I'm alive!

So I haven't written owt lately, for this reason:

I've been having a great deal of social FAIL and speech FAIL, so have had to avoid social occasions. This makes me gloomy. I LIKE social occasions and my friends, I just don't know how understanding the average person is with someone sitting next to them and "refusing" to speak - I guess it looks like refusal, because I'm normally Master of the Big Long Words.

So I decided to make a conscious decision not to communicate, because at least then the decision is mine, not that of a random bit of neurological circuitry.

But I'm up for a rant. This might not be the most important thing ever, but it made me rage incoherently (silently, obviously!).

OK. Sometimes I hate my body and face. They make me fucking miserable. I'm convinced that being a freaky trans person means that everyone goes "EWW OH GOD NO MY DEAR SWEET BRAIN" at the thought of having sexual relations with me (this is called internalised transphobia... though I just generally don't like my facial features).

And the media bar for representations of trans people is set so low that it'd make sense to be pleased by anything without the message "trans people are hideous, badwrong, fakes, "really" their assigned gender, really totally badwrong...".

So, a comic that's all about trans men being hot? Because of the above two issues, we should surely shout Hoorah! Or, some of us, Good gods, give me the artist's phone number!

But this one? (Found it here, where nixwilliams already says everything that needs to be said).

I was assigned female. This, combined with our sexist society, means I've been subjected to more objectification by straight men than... than... than something else I've had lots and lots of (yes, perhaps it's a good idea that I don't attempt to use language at the moment).

So, I know what good, consensual objectification feels like, and I know what creepy, unpleasant objectification feels like. This cartoon falls squarely in the second category.

In the last panel, is the author negating the rest of it with humourous self-deprecation? "Look at the ridiculous way my mind works"? That was my last hope. However, if you find her LiveJournal entry concerning the comic... nope.

There's more stuff to rage about the more you look. "They transform their female bodies to pass as male"?

... yes. Yes, that is our ultimate goal. To put on a big performance for everyone else's benefit. Not to feel congruent with our own bodies, or anything - to "pass".

If your irony detector isn't working... that's a giant pile of poo.

Finally, I've come across the comics before. I've liked them. One of my friends has an adorably lovely one up on her wall. I'm disappointed in the author.

Let's put it simply. If I hadn't had sex in fifty years, because Hagrid had fallen under a bus and every single person I'd approached in the meantime had done some version of the "OH GOD NO" thing... if I was desperate for affirmation that I'm not some hideous monstrosity (OK, yes, make that more desperate, be quiet)... if the Government had paid a skywriter to follow me around producing the cloudy sentence "All trans men are hideous and Oliver particularly so" for all to see...

I still wouldn't date/sleep with a tranny-chaser. Because I was assigned female, and have thus had enough of "you're a sex object because of your parts, I am not interested in any objections" (obviously trans women get that a hundred times over - "tranny chaser" originally meant a creepy individual who chases trans women).

In the post by nixwilliams, he's worried that he's merely projecting his Issues on to the comic - heterophobic Issues. It's pretty obvious that he's not, but I need to do the same kind of check - am I simply bitter because everyone around me, apart from Hagrid, thinks trans men are EW GROSS?

In vaguely related news, Hagrid and I are now like all the other queers (queer in the modern British identity sense, though we just don't eat/knit enough lentils for this to be entirely true). We've decided we'd officially be polyamorous if appropriately lovely people wanted to do so. We have plenty of issues (like my not being able to talk, can you tell I'm getting tired of that one?) but relationship-related jealousy is decidedly not one of them. Insert stereotype of male homosexual here.

In other news, I have now seen both Repo! The Genetic Opera and Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (yes. Yes, I am late to the geek party) and have decided that no other genre... hell, no other medium... need exist. From now on, everything needs to be done in melodramatic modern quasi-opera.

For example, the news and weather. Wouldn't life be better then?