ive been reading a book that basically explains how so-called “brain differences” between the genders is the result of gendered socialization and not the cause of it. i honestly expected the book to be very cis-centric but its actually the opposite, the author stresses that testimony from trans ppl is actually indispensable because we’ve, in a sense, “lived both experiences”
more cis feminists should have this mindset
one of the first examples that she uses to introduce her point about how perception by others can shape a person’s performance actually uses a trans woman. it explains that as a certain trans woman became to be seen as a woman more and more frequently, the ppl arond her eventually started viewing her as being ill equipped for tasks that they did not bother her about pre-transition. eventually she even found herself underperforming in these tasks herself.
I knew it was this book before I’d finished reading the first two lines. Honestly this book is indispensible if you want to debunk any gender determinism people claim is science. I can’t recommend it enough.
(Bonus bonus: I am myself a neuroscientist, and the old white men mentioned above – who are not – could not have missed the point harder if they’d actively tried. Which. Maybe?)
So I’ve written before about how to lose yourself in activities, how to make friends, how to get out of the four walls of your apartment (which will drive you mad, if you don’t) and experience your new city on its own terms. So I won’t talk about that.
Instead, I’m going to talk about the invariable, unmovable, awful terror. And how you will survive it.
Because it is unmoveable, at least at first. There is….a certain measure of terror inherent in moving to a new place and right then, you can’t do anything about that except feel it. You can distract yourself from it, with long walks and fun meetups, mixers, and various other assorted activities. You can drink (I do not advise this, it’s not a good long-term strategy) or engage in risky sexual behaviors (ditto) or neither and see a therapist instead (yes, please). You can throw yourself into work, you can get a dog (something I’ve seen members of my cohort do) you can choose to hone one of your hobbies. There are a lot of distractions, the world is full of them.
But at the end of the day, you will lie in bed in a strange place, and the terror will be there for you. Waiting.
I’m personally convinced it’s because your brain thinks you’re dying.
After all, a tomorrow that doesn’t look exactly like today, or at least reasonably similar, translates as a terrifying and uncertain blankness. It’s an abyss. It may as well be death. The human brain—an extremely stupid organ, built to identify poisonous berries and remind us to run away from things with teeth—thinks you are stepping off the edge of the world.
The terror is limitless, and senseless, in that it feel endless and engulfing, and will not listen to sense. It doesn’t matter how many times you reassure yourself that this will pass. It doesn’t matter that you know—know, with a certainty born of experience—that the terror will slide, slowly, into familiarity and routine. There will be a morning when you wake up, and cannot imagine a time when your dresser wasn’t exactly there, when you didn’t take that route to work in the morning, or know exactly where to go for lunch. The blankness will give way, inscribed by all the great and small details of a new place, and you will be fine.
The terror doesn’t care. The terror is convinced that this time, this time, you will not be fine. This time, you are definitely going to die.
(Depending on how you define it, I have moved somewhere between five and nine times, and lived in over four states. It’s mostly a lopsided triangle through the Midwest: Illinois to Michigan, Michigan to Kentucky, Kentucky to Illinois. A brief couple months in Boston for an internship, then back to Illinois. The longest I ever stayed put was in Chicago: an astonishing eight years and six different addresses. A couple months in Kentucky, then on to Philadelphia, a city I’d seen for the first time when I was brought in for an interview.
I was terrified, each and every time.)
The terror doesn’t care about ambition or your wanderlust or your fancy, logical reasoning. The terror doesn’t care if you have done this five times or nine times; if you know it will be fine, if you have controlled for every variable, if you are an expert. You can stare at maps and take notes and get excited while making new and wonderful plans; you can breathe, in and out and in again. But the terror is a senseless animal, and it cannot picture tomorrow.
The terror says: you are stepping off the edge of the world. You are dying.
Unfortunately, the only way to prove it wrong is to point yourself in that direction and walk.
I will say the distraction helps. My transition to Philadelphia has been smoother, in many ways, because now I know to search “things to do + philly + this weekend” and get out of my apartment; I take long walks, I’ve picked up photography. What used to take me a year has taken me two months simply because I’ve pushed myself to get out into the city and not be afraid. I go into restaurants and bars alone; I visit museums. I ruthlessly, shamelessly, force myself to enjoy my life here, in this specific place.
Of course the terror is still there, and it sneaks up on me sometimes, but it doesn’t have to own me. And that—if anything—would be my advice. You’re going to have feelings, they’ll be messy and ugly and paralyzing but the only way out is through. Get on the plane, get off it again. Point yourself in that direction, and keep on walking.
An incomplete list of descriptive paradigms for physical immortality – a resource for tabletop RPGs and other situations where you might find yourself playing or writing a character who can’t be hurt through conventional means.
Superman: The standard option – physical dangers just bounce off of you. If something does manage to injure you, you’ll display signs of pain or discomfort, and may exhibit light bruising, a thin trickle of blood, or some other cosmetic damage, but nothing short of complete destruction can violate your bodily integrity.
G-Rated: A series of unlikely coincidences arranges for injuries that you suffer to be much less severe than they should be. Fatal plummets become embarrassing pratfalls, and plunging into a fire merely leaves you artfully singed. Should you have enemies, they likely find you extremely frustrating to deal with.
Looney Tunes: You stretch and squash like a cartoon character, or else your body is simply amorphous. The effects of injuries tend to be exaggerated, but inflict no long-term impairment; for example, you might be cut in half, burnt to ash, or shattered like glass by trauma that wouldn’t ordinarily produce such extreme results, but quickly recover.
Zombie: You’re no more resistant to injury than an ordinary person, but being injured simply doesn’t particularly impair your ability to act. You’ll just keep going through anything short of complete bodily dismemberment, and even in that situation, your severed limbs may continue to act with far greater effectiveness than they really should.
Jekyll & Hyde: Trauma that should incapacitate or kill you instead causes you to transform into or be replaced by something else, typically an entity that can more effectively remove or escape the threat. The process later reverses itself, leaving you unharmed; you may or may not remember what your replacement did in your absence.
Skinsuit: Your human form is something you wear like a suit. Damaging it doesn’t meaningfully injure you, though it may impair your ability to act in a human fashion; in essence, injuries are recontextualised so that they change your ability to interact with the world rather than reducing it. Tentacles are traditional but not mandatory.
Puppet Strings: Your body is something that you have rather than something that you are. As you become progressively more damaged, it becomes progressively more apparent to onlookers that your body is being driven or dragged about by some outside force. You may or may not be able to replace it in the event of complete destruction.
Reset Button: You can be hurt or killed in the usual fashion, but no matter what happens to you, you just show up again later as though nothing happened. This may involve time manipulation, literal reincarnation, or some sort of metatextual contrivance. If killed, you may or may not remember dying.
Disposable: You’re actually one of a large number of essentially identical entities, typically a hive mind (if biological) or part of a product line (if mechanical). Destroyed instances are simply replaced. There may be a fixed number of you; if not, you may depend on some sort of external facility to produce more of you.
Outside Context: Your nature is sufficiently weird that it’s unclear what would qualify as an injury for you. The archetypal example is an intangible ghost, though there are many other possibilities. This usually involves a set of concomitant limitations on how you can interact with the world – it’s as alien to you as you are to it!
My face is having uncontrollable spasms. Great. It hurts really, really, really bad.
I think part of why I have trouble explaining pain to the doctor is when they ask about the pain scale I always think “Well, if someone threw me down a flight of stairs right now or punched me a few times, it would definitely hurt a lot more” so I end up saying a low number. I was reading an article that said that “10” is the most commonly reported number and that is baffling to me. When I woke up from surgery with an 8" incision in my body and I could hardly even speak, I was in the most horrific pain of my life but I said “6” because I thought “Well, if you hit me in the stomach, it would be worse.”
I searched and searched for the post this graphic was from, and the OP deactivated, but I kept the graphic, because my BFF does the same thing, uses her imagination to come up with the worst pain she can imagine and pegs her “10″ there, and so is like, well, I’m conscious, so this must be a 5, and then the doctors don’t take her seriously. (And she then does things like driving herself to the hospital while in the process of giving birth. Probably should have called an ambulance for that one!)
So I found this and sent it to her. Because this is what they want to know: how badly is this pain affecting you? Not on a scale of “nothing” to “how I’d imagine it’d feel if bears were eating my still-living guts while I was on fire”.
I hate reposting stuff, but I’ll never find that post again and OP is deactivated, so, here’s a repost. I can delete this later, i just wanted to get it to you and I can’t embed images in a chat or an ask.
This is possibly why it took several weeks to diagnose my fractured spine.
Pain Scale transcription:
10 – I am in bed and I can’t move due to my pain. I need someone to take me to the emergency room because of my pain.
9 – My pain is all that I can think about. I can barely move or talk because of my pain.
8 – My pain is so severe that it is difficult to think of anything else. Talking and listening are difficult.
7 – I am in pain all the time. It keeps me from doing most activities.
6 – I think about my pain all of the time. I give up many activities because of my pain.
5 – I think about my pain most of the time. I cannot do some of the activities I need to do each day because of the pain.
4 – I am constantly aware of my pain but can continue most activities.
3 – My pain bothers me but I can ignore it most of the time.
2 – I have a low level of pain. I am aware of my pain only when I pay attention to it.
1 – My pain is hardly noticeable.
0 – I have no pain.
It’s also really important to get this kind of scale to people who have chronic pain, because chronic pain drastically lowers your perception of how “bad” any kind of pain actually is, and yet something like this pain scale is extremely user friendly.
For example, if someone asked me how much pain I’m in at any given time, I’d say hardly any, and yet I’m apparently at a chronic 2.5, and it only goes up from there depending on the day.
I haven’t been below a 5 on this scale for 4 years
Here’s the fatigue scale
ok but who watches tv and plays phone games simultaneously? you miss everything on the tv! *glares at seebs.* seriously tho this is very helpful, thank you. i’m at a 5 on both scales most days, and that’s scary to think about.
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hey gyns let me plug a book for a second. its a childhood favorite of mine, but its also one of the best fairy tale books for little girls, imho. its called ‘the serpent slayer: and other stories of strong women’, and its a collection of fairy tales from around the world whose main characters are women. some of my favorite stories from it include:
neesowa and the chenoo – when an injured chenoo (an evil, cannibalistic monster) stumbles upon neesowa’s camp, she throws the monster off balance by treating him with kindness and sharing her home with him as he recovers, which pays off when another chenoo attacks her camp.
grandmother skull – a young woman, neruvana, marries a man who kills her entire family and abandons her. thankfully, the skull of her grandmother comes to life to teach her how to survive and to help her get revenge.
beebyeebyee and the water god – a young woman, beebyeebyee, falls in love with a water god who is slain by the envious people of her village. she gets revenge.
three whiskers from a lions chin – maria wants to help her husband, who returned from war a changed man, and the local bruja sends her off to get three whiskers from a lions chin, apparently a key ingredient in a magic spell that will bring her husband back to himself. when she brings the whiskers back to the bruja, the woman explains that there is no magic spell, but that with time, and the same patience she used to get the whiskers, she can help her husband recover.
the old woman and the devil – a brilliant old woman faces off with the devil in a bet to convince him to leave her spot in the shade. she outwits him, and undoes the harm he did as well.
duffy the lady – a version of rumplestiltskin where a housekeeper who cant knit or spin accepts a deal with a devil who will do the tasks for her for three years, if she will marry him at the end of the three years if she cannot guess his name. spoiler alert: she can.
sister lace – a creation myth about the stars, when the emperor hears of sister lace’s incredible lace-making abilities, he has her brought to the palace and ordered to marry him. when she refuses, he has her imprisoned unless she can spin him a live rooster. her skill and blood bring the bird to life, but she remains imprisoned, until, eventually, she finds her way out.
a marriage of two masters – a very intelligent young woman who speaks only in riddles meets a man who sees the world the same way, and as they decipher one anothers riddles, they fall in love.
clever marcella – marcella, a genius, fascinates the prince, and they agree to marry, provided she not interfere with his rule. when she feels compelled to challenge a ridiculous ruling he made on a case, he orders her to take whatever she likes from the palace and then leave. she solves the problem as anyone in love would, compels the prince to see the error of his ways, and becomes the kingdoms chief justice.
the rebel princess – to escape an unwanted arranged marriage, judith and her ladies-in-waiting take to the open sea. when they come across a ship of pirates who decide they will each marry one of the women, the crew steal their clothes, their treasure, and their lives. by the end of the story, judith has been crowned king in place of an heir-less king who drowned.
its just a really, really good book, with a portrayal of women that most fairy tales dont have. theyre kind and wise mentors and teachers, not wicked stepmothers and ugly hags, and an undeveloped marriage to a man isnt their be-all and end-all. i really encourage you to get a copy for any little girls in your life, especially who enjoy fairy tales.
Sounds awesome!
THE ILLUSTRATOR IS TRINA SCHART HYMAN WHO WAS A FANTASTICALLY COOL LADY THAT YOU SHOULD READ ABOUT AND ADMIRE AS MUCH AS I GREW UP DOING AND WHO PROBABLY DESERVES HER OWN WONDERFULLY ILLUSTRATED FAIRY TALE
I’ve seen a bunch of people in the notes concerned (like I was) of comparisons of members of the lgbt to dogs: but upon visiting their website I was reassured that they monitor a variety of content, including (but not limited to):
THIS IS A GOOD SITE
Yeah, this site is literally so people can check for content they don’t want to see…or in some cases content that would make them physically or mentally ill. (I have strobe issues myself…)
It’s highly useful for a lot of people.
I had no idea they warned for strobe effects, that’s awesome! They give me headaches and nausea.
They frequently add more categories, it seems – there have been more added just about every time I’ve visited the site. And they’re clearly open to suggestions, as the twitter exchange in the OP shows 😀
just moving along like everyone else 