We Love Those!

What they said was, to the best of my recollection, “Women have had to work damn hard for a long time to get what little we have…. …and I don’t like the idea of someone who’s had all the privileges of being a man their whole life saying they know what it’s like to grow up as a girl…. …[and] I don’t like them using resources allocated to [cisgender] women.”

Now, there’s a lot to unpack there, but specifically that bit in the middle- the statement of, “I think trans women have benefitted from the patriarchy as men in their formative years, and then grow up to become competition for limited resources dedicated to cisgender women, who I think are more deserving because they’ve been victims of the patriarchy longer”

And I think that- interestingly- this makes a slight bit of sense to me. I don’t AGREE by any means, but I can follow the thread of logic and see how she came to this conclusion.

But I think the thing here- the vital thing, the difference between our two conflicting conclusions- is that SHE saw it as, “trans women deserve resources, yes, but they shouldn’t receive them from the same facilities or programs as cis women”, and the way I see it is, “women at large need enough support that they don’t see their own sisters as competition” and “no amount of past suffering is a higher priority than current suffering, and so current aid should be distributed according to current need”

And yes, it’s exhausting that this is always where the conversation seems to go- to the caricature of trans women specifically being invaders- but every time it does, it feels like I learn a little bit more about the person speaking

Which may be as I suspect in this particular case, at the risk of reading too deeply into it with not enough hard fact, “my experiences as a young girl were traumatic”, “I yearn for security and reassurance that I never got and I am now envious of others who do”, “I’m afraid of scarcity”, and “I tie my current identity so strongly to my own trauma and negative experiences that I tie some amount of any person’s identity or value by how much they’ve suffered”

"a woman has XX chromosomes"

*Diogenes with an androgen insensitive XY cis woman*: behold, a man!

"Nono, a woman can bear children!"

*Diogenes with someone who has medical complications associated with pregnancy*: "behold, a man!"

"nono, a woman produces the large gamete"

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

By shadow I mean all the things we usually suppress in polite society; impulses & desires that are (self)destructive, harmful, shameful. things that would be Wrong, maybe a bit inappropriate or outright monstrous, if we did them in real life, can find expression in fantasy & imagination, in play & games. Nobody gets hurt and we’re just having fun

— or maybe we’re being confronted with uncomfortable truths about our psyche, but we have a safe container to really go there, go deep & not shrink back from it, go past the point we would have allowed ourselves to admit is in there. & it can be ugly & shocking & gross, like truly disgusting.

But again, it’s not real & nobody was hurt. It’s cathartic, but more than that: It allows us to be honest with ourselves and see what’s in us. It’s simultaneously repulsive and harmless. We can safely accept these parts of ourselves, we don’t have to push them down, deny them, disavow them, project them onto others.

Because that happens all too easily.

We end up seeing our own demons in others if we can’t allow them in ourselves.

And it’s not necessarily a one-to-one projection. Often our fears get mixed in with just a little bit of uncomfortable lurid excitement, but if we can’t allow ourselves this “moral failing” (an emotion, a thought), then we can end up on “righteous” crusades against imagined monsters & perverts.

I’m not armchair analysing rightwingers here btw, I’m speaking from my own personal experience. There’s something intoxicating about imagining yourself as morally pure, upright; bravely standing up against the corruption & crimes of those Others who are not like you, are persecuting you. You become, in your imagination, an innocent victim and righteous saviour at the same time. Any cruel, repulsive, evil thing your creative mind can conjure up gets a home away from you, in the perverts & criminals threatening your way of life, & any violence against them is justified.

You get all the lurid pleasures of imagining horrible things without any of the discomfort, shame or responsibility of considering they might be part of you. You’re free. You can’t understand that anyone could enjoy their bad thoughts, impulses, desires without acting them out in real life. You’re trapped.

Of course this is just one extreme, & certainly not inevitable.

Or you might recognise that darkness inside you & conclude that you’re a monster, a ticking time bomb, a danger to everyone around you. When chances are you’re just a normal human with normal thoughts. We’re animals and people, both.

That adults are cruel to children.

That you will suffer injustice, but that doesn't give you the right to be unjust to others.

That there are negative consequences to indulging vices.

That upholding moral principles is always the better path, even in the face of hardship.

That you will die someday.

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

You can be – you should be – furious with people who voted for Trump, for wilfully trying to sabotage those rights and make them conditional, a privilege for the "deserving", a privilege they can deny the "wrong" kind of people.

And when the MAGA crowd are hit by the consequences of their actions, and denied basic human rights because it turns out their Great Leader doesn't actually include his followers among the privileged, it's tempting to say that they deserve to be denied those rights, because that's what they wanted to do to others.

But if you do that, you don't truly believe that those rights should be universal; you just have a different idea than the MAGA crowd about who should be included among the privileged.