only here for shits and giggles

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Pronouns

An accent

Because my comics have gone around the internet, many people have asked if I’ve “gotten better yet”. The answer is a firm NO because that’s not how post-viral illness triggered by an infection that causes organ and brain damage works. Please consider your behavior and who you are leaving behind.

Check out the People’s CDC here where they provide weekly updates on the COVID situation in the U.S.

ID in alt text and below!

ID: a 10-image black-and-white cartoony comic.

The 1st image is titled Pandemic Year 3 and dated January 2023. The drawing shows a masked boy with fluffy hair, Joey, surrounded by unmasked people. The text reads: At some point, the people around me decided that the price of me staying alive — a few small inconveniences for them — was too high. In image 2, Joey sits at a table with his drawing tablet looking concerned. The text reads: The world, many loved ones included, is actively hostile to me continuing to live. How do I cope with that? I don’t have the answer. I’m just really alone.

Joey, stressed and frightened, clutches his laptop. The text reads: And I mean really alone. A figure on the laptop screen says: High-risk people will take care of themselves. Joey yells: How?

This image is split into two panels. The first one reads: How do I keep myself safe when the store, work, and school, is a death trap? For each word, a triangle displays that maskless environment. The second panel shows Joey’s sad face in a Zoom window. The text reads: I’m taking my final semester of undergrad online to the displeasure of many.

Joey lays face down in a pillow. The text reads: If you’ve been following me for any time, you know I got Covid in February 2020 at 19 years old and have become disabled by long Covid. Everything smells and tastes like rotting meat, I can’t keep anything I eat down, and I’ve started randomly fainting after years of dizziness.

Joey is shirtless and masked and hooked up to an EKG. The text reads: I’m one of millions of Covid survivors for whom re-infection is much more dangerous. Not to mention everyone who was already high-risk.

Joey lays on the couch and looks at social media posts where people are posting photos of themselves maskless in crowds. The text reads: The general public is very happy to isolate high-risk people from society if it means never having to think about us ever again and continuing with the actions that kill us. That’s eugenics, by the way.

This image is split into two panels. The first one shows Joey laying down, clutching his heart, and crying. The text reads: And it’s not just the people who don’t see us. The second panel shows Joey looking disheveled. The text reads: The cognitive dissonance is unlike anything I’ve seen. A speech bubble says: Are you sure you won’t do indoor dining?

Joey holds his hands lovingly under his face and raises his arms. Hearts are around his head. The text reads: If you’re here with me and isolated from the rest of society while being continually told that your life doesn’t matter and that you’re crazy, I see you. I love you. You’re not alone.

See, if women aren't real people, then the things that gender-mark women are real gender markers that identify them as not-people, but the things that gender-mark men are just normal people things, not gendered. Because the male gender doesn't exist, it's just women and people.

So you can't be gender-euphoric about becoming a man; all you're doing is shedding gender and becoming a genderless "normal person", because normal person is male.

It is really really weird that misogyny against women ends up, through a circuitous route, as redefining men as genderless, but this is the effect of generations of men being "normal" and women being "gendered".

Trans men, of course, know better; they can clearly see the gender marked-ness of masculinity, and feel euphoria when they reach it, because they're specifically looking for it. But cis men don't see it because women are the gender-marked class, and trans women might not see it for that reason and because they've been trying to achieve gender-markedness. Maybe they haven't put enough thought into the construction of the gender they're trying to leave behind to recognize that in fact masculinity is marked. (Any enby could have told them that, but it can be genuinely hard to recognize how marked masculinity is because even feminism falls into the trap of "women are the gender marked class and everyone else is just a person".)

Given how hard people have to fight to be seen as "manly" you'd think we'd all understand how very gender-marked masculinity is... but the fight to be manly is often constructed as the fight to not be womanly. Like, this is how normal people behave, and this is how girls behave, and you don't want to be a girl, do you?

this is a knock-on effect

of misogyny.