I wanted to add that I think performative allyship is easy to fall into and I’ve definitely been guilty of it in different circumstances throughout my life so I’m not saying it’s evil or anything, just that I think it’s worth examining
I’ve read accounts of younger binary trans people who are not ready to come out and hate being asked pronouns because the options are out yourself or invalidate yourself and it makes me wonder if a lot of the (especially corporate) drive behind this stuff isn’t mostly a way for people to feel like they’re doing activism while not really doing anything.
The weirdest thing is this person was engaging w/ each of us one on one so pronouns were not really even an issue and their opportunity to misgender was pretty low, even by accident. The biggest irony is I didn’t mention any of this to Terry because I knew they would feel better thinking the tech just presumed female pronouns, if it came up at all. I guess maybe this was an important issue to the tech or maybe they are not cis? But it really felt like they wanted praise.
A way that I genuinely feel bad for trans people is that woke cis people are often embarrassingly bad about patting themselves on the back for engaging with their identities. I made an eye appointment for me and Terry a few weeks ago to get our scripts updated and I got called first to do the basic eye chart / eye wellness test. The tech made a big deal out of asking me Terry’s pronouns and then clearly expected to be praised for it, so I was like ‘uh, thanks for asking’.
I paid the lawyer 3k of my own money and did basically all the work but every step is somewhere between drowning and pulling out my own teeth. I’m either going to escape or die, idk. I just want to sleep.
Their new thing is talking about how much they regret transitioning to guilt trip me. I don’t care. I would want to leave anyway. The gender shit is what let me know things would never improve (because of how it has been handled) but it’s clear that the core of the whole thing is rotten. I don’t hate this person (sometimes I hate myself for not hating this person) but staying is only an option in so far as suicide is an option.
The reason things have dragged out as long as they have is that my ex does not want to split up. They are afraid to be alone. I often wonder if they even want specifically me around anymore or it’s just not wanting to be alone. They have used every possible thing to leverage this outcome and still refer to us as ‘lesbians’. It makes me feel like shit. At this point it has been two years since I said I wanted to move on.
I went downstairs to get something small to eat because I skipped lunch to get work done. I had been crying. My ex started their usual routine of hugging and fucking with me because they are lonely without realizing I was upset, but eventually they figured it out and asked me what was wrong. I tried to lay it out as like, calmly and non-judgementally as I could thinking maybe its good to communicate it. They freaked out and had a panic response.
Recently one of my highschool classmates had a miscarriage. She was so excited to finally be pregnant, but we are both 35, and pregnancy is risky under ideal circumstances. I was reading twitter and a mutual had retweeted a thread about a woman who has just lost her baby under similar circumstances. She admitted she blamed herself because she was 37. I have ‘pregnancy’ blocked on my phone but not on tweet deck. It blindsided me and I got pretty upset.
One of the things I’ve been keeping to myself is the anxiety that the length of time the divorce has dragged out has made it so that by the time I’m in a position to have a kid with Mike, I won’t be able to do that safely anymore. It’s so sad and bad and big that I just try not to think about it. Sometimes I can’t stop myself from thinking about it. It’s kind of become an intrusive thought.
