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genderjumperThe first C is a whole saga that I will tell at another time. All that is relevant here is that someone whose name started with C was a serious partner for 2.5 tumultuous years and the explosive ending of the relationship kind of messed me up.
*****
The spring after that break-up, I went into a relatively new sex shop in town and had a look around. Keeping up with the biz, I guess. Things were quiet, and I ended up striking up a long conversation with the manager, a white girl from the Rust Belt with a huge, malevolent grin. Before I knew it, she was showing me her most abrasive tattoos and we were exchanging numbers. Her name, you may have guessed, was the same as the ex mentioned above.
When she called that weekend, I was deep in a cuddle pile at PolyBigFun, an annual retreat hosted by Austin Poly (that still operates, as far as I know). I answered the call, explained that I was indisposed but didn't want to ignore her, and said I'd call her back after the retreat (without going into detail). My polycule and I had a good laugh about it, since I'd already told them about the surprise connection.
When we did finally talk, I got brave enough to explain the retreat (I've never been one to waste time on monogamists, but in those early years I was way more likely to beat around the bush for a while). I could hear her smile and comfort over the phone, as she explained that she was also nonmonogamous with her "Sir". I wasn't enthusiastic about dating another BDSMer, but the chemistry was undeniable. Since the name she shared with my ex was anathema to me, I started calling her "New Coke" behind her back.
As I recall, we went on like two dates, primarily spent walking around or sitting beside a duck pond near the mall. The first date included a bit of heavy kissing, but for the second she kept her distance. She spoke obliquely about some STI scare that had happened in the interim and admitted she was exercising an abundance of care. I honored that and did my best to stay in touch, but it felt more like a Facebook friendship than anything else for a while. I'd stop in at her work or invite her to an event, but connecting just never seemed in the cards. I told her about "New Coke" pretty early on and she said she loved it, even though I never really called her that to her face. By the time I found out she was leaving "Sir" and denouncing him as an abusive, gaslighting manipulator, I was several years into caregiving and relatively poly-saturated myself. What's more, once she left the man and later the sex store, she moved to the other side of the Metroplex, and connecting in-person remained difficult. I learned when her birthday was and honored her tradition: she'd get blitzed on some very specific drug and solicit nudes from her friends. Somewhere in there -- time is bad, but I'm confident my grandfather was still alive, maybe even still home -- she did come over for one playdate. Years of excitement and diversions led me to show off a bit, and she was quickly spent before any of my clothes came off.
She soon found a new love, was eager for me to meet him, but that's never happened. They moved in together, got married, and she became a stepparent and a respectable office manager. She never had a negative word for me, but even when I was driving past her town during grad school we only ever mustered a couple of drive-by hugs and deep, fleeting kisses. She often interrupted herself when we saw one another, like I might be a figment of her imagination and she didn't want to threaten that etherealness (however grounded and reliable I tried to be). There have been a few career shifts over the past decade or so, earning up to six figures and then losing jobs abruptly, all the while complaining as loud and often as she could about customers and bosses on Facebook. Sometimes she seems to revel in her coarseness, but other times I think she wants to protect me from it. I rarely ever felt closer than arm's length.
It's been 3-4 years now since our last drive-by hug (no kisses due to COVID) and even when I make a point of reaching out and offering specific support for specific challenges in her life, I rarely hear back, and when I do it's brief yet effusive. I rather doubt I'll see her before I leave Texas, let alone ever get any more time to open up or play together, and I think she's resigned herself to it. It's so much clearer now than it was when we first met how much trauma and weaponization has defined her, but even in "peacetime" she struggles to just be around people who aren't equally bitter; I've sometimes wondered whether she has borderline traits or just doesn't know how to relax. I think the relationship is good for her, and I'm happy she has it, but I don't know if she lets herself have much of a self any more outside of work, primary relationship, and parenting. Still, as we approach 16 years of friendship, I have to appreciate that she's lasted longer than many of my friendships and partners, that I've never felt in any danger from her, and that even after all this time I might leave her a little breathless.
*****
Later the same year I met New Coke, I also met a couple of friends of a younger (like mid-20s when I was entering my 30s) colleague from one of the political campaigns I worked. The first was ineffable, with a clever but identifiable Internet handle, impossible to pin down like Billie. She told stories, but they were off-handed and nigh unbelievable. Was she really hanging out with a lot of pro athletes or was she a pathological liar like the person I "lost my virginity with"? was she Latina, mixed, or spicy white as her Anglo implied? Was she ever stoned? Was she ever sober? We hung out two, maybe three times, and I never knew where it was headed nor what either of us wanted to happen from it. At some point we just stopped talking.
The second, however, left a big impression on me by holding up a mirror to my entitlement. There's no other way to put it, I read things wrong and I did so over and over again, and if she hadn't had the patience to be blunt with me I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to unpack some uncomfortable masculine assumptions that I am glad to have left behind me. It took me a bit too long to realize I was being the bad guy in her story. And as you may have picked up, she had the same C-name as my still-fresh ex and of New Coke.
We met a couple of times before connecting directly. She was just a small, dark-haired woman with big eyes and bigger glasses at our mutual friend's occasional gatherings. I don't remember specifics, but it would make sense that we added each other on Facebook long before we started having 1-on-1 conversations. It was in-person when lightning struck for me, though: we were at one of these gatherings, I was slightly older than everybody but not out of place, and the conversation took this very specific turn. I can't remember whether we were going from race to movies or movies to race, but I was trying to make some kind of point about how white people hurt themselves with racism and she brought up the movie, This Is England. I was not prepared. You have to understand that circa 2010, I had barely ever met another white anti-racist, and zero of them had been in Texas. And I had only seen that movie a few months prior and was in DIRE NEED of someone to process it with.
I would later to describe it to my polycule as analogous to if I had been taken away from a lost society, raised a longing outsider, and one day randomly heard someone singing a forgotten lullaby from my original people, but it held no such meaning for her; to her it was just a song she'd read in a book or something. I thought for a while that I'd found home in a way I didn't know I missed, all I had to do was deepen the connection.
I started referring to her as "C3P0" -- "shiny and whiny" -- but I never told her that. She was carrying a lot of unfocused exasperation toward the world, yet I was mesmerized and hung onto every word. She lived in Austin. We texted or called occasionally, but deeper conversations had to wait for when one or the other of us was visiting our town. When there was another party, I couldn't exactly pour out my heart in a public setting, but when I would go to Austin, my time was usually reserved for partners there. Finally, I had a long weekend in Austin with an afternoon to myself and invited her over to my partner's place to talk, really talk.
Looking back on it, I think I was a little manic. I tried to be respectful but that took way more effort than I was used to. I told her that we were connected and she was skeptical. I recounted the story about the movie and she basically shrugged and said, "So what?" I told her I was attracted to her -- probably for the first time, though it was never not obvious (and I can only hope I wasn't leering too badly) -- and she reiterated something she'd said on one of our calls: "But I like bigger guys. Fluffy guys." She even mentioned a specific guy she used to hook up with, whom I had met in passing and seen around Facebook. I wasn't feeling jealous nor competitive, but it all seemed so irrelevant.
"Yeah, but I feel so connected to you," I asserted.
"What, like you're in love with me?" Like that would have changed anything.
"No, not like in love, but... I don't know, I don't have words for it. There's something here and I think it's really powerful."
"I don't see it. I don't feel that way."
That part feels close to verbatim, but understand we went round and round like this for a good 45 minutes, maybe an hour or more (or maybe it was only 15-30; it FELT like forever). What's more, I was attuned to her enough to notice that she was becoming uncomfortable. Not afraid, not even annoyed I don't think, just out of place and frustrated by my stuck-ness.
I'm not sure why I was so resistant/skeptical/devoted. Did I just want her to give me a chance? Was I getting used to being "hot" and in disbelief that she couldn't fathom being attracted to me at 6'4" and 230 lbs? (I hope she's living her life well, but she should see me now!) Was I just so convinced of my own narrative that I refused to take no for an answer? It shouldn't have been so hard, but I had a lot of societal programming to overcome: just because I thought it was important, meaningful, or even possible, didn't mean it meant anything to anyone else. And her vague opinion mattered here, ultimately more than my own zeal.
Somewhere after she asserted for like the third time that she only saw me as a friend and saw no chance of that changing did I realize the narrative in my head was irrelevant to her. I didn't have the vernacular at the time, but I was treating her like a sexy lamp in my narrative and she was rightfully rejecting that. I wasn't going to create myself a starring role in her life, she was just going above and beyond to hold her ground (possibly because she didn't know me well enough to know I wasn't a threat, or possibly she was just as confused as I was from another angle) while I sussed out whether some deeper meaning lie behind her "no". It did not. She just wasn't interested. In that era, I had a lot of "mini-piphanies", but this was one of the more stark moments of realizations I ever had, not as powerful but more enduring than my original conviction that we were connected: I just wasn't important to her, regardless of how important I believed she was to me. She didn't owe me an explanation, she was just choosing to do that. (Here's a pop-culture equivalent that I don't think I saw until after this all went down.) What's weird is I might have relented faster if she'd just said she was monogamous, but I don't think it really came up one way or the other.
Once I believed her, I accepted that my reality was inaccurate and stopped arguing with her about her own feelings. I think we engaged in some cordial chit-chat, but she left soon after. I might have listened to her whine about something or other once more but we didn't really talk again. I'd like to believe this was the final boss I had to defeat on the path of truly understanding enthusiastic consent, but I still have one or two later stories that are even murkier. This was absolutely the last (and hopefully only) time I ever hesitated to take no for an answer, at least. I even got better about asking outright instead of insinuating.
*****
The spring after that break-up, I went into a relatively new sex shop in town and had a look around. Keeping up with the biz, I guess. Things were quiet, and I ended up striking up a long conversation with the manager, a white girl from the Rust Belt with a huge, malevolent grin. Before I knew it, she was showing me her most abrasive tattoos and we were exchanging numbers. Her name, you may have guessed, was the same as the ex mentioned above.
When she called that weekend, I was deep in a cuddle pile at PolyBigFun, an annual retreat hosted by Austin Poly (that still operates, as far as I know). I answered the call, explained that I was indisposed but didn't want to ignore her, and said I'd call her back after the retreat (without going into detail). My polycule and I had a good laugh about it, since I'd already told them about the surprise connection.
When we did finally talk, I got brave enough to explain the retreat (I've never been one to waste time on monogamists, but in those early years I was way more likely to beat around the bush for a while). I could hear her smile and comfort over the phone, as she explained that she was also nonmonogamous with her "Sir". I wasn't enthusiastic about dating another BDSMer, but the chemistry was undeniable. Since the name she shared with my ex was anathema to me, I started calling her "New Coke" behind her back.
As I recall, we went on like two dates, primarily spent walking around or sitting beside a duck pond near the mall. The first date included a bit of heavy kissing, but for the second she kept her distance. She spoke obliquely about some STI scare that had happened in the interim and admitted she was exercising an abundance of care. I honored that and did my best to stay in touch, but it felt more like a Facebook friendship than anything else for a while. I'd stop in at her work or invite her to an event, but connecting just never seemed in the cards. I told her about "New Coke" pretty early on and she said she loved it, even though I never really called her that to her face. By the time I found out she was leaving "Sir" and denouncing him as an abusive, gaslighting manipulator, I was several years into caregiving and relatively poly-saturated myself. What's more, once she left the man and later the sex store, she moved to the other side of the Metroplex, and connecting in-person remained difficult. I learned when her birthday was and honored her tradition: she'd get blitzed on some very specific drug and solicit nudes from her friends. Somewhere in there -- time is bad, but I'm confident my grandfather was still alive, maybe even still home -- she did come over for one playdate. Years of excitement and diversions led me to show off a bit, and she was quickly spent before any of my clothes came off.
She soon found a new love, was eager for me to meet him, but that's never happened. They moved in together, got married, and she became a stepparent and a respectable office manager. She never had a negative word for me, but even when I was driving past her town during grad school we only ever mustered a couple of drive-by hugs and deep, fleeting kisses. She often interrupted herself when we saw one another, like I might be a figment of her imagination and she didn't want to threaten that etherealness (however grounded and reliable I tried to be). There have been a few career shifts over the past decade or so, earning up to six figures and then losing jobs abruptly, all the while complaining as loud and often as she could about customers and bosses on Facebook. Sometimes she seems to revel in her coarseness, but other times I think she wants to protect me from it. I rarely ever felt closer than arm's length.
It's been 3-4 years now since our last drive-by hug (no kisses due to COVID) and even when I make a point of reaching out and offering specific support for specific challenges in her life, I rarely hear back, and when I do it's brief yet effusive. I rather doubt I'll see her before I leave Texas, let alone ever get any more time to open up or play together, and I think she's resigned herself to it. It's so much clearer now than it was when we first met how much trauma and weaponization has defined her, but even in "peacetime" she struggles to just be around people who aren't equally bitter; I've sometimes wondered whether she has borderline traits or just doesn't know how to relax. I think the relationship is good for her, and I'm happy she has it, but I don't know if she lets herself have much of a self any more outside of work, primary relationship, and parenting. Still, as we approach 16 years of friendship, I have to appreciate that she's lasted longer than many of my friendships and partners, that I've never felt in any danger from her, and that even after all this time I might leave her a little breathless.
*****
Later the same year I met New Coke, I also met a couple of friends of a younger (like mid-20s when I was entering my 30s) colleague from one of the political campaigns I worked. The first was ineffable, with a clever but identifiable Internet handle, impossible to pin down like Billie. She told stories, but they were off-handed and nigh unbelievable. Was she really hanging out with a lot of pro athletes or was she a pathological liar like the person I "lost my virginity with"? was she Latina, mixed, or spicy white as her Anglo implied? Was she ever stoned? Was she ever sober? We hung out two, maybe three times, and I never knew where it was headed nor what either of us wanted to happen from it. At some point we just stopped talking.
The second, however, left a big impression on me by holding up a mirror to my entitlement. There's no other way to put it, I read things wrong and I did so over and over again, and if she hadn't had the patience to be blunt with me I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to unpack some uncomfortable masculine assumptions that I am glad to have left behind me. It took me a bit too long to realize I was being the bad guy in her story. And as you may have picked up, she had the same C-name as my still-fresh ex and of New Coke.
We met a couple of times before connecting directly. She was just a small, dark-haired woman with big eyes and bigger glasses at our mutual friend's occasional gatherings. I don't remember specifics, but it would make sense that we added each other on Facebook long before we started having 1-on-1 conversations. It was in-person when lightning struck for me, though: we were at one of these gatherings, I was slightly older than everybody but not out of place, and the conversation took this very specific turn. I can't remember whether we were going from race to movies or movies to race, but I was trying to make some kind of point about how white people hurt themselves with racism and she brought up the movie, This Is England. I was not prepared. You have to understand that circa 2010, I had barely ever met another white anti-racist, and zero of them had been in Texas. And I had only seen that movie a few months prior and was in DIRE NEED of someone to process it with.
I would later to describe it to my polycule as analogous to if I had been taken away from a lost society, raised a longing outsider, and one day randomly heard someone singing a forgotten lullaby from my original people, but it held no such meaning for her; to her it was just a song she'd read in a book or something. I thought for a while that I'd found home in a way I didn't know I missed, all I had to do was deepen the connection.
I started referring to her as "C3P0" -- "shiny and whiny" -- but I never told her that. She was carrying a lot of unfocused exasperation toward the world, yet I was mesmerized and hung onto every word. She lived in Austin. We texted or called occasionally, but deeper conversations had to wait for when one or the other of us was visiting our town. When there was another party, I couldn't exactly pour out my heart in a public setting, but when I would go to Austin, my time was usually reserved for partners there. Finally, I had a long weekend in Austin with an afternoon to myself and invited her over to my partner's place to talk, really talk.
Looking back on it, I think I was a little manic. I tried to be respectful but that took way more effort than I was used to. I told her that we were connected and she was skeptical. I recounted the story about the movie and she basically shrugged and said, "So what?" I told her I was attracted to her -- probably for the first time, though it was never not obvious (and I can only hope I wasn't leering too badly) -- and she reiterated something she'd said on one of our calls: "But I like bigger guys. Fluffy guys." She even mentioned a specific guy she used to hook up with, whom I had met in passing and seen around Facebook. I wasn't feeling jealous nor competitive, but it all seemed so irrelevant.
"Yeah, but I feel so connected to you," I asserted.
"What, like you're in love with me?" Like that would have changed anything.
"No, not like in love, but... I don't know, I don't have words for it. There's something here and I think it's really powerful."
"I don't see it. I don't feel that way."
That part feels close to verbatim, but understand we went round and round like this for a good 45 minutes, maybe an hour or more (or maybe it was only 15-30; it FELT like forever). What's more, I was attuned to her enough to notice that she was becoming uncomfortable. Not afraid, not even annoyed I don't think, just out of place and frustrated by my stuck-ness.
I'm not sure why I was so resistant/skeptical/devoted. Did I just want her to give me a chance? Was I getting used to being "hot" and in disbelief that she couldn't fathom being attracted to me at 6'4" and 230 lbs? (I hope she's living her life well, but she should see me now!) Was I just so convinced of my own narrative that I refused to take no for an answer? It shouldn't have been so hard, but I had a lot of societal programming to overcome: just because I thought it was important, meaningful, or even possible, didn't mean it meant anything to anyone else. And her vague opinion mattered here, ultimately more than my own zeal.
Somewhere after she asserted for like the third time that she only saw me as a friend and saw no chance of that changing did I realize the narrative in my head was irrelevant to her. I didn't have the vernacular at the time, but I was treating her like a sexy lamp in my narrative and she was rightfully rejecting that. I wasn't going to create myself a starring role in her life, she was just going above and beyond to hold her ground (possibly because she didn't know me well enough to know I wasn't a threat, or possibly she was just as confused as I was from another angle) while I sussed out whether some deeper meaning lie behind her "no". It did not. She just wasn't interested. In that era, I had a lot of "mini-piphanies", but this was one of the more stark moments of realizations I ever had, not as powerful but more enduring than my original conviction that we were connected: I just wasn't important to her, regardless of how important I believed she was to me. She didn't owe me an explanation, she was just choosing to do that. (Here's a pop-culture equivalent that I don't think I saw until after this all went down.) What's weird is I might have relented faster if she'd just said she was monogamous, but I don't think it really came up one way or the other.
Once I believed her, I accepted that my reality was inaccurate and stopped arguing with her about her own feelings. I think we engaged in some cordial chit-chat, but she left soon after. I might have listened to her whine about something or other once more but we didn't really talk again. I'd like to believe this was the final boss I had to defeat on the path of truly understanding enthusiastic consent, but I still have one or two later stories that are even murkier. This was absolutely the last (and hopefully only) time I ever hesitated to take no for an answer, at least. I even got better about asking outright instead of insinuating.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-22 04:42 pm (UTC)These aren't even the worst
Date: 2025-12-23 09:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-23 10:09 am (UTC)(I now sometimes feel uncomfortable even giving out hugs unsolicited online, though I do do sometimes. Often I now put *offers hugs* instead out of an excess of paranoia; though my fun game on bluesky is *offers hugs or ——* and coming up with a different “or” each time [pretty semi-precious beach stones] [mug of hot chocolate] [a video of baby sloths]. It is silly but amuses me.)
*I heard recently that this terminology is out but I’m not quite sure what is in, so it’ll have to do - it was the terminology at the time, anyway!
I am fortunate...
Date: 2025-12-23 09:44 pm (UTC)I share your hesitation online, and often say "hugs offered" myself! Then I try to pay attention to who accepts them or doesn't, but my memories less astute than it used to be.
Assigned Gender at Birth
Date: 2025-12-23 09:47 pm (UTC)However, I'm open to reading more recent theory and discussing further if you find something you want to read together.
Re: Assigned Gender at Birth
Date: 2025-12-24 12:36 am (UTC)Unfortunately, he’d locked comments off, so I couldn’t ask him what he’d found out one should use instead, and given the strength of the reaction he’d apparently got, I was too scared to quote post and ask what one was supposed to use, in case the strength of bluesky came down upon me and yelled at me in full force. I should probably look it up, as well as seeing what other folk on bluesky are using. I seem to follow a lot of late 20s/30s trans folk there, who make me feel a tad old and out of touch.
I may have to do some digging...
Date: 2025-12-24 11:24 am (UTC)I celebrate your connecting with younger folks, though. It's unnatural for everyone to segregate into narrow age cohorts!
I'd love to follow you. My Bsky is professional-ish and can be found by my name, if you feel like connecting there.
Re: I may have to do some digging...
Date: 2025-12-24 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-23 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 12:55 am (UTC)So that’s why I try and offer something else instead (a slice of cake is always a go to; they can always put it in the fridge or give it to someone else, this completely imaginary piece of cake, if they don’t want it, but at least it exists, in it’s nonexistent form!).
(I think it is at moments when I try and explain something like this that I sound most autistic. This could practically be a “the daily Tism” post…)
As I say, I am honestly mortified that I basically assaulted several people. The ones I know now don’t like hugs, I have apologised to in person (I wish they had told me, but I understand that they were being polite).
It does at least mean that it was something I could make certain my son knew from a very early age, however (even before I thought of it from grown up povs, I was telling my 2year old he didn’t have to cuddle anyone he didn’t want to; I learned properly by the time he was 5, which was 15 years ago but I was in my 30s which is waaaaay too late, though there weren’t all that many people I wanted to hug, really so it’s not *quite* as bad as it sounds, though I’m not excusing it). As he’s a cishet AuDHD guy, it’s even more important in him that he knows boundaries, and he definitely did need teaching when he was about five that when your friend says “stop” crossly they mean it. But I think it’s fine to need to learn at that age.
Sorry, this turned into a post of its own!
The short version - gosh yes, in person I’m very much about asking first, unless it’s family, where they expect hugs and already think I’m peculiar enough without my asking a question I already know the answer to. But online if I offer hugs I need to offer something else as well so I don’t leave them with nothing if they don’t want them. In person I am there myself…
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 01:24 am (UTC)Edit: "kissing" replaced my initial wording of "sticking my tongue where it didn't belong". Soooo autistic today. But at least I was able to access a filter, but then thought what I originally typed was funny enough to share.
I'm glad you found wording that felt comfortable
Date: 2025-12-24 11:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 11:10 pm (UTC)Anyway, I just friended you. You have no obligation to friend back, but as you’re friends with
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 11:57 pm (UTC)I never got around to publishing any...
Date: 2025-12-26 08:57 am (UTC)Re: I never got around to publishing any...
Date: 2025-12-26 01:28 pm (UTC)It was interesting trying to explain to my mother when I got my first story published because I was torn between being very excited I’d had something accepted and kind of embarrassed that it was about role play with someone being tied to a tree and spanked! She was like, “oh, what is it about?” and I mumbled “it’s erotica” a couple of times, but when she still didn’t hear me, I just lost the plot and shouted, “it’s PORN, mother, PORN,” down the phone at her…
Thankfully I have the sort of parent who was amused rather than scandalised forever; she has copies of all my books (currently displayed hilariously obviously in her sitting room, goodness knows what their neighbours think) and is proud of me, bless her.
Confronting and learning are GOOD things
Date: 2025-12-24 11:30 am (UTC)We can all be mortified by our mistakes, but we don't have to beat ourselves up for them. I have a small number of really awful things I've done, but the path of healing from that wasn't to stew in how awful I was. It was to never repeat it/not make a pattern, to learn what I did and own it, and to not profit over stories where I hurt others. It took me decades to stop holding it against myself, but I was genuinely a different person by then. And if some new wave of accountability arrives, I'll accept it.
Re: Confronting and learning are GOOD things
Date: 2025-12-24 11:03 pm (UTC)There were a lot of things we accepted in the 1990s and early 2000s which would not (I hope, and Mouse certainly believes) be acceptable now. And that’s even with Mouse having a pretty low opinion of guys his age in general, unfortunately.
Re: Confronting and learning are GOOD things
Date: 2025-12-26 08:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 07:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 10:37 pm (UTC)My Christmas Eve learning experience, along with discovering that the Mouse hadn’t heard of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, to my complete horror!
It invites a lot of theory...
Date: 2025-12-24 10:42 pm (UTC)But sometimes people are just talking about their lives and it's okay to use terms that are personally relevant or convenient in private spaces.
Re: It invites a lot of theory...
Date: 2025-12-24 11:10 pm (UTC)Ironically, afaik, A_AB/D_AB/CA_AB etc. were originally terms in the intersex community for the designation, non-consenting medicalization, and “corrective” surgeries so common to their experience. And now some people use them as stand-ins for binaries that intersex folx often can’t / don’t want to be part of. So I get why they’d want to keep their terms for their own use if we as a society are using them in ways that alienate them from their own inventions.
It’s complex, like everything is.
Re: It invites a lot of theory...
Date: 2025-12-24 11:20 pm (UTC)And if there’s an intersex person around, they’re welcome to slap me for that ridiculous comment.
But isn’t that the way? A minority group have a phrase, and then it gets stolen by the mainstream and butchered and then often, if the minority continue to use it as they always have, they’re then told they’re using it incorrectly - or it’s thought to have a wider meaning than the more specific one they meant.
(That reminds me, I want to have my testosterone levels checked…)
Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-24 11:07 pm (UTC)--AGAB is about what one doctor thought at a single moment in time and is not supposed to factor into anything else that followed.
--AGAB is weaponized, against trans women in particular.
To the first point, I am resistant because that one moment affected a great deal of social interaction for the person's enduring life, not least most or all of their youth and all that social interaction (which I don't want to here conflate with socialization; they are subtly distinct) when every class could be divided into boys and girls on the daily...
To the second point, I can only say that outcomes matter more than intentions and in that case I welcome alternatives.
But I don't see alternatives emerging and I worry about the conversation about how we were segregated (erroneously as trans folks, but also in general) as youths did real harm is subtly undermined. Theoretically, any discussion of our pre-transition experiences can lead to the same outcome: insular vocabulary that escapes containment and becomes weaponized against us. It's not like the word was a weapon waiting to be found by the wrong person -- they were always going to find a weapon because they despise us. Waiting for the perfect word to emerge is a fallacy; do we make up new terms every five years to try to stay ahead or do we just acknowledge that they will weaponize whatever we do in bad faith as soon as it is visible enough. I don't have an answer.
But I do further worry that there is a disconnect here between binary and nonbinary trans experiences. Trans women have always been women, no matter what lines they stood in during Kindergarten, but the conversation about unpacking nuance and fluidity looks much more complex for those of us who are not mono-gender, who don't care so much how we are "clocked", and who don't pursue medical transitions (not even hormones). Describing myself as an AMAB is a shorthand way to say that my genderfluidity is not incompatible with my whiskers, my height, my build. I like the framework because it acknowledges AGAB is something that happens to us, over and over again; in my case may never end because my relationship with my gender and my relationship with my body are not deeply entwined with one another.
This is all just thinking aloud, again I don't have answers and I don't want to feed the trolls (even if I haven't seen them myself).
I saw another Reddit discussion, over a decade old, that says AGAB began as an intersex term and was not necessarily intended for trans folks to begin with.
[sigh]
There is a conversation to be had about the flawed sex/gender paradigm, itself a convenience that originally let trans people exist in conservative eyes but was later weaponized against us. All of this is conflated with medicalization of trans experiences as well, and medicine is far from the hard science many would like to believe. But without a new (or old) paradigm to point people toward, they're still going to default to this and AGAB is one of the least weaponized components I have seen for public discussion.
I don't know where I'm going with this. May we ever evolve.
Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-24 11:23 pm (UTC)And definitely yes, may we ever evolve.
Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-24 11:49 pm (UTC)Then, if having a record was so important, they could officially notate it when people were 16 unless they were still undecided , in which case it would say U until they did decide.
Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-25 12:26 am (UTC)I still don’t see why your drivers license and ID need you to have a sex or even a pronoun listed. It is none of the government’s business, in the normal run of things, to know or have an opinion on what’s in my head or what’s in my pants.
Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-25 09:28 am (UTC)Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-26 09:04 am (UTC)Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-26 09:02 am (UTC)Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-26 12:59 pm (UTC)Burn down patriarchy and capitalism and start again :) we won’t, but it’s enjoyable to imagine sometimes, as long as one has practical ideas and hopes as well, and is prepared to work towards those. I’m not a believer in “vote blue no matter who” or whatever the uk version is, because it’s not changing the dial. I’ve been trying that, and the clock is ticking too close to global annihilation with climate change. But I will accept taxing the rich and getting green power, and spending money on universal health care and social care. I’ll put up with “is it a boy or a girl?” if I must…
1984 reference
Date: 2025-12-26 09:11 am (UTC)Not only do we see this literally true with current conservative administrations (banning words they don't like or that make them look bad), but it's also an appropriate analogy for how constructs from capitalism to artificial intelligence are treated as inevitable, not even allowing room for other possibilities to be considered.
I've already decided I'm not much of a communist, but wow would I love to study models of governance that aren't steeped in the biases of dead white men...
Re: 1984 reference
Date: 2025-12-26 01:18 pm (UTC)I think it only really works in small groups, but I’m pretty sure there’s that monkey research thing about how we can’t imagine past about 250 people because that’s the size of communal groups our brains are set up to expect.
(Scientists did research on monkey brains and studied lots and could tell with startling accuracy the size of group the monkey/lemur/ape etc would move about in. Then someone gave them a human brain without telling them and they came up with a number for that, because of the similarities. I believe - correct me if you know better, but this was my understanding.)
I find it interesting on a minor scale how countries/groups/empires grow and then split, so that even in this globalist world, actual countries are deciding they want to be independent of each other, at least to some degree. So in my lifetime, a lot of Europe has changed: we’ve gone from having Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Serbia; there’s also been the unification of Germany, and the fall of the USSR; the UK now has different parliaments for Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, even if their main ones are in England- and Cornwall is pushing slooowly for some measure of independence, though it’s a long way behind the rest.
Everywhere is getting smaller, yet at the same time wanting to join the EU and be part of something bigger, so there’s the constant pressure between globalisation and independence… Of course, in theory this would leave room for many different styles of government, and certainly the UK’s First Past the Post voting system is very different to the Netherlands ranked voting system (theirs is much better, imo; few people think FPTP is any good, and those who did may be changing their minds as they currently sink in the polls…) but in reality, it’s all much the same - run predominantly by white men, and currently skewing far rightwards.
Sorry, this got away from me. I think your comments section here has rather escaped bounds, I hope you don’t mind!
Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-24 11:43 pm (UTC)The way we split children in our heads into “boy” and “girl” (and nothing else, there’s still no real term for the other unless we accept “enby” but that then has to do in place of both boy/girl and man/woman - otherwise you’re stuck saying ‘nonbinary person’ or ‘genderqueer person’.) from the moment of birth and it affects our ideas of everything they do is scary. I dressed Mouse in pink a lot from the moment he was born because we were very poor and inherited a lot of baby clothes from my sisters, who had more girls’ clothes than boys. And Mouse wasn’t going to be bothered, so I dressed him in pink onesies regularly.
I ended up writing about it for a feminist mum blog a couple of years later [tw: ref to JKR as it was 18 years ago] https://thefword.org.uk/2008/08/why_my_son_wear/
I wasn’t confident enough about nonbinary issues to mention them (I’d run into a genderqueer space where I’d felt completely not at home and my mind was all confused so it was easier just to stick to the binary for the article I decided, though it’s not how I’d write it now). But there are lots of things I’d write differently now, tbh. I’m still separating them out a lot - girls this, boys that.
We do it before we have a chance to ask “who are you?” I did ask Mouse, every so often, as he grew up, if he was a boy. For quite a while, he’d shrug and say “I dunno, probably,” before he was sure that yes, definitely he was a boy, thanks.
But honestly, why do we have such strict lines in the first place? Make the lines less rigid, and then moving from one to another would be far less scandalous.
Re: Okay, I started diggning...
Date: 2025-12-26 09:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 07:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 10:52 pm (UTC)I learned a lot from a friend of mine who arranged group meets to read through plays and used to go through a massive checklist of boundaries, pronouns, issues such as misophonia etc in advance, so everyone knew where they stood. He is *lovely* (and if I were poly, I would also totally play with his partner, as they are gorgeous and I am totally on flirting terms with them…they *are* poly).
Reading a list of people who didn’t want hugs on meeting, even with people they knew well made me realise that this was a thing. (I knew cis guys were sometimes not comfortable hugging each other, but my understanding had always been that, as an understood-to-be-cis girl, and as a queer enby, folk had been happy to hug me, which sounds very egotistical but is more just a ‘my brain hadn’t processed that concept, now it has I will overthink everything massively’ moment.) So I got taught without specifically having to have someone say “just get off me!”
I tend to go with “are you a hug person?” these days, which gives the option to say, “sometimes but not right now,” or “not really,” or “hell yes” - the one thing I do tend to hope people don’t want to do is shake hands because I feel like a dick if it’s someone I’m friends with. It feels like it should be a business meeting. But I do try and keep that prejudice to myself :)
no subject
Date: 2025-12-26 08:18 am (UTC)I don't mine handshakes, but your share sparks a tangent about how my mom told me as a teenager that she found it creepy when guys would kiss her hand. I was a budding romantic and had to contemplate more universal ways to express interest without pressure.
Somehow, I was intimidating?
Date: 2025-12-26 08:15 am (UTC)Re: Somehow, I was intimidating?
Date: 2025-12-26 09:17 am (UTC)Accurate, but I meant in adolescence.
Date: 2025-12-26 09:26 am (UTC)