Politics

And even well meaning friends often can’t do more than say “hey don’t apologise”. But every time I meet a person like this, I teach them like two tricks about how to be aware of their own emotions and that day I see effort, every time.

>open up with visceral description of how this girl is clearly struggling emotionally, leading to her failure to contribute to the relationship, while she expresses directly to you that she depends entirely on you to help her >immediately compare her to men who are entirely content in their lives directly controlling what they do and do not contribute to their relationships

this is already incredibly fucked up and transphobic. I don't even need to read any further. the very first thing you have done is compare a struggling trans girl with smug cis men. I will read on anyways.

the traumatized girl who's afraid of taking up space apologises a lot. you do not like this. you think it is annoying and counter to the point of apologising. have you ever told her this? helped her learn that she doesn't need to apologise for everything? or are you just comparing this trauma response many girls need help to unlearn to the previously described men?

>clearly traumatized girl is diagnosed with anxiety >"obviously she's using this as an excuse to not do things!"

hi again op! that's ableist. I shouldn't need to say this, but anxiety can be genuinely debilitating. of course it can, it's a disability. that she's been diagnosed with. have you ever considered helping her get things done through the anxiety, instead of comforting her and taking care of it yourself or dismissing it outright as an excuse? (I doubt it.)

this, while still harsh, I can at least understand the perspective of. one who does not carry much burden of their own can indeed be burdening to others. but did you ever talk to her about this? did you talk with anyone else in the polycule about this? did you realise that these issues are ones that can be improved with effort, and often with help? did you think to provide that help, when she made it so clear she depends on you? or are you just complaining that she's not pulling her weight again, like those men you brought up earlier? (it reads much like the latter.)

do I even need to say anything about this one? no? I will anyway.

you're. allowed to say no to sex you don't want. there's a whole thing about that. it's called "consent", it applies to a lot of things outside of sex too. you should try looking it up some time. oh, but she might have felt bad if you denied her, right? (gee, I wonder why a girl in that kind of mental state would feel bad if the one person in the world she relied on rejected her.) even then, there are other options. you can still say no, and deal with the consequences. and if the entire polycule would somehow reject you for enforcing your own consent, that speaks to larger problems than making someone cry.

this is once again blatant transphobia and comparing this girl to the deadbeat men you described at the beginning. you're literally describing her here as someone who pretends to be a woman to dodge a woman's responsibility. I shouldn't need to go into more detail about how fucked that viewpoint is about a traumatized, struggling trans girl who's specifically looking up to you for guidance.

have you tried making the conversation not the spiral? or perhaps guiding her out the other side of said spiral and showing her it's still okay? yes, that's difficult, but so is having sex you don't want, and out of these two options the sex clearly isn't leading to long-term emotional growth or healing. it really seems like op either doesn't know or doesn't care that caring for someone doesn't mean catering to their every request, or about how to handle someone in a slump like this (in which case, why the hell did you start a romance with this obviously traumatized girl in the first place?)

the horribly traumatized anxiety-ridden transgender woman has memory issues. shocker! you don't provide any solutions. no lists, no calendars, no reminders, not even fucking sticky notes or phone alarms. you remember everything for her. then you complain about this as if she forced it on you. tip: this is also ableism.

are you seriously comparing breaking up with an emotionally unstable girl to fucking communism??? even if your description of her is accurate, in which case I would say she probably needed more stable friendships rather than any sort of romance (and you can turn down romance from girls like this, I've done it twice over), this is still such a wild comparison to me.

I don't have a proper conclusion to this. it just sounds like you entered a relationship with a girl too emotionally immature for one and then blamed her for entering the relationship, then you saw fit to rip into every flaw she has as if it were intentional and malicious, in the process being exceedingly transphobic and notably ableist.

I'm not saying this girl could do no harm ever. even if we take her presentation in this story fully at your word, however (which I'm not inclined to do), you clearly play a part in just how bad she becomes. it was your choice to continue coddling her for as long as you could stand and then some, instead of helping her actually confront the world as it is.

all that, then you just drop her like a burning stone. then on top of that, you compare this girl to obnoxious men, and dismiss her disabilities as nothing but excuses. and just to top it all off, let's not forget this, possibly the most important part:

YOU WROTE THIS ENTIRE STORY UP AND POSTED IT PUBLICLY.

yes, you posted it on your own little blogging corner of the internet, but that is in fact still public, and can get carried quite far. far enough to reach me, and farther still.

you must accept that people will have kinks that disgust you and you must come to this same understanding.

most of all, you must come to the understanding that the attraction a person experiences is not proof of some "original sin" that lies inside of them and makes them an irredeemable human. not only because accusations like this have been used as thinly-veiled excuses to lynch brown people/queer people/name a minority group here since literal antiquity, but because you as a leftist should not look at someone who likes lolisho or r*pe kink and suddenly decide that certain people DO NOT deserve human rights

Voss spent 25 years as a hostage negotiator, meaning that his job was to talk to guys on the phone who had literal guns to innocent people's heads. He KNOWS how to compassionately de-escalate a conflict and have productive, constructive conversations with people who are highly activated and reactive.

Weaponizing state violence against people who annoy you, disproportionately minoritized groups, is by definition cop behavior, and antis do exactly fucking that.

And if your response is "well those are only the extremes" maybe you should take one second to reflect on whose talking point re: cops that reaction is. Antis push a pro-censorship, authoritarian agenda, and are willing to target people with state violence in order to get what they want. At a moment when a fascist regime is in power in the US, this behavior has never been more dangerous to queer, POC, and disability communities. State violence is a constant risk, especially as the FBI explicitly targets our communities for our online activities and disseminating information. "Fancop" etc is not watering down the description of cop, it's fucking accurate.

Outreach to radicalized individuals needs to happen, because without it their numbers just grow

But also

Outreach is time consuming and difficult, not guaranteed to work, and put you or people around you in danger by putting you on a radicalized persons radar

But also

We know that compassionate, prolonged outreach is remarkably effective. We also know emotional appeals are astronomically more likely to change someone's mind than factual ones when it comes to core beliefs

But also

most deradicalization works when someone who is close to the individual puts in the work to shift their perspective.

But also

You do not need to do this yourself/no one is obligated to do this thing that is difficult and dangerous and there is a ton of organizing work and also outreach work in our own political circle that needs doing and you should utilize your resources how you see fit

But also

You do not need to be nice to or coddle people who have done material harm

But also

Outright hostility only serves to reinforce the us vs. them mentality and makes it harder to deprogram people

But also

focusing on trying to win over radicalized individuals can't come at the expense of work to help victims/our community/those marginalized/etc.

But also

People who are deradicalized need a community to reintegrate to or what's the point.

But also

You don't have to welcome someone who's done harm into your community.

But also

Sometimes your desire to not allow someone who has reformed reintegrate into a community has less to do with harm reduction and more to do with punishing them for previous wrongdoing

But also

You never owe forgiveness to anyone who has harmed you.

But also

Outreach to radicalized individuals needs to happen, because without it their numbers just grow.

Just ad infinitum. Just a never ending ouroboros of "You're an idiot for how you engage with this famously thorny issue".

i think we should bring this back (with some amendments ofc) if we ever needed an "internet etiquette" for the younger generations, now is the moment to remind them. purity culture kills fandom

as well as the three laws of fandom:

--

A psychopath.

She's a blogger who decided to break into English-language SFF publishing and set about destroying her competition, starting with other WOC and other queer women (her own two claims to minority status). She presented herself as an ethnic minority, which is technically true as far as it goes. She's ethnically Thai-Chinese rather than purely Thai... She's also an heiress of a hotel empire. Her most impressive close relative is worth over a billion. The rest are merely millionaires. She does have US citizenship, but this is a person raised in Thailand who has primarily lived in Thailand and then Hong Kong. I leave it to readers to decide how much of an oppressed minority that makes her.

No one knew just how wealthy she was when this all started, but they did know she was a Thai woman living in Thailand, not diaspora in the West. They also should have been able to see she was a bully. Should.

That whole Worldcon-y SFF crowd is so dumb at all things race-related that this toxic parasite was able to manipulate them for years. Not everyone, but more than enough. Even now, many people still think the callouts were racists cruelly going after an innocent minority.

Before all that, she used to be a book blogger who hated everything and ripped books apart in her reviews. She managed to tank 50bookspoc, which was a com for the self evident reading challenge.

Her pro writing name is Benjanun Sriduangkaew. Her writing... well... you're not missing out.

She was and is a cancerous tumor on the side of SFF fandom who gets away with it because credulous fools can't tell the difference between a disadvantaged minority and a Thai kajillionaire or between genuine critique of racist media and targeted strikes on professional rivals.

Here's a quote:

"She stalked authors she disliked online, talked about subjecting others to violence (acid attack, beheading and rape, for example), and apparently enticed earnest social justice allies into private correspondences which then gave her blackmail material. Her "performative rage" methods even contributed to one author attempting suicide via overdose."

It's normal to be angry about racism and even to have the occasional scathing book review, but requireshate (yes, really) aka winterfox hated everything. Her style was nothing but hate, and that should have been a red flag for people. At some point, rage becomes either an out of control coping mechanism that has turned into self harm or a deliberate tactic.

Beware when you see one of these people.

But more than that, beware being the patsy they use against their enemies. No bully like this is effective alone. They weaponize all the dumbasses who want to elevate a voice, any voice, to assuage their own guilt and helplessness in the face of societal racism.

Another quote about the destruction of 50bookspoc, also from hesychasm's post:

But I was surprised -- and frankly, very angry -- at how many of the honest, earnest advocates in that particular community bent themselves into all kinds of contortions to give someone like Sriduangkaew legitimacy. At how some of us had to patiently explain that calling an author a "stupid fuck," for example, was kind of messed up and served no social justice purpose whatsoever. And that trumpeting the idea that this was actually a laudable action was also messed up...because why? Honestly, why? The prize at the end of all of this is supposed to be equality, and that kind of bullshit not only takes our eyes off the prize, it has us staring daggers at each other.

Here's her Fanlore.

And again, her first targets were other people she perceived as the competition: genuinely disadvantaged WOC and/or queer women. That is nearly always how this type of bully operates. We see them in every fake-authentic fuckface in our part of fandom too. It's a distinctive pattern once you've encountered one of these.

i am saying this, because i already had a person say that they thought this comic was "defending child abusers." and by child abusers, they meant people with paraphilias that fall under the big 3. but like...developing a paraphilia like that can also be a trauma response. like i try not to talk about this part of myself because its such a raw and vulnerable part of me, but i am that way. i developed a paraphilia due to my trauma. it was completely out of my control and not something i was willing to develop, it was simply something that happened because id been taught at a young age that intimacy like that is okay and acceptable. i would never dare to abuse someone or make any contact that cannot be consented to, i vent this part of myself out through fiction and kink and the idea of hurting a real person in the way in which i was hurt makes me feel ill.