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It’s an interesting read - a lot of her experiences she’s discussing boil down to feeling she was ignored or her voice minimized because of her perceived gender identity and assumptions about how she was raised and what she would feel.
I liked her discussion and thought her perspective on purposely not transitioning was an interesting view. This was a really good analogy and drove home the point for me:
Imagine, dear reader, a cis-woman evenly saying:
“I wish I looked like that but I don’t and can’t. It sucks and it makes me feel really awful if I brood on it. That’s why I focus on my writing—I’d rather make things. Investing in and building things that aren’t my body helps me cope with the body issues I’ve been saddled with against my will.”
She doesn’t sound like she needs advice on how makeup will actually fix her core problem, does she? She seems like she’s doing alright. I’m her and I’m trans. That’s all.
Some big quotes that hit home through this post were
Do I need to be inspected and dissected by the people who laughed at me in order to receive my credential?
“I play along,” one of them told me, “because in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I don’t want to give up finally being read as a girl.”
Oof.
I don’t know if it’s just the sections of the internet I frequent these days, but this intense, misandrist views don’t seem to be as common as they once were, and not as accepted.
I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it.
Cis woman here. I run in pretty leftist circles and whilst I don’t see open misandry as much anymore, I also don’t see as many people speaking about men’s issues as I’d like. If I do see people speaking about men or masculinity in a problematic way, it’s usually people who are receptive to being challenged, once I’ve pointed things out.
I appreciate that you call people out on these things. My experience with pointing things out or seeing online conversations where someone else pointing it out has been very different. That’s not to say what you’re saying doesn’t happen. It’s probably just different based on where exactly on the internet we’ve been. Granted, leftist areas of the internet has this issue less, but it’s not zero.
Like let’s take a conversation about men that are virgins. The more comments there are, the more likely it is that at least one person will make fun of this category of men. And in the cases I’ve seen, any attempts to counter this is met with “Lol the virgin outed himself”. Very rarely does an actual conversation happen (again, in the cases I’ve seen), because any arguments brought forward about why we shouldn’t shame men for being virgins is shot down as invalid because the person bringing these arguments is a virgin. Or heck, he might not even be one, but the other person has already made up their mind on the virginity status of the commenter.
And the fact that it’s present, albeit not as often, in leftist spaces as well is really harming and it can push people in the other direction. I’m in my 20s, a leftist man and a virgin, but I was fortunate enough to form my opinions on a lot of issues without encountering douchebags like Andrew Tate. But what about someone that’s a teenager right now, doesn’t have any opinions on political stuff yet, but sees the left that’s fighting for no discrimination, making fun of virgins, which he is? He goes to see what the other side is saying, and boom, he’s trapped in there now. Of course, the past couple sentences is my idea of what might go through this hypothetical guy’s mind. So it’s not that I think the left as a whole makes fun of virgins, but from where my example guy is standing, it could seem that way when a lot of people say those things and they go unchallenged.
Sorry for the long rant, but it’s basically a really long way of saying: I’m glad you’re calling this shit out and keep at it!
the misandry has become less acceptable over time, probably as more “cis” girls like i was realized we weren’t so cis or girls and made some of those actually cis girls confront the things they’d said and thought during that time
but also we’ve become a lot more aware of how the patriarchy hurts men, and we’ve also become more broadly aware of feminist authors like bell hooks, who have been writing about how men need feminism too all along
Absolutely captivating read, I almost backed away just from the sheer length of it but now I’m sending it to others lol. Vivid and powerful, you can really feel the knot twisting around in her stomach. Interesting too that it was written so long ago, and looking back at her perspective now seeing how the social phenomenons she wrote about have evolved
I didn’t consider reading until I read your comment. I’m not done yet but I’m glad I started. She has a way of writing for sure!
Also 2016 isn’t that long ago… right?
I also wouldn’t have read it without your comment, but it was absolutely worth it
Tough read.
Good stuff.
It’s hard to understand why reactionaries seem to think that anyone would want to be trans- if they had any choice in the matter at all.
It’s the only way to defeat the labrenthine security measures that keep people from going into the wrong bathroom.
I remember once at a Cracker Barrel shortly after we had our first kid, my wife was in the ladies’ room trying to change a bad, bad diaper. We were expecting a 3 Mile Island, but this was Chernobyl. She hollered for help.
I panicked for a moment but remembered my training. I only just made it past the cross-cutting grid of lasers using some parkour, the riddle guards where one always lies, and the other always tells the truth, and the spike pits with swinging vines over them. I definitely don’t remember just fast-walking in there, eyes to the floor, loudly apologizing to nobody in particular.
Once containment and remediation were complete, we enjoyed our meal without incident. The child was especially fond of apple butter.
If I had known I could have avoided all that by simply attending decades of therapy, being abandoned by my family, going through painful binding, and multiple reconstructive surgeries which I had to save up for and purchase myself because they weren’t covered by insurance and taking handfuls of pills everyday to try and regulate my hormone levels for some semblance of peace if a body I knew wasn’t actually mine…man that would have saved me so much work.
I wish this person a sense of belonging and if being loved for what they are. Even by themselves. It does really make clear what kind of handicap gender dysphoria is, it reads like a irl purgatory.
I worked with some 50yo gay black men who shared how deeply that had to hide who they were for decades. Even in the 90s, there was violent assault because you were gay. Police frequently turned a blind eye.
People say things like “Just leave people alone” and yet someone come out of the closet, and they want them removed from society.
That is a really good article. Glad to have read it, thanks for sharing.
