#don't victim blame women that's all

[uncanny-tranny]

It's weird how people paint "daddy issues" and even "mommy issues" as, like, a joke or a failure on part of the person who has those issues, rather than recognizing that daddy and mommy issues stem, for so many people, from abuse. What this all is is just abuse apologia, and nobody seems to either notice or maybe even care.

When somebody with daddy or mommy issues opens up about the "why," I can't ever seem to shake the fact that they tend to have gone through a ton of abuse and bullshit as a child. It's just crazy that other people would look at that and see a joke or a failure of the once-child who was abused.

[azol-otl]

Not Reverse Robins or Scrambled Birds but a secret third thing: A Step to the Left.

Not  Dick > Jason > Tim > Steph > Damian, 

but Jason > Tim > Steph > Damian > Dick*.

But not only them. Every sidekick with a legacy name gets shifted one spot. (No I’m not counting the Golden Age because I’m not combing through that ).

This means that Jason’s Titans team is him, Mia (Speedy), Jackson (Aqualad), Cassie (Wonder Girl), and Bart (Impulse but y’know he was KF II in the comics).

The NTT team including Starfire, Changeling, Raven, and Cyborg stays the same since they’re the only ones with those names. Cass gets lumped in here because Jason actually wants to do college/is becoming disillusioned about cape life and the idea of Kori learning Cass's body language is too good to pass up.

Tim gets one (1) cape friend (because Jason only got one) and it’s Zachary Zatara because it has to be a d-lister who deals with that disaster Teen Titans era.

Stephanie gets Jon (Superboy), Yara (Wonder Girl II now), and Irey (Because guess what it’s Impulse on the team and not KF which means we get Impulse II). Secret, Cissie, Anita, Slobo etc. all stay the same.

Damian doesn’t get anyone until he becomes Batgirl.

Duke literally gets Damian’s exact canon team but it’s Kon instead of Jon and probably won’t end with them committing war crimes.

If the character in that placement dies in canon then the new character in that placement also dies (i.e. Jason dies so Tim will die/ Kon dies so Jon will die).

But there will be changes because these are different characters so not all of them would react the same.

For example, Jason and Cass are the first Robin and Batgirl, but Cass becomes Nightwing while Jason becomes Oracle because I feel like Jason generally fits Barbara’s character better than Cass does (which is a fucking shame because Oracle being someone named Cassandra should be a no brainer but yeah).

 Or how Barbara should be Batgirl number three, but it’s actually Damian because Cass would see their similarities between them and offer him Batgirl (which he refuses at first but after his disastrous run as Robin he sees how Batgirl would fit his strengths better).

 Also I refuse to believe that Jason and Cass would let Dick out as Robin so young so he’s benched until later and his place is taken up by Duke and instead of Leviathan it’s Gnomon.

[lastoneout]

*grabbing young queer people by the shoulders* listen to me. radical feminism is inherently transphobic. you cannot rehabilitate it or reclaim it or make it trans inclusive, I don't care what the people on twitter who claim to be authorities on queerness say. the foundation of radical feminism is nothing but bio and gender essentialism and biphobia and aphobia and anti-kink rhetoric and intersexism and yes, misogyny. it does not offer a future, not for bi people, aroace people, sex workers, not for kinksters, or intersex people, cis women, or trans people regardless of gender and you should care about those people. it will never result in queer liberation because it is an ideology of exclusion and hatred. you gain nothing by buying into the idea that half the population is evil by birth or by transition. you gain nothing by acting like women are perpetual victims who can't think for themselves and are tainted by their association with men. being a man or being attracted to them is not a sin. if we truly want to stand a chance of dismantling the patriarchy we actually NEED men on our side especially marginalized men. they are our allies.

the problem with terfs is not just transphobia, it never was, the radical feminism is also so unbelievably harmful. you cannot save it and it will not save you, stop drawing lines between queer people and join hands with them instead. remove people who are actually harmful, not innocent people who happen to have the wrong sexuality or gender or job. we get there together or we don't get there at all. we need each other now more than ever. do not listen to those who seek to divide us even if they are queer. we all deserve so much better than the hell radical feminism pretends is a liberated future.

I do not blame anyone who fell prey to this rhetoric, I know it feels good to have a common enemy and lash out at those you think are siding with them however they do it, but men, especially marginalized men, are not your enemies. and it's never too late to realize that and change for the better.

[diamondcitydarlin]

Just fair warning- I said on my personal post about this that I wasn't going to talk about Neil Gaiman anymore, but as it's becoming clear that him and his publishers and anyone else who makes money off of him is circling the wagons and trying to bury these allegations, as well as some fans still defending and trying to 'rationalize' this information, I feel like, actually, we need to keep talking about him (as much as I cannot stand him and feel physically disgusted now when I so much as see his face somewhere). Specifically, the fact that he's a liar, master manipulator and should not, under any circumstances, be given access to his fans like he has in the past. At the very least. (And if you need to blacklist his name or even unfollow me so as to not be triggered, I completely understand, but I will always try to tag these posts accordingly and I think it's crucial right now that the truth be put where people can see)

This post specifically is in response to those 'rationalizations' I've seen, some that have gone as far as to blame the young fans/groupies that hooked up with him for being 'golddiggers' or just making a mountain out of a molehill for something they now regret. It's not that simple, yall. (And, again, this requires some amount of completely ignoring the story about him extorting his tenant for sex under threat of eviction of her and her three young children, I'm not sure how you 'rationalize' that under the best of circumstances)

So let's be clear here. What we know is that NG has routinely, for possibly an upwards of 30 years, pulled sexual 'partners' from his fan groups, most of whom are 18-22 year old young women (though possibly younger, accounts are coming forward of 16 year olds having allegedly been inappropriately touched/flirted/propositioned by him, which ig is the age of consent in the UK but still?? 16 year olds!!). This wasn't one or two times in the course of three decades, this was a constant pattern of behavior for him and for a very insidious reason.

This isn't to try to infantilize those fans or young women/young people in general or try to suggest that they couldn't have consented to sex with an older person or famous person. In fact, the onus isn't on them at all. This is about an older guy with a lot of fame, power and wealth choosing to sleep with people that he had already conditioned to idolize him and using that power imbalance to coerce them into doing things they didn't want to.

Regardless of one's age or gender identity, it can be difficult to impossible to say 'no' to someone like that. After all, you've been 'chosen' by the chosen one, you're special and not like everyone else, and if you don't do what the popular person everyone trusts is telling you to do you could end up ostracized. Alienated. Or worse. And you know what? Gaiman knew that! He knew it when he was crafting his 'approachable dad' persona on tumblr. He knew it when he was cultivating a fandom of personality. He knew it when he was having huge meetups to try to ensnare more victims. I hate to even think it, but I'm starting to believe he knew it when he was writing children's books too.

It's been talked about again and again in separate issues, but needless to say something not being strictly illegal does not make it inherently, morally okay. It does not erase the fact that this man has been essentially grooming his fandom to feel safe meeting/speaking with him so he can coerce those he can snare into sexual acts they're not comfortable with. That is predator behavior, whether strictly 'illegal' in the eyes of a court or not (but ofc I think he should be criminally punished even if I'm not naive enough to think he actually will be, because this IS rape and rape should be criminally punished)

I'm not personally advocating for anyone to give up being in his related fandoms, but what I am personally advocating for is that people don't forget who he is and what he's capable of, especially when he tries to crawl back to where he was (I'm almost certain he will eventually, as I've said).

Again, at the very least, we need to use what little influence we do have to keep him from infiltrating fan spaces again. He should not be on tumblr yukking it up with young people, he should not be at public appearances hitting on teenagers, he should not be given the unrestricted access to fans that he's 'enjoyed' for the past 30+ years because he is not a safe person. While I wish there was more in the way of restorative justice that could be done, I think at very, very least we should do what we can to limit his proximity to people he could hurt in the future. Make sure no one forgets, because sweeping this under the rug means Gaiman gets to hurt more people.

Lastly, no one is the wrong for having been manipulated by him. Let's make that very clear. What we're NOT gonna do is blame ourselves, each other, the victims, etc, for evil acts that Gaiman chose to do himself, time and time and time again. It doesn't help the situation and it certainly doesn't protect future potential victims. We were all duped because we're human and we attach and a lot of us want to believe there are good people out there, particularly those who make art that means so much to us.

And there are. But let's also use this a teaching/learning tool about how much faith we place in famous people in the future, regardless of how 'approachable' and 'safe' they might seem. Let's remember to have a healthy suspicion of creators/famous people that are oddly immersed in fandom spaces- yes, even the ones you still currently like that seem fine, as difficult as that may seem.

At the end of the day, we don't know them or what they're capable of doing or what they might be plotting to do to us. Support victims. Amplify their voices. Don't forget.

[specialagentartemis]

I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: "why does it matter?" Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It's not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn't hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.

Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn't matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn't really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don't hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.

It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it's harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It's less harmless when you're espousing that the Holocaust wasn't really about Jews because the Nazis "came for trans people first." You might think it's harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it's rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.

It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don't know what they're talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessary for the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don't want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.

How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend's house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that's nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is... is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don't agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.

It frequently reinforces "Good vs. Bad" dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn't deserve it... not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice... but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a 'noble savage' or an 'innocent victim' that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn't deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad... you're caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of "The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that's bad" is not "The Aztecs didn't do human sacrifice actually, that's just Spanish propaganda" (which is a lie) it should be "We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don't call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary." It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don't deserve to be oppressed anyway.

It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we're lying to push the Gay Agenda. We're liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that's easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that's easy to counter with "there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman," and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get "you don't know what you're talking about, didn't you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?" TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.

It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real. This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?

It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.

Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.

[rose-bookblood]

Between the 11th and 12th of this month, Giulia Cecchettin, a 22-year-old Italian girl, disappeared alongside her ex boyfriend, Filippo Turetta. Today, 18th November, her body was found in a lake 140km from where I live.

For six days, we were told that they ran away together, despite the fact Giulia was supposed to graduate from university on the 16th. That we shouldn't jump to conclusions, that there wasn't any proof he had killed her, that we were crazy for even thinking it. When a video of him beating Giulia up until she was bleeding came out, newspapers were filled with declarations from his family saying he loved her, he would never do anything to hurt her, he was just a little possessive and jealous.

We all knew. We all fucking knew since we read the words "ex boyfriend".

Giulia is the 103rd woman victim of feminicide in Italy in 2023. 103.

Meanwhile, Giulia's sister Elena, who has had to spend the last week making as much noise as possible because that was her only hope of finding her sister, was asked if the family was ready to forgive him. Newspapers talk about how good of a guy he was, they carefully avoid saying he murdered her, they refer to them as a couple. I've lost track of how many men have taken time to comment "not all men" under posts about Giulia.

Not all men, but all women.

If you live outside of Italy, you probably won't hear of this news. You probably don't know how pervasive victim blaming is in Italian news stations, how bad the statistics of feminicide are. So, please, reblog this post. Demand justice. Say Giulia Cecchettin's name.

Se domani non torno, distruggi tutto.

[penisbagelbite]

"Affirmation" & Malgendering

"Fine, I'll 'respect' your gender, but I'll make it absolutely miserable for you. What? You don't like the way I'm 'affirming' your gender? Guess you'll have to stop being a (trans) man then."

I want to put something out there about what I call "malgendering". I see trans men talk about the phenomenon and acknowledge it as a part of antitransmasculinity but not the concept of "malgendering" itself and what it's purpose is, and as trans men and transmasculine people are especially caught in the lose-lose situation between misgendering and malgendering I think it is an important concept to establish. The erasure of transmasculinity, particularly as a unique gender and gendered experience, also serves to keep the transmasculine trapped within this double-bind, positioned between the gender binary of cis patriarchal ideas of womanhood and manhood, where for us there is only misgendering (being abused with the Woman gender) or malgendering (being abused with the Man gender).

I define malgendering as the practice of "validating" someone's gender identity only when it can be used against them and to hurt them, and malgendering almost always involves the enforcement of only the most negative sexist stereotypes available onto the victim with none of the "positives". If misgendering is forcefully pushing you back into your 'proper place' such as by calling you a "girl" or a "her" and showing you that you're really a woman through sexual assault -malgendering is scaring and traumatizing you into it by using your own gender against you. Malgendering is the realization that you don't need to misgender someone to hurt them or to punish them for the way they identity and push them towards the gender they're 'supposed' to be - you can do all that through 'validation'. It's psychological warfare on the sense of self.

This violence and abuse under the guise of "respect" and "identity affirmation" creates plausible deniability of intent and places the blame on the victim for "identifying that way", so much so that even other trans people will defend it and believe it's not maligned (especially because "but being seen as and treated as your gender is what trans rights is all about!" and "errm but its transphobic to not treat u this way?/ur misgendering urself by wanting to not be treated this way :/" with the hidden message being "don't like it? stop being trans"), even when faced with evidence of the (very much intended) effects it has on stalling and outright eliminating transmasculinity (ie. repression, detransition, suicide).

Some examples I can pull off the top of my head:

A transphobe is talking about a pregnant trans man. The whole energy of the Facebook video is 'comedic', and while calling birth the most “feminine” thing someone can do and alluding to how the trans man is really a woman, they still use he/him and call him a “guy” (in air-quotes). Not out of any respect but because the idea of a man being pregnant, calling a pregnant person a "he", and the very existence of the trans man in question, is the whole joke. In doing so, the transphobe has turned the act of using the proper pronouns and gendering him into a source of humiliation and made the experience of being properly gendered a demeaning one. -

The Ukraine military situation where all males aged between 18 and 60 were banned from leaving the country and obliged to serve in the military. Trans women were denied passage out of the country "because they were men", and trans men were similarly denied passage out of the country "because they were men". With the discrepancy between invalidating the gender of trans women and "validating" the gender of trans men, you'd think the motivation behind this would be obvious - that trans people are expendable meat and it's better they die than cis people. It shouldn't of needed to be said that "I'm only affirming your gender because it allows me to put you in a position where you will likely suffer and die and put the blame for it on you" is not 'respect' or 'affirming' at all but somehow this was taken as evidence for the idea of that trans men are more 'respected' and seen as their genders than others (and are thus 'privileged'). -

A common one almost every trans guy deals with at some point is cis people threatening to beat trans men up (and often following through), because "If you're a man and not a woman (anymore) that means I can punch you," using the proximity to masculinity that transmasculine people claim as a justification for violence. Every other week there's a new story in online transmasculine spaces about someone having their ribs broken with "Since/if you want to be a man so bad-" preceding the attack. -

The above is in a similar vein to when accounts of violence done to transmasculine people by cisgender men are brushed off and they're told something along the lines of "welcome to being a man", "that's just what men do to each other", "that's just the way things are with men", etc. along with the insistence that their attack had nothing to do with antitransmasculinity, making it an immutable problem with (cis)men as a whole - creating a sense hopelessness and that this is all they have to look forward to. -

Transmasculine individuals being refused treatment, tests, or insurance for gynecological issues, especially cancer, despite the knowledge that they are transmasculine, because "men don't deal with these problems" and they don't want "men in women's spaces", and if you don't want to be 'treated like a man' and get the care you need (and not die), you're going to have to go ahead and detransition, change that M marker back to an F.

All of this functions to create contention, and eventually a rift, between the individual and their sense of gender identity. Creating an association between being gendered 'correctly' and 'respected' as your gender (and ultimately existing as a transmasculine person) with abuse, violence, helplessness, trauma, fear, isolation... and by making transmasculinity and transmanhood uninhabitable and driving a wedge between the individual and their sense of gender identity you can more easily drag them back to their 'proper' place. Plant seeds of doubt by making being transmasculine an exceedingly unhappy experience. Make them think that everything that's happened is their own fault for choosing to be transmasculine or trying to be a man. That maybe since they're so unhappy this isn't for them. That living as a transmasculine person is just too difficult and they're not cut out for it, that if they "gave up" and were to be women again things would be easier and they would be safer and happier.

This also all serves to maintain cis patriarchal ideas of gender and the gender binary and police the boundaries of manhood, in a way I can't articulate right now.

Through all this, despite being called "men" during malgendering, we are not actually perceived as such. We are always an "other". Acknowledging us as "men" is just another weapon, and why some transmascs flinch at the phrase "trans men are men". Our own genders are used to beat us.

Using a scrap from my .txt journals:

"[...] on the subject of having a core aspect of yourself taken from you and turned into a weapon to beat you with, with the result being that aspect of yourself now becoming a source of trauma and pain so you abandon it and lock it away like an awful secret, that’s exactly what happened with my gender. Being genderless and a(nti)binary is what I’m most comfortable as, a(nti)gender is my ~real gender~, but I have to admit a lot of this is because I have been traumatized out of any gender with binary associations and have consequently come to know gender itself, and the act of gendering, as violence. Gender is but a designation for what exploitation, abuse, and violence can be enacted upon you and the justification there of. When someone asks whether you are "masc" or "femme", behind their back as they face you is a hammer in one hand, and a knife in the other, and what they are actually asking is if they can pummel you or lacerate you. When it comes to the “direction” I’m transitioning in though, it is obviously “masculine” (as much as a negation of "femininity" is always taken as stepping towards "masculinity") and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong to call me “transmasculine”, though I have been scared to death of being acknowledged as such."

My first encounter with malgendering was when I was 13 and had just started to realize I was "ftm" and looking for community online. My first exposure to any affirmation of transmasculinity was someone I came to respect reblogging a post about how Kill All Men includes trans men. This would set the precedent of the next decade of my life of existing while transmasculine. A decade of only hearing the words "trans men" and "transmasc" used negatively and as the butt of jokes that served to reinforce patriarchal ideas of gender. The consistent and relentless denial of transmasculinity as a unique gender and gendered experience, the denial of transmasculine reality especially in regards to misogyny, and continuous abuse and threats of violence, all under the guise of affirming trans men's genders as men (and affirming the gender binary in the process). A decade of having antitransmasculine sentiment fed to me in every way possible.

For me, the experiences of antitransmasculinity and malgendering from non-transmascs has effectively "chased" me out of my transmasculinity and any acknowledgement of it. For years I have hidden my transmasculinity and presumed "AGAB" out of fear, even in queer and supposedly trans-friendly spaces. I have not been able to associate with any “masculine” language in reference to myself without feeling that I am in imminent danger, have made a grave mistake, and suffocating in anticipation of punishment. I have always been scared of posting any of my art that eludes to my transmasculinity. I have always been terrified of being referred to or perceived as “transmasc”, a “trans man”, of being called a "guy" or “dude” or “bro”, of using "he/him" anywhere. All of it. Deep down on some level I do desire it, but it’s been forbidden and only aggravates existing wounds.

And this, in turn, pushed me out of associating with other transmasculine folks out of fear and internalized antitransmasculinity towards other transmasculine people, isolating me from any community or connection with anyone similar to me, exacerbating my loneliness and alienation as a youth to the point where now as an adult my ‘normal’ human social needs – connection, community, relationships, empathy – are completely broken. I don’t feel loneliness anymore, or the desire to connect to anyone, despite in ways being even more alone now than I was then. In a way I believe antitransmasculinity shaped the path of my schizoidism. Isolating and divorcing me from my transmasculinity and the world at large is what I understand to be yet another point of this type of antitransmasculine rhetoric - because when you've destabilized and isolated someone from their whole sense of self and community, they are much easier to control.

[snowsinterlude]

overprotective, lovesick, deranged.

(yandere coriolanus x reader)

summary: your ex boyfriend couldn't seem to let you go.

if i can't have you, no one can.

trigger.warning: yandere coriolanus, obslove (obsessive love), stockholm syndrome, drugging (no its not for sexual purposes), pregnancy, marriage, horror, depictions to murder (explicit), dubcon, p in v, cockwarming, extremely toxic behavior, unhinged coriolanus, this fanfic contains extreme toxic behavior and too much blood, if uncomfortable with that content, please, don't read it.

"This might get a little messy, I'm sure.

Heads rolling for the one I adore

This may become a little brutal if I'm honest

But it's any-anything for you my dear, I promise"

overprotective.

coriolanus snow was a man of ambition; one of those who won't quiet down until the moment he had what he wanted. this was something that happened to the women he got involved with too.

lucy gray baird was one of those. the moment your now ex-boyfriend was sent to district 12 you could tell something was wrong. you could not care less, though. he wasn't your boyfriend anymore and in your most honest opinion it was something good.

when he came back you were with a different man; one named valentine, who stayed with you when you saw coriolanus kissing lucy gray. who comforted you during this time and who hugged you everynight when the thunders during rain times echoed so hard that made you feel like being killed by one of those.

valentine, who's head was decapitated in front of you.

coriolanus, who was smiling to you as he opened the 'gift' he had prepared to you.

you, who couldn't help but throw up at the sight of your dead boyfriend. you, who passed out by the sick sight of his decapitated head, his eyes opened by strings of a red line, needled carelessly. the same eyes who used to look at you with so much affection and love, now weren't looking at you at all.

when you woke up, your hands were tightly wrapped up in a tight knot that he learned to do as a peacekeeper. strung up reasons.

"good morning, my love." he smiled, kissing your forehead. you were still in the kitchen, dressed in a white dress, you didn't remember putting it on. you didn't like the fabric nor the color of white- it would always get stained too easily. "you finally woke up."

you didn't had to think much to know that what happened wasn't a dream. it was real. he killed your boyfriend.

you opened your mouth, and the scream you left was enough for him to slap you across the face. once you begun to cry, he kneeled in front of you, hands cupping your face as you shaked.

"it's okay baby, snow's here for you,"" he kissed your face, making you melt into crying as hard as you could, sob after sob making your doll heart heavy. "remember you used to call me snowflake?" he asked, and you nodded cowardly, afraid of saying anything that might make him furious. "i'm still your snowflake."

and he hugged you, caressing your scalp as you ugly cried in front of him, but to him, you would never look ugly.

lovesick.

with your face pressed against the mattress, you stared at the gigantic mirror that covered an entire wall, watching yourself.

it's been three months since valentine died, and two months since snow untied you, carried you like a princess bride and bathed you, always murmuring the waltz that played when you both met.

maybe it wasn't so bad after all. he took extra care of you, never slapped you again- it was a relapse. he took care of the red slap mark in your cheek, apploed ointment on you everyday, prepared your favorite meals and left you to your own peace, let you mourn the death of that pathetic boy you decided to date.

it wasn't his fault, right? no- it was. why the hell were you thinking that the victim was the one to put to blame for their own death? are you dumb?

well, you aren't- but you're starting to become.

why were you smiling at him as he showed you the dress he brought you? why did your heart flutter when he made you desserts? c'mon now, he killed your boyfriend. ex-boyfriend?

he wasn't there to protect you now, was he? why would he be important in anyway? of course, he was the sweetest to you, never questioned when you moaned coryo's name instead of his, he knew how hard it was to you.

for fucks sakes, what were you doing? what were you thinking?

coriolanus entered the room he made to you after three knocks, a tray with golden white details on his hand, with two toasts, less than a dozen pancakes that he knew you liked, a cup of strawberry juice and a small bow of green grapes.

once you ate at least half of it and drink the juice, he was by your side, caressing your hair.

"bunny?" he called, taking you off your own state of blankness.

"yes?"

"do you hate me?" you wanted to say yes. wanted to spit on his face for asking such a dumb question after holding you hostage and killing your boyfriend, you truly wanted to.

but you didn’t. "no," and maybe you didn't hated him at all. maybe that juice with the truth-telling pill didn't had much of an effect on you

"hm." he hummed, lips curling into the pretty smile he had. "it's good to know that."

he put the tray aside, laying by your side. why have you been laying like a sick woman at it's death bed? ah. yeah, he didn’t liked the idea of you going away, he said he didn’t want you to leave him. how cute.

you smiled at the thought. then you had to gather all the senses you had left to scold yourself.

it didn't last long though, the moment his hands found your hips and started grinding on you, you felt aroused. you shouldn't be, this was the man that killed your boyfriend. this was the man who slapped you. this was the man who didn't let you go around the house with the excuse that he didn’t want you to leave him.

but of course, your cunt didn't had the same thought that you did. so, by the amount of teasing and the way his soft, slender fingers found your clit almost immediatly, you couldn't help but moan and grind back, feeling as if you were humiliating yourself.

"s-stop that, coryo. please." you said. "i'm still mourning valentine's death-"

"i'm sorry, dove, but your pussy doesn't seem to agree with that." and he rolled your nightgown up, pulled his pants down and finally his dick was grinding against your wetness, the tip teasing your clit as he didn’t went inside, why he wasn't going inside? you needed him in.

your breath hitched at the thought, your hand gripping the sheets as he slowly thrusted, but never inside of you.

"tell me, dove, do you want it in?" he asked, his index finger teasing your clit.

"n..no, i-i don't-" he chuckled at your own lies, you felt like laughing too, the exact moment he kissed your shoulder you had to close your own lips, aware that you would end up smiling at him.

"i don't think you don't want it. tell me, baby, what do you want exactly?"

your breath hitched, you could feel how harder your nipples were compared to before. you shouldn't be wanting this. and you knew that. but you loved him so much.

"y-you. please, i'm sorry, coryo." what were you sorry about? you didn't do anything wrong other than mourn and cry.

"you're forgiven, baby. now, just let me enter you, okay?" you nodded. you were pathetic, that nod was pathetic, looking at you in the mirror was pathetic, seeing how you surrendered so easily to his touch was pathetic- the fact that you were ovulating was pathetic. the fact he knew you were fertile was psychotic, and mostly pathetic cause it was you who let him know about it when you were both dating.

you slurred a long and low moan out of your mouth, your eyes closed shut the second your walls were slowly stretched by his dick, it wasn't as painful as the first time, but you felt like being ripped apart.

dubiously, you let his dick kiss your uterus like never before. you felt so ridiculous when his dick went further into you, when your warm walls squeezed his dick into you, when your pussy felt like gushing and you cockwarmed him with pleasure, and you fucked him back, moving your hips almost like you didn't want him to see you moving.

"you would look so good pregnant, don't you think, baby?" he asked, his hand going upwards and abandoning your clit to pass on your belly. "you'd be so pretty. more than you are already"

you shook your head, panic taking over you.

"p-please, coryo. don't do it, not inside, please. not inside" of course, he didn’t even cared about your mewls, thrusting harder into you, earning a bunch of moans out of your mouth, your voice echoing as he spread your legs and made you look into the mirror to see the mess you were.

your boobs bouncing out of your nightdress, your pussy beautifully welcoming his dick inside your cunt, his balls slapping against your clit due to the pose, and the more you concentreated on the pleasure, you were closer to cumming.

"yeah, keep squeezing me like that, dove" he said into your year, sucking on your neck. you moaned as an answer "i'm gonna fuck my baby's into you."

you squeezed him too tightly, your pussy gushing around him before finally cumming. too good, too good. were all that you could think of.

"such a pretty girl, baby. you will be such a good mom." he said, finally cumming inside of you, the hot seed flowing inside you and leaking a bit.

you turned to see his face, recieving a kiss that you promptly deepened.

you were doomed.

deranged.

his grandma'am was the one to acompany you to the altar. the entire panem was there or outside waiting to see the marriage of the new president snow.

you smiled at him under the veil, your swollen round belly being the one that claimed attention more than anything. you were in fact a beautiful mom, carrying his twin girls in your heart and stomach.

you still loved him after all, who would know?

not even him expected you to say yes, not in the marriage, not at the proposal, and not at any other situation, specially when he was impregnating you.

"do you, mr. snow, accept mrs. y/n as your wife?" the priest asked, a sweet smile on his elderly lips.

"i do."

"and you, mrs. y/n, accept mr. snow as your husband?" he asked to you, and you smiled, cherry lipstick covering your lips.

"i do."

you caved your own grave, and you knew it. but if you died, you would take him with you.

that's what love is about.

[mintydoll]

also this might be hard to hear but if u are in a comptop situation and ur partner(s) don't actually know you want to bottom, if they're unaware of your true feelings, you're doing them a disservice and possibly hurting them when things finally come to a head as well. most people don't actually want to take advantage of people pleasers, esp during sex; maybe they're just being open and honest about their own desires and expecting that you're doing the same. like there are definitely abusive situations out there don't get me wrong, but i feel like in many cases its a communication issue and you (the one being cagey abt what u really want) are primarily to blame.

i know there's a whole melange of social forces that make comptop an issue mainly with trans women (esp those of us who have been victims of abuse in the past), and i find all of that very disgusting, in fact i lost much of my life to it. however when it comes to sex and its just you and your partner, you NEED to be truthful and open about what you want during sex. if you don't feel safe doing that with a partner, that's a sign that you shouldn't have sex with them. if you do that with a partner and they don't listen to you but still want you to fuck them, you shouldn't have sex with that person.

if you're going to be sexually active you need to develop self-advocacy skills as well as enough self worth to avoid just giving in to whatever your partner wants. if you don't you will end up hurt and you'll most likely hurt your partners as well.

just my two cents on the issue after having struggled with it for a decade.

[evidence-based-activism]

you’re still ignoring WHY the rates for men are so high, because women get underreported and don’t get taken seriously at all when they commit crimes. Women abuse children more and initiate 70% of domestic violence, yet men are still portrayed as the villains. You should read the comments or some of the reblogs under that post. Full of people who have been abused by women and have been safer when around only men,and never been taken seriously. You say it’s a strawman fallacy but no it’s not, radfems say this shit all the timesee. and are very gender essentialist themselves. Maybe you’re not saying it but a lot of popular radfems are, to mostly agreement from other radfems,so you can’t really blame people for seeing that and understanding it to be a popular TERF take.

Hi -

So, I'm going to answer this ask and the one that includes the bustle link that I expect was also sent by you? However, I'm not going to continue putting in this degree of effort (i.e., reading and researching the information you send) unless you start matching that effort. It will be difficult for you to do so in an ask (although I suppose you could try), so I suggest you reblog this post to further discuss.

So, on to the response:

---

No, there is not a significant reporting gap (at least, not one caused by sex).

You said "women get underreported and don’t get taken seriously at all when they commit crimes", but there is no evidence that is the case. Let's take the crime data from two sources: the criminal victimization survey by the BJS [1] and the FBI crime data explorer [2]. These two sources are helpful for this discussion because the BJS attempts to determine total offenses including those not reported, while the FBI only looks at reported offenses.

For 2022 (rounding numbers) and looking at violent offenses (excluding homicide as the BJS report is interview based):

Male violent crime: 4,750,000 estimated by the BJS and 1,990,000 reported by the FBI for an overall 42% reporting rate

Female violent crime: 1,220,000 estimated by the BJS and 777,000 reported by the FBI for an overall 64% reporting rate

These numbers would suggest that more female offenders than male offenders are reported (i.e., a greater percent of female offenders, even though in absolute terms there are far fewer female offenders). However, there are some caveats to this data that makes me reluctant to state this conclusion:

The crime definitions between the BJS and FBI differ slightly. For example, I had to search through the "other crimes" for the FBI to find simple assault and several additional sexual assault categories to try and match the overall BJS "violent crime" statistic.

These stats are incident based not offender based. So, for example, if John commits 10 aggravated assaults and 5 of his victims report the assault to the police, 5 incidents are recorded in the system. Therefore, recidivism may or may not play a role in reporting rates.

I calculated the rate using the offender stats for individual offenders and "both male and female offender". Proportionally speaking a greater percent of female offenders are in the "both" category (23% vs 6%). Other statistics suggest more severe crimes are more likely to be reported to the police (e.g., 50% of aggravated assault is reported vs 37% of simple assault). If we make the assumption that violent crimes involving multiple offenders are more likely to be severe, then this could partially explain the disparity.

However, this point is essentially irrelevant, as the statistics previously discussed in the CDC report don't rely on reported crimes, they specifically interview representative samples in order to determine prevalence rates. (The difference between this data (and data in the BJS report) and the number of reported cases is how we know these crimes are under-reported.)

Just to drive the point home: the BJS study, which again, looks at both reported and unreported crime indicates:

Men take part in 84% of violent crimes and the only offender(s) in 79% of violent crimes (the stats for women are 21% and 17% respectively)

The offender-to-population ratio is 1.6 for men and 0.3 for women. That means the share of men in the "offender population" is 60% more than the share of men in the US population. The share of women offenders is 70% less than their share of the US population.

And before you send me another debunked myth: no men are not victimized more: the victim-to-offender population ratio for all violent crimes is 1.0 for both men and women.

I've also talked about how men don't under-report abuse (at least, not anymore than women do) in the past, so see this post for a couple more sources.

There's also no evidence that crimes committed by women get taken less seriously. However, it is true that when women do commit crimes, they tend to be less severe than the crimes committed by men (i.e., women commit more simple assault and aggravated assault). Given this, women's crimes may be taken "less seriously", but that's because the crimes are less serious, going by the accepted definitions of the crime. (And this is not my personal opinion! There is an actual "crime hierarchy" used in the American justice system that ranks crimes by degree of severity.)

In terms of legal consequences, women and men receive similar sentence lengths with one major caveat [3]. Caretakers of children, especially, young children, routinely received shorter sentences. Since women are more likely to be the primary caretaker of children, they'd be more likely to see this sentence reduction. However, this gap has been closing since the introduction of mandatory minimum sentencing. Some research suggests women may receive harsher sentences than men for "traditionally male crimes" [4].

Either way, crimes by women are clearly taken at least as "seriously" as crimes by men.

---

No women do not abuse children more.

You said "Women abuse children more", but this is an oft-repeated statement from terribly misinterpreted data.

The misconception comes from data from the child maltreatment report from the HHS [5]. This report looks at reports of child abuse and neglect. In it they found that 52% of victims had a female perpetrator and 47% had a male perpetrator. At first glance, this looks like women abuse more children (hence the wide-spread misinterpretation), however this neglects to take several things into consideration.

First, since about 51% of the population is female, even if we considered nothing else, these values would suggest parity in maltreatment (abuse + neglect) rates. Of course, even this interpretation is deeply flawed, but I thought it merited pointing out.

Second, and perhaps most important, these stats are not looking at incidence or even prevalence rates. This isn't a rate at all. For example, you may be tempted to interpret these as "52% of children in a women's care are abused" or "52% of women abuse children". These are, and I must stress this, completely incorrect interpretations. These stats say only that of child maltreatment (abuse+neglect) victims identified by CPS, 52% of them were maltreated by a women.

Next, these stats fail to take into account the fact that many more women are the primary caretaker of children. According to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), mothers spend 80% more time caring for children than fathers. This disparity widens even further when you exclude the "entertainment" categories like playing or reading to children (130% increase, or more than double) [6]. This matters because it provides some insight into how rates of abuse would be different. You need to adjust for time spent with children to get a meaningful rate. Another way to look at this is that despite mothers spending almost twice the amount of time around children as fathers, they account for the same number of perpetrators. This alone should tell you that a child is more likely to be safe in the company of a randomly selected woman than a randomly selected man.

In case you still aren't convinced however, the report also clarifies that the perpetrator sex varied widely by maltreatment type. Women were the perpetrator in 58.5% of neglect cases (vs 41%) and 70.5% of medical neglect cases (vs 29%). But men were the perpetrator in 49.5% of physical abuse cases (vs 49%), 89% of sexual abuse cases (vs 8%), and 59% of emotional abuse cases (vs 41%). While no form of child maltreatment is ever acceptable, I hope I don't need to explain how abuse (which "requires an action") is different from neglect (which "occurs from an inaction") and requires different responses.

Speaking of neglect: there is much discourse on how much of the neglect (and medical neglect) registered by CPS is "true neglect" and how much is a result of poverty. This is particularly relevant considering single mothers are much more likely to live in poverty than married couples or single fathers. Examples of this may include: a mother doesn't have enough money to buy food and pay for rent so she and her child eat very little until her next paycheck, a single mother can't miss work without being fired so she sends her sick child to school, a single mother can't pay for child care so she has to choose between leaving her child home alone or having an unfit adult (her own abusive parent? an unsuitable boyfriend?) watch her child. In all of these situations, something absolutely needs to be done to help the child, but it likely isn't the same something as a child who's being beaten or sexually abused by his father.

Other notes on neglect: even the relatively higher proportion of female perpetrators for neglect and medical neglect in this sample are well below parity when adjusted for time spent with the child. It’s also likely that men’s rates of neglect are likely severely under-reported here. Why? Because a neglect case is rarely (if ever) opened for absentee ("deadbeat") dads; it's also unclear how many men with non-primary custody are listed as perpetrators of neglect. (I ask you: if mothers are considered neglectful for failing to intervene on behalf of their child in abusive/neglectful situations, why aren't fathers?)

Other studies on child abuse perpetration (sadly no national reports) show:

Evaluations of child fatalities in Missouri over a 8-year period showed men inflicted 71% of fatal injuries on young children [8]

Evaluations of fatal and nonfatal abusive head trauma over a 12-year period at the Children's Hospital of Denver found 69% of the perpetrators were male (including 74% of the perpetrators of fatal head traumas) [9]

Data from conviction rates and victimization surveys suggest that 4-5% of adult, child sex offenders (as in child sex offenders who are adults) are female, meaning that 95-96% are male [10]

Altogether, this indicates that men are more likely to abuse a child in their care than women. Unsurprisingly, it’s safer for children to be around women than around men.

---

No, women do not initiate more domestic violence/commit the same amount of abuse.

You said "women ... initiate 70% of domestic violence". It took me a while to find a source for this statistic, but I eventually found out it comes from a poorly done study that unfortunately finds company with a number of other poorly done studies touted by MRAs and anti-feminists.

Before we address that study specifically: a brief history of the nonsense plaguing domestic violence research.

To be clear, this is not a new discussion, we (the general we) have been having this same discussion about whether there's gender parity in domestic violence for, oh, 50 years or so. It is, possibly not entirely, but certainly mostly the result of the "Conflict Tactics Scale" (CTS). Intended for use in family violence research, it has several methodological flaws which make its results ... let's go with unreliable.

I really thought I'd discussed the CTS before now ... but can't find anything on my blog. But there is this post which is a nice pictograph about this next topic, which I will loop into our discussion of the CTS.

So ... why is the CTS so unreliable? Because "domestic violence" is not a homogeneous phenomenon. If I asked someone to picture an abusive relationship they are almost certainly going to imagine an abusive man controlling his partner through intimidation, likely restricting her behavior, and possibly hitting or otherwise physically harming her. This "typical" dynamic is what we think of when we hear "domestic abuse/violence". (I'd argue that it's what we should think of when discussing domestic violence, but I'm open to being convinced otherwise.)

Notably, what this doesn't include is the -- far more common -- case of situational violence. A "typical" example of situational violence is arguments that "gets out of hand" and end with one partner slapping/shoving/etc. the other (switching between perpetrator for different incidents) or two people who routinely get "nasty" (name calling, personal insults) to each other during arguments. There's no intimidation or controlling behavior and it doesn't escalate. It also is generally not associated with significant victim hardship (i.e., no/little increase in depression, anxiety, or PTSD; little fear or feeling unable to escape the relationship; no or few physical injuries; little or no economic hardship; etc.). It's also what's predominately being measured by the CTS.

This isn't to say that situational violence is "okay". It clearly isn't, no more than a bar fight or slapping a co-worker is okay. It is, however, far more comparable to these examples (bar fight, slapping a coworker, etc.) than it is to the standard conception of domestic violence (which itself is more comparable to being a prisoner of war [11]). Some people have tried to resolve this by renaming the standard conception to "intimate partner terrorism" or "domestic abuse with coercive control". I have ... mixed thoughts on this, so I'm going to leave it at this for now.

If you'd like to read more about this, Michael P. Johnson at PSU (who originally proposed this division back in the 1990s!) has written a book and also has numerous articles about the topic.

I have a lot of sources about the CTS/differences in violence perpetration rates, but this post is already very long and I plan to make a whole separate post about this at some point. So, I'm going to briefly summarize the points and give some references that would be particularly helpful.

So, the issues with CTS include:

Failure to include a full range of possible violent behaviors, including many that are almost always perpetrated by men, including: rape, murder, choking, and suffocation.

Failure to examine post-breakup/divorce time periods, despite post-separation being one of the most dangerous time periods for abused women (but, notably, not men).

Failure to examine context. This gets back at the paradigm I mentioned above: studies that do examine context have shown that the vast majority of coercive controlling violence (i.e., traditional abuse) is perpetrated by men and the vast majority of responsive violence (i.e., self-defense) is perpetrated by women.

Failure to examine the severity of the violence and/or violence impacts. Studies have also shown that women routinely receive the more severe injuries than men. That applies to both the injuries received from coercive controlling violence and from situational violence. Notably, men are rarely ever injured from responsive violence. Women also routinely report more severe psychological and social problems as a result of abuse.

Extremely poor phrasing of the questions. The CTS is unique in its false positive rate, as has been established by several other measures of violence. For example, simply adding the stem "Not including horseplay or joking around..." reduced the number of violent incidents reported and also showed higher rates of female victimization than male victimization.

Inconsistency with every other scale/measure used for determining prevalence rates of abuse! Hopefully it is obvious why this is an issue, but as an example: if I created a new measure for "depressive symptoms" and I found that it correlated very poorly with every other accepted measure of depressive symptoms then my new measure would be considered to have very poor "convergent validity". In non-politicized situations, my measure would likely never make it to the publishing stage, and would certainly fall out of use once this poor validity demonstrated by another study. Unfortunately, science is not immune to politics any more than the people conducting it are, as we can see with the survival of the CTS.

I gathered this information from a bunch of sources, but I've selected a few reviews (i.e., papers that "review" or condense many other papers into one) that would be helpful to you [12-16]. I recommend [12] in particular, although [13] touches on much of the same information and is much shorter. Ultimately, the CTS can, at most, be considered a measure of situational violence (and it's not even very good at that!).

---

So, finally, why is the 70% study [17] particularly bad?

All of the above problems with CTS apply, but in addition to all of that, they didn't just use the already flawed measure as it was ... no they, narrowed it down into 6 total questions. In total it asked about the respondent's perpetration of victimization of the following forms of violence: threatening with violence, pushing/shoving, throwing something, slapped, hit, kicked. They then "assessed" severity by asking a single question about injuries ("How often has partner had an injury, such as a sprain, bruise, or cut because of a fight with you?" and the corresponding victimization version.)

So, let's see ... failure to include predominately male forms of violence? Check. Further exclusion of even the existing items on the CTS that do examine this? Check! Failure to examine time past the relationship? Check. Failure to examine context? Check! Failure to examine severity of violence? Check. (Asking about a sprain or a bruise but not hospitalizations? broken bones? concussions?) Inconsistency with all other measures? Definitely!

Other problems with the study: they asked individuals to rate their perpetration and victimization, they did not examine their partners responses to such questions. This is a problem for a study like this, given that men tend to over-estimate their partners violence towards them and under-estimate their own violence towards their partner, and women do the opposite over-estimating their own violence and under-estimating their partners [12]. A note that a related problem has also shown up for the original CTS (i.e., if you asked both partners to complete the scale, their responses may agree on the "explaining a disagreement" item pair, but there was little if any agreement on the severe items like the "beating up" item pair).

To make a bad problem even worse: they condensed their multi-item (8-point) scales into binary (yes/no) categories and 3-item (low/medium/high) categories. This reduction in variance likely created artificially high rates for women and artificially low rates for men.

Hilariously (infuriatingly), they make it all the way through this data and then acknowledge that their study may not actually have examined domestic abuse at all! Instead it describes "common couple violence or situational violence", which, again, goes back to what the paradigm I introduced earlier. Of course, they don't revise their title or abstract to be less misleading ... that wouldn't be sensational enough.

Also, just to point this out: even this poorly designed, misleading study still showed "men were more likely to inflict an injury on a partner than ... women". So ... there you go. Even tipping the scales/design as far in favor of a "gender symmetry" result as they can possibly go, women still end up injured more than men.

---

So, for the rest of your ask:

"yet men are still portrayed as the villains"

well when 1 in 3 men around the world openly admit to abusing women, and they are the perpetrator of 90+% of homicides, and 10-67% of men openly admit to believing non-defensive physical and sexual violence against women is at least sometimes okay it's pretty easy to see why women can see them as the villain/enemy.

"You should read the comments or some of the reblogs under that post. Full of people who have been abused by women and have been safer when around only men,and never been taken seriously."

This is one of those cases where critical thinking skills are pretty important! Let me start you off:

Do I think that a social media post will garner a representative sample from which to draw conclusions? Or is more likely that people who agree with the post will comment on and re-blog it, spreading it more people who are more likely to agree with it?

Can I see the re-blog I'm making comments about (i.e., evidence-based-activism's re-blog?). If not, (hint: it's not in the re-blog viewer :)) is it possible that there are other hidden replies that are disagreeing with this post?

Maybe most importantly: do I need female-on-male or female-on-female violence to be as common as male-on-female and male-on-male violence in order to show compassion to those who do experience it? (Hint: you shouldn't!! Something doesn't need to be common to deserve sympathy and rare =/= excusable.)

In addition, this is touching on a pretty common issue with discourse these days -- the prioritization of "feeling" over "being". Someone (male or female) may feel safer around men, but statistically speaking they are safer around women. It's reasonable to respond to and accommodate people's feelings on an individual basis, it's not reasonable to base an ideology or policy around them.

"You say it’s a strawman fallacy but no it’s not, radfems say this shit all the timesee. ... Maybe you’re not saying it but a lot of popular radfems are, to mostly agreement from other radfems,so you can’t really blame people for seeing that and understanding it to be a popular TERF take."

Similar to the last point ... views on social media are not representative of a population. Views that you, specifically, are seeing are not representative! If they were, then "well, I see more posts preemptively criticizing people for not including men than I see posts excluding men" (which is true, almost every post I read now-a-days includes caveats like "but men are abused too!! and women can be abusers!!") would have been a valid counter-argument to your ask. But see, I know that my experience on social media is not universal, and I should hope you can acknowledge the same of your own!

Also ... to be fair to all these unnamed "radfems", I'm guessing that you would consider my posts (like this response) to be an example of someone "saying this", which is very much not the case. I am acknowledging social trends and making reasonable generalizations to allow for communication about a complex topic (you know, the way people do for any and every topic ever), but I'm not claiming that no women is ever abusive or that no man has ever been abused. I'm guessing that these other posts are pretty similar (if less verbose).

side note, you also said: "radfems ... are very gender essentialist themselves".

Either you don't know what "gender essentialist" means or the people you are talking to/about are not radfems. I acknowledge that there are a number of people going around and saying they're radfems, but the nice thing about a political group like this is they have (at least some) defined beliefs.

So, for example, if someone went around saying they are a communist, but then when asked to describe their desired economic system, describes an economy based around the free market and decentralized production ... then they aren't a communist no matter what they call themselves. A command economy is a central tenant to communism, so much so that a desire to implement one/have one is intrinsic to being a communist.

In the same way, if someone is calling themselves a radfem, but supports the preservation of gender/gender roles or believes that femininity/masculinity is biologically innate ... then they aren't a radfem.

---

TL;DR:

Violent crimes for women and men are reported at similar rates.

Women and men are punished similarly for violent crimes (i.e., people do take crimes by women seriously).

Children are safer in the company of women than men. There is insufficient research to accurately describe perpetrator demographics of "minor" child abuse/neglect, but there is significant research indicating that men are the perpetrator of the the vast majority of severe injuries, fatal injuries, and sexual abuse.

Men commit the vast majority controlling domestic violence (the type of violence people think of when thinking about domestic violence); women's violence is predominately responsive. Women are also the recipients of the vast majority of injuries (minor and severe) and are the victim of almost all fatalities.

Social media posts are not representative studies.

Critical thinking skills are important!

And, everyone -- regardless of sex or any other demographic characteristic -- deserves compassion when harmed. It is still appropriate talk about trends and create policies that assist the majority of those harmed.

A reminder that I will expect a reasonable degree of engagement with this information if you plan to engage in further discussion! I'll answer the bustle link ask, but after that I'll simply delete asks that don't make a genuine attempt to think critically about this information. (Clarifying questions are okay to ask though :)).

---

References below the cut:

Criminal Victimization, 2022 | Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/criminal-victimization-2022.

“National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Details Reported in the United States .” Federal Bureau of Investigation Crime Data Explorer, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend.

Myrna S. Raeder Gender and Sentencing: Single Moms, Battered Women, and Other Sex-Based Anomalies in the Gender-Free World of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, 20 Pepp. L. Rev. Iss. 3 (1993) Available at: https://digitalcommons.pepperdine.edu/plr/vol20/iss3/1

https://web.archive.org/web/20240406064949/https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2019/jan/12/intimate-partner-violence-gender-gap-cyntoia-brown

Child Maltreatment 2022. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/report/child-maltreatment-2022.

“Average Hours per Day Parents Spent Caring for and Helping Household Children as Their Main Activity.” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/charts/american-time-use/activity-by-parent.htm.

Shrider, Emily A., Melissa Kollar, Frances Chen, and Jessica Semega, U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P60-273, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2020, U.S. Government Publishing Office, Washington, DC, September 2021.

Schnitzer PG, Ewigman BG. Child deaths resulting from inflicted injuries: household risk factors and perpetrator characteristics. Pediatrics. 2005 Nov;116(5):e687-93. doi: 10.1542/peds.2005-0296. PMID: 16263983; PMCID: PMC1360186.

Starling SP, Holden JR, Jenny C. Abusive head trauma: the relationship of perpetrators to their victims. Pediatrics. 1995 Feb;95(2):259-62. PMID: 7838645.

McCartan, K. (Ed.). (2014). Responding to Sexual Offending. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137358134

Comparison Between Strategies Used on Prisoners of War and Battered Wives | Office of Justice Programs. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/comparison-between-strategies-used-prisoners-war-and-battered-wives.

Michael S. Kimmel. (2001). Male Victims of Domestic Violence: A Substantive and Methodological Research Review. The Equality Committee of the Department of Education and Science. https://vawnet.org/material/male-victims-domestic-violence-substantive-and-methodological-research-review

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Walter DeKeseredy & Martin Schwartz. (1998). Measuring the Extent of Woman Abuse in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships: A Critique of the Conflict Tactics Scales. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/measuring-extent-woman-abuse-intimate-heterosexual-relationships-critique-conflict-tactics

Shamita Das Dasgupta. (2001). Towards an Understanding of Women’s Use of Non-Lethal Violence in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/towards-understanding-womens-use-non-lethal-violence-intimate-heterosexual-relationships

Shamita Das Dasgupta. (2001). Towards an Understanding of Women’s Use of Non-Lethal Violence in Intimate Heterosexual Relationships. VAWnet.Org. https://vawnet.org/material/towards-understanding-womens-use-non-lethal-violence-intimate-heterosexual-relationships

Whitaker, Daniel J., et al. “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 97, no. 5, May 2007, pp. 941–47. PubMed Central, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2005.079020.

[mischiefwife]

Hey, think twice before supporting the BG3 Stardew mod.

Saw this nice looking Stardew Valley mod with BG3 characters, pretty quickly knew something was off when you see Halsin/Astarion/Rolan front and center with no mention of Wyll at all.

Then we get this whopper of a cry post, maybe suggesting they can't be anti-black because they're not white? They can't show misogyny cause they're women? They can't be blamed at all because they're just polling their PATREON votes? Fucking do better. Can't even hide behind the usual excuse that it's a free fanwork, it's not.

Fandom's got a racism and misogyny problem. Step up and draw the line with these creators crying victim when asked 'where's Wyll?' (And yes I checked, the replies are 90% positive and 10% where's Wyll, where's the women) when you've already fully developed your random minor npc first. Team members being made uncomfortable translates to being called out for contributing to a lil' racism.

The misogyny hydra and the racism in fandom runs deep i know, but for the love of fuck can we push back against it?

Or you can side with the mod's supporters (this is one of the devs actually lol). Who post things like this.

And the creators don't say a fucking thing at all about it, they just keep playing victim. It would be so easy to approach this system with a SMIDGEN of respect, just acknowledging the racism at all. Seriously BG3 fandom. Demand better.

I don't give a shit if they're the most popular, there's also a REASON why Wyll is not. But if you want to just eat this shit up and contribute making your fandom shitty and uninviting, by all means.

[drdemonprince]

I don't think I have it in me to be an abolitionist because I read that horrible story about the trans teen murdered in South Carolina and my knee jerk reaction is, those people should rot in jail, ideally forever, or worse. No matter how I look at it I can't make myself okay with the idea that you should be allowed to steal someone's life in such a horrible way and then just go back to enjoying your life. Some stuff is just too over the top evil.

You can have whatever emotions you want about that person's murderous actions, but the reality is that the carceral justice system is one of the largest sources of physical, emotional, and sexual torment for transgender people on this planet.

Transgender people are ten times more likely to be assaulted by a fellow inmate and five times more likely to be assaulted by a corrections officer, according to a National Center for Transgender Equality Report.

Within the prison system, transgender people are frequently denied gender-affirming medical care, and housed in populations that do not match their identity, which increases their odds of being beaten and sexually assaulted.

The alternative to being incorrectly housed with the wrong gendered population is that transgender people are also frequently held in solitary confinement instead, often for far longer periods on average than their non-transgender peers, contributing to them experiencing suicide ideation, self harm, acute physiological distress, a shrunk hippocampus, muscculoskeletal pain, chronic condition flare-ups, heart disease, reduced muscle tone, and numerous other proven effects of solitary confinement.

The prison system is also one of the largest sites of completely unmitigated COVID spread, among other illnesses, with over 640,000 cases being directly linked to prison exposure, according to the COVID prison project.

We know that number is rampantly under-estimated because prisoners, especially trans ones, are frequently denied medical care. And even basic, essential physical care. Just last year a 27-year-old Black man named Lason Butler was found dead in his cell, having perished of dehydration. He had been kept in a cell without running water for two weeks, where he rapidly lost 40 pounds before perishing. His body was covered in rat bites.

This kind of treatment is unacceptable for anyone, no matter who they are and what they have done, and I shouldn't have to explicitly connect the dots for you, but I will. One in six transgender people has been to prison, according to Lambda Legal. One in every TWO Black transgender people has been to prison. One in five Black men go to prison in America.

THIS is the fate you are consigning all these people to when you say that prisons must exist because there are really really bad people out in the world. We should all know by not that this is not how the carceral justice system works. Hate crime laws are under-utilized, according to Pro Publica, and result in few convictions. The people who commit transphobic acts of violence tend to be given softer sentences than the prisoners who resemble their victims.

We must always remember that the violent tools of the prison system will be used not against the people that we personally consider to be the most "deserving" of punishment, but rather against whomever the state considers to be its enemy or to be a disposable person.

You are not in control of the prison system and you cannot ensure it will be benevolent. You are not the police, the judge, the jury, or the corrections officers. By and large, the people who are in these roles are racist, transphobic, ableist, and victim-blaming, and they will use the power and violence of the system to terrorize people in poverty, Black people, trans people, "mad" people, intellectually disabled people, women, and everyone else that you might wish to protect from harm with a system of "punishment." Nevermind that incaraceration doesn't prevent future harm anyway.

You can't argue for incarceration as the tool of your revenge fantasies, you have to argue for it as the tool that it actually is. The purpose of a system is what it does. And the prison system's purpose has never been to protect or avenge vulnerable trans people. It has always been to beat them, sexually assault them, forcibly detransition them, render them unemployable, disconnect them from all community, neglect them, and unperson them.

[blackswallowtailbutterfly]

My nana at 9 years of age was dragged kicking and screaming to school. Her math teacher had been molesting her. She told her parents. They did nothing. Best part? Her father was the principal. So obviously that teacher learned he could get away with anything and started molesting the other girls, who then blamed my nana because...I dunno, little kid logic I guess. It was unlikely their parents were going to be any more helpful than my nana's and he knew it.

My great aunt at the age of 13 was forcibly kissed by a teacher in full view of several witnesses who then gave her shit for seducing an honourable man.

My mom at 12 years of age left her physically abusive father to live with her mother and stepfather, only for her stepfather to molest her. Her mother to this day refuses to believe it.

My best friend had a longterm close male friend who sexually assaulted her in her sleep. Their entire friend group as well as the youth counselor encouraged her to forgive him because it was obviously a misunderstanding and she'd been giving off mixed signals and he'd had a huge crush on her and he wasn't intending to hurt her! So she did forgive him, publicly. And he did it again. And again. And again. And then it was her fault because she kept hanging out with him. If she really didn't want him doing it, why didn't she just abandon her entire friend group? He also got emboldened and went on to sexually assault other girls, so eventually they all started talking and went to the school against him. The youth counselor admonished my friend for going forward against him.

My other best friend decided to be "open-minded" and dated a trans-identified male. He also sexually assaulted her multiple times in her sleep but he framed her as the abuser at their youth support group for not adequately validating his identity.

My stepfather molested me from the ages of 7 to 12 and when I reported him he was dating a new woman at the time. She didn't believe it. They're still together. I can only imagine the number of girls he's been given access to over the years (he didn't go to jail, or get convicted of sexual assault).

I was also sexually assaulted in my sleep at my friend's party once. That guy's friend said I "probably wanted it".

Went to group therapy. All the women there had very different stories, but one theme that kept cropping up: they weren't believed or they were blamed.

I read books about therapy sessions with other victims. And that theme kept up. Not believed or else blamed. One woman told her story, learning to gloss it over before being dismissed out of hand, for decades before a professional finally asked her to elaborate and put her in touch with a sexual assault crisis centre. Another thing that came up in those books: knowing how hard it was for victims to come forward, and all the discouragement from people in their lives, many women must take it to the grave.

But hey, it's fine. Men have it worse. I mean we all watched a rich abusive man successfully publicly humiliate his victim while everyone said he was the victim and she was the abuser. And actually it's super common for abusive men to claim to be the victim, and police and family believe it! And it can take multiple women to come forward against one man for anything to be done, and often even that's not enough. But never mind that, men have it worse. We know this because they so--no, no, don't pay attention to hospital records or homicides or child marriages, or--Men. Say. They. Have it worse! So they do. Everything a man says is truth. That's why you must believe whatever a man says and accept every observation he makes as objective. No, there's no irony here, no historical precedent, no global trend.

[theworldisabrokenbonebutitishome]

I know it's used partly as a 'ah-ha! gotcha!' plot twist that the letter in episode 3 is actually for one of the girls to go to university, and not that stacey devlin was leaving brandon for another man, but i still appreciate that it's a subtle way of saying this man has not been wronged at all and is not deserving of a seconds moment of sympathy. i don't think someone cheating or leaving a relationship for another person constitutes a loophole for murder, just to be clear, but it is the type of thing that some people would use to victim blame and rationalise the actions of bad men, there are plenty of news reports that could provide supporting evidence for this. women and girls who turn a man down and then he goes on a killing spree and yet it's the woman exercising her autonomy that gets judged, no matter how subtly.

of course jenny has already made this point when getting asked about the murders earlier in the episode: who cares what his trigger was? it is never going to be something that could excuse or rationalise his actions so why even bother trying to work out his logic because it will never result in justice? the reason is meaningless to her, it will never change the fact that this was a man who murdered his family, nothing excuses that.

but then, it turns out that the letter isn't actually causing the loop either. the contents of the letter actually becomes rather irrelevant to solving the case. it comes down to the vhs recording of the murders captured on the cameras brandon devlin installed. he caused their deaths because he was a controlling prick who could not bear the thought of his daughters one day leaving his house, his control, and his surveillance. and he caused them to get stuck in a loop reliving that night for 30 years because he had previously set up hidden recording equipment that captured the trauma. he didn't know that was possible but nevertheless every part of the horrors these women have been stuck in has been caused by him. there is no way to excuse him spying on his family in their own home and everything that spirals from that sickening behaviour.

i just think it's important how this episode really emphasises that the actions of controlling and abusive people is what causes the pain and suffering. victims should not have to answer questions about how they set off their abuser because that is not something they can control and also is rarely a rational thing, abusers are not reasonable.

[hertenskylarks]

One point that I want to talk about:

In the podcast, Clarie mentioned how she reached out to Gaiman with the intention of saying what she felt she needed to say and asking for an apology. This struck me because I did something similar with my rapist, and the response I received was eerily similar to Claire's experience.

Like Claire, when I called my rapist, I was fully expecting him to be defensive. I was fully expecting him to be dismissive and to shift the blame onto me. I was prepared to counter his excuses.

Instead, what I got was what seemed, at the time, like a sincere apology.

Yet, despite how genuine it sounded, I've always doubted his sincerity.The reason boils down to two words: damage control. When he realized I was confronting him, he said whatever he needed to say to pacify me. In Claire's case, Neil did the same. He apologized, claimed ignorance, attributed his failure to pick up signals to his autism, insisted he had never done this before, asked how he could improve, and even made a token donation to a charity Claire cared about.

How nice of him (sarcasm).

And for Neil, it worked… temporarily. After receiving what seemed like a sincere apology, Claire backed off. She decided against coming forward, felt she had the closure she wanted, and believed—or wanted to believe—that he wouldn't do it again.

But that's exactly what Neil wanted.

We now know that was a blatant lie. Not only did Neil target at least one other woman afterward, but Claire wasn't his first victim, nor likely his second or third. Not only is he a liar, he’s a GOOD liar. Here is this woman, Clair, who is finally calling him out on his bullshit, ready to hold him accountable for his bad behavior, is saying “No, I didn’t kiss you first, you kissed me first,” and “No, that’s not an excuse.” She still walked away believing (or wanting to believe) his apology was sincere and that he wouldn't do it again, even though he probably knew full well he was going to strike again. If he could convince Claire, in that situation, that he was genuine, imagine what else he's lied about, covered up with PR, lawyers, editing, rehearsing, and years of practice.

Actually, we don't have to imagine, because we already know. For years, Neil has constructed this persona of someone safe, someone who champions believing women, diversity, inclusion, and all these noble causes. Much of his fanbase resonated with these values and looked up to him for it. Hell, I used to think that man was a national treasure. And now we have to cope with the realization that the persona our hero constructed is a complete fucking farce.

Edit: So apparently, one of the newest allegations comes from a woman who had a bad encounter with him in the fucking 80s. Y'all, he's been at it for like 40 fucking years. That's longer than some of his survivors have been alive. I can't even...

[imoanurparentsnames]

"Affirmation" & Malgendering

"Fine, I'll 'respect' your gender, but I'll make it absolutely miserable for you. What? You don't like the way I'm 'affirming' your gender? Guess you'll have to stop being a (trans) man then."

I want to put something out there about what I call "malgendering". I see trans men talk about the phenomenon and acknowledge it as a part of antitransmasculinity but not the concept of "malgendering" itself and what it's purpose is, and as trans men and transmasculine people are especially caught in the lose-lose situation between misgendering and malgendering I think it is an important concept to establish. The erasure of transmasculinity, particularly as a unique gender and gendered experience, also serves to keep the transmasculine trapped within this double-bind, positioned between the gender binary of cis patriarchal ideas of womanhood and manhood, where for us there is only misgendering (being abused with the Woman gender) or malgendering (being abused with the Man gender).

I define malgendering as the practice of "validating" someone's gender identity only when it can be used against them and to hurt them, and malgendering almost always involves the enforcement of only the most negative sexist stereotypes available onto the victim with none of the "positives". If misgendering is forcefully pushing you back into your 'proper place' such as by calling you a "girl" or a "her" and showing you that you're really a woman through sexual assault -malgendering is scaring and traumatizing you into it by using your own gender against you. Malgendering is the realization that you don't need to misgender someone to hurt them or to punish them for the way they identity and push them towards the gender they're 'supposed' to be - you can do all that through 'validation'. It's psychological warfare on the sense of self.

This violence and abuse under the guise of "respect" and "identity affirmation" creates plausible deniability of intent and places the blame on the victim for "identifying that way", so much so that even other trans people will defend it and believe it's not maligned (especially because "but being seen as and treated as your gender is what trans rights is all about!" and "errm but its transphobic to not treat u this way?/ur misgendering urself by wanting to not be treated this way :/" with the hidden message being "don't like it? stop being trans"), even when faced with evidence of the (very much intended) effects it has on stalling and outright eliminating transmasculinity (ie. repression, detransition, suicide).

Some examples I can pull off the top of my head:

A transphobe is talking about a pregnant trans man. The whole energy of the Facebook video is 'comedic', and while calling birth the most “feminine” thing someone can do and alluding to how the trans man is really a woman, they still use he/him and call him a “guy” (in air-quotes). Not out of any respect but because the idea of a man being pregnant, calling a pregnant person a "he", and the very existence of the trans man in question, is the whole joke. In doing so, the transphobe has turned the act of using the proper pronouns and gendering him into a source of humiliation and made the experience of being properly gendered a demeaning one.

The Ukraine military situation where all males aged between 18 and 60 were banned from leaving the country and obliged to serve in the military. Trans women were denied passage out of the country "because they were men", and trans men were similarly denied passage out of the country "because they were men". With the discrepancy between invalidating the gender of trans women and "validating" the gender of trans men, you'd think the motivation behind this would be obvious - that trans people are expendable meat and it's better they die than cis people. It shouldn't of needed to be said that "I'm only affirming your gender because it allows me to put you in a position where you will likely suffer and die and put the blame for it on you" is not 'respect' or 'affirming' at all but somehow this was taken as evidence for the idea of that trans men are more 'respected' and seen as their genders than others (and are thus 'privileged').

A common one almost every trans guy deals with at some point is cis people threatening to beat trans men up (and often following through), because "If you're a man and not a woman (anymore) that means I can punch you," using the proximity to masculinity that transmasculine people claim as a justification for violence. Every other week there's a new story in online transmasculine spaces about someone having their ribs broken with "Since/if you want to be a man so bad-" preceding the attack.

The above is in a similar vein to when accounts of violence done to transmasculine people by cisgender men are brushed off and they're told something along the lines of "welcome to being a man", "that's just what men do to each other", "that's just the way things are with men", etc. along with the insistence that their attack had nothing to do with antitransmasculinity, making it an immutable problem with (cis)men as a whole - creating a sense hopelessness and that this is all they have to look forward to.

Transmasculine individuals being refused treatment, tests, or insurance for gynecological issues, especially cancer, despite the knowledge that they are transmasculine, because "men don't deal with these problems" and they don't want "men in women's spaces", and if you don't want to be 'treated like a man' and get the care you need (and not die), you're going to have to go ahead and detransition, change that M marker back to an F.

All of this functions to create contention, and eventually a rift, between the individual and their sense of gender identity. Creating an association between being gendered 'correctly' and 'respected' as your gender (and ultimately existing as a transmasculine person) with abuse, violence, helplessness, trauma, fear, isolation... and by making transmasculinity and transmanhood uninhabitable and driving a wedge between the individual and their sense of gender identity you can more easily drag them back to their 'proper' place. Plant seeds of doubt by making being transmasculine an exceedingly unhappy experience. Make them think that everything that's happened is their own fault for choosing to be transmasculine or trying to be a man. That maybe since they're so unhappy this isn't for them. That living as a transmasculine person is just too difficult and they're not cut out for it, that if they "gave up" and were to be women again things would be easier and they would be safer and happier.

This also all serves to maintain cis patriarchal ideas of gender and the gender binary and police the boundaries of manhood, in a way I can't articulate right now.

Through all this, despite being called "men" during malgendering, we are not actually perceived as such. We are always an "other". Acknowledging us as "men" is just another weapon, and why some transmascs flinch at the phrase "trans men are men". Our own genders are used to beat us.

Using a scrap from my .txt journals:

"[...] on the subject of having a core aspect of yourself taken from you and turned into a weapon to beat you with, with the result being that aspect of yourself now becoming a source of trauma and pain so you abandon it and lock it away like an awful secret, that’s exactly what happened with my gender.

Being genderless and a(nti)binary is what I’m most comfortable as, a(nti)gender is my ~real gender~, but I have to admit a lot of this is because I have been traumatized out of any gender with binary associations and have consequently come to know gender itself, and the act of gendering, as violence. Gender is but a designation for what exploitation, abuse, and violence can be enacted upon you and the justification there of. When someone asks whether you are "masc" or "femme", behind their back as they face you is a hammer in one hand, and a knife in the other, and what they are actually asking is if they can pummel you or lacerate you. When it comes to the “direction” I’m transitioning in though, it is obviously “masculine” (as much as a negation of "femininity" is always taken as stepping towards "masculinity") and you wouldn’t be entirely wrong to call me “transmasculine”, though I have been scared to death of being acknowledged as such."

My first encounter with malgendering was when I was 13 and had just started to realize I was "ftm" and looking for community online. My first exposure to any affirmation of transmasculinity was someone I came to respect reblogging a post about how Kill All Men includes trans men. This would set the precedent of the next decade of my life of existing while transmasculine. A decade of only hearing the words "trans men" and "transmasc" used negatively and as the butt of jokes that served to reinforce patriarchal ideas of gender. The consistent and relentless denial of transmasculinity as a unique gender and gendered experience, the denial of transmasculine reality especially in regards to misogyny, and continuous abuse and threats of violence, all under the guise of affirming trans men's genders as men (and affirming the gender binary in the process). A decade of having antitransmasculine sentiment fed to me in every way possible.

For me, the experiences of antitransmasculinity and malgendering from non-transmascs has effectively "chased" me out of my transmasculinity and any acknowledgement of it. For years I have hidden my transmasculinity and presumed "AGAB" out of fear, even in queer and supposedly trans-friendly spaces. I have not been able to associate with any “masculine” language in reference to myself without feeling that I am in imminent danger, have made a grave mistake, and suffocating in anticipation of punishment. I have always been scared of posting any of my art that eludes to my transmasculinity. I have always been terrified of being referred to or perceived as “transmasc”, a “trans man”, of being called a "guy" or “dude” or “bro”, of using "he/him" anywhere. All of it. Deep down on some level I do desire it, but it’s been forbidden and only aggravates existing wounds.

And this, in turn, pushed me out of associating with other transmasculine folks out of fear and internalized antitransmasculinity towards other transmasculine people, isolating me from any community or connection with anyone similar to me, exacerbating my loneliness and alienation as a youth to the point where now as an adult my ‘normal’ human social needs – connection, community, relationships, empathy – are completely broken. I don’t feel loneliness anymore, or the desire to connect to anyone, despite in ways being even more alone now than I was then. In a way I believe antitransmasculinity shaped the path of my schizoidism. Isolating and divorcing me from my transmasculinity and the world at large is what I understand to be yet another point of this type of antitransmasculine rhetoric - because when you've destabilized and isolated someone from their whole sense of self and community, they are much easier to control.