Carnation Insant Butch ☕

“For most dialogue, use a comma after the sentence and don’t capitalize the next word after the quotation mark,” she said.

“But what if you’re using a question mark rather than a period?” they asked.

“When using a dialogue tag, you never capitalize the word after the quotation mark unless it’s a proper noun!” she snapped.

“When breaking up a single sentence with a dialogue tag,” she said, “use commas.”

“This is a single sentence,” she said. “Now, this is a second stand-alone sentence, so there’s no comma after ‘she said.’”

working 12+ hour days for school without pay or the right to "switch jobs" to something better, often working a real job on top of that, still the legal property of their parents, can't even dye their own hair or use their own name or have a door to their own room in many many cases. yeah I would be at the end of my rope too, especially when dealing with the adults in my life who are enacting and/or facilitating the abuse! it feels pretty glaring to ignore this dynamic when talking about the strained emotional capacity of teenagers. did you forget? what it was like to not have the right to your own life yet? to be hurt 24/7? and then to have your (extremely reasonable!!!) emotional reactions dismissed as pure hysteria?

And I'm not talking about dysphoria, nor am I trying to frame manhood as something "evil" (because it's not.) No, I am talking about specifically *toxic masculinity.*

You are told not to cry, not to feel, not to emote! You are told to carry the weight of those around you, because "that's what men do." If you fail at manual labor due to your size or disability, you might as well not even exist, because what good is a man who "does nothing"? If you try to help with "women's chores", you are treated as Weak and Pathetic and scolded for it!

And your imposed maleness is hammered down harder with every feminine characteristic you show!

"Stop being a sissy. Stop being a faggot. Stop being a tranny." Whether these words are said outright, they are always implied.

You are not allowed to be a person. You are expected to be the embodiment of toxic masculinity, to keep your chin up, to stomp all over that woman in your heart and assert power over them!!

So when trans women who go through this escape from these households and begin their transition, there is an obvious, internalized issue - that being how difficult it is to stray away from the toxic masculinity. And I don't mean "oh, they act misogynistic towards other people!" - I mean they act misogynistic towards THEMSELVES!!

They may struggle to transition, because it feels wrong to let their femininity "dominate" them.

They may misgender and degender themselves, treating any conversation of womanhood as something that is Not About Them, because they're a TRANS woman, and conversations about women SURELY don't include them, right?

They may malgender themselves, treating their womanhood as something stupid and frilly and mindless. A literal "I'm just a girl" interpretation of their gender (not in the meme sense), because they don't think they, as a woman, have the right to be anything else. And it's not necessarily that they think other women have to undermine themselves - but they feel that *their own* womanhood needs to be belittled.

This is why conversations about toxic masculinity from the perspective of the person being taught it are so important. Its impact on every gender demographic is unique, but equally important.