clown meat pizza

18 years. this is enough time for the work to grow to adulthood and begin to care for itself

There are many scripts online you can follow, many ways to tweak your message to fit your senator (ESPECIALLY if they are up for reelection this year). Whether it's a recording you reach or a real person, be straightforward, don't argue, just let your rep know that you are a constituent and you oppose the KIDS act, etc.

I was vaguely openly queer, as in, I hadn't told my parents I was trans yet but I had an online girlfriend when I was 14 that they knew about, I was publicly identifying as pan, and was involved in my high school GSA, etc. and I needed a private space outside of school and the internet where I could process my traumas while being out as trans. As such it was really important to me that I had a queer or queer friendly therapist. Now that was hard to come by in Indiana even in the 2010's (especially bc a lot of the ones advertised were covert conversion therapists) but we did finally find one that took our insurance. A middle aged, married cis lesbian, who advertised as having experience with trans clients*.

I didn't know this until my early 20's when my mom and I were reconciling her poor reaction to my eventual public coming out as trans at 18, but my therapist was very convinced that I was not trans when I came out to her. She shared the fact that I told her I was trans to my parents and explicitly told all four of them she doubted me in her sessions with them about me.

I'm thinking about this all because the anniversary of my dad's passing was recently and I've been doing a lot of reflecting on my conflicting feelings about the ways he treated me as a teen (that was part of why I was in therapy, and why my parents were having sessions with my therapist without me). Then the memory of a day where he took me to Barnes & Noble and made me pick out several fashion magazines because "he thought I needed to be more feminine" came to mind and it clicked.

My therapist probably told him to do that.

It always struck me as very odd that my dad did that because while he was always kind of a "girl dad" with me growing up, he was also the first parent to fully embrace me when I publicly came out and never had any issue with my general lack of femininity when I was younger - in fact he often encouraged it and was very progressive about my upbringing... Until I started seeing my therapist and suddenly he was very concerned about me being a young woman and not being "feminine enough".

If that isn't a perfect example of transandrophobia, anti-trans masculinity, the gendered correction young people perceived as young women experience when exploring our genders/gender expression, and the private violence cis queer adults in positions of power can inflict on trans youth - particularly that adult cis women can inflict upon trans masculine youth, I don't know what is.

-defines manhood through a cissexist framework and tries to force trans men’s experiences to fit within that framework. denies the manhood of any trans man whose experiences cannot be easily mapped onto cis men.

✓ “trans men ARE real men, but they are not granted systemic access to male privilege, and whatever benefits individual trans men ARE able to access are limited and highly conditional. We should expand our understanding of men/masculinity to better account for their unique experiences.”

Genuinely genuinely - with all the love in my heart - none of the big initial posts that started all this (from nothorses, st-dionysus, doberbutts etc) claim anything about transmisogyny! Literally all they were saying was hey, I have experienced x, y and z and I would like to talk about a, b and c because I don't see it discussed a lot

Like, nobody claimed they were "more oppressed" than transfems or that transfems are in any way involved with the issues they face, like, literally that is a whole new sentence help

I know it sounds like an insult, but, like, it's not about you