There's Really Such As Beauty That You're In A Wonder Land. 🌷✨

One of the coolest things to remember is that because prey animals have eyes on the side of their head, they are looking at you when they're in profile, not facing you! Hot tip for artists and animal lovers!

you don't "hate kids," you hate being forced into a caretaking role.

you don't "hate kids," you hate censorship passed off as family values.

you don't "hate kids," you hate the constrictiveness of the nuclear family.

you don't "hate kids," you're just not used to occupying fully age diverse spaces so you're not used to the noise or the many different kinds of needs.

you don't "hate kids," most public spaces just aren't built for kids, and so the few kids you see are always uncomfortable and distressed.

you don't "hate kids," you hate the intense social rules assigned to kids and anyone who interacts with kids.

You don't "hate kids," you hate how society reproduces its most restrictive elements and how kids are powerless to resist it.

A Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) in Feeder City on this warm afternoon.

It is so frustrating to know what it's like to pass as a cis man in a male-dominated field, and see all these experiences of highly privileged trans men in these same fields propped up as the standard.

There is this odd phenomenon where being a transmasculinized individual one is faced with an array of exceptional examples of those like us, while being told these examples actually represent all of us. These examples are supposed to be saying something important about all of us.

Every narrative I was fed as a baby trans, was of exceptional trans men who could only talk about how much better people treated them. Being cis passing and indistinguishable from a cis man was the standard back then in 2016 when I originally came out, and remains as such today. It is disheartening to see that people have no issue with enforcing that expectation, even if "gender liberation" is supposedly important to them.

So to be a boyfaliure, a faggot, someone who faces open discrimination and gender questioning even when I can pass as being plausibly cis, someone who is talked over even when I am seen to be a man with expertise in my field... suddenly Devon Price is the standard I've simply failed to live up to. Even worse for non-white trans men who're made to feel they failed to live up to this white ideal of transmasculinity. When normative and gender conforming trans men write articles about their improved lives, better wages, endless opportunities, they receive an outpouring of support from those who wish to stroke a cisnormative image of transgender existence.

The stories from people like me, they don't feel good to read, they don't let the reader sit back and pat themselves on the back for seeing trans men as "real men" without any challenge to their preconceived notions of manhood (in this case, being a "real man" is being privileged, cis passing, and often stealth with a successful career).

For a reader who feels too challenged, these things are easy to dismiss. Perhaps the transmasc in question is simply "early in transition." If we aren't, then maybe he's just not trying hard enough. Even if "trying hard enough" is a transmedicalist and cisnormative standard which is unfair to apply to trans people, the speaker is simply lying. If they're not they're an outlier- and if they're not, then they are still somehow unimportant. It has to be okay to write transmasculine oppression off as a phase, (or as not having ever existed at all) otherwise it would mean accepting that manhood can't save one from discrimination. It would mean that trans gender doesn't map onto cis gender cleanly and neatly, that old models cannot be recycled to include all of us.

It is very easy to accept that a transmasculine transition ends in privilege and opportunity, after all, the only reason a woman would ever want to be a man is to gain privilege... right? The only trustworthy trans men, well they will tell you stories of their vast wealth of privilege after all.

By these mechanisms, erasure by exceptionalism is reinforced.

Finally got this thing mounted! I’m so happy with how it looks! 🍊🍊🍊

The Mailbox was a swinging place this afternoon...

Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis)

Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis)

maxime_lv_photography

For me this isn't even about empathy or sympathy (though there's value in those as well), it is just straight-up a human rights thing. Once you have decided that there is *any* category of human that can be treated as less-than-human you've said that humanity is conditional, and so are the rights that come with it. You've already lost, you've granted the fascists their point because *you agree with them* that some people don't deserve to be treated like humans.

i think the reason people have the view that transmasc people have an easier time passing and are generally more able to be cis passing is because the only transmasc people they perceive to be “really” trans are the cis passing ones. like they look at the whole transmasc community and see a handful of “real” trans men and a bunch of stupid girls playing dress up, so in their mind 100% of us are effortlessly cis passing, because the ones that aren’t just aren’t really trans, and therefore have no idea what its like to suffer as a trans person