âDonât call me babe.â
âItâs okay, I call everyone babe!â
The above exchange demonstrates the point Iâm trying to make pretty well. It happened in my workplace, my first interaction with this particular person. I was showing off a solution Iâd developed to a problem, a solution that I delivered in half an hour with no training despite the rest of the business collectively scratching their heads. He said it looked cool and called me babe when he did so.
In a misogynistic world, taking such a tone with a woman in the workplace is an act of misogyny. It doesnât matter whether you consider yourself a misogynist, it doesnât matter whether youâre a great guy or whatever, it doesnât matter how many other people were okay with it, this is belittling.
Hereâs the important part: itâs still belittling to women if you also do it to men. Men do not, as a gender, have their accomplishments in the workplace routinely overlooked. They are not with any regularity treated as a part of the furniture. Treating them unprofessionally may have consequences for you, but it will rarely have consequences for them. Treating men and women the same in this case will not result in equal outcomes for men and women.
Iâm preaching to the choir, right?
Hereâs where it gets harder: youâre probably already doing this. Might not be misogyny. Statistically, it will be racism. You may be reinforcing homophobia or transphobia without noticing.
The example that prompted this was not the conversation above, but an argument I saw break out over a post that, in highlighting biases we might not be aware of in ourselves, pointing out that an asexual person telling a gay couple not to kiss because it squicks them out reinforces homophobia. Plenty of people had replied to the post claiming that they get squicked out when anyone kisses, therefore theyâre not homophobic for wanting the gay couple to stop. In a homophobic world, each time a gay couple feels safe enough to kiss in a public location is a victory only dreamed of for decades. A straight couple kissing is, comparatively not a big deal. If you claim to be applying a rule evenly to both categories then you are not taking into account the difference of impact between telling a straight couple not to kiss and telling a gay couple not to kiss.
There are plenty of other examples too:Â
A woman saying sheâs scared of all men might adversely affect black men, who are disproportionately viewed as predatoryÂ
A bisexual person jokingly asserting that itâs unnatural to have to pick just one gender to be attracted to might adversely affect gay men and lesbians, who will almost certainly have struggled with their sexuality being treated as a choiceÂ
A cisgender woman insisting that dresses and makeup are tools of the patriarchy might adversely affect a transgender woman, who has overcome significant self-doubt and even risk of bodily harm to dress the way she wants to for herself
The point is not that thereâs a list of behaviours you can study and not do. The point is that we all need to pay a little more attention to our own words and actions, not only internally but in the greater context of the world.
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Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?
Like weâve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.
Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans whoâve abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you canât touch or see or smell. Theyâll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message and theyâll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.
Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.
All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in. Many do not understand the humour of mages.
The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them. We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to you with a loved oneâs voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldnât stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.
Iâm not saying itâs all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.
Idea: Wizards use wands, all wizards use wands, everyone knows this. First thing an asshole does after unlocking the mysteries of the universe, growing a beard and building a tower in the middle of nowhere is fill a perfectly good broom closet with shitty wands.
Witches do not use wands. Everyone know this. What everyone doesnât know is this is because wands are the babiest of baby magical focuses. Witches use these to instruct children and if you havenât grown out of wands by the age of eight they start clucking their tongues and asking whatâs to be done with poor elphie who still uses wands.
The result of this is wizards think theyâre hot shit until a frustrated witch takes their wand from them (ignoring petty words like âattunementâ and 'hand craftedâ) and pulls off some fucking clint eastwood shit, snaps the twig in half and tells beardy mcfuckpants to grow up and use a real focus.
So you get to the afterlife and St Peter is there, tallying up your deeds and the like. He nods for a moment as he scribbles something down but eventually gives you the go ahead and gestures to the pearly gates to his right. Only theyâre not pearly gates, what youâve got here instead is a pearly bead curtain.
You look back over your shoulder and St Peterâs like, âplease,â so you head on through, and itâs exactly as awful as youâre expecting. This thing is huge and you still feel like every single bead runs over your face individually. They tangle around you, you have to shake them off arms and legs and your hair almost gets caught in one, but eventually you get through.
Just as youâre about to set off you hear St Peter clear his throat, and as you turn back around he gestures at how tangled the curtains have become. And itâs heaven, so you kind of feel obligated, you go back there and you untangle them. You work as quickly as you possibly can but itâs still a goddamn eternity with this old dude just watch you try to fix the mess you made of his front door.
You finally get done and turn back around to walk on into heaven, but it looks like thereâs another doorway, and in this doorway thereâs two bead curtains one after the other. You give St Peter a look like, âdude,â but still he gestures you on and it is heaven, so you give it a shot. Itâs even worse than you could have imagined after the last one. Beads get in your hair, some get in your mouth, a few are definitely trying to go places beads only go on very specific occasions. You kick and you tug and your trip your way through and eventually youâre out. You donât even wait for St Peter this time, you know you fucked these up, you know youâve got to fix them. You pull them apart from the bottom-up, then when that seems to make it worse you try top-down and when that doesnât work you just go full simian rage on this thing, trying to get these beads apart. It takes hours, what feels like longer, and itâs almost as bad as having to walk through the damn things again, but at last youâre done and you turn around to walk forward.
In front of you is a doorway with five bead curtains. You turn back around and Satan throws his hands in the air and says âalright, you got me.â
"So when did you first know?" November 19, 2012 It would make a pretty good facetious answer to a question a lot of people want to ask their trans friends, but I'm actually being serious. Like just about all LGBT people most of my life before realising who I am can be categorised as "foreshadowing", I could point to a hundred examples of things I did between the ages of 4 and 20 that now make me scream at how obvious the whole thing was. It would be easy to give out the standard answer "I've always known" when you look back like that, but I think that does a disservice to the confusion a lot of trans people go through. Because as much as it's obviously in retrospect, it was never really an option in my mind. I can literally say that I asked my dad at the tender age of eleven whether I could change and become a girl but I wouldn't say that I knew that I was trans then. So why that date then? Easy. A webcomic I followed had a character come out as trans. She wasn't transitioning, it wasn't some cheesy 'arc', she was just trans and had always been. I'd never seen something like that in my life and it opened a whole new world of possibilities. In the next few weeks and months I devoured everything I could on the topic until I could eventually come to the conclusion that made me the woman I am today. Because even though I could look back and claim I'd always known I wasn't cisgender November 19, 2012 is the first time I knew that a person could be trans. So I want to give a big shout out to Griffin McElroy right now for pulling off the exact kind of trans representation that helped me realise who I am, I love the Adventure Zone and I couldn't be a happier queer fan than I am today after hearing episode 60
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Everything I write is at least a little bit cosmic horror. Even the porn. Especially the porn. Please know that no matter what thing I appear to be writing, I am imagining cthulhu beating off in the corner.
I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that reading things I like does not motivate me to write. Reading things I like motivates me to read and read and keep reading and read some more. When I finally run out of book, like a cartoon character running obliviously off a cliff, I keep reading in my head, lying awake and staring at the ceiling and reading the words that were planted inside me to grow and I love every second of it. If I want to write more, I need to read more things that I don't love, things that are imperfect, things that are bad. Because when I read these things I see all the wasted possibilities, all the improvements that could have been made, all the editing that could have been done. I tear myself away from the page and instead of reading I seethe with the injustice of how perfect the story could have been if they had have only just- And then I tear out my laptop and write and write and write until all the seething is there on the paper in pristine prose. I write until the hole in the world where the perfect story I wanted to read should have been is just a little less empty. And then, exhausted, I turn back to the book so I can seethe some more.
The most inspiring moments in human history occur when we go off-script. As a whole, we are creatures of habit. We like routine. We like following orders. It's a hard truth but it's been proven. What has also been proven is that, in dire situations, we are known to refuse orders. All of our comedy can be distilled down to "something unexpected happens". We've stopped nuclear wars before they started because a human decided to go off-script. So just remember, as you get up and go to work and follow the rules that we all agree are in our best interests, that in desperate times, the most inspiring moments in human history occur when we go off-script.
