Merry Christmas, friends!

Hello! Here is an actual post! This is a little Christmas present for any of you who still might be lurking on WordPress even though most of the feminists have been kicked off.

For a personal update, over the last few months I actually haven’t been working on fiction as I was supposed to be doing. Instead, I was taking care of a lot of tough stuff in my personal life. After making some massive changes, I am now living in a new location, working at a new job, and newly single. I’ve matured a lot this year and I’m much more aware of my boundaries, more aware of my needs and limitations and more likely to give myself what I need in life. It hasn’t escaped my notice that I’ve also developed some new lines around the corners of my eyes. Hopefully they make me look “distinguished,” as they say.

My latest research obsession is the Myers-Briggs personality types. I started reading more about my type, INFJ, and it’s been making so much sense, and it’s been so validating to actually see my whole self intricately and accurately described by other people. Because of my personality type, I am easily over-stimulated by noise, chaos, and people, and I need a lot of quiet alone time, and if I don’t get this, I literally lose my shit and can’t function. Instead of thinking there’s something wrong with me, which is what I’ve always done, now I know that I’m just wired this way and I have a right and a responsibility to organize my life in a way that gives me the environment I need, so that I’m not continuously losing my shit. I’m in a much healthier state now, and I no longer feel like I need to be medicated.

So, let’s talk Complaints about Christmas. I’ve made peace with the dumb political comments my extended family makes when we all get together—I’ve perfected the strategy of suddenly having something important to do in another room whenever someone brings up fun topics like how great a job conservative politicians are doing at “improving” our country by taking more money away from poor people, or how minority races are weird and scary, or how sexism is fun and hilarious. Yeah, I can deal with that now because I’ve made my views clear and I’m no longer interested in putting my energy into being angry and yelling. But this year brought with it a brand new nuisance—people who have dumb, ugly opinions on the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” No one particularly cared about the song before, and would have never even noticed had the song not played for a year, but now that people have pointed out the obvious problem that the man in the song continues pestering the woman even after she clearly says “the answer is no,” and that this very closely resembles a lot of the sexual assaults that women endure in real life, now suddenly this particular song is of supreme importance to everybody’s holiday celebrations and must be preserved at any cost, despite the literally hundreds of other Christmas songs available. Not only that, but people have inexplicably decided that feminists are only concerned about this particular Christmas song and that we aren’t concerned about the myriad of much worse problems that women are facing, and they gleefully mock women for not having identified the actually serious problems. But if people had ever listened to anything that feminists had ever said before, they would know that in fact we are much more worried about the bigger problems facing women, such as pornography, prostitution, wife battering, child molestation, poverty, racism, etc, than we are about a Christmas song. Banning a song that sounds pretty rapey is just a small, achievable goal that we can make on the way to creating a culture that values women, which is an extremely large, long-term project. Duh! The lyrics to that song have always made me cringe, but now I cringe doubly when I hear it because I’m bracing myself for the really fucking dumb and ignorant comments I’m about to hear about the banning and subsequent unbanning of this song on the radio in Canada. Barf!

Thank goodness for the presence of smart, confident, well-spoken, brave, and fierce feminists in the world who keep me sane. Did you see Meghan Murphy’s new YouTube channel? Best Christmas present ever!

Now to the second order of business. Or is this the third? I’m not really keeping track. Here’s a heterosexual couple who was not really feeling the compulsory traditional gender roles that most of us are understandably not comfortable with, and therefore concluded that they are a “lesbian” couple. Now, I do enjoy the idea that the word “lesbian” is synonymous with “defying gender roles” in these people’s minds, because lesbians are definitely hella awesome and gender-defiant, but no, a heterosexual couple doesn’t become “lesbian” just because they do a few superficial things that straight couples don’t normally do. This is yet another case of the word “lesbian” being appropriated as meaning anything that men/straight people want it to mean.

For those of you who aren’t going to click on the article, let me summarize: a boy and a girl fell in love during their late teenage years, and were happy together except for “an unnamable discontent” resulting from feeling “pushed to fill roles neither of us had any interest in playing.” These roles are then described more specifically as “the cis-het (or, cisgender, heterosexual-centric) culture into which we had been immersed.”

Of course! No one likes being forced to act out a stereotype instead of being themselves. Totally legit stuff. But is their solution to ignore traditional sex stereotypes and be the people and the happy couple they want to be, in their own way? NO! Their solution is to consider the man in the couple to be really a “woman,” because that’s the only way he could possibly get out of playing the masculine role in a relationship. God forbid a man refuse the masculine role and still call himself a man.

After he made his announcement that he was really a “woman,” their intimacy deepened because he was able to solidify his identity as a woman with his partner by doing fun things together like hair, makeup and nails.

Even the woman in the relationship, who had previously identified as straight, suddenly realized she was a “lesbian.” Both of them found much comfort in their newfound “lesbian” identities. He claims:

“For my girlfriend and me, our lesbian identities have given us both personal freedom and blissful security in our relationship that once felt impossible. I like to think that we challenge each other to be better women, and I know that my transition has facilitated personal and relational growth for both of us.”

Unlike heterosexuals, who feel they gain “freedom and bliss” from identifying as homosexuals, actual homosexuals face everything from mildly uncomfortable interactions with straight people to physical violence and murder, as a result of people hating their same-sex attraction. Said violence can sometimes occur even without the homosexual in question actually declaring their identity out loud. Because the discrimination is not resulting from a person’s self-declared identity, it’s about the actual same-sex attraction itself. The couple in this article have not reported ever having experienced same-sex attraction.

I wonder, if you did a survey of all the actual female homosexuals in the world, would any of them describe being a homosexual as “freedom and bliss”? I mean, the love and sex are blissful, but the awkward “coming-out” conversations, the hate from self-righteous religious people, the debates over whether or not we should have basic civil rights, the laws banning our relationships, all of this is kinda limiting the amount of “freedom and bliss” we get to experience.

Trans activists literally can’t speak without throwing in a few strawman arguments, and the chosen strawman in this article is that “It is an act of tremendous resilience to assert a trans identity in a world that tells trans people we do not and cannot exist.”

I’ve been studying this issue for years, and I’ve never come across anyone who is arguing that people who identify as “trans” literally don’t exist. For sure if you find an article online somewhere where someone is arguing that the trans-identified people who exist in the world literally are a figment of our imaginations and aren’t actually there, please send it my way so I can laugh at it, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for it.

Nobody is arguing that trans people don’t exist or that they shouldn’t have rights. We’re only saying that biological sex is real, words have meanings, and homosexuality is a sexual orientation based on attraction to the same sex. Further, although conservatives are in favour of enforcing masculinity on men and femininity on women, feminists who challenge the assertions of the transactivist community are actually in favor of gender nonconformity. We actually want heterosexuals to experiment with different roles and cast off traditional expectations. We want people to be true to themselves and dress how they want. We’re just saying that when male-bodied humans put on nail polish, their male bodies still continue to exist and continue to be significant in a world that treats males and females differently.

Although I’m considered a “bigot” for saying it, I think the man in this couple should feel free to do his hair, makeup and nails, and should go ahead and enjoy himself while doing that, without giving a shit about other people’s sexist expectations. I just don’t think he needs to rewrite the entirety of his identity, claim to have physical biology he doesn’t actually have, or make body modifications in order to justify his doing so.  Horrible of me, I know!

Well, that felt good. You know, blogging is a very good outlet for INFJs.

So friends, what have you been up to? Got any Christmas Complaints this year? Heard any particularly gruesome opinions about Baby It’s Cold Outside? Leave them in the comments below! I miss y’all.