Lila's boudoir

I’m in my mid-thirties and I have never had sex. I’ve thought about it and could have had one or two opportunities if I put in more effort, but I always decided against it because I just wasn’t into it at the time.

I can safely say that I do not feel I have missed out on anything. I was perfectly capable, by myself, of learning about my own body and boundaries without anyone else there to muddy the waters. The immense pressure that was there in my teens/twenties to Have Sex Just Do It is basically gone. I’m vibing. I’ve got my routine by myself in bed that I enjoy, and that’s enough for me.

And in the unlikely event that I ever decide to have sex with someone in the future, I don’t feel at all like I’m lacking some essential Knowledge or Skill that would “make it good” for someone else. I fully expect to ask my partner out loud what they like and to receive an answer clearly communicated and to relax and have fun. And if it’s a disappointing experience, I’m fine with that too. It is what it is.

I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the rescheduled Mass Lobby at Parliament, now on Wed Sept 9th, 1pm-5pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.

The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It became statutory guidance in the UK on August 5th, 2026.

Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.

A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Our demands have changed. Ask your MP to:

Write to Ministers and Prime Minister Andy Burnham to say they are profoundly concerned by the rolling back of trans rights, and that they believe that it is time for Parliament to legislate to protect equality for trans people.

Ask parliamentary questions focused on protecting trans people’s rights and defending trans people’s abilities to live safe and dignified lives.

Speak up both inside and outside Parliament in defence of trans people’s rights.

Meet regularly with trans constituents to understand their lived realities. 

Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.

I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.

We have already had some wins because we took action. The 2026 EHRC guidance has already rolled back its most harmful elements because of mass campaigning by individuals like us, and groups like The Good Law Project. This summer, 166 MPs signed the Early Day Motion 240 to reject the EHRC Code of Practice, because of our campaigning. That is 1 in 4 MPs.

It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:

moreover they should be prepping the bite point with an alcohol wipe.

and while I’m at it, I’ve noticed a blithe disregard for health & safety when it comes to blood pacts. can’t believe I have to say this but you should absolutely NOT be cutting your palm open with the pocket knife from your belt holster (??????)

Hi again everyone! 

I'm sorry to come back for yet another call for help, but we've tried everything and our current situation is worse than ever.

Long story short: my family and I are finding ourselves with less than 40% of our usual income. I'm trying to crowdfund whatever I can to help with groceries for the next two weeks (we managed to pay rent and bills with what we did get)

Anything help, even just sharing ! 🙏

If you want more informations on the situation :

Series 1. Overwhelmed

i had tried everything. everything on earth i could think of to try. distractions and burnout and medication and all of it. i integrated with my community and practiced my hobbies and tried to make smart choices and exercised regularly and kept putting it off until tomorrow. i would wake up and think - what if i am just like this, forever? three years into the worst depressive spiral of your adult life, the sensation of it becomes almost smooth, like a worrystone. nothing matters. it is almost a bone that never healed correctly. i was never quite mentally healthy, this was just the crystallization process.

i genuinely thought i was never going to recover, ever. that it would just be an eon of that experience, forever and ever.

my happiness did not come back like a bolt of light. i saw one very-small flicker and i snatched that moth out of the sky with my teeth, held her pinned against me. i worked so hard it felt stupid; i faltered; i continued.

on saturday, i had the best day of my life. it didn't start out that way. it just unrolled into one beautiful moment after another, even though i expected nothing from it. i spent the entire ride home grinning so widely that my cheeks hurt. i watched the sunset in silence. all i could think was holy fuck i'm glad i didn't kill myself.

in the bad place, i couldn't see the happiness coming for me. it wasn't like i wasn't aware good things could theoretically happen (and did sometimes happen even to me), it was that i just genuinely believed joy was no longer a possibility. i had tried to fix joy against my ceiling, after all, and it had bled down and spoiled in the air above me. i assumed that i had simply run out of the opportunity - that if i did experience joy, it would be difficult to parse, muted. a mumble instead of a shout.

the shout i am feeling is still echoing inside of me. i am joyful when i touch moss and i am joyful when i stand in the sun and i am joyful when i make my dinner. i am joyful when i text my friends and when i skinny dip and when i sing off-key to my girlfriend. i am joyful and i dance in the rain like a stupid lesbian manic pixie dream girl and i build little forts for mice to hide in and i hug trees without warning and i am joyful about the cringe of it all, about the silly abandon i feel.

i have bad days, but the good outshines them. i cannot fathom that. last year at this time, the bad days were still outnumbering the good by a margin so wide it was the difference between a pond and the ocean.

but the good days were there, which was new. and if they were there, it meant they could exist, and i could multiply them, and i could get out and get through. if the good days were there, laid out in white stars along the black beach of my life - i could pick them up gently and carry them, one at a time. each new one so blisteringly precious.

this can happen by constructing a scene where those details suddenly become relevant to the thing being depicted and the schemas the audience is using to think about it, or just by the simple act of being invited to dwell on them or having someone else's observations shared with you. and like, sure, this can be #edifying and raise the salience of #important things that are overlooked when they shouldn't be, but the fundamental mechanism at work is that when they're in the headspace for it, people enjoy the act of having their attention drawn to something they weren't even thinking about that makes them go "ohhhh." it produces that satisfying "click" in the mind, even a sense of wonder. we all have a miserly Heuristics Brain running at all times, guessing ahead and taking shortcuts to produce our initial impression of what we're seeing, and it's fantastic at its job of quickly processing loads of information. but we're all also constantly in the process of deciding when to go back and check its work. and there's a particular pleasure in the exercise of letting an artist shape that process, letting them pick which "irrelevant" details to guide you back to for reconsideration. like being walked through a wing of someone else's brain.

this is why the non-sequitur weirdness in little kids' stories and poetry is so much fun: the partially-constructed schemas of the world that they're operating on still leave a ton of those details unprocessed, and often lead to some really unexpected linkages and conclusions that force you to examine why it would never have occurred to you to think that. it's not mature art in the sense that most artists are aware on some level of their audience's expected shared ways of seeing the world, and are often skillfully playing games with them, or at least accounting for them. but the raw material for that play, for the mechanism that makes the game fun, is the unexpected details that come from noticing things we're primed to skip over. and kid weirdness has that in abundance.

Someone is complaining their child wants to cut their hair short or grow it long? Point out that it's the child's hair. Why shouldn't they have it how they want it? Why is that parent upset?

Support all kids' rights to do sports or dance or whatever - be a little judgemental, make concerned faces, if someone is pressuring their child toward an activity they don't want.

Let kids play with whatever toys they feel like.

Exclude creepy uncles or similar entirely from family gatherings.

Teach kids language to advocate for themselves. Respect their no, encourage them to express their feelings, listen when they cry. Criticise and argue with people who automatically ignore or shut children down.

Stand against beating and other forms of physical "discipline"

Every child deserves to feel ownership and autonomy over their own body, and regardless of their gender, an issue some trans ppl run into as they grow older is a sense of tension between what they want and who it feels like their body "belongs" to - their family, their future spouse, society

And there's a thought rattling around in my head over the fact that a lot of the issues with AI are not brand new to the technology era--a source of chronic and easy misinformation; a technology that causes people to withdraw and isolate and often self-harm; an environmental scourge; an absolute machete to critical thinking, disciplined learning, and meaningful study because why bother with hard and long tasks when you can get fast and easy dopamine hits--all of these can be applied to social media as well.

But something makes AI so foot-to-the-gas-pedal worse in such a festering and pervasive and sudden way, and I think my conclusion for that lies in this emergent technology debuting to the public already under the control of big tech mega-conglomerates who--and this part is critical--were absolutely panickingly desperate at the exact moment ChatGPT hit the scene.

And I'm going to bother you with graphs about this. Because I think it will help explain a lot of the Full-Shove-Down-Throatedness you've no doubt noticed with AI.

And like to back up a second--modern social media is controlled by these exact same mega-conglomerates. But the social media platforms didn't start that way. They were a lot of guy-in-his-basement style inventions--tumblr included--which developed to serve an organic and natural niche people wanted. No throat-shoving yet. Most of us (tumblr demographic) were probably sparkle-dogging on deviantart and--yeah whatever--superwholocking over here. And that was by no means perfect or necessarily even good but there was opportunity to ease in and learn the good and bad.

THEN the mega-conglomerates got it and Facebook is a festering cesspit and Twitter is Like That. But there was a bit of a gradual enshittification there, and I imagine most people following my blog are old enough such that you were able to recognize what enshitted itself and disengage appropriately.

AI--for all the way its ills mirror social media--was born a fully formed fucking asshole directly into the cradles of big tech. And it's weird to consider the technology behind LLMs is not, inherently, evil. And that feels weird because it never really had the chance to exist in the public eye in any capacity before it was the throat-shoved and desperate weapon of big tech downright begging you to rot your brain out your ears and steal your work and pollute the earth and stop thinking and stop trying and stop learning.

Which maybe then begs the question, WHY the crazy desperation? Why the complete disregard for sense, law, legal ownership, and customer voices? Why does 'fetch' need to happen and why do Tech CEO's talk about it like they're gonna bite the cyanide pill in their molars if you don't buy a fucking gemini subscription.

Well I promised you graphs.

Here's your first graph. And here's a little fun fact for those following at home: ChatGPT came out Dec 20, 2022.

This graph shows the stock price for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta (nee Facebook) between August 2016 (10 years ago) and Dec 20, 2022.

Now see that peak right before the start of 2022? Cover the downward side of it with your finger. Go on. Don't you see a beautiful exponential future of infinite growth? Don't you love when exponential growth is forever? Some of those returns were 400% in just 5 years. Sure, Covid caused a blip but what's a global pandemic in the face of a bullish stock run?

Okay now uncover the right side. That side is the screaming crying sobbing coaster of rich people feelings. And they were so very in their feels.

I'm zooming in on the graph for you. Welcome to November 2021 to Dec 20, 2022.

If you bought Amazon at peak? You were down 50%. Meta at peak? Down 60%. And every rich person investor is a money genius until the market turns, at which point it's panic to right the ship.

There were whispers of recession all throughout 2022 and it made the tech market crumble, because tech stock prices are highly speculative, and they ride market whiplash with more aggressive slingshotting than companies grounded in material value.

And then something happened on Dec 20, 2022. Obviously you know, I've said it 3 times. ChatGPT released. And oh boy.

Companies started promising AI. Investors started listening. The stock prices got happy.

Welcome to the graph 2022 to current day

And if the dance is working, they don't fucking stop dancing.

Do you WANT AI? Do you NEED AI? Will it actually help you? Might it in fact harm you? Will it harm the planet? Will it harm learning, and discipline, and the vulnerable, in the exact ways big tech companies are shoving it down people's throats?

Who give a shit! Whogiveasshitwhogiveasshitwhogiveahit. Money up! Desperate crying tech company HAPPY now. Money happy now!

Now the entire 10 year graph looks like this

And that scary scary scary scary drop off in 2022 that course corrected itself nigh exactly on December 20, 2022?