#unedited thoughts

The sun has set at 3 pm, behind a horizon of sorts, and as the light departs so do all sounds— birds and bugs and breaths hold silent as the night dawns across waiting upturned faces. A cheer in the distance. A cheer in my mouth, mingling with brownie crumbs. Grabbing my friend’s shoulders even as he grabs at mine.

Glasses off, glasses off, look, look, we tell ourselves and each other. It is still brighter than the pictures might lead you to believe— dusk, not midnight— and the moon is not black but burnished steely grey, wreathed in fuzzy whispsome white like windblown clouds forced out in all directions. Pink, on the edge, the brightest pink I’ve ever seen— a solar flare, I’d learn. Achingly beautiful. Startlingly simple. Fleeting and rare and all the more stunning for the knowledge that it may be the only time I see it in all my life.

Then after a minute or perhaps two: gone. Sunlight slips around the edge like blood from a wound so thin it only seeps, a bead, then two, then a line, and then the glasses are back on and the birds find their voices and another cheer, applause for a performance with no possible encore, rises on the sudden breeze.

All at once it is daytime again. All at once it is over. Only with glasses can you tell that the sun is still mostly hidden; her brilliance is such that once even a quarter wins free of the moon it is as bright as it ever was.

the argument is, by “misgendering” a trans person when they do something bad (or yknow, correctly gendering a male rapist for clarity and safety’s sake) you’re suggesting that “pronouns are a privilege” or that “respecting someone’s chosen identity is a privilege when it’s really a right;” this is an obfuscation. of COURSE using someone’s chosen pronouns and name when they contradict sex (reality!) is a privilege (or a courtesy, a kindness—call it whatever you want), the point being, it’s outside of your control. once you demand that someone subvert reality and refer to you in a way that doesn’t match up with an external, observable, coherent experience of the world (but by your internal, incoherent, unobservable sense of yourself) you give up the locus of power. that now resides with others, who can deny your request, refuse your demands.

speaking from experience, when someone denies your experience of yourself like that (in a way that is materially salient, substantive, and—to be frank—true) it’s infuriating, because there’s this feeling of impotence. like…you can’t MAKE them see you the way you see yourself, you can’t MAKE their experience of you line up with your own because by making a demand/request that doesn’t reflect reality, you’ve handed over power. now someone else has the power to say no. i won’t call you that way. you’re not a wo/man—because you AREN’T. there’s no external anchor onto which to tether your request/demand.

which is why we see social shaming campaigns around pronouns, calling them a human right. look at it slight differently and what right does any one person have to dictate how i see and describe my world? i see a male but i’m not allowed to call him he or else i’ll face social ostrasization? the media i consume, the political parties i’m affiliated with, the companies i work for (and thus my career prospects) are all influenced by this constant threat that if i call the wrong male a man or the wrong female a woman i’m a bigot. this is necessary because there’s no tether to reality, no built-in locus of control, so the locus of control becomes threat.

It was discovered and then people found a cool aspect of it. It could solve anything from illnesses or maybe write an essay.