doe @exiliaex@masto.anarch.cc

i'm not going to pretend i have any solutions. but i can't help but wonder if it'd be possible to start building some of this. pick a few sites of struggle, get involved with them in person, and try to explore the concepts that arise through the struggle in a piece of "content" - rinse and repeat.

perhaps significant ground could be covered if a group that's friendly with each other and adjacent to each other's politics enough from the get-go coordinated similar strategies in different places, with different sites of struggle.

mostly i feel like we've all failed to do the work in collectively establishing the frameworks and structures that enable us all to open up discourses further, with a mind towards multi-directional empathy and without Final Answers.

a new generation of those willing to speak their mind on things in society they're frustrated with is being born. and a lot of energy that could be directed at healthy critique of systems and structures of power is being directed towards framing interpersonal disputes as political disputes because leftists get tailwagged so fucking easily. twitter made it *too* easy, which is why leftists are mass-exodusing.

talked a lot with someone else tonight about the problems with Leftist Content - the incentives which drive them to reactionary actions and attitudes, and an inability to reach new people, the siloing of content into algorithmic bubbles, the niche ideological milieu discourses, the same refrains which get no easier to deal with on the 100th time hearing them.

it makes me wonder what's possible beyond what i went through.

damn this thread didn't get ported to bsky? only the top level post got sent? what's up with that?

and idk, maybe i'm wrong to feel this way but it feels like what was practically common sense for the trans people that came before us is gone, lost to the world of Spectacle.

i've been hearing this kind of line from (a certain kind of) trans person over the last few years. the people i was arguing against when trying to open up discourses on transness. it's so strange to see people who have every reason to understand why this view is fucked peddle it.

obviously, this is the standard Dem model. like the way they talked about gay people and gay marriage before the courts ruled it was legal.

but god this is so far behind the times. when i started HRT nearly 10 years ago it was on an informed consent model. no need for therapist notes. no psych evals. just me, walking into planned parenthood, and telling them what i wanted, and them telling me the risks and changes associated.

Kamala was asked about trans people, whether we should have "gender-affirming care" in this country. Her answer was that we should "follow the law" - after a followup question she iterated that it's "a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary"

i'm thinking about this stuff because i saw Kamala was asked about trans healthcare and how unsatisfying her answer felt.

i then re-identified myself a few years later - it/its pronouns, changed my name to doe - because "girl" and "woman" felt like a cage too. it was like opening a world of possibility and then drawing a box on the floor while saying "if i leave this box i'll die." i still consider myself a woman in many ways, but opened it up for myself.

i transitioned because "boy" and "man" felt like a cage. because i had all of these feelings for so long that i couldn't express - and with transitioning, i could.

when it came to gender discourses i was always interested in empathizing with the vastly varied ways people can present themselves. the unique contexts and situations we find ourselves in, separate from the models designed to organize us. in every discourse about gender i was trying to open doors to possibility.

as someone who has had a longtime interest in movements against injustice, someone who discovered radical leftism and anarchism in their late teens, i was continuously trying to bring notions of self-organization, direct action, and change through resistance against structures that harm us into various discourses.

thinking about the role i was previously trying to play in online discourses and how much it feels like i failed in the spaces i was in.

@teatimehobby.bsky.social the UX isnt exactly pristine on mastodon, but theres not a lot to figure out. its like if instead of signing up for discord you signed up with individual discord servers. and that those servers could interact with each other too.

in other, completely unrelated news - the new Vic Berger trump supercut is very funny and is one of the only things i've ever seen that made me empathize with trump as a human being (while still despising him and everything he stands for, of course)