i'm tired of this bit

and then later when he SNEAKS INTO A CORNER TO FUCKING… facetime yoda… like “ok so we have these millions of identical human men who were apparently suspiciously ordered for us by someone???” and yodas fucking response is just “when countless sapient lemons life gives you…….. send those lemons into intergalactic battle you must”

Obi-Wan:

And wild too that people are like "you're making them think it isn't actually really easy to look like cis women" like okay miss fucking My Mom Works At Raytheon but a lot of people legitimately do not have the time, money, or any other favorable circumstance which would enable them to do look like cis women, so why don't you shut the fuck up about how they'll look like Gross Men until they can scrounge up the fat stack of resources for those things?

Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do

Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control

Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child

This isn't a bad thing. But I do think it's a bad thing to form the basis of your queer understanding on a book that is intended to connect on an emotional level and make you have a borderline religious experience about how you are awesome because you are a trans woman. It's good as a jump start to your self esteem but not as an ongoing source of self worth and certainly not a basis of theory. Because what happens then is anything that doesn't square completely with the book meant to make you feel good becomes a personal attack.

And, unfortunately, the book says some incorrect and even outright indefensibly ignorant things at times. The book is dedicated to building up trans women, and one of the techniques it uses to do so is tearing down others. It's not enough that trans women are great, they have to be better than everyone else. Many of the most famous quotes from the book focus on propping up trans women as specifically the best, which necessarily involves saying everyone else is worse. That is what the best means, and is why Julia Serano felt the need to specifically comment on other identities to compare them to trans women and declare trans women better.

And when some trans woman is really hurting reads the book and for the first time in her life actually feels really good about herself and hangs her self esteem on the ideas presented in the book, this attitude of comparing trans women to others becomes a core part of her basis for self esteem. And anything that challenges the narrative in anyway is perceived as a personal attack and transmisogyny, no matter how irrational that is. No matter how prejudice that is.

It's not just whipping girl of course, lots of trans women culture and literature is like this. But whipping girl is a convenient example for being so popular and visible.

And this is the part that's going to really get me in trouble.

I do not personally like whipping girl. Frankly, it creeps me out to read it. Those famous quotes that people love so much set off all sorts of warnings in the back of my head and I've only recently figured out why. The sections that are dedicated to building up trans women by putting them above others read like Mormon propaganda, and having been born into the Mormon cult I have a very bad reaction to this type of rhetorical technique. An aversion to "you are just better than other people" type propaganda earned the hard way through more than twenty years of this type of stuff being an integral part of the trap that very nearly killed me before I managed to get out.

And a lot of them are aware of this (like we are when we make these “humans are space orcs” stories)

Maybe one species enjoys getting bit by something equivalent to mosquitoes. Maybe one actively avoids the hospitable places on their planet because it’s boring without a challenge. You get the gist.

I want to see a bunch of aliens (+humans) sitting around a table talking about how their own species is a bunch of freaks

Best possible addition. This is a top-tier insight

@prokopetz proposed that humans ought to get something special of our own that isn't just "We are the bestest and specialist in some generic way that feels like a vague and unsettling metaphor for American superiority and manifest destiny amidst all the other cultures of the world," and settled on space orcs because "Pursuit predators with freakish endurance" was the ecological niche we occupied during our own evolutionary history up until we started doing the civilization thing. The assumption from the start was that every other sci-fi or fantasy species would each be freaks in their own way, and the point of humans are space orcs was to let us be our own sort of freak, too.

People who expanded on the humans are space orcs stories immediately turned it into a reason to write little stories where humans are the biggest freaks or the only freaks and we are, in fact, the specialest most manifest destinyest je ne sais quoi-laden metaphors for the superiority of American culture over all the other cultures of the world. I hate it I hate it I hate it.