Keira Bell's win

HelloMomo · 2021-04-25T19:18:24+00:00

I recommend signing up for a welding class at your local community college. Doing good old-fashioned blue collar work with my hands is helping me.

HelloMomo · 2021-11-14T03:14:03+00:00

People have TRIED to state their genital requirements. MANY TIMES. That's what superstraight was.

And YOUR PEOPLE had a meltdown about it.

HelloMomo · 2021-01-04T01:48:05+00:00

Aww, I never met any terfs on Her! What was I doing wrong?

HelloMomo · 2020-12-22T03:02:08+00:00

And the thing is, right before the ban, I remember seeing a post that was a rallying cry to not say anything on there that could bring the sub under fire; to kill them with kindness. And it seemed to me that everyone was really toeing that line.

But that's not enough. It will never be enough for them. We can never have anything for ourselves, no matter how nice and polite we are about it. So I think this banning is probably going to peak some of the more mild-mannered, moderate lesbians from there.

It sucks today, but in the long run the TRAs are just watering resentment. They'll reap it in the end.

HelloMomo · 2021-11-14T07:22:42+00:00

I really have no stake in the question of what links should be listed here. But, on the topic of forced teaming more broadly:

While I do believe in LGB solidarity, I will side-eye anyone who demands it. It feels very #NoLGBWithoutTheT, that whole abusive marriage, "you can't leave, you owe me, you're obligated to me!" thing.

And like with the #NoLGBWithoutTheT thing, it has this baked-in denial about the fact that these are different demographics, which might sometimes have different priorities and be at cross-purposes with each other. And if cross-purposes do arise, the subtext is "You're under an obligation to subordinate your needs in favor of serving mine."

I'm in favor of freely chosen solidarity. Not demanded solidarity.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-13T20:58:30+00:00

I appreciate how transmedicalists mostly act like sensible, respectable people. I appreciate the ways in which they're grounded to reality, because that's really something you can't take for granted these days. And if they want to live their lives transitioned and it makes them happy, and they're not for medically experimenting on children or sacrificing women's rights or gay rights, then I'm ok with that. I hope they live their best lives and are happy. It's still sexist, but like... they're not the only sexists in the world, and as long as they're relatively nonintrusive about it, I can live with it.

But like... they take it so seriously! If anything, I think they believe in their genders more than the others. Like many think that at some point, neuroscience is going to catch up and prove they have cross-sex brains or something. (Which like... even if your brain was demonstrably more along the lines of what's male-typical, that wouldn't make it a "male brain" any more than a tall woman has a "male height.")

HelloMomo · 2020-09-22T01:38:15+00:00

(For context, I thought I was aro ace for a decade. I wrote a thing about that here if you're curious.)

First off, I don't believe in the split attraction model. The split attraction model isn't something that a researcher came up with to describe their findings, such as the Kinsey Scale. It's not a concept a philosopher put forth in an essay, complete with an explanation and defense. This framework is literally just something someone on the internet came up with, and then other people were like, "Sure, ok," and started using. The only evidence than posits this is a useful or accurate way to describe people's patterns of attraction is anecdotal accounts of "this works for me," and for each of those, there's more personal accounts saying the opposite.

I've yet to see a satisfying definition of romantic attraction in which it's not contingent on sexual attraction, but is also distinct from platonic fondness. I think romantic attraction is fondness (like friend fondness) but flavored by the hormones that attraction triggers. Sure, there are some people who aren't really interested in sex, but I see that as a variant rather than a distinct sexuality.

I do think that real asexual people (aromantic asexuals) do exist, albeit very rarely. It's the logical 4th sexuality: there are 2 sexes, each of which you can be into or not. And those real asexuals have a fair amount in common with gay people—lacking cross-sex attraction and being unable to be part of a straight relationship is a big deal, and to brush that off as "nothing" is very flippant.

But at present, I don't think it's logistically possible to include them without opening a huge can of worms and causing way more harm than its worth.

HelloMomo · 2021-11-09T05:26:11+00:00

The comments point out actuate information about masculine females have been considered lesbians all through the 1900s, yet no one connects the dots that the key feature that connects them is that they're all female, and that no one proposed feminine males might count until like the 2000s

HelloMomo · 2021-03-07T00:29:34+00:00

Wow, ok this meme seems to have blown up really fast. I looked briefly under the #SuperStraight, and it's basically all straight allies being super supportive and funny. It's hilarious and I love it.

My favorite might have to be, though:

i am #supermario. we are people who are attracted to Super Mario, no other males, just mario

HelloMomo · 2020-12-27T16:57:05+00:00

My disinterest in boys was noticeable pretty early. In elementary school, a friend will tell you who she has a crush on and then ask, "Who do you have a crush on?" If you say "No one," she'll believe you the first time. Even the second time. But by the third or fourth time, it becomes suspect. She'll believe you don't happen to have a crush right now, but not that you don't have crushes ever. And so then your friend will think you're lying to her. The lack of reciprocity becomes a slight. "I told you who I like; why won't you return the favor? Don't you trust me?"

So I knew by the time I was 9 that crushes on boys weren't a "thing" with me. I conceived of myself as asexual long before I actually heard the word. I never tried dating boys because dating is hard, and I'm shy and lazy, and I can't possibly be bothered unless I really want it.

The closest I got to dating a guy was a male friend in college who had a crush on me, and I was like, "Well, if I'm ever going to try dating, this is an ideal chance. Going out and trying to date someone would be wrong and leading them on, since I'm pretty sure I'm asexual. But if the opportunity fell in my lap, maybe I should take it?" So I half-considered that for a bit. He was a good friend. I recognized something of myself in him, and I humored the possibility that maybe that could be attraction. Our neighbors in the dorm were shipping us, and even I sort of shipped us, in a hypothetical, "in another universe" kind of way. Like we would've made sense together. But then one time we were hanging out — and I guess he thought we were having a moment? — and he asked if he could kiss me, and I was just like, "...no." If you'd asked me half an hour before, I'd have said I should do it, just for the life experience. But when it actually came down to it... just no.

In contrast, my interest in girls slipped under the radar for a long time. When you're in elementary school, obsessive all-consuming relationships between best friends are normal, so I didn't think much of it. Then in middle school, I was too depressed to have crushes for a while. The classic hallmark of depression is disinterest in things that would otherwise interest you. Then in high school I was lonely a lot, and so when I was disproportionally into a friend, I was like, "It's because you've been so lonely and now someone's being nice to you." Also: "Girls are really pretty. It's not my opinion; it's just objectively true. All beautiful things invoke aching longing in my chest — so does the starry night sky, and Italian villas, and Gypsy Vanner horses, and I'm not into any of those. That aching is just the nature of beautiful things, it doesn't mean anything." When I was a toddler, there was a lesbian couple who lived next door to me, and so I've always known lesbians exist and are fine. So there was also an element of, "You're not actually gay, you just want to be gay and so you're trying to talk yourself into it. You don't like girls enough to actually do anything with it. If you went and got a girlfriend, you wouldn't be into her enough to make it work, and you'd end up hurting her." Throw it some asexual community discourse where attraction is defined very narrowly, and that compounds it.

So I was 19 before I realized that I was actually gay for girls. And even then, at first I said something like, "You always hear people say, 'I am gay. I am so so gay.' But I'm not 'so so gay.' I am only a little bit gay." And I think that was an honest expression of where I was at at that point. I used the word "gay" then rather than "lesbian" because I conceived of lesbianism as serious somehow, and having a higher threshold of homosexuality than "gay". But I think my gayness has leveled up since then.

I'm 21 now, and still working on the "getting a girlfriend." Sometimes with family or friends who I know aren't going to scrutinize me for it, I phrase it as, "The current lead theory in the field is that I'm a lesbian, although more research is needed."

HelloMomo · 2021-07-16T00:32:05+00:00

I've seen bisexuals get told they "have no excuse," and bisexuals (especially bi women) treated like some communal sexual resource. It's fucked up.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-29T00:06:00+00:00

This phrase is something of a tumblr idiom, so I feel a bit odd saying it here, but... you're right and you should say it.

HelloMomo · 2022-03-26T05:47:48+00:00

I remeber writing a text at 15 I think about how menstruation made me feel horrible, as if my body was betraying me

Yeah; that's how most teenage girls feel.

HelloMomo · 2021-10-29T05:05:57+00:00

So this is just the same thing they were proposing before, roping in "gender identy" as part of conversion therapy.

But using that as a weapon against Mermaids? That's clever! That's a hot take!

HelloMomo · 2021-09-17T20:29:13+00:00

My understanding is that Kiera Bell's case was in the High Court, this was in the Court of Appeal, and Kiera is now going to take it to the Supreme Court, which is the highest court in the UK, and that will be the final trial. Is this correct? Could a Brit explain the UK process a bit more?

HelloMomo · 2020-08-19T13:43:02+00:00

Yes, there used to be less focus on orientation and more focus on behavior. But then modern bisexuals reverse-engineer it to add orientation back in and make it not behavior-based.

If bi women want to call themselves that in the context of dating women I don't really care. It's bi women dating men and calling themselves femme or whatever that bothers me.

HelloMomo · 2022-03-29T02:30:24+00:00

...you have heard of blind people, right?

HelloMomo · 2022-02-28T21:08:19+00:00

The whole "existence" thing is so weird. It's a word they reach for so often. Everything is a threat to their very existence!

Like... even with their logic, how is this "making your existence about HIM"? He never so much as asked her not to transition. He literally just had his own feelings about it.

HelloMomo · 2021-11-29T21:24:28+00:00

Another odd dimension to this whole thing is that — if you're going to pretend porn is fully consensual, and that you're not just paying people into consenting to things they don't actually want — then surely the ability to turn down certain gigs is key to that?

HelloMomo · 2020-09-12T03:04:59+00:00

I've been wondering for a while if the straights might yet save us. Straight men are not down with dick either, and they are not going to accept this bullshit of being told they have to. At some point, surely the TRAs are going to start coming for the straights, and when they do, I think that might be when society's goodwill for them runs out.

HelloMomo · 2022-04-03T17:01:01+00:00

This. What individual character of trans-identified people is not the issue. It's about whether their ideology is coherent and defensible, and whether it infringes on the rights of other people.

This he/him chick could be the nicest person in the world, and still be wrong. But "wrong" as in "factually incorrect," not "immoral."

HelloMomo · 2021-03-07T00:44:22+00:00

Wait, no, my favorite might be this one, just because it's SUCH an on-point satire: https://mobile.twitter.com/TPortengen/status/1368358213314359297

And I'm stunned someone set this up so fast. https://www.reddit.com/r/supersalliance/

And there is MERCH now and I am dying of laughter here https://my-store-11497263.creator-spring.com/

HelloMomo · 2022-04-01T04:33:08+00:00

[TRAs] don't want to date eachother.

I'm not sure that's a problem. The thing about the dating apps is that, if someone successfully finds a relationship via your app, they're likely to delete your app. So that means they're are incentived to make users like using their app, but they're not really incentived to make their app effective at creating pairings.

HelloMomo · 2022-02-20T04:06:44+00:00

I think this actually kind of illustrates the limits of the "only consent matters" model. Because clearly animals do mate (with each other) and do have ways of signaling that they're interested and whatnot.

It's like statutory rape. It seems odd to say that someone "can't consent" when they did consent. Like, doesn't that very clearly demonstrate that consent is not actually thought to be the only relevant factor at play?

I think that the problem is, within the "only consent matters" model, the word "consent" has been inflated to mean more than just "agreed to it". I think there's 2 pillars to what we consider "proper consent". The first one is straight-up agreeing to it. The second one is a little hard to put into words, but I think I would best term it as something like "being on the same page." A sort of understanding of where the other person is coming from, and what they want out of this. And when the parties are so different, that's impossible.

Teenagers can consent to sex with other teenagers, and dogs can consent to sex with other dogs, but neither can consent to sex with a grown-ass man. So within that framework, the issue is not that they can't consent _period_—it's not that they fundamentally lack that ability. The issue is that the scenario with the grown-ass man is uneven a very fundamental way, and that some level of parity between the parties is also considered to be important.

So I think it would both clearer and more honest if we just said, "Hey, some level of parity between the parties is also important," rather than sticking to the narrative of "consent is the one and only thing."

HelloMomo · 2022-02-06T03:40:07+00:00

Broadly speaking, the idea that homosexuality and other traits might be linked is not baseless. For example, homosexuality and gender non-conformity seem to be linked.

But homosexuals of one sex, and heterosexuals of the other sex, are not the same demographic. They're not linked.

HelloMomo · 2022-01-28T21:20:33+00:00

Straight guys already seem to have this underlying fear that pegging is gay. If people keeping telling them it is, they'll probably stop doing it.

HelloMomo · 2021-09-14T15:37:17+00:00

I don't much like or agree with her, but I am basically in favor of heterodoxy. We still don't really have much in terms of conclusive scientific evidence of how sexual orientation forms. If she has a controversial take on that, ok then.

Mostly, I'm just quite against the forming of a new orthodoxy which everyone must adhere to or be deplatformed.

It seems like she's what we'd call a febfem, who's found a lot of happiness in that choice. And I dunno, creating new words and them trying to enforce those words on people from older generations who didn't use those words/concepts is just too much of a TRA-style move for me to really feel comfortable with it.

HelloMomo · 2022-05-26T04:07:03+00:00

I would be curious to run a poll here with the question: "Did you at one point believe (even just vaguely or tacitly) in this shit?"

I remember being like 13 and on tumblr, and when I first heard of NB I thought it was kinda ridiculous. On some level I knew it was bullshit from the beginning, even as dumb kid. And yet despite that, I still kinda went along with it, tacitly believed it, for almost a decade more before consciously recognizing at 21 or so, "Absolutely not, this is bunk."

And I don't think my story is unusual. A lot of people believed it, at least a little. That's why we talk about "peaking".

I often have moments when I think how could anyone believe something so obviously stupid and baseless. And if a person does believe this, then how can I possibly trust or respect them in any other field? And in moments like that, I think it's good to remember that I too got caught up in this for a time.

HelloMomo · 2022-01-14T05:43:49+00:00

For all that they rage against people categorically rejecting them for being trans, this is the alternative, isn't it? People who can sustain the idea that they might be attracted to them, they keep that open mind — until they're naked in the bedroom, and then they can't sustain that maybe anymore and change their minds.

If it were me, I'd rather be rejected up front. I think that to be lead on and then rejected at the 11th hour would hurt significantly more.

HelloMomo · 2021-12-12T04:20:25+00:00

I'm not sure how to turn this into something actionable, but here's an anecdote:

In my final year of middle school, the most dysphoric year of my life, I was part of building sets for the school play. It was a small school and volunteering parents did everything. Set building was overseen by a classmate's butchy-but-straight mom. (She's great; she's friends with my mom to this day, and just last year I borrowed her welding helmet for my welding class at the local community college.) Anyways, in middle school she let me use the power tools even more because I was a girl. It seemed like middle school boys who really want to use power tools aren't exactly a demographic who's heavily trusted to use power tools. But a quiet girl who really wants to use power tools? Sure, she seems trustworthy. She's the one you can allow to cut stuff without constantly watching closely.

HelloMomo · 2021-11-21T17:58:14+00:00

...did you guys all go to elementary schools where no one had crushes or something?

Elementary school dating: 2 people hang out together, with no one else, at recess. Gifts are exchanged. After about a week, they dramatically break up. During this time, the rest of our classes watches them with bated breath like it's a soap opera or something.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-24T03:52:16+00:00

I saw something really interesting on r/BiologicalLesbians right before it went down. There was this woman from a south asian country talking about how in her country — and, from what she'd heard, and other conservatives countries as well — nearly all lesbians are gold stars, because premarital sex is discouraged. Teenagers aren't supposed to date, they're supposed to focus on their studies. And so most lesbians have the time to figure out they're lesbians first.

Coming from a very sexualized western country, I have no personal experience of this, but I thought it was a super interesting topic, and would like to hear more about it.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-15T01:28:14+00:00

I've written an essay on this here https://moessays.wordpress.com/2020/11/03/bullshit-words-queer/

In short, I don't believe that queer's origins as a slur is the true reason we dislike the word. I think the real reason we dislike the word is its modern usage.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-10T22:17:44+00:00

Real vaginas aren't open wounds that harbor infectious bacteria.

...holy shit. Neovaginas are basically everything that men have ever feared about actual vaginas, aren't they?

HelloMomo · 2022-05-18T04:08:33+00:00

I don't think making up your own ceiling name is really how it works (the other two are terms created by TRAs) because the word "ceiling" itself is part of a "break though the ceiling" idiom.

That being said, bisexuals being treated like a communal sexual resource is certainly a problem.

HelloMomo · 2022-02-12T20:40:03+00:00

I'm most disturbed by the commenter suggesting various violent emojis

HelloMomo · 2021-10-19T20:04:28+00:00

I worked at a girl's summer camp for a month this year. One day we had a carnival, and there was a face painting booth, and pretty soon there were kids running with with all sorts of tumblr flags on their cheeks. The oldest were like 14. The youngest were 7 or 8. Most the tomboys had NB flags. Lotta pan flags. Some bi and gay flags, and the pink lesbian one. One was running around with a flag cape.

It was uncomfortable, but at the same time, I think it's definitely easy to overreact. Kids playing at being adults is as old as time, and it's ok. When I was in elementary school, kids had crushes, "date" (play tetherball exclusively with each other, bring each other gifts, and then dramatically break up a week later).

We also had an incident with 2 of the oldest girls, who were suspected were maybe a couple, and apparently that wasn't allowed at camp, and I also felt uncomfortable with that. As long as there wasn't PDA, sneaking out at night, or anything (and there was no indication of any of that) then I didn't see anything wrong with it, and "my first love was at summer camp when I was a teenager" feels like a very cute, classic, in many ways old-school story.

I guess to me, it came down to the difference between a kid privately thinking of themselves as bi, or telling some friends, and literally writing it across their face, advertising it for everyone to see. When I was a kid, at least, who you had a crush on was highly confidential info, only to be shared with your closest friends. It's not something you paint across your face for everyone to see. So clearly this wasn't about who they have crushes on: it's about social identity, it's a game, it's a way to be edgy or whatever.

I often said of those kids, "I just want to wash the internet right out of them."

HelloMomo · 2021-03-03T20:19:59+00:00

Yes, the eating disorders rates are quite high among the trans population. This isn't a secret: lots of trans people will tell you this too.

When I was 14 and had my period of dysphoria, the anorexia was the biggest part of it. I experienced them as basically one and the same. I've always been pretty slender, so the fat I was trying to stave away was my breasts and hips. I knew that this amount of fat was the normal, healthy kind that you're supposed to have. I just didn't care—I didn't like it, and I didn't want it, and so I was going to do what I could to get rid of it, "normal" be damned.

But in some ways, my dysphoria sort of helped me stop the disordered eating too? I've never heard anyone else with a story like this, and I'm curious if I'm the only one this has ever happened to. But at the time, I didn't know that disordered eating was super common among trans people. The only model I had for disordered eating was "stupid straight girls who want to look like barbies because they've internalized dumb societal shit." (In hindsight I was a pretty mean and judgey 14-year-old.) And because I conceptualized disordered eating as so feminine, and that was at odds with my self-image, I was like, "Well why are you acting like a dumb straight girl?" And that really held me back from going too far with it, in some ways.

My view of disordered eating as feminine also played a role in which techniques I used. I treated my anorexia as an test of endurance, in contrast to the intricate, detail-focused anorexia I've heard other people describe. For example, I never counted calories, and I didn’t pay overmuch attention to which foods I ate — I would just fast. I never ate lunch, and other meals might be small. Talking about calories seemed like a stupid straight girl thing, while enduring hunger seemed tough and strong. I could endure a famine and survive it. Calories felt capitalistic and artificial, while good old-fashioned hunger seemed naturalistic.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-04T00:31:01+00:00

Get vaccinated against the plague, and get a girlfriend.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-01T20:55:03+00:00

They better not trans Vanya on umbrella academy over this shit.

It's so selfish, but that was my first thought too. I love Vanya; protect her!

HelloMomo · 2020-11-27T16:29:39+00:00

I thought I was asexual for a decade, and I've written an essay about that here (https://moessays.wordpress.com/2020/10/31/that-time-i-was-aro-ace/) dissecting it more if you're curious, but in short:

On the one hand, if asexual means a person experiences no attraction to anyone, that makes sense for it to be a sexuality.

That is what it should logically mean. If you want to argue it's a real sexuality, then logically it needs to follow the same rules as all other sexualities. And that would make sense! There are 2 sexes, either of which a person can be into, or not. We know from bisexuality that your attraction to one sex isn't somehow inversely linked to your attraction to the other.

That was the kind I believed myself to me. I knew from a young age I wasn't interested in boys, but given the pseudo-romantic nature of close female friendships, it took me a long time to realize my attraction to girls wasn't always platonic.

However, the way most people seem to use it is as a synonym for having no sex drive i.e. no desire or interest in sex.

That's how it's used in practice. Which sucks, because it really screws over the people in the former group.

HelloMomo · 2022-01-27T19:11:29+00:00

I thought straight guys were just barely starting to stop thinking of pegging as gay. And now that's being rolled back, by the very women who would've benefitted from it.

HelloMomo · 2021-01-09T02:20:31+00:00

This so much!

Tumblr is a cesspool of teens trying to figure themselves out. Which in and of itself isn't necessarily bad! Teens trying to figure out their identity (in the normal self-concept sense of the word) and sexuality is a normal developmental milestone.

But when you give them all this weird ideological stuff to work with, and insist that it's serious business and should be respected, you get weird shit.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-21T07:25:06+00:00

And then there are people who call themselves bi because they would theoretically date anyone they were attracted to, regardless of sex. Not that they actually experience same-sex attraction.

HelloMomo · 2020-11-23T04:55:04+00:00

You have some who try to shame men, but men tend to laugh at them, or just ignore them.

I've long hoped that straight men might someday save us all. Straight men are the other demographic who is exclusively into females, but are vastly more numerous than lesbians, and thus harder to steamroll.

HelloMomo · 2020-09-12T03:10:43+00:00

It's bullshit as a principle, but I do feel some sympathy for the young'uns who call themselves nonbinary. Adults should know better, but teenagers get swept up in stuff so easily. I dabbled with the idea of nonbinary briefly when I was like 14. (For context, I'm 21 now, and I'm sure the situation is way worse for the kids who are 14 today.) If you're told that gender is something people feel, and you're a normal-ass person who doesn't feel gender, then you're nonbinary under that conceptualization.

HelloMomo · 2022-04-01T04:36:50+00:00

My first ever date was with a girl from Her. That was only a few years ago. A year before covid hit, I think?

Her opening line (and to this day, the best pickup line I've ever heard) was something along the lines of "for a second I thought I'd matched with Luna Lovegood" (I have long blond hair, and my profile pick was a good hair photo). This was back before motioning Harry Potter was a hot button issue.

Things sure change fast.

HelloMomo · 2021-11-21T05:19:14+00:00

There are a couple theories that hold that humans evolved to be long-distance runners, who chase prey until it collapses of heat exhaustion. By being hairless and sweaty, humans could run for longer than other species before the heat exhaustion got to us.

Even though this is a thing the human body evolved to be able to do, very few humans actually do it.

HelloMomo · 2021-10-04T19:07:48+00:00

Like gender is just. not. real. Like what the fuck, why are we all walking around here pretending that it is???

I dunno buddy, you're the one pretending it is, so...?

HelloMomo · 2021-09-17T00:57:42+00:00

I actually find a lot of fanfic to be vaguely... lesbian-adjacent, I guess? What I mean by that is:

it's written by women, for women
het fanfic is (in my experience, maybe this isn't universal across all fandoms) more often told from the male character's POV—aka the POV of desiring a woman, not the POV of desiring a man.

HelloMomo · 2021-01-01T01:55:04+00:00

I think asexuality is a real thing, but as far as the identity goes, it's a very heterogeneous group. I'm not certain what portion of that identity group actually lacks all erotic interests.

I thought I was full-on ace for a full decade (I was basically to asexuality as transmeds are to tucutes) and during that time the ace community drove me crazy.

HelloMomo · 2020-12-29T00:11:51+00:00

I did for a couple years around puberty. If you want to know more, I've written a whole blog post about it https://moessays.wordpress.com/2020/10/31/that-time-i-was-dysphoric/ But the short version is that my body up and changed on me and that felt like a betrayal, and it took several years to settle back into my body after that. But I did settle back into my body; I don't have dysphoria anymore, and haven't for years.

Advice:

Don't dwell on it. Get on with the business of living, don't obsess over it. I know quarantine makes this harder. But if you're seriously dysphoric at present, I'm not sure that being on this forum is the best thing for you at the moment? Because it makes you think about this stuff. You don't have to spend your internet time on something like this. If you fall down the youtube wood-turning video rabbit hole, or something else like that, it might help you not have this so present in your mind?
Manual labor. I think dysphoria might in some ways be just one piece of a much larger cultural problem of disassociation with our bodies. We spend too much time online were we're little avatar pictures. So many people work office jobs. I don't have much personal experience with this, but a lot of other people speak very highly of doing hard physical labor with your body, and say it really helped them combat dysphoria.
CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy. Dysphoria is often basically intrusive thoughts of a self-loathing variety, and CBT helps you identify them. It's not about suppressing those thoughts, but letting them pass by without giving them too much significance or treating them as literally true.

HelloMomo · 2020-11-27T20:19:36+00:00

It's not talked about as much, but I've actually heard several stories of lesbians who thought they were asexual before realizing they're homosexual. It's not too different from the "I thought I was bi at first" story, which you hear pretty commonly as well — just, y'know, taking the other route to get there.

And to this day, I think the lack of cross sex attraction is in many ways a bigger deal than our same sex attraction. In the currently political landscape, it's our right not to date males that's under fire. In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote:

What must be explained in the female homosexual is thus not the positive aspect of her choice but the negative side: she is not characterized by her preference for women but by the exclusiveness of this preference.

(although to be fair, that might've just been Simone de Beauvoir being bi, and that being her lens through which she viewed things)

Historically, gay men were attacked for being with men. There was no female equivalent of the sodomy laws; lesbian sex/relationships/anything often wasn't considered "real" in the first place. Across history up to today, I think lesbians lack of cross-sex behavior was more "disruptive" of society than our same-sex behavior.

HelloMomo · 2020-11-26T03:59:42+00:00

Wow. This is... spirited XD

HelloMomo · 2020-09-13T20:37:05+00:00

I realised that's why I always felt just a little different/weird/off.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying be careful of that line of reasoning. When I was younger I thought that most of my feelings of being weird, or other, or broken, were because I wasn't straight. But as I've gotten older, and heard straight people talk about their experiences of teenage angst, the more I've come to suspect that feeling "other" might actually be the universal human experience.

HelloMomo · 2022-01-15T05:08:47+00:00

Gay, Lesbian, and Bi are descriptors, not labels

god, yes. "What if we stopped using ~~labels~~(adjectives)?" Like, what if we just stopped using language to describe the world and talk about our experiences of it?

HelloMomo · 2021-11-01T04:12:15+00:00

It's long, and I suspect many of you won't listen to the whole thing, so here's my summary of it. It's a long, often circling and repetitive conversation, that—predictably—doesn't really go anywhere.

He asks her where she got her training.

[7:25] I haven't read actual medical [papers].

[7:40] No, I mean, I've read little, abstract parts of different pieces; but I've got to classes; I've done trainings.

They talk all lot about what the job of a therapist is, in this situation. The therapist says her job is to help patients figure out what to do, not tell them what to do. He insists that in situations like these, where there are delusions and self-harm on the line, it is the therapist's job to tell people what to do.

[10:40] [People] who should have been stopped, and should have been told what to do, and should have been told what's real, because some people who are mentally ill need to know what's real.

She questions how he would have received that, at the time, if that had happened. He admits he probably wouldn't have taken it well, but maintains it would've been the right thing to do, and is still the protocol in other analogous situations.

[12:00] Therapist: If I came to you and I said: "I think you should stop, and I don't think you should do this," you would be having the same exact reaction.

Detransitioner: Yeah but at least I'd be fertile! And at least I wouldn't have boobs, and I wouldn't have worsening health conditions. That's the difference. That's the difference. That's the point. That's why you call the police on the people who say that they're going to hurt themselves, because they might hate you afterward, but at least you saved them. But that's not what's happening here. What's happening is you're hurting people.

This is a point that they circle back to again.

[18:35] Detransitioner: And you're just gonna let us decide for ourselves! But we're mentally ill! So how are you doing that? How are you doing that in good conscience? Letting us decide for ourselves?

Therapist: How would you feel if I was like: "Well, I think you have a lot going on, and I think I should call and have you committed, because you can't figure out stuff", you wouldn't appreciate that.

Detransitioner: Neither would someone who's going to kill themselves. They wouldn't appreciate that you did that.

She's either the 3rd or 4th gender therapist he's seen, and she often uses this as a shield, saying, "I wasn't the one overseeing the core of your transition, so I can't speak to whatever happened then." He firmly believes that all gender therapists are the same, and that he would've had largely the same experience with any gender therapist he went to.

Another repeating idea is that he alternates between blaming her personally—because she is the instrument of all of this—and a viewpoint which still blames her, but acknowledges that she could not have done otherwise—because this is the framework, this is the cultural zeitgeist, this is the training she received. and he often talks about "you", and then zooms back to clarify he means gender therapists collectively, not just her personally.

[27:46] you types of people, you gender therapists

To him, she — at the least — is the sum total of all 4 gender therapists he's been to, and — at the most — the sum total of all gender therapists everywhere. Some moments I almost feel bad for her, because how on earth can one human being ever be expected to shoulder all the unenumerable harm caused by gender therapist collectively? It's like Atlas holding up the sky. But in the next line, she'll duck away, shirk any responsibly whatsoever, and it's so cowardly, so spineless, that any sympathy I had for her vanishes.

She says a lot of, "I'm sorry you feel that way," and there are huge, gaping pauses after he speaks, while he waits for her to reply. Like 10 seconds long, which sounds short but feels like forever in context.

[29:50] I am not sure where you would like this conversation to go.

Which pretty much sums it up. She doesn't really have anything to say for herself, and he knows that—he knew it long before they had this conversation. He had this conversation at all because he wanted to call her out for what she'd done. Because he was curious what she would say. Because he hoped she might take something away from it, and not to this again to someone else. But not because he thought it would actually amount to anything.

HelloMomo · 2021-05-14T03:52:10+00:00

In middle school gym, I remember thinking about the topic of lesbians in the changing room, and being vaguely uncomfortable with the idea. I never said anything about it, because I had no better plan of how to reorganize things (where were the lesbians supposed to go, then?). But I do get that idea.

(Plot twist, turns out lesbians in the changing rooms were me + 2 of my closest friends at the time.)

But I was a middle schooler then. I thought that the idea of sex-segregated changing rooms was to protect people from lustful eyes, because that's sort of the friendly, down-peddled version of the story. I didn't know that the real reason for sex-segregated rooms is to protect women from literal assault, which is documented to happen much more in co-ed changing rooms. And I didn't know that because I was a kid. No one had ever told me, because they didn't want to scare me.

HelloMomo · 2020-11-27T16:27:23+00:00

The "is it a sexuality, or a lack of any sexuality?" has always seemed like a really petty semantic debate to me. Like it has to do with how you define "a sexuality" rather than the the nature of asexuality. And like what would this distinction even mean, and how is it useful?

If I had to take a ruling on it though, I guess asexuality is the lack of a sexuality, but it is a sexual orientation.

HelloMomo · 2020-09-27T01:51:36+00:00

I didn't start seeing this separation pushed so hard until the Q and A were welded onto the LGB(T)

I'm like 95% sure the split attraction model started on an asexual forum, and then spread.

HelloMomo · 2020-09-15T19:50:44+00:00

If I were bi, I suspect I'd be like you.

I don't get delighting in the male form, but I do understand a dozen other forms of delighting in nature's creation, from waterfalls to newborn kittens to huge old trees. So I think I at least understand the concept.

There's a difference between the real thing and a man-made facsimile thereof.

HelloMomo · 2021-12-25T00:49:26+00:00

I know a lesbian couple who found a gay man to be their sperm donor. I know they definitely wanted a sperm donor of the same rather-uncommon ethnicity as them. I'm not sure if him being gay was important to them? Or maybe both parties being gay just made him more on board with the idea?

Their kids were conceived in the late 90s, and one of the wives is a nurse, so I'm guessing she DIYed it at home with a turkey baster, rather than going to a fertility clinic or something.

HelloMomo · 2021-10-28T23:40:05+00:00

Well said

HelloMomo · 2021-07-16T00:28:03+00:00

She's straight, but in her interview with Megan Murphy, she talks about how of all the demographics in this, she's particularly concerned about the gay kids, and feels very protective of them. She's a mum, so I think that's why.

HelloMomo · 2020-09-11T01:30:16+00:00

Just throwing an idea out there, but what if it was a website, rather than an app? That would circumvent the issue of having to play nice with the Apple app store.

HelloMomo · 2020-09-10T22:19:23+00:00

What makes it difficult is that it needs to be at least a little bit private and underground in order for it to be safe to exist. But that means that if you don't know the right people (shy, just moved to the area, whatever) and don't have that "in", it's hard to find them. You can't publicize it to the right people without publicizing it to the wrong people too.

HelloMomo · 2022-03-31T01:36:04+00:00

Part of this is just counterculture...

Question: As a young person, I don't really know: To what extent were countercultures of the past political? I know they were at least a little bit, but how much so? How does it compare to now?

HelloMomo · 2021-10-25T16:34:32+00:00

Oh yeah, Ceri Black, I know of her from LG News. She and her wife Lauren are heads of their local LGB Alliance.

HelloMomo