Asking someone "are you a man or a woman?" is as illogical and leading as asking "what is your favorite flavor of ice cream, chocolate or vanilla? Circle one." When you ask a question and specify only two possible answers, almost no one* (statistically speaking) will choose an answer not given. But this is how people ask the question about gender, if they ask it at all.

Also, if you ask people "what is your favorite flavor of ice cream? Check one: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, praline, coffee, blank," you will definitely get more answers than just "chocolate" or "vanilla" but people will still mostly choose from the options given, even if that list doesn't make sense to them.

By framing the question in a way that makes being specific more work, you increase the barrier to being specific. Also, social desirability implies that anything on the list is more desirable than anything not important enough to be on the list.

So instead of making their own answer, many people will choose the one that is closest. For example, people whose favorite is rocky road may choose chocolate. Or maybe their favorite is a very unusual flavor that most people are unfamiliar with, so they choose the one that is closest while still being familiar to others. For example, my favorite ice cream of all time was Sheer Bliss pomegranate dark chocolate chip ice cream, but it is no longer in production and I have hated every other pomegranate ice cream I have tried, so I never mention it -- I just tell people my second favorite, which is not even a fruit flavor.

People will also take a cue on the range of acceptable options from the list -- for example from the list of five I mentioned, they may think that only single-flavor ice creams are being compared, so choose "coffee" because "mint chocolate chip" is a blend of two flavors. Similarly, I think many people initially describe themselves as "man" or "woman" because they felt like they had to pick the one that was closest, rather than define their own category. We choose from what we feel is the acceptable list of options and for many people that list is extremely short.

I am confident that if we stopped asking binary questions or asking people to choose from a short list, we'd find a much greater variety in the ways people identify, and a greater number that identify outside of the binary.

*I have loads of non-binary, neurodivergent, and artist/writer friends so I know this isn't true for most people who read me, but most people in the general U S population will not make their own line and write in their own choice!

There is no way to exclude oppression by sorting according to identity. There is no space that is safe for all people in it no matter how specific you get, because oppression is such a tangled web of interconnected forces.

I face oppression for being trans, queer, ADHD, autistic, hard of hearing (auditory processing disorder), anxious, depressed, non-binary, lower class, read as a woman, and fat. I face marginalization for being femme and gender-non-conforming, non-monogamous, and atheist. Not a single one of these identities would provide safety for me as a shared-identity group.

In trans-only spaces, I have faced classism, ableism, sexism, binary-ism (believing that non-binary is not real), thin supremacy, and marginalization. In queer-only and fat-only spaces, I faced all of those plus cis-centrism. In fat-only spaces, I have faced all of those. In non-monogamous, femme, and atheist spaces I have faced literally all of the isms that exist for me.

Non-binary spaces have been a safer space for me because anxiety, depression, autism, ADHD, and being poor are normalized, and of course non-binary people are affirmed as real, and straight cis people are not centered. However in non-binary spaces there is STILL a normative expectation of a "body journey" involving specific medical steps; there is a pattern of AMAB people feeling unwelcome or alienated due to being tokenized; being femme is devalued; and other oppressive forces like racism, ableism, and thin supremacy are present. Everyone is assumed to be non-disabled when it comes to sensory or motor disabilities. I have noticed that the thinner, white, masc-aesthetic AFAB people are more likely to speak up and come back and I feel like that means we are not providing enough sense of community to fat people, AMAB people, femme people, and people of color.

Disability justice has been a safer space for me because depression, anxiety, autism, and ADHD are normalized, and often being poor is normalized as well (but almost as often, classist assumptions are made). But there is still a lack of effort on the part of sighted, hearing people and people who do not have mobility or dexterity disabilities to make sure that all resources are accessible. There is still a stigma against people with cluster-B mental health diagnoses. Cis-centrism, sexism, and thin supremacy are common.

A lot of cis people can be accidentally hurtful and exhausting to be around due to their ignorance of trans-ness, but I have friends who I forget are cis, because they have put in real effort to unlearn habits that center cis people. And I have known people who are trans who make me feel incredibly unsafe because they want to enforce some kind of trans identity standard.

A lot of men enact oppression by talking over others, dismissing people, expecting to be served, etc, but I have friends who are men who are much less likely to do this than many women I know. That is because this behavior comes from being part of the dominant class and is just most OBVIOUS in men (where it is celebrated).

I have never felt safe from sexism in a women-only space, not to mention the lack of safety from cis-centrism and binary-ism. And I have read from many Black women and other women of color who have said that women-only spaces that include white women are usually (if not always) unsafe for women of color.

I do think that having groups where everyone shares an identity can be very healing and is absolutely necessary when that identity is devalued or erased. But there is no escape from oppression, and the illusion of escaping it only exists for those who are the most privileged in the space.

Instead of framing a shared-identity space as a safe space where people can be "free," I want us to frame them as a safer space where everyone is as open to recognizing difference as they are to recognizing sameness. I want safer spaces to be places where expressions of oppression are called out with the goal of everyone learning and growing, and the understanding that everyone needs to learn about their own privilege and change.

Neuro-divergent and mental health labels serve two purposes: helping you find your people, and helping you find the right professional to aid you in building coping skills and/or healing from trauma and/or prescribing you medication.

So if you don't need to find your people, build your coping skills, heal from trauma, or take medication for your brain function, then there is no need for the label. But if you do need one of those things, finding the right label or set of labels is really important, and is often something a very self-examining person can do better than anyone else. Coping skills can mask symptoms and prevent correct diagnosis.

I have had medical professionals doubt whether or not I had ADHD because I made A's in school. It had to get so bad that I was distractedly driving through stop signs before they would medicate me, because my coping skills resulted in an outward expression of normalcy (grades). Never mind that my mental health and physical health was suffering terribly due to me using stress hormones generated by panic and not eating to help me focus.

I support people self-diagnosing, and will continue to do so as long as the psychology community continues to treat external markers of capitalist success as one of the most important diagnostic criteria. I will continue to do so as long as it is expensive and soul-crushingly difficult to find a therapist who isn't incompetent or abusive.

One thing I have never understood is disdain for / disgust toward sex workers. Even when I was the Christianest Christian I've ever known, I never felt that. (Jesus treated full-service sex workers with respect so Jesus would say "it would be better if you drowned" to the so-called Christians who disdain sex workers -- because that is how you talk to religious bullies)

Last night I watched a scene in a show where a mom of a sick kid listens to a stripper describing how to swallow a pill so that you don't gag, which is something that the kid has been struggling with for months. Instead of being grateful that her kid now has a skill she needed to be healthy, and ashamed that she didn't previously treat the stripper character as a human, the sound faded out like it does in a panic attack. I was honestly worried that she was about to physically attack the stripper character.

In the next scene the mom is flipping the fuck out at someone else in clearly displaced rage. The mom describes her husband (bouncer at the strip club) as working at a job that makes *her* feel demeaned as a woman and as a mother. WHO THE FUCK THINKS LIKE THIS???

And the worst part is, the show writer is obviously sympathetic to that attitude because it is being portrayed as if it is the "natural" response! It's not fucking natural! It's horrifying and it makes no sense! And the stripper's explanation about the pill was clearly being written for "comedic" value because it was almost entirely double entendres including things you would never say to a child, like "just let it happen." This character is a goddamn caricature and I still like her way better than the mom. Your anti-sex-worker bullshit makes you a bad person, period. You are dangerous and gross.

To make it even fucking worse, the husband in the "demeaning" job of bouncer had just saved the stripper from getting raped the night before. She was bringing over a gift basket as thanks. How is your response not "oh my god, my partner's work is actually really important, now I can be happy he has this job, and also I want to offer support to this person who got attacked"?!?!?!? How do you see her as a threat instead?!?!?

I'm kinda over the whole show from this. Ugh. Yet it was really fucking good in the first two seasons. Like, groundbreaking excellence in some ways. *tears hair out*

Content note: general discussion of abuse, social fall-out from talking about abuse, and rape (no specifics)

Most of the caring people I have known rely on the same tool to manage any conflict: compassionate conversation. This is a fantastic tool for many interpersonal conflicts, and it can be life-alteringly good if you had previously only experienced antagonistic or competitive conflict.

However that tool is not a simple one and it simply will not run without all parties contributing respect, a willingness to be wrong, ability and willingness to put in effort, and a desire to create an outcome that is positive for everyone.

I recently got to listen to someone speak about restorative justice, as a concept opposed to punitive justice. I absolutely believe that punishment does nothing good, and that most harm can be best addressed with a focus on healing and providing solutions to the problems that created problematic behavior in the first place. I think there are too many times when we rush to discard a person rather than coming together as a community and explaining the harm they caused and guiding the person to safer behavior.

However, when we discussed it, all the solutions that were mentioned relied on the person who caused harm being willing to acknowledge that harm and work on a solution that would reduce future harm to the victim.

Unfortunately there are many cases where the person who caused harm does not care about the victim, or doesn't care enough to admit to fault or change their behavior. In these cases, a restorative justice approach will often result in further harm to the victim, because rather than doing the work, the abuser will lash out at the victim. They will call this person a liar, and often make up offenses to try and paint themselves as the victim. This happens so often that it has a name: D A R V O: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender.

Which brings me to another practice in social justice which can be skewed to cause harm: believing all victims without checking for truth. I am NOT suggesting that we EVER dismiss a claim out of hand. However, we need to do more than zero checking because if we don't, abusers get to control every situation. All they have to do is make up some shit about actually, they hit that person because the other one hit them first, etc.

When I say check, I don't mean for forensic evidence. I mean, talk to all parties who witnessed it and ask them to tell their version of the story. Then make your own decision about who is dangerous and who is not.

I once was told that a friend of mine, Cliff*, had raped someone. I was not at the place where this happened and I didn't know the victim, but a mutual friend, Mac*, told me (with permission) that this had happened because I had invited Cliff to a cuddle party, where consent is extra important. I was horrified that my friend Cliff might have done this but I also know that consent mistakes exist, and I hoped that there was some kind of explanation or at least remorse and reform.

So I reached out to Cliff and said hey, I have heard about a consent violation you did, can you explain please? Cliff then explained sort of vaguely and made it sound as if something relatively innocuous was all that had happened, and asked what exactly I had heard. I got permission from the victim via Mac and quoted the thing that the victim said that Cliff did (unambiguous rape), and Cliff did not deny it, but asked to move our talk to in person or via phone. I can't hear on the phone and I didn't have the gas money and time to drive to them so I said no.

I asked them to explain themselves further and they didn't -- they just stopped responding. (it didn't occur to me until later that they probably reacted this way to protect themselves legally) From this interaction I decided that Cliff was not a safe person and that it was likely that they did commit rape and then try to pass it off as something else when I confronted them. I waited several months, still hoping they would follow-up and have something worthwhile to say but they did not, so I unfriended them. Later I learned that they were not informing their sex partners about an STD they had, which I believed partly because they now have a history of consent violations.

Which brings me to my suggested community solution, which is listening to all stories and checking to get as much information as possible, then taking protective action if necessary. Whenever there is abuse, it almost always has happened to more than one person. In my opinion, patterns are the best evidence of someone being an abuser, but you can't notice these patterns without checking. And of course, in the meantime ask what you can do to support the person who has told you that they suffered abuse, and do what you can.

Then, when someone has been confirmed as an unrepentant, unchanged abuser, they should be removed from the social circle of the victim if that is what the victim wants. People don't have to stop interacting with the abuser entirely, but any gathering of the victim's social circle should not include them. This is not a punishment, but a protective measure to prevent the victim from being harmed further, and to protect others in the community.

What happens more often is ostracization of the victims, where people other than the abuser are continuously cut out of the social circle because it has become traumatic for them. Abusers should not get safety at the expense of their victims. We have to make a choice to remove the abusers so that we don't remove the victims by default.

*(these names are fake)

I keep thinking about the ways that stranger kindness and friendliness is reserved for those who are:

1) white,
2) "pretty" and/or "well dressed"
3) thinner than average (which is a size 14 btw), and
4) read as gender-conforming.

Recently I was in a coffeeshop and the barista didn't look at me when taking my order and said as few words as possible to me. Then someone that was all four of those things came up to the register and the barista turned on the charm like a light switch.

I am ALWAYS friendly to service workers because I know how shitty it is to have to perform for people who don't return any of that energy. So I try to bring some and give some. I always smile, I always tip, I always give them my full attention. So I know it wasn't a reaction to me. Especially because the next person was mostly talking to their friend.

I don't think the barista had anything against me -- I think I just didn't register as a real person because I am fat, dress weird, and have a very assertive way of carrying myself (not gender-conforming).

For me the biggest change in how strangers treat me happened when I shaved my head. All of a sudden, when I smiled at white strangers they did NOT smile back. I never got casual smiles from white strangers of any age or gender when my hair was very short. (However, black women strangers smiled at me and even complimented my haircut on multiple occasions.)

I still am not sure why a buzz cut would have this much effect on how people treat me, but it really made me think about how much more effort it is to be in public when people look at you with a blank face, or stare. Every single time that happens it sucks away some energy.

And I think about this whenever I see children of color. I notice when older white people smile at young white children and look away or even frown at young children of color just for existing. I don't usually smile at strangers but if a child of color looks at me in a friendly or curious way I do smile. I don't want to be a dead staring face that saps some of their energy.

Holy fuck the 4th episode of Shrill had me absolutely sobbing with joy. Bodies that look like mine, dancing and swimming and just happily existing in bathing suits and not a goddamn skirted 1-piece in sight.

If you have never been fat and you have hulu, please watch this show. It is literally the only show I have ever seen with multiple fat people in it and where being fat is never a joke and the usual trope of fetishizing food or eating a lot is not present. It's so goddamn real.


I'm so fucking annoyed with the piece of shit boyfriend but also that is such an important story to tell because I did that, and for similar reasons. I put up with greedy, selfish, useless, entitled fuckwads because for so many years it literally did not occur to me that I could say "no" to something my datefriend wanted. I felt like I had to make up for my "inferior" body by accommodating their every whim and soothing their every uncomfortable feeling. And this idea was so deeply embedded that I didn't realize I was thinking it until after I had stopped doing it. While I was doing it I could not recognize it.

Also I don't know if non-fat people would get this, but in the second scene of the first episode, when the barista and customer say that she reminds them of Rosie O'Donnell, that is almost as bad as the overt harassment. It says that the only thing they see is "fat woman." It was a second cut-down by people who were trying to be nice, and for me that hurts so much more. It is worse when people are trying to be nice and they reveal themselves as so ignorant and alienated from your experience that they accidentally stab you.

I don't like that the main character gets so self-involved that she doesn't listen to her friends' needs. I feel like this is a trope when fat (or fat-ish) femme characters start to assert themselves and value their own needs and I think it comes from the writers not actually knowing any people who go from full-time-comfort-blanket to actual-human-who-still-cares.

Every time I go to the gym, I am by far the fattest femme there and usually the fattest person, as well as the only one in a skirt. I feel like I am doing important work because if I was not me, and I saw someone my size and shape doing weight training in a skirt, it would encourage me and make me feel like I belong and like it is okay to be there. I want other femmes and fat people to feel empowered to take up space in a gym. Yesterday I did have a femme person come up and compliment me on my skirt, which made me happy. I'm worried that I gave them a "back the fuck off" look before they said that though because staff members keep on bothering me about it.

On my second visit to the gym one of the workers came and told me I couldn't work out in a skirt. The skirt fell to slightly below my knees: definitely long enough for "modesty" without being so long that it might create risk of tripping, and stretchy with no buttons or zippers to get caught on anything. I probably got an "I will FIGHT you" look on my face because it got my anti-discrimination hackles up. I was thinking of all the femmes who wouldn't feel able to talk back and would be effectively banned from weight training by this sexist bullshit, and all the people who don't have workout-specific clothes and can't afford to go buy them.

I asked to talk to their supervisor and when two tall barbie and ken people came over (seriously I was like "what is this, a surfer movie?") I said "this IS my athletic wear: I only wear skirts" (the worker was silent, probly embarrassed). Then ken said "well you can't have your midriff showing because of our rules about no skin on machines due to sweat" so I said I would pull my skirt up higher to cover the 1 inch strip of my belly that was showing, and did so. Then I returned to my workout.

It was a bullshit thing to enforce on me because many people in the room were wearing tiny shorts that were basically underwear and sleeveless racerback tops where their whole shoulderblades showed: they definitely had more skin touching the equipment. The worker who initially told me my skirt wasn't athletic wear didn't mention to the supervisors that that was what they meant, so we didn't even discuss that. Which was lucky for them cause I was ready to spend the whole night arguing.

Then the next week (last week) a different worker came over and told me I couldn't wear a skirt, and then called down their manager (2 steps up heirarchy wise), who I had the same argument with. They told me it was in the policy and I said no, skirts aren't mentioned (fact) and every argument they made I refuted but they kept on saying that it's against policy. Finally something seemed to get through and they said that I should email them and they would look in to getting the policy changed. This show of respect broke my self-illusion that this issue didn't affect me personally and I lost the ability to speak and left as quickly as I could because I knew an anxiety meltdown was imminent.

I went to the locker room and sobbed for a while, struggling to calm myself. Two people at different times talked to me and asked if they could help, and I said no it's anxiety and I just need to gather myself and focus on breathing to calm down. I was touched that they expressed concern and them asking what they could do reminded me of what I could do (breathing) so it did help indirectly.

After I gathered myself I went out to the weight room again and asked for the email address of the manager, they gave it to me and the following day I sent this (the binary language is so that there is less for them to argue with):


Good afternoon [managers name],

You spoke with me yesterday and invited me to email you with my concerns after one of the staff interrupted my workout to tell me that my clothing was not acceptable.  Despite there being no mention of skirts in the policy (as defined here: [link to policies] ), my wearing a skirt has resulted in staff interrupting me multiple times to discuss whether or not it was acceptable.

My inclination is to just obey because I just want to work out in peace and it is very difficult for me to deal with these confrontations with staff.  But I can't in good conscience do that because this unspoken -- yet rigorously enforced -- skirt policy disproportionately affects women, particularly poor women. 

To restrict femme clothing and require pants or shorts excludes women who

1) do not own pants or shorts other than work pants (jeans / khakis / zippered pants) and can't afford to go out and buy them;

2) are modest and thus uncomfortable with displaying their legs all the way up to the crotch;

3) have body dysmorphia or dysphoria which make the exposure of pants a prohibitive barrier;

4) are religiously devout and wear skirts as part of their religious practice;

5) are fat and have a difficult time finding shorts/pants which fit (skirts are much easier);

and most likely women in additional situations which I can’t readily imagine.

You said that it was a safety hazard because my skirt might get caught in machines, but this is not true.  I am happy to try out every type of machine in the room while you watch so that you can see what I know from years of wearing skirts: as long as they are at least 8 inches above the ankle, it is practically impossible for them to get caught in the spokes of an exercise bike wheel. Skirts that are approximately knee-length do not get in the way of working out. There is no valid safety argument here, particularly given that loose pants are not banned and fabric around the ankle is far more likely to get caught in a machine.

In an environment which is already highly masculinized, putting additional financial and emotional burdens on women will result in women not participating; they will be excluded by default.  A no-skirts policy is plainly discriminatory. I propose that the clothing policy be amended to state that skirts worn must be at least 8 inches above the ankle to keep them from getting caught in any machines.  That should cover any actual safety issue while also making it clear to staff that any skirt that is shorter than mid-calf is acceptable.

I hope to hear back from you very soon on this matter.

Regards,
[my name and workplace]

Then I went in to the gym and spotted the manager, who nodded and waved me over to follow to their office, which I did. They then said they had been expecting an email, and I told them that I just sent one a bit ago, so they read it while I sat there so that I didn't have to say it all again. They were nodding a lot while reading (I watched out of the corner of my eye) and afterward they said that they totally agree and that they have made religious exemptions before so it is not an absolute rule. They said they will take my name off it for anonymity and send it to the director and get it discussed and that until it is settled I can wear my usual skirts. Then they gave me their card and went and talked to the workers so that no one would bother me.

I had initially interpreted them in a very negative light but now I'm realizing that that might have been due to my anxiety. I think they genuinely do agree that it is the right thing to do and will advocate for it. I hope this policy gets changed but I am pretty sure their bosses are old white men who want to discourage women from working out, so we'll see. I have title 9 (anti-sexism mandate) in my corner since this facility receives federal funds (I didn't mention it in the email because I was trying to be less hostile in tone).

If they end up not changing the policy, I'm gonna get a bunch of skorts and femmme the fuck out of them with fabric paint.

Early spring last year my biodad, who owns the house in which I live, threatened to kick me out if I couldn't pay an unreasonable amount of rent, so I told him I was going to move out as soon as possible. After he tried to rent it to my cousin and she flaked out, he seemed to come to his senses since the house is not in rentable condition to any unrelated person. He sent me an email with a proposal of me covering the house expenses. I proposed some amendments on the methods and included that they can't come visit without at least 2 weeks notice, they can't go through my stuff, etc and he agreed. I also said that they need to respect my need for calls to be scheduled, and they have mostly done that, with the exception of my birthday. While it is not a pleasant thing for me to get an unscheduled call ever, I can understand and forgive the impulse there.

He also included this, in the hyper-formal fashion typical of his writing:

"Also, I have given careful thought to your name.  [Your maternal grandfather] was faced with the prospect that one of his daughters decided not to use her birth name and replaced it with a name of her choice.  Her birth name was [birthname] and her newly chosen name was [chosen name].  Mr. [maternal grandfather] honored her decision and called her [chosen name].

     I am no better than [maternal grandfather's full name], my kinsman and father, and I will follow his example, if required.  If you ask me to refer to you as James, I will honor your request.  Simply ask.

     My name, however, is [M], to the whole world except my children.  I request that my children refer to me as Daddy or Dad.  You only have one daddy and his days are numbered.  This is my request."

So I agreed to call him Dad, which I hadn't ever done (I went right from "Daddy" to his first name). I feel doubtful that he respects my name when talking about me to others, but I'm trying to use "Dad" more in my head so it doesn't feel so weird and uncomfortable.

He came in town to visit a relative who is sick (someone I don't know) and before planning that trip he asked if he could stay at my house. He did a great job of checking in and not using pressuring or controlling language, so I said yes, and I offered to take a day off to spend it with him.

He finished his trip to the sick family member and his longtime mentor and arrived at my house on Sunday. He bought himself some groceries before arriving, and we sat on the front porch to have dinner together. He asked if it was okay to reheat meat in my house (I'm a vegetarian) and I said yes -- amazed that he thought to ask, and that it seemed like a real question. We had dinner and a thoughtful conversation -- which was a little one-sided as he talked a LOT but listening takes less work for me most of the time so I was okay with it. When he seemed to not listen I pointed it out and he paused and listened.

Yesterday was the day I took off to spend with him, and it was a good day, overall. We had breakfast together, went to a park I love and took a long walk, and then went to dinner. I gave him a book about trees that I had been thinking of mailing him, and he actually looked at it and smiled and said he thought he would enjoy it. Love of trees is one thing we share, though he cannot let the subject pass without emphasizing that he is fine with cutting trees that need to be cut because they lean dangerously or whatever. Every. Single. Time. we talk about trees he says that. I get it, okay? I'm not about to criticize you for loving then too much so enough with the preemptive defensiveness! I feel for him about it though.

When we got back we loaded up the paper recycling for him to take in his truck, and while I know he wanted to complain that there was so much cardboard (he thinks its dirty to keep it around) he didn't complain or pressure, and even verbally assured me that he didn't want to do anything but complete the chore for me. In the past he would have said "this has got to go. I'm going to load it up, come help me." So he was doing remarkably well with being respectful.

We talked a lot which was so exhausting because he twists himself in knots sometimes to avoid saying things which don't actually need to be avoided, and he is stubbornly wrong about almost anything to do with social justice. But I finally said something that got through yesterday when he was talking about how he doesn't trust or like cops and how they're assholes to him and he thinks its not about race.

I told him that maybe the cops who harass are all assholes who would prefer to treat everyone like shit, but they expect, looking at a white man, that there is a greater chance of him having powerful friends. An asshole cop still doesn't want to get in trouble so he is going to take out his shittiness on the people he guesses as the least powerful. Dad told me "you just said something powerful there" and agreed that that would be a consideration for cops. I thought to myself "not any less powerful or true than the other things I have said but somehow this didn't get caught on your defenses."

This is why I talk back to privileged ignorance every time I have the chance. This was like the third time we had the same conversation in one day, and I tried something slightly different and this time I got through. There are little cracks in everybody's privilege that can bring understanding, but the only way to find those cracks is to push against their privilege over and over and over in different spots.

do you consider your own sexuality fluid? If so, how has it changed over time? Regardless, how did you come to discover and embrace your sexual identity(ies)?

I think my sexuality has always been the same, but my experience and understanding of it has evolved. When I was a teenager, I was so restricted from knowledge about sexuality that I identified as straight despite the fact that I had more than twice as many sex dreams about girls as I did about boys (and I didn't know any other kind of person existed). It literally did not occur to me that I could be anything other than straight, because I wasn't lacking in crushes on boys. I don't think I even heard the word bisexual until I was in college.

How is this possible? Well, I was in private christian schools until 4th grade, when I went to public school for one year before being homeschooled 5th to 10th. The internet was still a toddler (google didn't exist until I was in ninth grade and didn't become really useful until a few years later), my house didn't have cable tv, and I wasn't allowed to socialize outside of school, except with people who lived as restrictedly as I did (and even with them, only once or twice a month). I had only books to teach me about relationships, and there were no queer people in them.

I think it was actually Angelina Jolie who taught me the concept of bisexual and the concept of genderfucking, via quotes people shared about Jolie on livejournal. "Honestly, I like everything, boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny." Reading that quote was my first time relating to anyone who expressed attraction! and still, there are very few who feel this way, because even among people who don't identify as monosexual, most people don't consider genderfucking people or fat people to be attractive. We look "weird" or "wrong" to the average person due to sexist and cis-sexist assumptions.

It was a few years after I learned what bisexuality was that I came to identify as bisexual, because I was strongly influenced by the popular cultural myth that unless you had experiences with men and women, you couldn't identify as bisexual. I would guess that at about age 21 I learned that bisexual people exist and at 23 I began identifying as bisexual. At about age 25 I learned that non-binary people exist and changed my self-label to queer to make it clear that I liked non-binary people too. This was before bisexual people queered the definition of bisexual to its current meaning of "attracted to people of 1) my own and 2) other genders."

A few years later, age 28 I realized that I was trans and non-binary, which further complicated my sexual identity as most ideas of identity start with who you are -- for instance men who are attracted to men are called gay while women who are attracted to men are called straight. Fortunately, "queer" is an umbrella term that always means "not hetero" and otherwise can mean pretty much anything.

Despite identifying as bisexual and queer since age 23, it took me until age 30 to feel sure that I was right about my identity. Even though I had had a number of romantic and sexual relationships with non-men, there's this attitude among mainstream gays that until you've done certain sex acts or had 'primary' relationships with people who were assigned the same sex as you, you don't 'count' as queer. The sexuality-policing heterocentrism is as common and intense among binary gay people as it is among binary straight people. We should be able to claim our identities without having to perform, just like straight people who have never had sex do. But it is a struggle.

It was a few years after I began identifying as queer when I learned what asexual meant, but like with bisexual, I came across a very restrictive definition and it took a while before I even learned the word demisexual. I had to work up my courage to claiming that label as well, because while it is true that I need to feel emotionally intimate to begin to feel sexual attraction, I had a period in my life where that wasn't always true, so I had to deconstruct a binary to claim my demisexual identity. I was 30 when I finally claimed this part of my identity.

When I was a kid, a teen, and a young adult I didn't know what I was, because I didn't have words for it. Once I learned the words, in every case I had to unlearn the shitty gate-keeping definitions in order to claim my identity. When you think you are cis, straight, and allosexual (having an average or high sex drive), society will never pressure you with "are you SURE?" or "but WHY are you that way?" -- you just get affirmed as who you are. If you are not those things (especially if you are trans), you have to be more sure than you have ever been because people will question you and invalidate you constantly.

As you can tell by the fact that it took me three decades to learn who I am, representation is vital. I have seen trans people on tv now but they're never asexual, rarely non-binary, and usually straight. Maybe two characters that I have seen in my life are queer and non-binary (Vex from Lost Girl and Nomi from Sense8) and that is only a guess as their identity is never mentioned and they use typical gendered pronouns -- and both are shown as highly sexual. If I had ever seen a character like me on screen I would have instantly known "that's me!" but instead I had to fumble in the dark and each time I found a part of my identity it was taken away several times before I got a permanent hold on it. If I had had an example, that would never have happened.

Straight, cis, allosexual people should have their identities questioned at least by their intimate people (parents, best friends, lovers) to help them understand themselves and to increase their empathy with people who are not like them. Queer, trans, and asexual/demisexual people should be questioned less often in general and NEVER by non-intimate people. The same as you wouldn't ask someone who you're not intimate with about what they discuss in therapy or what they like in sex, you don't ask them why they identify the way they do. That is demanding a vulnerability from them that you have not earned the right to ask. If you feel like you need to know their why in order to accept their identity as legitimate, that's due to your ignorance and cis-sexism and you need to do some serious self-examining.

There was so much sci-fi and fantasy that I loved as a child that now reads as blatantly exoticizing, stereotyping, oppressively gendering, horridly ableist, fatphobic, and/or overtly white supremacist (Tolkein, Lewis) now that I am an adult educated on those things. It's strong enough that I don't re-read books because I don't want to ruin child me's experience. Some I cringe even thinking about re-reading.

But then I am reminded that authors like Cj Cherryh still have fan interactions and sometimes even listen to criticism. Maybe I have a responsibility to reach out to my estranged literary parents. I can't do a lot because I have so many other responsibilities, but maybe I can make it a goal to read one new book by an old favorite author (who is still alive) each year, review it with my current understanding and share that with the author.

Unfortunately a lot of them have died, but here is the list of still-alive favorite authors of pre-consciousness me that I have thought of so far:

Piers Anthony (this one I just can't ever read again. too pro-rape. AVOID. None of his pluses are worth the constant pro-rape thread in all of his work. I stopped reading this shitwad before I even discovered feminism)
CJ Cherryh
Alan Dean Foster
Terry Brooks
Tad Williams
Elizabeth Anne Scarborough
Sharon Shinn
Sarah Isidore
Emma Bull
Nick O'Donohoe
Kaaron Warren
Rebecca Lickiss
Louise Marley
Rachel Pollack

And more recent favs which still should be critically examined:
Stephen Leigh
Joan Slonczewski

This is a looong term project so we'll see if I manage or not.

a question asked of me anonymously via sarahah: "Is it, or under what circumstances is it, fatphobic to congratulate someone on weight loss?"

Yes, it is always fatphobic to "congratulate" someone on weight loss or more accurately, size loss. First, it is never appropriate to comment on someone's bodily changes unless they have commented on it to you in a way that communicates their feelings about it and opens the space for you to comment also. Don't assume that anyone decreased in size on purpose. Don't assume that anyone is happy about decreasing in size. Don't assume that it is okay for you to comment on someone's body.

If someone tells you about their size loss in a way that shows they did it on purpose and they are happy about it, it is appropriate to make a positive comment. You can say something like "I am so happy you feel more comfortable in your skin now" or to express happiness for them about the positive causes or effects of this size loss. This is simply emphathizing with their feelings and there is nothing wrong with it.

Congratulating them, on the other hand, implies

--- CN: fat-phobic ideas, this paragraph ---

that size loss is inherently a positive*, admirable* experience achievable* through hard work and perseverance, which is wrong, wrong, and WRONG. When people use nutrient-poor restrictive diets to lose size, this almost always causes health problems: this is not positive, even if they get the look they want for a short time. As for admirable, it is no more admirable than buying a new outfit. Changing your look is a personal decision and just like you wouldn't say congratulations if someone got a new haircut, you don't say congratulations when someone loses size.

--- end CN ---

Most of the factors that determine size are out of the control of a person, and size loss is mostly an accident or a fluke. Your body will return to what it is genetically comfortable with. Many people can achieve some form of athleticism but that does not usually mean a great size change. Fat bodies can be very athletic just as thin bodies can be very un-athletic, and your body thickness is almost as genetically determined as your height. Is it appropriate to congratulate someone for growing taller? no, because it is not an achievement. Size loss is not an achievement, it is merely a change.

( TW/CN: Aziz Ansari's sexually coercive behavior )

Also highly relevant to this discussion:

the feigning ignorance consent violation tactic: if they care, they change their behavior. TW: rape

Why making it safe & comfortable to say 'no' is as necessary as respecting a plainly-stated 'no'

Some facts:
1) Eating farmed meat is bad for the environment because it is usually done in a way that is an unsustainable overuse of resources.
2) Being vegan can actually be worse for the environment than not, due to the way a vegan diet uses land and the way that vegan substitutes such as almond milk are created.
3) Eating lots of meat can be bad for your health, but eating no meat and/or no animal products (eggs, dairy) can be even worse, due to lack of vital nutrients found primarily in meat and animal products.
4) Being in control of your own diet is a privilege that many poor people do not have, and it is unethical and cruel to tell them to cut necessary nutrients out of their diet whem they have no alternative way to get them.

I went vegetarian in April 2009, when it was first pointed out to me that even if you only consider water use, meat is an extremely resource-wasteful food. I was worried that I wouldn't be able to function without it, so I kept it a secret for 6 months so that if I failed, only I would know about it. I was able to maintain my energy levels without eating meat, so I didn't eat meat from then on.

It wasn't until April 2014, five years later, that I accidentally realized that I had a massive nutritional deficiency. I was on tumblr and saw a necklace with a molecule that the artist referred to as "memory." Since my memory had been getting exponentially worse over the past few years, I looked up this molecule, acetylcholine. I learned that a major building block of memory is choline, also called b-11, which is obtained through eating meat, especially fatty meats such as beef and pork. I have never really eaten pork, and quit eating beef years before because I didn't like the taste. However there is enough of it in meat in general that I probably wasn't deficient until I went vegetarian.

I immediately ordered choline supplements, and when I started taking them I saw a jump in my mental capacity. When I ran out I noticed it even more as without it my mind was slow and stuttery and constantly forgetting. I have been on a high dose since then. I have since learned that all medications for dementia that are currently used in the US work on choline. This affirmed what I already knew, that choline is incredibly vital for cognition. Further, eating fat with choline is necessary for good absorption, so a low-fat diet can create the same problems as a no-meat diet.

Now you can get enough choline in your diet without meat or supplements but the primary sources are going to be animal products such as eggs (2-3 eggs a day will do it) and dairy (whole milk, cheese, yogurt). Otherwise the amount of veggies, legumes, and/or beans you would need to eat daily to get the right amount of protein and nutrients is so extreme the vast majority of people would not be able to do it. I love spinach more than most but I'm not going to eat a pound of it every day. If you are not a nutritionist and meal planner, not able to hire a nutritionist and meal planner, and not able to spend hours and hours essentially learning to be those things, you can't eat vegan and be healthy, in my opinion. The problem is that deficiencies show up very slowly, so you're not going to notice them until they're pretty bad.

The other main nutritional deficiency I developed was for amino acids. I didn't know these are primarily sourced in meat, because nobody seems to have ever accounted for vegetarians in any of the nutritional literature I could find. I discovered my deficiency because after one outbreak of herpes 5 years ago, I had another in February 2016, and then I had another in March, and another in April. This was really weird because usually they increase in time between re-occurrence. So I started taking lysine supplements daily, and I haven't had an outbreak since.

However it didn't occur to me to look into other amino acids until a few months ago, when I realized I needed to supplement for histidine, phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, methionine, isoleucine & leucine as well (your body can't produce these). Fortunately some of these are easily available in full-fat dairy such as whole milk and cheddar cheese. For the ones that are not, and to be sure I am getting enough, I also ordered dried egg powder that I can mix into my morning protein shake. It has a good amount of all of them, it doesn't taste bad, and I found what seemed to me to be an ethical source.

If you are not prepared and able to buy and take supplements every day I would encourage you NOT to go vegetarian but simply to reduce the amount of meat you eat. Most US people eat more than they need: you only need an amount that is about the size of a deck of cards each day, and less than that if you eat other sources of protein -- and most people don't need meat every single day, so maybe skip one day a week. But when you do have it, please eat it with a fat so that you can properly absorb the choline.

(also, if there is ANYTHING that you eat a lot of on a daily basis, I urge you to look up its effects, especially if your hormones are sensitive. A lot of people suggest soy as a source of vegan protein, but it will disrupt your hormones so unless you need more estrogen I do not recommend it. I think eating soy every day for a year and a half contributed to one of the worst depressions I have ever experienced. Soy is getting to be well-known for increasing estrogen, but flaxseed, sesame seeds, and chickpeas have similar effects -- flaxseed to a much higher degree than soy.)

I will never go vegan because I find it difficult to eat as it is, and without eggs and dairy I would have to spend so much more time researching, shopping for, and preparing food. I would end up going hungry much of the time, I wouldn't be able to ever eat enough to get all my needed nutrients, and it would harm my health. And if I became poor again I would have to stop, and adjusting back to animal products would be hellish until I built up my microbial communities again.

If you do go vegan, please consider the environmental and human costs as well as the cost to animals. For example, I consider it far more ethical to drink local animal milk than to drink almond milk sourced from California almonds, since California is in drought and should not be producing such a water-greedy crop. When I looked it up, cashew and pea-protein milk are both more gentle on the environment, so you may want to look into those.

Another important consideration is that many farms which produce vegan imitations of dairy and meat products do not treat their human workers with dignity or offer safe working conditions, and these bad conditions disproportionately affect people of color, women, and children. So if you choose to be a vegan to reduce the suffering of living beings, you have an obligation to look into the sources of your food so that you're not simply shifting the suffering onto humans who do not have your privilege.

What are the parts of your identity that you have labels for? (list and then define)

Part 2: my soul parts. These are parts of my identity that relate to my purpose n the world and the way I interact with it.

My soul identites: consent advocate, communalist, social justice activist, polyamorous / relationship anarchist, creativity catalyst, Southern / ATLien, tree-hugger, vegetarian, nudist.

consent advocate

This is a big damn deal to me. Most people are really bad at consent because we live in a rape culture. I try to model good consent at every opportunity and I am very demanding of myself not to ever be careless with consent. Why making it safe & comfortable to say 'no' is as necessary as respecting 'no' I don't separate people into rapists and not-rapists, but rather into a spectrum of good at consent to bad at consent, with rapist as a separate category for people who knowingly make a choice to cross someone else's sexual boundary and people who sexually violate others due to not bothering to check what they want. People who do their best not to be a rapist can still be bad at consent! Everyone has to unlearn rape culture. how to be careful w sexual consent: discuss meaning, risk, safeword, triggers, roles, acts, sobriety, needs

communalist

This is what I call my radical anti-capitalist attitude toward money and other shareable resources. I share my resources; I give a portion of every paycheck to resist inequality and support oppressed people; I speak out against economic inequality; I consider the economic cost within my own relationships and events and do what I can to balance them.

social justice activist

I resist oppression and work to bring justice wherever I can. I call myself an activist rather than ally because to me, ally is passive: someone who will not attack you nor overtly support oppressors. I consider being an activist to be about taking action, first in self-educating, then in doing what you can where you are with what you have. More than anything else, social justice is about considering the meaning and impact of all my choices and trying to create the least harm and the most good.

polyamorous/relationship anarchist

I am polyamorous: for me this means being open to multiple simultaneous romantic relationships. More specifically I identify as a relationship anarchist because I will not make rules or commitments designed to protect the relationship at the cost of the individuals. My relationship anarchy: we each only do what we want / my intentions & desires in all connections

creativity catalyst

I feel that true creativity is sacred, that every human is capable of it (and many other animals are also), and that we need more of it in the world. I try to encourage this both indirectly through my example, (such as by painting on my car and customizing my companion objects) and directly by sharing my creative materials and methods, affirming when people are creative, and resisting when people are derogatory toward art based on its lack of technical skill or for other elitist bullshit reasons. I have catalyzed art in many people even if it was just once or twice, and I want to do it much more. I have needed art catalysts in my life and I want to be that thing that I need to exist in the world.

Southern / ATLien

I love Atlanta deeply. A lot of people from other places have this idea that the South is all anti-queer anti-justice tradition-enforcers, but they are flat wrong, as you can tell if you look at any objective measurement. Atlanta, Georgia's capital, has the second highest percentage of self-identified lgbtqia people in the United States, at about 13%.

The best explanation I have ever heard was from a black queer southern woman who said "southerners are just like everyone else, only more so." Here, the bigots are loud, but so are the activists. I would say the majority of southern people I have known are not fence-sitters. You can pretty easily figure out if we are with you or against you, and I vastly prefer that to completely covert prejudice.

I also consider Atlanta and Georgia to be my responsibility in a "take care of your own house" kind of way. I will not abandon it to go somewhere that might be more friendly to me and people like me; I will stay here and make it better.

And I identify with Georgia specifically because of our trees. No other place I have been has had so many trees, and Atlanta's nickname is the City in a Forest. I treasure and worship trees and love that Georgia has so many.

tree-hugger

I mean this literally and figuratively. Literally, I love trees more than almost anyone I know (I only come in second to a professional tree-lover: a botanist/naturalist who has catalogued hundreds of trees in Atlanta and Georgia). I read about them and practice identifying them for fun, I connect with them on a deep level and almost all my travel desires are about trees I want to meet. Figuratively, I try to create as little waste as possible by reducing the waste I create, reusing as much as possible, and recycling carefully.

vegetarian

I am a vegetarian because it takes much more resources to raise animals than to raise plants. It is also very very expensive to eat ethically raised or wild-caught animals and I just don't like meat enough to try and keep meat-processing microbes alive in my body, but neither do I want to contribute to harm caused to animals by buying from unethical sources. HOWEVER this is not about right/wrong, it is about reduction of harm. Why I am vegetarian but do not recommend it for everyone and why I won't ever go vegan.

I have learned the hard way how to supplement and if someone can't afford $50 a month in supplements as well as healthy proteins, they can't afford to be vegetarian. And being vegan can be bad for the planet in a lot of ways and is not a nutritionally sound choice for the vast majority of people, since you need either a lot of spare time and research skills or to hire a nutritionist to know how to supplement all the needed nutrients.

nudist

Simply put, I hate being forced to wear clothes and if I could get away with it I would be naked all the time except when it was cold or for occasional dress-up. I reject the idea that nudity is sexual; for me, it is simply the default human state.

If you describe someone as fat in conjunction with telling a story that has nothing to do with their size, you're fatphobic and that's fuckin gross. If you use words that imply someone or someone's body part is too large (like huge or massive), you're fatphobic and that's fuckin gross.

Way too often, someone supposedly pro-justice tells a story about a privileged shitwad & uses that person's fatness against them, to start people out disliking the person. It is unacceptable to encourage people to judge others as morally evil because they are fat.

I feel that my mental experience is as much a part of my life as my physical experience; my dreams, my daydreams, my by-proxy experience through imaginative absorption, all create me as much as my physical experiences do. Since my mental experience is something I have a lot of control over, I am very selective about the media I consume -- especially media that is new to me. I was gonna explain books, movies, music, and tv shows, but this is a much more extensive topic than I thought so I guess I'm doing this as a series, starting with books.

I will not purchase a book written by a default (straight cis nondisabled white man) or read it unless it is really, really exceptional. Out of the books I have chosen to read in the past seven years, I have read no more than one book by a default each year, probably fewer. I read easily hundreds of books by defaults in my childhood and I'm going to balance that out. Also, they just tend to be terrible, full of stuff that is either ethically terrible and/or the imaginative equivalent of a bowl of oatmeal. That criteria rules out probably at least 70% of books published in English.

Also, I will not read a fiction book written with a default main character, or about someone who spends the book pining over a default, or about anyone whose primary yearning is a romantic relationship. I'm including the nominally-different who act exactly like a default because the author hasn't bothered to learn perspective-taking. I will not read any patriarchy-affirming gendered bullshit. There better be at least a little bit of criticism of gender roles, and no rape unless it is approached in a truly honest and meaningful way, with no rape myths in the method or motive. And it must be first-person: do NOT use it to show the empathy in your main character while the victim is a mere cardboard cut-out with no other story. I will not read white savior or "my whole planet just happens to be white" books, or books that have more dark characters in antagonist roles than in protagonist roles. I will not read ableist-trope shit where disabled people are saints or demons. All this stuff is really really common.

My preferences for fiction (none of which are ALL true in a given book but the more it has, the more I like it):
- themes of non-human, non-humanoid sentience, especially plant, fungi, and microbe sentience.
- characters who vary widely in appearance, ways of thinking, emotive patterns, and cultural norms.
- unique worldbuilding that gives me new ways to imagine.
- characters who connect to each other in an unusual way.
- resistance to an oppressive regime (with enough magic/revenge/joy to balance it out).
- magic, if it is a unique system or a system that feels similar to how I experience it.
- extended metaphor and/or satire.
- characters who grow noticeably.
- any gender concept that is not some variant of binary ruler/ruled.
- retold fairy tales & myths, especially if they're sinister and gritty.
- not fat-phobic and doesn't reinforce ableist ideas about cognition or mental illness etc (sadly this one is a preference because some of my favorite writers who fulfill almost all my other criteria fail this one, but at least they do it rarely enough that I can just scribble out the lines on those pages).

As for non-fiction, I am unlikely to read anything about spiritual practice written by a white person, and decidedly will not read it if the practice they're discussing belongs to a non-white culture or was stolen from multiple cultures. We committed so much spiritual genocide (on top of physical genocide) that I think we need to spend at least 12 generations doing nothing but learning, and frankly most white people package up colonialist capitalist attitudes in shiny new phrases and sell them to make a shitton of money. I will not contribute to that and I don't want any of that shit in my head. Further, in any kind of book that gives advice no matter what the topic, it better fucking be concrete actions you can take without needing money, or it's useless. The author better have actually followed the advice and benefited from it.

Non-fiction that claims to be fact is held to my highest standard. I don't check the author status here, I check the references. In science books, I want a FAT section of references and every single one better fucking have decent experimental design. Don't understand statistics? don't write a book about science, because you can't tell a good study from a bad one and your opinion is not reliable enough for other people to approach it as fact. If you're writing about social science and you reference structural functionalism in any way other than as a debunked and ridiculous attempt by defaults to justify and maintain power, you're a fuckin quack.

Preferences for non-fiction:
- in autobiographies, I want to know how things felt and how the author solved problems. I want to feel like I am reading a journal, and like I am vicariously experiencing things I can learn from and apply to my own life.
- in dense matter, I want short chapters with visual space to help me take my time.

I started 2016 with a lot of hope. In January I connected a lot with Kylei, Sande, and Hannah; I had two graduation parties and started making more plans to spend time with people, and I started meditating weekly-ish with Elizabeth. But by the end of January I ended up in a dark crash over how little I felt connected to people. The beginning of February was a little better -- I got to go to Big Trees with some of my favorite people, and Topaz hosted Heather's birthday which was also nourishing and fun. But then I went to a party at Kylei's and had a terrible anxiety crash which ended up leaking into the next day and causing a horrifically painful miscommunication with Topaz. Later that month I went to the activist meet-and-greet for the first time after meaning to go for ages, and met three awesome new people. But just introducing myself made my heart beat painfully hard. At the end of February I asked my psychiatrist to prescribe me anxiety meds and start being medicated for that for the first time.

In March I did a lot of social -- met with four friends as well as with my ex-mother-in-law. I also began a four-week break with Topaz, in an effort to re-set our relationship which had become too central for both of us. In April I had two tinder fails (one flaked and the other I could hardly talk with), made a new friend, hosted a crafty party and a cuddly communion, spent time with Roger and Serenity, and went to Euphoria where I gave a talk on intimacy and made a game with it. (yeah I'd say that the anxiety meds were helping!) In May I spent a lot of time with Serenity and Evelyn, hosted a cuddly communion, spent time with Katie, Allison, Serra, and Indie, and wrote a lot of important posts. In June I spent lots of time with Serenity, presented at APW and SFQP, hung out with Arizona, Sande, Allison, Kylei, Evelyn, and Cass, and had a truth-or-truth videochat with LJ friends, as well as writing a lot of important posts.

In July stuff started getting very stressful -- Topaz went through something really traumatic, Kanika had a medical emergency and I had to take her to the vet, my little sister came in town unexpectedly, and I ran out of money and had to start begging from my bioparents. But also I spent lots of good time with Serenity and had several gathers -- two with my lil sis, also Katie, Allison, Hannah, Kylei, Elliott, Evelyn, Sande, Cass, and even Adi, so that part was positive. But August brought a lot of painful stuff for Topaz, was when I ran out of ADD meds with no access to a doctor, and was the last time I saw Evelyn for months. Roger and Allison were supportive and helpful, and I went to a SONG membership meeting which gave me hope like nothing else except for TBC ever has.

September I got a job at Starbux and finally started getting call backs and interviews for a few of the hundreds of applications I had sent. My awful bioparents also invaded my house and stayed for a month, harassing me about money, rearranging my stuff and throwing some of it away without my permission, invading my bedroom, and being transphobic. October was mostly filled up with my awful bioparents and working at Starbux but at the very end I began doing LJ Idol again. In November things got still worse -- Evelyn officially broke things off with me and Kylei blew up at me and told me we can't be friends. Then later that month Evelyn invited me to a party at their house which ended up being an emotional disaster. I quit Starbux for my new job.

December was a very mixed bag. I started my new job, which was amazing; I got a new psychiatrist and finally got medicated for ADD again; I got to spend time with Arizona, Felix, Felix's people Blaire and Shay, Allison, Jonathan, Heather, Brian, Jessica, and my little sister. But also, my grandmother died and I had to spend time with my awful biofamily, and I was so emotionally drained that I couldn't really enjoy Solstice. It was also a sad reminder of my estrangement from Kylei and Evelyn, because I wanted them at Solstice so much.

( detailed events )

I started 2016 with a lot of hope. In January I connected a lot with Kylei, Sande, and Hannah; I had two graduation parties and started making more plans to spend time with people, and I started meditating weekly-ish with Elizabeth. But by the end of January I ended up in a dark crash over how little I felt connected to people. The beginning of February was a little better -- I got to go to Big Trees with some of my favorite people, and Topaz hosted Heather's birthday which was also nourishing and fun. But then I went to a party at Kylei's and had a terrible anxiety crash which ended up leaking into the next day and causing a horrifically painful miscommunication with Topaz. Later that month I went to the activist meet-and-greet for the first time after meaning to go for ages, and met three awesome new people. But just introducing myself made my heart beat painfully hard. At the end of February I asked my psychiatrist to prescribe me anxiety meds and start being medicated for that for the first time.

In March I did a lot of social -- met with four friends as well as with my ex-mother-in-law. I also began a four-week break with Topaz, in an effort to re-set our relationship which had become too central for both of us. In April I had two tinder fails (one flaked and the other I could hardly talk with), made a new friend, hosted a crafty party and a cuddly communion, spent time with Roger and Serenity, and went to Euphoria where I gave a talk on intimacy and made a game with it. (yeah I'd say that the anxiety meds were helping!) In May I spent a lot of time with Serenity and Evelyn, hosted a cuddly communion, spent time with Katie, Allison, Serra, and Indie, and wrote a lot of important posts. In June I spent lots of time with Serenity, presented at APW and SFQP, hung out with Arizona, Sande, Allison, Kylei, Evelyn, and Cass, and had a truth-or-truth videochat with LJ friends, as well as writing a lot of important posts.

In July stuff started getting very stressful -- Topaz went through something really traumatic, Kanika had a medical emergency and I had to take her to the vet, my little sister came in town unexpectedly, and I ran out of money and had to start begging from my bioparents. But also I spent lots of good time with Serenity and had several gathers -- two with my lil sis, also Katie, Allison, Hannah, Kylei, Elliott, Evelyn, Sande, Cass, and even Adi, so that part was positive. But August brought a lot of painful stuff for Topaz, was when I ran out of ADD meds with no access to a doctor, and was the last time I saw Evelyn for months. Roger and Allison were supportive and helpful, and I went to a SONG membership meeting which gave me hope like nothing else except for TBC ever has.

September I got a job at Starbux and finally started getting call backs and interviews for a few of the hundreds of applications I had sent. My awful bioparents also invaded my house and stayed for a month, harassing me about money, rearranging my stuff and throwing some of it away without my permission, invading my bedroom, and being transphobic. October was mostly filled up with my awful bioparents and working at Starbux but at the very end I began doing LJ Idol again. In November things got still worse -- Evelyn officially broke things off with me and Kylei blew up at me and told me we can't be friends. Then later that month Evelyn invited me to a party at their house which ended up being an emotional disaster. I quit Starbux for my new job.

December was a very mixed bag. I started my new job, which was amazing; I got a new psychiatrist and finally got medicated for ADD again; I got to spend time with Arizona, Felix, Felix's people Blaire and Shay, Allison, Jonathan, Heather, Brian, Jessica, and my little sister. But also, my grandmother died and I had to spend time with my awful biofamily, and I was so emotionally drained that I couldn't really enjoy Solstice. It was also a sad reminder of my estrangement from Kylei and Evelyn, because I wanted them at Solstice so much.

( detailed events )

To be good at consent, you have to be able to take a 'no' without external displays of hurt or offense. Because the fact that you'd never do an act that someone said no to means NOTHING if they are too afraid to tell you no because your reaction is worse than enduring things they don't want. What good is saying no when it has worse consequences than the inner turmoil of not stating your desires? If I don't say no, I can at least tell myself that my suffering is my own fault, whereas if I say no and the person reacts badly, I have to face the fact that they're more invested in not being rejected than they are in helping me to feel safe.

Reactions that I or someone I know have endured unwanted touch rather than facing include:

• withdrawing emotionally
• expressing self-loathing
• apologizing profusely as if they did something wrong
• self-harming
• sulking or pouting
• acting resentful or angry or insulted
• getting irritated at them over other things that are usually not a problem
• ceasing to initiate
• ceasing to play
• ceasing to cuddle
• ceasing to express romantic or sexual interest
• expressing a wish to be dead or not exist
• depreciation of self
• acting afraid to touch the person who said no
• making snarky comments at future similar moments like 'oh NOW you want me'
• disbelieving in the continued romantic/sexual interest of the other person.

To summarize, negative reactions include self-directed negativity, emotional and sexual withdrawal, and emotional punishment. The first two things aren't necessarily damaging to others in general, but as a reaction to a no they very often create a dynamic where the other person can't say no, and that can be very damaging.

If someone can't say no to you without fear of fall-out, they can't say no freely. And if they can't say no freely, it's not full consent. It's the responsibility of each person to make it as easy as possible for the other person to say no. Which is difficult, because it is disappointing when people say no and if you're feeling fragile it can spark a lot of negative feelings about yourself. I'm not saying don't feel those feelings: I'm saying don't make them the other person's problem.

Do whatever you need to do to manage your reaction without forcing the other person to comfort or placate you. Maybe have a list of things to read that remind you that you are loved and wanted and worthy. Maybe do something distracting like playing a game or watching a show to get past the initial overwhelm. Maybe have a set of things your person can do for you (that are easy for them! Low-energy-cost things) that will reassure you; or a set of things you can do for them, even. Maybe have a mantra you can repeat in your head to block out the negative reaction until it is small enough to handle internally. Maybe figure out the best way for them to express a 'no' that doesn't spark your insecurities so hard. Maybe give them a sentence they can say to reassure you when they say no -- and then trust in them and believe it.

I won't pretend like it's easy: it can be VERY hard. But the alternative is that your person will sometimes be merely enduring your touch and wishing you would stop. Sometimes they will experience that as merely frustrating or annoying but other times they may experience it as sexual assault or even rape. So it is simply necessary to be able to handle being told no, without your reaction causing distress to the one who said no. Nobody is automatically good at this; it is a skill that everyone has to develop. At points in my past I have done several of these and I've had several done to me. I am certain that most people who have had significant sexual experience have reacted to a 'no' in at least one of these ways.

A really good support skill for this is focusing on noticing non-verbal 'no's and asking if they actually want to continue when there is a strong change in tone, breathing, facial expression, body tension, body position, noises, etc. It is a lot easier for the person to say no when you opened the door for it, and it feels better to get a no when you opened the door for it, too. Instead of it feeling like rejection, it feels more mutual. However, even the most observant person in the world won't notice every non-verbal signal, so this is not enough on its own: it's just a good support skill. Even if you're great at noticing non-verbals (or think you are) you still need to create a dynamic where your lovers feel not just able to say 'no' or 'stop' in a dire situation, but comfortable enough to say 'nah, I don't feel like it' or 'okay I'm done now' at any time.

When you have a mental illness, it's like you have an amorphous monster that follows you everywhere. If it's depression, it can sit on you like a lead onesie a lot of the time and make it damn hard to move, and it can cover your head and make everything dark and drab. If it's anxiety, it can whisper nasty things to you and sometimes shout them so loud you can't pay attention to anything else. If you have trauma flashbacks it can cover your whole body and force you to watch videos and listen to sound of awful things, and even if you can see through it, you can't stop it and you can't escape it. If you have a different illness I'm sure it does other things, but I can only speak about the ones I've experienced.

It can be awful to have this monster, especially when it contains multiple varieties of mental illness. But it can also be fucking awful to be around someone else who has a monster. It can be torture; at its worst it can be abuse. So people have a responsibility to manage their monster as best as they can to keep it from attacking other people. Just like if you have a pet who will attack people -- it's not your fault if they attack someone, but you need to do your best to care for them, train them on how to interact, and keep them on a leash when they're out. And if you know what sets them off, you need to warn people so that they don't end up getting bitten when it could have been avoided.

I have known people who have the most massive, powerful monsters and yet they keep that thing on a leash and it almost never bites anyone. It will blob over them and scream at them from every direction, and they will quietly tug on the leash and pull it away from people so that no one is hurt. They know that it lies and so when it tells them "that person doesn't like you" they don't accept this and they ask the person. They know it predicts things that won't happen and so they refuse to believe it. When their monster is incontinent they take it outside, and if it makes a mess they clean it up. Their monsters are not dainty or polite, but the way those people handle them you might think they are. Some people I know have monsters three stories tall yet I've barely heard a peep out of them.

And then I've known people who don't bother leashing their monster at all. Who will sit and watch while their monster rips someone to shreds, and later say "it wasn't me" or worse yet, have no comment and try to pretend that it didn't happen. I've known people who let the monster shit anxiety all over people, instead of taking it outside to poop -- and then complain when the person takes time away to go shower! I've known people who refuse to feed their monster and let it climb all over other people desperately begging for food. I've known people who get angry when someone who has been feeding their monster stops, because now the monster is grumpy and loud again and is turning to them for food when they had gotten used to ignoring it. I have been most of these people, as well. Sometimes I slack off in training and my monster starts getting rude and gross again.

It's never your fault when you have a monster like this attached to you. But it is your responsibility and no one else's. It's your job to feed and tame your monster so that it is as respectful and kind as possible. It's your job to take it to excrete waste away from other people, or perhaps with the attention of a monster vet. It's your job to keep it from attacking people with words or deeds.

If you have someone who has offered to help you tame your monster, that's awesome! Just don't try to leave it with them. It's not 'help' if the other person is fighting your monster while you do nothing. Just like a rowdy pet, if you don't train it, it will get worse and worse no matter what people try to do from outside. You have to tell it no. Every single time. And when your monster damages other people? That's on you. You are the only one who is responsible for your monster. It's shitty because nobody signed up to be a monster-keeper, but it's yours now. And if someone who usually helps is not up for it, don't complain to them about it and don't make them feel bad. Your monster is NEVER someone else's responsibility.

You can have terrible monsters without those monsters constantly hurting others. Training monsters is a learning process and no one does it right all the time, but if you don't do your personal best to keep your monster from hurting others, then you are just as guilty when it does. I'm not suggesting that you avoid all people if you have an unmanageable monster. I'm suggesting you use every tool you have to tame it, and in the meantime you warn people about how the monster sometimes acts, and when the monster does make a mess or cause damage, you do the cleaning up. On what is possible for any given person or situation, I cannot guess and certainly cannot comment; only the monster-keeper knows if they are doing their best.

I don't think I'd feel fully at ease around someone who had no monster at all, simply because I think it would be hard for them to understand monster-keeping which is always a pretty big part of my life. But I also know that my monster is very suggestible and if I spend too much time with someone who has an out-of-control monster, mine will get increasingly difficult to handle. And despite not having physical form, these monsters can kill. So for me, it doesn't matter the size or type of monster; I feel safest with people who have a monster, but keep it in line most of the time.

A brushback pitch works because the batter's subconscious screams "it's gonna hit you!" The body reacts to a close call almost the same as to actual damage, dumping adrenaline and intensifying senses, increasing heart rate and respiration. It doesn't matter that your conscious mind is telling you "they want to scare you, not actually harm you."

This is what microaggressions are like, except that they're usually accidents. Someone thinks it's funny that a man wore a dress -- they're not attacking, but they find gender-non-conforming behavior to be so alien that it is funny and you know from long experience that if someone can't relate, they can be cruel. So a giggle becomes a near blow. Or someone uses a slur to describe an upsetting situation -- they're not attacking, but they're showing a lack of understanding that also allows for cruelty. So a bit of slang becomes a near blow. It doesn't have to be physical to cause intense physical reactions which use up your physical and mental reserve energy.

I used to be such a bold and brave person, back when being myself didn't cause constant flinching. Back before I knew how many people get fired and beaten and raped and murdered for varying from the accepted norm, not to mention being ostracized and excluded by default. Before I knew the consequences and before I knew myself to be at risk, I was free. I was just a little bit different and people thought it was quirky and interesting, not threatening and overwhelming. It's easy and safe to be yourself when who you are does not disrupt people's belief systems.

Now my system is so exhausted from the constant jolts of adrenaline I endure in day-to-day interactions with people that being myself becomes almost impossible. My body doesn't even wait for people to say stuff anymore. It just dumps adrenaline as soon as I'm doing something that exposes me to people, no matter how small and innocuous. When it's about to be my turn to talk in front of people, my body is acting like I'm about to jump out of a plane. I'm not afraid in my conscious mind but my subconscious doesn't care. I'm not shy, reserved, or introverted, but I have become anxious and on the outside that looks the same. I have become literally unable to be myself thanks to an endless series of brushback pitches.

But after many years of having no financial safety, I finally have a job where I can take care of myself. I can afford to offend biofamily. And after many years of feeling unnourished and unvalued, I have people in my life who really do love me as I am and value what I offer. I can afford to lose friends. I still get thrown brushback pitches constantly, but I'm wearing some body armor now, and I don't flinch quite so hard. I plan to make armor for others, as well as dismantling the system that creates these pitchers who give us nothing but brushback pitches.

I cannot relate to feeling like you need to add more danger or stress to your life in order to feel fully alive; I think you have to be damned cozy in your privilege to feel that way.* Certainly a lot of people are that cozy, which is why shit like volcano surfing exists. Some people actually get adrenaline jolts so rarely that they find them fun!? I can't imagine.

My daily life is a struggle. I struggle to maintain my identity through being constantly assigned gender and having my sexuality and relationships erased any time I am around people (other than my closest). I struggle to make enough money to feed myself and pay my bills. I struggle to maintain relationships because literally all of my people are drained constantly by oppression & other hardships. I struggle to understand what people are saying, both because of my auditory processing issues and because I am extremely literal. I struggle to feel understood and valued when the best parts of me seem to go undesired and unnoticed. I struggle to be social because it takes so much out of me and so often gives little back.

I am privileged in significant ways (being white, physically non-disabled, cis-passing, & college-educated) and yet still, I struggle every day. I don't want to struggle; the more I am struggling, the less I can give. I want my struggles to decrease so that I can give more. I want to be able to help others and not need to spend all of my resources on my own mere survival. I know that I will have to work to maintain empathy with others if/when my own struggles decrease, but I am not concerned because I am more dedicated to doing that than I am to life itself.

What makes me feel alive is not when I am wrestling with some issue. I feel most alive when I can put aside my struggles for a little while and rest in my little bubble with just my safe people who I know are going to do their best to not use slurs, infringe on consent, or enforce damaging norms. Oppressed and marginalized people don't get to feel fully alive very often. I want change this, so I create safer spaces when I organize events and I work to improve those spaces that I don't control.

---

*there are other reasons to seek out danger or the simulation of it, I know: depression for instance can be so numbing that a shock of any feeling is a relief.

I do a lot of explaining myself as a queer, demisexual, agender, trans, relationship anarchist, vegetarian, eclectic pagan Quaker with ADD-PI (attention deficit disorder - primarily inattentive) and CAPD (central auditory processing disorder). My communication methods can be alarmingly rude on accident (illustrated by my lack of understanding of why others appreciate empty words like "hi") but my goal is almost always to create the best understanding for the most people. If I have one main function, it is to explain: explain people to each other, explain systems to people, explain myself to those I care about, explain how things work to my own self, explain to others how to practice skills I've learned.

My primary motivation is compassion, and for me that is very complex. In a simple, wholesome world compassion is just being kind to the people around you. In a world of structural injustice, compassion takes much more work. It takes learning about systems and about anyone who is different from you, because otherwise you will hurt people no matter how wonderful your intentions are. So I spend a lot of time trying to learn about people who are different from me and trying to help others also learn, so that I can reduce the amount of suffering I cause and hopefully ripple out to reduce suffering in general.

I want to connect with living beings in a mutually nourishing way. I've learned that if a person wants to reduce suffering enough to do work for it, we will probably nourish each other and be great friends. My hope in life and in writing is to create more understanding that will allow for more nourishing connections.

I want a monthly gather, minimum. In it I want to address structural things like donations to pay for the space (if we can't find a free one). I also want to address people's needs in general and offer time for food, time for play, time for intimacy, and time for touch. I want it to last at least 3 hours, and I want people to commit to coming to at least the structural and needs-share parts. I want a safe space where we have a set of agreements for safe behavior and we pay attention and call people on it if they are not respecting consent, or if they are making oppressive/demeaning 'jokes,' etc. I want it to not be taboo to call people out OR to make mistakes. I want mistakes handled with as much kindness and gentleness as possible, and deliberate shitwadness to result in people being immediately escorted out (with the understanding that they are allowed to return next time if they refrain from being a deliberate shitwad).

I want a rotating group of at least four people who take turns doing the structural work, but I want everyone to feel like they have a commitment to keeping the group going and to making it better with their help and their suggestions. I want people to volunteer to as MOOP fairies (people who gather up 'matter out of place,' clean and tidy) at the end of the gather, and to volunteer to be consent coaches for cuddle time, or trick teachers for play time, or facilitators for intimacy time, or labelers for food time. I want people to be willing to really invest their time, effort, and material resources to creating community. I want people to hold each other accountable with things like reminding each other to attend and to bring/do whatever they promised.

To address needs in general: I want people to write down what they need help with on numbered papers (one paper per need, not per person) and put it in a bucket. I want one person to read those needs aloud and then people to raise their hand if they can offer a gift to fill that need. On a whiteboard, we can put the number of the need with a list of the people who can fill it. The person who had the need with that number can then spot those who raised their hand, or read from the list, and later go up to whoever they feel safe receiving from, and discuss it with them. The goal is to put no one on the spot. These can be needs like a ride to the doctor, or a can opener, or a person to talk with about assault.

For food, I want it to be a potluck where each person who is able to brings enough for 1-3 people -- nourishing food, not just munchies. If everyone just brings their own dinner, that's fine. If people bring more than their own dinner, I want them to provide ingredients lists so people with food allergies can participate. For play, I want there to be space and time for people to play with flow toys, or do art, or play music together. For intimacy, I want there to be space and time for people to engage in meaningful conversations, to do exercises like eye gazing and mirroring. For touch I want there to be time and space for people to give and/or receive touch, whether passive or active.

I want this gather to be in a wheelchair-accessible, non-allergenic, temperature-controlled space with non-fluorescent lighting. I want people to be scent-free. Ideally I want there to be at least one sign interpreter, and I want people to take turns talking and leave the room if they want to have a side conversation. I want notes to be available in text format (not images).

(this is a sketch and I may edit it as I think of more things)

(crossposted to Medium)

At least three friends who I think of as burners (people who attend Alchemy or Euphoria or other Burning Man events) have expressed a similar dissatisfaction with the way that burns are less and less community and more and more conspicuous consumption. We want burners to put resources toward building sustainable year-round community rather than dumping so much money and effort into a few days a year. It's highly reminiscent of Christmas-and-Easter Christians who make a big damn deal twice a year but don't bring the principles they supposedly care about into their daily lives.


Even the poor burners I know usually end up spending at least $150 on tickets and food and water and supplies, and it is easily two or three times that for the more well-off burners. (that's just regional burns: don't get me started on Burning Man) Each year most burners seem to upgrade something they bring, with the result that long-time burners have invested hundreds of dollars over time and there is a significant difference in 'burner class' even among people who have similar income levels. This effect heightens the seniority effect, so that one has to invest for multiple years with increasingly luxurious accessories to be treated as if one belongs.

When I first started going to Georgia burns they were only five years old. Five years later, the landscape has changed radically. Instead of a bunch of little tents with a few shared spaces, lots of camps have infrastructure they bring. This has the effect of making camps very insular; instead of going from place to place enjoying various shared spaces, most spaces are fairly self-contained. Most of the resources seem to me to be going to making one's home camp more and more elaborate. I don't think there is anything wrong with that in theory, but in practice, it reduces community. If all giving was meant to happen in a shared space, how different would that look? how much more would people leave their own little bubble?

And at this point you look 'uncool' if all you have is a tiny tent. In the absence of vibrant shared spaces (not private 'shared' spaces that actually function as the living rooms of the camp that 'shares' them) being poor means being alone. I think all shared spaces should be separate from sleep spaces -- this would not only reduce the effects of class, but it would allow people to have quiet space away from partying when they slept.

If I was going to a Georgia burn for the first time this year, I would have felt like my class, my lack of money, made me unable to participate. I was able to borrow a tent, but if not, what then? Do people contribute to any kind of a shared sleeping space? Tents are expensive, especially ones that have enough space to breathe. People are constantly upgrading -- what happens to the old tents? Couldn't they be kept communally and lent on a by-need basis to people who don't have them? There are just so many ways that class cuts in.

There are some other large issues with burns but right now I'm just discussing the community aspects. I'm not ready to try to make the local burns better; I'm ready to take the principles outside of burns.


How much more nourishing would it be to have community in a continual way rather than periods of famine broken up by glut? How much more true to the principles of civic responsibility, participation, and communal effort to be building community at home, taking responsibility for taking care of each other, and doing actual work to build something lasting? How much more true to the principles of gifting, decommodification, and immediacy to invest in each other, here and now, rather than buying needs and luxuries for a three-day party once or twice a year?

We need accountable, accessible, growth-and-healing focused community. I am ready to build this. We need to find a gathering space that everyone can get to relatively easily, then bring together everyone who wants to build real community and have a brainstorming session. We need to decide what we want it to look like and what minimum things we need to keep momentum, and what people can contribute. We need to set shared goals and values, as well as safe space boundaries and how to handle violations of those.

I'm writing my set of wants and ideas now, but will post that separately because this is already long.

The worst person I ever had the displeasure to meet (and I'm including people who abused me as a child) was a boss I had at a retail job. Unlike the people who abused me as a child, this person was cruel on purpose and I consider that far worse. He was a racist, sexist, cissexist, ableist, fat-phobic looksist who never showed compassion, had no sense of humor and literally zero good qualities. He talked about the sex he imagined his teenage son having in a way that made it clear to me that the only reason this shitwad wasn't assaulting young girls was that he didn't think he could get away with it. I can only hope that saves people from becoming his victims.

And this dude thought people liked him. He thought his employees were his friends because they laughed at his awful jokes and pretended to take an interest in his alternately brain-scrapingly boring or skin-crawlingly creepy stories. He hated me because 1) I violated his sexist beliefs by existing 2) I didn't allow him to mock me or put me in my place and 3) I did not laugh at his fat-phobia, islamophobia, racism, or other 'jokes' he made.

He deadnamed me and refused to call me by my real name, and told people hired after me that they could also deadname me. (to which I responded, "you can -- I won't answer to it but you can call me that." None of my coworkers were that disrespectful, at least not to my face) Lest you think that he was rude 'to everyone equally,' let me tell you that at least three other people went by a name that was not their birth name and he respected that fine because they were cis (although, the cis girl with a 'boy' name was always called "miss [name]" but I don't think she minded). When I was saving bottle caps for an art project (with all my co-workers aware and setting the caps aside for me), he asked why they were in a cup on the counter and when I explained that I was saving them, took it and threw it away. In full view of everyone, with no explanation; my coworkers privately expressed empathy for me after that blatant meanness (and symbolic violence). He knew that I lived an hour away and he continually gave me 4-hour shifts, even after I requested longer shifts to make the drive worthwhile, and he gave me shifts that ended at 5 so that I would have two hours to drive rather than one. He lived in the same city as I did, and he left every day at 3. He worked with most people's schedules, even the one who left the city for months at a time.

But it wasn't JUST me who was scapegoated. He also mistreated my Persian coworker partly because she was a transfer and he was angry that he didn't get to pick, partly because he wanted to give her shifts to his 'friends' and partly because he's a fucking racist. She reported him to HR and he responded by cutting her hours until she couldn't afford her apartment and had to move. He mistreated my Jewish coworker by continually scheduling her for Saturday morning, which was the one time she had asked not to be scheduled, even though she was fine with working Saturday evenings after sundown (when other people would rather not work). He did this over and over until she quit. He mistreated my black queer coworker by continually logging her as a regular employee when she was a shift manager so that he could cheat her out of a dollar an hour. She'd have to go in and fix it every time, or he'd steal her money. He mistreated another black coworker by continually belittling him and making him prove himself with tests despite the fact that literally no one else had to do these tests.


When I finally quit (after months of that shitwad trying to get me to do it), I felt panic at the thought of work even for months after. It wasn't until I'd been working for an actually supportive boss for a while that I stopped being terrified. To be scared of doing what you need to do in order to live and to have food and shelter is a profound problem. And I know it would have been at least three times as bad if I hadn't had a safety net.

Insecure abusive bosses require a scapegoat/drudge so that they can maintain social capital with the other employees. They pick one person (or maybe two) and give that person all the worst tasks, the things no one else wants to do. They give them fucking awful schedules so that they can give great ones to others. They make every problem into the scapegoat/drudge's fault. I have seen it not only with the unbearable waste of space that called himself my boss, but also with the bosses of my friends. One friend's boss literally gives them three people's jobs worth of work so that everyone else in the office can do nothing but chat with the boss all day.

This is what happens when you put dysempathetic, mediocre non-leaders in positions of authority. They don't care who they hurt, and they don't care or even realize that they're doing a shit job -- until an underling shows them up, and then they take the credit and punish the underling. Mediocre people respond to their inadequacies by lashing out rather than re-evaluating their behavior or trying to learn. If this happens more than once, that poor underling is the permanent scapegoat/drudge.

Unfortunately a lot of us underlings respond to attack from a boss by trying to do an even better job, which shows up the boss more and makes them more prone to attack rather than less. So honestly, it is often the best workers who are made into the scapegoat/drudges. Mediocre bosses want mediocre or even bad workers and they'll drive the good ones away so that they don't look bad in comparison. Capitalism: making mediocrity profitable.

There are a lot of ways to to cause others pain and even damage despite the very best of intentions, especially with sex and kink. This is not a comprehensive list, but it includes the most common ways I see people making consent mistakes. Here's a more in-depth discussion of most of this list: how to be careful with consent. Quoting myself: "EVEN IF you follow ALL of these steps, you may STILL accidentally coerce or violate someone. We live in a rape culture that makes it very difficult for us to understand consent, to respect our own boundaries and the boundaries of others; so sex is dangerous. We need to go in knowing we can hurt each other, and being careful to minimize that risk."

I have never discussed all of these things before first having sex with someone. There's always something I didn't think of, but I work towards being the absolute best I can at consent with each person I have sex with. I treat consent as an ongoing process of becoming more and more in-tune with what the other person wants and needs in sex.

To be fully careful with consent you need to:

1. discuss the meaning of sex/kink for each person involved.
   • is everyone involved aware of current relationship structures and additional partners (if any)?
   • do any of the people need a shared emotional/spiritual meaning for sex/kink?
   • do any of the people need shared attitudes toward bodies for sex/kink? (I do)
   • do any of the people have a need for future connection or particular kind of relationship after sex/scene?


2. discuss STI/pregnancy risks & how to manage them.
   • disclose your STI status and your risk factors and ask about theirs.
   • if relevant, discuss birth control and what to do in the event of barrier-method fail or pregnancy.
   • ask what methods of protection they want, tell what you want, and then go with whichever is more cautious.


3. choose safe words/signals.
   • at least choose a word/signal that means 'stop everything'.
   • describe what you want the other person to do when you use the safe word.
   • it's good to have a non-verbal signal as well as a word since some people can go non-verbal when triggered.


4. discuss known triggers and what to do in the event of an unknown trigger.
   • tell them your triggers and how you need them to react if they accidentally trigger you.
   • ask what they need you to avoid or be cautious with and what to do if you accidentally trigger them.


5. discuss roles (or lack thereof) and define terms.
   • roles must be consented to and you can't guess what someone else would like.
   • define terms: there are hundreds of definitions out there, don't assume.
   • describing a typical scene/sexperience in detail is a good way to find unconscious expectations.


6. discuss specific acts & label as ask-each-time or whatever.
   • ask what parts are okay to touch, when.
   • ask what kinds of touch are okay, where.
   • ask about marks before making any.
   • ask about sensitivities.
   • ask about oral, manual, toys, penetration, etc.
   • ask if there is anything that is never okay.
   • ask about which parts/acts are ask-first every time, and when in doubt ask first.


7. define acceptable sobriety emotionally and physically.
   • how much intoxication is too much for sex/kink between you?
   • what level of emotional instability is too much for sex/kink between you?
   • what level of physical weariness/sleepiness is too much for sex/kink between you?


8. discuss related needs which sex can compete with or create.
   • Do any of you have a strict bedtime?
   • Do any of you need privacy (such as not being overheard, or not having your shared stories told)?
   • Do any of you need a certain amount of aftercare time?

And within each sexual experience you need to:

1. check for sufficient emotional & physical sobriety.
2. ask in a way that makes it easy to say no.
3. assume no particular acts to be included and no particular length of time.
4. check in: pay attention to reactions and non-verbals, ask questions.

Zuo and Han (2013) measured relative empathy responses for Chinese people who had lived in the US most of their lives using a series of 48 video clips of white and Chinese people (gender and race numerically balanced) being poked in the cheek with a cotton swab or a needle while wearing a neutral expression. Participants had to press one button to say that the person was feeling pain or a different button to say that they were not feeling pain. This happened very quickly to try to measure the subconscious response.

They found no significant difference in response times, nor in the fMRI signal intensity, despite the overall trend of own-race bias found in many adults. They conclude that living in the US has increased the subjects' ability to empathize with the majority race. I further imagine that as the subjects have the perspective of the majority pressed on them at every turn, they are forced to perform the cognitive empathy task of perspective-taking, and over time this builds up their emotional empathy responses as well.

Cao, Contreras-Huerta, McFadyen, and Cunnington (2015) built on this by measuring relative empathy responses via fMRI for Chinese students living in Australia using videos of white and Chinese faces being touched with a cotton swab or a needle. They found that increased levels of contact are related to increased levels of empathy. Further, the kind of contact that is most predictive is incidental contact -- just seeing white faces around you.

Consider this in the inverse: empathy is decreased when you are never forced to take the perspective of someone else, and when you never see them around you in large numbers. When you do not consume any media by and about people of color, you automatically have less empathy for people of color. When you do not ever experience being in a majority-female space, you automatically have less empathy for women. If you want to be empathetic to people who experience oppression you do not, you have to change what you see and where you go.

Zuo, X. and S. Han. 2013. "Cultural experiences reduce racial bias in neural responses to others’ suffering." Culture and Brain 1, 34-46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40167-013-0002-4

Cao, Y.; L. S. Contreras-Huerta; J. McFadyen; and R. Cunnington. 2015. "Racial bias in neural response to others' pain is reduced with other-race contact." Cortex: A Journal Devoted To The Study Of The Nervous System And Behavior 70, 68-78. PsycINFO, EBSCOhost.

---- TW/CN: slurs are used within this post without asterisks ----
---- TW/CN: discussion of systemic & personal abuse of cognitively disabled people ----

( continue )

Another side note: not everyone CAN change their vocabulary; for some people training out or replacing slurs takes too much cognitive effort, or requires a kind of word control that they do not have (I have heard this particularly from autistic people and people who deal with aphasia). No one can know from the outside who is able to train it out and who isn't, but I hope that people who are able to will make the effort. If we do, eventually these words will become obsolete and thus easier for everyone to avoid.

Here is a list of ableist terms to avoid and non-ableist words to express negative feelings. But on the list of non-ableist words I would avoid 'ignoramus' because having knowledge is a privilege and so insulting someone for lack of knowledge is a very similar problem. Basically, if you want to insult a person or thing, make sure that you are not insulting them by relating them to a devalued group of people, because this further harms that group of people.

Avenanti, Sirigu and Aglioti (2010) tested white and black people on their empathy for same-race, other-race, and unknown-race people using TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation: a way to measure emotions at a subconscious level), SCR (skin conductance response) and heart rate to measure their affective empathy (automatic emotional response) and a questionnaire to measure their cognitive empathy (ability to relate in a logical, thinking way).

The researchers had black and white people watch scenarios of hands being penetrated by a needle or touched by a cotton swab -- white hands, black hands, and hands painted violet to give no apparent race. The people all tended to react more strongly to their own racial group than to another. Despite the fact that they saw the violet hand as the most strange (this was measured to be sure), they reacted with empathy for violet hands yet not for other-race (though the violet hand was actually other-race for each group)!

Given no racial information, people are not AS empathetic as they are for their own race, but they are more empathetic than when race is apparent. This implies that the dysempathy people feel towards those not of their own race is a learned behavior, not 'natural.'

I am critical of the assumption that this bias is purely ingroup/outgroup, as the sample is composed of white native Italians and black immigrant Africans who live in Italy. As such, it doesn't solely measure race, but also national identity. Other studies have shown that minorities tend to have empathy for majorities across racial lines (I'll get to those). Gender is not mentioned, and may also have effect, as there is significant gender difference in the empathy of adults.

Avenanti, A., Sirigu, A., & Aglioti, S. M. (2010). Racial Bias Reduces Empathic Sensorimotor Resonance with Other-Race Pain. Current Biology, 20(11), 1018-1022. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.03.071

I've told this story many times now, though never as one piece: How Loss of Alone Time, Constant Caretaking, & Medication Stigma Almost Killed Me. In the worst period of my life, when I was suicidal for months and felt in more pain every day, I learned several vital things:

1) relationships don't have to be abusive to be profoundly damaging.
2) self-awareness is as necessary for safety as anything else.
3) I literally cannot handle living in a place where anyone wants my attention randomly every day.
4) just because you can caretake someone does not mean that you should.
5) giving doesn't have to be in huge pieces to take a huge toll.
6) once you are situationally depressed for long enough, your brain can forget how to be non-depressed and need chemical help.

I love Kylei as one of my favorite people, but living with them when they didn't have someone else to have casual social interaction with (and thus talked to me randomly through the day whenever we were both at home) was one of the most depressing and draining things I have ever experienced. It was just as bad for me -- if not worse than -- living with an abusive person.

It wasn't good for them either because the best I could offer was not enough to be nourishing, so it drained them also. Let me emphasize here: I was not doing anything that felt generous; I was not doing anything that was significantly helpful. I was allowing them to come into my room 3-4 times a day and randomly engage me in conversation for 1-3 minutes. That's it. I didn't think to tell them not to for months because it was 'such a small thing' that I could 'easily afford to give.' But it was torture for me. They were small gifts but they took superhuman effort from me.

I felt just as much need to hide as I did when I lived with my abusive parents. I had to be just as hypervigilant and seeing them became a stress to the point where we couldn't have any good interactions. Yet I missed them and was sad to have none of the connection that I wanted because there was too much of the unwanted! this made it even worse than when I was living with someone abusive who I didn't want to be around: that at least I could withdraw from and feel better. Withdrawing from Kylei made me feel worse because I missed them! But I just cannot deal with unexpected real-time interaction. It only took about six months of that for me to be drained to the point where I could not recognize myself.

There was additional stuff going on at the time, but most of the reason I can't handle this is because with my ADD-PI, that breaks down my ability to process anything; it literally shatters my ability to think. My thinking becomes disjointed and even more forgetful, like the thinking of a person who hasn't slept in three days. I can't do any art or reading or anything that matters to me at all, which rapidly increases any latent depression and makes me feel worthless.

I learned that I mustn't allow people to randomly talk to me when I am at home, that I mustn't take on responsibility as a person's only source of comfort (nor be more than 70% of their comfort), and that I mustn't be the only one initiating connection with anyone for more than a few months. I was doing all three of these things and together it made me drained to the point where I could not even feel the most basic motivation of my life: empathy.

I could no longer care about any suffering, human or otherwise. Even when I realized the problem and stopped it happening, nothing got better. My brain ran completely out of the chemicals necessary to feel happiness, and stayed there for about four months. Every day I would have said it couldn't hurt more and then the next day it did.


--------CN/TW: suicidal ideation, deep depression, medication, stigma against mental health medication (the rest of this entry)--------

I would have committed suicide if not for the fact that Topaz had already experienced too much tragedy for me to be able to handle the guilt of causing more pain for them. I daydreamed about making them hate me so that I could feel free from that guilt and able to kill myself, but that would have required me breaking my ethical code to do things that would cause them to hate me. I didn't think about anyone else. I didn't feel like anyone else would really care, even though I knew logically that people would mourn. I felt unloved and unloveable and it was only through Topaz proving daily that they cared that I managed to believe that they did love me.

Eventually I felt desperate enough that I went to get medication. I was put on citalopram, and after a month of slowly stepping it up, I stopped feeling worse every day. Just that was such a relief I can't even describe. After a few months, I started to feel better each day rather than just the same. A few months after that I started to feel aware of being numb and it started making me feel worse, so I weaned myself off of the drug. This all totaled maybe 8 months. Mental health medication saved my life.

There are people who push their personal quackery on others who are depressed, telling them to "just" exercise, meditate, think happy thoughts, take herbs, change their diet, etc. That might work if you're just feeling a little bad one day. It does not fucking work when your brain has worn a rut in the negative emotion pathways and forgotten that the positive emotion pathways even exist! Also, while talk therapy is effective and important, it only works if the problem is that you need to process your experiences -- it doesn't work if the problem is chemical!

I suffered so much longer and so much worse than I had to, because of the stigma against depression medication. If not for the coincidental timing of Topaz, stigma against medication would have killed me. I did not try to get medication until after I was already suicidal enough to go through with it. I will not take any of that quackery lightly because it literally kills people.

White men: we need you to start talking to other white men when they cause you pain. Only you are able & responsible to teach them empathy.

Note: do not complain to them about how some oppressed person hurt you; this only reinforces their dys-empathy. And do not talk about your pain to oppressed people without permission. We are forced to do too much emotional caretaking already.

On the other hand, IF you have permission, talking about the pain of your oppressed friend/love/family member in a sympathetic way to another white man is also effective. For instance, responding to a rape joke by talking about how your friend was raped and has ptsd and how it affects their life. Make SURE you have permission for this, else you are violating your friend's confidence. I give permission for anything I have shared publicly to be shared again, but this is not true for anyone but me!

Starting a new thing! Findings Friday: I describe a study and share the findings. I learned soooo much writing a giant research paper on empathy, so I'm gonna go through and summarize at least most of the studies in that paper. Here's the first, chosen at random.

White USian adults tend to assume that black people feel less pain than they do in the same situation. To figure out where this begins, Dore, Hoffman, Lillard, and Tawalter (2014) interviewed children -- 144 white children and 15 children of color. Their study asked 5-year-old, 7-year-old, and 10-year old kids to rate the pain they'd experience in 10 different scenarios, both for themselves and for another two children, one black and one white. The 5-year-olds didn't have a racial bias in how they rated the pain, but the 7-year-olds had a small bias and the 10-year-olds had a significant bias.

To see if this pattern was still true when one controlled for overt racism, the researchers included three additional measurements: how often a child would choose to play with a black or a white child, how much difference a child used in assigning positive traits to black or white children, and a questionnaire of the parents to control for parental bias and interracial friendships. None of these had any significant effect on this trend.

Interestingly, all the children rated the pain of others as stronger than their own. My thoughts on this is that the exercise is one which involves taking the perspective of another person, which has been shown to increase empathy in significant and immediate ways.

Dore, R. A.; Hoffman, K. M.; Lillard, A. S.; and Trawalter, S. 2014. "Children's racial bias in perceptions of others' pain." British Journal Of Developmental Psychology 32, no. 2: 218-231. Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed December 3, 2015).

After 22 months of using image descriptions, I've noticed some great side-effects:

1. I notice things more. When I write an image description, I have to really look at the image multiple times, and most of the time I realize aspects that before I would never have brought to my consciousness. In this way I get to look at it for the first time twice. It's a great mind-sensation. This used to happen for me when I edited photos I took, but now I can have it for any image whether I created it or not.


2. I've grown far better skill at describing things. I have to figure out what is important for meaning and feeling, and put that into words. I have come to be much more aware of lighting, textures, and mood.


3. I am more intentional in what I share of both my own and others' images. There is a bit more work to sharing things, so I don't just click 'share' on any image I come across that I like. Instead, my feed ends up being weighted toward original content. I value creation deeply and am grateful that that little bit of extra work keeps me from ever getting in the habit of merely re-sharing others' content.


4. It has made me more expressive. Rather than popping in an emoticon, I have resurrected the art of emoting: I will type *smiles* or *excited bouncing* and this is oddly far more vulnerable and makes me feel far more connected.

Even if I didn't have great side-effects AND I had no friends who were blind or low-vision, this would still be very important for two reasons. 1) I make public posts, and many people who I am not friends with can observe my shares. 2) To make the web accessible, EVERYONE has to do this. More than 1 out of every 50 people in the US has a visual disability (and that number quadruples when you don't count children under age 16) which makes it likely that some of your friends or at least some of your friends-of-friends have a visual disability. I use image descriptions partly to influence sighted people to start writing them also and stop excluding blind & low-vision people by default.

Len Burns, a blind facebook user, writes:

"As one who strives to fully participate in community, I value what you communicate. Each time I am excluded from your conversations because a photo is undescribed, stings. When the "sting" is multiplied hundreds of times per day, I feel excluded and unvalued. Plain and simply, it hurts like hell... If inclusion matters to you, really matters, describe the next photo you post, the one after that, and before you know, it will become a habit. Choosing not to describe a photo or consider the accessibility of other media you plan to use does not differ from ignoring physical barriers that exclude people from community. Exclusion is exclusion. If inclusion is a core value, please think before you post. Thank you."

This past March the official twitter app gave users the ability to add image descriptions, but you have to enable this in the accessibility settings. This allows users to give descriptions that are just for screenreaders (which otherwise would take up the whole tweet). This is a great first step, but people have to be proactive, and the fact that it is an option rather than a requirement reinforces the idea that access for blind/low-vision people isn't important.

A few weeks after twitter released this, facebook released AAT (Automatic Alternative Text), which is nearly useless, as Tasha Raella explains:

"I am a blind Facebook user, and examples of image descriptions I have received so far include 'Image may contain indoor,' 'image may contain one person smiling,' and 'image may contain hat.' ... Rather than questioning the assumption that providing image descriptions is a burden and that blind people’s access needs are blind people’s problem, Facebook is reinforcing the ableist status quo...

As it is currently implemented, Facebook’s automated image description tool promotes independence, rather than interdependence. It sends the message, loud and clear, 'Don’t bother writing a description of your new baby. Our AI has it covered.' In ten or twenty years, that might be the case, but not now. With existing technology, the only way to ensure full and meaningful access to images is to encourage sighted users to describe their photos."

I heartily encourage you to begin writing image descriptions, at least in any shared space such as facebook groups or LJ communities. They don't have to be fancy; something like "[image: photo of dog with a bone]" or "[image: cartoon of two kids holding hands]" is just fine. I use more in-depth description when I'm describing art such as my icons. I could also describe my icon for this post as "photo: my face" and while a blind person would not get the feel of the image from that, they would get the information that I am using an image of myself to introduce this post, and that might give a variety of impressions, depending on how they interpret that act. Such a bare-bones description at least gives the most basic info.

Some resources on writing image descriptions:

• Image Descriptions and How To Write Them (this was what I read when I began to practice)
• How to Describe Pictures to Blind People (written by two blind people)
• Getting really in-depth: this is a handbook for educators on how to write image descriptions

Tsundoku is a Japanese word for when you keep on bringing in new books but let them pile up without being read. Starting now, I'm posting book reviews or previews on Tuesdays with the end goal of shortening my 'to be read' pile -- but more importantly, offering recommendations which factor in representation. (it still counts as Tuesday because I haven't gone to sleep yet!)

Triad by Sheila Finch: Sci-fi / first contact / language, gender, sentience, colonization. ✰ ✰ ✰ [three stars out of five]

In Earth's future, most people are conceived through artificial means, and the population is sex-selected for females by the computer that has taken over and designed the culture. Main character Gia is a 'lingster' (a trained linguist who uses a neural implant and hallucinogenic drugs to decipher unknown languages), assigned to go to a recently discovered planet to determine if the inhabitants are sentient.

The characters are all fairly alike. The main character is a young white cis woman, with primary supporting character a middle-aged white cis woman. All are average-sized and fit except Lil, who hates her fat. There is a black supporting character, but everyone else is white. All but one character are cis women, all non-disabled and neurotypical. Class is not really addressed. Culture is only referenced in memories and history. The point of view shifts between the characters, but their perceptions are so similar that it is hard to tell whose thoughts you are reading. This detracts from the book and makes it frustrating to read. Dialogue is not interesting, and most of it is internal.

I got this book because I knew it dealt with gender, sentience, and language, and some of the ideas were very interesting, but they felt undeveloped. ( cut for length )

I've said much of this before, but I am going to try to make it more specific and plain-spoken.

If I judge your actions as bad, that does not mean I am judging you as bad. Almost every action I rail against as harmful in some way is a thing I have done in the past. I have believed wrongly and damaged people with my actions. I have been classist, racist, sexist, fatphobic, ableist, looksist, anti-sexworker, queerphobic, and gender essentialist, and acted on those ideologies in my actions toward others. I have believed in rape myths and imperialist dogma. I have manipulated and disrespected my partners.


---specific examples of my wrongs: CN/TW for violence, oppressive attitudes, and slurs---

I judged poor people if they bought a small luxury. I avoided people of color because I thought they were too different and I could not relate. I thought women should submit to their husbands. I thought fatness was ugly and that fat people should hide their bodies. I expected all people to be able to learn and perform in the way that I do. I thought cleverness and education made a person more worthwhile. I ranked people on a scale of attractive to not attractive. I assumed that people could not choose to sell sex and that if they did they were forced or acting out of damage. I compared queer sex to sticking your hand in a blender: 'misuse' of intended purpose. I assumed everyone's gender matched what they were assigned at birth, and I assumed that there were only two sexes. I used slurs, especially ableist ones like 'stupid' and 'crazy.'

I have violated people's consent (thankfully not in ways that caused lots of damage, but I was lucky). I have been invalidating of people's identities. I have considered myself to have the 'one true' god and dismissed others as false. I have made relationship expectations without discussion or agreement, and manipulated people into the performance I wanted. I have assumed the worst motives of people I loved and not bothered to check. I have screamed at partners. I have called names. I have hit children (I was a child also at the time, but it was damaging and terrible).

---end TW/CN---


All those things are things I consider deeply wrong and I am profoundly ashamed of them. I mention them because I do not think of myself as a bad person, yet I have done all these bad things. There is not a thing that I say "don't do this" that I haven't done to some extent. So, I cannot think of other people as bad because they do them.

For me, there is only one sin that makes you a bad person: not making any effort to reduce the harm you cause to others and the harms that you benefit from. You don't have to make the efforts I suggest; you just have to make SOME effort, repeatedly, to reduce the harm you cause and/or benefit from in order to not be a bad person. You have to consider carefully if your behavior needs changing when someone says that you are causing harm.

When it comes to creating justice, intention means nothing; your harm-reduction needs to be effective in order to matter at all. When it comes to a judgement of moral character, intention + effort is everything. If you keep on trying to get better, and you keep on trying to learn from a variety of sources, I believe you will eventually get to a place where your efforts are effective and you do reduce harm. So I don't care where you are now; I care if you are repeatedly learning and trying. The more you try, the better a person I think you are.

1) Don't make jokes about their difference from you. This means, if they have a different skin tone, don't make jokes about it. If they have a different gender identity, don't make jokes about it. (this includes "jokingly" or "affectionately" using slurs that refer to a group you're not in) If they have a different relationship style, don't make jokes about it. There are many reasons for this, but the very most basic is that it feels like you're saying "you're not one of us, isn't that funny?"
2) Don't make general statements about how "those people" who are different from you behave, look, think, etc. If you are not one of that group, you're probably just repeating stereotypes, so just don't make general statements. NO, knowing someone from that group -- even very very well -- DOES NOT change this. If you're quoting someone else's opinion on group A, make sure that person is a member of group A and make sure you state it as a quote of a specific person, not as a general fact.
3) Don't make assumptions, and don't put the burden of your ignorance on other people. If you don't know, educate yourself through the internet and the library/bookstore. Feel free to ask for resources, but don't demand free tutoring. You can ask IF the person WANTS to be extremely generous and give you free tutoring, but there is a reason we pay teachers, professors, and tutors -- it's WORK teaching someone, highly skilled and frustrating work.

These things are not all necessary for consent with all people; however, if you want to make sure that you don't accidentally coerce or violate someone, these are good ways to avoid that. In all cases, discussing specifics with the person about the instance you're in is the best method. If they are comfortable giving blanket permissions, you can act on those, but understand that you MAY be risking an incomplete consent, because no one can predict themselves perfectly. If they don't specifically say "you can do this at any time" do NOT assume that a yes once is a yes at ANY point after that.

These steps are assuming that you're not a rapist and therefore would never deliberately push sex on someone regardless of their will, through drugging, physical force, threat, or power (such as an adult over a child or a boss over an employee). Those are not mistakes, those are crimes.

Step 1a: the STI, birth control, protection, and trauma conversation. Before starting sexual contact, if you want to have full consent you need to do these things:

• a) disclose your known STI status AND your risk factors (unprotected sex? sex with people whose status is positive or unknown?), and ask about theirs. If you are not okay with taking the risk or vice versa, don't have sex with them.
• b) if relevant, discuss what birth control measures are being taken and what to do in event of unplanned pregnancy or barrier-method fail. If you're not okay with how they'd respond to those things or vice versa, don't have sex with them.
• c) ask what methods of protection they want, tell what you want, and then go with whichever is more cautious. If you're not okay with how much protection they want or vice versa, don't have sex with them.
• d) ask about any trigger behaviors you should avoid, and disclose your own if you have them. Such a huge number of people have been sexually abused that you need to assume that anyone you have sex with may have triggers; if you don't want to give someone a PTSD flashback, ASK FIRST. If relevant to one or both of you, discuss carefully. If you still feel too scared of triggering them, don't have sex with them.

This first step is why I don't often have sex with strangers any more: having this conversation is difficult with strangers since it involves a lot of trust. If I do, it's low-physical-risk sex, like fully-clothed grinding or energy exchange. So far I have not been very careful about asking about triggers and have been lucky, but that is something I am going to be much more careful about now that I have considered the possible consequences.


Step 1b: disclose any other information that you think they might want, given what you know of them. If they only have sex in the context of a committed relationship, and you're not committed to them, make sure they know that. If they're monogamous and you're poly, make sure they know that. If you only have sex with the same sex in a casual way that can never get serious and they aren't the same, make sure they know that. Deliberately having sex with someone when you KNOW they would NOT do it if they had relevant information is coercion, not consensual sex. If you hold back info you think they want in order to have sex with them, that's manipulative and coercive at best.


Step 2: ask about the specific occasion BEFORE starting sexual contact, without pressure in your language, attitude, or behavior. Asking a yes or no question in a culture where saying no to sex is taboo is NOT a no-pressure way of asking. A better way of asking is an open-ended question like, "I want to have sex with you right now. How do you feel about that?" Then,

• a) if they express that they do not want to have sex, ask for a time frame -- not now, not tonight, not ever? You don't want to ask again if they know they won't want to do it tonight or ever. Responses like "I don't feel very good" or "I'm really tired" or "I'm drunk" mean, at the very least, not now, and should be treated like a no -- ask for time frame and wait that long before asking again. DO NOT POUT: do not complain or whine or express upsetness: you NEVER have a right to expect a yes. If you can't avoid showing disappointment, ask for some time to compose yourself and go away until you can be happy to share non-sexual time. To make them deal with your negative emotional reaction to a "no" is pressure, both now and in the future. If they know they're going to have to deal with your crankiness or whinyness if they say no, they can't say a completely uncoerced yes.
• b) if they give a non-committal answer like "I don't know" or "I'm not sure," ask for clarification. Ask questions like, "Is there something you would rather be doing right now?" (if the answer is yes, do that before asking again or don't have sex.) or "what is your emotional response to my desire?" If they continue with non-committal answers or look uncomfortable/distant, that means no -- don't continue asking for sex. For me, at that point my sexual desire is gone, so I might say something like, "I no longer want to have sex but I very much want to understand your feelings and thoughts right now."
• c) if they express a clear desire to have sex, move to step 3!

Step 3: do not assume that any particular sex act or response will happen, including but not limited to:

• a) penetration of any kind (some people don't want or can't handle penetration every time)
• b) genital touch of any kind (some people don't want or can't handle genital touch every time)
• c) orgasm or climax of any kind (some people don't want or can't have orgasms every time)
• d) roleplay of any kind (including feminine/masculine, dominant/submissive, initiator/responder, etc! these must be discussed to be consensual)
• e) pain or sensation of any kind (some people may not be comfortable with the kind of sensation you want in sex, or don't want it this time)

If you feel a need for one or more of those things in order to enjoy sex, discuss it with the person BEFORE touching them sexually, and if you cannot feel comfortable not having something that they don't want, do not have sex with them. If you do, you risk pressuring them into doing things they don't want to.


Step 4: agree on safe words/signals

• a) there should be a word or signal that means "stop all things immediately, for a significant period of time, possibly ending the sex"
• b) if using bondage, there should be a word or signal that means "loose the bonds immediately"
• c) it's also useful to have a word/signal that means, "stop everything for a little while" and another that means "resume" I use the words 'pause' and 'unpause' -- this keeps me from getting overstimulated and going numb.
• d) it can be useful to have a word/signal that means "try something else" -- I prefer to be specific about what else, but I know people who like the indirect method better.

Step 5: check for sensitivities when touching and ask before penetration

• a) when touching anywhere you think might be especially sensitive (like nipples or genitals), pay attention. If you are sighted, you can do this by watching their body language -- ease towards their sensitive places and if they look uncomfortable, take that as a not yet, or if you'd rather not risk doing something that will feel bad, ASK FIRST. I always ask, either with words or by reaching for a spot, pausing with my hand near it, looking at them and continuing only if they nod. If they don't respond at all, that is a NO, and I do other things instead and then ask with words if I want to go to that spot. Be gradual in intensity or ask how intense they want it. I once was making out with someone who reached up and pinched my nipple so hard I thought it was a bee sting at first -- NOT OKAY, EVER. If you know they like super-hard pinches, that's different -- do not assume that you can guess the level of intensity they would like.
• b) when you want to penetrate them with fingers, you can ask with words or (IF you already got a yes for touching the area) lay your hand on the opening of the place you want to penetrate and wait for a response. Usually what happens for me at this point is that the person asks for penetration or does not respond. No response means NO, move on, then ask with words later if you still want to. If you want to penetrate with more than one finger, ask with words; more is NOT better for everyone.
• c) when you want to penetrate them with your penis, if you have agreed on barrier methods for penetration but not other sex acts, ask if they want penetration before putting the condom on; putting the condom on in that situation communicates an expectation of penetration which will be louder than any question that follows. When you ask, be specific: WHERE are you wanting to penetrate? Don't assume that penetration means penis-in-vagina to them just because they have a front orifice. Or that it means penis-in-anus just because they don't. If you have an agreement to not use barriers, you can try the "pausing outside the opening and waiting for a response" method and remember -- no response means NO. You can do other things and ask with words about penetration later.
• d) if you want to be penetrated by them, all the same requirements apply -- do NOT put their parts (including their toys or prosthetics) inside you without asking, or put a condom on them without asking.
• e) when you want to penetrate them with an object, ask first and ask specifically: "I want to put [object] in your [place] -- how do you feel about that idea?"
• f) Do not take a yes for one kind of penetration as a yes for any other kind, ever.
• g) with any kind of penetration, if they look uncomfortable and say non-committal things when you ask about penetration, drop the subject and if you still want to, talk about it when you are not in a sexual situation.

Something that makes consent easier is picking only highly-communicative partners who are good at stating their own boundaries. It's your responsibility to keep from violating or coercing them; if they are willing to help you that makes things much easier. If someone doesn't want to talk about sex or doesn't know their own boundaries, don't have sex with them because you will probably make a big mistake and hurt them, and yes, that will be YOUR FAULT because it is YOUR responsibility to keep from hurting others.

EVEN IF you follow ALL of these steps, you may STILL accidentally coerce or violate someone. We live in a rape culture that makes it very difficult for us to understand consent, to respect our own boundaries and the boundaries of others; so sex is dangerous. We need to go in knowing we can hurt each other, and being careful to minimize that risk.

This is from my perspective as a fairly neurotypical person, and may reflect neurotypical privilege; please understand that I am speaking to/about neurotypical experiences/abilities. How this process might work in brains significantly different from mine, I don't know (if you do, I'd love if you'd share with me).

The human mind is programmable and everything we take in -- consciously or unconsciously -- alters that programming. I've recently realized that I have a high level of skill at programming my mind because I started very early. I have always believed that some people can 'hear' thoughts and that I can't tell who can, so if I ever think it would be shitty to SAY something, I make sure I do not THINK it either. That habit started because I didn't want especially-sensitive (thought-reading) people to think badly of me, and as I developed a taste for honesty and openness, it became more central. If I want to be honest and open, ready to answer truthfully whenever someone might ask "what are you thinking?" I need to make sure that my thoughts and utterances match. I consider it a level of profound dishonesty to think one thing and utter another. (This is why I want people to call me by the pronoun that reflects how they see me, rather than the one that reflects how I see myself. If they gender me, I want to know)

I've heard many people say that they "can't help how they think" and to a certain extent, that's true. We can't help the ways that societal bullshit imprints on us, or the thoughts that pop up unbeckoned. We CAN control a good bit of what we let in, and we CAN "talk back," and over time we CAN silence those sexist, racist, etc thoughts. It takes discipline and practice. It takes recognizing that there is some HORRIBLE SHIT inside us, and instead of moving on quickly when we have rotten thoughts, we need to examine them and talk back. An example would be body policing: back in the day I might see someone with clothing that highlights their fat, and think to myself, "she shouldn't be wearing that, she looks awful." Instead of responding to my shame by ignoring the fact that I'd just thought that, I would talk back by saying, "why am I judging how someone else chooses to decorate themselves? She has a right to put anything on her body that she wants. She has no obligation to dress in a way that I would prefer. What is it that I think this person 'shouldn't' be doing? Showing their fat. What is wrong with that? nothing. What is it that is preventing me from seeing this person as perfectly beautiful? I am thinking that fat is bad. Fat is not bad, it is just a body part. Now I will look again with intent of seeing them without the lens of social judgement. Now I can see [the entire person, whom I missed because I was so busy judging out of fatphobia]." Fatphobia is an easy example for me because I feel sure that I'm 99% over it. I have no idea how much of most other prejudices are still in me, so those are harder to talk about. It's weird because at a certain point of learning about racism and sexism, I would hear those things in my head. I would hear things like "bitch" or "watermelon" (the last one I found very strange because I didn't even know that liking watermelon was a stereotype until I took a class on racism) and be shocked and ashamed that those associations were in my head, particularly because I had never accepted them as truth, and yet there they were, in my subconscious. I still feel a lot of shame that that would ever occur to me, but my only power over my mind is what I allow to STAY, not what comes in (though that, too, we can affect by not watching media that supports stereotypes, not putting up with other people saying prejudiced stuff, limiting our exposure to those memes as much as we can).

If lookist/racist/sexist/ableist (etc) slurs come to your mind when you get angry with someone, that means you still have those thoughts embedded in you and they are still doing damage to yourself and others, whether you can notice that damage or not. When people are put under pressure, what gets squeezed out is whatever is in your subconscious. If you haven't cleared that stuff out, it's going to be horrible HORRIBLE stuff; increasing with the amount of privilege you have. Violence, hatred, prejudice, arrogance, entitlement, etc. It's so important that we don't try to stuff those thoughts and urges down but instead dissect and cast them out. I am not saying ACT on the bullshit that comes out of your subconscious! I'm saying WORK on it. If you have an urge to be violent to someone or call them names or if they become a stereotype to you when you're angry, examine that, deal with it. If you don't feel equipped to handle it yourself, ask a trusted friend or get counseling (if you have access to those things). At the very least, be honest with people who trust you. Don't pretend to be perfect; be willing to accept it when people point out that your imprinting is showing, and take that opportunity to look CAREFULLY at where that is coming from and what lies you might subconsciously be believing. If you have people in your life who are willing to do the (exhausting, unrewarding) labor of pointing out where you need to unlearn things, take that for the gift that it is; don't just use it to hide your prejudice, use it to change your mind. PRACTICE.

This is something I know I need to work on. Being honest about my ignorance (especially when it comes to race and disability) is hard for me. If you notice me doing/saying something that reflects ignorance, privilege, or prejudice in any way, I want to know. I'm not going to take it as you calling me a bad person, I'm going to take it as a possible new pathway to removing imprinted lies. I feel nervous because as far as I can remember, I have learned my problem areas indirectly, and I know it has to have occurred to people that I was showing problematic beliefs, but I haven't been called out on it directly (except to be called "racist against whites" and "sexist against men" which [so far] has always been a problem with understanding how privilege works). I fear that I might seem too dogmatic or something. I hope that people will be frank with me about these things.

( extra rantyrant )

I'm extra pissed because radical feminism was my home until these people shat all over the entire house. Now I have to specify that those people are not living up to radical feminist values. I refuse to abandon radical feminism because there are some turdmonsters stinking it up.

Here's what radical feminism actually means: going to the root of patriarchy, which is gender roles, and breaking them down. It differs from liberal feminism because it attempts to work through social change rather than legal change. (there's a need for both kinds but I have no interest in the watering down you have to put up with to make any legal progress) Because all oppressions intersect, fighting sexism means fighting racism, ableism, ageism, lookism, etc etc: to fight "only for sexism" you would have to only fight for the most privileged women to have rights. That's a huge issue that feminism began with and then people like bell hooks and Audre Lorde said "that's not feminism for ALL women" and now WE OUGHT TO KNOW BETTER THERE IS NO FUCKING EXCUSE.

Also, yes men CAN fucking be feminists. They can even be body-building beard-wearing lumberjack-dressing tobacco-chewing beer-drinking loud-belching men and be feminist because HELLO! FEMINISM CAN FIT IN ANY BRAIN IT DOESN'T COME FROM STRAWBERRY VULVA JUICE.

MY FEMINISM WILL BE INTERSECTIONAL OR IT WILL BE BULLSHIT!

There's this "radical feminist" conference happening this year that is a blight on the name -- it's a conference only open to "women born women living as women." That's fucking ridiculous because radical feminism is ALL ABOUT breaking down gender roles. But apparently the poor cis women need a place to get away from all the trans women who are oppressing them with their male privilege. The cesspool of bullshit runneth over! Do some fucking research -- just the murder stats ought to be enough.

I have two problems with this. First of all, supporting existing hierarchies is neither radical nor feminist -- privileged "activist" groups should not be excluding those with less privilege. If you didn't learn from first wave feminism's "only upper/middle class straight white women count" mistake, go back to feminism 101 and leave the organizing conferences to people who care about more than one-step-away-from-privilege-pinnacle people. UGH. Your privilege reeks and you're splashing it everywhere.*

Second, the idea that having an exclusive gather based on external bodily characteristics automatically gives some kind of safety/freedom from privileged/oppressive behaviors. NO IT DOESN'T. It's a simple way to find MOSTLY safe people, but it's certainly not the best way. Exclusive gathering is a false sense of security -- it excludes people who might look different but would learn and be respectful, and includes people who might be trying to impose their internalized oppression on others who are the same. I would never try to push my way into a gathering that didn't want me, but I also would never form a gathering based on some external similarity to me. If I was having a meeting about being classed as female, or being queer, or being trans, I'd set the topic and set rules for behavior, and let people agree in order to join. If I wanted to create a sense of safety, I might have a behavior rule that said, "if you have not experienced this, attend to listen only." More likely, I would use some variant of numbers 3, 4, 5, & 6 of my house agreements, perhaps with volunteer bouncers just in case someone could not be civil.

The idea that because someone has experienced similar oppression they will not visit that oppression on you is sheer ludicrous error. I've experienced silencing, policing, 'splaining, shaming, erasing, and other tools of the kyriarchy being used against me by female, queer, trans, poly, fat, etc people. And I know it's not just me. I'd trust someone with more privilege who was willing to be called on it and stop over someone who merely had similar oppression ANY time.

*on the bright side, at least I didn't go to the conference unaware and get surrounded by that shit.

I recently overheard a conversation about how being "scantily clad" is a declaration that one wants sex, and it reminded me of being told that my clothing was "provocative" and more recently told that if I go naked in a public place, I am sexually harassing anyone who sees me, by drawing them sans-consent into my sex scene. In response to these ideas: "HELL THE FUCK NO."

The way a person chooses to cover or not cover their body is 1) not a declaration of any kind of desire 2) not inherently centered on the viewer and 3) not sexual in and of itself. People make these faulty and damaging assumptions because in our culture nudity is fetishized: that is, it is assigned sexuality. Thus "showing skin" is erotic: a sexual invitation or "provocation." It's not simply or inherently human to consider nudity erotic: if it were, the nudity fetish wouldn't vary according to culture. This is purely an individual fetish: one taught by culture but owned by each person. It being a common fetish doesn't mean that it is appropriate to assign other people's motives by, or to act on these assumed motives. If a group of people fetishizes tie-wearing, and they hang out with other people who say that tie-wearing is an invitation to choke people, that does not make it appropriate to assume that any person wearing a tie wants to be choked with it. Because people are never all the same; behavior and dress can never tell you anything unless the person who acts/wears explains those actions/clothing. Even if in all the world, there was only one person who ever wore a tie just for the look of it and everyone else wore it as an erotic choking device, you would still need to check with every person because choking a non-consenting person is a horrific act.

If my clothing or lack thereof provokes you, that's your fetish, not my behavior. When I go naked, I am not getting an erotic thrill out of it and I am not signaling a request for sex. I don't care what you think; you may call yourself aroused but you may NOT call me arousing (unless we have decided to have sex and are currently having it). You have the right to look away and the right to ask me to not be around you when I'm naked but you don't have the right to force me to cover my body. I wear clothes because the law will punish me if I don't (and occasionally for practical reasons), but I deeply resent this imposition on my bodily autonomy. Don't you dare assign my clothing (or lack thereof) any intention or meaning; only I get to declare my intentions.


Strange Children
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