Mx Aria Stewart @aredridel@anarchism.space

@iarna Hah. This one bites me on the other end. People say "Wow, that was blamey" and I'm like "Huh? Oh, I was looking at contributing factors, huh, and ..."

@Thuslyandfurthermore hmm maybe. I was using firefox macos

@Thuslyandfurthermore I can!

Twitter: We made a social network. It is made of wasps and will fuck you up.
Facebook: We don't have wasps, because we have spiders that will fuck you and the wasps up.
Mastodon: Here's fifteen paper straws, half of them soggy. Make a social network out of it.

@jellal Yeah. It's such a fucked up thing. But so big, of course, that it's not homogenous. And learning that was a huge thing for me.

@jellal Kinda?

It exposed me to a bunch of interesting concepts, and really gave me a sense of what solidarity despite differences looks like.

Also, I found some knowledge of Christianity useful, which set me up to get away from the toxic parts of the Atheist upbringing (stereotype and shallow understandings)

@jellal Unschooling specifically is super weird. It's such an open-ended, free way of learning; but in the 90s, in the US, the other people fighting for the right to self-educate were a fundamentalist Christian set. So I was pushed into close contact with evangelical Christianity (the American flavor) _by the radical schooling approach my family chose_.

@jellal I mean, Christian has been mentioned specifically a couple times. Netherlands is in your profile; Unschooling is rare enough in general and especially in Europe as to be able to be assumed.

@jellal Heh, yeah. I'm trying to imagine how that looks where you are. It's so different!

Rural Colorado, USA vs Netherlands; Christian vs Athiest-humanist; Unschooler vs (I assume) normal school traditions there. I've enjoyed a lot of what you post because I can _see_ how different the frame is.

@jellal Absolutely!

If anything I've learned that telling my story is interesting because I was in fact brought up differently. Really differently.

@jellal At the same time, this was the 90s. There was a fence around womanhood, and the skinny gentle bookish boy with the long beard wasn't playing on that team. Allowed to hang out, but not on the team. Transition in a lot of ways felt like joining the team, and doing the training needed to do so.

@jellal I mean, I'm a big, fat, loud, mohawk-wearing woman. Womanhood as the world sees it fits me poorly, just like those people I've patterned myself after.

The women I looked up to, my role models? Carpenters, painters, machinists, artists, gardeners, ranchers. In so many ways, I let myself be like them.

At the same time, I kept some of my quietly bookish masculinity. I kept a lot of my pre-transition self.

@jellal Ew!

But yeah, for my own personal transition, I've got some weird influences. Lesbian friends as a teen. Lots of identification-with them. Growing up in a culture of relatively rugged women (and men, but that is less distinct from the outer culture). And a lot of non-toxic men in my life, who I _didn't_ end up identifying with (but love just the same)

@jellal ... I just realized that one could call this "evaporative cooling of manhood" (where cooling = toxifying)

@jellal (that said, like, this is a social level argument; that's not to say any one person's disavowal is wrong. But I think that the structure we've created is bizarre, twisted by patriarchy. And somewhat by our participation in it.)

@jellal Yeah, for sure. Though I don't think that's disagreement.

I just find it weird that disavowing manhood is part of this process. Like really deeply weird. I think it helps sustain the toxicity in manhood.

@jellal Also, I wonder how many more might transition because it sounds like fun. Or like a change.

(To some degree, I did this. And I find it a deeply rare thing.)

@emsenn @jellal Yes indeed. And I love love love that document, even as I can critique the utopian-technocratic things it allows.