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Iron Lung Fanart

Ballpoint pen on paper

Your own analogy is crap - in it you’re the innocent and perfectly detached tattoo artist that had nothing to do with the art or the placement or the size or color of the piece, just head down needle out do the work, get paid for the job done, and anyone who isn’t happy afterwards is a karen who obviously doesn’t understand the industry works.

The problem is that tattoo artists fuck people over all the time on work you fully consented to and paid for. Your consent doesn’t make them not liable for their own mistakes. They pressure you into designs you don’t really love because it fits their style better, they do wonky lines and impossible anatomy, they spell things wrong, they shade poorly or blend colors weirdly, they scratch or cut you with the needles, they overcharge and then still act like you’re scum if you don’t leave a huge tip. They expect you to love it even if they do a shit job. There’s any number of things a tattoo artist can do to not just give you a terrible experience but to make you regret and resent something you were once excited and hopeful about.

The worst part is hearing them bitch and moan about how awful a client was and then go on to describe completely a person behaving perfectly reasonably.

And that attitude is pretty familiar:

If you change your mind after I’ve sold you something that’s your own fault!

If you regret it after I’ve done something permanent to you that’s not my responsibility!

If you’ve been groomed to believe you’ll die young and miserable without transition and then you’re still unhappy afterwards then you can fuck right off!

Where’s even a hint of the love and compassion and understanding they claim we need to all have for anyone questioning or confused about gender? Where’s the empathy? Trans people claim to be the most marginalized abused helpless population on the planet, and they can’t bring themselves to give a shit about the kids they leave behind in the wake of their overmedicalized ideology.

If this is truly your attitude then just call yourself the trans industrial complex. You don’t care about kids being happy or healthy, you don’t have a leg to stand on to even try and claim you do. You’re part of a system that tells kids that the only solution to feeling strange or uncomfortable in their bodies is medication and surgery, and then immediately and cruelly abandons them when it isn’t successful. That mocks them when it goes wrong. That turns on them the instant they start to have doubts.

You are the shitty tattoo artist actually, because after they get the surgeries you told them they cant live without, if they don’t absolutely love it then you’re content to wash your hands of the matter. You made your contribution and it’s out of your hands. Not your problem, not your responsibility, they brought this on themselves, they should have thought about it more beforehand, they were obviously never really trans.

A painting of a nightmare I had recently.

Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless. 

Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.

We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"

To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.

About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.

The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.

You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M. 

"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."

Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.