Matt McCreary
can i come over and do this
basically, i think the general rule of thumb is: if someone REALLY wants the blood that’s inside of your body, and they’re like… a vampire, or a dracula, or some sort of mansquito, then that’s probably okay. a dracula and a mansquito are made for removing things like blood and swords from inside your body. that’s basically fine.
if something wants to get at your blood, and they’re, say, some kind of murdersaurus, or maybe a really big frog, that’s where the problems start to arise. a really frog is not made for removing blood, and your blood knows this, which is why it is so vehement about wanting to stay IN your body instead of coming out.
unfortunately this will not deter a really big frog, because a really big frog is full of things like prizes, and value, and quite a lot of hatred, and it would REALLY rather like to replace any and all of those things with your blood, and basically by any means possible.
if you wanna understand why transmisogyny is so horrifying you have to understand the sorts of social and cultural patterns it takes to abuse someone until they will happily fulfill the role of the fetishized tokenized tranny bc any other option means isolation and death.
patriarchal society needs its sacrificial hypersexualized disgusting living sex-objects, and transmisogyny is how it tries to turn a human into that. i keep thinking abt this 4chan thread i read ~2013 shortly after i came out, in which a chaser talked about how he specifically liked dating trans women because “they have such low self-esteem that you can make them do anything”. he went on to talk about how he specifically looks for trans women with “dead, lifeless eyes” (aka dissociated from ptsd) because “they’re like a doll you can mold into whatever you want, then discard when you’re done, and there will always be more desperate for love”
that’s what transmisogyny is: a systematic pattern of abuse applied to a small sacrificial portion of the population to create a class of women with no claim to community or personhood, who will never be defended or avenged, who can be safely sunk into the attrition of patriarchy’s darker desires to protect the cis women, who after all could one day be mothers or some other kind of person. we are the class sacrificed to men’s violence and cis women’s violence. the socially unimportant. the weird and ugly. the punching bag. the blowup doll that talks. the mad artist that produces something great and then must burn out cause who could support that eccentric through life? the activist who makes huge steps for the better but stumbles on a community that would rather rape and abandon her than admit that it needs her. the queen of the dance who gets beaten with sticks as she’s leaving it and no one helps.
and its easy to do this, by painting the class as predatory, by making us hate and fear our own genitals, by indoctrinating us with an absurd amount of self-hatred, by giving us no out, no safe community, no one we can ever turn to. every cis person becomes a beartrap just waiting to swing shut and take out a chunk of flesh. and with fear and trauma we start to disappear from the world. we commit suicide, we overdose on heroin, we starve quitely in rooms playing videogames, or we become the tranny they want, deadeyed and always compliant and always ready to soak up blame. but whatever happens its the same: over time, we cease to exist. the person we are withdraws from the world until there is little to nothing left.
i don’t know how to stop it, but this has to stop. this is not something anyone ever should have to go through.
Two bucks frozen in a pond in antlerlock
A diver rises from the ooze with an intact Maya jar, perhaps a thousand years old. (1959) photog. Luis Marden
Frederico VENDER - Mannequin de corde, vers 1930
wild conjecture but i’ve been thinking about this post and whether, if as a basically-apocryphal little web search attests, cortisol levels begin to rise around 2-3am, this is why staying up that late feels so good, even or especially when there’s nothing on
i recall a piece of research about a possible use for an existing, relatively cheap and common drug that could be given in the immediate hour after a traumatic event (eg a car crash, a mass shooting) that would stop you developing PTSD; not just calm you down right now but prevent any long term effects from developing. you seem to have read a lot of papers, am I misremembering something or is that real. it wasn't in common usage, it was just a trial.
they were talking about hydrocortisone, the same stuff you put on itchy spots if you have a rash or something. hydrocortisone is the same thing as cortisol, which is known to the public as "the stress hormone". it's extremely good at suppressing inflammation.
before they started actually doing the research they assumed that PTSD patients would have higher cortisol in their systems than everyone else, but they found the exact opposite. PTSD patients are chronically low on cortisol, and increasing their circulating cortisol to normal levels makes them feel better. this may explain why PTSD patients seem to be "really good in emergencies", as the stress of the situation just brings them up to a normal cortisol level while everyone else is getting way too much, leading to panic.
at this point there have been tons of studies on cortisol in PTSD, including administration to crisis victims to prevent PTSD forming in the first place. use Sci-Hub to read full articles.
i got my hands on some hydrocortisone recently and can confirm it fixes an unbelievable number of chronic problems for me. however this is a drug with a very very high index of possible side effects and dosing is real tricky so i cannot recommend it as safe or easy for people to self-administer.
someone in the notes of that post said for trans inclusion and feminism we shouldreplace "guys" with "fellas" hello. hello. is this thing on. can anyone hear me.
Though actually, cute thing: there are "standard" photos of the Kowloon Walled City that are always passed around, and they tend to be the most modern ones due to quality & availability reasons:
But these are from a unique period in its history, namely the end of its history - right before it was demolished. However, it wasn't the only thing to go; its removal was part of a much wider project to level and redevelop the entire area of the Kowloon City District. It just happened to be the last part to go due to its size and legal complexity. That "island of concrete in a desert" look is essentially a fiction:
It was really the heart of a dense urban ecology of low-income development that had emerged over 30+ years in the postwar era.
And you can see how integrated it was with its surroundings, the "walls" were after all purely a legal concept:
The common photos imo are also popular because they heighten the dystopian aspects of the city, making it appear like a tumor infecting the area. Once you see it in its proper context its place as an organic part of the city is much more clear.