damn girl u live like this

A Nervous Old Man (right) and his Emotional Support Violence Machine (Left)

1.) Not all our parents would bake us a fucking cake when we come out. Some of us are closeted. Surely you understand this? You also do not need to know my parent’s names or occupations; we are both adults. I do not need nor want to mix you and my private life with my parents and my public life.

2.) Trans people do not owe you their dead name or government name

3.) I’m not telling you for the sake of job security. I am a government fucking caseworker working amidst a fucking lavender panic!

“There’s no way you’re a different person outside this; you’re still you at your core. What harm is there—”

No, I am a completely different person. A different person with a different personality and different interests and a different name and presentation. I am a completely different person because I keep this life and my public life private to avoid fracturing 90% of my interpersonal relationships and 100% of my professional ones.

“You’re not out? But you’re so confident.”

I need y’all to start bringing that energy. Because it’s not always safe for someone to be out and not everyone is safe to be out around.

please try this on for size:

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

The surprising thing, to me, was that no one was talking about the child abuse and neglect that was affecting Huck himself, and all of the commentary was about slavery and racism. The commentary I saw on Huckleberry Finn seemed to insinuate – if not directly state – that it was the story of a privileged white boy who generously condescended to empathize with Jim, the poor slave who wasn’t born with the innumerable advantages Huck’s white skin blessed him with.

Then I read the book, and I was reading a story about a boy with a physically abusive, neglectful, alcoholic father who reappears in his son’s life only to attempt to seize his windfall wealth in a brazen act of parental theft that would have shamed James Spears, and an aunt a guardian whose self-righteous controlling behavior and spiritual abuse make Huck wonder whether he isn’t better off with the aforementioned dad.

So I think the adverse circumstances that both Jim and Huck face – although in many ways different from each other – have parallels that allow them to empathize with each other in a manner that’s closer to parity than “Huck gazes down at the pathetic Jim from the peaks of Mt. Privilege and feels pity.”

(There are times when Huck acts kind of patronizing toward Jim, but correspondingly there are times when Jim does the same thing toward Huck. In both cases, they tend to be confidently wrong, with Huck citing half-learned, misremembered, garbled lessons from school, and Jim citing various superstitions.)

Crucially, it is personal empathy, and not any kind of principled abolitionist morality that is at play here. Huck and Jim are thieves and vagabonds. Rejection of slavery comes in the context of a broader rejection of social norms and morality – and not some kind of consistent high-minded anarchism, either, but stuff like “we’ve gotta steal to survive, but persimmons aren’t that great this time of year, so we won’t steal those, and we’ll count the fact that we don’t steal persimmons as points in our favor morally.”

A cynical part of me wonders whether that’s the really offensive part of Huckleberry Finn – the suggestion that maybe the ability to transcend and see past society’s arbitrariness and injustices isn’t the exclusive preserve of the respectable classes using all of the right Diversity Equity & Inclusion-workshop approved language, or the YA authors obsessed with imparting the Correct Moral Lessons to the Youth (hmmm… which Huckleberry Finn character do they remind me of?), but might lay with outcasts and runaways who use some offensive language and do desperate things to survive, but who experience society from an outsider’s perspective and form bonds of necessity – and, ultimately, empathy – with members of other widely despised segments of society.

alice is dragged from place to place without warning, forced to play stupid games with no good prizes, grilled over her schooling and manners and recitation and dress, scolded, judged, insulted to her face, sent away, given gifts she didn’t ask for and doesn’t like, corrected incorrectly, been subject to shifting and arbitrary rules, and then when she gets snappish with all this bullshit everyone acts like a little girl’s temper is the end of the fucking world.