#about how trans girls are treated and the very real threats at the moment. The scene where the cps (?) person comes to her house is. pretty | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

eulangelo · 3 years

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callout for @genderfluidlucifer

google docs

tw for transmisogyny + TERFs + emotional manipulation

Transmisogyny

Lucifer is a huge transmisogynist who will complain 24/7 about how TERFs hurt the ace community, but the moment @randomclustermissile , a trans girl (who is not an exclusionist at all) tries to point out transmisogyny in inclusionist circles (in the most vague and general way possible, without pointing fingers nor calling anyone names) Lucifer will immediatly jump to block her and so they did with me (another inclusionist) and i have to suppose to everyone else who agreed with that post, even arriving to vagueing about us in private group chats to suggest that we were “sympathizing with exclusionists”. all because we dared point out transmisogyny in inclusionist circles. lucifer is TME but apparently they think they’re the authority on TERFs and their talking points but actual trans women are not, according to them, since this is the stuff that they would go and spew to other people. (screenshots from @enbyoctoling)

here’s more examples of Lucifer (again, a transmasc person) going deep in detail about how according to them, TERFs/SWERFs hate aro/ace people and are an active threat to us

1. link

[Image ID: Three screenshots of a post by Genderfluidlucifer. The first screenshot is of a paragraph that reads, "Hey. So I can actually answer this. Anon your commentary about how you thought terfs would approve of sex repulsed aces is sort of it. Except...not. Basically terfs hate ace people for not wanting sex in the approved by terfs way. Terfs are actually extremely interested in [forcing] amatonormativity onto everyone. Because for as sex negative as terfs are...they don't want to actually acknowledge or change the fact that amatonormativity is at the root cause of rape culture and misogyny."

The second screenshot is a zoomed in section of the post that reads, "So yeah no I have NO idea where exclus allies are getting this idea from that terfs would even remotely care about the sexual rights of ace people. Terfs generally hate any sexualities in the LGBTQ+ acronym that aren't LGB because they can't force a gender binary onto those sexualities. At least, not as easily. That's why it's actually a massive sign of someone who doesn't call themselves a terf being a crypto terf if they use the term LGB in a positive manner. Along with the term SGA, as it is deliberately exclusive of nonbinary and not inherently SGA centric queer-aligned sexualities. /END ID]

link to the full post, these are just excerpts but the whole thing is just a very long rant about how TERFs hate ace people and so on (i think it’s worth noticing that although the actual post is kinda long, trans women are never once brought op in a conversation about TERFs issues and the only time transmisogyny is mentioned is not relevant to the conversation)

2. link

[Image ID: A screenshot of a reblog by genderfluidlucifer. The original poster is nothorses. It reads, "Because apparently I have to say it: Testosterone is not a 'violent' hormone. It doesn't make you 'more aggressive' or a worse person, it doesn't make you 'dangerous,' or 'toxic.' Transmascs do not need to be 'warned of the dangers of T.' We do not need to spend our transitions terrified that we're going to become a danger to those around us - that HRT is going to turn us into a monster.

Everyone experiences mood swings during hormonal shifts (pregnancy, menstruation, menopause, estrogen HRT, etc.) and while you might have grumpy moments or feel anger/frustration that you need to learn to handle differently, that doesn't make you a bad person.

Testosterone can change the way you access/process emotions somewhat, but if you're already thoughtful about how you handle your feelings and treat others, you're going to be fine. It's normal to lash out on occasion, by accident, then apologize and work to do better. It doesn't make you a bad person. Everyone on HRT is prone to this, and everyone experiencing hormonal changes is prone to this.

Getting HRT should be positive and affirming; you should not have to spend your entire transition terrified of becoming a monster."

The post then has a reblog by captainlordauditor that reads, "The big danger of T is that needle ouchy." /END ID]

here’s them reblogging from known transmisogynist user @nothorses (once again, the irony that a post about how testosterone is seen as the "aggressive hormone" does not mention transfem at all which are literally the main victims of this rethoric in the first place)

3. link (1), link (2)

[Image ID: Two screenshots of posts by genderfluidlucifer. The first screenshot reads, "Queer exclus: We're not repackaging terf rhetoric! Saying that is transmisogynistic! Also queer exclus: Remove the plus from LGBT!" and has tags that say, "I will pay these people to grow some god damn self awareness. Imagine being this dense. Queer discourse." The post has 15 notes.

The second screenshot reads, "Honestly it is so stupid and frustrating to see ace exclus continue to deny that the ace discourse was started by terfs. Proof was given countless times. And a big name terf like galesofnovember even admitted to starting it. Those of you who demand proof but ignore all of this never wanted proof to begin with." and is tagged with, "ace discourse. The post has 38 notes. /END ID]

heres another two post of theirs conflating TERFs with ace exclusionism

4. link

[Image ID: A screenshot of a reblogged post by furbearingbrick. The original poster is boxlizard, Lucifer's old account. The original post reads, "By the way for people still in denial about it, here's galesofnovember, a terf, admitting that she intended to start the ace exclus movement. She's taking credit for it. Normally if the victims of this behavior weren't ace/aro or other queer identities y'all be ready to rightfully lynch her. But since it's us, y'all just still wanna stamp your feet and go, 'Nuh uh!' instead of acknowledging facts." The part that says, "admitting that she intended to start the ace exclus movement" is a link to a galesofnovember post.

There is then a reblogged addition from furbearing brick that reads, "archived versions of the receipts" and has two links to the webarchive. The tags read, "Bringing this back since it's apparently still relevant. Terfism mention. Aphobia mention. Queerphobia mention. Blocklist." and has 1,455 notes. /END ID]

this is their post that ive already talked about but basically they found a 52 notes post made by a TERF in 2012 and this one person said "i dont know why i dont get to be the princess of the anti-ace-brigade" and apparently they are convinced that this means TERFs started the ace exclusionism movement and that this is one of their goals. which is insane when TERFs in real life only care about making life miserable for transfem people first and foremost.

5.link

[Image ID: A screenshot of a reblog by genderfluidlucifer. The original poster is yu-gay-fudo. It reads, “Just in case you happen to be unaware, some of the “radfem lite” they post to warm you up to their rhetoric, just off the top of my head:

- Ace/aro exclusionism

- Bi exclusionism or claims that bi people are “less queer” bc of “straight passive privilege”

- Saying you have to be dysphoric to identify as transInvalidating nonbinary people

- Calling queer a slur regardless of context, saying people can’t identify as queer, and saying that it can’t be reclaimed

- “Mogai hell”, “kweer”, or otherwise mocking less common labels and claiming they are “just cishets who want to feel special”

- Excluding sex workers from feminist discussions or claiming that sex work is inherently evil

- Basically anyone who thinks they can determine what other people identify as”. The tags read, "queerphobia tw. twerfs tw. no id." and has 70,727 notes. It was reblogged on March 22nd, 2021 /END ID]

another example of conflating radfems to things that, while wrong, have little to nothing to do with them because being a radfem, again, is something very specific that has all to do with transfem oppression.

Emotional manipulation

Lucifer has done nothing but block, break boundaries, spread lies and vague about people, some of which were even mutuals with them knowing they would see the posts. when confronted about it Lucifer's only answer was "just say you hate me and block me" but they actually ended up blocking everyone first, making it impossible for anyone to set some boundaries with them or even just to calmly confront them about anything.

[proof: Io(popncourse) and Lucifer had a disagreement in a shared discord server, which prompted Lucifer to vague Io in a vent post. Io confronted them, as being vagued is one of buns triggers, to which Lucifer initially agreed to delete the vent post, but then proceeded to victimize themself and immediatly blocked Io. later on, Jude(malewifedeckard) was confronted by Lucifer, then after Jude told them “I’m worried that you’ll vague me just like you did with Io” they proceeded to block Jude and vagued about him too. when Io made a post (which was not a callout, it was just bun setting buns boundaries) explaining what Lucifer did, Lucifer immediatly jumped to victimize themself, acting like they were being called out and straight-up lying, even going so far as to say that no one tried to hear them out, which is a blatant lie if you consider the aforementioned Io and Jude’s attempts at doing so, with Lucifer immediatly blocking and cutting ties with the both of them. ]

(screenshots taken by @popncourse and @malewifedeckard)

as seen in the proof above Lucifer’s behaviour is not ok because they don’t accept any kind of confrontation and immediatly jump to blocking, and after blocking, they'd immediatly go and vague about the people who confronted them pacificly, spreading more lies and painting themself as the victim and even arriving to say “no one hears me out at all” which is simply not something you can say when you block people who are trying to hear you out in the first place.

this is by no means an invitation to go and harass them, send them hate or anything like that. i absolutely don’t want anything even remotely hateful or negative to be sent their way after this post.

this post was only made because:

1. as an ace person who fully supports the inclusion of aspec identities in the lgbt+ community i don’t want to support an enviroment that costantly downplays transmisogynistic oppression in order to be taken seriously. there are hundreds of ways to make aspec activism without acting like we(as in TME aspecs)are the victims of a system that seeks for the annihilation of transfemenine people in real life everyday. i especially don’t want to support TME individuals who act transfem-friendly but then block any transfem who tries to speak on transmisogyny without a second thought.

2. Lucifer’s behaviour has hurt two friends of mine and i don’t want to associate with someone who actively breaks people’s boundaries without taking accountability when messing up.

3. i cannot associate with someone who spreads lies about me accusing me of sympathizing with exclusionists all while having me blocked so that i can’t see it nor defend me. they complain about people not hearing them out but they’re the very first person who does not try to hear people out, and instead jumps to spread baseless rumors. this is not someone i can nor want to associate with.

(image descriptions provided by @malewifedeckard)

#genderfluidlucifer #transmisogyny tw #terfs tw #ask to tag #txt #long post #ok to rb

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pastelprince18 · 3 years

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Scrapped babies done [dies] accept my offer,, ;;

Some stuff about them will be fixed from the sketched I showed last month so bare with me /LH

MeatFace

Non-Binary/Gay

Dwarf Hamster

Looks scary with and without mask but is actually sweet to everyone in town

Was in a huge fire and was stuck in there causing half his face destroyed, his hands destroyed and blinded in one eye

Anxious mess around fires

Butcher of the town

Very close with the twins since he always provided them food and makes sure there okay and welcome to do anything for them

Also close with fliq (still trying to think of a new name for him <\3) since fliq really enjoys meat in my Hc and they just chill and talk

Trans Male/Pansexual/Aro

Cranky old man who runs a bakery

Tired 24/7 since he rarely sleeps

Annoyed that nutty always comes in but enjoys the fact he enjoys his sweets

Very close with Meat Face since there jobs are actually close by

You steal his recipes he will kick your ass and prob make you into a pie

Needs to focus when baking, one mistake he’d through a fit

A perfectionist

Penny

She/Her /Lesbian

Works at the diner in town as a waitress, very close with giggles and petunia like a mother figure to them both

Married to famous musician “Princess” Real name Priscilla

One of flippy’s Aunt on mother side of the family, the two are close and try to catch up when they can 3:)

Adopted/ Took in fox who was injured while she was in the woods, treats it like it’s her own baby

Very wealthy thanks to her wife and retirement since she did server in the war for a short period of time

She will fight you if you try to threat her or her wife

Princess

She/Her /Lesbian

Very famous musician in town just like disco

Speaking of disco, the two actually get along and knew each other when disco continued music again after the hiatus

A mother figure to Jazzy [an oc of mine shh…] who adore her music for a while

Married to Penny

Doesn’t really trust many people due to past experience of having fake friendships and using her due to her talent

Very blunt and honest if someone is very terrible or just a complete mess. Also to sweet people who want to become musicians

Mrs.Possum “Patty”

She/Her /Bisexual

Single mother who is raising 4 Children [3 boys 1 girl]

Works at a daycare center, she just really love to take care of children since it’s her passion

“What happen to your husband?” [Sweats] “He’s uh…somewhere!!”

Don’t fuck with her kids, she will tear you into applesauce

Close with Pop + Cub, since she help him also raised cub and teach pop what to do and not to do with a baby

Based as a 50’s character like pop

Pranky

Trans Male/ Gay /Ace

Hyena

Pranks everyone, Either being too dangerous or harmless [Most ones that are dangerous he doesn’t realized and feels bad after]

Abandonment issues due to the fact his parents didn’t want him nor some old pals of his from the circus he was in

Enjoys entertainment to satisfied both himself and others

Always happy but deep down can feel hurt over the smallest of things being a tiny mistakes or not

Mime is prob his only friend at the moment since he really loves and wonders how he does all his tricks and wants to learn!

Bunny Bumpkin

Trans Male /Aro

A run away from home since it was very strict household and escape into the woods.

Scar on foot was from bear trap and was only free thanks to lumpy. He really trust him a lot ever since and the two bond!

Didn’t have no home till he found a Ranch that was abandoned, so he lived there his whole life

He became a farmer and grows his own little crops and enjoys it

Scared to leave ranch thinking his family with find him so he just stay there but only leaves if he needs stuff for home

Comfort Stuff is Moonshine and Country songs. It brings him peace

Mafia Doctor “Maxwell”

Male / Bisexual

Clumsy which is why he looked bruised and messed up

Not a actual doctor but only knows it thanks to his father and reading a lot about medical books

He was held hostage since he prob had to pay people in the mafia but didn’t have time and was close to dying but didn’t since one of the members got hurt so he patch them up

He would wanna leave but those idiots need him and he has no other choice. Either or he enjoys there company

#kbyeart #htf #happy tree friends #scrapped characters #meat face #cookie #penny #Princess #mrs.possum #pranky #bunny bumpkin #mafia doctor #guys please look at my hands *shows nothin but broken fingers*#TOOK ME ALMOST A HR TO WRITE THIS ON A PHONE <\3

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constantlyirksome · 5 years

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Zendaya is the diamond in a Rough Euphoria Premiere. (1x01 Review.)

I want to preface this post first by saying that as a cis male I’m not able to speak for the experiences of women or trans people, or assault victims because we don’t share the same experiences. I can’t truly understand their struggles; all I can do is speak for the show’s other components. If I step out of line please feel free to send a message through.

Second, Euphoria is R rated and incredibly explicit, so if you have certain triggers surrounding some of the themes of the show, maybe don’t watch, though the show does a better job than most when it comes to warning it’s audience what’s going down.

The first thing you notice about Euphoria is that it’s beautiful. The camerawork and lighting set the show apart from a lot of other teen dramas, perfectly matching the tone of the show's story. Every time the main character partakes in a drug the visuals match. Rue takes hallucinogens and the room literally spins on its axis, until she’s on the roof. When she takes something to mellow out her anxiety everything goes dark, the music slow like molasses and the lighting moves across her face, matching Zendaya's face her emotions spin. The music is very cool, which probably has something to with the fact that Drake is one of the producers. Big names like Beyoncé, Migos, Megan Thee Stallion and Asap Ferg are joined by more independent acts like Yung Baby Tate and Lil Dude. Sprinkled in are some more old school tracks by Andy Williams. The mix feels very cool and genuine and stops the dark elements of the show taking over too much. The show is incredibly fun to watch from a production standpoint.

The shows two leads Rue (Zendaya Coleman,” and Jules (Hunter Schafer) are the guiding lights in a cast of liars, cheaters, abusers, and jerks. Rue is fresh out of rehab after having an OD during the summer and comes back into town looking to score more drugs immediately. We learn she uses to cope with a plethora of mental illnesses that she’s had to deal with since she was little. Her panic attacks are so severe she loses consciousness and feels like she can’t breathe. Her first relief comes the first time she uses drugs. She sometimes goes on long, theatrical rants that can seem a bit corny, like when she gives a detailed description of her birth. (This is coupled with some pretty graphic imagery, and it’s the first scene of the show so it gets your attention I guess.) But her story is interesting and there’s underlying compassion that comes through, with her sister, with a classmate having a rough time, and with Jules. Zendaya is a powerhouse, while this probably being the first adult program she’s been in she really steps it up. Her subtlety when playing drunk or stoned stops the show feeling goofy and actually makes what she’s going through pretty sad. Except for the montage of drunken bike riding accidents where she keeps riding into parked cars. Poetic cinema. Jules is still a little bit of an enigma, only appearing in her scene with the older guy, and at the party. Both times she’s profiled for being a trans woman, once threateningly and once sexually. But there’s a real fire there that’s intriguing. When she maims herself to fend off an aggressive jock it’s genuinely shocking and possibly gratuitous. It would be good to see how she’s gotten to where she is without relying solely on abuse tropes, which seems to be where her story is geared. The final scenes with Rue and Jules are incredibly sweet and make all the grime and darkness worth it.

You might wonder why people would want to review, or even watch shows that are so graphic and dark, or that the shows allure lies only in shock value. But Euphoria is more than just dick pics and teens taking drugs, everything is done for a reason, whether it adds to the story, or clues the audience in on the shows key themes. I have NEVER been a fan of sexual assault as a narrative device; it’s lazy and harmful. The first episode of Euphoria doesn’t have any explicit rape scenes, though the threat of it feels imminent, and there are a few hard to watch moments where the men take it a bit too far.

I think that’s the point, none of the shows men are painted in a particularly favorable light, the episode, and the whole series probably, wants to show of the worst types of misogyny that teen girls in high school face. There are jocks who bond over stolen nudes and sex tapes of their classmates, guys peer pressured into treating women poorly, and one very creepy older man with a major creep factor. It’s basically a PSA warning against some of the most common traits of entitled, sexist dudes. Head Jock, Nate, spends the episode walking around shirtless, shouting, cat calling and pushing people around like he’s top shit. When his ex, Maddy has sex in Nate’s pool in front of their classmates (not the classiest move, obviously,) he flies into a fit of rage. He shouts people out of his kitchen and smashes stuff until he comes face to face with Jules, who pulls out a knife and sikes him out until he retreats. Not all women have knives, obviously when men harass them, and men shouldn’t have to be held off by a knife to stop from playing up, but it was satisfying watching Nate get owned anyway. His influence over McKay, whom he peer pressures into treating a girl horribly in bed, will hopefully fade.

The other man Jules encounters, Cal, is a married man played by Eric Dane (McSteamy from Grey’s Anatomy.) He meets Jules in a seedy motel after she cruises him online, leading to one of the more uncomfortable scenes this episode that really had no purpose other than to let on how creepy he is and that he’s Nate’s dad.

The girls in the show just do whatever they can to fit in and get by in high school unfazed. Rue uses substances, Jules uses isolation and rough exterior, and the popular girls use sex. People with cameras and classmates shaming them take their desire to explore at a young age at every turn. Jules’ friend Kat has sex for the first time after the other girls make her feel weird for not having done it. Some turn the tables, using sexuality and influence to embarrass or shame the people giving them shit.

The whole premier’s focus was on survival in high school, in a time of social media and substances that make it almost impossible. Peer pressure, drugs, nudes and mental illness are all key motivators but it’s how each kid chooses to respond and stand out that makes the show special. Hopefully, we move from just surviving to actually thriving. We get a hint of this when Rue and Jules finally meet, and are actually kind to each other, hinting at a possibly healing, fun pairing. Either way, the show isn’t likely to slow down and has a lot of potential.

#reviews #euphoria #euphoria hbo #zendaya #zendaya coleman #hunter schafer

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candyclan · 6 years

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Coming out letter to my mom. (FTM) At the start of my transition, I wanted to go by a name that started with an “A”because my birthname did. All the rest of it is basically the same.

THE TRUTH:

I didn’t scream “I am a boy” at my parents. Honestly, my mother (specifically) controlled a lot of what I did, who I hung out with, and what I wore as a child. I believe she has/had an idea about what she wanted out of a daughter since I was born, and really just lived through me. I think she eventually had to give me room to make my own decisions, later in life. I didn’t come out until I was 16, although I had spent 6 months prior to even coming out thinking about my gender identity. I was extremely sheltered. I want you guys to know that I didn’t know what being transgender was until I was a freshman in high school and met my best friend (who is STILL MY BEST FRIEND TODAY) who identified as Non-binary gender fluid. I had never really met someone AFAB that lived to be anything other than female. With that came the knowledge that sometimes, men don’t necessarily have to have penises and I can wear whatever I’m comfortable with. I used to be religious in middle school (raised Christian) but I never found god. It never made sense to me how so many people can put their faith in other people’s ideas of what god is (the Bible) but not listen when their real CHILD comes to them and tells them that they feel uncomfortable in their gender identity. I also came out as bisexual in middle school, after meeting a girl I had a fancy for. To which my mother sobbed and cried and asked how she had failed as a parent. I remember loving pink, it was my favorite color. Pink, purple, blue. My top 3. Now it’s blue, pink, purple but basically the same. I had a pink room, loved hello kitty, let my mom curl my hair with little curlers at night so I could wake up and be somebody different the next day. My brother played with carebears and my Barbie dolls more than I did as a child. I remember a toy gun and handcuffs. I was fairly experimental as a child, I did: Girl Scouts, swimming, piano, soccer, ballet, cheerleading, and more honestly. I always got “boy” toys at McDonald’s (I mean cmon they’re cooler) I just was kinda everywhere. I feel like that’s easier for someone AFAB to be. My brother was harassed by my family for liking girly things but I was never shown that I couldn’t like stereotypical “boy things” by extended family. My mother however in the line at McDonalds I could never forget, turned and looked at me (baseball cap backwards tank top and shorts)and said “So, what?” “Are you batting for the other team” implying that because of the clothes I liked to wear I would be a lesbian. My mother (like I said, kinda controlling and extremely narcissistic) when I was allowed to cut my hair super short for the first time I was 16. Afterwards she has said things like: “but you’re so pretty how could you have cut your hair” “you looked so nice with long hair” I never felt akin to femininity. I was actually VERY uncomfortable with it. I hated being the “weaker” gender. I never wanted my nails painted. It was torture. I acted like makeup and and nail polish was torture, the hairbrush was my enemy. I used to just put my hair up in a low ponytail every day as I got older. I knew she’d never let me cut it all off. Basically, other than wanting to grow up strong and tough and not liking to be treated like a female, I was female. There were parts of being female I didn’t really have a problem with, and honestly that’s why I didn’t come out for so long. I wasn’t in a house or raised by people I knew would accept anything other than me being their “little girl” I was a daddies girl. So between my lack of understanding of where my feelings towards my gender roles were coming from, being encouraged by my family to be girly, not being exposed to gender diversity (or anything queer), and my controlling mother, I remained in the dark about who I was.

TRIGGER WARNING:::(abuse)::::: I was never close with my mother, and actually hated her growing up. To this day she is the most judge mental, self-centered woman I know. My father was funny, charismatic, and lost his shit sometimes. I like to say, 90% of the time he was amazing. We made jokes and could literally finish each other’s sentences. But honestly my father, 10% of the time was abusive. Most of my abuse in my life was covert (narcissistic abuse from my mother) and verbal/emotional/barely physical abuse from my father. He’s 6”3’ 350 lbs and very loud and scary, especially to a young child. He punched a hole in my wall, he threw a remote at a wall and shattered it to pieces, he threatened to kill my dog with a baseball bat in front of me. Which I swear to god he would have done if I wasn’t holding my dog, protecting him. These moments were few and far between, but they were riddled with insults and almost always left me with less than I started with. My father did spank my brother and I, and one time he clapped my brother so well that he left a purple hand mark on his butt. My mother told my father she’d take us away if that happened again. My father never left marks. He never had to, he was so big and would just get up in my face and scream at me. He made me feel helpless. Because he was invading my space I felt physically threatened, and he never actually had to touch me and leave bruises because that threat was already implied by invading my space. I was so young, but I always knew my family wasn’t right. Finally at 16, I stood up to my father for the first time. I didn’t care if he was bigger than me, I didn’t care if I would lose, I was willing to fight for me. Anyway, long story short the police were called because we were screaming at each other in front of his apartment building. I’m not going to say I didn’t fuck up as a teenager, but I never deserved the pressure and the abuse he was dishing out and had dished out my whole life. I knew that. I cut him out of my life just after turning 16, by then I had been questioning my identity. It became easier after leaving my father to fall into who I was. My father is FAIRLY religious and my mother claims to be but she never talks about god, she never prays, and now that my father and her are divorced I don’t think she’s been inside a church since. Losing my father was a lot, despite his abuse he and I were really close and had really similar personalities. The reality of abuse isn’t “well, now I see them as an abuser so now none of that good stuff is left it’s all tainted” I had to struggle with losing someone very important in my life at a young age, for myself.

Arguments against me being trans:

My family has been a bit divided in responding to me coming out. By now, it’s been about 4 years.

My mother and her side of the family are in denial. They don’t understand how I can’t be a “lesbian that just likes boy things”. They don’t use my name or pronouns.

My father, what little communication I have with him now, is bewildered. He and I had a discussion this past Christmas where I brought up what his abuse did to me mentally and he apologized but then tried to say “well what about your part in all of this” and said that I was hanging out with crazy depressed people, cutting myself, doing drugs, (I was smoking weed and I’ve tried acid like once piss off) and was sneaking out. Yeah. I did do all of that BUT GUESS WHAT. IM 20. I go where I wanna go. I fuck who I wanna fuck. I smoke what I want and guess what? It’s not any different from when I was 16 except now I don’t have parents up my ass telling me what to do. His argument basically was that I need to own up to what I did too and that fucking angered me. You don’t apologize and then go “well what about you” that’s not an apology. That’s deflection and honestly I don’t think I need to apologize because my parents were super controlling. I was just trying to do what I wanted and they didn’t like it. He and I have talked about me being trans and he pretty much thinks I’m certifiable. Doesn’t use my name or pronouns.

My brother: Ethan, my brother and I have always been close. He’s 17 now, and he had a different reaction to me being trans. Of all of my family he was the most receptive to my pleas of gender dysphoria and he suffers with anxiety so he gets stuff. But alas, after asking him if he’d call me by my name and pronouns (after 4 years of being out) he thinks that I am the one that has an issue with society. I told him I was starting T soon and he said: “Hrt won’t lessen all the things that come with being transgender. If you feel like doing hormones is the best for you then do it, but from a logical standpoint I think there just needs to be more thickening of skin” he claimes that if I try hard enough I could be fine living as female. Doesn’t use my name or pronouns.

None of my family supports me. None of my family understands. And none of them ever will. I have been out for four fucking years. I can’t tell you how frustrating family rejection can be. I have cried so much at the idea of not having a supportive family. I feel like I was ripped away from a beautiful life somewhere and thrust into this mess.

Honestly though, it doesn’t matter, the world keeps spinning and I keep finding people who love and accept me for who I truly am. I have made peace with my family’s lack of acceptance. It’s made me stronger and more compassionate towards others. Made me want to be better than them. I am actually going to start hormones soon, and on top of other fears I have, will be cutting my family out of my life. I can’t be 25 with a full beard and getting misgendered by my family. I can’t do it. They may feel like I’m going too far, that I don’t have to do this, but I do. I’m not doing this because I didn’t get too much attention as a kid or my mom favored my brother over me, I’m not doing this because it’s cool, I’m not doing this because I’m bored, I’m not doing this because I hate myself or anyone else. This is AFFIRMATION. Sometimes, cutting people who can’t see you for who your really are out of your life is affirming too.

Guys, girls, people, keep your head up. Things get better, I know. I thought life was never going to get better so I know that’s what it can feel like. But it does. Never ever let someone control your life or who you are. You’re beautiful/handsome/amazing! You deserve to be comfortable in your own skin and to love who you are. I am getting there, we all are.

Love,

Tanner M.

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mothergwendoline-blog · 5 years

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Trans Isolation

Disclaimer: This blog contains discussion of suicide and depression. If this makes you feel unsafe, please leave.

For a journal of a mad woman dedicated to suicide I certainly seem to be forward thinking. If nothing else the thought of my transition goals are one of the few things enabling me to wake and face every day. Make no mistake, the planet is dying, we live the last era of humanity and I fully intend to end my life before the apocalypse but I will be damned to go without seeking joy where I can. Barring the recent resurgence of extremist hatred and fascist uprising, no small matter, I am fortunate in many ways to be well positioned in life. Though I am poor, through fortune of being allowed to live with family whilst I recover from my last two suicide attempts, I at least am afforded some stability. I have a roof over my head, hygiene, relative physical health compared to many and food in my stomach. I think on my ultimate suicide daily, how and when I will accomplish it, but where is already decided. I will take myself to our government and end my life at their doorstep in environmental protest to the constant neglect and abuse of our planet at the hands of the powerful. When will be after I reach my original weight before my binging, after breast augmentation and a return to the sex industry, and finally after bottom surgery. I give myself about five years. I am not be the first climate change suicide but I intend to be a notable one. I expect I shall make national or hopefully international news for demonstrating in blood the very real harm those in power have done to our Earth. Soon we shall see an uprising of the masses and I have every hope the rich and powerful will beg us for mercy as we overthrow them.

For now, it is the joy and meaning of self-improvement that motivates my living. I have resumed weekly electrolysis treatment of my facial hair. It is a slow and constant progress but eventually I will have a soft, smooth kissable face. Of course I am mostly concerned with ridding myself of the immense dysphoria of having to shave away my beard but I am also glad to become more attractively feminine. Beauty is fickle and open to debate but I have my own concept of my personal beauty and I will obtain it through hard work.

I found a nice beauty therapist for electrolysis, I have had two of many treatments to come. Although she is a tad blunt on matters transgender. This would shy a lot of people away, too many trans folk are in my experience fragile and easily wounded by misplaced comments. My beauty therapist refers to us as “transes”, or “my girls” more affectionately. She told me a tale of how her second husband, after their divorce, left her to become a “transvestite”, her words, in a large city and is now a “street walker”. She holds no resentment to the ex-spouse or to trans people, which is fortunate. She did ask a great deal of questions of the trans experience, most revolving around socialization post-transition which I found an uncommon and interesting query.

The beauty therapist said “most transes I’ve known prefer to socialize with [cis] women rather than other transes” and asked why I choose to socialize with other trans people. Solidarity and good company I suppose. But it did raise an interesting question in my mind about the shame and self-imposed isolation of trans people. There are many trans folk, mostly older white women in my experience, who prefer to live lives without other transgender people. I can empathize to this. For a long period of time after my transition I refused to call myself trans; I was just a woman, plain and simple. There is still a great deal of truth to this but now I see myself as a woman and as a transgender person equally. I can only make guesses for others but for me there were, at the time, a great many things I detested about the trans community. For one, the promotion of finding happiness looking visibly trans was something I did not, and still do not rest easy with. Only now I hold no resentment towards others who hold this position, I simply see myself as sharing different sentiments. I used to want to go completely stealth, to move to a new city where no one knew me and live a life closeted about my gender history. However, things changed. I hold no grudge against people who want to live stealth, for some that is their truth and meaning and I respect it. For me, I look at the horrible state of inequality and abuse faced by my trans siblings and I can do nothing to remedy this without being open and out with them. I am trans, I want and need trans people in my life and though my goal is to pass and obtain bottom surgery, I will continue to remain open about who I am. So to the inquisitive beauty therapist I am not sure what to say in answer to her questions. Perhaps it is best said I believe that, if my being out can offer solidarity and comfort to other trans people and if it can help peaceably advance our equality, then I will be out. Barring of course an anonymous trans blog. I can be out in my public life whilst seeking my privacy online.

On that note, I have started going to a transgender support group held every few weeks at a local LGBTQ center. I waited outside vaping with a handful of other “transes” whilst waiting for our meeting space to be set up. All a very quiet bunch but then again, it is hard to have deep and involved trans talk out in public waiting on the street, the privacy is important. We were let in to a warm and inviting office lounge coopted into a meeting place. We shared food (all vegetarian, it’s always vegetarian), drank special teas and spent the next hour and a half regaling our lives, our woes and joys of life being transgender.

There were many shy, all but broken people in the room. This, sadly, is much in line with my other experiences of such support groups. The condition of life for trans people is unfortunate, many come from families who have abandoned them, others cannot come out for this very fear. I found myself to be one of the most extroverted people in the room which came as a surprise to me as I am usually the shyest in the room. Or perhaps I have simply grown in social confidence and should pat myself on the back for breaking out of my shell. I was also one of the longest “out” of those in the room, this being a young group and myself having been out since about twenty-one years old. I was not the oldest person there, but one of the oldest in trans years. It afforded me an interesting position, to listen to people talk of such things as beginning hormone replacement therapy, or their first venture into a public restroom, or even planning for their first surgery, whatever that may be. It made me take a moment to reflect and feel happy that, although I am young and have yet so many transition goals to achieve, I have already accomplished a great deal.

I started HRT about six or seven years ago, I have fully socially transitioned and am out to everyone in my life, and I have had FFS. I still remember acutely my first trans milestones. The first time I used a public women’s restroom was at a hospital after my first meeting with an endocrinologist, just when I started HRT. I decided then and there I would be brave and allow myself that infinitesimal right to go to the bathroom of my true gender. Exiting the cubicle, a mother and her child were in the room and she looked at me with shock and horror and moved her child away from me so that she the mother stood between us. I washed my hands and quickly left in self-disgust, even though it was her wrong and not mine. I pass better now but at the time, even though I was wearing a dress, makeup and handbag and had my hair done, I was visibly trans. Even in this day and age there are still those bigoted and ignorant people (sometimes hateful) who believe our very presence is a threat, to children no less. You could ask me to be sympathetic to her and consider what she was thinking. But you should also ask the same of her, to be sympathetic to me. And ultimately that is what it comes down to.

Transgender people have a right to use their correct restrooms and it is for others to abandon their hateful prejudices and look at us as common, equal human citizens. I am tired of the lackluster, unscientific, illogical and bigoted complaints of TERFs and transphobes. “It is a space for females” they would say “And you have a male body”. But sex and biology and gender roles are not, nor have the ever been so simple. But this blog is not an essay to justify the rights of trans people to use restrooms, plenty others exist. This is a personal journal to catalogue my experiences of transition and fitness. Hearing others at the trans support group talk of these milestones in transition with apprehension and fear made me look for the first time and realise I take these actions in stride. Using a public restroom, dressing how best suits my gender expression, entering gender specific spaces such as women’s art groups. Of course there is still adversary and transphobia I encounter regularly but I have become somewhat dulled and desensitized to it. On reflection it angers me and fuels the fight for rights and equality but it has also become a day-to-day occurrence.

After another month or so of rest and recuperation, once my mental health is less volatile as a result of therapy, I intend to find work in the city. I’m an artist, a writer, so finding work within my passion will be too difficult to obtain steady living as yet. A nice office job, secretary, clerical, data entry position will suit my needs and experience. And it will make the cost of transition achievable instead of digging away at my steadily diminishing savings.

Exercise at the gym has been treating me well although I have yet to lose weight. I recently had a severe depressive crash which resulted in my relapse in drinking self-harming again. I also broke my intermittent fasting for several days and returned to binge eating out of sadness. Thanks to exercise I have not gained weight, but I have not lost weight either. From today I will be trialing one month of intermittent fasting and will post my weigh-in at the end of the month.

I will likely have to return to a psychiatric hospital for a few days as my suicidal ideation is reaching its breaking point. Self-harm is a dire warning sign for me. Although my family are loving and empathetic, I need to be somewhere I can receive professional care.

Ultimately my goal is to obtain a referral through the public mental health system to attend a private psychiatric hospital which I would otherwise have no way of affording. And I believe I am an ideal candidate. I have had ongoing mental health struggles since the age of about ten or eleven. Since then I have been in and out of public psych wards and attempted suicide twice. I believe a private psychiatric hospital with intensive daily therapy is my best and only shot at obtaining a meaningful quality of life. But obtaining a referral is exceedingly difficult.

And that is where I shall end this entry. Between gym, electrolysis and the trans support group I am filling my life with meaningful pursuits of happiness, but I require something far more drastic to improve my mental health. Unfortunately we live in a world that chooses not to listen to suicidal ideation until it is too late. And then the mourning comes, an outcry of people exclaiming “What were the signs? What could we have done?”, but our drastically underfunded mental health services remain barren and individuals like myself bear the brunt of lack of care.

Mother Gwendoline

#Beauty #Climate change suicide #Climatechangesuicide #Electrolysis #Environment #Environmentalism #Feminism #Feminist #Fitness #Gym #HRT #LGBTQ #LGBT #Lifestyle #Suicide #Surgery #Trans #Trans woman #Transgender

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nomiruiz · 8 years

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The Lingering Trauma of Searching for Love as a Trans Youth

by Nomi Ruiz

When I was a teenage girl, I dated an extremely handsome and charming man named Diego. We met over the internet, and eventually would spend time together in his souped-up truck, talking and touching beneath the moonlight, under the loud boom of his sound system as his brand new rims glistened in the night. Eventually we graduated to the back seat, where we fucked all over that fresh interior until the sun began to rise. Slowly, as our relationship progressed, our tryst moved up to his apartment. That seemed like a big deal to me; we had never stepped foot onto the same concrete until that very moment.

The world wasn’t ready to see a man lusting over a trans woman, and so there was an unspoken agreement between us to never be seen together in public. Imagine what would happen, we thought, if strangers saw the look in our eyes as we sat across from one another at a dinner table. It was too much for us to even consider, so we chose to avoid public circumstances. There would be no holding hands on our way to brunch on a Sunday. No overnight stay, or sweet goodbyes in the a.m. as he scurried off to work, wondering if I was still in his bed, in his t-shirt—wondering if I was wondering about him. We knew we were safe in the dim light of his bachelor pad, hidden behind the fantasy and fallacy of it all. For what crooked smile could question the intent of star-crossed lovers if we never challenged their belief system? If we never even questioned the world around us and remain encapsulated in the callous act of limited love? Secrecy seemed like an easy solution.

This went on for a couple of years. The sex was exceptional and over time we became connected deeper on an emotional level—until one night it all came to a screeching halt. During one of our lengthy telephone conversations, he said, “Damn Nomi, if only things were different we would be in love,” and in that moment, the spell was broken. The magic had vanished, and I finally saw beneath it all.

I knew he was telling me he loved me while using a language that hurt me. I knew he was making an attempt to dedicate himself to me while asking for forgiveness. I was an outcast who taught myself that love was a weakness, but as I began to feel it for the first time I realized that love was like death, it was unavoidable and it was coming for all of us. In that moment of unveiling rage, I learned a lesson in both love and hate. Maybe over the course of our relationship I had silently accepted the barriers he built in his mind, but by no means had I ever given up on love. I was open to loving him even if it meant I was weak. In that moment, however, I realized it would never be an option. It would never happen in this context because he was in possession of a dead end soul. He was ashamed of his desire for a trans woman and wouldn’t let our love to come to life. Not in public and definitely not in his heart.

I told him he was right, that if only things were different we could be together, but I wasn’t the one who needed to change; it was him and his closed mind.“You understand what I’m saying! You know how I feel,” he argued. “I love being with you. I don’t want this to end. If only things were different. If only things were real.”

I stood there, shocked by his delusion. “You are going to die old and lonely,” I responded, “looking back at life regretting never having given yourself the opportunity to live your truth.” I never spoke to him again. And almost a decade later, I was right. Although he’s not dead yet he is still chasing me, still chasing his truth.

Diego was one of many lovers who kept me in the dark. Many who I never met at a restaurant for dinner or at a bar for drinks. Never did we go to a theater to catch a movie or a walk through a park. No museum visits or romantic nights out on the town. It was door-to-door delivery service, like Seamless for lovers. It was easy. Why face the pressures of society? Why take the chance of someone realizing I was trans and giving us a hard time? Why take the chance of his friends and family finding out he preferred the company of me over a cis woman? Why put us through that shame?

My fear of judgement allowed me to accept this poor treatment. Even as I grew older, prouder and wiser, I felt as if I was never perfect enough to be on the arm of a man. As society began to accept me because I grew to be what it deemed beautiful, I still wondered, was I beautiful enough? Beautiful enough for love—beautiful enough to be loved in public? Why couldn’t we just live in a fantasy? Why couldn’t we hide from violence? Why did we have to prove anything to anyone?

It was all too much for my lovers and myself, so we never put ourselves in that position. We created safe spaces in the comfort of our homes, or whatever hotel room was available. Our intimacy only existed in these moments, and sometimes these romantic bubbles would become our primary relationships. Lighting and lingerie; our favorite wine and music. It was always the perfect setting with no pressure. We’d make love like beasts behind those closed doors, our sanctuary. We would speak about the possibilities of our future through weed smoke and locked lips. We’d discuss what the future held for us or would hold for us… if only things were “different.” Once, a man imagined how I would be pregnant, and I had to listen to him describe what our child would look like, how we would live together in a one-bedroom in Spanish Harlem where we would have way too much sex for our own good. We became addicted to this standard of love. Addicted to pretending we didn’t want something more from our trysts and to pretending our trysts were actually something more. It was easy to fantasize while living in a dream, for fantasies are not frightful nor do they cause any pain. The reality of seeing them through was the nightmare.

To this day I’ve kept some of these lovers. Not because I keep my romantic life hidden behind closed doors anymore, but because these men are still addicted to these moments of fantasy. Addicted to the sex and safety of it all. And even though I live my life in reality now, it is still easy to dip back into that bubble. I mean, who doesn’t love a comfortable night of wining and dining and fucking ‘til the sun rises while Mobb Deep plays lightly in the background, right? But as I find myself owning my identity and stepping into womanhood with pride, realizing my worth and what I actually want out of an adult relationship I can’t help but wonder: Am I enabling these men?

Eventually, I met my first serious boyfriend. We were together for five years and had a fairly normal relationship. But one night while we were having an argument, he said, “You should be thankful for having a man like me who accepts you.” I told him, “This is not special. You are not rare. This is normal. And the same way you accept me, there are millions of other men out there just like you.”

Although I may not have fully believed myself as the words fell from my lips, I was right. Since then, there have been others. I’ve met some extraordinary men who are brave and who have allowed themselves to be present with me even in the face of society’s judgment, but it has definitely been a journey—and I’m only now realizing how I’ve carried so much trauma from my shameful past. It turns out those safe spaces I created for myself and my lovers were actually danger zones, and were extremely detrimental to my mental health. I let myself believe that I was not worthy of love or of being treated with the same respect as any other woman walking this earth. I love a good passionate, private night indoors, but not under the pretense of shame. At one point I found myself involved in a terribly abusive relationship. I was so used to being shrouded in this constant shame that I found comfort in being trapped and controlled—comfort in what I believed to be a constant exhibition of pride and love through anger. He couldn’t live without me. He would show me off to the world and even challenged his parents when they threatened to withhold his inheritance because I was trans and couldn’t bear children. He was ignited by the anger in their eyes. It excited him. It made him feel alive. His revenge was a threat brought to life. He would die without me. He would kill for me, and even kill me, if I ever thought of leaving. In his own words, he would “dig my grave.”

My trauma had convinced me that this was love because it was out in the open. All his rebellion—in the face of a rich, traditional family and in the face of the society I had feared my whole life—became my revenge as well. Eventually, this sense of redemption became the misstep which left me open to receive even more trauma. I told myself how no one else could love him because I was the only one who understood his madness. I settled into the pain while giving him all my magic only to be handed back a diminished soul. “Forget about the bruises on your body babe,” he told me. “Imagine if they could see the bruises I put on your soul.” I allowed my character to be assassinated because I was high off his pride and, after years of building it up, had a high tolerance for pain—so high I didn’t even realize I was hurting.

Thankfully, it began to hurt too much. I never thought I would be thankful for pain but it saved me. It rose to the surface and finally became unbearable. I planned my escape. When I left, not only did I take my belongings, I also brought with me a new set of traumas that still follow me as I navigate my way through life and love. I still have a lingering fear and anxiety about dating in public places, but once I push through I begin to realize it’s only in my head. Getting there is the hard part. Meeting men by chance while I’m already out in public is much easier for me—but I find myself surrounded by predatory men attracted to my past sexual, emotional and mental trauma. Sometimes I’d rather not deal with it at all. Being alone is so peaceful. Loneliness is my new safe space, but there are times when I let myself out of that cozy little bubble and I meet men who actually don’t give a fuck what anyone else has to say. I call them brave and they tell me, “This isn’t bravery, this is humanity.”

I still don’t understand all of this. I’m still learning. But I know the more I stand up for myself and refuse to settle for less, the stronger I’m becoming and the less my traumas seem to have a hold on me. Saying it out loud has been the first step for me. Talking about it with friends, admitting to them when they ask “How are you?’ that I’m actually not that great. You’d be surprised how many times they appear relieved and reply, “Me neither.” I’ve learned to love myself unconditionally and I hope someday that will be enough. As a good friend recently told me, “Eventually you’ve gotta just jump and figure out that you have a daughter on your hands and it’s yourself and you have take care of her.”

It’s difficult to admit that you will never be a part of the society you’ve grown to know. But what if that freed us? What if looking good on paper became poisonous? What if being that thing the world rejects made you feel sexy and you found power in that feeling? How powerful it could be to find confidence and love yourself in the face of such opposition. I hope being rejected makes others feel beautiful, powerful and unique—because rejection is only a violent form of jealousy. I especially wish this for young trans women who are navigating their way through womanhood. What a fragile device, to be frail in the eyes of the preying.

It’s only now that I see how much pain I caused myself. I look back and I feel so sorry for that poor, young girl who only wanted to love and be loved. To touch and be touched. To make love and build love and live in love. I hurt her, and it isn’t until now that I finally see it and I need to apologize. I’m sorry, Nomi, for causing you so much pain all those years. Sorry for poisoning your mind to believe that you are not worthy of love. You are worthy, you are love, and I know that now.

#nomi ruiz #ptsd #girlslikeus #transgender #dating #trauma

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harrypotterfirsttime · 4 years

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JK Rowling’s essay about why she’s a TERF: Full Overview

Be forewarned, this is going to be LONG. I started reading the Goblet of Fire today and saw that JK Rowling has written and posted an ESSAY about why she’s speaking out about her blatant transphobia. I never intended for this blog to be about her, but since this is happening while I am attempting to read the series for the first time, I feel compelled to address it.

“This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.”

I cannot fathom how she believed this would be a good idea and not add to the toxicity surrounding this issue. During pride month. When Black Lives Matter is protesting for equal rights. How is this necessary?

“For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.”

First of all, Maya didn’t lose her job. Her contract was simply not renewed by her workplace, something that she was not entitled to under any law. JK Rowling also continues to falsely assert that Maya’s belief was that ‘sex is determined biology’, when she actually asserted that under no circumstances is a trans woman a woman nor a trans man a man, and the judge ruled that it did not fit all five necessary limbs to be a philosophical belief (it actually only failed the last one). The judge ruled that the ‘under no circumstances’ part of her assertion was absolutist, and that is what ultimately failed the fifth limb. [source]

“My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.”

Not much to say here, except that this paragraph is meant to tell us that she’s considered including this debate in a fictional book she’s writing for some reason, and that she has allegedly had time to talk to all of these extremely knowledgeable people who all failed to inform her that trans people don’t actually hurt her or take anything from her.

“All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.”

First off, this goes against the statement a spokesperson made for her when this happened, stating that she had a ‘clumsy middle-aged moment’ and liked the tweet by ‘holding her phone incorrectly’. The tweet she liked also had no content that she could research, it was a baseless claim that men in dresses get more solidarity than cis women (which I won’t even dive into, we have so much more to cover). [source] I also won’t dive into the use of ‘wrongthink’ as if we are all characters in George Orwell’s 1984, simply because nobody is controlling her speech, she is simply facing consequences for the shit she chooses to fling at the wall.

“Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Burns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.”

Just take a moment to laugh at the fact that she misspelled Magdalen Berns’ last name. But to clear things up, yes, Magdalen was suffering from a fatal aggressive brain tumour, but no, she was not a brave young feminist, she was an extremely outspoken transphobe, who regularly made videos misgendering, slandering, and twisting the words of trans people and trans activists in order to victimize herself. The vast majority of trans people will agree that you shouldn’t date anybody that you don’t want to date, or have any kind of sex with anyone that you don’t like. But Magdalen took it a step further, and said that NO lesbian could have sex with somebody with a penis and still be a lesbian, and NO lesbian could have a penis, despite trans lesbians continuing to exist to this very day. [for sources, Magdalen’s twitter and youtube channel remain active]

“I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.”

Can we salute the man who decided to tell JK Rowling that he composted her books, because that’s absolutely hilarious. But really, I just want to point out that no matter how many threats of violence JK Rowling thinks she is getting, transgender people are subjected to much more abuse both online and in real life, and it affects their wellbeing much more directly than simply being called a cunt or a bitch on twitter. [source] While JK Rowling thankfully isn’t killing trans people, she’s disappointing so many of her LGBT+ fans who looked up to her and found comfort during their childhood in her books that encouraged people to be brave and be themselves.

“What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.”

I’ll tackle this paragraph from top to bottom. Firstly, the reason you believe the overwhemling majority of people supported you is because many of those who don’t (myself included, until now) simply rolled their eyes and ignored you, because you are not worth our time. We have lives to live that are unconcerned with your bigotry. Second, I hope those people who were working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people have since left their jobs, because they have no business serving a community who they secretly harbour unsupportive ideologies about. And finally, the idea of supporting and helping trans people (specifically trans youth) is DANGEROUS to young people, gay people, and women’s and girls’ rights is simply false. No women’s rights have been repealed in favour of trans people’s rights (mainly because trans women continue to shockingly be women). In fact, trans youth with parents who are very supportive and affirming show a statistically significantly lower rate of both depressive symptoms and suicide attempts. [source] [specific graph]

“I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.”

I can completely understand taking a step back from Twitter for mental health reasons (perhaps we all would have been better off if this had been an indefinite hiatus). To be clear, no activists are claiming the right to police your speech. People are speaking up against your speech because it is hateful and contradictory to current research about transgender people and the best way to treat and support us effectively. Some people maybe using misogynistic slurs, which I don’t condone, but let us be clear that TERF is not one of them.

“If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.”

The first two sentences in this paragraph are true. Viv Smythe, a trans inclusive cis radfem, is credited with coining the term TERF to describe her fellow radical feminists who are ‘unwilling to recognize trans women as sisters’. It has also become widely used to describe feminists who exclude trans women from their feminism, even if they are not radfems. [source] I don’t care about who has been called a TERF, all I need to know is that they are transphobes, which they should feel equally disgusted at the fact their behaviour warrants the label. Trans men do not want to be included in radical feminism because we were ‘born women’, and JK Rowling including this as if it is an excuse is appalling. Trans men are not women, therefore we do not appreciate radfems claiming to support us based on their obsession with what genitals we were born with.

“But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).”

I cringed hard at ‘speaking as a biological woman’, because that’s just the kind of language that TERFs consistently use to make it clear that they are NOT under any circumstances to be mistaken for trans. The notion that these people, institutions and organizations are ‘cowering’ out of fear of being transphobic as opposed to wanting to openly support and welcome trans people as they would any other person is extremely biased. And as a last note, people using clownfish are trying to show that sex is noy cut and dry binary, it varies between species, and there is so much more to it than ‘XX vs XY’ and ‘penis vs vagina’ like JK Rowling and company seem to think.

“So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.”

I don’t think anyone will argue that JK Rowling’s charitable trusts and funds are a bad thing. But her need to specify that these have an ‘emphasis on women and children’, imply that survivors of domestic and sexual abuse cannot be men or trans people, and for some reason pointing out that MS can present differently in men and women, are all red flags that these are issues she’s injecting into her charitable efforts, as opposed to actual threats to the causes she supports. The fear that transphobes have over people being classified by the gender they experience and walk through life presenting with instead of the genitals they have underneath a few layers of clothes is ridiculous, especially when you strip it down like this.

“The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.”

The movement to secure equal rights and protection under the law for transgender people will not have a negative effect on children or education, other than allowing kids to learn more about the diversity among people they’ll interact with throughout their lives. And once again, nobody is trying to tell you that you cannot say these things, only that you will face consequences for saying them, like Donald Trump does daily. Trans people and activists don’t even have the power to affect the right to freedom of speech, so this is a moot point.

“The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.”

There is a lot to unpack in this paragraph. And I don’t have the room in this already much too long post to dive into detransitioning, so I’ll say this: it sucks that some people transition only to realize they shouldn’t have. But these people are a staggering minority of people who do transition, and there is no external person they can blame for believing them when they relay their symptoms (as doctors are supposed to do) and acting accordingly, with the patient’s consent. The issues I have here are the language JK Rowling uses to say young women are transitioning, purposefully misgendering trans masculine people. And implying that people are transitioning because they are gay, because their families or society push them to not be gay and instead transition, is absolutely laughable. Studies have already shown that society as a whole is much less accepting of transgender people than they are of gay people and lesbians. [source]

“Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.”

There are a number of factors that could have led to such an increase in referrals, and no studies have a definitive answer, though most speculate that the increase in acceptance and visibility of trans people is likely a major contributor. [source] Additionally, I personally believe that more trans women seeked transition years ago because it was impossible to be accepted as a trans woman without fully medically transitioning, whereas trans men could get by without transitioning and simply presenting as their gender. Now that transition is more acceptable and available, trans men do not need to hold themselves back from transitioning, but unfortunately, with more visibility has come more vitriol that is specifically aimed at trans women, and this could discourage them from transitioning or coming out at all. I won’t dignify the statement about autism in afab trans people being prevalent other than saying that cis people can be autistic, trans people can be autistic, and implying that neuro-atypical people cannot make informed decisions about their bodies and healthcare is abhorrent.

“The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’”

Lisa Littman’s study can be read here. There are a multitude of issues with this study, and many big names in psychology and gender studies have spoken up about the issues in her conclusions and in the methods to begin with, which are unscientific and deeply flawed. [source] The biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that the study interviews parents of trans youth as opposed to the trans youth themselves, and takes the parents’ limited knowledge of their child’s inner thoughts and experience as fact without consulting the trans person at all. Additionally, recruitment for the study was mainly done through anti-trans organizations. All of this information is available in the original study and in the rebuttal. Because of this, I cannot take anybody who cites Lisa Littman or her study seriously, because it is not credible whatsoever.

“Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.”

There are reasons clearly stated above why Lisa Littman and her work should be discredited for publishing this work and claiming it to be a study (especially because it was not published in any journal and was therefore not subjected to peer-review). Also, for argument’s sake, why do people like JK Rowling take people’s word for it when they report their sexual orientation, but not their gender? Why should one be recognized as innate, but not the other? Both can only be determined by the individual and their internal thoughts and feelings and urges and sense of self. Nobody can be persuaded to be trans any more than anyone can be persuaded to be gay, or lesbian, or bisexual.

“The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’”

I didn’t think it needed to be said, but a single psychiatrist’s experience is not representative of the entire reality. Many people misquote studies in order to make them work for their agenda. Studies show that trans people have higher suicide attempt rates, not higher rates of actually killing themselves. To insert personal experience like Marcus Evans did, I attempted suicide multiple times, and experienced high levels of depression and anxiety directly tied to my gender dysphoria, all of which has been alleviated since being allowed to medically and socially transition. There are hundreds if not thousands of other trans people who will report similar struggles to myself.

“The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.”

Comparing having OCD to suffering with gender dysphoria and all the side effects it can have (many of which she listed here) is offensive. So is saying that she, too, may have transitioned, because she clearly is very comfortable as a cis woman. Trans men do not transition to escape womanhood, we transition because at our core we know we are not women and this causes us deep turmoil, on top of all the sexism and misogyny we face as a result of moving through the world being perceived as women while in the closet. Comparing the admittedly terrible experience of growing into a world riddled with sexism and misogyny to that same experience topped with multiple deeper levels of emotional turmoil is just not a comparison any cis person can make or attempt to understand, which is difficult to hear and accept for JK Rowling I’m sure. If there were online communities when JK Rowling was struggling with severe OCD, she likely would have found sympathy in other people who have OCD. The following implication (out of nowhere) that there are trans people online luring in teenagers with unrelated mental health struggles trying to ‘persuade’ them to transition is just ridiculous and I cannot believe she attempted to make this comparison.

“When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’”

More people than JK Rowling is probably aware of feel ‘mentally sexless’ in youth, because they have no crippling discomfort regarding their gender identity, and either do not feel pressure to prescribe to gender stereotypical behaviours or actively rebel against it. According to brain studies, everyone is technically a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ because there remains to be no such thing as a male brain or female brain. [source]

“As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.”

Just to clarify for JK Rowling, trans men and trans women both existed in the 1980s, and long before that. If she had been a trans man, she would have been able to pursue a social or medical transition. Those trans people in the 80s also turned to books and music to get through their struggles. It has been long documented that women and girls have negative feelings towards their bodies that are mainly rooted in the misogynistic society we all have to grow up in, and it’s a battle that trans people fight to end alongside cis women. I think JK Rowling will also find that trans people are at the forefront of making it known that gender roles and stereotypes are not necessary and should not be the standard for being a man or woman; women do not need to like pink, frilly things and men do not need to like monochrome, masculine things. Trans people are also huge advocates for finding yourself and living your life in the way that is most authentic to you, without focusing on whether your body is ‘male’ or ‘female’ and fighting against stigmas surrounding that obsession.

“I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.”

First of all, the number of kids who “desist” from their gender dysphoria are not reliable. Mainly because the methods in these studies are not robust (ie one study defined gender dysphoria as exhibiting any behaviour that was not typical of their gender, such as boys playing with barbies and girls playing with monster trucks; another study classified subjects that did not return to the clinic and did not follow up as desisters without confirming). [source] Additionally, studying children who do exhibit true gender dysphoria, the main factor determining whether it will persist or desist seems to be the intensity, and not at all related to peer relations. [source] Trans people wishing to transition medically may no longer need to subject themselves to extensive and unnecessary therapy to convince medical professionals that they are who they say they are, but they still need to wait on very long lists for our turn to access hormone replacement therapy and surgeries, and can spend all of that time being sure that we are indeed trans and want these medical treatments. JK Rowling is also purposefully misreporting facts in regard to Gender Recognition Certificates. In order to get one, one must be over 18, have lived as their true gender for at least 2 full years, and provide two medical reports (one from a gender specialist and another from a general practitioner) citing that they have gender dysphoria. If they have not had any medical transitional treatments, the medical reports must state whether they are waiting for them or why they are not pursuing any, in direct contradiction of JK Rowling’s assertion that any man can get this certificate. [source]

“We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.”

I find it hilarious that JK Rowling believes that 2020 is more riddled with misogyny than the 80s, and even the 90s. There is only backlash against feminism that isn’t intersectional and purposefully excludes groups of people for reasons rooted in ignorance and bigotry, like TERFs. Her personal belief that things are worse for girls are not reflected in society as a whole for a multitude of reasons. Although I’ll give that Donald Trump being president is a failure of the American people and highlights the bigotry of Americans, it is completely unrelated to trans people, and I’m not sure why it is relevant. I’d even argue the existence of incels is due to the fact that women are no longer forced into relationships and marriages the way they used to, no longer have to find a husband because they can work and live without leaning a man for financial stability, and can say no to sex with less repercussions (except a very small minority of men throwing tantrums about it). Comparing trans people fighting against TERFs and wanting to re-educate them to incels, Donald Trump, and misogynistic men is just a blatant attempt to derail the conversation. JK Rowling refuses to see that she is not being told to shut up because she’s a woman, she’s being told to shut up because there’s a transphobe. (On a lighter note, this reminds me of the post of a comic where homophobes were told to hit a beehive like its a pinata, and Christians got upset for being targetted, without Christianity ever being mentioned....seems relatable here)

“I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.”

I think all trans people will admit that people with vaginas have shared experiences because, well, they have the same body part, the same way all people with arms can relate to having arms. What we are arguing though, is that womanhood is not tied to having a vagina, or the struggles that come with having one, even though those experiences may be shared by many women. Many women may also share the experience of playing with barbies or being part of a soccer league as a child, neither of which have to do with being ‘biological women’. Pushing the absurd accusations of segregation and some weird political plan, trans people don’t pretend that we’re the same as cis people. There are material differences between trans women and cis women, and between trans men and cis men. There are also material differences among cis women and cis men. Our argument is that these material differences are not a valid excuse to exclude us from being women and men.

“But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.”

Trans people are not claiming that being a woman is a costume, or an idea in anyone’s head, or a pink brain or any gender stereotype. Men do not know what it is like to be a woman. I have absolutely no idea what it feels like to be a woman, because even when presenting as one, I did not feel womanhood or any kinship with other women, because I knew that on a deep level I was not a woman. But on to less personal experiences. Inclusive language shouldn’t have quotation marks around it. Those you call female people (which I call afab, or assigned female at birth) do not all identify as women, and do not all like the label female. Therefore, using inclusive language such as ‘people who menstruate’ and ‘people with vulvas’ includes all the women who have vulvas and menstruate (because not all cis women do), and also includes the people who do not identify as women or associate the word female with themselves, despite menstruating or having a vulva. This is not an attack on women, this is not the same as misogynists using these facts to degrade women. It is simply language being used in a more encompassing way that in no way harms cis women, no matter how much JK Rowling or any other transphobe tries to play victim.

“Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.”

It goes without saying but obviously I am sad to learn that JK Rowling is a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault. It pains me to know she went through something so traumatic and that her daughter also either witnessed or experienced similar horrors. I do however have a problem with weaponizing these experiences as a reason to continue being a transphobe.

“I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.”

Again, I am deeply saddened knowing that JK Rowling had experiences that caused lifelong struggles for her at the hands of someone she gave her trust to and had to endure throughout her first marriage. It is interesting that she feels she is able to sympathize with trans women who suffer similar abuses, despite her blatant disregard for trans people’s struggles on display throughout this essay.

“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”

‘Natal girls and women’ is another transphobic dog whistle. There is a non-offensive way to say this, which I am sure if JK Rowling has done all the reading she has claimed to do, she must have stumbled upon the word ‘cisgender’ at some point. It effectively communicates the same information without alienating trans people and implying they are less than cis women. Trans women are not ‘men who believe or feel like women’, and this long standing myth that cis men will use the guise of being a trans woman to gain access to public bathrooms and changerooms has been thoroughly debunked, because trans women have been using women’s bathrooms and changerooms for years with no issues. [source] And scroll up for the claim that Gender Confirmation Certificates are given out to any man who decides to be a woman for a day above, this is just more misinformation, no ‘simple truth’.

“On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.”

First of all, JK Rowling is blatantly lying. The Gender Recognition Act Reform has been completely shelved by the Scottish government in light if the more pressing need to fight the coronavirus on April 1st, and I cannot find any updates on this being considered by the government. [source] The only trans related news out of Scotland I can find is that on June 5th, the Scottish government included trans women in the definition of women in guidance for school boards, which will have none of the effects that JK Rowling is fear mongering about. [source] Again, I am upset to know that JK Rowling is a survivor, but she is using this revelation as a weapon to make people fear that it will happen to others as a result of trans people gaining access to the same public spaces as their cis counterparts. Women’s and girls’ safety is NOT being put at risk by trans people using a bathroom or changeroom.

“Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.””

This is misinformation. On Saturday evening, JK Rowling took issue with inclusive language being used in an informational and medical piece about coronavirus, which is in the best interest of getting the information out to the necessary people. I would stop reading an article that said it was concerning the health of women or females, because I do not consider myself a member of either category. I have, however, menstruated in the past, and continue to have a vulva, and if an article used that language, I would continue reading, because it would concern me. She then went on to strangely imply that trans people were removing the right of gay people and lesbians to be attracted to the same sex, which has never been true, and I don’t have time to get into the same-sex vs same-gender attraction debate, nor is it relevant to her original tweet. It’s ironic that Simone de Beauvoir’s quote relates more strongly to trans people and activists fighting for liberation instead of continuing to be bound by a transphobic society.

“Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.”

The only people who have any reason to feel any negative way about what a trans activist might say to or about them is a transphobe, so I can only assume the people JK Rowling is talking about are transphobes. The following sentence is just more fear mongering about ‘woman’ being redefined to include trans women, as if that somehow invalidates cis women or puts them in any more danger than they were in before. Predators are predators regardless of the existence of trans people existing. Trans people are not, nor do we have the power to, infringe on any right to free speech or thought, but transphobes will continue to face consequences for their speech, in way of trans people and activists exercising our own freedom of speech. The assumptions made about people who are okay with trans people in single sex spaces are baseless and completely unfounded, only biased assumptions that serve JK Rowling’s personal agenda. Even if these polls are true (she offered no sources), just because public majority agree with something does not mean it is right. History has multiple examples of this.

“The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.”

Again, more fear mongering, because women’s rights are not being repealed or altered by granting similar rights to trans men and trans women. I find it entertaining that JK Rowling ironically fails to see that trans people are not the loudest voice, when she has clearly been the loudest voice internationally and has gained huge amounts of attention from her words, much more than any trans person has about this subject. Gender critical people feigning concern for trans youth aren’t excusing the harm their ideology does to trans youth (one example is the idea that trans youth must wait until 18 or even 25 to transition to be sure, and not ruin their fertility or body). Then comes the idea that the ‘good trans people’ who agree with JK Rowling and gender critical feminists and TERFs are getting a bad name from the trans people who just want to be allowed to change for the gym and pee in the right changeroom or bathroom. If more cis women are becoming transphobic, it has much more to do with loud voices like JK Rowling than it does with trans people, again, just fighting for equal rights and protections under the law.

“The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.”

I find it deeply troubling that JK Rowling chose this moment to come out as a survivor. It is extremely manipulative, claiming not to want sympathy, when she knows all decent people will feel hurt for her going through such experiences, and weaponizing it for her transphobic agenda. JK Rowling cannot expect empathy and understanding from any trans people or activists until she stops actively advocating and spreading ideology that directly works against the fight for equal rights and protections for trans people, that in no way infringes on the rights and protections for women. Until she stops trying to twist everything about trans rights into her own victimization, she will be stuck in the classification of transphobe, and TERF is she continues to align her views with radical feminism.

#jk rowling #transphobia #terf #important #long post #not hp

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mermaidbookrecs · 6 years

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Beautiful Music for Ugly Children

Cronn-Mills, K. (2017). Beautiful music for ugly children. Mendora Heights, MN: Flux. Pages: 356 ISBN: 978-0-7387-3251-0 Price: $9.99 Lexile: HL600L Format: ebook Awards: Stonewall Award

“You are you. That’s all there is to it.” (57)

Gabe has always loved music and just started a part-time DJ gig at a community radio station with the help of his friend and neighbor John, an elderly former DJ who was the first person to play Elvis on live radio. Gabe’s show holds promise; he quickly grows a following and has one fan in particular who calls in to make requests every night his show is on. But when Gabe recognizes the girl, Mara, as the “change girl” at school from whom he always gets change for a Pepsi, he is terrified. Because what his listeners don’t know is that while his “B side,” his true self, is his DJ persona, his “A side,” the self he presents to the rest of the world, is Liz, who appears to be a high school senior. Only his family and his best friend and crush, Paige, know the truth and despite making small steps toward his transition, he isn’t ready for the rest of the world to know.

Unfortunately for Gabe, his fears become reality when he meets his biggest fan for a date and his secret is revealed. Suddenly his fan base shrinks in size and he is under the very real threat of physical harm by two boys in masks. While Gabe continues his radio show and works on his playlist for a radio competition with a reward of a more prominent radio position, Gabe begins to transition into his “B side” more permanently, while dealing with the awkwardness of his new status in the family, threats of violence, his show’s growing popularity, and his feelings for two girls he’s crushed on for years, who both suddenly seem to be interested in him.

Beautiful Music for Ugly Children is a realistic portrayal of the life of a transgender teen who wants to share his love of music with the world and be his real self despite his fear of society’s reaction. Written in 2012, the edition I read has a very nice afterword by the author, a cisgender woman, commenting on how she would not have written this book today because of how important it is for trans narratives to be written by actual trans people, and her acknowledgement that she is unable to convey exactly what it is like to be a transgender man, as she is not one herself. The afterword also remarks on how culture has shifted in the five years between the book’s first publishing and when this edition was written, and how certain terminology is not used as much today, as well as information on what it means to be transgender. The afterword is a very nice addition to the novel, and while it is, indeed, important for trans voices to be heard, the fact that transgender fiction for teens is still a niche category means that even books like this, written by cisgender authors who take the care and consideration to research and listen to trans voices, are still appreciated.

There is one moment involving sexual assault, although it is not treated within the narrative as such; it is treated the same as physical violence, which also occurs several times throughout the novel. Bullying is also featured in the novel, both before Gabe is outed as transgender (when slurs are thrown at him referring to him as a lesbian) and after he is outed (when other slurs and threats of violence are used against him). Gabe’s family, while loving, is woefully inept at supporting their son and brother throughout most of the novel, although their treatment of him improves later. Even Gabe’s best friend, Paige, who is the most supportive of him throughout the entirety of the novel, wavers at a moment that seems, for me at least, uncharacteristic of her. Only John remains supportive throughout the novel.

Because of the sexual language and references and violence, I would recommend Beautiful Music for Ugly Children to teens age 14 and older. Out of 5 stars, I would rate it a 4, because while Gabe’s character and most others were handled well and most situations were tragically more realistic than I wish they were, some other situations seemed too unrealistic for a realistic fiction novel and the ending left me feeling a bit unsatisfied.

The following excerpt comes from pages 59 and 60 in the digital edition:

“So tell me, listeners … are you an A side or a B side? Are you a Top Forty hit, or an equally good yet potentially undiscovered gem?” I can’t believe I’m saying this. “Some of you might be right up there in the top ten, but if you’re listening to this show, I’d bet you’re more on the funky side.” Dorky. “Then again, I think all of us have our A and B sides, even though digital music has kind of wrecked that idea.”

Another deep breath.

“Personally, I like my B side, which is tough, because everybody else likes my A side. But I’m sticking to it.” I feel and hear my voice shake, but hopefully it’s not noticeable on the air. “And I played my B side for someone yesterday, and he was okay with it. No complaints, nothing. Can you imagine?”

Star rating: 4/5

Here is a neat interview from the author of Beautiful Music for Ugly Children about her thought process while writing this novel. This interview was published in 2014 and she mentions how terminology has changed since the book was published...and you can see in the interview how even 4 years later things have changed even more!

#lgbt #realistic #malepov #1stpov #whitepov #minage14 #beautiful music for ugly children

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forkanna · 7 years

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[AO3 LINK] [EF LINK]

NOTE: "It's the CLIMAX!" - Haruko, FLCL (as in story climax; there are a few more chapters after this)

Actually, it wasn't Simon Lee. What I mean is, it was the crazy psycho evil Simon Lee from Scott's memories and from my annoying dreams on nights where I couldn't sleep. The real one was just this nerdy little Chinese kid I almost-kinda dated before I met Scott. Shortish, wearing thick glasses, kind of a dick but not really a threat to anyone.

This dude in the purple tracksuit was seven feet tall and limber, with gently-windswept brown hair and a much trendier pair of glasses perched on his smug nose. His hands were in his pockets, as if completely casual and disinterested in anything we had to contribute, but the fury in his eyes and the way he had shouted definitely said otherwise. Somehow, he wasn't that intimidating, despite the size and everything. I mean, Knives had just taken apart a monster much more huge than him all on her own, right? This chump didn't stand a chance.

"Surprised you remember," he spat back at me as he strode closer to the cage, laying a hand on one of the bars. To her credit, Princess Pine looked afraid of him; at least she didn't somehow find him attractive despite the fact that he was a douchebag. "After all, apparently Pilgrim wasn't good enough for you, either. Why such high standards? Gingers don't even have souls, much less a right to spurn the advances of someone as majestic as-"

"We don't have souls?" I cut him off, gesturing to my body. "What the fuck do you call this? Maybe you should just leave now, before it gets messier."

Sneering, he nodded at Knives. "You think this he-she will treat you any better? Pathetic."

Even while Knives's face was darkening with mingling anger and shame, I was curling my non-tangible hands into fists. "You… better not… say that again."

"Say what? That she's a freak who thinks owning a few skirts makes her a real girl? Not like you haven't thought it before. I know; I'm actually living inside your head, so there's no sense in trying to hide the tru-"

"NOPE. I meant it, you fucktard. Get out of my head. Now."

The bars of the cage were as solid as ever… but something was happening to Princess Pine. Most of her fear and her cowering had subsided, and now she was sitting on the floor of her prison, looking up at him with white-hot fury in her every pore. Neither one of us were happy with the way he was speaking about Knives. It pissed me off that I wouldn't be able to hit him the way I was, but that didn't matter. I was just angry and She-Hulk wanted to smash.

"Do you… really think I'm a freak?"

Instantly, I forgot about Simon and turned back to Knives. "No. God, no! I mean, maybe I did right when I first found out, but like, people think dumb shit all the time. When we first met, I also wondered if you knew kung fu and drank green tea. And like… you do, but there's also a ton more to you than just being Chinese, so like… you're Knives. Not just Chinese, not just trans, not just any one little byte of data in your profile. You're a whole person. I, um… I get that now in a way I didn't when we met, so…"

"NegaKim is right," the princess assured her, again trying to push her way out of the bars to get to her 'prince'. "We all have intrusive thoughts we cannot help. But that never stopped me from loving you."

"HEY!" I snapped. "That was my line to say! You don't get to steal my line, faker!"

Knives was looking between the two of us, barely paying attention to Simon. "Wait… you said- I mean, she said that you… I mean, do you?"

When I saw the other Kim opening her mouth to answer, about to beat me to the punch again, I rushed to blurt out, "YES! I love you, Knives, you idiot!"

"That wasn't a very nice way to phrase it," Princess Pine grumbled, annoyed at missing her opening.

"Maybe if somebody gave me a minute to get my thoughts together, I could have put a little more finesse on my declaration, you high-class hologram!"

Finally, Simon chuckled and tried to reinsert himself back into the conversation, arms now folded over his chest as he mimicked an imposing figure next to the cage. "Oh, she's no hologram. You really haven't figured out who she is, have you?"

"Shut up, Mr. Velour. Women are talking."

"Why you little-"

"Let me out of here!" the princess hissed. "I can help you defeat him! Together, we will, we must!"

"How ungrateful!" he burst out, turning to shout at her. "I gave you meaning again, drew the host's attention to you, and this is how you repay me? The thanks I get! Well, forget this! I'm bringing it all down!"

As I started to ask Knives if she could just cut him to pieces and we could skip this whole cutscene, he began to grow. Like, in a Power Rangers kind of fashion. Seven feet became eight, then nine, then about ten when he stopped, rippling muscles threatening to burst the threads of his tracksuit. In fact, the front did rip open to reveal his pecs and abs, which might have been attractive if I were a little straighter, and if they weren't bright red and abnormal. At the same moment, he reached behind himself to retrieve a giant golden axe, glowing with unnatural might.

"Fuuuuck me," I breathed.

"Quick!" my copy was hissing at us, reaching a hand through the bars. "Don't any of you have a bottle of Soft? It can turn these bars back and we can cut through them easily!"

"Why, what are they made of?" Knives demanded as she got both of her weapons back out, readying to do battle.

"Skin! I mean, where do you think you are? Everything in here is skin!"

Both myself and Knives exchanged a disgusted glance. But we didn't even have a chance to brace for impact, or to try to strategize further. Even as we looked on, a giant green pipe appeared coming out of the ceiling, and out fell…

Scott Pilgrim and Ramona Flowers.

Of all the people in the known universe, there they were, in my heart-chamber-thing. Scott was hanging onto a bright pink parasol and Ramona's arms and legs were wrapped around his front as they slowly drifted downward, eyes wide as they stared at the scene they had stumbled into. Ramona looked about the same, except half of her hair was pink and the other half green, which really looked kind of hideous but it would probably be different next week, anyway. Her fishnets were ripped in a few places, and her heavy-duty blue rollerblades were probably close to being retired, but otherwise she looked good, I guess. Whatever.

There was something else about Scott I noticed right away.

"Dude, you're bald."

"Hey to you, too, Kim!" he called down, and he actually sounded like his usual cheerful self. "What's new?"

"What's- Scott, seriously? It's time for a casual game of catch-up right now? Right now?"

Ramona cleared her throat and said, "I think she means the big purple-suited dude."

"Oh." They touched down with barely a noise, and Scott folded up the umbrella. "He must be the next fragment of the Gideonflux."

"The what?" Knives asked. But then she smiled and waved. "And hi!"

He nodded upward as he grinned at her. "Hey!"

"The Gideonflux," Ramona provided. I always admired her ability to actually focus, unlike either of those other two dorks. "The seven remaining pieces of Gideon Graves's telepathic mind that he left behind when we destroyed him a year and whatever ago. You didn't know about it?"

Myself and my 'prince' shook our heads. Princess Pine looked a little guilty, but she didn't respond; probably, she had figured it out, or Simon had been grandstanding and literally told her.

"Anyway, yeah, Scott and I have been trying to track them all down before he rises again. We're on… what is it, three?"

"Four, I thought," Scott answered, rubbing his hand over his oddly-bald head. Still freaking me out.

"Okay, there was the one in the mummy's tomb, the one in the book under that old castle… the one in the Krispy Kreme… what am I leaving out if we got four?"

Scott was thinking too. They were both having a hard time coming up with it. Then he snapped his fingers. "Right! You took care of that one on your own, you didn't wanna talk about it?"

Her lip curled. "Oh yeah. That was nasty. Think I blocked it out… yeah, nevermind, Scott's right; it's four. And Super Simon Lee makes five."

"Wait, how do you figure that?" I demanded. "What does Gideon have to do with Simon?"

"Nothing. Not the real Simon; he's still doing pretty well at his IT job in Vancouver. We had to find out, since the name was our only clue for the next Flux piece," she went on in an undertone, seeing how confused we both looked. "This was something Gideon did to both you and Scott to put you at odds. It didn't really work in Scott's case, since he's kind of a dope. But yeah, when I hopped the highway through his head and saw no sign of Simon, and since we already broke his hold over me a long time ago, there was only one other place we could think of to look."

While Scott pouted, Knives stepped forward and pointed her knife over at Simon. "So he's not real? I can defeat him and not feel bad for beating up a real person?"

"Knock yourself out. And hey, you look pretty good, Knives. Working out?"

"Oh, yeah! Training, you know, all that. Plus I'm using this new moisturizer, it's made from-"

"ENOUGH!"

Everyone turned to look at the clearly-furious fake Simon, who was heaving breaths and glaring icy death at his room full of opponents. Raising the axe high, he sneered at me, "If I can't have you, no one will!"

"Somebody get this asshole a line read," I snarked. "Can you believe what he's spewing? Makes Lucas Lee look like a Tony award winner."

"Let's get him!" Scott shouted. At that instant, a pale blue sword burst from his chest, and he pulled it free as a narrator's echoing voice said, "Scott earned the Power of Loyalty!" while plus-bonuses briefly appeared above his head. Ramona reached into her bag and pulled out her hammer, and Knives crouched down with her blades, ready to pounce on the monstrous inflated form of a former boyfriend that had been twisted by one of Ramona's evil exes into something to keep a piece of my soul trapped within a subchamber inside my chest cavity.

My life is abnormal.

Ramona struck first because he ended up being closest to her, driving the hammer into his knees; he barely flinched before batting her aside, where she flipped to race down the wall on her skates. Scott and Knives double-teamed him, Scott jumping at his back with a downward stab as Knives tried to dart in past his windmilling arms to get him in the chest or the ribs. All attacks thwarted. He didn't beat them back, but he managed to make them dance away to avoid getting hit. When Ramona got to him again, she went for an uppercut and caught a piece of him, but he barely staggered; he seemed more enraged than anything, and grabbed her by the leg, swinging her in a quick circle before letting her go, hurtling toward me.

"I got you!" I cried, opening my arms — and feeling her pass right through them. "I don't got you."

But she was fine, already popping up and motioning for Knives to hop onto her shoulders. She did, and Ramona started racing around Simon in a circle while Scott used the sword to block a few of the energy blasts he sent flying at them. When they got to his side for the fifth time, Knives hopped off and stabbed for his eyes, but he deflected her at Scott, who was just getting to the other side now, sending them both down. He just barely managed to roll out of the way of a foot-stomp, and flashed an upward swipe at the shoulder that managed to score him, but didn't seem to slow him down much.

The fight was going badly. Like, they were doing great, but Super Simon really did just seem impervious to most of the attacks. At this rate, they were going to lose because he would simply wear them out by outlasting their stamina reserves. We had to do something!

"Let me out!" Princess Pine was shrieking at me. "Please!"

"We're a little busy!" I snapped at her impatiently. "God, I'm glad you've been locked up, you whiny piece of-"

"No! You have to let me out, or they can't defeat him!"

Surprised, I floated over to her cage and leaned closer still. "Say that again?"

"Verily! Only through my body will you have the power you need to overcome his defenses! Without this, their efforts will be for naught! And he's already damaged your heart enough as it is!"

"Why do you talk like you're in fucking 'Twelfth Night' or something? And what do you mean, damaged my…"

But even as I said it, I looked around and noticed what she meant. There were several areas in the chamber that looked like they had been hastily repaired. Most of them sturdily, but a few were just a single wooden board pushed up against a gap and nailed into place. Now, there were a few new tears and fractures being made by this epic battle; things that would need fixing up once we defeated him. How did I miss that? Probably too distracted by the whole bizarreness of there being a chamber in my heart that would serve as the stage for the final battle.

"Fine. You're right, I'm an unholy mess. But how is me letting you out going to help? And how do you suggest I do that, anyway? If I can't break this cage, and you can't break it…"

"Trust me."

"I don't! You're trying to steal Knives from me, and you keep calling her a 'prince', and… and I think you're part of Simon's scheme! So thanks, but no fucking thanks!"

Finally, she started to look a little more panicked than simply distraught and angry. "We don't have time! You… you must, or… or we'll lose her!"

It did shoot a pang through me at the thought. But I had faith in Knives. I knew she could defeat Simon, I knew that the other me was totally off the mark. All I had to do was trust in the one who had given me a reason to trust her.

Except then I saw Knives's knives get knocked away, watched her skitter across the floor toward me. Letting out a yelp, I went to drag her into my arms as Ramona and Scott did their best against the behemoth, but it wasn't happening because my arms couldn't do anything. I was useless.

My uselessness was going to get us all killed. While fighting a figment of my imagination.

"I'm sorry," I breathed down at her, watching her dazed eyes trying to focus on my voice. "This is my fault… I couldn't figure out that something was wrong inside me, and now… you have to deal with it, when it's not your fight. Should be mine. Only mine, and only my responsibility to do the clean-up work. But I can't. I'm a piece of shit."

"No, Kim!" she assured me, voice still numb but getting stronger as she started sitting up a little, flashing me her best smile through a black eye that would look way worse in an hour or two. "You're not, don't say that! Nobody could have expected any of this to happen, y'know?"

But I was already feeling that vice-like grip of terror around my heart again. The same way I felt it just before I turned to stone for the last time. As I felt it, I watched Simon growing larger, spikes jutting out from his forearms and shoulders, and Ramona and Scott hopped back to reassess the situation…

And it kind of all clicked into place. The problem wasn't my inadequacy. Wasn't my saltiness or my fear of commitment. Well, the last one was a little closer to the mark: it was my fear. I was being a coward. Being selfish.

"Okay," I breathed, standing away from her and turning toward the cage. "Enough of my whining."

"Kim?" Already, I had drifted through the bars, curling my lip at the joyful smile Princess Pine was wearing. Using my face for that purpose was just wrong on so many levels. "Kim, wait, what- KIM!"

"If Scott could be big enough to do this… so can I."

Then I started merging with her. Letting my soul get consumed by the annoying, bleeding-heart version of me that I wanted to punch if I could have.

"Don't worry!" Scott was calling out as he leapt over a ground-pound. "It's not as bad as you think it'd be, trust me!"

And he was right. A few seconds later, I had a body again, and I felt almost completely normal… except a little lighter. A little stronger and more full of purpose than I had ever been in my entire life. My hands pushed outward against the bars, and they shattered, freeing me from the prison in which I had never truly been trapped. Only been convinced I was trapped by anxiety and depression, and a deep-seated uncertainty that I could ever fully trust anyone at all.

But I had to. Even if I only trusted Knives, I had to trust someone. And I had decided to try trusting myself for a few minutes, too. Take that for a test drive.

"NO!" Simon growled, then lashed out with his tail — must have missed when that grew in — and knocked away the hammer Ramona had been about to bring down on his head. Loosing a mighty bellow of rage, he initiated a spin move that was deadly from all the spikes, launching himself at Scott…

I called for a weapon. Somehow, I thought if I just made that same kind of self discovery Scott did, I'd get one. Maybe a gun; that'd be cooler than a sword, right? But nope. Nothing came. Still, at least I could help Knives stand up now that I no longer owned ghost-hands.

"Thanks," she whispered, then whipped out a few throwing knives from somewhere or other. "He's mine!"

And on the battle went. It actually took a while, but they seemed to be turning the tide now. Before, it had been a stalemate, but in some small way, I think me breaking out of the cage shook Super Simon's confidence. Or maybe the cage was some kind of energy siphon and me breaking out my other self really did lower his regeneration stats, which was why each hit they landed dealt more damage now. Whatever. The point is, a few minutes later, he was starting to stagger, his attacks were sluggish and dumb, and missed pretty often now. Somewhere in there, he managed to destroy Scott's sword and it turned into a dozen little ghostly dog bones before they vanished, but he grabbed one of Knives's daggers from the corner and tossed her the other one, and they made it work with those.

Finally, they had him on his knees, wrists tied with Knives's scarf and Ramona's hammer weighing his head down so he could only barely glare up at us. He looked even more demonic than before, teeth jagged and eyes blazing red. He chuckled darkly.

"You can't kill me, Kim." I was holding his own golden axe high above my head, ready to strike. "I'm a part of you now. I'll always be a part of your nightmares. Killing this form of mine will solve nothing."

"Maybe, maybe not. But I'm tired of looking at your fucking face!"

His head came clean off, spraying the same green blood everywhere that the other monster had, before his body burst into coins. We all glanced at each other, surprised at how sticky and nasty it felt. Scott was the first to laugh.

"Well, that was a thing."

"Doof," Ramona snorted, though it was clearly with a fond tone. Sighing, she turned to me and frowned. "Sorry about the mess. This has been some of the hardest resistance we've ever had to recovering one of these."

As she was saying it, I watched Scott stoop to the floor where the body had been to pick up a little triangular "G", like the logo on the doors of the Chaos Theater. It glittered an oddly sinister green, but I only had a second to wonder about that before he popped it into his jeans pocket and out of sight.

"Uh… yeah." Clearing my throat, I said, "This is probably asking a lot, but if you guys can help me clean up? I mean, otherwise it'd probably take years…"

"Sure," Scott said at once, pocketing some of the coins, as well. I noticed both Knives and Ramona already were, too. "Where's your mop?"

"Really? Just like that?"

Scott stood up a little more fully and shrugged. "Hey, I kinda owe you a little repair work. Especially here, since I'm pretty sure a few of these holes are my fault."

Had me there. Normally, I would have said that he was a dick, or just scoffed and turned away. But I found myself saying, "Yeah, probably. I have a lot of healing to do. It's hard work, Scott."

His smile finally slipped off. But he didn't do much else, only shrugged and kicked at a little blob of slime-blood. "Yeah."

"But I can do the repairs myself. Just help me clean up this mess and we'll go back to working through our own drama."

"Can do, Kim. But hey, if you ever need a hand…"

"Thanks, but…" I caught Knives before she could walk past, holding her hand up. "Already have one."

"Really?" he piped up, the smile springing back to full force. "That's awesome! Wondered if anything was gonna come of that."

"What?" Knives asked, shocked. "You mean, you knew about it? I didn't tell anybody!"

"Well, I kinda walked in on you guys," he admitted with a shy little laugh, scratching the back of his head. "At Julie's aunt's, we were all super wasted? Figured it was none of my business, though. But man, you were really making out! Like, a lot!"

Sighing but at least grateful that he wasn't making a huge deal, I glanced at the two of them before I said, "Get used to it, because… I'm in love with her."

The echoey voice said "Kim earned the Power of Love!" and a glittering pink spear came out of my chest, a little taller than me once pulled completely through and with a couple of wicked prongs on either side of the main spearhead. A magnificent weapon. There was only one problem.

"FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC!" I shouted at the world in general. "So now I get this! Where was it fucking ten minutes ago when we needed it?! UGH!"

To Be Continued…

#kim pine's precious little knives #forkanna writes #scott pilgrim vs. the world #scott pilgrim fanfiction #kim x knives #forkanna the writer

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