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i got some trepidation about this but i wanna talk a little about my experience of queer trauma.
i was taught early and often to hate myself and to be ashamed of myself, to think of myself as a Bad Person. villains in movies like Dressed to Kill and The Silence of the Lambs were the closest thing i had to trans role models. i didn't admire these people. i didn't want to be like them. i found them repulsive and disgusting.
i hated myself, hated my body, found myself repulsive and disgusting. but that was different.
the truth about me, the truth about who i was, was literally unthinkable to me. it was worse than the worst thing i could imagine. so i thought about the worst shit i could imagine instead.
it's certainly an oversimplification, but there's these transfem memes. there one using the kid looking at the two castles and one's labelled "trans woman" and the other is labelled i don't know "fascist", and there's another with the evolution of some pokemon, i don't know all their names but one is vileplume i think, showing two evolution paths, where vileplume is "white supremacist" and the other one is "trans lesbian communist". and again i don't think it's _true_, i think that's just how a lot of us see ourselves.
most of us have a lot of internalized self-hatred. we work with it, we learn to live with it. but we also have to be careful around each other, because sometimes people will externalize it. growing up thinking of myself as disgusting for being trans created a sort of cognitive dissonance in me. i thought my transness made me repulsive, but all the other trans people i saw, i thought they were amazing and hot and awesome. there's two basic ways to resolve that. i learned to stop hating myself. some people decide instead to hate other trans people.
or, fuck it, why stop with just trans people? why not just hate _everyone_? why not conclude that human beings are disgusting, vile creatures, and it's better not to be born? i did that for a while too. i fucked around with antinatalism. there was some show called "true detective" or something where one of the characters was an antinatalist. a ligotti type. i had friends into ligotti. i was more into cioran, because he basically wrote funny tweets decades before twitter, which means that he wasn't stuck in the capitalist hellscape cesspool that is the twitter ecosystem. there are tons of sorts of antinatalism, i'm sure, millions of dead antinatalisms. mine was just one kind. i don't think i'm necessary _like_ someone because i used to be into antinatalism.
my particular antinatalism? it was fucking bullshit. it was me hating myself for being queer and not admitting it and turning it into some fucking _universal fucking truth_, like no it's not better that i wasn't born, i haven't felt that since the day my egg cracked. being trans sucks a lot of the time but i understand that my existence is of enormous positive value to the world, that the shit i was most ashamed and afraid of, the stuff i thought was literally unthinkable, wasn't nearly as bad as some of the "worst stuff i could imagine" that i was putting myself through.
so when i read certain stuff, the lens i read it through, i tend towards that lens. and that don't say anything about the author. when i apply that lens, i don't think it _can_ be anything but a barthes thing. i'd write these long theoretical pieces and i was trying to suppress some shit very very badly, it came out sideways. i look at what i now consider "egg art", some of the stuff i wrote, and some of the lies i told myself about that i wonder how i could ever have believed it.
so when i read certain stuff i look for the stuff that comes out sideways. if someone's writing a long essay making a theoretical defense of, like, pedophilia, ugggh it's always these most taboo subjects, pedophilia and nazis and you know yeah i read "answer me!" when i was younger, edgelordy bullshit written by some piece of shit asshole. i'm not like him. obviously. (you know, if i'd lived in portland in the 90s... maybe it wouldn't have taken me quite so long to figure out how completely and totally queer i am.)
but sometimes you run across this stuff and... ok, here's someone saying that they're attracted to people who are like them, here's them complaining about specifically _gay men_ who oppose pedophilia, calling them hypocrites, here's him "joking" about being a bottom. maybe what's unthinkable for them, maybe what's worse than the worst thing they can imagine, is being railed by a hot tall twink.
and i'm not personally into being railed by a hot tall twink, but you know what, i don't think being into that is somehow worse than the total extinction of the human race. personally.
anyway. that's me talking about me. i don't know shit about other people who do horrible things. i sometimes think of myself as a horrible person who would do horrible things, but that's obviously not true. that's just what i was taught about myself.
― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, 30 March 2023 15:32 (one year ago) link