joshuadunshua

[joshuadunshua]

[joshuadunshua]

I don't think men saying out of pocket shit to me on the internet is because they're men. everyday billions of men wake up and don't say out of pocket shit to me on the internet. this is clearly an active choice

[joshuadunshua]

there IS a middle path between "worshipping every cis guy who says anything vaguely feminist and then being shocked when people use this to cover up their own misogyny" and "treating every single cis male feminist as inherently suspect and probably a lying predator who only talks about misogyny for clout/to get laid." we don't have to do either. there's this cool thing called "seeing other people as full human beings" and i think it's worth trying out

[joshuadunshua]

im laughing so hard because no matter what song you listen to 

spiderman dances to the beat

no matter what song ive been testing it and lauing my ass off for an hour

[joshuadunshua]

It turns out that actually standing by "men and women are not inherently very different" is a reliable way to bother absolutely everyone. Left or right, cis or trans, feminist or misogynist, all cling to the binary for dear life.

[joshuadunshua]

It’s Fourth of July Eve so make sure to leave some milk and cookies out for Captain America

[joshuadunshua]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[joshuadunshua]

This is the last thing I'm gonna post about this topic for a while; or probably write on this blog tbh, because this website is a huge time sink and the return is minimal at best.

But watching the way this discourse has played out for the last five years and counting has been fucking bleak.

Trans men and transmascs are currently getting scapegoated and our issues diminished by the greater community hard, at a time when all trans people's rights and safety are on the fascist chopping block. We should be building mutual aid and looking out for one another, but instead, some people are trying to genuinely throw us under the wheels and then play like that's not what they're doing when we point it out. Like we're too stupid to know what's up.

This sort of thing is, unfortunately, not unique. It happens all the time; we're just the freshest targets for the self elected marketing team that's trying to contort the queer community into the most appealing shape they can imagine, to better entice cishet white supremacists into calling other queers slurs instead of themselves. (It never actually works, bless them, but they never seem to give up)

This behavior is not a unique thing, and logically, unemotionally, I understand why it's happening; I understand that it's mostly because of the queer community's rampant gender essentialism problem and near permanent scarcity mindset.

The gender essentialism problem is pretty obvious. It's a lazy, black/white paradigm to adopt and create a false sense of security that also lets you justify weeding out types of people you don't like. It also lets people feel inherently noble for being on the 'correct' side without having to do anything at all besides identify with the correct gender. There's also the racism, intersexism and exorcism that's inherently baked into gender essentialism. So that's obviously going to be a popular choice with white liberals who couldn't identify their own biases anymore than they could tell their own asses from their elbows. The recycling of gender essentialist ideas will probably only stop when white feminism itself is a thing of the past and no longer a rotten pillar in the queer community.

As for scarcity mindset, it's a common maladaptive coping mechanism with folks that have been severely mistreated themselves. It gets you into thinking like this: 'You people can't talk about your problems because if you do, no one will care about my problems, and my problems are frankly more important and yours aren't even real anyways.'

Scarcity mindset is a trauma response that will have you acting like a starving dog and attacking your neighbors, when there is currently enough food for everyone to eat and be full. You've been starved of compassion, and think anybody next to you also asking for compassion is trying to take away yours. And you've been taken from enough and aren't about to let those people take anything that's yours.

But the funny thing is, there is enough compassion to go around. More than enough, actually. We can care about multiple things, and it is perfectly reasonable for other people to be able to ask for compassion when they need to. They are not taking anything from you, and they aren't saying you don't have struggles that also need attention. Other people are allowed to be hungry and to ask to get their needs met.

Bisexuals, asexuals, nonbinary folk- all these identities and way, way more have gotten it from the 'queer community' in recent years because of a collective scarcity mindset. A paranoid, fragile terror that sics other queer people on their peers, and not at the people trying to actively kill all of us. It would be embarrassing if it wasn't so effective.

Instead it's just sad. And infuriating.

So I understand this cycle of intercommunity bigotry from a detached, logical standpoint. I know that it will eventually pass, and that things get worse before they get better. This is just the most recent discourse cyclone that'll one day spin itself out.

I understand that.

But from a purely emotional perspective... from an emotional perspective, I genuinely hate some of y'all. Because you don't fucking learn. Ever. You people are so god damn frustrating.

How do you not get it by now? Really? Are you fucking serious?

"Bisexuals have straight passing privilege -"

"Asexuals aren't really queer, they're faking for attention-"

"Nonbinary people aren't really trans, they're all trenders-"

"Trans men aren't really oppressed, they all have male privilege -"

You self centered, pick-me morons identify more with our prison guards than you do with your fellow prisoners. We're all locked in here together baby, why are you are you acting like a cop?

You think that'll keep you safe? That it will convince the fascists from cracking your skull in with the rest of ours? That if you gatekeep hard enough , hurt enough of your peers, that the people who are currently stripping us all of our civil rights will make an exception for you personally? Is that how you think this shit works?

Some of y'all are genuinely pathetic and fall for this discourse shit every single time, because you don't actually believe in a queer community and you don't actually want to abolish the systems that are actively oppressing us all. You just want to tweak said systems enough so it actively benefits you personally, at the cost of people you climbed over and left behind for dead. Your hearts are husks and your ribs a casket for the loving person you should have been, but failed to become.

And despite aaall this, despite how badly I want to throttle some of you baby brained, backstabbing idiots, I still want you to live in safety and have all your needs met. I want you to not go hungry for compassion again, I don't want you to suffer needlessly because of an unfair and oppressive system or from cruel people that have power over you. Because more suffering doesn't fix already broken people, and I genuinely want some of you to be capable of fucking fixing yourselves.

[joshuadunshua]

I wish this is what people meant when they say someone has a “victim mentality.”

That is, a mentality that you have that sets yourself up to feel like a victim of harm even when no harm is taking place.

Going into the world “prepared,” in the loosest sense possible, to be traumatized by anything that is uncomfortable, anything that may upset your worldview or that you may find personally distasteful or disturbing.

Not “prepared” as in “I know I will experience things I find uncomfortable, but I am going to remind myself that if it doesn’t actually materially harm people, it’s not my business, and if I need to, I will look away/go elsewhere/do something else.”

But instead, “prepared” as in “I’m so terrified of seeing something uncomfortable, I’m setting up the scene in my head for how awful it will feel to experience, and when I inevitably encounter it, it will feel like a material harm has been enacted on me and I will be traumatized by it because I have put absolutely zero skill points in emotional resilience.”

But alas. Not how that turn of phrase actually gets used.

basically there's a whole lot of people who seem extremely inexperienced (or willfully ignorant) in telling the difference between actual material harm and discomfort, which leads both to people using art as an excuse to hurt other people, and to people using the possibility of harm as an excuse to demand all art be as polite and normative as possible and if you disagree you clearly support revenge porn

which is not to say that telling the difference is always easy! but the complexity of an issue is not an excuse for lack of effort.

[joshuadunshua]

"drug-seeking behavior" woah the patient wants u to treat their ailments with medicine ...... thats crazy

[joshuadunshua]

I think if you try to wiggle out of getting your dog vaccinated for rabies due to your own anti-vax beliefs, you should be forced to watch footage of a dog succumbing to rabies and the pathological process of taking brain tissue from a suspected canine rabies victim. I really think treating these people with kid gloves is not working and they need to viscerally see what the consequences of their actions can be.

[joshuadunshua]

as a person who uses either public bathroom on a toss of a coin i gottta say its kind of ridicuous that people are so attached to them being seperate facilities. youre not usually gonna see anyones dick at the urinal and youre not usually gonna be able to spy on any women. the stalls are the same except one has a little tampon bin. we would lose nothing if all bathrooms were unisex and i'll die on that hill.

[joshuadunshua]

[joshuadunshua]

me and my large mama...

[joshuadunshua]

One of the strangest aspects of tumblr is that you can say something like “transmascs and transfems both face unique intersections of oppression, which is why we are stronger with an intersectional approach” and people with a pinned blocklist of every Black trans man on this site will come in and say “nuh-uh!” like I give a fuck what Racist Assclown McGee #19 has to say.

Anyway, happy Friday to all of my trans brothers, especially transmascs of color. May God lead you to a banging slice of pizza and a cold lemonade in the near future.

[joshuadunshua]

are you tme or tma

"i know you're nonbinary but which of these two arbitrarily constructed gender categories do you fit into" genuinely are you having a laugh

[joshuadunshua]

The promise of social and institutional power via adherence to patriarchal principles and values being absolutely mind-warping is not a gender specific promise! Patriarchal manhood and patriarchal womanhood both work in this way and this is how we get women who treat boys & men like shit for being out of step with patriarchal manhood even a little (e.g. “men who cry are weak,” biphobia against bi men looking to date women, homophobia enacted against men who are literally just wearing nail polish, etc.) and this is how we get moms who terrorize, enmesh with, or emotionally abandon their sons, this is how we get women who will fight against their own rights at every turn. The promise of social and institutional power via adherence to patriarchal gender norms is strong and intoxicating.

But more than that, it’s not just the promise of power via adherence.

It’s the promise of certain destruction and complete social death via either failure or refusal to adhere.

Power is an intoxicating motivator, absolutely.

Fear is the underlying motivator. They know, even if they only sense it, that to choose anything else is socially unacceptable. The fact that the promise of power (whether delivered on or not!!!) is a strong draw will pull (mostly young) people in, but then once their livelihoods require continued adherence, it doesn’t matter how miserable they are, or are making others while stuck in their roles, it doesn’t matter if the patriarchy ever even delivered on the promise it made to them, they feel and they know the probable consequences of giving it up.

This is why the miserable wife who was promised marital bliss if she followed the rules and behaved like a good woman should, but instead ended up with an emotionally constipated husband, a lifeless marriage, and a home and kids she takes care of almost entirely by herself, will still raise her children to take the same road she did, will teach her daughters they have to be good longsuffering wives, will stay married to misery, will rabidly vote against her own best interests. She has intuited and can feel what it would mean for her to give up the patriarchal values that promised her so much and delivered so little. She knows it would turn her community against her, she knows she would become judged harshly, lose social credit, and give up access to the power she holds by virtue of her marriage. She may have no friends if she changes her mind. She may lose absolutely everything she considers meaningfully part of her life. She probably recognizes what would be at risk by merely cutting her hair.

Power does a pretty good job of drawing you in.

Fear does an even better job of keeping you entrapped.

"male socialization" is not a thing, everyone is raised in a misogynistic society and internalized those beliefs.

this idea that "males" boys and men are inherently just bad because of the way they were raised (or born) instead of /choosing/ to adhere to patriarchal ideas of manhood, is inherently terf ideology, and just another way of saying "boys will be boys" The thing that you're actually wanting to say is "damn that person is really misogynistic"

because women and girls are also raised to be misogynistic. We can criticize those behaviors without trying to imply or outright say that trans women are forever tainted by this "maleness" that gets thrusted onto them.