What if I just name myself after a top-tier Twitter poster.

Half-sister made a comment about the people running on testosterone that implied I was in that group. I corrected her. Does that could as coming out to her (and my sister who was also there)? We're a pretty queer family, so I assume they would realize it's an intentional choice vs a medical issue.

💤

💤

It was the first trans fic I've read since my brain cracked in half for the third time, after I realised that gender was fuckin fake shit. I wasn't really expecting that to have a great impact on My Personal Quest, but I think it did honestly. The Masker is more or less an exploration of trans sexuality, of the whole fictionmania, nifty forcefemme/sissy/whatever phenomenon in closeted transfemmes. It's posed as forcing its protagonist (Krys, closeted half-aware crossdressing-kink poster) to make the choice between siding with one of two sides in a scuffle at a local trans meetup group thingy:

You have Sally, the harshly cisnormative, gatekeeping, binary sex shamer trans woman. She's sort of like halfway between a Susan's Place boomer and an imageboard assimilationist, if you know what I mean. Her bit is that she's pissed she has to share space with the Masker, Felix. She's all like, "I didn't go through everything"--Sally waves up and down her body--"to be in the same club with that kind of pervert," that sort of thing. Also she is a former cop.

Then there's Felix. He (using the novella's pronouns) is the filthy dirty fuck-yourself-you-are-a-hot-girl crossdressing fetishist who moonlights as an attractive young man when he's not wearing silicon women's skin. He's not overly complicated beyond being an absurd misogynist, I guess. They both kind of represent extreme ends of that one crackpot transphobe guy's typology, weirdly. Such is life on imageboards, I guess.

Krys sort of exists at the intersection of both, shame, gender envy and "you will never be a woman" instinct bubbling together alongside real fuckin validation and enjoyment from dirty sissy stuff and forcefem fiction. An instinct to dress up pretty and femme, take photos of a highly indecent nature. You know, the good stuff.

The crux of the plot is basically that Krys is involved with both of them, and they both like her for their own weird reasons. Sally views her as a Not Like Other Crossdressers, and Felix is a weird horny fucker who's willing to cosplay a beautiful effeminate man for Krys. But Felix keeps showing up to local transfemme events and Sally hates him to death for it, basically taking a transmed gatekeeper stance on him. She wants Krys to phone the cops on him when the next local transfemme event is held at a very transphobic casino, except Krys is an allosexual fiend and reveals, while Felix is palming her crotch, this plan. Felix demands she call the cops on Sally instead.

The Masker seemed like it should be horrifying and distressing to me, like it's just brainworms in a can. It sounds like it should be a brainrotter, right? Better books than this have dealt me psychic damage in past. Honestly though, I think I appreciate its outlook at the end of the day. It's a very blunt rejection of the typology; both Sally and Felix are misogynists at the end of the day, right? Whatever their specific views, they both come down to weird exclusionary gatekeeping shit. So, fuck em.

The most telling thing about The Masker in this respect, though, is that it's far from the least sexual thing I've ever read. Passages describing Krys' sexual escapades are written with a close intimacy and a total lack of judgement. It has detail that verges on tender: Krys hasn't or can't decide what to call her anatomy. I've never heard the term "pink fog" before, but it's like, Oh Yeah, okay. The Masker says: Fuck Yourself. You can do both, you don't have to make a choice between these because they're bullshit constructions, and they're not really reasonable ways of relating to your body. It's fascinating. I kinda dig it.

Thing is, I doubt I would have been able to take any of this in a year ago. Again I suspected this book was gonna be excruciating, but I think the whole bit where my brain got rewired was really healthy for me, I guess. I think I had a lot more fucked up stuff woven into that than I realised, which sadly is not surprising.

It helps to be able to view binary genders--"woman" in particular--as constructed and heterosexual in this context, the way The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto describes, instead of as some sacred totem not to be infringed upon. I think that conception, the hopeless grasping of binary gender for validity caused a lot of strain to me when I read these things before. People are allowed to do funny things with gender. I think I am finally reading with a combined sense of slight remove and greater understanding. It's really cool.

I'm sitting here wondering if I need to go re-address other stuff I've read. I think I'd maybe feel a lot better about Manhunt with this in mind, but I doubt Light from Uncommon Stars would be greatly improved by this view, Idk. I'm pretty sure this is a net positive though, because I'm pretty sure Psycho Nymph Exile would have been harder to read before.

TL;DR lines like "Maybe I don’t pass as a woman, but at least it looks like I eat their hormones" and "The dress is classic sissy fetish-- super-pretty boys dressed in ridiculously feminine satin outfits-- frills and bows dripping in profusion not seen on a cis woman since the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire" now make me laugh instead of groan, which I dig :::

I got beaten by the flu on my day off, figures you don't sleep for long enough and eventually shit like that will come for you, ended up having to take a day off work too, which sucked.

Now for the day's weak rant, on some reddit shithole people were praising some bourgeois redditist scumlord for being able to drive home on a Canadian freeway since some shit on his Tesla gave out so he had no heat nor front windshield defroster, he comments he wouldn't have been able to go home without AI and everyone was liek 'so brabe', he had to do that one day, I do that near every fucking day in winter, no AI, its called use a sharp Dollar Tree squeegee every so often to scrape the ice from your inner car window and a rag covered with deicer. Also, dress like an Antarctic explorer while your coworkers giggle that you're from California, too soft to be in the midwest. If it wasn't here I told the Korean war vet that's a regular shopper at work story I'mma tell it again, deal, supposedly he was a tank driver and they abandoned the tanks because heat stopped working and he loved to go on and regale everyone how cold it was. I was reminded of the Lake Tianjin film.

The heatercore in my usual antique for the mid 90s has been clogged for years and its a pain and a half access hoses out and its already a cobbled up precarity since some other mechanic de jour probably broke something, so not happening, and this winter no front windshield defroster for me as well (good thing I got that clank truck with half of everything wrong with it right?) Damn truck's is partially clogged, and I haven't had a chance to look at it, I'm either sick or working like a donkey, so its much of the same shit but at least when I get home like 40min later the heat might kick on, if I get blessed by the right Frost-based deity, vs in my precious classic I've driven 3-4hrs like that, it be like 6F outside and body-heated car inside. Its fun closing and my angry coworkers waiting on me (we all gotta drive away safely), they don't seem to comprehend the idea of no heat, 'tee hee tamagotchi, just wait for your car to heat up', listen buddy, I don't want to wait until Spring. Mechanics here would charge what I make in a month to maybe fix shit, so nah.

Shit always makes me think of the Martian, though its a poverty-induced survival deal. Just lil babies need to get on my level, wouldn't damn survive.