Every Time I Reread A Bit Of Spinning Silver, I Notice New Ways The Staryk King Is 100% A Panicking,

Every time I reread a bit of Spinning Silver, I notice new ways the Staryk king is 100% a panicking, highly reactive dufus who does not know what he's doing at any point in the book any more than Miryem ever quite does.

Miryem and the Staryk king are peak clown-to-clown communication; to the point that they come to understand each other on a deeply personal, cross-cultural level - enough to realize that they are actually well-matched in terms of their values and long-term goals enough to actually fall in love with each other - all while still completely missing like 90% of everything the other one is trying to say at any given moment.

I love them and I love this book so much.

.

I feel like many tumblr users could get a lot of value from periodically reminding themselves (both for their own posts, and when encountering other people's posts full of the particular brand of emotionally manipulative language I see go around all the time on this website) that:

While it is absolutely true that no one is obligated to put aside their own emotional reactions to stressful conversations that directly affect their day-to-day lives in order to act as objective educators for every rando who hops in their inbox with disingenuous, lazy, or Marginalization 101 level questions, the reason for this is not because there is some threshhold of marginalization beyond which you're just, like, allowed to be an asshole now and everyone else has to deal with it.

The reason is that teaching is hard fucking work, and teaching emotionally charged subjects that affect you personally can be doubly so.

But!

If you aren't going to put in the work to be an effective educator - for whatever reason, including if you just want to vent about your own personal experiences in your own online space - without doing the work of actually teaching other people about said experiences, then you do not get to demand that your personal rants be treated as containing any kind of educational authority, either.

Tone policing is a shitty, asshole thing to do to people who are just talking about their own lives.

It is also an incredibly important skill to learn and employ for yourself if you want to teach.

Personal vent spaces are a super valid and positive way for some people to let off steam and destress about shitty things in their lives, and everyone deserves to have people - friends, family, kind strangers with a lot of empathy to share - to lean on for empathy and validation during stressful times.

Realistic and effective education, on the other hand, is hard fucking work, and your vent post does not and should not count as an educational resource if you are not putting in that work to make it one for the audience that you are hoping to reach.

So a few months ago there was the discourse about would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. I didn't want to touch it while the discourse was hot and everyone dug in hard because those are not good conditions for nuance, but I waited until today, June 1st, for a specific reason.

I'm not going to take a position in the bear vs man debate because I don't think it matters. What is really being asked here is how afraid are you of men? Specifically, unexpected men who are, perhaps, strange.

People have a lot of very real fear of men that comes from a lot of very real places. Back when I was first transitioning in 2015 and 2016, I decided to start presenting as a woman in public even though I did not pass in the slightest.

I live in a red state. I knew other trans women who had been attacked by men, raped by men. I knew I was taking a risk by putting myself out there. I was the only visibly trans person in the area of campus I frequented, and people made sure I never forgot that. Most were harmless enough and the worst I got from them was curious stares. Others were more aggressive, even the occasional threat. I had to avoid public bathrooms, of course, and always be aware of my surroundings.

I know how frightening it is to be alone at night while a pair of men are following behind you and not knowing if they are just going in the same direction or if they want to start something - made all the worse for the constant low level threat I had been living under for over a year by just being visibly trans in a place where many are openly hostile to queer people. You have to remember, this was at the height of the first wave of bathroom law discussions, a lot of people were very angry about trans women in particular. My daily life was terrifying at times. I was never the subject of direct violence, but I knew trans women who had been.

I want you to keep all that in mind.

So man or bear is really the question "how afraid of men are you?", and the question that logically follows is "What if there was a strange man at night in a deserted parking lot?" or "What if you were alone in an elevator with a man?" or "What if you met a strange man in the woman's bathroom?"

My state recently passed an anti trans bathroom bill. The rhetoric they used was about protecting women and children from "strange men", aka trans women.

Conservatives hijack fear for their bigoted agenda.

When I first started presenting as a woman the campus apartment complex was designed for young families. The buildings were in a large square with playgrounds in the center, and there were often children playing. I quickly noticed that when I took my daughter out to play, often several children would immediately stop what they were doing and run back inside. It didn't take me long to confirm that the parents were so afraid of "the strange man who wears skirts" that their children were under strict instructions to literally run away as soon as they saw me.

"How afraid are you of a strange man being near your children?"

I mentioned above that I had to avoid public bathrooms. This was not because of men. It was because of women who were so afraid of random men that they might get violent or call someone like the police to be violent for them if I ever accidentally presented myself in a way that could be interpreted as threatening, when my mere presence could be seen as a threat. If I was in the library studying and I realized that it was just me and one other woman I would get up and leave because she might decide that stranger danger was happening.

Your fear is real. Your fear might even come from lived experiences. None of that prevents the fact that your fear can be violent. Women's fear of men is one of the driving forces of transmisogyny because it is so easy to hijack. And it isn't just trans women. Other trans people experience this, and other queer people too. Racial minorities, homeless people, neurodivergent people, disabled people.

When you uncritically engage with questions like man or bear, when you uncritically validate a culture of reactive fear, you are paving the way for conservatives and bigots to push their agenda. And that is why I waited until pride month. You cannot engage and contribute to the culture of reactive fear without contributing to queerphobia of all varieties. The sensationalist culture of reactive fear is a serious queer issue, and everyone just forgot that for a week as they argued over man or bear. I'm not saying that "man" is the right answer. I am saying that uncritically engaging with such obvious click bait trading on reactive fear is a problem. Everyone fucked up.

It is not a moral failing to experience fear, but it is a moral responsibility to keep a handle on that fear and know how it might harm others.

Y'know... Oliver really does give a whole new meaning to the phrase, "fucking up."

I want a soulmates au where Zuko and Sokka are *not* soulmates but end up together anyway.

Because fuck destiny, we’ll make our own.