Wow.
Someday I’ll read a book again, I suppose.
Those of you who have observed the blogging – especially the Mom Blogging – world for a couple of decades now – well, you know about Dooce.
Dooce, aka Heather Armstrong, was the first Mom Blogger to get big with huge readership, notoriety and a book deal or two, I guess. I was never a big reader of Dooce, but checked in with her once in a while as a part of taking the temperature of the Online World. I had no strong opinions about Dooce except…wow. Oversharing much?
But that was definitely her brand. In super-stream-of-consciousness, anxious prose. About everything.
The last I’d read, a few months ago I guess, was about her older daughter declaring a non-binary identity.
Heather, who has, by her own account, dealt with body dysmorphia her entire life (she is skeletal), very astutely ties the trend to non-binariness and transness with that particular issue. She is, of course, being cancelled right and left and accused of transphobia, but my Lord, the pain here is so real and deep and again…real. And the writing is very brave.
When I was your age I was angry at everything and everyone, and if I had thought that testosterone would make me feel better about how skinny I was or wasn’t, how curvy I was or wasn’t, how a pair of jeans never fit my body the way they fit the bodies of supermodels I had hanging all over my walls, I would have injected testosterone into my arms like heroin.
Instead, I did was de rigeueur at the time. I tried to control what I put in my body. I tried to control the way I looked…
…..
When we shackle ourselves to an idea of happiness, and that idea can look like anything — a thin body, a man’s body — we blind ourselves to a million instances of happiness that don’t look like that image. We are shackling ourselves to a life of constant suicidal ideation that is in no way temporary.
When I stopped drinking I returned to that eating disorder only this time I had Adderall. I had developed a whole new league of eating disorder. Let’s call it Anorexia on Speed.
That’s how fucking serious I am.
I want you to memorize this phrase and repeat it to yourself over and over again in case you ever think that you would be better off dead:
Suicide is a permanent fix to a temporary problem.
Moms, and more specifically WHITE PROGRESSIVE MOMS, you know exactly who you are because you want to be the fun mom, they need you to knock off your bullshit.
Stop playing into this nonsense because you are helping them destroy their lives…
….
White progressive moms, I am talking to you now. And I have no fucks to give should any of this hurt your feelings. I feel your pain, too, because when my they/them told me they wanted to change their pronouns I believed they were riding this massive cultural shift in acceptance and inclusion.
But I was wrong. America is fucking wrong.
During my recovery process I began to realize that I was not asking the right questions about what we think is a radical new way of celebrating diversity.
White progressive moms, are you asking yourselves the right questions? Maybe you should so that I don’t have to do the work for you. But since none of you are doing the work, lean in close and let me give you the answers to the questions you won’t ask.
Gender dysphoria is social contagion.
Should your theys and thems be afraid to read this or disinterested in the manic rambling spiral of some looney white anorexic on the internet, this part is for you and your kids together. Read this part together calling upon the pain of your childhood that in hindsight might have made you realize that your girls are experiencing normal human sadness. They are teenagers. They were once your precious baby girls.
They are experiencing the same sadness you experienced when you were their age.
Your children are perfect. They were born perfect. And you love them just the way they are.
Let me say it again, and you need tor repeat this over and over again to your girls. Every single day for the rest of their lives because WHO KNOWS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE DIE:
Your children are perfect. They were born perfect. And you love them just the way they are.
That’s how fucking serious I am. I have been thinking a lot lately about how much I have destroyed my body, and that has made me consider death in a way I never have. I cannot imagine losing anyone in my life knowing how many memories I have decimated with drugs.
And now, at last, we have come to the Radio Free Europe portion of the program, kids.
And adults if you are still reading and not already writing an angry missive to your progressive congressperson who doesn’t give two fucks about your kids anyway, this is important for you, too.
Desisters and Destransitioners, these women are my heroes. And they are going to save this planet because no one else has the guts to do it. And I am going to help them.
Desisters and Destransitioners are being silenced. And they are being kicked off every forum and social platform for trying to tell you to stop doing this to them and to each other. They are telling you what they wish they had known long before they headed down a path toward transition, and I am the only progressive white woman alive who is willing to say publicly and proudly and authentically and unapologetically:
These Desisters and Destransitioners, these women, they are right.
I am a white progressive women who co-opted oppression and saddled my own teenage girls with all that baggage. These Desisters and Destransitioners are now tasked with the burden of undoing the damage done to them by their own parents and trying to figure out a way to get everyone to safety before the whole boat sinks.
They are trying to megaphone the shit out of this goddamn tragedy of millennial proportions. They are screaming:
Get off that boat because that boat is heavier than the Titanic.
Celebrities won’t say it because they are buying into it. Celebrities are selling it. Celebrities are cloaking themselves in it as if they are aligning themselves with all that is good and right in the world and no one seems to be asking, have we lost our goddamn minds? These celebrities and white progressive moms think they are on the right side of history.
And let me tell you, they are dead wrong.
Desisters and Destransitioners — these genuine heroes of mine — they are being silenced and threatened and canceled by their friends and every one in power who should know better.
They are the poster children for the question I have asked myself every goddamn day of my life, “Why are you agreeing with us when we are telling you that we hate ourselves?”
And finally, the Radio Free Europe portion of the program which we will co-opt today, immediately, here on my platform and rename it:
Trans Central Station
Radio Free Europe was a broadcast news organization that hosted the free flow of information to parts of the world where free speech had been silenced by their government entities.
Desisters and Destransitioners, I speak your language. My brain and your brain, they are one, and I will never dismiss your pain.
I have messaged some of you to let you know what I am doing and I will host your stories here.
If I can quit all these drugs and this pain and this shame, I believe that you will save the planet. Does that sound insane? I don’t care. Because I know you will. You kids, you desisters and detransitioners, you are my inspiration. You are the bravest kids who have ever walked the Earth. No one has ever really told you that yet. So let me say it to you again:
You will save Earth.
Here I am. I am here to tell you that you are perfect, now. Right now. In your body right now you are perfect no matter what damage you may think you have done to it.
America needs your stories. You speak the language of the theys and thems the most. And their white progressive mothers need to read your stories over and over and over again. I will publish them here.
And you can trust me. You will never be banned or censored. You can speak your truth here.
I have contacted a few of the women here, and I will post those women’s stories after I emphasize again:
Everyone needs to leave my family out of this.
No one wants me to do this but when I realized that my whole life has been leading up to this point, I don’t really have a fucking choice. No one else on Earth is willing to do this work. The purpose of my life is this right here.
If you are going to get angry at someone, get angry at me. If you are going to threaten anyone, threaten me. This is my cross to bear.
And now for the totally bonkers portion of the program which will get me canceled in 17 languages. Are you ready for this?
Good. Buckle up, buttercup…..
…
Kids, do you ever sit around and think about having a family? Do you want to become a breeder?
You know I am calling all of your bluffs, potential breeders.
Because I know what you’re doing when you are referring to women like me and your mother as “breeders” but do you know? Do you know what asexuality is? Do you know how children are conceived? They are conceived biologically through sex with someone from the opposite sex. Your mother is a breeder and I am a breeder and we brought you into this world because at some point before you were a glimmer in our eyes we had sex with your dads. And they are dudes. They are men. They are male. And we had orgasms while we were doing it.
And do any of your moms know what you are referring to when you deadname yourself? They will now when they read this link. And then they are going to think about you and your friends dropping the name they gave to you at birth in exchange for a new name you choose out of some random grocery aisle that means as much to your real heritage as a saltine cracker.
Can you imagine what they are going to think if they named you after a female family member who was important to them?
God bless her. Really. Unhinged and rambling, but the core of it? She’s not wrong.