I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.

easterman doodles and sketches (IM FINALLY BACK FROM THE DEAD AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)

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bonus : drawings doodles of easterman, avellanos, and amelia

He doesn’t have company over, not that he declines but because no one ever offers. The apartment is both bare and intensely cluttered. The bare minimum of furniture but files and notes and loose sheets of paper with incoherent intoxicated ramblings hastily scratched down.

Because I believe the butch shortage is a real thing. The reason I believe that is because I'm a gay man who's into femboys and there is also a fairly gnarly Femboy shortage. But I think, if you're really a feminist, you'll understand me when I say that there's a fairly obvious reason for that that has nothing to do with trans people.

I know you spend 100% of your time obsessing over us, but trans people are not actually that common, we're common enough, but it's like demonizing red heads or twins. Additionally if you talked to a trans man instead of just deciding what our deal is for us the way that cis men do for you, you'd know that the "lost lesbian sister" thing doesn't bear out in practice. I like men. A lot of us like men. A lot of us also aren't very masculine, personally for me even if we lived in a post gender society where sex traits didn't mean anything I would still be on testosterone and cutting my boobs off because I just don't like those body parts. My life would be easier as a cis woman, I'd make more money, I'd have an easier time dating, I wouldn't have had to fight my family, but my body just wouldn't be right.

The point is that if I wasn't transitioning, I wouldn't be butch, I'd be dead or I'd be a feminine scene girl Instagram influencer who's boyfriend in a marginally successful screamo band who is holding her back from jumping and locking up the sharps or has joined a super goth 27 club suicide pact with her. Like you guys are not bagging me as your butch gf I've got long green hair and I'm paying luxury car amounts of money for a penis because I want to make a guy's masquara run down his face while I fuck his throat so bad it makes me look stupid.

No trans guys are not your enemy, some of them are masc and like women but those guys would have transitioned in any decade, there's evidence of them doing that going back as long as we've been writing things down. It's guys like me who have an easier time pretending to be female that are running up the transition numbers in the 21st century. In the 50s I would have just killed myself as soon as I got pregnant and that would have been that because as a feminine homosexual manhood wouldn't have been worth transitioning into at the time.

The butch shortage is actually happening because people who would be happier as butches are pretending to be feminine straight women. The same way the Femboy shortage is because all the men who want to be feminine are DL. I know this because I go onto Grindr and I see 12 men who are like "oh I like to cross dress please fuck my ass but I won't send you a face pic" and then if I meet up with that guy I'll find him in a frat house and he'll meet me wearing a hoodie and basketball shorts and he'll have a secret drawer where he keeps his lingerie. It's like, dire out there. The men that the gods put on this earth to be makeup twinks are not becoming women, they're becoming Brad. And so, because misogyny is reinforced with violence, I must assume that the women put on this earth to wear a pit stained wifebeater and a cut off jean shorts and cut their hair off are becoming Chelsea with perfect makeup and long bleached hair and entering undiscussed lavender marriages with Brad the would be makeup twink, when she should be dating you (well probably not you because you're deeply unpleasant, but a lesbian who's into butches) and he should be dating me.

i have to do everything around here