Redefine Beauty

Regarding economic coercion, that's called having a job. But also I promise you there is a world of difference between trying to buy a person (for the love of fuck will you people ever aknowledge its not only women in porn and work conditions are a concern for EVERYONE involved) and someone making a career in porn.

To help trafficked and coerced sex workers we necessarily must end the demonization of sex work or else you are giving traffickers the literal tools to force unwilling people into it!

One of my family members was sex trafficked. Her case became a part of state legal precedent because her trafficker's conviction resulted in an expanded definition of one of the terms used to define trafficking (kept vague for the sake of my family's anonymity.) You know what one of the biggest barriers was to her getting help?

The fact that everyone she reached out to saw her as a stupid meth head "whore" and not a person who was fucking afraid for her life.

I think with BPD especially, people can end up hearing “your reaction wasn’t fair” and accidentally translate that into “you had no reason to feel that way.”

But those aren’t the same thing.

If a friend cancels plans and I feel hurt, disappointed, lonely or even abandoned, those feelings make sense. They came from somewhere.

That doesn’t automatically mean my friend hates me, doesn’t care about me or intended to hurt me. And it also doesn’t automatically mean lashing out would be fair.

I think recovery taught me that feelings deserve curiosity, not immediate obedience.

Sitting down at the table, I remembered the scars on my arm. The universal signifier of "This Kid Needs Help." Maybe his kindness was only out of pity. He saw those and assumed there was some great misery and wanted to offer me some relief. It's generally good to be kind to people who are hurting. But I wasn't hurting that bad.

The thing is, there is some great misery. People generally aren't doing that great. There is a great misery within me and within him and within everyone, and some people notice the pain, some people express it, others don't. But we all suffer from something.

It doesn't matter if someone seems to deserve some relief. Everyone needs it. Everyone is suffering constantly. Some more than others, but still. This Kid Needs Help applies to everyone.

Thirty minutes later, I went to get a second pastry, intending to pay and leave a tip this time. It was the same cashier. As he reached to grab it for me, I saw scars on his arm.

If your parents didn’t let you have toy cars or dolls as a kid, you can just buy them for yourself as an adult. 

I’d say here that „this post was requested“ but I’d be lying - what was requested was a letter on grieving the childhood experiences you didn’t get to have because you’re trans, and I guess that the piece of advice above may seem overly simplistic or even dismissive to you: of course you can’t just „catch up“ on childhood as an adult.

You already had the childhood you had, it already shaped you. Plus, your feelings and your ways of thinking are more developed now than they were at 3 or 5 or 10 years old. Which is obviously a good thing in general but also means you will interact with that toy car or that doll differently now. So I really can’t tell you to just replace your actual childhood with some play-pretend childhood done in adulthood. That’d be silly for me to recommend and for you to expect from yourself. 

And yet - my main advice would be to get that toy car or that doll now. 

Sure, we could talk about how gendered toys aren’t necessary to be a real man or a real woman. We could talk about how there are cis boys who never played with cars and cis girls who never played with dolls either. We could talk about how your family and the choices they made when you were young do not define you. We could counter that feeling of grief with logical arguments. 

But grief isn’t easily soothed by logic. Grief deserves softness. Grief deserves „I see you and I give you space to exist“. Grief deserves care. 

This isn’t even a trans-specific problem: there are many people who, for various reasons, grieve the child they didn’t get to be. Kids who grew up in chaotic circumstances. Kids who grew up in emotionally distant families. Kids who were severely ill for long periods. So many examples I can’t even list them all. Grieving the childhood you missed out on feels so specific but it’s unfortunately quite common. You’re in good company. All these people understand, from their own unique angle, the grief you experience and that you can’t just easily talk yourself out of it. 

But what they, and you, can do is to treat the wound gently. So, buy that toy - not to replace or make up for your actual childhood, but out of respect and love for yourself. Buy it to tell yourself „Hey, I’m sorry you didn’t get this back then, you deserved it then and you still deserve it now“. 

Then maybe...

Maybe...

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.