braziliant

Like, “it’s not my responsibility to fix others”, bitch, yes it is, the problem is that it is ALL of our responsibility, but so many people have this shit knocking around in their head that they neglect it and so only those with either an immense commitment to others or those who have been groomed into self-sacrificial behavior engage in it and they end up burned out and used because everyone else is putting “not my responsibility to fix others” next to shit like “drink more water.”

And people will be like, “This is manipulative, no one should feel obligated to help other people with their problems” but like…

And you are free to think that way, I can’t stop you, but we need to call it what it is: selfish.

From the same mouths come the claim that the deeply traumatized and the psychotic need to be hyper-vigilant in making sure that all of their coping mechanisms are coherent, respectable, and ideally quiet, and at all times never made other people’s business (even if those people actively try to pry into your life to make sure your coping is following these guidelines), but at the same time, we can’t call selfishness what it is just because it’s dressed in the trappings of this paradigm of neurotic recovery and self-care.

Like, you can take a step back, you can establish boundaries and say “right now I need time and space to work on my own shit”, but the ritualistic “cutting out” of “toxic” people is selfish, plain and simple. Toxicity used to mean people who were actively engaged in harming you, who were actively looking to abuse and manipulate you, but now it’s just “anyone that makes me feel bad”, and like, who is really the toxic one in that scenario, if we really wanna cling to that language?

“I never asked for that responsibility”, bitch, me neither, but we are all struggling on this Earth, and you can be selfish, you are allowed to be selfish, you are allowed to be callous, you allowed to close your heart to the plight of others, but if you do, why should you be spared the vitriol that seems only reserved for those in the greatest need of help? “These people are toxic, they deserve to be abandoned”, you too bitch, you too.

See, I was raised to respond to a person who has fallen down by getting my knees in the dirt and helping them back up again, and yes it is hard, but what makes it hard isn’t the person in need, it’s the hundreds of people walking by, unwilling to lend a hand and share that burden because they’re lost in their own “self-care”.

The appropriately named Jarrett Walker is the author of Human Transit, a seminal text on transportation and cities that draws on his decades of experience in urban planning; he has the distinction of being called “an idiot” by Elon Musk on Twitter, when he pointed out that Musk’s Boring Company tunnel proposals could not possibly work due to their low capacity.

Walker’s overarching thesis is that city transit is undermined by “elite projection,” where rich people pretend that the way they like getting around – in private vehicles that go from door to door – can possibly work at urban scale, despite the fact that simple geometry shows that this is a physical impossibility.

As in, “It doesn’t matter how tightly you pack self-driving Ubers together on our roads. If all the people who make your coffee and empty your wastebin are in private vehicles rather than on buses and trains, the roads will be at 5 or 10 times their physical capacity.”

This emphasis on private vehicles leads people to seize on technological fads to defend the indefensible – hence the vogue for describing the smartphone as the key technology for transportation, or self-driving cars, or data-driven custom shuttle routes that re-route themselves based on demand signals from riders’ phones.

These all share the geometric flaw: even the smallest cars, packed as tightly as possible, multiplied by all the people who rely on buses and trains, will overflow all the roads we have now and all the roads we could ever build.

There is another flaw: when you make it cheaper to ride private vehicles (rather than public transit), you siphon transit riders out of the buses and trains, and put them on the roads, increasing congestion: so adding “efficient rideshares” actually makes transit worse, not better

Walker tried to explain this to Elon Musk on Twitter, discussing how his proposed Boring Machine tunnels’ narrow bores meant that on the one hand, they couldn’t carry enough people to make an appreciable difference in traffic, and on the other, that his proposal for allowing private cars to run through the tunnels is nuts: “The amount of the city that you would have to level to create enough of those elevators to get everybody’s car into the tunnel at 5:30 in the evening, it’s preposterous; it cannot help being. Anything that is that inefficient has to be only for elites.”

Musk called him an idiot.

When I was first coming out as trans, I had a lot of internalized transmisogyny.  I knew how negative society’s images of trans women were and I was convinced that I was somehow different.  I was terrified of being seen as a man in a dress, so I just never wore dresses.  In that respect it was rather convenient that I’m butch.  I was not going to be - as another trans woman put it to me - “a masturbating freak in panties.” I internalized a list of norms and behaviors that I had to avoid in order to be taken seriously and seen as a real woman.  This list of “don’t"s is more or less the autogynophilia diagnostic citeria.

Years later, after I had begun writing on transmisogyny I still had a lot of these messages internalized.  I had a wake up moment when I was traveling and visiting a girlfriend.  Her roommate came home after a difficult day and mentioned that she had gone clothes shopping to cheer herself up, and quickly showed off her new underwear and dresses, in particular one slinky sequined number.  There was much oohing and aahing and her mood significantly improved.

About an hour later she came back out of her room and said that she was having a hard time doing her work for the evening because she was still depressed.  My girlfriend sat her down and gave her some sage advice.  "Just put you nice new dress on, as well as your fancy new underwear.  It will make you feel sexy and you’ll feel better.”  "Then what, just work while wearing it?“ “Yeah.”

Warnings had been popping into head the whole time but now alarm bells were going off.  I so desperately wanted to warn them “Don’t do that! You’re directly admitting a connection between feminine clothing and sexual arousal and using that almost as if you’re self medicating!  No one will take you seriously as a real woman, you’ll just be seen as some fetishist!”  But I didn’t say that of course.  Not only because it would have been very rude, but because they were cis women.  No one is going to take away their womanhood for feeling sexy about lingerie and slinky dresses.  This seems to be something cis women, particularly femmes, do all the time.

The bottom line is that the behavior classified as autogynophilia is normal female behavior.  Charles Moser did a small study where he tried applying the criteria for it to cis women and found that 93% of cis women qualify as autogynophiles. So why are trans women subjected to this standard and often stigmatized, punished, or denied access to healthcare if they fit this criteria?  And why is there no similar criteria for trans men?