no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Is it that the two week break made you realize you don't want to return to how the relationship was? or that you can only see the relationship growing/ continuing if you have preplanned time apart.

Let's just say for now that the reason it was possible for us to make the 8 year mark was that we weren't together all the time and, speaking for myself, I had time to nourish myself with my other friendships and wasn't trying to get so much of my socialization from one person.

yeah, and I guess it is also a difficult thing to gauge because of the extremes of the last two years.

if i'd had the vocab during my teen years i might have gone with non-binary bcuz of not identifying with any of the standard """woman""" archetypes, but now it's whatever

totally, I was the same (I probably posted about this a bit way upthread)! and welcome cat!

ay! (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞

i remember that laurel post too! i took it as, like, prospective s.o.’s don’t get to pick and choose which parts of you to take on, it’s the whole enchilada o nada, and i thought that was very cool

yes! your memory is probably more accurate.

I also remember! Such an apt expression, love it.

I take anti-anxiety meds (which also help with some low-level OCD stuff) and I don't remember things as well as I used to ... for the most part, this is a very good thing.

the meds also enable me to scroll past and/or ignore annoying and potentially enraging ilx content without having to figure out how to use killfile. It's kinda like my approach to alcohol consumption -- try to do it in moderation with "cold turkey" being the last resort if I can't do moderation.

yeah, and I guess it is also a difficult thing to gauge because of the extremes of the last two years.

― Yerac

yeah COVID deffo played a big part in tanking my marriage. as far as meds i've started shit-tons over the past couple years. finally acknowledged that yeah i'm bipolar, started taking a mood stabilizer. got diagnosed with adhd, taking adderall for that. the stuff that's helped most is the HRT, honestly. it's changed the way i process anger _so much_. like, being angry makes me physically weak now.

what mood stabilizer?

lamictal

hi! still intermittently here, mostly just lurking. hello everyone! hope you're well! hope absent former regulars are well too! hi & welcome cat!

if i'd had the vocab during my teen years i might have gone with non-binary bcuz of not identifying with any of the standard """woman""" archetypes, but now it's whatever

Yeah, add me to this list. Might conceivably have gone further than "non-binary"; when I was a v small kid I really wanted to be a boy, or even thought I was a boy and there was just some mystifying cosmic clerical error resulting in everyone else pretending otherwise. Loved when old ladies mistook me for a boy and hated when my mum corrected them. As a teenager I heard the words "is that a boy or a girl" bellowed down the street or across a party at me pretty frequently and cursed my fat hamstery freckled cheeks and ginger hair for not being gamine and gothic enough to pull off the cool kind of androgynous.

And now I'm content to be a straight cis middle-aged woman, or at least if I'm not content it's not due to the gender part. But when I was younger I had some proto-terfy ideas because I thought "I've never felt like a woman but nobody gave me any choice about it, so anyone who thinks they do feel like a woman is making some kind of category error", and you know what? I was wrong, the category error was on my part, and I'm sorry.

(esp sorry bcz I think I posted some dumb offensive shit on ILX along those lines which I apologise for and hope nobody ever reads again, including me, so I'm not going to go looking so I can apologise in the right place tbh)

So yes, I fell for some early terfy "what about the tomboys?" articles/sentiment, and then noticed a lot of the people who said that were apparently very cool with harrassing trans people & unsure kids & insufficiently feminine-presenting women alike, and now apparently they're having horrible ideas about checking teenage girls' underpants before sporting events - so really fuck those people, and good for the tomboys and the unsure kids if they have more options open to them to explore and hopefully a more accepting world to explore them in (or not, I mean OK, some signs aren't good, maybe even a lot of them, but there's still been a lot of progress in this respect since I was a teenager). All for it. Good luck to 'em.

Sorry, went off on one there. Just babbling away to myself, same as it ever was.

Yeah, add me to this list. Might conceivably have gone further than "non-binary"; when I was a v small kid I really wanted to be a boy, or even thought I was a boy and there was just some mystifying cosmic clerical error resulting in everyone else pretending otherwise. Loved when old ladies mistook me for a boy and hated when my mum corrected them. As a teenager I heard the words "is that a boy or a girl" bellowed down the street or across a party at me pretty frequently and cursed my fat hamstery freckled cheeks and ginger hair for not being gamine and gothic enough to pull off the cool kind of androgynous.

― a passing spacecadet, Tuesday, July 5, 2022 12:04 PM (yesterday)

So this is the thing, this is the difficult thing for me to talk about.

It took me 43 years, give or take, to figure out something which is in retrospect blindingly obvious: I'm a woman. Why did it take me 43 years? Because I was misinformed about gender, misinformed about what determines it, what it _is_. Specifically, I was _not_ ever told that gender and genital anatomy are not the same thing. It took me a _very long time_ to understand, accept, and internalize this basic fact. The idea that gender and genital anatomy were the same thing was a fundamental, axiomatic part of my worldview. The truth of the matter is that I was, myself, transphobic, that I still struggle with what is termed "internalized transphobia". The false beliefs I internalized are _persistent_, persistent in myself most of all.

The difficult thing is knowing that the deck was not just stacked against me, but against fucking _everybody_. I never really got to ask the question, consider the possibility. And by the time I could, well, I had a lot to lose from it. It was, really, desperation that led me to exploring my gender. I'd been miserable, fucked up, for a very long time, for no reason I could figure out, and I'd tried pretty much everything else. CW: self-harm I figured it'd kill me, but fuck it, I figured I didn't have long to live anyway.

And this is in some ways the worse lie, the lie that being trans is _bad_. That we're _cursed_ and _miserable_ and that gender exploration is, for a lot of us, a last resort.

That's painful for me to watch. People have the absolute right to self-determination, but something like gender? That should be a _first_ resort, not a _last_ resort. The bias was so pervasive, so universal, where I think... Honestly? I think _every single cis person_ should re-evaluate their gender identity. Ask the hard questions. People ask us over and over again "But what _makes_ you trans?", and the snappy answer is "OK, but what _makes_ you cis?". Both those questions are stupid questions. They're not answerable, and we don't need to have answers.

Even the _labels_ get in the way, a lot of times. Gender is experimental, but there's this huge bias against experiment. Right now most of the people who question come to the same conclusion, and I think that's a _systemic problem_. I am really in favor of genderfuck, not just for "trans people" or people with "gender dysphoria" but for ANYBODY AND EVERYBODY. Get a new haircut. Take a new name, new pronouns, different clothes, different approaches to body care, not _because_ of anything but just for the hell of it. Because we were told it was the worst thing on earth, but in fact it doesn't do anybody any real harm, and it can do us a _hell of a lot of good_.

When I see someone say something like what you say above, spacecadet... I know this is dangerous, I know this might be taken the wrong way, but I would _encourage_ you to see what happens if you rephrase that "might have gone" to "might go". I'm not _diagnosing_ or offering any _opinion_ in any way on these things, but the things you list off are... pretty common experiences a lot of trans and gender diverse people have.

Because here's lie #3, to the extent that any of us were taught about "gender dysphoria", what we were taught about it was... grossly _inadequate_ and _misleading_. I think it would particularly be of benefit for everyone, cis, trans, everyone, to understand gender dysphoria more accurately. The Gender Dysphoria Bible at genderdysphoria.fyi is a great resource. Again, this is _not_ something _anybody else_ can diagnose in someone else, any more than someone else can diagnose me with The Gay, but most of us didn't have the tools at our disposal for healthy understanding of our gender, and nowadays these tools are available.

Not trying to get into your shit here. This is just stuff everyone... ought to know, but most people don't.

idk for me, a lot of it was "why would I want to be the gender category that is marginalized and oppressed? why would anyone want to be this if they could choose?" I think the reason I had gender dysphoria growing up and periodically as an adult, is less about wanting to be male, and to have male anatomy, but because men had power, had more opportunities, and that's what I wanted. I wanted to be able to drive a forklift and play drums, I didn't want to be able to grow a beard or have a dick.

I am seeing a lot more people in my community get gender affirming surgery (and doing crowdfunding if its something they can't afford to pay for), which makes me think this is something that is way more accessible now than in decades prior ... which I think is great. I feel like that shouldn't be a barrier, if it allows someone to be more comfortable in their own body.

idk for me, a lot of it was "why would I want to be the gender category that is marginalized and oppressed? why would anyone want to be this if they could choose?" I think the reason I had gender dysphoria growing up and periodically as an adult, is less about wanting to be male, and to have male anatomy, but because men had power, had more opportunities, and that's what I wanted. I wanted to be able to drive a forklift and play drums, I didn't want to be able to grow a beard or have a dick.

I am seeing a lot more people in my community get gender affirming surgery (and doing crowdfunding if its something they can't afford to pay for), which makes me think this is something that is way more accessible now than in decades prior ... which I think is great. I feel like that shouldn't be a barrier, if it allows someone to be more comfortable in their own body.

― sarahell

Right. I mean, this is also what makes it difficult to talk about because of, my favorite phrase as a data analyst is "confounding variables". Just because someone has had experiences that a lot of people who have gender dysphoria have doesn't make them gender dysphoric. It's more that... if there's any possible _other_ explanation for something besides gender dysphoria, trans people will just _immediately_ gravitate to that, just because trans people are so fucking marginalized and hated.

Patriarchy and misogyny make being a woman really difficult and it's eminently reasonable to hate being a woman because we have to deal with this bullshit for, well, basically no fucking reason. Cis men have it a lot easier. It's kind of a weird thing for _me_ of all people to talk about because yes, patriarchy and misogyny suck, I hate them, and I am... pretty vehement about opposing them, but at the same time being a woman is still really important to me.

But there's also this overhang of... I mean, being a man isn't about driving a forklift or playing drums, there's no reason women can't do either of those things, but it's also not about growing a beard or having a dick! Most trans guys don't have bottom surgery. A lot lot lot of transmasc people don't take hormones.

I will note also that what a trans person wants - hell, what _any_ person wants - can and often does change over time! For a long time I thought I couldn't be _really_ trans because I didn't want bottom surgery, and here I am having actually had bottom surgery. I was talking to a transmasc friend a couple weeks ago and he talked about the pressure he faced to go on hormones as a trans man in the '90s. It was shitty that he faced that sort of pressure to do something he didn't want to do, and a TERF will look at that and say "see? IRREVERSIBLE DAMAGE" but it's more complicated than that in practice. Hormones weren't right for him then, but he's taking T now. He's older, wiser, and he's making an informed decision about what's right for him. The trans community is, as well, has grown wiser over the years, and that sort of pressure to start taking hormones just isn't something I've observed in practice since starting transition myself a couple years ago.

It gets really difficult because the way transmasc erasure works is different from transfem erasure, there's this idea that it's a _betrayal_ of a _sisterhood_ to not simply, straightforwardly, and uncomplicatedly be a woman. Your TERFs of the world will say, correctly enough, that you can drive a forklift and play drums and still be a woman, but if someone just doesn't _want_ to think of themselves as a woman or be seen as a woman by others, why the fuck should they have to?

(The way we are seen by others is a _really important_ component of gender that gets a little thrown under the bus by "born this way" narratives. I benefit greatly not only from understanding myself as a woman, but by being _recognized_ as a woman by other people - this is a big source of what is often termed "gender euphoria".)

There's this sort of implicit question of _motive_ underlying gender stuff, and to me it's just... irrelevant. I'm not out to destroy gender or anything like that. Womanhood _works_ for me. I function better and am happier as a woman than I was when everybody thought of me as a man, and in that sense, I do think there is some value to the idea of gender. The _norms_ of gender, though? Obliterate them. Smash them into a million billion pieces. Terrible, awful little things.

i picked up this concept from some feminist author æons ago, to which i strongly related & which i will now awkwardly paraphrase:

when people who were raised as girls start being treated like women (i.e. when men start sexually objectifying you to your face) they feel this horror of becoming alien to themselves. they had been kids, but apparently now the outside world is classifying them as Woman, and Woman is a scary gross weird intimidating thing to be: the vamp who makes the wolf's eyes pop out of his skull, the nagging harridan wife, the bitter dried-up spinster, the gauzy angelic impossible girl-next-door ideal, etc.

these had all been The Other but now suddenly it's supposed to be you. but you still feel like you, so that can't be right, but then what are you? so a lot of girls try to hold on to their identity with variations of "I'm a person, not a woman" to forestall their personhood being subsumed by these female cultural totems.

but then if you're lucky/privileged you can get old and stop caring, except insofar as government & employers & family & doctors & dangerous randos on the street are concerned

similar nightmare stuff for people raised as boys, maybe

fucking gender norms imo

these had all been The Other but now suddenly it's supposed to be you. but you still feel like you, so that can't be right, but then what are you? so a lot of girls try to hold on to their identity with variations of "I'm a person, not a woman" to forestall their personhood being subsumed by these female cultural totems.

similar nightmare stuff for people raised as boys, maybe

fucking gender norms imo

― i REFUSE to pay for my own cbd (cat)

not ime, this is like what male privilege means to me, that they are always fundamentally viewed as _people_ in a way that women aren't. that's been one of the weirdest experiences of my transition, at age 43 suddenly all these guys see me as a fetish object and it's just like _why_? that's the aspect of dealing with misogyny i didn't really get pre-transition, the aspect of "dude what even is _wrong_ with you, can you just like not be weird and creepy?" i was talking about it with a friend yesterday, like i never really got along with guys in a social setting but you come out to guys and even if they're not transphobes they get really awkward, like you can see the gears in their brain churning going like "wait, am i supposed to want to fuck her now?" todd, it doesn't _matter_, i'm not going to have sex with you, there's nothing to think about here.

oh hai I just wanted to say that I really appreciated everyone's posts which gave me a lot to think about and a lot I agreed with! and I was full of enthusiasm for replying to various points once I worked out where to start

and then my mood/energy crashed again and I didn't post anything, but I didn't want anyone to think I'd been scared off/upset by/just plain ignoring their very good posts. I'd really just have been posting 3 pages of quotes interspersed with "yes, this" anyway tbh, so I'll just put "yes, all of this!" here and hope it will suffice (for now, or maybe in general)

fucking gender norms imo indeed

todd, it doesn't _matter_, i'm not going to have sex with you

irl lol ... and otm re the male privilege. ... women (at least in my vague recollection of Lacanian theory related to film) are always the imaginary (the fantasy, the object of projection) ... as opposed to men, who "get to be" the symbolic and can construct identity through language and narrative (in that they control such things)

Every time I come back here it’s a mistake. Male discomfort will always be prioritised over female pain here.

A reflection of the world we live in :(
Sucks. I’m finally at the point where I don’t think the benefit of casual jib jab outweighs the vom factor.

I don't know if it's getting worse, I'm noticing it more, or if I'm getting more and more outraged at essentially the same thing as I get older. (In general, not just here)

My ability to call out bullshit has improved — my detection has always been strong but when it came to calling it out I would often find myself too vulnerable/upset to say anything. I don’t care why (probably age) but idgaf anymore.

Obviously I don't have much of a personal perspective on whether or not it's getting worse. It's one of the things that keeps me coming back here, honestly, knowing that I used to be like that myself. So guys behaving like that, I don't think it's a gender thing at all, I just think it's pure uncut ignorance. It fascinated me enough, what went down Sunday, that I wrote a 3,000 word essay about it Monday morning.

I don't know. I want to believe it is better. I want to believe that the men who do take us seriously - and a lot of men don't - take us more seriously.

Probably the first time I understood this aspect of being a woman... I don't remember when exactly it was, but it was before my egg cracked, before I even came out to myself. I made some entirely innocuous, milquetoast statement looking at things from... just looking at things from a woman's perspective, seeing things how a woman might see it, over on Reddit. Jesus I got downvoted so fucking hard on that one. Like we're talking Kelvin levels of karma on that post. That was about the time I quit posting to Reddit.

What surprised me most about the response on Sunday was that it was only about one or two people, only one guy really, and someone actually angrily pointed out to him how egregiously, ludicrously awful what he'd said was. Yeah, it was "That's my sister you're talking about, asshole", the thing where you have to basically _personally attack a guy's sister_ for him to take offense, but I mean, a lot of guys, they won't even stand up for their own sister that way.

I like that ILX is a small board, these days. I think on a larger board I would've been dogpiled for saying the stuff I said. My feeling is less "I can't believe people can be that awful" and more "I can't believe I got away with saying the shit I said". Maybe I'm too pessimistic about men, but I spent 40 years listening to what they said about us behind our backs, when they thought we weren't listening. Compared with what I heard there, the stuff on this board is... encouraging.

That's why I'm here, mostly. I don't really spend a lot of time around cis men. It's sort of... a controlled, safe environment, for me. No transphobia, not enough people left for a dogpile. It's as close as I get to feeling safe on the public Internet.

For me, June really brought it home just how much they fucking _hate_ women. I mean, I knew they hated _me_, but it's not just me, it's not just women _like_ me, it's _all of us_. That's what I took from June. Even though June wasn't, by and large, anything to do with me, it still changed me.

oh shit you were talking about a _different thread_ i see now

My ability to call out bullshit has improved — my detection has always been strong but when it came to calling it out I would often find myself too vulnerable/upset to say anything. I don’t care why (probably age) but idgaf anymore.

fwiw i really appreciate all of you on here who are still calling it out. my default response these days is eye roll, "close tab".

Apparently I missed something? Ah well, probably for the best.

I have lost a lot of tolerance for bloviating, which makes some posters just too much for me.

woke feminist dudes of ilx posting everything EXCEPT any interest in where the sixish women of ilx are in all of this

what was that even about?

This was when Roe v Wade was repealed.

figures

I think stuff like that is related to the way that marginalized groups have used social media to self-segregate ... as in, this thread, being an example ... and I feel like there is also a connection to factionalization of the Left, in that, when you have the benefit of a self-segregated group away from the dominant identity, going back to the larger group of "comrades" and having to often fight to be heard / seen / taken seriously is less appealing.

* should probably just be "the internet" and not just "social media" ... you can probably trace it back to usenet era

I am a fan of many ilxbros but man, as a collective their feminism feels quite performative.

also sarahell otm

I am a fan of many ilxbros but man, as a collective their feminism feels quite performative.

― mom tossed in kimchee (quincie), Wednesday, November 9, 2022 11:12 AM (thirty-five minutes ago)

yeah! ... I think I tend to just "ignore and avoid" because the conversations/arguments are mainly for each other / with each other ... with non-bros as potential audience, as opposed to, uh, equal participants? idk. I guess I admire their confidence in a way.

I forget where we (and/or ILX in general) were discussing this, but it's like there's a default identity in threads.

There is a "subject position" (sorry for academic) that it is assumed the majority holds in a thread, and it will vary from thread to thread (e.g. regional threads will assume that the poster/reader lives in that area or is "from" there, though some assume that way more intensively than others). If you don't have that "default identity," it is common for people just not to post. Those that do, again depending on the thread, will either be welcomed and/or deferred to, or shot down/dismissed. But, it's a risk on the part of the poster, right? Is it worth taking?

Sorry Roz.

not at all, i knew it was going to get some folks riled up and that I prob wasn’t going to able to respond adequately as I’m on a whole different time zone to the rest of ilx

thank you though, I really appreciated your posts

It’s not even that, it’s like, I don’t think I even knew your background and I immediately got where you were coming from because I read your fucking post. But, you know. I was just really annoyed reading all that. So much bloviating.

lol yeah this is why I generally don’t post on film threads

I just couldn’t ignore it today because people were saying careless things about a film with a very careless ending

bracing myself for the response to me saying its not chill for a band to write only violently misogynistic rape anthems on the metal thread, but i know it, having been posted by me, is more likely to just be ignored :)

i do remember the last time i brought this up being condescended to by jd for not understanding trauma or whatever

Hey!

I am not in that thread but yeah. I totally feel you. It is bad, right? It’s not just me?

it is bad

Ps on an entirely different note, I need to know, do you still like classic Tim Lincecum?

about 10 years ago i brought up the fact that folks didn't respond to the things i said in there, that then someone else would say the same things and get a response, and someone said it (my sentiment) "felt like high school"

YES i still live for The Franchise lol

Yeah. I know most of the replies are probably not gendered per se but fuck me if the tendency to bloviate and talk over people isn’t so very male.

It didn’t even happen to me and I’m still angry a load of American men queued up to tell Roz the racism in Tár was explainable through increasingly convoluted explanations.