Amazement. 😋

in a social context where there are radically different dress styles for men and women, you generally get as far as assessing presentation and then stop. you aren't looking at people with an eye to determining their gender from their bodies unless you've got some specific reason to think the person in front of you is breaking the rules, or they're naked. which is also against the rules mostly lmao.

in this scenario there is no perceived need to distinguish men from women by looking at their hands or hips or jaws or anything and determining where these things fall on a bell curve, because there are strict and dramatic systematically imposed differences, that allow them to be distinguished at first glance.

if you go ahead and break down the system whereby men and women are given distinct silhouettes via costuming without retracting the social expectation that one should be able to gender others instantly, and should always do so, and that getting it wrong when you do so is horribly rude and embarrassing to both parties, then there's now this intense social pressure to develop acute gender-assessing skills that don't depend on conformity of presentation in others.

of course, most of our gender-assessing skills still focus on presentation, the cue system is just way more elaborate nowadays. but there's also a lot of pressure to learn to read people's bone and muscle so you Don't Get It Wrong.

(and thus, it is quite easy to feel, anyone whose body confounds these skills is Making You Fail At Society by being an outlier and therefore actually themselves Failing or else Out To Get You.)

so modern people (in 'globalized' society at least) are trained to look for physiological sex markers specifically because we've broadly normalized female cross-dressing without actually letting go of our whole rigid gender system, or the duty to uphold it.

Just like the horrors of what happened to Bill’s neighbors. We saw the aftermath. We saw the evacuation in the flashback. We knew the atrocities that occurred without having to actually see the violence.

Just like the quiet hopelessness of having the leading expert ask to go home to be with her family and saying the only option is to bomb everything. But we didn’t have to see those measures being taken.

I could go on forever. I just feel like The Last of Us gets it right. The joy of viewership and fandom without the trauma. The atrocities are clear. Which is an insane feat because of the source material. It feels almost gentle in comparison to other popular shows lately.

This is not talked about enough and as a result ppl struggle to process grief bc the world is telling them that grief is something else.

Grief is about loss, and IF you’d like to define it as a loss of life it is not restricted to loss of life via death. Even then I’d implore you to not view grief as about death or life but again, just loss.

Grief is also about having a shitty childhood that nothing can fix even if you have healed from it as an adult; your childhood was shitty and there’s nothing retroactively you can do about it. You grieve the loss of thriving your past self was denied.

Grief is about friendships that ended abruptly, confusingly and again, there’s nothing you can do to change that. You just have to sit with it. This is the only way grief can ultimately be processed and all it wants by the way: to be accepted and sat with. That’s it.

Grief is about opportunities that have passed, experiences you can’t have because of the way situations have ended up, and having to accept that while you do have your whole future ahead of you, there were some things you wanted to be a certain way then and they weren’t, aren’t and will never be.

Grief is being estranged from your family and missing family closeness even though you do not want to be closer to your parents, because you’re grieving the fact that there is a healthy part of human life you will not experience through them.

Grief can be the job you lost, the plans that fell through, the events that spiraled out of your control

If grief is strictly about life and death, understand that it includes grieving the life you never had and the death of who you used to be, too.

But moreover, grief is about loss.

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