Notices by Cum Vampire (divinekestrel@chaosfem.tw)

Me: "What am I doing, I don't even deserve an interview for this position, I'm in way over my head. This was my graduate school work but I don't even know what this term MEANS."

Also me: Wow, I just researched an unfamiliar groundwater flow term that I never heard of because it was coined in 2008, a year after I graduated graduate school. Turns out the term describes a concept I developed and presented at a conference in 2005, two years before I graduated.

ACAB includes the mean voice in your head.

White second wave feminists will tell Trans femmes we damage womanhood and will never have read a single fucking work written by a women of color.

Like bitch if your version of “womanhood” is toned down mayonnaise patriarchy then you’re goddamn right ima ruin that shit.

White second wave feminists with condemn you for cleavage and tell you that if you want to be effective working in a man’s world you should hide your femininity and never once think they are holding up the master’s tools and saying “we should use these!”

White second wave feminists will condemn you for dressing sexy because it’s just a creation for the male gaze and be wearing a pant suit and reading Lean In.

There've been some posts recently about Trans femmes not fitting in with lesbians because of an unshared history and, while I get it, I feel so differently. Opposite, in fact. Like, I feel way more comfortable and aligned with the lesbians I know than with most Trans women. I've been trying to find a way to describe why and couldn't.

Then @Impossible_PhD wrote the best thread holy shit! and, yeah, that's the context…

https://hachyderm.io/@Impossible_PhD/113311857718080015

See, here's the thing… most of the Trans girls I meet IRL have done a lot of processing and emotional evaluation about one thing.

I'm sorry, but a lot of y'all are like "I'm a girl now so I'm done and everything great and I can do whatever I want because girl power" and then stop there, and don't go any fucking further into deconstructing your place in the world.

And, y'all, I just can't with that shit. It drives me up the fucking wall. Because I spend a lot of time in a white patriarchal colonialist world that it's really hard to have people be like "We're both Trans so naturally you fit the box I created now!"

I have had more than one person tell me that my being trans was great because I don't have to think about being Black anymore.

Bitch you need to walk the fuck away.

This… is very rare among cis lesbians I know. Why… because…

Cis friends telling me they are so glad I’m finally happy is the most painful fucking thing in the world.

I cry every single day when I’m alone in the house. It’s like I can feel nothing but loneliness and despair. And, yeah, this is better than before.

Because before, I was just acting in the way I was supposed to. I knew what happy was supposed to look like and played that part. But I didn’t even feel despair. I felt nothing. I was empty. I existed on the edge of suicide not from pain but from emptiness.

So now, yeah, it’s better. At least now I can feel something, even if it’s only despair. Even that is better than feeling empty.

But the picture of me being happy is a projection of the Trans story cis people need to make themselves feel better. I’m “happy” now in much the same way as I was “happy” before—in the way they need to see me as happy.

If you are ever wondering whether the Trans femme landscape is too white-focused, ask yourself why all the voice therapy shit you see is focused on sounding like a white girl from California.

…

Oh, you never knew that wasn’t the only option for woman’s voices? Yeah, maybe think about what that shit means. 🙄

White second-wave feminists need to step off. Y’all just stay the hell out of my way. Go sell your tamed down mayonnaise patriarchy somewhere else because I ain’t fucking havin it.

As far as I can tell, men thing “subby” and “asshole aggressive” mean the same thing.

So I guess I’m just gonna be “technically bisexual but lesbian for any practical purpose just because it’s not worth trying to dig through the dumpster until I find a man who wasn’t meant to be thrown in the garbage.”

Sexuality: Bisexual, meaning I love love all women, most non-binary people, and men as long as they are actually closeted trans women whose shells are about to crack.

I have to say, wearing my skirts and shorts at my natural waist instead of my hips like a boy was the biggest factor in feminizing my outfit look. Just night and day.

Almost two years later, it still feels weird.

“How high you wear your pants.”

It’s amazing how many small things that I was berated and mocked about are so deeply embedded.

Fuck you, random boys from my childhood!

A while ago @oldladyplays posted about how it might have been easier transitioning in the 90s because you were under the RADAR (if I remember correctly).

Everything I remember from that time is bad. The media treated us like either comic relief or literal psychopaths. There was no support for me trying to talk about it. The Trans women I met were standoffish and didn’t want to talk about it, only wanted to blend in because that was the only safety.

I started intuitively transitioning in my late 20s (the late 90s) and bounced out before I even got a chance to realize I was really a girl. The only thing I knew is that if I kept going being myself I was gonna be a clown or a psychopath, so I guess I’m not trans, I’m just a broken dude and with just be miserable.

1/

20 years later, things look very different.

Yeah, there’s a coordinated legislative attack on Trans existence by the right. But things look so different literally everywhere else.

By their own words, the right started the NC state bathroom law issue as a way to start the broader conversation about Trans people, to get the public comfortable with the topic so they could then denounce it. That was a serious miscalculation because younger generations are queer AF.

Trans people keep coming up in the media now, in movies and shows and music, but now when there’s comedy about us, it’s usually making fun of the people who don’t accept us. There are Trans characters who literally transition as part of the show. There are trans characters who act in their own gender without ever being identified. That’s so vastly different.

2/

And I’m consistently amazed at how easy things are for children. Maybe I live in a bubble but the school system here is queer AF. My daughter had a classmate who identified as a lesbian in third grade.

Third grade!

I’m not saying that comphet ain’t a thing, but I know 40 year old women who are still testing to process that they might be gay while third graders play with wearing the term “queer” like it’s a dress style.

In any given day our high school may have more open Trans kids attending than kids who are wearing purple. Seriously, that’s not me just saying that, that’s data from a non-Trans-identifying non-binary kid who did a project on it.

Read that again. The important thing is not that a kid in high school did a project on how many trans kids were in the high school compared to the color purple. The kid is non-binary and doesn’t identify as Trans.

That’s wild.

We’ve blown right past “switching from boy to girl” and even over-shot “non-binary is Trans by default” and the kids today are even past that language Trans folk use.

They are so over it. Gender fluidity is so fucking normalized that older Trans people like me don’t even understand the kids anymore.

That’s so magical I’m crying as I write this.

David Sedaris might complain about that because he’s a grumpy-ass boomer who wants to hold onto his trauma as a sales pitch as if his white male ass had it worse than everyone else but this Black Trans bitch knows that when children treat “queer” as if anyone can be it that means IT IS FUCKING SAFE FOR ANYONE TO BE IT!

And the Black Trans women who threw the first bricks didn’t do it so the old white assholes could hold on to the terminology as if it was theirs, alone, David.

In conclusion, for me, it’s easier transitioning now, because now I’m boring.

Hari Nef is a fucking Barbie. Elliot Page transitioned in a damn TV show. I’m nothing. I’m boring as fuck. And that’s wonderful.

The Republicans have their torches out, yes, but this time the villagers are mocking them and throwing buckets of water. It’s clear that the view of the radical right is a reaction. A reaction to the freedom of anyone to be as gay as they fucking want. That’s dangerous, so they’re fighting.

But while they are fighting, high school kids with more knowledge of systematic oppression than they will ever know are doing school projects on Trans friends using the color purple.

Remember the 90s when polyamorous relationships were so popular The Spice Girls sang about them?

“If you wanna be my lover
You gotta get with my friends …”

I love how they spoke so openly about that.