but seriously if you see someone call themselves âproshipâ and you think âthis person is a pedophileâ without any other context, this is your sign to log off of social media. there is still time.
social media is an amazing tool for connecting with people across the world for community and solidarity, but it is also a hellscape of brainworms and horrible opinions, such as the reduction of âthis is part of a complicated discussion about critical consumption and morality in mediaâ down to âif you write/draw/think about Bad Thingsâ˘ď¸ in fiction with exclusively fictional characters then you are defending those Bad Thingsâ˘ď¸ happening to real people.â
do you see how this is an insane leap in logic? you donât get to pick and choose what Bad Thingsâ˘ď¸ are permissible to explore and present in media, and so long as weâre talking about fictional charactersâand theyâve hopefully put up some Dead Dove content warningsâno harm is being done. you are making dangerous and irresponsible accusations against people, independent of their actions.
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just saw someone in a debate with vegans about milk ethics say âwell living in houses, cooking food, and using electricity isnât natural, should we stop doing that, too?â
and it made me realize that there really this perception of ânaturalâ versus âhuman-designedâ that needs to be utterly demolished for the good of everything. humans are toolmakers, and that is a key part of hominin evolution. there are also many animal species who make and use tools! this is significant, because tools (and knowing how to create/use them) can be passed down to new generations and can be optimized on a much faster timescale than that of evolution, which depends on many generations of reproduction and myriad other influences.
humans making and using tools, harnessing fire and electricity, is literally a natural progression of something that many other nonhuman animals are already doing. and âliving in houses?â i get the point the commenter was making, but building a shelter is something you will find among most (i wonât say âall,â there may be exceptions) animals across the board. we are no different, just because our shelters are tricked out with advanced forms of our invented technology!
humans have an environmental impact, sure. but so does everything else! every plant, every animal, every fungi, every living organismâand all nonliving matterâaffects their environment in some way. sure, we are conscious of our impact, but frankly we donât know enough about nonhuman intelligence to know if weâre the only ones. we are a part of these systems, not apart from them. there is no âunnatural.â there is only ârefined.â there is only âtool technology.â animals refine things for their useâthink of a beaver building a dam. animals use toolsâcorvids and many primates are infamous for this.
end the paradigm of ânaturalâ versus âunnatural.â itâs damaging our perception of ourselves, and of the world.
listen i think itâs perfectly acceptable to be vegan as a personal choice
that said, so many of the emotional appeals that get used are all about the intelligence of the animals that get slaughtered and like. do plants not have their own form of intelligence??? we are literally baffled by the way plants can communicate with each other. itâs so fascinating, yet so alien to us. and thatâs just it! we see plants as being totally fine to eat because they donât seem to have humanlike intelligence like what we project onto pigs and dolphins and such.
but we have to draw the line somewhere, right? most vegans are reasonable people, and we can agree that harm reduction is better than not doing anything at all. so, we draw that line. vegans draw that line at any animal product, but will eat plants. some include honey in that, some donât. vegetarians draw the line at animal meat. pescetarians will eat fish. i draw the line at humans. itâs really that simple. i firmly believe death is a natural part of life, and if humans had any more consistent natural predators, there would be no immorality in their consumption of us.
i sometimes wonder just how much in-group bigotry from marginalized people comes from a place of pain, pushed outward into hate. thatâs the way i was, anyways. there was a 100% correlation between me being pushed deep, deep back into the closet as a trans person by my father and me becoming a transmed and shitting on trans people who didnât experience dysphoria, or who were GNC, or non-binary. i took all that pain iâd felt, that experience of being denied what i truly needed, that horrible nightmare of trying to accept myself as a cis woman again. i took the pain and turned it into a weapon against my own community.
i know iâm not the only one. i know iâm far from the first, and certainly not the last. i just wonder if thereâs a way to tell the difference, to identify who is speaking from a place of great pain and anguish. how do we help these people? i may sound crazy, saying that, but these are people who are hurting, too. transmeds (not cis ones, but trans ones) face transphobia, too. cis people donât give a shit if they suck up to them, if they fawn rather than fight or flee, if they say âall the right things.â these are members of our broader queer community, even if we hate to think of them that way because of the harm they cause.
nobody ever said this was easy. if it was, it wouldnât be called âwork.â but every trans personâthat includes transmeds, that includes self-hating trans YouTubers, and yes, that includes the worst trans person you can think ofâdeserve to live in a world free from transphobia. very likely, if they had, they wouldnât have turned out the way they did in the first place.
i feel like the simplification of the divine in modern pagan communities (specifically those in Christian-dominant areas like the U.S.) is both an unfortunate and necessary growing pain of reclaiming a spirituality that feels right to us, and so we run as far as we can from the things that we associate with the mainstream religion. in doing so, though, we fail to see whatâs specific to that religion, and what is instead simply a natural part of many paths. we throw the baby out with the bathwater.
i have no problem with people making silly TikToks where they take on the persona of a certain god and use their associated traits for humor. just the same, i see no issue with making light of the stories we know of our gods. have we not reenacted myths with imagined play in the past? have we not dressed ourselves as gods and taken on the role for storytelling purposes, or even as a sacred rite? i think itâs a bit silly to think that the gods we honor wouldnât have a sense of humor. at least, iâve certainly never heard of someone receiving divine retribution for posting funny memes.
whatâs missing in these examples, i think, is the appropriate reverence we associate with the divine, and i think itâs good to present that side more often, to show others of our kin that itâs okay to be irreverent and silly, to honor the gods with humorous tales of their âdivine shenanigans,â but i think itâs also good to say, yes, itâs okay to feel inspired, even overwhelmed, by the sheer magnitude of what weâre offering to. itâs healthy to step back and take a look at how utterly small we are, and to give the gods their due respect.
in doing so, we open ourselves up to that potent alchemy of spirit that religion is beloved for. itâs alright to have fun sometimes, but when we take a moment to step back from putting the gods in boxes so we can understand them better, we realize that true understanding will always evade us. that knowledge is lost on us, as the knowledge of economic theory is lost on an ant. we can bask in that reverence of the whole, of the unseen stream, and it does nothing to cheapen the experience, but rather allows us to see a fuller picture of what the gods areâand, certainly, what they are not.
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i fucking hate the discourse over the reclamation of âqueerâ so much, like itâs completely okay if you donât want to use it for yourself or be called that. that is 100% your right to choose for yourself. but you donât get to look at other people and tell them itâs unacceptable to reclaim it, to take their own power and agency back and use queer as a way to signify that. âqueer is a slurâ no shit, thatâs why it can be reclaimed, which marginalized communities have been doing forever. why are you pressed about it now?
you donât get to dictate the terms of someone elseâs empowerment.
the most relatable yet difficult to explain part about being a trans guy whoâs attracted to women is the subtle differences in your attraction vs that of, say, a cis guy who likes women. and itâs hard for me to properly put it into words, but i can really only speak to my own life, so this may not apply to everybody, but my own narrative is that i didnât even truly figure out i was trans until college, so i spent two decades of my life being raised as a girl, and then a young woman, and it shaped so much of my experiences with how women are treated (being treated as one myself for years) that it gave me insight cis guys just arenât privy to. and just the same, i was never raised with those same gendered expectations as cis men, so i have no idea what itâs like to go through childhood being treated as a boy, and then as a young man.
and let me put the disclaimer right here so you donât get any ideas: TERFS, this post is not for you to clown around on and bring your interpretations of âfemale socializationâ onto. iâm one trans guy sharing personal experiences, and if you want to water down what i say and use it to push your bullshit narratives, save us all some time and get the fuck out. i can and will skip your kneecaps across a lake.
so here i am, having been raised with all the expectations of womanhood that i kicked off of me like heavy blankets on a summer night, and suddenly taking on the role of a man, and the expectations are completely switched. iâm painfully aware of how my presence can make women fearful when itâs just the two of us in an elevator. i was that girl in the elevator for most of my life, i know that fear personally. it breaks my heart to think that now, iâm the one causing it. iâm aware that my opinions are taken seriously more often than the women iâm with, even if they know more about the subject than i do. i experienced repeated sexual harrassment at work and nothing was done about it because it wasnât taken seriously since we were both men, when the same was rightfully punished when it happened to women i worked withâthough still not punished nearly enough. how it was viewed by the staff, even, was completely different.
and it affects my attraction, too, because all of this baggage and all of these experiences shape how i view women. i grew up on the other side of that fake binary, where it was easier to work through misogyny once i was aware of what it was because so much of it was internalized. so much of my own work on introspection and self-love also came with a side benefit of combatting that internalized misogyny. and sure, we all still have lingering biases that we actively have to work through. but most of the time when iâm talking with cis guys about womenâand it doesnât matter if these guys are straight, bi, panâthereâs always a separation there. there are things about living life as a woman that they donât understand. things that cis and trans women alike understand, that AFAB trans people often understand for some portion of their lives, they just donât. theyâll just say the most sexist shit like itâs normal, or make awful assumptions about women based on gender.
this isnât to say trans men canât be misogynistic. obviously, we are. sometimes we even play that up when weâre first transitioning because the pressure from other men to do so can be incredibly strong. the impostor syndrome is real in those moments. itâs no excuse, just one of many reasons, and itâs still just as awful. but those of us who transitioned later on can attest to the fact that our experiences being treated as a woman shaped us and affect us today. the key here, which TERFS will conveniently refuse to recognize, is that this makes us no less of men than cis men. we donât suddenly become âfake menâ because weâve also experienced life through the lens of womanhood. that view is incredibly limiting and, when flipped the opposite way, is used by transphobes in extremely destructive ways. but i feel like so many of us are afraid to have this conversation because transphobes can so easily use it against us to fuel their bullshit. it doesnât make it any less true for my own experiences, and iâm sure a lot of other trans men feel the same.
