Rox

It's like when that white woman got killed by ICE and suddenly everyone started caring and losing their shit, even tho it's been happening to black and brown folks for years.

you’re missing very personal context: but I’ll give it here. I knew a Puppy girl I knew multiple puppy girls everyone I know in my personal life and through 3 years of running a massive platform that gets hundreds of DMs a day from transsexual women who basically did this entire thing very much knowingly and very much to the detriment of everybody involved which ultimately culminated in some ofthem being harmed materially as in physically and sexually later because of it.(at least in my case.)

I'm hoping to raise about $200 for things like transportation, food, and essentials. Any donations help immensely and reblogs are super appreciated! <3

originally posted may 8th

$80/200

Cashapp: $crescentgirl

I think the part that knight missed (which is completely understandable, it was just a vent post to start with) is that this pattern of behavior can't happen in isolation. It's a result of being around people who care deeply for you and feeling so safe in that space that you forget how to be an independent person. It feels good to be taken care of, and it is distressing to think that that feeling might go away.

The thing is though, if you love the puppygirl, you cant let her live like that. It's no different than living off of taco bell and monsters just because they taste good and cooking for yourself is hard. It's nice as a treat, but you can't let it become your routine. The thing about crutches is that, at a certain point, you have to let them go.

The problem is never the disability, or the puppygirl aesthetic, or the fact that she takes up space to live. Those things, by themselves or in combination, are all great. When you have that combination and then add in someone who's always willing to pick up the slack, who's always there to shield the puppygirl from the consequences of her own actions no matter what, then you get a problem. That's when a person falls into the habit of giving up and not taking care of themselves, and trusting that it'll still get done.

Tara has since released two followups, however, and the first followup, in my opinion, deftly uprooted and discarded the notions of "male behavior" from the original essay and relocated the origins of these behaviors into places that, in my opinion, begin to humanize the puppygirl and understand her behaviors not through reductive comparison to her male oppressors, but instead through a much more tangible and transfeminist lens, showing how her oppression has influenced her behaviors

I personally felt satisfied that Tara had put that issue to bed after reading this followup, but I still felt that a major thing missing from the picture was an understanding that sometimes the woman is just disabled and she really can't reciprocate labor equally, and there's no emotional manipulation going on

I've been the puppygirl before, so I recognized myself in Tara's portrait of her. but recognizing the shape of what she was describing didn't dampen the danger posed by the lack of distinction between the puppygirl's disabilities and her maladaptive behaviors. the essay didn't offer the tools for the puppygirl to adjust her behaviors, nor did it offer the tools for a woman's disabilities to be understood, respected, and accounted for within a relationship, without being dismissed as manipulative

I felt that this dangerous gap Tara left open was closed in the next followup, which addresses said gap in the original essay and offers the perspective of a woman whose disabilities preclude her from reciprocating the same amount of labor as her partner

Tara also discusses in this essay how she herself has been the figure of the puppygirl that she's been painting, and through discussing her perspective from this angle she rounds out the humanization of the puppygirl. this was the point throughout all of these essays where I felt the most seen, because I too have been caught in a spiral of clinging to the first place where I feel safe and obsessing over my fear of losing it, constructing myself around trying to maintain it while failing to respect the individuality of those who do the maintaining

at the time that I was the puppygirl, the original article would have destroyed me, but taken together with the followups, I think it would have given me a difficult awakening and then gently handed me the tools to build healthier and stronger relationships, without simply asking me to do the impossible and just not be disabled