Catharsis Incomplete

and inside the plantation house is another white man sitting in a cool comfortable chair, sipping lemonade, making a hundred dollars a day off that idiot sweating his ass off on a horse. because if he ever dropped the gun, if he walked off with the slaves...

but he never did. none of those overseers ever did. so that's still going on today. if you're white you're still being handed a hat and a quarter and a gun. and the sun's beating down on all of you out here in this fucking field growing poison for another man's mansion.

and you're never going to get to taste that lemonade.

i

"yeah try out any pronouns! doesn't matter if you're cis, you can be called what you like!"

"oh damn, I love that hairstyle/haircut/outfit"

"yeah, why not play around with drag or costumes, it's fun. let me know if you need help finding good quality bras/breastforms/binders/packers"

"you can totally go on hormones if you want, like technically we're all already producing hormones in our bodies, so if you wanna try out different hormone ratios you could talk to an endocrinologist about it"

"even if you're cis you can get top surgery if it makes you feel good, there's no rules about who is 'allowed' to have larger or smaller chests."

"it's totally cool if you don't think you're cis but you're not ready to use the term trans. use whatever labels you want or none, it's chill"

"you don't need to pick apart all your memories to justify what you want your life to be, it's enough to just want what you want for your own life"

"thank you for trusting me with that, I'll support you no matter what"

"who do you want me to use that name/those pronouns around?"

"hell yeah, so proud of you for realizing that about yourself"

we sometimes joke about how cis people entering a trans friend group often "become" trans, but on a serious note, just having a social context where, when you do stuff for yourself that feels good, you are met with reaffirmed friendship & confidence boosts, that's inherently going to help you become more comfortable identifying as trans if you are trans. and another great thing is it also helps people realize they can be as gender nonconforming as they want & still be cis if that's what feels right too.

it's win/win to have friends who are cool about gender-- everyone is better off when we can make decisions about our own bodies without fear of social ostracism.

consistent acceptance (& encouragement) of radical gender nonconformity is always going to make our relationships with each other safer and more fulfilling.

Feel disgusted by something? Don’t immediately act on it. Deconstruct your disgust!

Be just a little curious about it. Why do you feel disgusted by something? What is it about the thing that disgusts you? Is it the whole that disgusts you, or just a part? Do you feel disgusted because you’re supposed to? Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Are you just disgusted because something looks unfamiliar to you? Do other people seem disgusted or are there people opposing your disgust (or do they, on the flipside, like it?). Is there a cultural context you might be missing? More importantly, could there be biases like racism, sexism, classism, homo- or trans-phobia at play? Is the object of your digust actually causing harm? Does someone benefit from your disgust politically?

In relation to food in the back of the fridge, absolutely throw it out. You’re not harming anyone by not wanting to eat food you know is past its best. But there are cultures who ferment foods in ways we might immediately balk at because your brain connects the mould in your fridge and the sensible ‘probably not good to eat’ warning with something harmless, and that’s the danger of disgust.

You might genuinely find them disgusting. Icelanders can do what they want, nothing about kæstur hákarl (fermented greenland shark)* appeals to me and I think I’m fine in saying I’m disgusted by it. All theirs.

But, you can see how this could be weaponised, yeah? There are plenty of cultures and peoples where ‘they’re disgusting, vermin-like’ were used as legitimate reasons to oppress and destroy. In that case, their food - harmless and controlled as the spoilage might be - might be used as evidence to prove their point UNLESS you interrogate your initial gut reaction to their fermented foods.

Back to our questions - Does the person telling you about the fermented foods have an agenda? Yes, they do, bigotry. Is your unfamiliarity playing in? Yeah, you’ve never actually tasted the food, you don’t know what it’s like. Is there cultural context you’re missing? Might be! Again, in the case of kæstur hákarl, Iceland is a hard place to grow food and you make edible what you can. Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Yes! Do other people disagree with the speaker? Yes - the culture that created the food think it’s swell!

In this case, you might want to hold back on acting on your disgust. There’s enough rhetorical evidence here to suggest it might be displaced.

(* I’m using kæstur hákarl as an example because the sort of strongly fermented fish products scandinavians make are a good example of food you might not want to eat that doesn’t have any other strongly anti-Scandinavian things attatched to it. I can discuss a theoretical here in a way that means I don’t have to walk into someone’s pre-existing biases. White Scandinavians don’t have to worry about it, no-one is actually using kæstur hákarl to oppress Icelanders.)

I had things like kink culture, purity culture ect. in my mind when I wrote the original post, and you might be able to see now how weaponised disgust is used against fandom and kinksters. A gut-level disgust is what drives a lot of homophobia and transphobia too, when you scratch down deep enough.

"We're going to command God, unlike the Jews, we'll do it right!"

It is morally neutral to not go to college.

It is morally neutral to not do housework.

It is morally neutral to sit at home and do nothing all day every day.

From the article:  

And I got several messages telling me I was what was wrong with both tumblr and America and I should die