wish I could just be more stable. have a foundation that wasn't so easy to break. it's been two weeks since thanksgiving but I'm still as beat down as I was since then. I wake up and I'm broken down, trauma dreams every night. having trouble working, and I'm afraid my boss is gonna start noticing. can't turn the bad part of my brain off. I haven't started drinking or smoking like I did the last couple of times I felt like this, but it hardly feels like a victory. just want to be able to bounce back. I could deal with feeling bad if it didn't last so long, wasn't so persistent, if I could bounce back.
reflexively over-analyzing myself is really annoying. yearning today and slipped into daydream, and couldn't even sit in it because brain decided to bust in like "hey are you sure youactuallywanna be tenderly dommed by a lesbian or are you just desperate for any way to try and validate your womanhood?" like girl please be quiet, it's okay a) for me to be horny and want nice things and b) if it's both, it can be both and that can still be okay.
sometimes work is just saying "I can't fix that problem, it's not related to what I do and everything even vaguely related on my end is correct" fourteen different ways in a row until your coworker stops asking "why haven't you fixed this problem yet"
there are! if you search stim chew toys a bunch will come up, they're usually pretty affordable and some come in packs that have like different stiffness and stuff even. I got gifted one from a place called Komuso that I really like, it's about as thick as a pen and maybe half the length, and has different textures on it and a whistle-like passage through it that I also find useful for like anxiety-breathing-exercises, but yeah if you search it there are a couple of places that seem to specialize in stim chew toys and also maybe some on etsy it looks like!
I have dnd tonight and it will be the first time I've spoken out loud since Thanksgiving when my sister told me "you sound like a man pretending to be a woman, but maybe that's just because I know what you are" and yeah ngl I'm having a little bit of a break down. Or a lot a bit of a breakdown. If I'm being honest I don't want to speak ever again in my life.
The accusation that trans women are just crossdressers, i.e. "just men in dresses," is like, pretty common? Like if someone is self-identifying as a crossdresser that's fine and I'm not here to like debate performance theory or anything, but it being included in the survey as an answer by the surveyors is a red flag because of it's usage in transmisogynistic contexts. They don't say one way or another if the the survery was multiple-choice or write-in answer that I could see, but the lack of for example an "Other" category seems to suggest it was multiple choice. So yeah, I find the choice for the surveyors to include the option of Crossdresser over terms or categories that do not have transmisogynistic contexts such as Gender Nonconforming or Questioning or simply Other as dubious. The way questions and answers in a survey are framed affects who participates and how they answer, and can also give reference to the surveyors intent or perhaps internalized biases. This is why I'm skeptical based solely on the inclusion of Crossdresser. Also, and this one is admittedly probably me just looking into things, where they included Crossdresser in the graph is kinda suspect.
I do also think that there are additional issues with categorization just within those two tables. The survey, for example, does not have an option for if a person is both a trans woman and enby or both a trans man and enby. Those experiences don't exist according to the survey.
This sort of strange categorization is also present in other areas of the survey. The regions for the US they have are... kind of bizarre? Saying that there's only 4 regions in the US is certainly A Choice, and including Mid-Atlantic states like Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia in the South or having Arizona and New Mexico unilaterally in The West with Washington and Oregon is just. It's just strange, why are those choices being made? Their age ranges, to me at least, seem a little weird in their incongruety. 18-24 is a range of 7 years, 25-44 is 20, and then 45-54 and 55-64 are both 10. Maybe this one is like, more typical, idk, it just kinda sticks out to me given the other odd choices for categorization.
So yeah, this isn't necessarily an indictment of the National Center for Transgender Equality as an organization, maybe they're great folx and this isn't something malicious or intending to be some sort of disinformation. But yeah I think the survey has flaws both in its presentation and structure, I think this flaws do have adjacency to transmisogynistic and enbyphobic attitudes, and that does make me skeptical of the represntativeness of it.
so like, you're basically just positing some sort of intrinsic behaviour based on assigned gender at birth. this is like half a degree away from like "trans women have male socialization and trans men have female socialization" shit.
there's some kind of grand irony in the fact that I got a headboard so that I would have something to be comfortably tied to, but it didn't have the right fittings so I had to tie it to my bedframe
basically haven't slept the past couple days, but at least it's because I've been hyperfocused on yuri instead of because of, y'know, everything else.