The necklace looks like the sparkly black collar from the girlboss character in the Food video.
View attachment 2621853View attachment 2621869
You'd think he'd buy a nicer necklace if intending to keep it for regular use, but here we are and Claire's it is.
What is a "real" trans folk? And what is "harm"?
I've met a lot of trans people in the last five years. A few were decent, interesting, well rounded individuals with full lives beyond their faith in gender. Many more were lost or sad and grasping for a cure, though their problems ran deeper than dysphoria. They were hurting, all of them, and I don't begrudge them a balm for that hurt — I think we all have the right to change ourselves as we wish, and (separately) we all talk ourselves into believing some things that we wish to be true against the grain of reason. There are atheists who talk themselves into believing in an afterlife when their loved ones die. It's human. I've made peace with it.
But you can't give someone the moon just because they're hurting, and sometimes that's what they ask for when they register the extraordinary cachet that trans status gives them in liberal spaces. They say: here's my suffering, it's your job to ease it, and if you pull back you're a bad person who deserves to be destroyed. This includes people who demand opposite sex pronouns without trying to pass, enbies who go by "they" despite appearing perfectly at ease with their birth sex, ideologues who flare up at any reference to biology even when it's crucial to the discussion at hand, and of course transbians who try to guilt trip you into including them in your "dating pool" because politely refusing to interact with dick is transphobic.
I believe that at least 90% of those people were hurting. Their anguish and alienation from their bodies, their yearning to change themselves, to become something special and true — that was "real." But so was their increasing sense of entitlement to other people's faith and labor. And that's not how any of this works.
If you want to change how others see you, it's on you to make that happen: lose the weight, hit the gym, conquer the stutter, buy clothes that fit. I respect trans people who make that effort the way I respect anyone who sets a difficult goal and works tirelessly to achieve it. I may not share their goal; I may worry for their health and happiness in the next sixty years; but the commitment is impressive nonetheless. I can't say the same about trans people who expect the light of the universe to bend around them and make them who they want to be. There are more and more of those these days, as liberals treat the mere acknowledgement of material reality as transphobia.
Olly is so obviously phony that even trans people can hate him for making a mockery of their hurt. But that doesn't mean every trans person more "real" than him (the bar is in hell) is a soft authentic soul who "deserves my comfort and respect" (what does that even mean?). There are genuinely troubled trans men who insist that their bodies were never female. There are genuinely troubled trans women who deny ever experiencing male socialization. At this point, most of them would perceive any challenge to their personal beliefs as "harm." It's not on me to accept that framing and hold their hands at church.
