Just a Gay Space Nerd

1) Figured this out.

Peter Pan edited by Anne Hiebert Alton (2011)

(sorry to interrupt joke post but) this is true!

Children not clapping did happen too, (and some were even expected to have hissed, which was later written into the 1928 playscript and 1911 novel). But my all time favourite anecdote about it is from Pauline Chase (who played Peter)'s intro to Peter Pan's Post Bag 1909:

Children love to clap their hands at the play because then they feel that they are really part of it, and you can see them holding their hands poised ready to seize an opportunity. Their great chance is when I ask them to clap their hands if they believe in fairies, and so save Tink's life. But they are very wrathful if any one claps who has the reputation of being a cynic, and once there was quite an uproar in the front row of the dress circle because of a girl who clapped. Those about her pulled down her arms angrily. "How dare you clap," they cried, "when you know you don't believe in fairies!" There was one dreadfully hard-hearted little boy who came to the theatre not to clap. That was his object for coming, and he came round "behind" to tell me so in the middle of the play. His teeth were firm set. "I won't clap," he said doggedly; "I'm not going to clap." And when the time came he didn't clap; above the clapping of all the others I could hear him shouting from a box, "Peter, I'm not clapping."

I find her reasoning soooo fascinating — the conclusion of the article is that she’s Actually grieving the fact that her son didn’t care how She would feel if he altered his body

She acknowledges that he probably wasn’t trying to deliberately hurt her BUT that he simply didn’t prioritize her comfort when making the decision to get a tattoo

She’s grieving that her son doesn’t care enough about her opinion to limit what he wants to do

It’s mainly about the loss of control, as @brawlcloud pointed out

My own mother had this exact crashout against me when I came out as trans and started hrt (as an adult)… almost beat for beat word for word….

I think there’s a few key moments being overlooked

- She claims to not want control, out of fear of perpetuating her own deficiencies

- The frequent self deprecation

- The phrase “maybe it’s just because I’m a mother”

- Her ultimate conclusion that her grief stems from her feelings not being considered.

I think that selfishness and a desire for control are absolutely accurate descriptions of her behavior and attitude, but I think maybe we should step beyond and ask where this belief system came from.

We live in a society that pushes motherhood on women, in part through a sort of deification of the role, (very often literally when you bring in how religion gets involved as well). Motherhood is treated as a sign of success, of a life well lived, and I think some women cling to that because the world has limited them so much they believe they have nothing else that makes them special.

It’s a process that sort of, gives them a narrow socially controlled avenue by which they can express themselves more freely, and see themselves more positively. They respond to that by making it their identity.

When this makes contact with the real world, you could accurately describe it as seeing your children as property, but on paper, in their heads that’s not where this came from. I think there’s this view that parents are given power and they exploit that control for their own benefit, (and that perhaps their love for their children is on some level a lie). But the desire for power or exploitation is not necessary to commit harm. I think genuinely loving parents replicate these destructive and exploitative mindsets simply by conforming to society.

Motherhood as an identity demands more than just taking care of one’s children, it demands that you shape them into good and respectable middle class drones members of society, and ties your own place in that society to your ability to complete this task. Functionally your children are your property yes, but the way that structure itself is by selling it as your children are a part of who you are and what your own value is as a person. Its a form of dehumanization wherein children are not to be seen as complete people, but as vessels for a societal ritual wherein love and care is transmuted into social control.

The reason that this moment is ultimately painful for her isn’t that she’s lost control of her pawn, it’s that she’s being confronted with a fundamental contradiction of her structure of reality.

She’s not stupid, she recognizes this is wrong, it’s obviously an abhorrent outcome that she’s perpetuating. She believes in (lowercase l) liberal values of adults* as equals. She recognizes that she is supposed to teach and believe these values, but also that she cannot reconcile them with her construction of motherhood.

Either she fails at motherhood by contradicting liberalism (lowercase l) and imposing control when she is not supposed to (it’s past when she’s allowed to need it, she’s expected to already have a “successful” mimetic replica by now), or she fails at motherhood by failing to replicate the model she was expected to replicate (which is also where the classism plays in).

The contradiction is in some ways a revelation, the fact that she is able to begin to confront at least the outlines of the forces of her world is exceptional I think, something we want to see. But ultimately she finds herself clinging to a way to restore the balance and return the cognitive dissonance into hiding, and decides on a rather nebulous excuse that her son is ultimately at fault for failing to consider her feelings instead of continuing her line of inquiry and asking why exactly she feels like he should be required to do that. Ultimately she tries to simply try to forget it’s there, her son seeking peace tries to let her.

But I think this is not the best approach, it’s not the path I chose when I was in this circumstance myself. The barrier is weakened here, this is the time to be relentless, to force confrontations with the cracks in the foundations. Because there is more than just selfishness here, there are good intentions built into a crooked structure of control by broad societal forces of control which can and should be fought against. When someone is starting to look at where the shadows are coming from is the best time to attack the chains keeping them in the cave.

Ultimately what we’re seeing here is fundamentally a function of the western middle class culture exposing itself in a bit of an obvious and interesting way. The middle class evolves like this because it’s rewarded and influenced to be like this because of Capital and Patriarchy. But it adapts to be able to be able to replicate without exposing the power structures beneath or necessitating a strong lust for power/control/domination, because this is required for it to remain memetically successful.

There is so much free labor being bounced around in creative circles - so often because we're all doing something we love! And I'm not above it, I am also frequently saying yes to projects not intended to make money, knowing I'm going to be working for free. But on my own projects? Not if I can help it. Even if it's only $15-25 or a tip split, everyone is getting paid or otherwise compensated for their time. In the instances where there truly is no budget and no profit, I am doing any / everything I can to compensate: a comped ticket, trade for play, etc.

Even if you're starting a project with no intent to profit, have it in writing that should profit be generated in a way you do not anticipate, it will be split evenly until a new agreement is signed between all parties. For example, the TTRPG shows I do are insanely low budget - most players are walking out with $75 for a single show and that money is generated from sponsors and tips. In the contract I have with all players, it is spelled out that that is their pay and that any profit from other revenue streams (Twitch / YouTube), will not be allocated to them unless it exceeds business costs (which it never has) and should it ever exceed business costs, a new arrangement will be made and agreed upon. The only way I have cleared any profit beyond business costs over the last few years is if you factor in my personal pay for being a performer in many of the shows myself. But as two separate entities, the business is in the hole. So the $25 we've made from Twitch & Youtube goes right back into the business. At this point, ad revenue is pretty much only sometimes covering our Zoom subscription. If, however, we started getting crazy amounts of ad revenue, if our shows exploded into popularity, I would draft a new performer agreement with a breakdown of what percentage or amount folks would get from that. Because that's the right thing to do.

// I spent five fucking ever making this background and it won’t work on my damn layout so fuck me

Also have the original too

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"