absol

lemme put it this way; european longswords and european cannons are siblings. they emerged at basically the same time in the early 1300s, and when the longsword was at its peak use in the mid-1400s, the musket was beginning to proliferate.

likewise, the 'modern' style of katana only started being made in the century leading up to the introduction of muskets to Japan; in fact, the reason the katana became The Samurai Sword was because it was a small practical blade you could wear while you carried a gun.

Something I notice is, when men discuss the manosphere, they either centre the reason boys fall down that pipeline on some inner weakness or defectiveness of the boy, ie. "they're just autistic weirdos who want rules for women because they can't get their dick wet," or they centre the reason on women, "feminism had made women too woke, mean and impossible to socialise with."

What I noticed while working is that every single little Tate goblin I had to work with had conservative parents, and I have never once seen that aspect of all this discussed. Boys will reflect the social norms they are raised in within their household. The biggest preventative for manosphere bullshit I saw in the boys I worked with was a dad who isn't a fuckwit and a household that isn't LARPing the 1960s.

A disabled white man sees a disabled black man making positivity posts for disabled black people. He feels insecure because he's not included, so he asks the disabled black man if it's okay to be a disabled white man. The black man would probably get frustrated by this. He might even roll his eyes or playfully tell him no, it's not okay to be white. Even though they are both disabled, it's easy to understand why this interaction was not ableist.

A trans man sees a trans woman making positivity posts for trans women. He feels insecure because he's not included, so he asks the trans woman if it's okay to be a trans man. She gets frustrated. She probably rolls her eyes. She playfully tells him no, it's not okay to be a man. It should be easy to see why there's no issue with this interaction.

The purpose of my blog is more to be a kind-of journal than anything else. I used to keep a pen-and-paper journal, but it didn't achieve anything for me, because I really struggle to acknowledge when bad things have happened to me. I would write down that someone e.g. yelled slurs at me in the street, and it wouldn't help, because I would still believe that I deserved it, or that everyone experiences that and I'm pathetic for being upset by it.

I've written before on here about the CSA I experienced, and how it has resulted in me being unable to treat my own feelings as important. I've found that posting about this stuff on here is really helpful, because people will say "wow, that sucks," or, "omg I hope you're ok," or, "this happened to me too, it's awful," and that feedback is so valuable in helping me to understand that the things that have happened to me are objectively bad. I've made more progress in my mental health in the last month (thats how long I've been posting here) than I did in the last 10 years!

I will also say that my life is probably not that usual relative to the average person on here. I don't live in the US or Canada and I don't live in a big city. I live in a moderately-sized European town with a fairly small queer community and a very small trans community. I go to irl queer events several times per week, and frequently I am the only transfem person or even only trans person there at all. Sometimes these events are like 80% cis gay men! (I know some cities are big enough to have a "trans book club" or "trans climbing club". Not mine! It's often hard to even get double digit attendees at a generic "trans social" here!) And I get a lot of microaggressions in these spaces which is not really surprising tbh.

The only reason I keep going is that I know for a fact that like 90% of transfems in my town are totally disconnected from community. What often happens is they go to one irl queer event, have a bad time because of the demographics, and never go back. I need to connect them to the (tiny) local transfem community in that window of time. I also organise and run events myself, that means I have to put up with a lot of shit and deal with a lot of (often hostile) people that the people attending those events don't have to. What I'm trying to say is that I often put myself in situations that I know will result in microaggressions (and sometimes macroaggressions), and I don't think it is neccesarily representative of what the average transfem in my town experiences.

In spite of all the issues, I typically have a really good time at irl trans events. I strongly recommend going if you have trans events near you. I'm not sure I could say the same about generic queer events, but that may be a feature of the smallness of the community where I live rather than a general property. If there is even one other transfem at an event I attend, there's like a 95% chance I will have a good time there.

As I said above, from my POV this blog functions as a kind of therapy, and the kind of therapy I personally need is the kind where I can learn to acknowledge when I have been wronged (because that's what I struggle with). That's why I post about bad things that happen to me but not good things that happen to me. For balance, here's some good (trans-related) things that happened to me only yesterday:

I had a plant swap with a trans man I'm friends with. I got some cool plants I've never grown before, and so did he.

I went for coffee with a trans woman and a trans man who I've organised stuff with before, we planned some new stuff for the future.

The cafe was really nice, the staff were really friendly, and they even gave us free pastries.

A couple of transmascs I know asked for help running their events because there has been feedback about occasional transmisogynistic microaggressions at them and they feel out of their depth.

A really great trans man I know (who I havent seen for a few months) invited me to hang out with him later in the week.

90% of the volunteers were wealthy retired neurotypical cishet white women. That meant that for basically every call these people received there was a pre-existing power dynamic where the caller was well below the call-handler, and the call was consequently handled totally paternalistically, never with any sense that the volunteer might actually have something to learn from the caller. The similarity to the typical patient-GP/PCP dynamic was really striking.

Most of the callers were prisoners, homeless, or people who had recently stopped taking anti-psychotic meds. I think many of the volunteers enjoyed the feeling of the power dynamic that was obvious in these calls. If you spend most of your social time with people of the same high social class as you, I guess you might find it refreshing to encounter people who remind you that you've actually done well out of life, only from a safe distance and through a phone ofc.

We also got a lot of trans callers. Hearing how the volunteers talked to these callers was a really radicalising experience. "Why do you think you're a woman?" "Why do you think you enjoy wearing women's clothing?" "Is there a sexual component to it? Maybe something that happened in your childhood?" "What do the other girls at school think about you calling yourself a boy?", plus the obvious constant misgendering and pronoun "mix-ups", saying, "Oh sorry, miss, your voice sounds like a man's so it's confusing."

People would say this stuff during training too, and the people training us would say it was correct. It's not like they were letting their bigotry cause them to deviate from policy, bigotry was the policy. I remember there was one senior volunteer who was a retired cis lesbian police officer, and I asked her about handling trans callers and she just repeated back all the same bigoted nonsense everyone else thought (at the time I put that down to her being a cop, not being aware back then that being a cis lesbian is no guarantee at all of an absence of transphobic views.)

It didn't take long for me to start getting reprimanded for having too much empathy for the callers. I was an unusual volunteer in that I had actually been in the same position as a lot of the callers. I was trans (albeit not out yet), I was frequently suicidal, I had been on anti-depressants (incredibly I was the only volunteer out of around 150 with that experience), I had experienced CSA and domestic abuse, I had lived through times when I had a zero bank balance, I had eaten food out of a bin because I had no money, I had been heavily addicted to alcohol and nicotine.

It meant I normally had some commonality with all the callers that I could use to make sure I was talking to them in the way I would've wanted to be talked to, i.e. as an equal. I would actually let the caller direct the conversation rather than directing it myself (which was the policy), I would show genuine interest in their story, I wouldn't tell them to hurry up because there were other callers with "real problems". After a while, I couldn't handle it and I just left, not because of the stress of dealing with the callers, but the stress of dealing with the other volunteers.