Hugging Monster

The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.”  Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index.  Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5]  In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s.  Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco.  Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.

from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html

VI - THE LOVERS

impact of us occupation

continued impacts of colonialism

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Yall.

When a cis man tries to imagine what it would be like to be trans, invariably that man imagines what it would be like if he “wanted to be woman,” because that’s what many people think trans women are.

Instead, he should be trying to empathize with trans men. He should be thinking about his own childhood and relationship to manhood, and then asking himself how it would have felt if he’d grown up being told he was a girl, forced to wear dresses, never recognized by other boys as a boy, and then experienced the horror of going through the wrong puberty and becoming a giant estrogen factory.

Many cis women, particularly in LGBT spaces, will fall all over themselves trying to empathize and identify with trans men, because the same transmisogyny that tells them that trans women and cis men are connected tells them that cis women and trans men are connected.

Instead, cis women should be asking themselves what it would have been like if they had never been allowed to have their womanhood acknowledged. How would it have felt to grow up being told you were a boy, not allowed to deviate from male stereotypes (often with violent repercussions if you did), always viewed by other women as an icky boy or predatory male, exposed to the utter horror that is being a woman in male spaces where they think no women are around, and had testosterone distort your body irreparably only to have everyone around you use your anatomy and appearance to forever deny your womanhood and where your best possible outcome is to transition and live your life in abject poverty fighting loneliness and dysphoria and surrounded by people who think you’re a disgusting, subhuman monster who should be locked away or put down?

If you want to worry about men pretending to be women, pay more attention to trans men. They are men who are forced to pretend to be women, and while that is immensely fucked up for them to go through, it doesn’t change the fact that they are MEN in WOMEN’S spaces, and many of them take advantage of transmisogynist ideas about gender to stay in those spaces even after coming out and transitioning. Just look at all the trans men at women’s colleges – schools that in most cases will not allow trans women.

Trans women have always been women. Trans women have always been female.

Trans men have always been men. Trans men have always been male.

So many people have no idea how true this is.  Almost no statement I have ever read has resonated with me more than this.

One of the arguments certain people (mostly terfs, but dishearteningly often well-meaning feminists who have accidentally been corrupted by terf rhetoric) make about trans women is that we experience “male privilege.”  This is a muddy topic, because there are certainly some situations where being socially read as male is a convenience (it is much easier to apply for jobs pre-transition and then transition while employed than it is to apply for jobs during or after the more awkward and difficult parts of transition, as an example).

There can be benefits, here and there.  But to call it privilege, especially with the term “male” attached to it, is horribly misleading.

Trans women can, in the earlier parts of our lives, EXIST in male spaces.  That does not mean we belong in them.  Or feel comfortable anywhere near them.  Even if you look outwardly male, being in male spaces is terrifying.  Even being in NEUTRAL spaces is terrifying.  You are in a constant state of panic around men.  And you fear rejection and ostracization from other women – the people you most empathize with and understand, whose personalities and ways of thinking most closely match your own, whose communities you desperately crave to be a part of because that’s where you belong – almost as much as you fear breathing the same air as any man you aren’t comfortably out to, including friends and family.  We NEVER feel safe.  And we are firsthand witnesses to all the reasons we SHOULDN’T feel safe around men.  They’re horrifying.  What was so frustrating about the “Locker Room Talk” scandal during the 2016 election, as a trans woman, is that you know from personal experience that it was “anywhere and everywhere outside the earshot of a woman” talk.  Dozens of sports teams came forward and said no, we don’t talk like this, we would never say things like this, we would never disrespect women like this.  I have never been an athlete.  My only experience with locker rooms was required as a high school credit, and made me extraordinarily uncomfortable.  I ASSURE you, I have heard talk like this OUTSIDE of the hypermasculine world of sports.  The level of total disregard that men have for women’s most basic humanity is STAGGERING.  Men don’t see women as less than human.  They see women as less than ALIVE, nothing more than usable, disposable objects.  

Trans women’s great “privilege” of existing “safely” in male spaces is being exposed to this world and these people up close, alone, (if in a locker room, without most of your clothes, and with all the added shame about your body that comes from that) in a state of absolute terror that ANYTHING about your personality, your mannerisms, your body language, the way you don’t quite fit in with the way they talk, will tip them off that you’re not one of them.  Your LIFE depends on whether they notice.  That’s not safety.  That’s Russian Roulette where you don’t get the option to stop playing, and not only do you not know if or when you might get the bullet, you don’t even know how many bullets are loaded in the first place.  Every single interaction with another human being is a trigger being pulled in slow motion, in overwhelming, agonizing detail as you can only wait to find out if you drew a blank.

We spend our lives pretending, often badly, to fit in with these people.  Not because we have or want any god damn thing on this earth in common with them, but because the alternative – that they will know we aren’t – fills us constantly with a paralyzing, spine-chilling terror that is almost impossible to describe.  Even when real benefits that do come from being read as male (again, this is usually socioeconomic factors), we are constantly, inescapably aware that all of these things come at the expense of our own authenticity.  We have to lie to get them.  We live in unbearable discomfort with the fact that everything good that happens to us is because other people are making these massively incorrect assumptions or judgments about the kinds of people we are.  We live with the fact that everything good could be taken away the second anyone finds out we’re not what they wanted based on our appearance, because often it’s the only way we can survive at all.

Let me rephrase that last part for emphasis, because it’s integral to understanding the core of this issue, and the core of the argument that OP (and the excellent addition) wanted to make.  If your takeaway is just ONE part of my addition to this post, let it be this:

Every single interaction we have with another human being is based solely on the value assigned to us based on our physical appearance, and how well we can conform to those expectations, which leaves us feeling suffocatingly, deeply uncomfortable and often terrified for our personal safety and livelihood.  

Think about that before you put the words “male privilege” anywhere in a conversation about trans women.

For parts of our lives, we can exist in male spaces.  But even in them, we are still always, at our core, women.  Everything else is social.  Everything else is acting.  Trans women pretend to be men until we just can’t take it anymore, and we either live as the women we always were, or one way or another, we die.  We can never really be anything other than female.

That scene in Mulan where all the ancestors are arguing about whose fault it was that Mulan ran off to join the army except with all the Force ghosts arguing about Ben Solo.

This is the greatest thing I have ever drawn I am so proud

“they” is more inclusive than “he/she”

“themself” flows more naturally than “him or herself”

“they” is less clunky than “(s)he”

“I shouldn’t like to punish anyone, even if they’d done me wrong.” —George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“A person can’t help their birth.” —William Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848)

“But to expose the former faults of any person, without knowing what their present feelings were, seemed unjustifiable.” —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)

“Every Fool can do as they’re bid.” —Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation (1738)

“So likewise shall my heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.” —King James Bible, Matthew 18:35 (transl. 1611)

“God send every one their heart’s desire!” —William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (~1600)

“Now this king did keepe a great house, that euerie body might come and take their meat freely.” —Sir Philip Sidney, the Arcadia (1580)

“If … a psalme scape any person, or a lesson, or els yt they omyt one verse or twayne…” —William Bonde, The Pylgrimage of Perfection (1526)

“And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, / They wol come up and offre a Goddés name” —Geoffrey Chaucer, The Pardoner’s Tale (~1380)

“þan hastely hiȝed eche wiȝt on hors & on fote, / huntyng wiȝt houndes alle heie wodes, / til þei neyȝþed so neiȝh to nymphe þe soþe [Then hastily hied each person on horse and on foot / hunting with hounds all the high woods / ‘til they came so near, to tell the truth]” —William and the Werwolf (transl. ~1350-1375)

Violets are blue

Singular “they” predates