Sad Songs on Repeat

Some women are expected to be strong at times when they can't. Her feminism would involve reassuring her that it's okay to not be strong.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're too stupid to ever amount to anything. Their disability activism would involve reassuring them that they're capable.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're smart and gifted, and are expected to live up to impossible standards. Their disability activism would involve allowing them to fail, make mistakes, be stupid, etc.

Some children are constantly reminded "you're the child, I'm the adult" in order to deny their autonomy. Their youth rights activism would involve treating them like an adult at times when they feel ready for it.

Some children are treated like adults in order to justify increased expectations or to downplay abuse against them. Their youth rights activism would involve allowing them to be a child.

the fridge-freezer is in the kitchen. Not only are there dishes every day, not only are there food preparation surfaces of various kinds every day, not only are there crumbs and odds and ends that fall on the floor every day ... but the fridge-freezer is in the kitchen. The oven is in the kitchen, the food cupboards are in the kitchen, and above all THE KITCHEN BIN IS IN THE KITCHEN.

I mean, it's not like the bathroom is all sweetness and light, but seriously! Who in their right mind is choosing the bathroom?!?!?!?

#You can piss in the kitchen sink but you can't make lasagna in the shower

So unfortunately that’s not really the case. Just because trans men can do something, that doesn’t mean that trans women can do the opposite of that. My experience as someone who transitioned from a gay man to a bi trans woman is that as soon as you transition to a certain point, the door of the gay male world slams shut in your face. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the door to the lesbian world opens wide.

When I go to gay male bars, I’m either welcome only as a guest or I’m not welcome at all. Because I’m a WOMAN. They don’t even want CIS women there, why would they want a tranny like me unless i’m on stage?

Trans men are often still welcome in lesbian bars in the US because of the specific history here. Trans men have often been welcome in “female only” spaces to the exclusion of trans women, as long as they misgender themselves. The Michigan Womyn’s Festival is a prime example. Trans girls, though, we don’t usually have this option in gay male places if we look too femme.

The funny thing is, now that gay trans men are gaining more acceptance (happy for y’all btw) i can go to a gay bar and see trans dudes there having a blast or i can go to a lesbian bar and see trans dudes there having a blast, but in either space, the trans girls are usually shuttled off to some dark corner or are absent all together. I could only be the “main audience” of those places if i detransition or pass completely for a cis woman.

That’s why i said that a trans woman can’t be a gay man. Because we simply aren’t allowed to be! And this can be painful, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. For many years, trans women were just seen as extremely effeminate gay men. Our lives were NOT better then. We fought to have the misogyny we experienced recognized as such and we fought to be recognized as the women we ARE. I don’t need other people trying to be progressive to come in and undo that work.

Maybe if we fought really hard, we could be let back into the gay male world, but I don’t know a single transfem who actually thinks this should happen. Myself and the other transfeminists in my circle are instead fighting more important battles. Is there misogyny in the gay world to be addressed? Sure, where isn’t there!

But rather that going on a holy conquest to break into the darkrooms of the gay leather bars, it’s much more important to fight for trans women to have equity in labor, access to medical transition, and equal rights with not only cis women, but cis men as well.

SOME people are allowed to be a gay boy one day, a genderless angel the next, and a butch4butch lesbian the day after. Transsexual women, for the most part, are not. Past a certain point of transition, there is no escape we can find from the transmisogyny we face outside of detransitioning or complete passing. Without a better way to describe it, I think this freedom or the lack thereof is the epitome of how transmisogyny is selectively applied to trans women.

That lower social class we occupy, shuttered out and ridiculed, that IS trans womanhood. We can be whoever we want inside, identify however, present however, but if we transition, transmisogyny is going to be our lot. It exists outside of us and is applied TO us no matter how we identify. We don’t receive the leisures, endowments, and privileges that gay men do. We don’t experience the leisures, endowments, or privileges that cis women do. We share in the struggles of both. There is no opt-out we can take. Transmisogyny reigns.

Because there is no way to tell with 100% accuracy that a piece of writing was created by or with the aid of generative AI, and anything less than 100% accuracy is completely unacceptable, no nuance, no exceptions. You can tell with 100% accuracy if something is not a fanwork--like an ISO or placeholder post that does not contain a fanwork--and you can tell with 100% accuracy if a fanwork contains a link to a payment apparatus or is otherwise soliciting payment for fic in violation of the TOS, so these things can be disallowed and, when discovered and reported as violations, dealt with by PAC. And you can tell with 100% accuracy that a fic has been plagiarized, meaning that it has pulled entire passages word for word from another fic and this can therefore be detailed in a report in order for PAC to take action. (This is important to note because while generative AI is in fact The Plagiarism Machine, that can only be proven on the back end via the datasets used to train it. You can't actually look at generative output and tell which place the words were ripped from, because LLMs operate on statistical probabilities of word order, not actually pulling phrases wholesale from a specific work.)

But you cannot tell with 100% accuracy that a particular passage has been generated with AI.

And we are already seeing the problem with spurious AI accusations! People are claiming that 'excessive use of em-dashes' is a 'tell' for AI, when the only reason em-dashes exist in AI-generated output is because the machines were trained on human-generated writing that used them! (And as a writer who frequently ODs on em-dashes and italics, I find that particular 'tell' especially insulting. My overuse of em-dashes comes from my own brain, thank you very much.) So the only way to actually tell that someone on Ao3 is using AI to write their fic is if the admit as much up-front.

Guess what would happen if Ao3 decided to ban AI fics from the platform? Those fics would stop being tagged, and then we'd run into the exact same problems we had on FFN with fics being grudge-reported by bad faith actors, which was one of many reasons Ao3 was created in the first place--so that people couldn't do that.

I was bulled extensively in elementary school, but 1. Mostly by my teachers and 2. Not during this, because we ALL had PBS Nature and as Deer, I was allowed to gouge, kick, bite, keep running even after being grabbed, or body-check the larger children into the picnic tables and other architecture.

You know, for realism.

THERE'S A WAY TO BYPASS THE COMMISSION AND PEOPLE ARE ALREADY WORKING ON IT