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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
I was assigned male at birth, based on visible primary sexual characteristics of my infant self. What followed from that was the assumption that my outward gender would be the same as my assigned sex, and therefore I would be raised first as a boy, and then when the time was correct, I would take my place among the company of men and behave and function as a man in society.
Reality, of course, had other plans, and I am the beneficiary of the good fortune of living in an era where there is at least discussion and frameworks around the differences between chosen gender identity and assigned sex at birth. There may not be as much acceptance of those frameworks or credibility given to the discussions and those who have forged their path as transgender persons, binary or otherwise, but it is not currently so forbidden as to have the vocabulary of sex and gender removed entirely, despite the very best efforts of fools and charlatans worldwide.
And while I claim the community of not-men for myself, it still feels like it's seen as a question that is about whether or not someone else wants to accept that claim, instead of the claim itself being reality and someone has to decide whether they want to accept reality or reject it in favor of something more comforting to them. (I do not need to perform a particular presentation before my legitimacy and reality is accepted.)
When I did the not-men community post, I talked about the way that masculinity establishes its norms and who is part of the group of men by relying on whether other men believe the behavior or the person is part of being a man. What a system like that eventually does is cede the definition of what being a man is to people who are willing to declare themselves real men and not seek the approval of others for their behavior. Which includes a significant number of sociopaths and assholes. I don't come to that conclusion because of scientific study and experimentation, regrettably, but instead as a sort of intuition that comes from having lived long enough and observed behaviors. Conceiving of manhood and masculinity as a power struggle rather than as a set of more and less concrete norms does account for the existence of those groups that are trying to pull men away from the macho bullshit, expand their available repertoire of emotional states and conversation topics, and otherwise get them away from the sociopaths and assholes. It also helps to explain the relative paucity of success in that area, since the people who are looking for a better way tend not to be people who want to amass power and wield it in ways that people who are looking for the strongest man to validate them will easily grok and decide to go along with.
Even if I disclaim the membership now, at least until the majority of men get their act together and make it possible to be the person I am and include it in their definition of manhood, I was raised to be a man, and went through a boyhood that was intended to do this as well. To their credit, I don't remember my father nor his father having very strict definitions of what it meant to be a man that they passed on to the children they expected to be men. There were some pictures taken of things like the first time I took a razor to deal with facial hair, but these were mostly light-hearted things, and I was allowed to scowl and otherwise indicate just how much of an aggravation it was to deal with these things, and that there was someone taking pictures of it as well. My father did teach me the use of some tools, and problem-solving with tools, even though I didn't feel like learning them. (To my perpetual annoyance, those skills have come in handy as a house owner and able-bodied person.) The skills weren't positioned as "man skills," and, as far as I know, Dad also tried to teach these skills to the children he expected to turn out as daughters and women, because it's useful for anyone to learn how to swing a hammer, turn a screwdriver, or drive a manual transmission car.
The rest of the society around had some specific opinions on the matter, with the intent of filling the gap, and while they all translate pretty well to "don't be womanish," there were definitely some things that got more attention than other things. Many of these things were inflicted by other men and boys, or in the context of things that were supposed to be about boys learning how to be men, like Boy Scouting, sports, and school. The general vibe of those kinds of places seemed to be "You must be at least this manly to participate, but if you aren't, we'll try to teach it to you, formally and informally."
The first and most obvious of these seeming commonalities is that a sensitive child who cries when they are hurt or upset must learn to suppress those feelings or channel them into something else. Which is a real treat, let me tell you, to have other people making fun of you or telling you to be a man when you're already in a situation where you're hurting and would like something other than minimization and dismissal of your feelings. Yes, sometimes what a child needs is to keep trying and failing at things until they succeed, possibly with scaffolding or encouragement or taking a break and coming back to something later, but people don't learn well when their brains are engaged in other tasks with higher priority or more systems engaged. (Actually, people don't do anything well when they're running on their emotional centers instead of their thinking ones, unless it's been so well trained into them that they can do it without needing to access those thinking functions.) It wasn't hard to figure out the part where "showing unapproved emotions" = "get made fun of, called womanish, and lose social standing with other men" pretty easily, when that message is repeated from peers, grownups, and media. If I wasn't playing that role because of something that had happened in life, then provocation often came out to try and produce those same emotions. (If everyone's decided you're not part of the men, then their own manliness relies on taking their turn to reinforce that you're not one of them.)
The second is that violence is an acceptable expression of manhood. Those who do not use violence as a way of working their will on the world deserve to have violence worked upon them. Those who do not use enough violence, or to a sufficient degree, are similarly deserving of violence until they do. U.S. media is entirely full of stories of violence, revenge, and destruction as stories, and very rarely does it show the consequences of such things, either physically or mentally. Verbal violence is encouraged as a way of demoralizing your opponent, whether in sport or in life. (This is often despite the various prohibitions on the taking of life and oppressing your neighbors that most Christians would say they follow.)
(One of the things that the "Humans Are Space Orcs" idea does get right regularly is that the human capacity for violence is frightening to the rest of the known universe, along with the ability to survive in multiple climate zones and our recreational poisoning of ourselves.)
The third is that men and boys (of sufficient age) are expected to be sexually aggressive, if not sexually violent, with their partners and anyone else they hold an interest in, and that been were always topping. Men who did not have sexual partners were weaklings or possibly gay. The words that got used, even if many of them are reclaimed or used in different contexts now, are related to strength, virility, and size. Those that don't have the physical attributes are "twinks" and "pretty boys," and not in that bishounen sparkly sort of way.
It was Arnold Schwarzenegger, then it was a bit of The Rock, but if you want a clear image of what's supposed to be an ideal man's body, both then and now, you want the picture of Vladimir Putin shirtless on the horse. Or Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt. (And they would say Hulk Hogan, even of many of them are closer in behavior and demeanor to Hollywood Hogan, the somewhat short-lived heel persona of Hulk Hogan.) I make fun of the Charles Atlas Dynamic-Tension advertisements because there are so many people who follow things like this in the belief that it will give them power so they can enact violence on others in revenge for violence being enacted on them. Pay no attention to the parts where so many of these masculinity scams are, y'know, scams. Body type, presentation, and the projection of strength and vigor is vitally important in many conceptions of masculinity, but it's not quite a universal rule that if you want to have social, economic, and political power, you have to be ripped. After all, there was an eventual grudging acceptance of the existence of "bears," and they're kind of assumed to be more dad bod than bodybuilder.
One of the jokes a younger and less sophisticated me used to hear about men being attracted to men was that if you were a consumer of (mainstream straight) pornography, you generally wanted the male performer to have a large and girthy penis, and because you cared about the penis size of the performer, you were at least a little bit sexually interested in men. (This was, to some degree, leveraged as a "stop beefing so much about gay people, everyone's at least a little bit gay" kind of statement.) This was not a group that had been given the tools to more accurately say that men viewing straight pornography often view the man in the scene as a stand-in for themselves, and since they are projecting themselves onto that character, they want that character to have the virtues and skills that they want to have. At least for me, I think a fair few of them also want the environment that most mainstream straight porn exists in. The kind of space where someone is not only surrounded by attractive people, but they are willing to have sex with just about any penis that waves itself in their direction, regardless of whether the person attached to that penis is worthwhile. Or, if they are unwilling, that they can be persuaded, whether with alcohol, blackmail, money, the abuse of power, or force. The kinds of people peddling the manosphere bullshit and the guaranteed-success pick-up artistry that want to reduce complex beings to a series of relationship values or Pavlovian responses are trying to sell the idea that they can make the dating sim real, or draw the porn world into the real world. They project the idea that they have strength and power through Dynamic-Tension, and you, too, can gain their strength and power if you send away for their book, buy their virility supplements, and religiously practice their proven techniques. When reality rejects them firmly and they do not get their desired results, the hucksters, shysters, and grifters say that it's the rube's fault for not doing it correctly or enough, or any number of a hundred gaslighting bits that deflect the blame away from the person profiting handsomely off of the power-struggle conception of masculinity and onto either the "involuntarily celibate" or the women who keep defeating the "proven techniques." Which often means they try harder to make the system they've bought into work, because sunk cost fallacies, and because, supposedly, these other folks have tried the techniques and gotten their desired results. When that doesn't work, either, well, see above about other common beliefs about what makes a man, especially a man who has decided they want to engage with Dynamic-Tension so they can deliver justice to their bullies and get called a "real man" by the women they're interested in.
Similarly, there's the assumption that men always top, both sexually, and also as the person who does work and provides for the weaker people in their life, the women, boys, and girls. Men who take a bottoming role, whether sexually or who have a partner who does work and/or brings in more money to the household were assumed to be weaklings or gay, deserving of the derision that came with being a "sissy," especially if there's gender play or crossdressing involved. Among the people who proclaim themselves masculine power brokers, there's no place for a man to be the penetrated partner, whether physically or metaphorically, lest someone lose the favored status of "man." Insert the long-running argument about whether it was Achilles or Patroklus that topped in their relationship here, mostly because there are a fair few people, apparently, who have to have their chosen hero always in a topping role or else they're somehow not heroic enough, and compare it with the somewhat common stereotype of the limp-wristed effeminate gay man (or, for that matter, the stereotype of the man librarian, who was in such a profession because he was "fussy" and had failed at some other, more appropriately manly, profession.)
This is one of those bits of wrong that persists despite the ease in which someone could educate themselves about the relative strengths of the roles of power exchange and come to a more nuanced conclusion, but won't, because "his salary depends on his not understanding it," as Mr. Sinclair quipped. Also, actually learning about things like power exchange or the actual experiences of topping, bottoming, and the like puts you in far too close of proximity to queer people and their persistence in completely shredding norms, beliefs, and practices through their existence, much less any active attempts to do the same. Can't have someone's power threatened by the possibility that someone might exit the system entirely, or find some way of doing manhood that's much better suited to them and makes them feel good about themselves, now can we? They might lose followers and power.
If you wanted to sum up those common assumptions and how useful they are to the practice of being a man, you certainly could do worse than "Guns, bitches, and bling were never part of the Four Elements, and never will be." And yet, like the popular perception of the life that leads to or comes from a successful career in rap and hip-hop, these things persist, either because that's what they were taught and they're pushing it out to the next generation, or because they want to seize power, money, and influence to themselves. It was a popular enough conception to get people on board for the 2016 election, and it's still popular enough for the 2024 election. They're doing their best to make sure everyone but them gets the whirlwind, though, and that's going to make for some crunchy juxtapositions when someone who a rube thought was an ally turns out to be unmistakably a predator on them.
Even though I've since broken with the identity of being a man, I'm still part of that community in so many ways, usually imposed by others rather than through my free choice. It's not just "sir," but often how, if I place my body in the way of someone's pathways so that my partner can safely turn their shopping cart, people will move around me rather than try to go through me or complain at me for blocking their pathway. Or how much I can lean on my presentation and voice to command attention in a situation when I want it. (And how I get thanked for handling a situation using those tools.) I can watch a situation where someone completely discounts everything a colleague of mine is saying, the correct statements and procedures, but if I say the same thing, I'm treated as authoritative. (And someone will often try to twist the knife by saying "That woman who tried to help me before, she didn't know anything at all.") It's the "will you deal with this problem in the men's room" and the "Oh, I'm sorry if that is TMI, it's womanly things" and the part where all I have to do is stand there and other men will tell me the important details that they would not tell anyone else, on the assumption that as another man, I will be the one making the decisions. I even sometimes lean into it as a "well, if they can't conceive of me properly, at least they'll have a thought in their head about the man who does children's services and was pretty good at it with their younglings."
It's all the unearned privileges that come to me because of how I look, and all the unearned threat that comes to me as well, because of how I look. These are not mutually exclusive, although I'm probably more likely to notice when someone is giving me unearned threat than unearned privilege, because of the way I was raised not to notice the privilege, only its lack. It is a lifetime's work unlearning, and a lifetime more's to try seeing things from the perspective of the people who were raised with greater consciousness of their lack of privilege. And there's a lot of hurt feelings and running face-first into Finding Out without realizing that I've been doing the first part of that phrase. It hurts. And I try to at least learn from it, even if I have trouble getting over the feelings initially (or significantly afterward).
Even if I'm not a man, I kind of hope that my best self can be an example for them on how successful men behave, and manage to work through their feelings and their weaknesses, and aren't so supremely intimidated by the possibility that a woman might be correct and have the expertise needed for the situation.
I was assigned male at birth, based on visible primary sexual characteristics of my infant self. What followed from that was the assumption that my outward gender would be the same as my assigned sex, and therefore I would be raised first as a boy, and then when the time was correct, I would take my place among the company of men and behave and function as a man in society.
Reality, of course, had other plans, and I am the beneficiary of the good fortune of living in an era where there is at least discussion and frameworks around the differences between chosen gender identity and assigned sex at birth. There may not be as much acceptance of those frameworks or credibility given to the discussions and those who have forged their path as transgender persons, binary or otherwise, but it is not currently so forbidden as to have the vocabulary of sex and gender removed entirely, despite the very best efforts of fools and charlatans worldwide.
And while I claim the community of not-men for myself, it still feels like it's seen as a question that is about whether or not someone else wants to accept that claim, instead of the claim itself being reality and someone has to decide whether they want to accept reality or reject it in favor of something more comforting to them. (I do not need to perform a particular presentation before my legitimacy and reality is accepted.)
When I did the not-men community post, I talked about the way that masculinity establishes its norms and who is part of the group of men by relying on whether other men believe the behavior or the person is part of being a man. What a system like that eventually does is cede the definition of what being a man is to people who are willing to declare themselves real men and not seek the approval of others for their behavior. Which includes a significant number of sociopaths and assholes. I don't come to that conclusion because of scientific study and experimentation, regrettably, but instead as a sort of intuition that comes from having lived long enough and observed behaviors. Conceiving of manhood and masculinity as a power struggle rather than as a set of more and less concrete norms does account for the existence of those groups that are trying to pull men away from the macho bullshit, expand their available repertoire of emotional states and conversation topics, and otherwise get them away from the sociopaths and assholes. It also helps to explain the relative paucity of success in that area, since the people who are looking for a better way tend not to be people who want to amass power and wield it in ways that people who are looking for the strongest man to validate them will easily grok and decide to go along with.
Even if I disclaim the membership now, at least until the majority of men get their act together and make it possible to be the person I am and include it in their definition of manhood, I was raised to be a man, and went through a boyhood that was intended to do this as well. To their credit, I don't remember my father nor his father having very strict definitions of what it meant to be a man that they passed on to the children they expected to be men. There were some pictures taken of things like the first time I took a razor to deal with facial hair, but these were mostly light-hearted things, and I was allowed to scowl and otherwise indicate just how much of an aggravation it was to deal with these things, and that there was someone taking pictures of it as well. My father did teach me the use of some tools, and problem-solving with tools, even though I didn't feel like learning them. (To my perpetual annoyance, those skills have come in handy as a house owner and able-bodied person.) The skills weren't positioned as "man skills," and, as far as I know, Dad also tried to teach these skills to the children he expected to turn out as daughters and women, because it's useful for anyone to learn how to swing a hammer, turn a screwdriver, or drive a manual transmission car.
The rest of the society around had some specific opinions on the matter, with the intent of filling the gap, and while they all translate pretty well to "don't be womanish," there were definitely some things that got more attention than other things. Many of these things were inflicted by other men and boys, or in the context of things that were supposed to be about boys learning how to be men, like Boy Scouting, sports, and school. The general vibe of those kinds of places seemed to be "You must be at least this manly to participate, but if you aren't, we'll try to teach it to you, formally and informally."
The first and most obvious of these seeming commonalities is that a sensitive child who cries when they are hurt or upset must learn to suppress those feelings or channel them into something else. Which is a real treat, let me tell you, to have other people making fun of you or telling you to be a man when you're already in a situation where you're hurting and would like something other than minimization and dismissal of your feelings. Yes, sometimes what a child needs is to keep trying and failing at things until they succeed, possibly with scaffolding or encouragement or taking a break and coming back to something later, but people don't learn well when their brains are engaged in other tasks with higher priority or more systems engaged. (Actually, people don't do anything well when they're running on their emotional centers instead of their thinking ones, unless it's been so well trained into them that they can do it without needing to access those thinking functions.) It wasn't hard to figure out the part where "showing unapproved emotions" = "get made fun of, called womanish, and lose social standing with other men" pretty easily, when that message is repeated from peers, grownups, and media. If I wasn't playing that role because of something that had happened in life, then provocation often came out to try and produce those same emotions. (If everyone's decided you're not part of the men, then their own manliness relies on taking their turn to reinforce that you're not one of them.)
The second is that violence is an acceptable expression of manhood. Those who do not use violence as a way of working their will on the world deserve to have violence worked upon them. Those who do not use enough violence, or to a sufficient degree, are similarly deserving of violence until they do. U.S. media is entirely full of stories of violence, revenge, and destruction as stories, and very rarely does it show the consequences of such things, either physically or mentally. Verbal violence is encouraged as a way of demoralizing your opponent, whether in sport or in life. (This is often despite the various prohibitions on the taking of life and oppressing your neighbors that most Christians would say they follow.)
(One of the things that the "Humans Are Space Orcs" idea does get right regularly is that the human capacity for violence is frightening to the rest of the known universe, along with the ability to survive in multiple climate zones and our recreational poisoning of ourselves.)
The third is that men and boys (of sufficient age) are expected to be sexually aggressive, if not sexually violent, with their partners and anyone else they hold an interest in, and that been were always topping. Men who did not have sexual partners were weaklings or possibly gay. The words that got used, even if many of them are reclaimed or used in different contexts now, are related to strength, virility, and size. Those that don't have the physical attributes are "twinks" and "pretty boys," and not in that bishounen sparkly sort of way.
It was Arnold Schwarzenegger, then it was a bit of The Rock, but if you want a clear image of what's supposed to be an ideal man's body, both then and now, you want the picture of Vladimir Putin shirtless on the horse. Or Hulk Hogan tearing his shirt. (And they would say Hulk Hogan, even of many of them are closer in behavior and demeanor to Hollywood Hogan, the somewhat short-lived heel persona of Hulk Hogan.) I make fun of the Charles Atlas Dynamic-Tension advertisements because there are so many people who follow things like this in the belief that it will give them power so they can enact violence on others in revenge for violence being enacted on them. Pay no attention to the parts where so many of these masculinity scams are, y'know, scams. Body type, presentation, and the projection of strength and vigor is vitally important in many conceptions of masculinity, but it's not quite a universal rule that if you want to have social, economic, and political power, you have to be ripped. After all, there was an eventual grudging acceptance of the existence of "bears," and they're kind of assumed to be more dad bod than bodybuilder.
One of the jokes a younger and less sophisticated me used to hear about men being attracted to men was that if you were a consumer of (mainstream straight) pornography, you generally wanted the male performer to have a large and girthy penis, and because you cared about the penis size of the performer, you were at least a little bit sexually interested in men. (This was, to some degree, leveraged as a "stop beefing so much about gay people, everyone's at least a little bit gay" kind of statement.) This was not a group that had been given the tools to more accurately say that men viewing straight pornography often view the man in the scene as a stand-in for themselves, and since they are projecting themselves onto that character, they want that character to have the virtues and skills that they want to have. At least for me, I think a fair few of them also want the environment that most mainstream straight porn exists in. The kind of space where someone is not only surrounded by attractive people, but they are willing to have sex with just about any penis that waves itself in their direction, regardless of whether the person attached to that penis is worthwhile. Or, if they are unwilling, that they can be persuaded, whether with alcohol, blackmail, money, the abuse of power, or force. The kinds of people peddling the manosphere bullshit and the guaranteed-success pick-up artistry that want to reduce complex beings to a series of relationship values or Pavlovian responses are trying to sell the idea that they can make the dating sim real, or draw the porn world into the real world. They project the idea that they have strength and power through Dynamic-Tension, and you, too, can gain their strength and power if you send away for their book, buy their virility supplements, and religiously practice their proven techniques. When reality rejects them firmly and they do not get their desired results, the hucksters, shysters, and grifters say that it's the rube's fault for not doing it correctly or enough, or any number of a hundred gaslighting bits that deflect the blame away from the person profiting handsomely off of the power-struggle conception of masculinity and onto either the "involuntarily celibate" or the women who keep defeating the "proven techniques." Which often means they try harder to make the system they've bought into work, because sunk cost fallacies, and because, supposedly, these other folks have tried the techniques and gotten their desired results. When that doesn't work, either, well, see above about other common beliefs about what makes a man, especially a man who has decided they want to engage with Dynamic-Tension so they can deliver justice to their bullies and get called a "real man" by the women they're interested in.
Similarly, there's the assumption that men always top, both sexually, and also as the person who does work and provides for the weaker people in their life, the women, boys, and girls. Men who take a bottoming role, whether sexually or who have a partner who does work and/or brings in more money to the household were assumed to be weaklings or gay, deserving of the derision that came with being a "sissy," especially if there's gender play or crossdressing involved. Among the people who proclaim themselves masculine power brokers, there's no place for a man to be the penetrated partner, whether physically or metaphorically, lest someone lose the favored status of "man." Insert the long-running argument about whether it was Achilles or Patroklus that topped in their relationship here, mostly because there are a fair few people, apparently, who have to have their chosen hero always in a topping role or else they're somehow not heroic enough, and compare it with the somewhat common stereotype of the limp-wristed effeminate gay man (or, for that matter, the stereotype of the man librarian, who was in such a profession because he was "fussy" and had failed at some other, more appropriately manly, profession.)
This is one of those bits of wrong that persists despite the ease in which someone could educate themselves about the relative strengths of the roles of power exchange and come to a more nuanced conclusion, but won't, because "his salary depends on his not understanding it," as Mr. Sinclair quipped. Also, actually learning about things like power exchange or the actual experiences of topping, bottoming, and the like puts you in far too close of proximity to queer people and their persistence in completely shredding norms, beliefs, and practices through their existence, much less any active attempts to do the same. Can't have someone's power threatened by the possibility that someone might exit the system entirely, or find some way of doing manhood that's much better suited to them and makes them feel good about themselves, now can we? They might lose followers and power.
If you wanted to sum up those common assumptions and how useful they are to the practice of being a man, you certainly could do worse than "Guns, bitches, and bling were never part of the Four Elements, and never will be." And yet, like the popular perception of the life that leads to or comes from a successful career in rap and hip-hop, these things persist, either because that's what they were taught and they're pushing it out to the next generation, or because they want to seize power, money, and influence to themselves. It was a popular enough conception to get people on board for the 2016 election, and it's still popular enough for the 2024 election. They're doing their best to make sure everyone but them gets the whirlwind, though, and that's going to make for some crunchy juxtapositions when someone who a rube thought was an ally turns out to be unmistakably a predator on them.
Even though I've since broken with the identity of being a man, I'm still part of that community in so many ways, usually imposed by others rather than through my free choice. It's not just "sir," but often how, if I place my body in the way of someone's pathways so that my partner can safely turn their shopping cart, people will move around me rather than try to go through me or complain at me for blocking their pathway. Or how much I can lean on my presentation and voice to command attention in a situation when I want it. (And how I get thanked for handling a situation using those tools.) I can watch a situation where someone completely discounts everything a colleague of mine is saying, the correct statements and procedures, but if I say the same thing, I'm treated as authoritative. (And someone will often try to twist the knife by saying "That woman who tried to help me before, she didn't know anything at all.") It's the "will you deal with this problem in the men's room" and the "Oh, I'm sorry if that is TMI, it's womanly things" and the part where all I have to do is stand there and other men will tell me the important details that they would not tell anyone else, on the assumption that as another man, I will be the one making the decisions. I even sometimes lean into it as a "well, if they can't conceive of me properly, at least they'll have a thought in their head about the man who does children's services and was pretty good at it with their younglings."
It's all the unearned privileges that come to me because of how I look, and all the unearned threat that comes to me as well, because of how I look. These are not mutually exclusive, although I'm probably more likely to notice when someone is giving me unearned threat than unearned privilege, because of the way I was raised not to notice the privilege, only its lack. It is a lifetime's work unlearning, and a lifetime more's to try seeing things from the perspective of the people who were raised with greater consciousness of their lack of privilege. And there's a lot of hurt feelings and running face-first into Finding Out without realizing that I've been doing the first part of that phrase. It hurts. And I try to at least learn from it, even if I have trouble getting over the feelings initially (or significantly afterward).
Even if I'm not a man, I kind of hope that my best self can be an example for them on how successful men behave, and manage to work through their feelings and their weaknesses, and aren't so supremely intimidated by the possibility that a woman might be correct and have the expertise needed for the situation.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 10:17 am (UTC)With regard to sexual preference there was none before I started to deal but I started young (which may be why there was none) so the preference for male sexual partners also started early.
The transition soon made me realise how different things are when people perceive you as female!
no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 04:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 12:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 11:48 pm (UTC)You're welcome, all the same.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 05:42 am (UTC)