🐑 Have you ever told someone "you're valid"? No! *sprays water* Bad brand!

Have you ever made a blanket statement that everyone is valid? No! *sprays water* Bad brand!

Neither of those is affirming anyone. They're no more caring about anyone else than George H.W. Bush reading "message: I care" from his margin notes. What they are are self-declarations of a pro-trans brand identity you want, and a demand that trans people validate this.

And if you say such things while also doing endless discourse about all the ways and reasons so many actual trans people are fake? They're just pure cruelty, there is nothing remotely nice or even neutral about them, they're just cruel and you're a kind of not good person if you do that.

It's really simple: Is there any way or sense in which I am less woman, less female, less at home in womanhood, than any cis woman is?

Then I am not "valid" because I am not a real woman.

I need to be what Nikki Hiltz is so proud to be that none of you will ever let a trans woman be: an actual woman, who belongs in womanhood as a real woman, no matter what I like to be called. (Watch me break barriers by going into the men's room.)

You all have the same goal as JK Rowling (and you canceled her for it): to make me desist from my transgender insanity of claiming to actually be a real woman, actually be female, stop expecting everyone to cater to my delusions like they're true, and learn to accept myself as a transgender-identifying male who's free to be feminine if I want, so long as I understand it can never actually make me a woman.

You know what we see around these days? Women you've all convinced are men desperately wishing they could be women. You've clearly informed them that's not possible and that being trans can never accomplish that because trans people only do some unrelated "gender identity" thing that has nothing to do with that, nothing to do with what men and women, boys and girls, males and females are. We were that before last decade, because everyone from queer-affirming sex ed to Gay-Straight Alliance to Rocky Horror Picture Show to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to The Crying Game made it 100% clear to me that a trans woman is not a woman. And there were many others. For maybe 5 years we basically disappeared and just became trans women. But then you all fixed that, you got the lid back on that ill-advised transgender thing and twisted transness into just another weapon to beat us back down into the cis binary.

And this won't give a single one of you pause about anything other than maybe a moment of helpless searching for the inclusive words to correct me that no, actually, I don't want to be a woman because that's not possible, no I don't want anyone to treat me like a woman anytime it's worth caring about because that would be unreasonable. etc.

I hope y'all got something more than just a person-to-brand transition in exchange for your souls.

(Reminder that we do not accept apologies, i.e., ritual self-absolution, only atonement. This one's easy, it involves an unfulfilled promise, namely validity, so atonement is as easy as making good on it. As soon as you deliver on me being valid, i.e., every bit as much a real woman as a cis woman is, we're cool. Many of you have assured us that's easy, so it shouldn't be difficult for you to deliver. I'd hate to think that was also cynical brand behavior.)

🐑 Already just typing drafts, more basic words that Firefox spellcheck somehow doesn't know (is Firefox spellcheck a form of Newspeak? discuss):

• masculinize (it knows feminize)
• operant
• von
• Anglosphere

@20002ist 🦌 It's funny you should say that. The Curse of the Diaeresis

My predecessor (and the former keeper of the comma shaker) told me that she used to pester the style editor, Hobie Weekes, who had been at the magazine since 1928, to get rid of the diaeresis. She found it fussy. She said that once, in the elevator, he told her he was on the verge of changing that style and would be sending out a memo soon. And then he died.

This was in 1978. No one has had the nerve to raise the subject since.

@sluttymayo