get away with it, my voice forever lost?

i also made a post that next time someone forces me into something i don’t want, i won’t freeze up— if it is a physical situation, i know i will fight back and win against someone literally sexually assaulting me, that is what the post was about! that’s not even something she wants (presumably). so to make this out as some threat against her is frankly preposterous, and i can’t really find any way to take it as another cynical attempt to portray me as the wrong kind of tranny: the one without a lithe body and who doesn’t perform a fetishisation of her own (pretended) lack of power over others well enough, with the wrong set of traumatic personality alterations.

---

allow me to end with a few choice screenshots from this person’s blog, and an ask she sent me to circumvent my block on discord.

what’s the deal with people who have a certain access to feminine fragility (cis women, certain kinds of trans women) and comparing people to their abusive fathers?

stop postmodernising about my boundaries. please.

what’s worse? ending something awful for both of us as well within my entitlements, or circumventing a block in order to chastise me for it as a prelude to unleashing the full power of the whisper network? i guess all things are fine when the first is done by a trans woman who can deadlift 1.5x her bodyweight and the second is done by a trans woman who prides herself on being sensitive and who is just so easy to hurt— not like she has plenty of means to passively aggress or cut trans women like me off from their support networks, murder them in a thousand ways which our community sanctifies, which is exactly what she did, both while we knew each other and after.

this, for months and months and months. making me wonder what the next way she will hurt me is going to be.

---

it is a genuine relief to hear that this person never wanted to see me again. because of her behavior, i was under the distinct impression she wanted me back in some sense. you may see why when you look at all these strange attempts to undermine the boundaries she knows i struggle to maintain.

all this talk invoking the concept of radical transformative justice after she did her best to escalate situations to get me exiled simply because i didn’t want to have a personal, individual association with her. it’s not enough for her that she managed to get rid of me, me daring to feel hurt by it is another violation of the values that were supposed to prevent what happened to me from happening, in fact, me feeling hurt is portrayed as worse as what she did to hurt me, and as invalidating any demand i have at all to be treated with any dignity or receive any defense or protection from anyone at all, simply because of the way it made her feel that i dared to be hurt by what she did.

what matters is what happened. what matters is what people did. what matters is what factually happened, not transmisogynistic interpretations of it, forgotten at convenience by the people who were there. what matters is who is decided to be worthy or unworthy of protection, who is actually capable of being hurt instead of considered unrapeable, unviolable, invulnerable and dangerous for it, which frankly, seems what patterns of ‘disposability’ always seem to revolve around. it is disturbing that this language was invoked to ironically, argue the status of my body as public property at pain of isolation.

what matters is power, and statements like “i don’t hate you” are cheap from those who will always have the social capital to hurt me like this so long as the gendered heuristics of the circles we share remain hegemonic.

#likes only.