Not Gay as In Happy

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

—got confused about why I’d never been a boy scout because he forgot i was trans

—told me he was gonna get top surgery scar tattoos to match me after i get mine

—laughs at all my trans jokes, even if they’re supremely unfunny

—calls me big dog (and him little dog) even though he is about as tall as two of me

Then he said "You know, I completely forgot you weren't always this way. Femininity really suits you" and let me tell you I started tearing up

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.

i'll reject someone and then they'll get upset so i either don't defend myself or give in because i'm afraid of upsetting them and losing them

so i don't think it's exactly right to say that having RSD or struggling with rejection makes you more prone to sexual assault. it does makes you more prone to sexual trauma, whether you're the victim or perpetrator.

for me, it's a lack of self esteem from trauma. but my self-esteem alone doesn't cause sexual assault. there needs to be something else going on that makes people to think it's okay to push someone or center their emotions in someone else's consent - usually a sense of entitlement or desire for control or security.

otherwise it'd just be having a difficult conversation. if you don't feel safe telling the other person that you're struggling emotionally, then either there needs to be an accommodation so you can communicate, or the relationship needs re-assessing.

not because anyone's bad, but because that's what you do. prioritize both people's safety and wellbeing. it's okay to not be ready for a relationship or sexual interaction. it's okay.

"abuser" is not an ontological category, just like "racist" or "homophobe" are not ontological categories. abuse, racism, and homophobia are actions done by individuals (and also systems in a sociological sense but that's tangential to the point.)

when i said "if you don't control this mental health symptom you will eventually enact abuse," i said that on purpose, because if you don't control this mental health symptom you will, factually, with near total certainty, eventually enact abuse.

because punishing people for rejecting you is coercive. the only thing that prevents it rising from "coercion" to "abuse" is the magnitude of the situation in question. when it's over something minor like "getting invited to social events," yeah, that's not really abuse, it's an annoyance. but life is full of rejection in many arenas. eventually, you'll face rejection in a situation involving something more impactful like sex, or domestic labor, or financial support.

if you have not built any control of your RSD, this will have a predictable outcome: abuse.

this phrasing two replies up is very telling:

"so i don't think it's exactly right to say that having RSD or struggling with rejection makes you more prone to sexual assault. it does makes you more prone to sexual trauma, whether you're the victim or perpetrator."

it's pretty obvious how absurd that phrasing is, but i want to dig into the motivation behind it, because it's important.

rates of perpetration of sexual assault (i.e. "what percentage of people have committed at least one sexual assault in their lifetime") are incredibly high, across the board. they're higher in certain demographics (e.g. men) but there isn't a demographic on earth where it isn't way higher than you would think just from knowing people in that demographic. you are friends with rapists! right now. if you have more than like 10 friends it is a near statistical certainty.

people find this very difficult to talk about without modifying the language specifically for the "gentle, nuanced" context. they don't want to say "a significant fraction of my friends have almost certainly committed at least one sexual assault." because sexual assault is the word that they use when they're conceptualizing it as exclusively a willful act by ontologically evil abusers. they would prefer to say "a significant fraction of my friends almost certainly have sexual trauma histories, as victims and/or perpetrators." to soften it. to pretend that rape committed by an "evil person" and rape committed by a "good person" are fundamentally different phenomena with different impacts, when they are not.

i point this out because this post has been floating around for months, which means it's been seen by thousands upon thousands of people who think of themselves as morally good, who have sexually coerced at least one person with rejection meltdowns in the past, and may not have considered the possibility that this qualifies as rape or sexual assault before reading this post. this post will hit them incredibly hard! it might stick with them for days, weeks, months. i knew it would do that and i did it on purpose.

(btw, that's not to imply that i think people responding negatively to the post are in that camp - in fact, i think the people in that camp are more likely to either silently ignore the post, or repost it positively to get a small hit of guilt-relief feelings. i think people writing negative responses are more likely to be in the 'anxious about doing it in the future' camp.)

again, i did this on purpose. there were two target audiences for this post: people who have enacted abuse with rejection meltdowns, and people who haven't done it yet but are at risk of doing it.

there are also many responses to this post from people who've suffered that abuse, and i'm happy to have contributed positively to their emotional processing, but that's actually just an incidental positive side-effect! abuse victims were not my target audience.

people doing abuse and at risk of doing abuse were my target audience. so the post was, frankly, pretty fucking confrontational.

Glimmer: Oh no that means...

Bloodhound

Jun Kumaori (Junkuma)

"chasing its tail too much"