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It is stupid and there are these hoops you have to jump through, boxes you need to check: I have only ever been attracted to men, I have never fetishized women’s clothes or done anything remotely kinky, I have never been sexual with the junk I was born with. Pretty much you have to prove that you’re totally normal and straight and not queer at all, so that if they let you transition you will be a normal het woman who doesn’t freak anybody out, and so we often, as individuals, internalize these things, and then we, as a community, often reinforce them.
It sounds all dramatic but the funny thing about it is how undramatic it is when it’s you doing it to yourself. It’s just a thing you do.
She’s like Sigmund Freud: she can come up with a million examples to support whatever bullshit theory she wants to support. And being completely irresponsible for the first time in her life is so appealing that she is fully willing to build a case for it.
Like, it would be nice to believe that you could just exist, just be some true, honest, essential self. But you only really get to have a true honest essential self if you’re white, male, het and able-bodied. Otherwise your body has all these connotations and you don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
maybe because his ribs were all full of disappointment and helium,
James is kind of like, well, I guess I actually do want to have the kind of life where I bail on work to go to Reno with a transgender murderess I just met or whatever. And the more he thinks about it the more he’s like, whoa, this is actually what freedom feels like.
The problem wasn’t the coping mechanism, the problem is that the coping mechanism became a pattern of behavior, and it is really hard to just up and end a behavior pattern.
Like the only unperverted kind of sex is being a dude and getting a boner from looking at a girl’s boobs and then putting the boner in her vagina. But guess what, that shit is all culturally constructed and culturally bound . . . blah blah blah.
You’re putting yourself into this restrictive box they made up that doesn’t leave room for figuring out who you are or what you want. It’s a box labeled Dude and Pervert—Bad and Terrible Secret.
