no boys allowed in the room!!!!

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.

*at least one

Like, I am glad that some of these dudes are trying to engage with #metoo and all, but my god are these conversations triggery as hell and I don't know how to recconcile their need to discuss them with my own needs to manage my mental health. :(

i mean, yeah, i'm super self-conscious too. part of the way i was brought up, what i was taught as an amab, was to talk over everyone else, was to suck all the air out of the room, was to make everything about me.

and a lot more people are afraid of me, since my transition. they're afraid of saying the wrong thing, that if they say or do anything that hurts me that will make them a Transphobes and Transphobes are Bad People.

a lot of what keeps me here is the positive encouragement, which i've gotten a lot of, and you've gotten, well, considerably less of.

as far as what you're talking about... i don't think there is any way for someone to talk about a trauma like that and still be "polite". it's something i struggle with a lot too. there are these standards of decorum and the standards are based around circumlocution, about talking _around_ things. confronting trauma directly that's challenging for a lot of people. well, i don't get the impression that you were given a fucking choice on that.

and that is a big part of the problem, a huge part - i'll just put this in the passive voice, i have observed a widespread desire to talk around these things, diminish them, minimize them, maybe make them _invisible_. being able to speak openly and directly to one's own trauma is both an incredibly powerful weapon against that tendency and is also, very often, immensely painful and difficult for the person doing it.

the best i can say is that i do try to be aware of when i'm saying that will hurt or challenge other people, that will bring about that programmed/automatic "that's not my fault!" response, and call it out in advance. no magic bullet, i don't know if it works or not, but at least if i tell people ahead of time when i'm going to be "unreasonable" i don't have to waste time engaging with responses that accuse me of being unreasonable.

i don't have much advice in general, but the advice i do have is that it is really important to do whatever you can to take care of yourself, and that whatever someone else feels like you _owe_ them, you fucking don't. there's a lot of shit i'd like to do but can't, not now, maybe not ever, and i have to make my peace with that just about every day. every time walk into a space, no matter what brings me there, no matter if i'm _invited_ there, i've got that... again, i try not to make it hypervigilance but it's a risk. it's always a risk, and i gotta keep my eye on how the odds are running.

Hey Kate. I never know how people use / are supposed to use the 'second thoughts' thread. Some people seem to use it to indicate they don't wanna talk about the thing any further; some people seem to take it a request to expand the conversation in a different place. I have no idea which you intend.

I just wanted to ask about your relationship to the word 'dysphoria'? If that's not comfortable to do here, please tell me to drop it, I'd be happy to.

I struggle with that word, because there are so many, many meanings to it. And I think the slippages between the different uses and different contexts of that word, *did*, for me (maybe just for me) make it harder for me to understand what gender dysphoria was and what it wasn't.

Other posters on the thread, if this is not the place for that discussion, please direct me somewhere better? And again, Kate, if you'd rather drop the topic, I'm happy to drop the topic.

Also, the Jane's Addiction thread really messed me up - not even on consent/age issues, which went much more politely than I thought they were gonna go - but on addiction issues.

To this day, I am still endlessly confronted with all kinds of ways in which my attitudes towards that stuff is so far outside the normative range (in negative ways and in positive ways) - I still have the thought processes of an addict.

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*!")