It was an online space meant primarily for gay/bi/pan guys who sometimes suffered from gender dysphoria, and was largely an extremely friendly place, and I was sad to have to go, but there was an outlook/culture/agenda that I just couldn't swim against the current of or ignore anymore, one of being victimized and oppressed for any level of recognition/agreement/embrace not being met. A lot of "dysphoria makes you trans -> trans women are real women/biological sex is not something that can be scientifically nailed down -> anyone who identifies as a woman is just as much a woman in literally every sense of the word as a born biological female" type-stuff that essentially boils down to "anything that I want, even so much as a pronoun or term I made up myself, I deserve and have a right to the public recognition as having, and anyone who doesn't inherently view me the way I view myself is a prescriptive bigot who's trying to drag me down."
Besides being naive and entitled, it was just so negative and cynical about the world's observance of you. You all just wanted to be so pitiful and so special at the same time. For instance, that Cyberpunk 2077 in-game energy drink poster with the pre-op trans woman and the "mix it up" tagline, most of you took offense to, saying "this is not recognizing us as a people, this is just turning us into a fetish." God forbid an ad uses sex to sell a product. Who ever heard of such a thing.
Now to some, maybe that's not the best example of what I mean, but there was just no hope you would allow for yourselves. I couldn't talk to you about the strides in feminism/homosexuality acceptance Disney has made in recent years' films. Even guys who would join the community would say they were into trans women would be immediately rained down upon with "we're women, treat us like people, not objects" etc. It was fucking brutal and sad. And stupid, because most of you saying it were in fact not women in the way we've been using that word for millennia. Your wishing you had societal ownership of a word because of its associations (associations I thought we were all trying to break down and do away with by the way) does not magically give you the word. I'm sorry. But the secret is, the label you have does not make you who you are. I REALLY thought we had arrived at this and were attacking preconceived notions from this angle for a long time now. When did the entire LGBTTQQIAAPS+&4*~ community forget this?
Some things are not going to be EXACTLY what you wish they could be because of the hand you were dealt. But you do what you can and you be happy with yourself for what you've done for yourself and how you've molded yourself IN YOUR IMAGE. It's good to go for what you want, but at some point it's a lot healthier and more practical to just want a little less, because it is a gigantic world full of people and you are not actually at the center of it. You need a lot less in order to be happy than you think you do. Yes, fight for equality, fight for injustice, fight discrimination, but don't fight for fucking pronouns. Dorothy didn't have to be born a bluebird (and she never will have been born one no matter how many blue feathers she grows) to go over the rainbow, and you don't have to have been born or referred to as anything to be or do whatever it is you truly want. Would it have been exactly the same as if she was a bluebird and flew over it? No, and she's really just going to have to get over that, because there's no changing it. It's not oppression, it's not prescriptive or bigoted or narrow-minded, it's a fact of motherfucking life that applies to every single one of us.
Once upon a time we were trying to fight against gender roles, but now people are just trying to claim labels or even make up new ones on an individual-by-individual basis and expecting the world around them to be psychics lest they have a goddamn meltdown every time a cashier uses a word they don't like. And I think it's because deep down they want to be oppressed. Because being pitied is a lot easier than being respected. But one day maybe you will realize they are not equally gratifying.
Side-note: Oh, and the sultan in Aladdin being dressed in white with a white beard and Jafar having black hair and dark clothes and skin is because they're the fucking good guy and the bad guy and it's character art illustrating character. Light and dark have more meanings than skin tone in the world and in literature, and if you can't agree with that then you need to shut the fuck up about your precious Star Wars because no property besides Kingdom Hearts has more heavy-handed usage of this idea. Stop jumping in front of every possible bus to make yourself feel victimized and stereotyped.
Submitted December 10, 2019 at 10:06PM by Teehokan https://ift.tt/359H5ZP
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