2024-09-06

blog/2019/05/gender-critical.mu

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+> So I guess I'm gender-critical now
+>> 2019-05-23
+>> updated: 2024-09-05
+
+I am biologically female.
+
+That's not hate speech. I was born female. I have female genitals. Had I been born a male, my parents would have had me circumcised, but instead I was a girl, so I was spared. I was raised female, with all the emotional trappings and socialization and enforced femininity that comes as such. I grew up with the societal expectation that I would get married to a man and have children and live a standard suburban life, an expectation that the vast majority of people in my life still operate under despite me being quite vocal in recent years that I have no intention of reproducing.
+
+At the end of 2014, after my first girlfriend cheated on me, I came out as bisexual to my parents and slowly my friends (at the time). Starting the summer of 2016, as the sudden fluxes of puberty settled into something resembling the rhythm of womanhood and my dysphoria flared up in response, I toyed with the idea of being nonbinary.
+
+Labels are not intended to be permanent once first applied. Not to political positions, or religious affiliation, or things like gender or sexuality. Labels are for accurately describing experiences. One's loyalty should be to reflecting the truth of themselves, not clinging to labels as if they were the last lifeboats leaving the Titanic. If that means changing the labels one uses as shorthand for all the intricacies of themselves, then so be it.
+
+As my time at college draws to a close, I've been doing a lot of self-reflection. Who I am, where I want to go on life. And as it turns out, I'm... not attracted to men. Either I was subconsciously imagining them as "transmasculine female", deluding myself and lying to others for the sake of fitting in socially, or merely trying to protect myself from some danger my subconscious had picked up on - not `*actual`* attraction, but a defense mechanism. Hardly something that could `*ever`* blossom into a healthy relationship.
+
+Even to one not knee-deep in the clusterfuck that is the postmodern gender theory sphere, it's obvious that a woman exclusively attracted to other women is called a... lesbian.
+
+An admission to which one might respond, "but what about fem-aligned nonbinary people? You can't tell what gender someone is by looking at them! And what about women who look like men?" To which I would respond, I am not attracted to male genitals. I am not attracted to the male physiology. A masculine female's presentation will always have that undertone of femaleness underneath it, which makes it special, `*what I'm attracted to`*, different from a masculine male or any other kind of male. We can discourse all day about the defintion of the word "woman", but no amount of redefining "woman" as a misogynistic stereotype will make me legitimately attracted to a male.
+
+And, as it turns out, I'm not nonbinary either. Because the idea of "nonbinary" genders has historically been used to slot gender-non-conforming people into a "failed at assigned gender role" category, and given that there is no definite meaning of what a nonbinary person transitioning would entail, it's kind of a... useless designation. Not to mention that it implies that one could simply "identify" in or out of sex-based oppression: I could barely get the people in my college to address me with they/them pronouns, and they were supposed to be super liberal and accepting about that kind of stuff! Do you `*really`* think that some random attacker on the street prowling for his next rape victim is going to care about what a pronoun pin says? I look like a female. I sound like a female. Everything about me screams "female", and no amount of "identifying" as something other than female is going to change biological reality.
+
+Societal reasons aren't enough to get me to stop being something. If that were true, you'd still be reading this on a WordPress blog, and I'd have announced that this post went up via Twitter. (Or Mastodon, now that I'm rewriting this post in 2022 and Twitter is up in flames.) As for personal reasons... I am still dysphoric. I still have dreams where I've managed to get a double mastectomy and a perfectly androgynous body and nobody saddles me with the gender role of "woman". But now I realize that most of it was because of these societal expectations that I so heavily resent being bound with. The technology side of the sphere on the internet that I inhabit (or used to inhabit, anyway) is heavily male-dominated. Back during the summer of 2018, when I was struggling through anhedonia, I spent a lot of time on chans, where the prevailing culture towards women is generally "tits or GTFO". And society in general, where I'm "too weak" or "too emotional" or "too-lighthearted". Being a man on the internet afforded me status, greater mobility, a greater likelihood of being `*taken seriously`*.
+
+If my dysphoria is the result of societal messaging saying that I'm inferior for being a female, then why the hell do `*I`* have to change? Why `*should`* I? Why should I take hormones and get surgery and make myself into a lifelong medical patient in search for a salvation that will never come? I stand alone in the wilderness, and my desired androgyny feels sterile, lifeless, out of place. I stand alone in the wilderness, and nothing hurts.
+
+-
+
+CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander

blog/2019/09/sign-of-life.mu

@@ -0,0 +1,44 @@
+> Sign of Life
+>> 2019-09-29
+
+I feel as though I am waking up after a long sleep. Cradled by the undercurrents - not a sudden and fierce unleashing of power, like Ceuta bursting out from her tomb, but something more subdued, more silent. A trawl through the tombs instead, torch in amnesic hand, shards of memories slowly bubbling back to the surface as my eyes gaze on the carvings on the ancient hallways I pass by. Times past, long since passed, times where I sang in the sun and rolled in the grass. Times where the words flowed from my fingers as gracefully as a spider building its web. But now everything is covered in webs, gray as silk, sparkling in the sparse flickering light.
+
+`*Returning home, are you? I never thought I'd see the day...`*
+
+`*Welcome home, Vane Vander.`*
+
+I feel as though, in the vast wilderness of my being, some part of me has died in order to survive. The forest has been razed, burnt to the ground. And although I know it will grow back, and it will bloom in abundance as it once did in full defiance of all I have gone through, it will never grow back the same.
+
+I have scorched myself in the flame of my passion, and now, instead of the overgrown bush that reached in a million directions and tangled itself in its intricacies, I am the little sprout poking its head out from the ashes, free to see the sun through the frames of the tree branches sans leaves lost in the blaze.
+
+One can only grow up from here.
+
+-
+
+`F908`_`[And now I stand at the precipice of yet another fleeing`:/file/books/tyia.epub]`_`f, but this time, I am not seeking refuge: I have my own server, my own website, my own domain. I have backdoors (in the "way out" sense, not the "security hole" sense) in ZeroNet and Tor and I2P. I am not dependent on the goodwill of anyone anymore, except for those who I have paid for their services, and they care little what I do so long as they receive their pennies at the end of the day.
+
+Any time I join a community, it always ends up in my being abused in one way or another. Whether from full-blown psychological warfare to a six-page essay in response to a throwaway comment to the common "it's just banter, bro", it always happens. Always it's one rotten apple that's allowed to fester, spoiling the whole bunch.
+
+>>>
+Community, as an ideal, stands in opposition to individuality, because it requires in the reining in of the unique for a supposed greater whole. I recognize no greater whole to whom I am willing to give such power, so I have no interest in community.
+
+`-- Apio Ludd, `*I Want Friends, Not Community`*
+>
+
+So I come to the mouth of the tomb. The air of the world kisses my face for the first time in what feels like forever. The sky is overcast. It is slightly chilly out, the start of October, the true end of summer. The unshaven hairs on my arms stand up a little, and I smile at the thought that, even if I don't quite remember what to do from here on out, some part of me knows.
+
+Some part of me will always know, I guess.
+
+I ascend the last few stairs and step out of the cave. A familiar song fills my ears, or perhaps "bundle of melodic noises" would be a better description, for it carries no discernable melody. And yet, if any one of the noises were to disappear, the whole thing would fall apart.
+
+It sings of something lurking beneath the surface. Something from days forgotten redicovered anew.
+
+A friend, a lover.
+
+A poet, a brother.
+
+Long live Vane Vander, indeed.
+
+-
+
+CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander

blog/2019/10/cameras.mu

@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+> Cameras
+>> 2019-10-03
+
+The funny thing about elucidation is that everywhere you once thought safe is no longer so.
+
+For our first example, take my local park. I went on a walk, not too far from my house (probably the only place I could get away from home without breaking out in a sweat, one-way ticket to sensory meltdown) and sat down in the shaded pavilion, where sat three rows of picnic tables.
+
+`*This area is under surveillance,`* a sign mounted high up inside the roof greeted me. And, sure enough, on either side of the roof were two black glassy boxes pointed straight at me. And surely the eyes of the state are no better than those of my parents, and `*those`* certainly aren't conducive for writing, so I picked myself up (for luckily I'd seen the cameras before unpacking my stuff to work) and continued walking.
+
+The shattered remnants of a pen rest farther down the path, little shards of neon yellow plastic. One can't go a single step without stepping on a strip of asphalt darker than the rest, hasty fix for cracks that just shone right back through anyway.
+
+I cracked open my window earlier, and a burning scent filled my room. A disused furnace, sleeping dragon awoken from slumber and put back to work despite its groggy mind. And the same cold that beckoned a year ago crept back in, calling, whispering of the same things as it had a year ago back in college: to go outside and see what I could of the world, lest I rot to nothing in my room and discovered that I had survived everything thrown at me so far only to languish and give up and turn to dust.
+
+Which my mother would have probably liked, since it would mean more material to sacrifice to her pet hedgehogs as bedding. The same fate as my old stack of art paper, a few unfinished journals, hasty heartfelt notes. Gods only know what else has been condemned to a fate of shit.
+
+Next to the park is an "advanced wellness system", which is a pretentious name for what one would get if a gym aficionado was put in charge of designing a playground without having ever actually met a single kid in their life. Three stairs, two cots-but-made-of-metal, the cycling part of a bike. Plenty of pull-up stations. Everything made out of the same garish colors and burn-your-skin-off-in-the-summer metals as the actual playground.
+
+No visible cameras in sight, but no protection from the rain, either.
+
+You give up safety in exchange for freedom. Except, at the park, it's a false sense of safety, for it's not like, if anybody came out of the cars idling in the parking lot while I was there and attacked me, police would suddenly start pouring out of the cameras and arrest my assaulters.
+
+And for our second example, you give up the safety of not having to personally worry about financing your server and personally securing it for the freedom of not having to answer to anybody: not a corporate overlord like Google or Facebook, not a slackoff server admin who refuses to kick out repeat abusers of other users, not an easily-offended community when they come for you with their pitchforks and torches. There are other ways to be hurt when the day comes: the classic DDoS attack, mass reporting to a VPS provider, slander on social media where the search engines are likely to pick up on it. Even on ZeroNet, one isn't completely "safe", as there's still the infinitely small chance of the Bitcoin private key of your zite being stolen, or a massive and widely-used blocklist adding your zite or user ID for the crime of having a wrong opinion.
+
+But the cameras remain, and will remain so long as corporatism reigns and the NSA has its sticky fingers in everything. Autumn comes, but the chilling effect remains no matter the season.
+
+For our third example, we'll turn the cameras around, and focus on... me. Or, rather, the places I live.
+
+My friend's house is `*covered`* in Amazon Alexas and Google Homes. Every device has voice controls turned on. Always listening, always reporting everything to their respective corporations. And my mother - my `*mother`*, of all people - has made fun of them for this, for consenting to the auditory cameras, but they just shrug it off every time.
+
+And the air grows frigid around us. Where once sparks flew and we spent hours thinking they were only mere minutes between us, the sparks go out, and I count the minutes until we go home, feigning a smile and going through the same routines in Minecraft for the millionth time.
+
+At home - or the place I spend most of my time in, anyway - the surveillance is less thick. No Alexas disgrace the air, but everyone except for me is apparently too lazy to use their device keyboards, opting for voice dictation instead. Asking Siri the most ridiculous questions for the sole purpose of making me miffed, laughing to themselves when I refuse to consent to Apple analyzing whatever noises I make and leave the room.
+
+But something more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. I... I can't seem to concentrate in the confines of my home anymore. The first third of this post was drafted at the park, and these last two seem to be some mere moment of respite, some sweet relief. I don't know if it's a psychic attack, willing or not, or my subconscious forcing me out of a place I swore I'd be out of forever just a year ago, or something else...
+
+But I keep all my devices encrypted, full disk whenever possible, and I wipe and reinstall everything regularly, for I'll be damned if the cameras become real. Even if this is the only way to resist the golden cage, in such a seemingly insignificant area, I keep it close to my heart.
+
+-
+
+CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (c) Vane Vander

blog/index.mu

@@ -1,5 +1,8 @@
 > Index
 
 >> 2019
+`- October 3 - `F908`_`[Cameras`:/page/blog/2019/10/cameras.mu]`_`f
+`- September 29 - `F908`_`[Sign of Life`:/page/blog/2019/09/sign-of-life.mu]`_`f
 `- September 5 - `F908`_`[Neurodiversity (ROOPHLOCH 2019)`:/page/blog/2019/09/roophloch.mu]`_`f
-`- August 14 - `F908`_`[Consumption`:/page/blog/2019/08/consumption.mu]`_`f
+`- August 14 - `F908`_`[Consumption`:/page/blog/2019/08/consumption.mu]`_`f
+`- May 23 - `F908`_`[So I guess I'm gender-critical now`:/page/blog/2019/05/gender-critical.mu]`_`f

ld/directory.mu

@@ -3,11 +3,9 @@
 >> I run this
 `F908`_`[MayVaneDay - Gebo`49fc062768ec9ce76bffdc7ff5c97bd6:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 
->> 2024-W36
-`F908`_`[Waystone`1e38aa3800d09299aa9e28ceb9826397:/page/index.mu]`_`f
+>> 2024-W37
 `F908`_`[Node Blue`f899a9d42571b640a399a8c371d2e0e3:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[V0LT Node`e412f02e798e7af751840f26cdac3206:/page/index.mu]`_`f
-`F908`_`[SparkN0de`b407b32b576d55b31c73380518537ac0:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[RotatedNode`11796bb40d515104e7e7d9f37757869e:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[The Outpost`84595b37a4225a27a7b6476099b79b91:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[TrollyIsNotDead`9c06ead4028b142186aa74415b3c2928:/page/index.mu]`_`f
@@ -15,9 +13,7 @@
 `F908`_`[ReZero_NN`a7b3eed8b84ee72fb7cf36c05787b924:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[Bitcoin.Review Podcast`3a3a15dcce6fc531a31c9482b95a9ebf:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[Bitcoin`8b2e08d79b3dee64d5978d2028fa7745:/page/index.mu]`_`f
-`F908`_`[nomadForum Public Beta`428118bf70e715a89331ea928b250c05:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[S0LAR|N0DE`24878ea1f8b5b9f89c7a55789d38993b:/page/index.mu]`_`f
-`F908`_`[TheOneCurlyNode`c359b6a0e2b4389a921d8d6fab435979:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[Interloper -- intr.cx`850433377b51ce9a9e52d760780baa97:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[SherbyNode`3e05f77a9f0dbfc124f230862153c9f9:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[HYPOGEA`81c987e99b3cf649c3957942355085ba:/page/index.mu]`_`f
@@ -25,6 +21,13 @@
 `F908`_`[Unsigned`ec58b0e430cd9628907383954feea068:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[SwissLibertarian`af959c4c4069fb62b91e9e9ee3451518:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[Gustavo's Minnow Shop and SAM Site`14b60a9088db5e37406744282516a95c:/page/index.mu]`_`f
+`F908`_`[sunmeadow`f07ff3a4ce9e60dc41382df47383bdd2:/page/index.mu]`_`f
+
+>> 2024-W36
+`F908`_`[Waystone`1e38aa3800d09299aa9e28ceb9826397:/page/index.mu]`_`f
+`F908`_`[SparkN0de`b407b32b576d55b31c73380518537ac0:/page/index.mu]`_`f
+`F908`_`[nomadForum Public Beta`428118bf70e715a89331ea928b250c05:/page/index.mu]`_`f
+`F908`_`[TheOneCurlyNode`c359b6a0e2b4389a921d8d6fab435979:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[Hot Plastic`90a9527bf8fdf67db353f8fce4ab1cf0:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[NVK 2 test's Node`9fbf17df01f057bfbde0c4a548120cd7:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[Winkers`0c780de45be204a29933b5cb99f1b63b:/page/index.mu]`_`f
@@ -32,7 +35,6 @@
 >> 2024-W35
 `F908`_`[suah`3b5bc6888356193f1ac1bfb716c1beef:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 `F908`_`[Liberated Embedded Systems`05831b7dc1fb6e827356607046324444:/page/index.mu]`_`f
-`F908`_`[sunmeadow`f07ff3a4ce9e60dc41382df47383bdd2:/page/index.mu]`_`f
 
 >> 2024-W34
 `F908`_`[NiceBoatNode`a693d2b5183f4125a934015afe87970c:/page/index.mu]`_`f