no boys allowed in the room!!!!

xpost justine:

lisa frank designed crazy school supply items like some of the dolphin-festooned things you see on this thread, she was v popular with middle school aged girls in the early-mid 90s

melissa joan hart is mjh, she played the title role in "clarissa explains it all" which was a popular nickelodeon television show for the same age of girls at roughly the same time

i hate to be gabbneb, but i actually did briefly date a guy who kinda looked like james franco, esp as he is in this picture:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1940000/images/_1944248_mate_pa.jpg

anyways he was mad dumb

http://img2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/081027/Freaks-And-Geeks/James-Franco-Express_l.jpg

love u boo

awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

right??????

man i so rarely like a pinup type of dude it is kinda cool when i do cause then you can like commiserate about it with other girls

LOL yeah he's defintely just well . . . dreamy.

dryer sheets?

yes james franco is a universal.

he's 2 years older than me?!

dryer sheets and other products for the home lol

yeah what's the with dryer sheets? I'm allergic to most fabric softeners so I have to use hippy dippy all natural stuff that doesn't work all that great but is at least something.

how old r u

i hate dryer sheets, they are pointless

i don't like anything that makes things smell like anything!

Mr. Franco and I are 4 mo. and 10 days apart in age and I believe he's currently attending my alma matter.

http://www.mblcosmeticsandmore.com/files/2343446/uploaded/Loves%20Baby%20Soft.jpg

?

damn erica lol

http://lee.org/journal/journal%20030104-043004/jean-nate.jpg

en vaporisateur

hahahaha touche

yall check out this creepy ad btw:

http://rgh.cc/albums/userpics/10001/%5Bcreepy%5Dloves-baby-soft-ad-c1976.jpg

(wait - I dind't actually know that . . . I looked it up just now. Just wanted to make sure you didn't think I was some franco-obsessed crazy person)

ew rapey

xp

ok yeah, that is exceptionally creepy

would not judge tbh: this is a girls only clubhouse for sharing and caring

ha i was going to go look for a photo of jean nate but was too lazy

i mean about enbb and franco, not about innocence being sexier than u think
xpost

OK REALLY THAT AD IS COMPLTELY WRONG AND WTF?!

this guy was suck a fuckin babe in 'go' and 'deadwood' but there are basically no other online pics of him where he doesn't look like a plastic surgery model

http://www.jdmfilmreviews.com/userimages/user-6813828_1179400556.jpg

lol 'suck'

sposed to be 'such'

freudian slip, ladies

wtf is a dryer sheet

my femininity is feeling threatened

am i supposed to know these things?

OK, I totally had this in middle school:

http://images.bidorbuy.co.za/user_images/866/419Discretion_Exclamation_by_Coty.jpg

who was yalls favorite new kid

(jordan)

yeah or else you are a failure as a woman sorry xp

speaking of gross ads, have y'all seen these:

http://www.sostav.ru/articles/rus/2008/columns/golden/images/gf_05.jpg

w t f

i don't remember which one was favorite, i had their tape but i was like 5 or 6

o sorry that was so hueg ugh

i bet enbb liked donnie

jesus christ xpost

the one with the curly hair, i forget his name

tim olyphant in Go is a crush archetype of mine

Dryer sheets are fabric softener sheet things you put in the clothes dryer to make things smell "nice" and eliminate static.

OK WHAT IS THAT AD???

I had NKOTB earrings and my favorite was . . . DONNY! I liked the bad one. lol.

OMG HOW DID YOU KNOW IT WOULD BE DONNY!?

wait

it was joey

is it "ie" whoops - guess I'm not such a fan as I once was

mine was joey too! i was not going to be the first to admit that

xpost

someone is yelling homophobic slurs at some lesbians outside

Kate I am a cis woman who finds your space-sucking on this thread and elsewhere off-putting because I associate it with crap dude behavior. Honest Q: does this put me into TERF territory?

Quincie: Short answer is no, but it _is_, to my mind, indicative of internalized transphobia. Oh, also, _thank you_ for saying that.

Long, space-sucking answer follows.

One of the biggest challenges I have as a trans woman is that things get essentialized and reduced to my gender. So for instance, I'm really acutely aware that my logorrhea is off-putting, that I'm taking up space and making people, particularly people who are for gendered reasons _encouraged to be discreet, silent, not to speak_, feel uncomfortable speaking. And maybe part of that is that I was encouraged, as a "man", for most of my life, to be loud, to take up space. There's a lot more to it than that but I don't want to get off-track here.

And on top of that, since I'm a trans woman, there's this sense that you express, this _absolute concern_, that one is being "transphobic" if one criticizes a trans woman at all. So just as your question was sincere, I want to sincerely thank you for speaking up. Speaking as someone whose trauma manifests in BPD-like behavior, one of the things I struggle with most is maintaining healthy boundaries. I'm bad at it, and I rely a lot on external feedback, both positive and critical. I don't know how many people have left silently because I never shut up. I can't know that.

And that's the reason for a lot of my inappropriate behavior, honestly. I bounce all over the place between spaces because I don't want to overwhelm any one space, I don't want to make other people feel uncomfortable (and then I do anyway). I'll overengage with a place, like I've been doing here, and then ghost because I feel ashamed of my behavior.

My behavior is, I'd say, informed by my experience and history with gender. Where the internalized transphobia comes in is the tendency to reduce my gendered behavior to "that's just like a man". You're not alone in feeling that. My impression, honestly, is that most people feel that way, and that's not indicative of _individual prejudice_ against trans people. To me, though, it _is_ a sign that we were raised with transphobic norms. Using my name and pronouns doesn't erase or negative the bigotry we were all implicitly raised with.

That's the hardest thing for me to deal with. The things people think and don't say, and I know people think it, because it's what I was raised to believe, because I think it too. Someone says they're a trans woman and _logically_ one can be trans-affirming, one can think "oh, yes, trans women are women just like anybody else", but there's some connection buried deep down in the brain that says "trans women are men". No matter what we look like, no matter what we sound like.

It's the accidental misgenderings that hurt the worst. If somebody intentionally calls me a "man", they're just being an asshole. Their opinion doesn't count. If someone slips up without thinking and refers to me as "he", that hurts more. And I know how difficult it is, because four years and I still do that, with transmascs in particular. That's transphobic of me. My brain has this persistent belief that transmasculine people are women. I know, rationally, that's not true, but rewiring that internal connection... it's a lot of work.

So that, to me, is the important thing. We are all biased. We were all taught to be biased. When people are like "Oh I'm not transphobic", like it's a matter of individual virtue? Fuck that! We're all transphobic. Which is one of the reasons I never fucking shut up about being trans. It exhausts people, I know it does, like Kate we know you're trans, not everything is about you being trans, shut the fuck up already. It's possible, and probably common, to both _value_ my _perspective_ and still be like, Kate, girl, you've been talking for twenty minutes straight without taking a breath. Could you just, like. Breathe for a minute?

It's a tough balance to strike - a lot of this shit _is_ really important for me to talk about and my lived experience gives me the ability to talk about it that a lot of other people don't have, a perspective a lot of people don't have. I really want to push back against these assumptions and stereotypes that all of us have, that everyone here has spent decades being taught, to be _nuanced_ about this stuff. But also I never fucking shut up. And the BPD, the BPD sure as hell doesn't make it any easier.

I think there's also a spectrum though ... like, one of the positive things about "they" and people identifying as non-binary, is that it calls attention to that. There are a lot of differences in terms of "taking up space" and how much we were taught we could take up within the category of "cis-women" ... I get that a lot as a white woman interacting with BIPOC people.

And Kate, for me, I sometimes feel uncomfortable with the length of your posts, esp. with regards to fraught topics, because I often don't have time to read them all the way through, and I feel like I should do so in order to give a respectful response, and then I don't respond, and then I feel awkward? Because it's clear you're going through some heavy shit and you've been having some serious problems! And I want to be a compassionate person and show you that you are cared for and valued.

I am gonna do a long-ass response to it but I'm gonna do it in the "Uncorrected Personality Traits" thread, it doesn't have anything to do with this thread particularly. :)

Kate, you have been way more kind to quincie on this than I feel. I get why she might not like your long posts, fuck, I even get why she might feel like they're space-sucking. But to add that gendered element to it - yes, I think that's transphobic as fuck and awful. Incredibly fucking awful.

Kate, you have been way more kind to quincie on this than I feel. I get why she might not like your long posts, fuck, I even get why she might feel like they're space-sucking. But to add that gendered element to it - yes, I think that's transphobic as fuck and awful. Incredibly fucking awful.

― emil.y

i think that's a really good perspective as well and i'm glad you were able to say that! (i know that's therapy-speak, i just don't know how to express my feelings _without_ lapsing into therapy-speak haha).

that's kind of what makes it difficult to talk about this stuff in a public forum, what makes twitter such a hellsite (or made twitter such a hellsite, i guess, now apparently it's elon musk who's making twitter a hellsite. i appreciate the concept. like why do people always want to remake _good_ movies? why remake _all the king's men_, that's already a perfectly fucking good movie. why not make _escape from the bronx_? that's the way to do it. except that for all its hellishness twitter did occasionally have, ahem, _redeeming social value_. by which i mean communism.)

sorry. haven't had coffee yet. the point is, you say something and one person will be ok with it, more than ok with it, and somebody else will think it's incredibly fucking awful, and even if the question is directed at _me_ personally other people's experiences in a public forum are important! that's what i struggle with sometimes when i make myself vulnerable and choose to say things that reflect on me poorly, but are true.

well anyway i can only speak for myself and i do think i'm gonna double-down. getting that feedback _was_ emotionally difficult and made my day more challenging in the short-term, but in the long term it gave me the opportunity to say some things i'd wanted to say for a long time. like it's a paradox but transphobia actually _has_ helped me a lot. and i'm gonna start out by phrasing this in the extreme form, so i want to say up front that this _isn't_ how i feel about quincie.

all of the worst, shittiest things transphobes say about me were things that i internalized, that i believed about myself. hearing _them_ say it helped me examine those beliefs more critically. because i looked at the people saying these things and i was like, "wow, all the people who believe these things about me are incredibly terrible people. i'm not an incredibly terrible person. the people i look up to and admire don't think these things about me, in fact, they think the opposite. maybe i should listen to the people i like and not the people who are awful."

that's not the point of similarity here, the relatable thing is that i had a _whole lot_ of internalized transphobia. it was a tremendous weight i was carrying. i hated myself a lot for being trans. when other people started hating me for being trans... i know personally the weight of that hatred. i'm really happy that other people are, of their own volition, willing to carry that weight, particularly given that it's their fucking weight to begin with, not mine.

the stuff quincie said, that's stuff i've thought about myself for a long time. that's a really strong concern i've had, that i'm "acting like a man" by talking and explaining incessantly. quincie expressing that, externalizing my internal transphobia, taking on the _weight_ of it, is something i'm really grateful for. unlike with the radical transphobes, i don't think that makes her a bad person. i don't get the sense that she's "just asking questions", either. this is a space that _is_ affirming and welcoming to trans people. by asking the question she asked within that context, it really made me feel safe to address it in detail. to, uh, respond to accusations that i'm "space-sucking" by "space-sucking" some more.

---

so ok, i'm gonna get really controversial here. there's this sort of implicit assumption that trans women's goal should be to be as much like cis women as possible. and cis women are amazing, i love, respect, and admire cis women. and lust after cis women too, because, yeah, i'm very lesbian. the thing is, a lot of the shit cis women are raised with is fucking misogynist patriarchal bullshit, decades upon decades of that, and i don't view not having been directly beaten down and taught to think of myself as categorically inferior to men for decades as being a deficiency i need to remediate.

i don't think the solution here is that i need to be quieter - i think cis women need to be louder, angrier, god since last june i've _felt_ the fucking rage so many women have, and we're not supposed to feel that, only _men_ are supposed to be enraged. my favorite aunt gave me a book a couple years ago called "Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger". this is fucking bullshit and the fucking fragile-ass _men_ are trying to say that _they're_ the ones who get to be enraged, _they're_ the ones who are being done wrong, and FUCK. THAT. one of the things that really connected with me hard last year, i talk a lot about it, is a 1994 essay by susan stryker called "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage".

it's more complicated for me than that, as it turns out. see, the thing about my behavior being categorized as "male behavior" is that i didn't get this from men. i got it from my mom. she's a cis woman but she's also Not Like Other Women. she's one of those libfems who believes in "equality" and took that to mean "i can do anything a man can do" and put that into practice and suffered a lot for that, for being outspoken the way a man is. and also suffered because, well, she's an awful, abusive person. she's also where i got my rage. she taught me that, by abusing me. my rage _isn't_ clean. it's _justified_, we _all_ have a right to it. i have to be very, very careful with it. it's addictive to me, addictive like alcohol is to my youngest sibling. but it's something we all fucking _need_ and _deserve_ right now.

and that's another thing i admire about quincie! as much as she's calling me out for space-sucking, she's being loud, she's being outspoken, she's not conforming to how women are _supposed_ to behave, we're all supposed to get together and watch "the sisterhood of the traveling pants" and honestly i'm more of a thelma and louise kind of girl. refusing to call each other out in the name of "solidarity", that's the kind of game i played for a long time and it's not good. if we got differences, if we got distrust, i think it is both _possible_ and _important_ to name them, to name them honestly and with kindness.

and to me, that's what quincie did. to me, that's preferable to me swiping right on cis women on Her and just wondering why none of them ever seem to swipe back. i mean cis women all live with that, that fear of being _A TERF_, and that's what I really wanted to say, that for quincie to say what she said _doesn't_ make her a TERF, that these are misconceptions, prejudices even, that a lot of cis women have and are under a lot of pressure to pretend they don't have. I get that, I was raised with a lot of prejudices, and I _know_ I have prejudices, and I struggle to not be ashamed of them. Because I'm not a bad person, I was just raised with some stupid bullshit, and I don't know how to get rid of or challenge that bullshit without naming it and taking accountability for it. Which, again, is what I feel like quincie is doing here.

And by the way that's one of the reasons for my space-sucking. I do a lot of explaining things, and it _looks_ a lot like mansplaining (just like BPD _looks_ a lot like narcissism sometimes). I'm not interested in that. You can't change somebody else's mind by lecturing them. I explain things because that's how I _learn_. It's, like, _the_ most single effective method of learning. I do see it as a positive good, I want there to be more of it. Womansplaining. Not explaining as _discourse_, explaining as a form of _learning_, of challenging ourselves.

Anyway I know all that is just gonna piss more people off, with them I'm in a hole and I won't stop digging, but there is _something else_, something else I'm really wanting to get at. And I don't know how to do that without digging myself further into a hole when it comes to how they think of me.

I explain things because that's how I _learn_. It's, like, _the_ most single effective method of learning.

I totally get this. As in, it's something I do, and it's something a number of my friends do as well. And, being on the receiving end, does make me more self-aware of how I am, and how I can be annoying, maybe?

One of my friends that does this a lot to me, I will sometimes get frustrated because he is very loquacious. And I will ask him, "Does it matter that I am here listening to you?" As in, I am present for this conversation, but it is mostly his monologue and I'm supposedly the audience, but, am I really? Or ... as the audience, do I get some agency here? Can I like, fast forward through some of it?

Need to catch up but I am glad to have been called out because I didn’t see that my comment could be interpreted as non-affirming of Kate’s gender identity. I sincerely did not mean that and really apologize for angst I caused

One of my friends that does this a lot to me, I will sometimes get frustrated because he is very loquacious. And I will ask him, "Does it matter that I am here listening to you?" As in, I am present for this conversation, but it is mostly his monologue and I'm supposedly the audience, but, am I really? Or ... as the audience, do I get some agency here? Can I like, fast forward through some of it?

― sarahell

i mean as long as the other person is clear that they don't actually need me to listen or respond i'm fine with it. my primary calls it "rubber-ducking". i guess it's something programmers do, they try to explain their code to like a rubber duck on their desk and that's how they manage. nobody actually listens with rapt attention to every single thing their partner says, right?

What’s up with Lume deodorant … I feel like I am missing something?

Or am I the only one here who gets lots of ads for this product?

i get them too and i totally dont get it

It’s apparently great at preventing swamp crotch

*sad lols*

https://imgur.com/a/P7cTAlP

Hopefully that link works

My period AND period shits AND chest congestion? Did I inadvertently offend an old Romany woman? And just as the Oscar bait started trickling into my local theaters!

ugh that sucks j.lu

for me the hilarity that i have been grumpy about for a while now is that oh hey guess what my fasting blood sugar jumps 20 points when i get my period because that is apparently “just a common thing that happens”

but how the fuck am i supposed to adjust for it when i’m perimenopausal and have zero chance of predicting when i’ll start anymore. 2 weeks? 4? 8? who knows weee

Maybe I am late to the party so to speak but apparently there is a trendy phrase “girl math” that makes me livid when I am reminded of it

yes hate it

oh my god yes, I get infuriated

I have to google that but I've been putting it off because I am sure it will give me the rage

Is it like "girl dinner" which is also awful unless you are referring to like a 5 year old's chicken tenders

pretty much

Relieved to not come across most of these trendy words unless my students bring it up. Or I see it on Ilx.

Lol … chicken tenders with a place setting for a stuffed toy and the family pet … otherwise ughhh