Bloggage 18 11 2021

 So two or three years ago I made the decision to accept that that this is now my life. Then in late 2019 inheritance money meant I could get a proper gaming computer and my family got kittens. I decided then that with my money from not needing to save up for a computer I would begin to go out but hey I had a new computer and kittens so I decided to stay inside for a bit and enjoy them. 

Then the pandemic happened.

There is a punch of stuff that has happened the last two years that I can’t talk about here but basically there was stuff that didn’t involve me and was not pandemic related but has been causing me massive stress the last two years anyway. It seems that maybe that suff has gotten better or maybe this is just a lul but the point is that atop the pandemic this unnamed Y Factor has been causing additional stress.

So I buried myself in my writing and became active online. I made friends and solidified current friendships. Things were good. I even edited and reuploaded a bunch of old fiction. I even managed to finish Weresylph Dawning - an incredibly fucked up story I was once really invested in.

I am writing this blog because I feel weird. Like I’ve finally had the time to grow as a person and I have realized some things about me. 

1. I’m probably non-binary in some way. While I don’t feel confident not calling myself cis yet lest I offend actual trans and non-binary people, I have accepted that I’m probably not a cis guy and that’s okay and I am quietly letting myself explore that. It’s hard given the Y Factor and the pandemic but it’s a thing. 

2. I am not the monster I feared I was but neither am I the logically perfect always right moral paragon I thought myself to be. I’m okay. I’ve said some weird shit and been insensitive and stupid and the Y Factor has helped me see I have a lot of baggage to deal with psychologically but I’m still basically okay.

3. If left alone and allowed time to sleep and recover I can quietly be productive. The last two years have been hard but I proofread, edited and in some cases finished novel length stories then uploaded them to my blog as free stories. Nobody reads them but they are things I wanted to get done and I am glad I did. I am also now so close to getting my mods sorted so I can play modded skyrim again. Something that has taken ridiculously too much effort but that I hope will be worth it and has certainly been a learning experience.

4. While I still have bad days, sometimes very bad days I mostly like my life now. That feels weird to say because I know that I have big problems with the way the world is and my life is and could and have ranted for hours but it’s still basically true that for the most part I like my life.

5. Somehow I became a mature person who helps people sort through their problems. That feels so weird to write at 4 am in a dressing gown and pyjamas while my barbies sit on my desk and my Amy Pond and Clara Oswald Standee are nearby and my model starship collection grows but it’s true.

Oh and I watched all of TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT and I really need to finish and upload my thoughts on it. I also watched all of Seaquest DSV, it deserves to be enjoyed as much as star trek and deserves to come back.

I feel weird because I am so close to finishing my modded Skyrim now and I am realising that I am not the same person that graduated university. I think this feeling is compounded by the fact that I have basically found a youtuber who is like me but more polished. I won’t say who that is on my blog because I have nazi stalkers but it’s like that void I wanted to fill with my videos is filled. Even better I get to watch thisversion of me from another universe make videos that I truly love. 

Anyway that’s where I am. 

Oh and the NX-01 is the best Enterprise don’t at me lol

The Collapse Of Hope bloggage

 The Collapse Of Hope

A Bloggage
By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

The Evil demon has been removed from power and normalcy has returned. With it the terror of Neoliberalism holds court once again and while it is much better than the monsters who held office before there is a disquieting sense of unease to the fallen ruling powers being reinstated. 

The Pandemic has not on the whole affected me much, my social life was destroyed five years ago so a life inside is no big change or sacrifice. What is disquieting is seeing the effect it has taken on the world. We are living through a global war, a siege against a pandemic. World War Coronavirus. Hundreds of thousands are dead, the economy is in shambles and generations will be scarred by the time this is done. 

What is particularly dreadful is noticing how the pandemic has become a kind of background factor. Friends complain about being tired and irritable that they aren’t as productive as they would like. I almost have to remind them that we do not live in normal times. In the days of prior pandemics there wasn’t the air travel and speed and ease of access across borders that we have today. 

There’s also a bitter fucking irony that the parties of closed borders have now become the parties of pandemic denial. Their desperate need to showcase their callous stupidity is so great that they would not even wear masks when invading the Capitol. Better to show the libs than have even the slightest element of self preservation. 

I am reminded ofwhen a far right stalker claimed I doxxed myself by using my real name online yet the far right committed coups while using their real names and smiling for the cameras.

What especially troubles me though isn’t the fascists or the pandemic - I trust the self preservation instincts of the powerful and the wealthy to resolve those problems in the end - it’s the delusional insistence of the super rich and the powerful that this neoliberal system of late capitalist politics and economic instability is viable going forward because they have resources enough that they could easily be blind to the impact of this devastation until its too late.

The reason I think it is so hard for die hard capitalists to see the instability in their beloved system as it stands is that we have never lived through a death of a global political and economic system like this.

The fascists are not a terrifying foe nor noble patriots fighting for liberty. They are vultures who can see the capitalist system is dying and seek to replace it. 

The problem capitalists have is that they have been under attack for so long that it is legitimately hard for them to consider that the inherent flaws of their system mean it is well overdue for a radical overhaul if not an outright replacement with another system.

I personally think that market based economics can have value going forward but definitely not like it is now. I would argue that we need to break up monopolies and have strong regulation, a much higher minimum wage that is a living wage, rent controls, higher taxes on the super rich (if you think I mean you, you’re not rich enough so relax) and increased protection to unions. (Except for the police unions. At least in America the police union has shown itself to be toxic and needs to be broken up.)

Maybe with the advent of the world wide web and global pandemics it’s time we consider having some sort of global government to regulate companies who exist across multiple parts of the world so the global government can impose taxes regardless of where people flee. Congratulations on hiding your excess wealth and the earnings of your company in a tax haven, the Global Economic Authority will be taxing that heavily with an extra high tax for being a slippery bastard.

Unfortunately the chances of this happening are slim. Instead it seems Capitalism is beginning its transition to Neo-Feudalism and starting to attempt legalising slavery again. In the age of drones and nuclear weapons when police will kill a black kid for stealing a chocolate bar and let fascists into the Capitol what hope does the common person have to achieve change.

There’s a bitter irony that the conservatives oppose identity politics when to the ultra powerful and ultra rich Identity Politics are a release valve for public anger and a way to pretend like progress is being made. Sure black people are being mown down by cops but you got a black man as president. Sure slavery is being legalised once again but the Biden administration is championing trans rights. 

I am not undermining the importance of legislation to protect the oppressed nor am I undermining the importance of representation but it is very cheap to do politically when in practise income inequality is rising and practical demonstrations of oppression aren’t being seriously addressed. It’s like addressing that black people can’t sit in the best seats on the titanic as it is sinking. I’m glad the racism is being tackled but I want the dying to stop.

I almost envy people whose biggest concerns are the pandemic and Trump. I do not say that from a position of ignorance either. White Supremacists are obsessed with me. There’s something pathetic about their need to get a reaction from me after losing the presidency, the senate and congress. Sure they handed the democrats complete power through their incompetence but at least they can try and bully an autistic man. They are scum but they are fundamentally irrelevant to the future of the country and the world. We need to address the inherent instability of an economic system that is currently not fit for purpose.

Anyway in other news I am working my way through series 6 of Voyager after watching all of TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9 and ENT. If you had told me five years ago that I’d miss Enterprise when I was watching Voyager I’d have laughed in your face but that show was a marvel compared to Voyager’s reset button method of storytelling. Voyager also missed that the reason Seven was popular was that she added an arc and consequences to the ship of the reset button. 

I know this was a blog about politics but I have a serious suggestion for anybody with the power to create and write for Star Trek: Remake Voyager but do it right. The existence of the Equinox already retconned the existence of another ship so you could literally have it tie into care take if you wanted. Or maybe Discovery or Picard could do something similar. Enterprise showed with series three that you can tell a serious lone ship in dangerous territory story without backups and limited supplies and they still managed to involve and episode where the crew turn into monkeys and an episode where they find a wild west planet. 

I will have to write my full thoughts on Voyager later but if any show is crying out for a remake it’s Voyager. For extra drama you could even have a twist of Battlestar Gallactica by having an old Enterprise era NX model ship be the one pulled out. Actually I’d be all for three series of the crew of Enterprise pulled into the delta quadrant and possibly hundreds of years into the future as they’re on board the NX-01 for a reunion cruise before its mothballed for good. Or hell we never saw the last voyage of the Enterprise B so you could use that. Make the stakes even higher by having the crew stranded in the delta quadrant without the luxury of replicators or holodecks.

24th July 2020

The Elephant In the room
24th July 2020 

By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

I have spent my whole life under siege mentally. At school I had the stress of essays, homework, coursework, deadlines bullies and my father and his anger issues. After school ended I had more peace but dad was still terrifying and I was still processing what the fuck happened at school. I did manage to pull myself together enough to consider learning to drive, start writing, then go to college and University. In those years I matured a lot but in the final year a one two punch happened. My parents separated and I got diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome or began the process of getting that eventually diagnosed.

Very quietly since maybe 2012 or 2013 I have been questioning my gender identity and expression. When I got diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome everything seemed to make sense, the misgendering, the odd comments my people, feeing queasy when I looked at my body. There is one thing that doesn’t make sense. Before I knew that there was something medically wrong about me I liked seeing myself looking feminine. I liked the tight tops the breasts and the long hair.

Do not misunderstand me I am a man. I identify as a man and getting the testosterone has made me feel so much better, so much more like what I am supposed to be. I love the beard and moustache. I love that I m physically so much bigger. More importantly since I have started receiving the testosterone it’s like I had an extra sense that I was just barely aware of, the volume on it was so low as to almost be inaudible but the testosterone has turned the volume control up and made it dolby digital surround sound with a bass subwoofer. A few years ago after tensions between me and Dad had finally reached a climax he tried to get my testosterone stopped and I was so angry and hurt. This matters so much. I am a man. This is important to me. My masculinity is important to me.

At the same time my questioning of my gender identity and gender expression didn’t stop. So much of what it means to be a cis man is societally enforced bullshit. More than a decade of bullying and denial about a genuine medical issue caused me to cling to this bullshit for dear life. Being normal was safety. Being weird was dangerous. For years I was mortally afraid of the colour pink or anything ‘girly’. Unfortunately I know from experience that no matter how tightly I try to deny parts of myself they are still a part of me and other people can see that and are freaked out.

I think there is a perception among those close to me that in some ways my autism has lessened as I have perceptively become less weird over the last decade but it is more true to say that I am more comfortable with who I am and have language to understand how and why I am the way I am.

I now understand for example that the reason I like Barbies really is just because I think they are pretty and cute, no more no less. I like to be surrounded by cute things that make me happy but to my idiot younger self Barbies were girly and therefore icky and so it was only okay if I liked them because I was a manly man who liked women. Reasoning that was fucking weird but I didn’t have the language or self confidence to appreciate why I liked them.

My father was a monster who thought buying me shit made up for terrorising me and proving no emotional support and I am still learning the extent to which mental illness effects my mother and her behaviour towards me and everybody else. I had so few friends as a kid to help me figure myself out and boys didn’t really do that anyway. The bullying meant that teachers were the enemy in school and even in university the fact I picked a subject that I lived and breathed meant I was so supremely confident in myself that I didn’t make proper use of the fact that there were finally reasonable authority figures that I liked and trusted.

I have been fumbling around in the dark, trying to learn how to be a person, how to be me, while navigating society. The last few years I have had so many sleepless nights as my increasing self awareness and self understanding makes me cringe at how I behaved at conventions, in facebook groups or at college or university. I am continually reminded and made more aware of just how much women constantly navigate monstrous cis men and have to be on guard because an innocent mistake or stupid bit of weirdness could be a sign of danger. I feel like the idiot boy who was swimming around with a shark fin on his back in Jaws. I might not have caused any harm myself but I have no guarantee that my stupidity didn’t scare or unnerve people because they have experience of the predators that do exist.

The pandemic has acted as the perfect excuse to spend time examining myself. I can’t distract myself with trips to the shops to get snacks and I physically can’t have the things that normally disrupt the pattern of my existence. No trips to town for the barbers, universal credit or a nice meal. It’s just me, my games, my writing, my kittens and the source of all human information that is the internet.

It has not been perfect or without stress. There is still one person I deal with in person and they seem to make up for my lack of stress from other people. Social media also provides the one two punch of hyper awareness of all the world’s problems and the potential offend and upset online friends.

That said. All of that said. All the context provided. I have had time to think about myself. I don’t think it is enough to say any more that I am just a cis man who presents in a masculine manner.

A community I am a part of is still reeling from the revelation that a middle aged lesbian cis woman was a cis man catfishing other women and manipulating them into sharing nude photos. In this context I don’t feel right saying that I am anything other than a cis man until I am absolutely certain. It feels disingenuous and potentially harmful to those who have been traumatised by cis men.

What I will say though is that if the grand spectrum of gender presentations, gender expressions and gender identities is analogous to a large ocean with being cis and heteronormative in presentation and expression analogous to the frozen polar ice caps then I am now starting to get my feet wet.

I do not know what this means yet but I am now going to start learning. 

Bloggage 12 June 2020

Bloggage

12 June 2020

A Friday

By

Alexander Gordon Jahans

Today is a good day and I have hope so I think it’s time for a status report.

The wheel turns but the story remains the same.

The world today is messed up. It’s dark joke at this point that the apocalyptic scenarios keep queuing up to strike us in 2020. Fascists, a global pandemic, swarms of locusts, murder hornets, erupting volcanoes, the list goes on. 

My immune system is compromised so I dare not leave the house and the world outside is simultaneously bright, sunny and beautiful directly outside my windows and filled with police sirens and screams on a global scale. I feel as if I am under siege, trying to hold out against a virus that my government is too incompetent to deal with.

I should be screaming, I should be crying, yet oddly nothing has changed for me personally, if anything psychologically I feel in a better place.

There are challenges to be sure. The lack of a reliable supply of diet coke is stressful and my autistic taste pallete has been annoyed at not having the right kind of tomato ketchup but that’s hardly life threatening. Even the lockdown fever caused by anxiety over the pandemic and not being able to get out and do stuff has not altered circumstances too much. That might sound absurd to my close friends who know the personal problems I’ve been going through but nothing I have faced has yet crossed the threshold into being as bad as when dad lived with us and I was still at school. It does sometimes feel like living in a continual social cold war with the doomsday clock edging ever closer to midnight but even if it did strike midnight it still wouldn’t be as bad as my childhood.

I have an increased sensitivity to the feelings I do have so I do care about the hell happening to people outside my little bubble of relative peace. It does make me angry and upset to see that shitheads are defending black face while others are protesting for an end to systemic racism and a radical change to the way the police force is structured. I hate that transphobes are using the cloak of a warped understanding of feminism to protect their bigotry. I feel so sad and angry for everyone who has died because of the coronavirus and this government’s pathetic response to it.

Do not mistake my own personal feelings about my own personal situation for a disregard of the suffering going on in the world right now.

That said. I feel weirdly at peace in my own life. I actually think that’s why I have days when I wake up feeling anxious for no reason. I have been mentally clenching for so long and now I finally feel able to rest and admit the pain I’ve suffered so I can begin to recover from it. Which sounds and feels so fucked up but I think it’s true.

Little has actually changed in how I personally live my life. Since leaving university and being stuck in my hometown I was left without a real life social life anyway and since the diagnosis of Kallman’s Syndrome I have felt unable to work and the nazi stalkers have left me feeling under siege. The pandemic thus provides a simple explanation I can give to anybody to justify why I can’t work, have no real world social life and feel under siege. It provides an easily understood coat of pain to my messed up life. Even my imposter syndrome can’t argue with a global pandemic.

So much of my existence for the last five years has been about avoiding people, distracting myself from my problems and never leaving the house and now people understand. I don’t have to give multiple lengthy explanations. Everybody seems to grasp not wanting to be infected by the pandemic.

In a weird and messed up way I’m not even that mad in retrospect about facebook calling it ‘hate speech’ when I swear about white people being shits. The practical consequence is that I have stopped injecting myself into the narrative and remind myself to be calm and just let people hear black voices. The last thing the wo9rld needs is more angry white men.

Undoubtedly however a large part of the reason my current existence is easier is that I finally have the gaming computer I always wanted. It means I have been writing less but because I’ve been writing less I’ve been missing my walks less. The one thing I truly miss about going outside. (Don’t insist that it’s safe to go for walks. I’m immunocompromised, I don’t want to take the risk.) I have a taller desk so I’ve been able to cycle on my minibike again and that has meant I have continued exercise. I do however have a treadmill on the way and the perfect place to put it so I can continue having walks soon enough.

The storm has struck and it will be with us for a long time but for now I am doing alright. Now if you will excuse me skyrim special edition awaits. I am an Argonian siding with the Dawnguard and the Empire.

Pride 2020

Before I begin I want to make clear that as I write this People are protesting the institutional racism of the police force and the horrendous brutality they employ against black people. I have been stalked by white supremacists and had to get the British police involved when they started sending things to my house. White supremacists have literally set up a wiki dedicated to harassing me and my family. They are complete and total scum who deserve to suffer. I am cis gendered and white so despite everything else I still have some relative privilege and I believe that Black Lives Matter.

Vote out Trump. Vote out the Republicans. Reform the Democratic Party to not be neoliberal conservatives and demilitiarize the American police force. If American people want to claim that I shouldn't get involved in their politics by suggesting that they follow their own damned constitution then I would remind them that it was American white supremacists who became obsessed with me. Being anti-fascist is to be human. Being anti-white supremacists is to be normal. I am not interested in debate or discussion.

Oh and if this does get posted to that white supremacist hate wiki about me and any neo nazi reading this I would ask that they think long and hard about what happened to the nazis in the second world war. Fascism is a con that is doomed to failure and pain for all concerned.

All that said here's my story of how I realised I was bisexual for Pride 2020.

Pride 2020

By
Alexander Gordon Jahans

As it's Pride I thought I would share my story of realizing I am bisexual.

2009 is the year I was reborn as a Doctor Who fan. It is also the year I started to grab a handle on my sexuality but given I was still years from knowing I had Kallman's Syndrome and getting treatment it was hard for me to feel anything for women, let alone the few specific kinds of men I'm into. Then Moffat's Doctor Who turned up.

It is no secret that I love Amy Pond but it was years before I realized there was a sexual attraction there. Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor however had me hooked from the start in a way I felt since primary school. There were always certain men that I looked up to , admired and wanted to be close to, wanted to like me. Given I was an autistic loner bullied by so many I thought it was just a desire for friendship. Whatever the case I felt that with Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor.

Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor is my taste in men. He is cute funny and innocent yet simultaneous capable of being calm, in control, ultra knowledgable and a flirty freak. He is slim, good looking and wears a suit well. He also is part of what I have since realized is as type for me: He is a trickster manipulator.

So Matt Smith's Doctor got me smitten and kind of turned on the heat underneath my sexuality so things could start to bubble.

Then I watched Farscape and fell in love with John Crichton. First it was the innocent "Oh I really like this character" then it was "Oh he's sexy and cute, I want to look like him" I started working out as I watched Farscape saying "I will be beefcake" then slowly I realized I was attracted to him.

It wasn't easy realizing my sexuality because this was happening during university when my parents began to finally separate and the nazi trolls were just starting to become obsessed with me.

I am still trying to understand myself and it is something that has to go on the back burner because the world keeps burning down around me. It's hard to focus on my sexual education and self realization when life keeps throwing shit at me.

General Election 2019

 You’re no use to me like this! - The Seventh Doctor

The dust has settled and the adrenaline is starting to fade. It is time to reflect. This cannot be remembered as just screams of outrage.

I haven’t felt such visceral anger since I realized nazis know where I live and were threatening my family. It’s as if all at once you are knocked to the ground and battered by the realization that your enemy is so much more dangerous than you thought they were. I am not a soldier or a politician. I am a man who gives a shit about the suffering of others and this result has left me so very very angry and depressed. I can’t fight this. I can’t stop this. There is nothing I personally can do to stop this.

The public have spoken and what they have said is alarming and depressing. I still believe in everything Jeremy Corbyn has fought for. I despise the centrists and I am so angry that the smug rich shits are smugly calling time on these moderate left wing values. We need these policies so much and I hate that so many are so stupid,. bigoted and selfish as to vote against it.

Ultimately though my rage can go nowhere and can do nothing. I am a volcano boiling away steam meaninglessly. I am a utilitarian. That’s why I stand by Corbyn’s policies. That’s why neoliberalism and conservatives baffle and anger me so. They stand in the way of all I see as logical and reasonable. Utilitarian Morality believes in the greatest good for the greatest majority. That same utilitarianism speaks to me now. I am no use to any cause I believe in, to anyone I believe in if I send myself mad raging at things I cannot change. Life has to continue. My strength will be needed for the times to come. I am not talking about any melodramatic political rhetoric either.

I have been so angry today that I have barely slept and have given myself RSI furiously playing Fallout 4 to distract myself from this. I am making myself ill achieving nothing. I have been telling myself over and over today that “I can’t do it.” That I can’t change what has happened. That is of course true but I can still live. I can still provide what little solace and support to those around me as I do bring. I can live and live as well as I can so that I am able to help those I care about. I am not the Doctor and I am not the Sole Survivor - as the player character of Fallout 4 is called - I can’t topple evil regimes or bring people together. I am not that important but I do mean something to a few people and those people would be the worse for my absense so I must continue. I must let myself be.

We may not be able to do anything about the terrible monsters we face now but we can try to keep living in hopes that together we can do something to stop the monsters later.

Toxic Masculinity

Toxic Masculinity
Or
Why Being Good Matters To Me

by
Alexander Gordon Jahans

I keep revisiting the guilt over that damned fanfic in my mind. I wake up at night thinking about it and wishing I could apologise. Wishing I could make it right. Everything I write seems to evolve into a reprocessing of my grief and guilt about writing it. Why? At the very time that was going down I was being diagnosed with Kallman’s Syndrome, suffering from depression and nazis, literal goddamned nazis were sending stuff to my house. Even my own father was taking his frustration at being divorced out on me. Yet it’s the fucking fanfic I keep coming back to.

Let me be clear, I am not a saint. At school I was bullied relentlessly and my own desperate frustration and anger caused me to have anger issues that would sometimes cause me to explode at others. In hindsight my naive crushing on women was perhaps expressed so awkwardly at college and university that while I know my actions never harmed anyone they may well have freaked people out. They didn’t know who I was and what I was capable of after all. So I have regrets, serious regrets, but it’s the fanfic that haunts me and I don’t know why. Why this thing? Why is this what causes me so many sleepless nights?

I think it’s because the fanfic is the clearest instance I can think of where my actions caused harm and I knew at the time that the inclusion of THE problematic scene was risky. This is like living with low level anxiety your whole life and one time you ignored it and things went disastrously wrong. Except did it really go disastrously wrong. The fallout certainly feels it but I have no proof that anyone was harmed by what I wrote. Indeed the person who most saw things wrong with what I wrote seemed an impenetrable strong personality that gave no fucks and just decided it was a messed up thing to have written that indicated things about my character. That’s the key though. The thing I wrote was stupid and I felt that was possible at the time and these people proved it then effectively decided that it was proof I was unsafe to be around. That I was unworthy and not a good man.

I regret many things about how I handled those events but I absolutely do not regret championing the cause of trans and/or non-binary people who want a safe space. People deserve to feel safe and if that means shutting me out then so be it. Safe spaces are important even if they are denied to me. I think though that it is the implication that I am unsafe, that I am not a good man that burns with me.

You see at university I went by Gordon Jones to distance myself from my family and my bad experiences art school but when I entered my final year of university I took up the name I had in school as a reminder to myself that I could survive no matter how bad it got. Alex Jahans the boy had survived more than a decade of relentless bullying and I knew I would need that strength when university ended. Becoming Alex Jahans again was a promise to myself that I would survive because it would be tough and I needed that strength so much because I had no idea just how much shit was waiting for me as university ended. The problem is that implicit within that promise was the idea that Alex Jahans is good, pacifist, he does no harm.

You see at school I was bullied by everyone and then I would get home and my father would scare the hell out of me with his shouting. Let me tell you the word ‘Sugar’ is goddamned terrifying when your dad is towering over at you and bellowing at the top of his lungs as he is literally foaming at the mouth with rage over some stupid bullshit. I defined myself as a pacifist and better than other people because I had to be.

The last few years have seen me come to terms with the fact that my memory works such that I can see through the cycle of my father’s abusive behaviour where my sister can’t. She sees the latest bridge of abuse to get past. I see every bridge my father has ever forced me to cross. I am not blind to the complexity of the situation. There are things I miss about him and he isn’t wholly evil and sometimes his actions are understandable. They aren’t justifiable. They aren’t normal. They definitely are not good or acceptable but sometimes I understand how desperation, frustration and anger has driven him to such actions. The problem is that none of the good of my father is worth a damn while his pattern of abusive behavior remains. He is a dangerous man and the bogeyman me and my mother define ourselves against.

One of the quiet joys of recent years has been watching how my mother has bloomed and developed into a different more rounded, happy and productive individual without my dad there to stifle her dreams, confidence and desire to improve things around the house. I am sure that part of my improving mood can be owed to fading scars of his behaviour. Slowly the effects of him upon our lives are being assessed for their worth with the bad parts being discarded and replaced with better stuff. We are healing.

So that’s why not being a good person cuts so deeply. That’s why the possibility haunts me. That’s why it used to madden me that I had no explanation for what they accused me of. Without an explanation of what I did wrong I can’t stop doing those wrong things, I can’t become safe again, I can’t become good again. Except maybe I never can. Not to some people. After all if you knew a man murdered someone once it wouldn’t matter how reformed he was you wouldn’t feel safe around him so why should a trans person feel safe around someone who once wrote transphobic things?

Even if there was some simple explanation that I could easily work with they don’t owe me that. Victims of oppression don’t owe their oppressors compassion and explanations, even if those oppressors did so accidentally. I fucked up and this is my mess to deal with. The problem is that I still don’t know how to deal with it. That cis privilege comes with ignorance of the perspective of a transgender person. I can do research but I can never truly know how it feels to be trans and/or non-binary so now every time I am around them I have anxiety that I am going to fuck up again and cause my social life to disintegrate and I know that sometimes when I ignore my anxiety things go very badly wrong.

This incidentally is why disagreements on twitter have caused me actual panic attacks before and why I have withdrawn from it. My autism means I am playing a continual game of Russian roulette whenever I talk to people online. If you fuck up and say the wrong thing in person you can apologise and learn from the experience. You fuck up and say the wrong thing on twitter or facebook and people will be sharing screencaps of it decades later.

Maybe that’s right? Maybe it is better this way but what the fuck do you do if your past is littered with such literary landmines of stupidity? I know myself and I know what I have or have not physically done but my autism means I can never be sure what I have said will be taken how I intended it. I have had other autistic people say they would not have made the mistakes I made. Has it been codified somewhere medically that autism causes a lack of social skills but always leaves someone mentally cognizant of any and all possible ways they might unintentionally be discriminatory or bigoted so such actions are definitively due to wilful bigotry and not unintended misunderstanding?

Heck there is another complexity to this that sometimes I have called women out for bigoted statements and they have called me sexist for daring to say a negative thing to a woman. How the fuck do I take that? What is the response to that? I am an autistic person with Kallman’s Syndrome and Growth Hormone Deficiency who has been bullied, abused and stalked by nazis. Surely I have a right, a duty, to call people out for being bigoted? At the same time I am a cis white man who likes women and was raised under the patriarchy so I am privileged and probably have some latent sexism, racism and heteronormativity to fight against.

This isn’t easy. Which is why I think the deconstructivist era of the 90s sticks with me. I don’t get to pretend I am definitively a good guy anymore. I have a black mark against my name and I have to live with that and the possibility that I might fuck up again. Women get to have golden age superheroes who are beacons of hope and love. Cis white men have to live with the complexity of being part of the patriarchy whether we like it or not and how we fight against that toxicity within ourselves and within our communities.

Right I’m going to get some tea.