It's weird when cis people feel like they own gender without understanding it.
The number of aggressively "supportive" cis white women demanding to know why I can't just be "a feminine man."
I like feminine men. They're great. But they're not women. And I am. That's it.
It's like the people who feel possessive about being American and want to keep others out when it's purely an accident of birth on their part.
People keep mistaking the "debate" over trans rights as a niche issue when it's the evangelical right negotiating with the well-to-do center-right over how severely they're going to collectively oppress women, kids, queer, and gender nonconforming people. That's why it's all over prestigious elite media like the New York Times. And it's not looking good at this point, folks.
Elon Musk's plan to make "X" an unbearable, ad-laden site useless to journalists or anyone else trying to link articles will surely pay dividends in his imagination.
It's not lost on me that society treats these rich weirdoes who inject their kids' blood to pretend they're still young with grudging respect, but respect nonetheless, while acting like some little trans girl growing her hair out means the end of civilization.
The one good thing I can say about Steve Jobs is he was a consummate salesman who thought tech should be beautiful and exciting (so people would want to buy it and show it off) whereas his peers just wanted to monetize the same shit over and over again forever.
Blatantly anti-LGBT+ legislation like KOSA just seems to glide past everyone's attention because unless it's called the Murder All Trans People Act of 2023 or some shit, nobody seems to care.
The thing about Q-Anon is it's basically self-selected to exclude the kinds of people who would be genuinely disappointed by repeated failed predictions and conspiracy theories. It's all true believers and petty fascists who don't care if it's true or not.
Nobody with an ounce of self-awareness or concern for the truth would bother with it.
It should be obvious by now that privatization and "running government like a business" are nothing more than dog whistles for the looting and authoritarian control of public goods.
Everything is monetized at the expense of its core purpose these days. Like college. Whether you get a good education is irrelevant compared to creating a long term debt burden. And anything that can't be monetized is politicized until it can be privatized and thus turned into another profit venture for somebody who doesn't care if it succeeds. Because even the success of a business is subordinate to how well those involved can cash out.
As fascists and fascism have proliferated and started creeping into the mainstream, there has come this strange idea that hating fascists is some kind of performative virtue signaling and not a logical response to genocidal sociopaths who want to torture and kill many of us.
I don't wanna punch fascists because I think it's cute. I want them dead. Because the only good fascist is a dead fascist. It's literally us or them.
People's insistence that things can't be improved and life is a zero sum struggle over the remaining good shit is a proximal cause of why things keep getting worse and why these people keep aligning with the rich assholes making it that way.
There's a very old reactionary tradition of labeling someone "insane" so as to take away their personal and bodily autonomy.
It's been done to women and sexual minorities for a long time, used to justify incarceration, "corrective rape," lobotomization, forced sterilization, "conversion therapy," torture, and a whole bunch of other atrocities.
The fascists are still at it today.
Some people consider themselves allies because they vaguely know some trans people or can imagine a "real" trans person whom they would support while nonetheless accepting anti-trans propaganda that too many people are transitioning too easily.
Perhaps they would prefer a carve-out for the "good" trans people but the result is they accept limitations on trans care and trans rights, particularly for kids, for the sake of the supposed many being harmed.
They're not allies.
People like to yell at me that the center-left are not my enemy and yeah, mostly, probably, but that doesn't necessarily make them useful allies either and there's a lot of wolves in sheep's clothing.
I have colorful things to say about everyone in the political spectrum. I'm not singling you out and it just starts to smack of "hit dogs holler" after a point.
My favorite video games are the ones that let me feel pretty and powerful without making me talk to annoying people. Or at least let me spend as much time as possible away from them.
Like, Skyrim understands if I just want to walk off into the forbidding, snowy mountains and never be seen again.
But a lot of games expect me to talk to characters they think are cute or interesting but are frequently just annoying or political mouthpieces for the developers' weird ideas.
Centrist "polarization" shit is inherently fascist because it yearns for a return to a bygone era of consensus driven by absolute cis-het white male dominance of politics and the economy.
The "polarization" pundits know what they're doing, by the way, and are barely one step removed from the average goose-stepping Republican. They just want to pretend affluence makes them more cultured than that.
Yeah, Ken Paxton was "acquitted." Texas needs federal troops and a second Reconstruction if you want anything to change here. The corruption isn't just deep. In Texas, corruption is the point.
People say trans women are soooooo powerful and then they bury us with transmisogyny they're never held account for because hurting us is socially acceptable.
“'Children in the US can be legally married in 41 states, physically punished by school administrators in 47 states, sentenced to life without parole in 22 states, and work in hazardous agriculture conditions in all 50 states.' Over and over again, the worst states for children are clustered around the 'pro-life' Bible Belt, and the map of the states that are the worst for children looks a lot like a map of red-state America."
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/09/human-rights-watch-usa-child-abuse-labor-report.html
@420f26f4 I've always wanted to be happy in a fairly ordinary way. Even my fantasies about power are just a way to enable that. LOL.
But I grew up with abusive family, including a brother who insisted he had to be the Chosen One for life to have any meaning, and I learned early on what kind of damage that does to them and the people around them.
Thinking you're special is a harmful delusion and the more innately, indispensably, and superhumanly special you think you are, the greater your capacity to do harm to yourself and others.
My seventh book, "Rain: A Novella," is now live as an Amazon ebook! It's a slim, standalone, open-ended story but there is a meta connection to my recent novel, "Not For Lack of Gravitas."
A teenage girl feels like her reality is constantly up for grabs. She seems to invent it from moment to moment according to the logic of a dream. Is she real? Is anything? Is she even human?
Someone out there knows. It's just a question of how deep the rabbit hole goes.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CB1VSTML
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