#i know i talked about how choosing recovery is a matter of autonomy but...

[uncanny-tranny]

Choosing not to recover is, frankly, a non-action and something neutral. While you can absolutely abuse people, choosing not to recover is not in and of itself an act of abuse, and sometimes it seems like people think that not recovering holds the same weight as abuse. While things like abuse are nuanced and dynamic, recovery is not a respite that prevents abuse from happening.

[drdemonprince]

I have Borderline personality disorder and deal with chronic suicidal ideation. up to 10% of us *will* die by suicide. not *might* or *are more likely to.* *will.* which is 50 times greater than the general populace. it's hard to talk about and even harder to deal with bc it's such a heavy topic. the best thing, I think, is to just listen to somebody who is suicidal. let them talk about it. don't offer solutions, none of that "you have so much to live for" shit. the best thing you can say is "I understand how you feel." yeah I might think about suicide every day, but that doesn't mean I'll just suddenly pop and kms. suicides are largely decided within half an hour, and even more are decided within minutes. help a suicidal person feel grounded, let them know that you respect their decision should they follow through. they know that it's not the only way.

Thank you for sharing your experiences, anon. I would caution you very strongly to not take psychiatry's profoundly flawed and biased statistics as a predictive declaration of your fate, however.

*Will* makes it sound unchangeable no matter a BPDer's circumstances -- and given that psychiatry already operates out of the stereotype that BPDers are "incurable" (and therefore not worth much effort in helping), it's subject to a ton of bias. statistically, we can't actually say that a person "will" die of something like suicide with any certainty, as it's not a simple progressive illness like a cancer or something. suicide risk is dynamic and influenced by a person's social support, relationship dynamics, financial situation, whether they're on medications that exacerbate or help things, their trauma recovery, all kinds of things that *are* mutable.

Psychologists and psychiatrist are taught downright cruel things about people with BPD -- i've been in those programs, i've heard things that have shocked me -- and it leads to profound isolation, internalized stigma, and sometimes unnecessary death. many providers give up on ya'll or make things worse for you when they have no right to do that, and they're taught that it's the most yall deserve. that's part of why the suicide risk for BPDers is so consistent.

A person ought to have the freedom to choose death and preventing all suicides is not a respectful goal. I am a harm reductionist and supporter of body autonomy to the maximum. my point here is that when psychiatry says you and people like you "will" die by suicide 10% of the time, what they mean is that that's the general trend they have observed, and they have decided that because of their (bigoted, hateful, scientifically unsupported) belief that yall can never feel better that it's a loss they are okay with accepting.

Anyone who has heard nothing but negative things about BPD I would strong recommend pick up a copy of the book Psychiatric Hegemony.

Sorry for the aside and the rant, but I really want to make that reality exactingly clear. Living with suicide ideation doesn't mean a person can't have a worthwhile life, or that their existence wasn't meaningful and important however long or short that it was.

[missmentelle]

What To Do When a Loved One is Dating an Abuser

There are few things as frustrating and as heartbreaking as watching someone you care about stay in a long-term abusive relationship. The red flags may be obvious to everyone in your loved one’s life - blinding, even - but for some reason, your loved one just can’t or won’t see them for what they are. There are always excuses for bad behaviour, always unconvincing explanations for suspicious injuries, always hollow assurances that things aren’t as bad as they seem. 

When someone we care about is in an abusive relationship, our first instinct is often to try to rescue them. We want to finally break through to them and make them see that their relationship is terrible and that they deserve so much better. If all else fails, we want to throw them in our car and drive them so far away that their abuser can never find them again. Or we may have no idea how to bring up the situation with our friend - talking about abuse is uncomfortable, and you may have no idea how to even begin that conversation. Being a third party to an abusive relationship is a horrible situation to be in, and you may find yourself overwhelmed with anxiety, fear, uncertainty and concern for your friend. 

Fortunately, there are some important steps that you can take to support your loved one and help them to build a safer life for themselves, like:

Don’t try to force them to leave. The first thing that most people want to say when they hear about an abusive relationship is “Leave! Dump them! Break up with them right now!”. But coming on that strong is a mistake. The victim has to be the one to make the decision to leave, and they need to be completely committed to leaving - when a victim caves into pressure from family and friends and leaves an abusive relationship before they’re ready, they are at extremely high risk of returning to the relationship, and repeatedly leaving and getting back together with an abusive partner is very dangerous. And if your friend isn’t ready to leave yet, you telling them to leave may push them away from you, leaving them with less support. There are steps you can take to help them reach the conclusion that leaving is necessary - and I’ll explain what those steps are - but pestering or commanding them to leave is not helpful. 

Emphasize that they are capable of making their own choices and that you will be there for them no matter what they decide to do. One of the biggest barriers that victims face in leaving abusive relationships is that their partner has destroyed their confidence in their own decision-making abilities. They are used to being told that they are irrational, stupid, incompetent, and that they can’t be trusted to make the right choices. They may not trust their own judgement, and believe that they are “overreacting” to their partner’s mistreatment - after all, they are used to being harshly criticized and having to second-guess themselves. One of the best things you can do for a victim of domestic violence is to restore their confidence in their ability to make decisions for themselves and feel good about those decisions. Remind your friend that they are smart and capable, and that you wholeheartedly support their ability to make their own choices. True recovery from abuse does not mean that the victim stops taking orders from their abuser and starts taking orders from their friends - true recovery means regaining the autonomy to decide for themselves. 

Avoid bashing their partner. I know it’s tempting to want to let your friend know what a horrible, lazy, abusive piece of shit their partner is. Don’t. People tend to view their partners as an extension of themselves - when you tell someone that their partner is garbage, what they hear is “I think you’re the kind of person who chooses to date garbage”. It puts them in a position where they feel like they need to defend their partner and their dating choices, and ultimately pushes them closer to their partner and further away from you. 

Focus on feelings, not labels. A lot of victims struggle with the word “abusive”. They don’t want to think of themselves as someone ended up in an abusive relationship - there’s a lot of stigma attached to that idea - and so they might push back hard if you try to force that idea on them, making them more defensive and less likely to leave. Don’t worry about the word “abuse” for now - your loved one doesn’t actually need to acknowledge that the relationship is abusive in order to leave it. They just need to realize that they aren’t happy. When a friend brings up something potentially (or definitely) abusive that their partner did to them, don’t rush to label it - instead, ask them about how that incident made them feel. Validate those feelings. When they say “it really scares me when my partner starts throwing things around”, don’t say “throwing things is on the abuse checklist” - say “Oh wow, that does sound really scary. Do they do that a lot? How are you coping with that? That doesn’t sound like something that should happen in a relationship at all. Are there any other times that your partner scares you?”. Encourage your friend to think critically about the relationship, their feelings, and what they want in a partner - help them contextualize their relationship and recognize that their experiences aren’t “normal”, and they can arrive at the conclusion that it’s abusive in their own time. 

Keep your relationship with them positive. Having conversations about the abuse you’re experiencing is exhausting, and if every interaction you have with your friend turns into a long lecture about how they need to leave the relationship, they might grow distant from you. If they want to talk about the relationship every time they see you, that’s great, but don’t try to drag information out of them if they don’t feel up to talking. Even if you’re having heavy conversations with them, it’s okay to try to keep things positive - compliment them, remind them of their strengths, remind them how much you care about them. Keep your tone thoughtful and concerned, but not preachy. There may be times when they just want lighthearted distractions from their situation, and that’s okay too.

Remind them that this is not their fault, and that they deserve better. Victims often stay in abusive relationships because they feel that they are causing their partner’s abuse or bringing it on themselves - something along the lines of “they wouldn’t have to get so angry with me if I didn’t screw up so much”. Let your friend know that the abuse isn’t their fault and that they didn’t do anything to cause it. Remind them that adults are expected to behave like adults even when they are upset, and that there are no excuses for their partner’s behaviour - they deserve to be with someone who treats them with respect and can manage their emotions like a rational, mature adult. 

Avoid shaming and blaming. Sometimes friends and family members will try to take on a “tough love” approach to getting their loved one out of the abusive relationship, and it’s profoundly unhelpful. They’ll say things like “if you stay, you’re choosing to be treated this way” and “I can’t watch you mess up your own life like this”, or even “your partner is going to kill you one day, is that what you want?”. It’s meant to try to shock or scare the victim into leaving - in reality, though, it just makes the victim feel even more worthless, and it makes them feel like a burden to the people who should be their greatest source of support.  

Encourage safety planning. It could take months or even years for a victim to decide that they are ready to escape - instead of trying to rush that timeline, start by simply encouraging the victim to start thinking about their physical safety. A safety plan is not necessarily a plan to leave the relationship; it’s a plan to prevent or minimize violence and protect yourself from physical harm, so that you’ll have the option to leave the relationship when you’re ready. Let your friend know that you’re worried about their safety, and that you’d really like to help them brainstorm some ways that they can keep themselves out of harm’s way. Offer assistance if you can. A safety plan should always be tailored to the victim’s individual situation, and should involve planning for common triggers and early warning signs of violence. If your friend knows that violence is likely when their partner comes home drunk, for instance, you could make a plan for your friend to leave their home whenever that happens and come stay at your place until their partner sobers up. Work with them to plan for their unique circumstances, and check the internet for online safety planning resources. 

Offer resources, but don’t push them. Almost every city and town has some form of help available for victims of domestic violence - there are hotlines, shelters, victim services agencies, counselling centres, etc. Resources are great, but not if you’re dumping a bunch of unwanted pamphlets in your friend’s lap that they didn’t ask for. Again, survivor autonomy is key here - your friend is the expert in their own situation, and they get to make the decision about when (or whether) to access resources. You also need to remember that accessing resources - or even getting caught researching resources - could be very dangerous for your friend, and it’s important that you let them take the lead on deciding what is safe for them to access. If you want to offer resources, do it gently - if you’re having a conversation where they seem to be acknowledging that things in their relationship aren’t great, you can say, “hey, would it be okay if we researched some resources together? What do you think would be helpful for you? What are you comfortable with, and how can I support you?”

Make open-ended offers of support. Make it very clear to your friend that your door is always open to them, and that they can call you anytime they need help. They need to know that it doesn’t matter if you haven’t spoken in six months and it’s the middle of the night - you will come pick them up, give them a place to stay, take them to the hospital, or give them any other kinds of support you’re able to offer. Abusers often succeed at keeping their victims trapped through isolation; they will prevent their victim from seeing or speaking to friends for so long that the friendship deteriorates, so by the time the victim is ready to leave, they have nowhere to go and no one to offer the kinds of material or moral support that they need to leave the relationship. Make sure your friend knows that you’ll still be there for them even if you lose contact for months or a couple of years, and that they never need to feel weird about turning to you for help whenever they need it. 

Be patient. It often takes several dozen instances of abuse before a victim acknowledges that the relationship is abusive, and the average abused woman (there are currently no statistics on men) attempts to leave seven times before successfully escaping the relationship. Leaving is a process, and victims need friends and family members in their lives who understand this. Many victims end up losing their support system when loved ones become frustrated with how long it’s taking for them to leave; if you are supporting a domestic violence victim, it’s important to have a realistic sense of how long it can take to safely and permanently exit an abusive relationship, and manage your expectations accordingly. 

If you are supporting a loved one in an abusive relationship, it’s also important that you take good care of yourself. The feelings of fear, worry and powerlessness that you experience when you watch a loved one struggle with abuse can be overwhelming, and you need to make sure that you are maintaining your own mental health while you are helping someone else. Take breaks. Talk to friends. Spend time on your hobbies. Eat good food and get exercise. If you’re feeling frustrated with the situation - and it’s absolutely valid to be frustrated - channel your feelings into art, journalling or anything else that helps you work through it. If you are feeling lost, you can contact a domestic violence resource center or hotline - they can give you tips for how to help your friend. 

If your friend is okay with it, it would also be helpful if you joined forces with at least one of their other friends or family members to help support them. Knowing that there’s at least one other person who can be there for your loved one and pick up the phone if you’re unavailable can take a huge amount of stress off your shoulders. Feeling like you are the only thing standing between a loved one and serious harm at the hands of their partner is a hugely stressful situation to be in - when you build a team of supportive people around the abused person, that person has a lot more support at their disposal, and you get to avoid burning out. 

It’s not easy to leave an abusive relationship. It’s not easy to help someone leave. But with the right support, you can help your loved one achieve a safe, abuse-free future. 

[skin-slave]

authoritarianism = wanting fic writers to have awareness of what they’re posting and know their potential audience??

literature has been banned (or burned for this matter) because it challenged the societal norms of that time/culture. this doesn’t equate to works of fanfiction depicting things that are morally corrupt to begin with.

what arch, or what lesson, does the reader get from those types of l fics? because all I see is a normalization/sexualization of pedophilia, incest, assault, etc. it would be different if these topics were written as a true experience that victims of these things go through. that’s also why music that corey taylor or jon davis have written cannot be used to justify this; those songs are a reflection of pain, heartache, and anger with the horrible shit that happened to them. the purpose of this is to show the listener that they aren’t alone in their struggle. their music has helped me with so much, especially knowing that both of them are victims of csa as well.

that’s why i’m not a purist, nazi, or whatever the fuck you want to call me. of course we should discuss these topics, but in a more meaningful way. we should take the depravity and hurt in us, and use it to inspire and help others heal.

one more thing- a couple of us, including me, are psychology majors. we know what we’re talking about. please refrain (unless you’re a psych major or a psychologist yourself) from trying to tell us how shit works within the field. (I could literally give you articles spelling out the dangers this shit causes)

have a good life ;))

If you hold amateur artists to a higher standard than professional artists, and you push that double standard as a kind of universal moral stance, and seek to censor and punish those who don't comply, and you don't see how that's absolutely draconian, I can't help you.

For anyone reading: Of all fandoms, Slipknot is one of the stupidest ones to police. Their work is aggressive and violent. It's not tagged or hidden behind consent checks. It isn't created to be educational, and therefore has no instruction. It's perverse, depraved, offensive, and immoral. Their behavior on stage, in real life, is disgusting and violent.

If their gross art is ok, then gross art is ok. Period. You aren't entitled to anyone's motivation, medical history, or trauma receipts. You don't get to hand out and withhold licenses to be gross. No one does. The very concept of creating that authority is oppressive and authoritarian.

If I get to decide who's qualified to make gross art, artists have to choose between giving up privacy and giving up their voice. Anyone who isn't willing to out themselves (a traumatic and dangerous process) doesn't get to speak. Anyone who does has a new set of problems. Bc there's nothing to prevent me from calling them a liar, humiliating them publicly, and still denying them a voice. There's nothing to prevent me from letting ppl write stuff I like and conveniently vetoing stuff I don't like. There's nothing to prevent me from acting on and perpetuating harmful stereotypes (ie men don't get to art bc they can't get raped; Bipoc have to go to extra lengths to prove worthiness bc they're oversexualized and therefore seen as complicit rather than victimized; trans survivors have to do the same bc they're inherently deceptive; m-spec women who are victimized by men made their own bed; date/marital rape doesn't count; hypersexual victims don't count; kinky victims don't count; victims who are sex workers don't count; ppl with non-sexual trauma don't count). There's nothing to prevent me from molding the landscape of art to express a message of my choosing.

A requirement that the gross be "meaningful" is just another way to control art. Who says what's meaningful? Who says what's harmful? What if I say that Duality romanticises self-harm and discourages recovery by painting survivorship as hopeless? What if I say that Disasterpiece is just revenge porn that's trying to normalize necrophilia? Do I get to take them away? Do I get to threaten to take them unless they're re-written to fit my demands?

When art has an agenda, it's not art anymore. It's propaganda. It's manipulative. It strips autonomy and agency. It others, isolates and punishes anyone who doesn't fit, which usually means minorities and ppl who are already vulnerable.

"Why do you do this?" and "What do you get out of it?" are completely and utterly irrelevant. It doesn't matter. It can't matter. Not to authority, not to spectators. No exceptions. The right to create cannot be restricted. The right to consume cannot be restricted.

And no, gross art is not poison. While some ppl cannot safely engage, others can and may need to. The only person who can help you determine how you may be affected is your therapist. Even then, it's still your choice to consume or abstain in peace.

(A rando on the subway is not qualified to tell you if you're lactose intolerant. Even if the rando is a Dr, if they aren't your Dr, they aren't qualified. Even if your Dr confirms that you are, you still have the right to buy and eat ice cream. Diarrhea is yours to have if you choose. Ice cream companies are not required to stop producing it, or to slap it out of your hands. They put "contains milk" on the carton and then it's up to you. You can quite literally kill yourself with ice cream. Even so, no one has the authority to police your consumption or make dilly bars illegal. You don't get to harass me, and I don't get to harass you. That's it. That's the whole thing.)

[arcticdementor]

You know what America needs? More mirrors for princes—the Renaissance genre of advice books directed at statesmen. On the Right, we have many books that identify, and complain about, the problems of modernity and the challenges facing us. Some of those books do offer concrete solutions, but their audience is usually either the educated masses, who cannot themselves translate those solutions into policy, or policymakers who have no actual power, or refuse to use the power they do have. Scott Yenor’s bold new book is directed at those who have the will to actually rule. He lays out what has been done to the modern family, why, and what can and should be done about it, by those who have power, now or in the future. Let’s hope the target audience pays attention.

The Recovery of Family Life instructs future princes in two steps. First, Yenor dissects the venomous ideology of feminism, which seeks to abolish all natural distinctions between the sexes, as well as all social structures that organically arise from those distinctions. Second, he tells how the family regime of a healthy modern society should be structured. By absorbing both lessons and applying them in practice, the wise statesman can, Yenor hopes, accomplish the recovery of family life. (Yenor himself does not compare his book to a mirror for princes; he’s too modest for that. But that’s what it is.)

…

You will note that this is a spicy set of positions for an academic of today to hold. You will therefore not be surprised to learn that Yenor was the target of cancel culture before being a target was cool. He is a professor of political philosophy at Boise State University, and in 2016, in response to Yenor’s publication of two pieces containing, to normal people, anodyne factual statements about men and women, a mob of leftist students tried to defenestrate him. Yenor was “homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic.” (We can ignore that the first two of those words are mostly content-free propaganda terms designed to blur discourse, though certainly to the extent they do have meaning, that meaning should be celebrated—I would have given Yenor a medal, if I had been in charge of Boise State.) They didn’t manage to get him fired (he has tenure and refused to bend), but the usual baying mob, led by Yenor’s supposed peers, put enormous pressure on him, which could not have been easy. He still teaches there; whether it is fun for him, I do not know, but it certainly hasn’t stopped him promulgating the truth.

…

Yenor begins by examining the intellectual origins of the rolling revolution, found most clearly within twentieth-century feminism. One service Yenor provides is to draw the battle lines clearly. He does this by swimming in the fetid swamps of feminism; I learned a lot I did not know, although none of it was pleasing. He spends a little time discussing so-called first-wave feminism, but much more on second-wave feminists, starting with Simone de Beauvoir, through Betty Friedan, and into Shulamith Firestone, this latter a literally insane harridan who starved herself to death. The common thread among these writers was their baseless claim that women had no inherent meaningful difference from men, and that women could only be happy by the abolition of any perceived difference. This was to lead to self-focused self-actualization resulting in total autonomy, and a woman would know she had achieved this, most often, by making working outside the home the focus of her existence. Friedan was the great popularizer of this destructive message, of course, which I recently attacked at length in my thoughts on her book The Feminine Mystique.

…

After this detailed examination of core feminist ideas, Yenor suffers more, slogging through the thought about autonomy of various two-bit modern con men, notably Ronald Dworkin and John Rawls. He analyzes the dishonest argumentative methods of all the Left, in general and in specific with regard to family topics—false claims mixed with false dichotomies and false comparisons, what he calls the “liberal wringer,” the mechanism by which any argument against the rolling revolution is dishonestly deconstructed and all engagement with it avoided. The lesson for princes, I think, is to not participate in such arguments, and to remember what our enemies long ago learned and put into practice—that power is all.

Yenor describes how the modern Left (which he somewhat confusingly calls “liberalism,” but Rawls and his ilk are not liberal in any meaningful sense of the term, rather they are Left) uses the law to achieve its goal of the “pure relationship,” meaning the aim that all relationships must be ones of free continuous choice, that is, without any supposed repression. This leads to various destructive results when it collides with reality, including the reality of parent-child bonds, and more generally is hugely destructive of social cohesion. From this also flow various deleterious consequences resulting from ending supposed sexual repression; this section is replete with analysis of writings from Michel Foucault to Aldous Huxley, and contains much complexity, but in short revolves around what was once a commonplace—true freedom is not release from constraints, but the freedom to choose rightly, to choose virtue and not to be a slave to passions, and rejection of this truth is the basis of many of our modern problems.

…

Finally, Yenor turns to what should be done, which is the most noteworthy part of the book. As he says, “Intellectuals who defend the family rightly spend much time exposing blind spots in the contemporary ideology. All this time spent in the defensive crouch, however, distracts them from thinking through where these limits [i.e., the limits Yenor has just outlined in detail] point in our particular time and place. Seeing the goodness in those limits, it is necessary also to reconstruct a public opinion and a public policy that appreciates those limits.” Thus, Yenor strives to show what a “better family policy” would be.

This is an admirable effort, but I fear it is caught on the horns of a dilemma. The rolling revolution does not permit any stopping or slowing; much less does it permit any retrenchment or reversal. Our enemies don’t care what we think a better family policy would be. And if we were to gain the power to implement a better family policy, by first smashing their power, there is no reason for it to be as modest as that Yenor outlines—rather, it should be radical, an utter unwinding of the nasty web they have woven, and the creation of a new thing. Not a restoration, precisely, but a new thing for our time, informed by the timeless Old Wisdom that Yenor extols. The defect in Yenor’s thought, or at least in his writing, is refusing to acknowledge it is only power that matters for the topics about which he cares most. But presumably the future princes at whom this book is aimed will know this in their bones.

Yenor himself doesn’t exactly exude optimism. Nor does he exude pessimism, but he begins by telling us that “we are still only in the infancy” of the rolling revolution. This seems wrong to me; in the modern age, time is compressed, and fifty years is plenty of time for the rolling revolution, a set of ideologies based on the denial of reality, to reach its inevitable senescence, when reality reasserts itself with vigor. This is particularly true since every new front opened by the revolution is more anti-reality, more destructive, and more revolting to normal people, who eventually will have had enough, and the sooner, if given the right leadership.

…

For most purposes, what Yenor advocates would be a restoration of family policy, both in law and society, as it existed in America in the mid-twentieth century. I’m not sure that’s going back far enough for ideas. You’re not supposed to say it out loud, and Yenor doesn’t, but it’s not at all clear to me that even first-wave feminism had any virtue at all. To the extent it is substantively discussed today, we are given a caricature, where the views of those opposed to Mary Wollstonecraft or John Stuart Mill are not told to us, rather distorted polemics of those authors about their opponents are presented as accurate depictions, which is unlikely, and even those depictions are never engaged with. But we know that most of what Mill said about politics in general was self-dealing lies that have proven to be enormously destructive, so the presumption should be that what he said about relations between men and women was equally risible.

…

Penultimately, Yenor addresses such new frontiers being sought by the rolling revolution, with the implication that the rolling revolution might, perhaps, be halted. Here he talks about the desire of the Left to have the state separate children from parents, particularly where and because the parents oppose the revolution, but more generally to break the parent-child bond as a threat to unlimited autonomy. He says, optimistically, “No respectable person has (yet) suggested that parents could be turned in for hate speech behind closed doors.” But this has already been proven false; Scotland is on the verge of passing a new blasphemy law, the “Hate Crime and Public Order Law,” and Scotland’s so-called Justice Minister (with the very Scots name of Humza Yousaf) has explicitly noted, and called for, entirely private conversations in the home that were “hate speech” to be prosecuted once the law is passed. A man like that is beyond secular redemption, yet he is also a mainline representative of the rolling revolution. The reality is that discussion does not, and will never work, with these people, only force. Still trying, Yenor presents a balanced picture to his hoped-for audience of princes, such as discussing when state interference in the family makes sense (as in cases of abuse). However, such situations have been adequately addressed in law for hundreds of years; the rolling revolution is not a new type of such balancing, but the Enemy. Discussions about it will not stop it. No general of the rolling revolution will even notice this book, except in that perhaps some myrmidons may be detached from the main host to punish Yenor, or to record his name for future punishment.

Yenor ends with a pithy set of responses to the tedious propagandistic aphorisms of the rolling revolution, such as “Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.” And, laying out a clear vision of a renewed society based on the principals he has earlier discussed, he tells us, “In the long term, the goal is to stigmatize the assumptions of the rolling revolution.” No doubt this is true; cauterizing the societal wound where the rolling revolution will have been amputated from our society will be, in part, accomplished by stigmatizing both the ideas and those who clamored for them or led their implementation. How to get to that desirable “long term,” though, when their long term is very clear, and very different from the long term Yenor hopes for? He says “Prudent statesmen must mix our dominant regime with doses of reality.” Yeah, no. Prudent statesmen, the new princes, must entirely overthrow our dominant regime, or not only will not a single one of Yenor’s desired outcomes see the light of day, far worse evils will be imposed on us. Oh, I’m sure Yenor knows this; it’s the necessary conclusion of Yenor’s own discussion of those eagerly desired future evils. He just can’t be as aggressive as me. I’m here to tell you that you should read this book, but amp up the aggression a good eight times—which shouldn’t be a problem, especially if you have children of your own, whose innocence and future these people want to steal.

[neurodivergentcosmos]

Wherever You Go, There’s a Forest of Arden (Ch. 2)

Here’s the final chapter! Thank you everyone for reading and I hope you enjoyed it! You can find Chapter 1 here.

Arden gingerly sat on the edge of couch, wrapping the tangle around their fingers, unwrapping, and then rubbing it between their palms. They took a deep breath, letting the sound of their hands against the tangle calm them for a moment. “Here you go,” Mr. Fell said as he handed them a mug of hot cocoa and sat in the chair across from them, hands clasped in front of him. “Thank you,” Arden replied and held the mug close to their chest and took a few sips before putting it down on the table.

Mr. Fell gave Arden a soft smile, “What is your name?” 

“Arden.”

“Oh!” Mr. Fell beamed. “I was just looking over an edition of As You Like It, I don’t know if you are familiar with it…”

“I actually chose to name myself Arden after I read it for the first time!” Arden flapped their hands excitedly. “It’s gender neutral and all of the characters just discovered in the Forest of Arden what the world could be like and could express themselves freely…” They trailed off and noticed their hands. I can’t move like that I need to keep that…They saw Mr. Fell flapping his hands with an expression of complete joy. Oh…I can flap here.

Mr. Fell’s expression shifted to concern as he asked, “You don’t have to tell me, but I am wondering if something happened?” Arden hesitated, “I-I don’t want to burden you…” “You won’t,” Mr. Fell responded firmly. Arden drank and stimmed with the tangle, nerves rising. “It’s trivial really but um I’m getting a flu shot for the first time tomorrow. I know that’s a weird thing to be anxious about… well for context I’m autistic and when I was diagnosed my mom turned to anti-vaccine ideology for answers. She… she wanted a neurotypical child.” Arden took another steadying breath. “That ideology was all I knew; I didn’t know of any other way to live. To everyone, being normal was the only way to live a good life. I worked hard to be a normal person, but I always failed. Because I believed all this, I felt…um…that my whole being was wrong. A couple years ago, I suddenly just couldn’t try to be normal anymore. Thanks to the Internet, I learned the truth. I realized that I was born autistic and that it isn’t a bad thing to be. I needed to accept myself so I can live. The people around me refused to understand so I moved away when I could. The shot tomorrow has caused a lot of the fear I internalized from that time to come back and I’m just scared that maybe that I will always have that fear.”

Arden looked up nervously, Oh God was that too much?, but Mr. Fell’s expression was different. For a moment, his face embodied a deep rage that remained within yet encompassed years of witnessing the world’s injustices, making Arden wonder, how many people have come here at their lowest point and told him of their pain? His expression then shifted to quiet sadness, “Forgive me, dear, it is just that your experience happens to remind me of my own. You’ve been very brave. In an ideal world, being who you are should not have to be brave, but sadly the universe doesn’t seem to be there yet. While my experience is different, the, um, community I came from held a worldview of the universe that’s similar.” Arden leaned forward, listening intently.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

“It was more of a strict view of God’s plan,” Mr. Fell continued. “It was very ‘This is the One Truth and one day everyone will realize that.’ I believed in their view deeply, but the community always treated me as inherently wrong no matter what. I suppressed anything odd about the ways I move and speak, yet that didn’t change anything. Then I met Anthony.” Mr. Fell’s face lit up with the light of infinite suns. “He showed me such a new way of thinking about the universe. His vision of a world where everyone has autonomy was so beautiful. For the first time, I saw that perhaps I could live a life of my own choosing. At first, I tried to nip my new ideas in the bud, but I began to question the community and became disillusioned. Anthony’s vision of the world was now  my vision too, and we could make that vision reality together.  So I chose to reject it all and start anew. Now Anthony and I have been partners for a long time. I run this bookshop while he tries to yell at his plants less in our flat above when he’s not in the bookshop. While I often do have difficult days where I feel ashamed of my past, I know I have this life right here and I couldn’t be happier.”

Arden felt that they could breathe again for the first time in a long time. “Thank you for sharing that with me. I don’t have a lot of words right now, but I didn’t think I’d ever get to meet someone who went through a similar experience and I just—thank you.” “Of course,” Mr. Fell answered.

Arden leaned back in the chair, lost in thought. “ I remember that when my mom told me about the anti-vaccine treatments, she said that my ‘recovery’ was a miracle thanks to God. That really messed up how I feel about God. Did you struggle to believe after everything?”

“What you believe is entirely your choice. I was disillusioned over the community’s view of God, but I wanted to have faith in Her. So I chose how I believe in Her. The way certain people twist who God is to harm others…” Aziraphale paused, passion rising as he went on, “I think, Arden, God created you as you are because She believes in you as you are. God transcends any idea of “normal” so you never need to be “normal” for God. Miracles are not about attempting to take away an identity essential to who you are. They’re about being alive. Taking in a beautiful view of London at sunset is a miracle. Surviving the worst and using your experience to help others live is a miracle. Discovering who you are is a miracle. In those moments, I think God is present within us. I got carried away, but I hope that helps.” Arden, lost for words for a minute, took a few breaths to process everything. But Mr. Fell’s belief gave them peace that they didn’t realize they were looking for until now. “I’m still questioning my beliefs, but your words help enormously. Your view of God is beautiful. You make believing in God make sense.”

“Thank you, I’m truly glad,” Mr. Fell replied.

“I hope the world can be more built for people like me one day.”

“So do I.”

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The two of them sat in comfortable silence for a couple minutes, Arden in wonder over the sequence of events. I’m not alone in this. “Oh! I’m afraid I have to cut our time short—Anthony is coming home soon to take us to try a new Italian restaurant tonight. I really enjoyed talking with you and please come here whenever you’d like,” Mr. Fell wiggled with joy. “I really enjoyed talking to you too, and I definitely will come back,” Arden flapped. As they put the tangle back in the stim box—

“Arden? Before you go...” “Yeah?” “I see that you’re struggling to move forward. Perhaps you could remember the Forest of Arden. Once the characters stepped in it, they could reject the norms of the court and learn what the world could be without that. They became better people. Everyone transformed because the forest gave them freedom to discover themselves for the first time. As you continue to discover yourself, you’ll flourish. Then others with similar experiences who feel lost can find you and you can help them grow into Forests of Arden for even more people. So many people have transformed the world that way. I think you could be a Forest of Arden.”

“God, you’re going to make me cry,” Arden smiled and ran a hand over their watering eyes. “You are one too. Thank you, for everything.” “Of course.” Arden walked out of the bookshop on to a quiet street, sun setting in front of them. They stood still, watching its purple, pink, and orange hues transform the sky into something so extraordinary that even that word couldn’t capture the wonder of it all. Arden tipped their head back and hummed. I’m transforming, and it’s a miracle.

[vampiresuns]

Would Valerius ever realize Anatole is his nephew in the upright timelines?

More than upright/reverse divide, the divide is apprentice/non apprentice timelines. Valerius knows he is his nephew at all times, except during the prologue — here, he thinks this is a magic trick, an illusion, not his actual nephew, and in Anatole’s canon (and therefore my own version of it) he throws him wine in absolute disdain.

Only to later realise that how he acts, how he moves, how he is, that the man in front of him is his nephew.

Getting on board the angst train, Anatole and Valerius are different sides of the same coin. Following my hcs about them, and again, my own version of canon, Valerius is the younger brother of Anatole’s father, who inherited the position of Consul through his own uncle’s husband, Florentino, a Vesuvian, brother of the former Consul. This is because Dragoslav’s and Valerius’ parents died when they were children, and were raised by their uncles Kuzma and Florentino, a married couple.

(Besides Drago and Valerius, there’s also Lucija and Kuzma Jr., both of them older than the former)

They lived in Vesuvia for about 10 years before moving back to Anatole’s home country (Balkovia, or the fantasy equivalent of former Yugoslavia), and having in consideration Anatole’s biological grandmother was Vesuvian, and none other of the siblings were at all interested, Valerius was the obvious choice.

(A side note, this makes Anatole Vesuvian, Slavic, and Latinx, as his mother is fantasy latinamerican)

Anatole was privately tutored from ages 15 to 18, and later studied politics and diplomacy in Parkra from ages 18 to 21, and continued his studies at the same time he began working with Valerius and the Council of Vesuvia from that age on. That means he had been working for three years with him when he died in the apprentice timelines. Now, keeping this exclusively about Val and Nana, Nana didn’t choose to follow Valerius into politics, not quite. This was his own choice, that was encouraged by Valerius, and chooses it less because he wants to be like him, and more because he wants to do something that matters and help people. Above all, Anatole, like Valerius wants to be great, just differently.

Valerius and Anatole were always close. Valerius was his favourite uncle, his favourite relative, and the first person he told he was a boy when he was 14 (before that Anatole plain refused to be called boy, or girl, and his deadname was almost never used on him. His family calls him Lily and Lilu), he used to follow him around before he moved to Vesuvia permanently, and when he did, he always visited in the summers. Valerius taught him to play chess and helped him fence, Anatole surpassing him in the former, but not in the latter. Yes, I headcanon Valerius knows his way with a rapier.

Valerius even helped him choose his name.

And moreover, and here’s the wonder trick, Valerius, like Anatole, also suffers their family. Based on Valerius fear of not being up to the rows of ‘notable’ and aristocratic, powerful people before him shown in Nadia’s route, he also knows what is like to have the very noisy, opinionated, often classist and judgmental Radošević’s breathing on your neck. The difference, is he does not suffer his social circles, while Anatole tries to steer away from high society and mingles with them only upon necessity, having very few true friends from it (namely, almost uniquely Nadia and Natiqa)

Anatole had a strained relationship with his parents and his family: he felt as if his autonomy and his voice were often smothered. Valerius taught him to survive this efficiently, while no one else could, did or cared to.

(Another side note: it isn’t that his parents don’t love him or care for him. They do. But Aureliana doesn’t understand him, and doesn’t love him like he needs, often being overbearing and commanding, she tends to tell him what to do, and try convince him her opinion is the truth, which stresses Anatole; Dragoslav simply doesn’t understand his son 90% of the time, and that creates a breach between them)

Because here is the thing. Despite Valerius being aware Anatole doesn’t think like him, Anatole is Valerius’ weakness, or rather, his soft spot. He always thought he was the brightest thing to ever happen to the Vultures (their family, as he calls them), and they didn’t even have the sight to appreciate him. He is his little sun, the best of them, the brightest of them. Valerius actually listens to Anatole’s opinion, and asked for his advice. Where is the tragedy? When Valerius turns back from him, from what seems to be his sole redeeming trait at times, life goes south for him. The tragedy is Valerius ended up doing what the rest of Anatole’s family has always does with him: ignored him and decide for him.

That’s what happened during the plague in the apprentice timeline, and it makes their relationship go to hell. This also happens in non-apprentice timelines, where their estrangement lasts until little after the events of the game, depending in which LI route you’re following.

But this is about apprentice!Anatole. When Anatole is sick, Valerius tries to care for him, willing to spare nothing, Anatole thinks this is unfair, he will not become another Lucio, hoarding resources from the citizens, and he will not get his uncle ill. He writes him a letter like he does to Julian, and he leaves for the Lazaret.

The rest in history.

(When Anatole dies, where he first wakes up is not the Fool’s realm, it’s the Hierophant’s.

“My fool, rebel child, what is it that you’ve done?”)

When Anatole died, the sun went out from Valerius life, and with that, the last tendrils of hope he had of actually being able to do his job — not only because of dealing with grief given Valerius is not great with his feelings, but also considering Valerius, while educated, does not connect with the people of Vesuvia like Anatole did. Beyond his own capacities and competence (which are there), Anatole was his link to the city, and usually humanised him and the Council to common citizen’s eyes. It is my running joke the only competent people in Vesuvia’s government was, for the longest time, a twenty something years old.

Secondly, Valerius did not tell their family Anatole died. His first great failure was being unable to protect his nephew. Thirdly, can you imagine the grief? The guilt? The absolute disdain at seeing Lucio, the carrier of the plague bargain and not die, while Anatole, his virtuous, intelligent nephew died? And he died for what? For a bunch of citizens who won’t remember him, for a two penny combat doctor who didn’t pay enough attention to realise he died.

When Lucio ‘dies’ himself, he couldn’t care less. He shouldn’t live, if Anatole cannot.

It is said in Nadia’s route Valerius was always a challenge, but never cruel.

Asra would’ve had to keep Anatole being brought back a secret from Valerius. If mentions of being dead and trying to rekindling his memories before he is ready sends him to a catatonic state, he has no idea what it could do if Valerius barrelled in. Not that I think that Asra’s opinion of Valerius is mightily high anyway, or that his recovery is the only thing at stake: there is the possibility of Valerius not believing that is his nephew, which is exactly what happened in the end.

My hc is that memories are not completely inaccessible, and like it’s shown in various parts of the game, the apprentice seem capable of recollecting places and faces, just not know how or why, or from where they know it. Valerius, for Anatole as an apprentice, has that quality. He knows immediately Valerius is important, but he doesn’t know why. He eventually either talks to him after the events of the game and asks, or puts the pieces together — he’s smart enough for that.

They do eventually rekindle their relationship, slowly, and Anatole also faces his family again with Valerius’ help. He doesn’t quite remember, but he wants to give it a try. It doesn’t go very well, but that is another story.

Theirs is a complex relationship in both apprentice and non apprentice timelines, but it is one both of them value, offences aside. Valerius was capital for Anatole to become the man he is, and while politically he doesn’t agree with him, and in non apprentice timelines, where he takes over as the Consul after the events of the game, a lot of his career efforts are directed towards undoing what was done by him and the former Consul before him (Anatole usually is in direct opposition to his family or his family’s connections) Valerius is his uncle, his friend, his protector and his mentor. He might be a bastard, but he is Anatole’s bastard.

To him he is the upright Hierophant, a teacher that initiated him in the ways of the world.

[laurensaysthings]

The Church

I can only speak for myself and the specific sect of Christianity I survived, and I believe wholeheartedly that every human being has the right to decide their own beliefs about existence. But I also believe that there are many others like me who have been traumatized by the weaponization of the unique brand of conservatism that occurs within certain Christian communities. 

Here is my truth.

I grew up attending an Evangelical Free Church in a small, predominantly white farming town. I was a depressed, anxious kid. As a licensed mental health professional, I would probably schedule a kid like me for twice-a-week sessions. But back then, I was praised as an overachiever. Middle school was my time to shine. I was 0.01 points away from being 8th grade valedictorian. I was involved in sports, yearbook, student council, youth group, guitar, piano and voice lessons. But buried under all of that was a mile-thick layer of insecurity and crippling fear of losing a Kim Il-Sung level of control over my existence.

Though I was surrounded by adults who purported to care about my “spiritual well-being,” not once did anyone acknowledge or seemingly even notice my many depressive episodes or extreme anxiety, let alone suggest I receive treatment. Instead, I was pushed to do more within the church. I led worship for the youth group and small-group Bible studies for other teen girls. All the while, I was broken, often suicidal, seeking out external affirmation as a way to subvert my lack of self-knowledge and self-worth. 

Women weren’t allowed to hold higher leadership positions in my church, so the highest achievement I could hope for beyond what I’d already attained was to land a husband. A man’s commitment to a me as a woman was the highest form of validation.   

And in the pursuit of being “chosen” as a wife, the greatest honor, I had to prove myself to be worthy in a very specific way. It was drilled into my head that the highest form of integrity a woman can have is sexual purity. This meant not having sex before marriage but also, not leading men astray in my daily life. Mostly this meant I had to dress conservatively, because I was taught that men having sexual thoughts about me was my own fault only. I was Eve and every man on earth was Adam. He only ate the apple because she suggested it. 

In retrospect, this ideology is obviously why it took me 4 years to share the fact that I’d been raped with my Christian relatives. In fact, I still struggle with the vestiges of this ideology in my romantic relationships. How do you build an equal partnership when you are responsible for your partner’s actions and even their private thoughts in addition to your own? What an impossibly heavy burden to carry. 

Meanwhile, I was never taught about consent and bodily autonomy. The focus was only on sexual purity, not on what it means to have agency over your body and your sexuality. “True love waits” was the mantra indoctrinated into us as teens. Just don’t have sex, then get married, then have sex. That was the limit of the education about sexuality. Men have the right to your body because men, after all, are the head of the church and the household. The pain of this still lingers in my bones. I am still grieving over what I’ve let men get away with and what I’ve blamed myself for, even recently. 

The first example I can recall happened when I was 16. I had dropped out of high school after freshmen year because my depression had become untenable. The excuse I used was that I was spiritually vulnerable to being led astray by my classmates’ drug use and sexual escapades. But ultimately it was as simple as this: I was mentally ill and not receiving treatment. 

I was in so much pain, and I couldn’t share this struggle with my fellow Christians, my community and support system, because even at age 14, I “understood” that being in emotional pain was merely a result of personal moral failings. I just had to be a better Christian, pray harder, be more involved in church activities. Then I would feel better. 

I was homeschooled my sophomore year, and then I enrolled in courses at a local community college for my junior year. I tried to hide my age from my classmates (which in retrospect was incredibly silly, considering I looked like a child). There was a man (age 19 or 20) with whom I had a few classes in common that first year, and he took an interest in me. You will recall that my entire education about relationships up until that point was limited to the church’s overtures about the importance of my purity and my responsibility for men’s purity, so I was deeply confused by this man’s behavior toward me. 

He sexually harassed me for months. It was so bad that at one point, a professor noticed and called me in to his office to ask me if I wanted to report the man to the school’s administration. But of course I didn’t because it was my fault. If I could just be more conservative, it would stop. I started dressing in baggier clothing, trying to talk to this man about Jesus so he too could be saved. I spent MORE, not less, time with him in this pursuit. He offered me a ride home one night, and I would have accepted had it not been for the intervention of my parents and a good friend I had at the college. Who knows what would have happened had I gotten into his car that night. 

A few days after I refused the ride home, he changed completely. He started mocking me, telling me how worthless, ugly, disgusting I was. I will never forget one night at the end of class as we were leaving, he turned around and, in front of all of our classmates, said to me, “No one will ever touch you.”

Thinking back, I am so deeply sad for how much I internalized that sentiment. Being desired by a man, no matter how awful his behavior, was the ultimate compliment. And even though the church sought to curb sexuality as a means of control over women, it ironically had the opposite effect. Suddenly, as a result of this man’s harassment, I understood that the easiest way to get attention from men was through my sexuality. 

The church taught me that it is irrelevant for a woman to be intelligent and compassionate and successful, because what matters most is marriage and children. Sure, you can have a career, as long as you have a family first. College was a means to an end: attend a good Christian school to find a good Christian husband.

Here is the impossible paradox inherent in the church’s lessons: attracting attention from men means you are impure and unworthy of committed love BUT your worth is determined by a man paying you attention and choosing to commit to you. And so we have the classic conundrum of the “innocent slut.” Of course I know this impossible standard exists outside of the church, but the church certainly does a good job of reinforcing the mixed messages women receive all day every day in a constant barrage of advertising. 

Imagine if we let women's integrity be defined in the complex, holistic ways we calculate men’s integrity. Of course that would require women to have power and bodily autonomy. It would require women’s worth to be defined outside of the context of men’s approval. In fact it would have nothing to do with men at all. But in the church, I learned that men are the center of everything. I can support them and play a role in their agendas, but they hold the power.

Fortunately here is where my own beliefs started to diverge from those I was steeped in. When I left home at 18, I moved to a new city and surrounded myself with incredibly strong women. They were funny, creative, brilliant. Some of them were even Christian, which actually helped during this transition period. Quite frankly, these women saved me. 

Through their relentless friendship, I learned that even though I was broken, I was still worthy of unconditional love exactly as I was. I didn’t need to change or hide my truth. On endless road trips across the country and all-nighters studying and just sharing the mundane parts of life with people who loved me so thoroughly, I started to heal. 

With these women in my life as my safe harbor, I could be weird and take risks and explore my talents and interests unhindered. It was a revelation. I started to understand the power of women and not fear it. I started to understand my own power, and it had nothing to do with men.

Of course, it’s a journey. During this same time, I let men take all kinds of liberties with my time and my body. To this day, I’m still recovering from the harm the church has done in my life, but my recovery started there with those brilliant women. 

In the decade and change since that time, I have gotten treatment for my mental illness. I still have depressive episodes every now and then, and on a scale of 1-10, my daily anxiety level is an 8. But part of who I am is that I run a little neurotic. I still want to have a Kim Il-Sung level control over my life, but I can cope when I don’t, which is most of the time. And I still seek out brilliant women as my daily support system. 

I hold a leadership position at work now. I have a team that relies on my integrity, which I define by my compassion, strength, commitment to social justice and unconditional support of my team members. 

I survived that Evangelical Free Church in a small, predominantly white farming town. I don’t look back with hatred or bitterness but rather with grief. I am grieving what I missed out on during those years and also the harm I may have done to others as part of that structure. 

To my family members who continue to try to reel me back into the church, this essay is for you. 

This is so you can better understand why I left and why I won’t return. I don’t begrudge you your beliefs at all but I do take issue with the institution. 

I believe that we all have to continue to examine the systems within which we operate. What I've learned in the years since leaving the church is that we often miss the forest for the trees. You can be so steeped in something that you miss the harm it’s doing. 

Another way to claim our power is to keep learning. Surround yourself with people who are different from you, listen to their experiences, believe them. Support others in claiming power that was stolen from them. 

As with those women who helped me heal, I want to be a safe harbor for others to heal. The work begins within ourselves and the institutions we uphold. We are responsible. 

Love, Lauren

[argotmagazine-blog]

Hysto

I had my reproductive organs voluntarily removed at twenty-two years-old. I’d like to imagine they’re pickled and floating in a jar waiting to be dissected. This is not the first time the distance between myself and my body has become literal; my perfectly healthy flesh and blood are my own worst enemy. My body is company I can only hold at this distance, like a prism against the ceiling light, a spectrum full of indecipherable color. A piece of me, somewhere, is gone.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about what it means for a transgender person to have surgery. I had to refuse any and all food and liquid, a seemingly impossible task for raging coffee-addict. I gingerly walked up the women’s and infant’s clinic front-desk alone, and told them that I was indeed, the patient being operated on this afternoon. To any passing stranger, I was a young man asking about his partner, wife, child. The reality was I stumbled over my words, with sweat on my forehead as the clerk found my name and said I needed to sign paperwork.

“Are you the patient?” the clerk asked me. I don’t recall anything unique about her. She looked me over with the type of familiarity she might give an unpleasant co-worker’s child.

I say yes. At this point, there’s no going back.

Cue me being asked to follow the dotted yellow lines into a room where I’m met with a dark hallway—not unlike the one from Barton Fink. It was surreal and slightly off-putting, like a dim forgotten corner of a movie set. I walked into the office to sign the consent forms and am asked to follow more yellow dotted lines to another department. In a matter of hours, I would be put to a sleep and operated on, as if none of this preamble ever happened.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the yellow-brick road Judy Garland and her dog dutifully traveled on to see the wizard, a mystical hermit in his emerald towers. The Wizard of Oz was an obsession in my single-parent household. The stripes on the floor are intended to guide patients and their families, but I went through this all alone, feeling like Dorothy after her house crashed on top of a poor witch. I want to apologize for intruding, for bringing this body into a women’s space, but because of my sex this is where the surgery must take place. It’s frustrating introducing myself; I’m ready as I’ll ever be for the procedure.

When a trans body enters a hospital, it’s as easy as being sucked up into a tornado. It’s swept away from a sepia-hued world into a hyper-visible, technicolor land of prying eyes and confused stares. It’s enough to give anyone cold feet. But there are medical fees for that. There are dollar signs flying like winged-monkeys everywhere. Legal paperwork saying I’m someone else might as well be a house dropping down on my head. That it clearly says they have the wrong patient.

But I had a letter saying I was supposed to be here, for this, I emphasized to the clerk, being as vague as possible. The surgery. I’m piss-broke and have just signed away a significant amount of money to pay for a surgery I would never be able to afford without my Ivy League college insurance.

Nice people get what they want and I wanted to have my organs removed to become a better, more whole person because of it. I was determined to find my ruby slippers, slap them together, and walk out to attend class next week like nothing happened. In retrospect, this is the apex of the overachiever mentality: going in for major surgery on Friday and talking about Foucault the following Monday.

I was used to trying to appeal to others for respect, so I smiled and nodded with every well- intentioned “miss” and “m’am” knowing all too well that the clinical description of “gender identity disorder” was stamped on every page of my paperwork. This was the nature of the beast, and I was lost in this Oz world, stumbling my way along, doing my best not to make myself too noticeable. All I wanted was to go home, metaphorically, into a body I could better recognize myself in. I had a big house crash in on my life and it was the body I lived in.

The DSM-5 now calls “gender identity disorder” “gender dysphoria disorder,” which supposedly lessens the stigma attached to transgender people. But bodies are messy and on principal, they’re subject to change regardless of how we choose to talk about them. This is inherently a problem with language and how culture violently twists and depicts trans bodies. I’m not here to entertain baseless arguments about people wanting to cut off limbs because they “think they should be an amputee.” Here was the brick wall in my transition: squishy organs, ripe for the picking.

Fixating on what people ought to do to their body isn’t new or exciting. I’m interested in the visceral messiness of the experience, the bureaucratic ritualism that preludes any endeavor to present ourselves to medical institutions. The mechanical process of sex-related surgery isn’t exciting. I doubt those other than the morbidly curious and skeptical would find the technicalities illuminating. It’s boring being a transgender person going under the knife. Waiting for surgery is like watching grass grow—nothing ever happens. It’s miles upon miles of dotted lines, signatures, and the sound of your own urine splashing against a measurement cup minutes before you’re on the gurney.

I spent my recovery watching gross, schlocky movies. It’s comforting losing myself in the screen, doing my best to get into another person’s head. It’s a good enough distraction from picturing the sinews of my abdomen healing together, my pelvic muscles recoiling after being sliced open for the surgery to take place. My gruesome tendencies go wild—I want to imagine all sorts of morbid transformations taking place where my uterus once was. I pictured it like the scene in The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum realizes he’s growing tiny insectoid feelers on his forearms. This scene is not unlike my own discoveries of individual chin hairs after years of injecting testosterone.

Compared to most transgender men, I’m about as masculine as a naked mole-rat. My body will now require synthetic hormones to be injected on a weekly basis in order to maintain itself. This is something I of course discussed at lengths for months with my doctor. There’s no problem here—I became obsessed with my own boredom waiting for my body to heal. I felt abnormally well.

I fantasized about a creature inside of me ready to burst out like an Alien parasite, announcing that I’m here, finally in this new home I call my meat and flesh. But no abomination will come tearing me open from the inside-out. Only my own ennui ready to swallow itself whole like Ouroboros.

The monster analogies are easy—Frankenstein, Chimera, test-tube creatures. Walking through the world with this body is the equivalent of hiding the fact you are, partially, the product of someone else’s handiwork. This is how I’ve come to terms with own sense of monstrosity, the jagged edges of my body that don’t quite all fit together.

Scholar Susan Stryker describes the trans body in her essay/performance piece My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix:

“The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.”

The trans body is both the site of medical and technological impact, crashing into each other violently to make beautiful results. The Frankenstein-qualities of a body that will need hormones to survive is admirable to me—it’s a powerful announcement of my own autonomy, the desire to live in a world constantly trying to kill me. I cut ties with the old biological demands of my old body for a new one, tailored to fit, in a form from “flesh torn apart.” This cycle began when I had chest reconstruction surgery and my hysterectomy is another symbolic middle-finger to the world. I have the agency to sew this body back together, transform it an optimized, beautiful living being.

When I inject my weekly hormones, I feel euphoria. I feel my body re-organize itself when I complete a dose. It’s an all-consuming experience that demands a concentrated up-keep of syringes, doses, needles, and gauges. To reject what I was given, I reach out for the tools at hand, become my own cyborg, someone who builds out of what’s despised.

From Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado:

“I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is post-pornographic, add a molecular prostheses to my low-tech transgender identity composed of dildos, texts, and moving images; I do it to avenge your death.”

Letting myself be used, medically, is an act of freedom. In his introduction to Testo Junkie, Preciado announces an “low-tech transgender identity” in conversation with the death of those he knows and loves. The consequences of dying, either on or off the surgery table, are all the same: the muscles give out and the body finally rests. Preciado and Stryker speak on the dissociation and pain of the trans body better than I ever could—the body isn’t one object, but a collection of “Frankenstein-qualities” and “dildos, texts, and moving images.” It’s an amalgamation of lost pieces sewn back together to make a façade that lasts just long enough, a shelter that endures just enough rough weather to survive. It’s a house, albeit one that crashed from the sky long ago.

Strewn on my bed, with my flesh bending itself back into shape, I couldn’t help but return to the image of bloodied meat. The recovery process is blinding, painful, and full of medication. My mind wandered to Elvira Weishaupt’s monologue in the climatic slaughterhouse scene of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons, in which a transgender woman recounts her childhood nostalgia with a friend. The scene is brutal, with vivid, long shots of cows being partially decapitated, their bloody flesh bare as Elvira speaks. Elvira is abused and traumatized by the men in her life after genital confirmation surgery, after which she commits suicide. The film, released in 1978—only one year before Janice Raymond published her hateful The Transexual Empire—explicitly associates the transformation of Elvira’s body with the carnage and violence that comes with production-line slaughterhouses. The transgender body is a site of mutilation and damage—surgeries only leave emotional and physical gashes that cannot heal, according to Fassbinder. The sentiment of the film is not empowering nor approving of transgender people’s autonomy in determining their own biology. It’s a moment of disgust and the re-opening of traumatic wounds by recollecting memories of a past body, one that the speaker cannot cling on to anymore.

The body is easily destroyed. It is also easily rebuilt, as sinews and connecting tissue regrow, the body regenerates itself, waking up again after being dormant. It’s amazingly resilient. A new flesh can spawn from the shrivel and bloodied remains of the last occupant—the meat of the body isn’t a dying thing. It grows and becomes—my scars now are just that now, only scars.

I still don’t know what the proper response is when people ask about the surgery.

It’s just a pinch, I want to tell them. A snap of the wrists. A crack of the skull.

A bullet to the heart. A fist to the eye.

That word, transsexual, hanging heavy and wet on a company’s tongue, because you had the dollar to your name and the will to live. Sticks and stones.

My body is vetting itself down the yellow brick road, hitting all the speed bumps along the way. It’s as good as broken. I like it this way.

Blake Planty loves crawling the web at the witching hour. He has fiction and essays published and forthcoming in Nat Brut, DREGINALD, Heavy Feather Review, Waxwing, The Fanzine, Tenderness Lit, and more. Find him talking about cyborgs and coffee at @_dispossessed on Twitter and online at catboy.club.

[elisaenglish]

Most Women You Know Are Angry — and That’s All Right

“In this op-ed, writer and journalist Laurie Penny, the author of the new book Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, explores female anger — why we hide it, why it's feared, how we can use it to change the world.

Many women you know are angrier than you can possibly imagine. Most are pretty good at hiding it, having been taught to do so since childhood.

One of the questions I am asked most often, when I give talks about my books on gender and politics, is about anger. Young women ask me how I get away with expressing anger with such apparent ease, and they worry about men’s reactions if they do the same. These questions are usually a veiled request for permission. Female anger is taboo, and with good reason — if we ever spoke about it directly, in numbers too big to dismiss, one or two things might have to change.

Young women who come to my events often tell me that they want to be more forthright, but they’re extremely worried about “coming across as too angry”. I usually reply that there are worse things to be. If you stand up for yourself, if you assert your right to self-respect and bodily autonomy, if you raise your voice above a whisper, if you leave the house without a sweet smile slathered across your face, some people will inevitably call you shrill, a scold, a nag, bitter, a bitch. And that's all right. Bitches, in the fragrant words of Tina Fey, get stuff done.

You’ll never guess quite how furious the women around you are, until you ask them. Some of the angriest women I know are also the sweetest, the kindest, the most personable and generous. Inside, they might be seething with rage they have been taught never to express, anger they can barely acknowledge even to themselves. They’d probably be surprised to find out how common that feeling is. They have learned that showing their anger is an invitation to mockery, shame, or shunning, so they displace their anger, try to smother it into silence, because they've learned that nice girls don't get cross. Nice girls don't speak out or stand up for themselves. It’s unladylike. It’s unbecoming. Worst of all, it’s threatening to men. Case in point: period jokes. How many times have you heard people dismiss and belittle a woman who dares to express emotion by telling her she’s probably menstruating? How many times have men in power — including Donald Trump — tried to push back and put down women who criticize them by implying that our opinions are nothing more than a mess of dirty, bloody hormones, none of it rational, none of it real? These jokes are never just jokes. They’re a control strategy.

The patriarchy is so scared of women's anger that eventually we learn to fear it, too. We walk around as if we were bombs about to go off, worried about admitting how livid we really are, even to ourselves. There are real social consequences for coming across as an “angry woman” — especially if you’re not also white, straight, and cisgender. In my work as a political writer and speaker, I've learned that the privileges I was born with mean I can “get away with” being angrier in public than other women I know. As a tiny white lady who passes as cis, I come across as "fiery" or "feisty," but someone else saying the same things might face more damaging stereotyping. “Race,” writes Roxane Gay in The New York Times, “complicates anger.”

If angry women manage to successfully hide their inconvenient feelings, they are praised for being “strong”. So often, “strong woman” is used to mean “a woman who doesn’t complain”. At most, we are allowed to speak about fear, about upset. Society can cope with girls who are “broken” — but girls who burn with fury are a problem, and they need to be controlled. Whenever my friends and I have to deal with harassment, abuse, and threats from people who would rather we not talk about women’s rights, we can expect some sympathy as long as we talk only about how frightened we are. But we’re not just frightened. We’re furious. We’re livid, because what is happening to us is unfair and unjust.

Boys learn to disguise their hurt and vulnerability as anger — girls, all too often, learn the opposite. Unfortunately, denying your anger does not make it disappear. It grows in the dark, away from daylight, into something twisted and unhealthy, eating away at you from inside. When I was a teenager and going through a difficult time, I didn't know what to do with my rage, so I treated it like a stained shirt and turned it inside out, keeping the rancor close to my skin where nobody could see. I directed my frustration inward and took it out on my own body, hurting and starving myself. In the slow, painful years of recovery, I learned that there were better ways of dealing with my anger, and I didn't have to be afraid of it. Part of me was always afraid that if I stopped hurting myself, I would start hurting other people — but anger does not have to lead to violence.

Anger is not the same as hatred, although it's easy to confuse the two, especially in a political climate where hatred of others comes easy and rational rage is met with mockery. Anger is a feeling. Hatred is an action. Hatred is anger applied indiscriminately, anger attached to cruel — rage reworked into an excuse to lash out at another person because of who or what they are. Anger itself is no more or less than the human heart rebelling against injustice, real or imagined, and often it has damn good reason.

It’s all right to feel angry. It’s all right to feel anything, in fact — as a society, we still fail to distinguish between emotions and actions, but it’s what we do, not what we feel, that delineates the difference between right and wrong. What matters is not how angry you feel, but what you do with it. Choosing to control your rage, to use it for good, is better by far than squashing it down or letting it eat you away from inside. Anger can be useful. It can keep you moving and working when you want to give up. It can give you courage when you need it. It can focus your attention on what has to change, in your life, in your community. Anger can be a tool as well as a weapon, and it’s a tool we shouldn't let rust away and never learn to use.

We worry too much about how men and boys will respond to our anger. One of the things I hear most often when I speak about female anger is that angry women are unattractive. This is supposed to end the discussion, because more than anything else, women and girls are supposed to want to be attractive. If we let on that we're cross, boys won't want to date us, especially not if it's them we're cross with. If we show our teeth, nobody will love us. I’m here to tell you that that’s not true. Being honest about my anger has made me surer in myself, and my life is now gloriously full of friends and partners who don’t require me to take up less space. The responsibility of making men feel safe and unthreatened was interfering with my plan of taking down the patriarchy and helping to build a world where the common human experience of being a woman doesn’t have to hurt so much. As far as I'm concerned, boys who want to be with only “cool, chill girls” should try dating in the morgue.

As I’ve grown up, I’ve stayed angry — but my anger has grown up, too. It has boiled down and condensed into something strong and subtle, something that I can control. Writing out my rage is cathartic — and useful, too. I’m lucky that my coping mechanism is also my career. Plenty of women are angry, and why wouldn’t they be? It's bad enough that women and girls are still being attacked and undermined, as individuals and as a group — when our basic rights to health care are stripped away, when we are blamed for the violence that is done to us and shamed for our sexuality, when we have to get up every day and deal with racism and homophobia and class prejudice. It's bad enough that we still have to fight to be treated as full, equal human beings without also being shamed and silenced if the whole situation makes us furious. Yes, we're angry. Why shouldn't we be? Why aren't you?”

Source: Laurie Penny, teenvogue.com (2nd August 2017)