how do i put that upside down happy face emoji in here

me: lol we learned that in science class 20 years ago 🤣 prick

But now, on top of Covid still spreading, monthly live active shooter drills, being chased out of parks for loitering, malls shutting down because people don't have that kind of money anymore, libraries running out of funding. They're being treated worse than anyone else because they don't have rights.

And when they turn 18, have stunted social skills, no prospects in life, we're creating another generation of failed souls, And doomed by the social narrative that teens should neither be seen nor heard. We owe them more than this. You cannot neglect a seedling crop, only for you to plant them into the ground and expect the largest crop that you've ever seen.

Then there is the YouTuber talking about Transformers, casually dropping the "Iraq war aesthetic" like it's a color palette. Desert punk. Military core. A vibe. This is what happens when your country hasn't had a war on its own soil in living memory; the violence becomes media, a backdrop for childhood toys. The explosions are no longer the sound of mothers screaming; they are cool action sequences. They are digesting the visual debris of massacre as a nostalgic fashion choice, scraping the trauma off and compressing it into a genre for their retro-futurist fantasies. The apocalypse becomes a mood board.

And finally, the girl recounting celebrity love triangles from her childhood, flippantly mentioning how the U.S. was "busy with the Iraq war or whatever." Or whatever. That single phrase is the thesis statement of American innocence. Over a million dead, a region destabilized for a century, an endless river of grief; and for her, it was the commercial break between pop culture segments. It didn't raise her rent. It didn't stop her Wi-Fi. The violence is geo-locked to brown skin and distant deserts, just background noise like a refrigerator humming. She has the luxury of forgetting because the machine doesn't eat her children, it eats yours.

And nonbinary people, right?

...

...

Livingston purposefully kept drag kings, butches, and trans men’s involvement in the scene to a minimum level, so as to not confuse the primary audience (the cishet white middle class American audience).

Now, I do understand why. This movie was made in the late 80s, released in 1990, it makes sense to keep a documentary film focused. But all the same, every time I think about the current trans discourse, I think about the decision to avoid interviewing a huge portion of the community so as to keep the emotional/rhetorical focus sharp. And again, I do have an appreciation for the movie — the paper focused on transfeminine case subjects and how they were empowered by an accepting community. But I cannot deny that it kinda stings to see that “trans men need to stay quiet so that the rest of the community can thrive” is not a new take.

Maybe I oughta write a paper on that...

Also, I have done a LOT of research on historical transmasc subjects, and the whole “hysterically demanding to be taken seriously while being a danger to themselves and others” is nothing new. TRFs sound like old timey doctors trying to keep transmasculine people quiet & obedient.

I didn't know I was trans until 2007, because I didn't know that a trans person could be THAT direction of trans. And even then, I wasn't really given any information about anything but binary transness. There's still very little information about it for people my age (another issue the queer community has). And yet in the almost twenty years I've been here, the needle hasn't moved at all for trans-m people. My Dr, who works at the queer clinic, was telling me how frustrated she was that she'd read this big huge book that was supposedly the history of trans treatment and transmen were not meantioned even at all, even though it mentioned doctors that worked with us, like Hirschfeld! And I was like yeah! We're invisible! We get called lesbians and tomboys and "wow she was so brave having to cross-dress and pretend she was a man to live her life #girlboss" even when its like "this person shot anybody that called him a girl, went by male appellations and a male name, and said he was a man".

We're here.

Y'all just don't fucking LISTEN.

I wonder why THAT is?

Livingston purposefully kept drag kings, butches, and trans men’s involvement in the scene to a minimum level, so as to not confuse the primary audience (the cishet white middle class American audience).

Now, I do understand why. This movie was made in the late 80s, released in 1990, it makes sense to keep a documentary film focused. But all the same, every time I think about the current trans discourse, I think about the decision to avoid interviewing a huge portion of the community so as to keep the emotional/rhetorical focus sharp. And again, I do have an appreciation for the movie — the paper focused on transfeminine case subjects and how they were empowered by an accepting community. But I cannot deny that it kinda stings to see that “trans men need to stay quiet so that the rest of the community can thrive” is not a new take.

Maybe I oughta write a paper on that...

Also, I have done a LOT of research on historical transmasc subjects, and the whole “hysterically demanding to be taken seriously while being a danger to themselves and others” is nothing new. TRFs sound like old timey doctors trying to keep transmasculine people quiet & obedient.

I didn't know I was trans until 2007, because I didn't know that a trans person could be THAT direction of trans. And even then, I wasn't really given any information about anything but binary transness. There's still very little information about it for people my age (another issue the queer community has). And yet in the almost twenty years I've been here, the needle hasn't moved at all for trans-m people. My Dr, who works at the queer clinic, was telling me how frustrated she was that she'd read this big huge book that was supposedly the history of trans treatment and transmen were not meantioned even at all, even though it mentioned doctors that worked with us, like Hirschfeld! And I was like yeah! We're invisible! We get called lesbians and tomboys and "wow she was so brave having to cross-dress and pretend she was a man to live her life #girlboss" even when its like "this person shot anybody that called him a girl, went by male appellations and a male name, and said he was a man".

We're here.

Y'all just don't fucking LISTEN.

I wonder why THAT is?

Your taking my words and mixing it to what I was not saying.