Gay Gobbo

B is quiet, sweet and gentle, has predominantly female friends, loves animals, spends weekends doing butterfly conservation with a group of elderly women, none of that makes her an egg but it's definitely unusual behaviour for a cis man.

No, what makes B such an obvious egg to me is how she is treated by everyone else. A lot of men just avoid her, they think she's weird and effeminate. Women generally like her well enough, but they still tend to keep her at arm's length in a way they don't do with cis men. In a way she is being third-gendered already, like there's no established pattern for men or women to interact with someone like her, so they just avoid doing so if they can help it.

Last year she asked out this girl Alice, and Alice said yes. They dated for a few months, broke up, and continued to be perfectly friendly. Alice started dating someone else, everyone moved on.

Then these whispers started that B was actually really creepy, people started saying they had heard bad things about her (unspecified), that she had abuser vibes, that she had done all this supposed bad stuff but no one was allowed to say what it was, but it was definitely bad. And, really unusually if B was a cis man, all the men and women and non-binary people in her circle all immediately stopped being friends with her. She was uninvited from events, people even cancelled one-on-one meet-ups with her, she was barred from attending the LGBTQ support group she went to (she is pan). And bear in mind that all this is stuff I heard only from the people who cut her off, I am at best a distant acquaintance of B.

I ended up at an organised-at-the-last-minute drinks event that was hosted by a cis woman acquaintance on the same night that B had a month earlier organised a boardgame session, and everyone who had been planning to go to B's boardgame meet cancelled to go to this drinks event, to which B was explicitly not invited (I didn't find this out until later, I'm not really part of this circle at all). Incidentally, the woman who hosted the event made a point of telling me she was concerned for my safety out in public at night, and then proceeded to call me a man 🤷.

Several months later, the details came out: the "creepy" thing she had done was to buy Alice a birthday present. Alice thinks that's weird because it's not normal for friends to buy each other birthday presents and so she understood this as B expressing a level of intimacy beyond friendship. (Again, this is Alice's perspective on what happened). I know for a fact that B buys her friends birthday presents often, because I know some of those friends. If Alice had originally led with, "B bought me a birthday present," rather than, "B is being creepy, and I don't want to tell you how just yet," it probably wouldn't've worked to socially isolate her, so she let everyone's imaginations run wild with ideas about what B might've done. Only when everyone had cut B off did she reveal the details, and I understand B's social life is very slowly recovering but there is still so much suspicion about her.

I've talked to enough trans women in my time to recognise this story well. I personally have been lucky enough never to end up in that situation, but perhaps that is because I tend to avoid friendship groups where possible and prefer to have individual friendships that don't join up. Perhaps that is a subconscious defense mechanism to avoid stuff like this happening to me, idk.

But during this whole saga, a common refrain from B's cis woman and transmasc former friends was to respond to mentions of her unspecified creepy behaviour with "I hate cis men". That is, to position her supposed abusive behaviour within the context of gendered violence, even while not actually knowing what she did. And, having met B a couple of times and got a vibe, it fell to me to point out that some people that they consider "cis men" are actually not, which raised the whole "male socialisation" issue and whether trans women are oppressed before coming out, and then I decided I couldn't deal with that conversation with a bunch of non-transmisogynised people.

But at this point I am sort-of thought to be the "cis guy defender". People will say they hate cis guys randomly, and then apologise to me as if I am personally offended. No, I hate them too. But I feel that with a handful of alleged "cis guys" I can see the woman beneath even if they are unaware of it themselves. And the thing is, I don't trust non-transmisogynised people to be able to see that at all. Or rather, I think they can see it, but I don't think they realise what they are seeing, only that they instinctively hate it and want to kill it, so ingrained is transmisogyny in our society.

And the fact is that most of these "I hate cis guys" people don't hate actual cis guys. They love cis guys. They go out of their way to spend time with them, they admire them, they seek their approval, their favourite writers are all cis guys, their favourite actors too. And that's not to blame them for that, we live in a world where cis guys dominate everything, that's life. But it is a problem when your hatred of cis guys is expressed only against someone who (it seems to me) isn't one.

To deliberately cut off B's social life based on no information, even as you still support Neil Gaiman or Johnny Depp, is not the action of someone who hates cis men's violence against women, but of a transmisogynist who doesn't even know there's a name for the bigotry they are perpetuating. It starts to seem that, coming from certain people, "cis men", much like "AMABs" before it, often functions ironically enough as a slur against transfems. And that's not getting into the issue of those transmascs who say "I hate cis men" not as a fact but as an affirmation, that effectively misgenders themselves in order to label themselves as ontologically non-oppressive, which is a whole other (but related) can of worms.

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

Like, a cop in the United States can pull you over for any reason. Which is a nice way of saying no reason, because literally anything can be used after the fact as justification. A cop can say its cuz you looked at him, or didnt look at him, or it looked like you were holding something, or looked like you were driving too perfectly for it to be natural. It's insane.

There are apparently no circumstances where a cop can't just kill you. The line the courts have applied is "reasonably believed" you were a threat, but that's such a nebulous nothing limit that people get shot for reaching for their license, having their phone in their hand, you're running away with no weapon, not being able to follow conflicting commands, like anything. And cops are almost never charged, because every court is going to believe he could "reasonably believe" he was threatened. Fuck, if you give me enough time, I can make any situation seem juuuuust plausibly threatening enough to pass that bar. It's insane.

A cop can just rob you. Like tell you to give him your wallet, take all the cash out, and just walk away with it. Exactly like you would imagine getting robbed in an alley would go, except no one can help. And he doesn't even have to hide it, he just drops it in a box at the station and they put it in their bank account. It's legal. You can't prove it wasn't drug money. I can't prove any money wasn't at some point drug money. It's insane.

If a cop just walks in your front door and says "I'm here to kill you and your entire family" YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON IF YOU STOP HIM. There is no positive defense for assaulting a police officer in the United States, and doubly so if you kill him. You have effectively no defense against a homicidal cop, which happens same as any other job. Unless for some reason you have cameras all thru your house and clearly caught the audio of him saying that he's there just to kill you, you have zero chance of not going to prison, probably for life. And that's assuming you aren't killed "resisting arrest" while being taken into custody. It is a crime, in this country, for you to defend yourself under any circumstances if the person you're defending yourself from is a cop. That's insane.

You don't have civil rights if a cop says so. You have the right to have a gun, right? A lot of states have open carry. A cop can shoot you if he sees you have a gun. Doesn't matter if you have a license and everything. So you effectively don't have the right to bear arms if a cop can shoot you for exercising it. You have the right to protest. Unless a cop tells you to stop. He doesn't need a real reason to tell you to stop. And if you don't stop, you can be arrested or shot. So you don't really have the right to protest, do you? A cop cant just search your car or house, right? Unless he claims he heard something, or smelled something, neither of which can be proven. So a cop can search whatever he wants, as long as he pretends there was a "reason". So you dont have protection from unreasonable search and seizure, do you? These are no longer rights- they're things the cops allow.. for now. But legally, those rights have already been found to not actually be rights, because any random cop can decide to take that right from you, for any reason. It's insane.