"An invention [...] that seems more like some marvel of a fairy tale or delusion of necromancy than a practical reality: it amounts to nothing less than making light produce permanent pictures." - Call me Dea. 33, white, bisexual. Consumed by image-making and storytelling. Come say hi!
I really thought I knew where this conversation I was writing was going, but then Marcille started crying, which feels too in character to change. Girl me too.
I’ve really been struggling lately so I promised myself that I would write every single day this week, no matter how hard it was, even if I only managed a couple hundred words. I’ve only got 1.5k so far. It’s like pulling teeth. But I’m going to keep at it. Every night. And then next week? I’ll do it again.
I really thought I knew where this conversation I was writing was going, but then Marcille started crying, which feels too in character to change. Girl me too.
I want to say one more thing as a cis person who experimented with labels over the years, questioned my gender, and ended up as cis after all. The trans community did not “indoctrinate” me. I had always been asking these questions, even as a little kid before I knew trans people even existed. Over the years, trans women gave me the courage to explore the femininity I wasted my youth denying, trans men taught me that manhood is what you make of it and that nobody could tell me how to define it, and nonbinary people taught me just how limitless my possibilities were. The only parts of my upbringing that left me “confused” about gender were the conservatives who imposed a vision of gender that my friends and I could not relate to. And when I realized trans identity wasn’t something I could claim after all, the community loved me all the same. I am happier, and the world is more beautiful, because of trans people. The human impulse to create and survive isn’t going anywhere, and neither are trans people.
i think the normalization of laying out your own sexual trauma as a pre-amble to a (typically anti-kink) argument is a really dangerous discussion format that we should not be legitimizing. even beyond the fact that experiencing trauma in no way makes you a kinder, smarter, or better person, the demand that we re-open wounds and bare our vulnerabilities as “victim credentials” to (usually hostile) strangers is a bad bad bad fucking expectation to legitimize. i understand the desire to elevate survivors’ voices and this absolutely has a place re: conversations about remedial justice and survivor resources. but the idea that one’s understanding of systems of sexual violence can only be confirmed by falling victim to them and later willingly offering that trauma to others is equal parts fallacious and dangerous, and it further insults those of us whose advocacy and understanding come from years of study, research, and work, not from our victimization at the hands of another person. i understand it’s the impulse to fire back when reactionaries open and end cap every argument with a gratuitous statement of trauma qualifications but you Cannot be ceding ground on this – not just for reasons of intellectual integrity, but also because your fellow survivors deserve the right to advocate for our lives and communities without being expected to first divulge voyeuristic personal trauma narratives
