probskay

Michael A Davenport, 3,090 Degrees Fahrenheit (Oil on canvas, 2025)

The story seems to want us to believe that the entire polycule has somehow degraded because of this one puppygirl who needs more care and support than everyone else. Like, look, I've seen a polycule house that I felt uncomfortable in because it was far less clean than I keep my own spaces. There were 5 people living in that home, and none of them were doing the dishes or sweeping the floor as often as they should have. I imagine that one person was doing the chores more often the others, sure, but that doesn't mean there was one individual we can easily shift all of the blame onto.

There are too many moving parts to this polycule that are essentially ignored. Every member of the polycule that isn't the protagonist or the puppygirl is effectively just a prop to show how bad the protagonist has it. If the whole house needs to make up $700 and that is all being placed onto one person, for either not paying or needing to pay it, what are the other members of the polycule doing?

Knight's piece suggests that the protagonist is "the mark," an individual whose labor is exploited by a polycule in order to provide comfort for the rest of the polycule. There is subtle emphasis on the idea that she is the only person in the polycule who bears those responsibilities. In the exact same manner, the puppygirl winds up bearing all of the blame for the entire polycule failing the protagonist, being used as a symbol and a prop.

Creating a common archetype can be useful for social analysis, providing a baseline pattern of behavior for the author to describe broad patterns of social behavior. Thing is, this piece doesn't actually seem invested in exploring the dynamic of a multi-person polycule, as much as it seems interested in blaming everything on a puppygirl and a bunch of faceless nobodies that the protagonist never really talks to.

The "accidentally ally teehee" thing of trans men being mistaken for trans women by transphobes does not, and will never, register to me as "the cis can't tell". It's honestly pretty blatantly a moment of "transphobes see or are explicitly tipped off to a Person Of Gender and immediately default to transmisogyny". And tbh it pisses me off how much transmascs don't see it.

Over and over again, I see bait posts from passing trans men with some approximation of "I'm a trans woman haha" to bait transphobes into tirades about how they'll never be a woman. Followed usually by little teehees about how affirming it was.

It never works in reverse. Not because it's easier to "pass" (a concept that already has little legitimacy) as a man if you're transmasc. The most "passing" trans woman alive could make this post, and they have. It doesn't work because the moment you indicate to someone that you're trans, with no further information, the default is transmisogyny.