Alice's Wizardly Void-Space

B is quiet, sweet and gentle, has predominantly female friends, loves animals, spends weekends doing butterfly conservation with a group of elderly women, none of that makes her an egg but it's definitely unusual behaviour for a cis man.

No, what makes B such an obvious egg to me is how she is treated by everyone else. A lot of men just avoid her, they think she's weird and effeminate. Women generally like her well enough, but they still tend to keep her at arm's length in a way they don't do with cis men. In a way she is being third-gendered already, like there's no established pattern for men or women to interact with someone like her, so they just avoid doing so if they can help it.

Last year she asked out this girl Alice, and Alice said yes. They dated for a few months, broke up, and continued to be perfectly friendly. Alice started dating someone else, everyone moved on.

Then these whispers started that B was actually really creepy, people started saying they had heard bad things about her (unspecified), that she had abuser vibes, that she had done all this supposed bad stuff but no one was allowed to say what it was, but it was definitely bad. And, really unusually if B was a cis man, all the men and women and non-binary people in her circle all immediately stopped being friends with her. She was uninvited from events, people even cancelled one-on-one meet-ups with her, she was barred from attending the LGBTQ support group she went to (she is pan). And bear in mind that all this is stuff I heard only from the people who cut her off, I am at best a distant acquaintance of B.

I ended up at an organised-at-the-last-minute drinks event that was hosted by a cis woman acquaintance on the same night that B had a month earlier organised a boardgame session, and everyone who had been planning to go to B's boardgame meet cancelled to go to this drinks event, to which B was explicitly not invited (I didn't find this out until later, I'm not really part of this circle at all). Incidentally, the woman who hosted the event made a point of telling me she was concerned for my safety out in public at night, and then proceeded to call me a man 🤷.

Several months later, the details came out: the "creepy" thing she had done was to buy Alice a birthday present. Alice thinks that's weird because it's not normal for friends to buy each other birthday presents and so she understood this as B expressing a level of intimacy beyond friendship. (Again, this is Alice's perspective on what happened). I know for a fact that B buys her friends birthday presents often, because I know some of those friends. If Alice had originally led with, "B bought me a birthday present," rather than, "B is being creepy, and I don't want to tell you how just yet," it probably wouldn't've worked to socially isolate her, so she let everyone's imaginations run wild with ideas about what B might've done. Only when everyone had cut B off did she reveal the details, and I understand B's social life is very slowly recovering but there is still so much suspicion about her.

I've talked to enough trans women in my time to recognise this story well. I personally have been lucky enough never to end up in that situation, but perhaps that is because I tend to avoid friendship groups where possible and prefer to have individual friendships that don't join up. Perhaps that is a subconscious defense mechanism to avoid stuff like this happening to me, idk.

But during this whole saga, a common refrain from B's cis woman and transmasc former friends was to respond to mentions of her unspecified creepy behaviour with "I hate cis men". That is, to position her supposed abusive behaviour within the context of gendered violence, even while not actually knowing what she did. And, having met B a couple of times and got a vibe, it fell to me to point out that some people that they consider "cis men" are actually not, which raised the whole "male socialisation" issue and whether trans women are oppressed before coming out, and then I decided I couldn't deal with that conversation with a bunch of non-transmisogynised people.

But at this point I am sort-of thought to be the "cis guy defender". People will say they hate cis guys randomly, and then apologise to me as if I am personally offended. No, I hate them too. But I feel that with a handful of alleged "cis guys" I can see the woman beneath even if they are unaware of it themselves. And the thing is, I don't trust non-transmisogynised people to be able to see that at all. Or rather, I think they can see it, but I don't think they realise what they are seeing, only that they instinctively hate it and want to kill it, so ingrained is transmisogyny in our society.

And the fact is that most of these "I hate cis guys" people don't hate actual cis guys. They love cis guys. They go out of their way to spend time with them, they admire them, they seek their approval, their favourite writers are all cis guys, their favourite actors too. And that's not to blame them for that, we live in a world where cis guys dominate everything, that's life. But it is a problem when your hatred of cis guys is expressed only against someone who (it seems to me) isn't one.

To deliberately cut off B's social life based on no information, even as you still support Neil Gaiman or Johnny Depp, is not the action of someone who hates cis men's violence against women, but of a transmisogynist who doesn't even know there's a name for the bigotry they are perpetuating. It starts to seem that, coming from certain people, "cis men", much like "AMABs" before it, often functions ironically enough as a slur against transfems. And that's not getting into the issue of those transmascs who say "I hate cis men" not as a fact but as an affirmation, that effectively misgenders themselves in order to label themselves as ontologically non-oppressive, which is a whole other (but related) can of worms.

But after coming out, this whole problem has magnified by a factor of 10. Before, people just assumed I didn't like them, so they decided to not like me, but that was all it really amounted to, no actual conflict. Now, they read deep malice into every one of my actions. I can say something like, "I'm worried I'm not pulling my weight with [task], and you're having to do it all. Can you show me how to do it so I can take some of the burden off you?" and this will be heard as, "Show me how to do your job so I can force you out and take over." And then from that point on everything I do will be coloured by this person's idea that I not only hate them but want to eliminate them, and so when they try to eliminate me first they feel that they are totally justified in doing so, even though I didn't even do anything except genuinely try to help.

I think this is because people are primed to expect deceit from trans women, so everything we do is viewed through that lens. They don't realise they are doing transmisogyny, they just expect us to be deceptive so whatever we do, no matter how innocent, is subconsciously reshaped to fit the mould they have in their brains.

This morning it was a message I got from a transmasc acquaintance after an event we ran together saying they thought it went quite well but they felt like they had done most of the work and I hadn't done enough.

This was an event to which they arrived half an hour late, so I had already spent half an hour doing all the set-up alone. "That's annoying" I thought at the time, "but maybe they can do the clearing up." Nope! They told me when they arrived that they would have to leave early, before the event was even over! OK, so I am running the last hour of a two-hour event by myself, and then I have to tidy up on my own, put all the furniture away, do the dishes, clean the floor, lock everything up, then I can go home 2 hours later than them. OK, but at least we were sharing the burden of buying drinks and snacks for this event, that was what we agreed, right? Nope! Sorry, but they forgot to buy drinks and snacks, so it's lucky I bought extra, which is what I was doing with my morning while they were forgetting to do anything helpful. And after the event is over, do I send a message saying "It's not fair that I did all the work"? No, of course not, I just say thank you.

So what, I wondered, are they talking about when they say I did nothing? I ask, and they say that they had to send out email reminders to everyone on a pre-existing list of emails. This took them half an hour, because they did it by sending each one individually rather than putting a list of addresses in the BCC bar which would've taken less than a minute. So from their PoV this is what happened: they spent half an hour sending emails and I didn't help. Then they came to the venue, we both ran the event for an hour, then they left. Therefore I did 1 hour of work to their 1.5 hours, which is unfair, hence the message.

I was trying to work out how the fuck this person could've reached adulthood with what appears to be a total lack of object permanence. As soon as they left the venue, the dishes ceased to exist, so no one had to clean them; the chairs ceased to exist, so no one had to put them away; the attendees ceased to exist, so no one had to run the event for another hour.

And then I remembered that this person grew up with paid domestic servants (and not for reasons of disability but rather for reasons of economics), and still has them because they live with their wealthy parents. This is someone who doesn't think about doing the dishes, because they have never done the dishes. This is someone who dumps their dirty clothes on the floor, and the next day they are clean and folded. This whole thing is about gender, yes, but I have known cis women and men who behaved exactly the same way, because it's also about socioeconomic class.

In my post about the mental health crisis line I used to work for, I talked about how charities like that often attract people from a high socioeconomic class who see working there as more of a vanity project that looks good to their peers than as a genuine opportunity to help people who are suffering. And if your volunteer team is of a high socioeconomic class, but the people you're helping are typically of a low socioeconomic class (as trans people generally are), it can be a really dangerous dynamic that becomes at best paternalistic and at worst pseudo-colonial, because the stark privilege dynamic means the volunteers are primed by their own bigotry to not care about the lived experience of those they are "helping".

tl;dr trans woman needs help paying bills, money for meds, and money for food!

Hi! I'm Mordred! I'm a trans woman that loves photography, writing trans smut, and streaming video games for folks to watch. I'm disabled, unemployed, I've tried for many months to get a job, but no where has given me a call back. I'm really desperate to keep a roof over my head, food in my fridge, and the electricity and Internet kept on since my husband (only source of income) works from home.

This is Dove.

I also need money for his food and litter.

I'm genuinely very desperate. And could use any help possible. I have been banned from PayPal and Venmo after a terf harassment campaign got me removed from both and ruined a lot of my life (keeping me from making money).

My only ways to receive money are with cashapp and zelle. Cashapp info below, DM me for zelle. If you need PayPal or Venmo, I could share my husband's in dms.

Cashapp: $thecatgirlprincess

So, after this criticism, the group has rebranded to "FLINTA", a category that explicitly includes trans lesbians, but also: all straight women, all intersex people irrespective of gender or sexuality, all non-binary people irrespective of sexuality, all trans men, and all agender people irrespective of sexuality. The majority of people on Earth are FLINTA, and the majority of them are exclusively attracted to men (because they are straight women)! That's not a sapphic group any more!

I found this really frustrating because the problem was never the admissions criteria for the group, but rather the fact that we couldn't know in advance how transphobic the organisers were. If a sapphic group is run entirely by cis women, that is frankly already an amber flag, and to counteract it it needs to say something like this: "We encourage all trans women and all non-binary people (no matter their assigned gender) who consider themselves sapphic to attend. We know transfeminine people have historically been excluded from spaces like this and we want to make it as clear as possible that we encourage you to join." Otherwise most of us will always be too nervous about abuse to attend at all.

Instead of doing that, they responded by also opening the doors to trans men and straight women, which is an extra insult because it suggests that they think trans lesbians don't count as "lesbians" in the first place. To respond to a request to be more accommodating of trans women by saying, "sure, what the heck, in fact everyone might as well join!" is just another way of saying you didn't really want us.

And even with these changes, I still don't feel welcome, because FLINTA (essentially "anyone but cis men") is a category that has historically excluded many transfems in practice even if not in theory. A cis woman can show up to a FLINTA event wearing whatever she wants and always be welcome. A trans woman will often feel compelled to present as femininely as possible, especially because FLINTA includes a lot of cishet women who will just call you a man if they clock you because they have no tact or experience with queer identities at all. If you show up in trousers and no make-up as a transfem there's a chance you might not even be allowed in the room, so it can often serve as a gender presentation barrier that is exclusively applied to us.

materialist transmisogynist: material conditions incentivize me to sacrifice transwomens wellbeing for my own benefit, and i am simply taking advantage of that

Thought it might be interesting to look at concepts of Amy and Tia! Before doing full illustrations for them I roughly sketched them to have somewhat solid designs! I'm also trying to get on Vgen so I can start accepting commissions🙏 Likes and comments will help out a lot! https://vgen.co/ChillyDum

Taking baby steps towards things

I want to talk to an old friend I hadnt talked to in years, and, it took.. i think a month or so to get myself to talk to her? I tried my best to build up my confidence by going outside a lil bit, playing with sticks (yes, going outside can be rlly great if ur able to), and just.. trying to get the motivation to do it. It took a lot.. I was really really scared and even once I pulled up the courage and just couldnt and i was so mad at myself for it!!!! I was so mad!!!! Its so simple, right? Why cant i do it??

Well, it really wasnt simple, now that i look backs. Reprogramming ur brain like this is really stupid hard and it SUCKS WHY is it so HARD!!!!!!! And it takes SO LONG!!!!! But at the end of the day, eventually, I did it, and it was very important to celebrate that :3

Attwmpting to be kind to urself

Obviously this is muuch easier said than done. Self love is not easy and never has been. But, through whatever u do, try to talk to urself kindly, even just a lil bit. Tiny actions very much compound into big things (as was earlier paragraph showing u)

Its gonna feel like nothing at first and youll still probably have moments where you fucking despise yourself but it works, and its slow, but it works :D

The freeze response thingymajig

I dont acrually know that much abt this. But, i learned from therapy (and did not like being told this) that I was probably stuck in the freeze response for a long time. Which, yeah, I guess i was. Theres a lil area in ur brain that does the Freeze response, (activatates especially when problems feel too big or insurmountable) which basically makes it so u just. Dont really try and escape. Im not saying its ur fault for that activating if that happens to be part of whatever ur facing (Its a natural response to danger i cant even blame u), but it could be maybe. Idk

I learned that ur frontal lobe thingy or whatever (The part of ur brain that helps u think) can override that Freeze response. Again its a very slow process and it sucks. All of this shit is slow and painful and monotonous and it SUCKS. its SUCKS. SO MUCH. but it can very much be overriden by trying to do small things. Such as standing up when u rlly dont wanna