no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Branwell - whew. That is a really good question and I definitely would like to address it and if you don't mind I think I will bump the trans thread to do it because it gets into some _deep_ trans stuff. It's a complicated and difficult question for me to answer but I think it's a topic well worth addressing.

I understand what you mean about thought processes. Honestly, where I'm at I tend to work against even labelling my divergences in thought processes as "positive" or "negative". Suspending self-judgement while still maintaining healthy boundaries is extremely difficult work for me.

No problem! I just... eeesh, I still feel weird about posting on the general ILE trans thread, because: history.

Maybe we should start a "no cis allowed in the room" thread on an obscure subforum no one reads. Ha!

(But of course then that would be really mean towards the ILX poster Cis, who is awesome and amazing and totally <3-worthy)

It doesn't have to be that thread, God knows there have been enough threads with awful histories restarted of late. There's also a 77 thread - I don't know if you're on 77 or not. My concern is not whether or not it's an an obscure subforum - I know I, like a lot of other folks on this board, read ILX through sna. My main concern honestly is indexing - I don't mind a public thread as long as it's not search-indexed. LMK your thoughts!

Yeah, I am not on 77. There's, erm... history around that, as well. (The one golden rule of 77 used to be, that you were not allowed to talk about posters there, if they weren't on 77. So the only way to ensure one wasn't gossiped about, bullied, piled-on etc. was just to refuse to be on it at all. That's probably gone out the window by now - but, I suspect there are a few people who would be very, very uncomfortable if I were to turn up there at this late stage in the game. I do not want to make people needlessly uncomfortable!)

I just went back and read the whole ILE trans thread. It started off really well, we had a lot of interesting discussions, and people didn't all have the same opinions, there was a lot of heterodoxy and that was the thread's strength. There was a ton of ~cis dudes coming in to have opinions at posters~ but mostly, as a group we held our ground? People got each others' backs. (Wow, am I in a different place than I was, when that thread was started! That was a trip!)

To me, it felt like there was a point where *the trans people* in the thread stopped being comfortable with heterodoxy and discussing our way through conflict. (It is entirely possible I am one of the people who became uncomfortable!) In a thread with a small trans group, where like, 5 out of 6 people had the same directionality, and 1 person had a different directionality, the 1 person with the different directionality became the friction point. It's not a fun place, to be the friction point. It is now a space I associate with... friction, which makes me feel quite defensive. Feeling defensive is not condusive to the kind of hyper-polite demeanour which is typically expected of 'people who are considered to be women' on ILE.

Sorry that's not a clear answer. Maybe I should just get over it. Being back on ILM has been fine, in fact it's been a lot of fun. But being back on ILE has gone... not fine.

Thank you for the insight! I figure it's OK to not have clear answers.

It's interesting to think about how I approach ILX and what my experience with it has been. I don't even really know when I started showing up here, when I started posting, when I became a "regular" that people noticed. I've never met anyone here. I do have a Usenet-derived friend group, by now basically a rump, and I guess for some people here this is sort of an equivalent.

ILX has always had a fondness for "necrothreads" in a way that other forums don't. In other forums it's considered bad form to revive a thread that was last updated five or ten or fifteen years ago. I think it's mostly a matter of convenience and not intent, but there is an awful lot of past to ILX, and a lot of it is very unpleasant and probably painful to the people involved.

I don't know. It's only been very recently that I've even been aware of the social dynamics of ILX at all. I know there are probably certain people on this board who hate my guts. I vaguely remember that most of them probably have a valid reason for it, even, but I don't specifically remember any of those reasons.

I am, at least, aware of the social dynamics regarding Trans Men and Trans Women. There are problems. I remember that at some point in my transition I was misandrist, and that it was very easy for me to be misandrist, in ways that were specifically invalidating to a lot of trans men. I know that the trans discord servers I'm on, they're all open to all trans people, but in practice it doesn't work out like that. There are servers that mostly have a userbase of trans men, and there are servers that mostly have a userbase of trans women, and everyone goes out of their way to proclaim mutual respect in the same way that diplomats hoping to maintain a cease-fire do.

And I don't have The answer, even An answer, to that, any more than you do. All I can say that is that even though I haven't read the thread, the way you describe what happened there... it doesn't surprise me, it's definitely a phenomenon I've seen before.

Maybe this would be the best thread for the novel I wrote this morning!

Early history of ILX shaped it in various ways - the lack of a decent search function, for one, so in the early days, people would start 4 or 5 threads for the same topic until someone shouted JUST PICK ONE THREAD FFS!!! means there is a lingering general annoyance with multiple threads on the same topic. That kind of history is really *good* in music threads, where people can see the building body of opinion around an artist's work as it develops.

I would really reccommend hitting "show all posts" on the trans thread, and reading it from start to finish. Re-reading it was a really good exercise for me. It helped reassure me - I wasn't going crazy, things really did happen the way I remembered them. That there is context and history behind the things that happen. (And also that that context is seen very differently depending on people's opinions of the posters involved.)

That there were cis dudes repeatedly popping in and posting really incredibly transphobic things. That my reaction in 2020, my reading of a transphobic tone to a cock joke, was informed by that specific poster's history of popping into the trans thread to say horrible things about e.g. {Caitlin Jenner's Deadname}. That yes, dudes who had a history of starting or participating in pile-ons against me (as recognised by other posters in the thread!) coming in to deadname me was not casual or friendly in the way that it has been represented, but deliberate and inflammatory. That the ways other posters' later transitions were handled were very, very differently to the way that mine was. That my repeated requests to "can we talk about cis dude transphobia, instead of dwelling on ~t*rf-discourse~ all the time?" were informed by a whole hell of a lot of cis dude transphobia, right there in the damn thread, but became just dismissed as "branwell is a t*rf / branwell hates trans women / branwell is transphobic" (So I'm trans exclusionary? Shall I go lock myself in the bathroom, then?)

That a lot of the stuff that caused the pile-on in 2020, was stuff that had been addressed and discusssed in that thread. (It was Rev, who came into her identity as a trans woman during the course of the thread, who first brought up the dichotomy between 'cis gay space' and 'femininst queer space' which is still causing ~problematics~ today.)

Like, if you want to revive the thread, maybe we give it a go and see how it goes. There's stuff that has totally changed since the start of that thread - OMG, Sophie is a trans woman and she was exploring her own identity, rather than ~doing a drag~ - wow, I got that one wrong, and I'm happy to own my wrongness and be corrected on that one. I've also totally flipped my position on pronouns, because of the experience of gender *euphoria* on being called a pronoun I like! (Again, why I wanted to ask you about dysphoria?)

p.s. you keep talking about "servers for trans men" and "servers for trans women" and... I feel like you're missing something here? Other genders are available? I don't know that 'trans man' is the correct term for what I am, and if you're using that one to describe me, I'd really prefer a different option? I am trans, I have transitioned socially, but the place I transitioned to is not "Man". I reject "Man" just as hard as I reject "Woman" as a placename for me. I'm not criticising, I just wanted to make that clear.

My Wahl clippers have brokened already waaaaaaah(l)! ;_;

Guess it's like the Germans say: Wer die Wahl hat, hat die Qual.

(that's not a comment on their clippers, just a stupid joke which I found mildly amusing and thought that Branwell, a fellow German learner iirc, might do too. I often think of this German phrase because I am a very indecisive person and generally feel like I shouldn't be allowed to make decisions even about mundane things without possessing more information than is actually available, so die Qual der Wahl - the agony of choice - is real to me)

Hello, I'm still here but not being very good at catching up with ilx atm and also unqualified to wade into the in-depth discussions going on in various threads. Hope everyone itt/all non-boys of ilx are doing ok, best wishes etc

xp - how did they break? ... they tend to be fairly sturdy so this is surprising to me.

Ha! That is a very excellent German phrase, surprisingly succinct for German and pithy, as well. Decisions are indeed agonising.

I managed to drop the clippers this morning, and a tiny bit of plastic snapped off, that clips the vibrating blade chunk onto the base (they are detachable so the blades can be washed). It's only on one side, so I did manage to shave this morning. But I'm wondering if I should try to repair with super glue, or just tape the attachment on, and just clean the blades with the brush.

oh yeah!! i just shaved the back of my head yesterday ... I too have new-ish Wahl clippers ... the detachable clips are not the sturdiest looking plastic. ... I would go with the glue rather than the tape (well, depending on what type of tape ...) as my instinct is that due to the vibrations, the tape might not be as resilient as glue.

Well, I just tried supergluing it back together but the two pegs look kinda uneven now and I fear I may have fuX0red it permanently?

Also. Just came back here to say: the menopause sucks in general, but 14 days into a neverending period, I would just like to be done with having a body for ever.

And as a third thing, I thought this was an interesting piece and some of you might enjoy it, the concept of ~heterofatalism~ has been getting a bit of a dragging recently in internet quarters (always, oddly, from lady-loving-ladies, hmmmmm, I wonder why that could be) but this is interesting: https://maljournal.com/5/sex-negative/sophie-lewis/collective-turn-off/

I went looking for a thread to just dump lots of silly lustful photos of my latest pointy-nosed, silver-trousered fuckwant receptacle, to stop clogging up the Proper Thread For His Band, and found this one and wow was that an awkward trip back in time, like, ugh, so many Bad Opinions from cis dudes - like I said, the Feminist Sex Wars left scars - but this weird reminder of how ILX has changed, but people on ~2020 ILX~ absolutely play amnesiac about what past ILX was like. I'm kinda sad and miss that there are no longer playful crush threads on ILX, but at the same time, wow, do I not miss the WOULD SMASH threads.

lol Branwell that thread sure brought back some memories. I remember the same damn arguments being repeated across multiple threads and the two of us just having no fucking time for ppl who tried to rain on our crush parade.

Aw, Roz, we had a lot of fun there, didn't we? :D

There is no giddy joy higher than crushing, and I get such a kick out of even vicarious crushing, like, your crushes, please show me them, and tell me exactly what you find so adorable about them! Are you crushing on anyone or anything* at the moment?

*I do not mean to imply that any people are things, but I think at the moment what I am crushing on is "The Shamen" as a total concept as much as the lad involved

I find crushes painful from either end, it’s an unhealthy feeling (for me). The main voice I hear in my head is “aw he’s just got a little crush on you, be nice” and I don’t appreciate that. If I catch one it feels like a disease. I hate it!!

Not trying to silence anyone it’s just that the joy being described is def not universal.

yeah it was amazing how many dudes just got SO. ANGRY. that there were people who actually dared to express their attraction towards other people who made the music they liked. like desire wasn’t the underlying driver of pop culture as we know it.

outside of kpop, I’ve actually stopped listening to a lot of male presenting musicians over the past decade or so (not consciously, just gradually got bored of hearing men’s voices) and as such I’ve found myself crushing way more on women lately? current obsession is Kate NVwho just looks soooo cool and makes records that often sound like the music I hear in my head. and boring I guess but Phoebe Bridgers, who is just someone I could *stare at* forever.

and the husband and I have been marathon-ing Robert Pattinson movies in lockdown and as a result, I think we’re now both crushing heavily on his very specific chaotic energy lol. and his magical scruffy hair.

xpost I totally get that too LL esp when I develop crushes on people I DON’T want to have crushes on. It’s the absolute worst!

I find crushes to be deeply painful myself. For me, being in a relationship that's been more-or-less in the throes of Lesbian Bed Death approximately since its inception, they're reminders of things I want but don't know how to have.

I hoped that transition would, finally, at last, give me the tools I needed to be able to be honest with my sexuality. Hoped that it would give me the power to explore ideas and feelings that I'd suppressed because they cut too close to the bone.

I'm not there yet. What I want seems so impossibly distant from what I can have, in so many different ways. Even according myself the _right_ to those things is an intellectual exercise that changes nothing. Various items sit in my bottom drawer gathering dust.

Crushes remind me that I am not asexual, that I want things, and that realization is painful and inextricable from the heady, floaty joy a crush brings.

I don't know, I was talking about celebrity crushes, which are... well, if not completely harmless, they exist 100% in the realm of fantasy, so there are no feelings to get hurt, because nothing about the crush is real, except the feeling of happiness?

(OK, I say that, but 3 out of my past 4 celebrity crushes have burst through the fourth wall into my life in some way or another, with, erm, variable results?)

Hearing people talk about stuff that they really love, that makes them uncomplicatedly happy does feel to me, like a way of increasing the joy in the world. Like, I'm going to go and check out the Kate NV thread now, because I trust Roz's taste in music (and crushes) and the description in the first post sounds pretty magic to me!

(Reading threads about IRL crushes has also been weird, like - sometimes I really struggle to remember which insignificant passing infatuation those posts were even written about? Other times, it's like - reading about e.g. the Pliny the Soundman saga, I later discovered that *was* totally requited, he was aware of the crush and intrigued by me, but *I* totally fucked that up in a very idiotic way because I couldn't believe that I was worthy of being crushed back on by someone I had so cool-icised (and he probably wasn't that cool or nice IRL as I had imagined him either.))

But... I don't know. Celebrity crushes are just safe joy. (I know true joy can never really be *safe* because all giddy joy contains an element of risk, through totally letting yourself go.) But safe joy is something *I* really need in this world right now. Celebrity crushes are it, for me, at the moment.

I've screwed up crushes before because I couldn't accept that I was worthy; I know how that feels. God, I've been in an amazing relationship for ten years and I still kick myself for what an idiot I was in my junior year of high school. (This also may play a role in my finding crushes unpleasant.)

So I just watched Kate NV doing Grace Jones dancing on top of a desk while wearing an awesome suit and great shoes and a perfect wedge haircut - A++ celebrity crush, completely approve, she is astonishingly adorable.

here's the thing for me with crushes, and if this gets too deep into transfem shit i apologize in advance

trans women are pretty much all brilliant and gorgeous. i mean i suppose there are exceptions, but for real, trans women are amazing. this is difficult because any given trans woman can recognize how fucking amazing all the _other_ trans women are but tends to think of herself as a loathsome monster. which is complicated by the way cisnormative society tends to look at us, which is not, generally, as loathsome monsters, but certainly cis people tend not to see in us what we see in each other. and this is fundamentally, i believe, a function of ignorance, anybody who has a monomaniacal focus on what's in someone's pants is missing out on some amazing, amazing things.

anyway the upshot of this is that i have, or have had, crushes on half my goddamn friends and it's really, really awkward. because i'm in a monogamous relationship that's amazing and fulfilling and wonderful in pretty much every way but sexually. because of the half my friends i haven't had crushes on i don't have any idea why and i don't know if i'm invalidating them by _not_ crushing on them. because i don't even know if any of these crushes are requited and because even if it was it wouldn't matter.

crushes mostly seem to make my life harder. :(

If I catch one it feels like a disease. I hate it!!

Yes!!! This is absolutely how I feel -- it's like a disease

Also. Just came back here to say: the menopause sucks in general, but 14 days into a neverending period, I would just like to be done with having a body for ever.

is it heavy? (the period, not the body) or just ... it keeps going and going and doesn't stop in a "drip drip drip" kinda way?

mine have been erratic for the past 6 months -- two months where i have two periods in one month (has never happened to me before) and then over a month and half with nothing so i was afraid i was pregnant, but fortunately i am not pregnant but ... is this just stress or this "Menopause: The Early Years and Unreleased Demos"

Man, you "crushes are a disease" people need to learn to channel your crush-bone into pop star crushes. I used to feel like crushes were an affliction that I inflicted on other people unwillingly - but if a pop star is up onstage prancing about, wiggling their arse, they are basically shouting "love me!" at the world, so it's... fine to love them back?

is it heavy? (the period, not the body) or just ... it keeps going and going and doesn't stop in a "drip drip drip" kinda way?

No, it's actually been like... 2 periods in 2 weeks? It came on really strong for about 4 days, then started to taper off to a dribble. It had actually almost stopped, to the point where I didn't need to use a pad at night - then the next week, boom, cramps all over again, and it started up and now I'm having a second period in 2 weeks.

I hate to say it, but "2 periods in a month, followed by 2 months no period" was definitely how the menopause started for me, so unfortunately I think this may be a 4-track demo for you. Joy!

I’m just not into it — developing feelings for someone I’ll never talk to does not make me feel good at all.

Developing feelings for someone you never *HAVE* to talk to is.. such a relief, though? There's no way to screw this up!

(Ha ha, sorry, I will stop pushing now. We are just very different; it's OK to be different.)

No obviously that’s worse. My aversion to crushes is so strong it won’t let go even when the person is not someone I’d ever talk with. It’s an extremely strong aversion.
Yes it’s ok to be different :)

i guess it's just the way the feelings feel? Like, maybe we are using the same word to describe different feelings ... idk

I'm on the trans thread right now, trying to describe how trans men have described T feeling like, and all of them are like "T makes you way more hungry and way more horny" and can you imagine how much more of a crushed-out hornball I would be if I ever actually got to take T.

yeah for me celeb crushes are the way to go and it often goes along with whatever musical/artistic obsession i've developed at the same time - it's escapism as much as desire. I do have to watch myself though - from past experience, whenever my fantasy crushes have gotten too intense, it's often a sign that there's something else in my life that's going wrong and that I'm not dealing with appropriately.

I'm currently in a very monogamous, very long-term partnership so I stay away from real life crushes anyway, but generally crushes on friends/people I meet are painful and messy as much as they can be exciting and joyful.

Yeah, absolutely! Escapism is completely what it is. (But also sometimes a touch of... "I wish *I* were a better person - like my amazing fantasy crush!") And right now, given the choice between escapism and absolute despair, I would always rather choose escapism.

How do you find managing celebrity crushes within a long-term partnership? You mentioned watching R-Patz movies with your husband, like, is he very "ooh, I know my wife likes this actor, let's indulge this obsession together" or does he not notice?

For me, that was always a real test of whether a long-term relationship was working, like, was the other person willing to share and engage with pop star crushes, or were they jealous and insecure about it. (But I guess that's to do with... most of my long-term relationships have been with bisexual people of various genders, and that whole "tell me your crushes, we will crush on them together and bond over it" kind of is a distinct and notable part of queer/bisexual culture. "R-Patz or K-Stew? - oh hey, *both*!")

Oh he notices and we tend to crush on the same people together - if it’s not RPattz, it’s FKA Twigs or Taika Waititi or Natasha Lyonne.

Neither of us identify as bi but maybe we’re both a little bi curious lol.

Oh, that's adorable. That's just like dream relationship co-crushing. :D

(I don't think crushing is always *necessarily* sexual? So it's completely possible to have a non-orientation crush without it affecting one's sexuality, I guess.)

I've got past the "looking at photos and watching videos" phase of the crush and moved on to the "reading lots of interviews" phase of the crush, and he's gobby and opinionated and too-clever-by-half in all the ways I find really, really catnippy. Why am I so attracted to people I think I could have really good FITES! with?

No one read this Sophie Lewis piece, huh?

As the porn actor and philosopher Conner Habib retorts when anyone complains that their eight-hour-a-day porn habit is getting in the way of their ability to perform their job, ‘dude, it seems to me that your eight-hour-a-day work habit is getting in the way of your ability to properly enjoy your sexuality.’

And in a colossal twinkle of universal irony, one of the queer theory reading groups has assigned an essay on eco-eroticism (those cheeky Scottish fuckers have ~ruined~ me for reading / thinking about / engaging critically with anything to do with *actual* Shamanism these days?) and here comes the kicker:

Feeling inside this fluid, living entity of what we call “nature” does have its consequences, as my sensuality often gets in the way of my scholarship. But then again, my scholarship often gets in the way of my sensuality. It is a common conundrum, feeling the difference between the world of thought and the world of my other senses.

is this just stress or this "Menopause: The Early Years and Unreleased Demos"

Yes? Idk. I had no periods for half of last year, then had it for 14 days in December, was regular for like one month, then didn't have it from Feb until last week, then had it for 7 days. If the "definition" of menopause is going a whole year with no bleeding at all (that is so stupid btw), it keeps fucking w me by going 6 whole months and then ruining my timeline.

Meanwhile I'm looking at parcels of forested land in the Northeast to buy and someday put a prefab house on. That's the new 5 year plan. God willing office jobs go to wfh and I can live in VT or something. Or Northern MI, frankly.

I'm obsessed with minimalist prefab houses that are only available in the EU or in Quebec or in Finland.

All My Demos Are Unreleased

can it be an A-frame?

I don't really like A-frames, weirdly? Idk--I dislike being in rooms where sloping ceilings make part of the room too short to move around in.

lol yeah they are really impractical on the inside. i just like looking at them.

Oh man I love slopey ceilings, like a big part of my obsession with Berlin is the slopey ceilings in Dachgeschosses.

My period is still the same even though I’m the same age my mom was when she started menopause.

in orbit, are you still upstate?

https://ark-shelter.com/
Only available in, like, the Netherlands and Slovakia.

https://www.ecohome.net/prefab-kit-homes/le-refuge-s750/
Only available in Quebec!

https://www.pluspuu.fi/en/mallisto/
Only priced for Finland!

xp to tr: Yes, well, not VERY upstate, but in Orange County.

Ok, just wondering if you wanted to do some sort of socially distanced meet up!

those are adorable. i have similar forest-living dreams but i don't know if i could downsize any more from my 880 sq. ft. house. too many kitchen things.

Oh yeah it wouldn't be my permanent residence probably? I have too much stuff! Or would be something modular that could be expanded later. I just can't afford a house ($250k and upwards) that I would want, and I only like old houses, and then I would have the constant maintenance, which I would love to say I could handle, but honestly without C and his skills and a whole workshop and tools and etc, which I don't have on my own, I would be sunk.

Anyway. When the climate crisis comes, everyone come to my 5 acres with a separate well and septic system and build a tiny house and we'll stick it out.