The fearmongering around medical transition for transmascs will never not be upsetting to me.
“you’re gonna look ugly as a man” “but you’re such a pretty girl, don’t change that” Wrong. You will look different after T, but you will look happy. You will probably grow hair and gain weight and look pretty different, and none of that is bad or makes you less desirable. You are going to look like you and that’s all that matters.
“T makes you angry” “you’re gonna be a scary man i won’t feel safe around you” Wrong. Testosterone does not “make” you angry. Messing with your hormones will mess with your emotions for sure, but you will not immediately become some scary predator when you start T. Being a man/masculine does not make you a threat, a predator, or inherently angry. That’s radfem shit.
“bottom growth is gross” “no one will want you with bottom growth” Wrong. Bottom growth is cool and a LOT of guys end up loving theirs a lot more than they thought they would. For a lot of people it is a desirable trait, there are people who find bottom growth hot and attractive. And! If you’re sure you don’t want it there’s things you can do to work around that, just talk to your provider.
“bottom surgery is super painful and not worth it” First off, call it phalloplasty, because that’s what you’re talking about. Second, yes it’s painful, it’s surgery. There are risks to it and complications can happen, but that’s true of any surgery. Phallo might not be for you, but it is life saving care for other folks. It is beautiful and should be talked about as life saving care and not as some afterthought thing that no one actually does.
Being transmasculine is a beautiful thing. Transitioning medically is not something every trans person wants, but if you notice yourself holding back for the reasons i’ve listed above (or similar) maybe reconsider.
Dan and I bought a thing called “long ziti” from the local Weird Bargain Store, largely as a joke, but…. I have never had a more unsettling pasta experience in my life. They wouldn’t bend enough to cook from top to bottom simultaneously, and while they were cooking boiling water kept spouting out from the tops of them out of the pot, like a boiling pipe organ.
Then they were so long and floppy and hoselike that we couldn’t pick them up with anything other than tongs, and then they were so long and unwieldy that it was basically impossible to sauce them without them all slithering out of the bowl like wet snakes. They then proceeded to cool down almost completely within the the seconds it took to walk to the living room.
Eating them was like eating a bowl full half melted drinking straws.
Bringing back Long Ziti for another round because it’s just too funny
“[Keanu] Reeves said a recent conversation about “The Matrix” with a 15-year-old put things into a terrifying perspective. The actor explained to the teenager that his character, Neo, is fighting for what’s real. The teenager scoffed and said, “Who cares if it’s real?” “People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art,” Reeves said. “It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the non-value. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us?” “It’s this sensorium. It’s spectacle. And it’s a system of control and manipulation,” Reeves continued. “We’re on our knees looking at cave walls and seeing the projections, and we’re not having the chance to look behind us.””
Transcript of Tiktok by stevetomjohn, in response to a stitch that says “but I am not going to hang onto every CNN breaking news…”:
This is one of the few times when I’m actually going to weigh in with my expertise, I did my PhD dissertation on North Korean propaganda. North Korea is, contrary to popular belief, a right wing authoritarian ethnostate, and there are a lot of reasons why that is that I’m not going to get into in this video.
But as someone who thought a lot about propaganda, I have some things that I want to share. The main thing is exactly this point, that it’s a bad idea to pay attention to every little thing that you see. A lot of people think of propaganda as something that’s trying to teach you something that you end up believing, so it’s like “profits are great now, profits are great now, profits are great now!” and then all of a sudden the audience is like “oh yeah, profits are great now,” but that’s actually not the case most of the time.
One of the articles that really broke my brain about this is, again, this is a very academic article in 20th century music, called “Stalin and the Art of Boredom” by Marina Frolova-Walker who specializes in soviet propaganda of sort of the mid 20th century. And she argues that the point of a lot of propaganda is not actually to convince you of anything, but to bore you into submission by basically filling up your brain to the point where nothing else can take up that space. So like, if you see a statue of Stalin in the courtyard, it doesn’t actually inspire any feelings about Stalin, but what it does do is fill up that “statue” position with something of Stalin so you cannot image something else being there.
So, if you’re someone who wants to see a different world, staying on this outrage wheel, obsessing over the people that you don’t want in that position, actually has that effect on you, it prevents you from sort of imagining and planning what you would actually want the world to look like, because you’re spending too much time obsessing over the way that it looks now. Just one of the many ways that I would advise you to protect your mental health in the world and help you build the world that you want to see.
