You’re Not Selfish For Wanting To Be Treated Well

jokes aside i think it’s amazing and heartwarming to see like 4chan incel bros perform the miracle of crawling out of that hole and becoming real human beings and chronicling their journey to realizing that they can be well adjusted happy normal dudes

“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school. Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that “Why is the world so beautiful?” is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants”, from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett

I’m making it a habit to say “drac u later” when I leave a room and “I’m backula” when I enter a room

tags on this post // Юрий Рейнер, Первые огни (Yuri Reiner, First Lights) // this post

"There's no thought crimes and no thought heroisms" is honestly such a good piece of life advice.

You could be having the most fucked up problematic thoughts 24/7 but if you treat people with kindness, the good you do is the only thing that matters. But if you have only the purest thoughts and all the correct beliefs, it doesn't matter one bit if you spend most of your time being an asshole to people.

you all need to think about how you interact with trans men online, like really think

recently one of my posts about being a trans man and casually interacting with another trans man got about 90,000 notes and the tags and comments are full of ‘too pure for this earth’, ‘i’m a dirty sinner i don’t deserve to read this post’, ‘adorable cute sweet precious boys’ despite the fact that it’s mentioned that i am in college and not a child in the post and you all need to think about how some trans men do not want to be referred to that way and being okay with being referred to that way is pretty much exclusively a young teenager tumblr thing that makes a lot of guys uncomfortable. i’m just a man. none of this is necessary and it’s very performative, but…

along with this infantilizing, with this obsession with the proposed purity of another man and myself just for existing, there’s also dehumanization that comes with it, for example:

somewhere along the post, someone decided it would be a good idea to add, ‘all i can imagine is two eldritch horrors trying to get their voices as horrifying and fucked up as possible’ (not exact quote but that’s the gist of it)…

and someone decided that it would be a good idea to take my experience, wildly change the context and make a FANFIC, on MY OWN POST, of two eldritch MONSTERS upset because their voices didn’t sound ‘as horrific’ as the ‘monsters’ around them, and bonding over it together. nowhere in this fanfiction was being trans mentioned.

this is, quite possibly, the most horrifying thing someone has added to one of my posts and going beyond dehumanizing my experiences as a trans man enjoying my voice getting deeper, but also writing a fanfiction onto the post that changed the context of ‘two trans men finding validation between one another and our voices’ into ‘two monsters are sad they’re not scary enough and bond over trying to be scary together’. i shouldn’t have to explain how horrible that is for me to read, and how horrible it is to see that added on my own post & circulated through hundreds with no criticism.

quite frankly, it’s devastating to see how people talk about and interact with trans men. we are either children who must be protected and are weak and vulnerable and ‘too pure’, or we are fuel for your fanfics that completely strip us of our humanity. i consent to neither and if you think that any of these things are okay to do to a complete stranger, all you’re doing is patting yourself on the back for your performative ally points while making trans men uncomfortable with sharing their experiences and talking about their lives and trying to be happy with themselves. stop it. 

“When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.”

— Abraham Joshua Heschel