#this post is a mess organizationally but I don't have it in me to do a round of edits

[crimeronan]

re: your empathy posts. As someone who probably has higher than normal empathy (I used to ask people around me how they deal with sympathetic distress in common situations that occur in a job and only got blank stares) you're so valid!! The lionizing of this random subconscious process called empathy is so useless! It says nothing about the person and their values! As your other commenters suggested, people disparaging you may just be trying to boost their own shaky feelings about how their own emotional stability is deeply tied to their people-pleasing tendencies.

If anything, I think learning to function "normally" in society with "empathy" makes you more messed up. I understand this person's distress. I acknowledge it, and know how my actions will make it worse. I make them feel worse anyway, because that's the organizationally approved behavior, causing more pain for both them and myself. All the while I must behave as if I am cheerful and unbothered. Internalizing that hurting others and yourself to achieve your goals is Fine is necessary in order to stay sane. This is counter to everything people say they believe, so lying also has to become a virtue.

Buying kindness from the store seems like a really kind thing to do tbh. I am passing you on the street as I am schlupping over to pick up some callousness.

this last sentence made me giggle a lot. but YEAH!! a lot of this is spot-on to stuff i've been thinking about lately. like, "normal" empathy levels seem to be socially defined as "you care about people and want to help them, but you don't care so much that you'll harm yourself in pursuit of that" and it's all just..... i dunno. so much pathologizing of how we think and feel and whether we're Human (TM) about stuff. it's all so Weird

like..... i keep thinking that my lack of empathy gives me certain advantages in social situations. but in a similar vein to the ppl worried about sounding like tiktok empaths for being hyperempathetic, i worry that this makes me sound like an alpha male influencer writing youtube essays about why emotions make you weak, or whatever.

it's not that emotions make people weak or that having less empathy makes me like, a Cold Logical Calculating Math-Loving Strategist. i'm a writer who focuses solely on character-driven stuff, u probably wouldn't expect that from a stereotypically sociopathic person. part of why i LIKE writing character-driven stuff so much is BECAUSE i've had to actively teach myself how other people think, how they feel, how they struggle, etc

a lack of empathy means i can choose not to get invested in other people's feelings or lives, i don't feel guilty for emotionally disconnecting, i'm not afraid of being disliked. but i still know how to act like a decent human being. there's that one post about how stupid it is not to realize being nice gets people to be nice back, and fuckin. YEAH!! it's astonishing to me to read about cases of """clinical sociopaths""" (who are just people who didn't get the 'pretend you give a shit, moron' memo) manipulating and gaslighting people and whatnot. everyone in the comments will always be like "ooo so scary... they didn't feel bad at ALL... so terrifying that people who don't feel guilt exist..." and i'm like.

IS GUILT THE ONLY THING THAT KEEPS YOU FROM COMMITTING ATROCITIES???

BLOWS MY MIND. IT'S LIKE..... THE LEFTIST EQUIVALENT OF SAYING EVERYONE WOULD BE MURDERERS IF THEY WERENT SCARED OF GOD. LIKE. YOU ONLY AVOID DOING BAD STUFF BC IT MAKES YOU FEEL BAD??????

good LORD. at least having no empathy means i've had to grow my principles organically. oh my GOD.

anyway what brought these thoughts up today was that i was thinking about gansey and luz noceda, since theyre extremely similar characters & on my All Time Faves list. and i've said this before but the things i love about them (the kindness, self-sacrificing shit, anxiety, etc) are things i don't see in myself. but Wish I Did. like i wish i was kinder on the inside than i am.

but i know that i admire ppl with luz and gansey traits both in fiction and in real life. so i simply just..... emulate the luz and gansey actions. not always successfully, esp because i have a temper and very little patience, but like. i try to be kind where i can bc i wish i was someone who tries to be kind when they can. so i'm just going to be. u know??

[stopcannibalizingourown]

Hi! Just found your blog and I really like it. Idk if youve been asked this already but whats your opinion on using agab terms vs tme/tma terms? I personally like agab terms when discussing how people have been socialized but Ive heard some transfeminine people have valid problems with them being overused. Wanted to know your opinion on it. Thanks and have a nice day!

let’s just pretend I didn’t forget about this in my drafts for months, whoops

The short answer: I dislike both tme/tma and agab language.

I don’t really feel like getting into it at this time, so I’d like to direct you to @nothorses​ whose pinned post has a few takedowns of the terminology, as well as this post. Basically it’s a shitty dichotomy that was either coined or popularized for exclusionary purposes by a group of Lesbian Separatist Radical Transfeminists (and I don’t know if you know this, but I have immense disdain for separatist politics and for radical feminism, and slapping a “trans” onto it doesn’t make it any better lmao).

Now, as for agab language, it has specific contexts where it can be useful, such as medical contexts--though even then not everyone with the same assigned sex is going to have the same medical needs, even when it comes to reproductive organs, and that’s before you factor in hormonal transitioning and such. agab is not a surefire predictor for literally anything after the actual assignment itself, and it being used as such inevitably excludes people whose experiences don’t match up with the typical narrative.

And outside of those contexts? Yeah no it’s just not helpful. Like, to use socialization as an example, there’s no such thing as a coherent “afab socialization” or “amab socialization.”

To use my own life as an example, though I grew up in a patriarchal society like (to my knowledge) everyone from the US, my parents’ chosen family and thereby my extended family is closer to matriarchal than anything, which very much informed my understanding of gender growing up--a lot of traits that are associated with masculinity, such as directness or even abrasiveness, were exhibited primarily by the women I grew up around and looked up to, with the men being for the most part more mellow and nurturing by personality.

Or, as another example: as a kid, I was very much a wild child (outside the classroom where I was excessively obedient because I trusted authority figures), always energetic and outgoing--but also extremely cheerful, openly emotional, and friendly to basically everyone. At the age of eight, trauma Happened, and overnight I became introverted, depressed, emotionally repressed, bookish, and closed off. In either case, however, I was almost always read as a girl (until I hit puberty anyway) in spite of identifying as a boy because the way I acted conflicted with people’s understanding of what boys are.

And that’s the thing--what we’re socialized into is the entire system of binary gender, not just a single specific gender. Both what we understand the two binary genders to be as a result of our surroundings and how much we internalize the expectations for the gender we’re assumed to be are huge parts in how that socialization impacts our behavior. Not only that, but the behavior you learn in childhood does not necessarily determine your behavior as an adult. 

It will absolutely almost always affect it in unavoidable ways (it’s very unlikely I will ever not be impacted by my trauma), but just as I am neither the cocky, outgoing, unstoppable assumed-tomboy I was as a young child, nor the broody, depressed kid with a chronic inability to assert myself and my nose always buried in a book that I was during my later formative years, no one else is inherently defined by who they were taught and who they learned to be growing up.

This mostly turned into a tangent about socialization rather than about agab language in general, but I know some of my mutuals have written excellent posts about agab language as a whole, so feel free to drop those here lmao.

also P.S. I didn’t even get into how neurodivergence affects things but like. My autism absolutely informed my grasp of gender growing up and that’s common with many neurodivergences.

Edit: The other issue is, admittedly, the difficulty with replacement language—in spite of my disdain for it you'll occasionally see me using agab language myself. Idk things are complicated.