lordofdapies

[lordofdapies]

I'd like to talk a bit about masculinity.

So, I'm a trans woman, I was raised male for 26 years, and since my father wasn't around half the time, my mother did the majority of the raising. This means that she did the majority of teaching me in how to "be a man" socially speaking. Sure, car stuff and male duties were my dad's job to teach me, but values and behaviour in how a man should act was the role of my mom.

My mother always told me that she was raising me to be a good husband to my wife, to treat women with love and respect, and overall how to be masculine but not toxic.

My mother even put together a collection of films and books for me to read with positive male role models for me to build my life around, and honestly it really helped a lot.

So, I'm going to pass on the knowledge I've learned about masculinity that I've learned over the years:

Masculinity isn't a bad thing. It's not bad to be a man, or masculine. Yes, there are toxic men out there with toxic views on how to "be a man", but the same could be said about women. If you don't think women can be cutting or hurt people with femininity, you're dead wrong.

Masculinity can be gentle. It can be loving. There's men out there who adore the women in their lives, and treat them extremely well. These men care about those around them, they're active listeners, they have good communication, they're devoted to their partners, and they're genuinely good people. They're not feminine for caring about animals, speaking softly, being gentle, being loving, anything of the sort. They're men, and that's their masculinity, which manifests in a healthy, positive way.

Masculinity can be gentle, loving, devoted, doting, generous, kind, and all sorts of positive gentle things. It's also a spectrum. There's plenty of masculine men who act in ways that are kind and caring.

George Fisher for example, lead singer of Cannibal Corpse. He's a big, masculine dude who works out. He also spends his free time at home and on tours out playing claw games to win toys for sick children.

Or Travis Ryan, who has a house full of rescue pets, and is an advocate for veganism

Donald Tardy of Obituary fame takes care of over 130 feral cats in Florida every night when he's not on tour, bringing them all food and water

Three examples of extremely masculine men, who are kind, soft, and gentle towards animals and children.

There's nothing wrong with being soft. It does not make you any less of a man.

Too many people act like masculinity is hard, damaging, evil, toxic, and so on. Which yeah, it can be in some - but there's also a lot of good in it. Loving, positive, healthy masculinity should never, ever, be treated like something that needs to be "fixed" because it's masculinity and therefore bad.

There's good men in this world, whose masculinity is good and should be celebrated, and healthy, positive masculinity in those that choose it, should be treated as the good that it is.

So, to those who are choosing masculinity, and choosing a path of loving, healthy, positive masculinity:

Thank you. Honestly. We need more good men and masculine people in this world. You're not a bad person for being this way. You deserve equal goodness to the goodness you put out.

Keep being loving, good, amazing people. Don't let anyone tell you that you're bad for being you, because you're not. Masculinity can be wonderful for some, and it shouldn't be treated like a curse, or a bad decision.

Masculinity is beautiful

Masculinity is wonderful

Masculinity can be a force for good

Masculinity is healing

Masculinity is a spectrum and there's no wrong way to do it, so long as it's not toxic

Masculinity can co-exist with femineity

Masculinity should be celebrated and not shamed

Masculinity doesn't make you a bad person

Trans men, and transmascs deserve all the respect, and room to grow into the people that they've always wanted to be. To shame them for wanting to be masculine is harmful for everyone involved. Masculinity isn't a bad thing, men aren't ontologically evil or bad. The vast majority of men are good people, and are blessings to those around them.

So men, and mascs:

Be soft, be nice, be kind, be gentle, be authentic, be vulnerable, don't be afraid to be you. You're not any less of a man for being "soft", instead you become a man of value, and worth.

[lordofdapies]

My generation is the forgotten generation. The latch key kids. We’re from the generation whose parents worked all day and left us home alone.

There was no childcare.

We were taught to lie. We’d tell people our mom is in the shower when taking phone messages. We were taught to hide when we heard a knock on the door.

We raised ourselves. Our parents were sticky notes and shadowy figures.

The parenting advice on this website is brutal! Ya’ll forget that parents are just people who had unprotected sex. We’re not making parenting mistakes on purpose. We’re irresponsible fuck ups who’s poor decisions led to the creation of another life.

We’re doing our best not to repeat the mistakes of OUR parents and we’re making brand new ones.

[lordofdapies]

y'all HAVE to watch this...interview??? with the inmates of the prison where luigi mangione is being held.

the reporter is standing outside the prison walls, while the inmates are inside watching newsmax, and collectively screaming out one-word answers to questions loud enough to be heard by the reporter.

I've never seen anything like it

[lordofdapies]

They’re just words. In fact they’re only letters! Nothing will happen if you accidentally associate yourself with the MRA. This is like when I was a child and my mom told me if I thought the word yes the devil would posses me.

Men deserve compassion. Trans men deserve love and respect…but WAIT!

Let’s stop to lecture everyone on semantics first. 🙄

I do not like the "reclaiming" of the term (t)MRA by certain transmascs on here. I don't like it at all.

The MRA movement is literally the manosphere. It's anti-feminist incel shit. It's patriarchal slop. I don't know why anyone would want to be associated with that, even if it's just in name. This goes doubly so because of the way TERFs often call trans women "MRAs", come on. Can NONE OF YOU see how that is in TERRIBLE taste?

If you get compared to a nasty movement of bigots (even unjustly), and your response is to "reclaim" that comparison, I'm side-eyeing you so fucking hard.

[lordofdapies]

I would say they want to silence all men who don’t fit into the patriarchy. They would have to stop blaming their problems on male privilege and start taking accountability.

i can't say i experience misogyny because that's "misgendering myself" and i can't say i experience anti-transmasculinity or transandrophobia because those terms are apparently offensive in some way. but i really think people just want trans men to stop complaining about their oppression so that they don't have to live with the fear that they're capable of hurting someone

[lordofdapies]

@churropussy can’t go more than ten weeks without reading the word “woman” or she will turn into a transtrender

giving birth sucks tbh. not only do you and the baby you’re birthing almost die, usually you shit yourself and often you tear your taint. then you have to push an organ out of your body (placenta) and if even a little of that remains in your body, you can hemorrhage to death or develop an infection that essentially rots your body from the inside out. even if you had a relatively “easy birth”, you bleed for weeks on end. even after that stops, your body and brain is changed for the rest of your life, the pregnancy leeched minerals from your bones, that can cause osteoporosis later. minor urinary incontinence is not uncommon, brain scans of people who gave birth show permanent changes in their brain, you’re never quite the same.

I say all of this not to say giving birth is disgusting but it is a harrowing and visceral experience. society downplays how fucking awful it is and makes it out to be a ~magical~ experience but it isn’t a magical transformative experience for everyone. it can be an extremely traumatic experience for someone who wanted to carry a pregnancy to term, much more so for someone who did not want to be pregnant in the first place or someone who knows their baby won’t survive the birth. anyway, abortion is a right. pregnancy and birth aren’t just inconvenient, it’s fucking awful.

[lordofdapies]

Misandry is real

[lordofdapies]

quite audacious that people still justify invasive questions about disabled people's health and conditions. "oh it's because people fake being disabled" and what?

it is presumptuous to believe that you uniquely are able to judge random disabled people's health, and that you have the right to do so. who do you think you are?

disabled people in general are not able to defend themselves as easily as ableds, for various reasons. either they lack the ability, or they don't have the resources or security. some disabled people will lose everything they need to live without disability support. you could be playing with people's lives by trying to casually investigate if they really need what they say they do, so

you're more willing to subject disabled people to cruelty over the idea that some people get "help they don't deserve." this neither protects disabled people, nor helps them. even if you "catch" a faker you have helped 0 disabled people. in fact the relentless hunts for "fake" disabled people hurts disabled people who already have to jump through a million hoops to get support. and some of us can't jump!

and disabled people have the right to privacy and dignity. being disabled in public is not an invitation. they're literally just living their lives. existing where other people can see you doesn't give them the right to your information

recognise the entitlement for what it is. you was curious. you was interested in what "went wrong" with someone you saw and felt like they should tell you. the pretense that it's really to make sure that it's a "real" disabled person is flimsy as bedamned

[lordofdapies]

[lordofdapies]

The ugly truth is that men and women are exactly the same. That means just as many men have the potential love feminine things as women.

Men have to suppress their desires in order to earn grudging respect within the patriarchy. If you step out of line a little bit the other men humiliate you.

[lordofdapies]

My first experience with gender euphoria was running shirtless with a pack of shirtless boys at my local park. We were loud, carefree, and perfectly temperature controlled.

My dumb sister ruined it by telling them I was a girl. I remember looking down at my flat bare chest and wondering what made me so different.

I was ashamed to be myself seconds after experiencing the joy of being me.

[lordofdapies]

I spent over 20 years as a woman and about half as much as a man. I noticed a lot of disparity between how I was treated as a woman vs. how I was treated as a man.

As a man my opinion held more weight and my good deeds were recognized. Only as long as I could be a monolith.

The second my ass hit the wheelchair my man card was GONE. My gender is wheelchair.

People wonder why men act the way they do! It is frustrating when men are at their worst. Thing is, men don’t have much wiggle room.

They are punished for stepping out of line. There is no reward waiting on the other side for trying to be better. People will say it’s just human decency. There is endless encouragement to step back into line, though.

Trans women talk about their experiences and how they weren’t extended male privilege because they could not conform.

This is true for cis men too. Human men and women are not sexually dimorphic. Gender roles are important but movement within the roles is essential. C’mon guys we need a full scale masculinity intervention not queer politics death matches!

[lordofdapies]

I think you are hitting close to the truth I am seeing. The world is not a safe space for anyone. Not even for cis het men.

Men who fit perfectly into the masculine gender standards are rewarded. Men like that don’t exist! The ones who seem to thrive in toxic masculinity are nothing but Judas goats!

The masculine gender role is designed to cut you off from everyone emotionally. It’s designed to make you ignore your health needs. It’s designed to make you work yourself to death. It’s designed to let your body rot out from under you while you slowly die alone.

Anger is the only acceptable male emotion. Anger pushes people away. Anger is the emotion that drives people to act their worst.

I’m seeing everyone breaking up into tiny cage matches. Who has it worse than who. Who is invalidating who. No one disagrees that cis het men are the devil? Where are we going with this?

I think contention is the POINT. We are being bamboozled, my queers. Divided we shall fall.

We are successful when we come together and organize. The cis het man was born that way, too. Maybe he doesn’t want to die angry and alone. Maybe he wants to be a trans ally.

i know it's a point of contention that as trans men we frequently have our trans-ness taken from us and are reduced to just 'men' but you know who i really feel for with that:

heterosexual trans men

cos at the very least trans men who aren't heterosexual have some other tie to the queer community to seek involvement but i can't imagine that trans het men are having a good fucking time in a space that's just hostile to their entire identity. lol and even if you consider yourself a lesbian still you have so many lesbians and non-lesbians then telling you that's not okay either and this only gets worse and worse the more you pass for a man

[lordofdapies]

"trans men have privilege when people don't think they're trans men" imagine if we treated every other minority's oppression like that.

also at this point you're just telling on yourselves. if your only argument for trans men having privilege is that we have privilege when people think we're Not Trans Men, then you have literally just run out of arguments, gone round in circles and accidentally admitted that trans men do not hold systemic privilege.

if a person in a minority group only holds social privilege when no one in that social scenario knows that they are part of that minority then that is called Not Holding Privilege actually. and kind of applies to almost every other minority group ever, including other trans people. only exception I can think of off the top of my head is invisibly disabled people but that experience is very different overall.

TLDR: if you ever find yourself saying "people from X group hold privilege when people don't know they're part of X group", then you need to put down your phone, close the tab, and repeat out loud what you just said. S L O W L Y.

[lordofdapies]

alert alert a trans man expressed enjoyment in being a man for a moment and didn’t feel sorry about it y’all gotta do something about it how dare he say “men are cool” without stating he knows oppression and patriarchy exists and he’s sorry before that

[lordofdapies]

I don’t even have to tag this to know you will watch it

[lordofdapies]

Dogpile

They will mount a personal attack. All arguments will focus on your person. They will make wild accusations and accuse you of lying. The accusations will be so ridiculously weak you will feel tempted to defend yourself.

Don’t fall for it!

They want you to defend yourself and they are targeting your personal life to trick you into giving them personally identifying information.

Do delete PII from your blog as soon as possible including photographs of yourself and your pets. Personal photos and even your pet’s real name can be enough to dox you

They will say anything to get other blogs involved and they will campaign to have folks block you so that you can see the content but not respond. It will work! Enough people are waiting for an excuse to justify bullying that they don’t have to be convincing.

They will come to your space and spam every post then accuse you of being the bad actor.

This has multiple goals:

1) they want you to get angry and say something problematic to help bolster the hate campaign

2) They want to set an example for everyone watching. This is the cost of disagreeing. Be quiet or have a hate campaign launched against you

3) They want to silence you. This is important because silencing others depends on it.

Don’t engage in hate speech but feel free to be cheeky if that’s your style. Don’t address personal attacks it’s a waste of time.

Do whatever is best for your mental health and individual needs. You don’t have to let them silence you but you also do NOT have to take on the battle.