wip

Lets take a look at the thought experiment of a patriarchy centring transmascs as the most prioritised group:

FGM would be banned and practically non existent - if it was ever even thought of - because a natal vagina would have no stigma attached to it

Child Marriage could not exist, because it would be recognised as morally wrong to try and force such a huge decision before children had reached their final form

Abortion would be free and accessible for all

Children would be able to express their gender as they wished, as it was imperative that they find out who they really are

HRT would be free and accessible from an early age

Intersex, afab and other non-pericis male bodies would have to have be studied

Different hormone systems would have to be included in all medical studies

Crash dummies would be an actual average human rather than the average pericis male, this would mean fewer women were outside the range of testing and therefore people die in crashes

There would be no homophobia or lesbophobia

Free the nipple would have succeeded (because transmasc bodies which often include breasts are the default)

I would be supreme ruler cause I'm cool as fuck

Everyone would have to listen to Michael Jackson

There would be no disparity in education and literacy

There would be no female infanticide

Everyone would have swag

There would be no underfeeding of 'young girls'

Dyke butches would reign supreme

Endometriosis would be studied

Forced Pregnancy would be seen as horrific and rare, much like cannibalism

The ability to create life would never be seen as shameful

The temperature would be lower (because i as supreme leader would suplex global warming)

"males and females" "AFABs and AMABs" "TMEs and TMAs" "You're TME, you'll never understand how scary it is to be a girl with a penis in the women's bathroom" (said to me, person who was literally beat up in middle school for being a girl with a penis in the girl's bathroom) "AMABs can never get cervical cancer, that's an AFAB only thing" "they won't let trans kids have hormones, but they'll give them to cis kids for free" "you can't be cis and trans at the same time" you can't be transfem and transmasc" "You can't be transfem if you were AFAB" "You can't be transmasc if you were AMAB" "RMAB and RFAB? Now you're just making things up" "All intersex people are biologically nonbinary" "I want to transition into intersex" "I'm such a b*eddel/f*ta/h*rm" "You're intersex? I'm so jealous, that means you get an easier transition right?" "I wish I was intersex, then I could get myself pregnant" "Trans people are brain intersex" "So what does it look like?"

She didnt insert herself.

Dawn is an unfathomable mystical energy source key protected by Ancient Monks from being used by the Evil Hellgod Glorificus to destroy the world. Glorificus found the monks and killed them but not before they transformed the key into human form and sent it to the strongest protector on Earth. Dawn was created as Buffy's sister so that Buffy would love and protect Dawn. But Dawn doesnt know any of this, she has no memories of her energy key life and as far as she knows she's just a teenage girl, until she discovers the truth. And even then she doesnt remember.

then someone gets brave and makes a character who is a real bastard and makes all the wrong choices and is maybe even malicious at times and they make this character explicitly queer. and then fans are like "this is what you think of us?? worst representation ever" and the creator gets absolutely lambasted, ESPECIALLY if theyre queer themselves

then everyone else sees this and either thinks its too risky to include a queer character, or wants to make sure they're only doing the good and nice representation with no flaws or mistakes

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.

There was a brief period in 2021 (the “great resignation”) where it was an employee’s market, but because a lot of people changed jobs, while a small fraction of industries were able to tempt skilled employees with good salaries and benefits in order to hire and appear healthily in growth mode, the question of raises fell to the wayside even more than usual. Especially because this happened during Covid—at the time a lot of employers just completely stopped offering cost of living adjustment raises as an “emergency response” to the economy. And then…they just never picked them back up. Every year became a “challenging year” and it was normalized for a shaken-up workforce that you wouldn’t get a modest increase in wages annually. While a lot of industries especially the ones most visibly in need of wage reform like food service have had static wages for decades, a lot of our workforce in places like public service, education, manufacturing/engineering, and mid-level white collar jobs, the types of careers that, at bare minimum, exist of offset the initial investment a huge part of our generation in America has made into the 4-year college system, were able to keep their heads above water more easily if they landed a job that would at least kind of take care of their needs in this regard. It was considered a dealbreaker for many people looking to switch careers if that wasn’t offered.

I think when we talk about raises and upward mobility we associate it with middle class people making the jump from lower mid to upper mid; this is really the only major type of class mobility that exists in America. You might grow up with parents who have no savings, and eventually become the type of person who can save and take their kids to Disneyland. It’s kind of hard to see this being denied to people as a crisis given that poverty is inescapable. However I think the type of slow decline in wage stability relative to inflation is extremely scary because it actually means many people are backsliding out of even being lower middle class without realizing it. In the grand scheme of things this is a less urgent wage crisis than what effects hourly wage workers, but because of that I think a lot of people don’t realize it’s effecting them, and feel guilty or frustrated when they have what looks like a stable career and feel something slip away from them.

For example: my second salaried job out of college was at the corporate packaging & purchasing department of a major dairy supplier in Buffalo. I made $45k plus benefits in 2018, a major raise from the $15/hr I’d been making before. People in that office had had careers at the company that lasted 15, 20 years, and relied partially on a steady, expected annual reassessment and cost of living raise. Without it, their stability their salary offered them would drift away slightly every year. This is bad for many reasons, but particularly because when you grow a career somewhere, it’s likely your life grows with you in terms of costs: you start a family, maybe need to take care of your elderly parents eventually.

What I hear anecdotally though this has changed radically in almost all career fields. There is no guarantee wage increases will ever be normalized again to the degree they were pre-Covid, and inflation has increased roughly 23% since 2021. The $45k I made in 2018 is worth $33k now. That is simply true. Let’s assume that company was generous enough to raise that salary commensurate with inflation to $50k by 2021. If they had done that yearly to meet the economic realities by 2026, that person should be making $61,000. But they’re not. They’re making the material equivalent of half of that, basically. That is a massive, mind-boggling gap, and has nothing to do with the role itself, just the value of money, and a lot of people who entered the workforce in the 2020s have no idea just how much they are being denied because (like I was in 2018!) they’re in their early 20s and happy to have a salaried job. But while that salary bought me my first car and enabled me to do things like host people who weren’t able to have stable housing at my apartment, it is simply not offering that to people today.