Absolutely captivating read, I almost backed away just from the sheer length of it but now I’m sending it to others lol. Vivid and powerful, you can really feel the knot twisting around in her stomach. Interesting too that it was written so long ago, and looking back at her perspective now seeing how the social phenomenons she wrote about have evolved
It’s an interesting read - a lot of her experiences she’s discussing boil down to feeling she was ignored or her voice minimized because of her perceived gender identity and assumptions about how she was raised and what she would feel.
I liked her discussion and thought her perspective on purposely not transitioning was an interesting view. This was a really good analogy and drove home the point for me:
Imagine, dear reader, a cis-woman evenly saying:
“I wish I looked like that but I don’t and can’t. It sucks and it makes me feel really awful if I brood on it. That’s why I focus on my writing—I’d rather make things. Investing in and building things that aren’t my body helps me cope with the body issues I’ve been saddled with against my will.”
She doesn’t sound like she needs advice on how makeup will actually fix her core problem, does she? She seems like she’s doing alright. I’m her and I’m trans. That’s all.
Some big quotes that hit home through this post were
Do I need to be inspected and dissected by the people who laughed at me in order to receive my credential?
“I play along,” one of them told me, “because in the queer community the only people who defend cisboys are cisboys. I don’t want to give up finally being read as a girl.”
Oof.
I don’t know if it’s just the sections of the internet I frequent these days, but this intense, misandrist views don’t seem to be as common as they once were, and not as accepted.
I was born into that shitty town, maleness, in the remains of outdated ideals and misplaced machismo and repression and there are some good people stuck living there. They are not in charge. They did not build it. And I don’t feel okay just moving out and saying “fuck y’all — bootstrap your way out or die out, I was never one of you.” I want to make it a better, healthier place—not spend all my time talking about how shitty it is and how anyone who would choose to live there deserves it.
Cis woman here. I run in pretty leftist circles and whilst I don’t see open misandry as much anymore, I also don’t see as many people speaking about men’s issues as I’d like. If I do see people speaking about men or masculinity in a problematic way, it’s usually people who are receptive to being challenged, once I’ve pointed things out.
the misandry has become less acceptable over time, probably as more “cis” girls like i was realized we weren’t so cis or girls and made some of those actually cis girls confront the things they’d said and thought during that time
but also we’ve become a lot more aware of how the patriarchy hurts men, and we’ve also become more broadly aware of feminist authors like bell hooks, who have been writing about how men need feminism too all along
I wish this person a sense of belonging and if being loved for what they are. Even by themselves. It does really make clear what kind of handicap gender dysphoria is, it reads like a irl purgatory.
I worked with some 50yo gay black men who shared how deeply that had to hide who they were for decades. Even in the 90s, there was violent assault because you were gay. Police frequently turned a blind eye.
People say things like “Just leave people alone” and yet someone come out of the closet, and they want them removed from society.
