there has been a pretty far-reaching trend on this website to blog about the effects of mental illness and trauma on emotional regulation and an aggressive campaign to get people to not only understand but accept boundary-crossing behavior from people because it is a reflection of their mental illness/trauma, as far as to imply that you are ableist if you are not able to tactfully handle and accept someone else’s dysfunctional coping mechanisms and behavior despite your own discomfort. i see this most often with posts about bpd but there are other topics as well. i haven’t commented on any of it because it’s not a pie i wanted a finger in, but it has over time led me to develop severe discomfort around people who follow that line of thought to the point that i have disengaged, unfollowed, and unfriended many people who agree with it.
the stuff i’m seeing passed around now about “supporting perpretrators” in addition to survivors is the horrifying track down which that train of thought has sped, because what people don’t seem to understand is that mental illness and trauma do no make you an exception to the boundaries of those around you. it is necessary to be aware of the ways that survivors and mentally ill people may lash out emotionally at those they are close to but it is not actually necessary to be “accepting” to the point that it is harmful to you. your emotional boundaries are important, more important than whatever obligation you feel to “accommodate” someone’s trauma.
it is not “okay” that survivors sometimes display manipulative/abusive behaviors towards the people around them and it is important to handle these situations with tact, sure, but not to the detriment of setting your own boundaries and checking the behaviors in question. when friends i know are mentally ill/ trauma survivors have lashed out at me with emotionally manipulation tactics in times of great distress, i have supported them afterward, but i have always followed this up with a discussion about how these kinds of behaviors can not and will not continue or our relationship will end. this is not “ableist” or refusing to support survivors’ trauma, it is setting strong boundaries within the context of supporting each other and providing the community in which we all can heal. what is important here is that these are isolated incidents – learned defense mechanisms arising in times of panic and stress – and not consistent grabs for power. these are not people following the deliberate, overarching pattern of actions abusers use to isolate and control victims, and their actions are easily distinguishable from such.
my point is that this discourse has allowed people to blur the line between these behaviors and abuse when it comes to community support. we should support abusers in our communities as well, they say, because otherwise we would be isolating vulnerable marginalized people who are just struggling with their own trauma. this is exactly what abusers want. this is not a radical attitude. abusers depicting themselves as helpless victims of emotions and circumstances out of their control has pretty much always been the abuser party line. there is nothing productive or useful or valid about carving out community resources for “accountability” in ways that perpetuate bad abuse politics and logics that have been used to silence survivors for years and years. you cannot support survivors and also support their abusers by continuing to welcome them in the same community spaces, period, and it takes some ridiculous mental gymnastics to pretend otherwise.
“biological sex is a social construct” doesn’t mean “chromosomes, anatomy, hormones, and genitalia don’t exist”. it means “these exist, but assigning roles, labels, and expectations to certain combinations of these characteristics is a social construct, and an unnecessary and pointless (actually harmful) one at that”.
I’m out to my friends and family. Most people at work know too. Everyone is cool with it. Yes, thanks to my fabulous sister they’ve done it before, but also because they’re fantastic people. Without the love and support of my wife and friends and family I would not be where I am today.
Lilly Wachowski
While yes, we should celebrate Lilly, please don’t forget that she was basically intimidated into coming out by the media – notably the Daily Mail, the notorious british tabloid – and yes the statement above is uplifting, but I feel it’s kind of covering up the circumstances a lot and I know a lot of people won’t follow the link to the article.
Another extract from the statement in the Windy City Times:
“My sister Lana and I have largely avoided the press. I find talking about my art frustratingly tedious and talking about myself a wholly mortifying experience. I knew at some point I would have to come out publicly. You know, when you’re living as an out transgender person it’s … kind of difficult to hide. I just wanted—needed some time to get my head right, to feel comfortable.
But apparently I don’t get to decide this.
After he had given me his card, and I closed the door it began to dawn on me where I had heard of the Daily Mail. It was the “news” organization that had played a huge part in the national public outing of Lucy Meadows, an elementary school teacher and trans woman in the UK. An editorial in the “not-a-tabloid” demonized her as a damaging influence on the children’s delicate innocence and summarized “he’s not only trapped in the wrong body, he’s in the wrong job.” The reason I knew about her wasn’t because she was transgender it was because three months after the Daily Mail article came out, Lucy committed suicide.
And now here they were, at my front door, almost as if to say—
“There’s another one! Let’s drag ‘em out in the open so we can all have a look!”
Being transgender is not easy. We live in a majority-enforced gender binary world. This means when you’re transgender you have to face the hard reality of living the rest of your life in a world that is openly hostile to you.
I am one of the lucky ones. Having the support of my family and the means to afford doctors and therapists has given me the chance to actually survive this process. Transgender people without support, means and privilege do not have this luxury. And many do not survive. In 2015, the transgender murder rate hit an all-time high in this country. A horrifying disproportionate number of the victims were trans women of color. These are only the recorded homicides so, since trans people do not all fit in the tidy gender binary statistics of murder rates, it means the actual numbers are higher.
And though we have come a long way since Silence of the Lambs, we continue to be demonized and vilified in the media where attack ads portray us as potential predators to keep us from even using the goddamn bathroom. The so-called bathroom bills that are popping up all over this country do not keep children safe, they force trans people into using bathrooms where they can be beaten and or murdered. We are not predators, we are prey.
So yes, Lilly is a fantastic woman, and I am happy that she is comfortably out in her own support network and community. But please remember that she only outed herself publicly because if she didn’t do it herself, the press were going to kick up a fuss.
Please note: I am cis, and I don’t want to speak for or over trans people, I’m simply highlighting what I think is the more important message to take from this press statement.
disney’s zootopia has a 99% rotten tomatoes score and 8.1/10 critical average across more than 100 professional reviews, and a 94% audience rating. what the fuck. who the fuck saw this coming. am i really going to have to go see the furry movie now
EY FATTY BOOM BOOM 