unsafe space

And then she said the Labrys flag has been “ruined” by TERFs and my interest began to fade. 

Then the speaker brought up Mary Daly’s book Gyn Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, and she flippantly dismissed the entire book as transphobia. Followed by, as you can imagine, a call to “reclaim” the Labrys flag.

Now I’m not super familiar with Daly’s work, but I think that there’s something really vile in painting an entire book/author as worthless, painting it with one label and that is “transphobic.” There couldn’t possibly be anything of value in what Daly has to say; obviously her entire goal in writing the book was to squash transwomen (those poor, most-downtrodden of all women), and anything about uplifting the souls and minds of the uterus-bearers was a tacked-on afterthought, and anyway that’s not important.

Yeah, screw that. It’s not only a dismissive attitude, it’s promoting ignorance, the idea that our feminist foremothers have nothing whatsoever of value to say. It’s a form of epistemic injustice, telling girls “your thoughts must not cross into this camp, anything that speaks to your oppression and your experience alone is worthless twaw”

Commenters: omg that’s so fucked up. Maybe educate yourself on domestic abuse from experts before you go saying things like this??

They also love to hit and beat their victims until the victims finally retaliate with a small slap or push. Then, predictably, the abusers will tell anyone who'll listen that they are the abuse victim.

One of the presenters said he'd literally gotten camera footage of a male suspect acquainting his fist with his face while pretending to scream as his bruised and battered wife was on the phone with 911, and then, when the cops showed up, he came crying about how she'd beaten him. The idiot did it all in view of his ring camera.

They are very predictable. Unfortunately, there's a reason they're so confident in their tactics: those tactics work on law enforcement, which is permeated with misogyny.

And, doubly unfortunately, I could add all the disclaimers about how male victims truly do exist and deserve help, etc.,....and yet some people will still choose to read this as hatred towards them.

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

But men still complain that there are special scholarships for women. Lol.

Sources:

Colleges avoid taking too many women:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/magazine/men-college-enrollment.html

All other statistics:

Between this and the study that came out recently saying single women buy over a million houses more than single men, modern women are really proving that we are the superior gender. In 50 years, we now outpace men intellectually, financially, and obviously emotionally. These men with their 2000+ years (technically significantly more, but I’ll be nice and only count the years after the Christian church started fucking the world over) head start are getting beat by us in so many ways.

thinking about that post that boiled down to "women are evil for being scared of penis and associating it with rape and sexual assault. you should be fine with seeing some randoms genitals" because some of the replies talk about how it's unfair that a normal body part gets such association when women also rape and vulvas don't have a negative connotation.

yes, a penis is a normal body part. yes, women can rape. there are female rapists. but why are we talking as if we didn't live in a world were the overwhelming majority of sex crimes are commited by men? we live in a world where the biggest victims of wars are women and children because men rape them. throughout history, rape has been used by armies, occupying forces, and armed groups, all of which were made up of men. where when a disaster hits it's statistically proven that men take advantage of it to rape. where indecent exposure by strangers is overwhelmingly committed by men exposing their penises, not by women exposing their vulvas. why are we acting like women randomly woke up one morning and decided to associate penises with sexual violence for no reason?

By the way, face covering IS part of Gulf Arab culture.

It also says a lot that you cherry picked images of women without headcoverings like the example for Bosnia even though headscarves are part of Balkan folk clothing including for Christians like Greeks and Serbs. You clearly don't know anything.

And I don't have a problem with Arabs. I have a problem with arab imperialism. Because if they hadn't invaded our country and forced their barbaric religion on us, millions of girls like me wouldn't be forced into this fucking cult. You can all pretend that arab imperialism isn't real and that only the British invaded us but fact remains that both Arabs and the British irreparably damaged our country. I was taught to read and write arabic at the age of 6 by an ustad who would pinch my arm for every little mistake. so hard that it would bleed but I wasn't allowed to cry or complain because I'm learning a "holy language". At the age where I should've been eating mud, I learnt to hide my pain and smile. You tell us to learn your superior godly language and visit your godly worship site in Saudi Arabia and I'm supposed to pretend that shit is not imperialism?

I know face covering is a part of arab culture that's exactly why I tagged this as #arab imperialism ? I don't care about your culture. Just don't force that shit on us.

And I did not cherry pick pictures of women without head coverings tf ☠️ are you blind? there's like 5 or 6 women in that picture with head coverings.

Hi anon, sorry for the late reply. This is a complicated topic for me.

It’s hard to talk about. I’ve had to sit down and work on it in small chunks over the last week or so, but there is only so long I can dwell on it before getting too worked up, and there are better and happier things to do in life. 

I can’t tell if what I’ve written is of any use; it probably comes off too strongly. Might be TMI altogether. But I’ll go ahead and share it, because I suppose that’s better than saying nothing. 

I’m not sure what kind of advice you’re looking for, both because I don’t know you at all and because it sounds like you have your surgery scheduled and have made up your mind. I think only you can decide what’s best for you.

Rather than advice, I can only share my experiences and personal opinion. I assume that’s what you want, since you’re asking someone who regrets having had surgery. 

You ask if I think top surgery is the best option. The answer is a resounding No.

I’m not even talking about you or any specific person. Just in general, I think it’s a bad idea. 

Surgery is intense, invasive, risky, painful, and traumatic. A mastectomy is a drastic measure to take, and yet, top surgery is casually talked about as if it were a fact of life, as natural as growing old. 

What’s worse, I see little discussion about what it feels like to inhabit a post-op body. I went and looked through the tags as much as I could stand, and nothing seems to have changed since I started binding ~8 years ago. You get flooded with “here is what I look like 1-year post-op!“ and “it’s my first summer binder free!” and “it feels like I’m finally in charge of my body”. 

Most of the focus is on visual appearance, identity affirmation, or on everything top surgery isn’t – namely, how different it is from binding. Everyone loves uses the horrors of binding as justification for surgery, as proof that surgery is good and beneficial. I did the same thing; I’m just as guilty of it. 

But, I don’t see many people sharing post-op experiences like mine: permanent nerve damage, chronic pain, unnatural sensations, major revisions (I had to undergo surgery with full anesthesia twice, 1 year apart), etc. Not to mention uncomfortable experiences with the surgeons themselves. Maybe I’m just an unlucky outlier, but even if so, I don’t wish it on anyone else. 

In my consultations, I told my surgeon that I didn’t care about the visual result without a shirt — I didn’t care about the fact that there would be scars. I just wanted to be able to finally stop binding. I wanted my chest to feel like it did before my breasts grew in. I didn’t want to feel breasts there anymore. I wanted it to feel natural. But the discussion was always steered back toward appearance, no matter who I talked to. 

Top surgery did not give me a body that feels natural to inhabit. Instead, it literally feels like my breasts have been cut away. It feels exactly like what it is.

With top surgery, tissue is still left on the upper portions of the chest, in order to make a “natural looking contour”. That tissue still feels the same and is affected by gravity in the same ways as before. So, if I lie on my side or bend over (or exist in pretty much any state other than the “stand up straight, shoulders back, arms at your sides” pose that they put you in for pre- and post-op photos), that tissue droops or jiggles or does whatever it did before, only now I can also feel where it cuts off and the rest of the breast tissue was scooped away. I can feel where I was cut, where disjoint pieces of skin were sewn next to each other, and where skin is now missing. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s an unsettling, unpleasant, truly surreal combo of sensations. It’s a heavy weight every day, to physically remember that I’ve been cut into. 

The procedures my surgeon did left the nipples and their nerves intact, with the aim of retaining sensation (Though he did still cut the areola and nipple to a smaller size, despite my asking him not to. Again, goes back to his insistence and focus on a “natural male appearance” over my concerns about how I physically feel.) Unfortunately, nipple sensation is not like it used to be; there is only pain now. My nipples used to be a source of erogenous/sexual sensation, but now, it exclusively hurts for them to be touched in any way. Even light pressure is painful. Sometimes I wonder if I would have been better off had I lost them altogether. 

I get shooting nerve pain both in the nipples and in the surrounding tissue, even into my sides and armpits. The frequency of pain has decreased over the last 3 years, but not the intensity. When it hurts, it hurts bad. It sucks.

And to top it all off, I still get residual pains in my ribs from when I bound my chest, even after all these years of being “free from the binder”, even though I followed all the rules to bind “safely”. Any given day, I’ll be going about my business when all of a sudden it feels like a knife is being wedged between my ribs. 

In some ways, top surgery has made me feel even worse about my body than I did before transitioning, especially since this is something I “did to myself”. I used to think accepting my body in its natural state was hard (in fact, I was convinced it was impossible and thus made surgery a necessity), but man, it’s even harder to accept an altered state that I chose and enacted. 

I did the surgery stuff right: I shopped around and talked to multiple surgeons, I picked one with lots of experience and a decent reputation (the worst I heard was that he’s a bit old-fashioned in attitude, but has a track record of good results); he even presents at the Trans Health Conference. I was in good health, didn’t smoke, wasn’t overweight; I followed my surgeons’ instructions to a T and didn’t rush during my recovery. Despite these things, it didn’t go well. 

Even before I detransitioned, when I still identified as male, I was disappointed and unhappy with the result. Having detransitioned puts the cherry on top of the I-Regret-This cake, but even if I hadn’t detransitioned, I would still be dissatisfied. 

I still remember the day the bandages first came off. I immediately knew something was wrong (and indeed, it turns out the surgeon did something different than agreed and I’d need a second surgery in a year), but even then, the close friend who accompanied me ooh-ed and ahh-ed at “how great it looks!”. All responses from friends were positive, were all about how I looked. When I shared how miserable I felt, they didn’t know what to say. Sometimes they’d get straight up offended and insinuate that I was being invalidating in some way or another.

I went to all my post-op followups with my surgeon, and at my last appointment, something like a year or two later, I told him I was still feeling the nerve pains he told me typically go away after the first few months to a year. The most he could say was, “Huh. That’s strange.” Instead, he showed me the pre- and post-op photos. “The before-picture looks like a hairy woman, and the after-picture looks like a hairy man! It’s a complete transformation!” I just gave him a tired smile and nod. There was nothing more I could say, to him or to myself.

I wish I could go back in time and tell myself, “Don’t get surgery, it will feel worse. Just stop binding. Crazy idea, I know! But you can! Please just try; you can find a way! Literally anything is better than the road you’re on!” Though if I really could go back, I’d go back several years further and make sure I never started binding in the first place, because that’s where things really started going downhill. But there is no going back, and there is no returning to what was. 

I can’t in good conscience call surgery a “good idea” when it has gone poorly for me. I truly don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what advice I can give. All I know to say is that it wasn’t worth it. Feeling flat wasn’t worth it. Fitting into button-downs wasn’t worth it. Feeling less-jiggly wasn’t worth it. Being slightly less noticeable to men wasn’t worth it. Because when I’m away from the eyes of others, alone with myself each evening, and I feel and see my body and what has been done to it, I have to live with that mental/emotional weight and literal physical pain and discomfort.  I feel like a fool for having gone into debt to pay someone money to do this to me.

I have zero regrets about having had this surgery, because it did change my life in ways that are a net positive – better range of motion, more energy, no more random gropings in my daily life. However, it was not an unqualified success, and there are things I wish I’d known before and information that I can’t find now:

First, the weird sensations, yes, those are a thing. I had some mild complications with the healing process and ended up with gnarly scars that hurt and sting and itch every day in some way or another. If it’s going to rain, my scars will prickle. If I’m wearing tight clothes, they burn and hurt. And there seems to be very little I can do to stop those sensations. They’re deep down and I can try to rub away the sensation but it’s really more just to feel like I’m doing something about it.

I wish I’d known that nipple sensation would be weird forever. For the first year, one nipple was oversensitive and the other had no feeling at all. Nowadays I can’t get any pleasant sensation from them. If I’m feeling anything from the ol’ nips, it’s pain, tenderness and the aforementioned weird scar sensations. I’d hoped to give up bras after surgery; now I have to wear them often to fend off nipple pain, but after a couple hours the pressure makes my scars so painful that I end up just taking the bra off to feel some relief. And then my nips start hurting.

The recovery was tough physically, but mentally/emotionally I had an immediate worsening of dysphoria due to how unfamiliar my body looked, and how disgusting some of the upkeep was – the complication I mentioned required me to literally rip scabs off my breasts so the could drain properly. I was alone through most of it and it was a nightmare.

But again, after recovery, it was smooth sailing for a while, and then I started noticing weird shit with ye olde boobes. Like strange patterns of discoloration that come and go. I called my surgeon and he was like “yeah that’s not normal but I don’t have answers for you.” Nobody has answers for me. This started happening two years ago and I still don’t know why and it worries me every time.

I also am unfamiliar with the territory when I do self exams for lumps. What’s scar tissue? Is that weird hard bit supposed to be there? I found a lump about a year ago and went in for a mammogram. They found nothing but told me that it’s much harder to read results on breasts that have been reduced.

I also walked away from surgery with a Dilaudid addiction, but that’s a whole other thing.

Basically: surgery had to happen so I could live without pain, but I’m not living without pain, I’m just living with less pain, of a different variety. I’m so glad I didn’t go through with my original plan of a full mastectomy. I can’t imagine what that would feel like now.