no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Yeah, I now have a brand new set of Wahl clippers, and an undercut. (I still haven't worked out what to do with the mop on top, but at least the awful hot sweaty clutter at the base of my neck that was bothering me so much is gone.)

xp -- oh geez, it's always weird to me when there are those big retrospective polls of artists/bands I was a fan of as a young person and people go on about "the guitar tone" or the recording quality when for me, it was like, this song inspired so many vivid romantic fantasies for me at the time.

xp THE BEST. I LOVE HAVING A CLEAN NECK!

this is on my agenda for the weekend btw -- clean neck self care

THERE WAS LIKE TWO SOLID INCHES OF HAIR BACK THERE!!!! It was so disgusting. I don't even know how that happened because I just trimmed it with a pair of scissors at the start of lockdown?

But wow, number 1 on the back of the neck is the best velvety feeling ever, and now I can have it WHENEVER I WANT!

(I am going to be stimming with these damn clippers all the time now)

i can't deny that I have experienced arousal with that number 1 back of the neck thing.

Whenever I step onto pretty much any thread except this one, I feel like... have I taken powerful hallucinogens that render everything I say completely unintelligble and garbled, or have the people around me taken some powereful hallucinogens that cause people to hear random things unrelated to, or even the opposite of what I'm saying and doing? It's a genuine mind-trip, to see what I write, and how people choose to interpret it. Seriously, I haven't slept in like 4 days, so am I going crazy here, or is this actually as bizarre as it seems to me?

i think past history is part of it, and also, idk maybe it's an age thing? i have no idea ... i am reading the pushback and going wtf along with you, for the most part.

i know i am at the age where i have to make an effort to change habits and language, and that things that "were acceptable" are not anymore. It's kinda the one thing that is a disadvantage to being middle-aged, whereas so much else is way better than being a young person. ... though I think I have at least 5 yrs before the menopause so ... I am trying to enjoy the fuck out of the rest of my 40s.

It's weird, because I actually have a ton of younger friends from other messageboards who are trans and nonbinary, and... they don't behave like this? We have reasonable conversations, and they actually view me as some kind of... "wow, a 50 year old nonbinary person!" like they love that I'm old and I am still this way, because it validates that it's not just some ~Tumblr fashion thing~ that we have been around forever, even if we didn't have words for ourselves back then.

Maybe it is a specific ILX thing. The level of projection from these people is seriously just off the scale.

ILX has always been full of bullies, it is in some way kind of a haven for bullies, but this feels like... the people who used to bully me in the olden days were just plain old misogynists and transphobes who couldn't stand the idea of a "woman" who behaved "like a boy".

It's bizarre when the bullying and the mobbing and the dogpiling is coming from inside your own community.

it makes me question whether healthy respectful conflict resolution is possible ... idk ... or going back to the part of the whole call-out/cancel process where there is supposedly accountability and reparations and healing, but that seems to be the most difficult part for us (at least in America).

The way that the #metoo thing is wending its way down to more subculture musicians, I am seeing friends coming to terms with the fact their bandmates and friends who are in other bands have done shitty things that aren't acceptable, and that they have to hold the bandmate/friend accountable and the messiness that is separating the person from the behavior, and caring for someone that has done a horrible thing, and having that process be somewhat public ...

I'm just feeling really down on the fact that it seems like it's perfectly fine for other people to scream, to swear, to call me names, call me a "piece of shit", to tell me to fuck off, and to act... unbelievably rude and aggressive and just over the top behaviour towards me, and apparently that doesn't reflect badly on them.

But for me, to like, deviate from absolute perfect, impossible precion and politeness in any way, means that I deserve every piece of abuse that gets hurled at me.

The double standards are just... wow, they really are something, huh.

Sorry, I'm gonna come back to the callout/accountability process of subculture musicians at another time. It's exhausting dealing with this.

Reminds me of that old chestnut - if you want to know where power lies, it's visible in who is allowed to display anger, and how much.

if you want to know where power lies, it's visible in who is allowed to display anger, and how much.

definitely!

...speaking of badly behaved subculture musicians, it applies there, too!

Whose rage is acceptable and even legitimises them; and whose rage totally disqualifies them.

ah yes ... the righteous anger vs. being the "crazy bitch"

There are like four threads going on at the moment all going round the same circles and I really, really don't get what ILX is about sometimes.

Neither do I, Kinder, neither do I.

The way that the #metoo thing is wending its way down to more subculture musicians, I am seeing friends coming to terms with the fact their bandmates and friends who are in other bands have done shitty things that aren't acceptable, and that they have to hold the bandmate/friend accountable and the messiness that is separating the person from the behavior, and caring for someone that has done a horrible thing, and having that process be somewhat public ...

It's much easier to produce the Correct Opinion when you're talking about the behaviour of Jimmy Page or Bobby Gillespie or That Guy With The Haircut From That Popular Band whose name I've forgotten (though obviously, some people cannot make the leaps through 'I like this person's music' and 'does liking a bad person's music make me a bad person?' to 'bad people can make stuff I like, but it's important not to dismiss or deny the badness of their actions').

When it's 'that guy who's the Missing Stair in your own scene' it is much, much harder, because those leaps become so personal. It's no longer 'does liking music by the bad person make me a bad person' - it's 'did I turn a blind eye to stuff that was happening under my nose; did I ignore or downplay or make light of some shitty stuff; am I personally implicated in this; is this a badness in *me* that goes beyond "well I like some questionable music"' That it's not actually about the bad behaviour of the shitty dude, or even about *their* accountability - the discomfort is about recognising one's own complicity in allowing the missing stair to go unaccounted for so long.

And I think a lot of the "well, any dude would act the same in the same situation" is a kind of handwaving way of both admitting and denying one's own complicity - "any of us could have done it" means no one is really culpable for it.

There is discomfort in 'the messiness that is separating the person from the behavior' (that shit is difficult) - but looking at yourself and realising that messiness has spattered all over you, whether you think of yourself as ~one of the good ones~ or not is, I think, what makes the process so difficult for many people to handle.

Is this something I would have to read ILM to understand?

Haha, yeah probably. It's exactly what you would expect from a clash of music nerds and #MeToo

Today, in my continued quest to re-examine the most ~difficult~ of the demon radical feminists of yores, I've been reading Barbara Walker - Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, and I'm having such a fun time with it. It is both so charmingly old school ~new age wymxn~ in a way that now seems adorably quaint, and at the same time, still kinda startling - or at least, for me, who was a priest's child at a seriously religious school, raised on serious Critical Bible Studious and Greek Myths.

#PostsVeryMuchInCharacter

Is this something I would have to read ILM to understand?

― There's more Italy than necessary. (in orbit), Saturday, August 1, 2020 8:50 AM (three hours ago)

in summary, previously celebrity musicians are targeted by #metoo callouts. In the past month or so, less famous musicians have been called out and smaller labels are cancelling acts, so the focus has gone from "oh shit, this guy in my fave band when I was a teenager" to "this guy my friend used to be in a band with/date"

and, to show my age, lots of people in my cohort thinking, "fuck, what would I have done at the time, if #metoo had been a thing 10-20 years ago? Good thing I'm no longer in a band and am a boring middle class wage slave with a kid"

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/592f4f5a2994cac7907b461b/1551897574685-MZ3WGIZM2NJJSV05BCZW/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kFMMQA9k7Q_pQQJjdOYnlXB7gQa3H78H3Y0txjaiv_0fDoOvxcdMmMKkDsyUqMSsMWxHk725yiiHCCLfrh8O1z4YTzHvnKhyp6Da-NYroOW3ZGjoBKy3azqku80C789l0mhydAgiKdIfeAoxVgE7c7oK07iYyEOLLXo4fTIvdjyaFEF5moreGOi38zza8M7wUw/IMG-3856+%281%29.JPG

Is a passing spacecadet still around?

harbl: yes! It blows my mind that the Myths and Secrets author is also the Treasury of Knitting Patterns author.

And she a created a Tarot deck!

wait it IS the same person?!?!

It is!

i own this one, love the cover photo lol
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51HFA0NP5QL._SX374_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Harbl!!!! Tokyo Rosemary!!!!

Yes, it is the same Barbara Walker. See, I knew the Goddess / Tarot stuff, but had no idea that she had this whole history as a serious knitting star? That's really amazing, so cool, but it also kinda makes sense.

I'm really enjoying the book, and I'm actually kinda surprised at how much I like it, and am learning from it? I'm confronting my own biases - as a 70s child, I often encoutered goddess worship through hippies, and by the time of the 80s, when I was a teen, the whole ~Earth Mother~ thing had become an insult, a term of dismissal towards women. (And I totally bought into that, and went along with it, because so many of the punk dudes I ran with in the 80s loathed hippies and all they stood for.) An interest in goddess-worship was really common among the kinda spooky goth chicks with tarot decks I was romantically interested in, but my general attitude was 'sure, the femininst aspects of this are kinda interesting, but most of it is fantasy novel bosh.' (I placed it firmly in 'Fiction' and 'feminist retelling' along with The Mists of Avalon, which I did actually love at the time.) Then as the 80s became the 90s, goddess-worship seemed like it had been entirely collapsed into New Age, and New Age was swept out like so much garbage with the 21st Century, as ~Skeptick~ and Cool Rational Atheist became the fashionable thing to be?

Coming back to Barbara Walker with 30 years of experience of systemic misogyny under my belt and having read a ton more feminist theory and queer theory; and also reading Myths and Secrets seriously and sequentially rather than "haha, let's read about male gods who tried to become pregnant and gave birth through their penises!!!" dipping in, I'm finding her a far more interesting writer, thinker and theorist than I ever gave her credit for. (And I'm also finding her dismissal says more about the dismissers than it does about her work - all the reviews of "she's so biased I can't even read her!!!" and it's like... hmmm, why is it that you find "goddess worship was everywhere" to be so biased, but you read these translations of Greek myths that are so full of rape stories and their 'just so' justifications, and you don't even interrogate *their* bias? Why are women and their theories about Patriarchy always subjected to levels of scrutiny and suspicion and accusations of bias, that theories in support of Patriarchy never are?)

Sorry, I'm monologuing and hobby-horsing here. It actually makes a lot of sense that she's a knitting expert, like 1) her taxonomy and research skills are first class. I bet she's great at taxonomising and collecting and explaining knitting techniques. 2) she's totally into the whole 'women were the o.g. source of generativity and creativity, let's reclaim and celebrate traditional woman-coded creative projects.'

I love people who knit, I think it's an amazing skill. I am really kind of sad my wrists aren't up to it. Thank you for this knowledge of the other side of Barbara Walker.

p.s. I do see Passing Spacecadet occasionally on the UK Politics threads but that is a space to enter with extreme caution! (Which you can definitely say about most ILX politics threads.)

And Sarahell, I don't want to blow on embers of a clusterfuck that seems to have finally died down. I don't actually think that the difference is *solely* age, though age is certainly a component which will become obvious with further explanation.

The internecine struggle did not actually seem to be between 'old queers' and 'young queers' - it is between 'people whose primary experience of queer spaces are physical, face to face, in the flesh' and 'people whose primacy experience of queer spaces are Extremely Online'. As I've said before, I do not think that one is any more real or genuine or valid than the other - but the modes and basic expectations and styles of engagement are very different.

(It's not that I'm not Extremely Online, wow, I am definitely OCD compulsively so, in a way that probably isn't healthy. But the bulk of my Queer Space experiences have been face to face interactions, and the bulk of my Online Life hasn't really been Queer, it's been Music Nerd.)

Trying to stop this before it becomes wall-o-text. That's a v v big difference between online and flesh space - in flesh spaces people can *see* me listening very intently, nodding in agreement, drawing people out to elaborate before reacting, before thinking and producing a statement in response. Online, it just looks like a monologue.

Back to the #metoo callout stuff - wow, yeah, I'm actually quite grateful I'm no longer in contact with most people from my music scene days, to not have to see that kind of 'thank fuck I don't have to confront the past" reaction. Unhelpful! It's bad enough - the one person I'm still in touch with telling me second-hand reports of how dudes I was in bands and music scenes with 30 years ago are now raging Trump supporters, but thinking back, they were always kinda whiney and entitled back in the 90s, the whiney entitlement has found a different outlet now?

branwell, this is pretty irrelevant to this and any convo, but i have a persistent memory of hanging out with you in person where we were talking about how "nutrageous" is a hilarious name for a candy bar and you said "this is a nutrage!!!!" and i loled so much and think of it often (every time anyone says something is outrageous tbh)

it's good to pop back to ilx after a Cis White Dude-induced sabbatical and see this thread thriving, and Branwell, it's good to see you here.

I feel what's been said here strongly. I just want to find some way to enjoy silly casual things, to talk about ordinary stuff without being steamrolled by some superfragile cis white dude, to live my goddamn life without having to be in the vanguard of some fucking revolution 24/7. so yes i love this thread and everyone in it.

Kaaaaaaaate!!!! Katey-Kate K8!!! I'm happy to see you back here, too. yeah, cosign - sometimes there is a real need to just... OMG, I just want to be able to enjoy some stuff in my life without having to wade through an endless swamp of misogyny to get there. What's bringing you joy at the moment, babe?

Roxy, I was going to insist "I have no memory of this, was I drunk?!?!?" and then had a very strong sense memory of you and I sitting in a bar that had, like, a weird mezzanine upstairs that was kind of somewhere between a mistrel's gallery and a treehouse (?!?!?) and both of us going "This is a nutrage!" in Mighty Boosh voices and pissing ourselves laughing?

oh god, Branwell, I can't remember the last time anybody asked me that! i got _so_ much cool shit going on right now. so. fucking. much.

i got my new birth certificate in the mail! it took my birth state forever to get it out to me, i sent the request in before covid and like a couple weeks ago they sent an apologetic email saying that there had been a "system error"... yeah, i get it, lotta shit at my job got kinda thrown on the back burner during all this. anyway, i'm not legally non-binary on both my birth certificate _and_ my driver's license! now to figure out how the hell to make this work with social security... they don't recognize "non-binary" as a gender option but will update your gender to your legal gender on your birth certificate or driver's license... which is "non-binary"... :shrug:

my therapist also finished my gcs referral letter... it's still a long road to go, i gotta have my consult and then figure out how long it will be until i can actually get the surgery. also, less than a month till my endo appointment! my t has been all out of whack, way too high, and all my doctor knew to do about it was to up my spiro, which wasn't doing crap. anyway, hopefully getting my hormones into better balance will help.

the good thing about my time away from ilx is that i did actually get some sleep, like a lot of sleep, actually. i hadn't really slept through the night since, like, march, so i had a week of sleeping like 12 hours in a row. and then when i woke up i was super spaced out and groggy, but still, i needed it. just hoping i can get a little caught up with, like, work.

i just finished 100%ing this fun jigsaw game called "glass masquerade" - it's relaxing, casual, got a nice learning curve to it. i love the art even if some of it is, uh, pretty disturbing, particularly in the sequel which has this sort of "dark wonderland" aesthetic to the stained glass pictures. next on the docket i got dali and magritte physical jigsaw puzzles, they're 1000 piece and i haven't quite been doing up to them yet, and the "pirates of barracuda bay" lego kit that finally showed up.

speaking of shit on backorder, i think we may actually be able to get our hands on a ring fit... i hope it'll help, wii fit got my bmi into a "normal" range back when i was doing it, so hopefully ring fit will help me with the same thing. my bmi hasn't been _too_ bad considering all the ice cream i've been stress eating, but keeping it low is pretty important for gcs (by the way for anyone confused about all the trans jargon i'm using feel free to ask and i'll be glad to explain), and also the more belly fat i can get rid of the less dysphoric i'll be.

haven't gone clothes shopping since before COVID hit, which means that i'm kind of low on summer clothes. i've been leaving the house every day for my second round of TMS, which I'm almost done with... no idea if it's working, too many confounding variables at play. really hoping i can get up the energy to go thrifting sometime soon, given that my body's changed a lot in the past year. i also really need to get properly measured for a bra, that abrathatfits thing is totally inaccurate for trans bodies. did get a new straw hat - since i can't really wear wigs for the TMS, and since it's still up in the air as to whether i'll get enough hairline regrowth on the finasteride or whether i'll have to get some hair transplant action going on, giant-brimmed straw hats have been my go-to. maybe a bit more of the hyper-signposted "early transition" vibe than i'd like, but other people seem to accept me so it makes it easier for me to accept myself.

the wife and i have also been thinking about getting some recumbent trikes. we tried some out on a vacation years ago and she said then that she'd get me one if i bought her a house, and we bought a house and ever since she's been encouraging me. there's this queer couple (maybe they're not a couple, but there's two of them and they're both flying the gay pride flag on their bikes) i see biking around our neighborhood on recumbents occasionally, haven't talked to them or anything but they're awesome, especially given that our trump signs and "blue line" flags are not unknown in my neighborhood. :(

music wise i've really gotten into gabber in the last year. i feel like somebody needs to do a dune-based gabber project and call it "jom gabber".

annnnyway... i feel like i had a fair bit of stuff pent up there. :)

Haha, it's funny, I'm generally OK with most of the trans jargon, but TMS really threw me, and I was like "I don't think I recognise that one?!?!?" and had to google, and found out it's not a trans thing at all. (I hope it is working, even if you haven't been able to tell?)

I'm glad you've got most of the form-changing done (the UK is so backwards we don't even have nonbinary markers for common documents?) And I hope you can see someone who can do a better job with hormones. Wishing you good luck with progressing on the GCS front!

Insomnia... ah christ insomnia will fuck with you. I don't know if I ended up back on ILX so much because I had insomnia so bad, or if ILX just causes or exacerbates existing insomnia. The last clusterfuck just sent it over the edge. After the thread was locked (I think it just completed an OCD loop in my head, like 'you don't have to pay attention to this any more' so I could switch off) last night I got 7-8 hours for the first time in a week and I still have unpaid sleep debt, but I felt so much more human. Annoyingly, my hyperacusis gets worse with insomnia, and then my hyperacusis prevents me from sleeping, vicious circle.

What are incumbent bikes like? I really enjoy cycling, but I haven't been on my bike at all this year. (Not even Covid, just some bad London traffic experiences that made me too nervous to go back out for a while.) How are they like for visibility, in traffic? Or is that what the flags are for, to alert drivers to the presence of a bike with a really low ground profile?

Jigsaw puzzles! We always used to have jigsaw puzzles in the office to reduce stress and encourage inter-team socialising. I don't have the space to do one in my flat, but I miss them.

i just finished 100%ing this fun jigsaw game called "glass masquerade" - it's relaxing, casual, got a nice learning curve to it.

i also really need to get properly measured for a bra, that abrathatfits thing is totally inaccurate for trans bodies.

do you have in your mind what you want from the bra? Like, do you just want coverage? Or do you want lift/shaping to visually demarcate "boobs" from "chest" for a more femme look?

Branwell: They're just bikes you ride while sitting down instead of standing up. My aunt has one because she has back problems. I'm pretty badly dyspraxic and have never been able to balance myself properly on an upright two-seater. Now that I think about it, I reckon the flags probably _are_ there for visibility. That makes sense.

Non-binary markers are really hit and miss here in the States. There really isn't any acknowledgement on a federal level that I know of - it's just something many different states have undertaken on their own. Fortunately for me I wasn't born in Ohio or anything awful like that.

sarahell - Well, since I started transitioning I've been wearing light shapewear camis. Nothing terribly extreme - just something to help flatten my belly a smidge (I have reluctantly accepted that I will never be one of those ladies who can rock a bare midriff) and give a bit more definition to my breasts. They're still more or less working for me, but I'd like to have better measurements just so I could try out various different styles and see how they work for me. My understanding is that basically any department store would be glad to give me a proper sizing; it's just motivating myself to head all the way over to one that's the problem.

"recumbent trike" is such a great phrase

Haha don’t make me come in here and start banging my “Any lady may rock a bare midriff if she wishes; we all need to adjust the ridiculous standards by which lady bodies are judged!!!” drum.

(Except my own feelings about my own body are so bad that even if top surgery were even on the menu, I’d still be too ashamed to ever go shirtless. Following one’s own advice is hard!)

kate - my thought for a "transitional" bra would be to get a bralette or sportsbra -- one that has inserts for padding -- some of the designs result in the padding moving around, which perhaps for you, could be a "feature" rather than a "bug" in that you can experiment with where to put the padding for a shape that you find flattering.

You also might want to look into "push-up" bras -- which will increase the space between boobs and stomach and visually make the stomach look smaller in comparison to boobs, some will also push the boobs towards one another, so if your boobs "point sidweways" that will also help create a more feminine shape -- as a fat femme, this is something I like as well. Idk what your band size is, but if it isn't small, you might look at plus-size stuff ... it can be awkward as a lot of plus-size bras are marketed towards cis-women with very large boobs, but they also have smaller cup sizes too.

I'm mostly just blowing off steam and thinking out loud, so unless anyone has any useful advice (that doesn't boil down to 'you should just leave' or 'have you tried being someone that isn't you') don't feel any need to reply.

There's a couple of threads on ILE related to (fairly neutral) topics that I am super interested in, and I feel like I could make some useful contributions and have good conversations and a good time with the usual denizen(s).

But this is how pile-ons twist you. I feel like, even if I go in and make well-informed and friendly posts on a neutral topic, there is still a non-zero possibility that people are going to use that space to come in and start ... doing what they do, because they're unable to ignore me or just put me on killfile. I feel like, the polite and kind thing to do would be to flag that up to the thread-starter and say, "hey, if you're not comfortable with the inevitable pile-ons that seem to accompany my presence, I can understand if you'd rather I not post here - but I've love to talk about your special interest with you, because I really share it?" However, if I even *say* that out loud, I'll be accused of ~narcissism~ and 'you're always making everything about you!!!!!' and even mentioning the possibility of a clusterfuck invokes the clusterfuck.

I think that ILX discourse *might* finally be moving from "Branwell is an inherent clusterfucker" to "Branwell is what they are; if you cannot control yourself from reacting, put them on killfile". But I'm not in a place where I want to push that, and risk another pile-on, I just want to have nice, fun conversations about my particular special interests.

You see how this shit twists you? Meh.

hi Branwell, i'm not sure i have any advice per se, but i hope you don't mind offering my... appreciation? for your post. i understand where you're coming from on this. my perspective on this is being raised according to cis white male cultural norms, and a lot of those norms didn't just make me fucked up because i am not in fact cis, they're genuinely fucked up norms in general i think. it's kind of painful because there is a lot awesome stuff about maleness and masculinity. in particular when i was a cis white guy, i now realize, i had a very poor sense of personal boundaries and i didn't know how to take responsibility for my own emotional shit. since transitioning it's something i've had to work on learning. and having done so, i now start seeing how many other cis men are kind of fucked up in the way i was, and the result of that is that when i talk to people like that i have to take care of not only my own personal boundaries but take care of theirs as well.

there's a lot of things i'd like to post about, i'd like to talk about here, but i don't, because i worry that someone will Take It Wrong. i try not to be _hyper_vigilant (which is something i honestly have a tendency towards), but ilx right now is a particularly fraught and dangerous place, and when shit gets tough, well, you know as well as i do who gets dumped on.

what i try to do is to trust my feelings, to balance the want, the _need_ to talk about things, to have fun, with that constant fear. and particularly what i do - and this may or may not be healthy, but it's what i do - is i am always ready to peace out at the first sign of trouble. i don't know how it applies to trans men, but us trans women are pretty infamous for our disappearing acts. if i don't feel good about where a thread's going, i walk off, which is hard if it's something i really care about. i just figure it's good practice!

Oh, Kate - I wish I could a) make my queer groups come off covid pause, and b) get you across the Atlantic so you could experience one, because those kinds of conversations are exactly what we used to do, all the time, in our little Gender Swag gang. And they were so healing and so helpful, because discussing in a mixed group of transmasculine and transfeminine people, we could really kinda help connect the dots and fill in the missing pieces about all of those 'but there was also kinda good stuff about the gender I was assigned at birth that I have some complicated feelings about' impulses. It's hard talking about stuff you could take for granted in your original assigned gender, which is no longer accessible to you as a trans individual, without lapsing into (whispers) terf-adjacent discourse. But it happens and it's painful and weird.

Unfortunately, those kinds of talks are never going to happen on ILX - lord knows, I have tried, in the past. But if it's not Cis People With Opinions, it's queers with our own trauma damage reactions. That stuff is fraught on ILX.

I have, myself, a long history of peacing out on ILX at a moment's notice, staying away for 6 months until the Suggest Bans expire, coming back, and doing it all over again. Like, it is a memetic mean joke around here. So yeah. I'm trying to stick to topics I'm genuinely excited about, and do actually have relevant knowledge on. I just have (autistic!!!) no idea of when I've gone ~too far~ until I've gone over the edge and brought the thread to a dramatic stop, and I have no idea if people have just gone to get lunch, or everyone's just staring at me like "WTF just came out of Branwell's mouth?!?!?" Letting go of that hyper vigilance is hard. Hyper vigilance serves us well in... dangerous situations. (Which is, let's face it, many, many situations when you're trans or in any way queer or gnc or even just Female In Public, really.)

I need to get off the internet and go for a walk.

Hope all girls, women, femmes, ladies, gentlequeers, tomboys in stompy boots, other diverses genders, and everyone else who travels in the Good Ship 'No Boys' is having a lovely day!

oh, don't worry about me Branwell, i have my own support networks. :) primarily trans discord - which has its limitations, but there is _way_ more opportunity for talking and working through issues and support than even a thread like this, nice as it is, can offer.

and partly i keep coming around here because of those limitations, because as much as it might seem to some here that i am All Trans All The Time i'm not, in particular i'm sort of pathologically obsessed with music and i literally don't know anywhere else where i can talk about the music i like without getting a bunch of blank stares in return

but partly it's because a lot of people, even, for god's sake, cis white dudes, are starting to understand things _so much better_ than even a few years ago. yeah there's some extremely advanced stuff i wouldn't venture to even bring up in a mixed cis/trans environment, because i know how hard it is even getting across the really simple basic stuff, but i'm starting to see more and more people understand more and more of the simple basic stuff. and that is super encouraging, even though i'm just constantly being disappointed when i expect more out of people than they're ready for; surprise can mean any number of things to me.

I feel slightly self conscious about this thread turning into the Branwell-and-Kate show? But I was worried about you after your last time-out. (And I'm grateful that there are people on this thread who have acted with care and concern about my return.)

On one level, I'm glad that there are cis-white-dudes who are starting to understand ~trans stuff~. However, because of the baseline misogyny in our cultures, cis-white-dudes are still way more comfortable with forms of trans activism that look like 'screaming at people you consider women until they comply' than they are with the whole 'you have to accept people's identities are what they say they are, even the complicated ones you find really difficult' thing. MEOW!

That one of the forms that 'power relations dressed up as binaries' take is that one 'side' of the 'binary' will have a great deal more information about and knowledge of the other 'side', because in a power gradient, information always runs downhill. Trans people typically know everything we need to know about cis experiences; cis people know very little about trans experiences. Black people typically know way, way more about ~Whiteness~ and white culture, than white people ever know about Black culture. Immigrants have to learn a *lot* about their host culture really, really fast; people in the host culture neither know nor care a whit about immigrants' originating culture. (The opposite is true for settlers and the colonised.) That's what makes them power gradients and not actual binaries.

It's not always immediately apparent where on the power gradient you are! (I include myself in this, before anyone starts eye-rolling.) The middle of a power gradient *feels* a lot like the bottom. Being in different places on different power gradients can turn stuff that *feels* like punching up, into punching sideways or even punching down. Stuff that is *mutual* ignorance can feel like a power gradient, when it is actually remediable ignorance. Sorry, I know I'm stating all the obvious here; it's what I do.

I guess it was really important for me to remember what I came to ILX for, back in late 2000. And the collective musical sense of "where were you in 92?" is a joyful swell of togetherness that I often truly miss.

Is there a polite way to nope out of a conversation saying "One of the people in this conversation was once a 13 year old girl who was raped. Is it you?" without being an arsehole?

Also, how does one handle saying, "can I please be exempted from your collective virtue signalling exercise without having to drag up my own past traumas?" without sounding like a jerk.

Asking for a friend.