Ok

Ok
I haven't read any of this, incidentally. Let's see if this entry survives the acid test.

Hello! You are a person! You are probably lovely! I like people!

This journal ends up being a bit of a mix of Srs Business (rants; things I've learned from counselling; &c), fannish & scientific joy, linkspams, & misc life updates. I tag fairly compulsively, though not always helpfully; I use content notes; I aim to maintain this as a safer space, and appreciate (but do not expect!) call-outs when I mess up.

Get ready for some shit, motherfuckers.
Anyone who has rules on how to read their shit is going to be a ton of trouble.
Remember my first entry? "Blogging sucks and here's a protracted, 4+ year lesson about why."
That was it.

I know Harry more through the glimpses I catch of him in CK (through a glass, darkly) than I ever knew him in person; and I still catch my breath every time I remember that I didn't know he was a poet until two weeks after his death.

Still, I have his copy of Whipping Girl. He loaned it to me almost exactly a week before he died; I can't remember whether I hugged him, but I know I told him I hoped to see him soon, and I know that he'd asked me to answer a question the audience had addressed to him.

Blah blah blah

Harry is still the reason that I say I am trans, and I am mad, and I am human, and is the reason I will keep on saying it as long as I have words left in me.

I cannot but light candles.

Oh, there we go. We can check that off our list of blogging shit now: trans.
If you've noticed my entries have been shorter lately it's because lately I'm kind of feeling like I'm going through the motions with this. There are only so many ways I can make "person of indeterminate gender whines about gender politics and writes fanfiction" funny.

It's really, really important for me to feel connected to my body, reminded that I am embodied, and reminded that I'm real. 

What?
Reminder that you're real?
This sounds like a problem for the unemployed, the lost and the damned.
If you want a reminder you're real go to a high school and see some punk ass motherfucker giving you a shitty look because you told him that blaring his shitty rap music at maximum volume in the computer lab isn't appropriate behavior and he should put on some headphones.
Shit doesn't get much realer than the hate roiling 'neath the mask of complacent, superficial charm.

 For a huge chunk of my life, the best way I've had to access that when I'm in a state has been self-harm.

Easiest way to remember you're real or you're you or whatever bullshit emotional troubles you snowflakes have?
Remember the roiling well of hate in the core of your being.
Hate is a man's best way of making the world recognize his existence.
Here's a fucking entry called "how to teach me" and it's 57,000 paragraphs of bullshit.
How's this?
You read the book and fucking study, dipshit.

I'm trans: specifically, genderqueer. My pronouns are "they".

I'm queer.

You're not royalty.
So this fuckchop wants people to ask questions and amazingly a lot of people did. So let's start with this fucking gem:

Theirself, themself: are those good usage? I've tried 'themselves' on a singular person, and it just doesn't sound right.

Theirself?
Are you fucking kidding me?
That reminds me of an anecdote: I know this girl with a tattoo of the female symbol with the closed fist inside the O part--
it represents radical feminism--
she got very pissy when I pointed out that symbol probably represents the vagina and ovaries and putting a fist in the vagina part probably isn't the image she wants permanently embossed on her arm.
haha
Fist in the vagina sounds like a porno version of Ghost in the Shell.
Or Blood in the Machine?
Ghost in the Machine.
ALL THIS SHIT IS CROSSING WIRES IN MY BRAIN HELP

(Very recently I found out that S.E. Smith's pronoun set, ou/ou's/ouself worked like 'a' for someone with a Yorkshire accent, and suddenly those pronouns became 100% easier to use, because now I understand the rhythm of how to use those in everyday speech.)

I remember conversations like this in pussy sensitivity class.
I AM NOT REFERRING TO ONE ASSHOLE AS A PLURAL.
ONE ASSHOLE = YOU
TWO ASSHOLES = YOU
A PROLIFERATION OF ASSHOLES: YOU.
ENGLISH HAS NO SECOND PERSON PLURAL PRONOUN.
KISS MY DICK.

Fun fact: English speakers have used plural they as gender-indefinite-human* pronoun since at LEAST 1600, if not earlier (I COULD try to sift for Middle English examples and probably should, one day...).

Oh well shit. If English in the early modern era had it it must still be reality!
This was the same period that had a letter called a thorn (þ) that represented "th". Commonly typeset as "y" because fuck making a specialized letter like the thorn--
which is why you have "ye olde".
It's not actually "ye".
It's pronounced "the" because the y is standing in for þ.
So you know clearly a language with letters we don't have anymore is also the same in the obscure part of grammar.

If you'd kept reading this thread further, you would have realised that I already knew the historical precedents and was satisfied with them, and that I wasn't trying to be prescriptivist, I was just asking for advice on how to use this pronoun (whose use I already agree with) better.

Oh boy that's a fun argument, too.
PRESCRPITIVST.
What the fuck is a prescriptivist?
Well simply it's that you believe words have a meaning and you should stick to it.
This is a bad thing to be, incidentally. Pussy sensitive types seem to have a burning need for words to mean whatever they think they mean.
And fuck you if you apply a different definition. You should respect that.
I got into it once with one of them.
"I'm a feminist because I hate racism and transphobia--"
"That'd be an egalitarian," I made the mistake of saying. "Feminism is specifically interested in the issues of women in exclusion to all others."
And it decayed from there.
How dare I imply feminists are for female exclusion!
Well yeah. If you look at the definition it's about the problems and causes of women.
How is that not exceptionalism?
That's the fucking definition of the word. Focusing on one group in exclusion to others.
Oh really? You worry about Africans?
What are you doing to stop peoples' hands getting chopped off in Africa over diamond mines?
She didn't even know that happened.
Yeah I see you're real concerned about the plight of your glorious POCs.
Hypocritical bitch.
Sorry. Flashbacks.
That's my version of 'Nam.

And. Um. I'm trying not to snap back since this is Alex's coming out post and they don't need hostility here, but your comment felt like drive-by splaining in a way that made me feel both condescended to (particularly since none of the information you gave was new to me) and kind of smacked-down for asking a question in a space devoted to asking questions, while not answering the question I asked (which Alex had already answered.)

How dare you try to explain something I already knew yet you had no way of knowing that I knew!

Sorry! I meant fun fact when I said fun, I genuinely do find these facts fun, and I hadn't mistaken you for a prescriptivist, I had figured you had an interest in pronouns and grammar / linguistic development. *shrug* I'm sorry for assuming that.

Don't kowtow to this oversensitive twat.
I wouldn't be sorry.
I didn't know that you knew already.
Literally the next 15 posts contain the word "sorry".
Stop being sorry you miserable cunts, Jesus.

Do you deliberately look, or want to look, androgynous? If you did, would it help strangers and acquaintances not misgender you?

God I run into that shit so much in schools.
Androgyny is in for girls and I hope it goes soon, too.
It makes figuring names out hard.

however, as a trans person, I found that other humans have a *huge* desire to attribute you to one binary gender or the other (something that most of us get trained to do from an early age and don't even think about anymore), so in reality there is very little "looking androgynous" that's possible.

Wow it's almost like we evolved that way!

If I mentioned something you had said, in a post, would themselves or theirselves be the preferred pronoun?

Here's my question: "is 'hey, jackoff' acceptable?"

Ah, thanks.

I would tend to the singular (theirself/themself) but otherwise it is entirely down to your language usage patterns, I think? Like, I would expect "they said it themself" rather than "theirself" but I am not prescriptivist enough to lay down any laws about general situations :-)

ASK ME QUESTIONS ABOUT MY INSANITY
I'M NOT PRESCRIPTIVE ENOUGH TO TELL YOU WHAT TO DO :-)
Oh God I can't believe this shit.
Fuck blogs.