anyways

This is a really good example of how TERFs disguise their attacks against trans men, and why it’s so harmful to consider TERF attitudes towards trans mascs as infantilizing.

The post is made to appear sympathetic to the man they are mocking. “Look at this poor ‘girl’ and how he’s mutilated himself” sounds sympathetic, especially to trans people who are subjected to aggressive, direct attacks on their identities and humanity.

But this performative sympathy is just a front so that TERFs can enjoy being cruel without appearing as the aggressor. This allows the audience to still enjoy the pleasure of engaging in cruelty while dressing it up as pity.

This plays into the broader tactic TERFs deploy with trans mascs.

Rarely ever do they confront us directly the way they do with trans women.

In fact, because they see us as women, their primary objective is to make sure we are never ever heard at all, so that they can maintain the narrative that none of us would ever transition of our own free will.

Instead, they poison the well. They talk to our “handlers”. Our parents, our doctors and psychiatrists, our husbands, boyfriends, our pastors.

The veneer of sympathy is not to appeal to trans men. It is to appeal to those they see as having ownership over us. When trans men fight back against this, the malice comes out in full force.

She’s there in everything he does and everything he is, because he loved her but then he killed her.

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

Separate post because this topic is a little tangential to that, but I think it does a great job of unearthing one of our very well-hidden internal biases, which goes as follows:

Good people don't need to be taught.

A good person (in this case, a good child) shouldn't need to be told to be gracious and grateful when given a gift. A good child should just know that a holiday tradition of gift-giving is a social performance to strengthen family bonds and that personal preference or genuine reactions are secondary to that performance. A good child should just know how to value gifts, how to express thanks, how to praise and compliment. No caretakers in their lives should need to put any effort into instructing or modeling these things.

Good people should just know how to be good. If they were really Ontologically Good, their inherent goodness would simply intuitively guide them to correct behaviors. If they can't do that on their own, in a vacuum, in the absence of cues, that's a sign of their inherent moral lack.

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...Which all sounds very reasonable and obvious, and surely a mistake that only fundie christian families would make! Except that people in the social justice sphere also do this all the time. It's not anybody's job to educate you. You should know this already. If you were a Good Person, you wouldn't need to be taught. You would simply intuit the correct philosophies and gravitate to them according to your superior internal moral compass.

If you were a Good Person, you would already know that everything you were taught by your family and/or background was wrong. You should have rejected it already. You should have cut off your family, your heritage, everything about your childhood and upbringing that was Bad and Wrong. You should have known it was all a lie.

If you were a Good Person, you should be able to find the correct way yourself. You should be able to seek out the proper educational resources, and distinguish them from bad advice leading you astray, and make sense of them all according to your own internal moral code.

If you were a Good Person, you would have found your way by the proper, ascetic, official channels, not by reading a comic or watching anime. You shouldn't need entertainment or art to guide you. You should just know.

Present Practice something that didn’t come easy to me either (in keeping with the topic of the post.) it was something I thought about after realising how hurt I was that my child never said goodnight to me. I would say goodnight I love you so much and do all these things and have this whole special story and they’d just complain, until I realized I had to explain about how you’re supposed to say goodnight and extra points for I love you.

I’ve realized Present Practice has recurred in my writing, indicating that it’s near the top of my mind in terms of important things I can give to the world, and once I figure out what I’m doing with this story this it’s OVER for you guys you’re getting TOLD, you’re getting kissed on the forehead:

This was where he did the only thing so far that he was proud of in this day. He did not start shouting, even though his temper was going something like What the fuck, kids, but worse. He stopped, took a minute, and remembered he'd had this whole thing where he'd wanted his kids to love him. He rubbed his nose, said, "Remind me," and his daemon reminded him: "What do we want them to actually do?"

And he said, "The bare minimum fucking acknowledgement would be nice."

And Bee said, "Have we explained that to them? Do they know?"

Which I believe is worth working on because of the very hard-won long-practiced belief that it is easier to share a lesson if you do it through a little story. An anecdote about my kids or my life or a little fanfiction. Which is exactly what you just said

That’s 1972

29 years before AVEN was started online,

and 47 years before the present.

And that’s only the date that Manifesto was written, so asexuals as members of a community must have existed at least some time before that.