CJ

Idk there’s not really much of a point to this and you’re under absolutely no obligation to respond to/publish this ask you’re just the person I follow who I’ve seen talk about this kinda stuff the most. If nothing else it was a very sobering experience, I really need more TMA friends :/

The pronoun thing I don't think is a big deal. By the end of the show they're still he/him-ing Jax and even the final shots of her she's still not there. Goose has said she understands if people still call Jax he/him, idk I get it.

But I do think people are needlessly cruel to Jax and the show at large. The show was never giving us a happy ending and was always about finding purpose in a world you hate to be in. Melancholy is the name of the game and people gate gray endings, they want black and white. Say Jax is responsible for everything going wrong is insane, she didn't make Caine act like that.

Can you blame me for not engaging with that? I wasnt *supposed* to engage with that. She admitted that she just wanted to make me mad and provoke me. She called it hatemail. So then she turns around and goes on about her opinions, when to begin with, she never expressed those opinions to me. She rage baited me. That is the behavior of an internet troll, not a serious marxist.

She's not even completely wrong necessarily. I understand her perspective, there is merit to it. I wish she told me what that perspective was from the beggining, instead of acting like an edgelord.

So, she feels that It is wrong for me to call them "latina edits" because she feels i am assigning latinas to a certain skin color. I get that, but the truth is that the point of the edits is to look like me. I called them "latina edits" as an immediately understandable shorthand. If she had talked about this with me like the supposedly serious communist she is, I would have considered changing my vocabulary rather than, yknow, doing this. So, maybe I can start referring to them as "melanin edits" or "dark skin" edits or something. Thats not so hard is it?

Now, the second point is on whether or not I can call myself a mexican. And I don't know the answer to this truly. But to me I feel this is a matter of opinion. My father always called me a mexican, I always called myself a mexican, my friends, family, teachers, strangers, to everyone I have always been a Mexican. So its confusing for me to suddenly be not a real mexican apparently. Once again, I understand the logic, seeing as I dont currently live there. Was it so hard to just express your feelings to me? From my perspective, all I had done was call myself what I always have, and now an internet stranger mocked my ethnicity, my family, and even the way I spoke Spanish.

By the way, mocking my Spanish was increadibly rude. Anyway, to me, this is not a call that a stranger can make. I'm sorry, but I just can't accept that an internet stranger has more right to decide who I am than my own parents. That is simply unreasonable to me. I disagree, and I will continue to call myself a Mexican. Its ok if you disagree with that, but don't belittle my family and act like you know anything about me or my life.

In retrospect, I have been emotional and defensive today. At times I leaned too much into insults and anger. But honestly, I can't blame myself too much when, by her own admission, she wanted to get me mad from the start. So she is partially responsible for my distress as she intentionally wanted to cause it.

Like, Sou, an abuse victim, constantly antagonizes everyone with a false mask of bravado, causes someone close to him to essentially off themselves, acts like he knows exactly what's going on but loses his mind when it's revealed that he was completely wrong in his assumptions. Does this sound fucking familiar? Sounds pretty close to the shit Jax did in her show, but Sou is given infinitely more leeway.

One moment, we're a woman who can be spoken over, overlooked, and ignored. The next, (often when we have the gall to stand up for ourselves) we're men who are violent angry and abusive.

By gendered racialization I mean the way that society views and treats us based on their categorization of us as Black Men and Black Women. While with what OP is describing it tends to be an either/or situation, for Black transfemmes, being openly/visibly Black and transfemme makes us subject to both concurrently. We do not get to leave being a “Black Man” behind even temporarily in the eyes of others, especially given society’s view of all Black women as being “masculine” no matter how “femininely” we present or behave.

For us, gendered racialization compounds each other, leaving us to be treated as both Strong and Aggressive Black Women and Virile and Violent Black Men at all times. We are often “positively” reduced to the ways we can support those around us or our sexual prowess/characteristics (real or rumored), while the second a nonblack person has something to gain from our suffering there’s no issue painting all of our actions as intimidating, aggressive, or forward. Of claiming a fear of violence, of harm, of impropriety that will be believed by many nonblacks no matter how we truly act or what we do.

Recently, another Black transfemme I know was accused of being a “homeless attempted coercive rapist” for commenting that she was going to take a nap in her car (before going back to her apartment) because she didn’t feel sober enough to drive responsibly. Later on, a white trans woman who was leaving at the same time used this to try to claim that she was trying to force her to let her come home with, and sleep with her because “she was homeless and sleeping in her car” despite the Black transfemme having an apartment at the time and the white trans woman knowing this.

The white woman’s reasoning? Another white trans woman had a crush on the Black trans woman, and the first white wanted to fuck the second, so she was willing to try and use these facets of gendered racialization to try to eliminate the Black trans woman from the “competition” on a whim.

This isn’t a rare occurrence, and for many Black transfemmes not in majority-Black spaces, this happening is a “when” not an “if” and a constant consideration we have to account for. If there’s not another Black transfemme around (such in small queer communities or isolated friend groups) we may be taken completely unawares by something that’s just.. sickeningly common.

(his shadow went from holding two male symbols to one male and one female)

Yeah… 😔 plus they didn’t keep the ‘good with your hands’ line from yosuke

(his shadow went from holding two male symbols to one male and one female)

Yeah… 😔 plus they didn’t keep the ‘good with your hands’ line from yosuke