#anyway i can't stand the like. culture of fear among certain women

[captainjonnitkessler]

Things I wish women were learning from true crime podcasts: how to spot early warning signs of abusive relationships, how to escape abusive relationships, how easily domestic violence can escalate to murder, how incredibly unlikely it is to be the victim of a crime done by a complete random stranger as opposed to friends and family

What women are learning from true crime podcasts: I am in CONSTANT danger and every day I survive without being murdered by a serial killer is a miracle. I should react to everyone I meet with distrust and paranoia and live my life as if I am in mortal peril and if anyone suggests that might not be healthy then they just don't understand what it is to Be A Woman In Today's Society

[starbright-cobweb]

NSFW transsexual depression

One side-effect of being on t is that I've finally felt properly at peace with being pan - but it's in quite a hazy way. Not pan as in, "I love to be a person who desires many different people" but weirder than that; the image of an orgy or fantasy transsexualism or a bisexual-gaze on a heterosexual encounter are closer to the mark, but that's still a bit too specific for something so diffuse; a desire that is pansexual because it is *all things all at once* rather than a sequence of variations. And it seems to be far less about "these are all the people I could be attracted to" than "these are all the genders I might temporarily inhabit", something about me that is unfixed, a homeless spirit in search of a body.

Anyway, I have gone into an immense depression because my chest has changed shape - one would assume, for the better; except I don't feel good, I feel like I've left one nice gender without clearly arriving at a different one. It's *weird* palming off your desire for women onto temporarily being a woman-stand-in during your intimate encounters, but it turns out losing that dissociative-autoerotic experience is strange and sad, when you're used to it, and especially when one doesn't feel a new connection it its place. Presumably, this is what cis mono folk feel all the time

(although apparently, they have done the study to find out that yes, cis women also meet the clinical criteria for autogynephilia {the historic transmisogynist medical diagnosis that theorised trans women were merely fetishists who liked to be attracted to their own body as feminine.} Turns out, most women like feeling attractive in their own body as a component of their sexual life. One wonders if this is quite so true of men, given the way that the male gaze dominates our society, and most women are raised among an ambient noise of sexualised women everywhere in advertising and popular culture. It's probably also true of men! There's nothing unusual about liking to feel desireable. Frankly, I think of anyone I've ever heard talk about it, I think maybe *I* meet the criteria for autogynephilia - in the sense that the original transphobic doctors meant it - that you can sort of enjoy being attracted to women through the medium of your own body, without actually wanting to be one or live as one in your inner mind and soul)

Someone made a throwaway post about the Greek gods existing on a spectrum of "no gender" to "lots of gender", which I thought was funny and wise, and I think a lot about the varying fates of "nonbinary" vs "genderqueer", the former a sort of hazy grey with a tint of watercolour violet to it, the latter a brassy gold and a jewel-tone rainbow. It's more specific than just depression at being trans, more like depression at no longer being anything; and I suppose fears of becoming undesireable, that starts with my own assessment of what I'm personally into. I always presumed that "pan for every gender but trans men" was a kind of internalised Something, but maybe I'm just into an overabundance of gendered signifiers rather than gender-minimalism.

Partly I think I'm just crap at being queer, like we're supposed to have Radically Fixed an eros that doesn't follow scripts or expectations, doesn't require certain kinds of bodies or to be centered around certain kinds of acts; and so when you don't fit, it shouldn't be disabling, it's a roundabout route to empowerment - how beautiful our experiments are. Rather than looking at where I am now and thinking: well, I have no idea what to do with any of this. I feel like the butt of the unkindness of jokes about how the hets just can't hack (mouths/hands/toys/etc) - which were never good jokes, and always a kind of defensively smug - unkind to the ways that what is important, is important.

I don't feel attractive in the male way; and there's a very real sense in which, "attractive in the trans-butch genderqueer cusp way" is my worst nightmare, something that paradoxically feels worse and further away than drifting along in non-denominational womanhood. & that's a worry that's limited me a Lot; like, playing around with suits at the weekend, I'm definitely able to pull myself together in a way that's desireable to someone - but not in ways that I enjoy. But then I think, maybe some time spent hooking up with people specifically thirsty for where I am in this moment might be good for me - like eating an apple or being good for the dentist.

It's strange, given the popular conception of going on T, but increasingly certain over the past few weeks that I've somehow become more asexual; which doesn't feel like a relief or something resolving, as the bi stuff does, more like - oh heck, more uncertainty, more ways to feel weird in my body and relationships. And I feel like I've lost touch with the small handful of things I knew I liked (without learning new ones), and that doesn't feel like an exciting moment of possibility, more like more opportunities to get passively assaulted a lot; if I can't pilot my own body, there's no hope in a stranger figuring it out.

Anyway, last night as I was laying awake in the dark - it came to me clear as a voice from God: I'd rather be dead than queer. oh crikey, how are we in 2022 and yet somehow still there. Love to feel so intimately connected to the long lineage of ancestors that way, to feel their thoughts and know their inmost secrets. This week has been strange; I experimented with my large collection of depression lingerie for comfort, to check that nope - also not good. It feels like I've exchanged a sense of active discomfort in my body for sudden absence and alienation. What would it feel like to stop existing? A bit like this, I suppose.

And I miss my ex; that is, I miss being in a situation where the world seems to be turning aright, I miss having a sense of something that is very certain and deeply-felt, instead of everything seeming a bit false and like I'm sort of going through the motions without a clear compass or star. I can see where I fit into that world; and I don't know how to find that with another person, or independently of a person. An endless sense of wrongness; a half of something. I'd like to sit down with this part of me and talk over a cup of tea, and feel myself warmed.