#char reads trans lit

[megkuna]

girl from date yesterday told me she got more of a friend vibe, which is fine, i'm still just like having that bad 'it's because you don't fit in with queer people' feelings lol. doesn't help that we went to a queer bookstore and i honestly just felt so out of place.

[thepoisonroom]

Trans Book of the Day #1

Welcome to St. Hell: My Trans Teen Misadventure by Lewis Hancox

Lewis has a few things to say to his younger teen self. He knows she hates her body. He knows she's confused about who to snog. He knows she's really a he and will ultimately realize this... but she's going to go through a whole lot of mess (some of it funny, some of it not funny at all) to get to that point. Lewis is trying to tell her this... but she's refusing to listen.

In WELCOME TO ST. HELL, author-illustrator Lewis Hancox takes readers on the hilarious, heartbreaking, and healing path he took to make it past trauma, confusion, hurt, and dubious fashion choices in order to become the man he was meant to be. It's a remarkable, groundbreaking graphic memoir from an unmistakably bold new voice in comics.

Really dug this one, especially for its frank discussion of trying to find an identity that fits when you have limited language and resources to do so! I thought the strongest and most distinctive parts of the graphic novel were:

The asides where Hancox invites commentary from his friends and family about their actions and reactions during his childhood, teenage years, and early transition. He has huge empathy for the ways that misinformation create obstacles to social and medical transition, even within a well-intentioned support network. The segments where he and his mother talk about lack of information on youth transition and HRT making them both anxious about actively addressing his early childhood dysphoria are particularly strong.

Discussion of eating disorders as a response to dysphoria during puberty. This is something that I've rarely seen addressed in literature even though it's such a common experience for a lot of trans people.

Depiction of coming into new identities and how that both does and does not change your relationships. I can see this being a great read for teens who are anxious about theirs or their friends' evolving identities altering the dynamic between them.

This is a super charming, very frank and funny memoir that I think will resonate with both teenagers and adults. Hancox doesn't shy away from critiquing barriers to transition in the UK, but the main focus of the book is his warm, empathetic depiction of his younger self and his loved ones.

[full-course-identity]

@flightysquip​ I have a Rich/Mo AU for you :3

[serious nsft/No Children Allowed, as well as a serious Very Bad Content warning ahead, plus some other unpleasantries. Just assume if you have a trigger, it’s in here. I got a Link too that isn’t... great]

Basically: a universe where Rich is covered in fire burns, but he was never actually in a fire. 

When his mom lit herself up* (* = I’ll provide explanations for those out of the loop below), he was at Jeremy's house*, Liz* planned this ahead of time and asked Em* to take care of him for the night.

Both his dad and his mom died in the fire, while Cody* was out of the house at the time. As a result, they (Rich and Cody) both uh... actually live with the Heere’s? Em is given custody, and Cody is actually only 18 in this, so he comes too.

I know this is a lot of backstory, but I’m getting to the good shit, I promise.

Anyway, Jeremy and Rich (and uh, Cody I guess) growing up together means that they remember they’re cousins* by the time they’re teenagers. Em raises them as her children... sort of. She mistreats Jeremy as always, outright ignores that Cody exists except a few specific occasions, and... tries to actually parent Rich, but is, uh, bad at it. Very stunted. Blunt. Uncomfortable, actually, with her own attachment.

It proves to be too much. She runs off, as usual. Now it’s just Mr. Heere, Cody who already moved out, and 14-year-olds Rich and Jeremy

But, well, it’s not Rich, because he doesn’t know he’s a guy yet. He’s still Emily-the-first (second)*, an edgy teenage supposed-girl with a growing personality disorder, repressed trauma, and mommy/daddy issues. You can guess what happens, right? ‘She’ starts self-harming.

... except. She discovers her pain tolerance is very high, nothing seems to really kill her (I mean, she’s not immortal or anything, just her usual cockroach-y surviving self), and she doesn’t want to stop.

Like, ever. Her suicidal ideations are gone every time she cuts, and every time she’s waiting for an injury to heal. Why would she stop?

But uh. Her self harm is a bit... beyond the normal realms. Baaaaasically, she uh... well. Here’s that link I mentioned: cold/ness/in/my/heart, another girl with BPD who’s very infamous for how far she goes.

The difference between them, though, is what Emily does to “clean up” the wounds.

... TLDR: she cuts massive damage into his flesh and then “melts the wound closed again”. She started reading every book on medical science in the library, and then moved to the internet when it Wasn’t Enough Info and stockpiled medical supplies for herself. Learned how to stitch, clean, bandage, etc. Learned how to medicate herself. Traded sex with Cody for a shitload of oxycodone. Etc.

“What does this have to do with Moses?”

Simple: her and Jeremy took Squips to “fix themselves” in the way they thought they needed.

Jeremy took a Squip to stabilize, fix the growing psychosis, and help his debilitating social anxiety.

Rich took a Squip to convince herself to just go ahead and die before she turned 18.

(She wasn’t suicidal as long as she cut, but she knew. She knew she couldn’t make it as an adult. Why not go out with a bang and some fun?)

... if you’re curious: yes, Moses is absolutely fucking horrified.

[* = the backstory me and Oli have crafted for Rich is that he’s the (trans) son of Elizabeth Beaulieu (last name not final) and Kelly Goranski. Elizabeth’s sister is named Emily (I call her 2.0 even tho she was born before Rich) Beaulieu, married to Edward Heere and the mother of Jeremy Heere. When Rich and Jeremy are both very very young, Elizabeth lit herself on fire and died, mirroring what happens to Rich later. Kelly refuses to let Rich attend the funeral and cuts off ties from the rest of their family. Rich subsequentially represses most everything about his childhood. Mr. Heere, taking a cue from Mrs. Heere who was heartbroken, doesn’t talk about what happened, nor tell Jer about the cousin he doesn’t know he has.

Cody is Rich’s half-brother (dad’s side), and he’s evil. Kelly is also evil. They’re both sexually abusive to Rich, especially when Rich was a child. Kelly, as a 30-something y/o adult and a police officer, “seduced”, impregnated, and married Rich’s mom, who was 14 at the time. Elizabeth, who had undiagnosed Schizo-affective disorder like my vers of Jeremy does (there’s a lot of... symbolical mirroring, Liz to Jeremy and Em to Rich), suffered badly from psychosis and helplessness that kept her from being able to leave.

In most canons, Rich is at the house when his mother burns. He sees her on her way out, charred and half-dead. This time around is a little different, obviously.]

[mtr-amg]

Letter to my sister 8th January 2020

It genuinely worries me that you read The Australian and that you think it is a great newspaper.

The day you sent that message I took a few minutes to find some Murdoch press stories. But I didn’t send them to you. I’m doing that now. These are all from the same day. [19th December 2019]

No. the BOM does not do that.

What? Impeaching Trump is preposterous… I mean it’s not like there is mountains of evidence to prove their case. And he WAS impeached.

Oh no, wait…

Fox news says he wasn’t impeached. It was a ‘sham’. [I honestly thought this could not possibly be real … but it is.]

David Shoebridge is not the PM. He’s not even a federal politician; he’s part of the New South Wales Legislative Council. As opposed to the NSW emergency services minister who went to Europe and that really WAS a problem.

So? To shout about Obama playing golf is irrelevant; the man is a private citizen, he can play all the golf he wants. The President on the other hand…

From some other Aussie Murdoch presses:

Yeah… nah.

We do have an effect, even if it it’s just by refusing to comply, which then suggests to some other countries that they, too could use creative accounting with carbon credits. We contribute far more than we should to CO2 emissions by selling coal and gas to other countries. And as an added point, the percentage is exactly the same as our percentage of troops in WWI but we didn’t bow out of that. 

Extinction rebellion mob? What even… if she wants to talk about the sales do it, but she can’t resist another swipe at climate change activists.

‘Weaponise’ health for political reasons? Shake my head.

I also found an article that reported the Australian had printed 86,000 words in anti-trans articles since June 2019. I have no clue why they are so terrified of people who chose to embrace a different sex than the one they were born with. Other people’s genitals are none of our business. This kind of hate will result in people being hurt.

But today [8th Jan 2020] the Murdoch press has published a story that there is a wave of Arson in Australia with 182 people arrested and charged. This is complete crap. 

The Victorian premier just said none of the fires in Victoria were deliberately lit. NONE.

This is also combined with a bot swarm hitting FB, twitter and other sites blaming the bushfires on Muslim Greens/Greenies eco-terrorists who light the fires to save the animals or some such trash. It makes absolutely no sense but in an environment where people are looking for someone to blame; they are being supplied with the wrong information. They are everywhere and it has reached America where the false stories are being accepted as true. And the maps of the burnt part are just ridiculous.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/08/twitter-bots-trolls-australian-bushfires-social-media-disinformation-campaign-false-claims

I don’t know who is behind the bot swarm. They can be easy to spot; on twitter it’s a name plus 6 or 8 digits. Check the location. If they say their house burnt down and their location is Turkey, it’s clearly a fake.

But someone is stumping up the cash to buy Australian located bots, which are significantly more expensive, and much harder to identify.

There is an insane claim all over FB that the government has created the bushfire crisis to clear land for high-speed rail. Another absurd claim is that Islamic State is somehow responsible.

It is all leading to confusion between the VERY CLEAR links of climate change and increasing natural disasters.

And the only industry to benefit from that is the fossil fuel industry.

We knew back in 1982 when I was studying geology that we should have been moving into an ice age and were not. We knew that fossil fuels damaged the environment.  We knew that all the people who were experts in this area got their ‘dream’ jobs with Shell or BP or whoever and were quietly and efficiently muffled. Those companies offered whatever price they needed to pull these experts out of university labs where their results would have been published and freely available and shut them down. [I don’t blame the scientists, everyone has a price]

We knew about the Greenhouse Effect as it was called then. Margaret Thatcher [!!] made a speech in 1989 about how dangerous it was and how the whole world needed to combat it. This isn’t new, and it isn’t faked.

Re watch An Inconvenient Truth. That was 2006. I remember sitting in the cinema with my children and crying because I knew the world would do fuck all about it.

Ross Garnaut made his report about all this years ago. In it, he said 2020 was the year it would all get very much worse for Australia..

Labor brought in a carbon tax that made a measurable difference to our emissions, and the LNP repealed it. And did their happy dance in the parliament.

Scott Morrison is the PM because the Liberal Party wouldn’t let Malcolm Turnbull pass an energy policy that addressed climate change.

Hazard reduction burns are not the ambit of the Greens. They aren’t even in power anywhere. The budget CUTS to the fire services have more to do with it. And the longer hot season. You can’t hazard burn when it’s too hot. Combined with greater rainfall and a larger growth of vegetation that needs to be reduced.

You are a gardener. You stood in my yard twelve years ago and told me it had got so warm in Brisbane that you didn’t get autumn leaves any more. You knew climate change was real back then, but now you parrot things The Australian and the Murdoch press have told you to think.

We should not be deriding Greta Thunberg for being a child. We should be horrified that we need children to point out to us what is wrong. They have to live in this charred and polluted world we are leaving them.

Murdoch press has damaged democracy in all the places where it publishes.

You need to stop reading it or watching it. Your friends are right.

This cartoon from Joel Pett is ten years old. And it is so accurate it hurts.