J.K. Rockin' on the tumblrphone

And look, okay, listen. I have a film degree. Im not in any an expert on cinema nor am I a film scholar but I do have some higher formal education on the topic, and I am a trans person who has, unfortunately, been 21. Here's my 2 cents:

Firstly, trans-coded villains in horror movies (namely the "man in a dress" archetype) is pretty cinema 101. It IS so extensively talked about that you were probably drawing an eye in the back of the lecture hall if you dont remember anything being said about it. If you ever take a horror movie class specifically then you are absolutely guaranteed to have this conversation and have the plethora of scholarship about it thrown at you for required reading.

Secondly, I do not like this idea that simply being a bit rude or short with someone of a particular demographic is always and exclusively rooted in a prejudice towards the identity group(s) they are a part of. There is a VERY big difference between active transphobia and just being a bit of a dick, and conflating the two is going to make things very messy and potentially dangerous. For starters, you are going to create an extremely paranoid and jumpy bunch of young trans people who are absolutely convinced that the entire world is out to kill them when they inevitably encounter some random asshole in the real world. And you are going to give a whole bunch of conservatives a whole bunch of ammunition to say that we think every minor inconvenience or moment of discomfort is a targeted attack against us, frankly because you are acting like it is.

Additionally, every 21 year old has a very weird superiority complex. I did, you did/do/will. It just comes with the territory. Youre having your first taste of true independence and are probably in undergrad, which is an environment that drip-feeds you a lot of rewards for doing essentially what you just did in high school again but at a slightly higher difficulty with less social ostracism. If you live on your own or in the dorms with other 21 year olds, you will all just feed into each other's superiority complexes. You end up convinced that you and your friends are the smartest people alive and the first ones to ever come up with certain ideas, that I promise have been thought of by millions of 21 year olds before you. This includes "has anyone else noticed that trans-coded villains are common in horror movies?" And I think its justified to have a bit of a reality check in someone saying "yes, everyone has, this has been discussed extensively for generations, youre just 21."

Finally, I do not appreciate in the slightest the response to this tweet being "silence of the lambs has no artistic merit and should be scrubbed from the media landscape entirely because of Buffalo Bill." If you personally are not comfortable with/do not have the ability to look past the trans-coded villain archetype you dont have to watch it, but to act like the presence of a poorly-aged trope completely negates all the very real positive impact a foundational film did for modern horror is infuriatingly anti-intellectual and betrays your one-dimensional morality around media, as well as your complete inability to look at something objectively.

"Kill your darlings" means "if something is holding you back, get rid of it, even if it sounds pretty."

That's it! That's all it means! It means if you're stuck and stalled out on your story and you could fix the whole block by removing something but you're avoiding removing that thing because it's good, you remove that thing. That's the darling.

It does NOT mean

That you have to get rid of your self-indulgent writing

That you should delete something just because you like it (?wtf?)

That you need to kill off characters (??? what)

That you have to pare your story down to the absolute bare bones

That you have to delete anything whatsoever if you don't want to

The POINT is that you STOP FEELING GUILTY for throwing out good writing that isn't SERVING THE STORY.

The POINT is that you don't get so HUNG UP on the details that you lose sight of the BIG PICTURE.

recycle your darlings

Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.

More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.

All the episodes of Galavant are on the Internet Archive!

eating disorder recovery is just getting angry over and over again because food is treated like some horrible necessary evil instead of one of the great joys of life. eat some nuts because they taste good and you are a living thing that thrives on pleasure and calories. you need both.

Q. You want to raise every boy as a girl? Yes.

Q. Why? A boy will learn to hate girls as long as he is raised in such a way where he is treated as better, and superior to, his girl peers, whenever he is cruel to girls. So, instead, we raise boys as girls.

Q. What if they say they are not a girl, and want to be acknowledged as boy? Then you know they are a boy, so you must make sure to understand them as boy, and not a girl.

Q. What does it mean to be 'raised as a girl'? That's up for you to decide. The only difference is that you should not raise boys any differently than you raise girls, since you raise every boy as a girl.

Q. Girls and boys are raised in specific ways for specific purposes, so it does not make sense to raise boys as girls. If you raise every boy as a girl, then there is no being which is not raised as a girl, so anyone raised as a girl necessarily must learn to do anything and everything to grow up, without restrictions on tasks, labours, or interests.

Q. But boys and girls are different. All two girls are different, and raising girls in one specific way destroys this individuality in favour of moulding girls to serve the same master. Still, the girls resist to live life on their own terms. If girls can be raised such that they know they can do anything they want, including not being girls, so too will boys raised as girls.

Q. Why not raise every girl as a boy? Because if a girl does not exist among boys, then the girl is made.

Q. Why not raise girls and boys as themselves? The self must be made in a world where girls and boys can first and foremost be themselves. One step towards this goal is to raise every boy as a girl.

Q. The way people raise girls is cruel, so why would you raise boys with that cruelty? If you raise girls with cruelty, then you should stop being cruel to girls.