Fuckdoll

Watch, I'll do it right now:

I, a white trans woman, have privelege over all racialized trans women. All the transmisogyny I face is amplified a thousandfold for them because that transmisogyny intersects with the racism they also face. And I will never be able to truly understand that as they do.

Did the transmisogyny I am subjected to dissapear? Lol, no.

Do I feel a need to invent some bullshit term like "transmisogynblanc" because they have the term "transmisogynior" to describe the specific form of oppression they face at the crossroads of transphobia, misogyny, and racism? Lol, no. I'm not at those crossroads. I'm just at the intersection of misogyny and transphobia. There isn't even an "anti white racism" road to intersect with those other two, it doesn't exist.

sOASNNWKQLWKDBWKSKDNEKDNDNW

So I forge him a new breastplate and on the inside, because I know he has plenty of room, I put a little pocket. Not big enough to hold anything functional of course. Just a little extra piece to see what he’ll do with it.

1. The backorder leatherwork log, which includes over 100 pieces that I am working through, because I have had to keep promoting my work in order to survive but have also had to lose the bulk of the last two years on surgery and still ongoing recovery and ptsd and everything.

1a. Making yet fucking more new stuff because A) demand from folks, B) having to grab monthly small markets to try and make enough to cover bills and everything still means keeping show inventory. C) And some of this stuff is great and what I wanna keep doing to some extent. Higher grade art masks. One offs.all the really cool really detailed stuff y'all fucking love. All of A and C gets accomplished in bits at best in and around juggling 1 and 1b, which tend to occupy tons of space despite never having everything in hand at once to clear it all out.

2. Ravenswood books 3 & 4. Both half drafted, both RIGHT FUCKING THERE IN MY HEAD and I can't make enough time in my days to currently sit and write and get back on content releasing levels of schedule.

3. Tattooing has been relegated to hobby status at best. I am taking and working on friends here and there, and myself regularly still, but trying to expand or really start taking clients or anything? Not happening. Lack of resources but also lack of time and space because 1 and 2.

4. Voice acting has just been fifteen minutes here and there and a few hours on weeknights. It thankfully doesn't get in the way of anything else, but except for what I'm doing with Not Ready for Opsec, it's definitely not paying or sustainable.

5. Stage acting: well, Coriolanus was a bust thanks to a director who decided to play gaslight gatekeep, cut the girl's role to nothing as we go into tech week. I am vontinuing to audition for other stuff in the meantime, because well, i quite honestly need it. It's the one space where I can really collaborate, work with others, find some community as an artist, but most importantly? Gives me a fucking schedule to my life because a huge chunk of all my problems is having zero way to decently enforce structure on myself that I desperately need. But it also doesn't pay enough to live on.

I could keep going. There's other books in drafts and two other mediums I work in. It doesn't really matter. Everything is overloaded, paralyzed, and I am juggling so many things and can't keep myself afloat at the same time.

Between all the places I'm at on social media, there's maybe a combined total of 12k people following me. Optimistically, figure half of those are bots and overlapping people? 6,000 people left.

If everyone following me chipped in at just a buck on Patreon, I wouldn't be e-begging every fricking month. I'd be able to focus on clearing the backlog orders and then doing what I really want to be working on without 12,000x the stress and juggling.

And yes. Fuck it, have the link, because I can't just verbalize what would actually help me fix this shit and not post it: http://patreon.com/tormentedartifacts

Like, 6/10 new haters I've encounter in the past two-ish months used to adore Jax.

You can search the Jax tag on their blog and they were making thirst posts about her.

They were selfshipping with her.

They were trying to justify every misdeed and woobify her.

They were demonizing Ragatha and Gangle for standing up to her.

They were taking their Jax plushies on dates to restaurants, and movies, and fairs, and etc.

They were exploring their fetishes and kinks using her character.

They unironically wanted the "I can fix him shirt."

They were unironically using Pomni and Ragatha to self-insert into the show to be with her.

They were making OCs who's sole purpose for existing was to date her.

They were writing fics about marrying her.

But the revelation that she was in fact a woman the whole time broke their brains.

Now they're back tracking hard and trying to hide the transphobia behind performative "lib speak" (for lack of a better term) so they don't lose their ally points.

They want to be seen as an ally because it makes them feel good, but they're not willing to put in any of the actual work, including the self-work of addressing why being attracted to a trans woman makes them so uncomfortable.

They just want credit while being given a pass to be transphobic. Which they're not getting, and a lot of them are having temper tantrums about it.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.