BUNNY WARRIOR

I loathe how so many in the feminist movement think that being angry specifically at men is integral to feminism. If you want to end rape culture, you should be angry at rapists. If you want to end domestic violence, you should be angry at abusers. If you want to end oppression, you should be angry at oppressors.

What does someone’s gender have to do with it? Why do we blame men when they are not the only rapists, abusers, oppressors? Why do we blame all men when men are also getting raped, abused, oppressed? Why do we blame all men when they are not all rapists, abusers, oppressors?

What is the point of feminism if it doesn’t address the need for equality for all people?

Her name rolls off the tongue,
soft and beautiful,
though that’s inconsequential.
He didn’t whisper it sensually in her ear;
he didn’t know it,
nor care,
when her vagina fell victim
to his archaic instrument of war.
He battered her stillbirth weakened flesh
until he ripped holes through her dignity,
and her soul.
The barrier to her colon gave way.
The caverns of her body,
once reserved for love making and birthing,
become a constant mudslide of feces and shame.
She naively assumes that she is diseased.
The noxious stench drives her family to disown her.
Hopeless, she flees.

She starves to death,
eyes brimming with impossible tears,
undermined by dehydration.
Every step ignites fire in her joints.
Her body shutters with inevitable infection.
Her ravenous brain bids her body to cannibalize her muscles,
her organs;
her heart slows to a timid pitter patter.
Her body numbs.
Like a cat,
she crawls to the lowest space
that she can drag herself to
and dies curled into a crescent,
an adult fetus.
Look into those parched dead wells,
and tell her she deserved it.

We have the audacity
to bitch that the government
won’t force misogynist insurance companies
to cover contraceptives,
while women are being raped to death
and legally beaten
for not submitting to husbands
who are old enough to be their grandfathers.
Well aren’t we entitled?

Keep your laws off my body.
And keep your cocks out of hers,
and mine.
The disrespect runs deeper
than pro lifers and pills.
It runs deeper
than you plunging your penis into my unwilling flesh
and claiming I asked for it.
Look into my eyes
and tell me I fucking wanted you.
Look into the shredded remnants of my cervix
and tell me I deserved it,
enjoyed it,
moaned your name while you shanked me,
as you straight faced lied to the judge.
I console myself with how truly pathetic you are.
I pity how bereft of dignity you must be;
you deserve it.

And fuck all of you hypocrites,
you faux feminist cunts,
who perpetuate slut shaming
and victim blaming.
Because villianizing consensual sex
makes rape only a tiny overstep on the atrocity spectrum.
Your disrespect is betrayal.
Your disrespect is more shameful
than that spewed from the lips of white men making mandates
about how many days I have to wait to get a legal abortion
and how many times they’re going to guilt me
with ultrasound polaroids of my rapist’s spawn.
At least those men
don’t have to be afraid to have a drink at a party,
because wearing jeans that fit my ass
is asking to be violated.

You cry about your two dollar copay
and ignore the crying
coming from within the whitewashed walls of psychiatric wards,
from the souls of women
who couldn’t even bring themselves
to put their feet in the stirrups
and let the surgical vacuum
suck away the tiny life,
who was conceived unwillingly,
but of no fault of its own.
She, who was so oppressed by stress
that she miscarried onto the bathroom floor,
a dead little girl,
and still thought herself a murderer,
instead of a victim,
and tried to end her own existence
rather than cope in a society that has brainwashed her
to believe it was all her fault.

Look into her eyes,
and tell her she deserved it.

Today is the last Sunday that this place will be my home. I spent my first night here passed out with my bestie in a pile of giggles on the kitchen floor, before we begrudgingly crawled into my nest in the corner of the living room- my corner of home, my tenderly tended niche where my only privacy was the world swimming beneath my eyelids. I could hold no secrets; these walls housed my fears.

I never had a closet; I never needed one. I needed veins full of pbr and powders, caffeine heartbeat thundering in my ears, and rooms full of people dancing under an oppressive blanket of sound. I drank in the intimacy of initial meetings and first impressions.

Spring slowly melted the snowy world; the sun exposed the yellowed grass and mountains of cigarette butts. My houseplants and peat pots neatly lined the door frame, and exploded onto the balcony, ensconcing a tiny cave, where I sucked down poison air and box wine and pretended water was food. We were good housewives, gourmet chefs with food stamp budgets. I was a work chauffeur on a cigarette salary, in the wee hours of the morning when the sunlight is just beginning to touch the sky, and I fell asleep every night with a cup of tea to the tapping of keys killing elves and orcs.

I fell in and out of love in the cool clean rain.

In the summer I starved and satiated myself with whiskey and wine and walking, and the glorified walk that is disc golf. My garden gave me more than I could eat. Our makeshift family shattered, I sold my soul to the retail machine, and the Rent soundtrack got stuck on repeat. Don’t eat.

My lover first peeked into the wells of my soul with my hipbone pressed against the counter top, urgently. I traded poison air for breathlessness. He planted purpose, and she grew as the VCR rewound our childhoods, with the faint creak of the cassette, the pale screech of the television tubes. We were good at kissing, and sarcasm. We smiled. We thought.

Within me ignited heartbeats, movements, thoughts. Tiny ears to drink in sounds, tiny legs to practice dancing, tiny feet to wear tiny shoes. I packed away my hunger strike clothing. I showered in glitter and blues. Spring sprung early.

The sun is streaming in through my curtains, and my plants are reaching out to kiss it. They’re beginning to give birth. I still nestle in my nest, and eye little towers of boxes and empty nail holes, soon to abandon the jet engine bathroom fan and the microwave that says, “Good.”

Good riddance to the family down the hall, locked in a constant domestic dispute, paper thin walls, and the toilet that you had to flush twice if you pooped. Goodbye roommate, who I wanted to strangle so many times but never did, henceforth, melt safely into your computer chair and form a layer of mossy mold on your immobile skin, without my supervision. I’ll be busy with seedlings.

romantiqueer:

vegantransboi:

i’ve been checking up on the trans* and transgender tags and i keep seeing a common thread with anonymous questions.

“i don’t want to offend you but…” [insert invasive questions about genitals here].

that is offensive.

it isn’t a trans* person’s job to educate you. read a book, do a google search, or just shut the fuck up. seriously, wouldn’t you feel a little offended if someone asked you about your junk, totally out of the blue?

yeah. 

Yup. This.

I think that this is a hilarious complaint, because not to make anyone feel less special, but I get asked about my genitals frequently. Especially since becoming pregnant, I get asked about my breasts, if they hurt, if they’re bigger than they were, if my nipples got bigger, when I’m going to start lactating, whether lactating makes me feel less sexy, etc. I get asked about my vagina, my cervix, my uterus, whether or not I still have sex, if my vagina tastes different, if sex feels different, if orgasms are dangerous, and the list goes on. Since openly talking about my ED recovery, I get asked about menstruation, my sex drive, whether sex makes me self conscious, etc.

The difference is that people don’t have to go onto my blog and click the anon option to ask me these things, they just ask, because I’m not offended! My body, much like, and much unlike, a trans* person’s, is going through changes that many people will never themselves experience. Asking someone about the changes they are going through usually isn’t to be offensive, it’s because they’re curious. I would much rather ask a trans* person who I admire about the changes in their body than read wikipedia, because everyone’s body is a little bit different. People do not fit into some cookie cutter mold. The generic list on wikipedia isn’t a comprehensive list of what happens to everyone.

I feel many times like a portion of the trans* community is very overly sensitive. It’s like walking on eggshells to talk to a sensitive trans* person, because if you misspeak and use the wrong gender pronoun (which I do to all of my friends from time to time) they act like you’ve just murdered their sense of self. I cannot comprehend why anyone would ever require such a huge amount of external validation to be confident. In my recovery therapy I talked to my therapist yesterday about how I ignore insults about my body as well as compliments, because external validation will never ever make anyone feel better about themselves if they aren’t proud and confident. Compliments give fleeting happiness, but they cannot mend a lack of self esteem. If they are proud and confident, then they wouldn’t need the external validation to begin with, because they get enough fulfillment from being comfortable with who they are.

I’ve noticed the people who claim to not sweat pronouns are the most offended by being misgendered. I’ve noticed that the people who claim to be sex positive get the most offended when people ask them about their bodies and sex lives. I’ve noticed that the people pretending to not need external validation seek out compliments and attention the most.

If you let people offend you, you’re giving them a lot of power over you. Most people, especially anonymous internet cowards, don’t deserve that power. By empowering them, you only weaken yourself. Instead of being offended, you could oblige their curiosity and in doing so show them how confident you are, how you are making a stand against sex negativity, and how you are happy and proud of the changes that you are going through.

As humans, we all face times when our confidence wanes. We all have times of weakness. Focusing on negativity only perpetuates it, and complaining to get sympathy only exposes your insecurities

This is not to say that there is anything wrong with being uncomfortable talking about sex, some people are. If that is the case, then why not explain your modesty instead of being abrasive? Being abrasive is so negative and self depreciating.

If you want people to be accepting of you and understand you, then it is your obligation as part of a misunderstood community to educate them. If you want all of the curious people, most of whom are willing to accept you for who you are, to just “shut the fuck up” rather than ask questions, then why do you bother to be a part of our society, which is inherently curious about things they don’t understand? Why do you attack people who just want to understand you better? People fear what they don’t understand and fear leads to discrimination and transphobia; it’s like you’re asking to be discriminated against. This is why I avoid the GLBT community for the most part; they are too abrasive. Being abrasive makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The challenge is to read an average of 2 books a month for the next year. Length doesn’t matter, as quality is more important than quantity. Lists may include both fictional and nonfictional titles, with a maximum of 5 titles that you wish to reread. You can read them in any order.

• Among the Mad by Jacqueline Winspear
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan
• Club Dead by Charlaine Harris
• Food Rules by Michael Pollan
• His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
• Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris
• An Incomplete Revenge by Jacqueline Winspear
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• Living Dead in Dallas by Charlaine Harris
• On The Road by Jack Keruac
• On Writing by Stephen King
• Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation by Elizabeth Beckwith
• The Shattering by Christie Golden
• Skinny by Ibi Kasalik
• Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects by Christie Golden
• The Three Martini Playdate: A Practical Guide to Happy Parenting by Christie Mellor
• The Vanishing Face of Gaia by James Lovelock
• Veganist by Kathy Freston
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
• What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson
• The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks