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Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"
Mal is so dumb. If she wasn’t so distracted by her own feminine urge to care for the baby and her insecure position in the throuple, do you think she’d tantrum about how unfair it is that Joe and Lily have dumped all the “women’s work” on the only man in the relationship? How transphobic of them.
But they refer to her as Dad so it’s okay to be a house husband and care for a baby. If Mallory had her own child with Joe she would have been an icky trad wife, but doing to same work for her husband’s girlfriend’s child while pretending to be male is bleeding edge, revolutionary progress.
Joe is making Mallory’s entire life an ironic joke. Troon out, chop off tits, take T and then we work as a full time nanny, wet nurse and maid that lives alone in the attics. The spinster transman servant.
Mallory could have had this exact set up in a standard lesbian relationship. It’s almost like after trooning she required a man and fertile woman to play house and have a family. Hope you’re happy Nicole Cliffe!
I find it fascinating that Mallory seemed to have a perfectly happy childhood and only when exposed to the world as an adult did she start to be dissatisfied with her comfy, educated, Christian, upper-middle class upbringing. It doesn’t even seem like she had any major issues or problems with her family and upbringing (even if she struggled with faith and god) until Joe came along. Joe opened her eyes to how terrible her loving family truly was and spared her the torture of having a large close knit family that loved her. I’m sure she’s so thankful she now has the honor of being in a “family” that consists of her raising the child Joe produced with a former-lesbian in Lansing.
I wonder if Lilly is allowed to see her mom? Joe might have opened her eyes to the evil intentions behind her mom too. But since Lilly doesn’t appear to have a large or close family Joe probably doesn’t see it as a threat or seethes with jealously. Lilly family situation seems close to Joe - one elderly mother and not much else.
I wonder if Lilly is allowed to see her mom? Joe might have opened her eyes to the evil intentions behind her mom too. But since Lilly doesn’t appear to have a large or close family Joe probably doesn’t see it as a threat or seethes with jealously. Lilly family situation seems close to Joe - one elderly mother and not much else.
I did try listening to his interviews and between the Bruce Vilanch good looks, and the heavy cut of jargon filled academic talk I just find him annoying. I know some girls like that British stick insect look so I can imagine how he and Mal got together, but current day Joe pulling anyone does suggest Lilly is a true believer through and through.
Heck, to give him some credit, though i don’t particularly want to, im sure he must have in person charm, otherwise he couldn’t have gotten this far.
Mal is so dumb. If she wasn’t so distracted by her own feminine urge to care for the baby and her insecure position in the throuple, do you think she’d tantrum about how unfair it is that Joe and Lily have dumped all the “women’s work” on the only man in the relationship? How transphobic of them.
I want to say that like a lot of pooners she overdid the masculinity early on and is now trying to find herself all over again.
At least from my experience she will settle into a kind of sexless feminine routine where child rearing may help with the pain.
Unpaid maidservant duties confirmed. She tidies up, does laundry, washes dishes (kitchen is too small for a dishwasher I guess), prepares meals, keeps baby strapped to her body for most of the day. All while having no legal right to the child and receiving no compensation, while the real couple in the house barely tolerate her and occasionally lock her outside.
What an absolute fool this woman is. Her self esteem must be in hell, she must see what's going on here? Surely?
When the time comes, Lily isn't going to be leaving her house and child with Joe & Mal. Joe being the dad makes Mal the odd one out and I'm pretty sure baby trumps weird wife.
Joe will go with whomever will support his dead beat ass to be a writer. I don't see much prospect for Mall to be pulling in money unless her book is a runaway success (but if it's anything like that article she wrote above, then she's clearly been influenced by Joe in all the worst ways).
Mallory could have had this exact set up in a standard lesbian relationship. It’s almost like after trooning she required a man and fertile woman to play house and have a family. Hope you’re happy Nicole Cliffe!
A Toast, to you for the Cliffe reference. The one who got away. Meanwhile, Mallory copes:
Hotness. Just spicing this verbose thread up with a lil visual from a while back ITT, a real classic. Iirc, it was determined that Lols4Lil was present during the above photo shoot for the New York Times, though in those days she didn’t rate high enough to make it in the photo. Now Lily is the center piece in the Laverey’s marriage. Them’s some extra steps all right. Anyway, how do they handle all that trans love? Hmmm, trans, love, trans-love, that could be read as the absence of love, couldn’t it?
I feel so depressed when I see yet another male crossdresser having fun and preening about how much of a woman he is, while the real woman slaves away in the background doing all the actual female-coded domestic drudgery. I don't know why, because they bring it upon themselves. Secondhand bleakness? Because there are children involved, maybe.
I'm trying to decide whether this is better or worse than the "black trans girl in Maine" situation from a little while back where a transwoman pretended online to be pregnant (he claimed to have had a uterus transplant, you'd be surprised how many handmaidens believed him) and then it came out that a pregnancy did exist, in the form of him using his FtM wife as a birthing slave. After the baby was born, he kept up posing and bragging online for a few months before he decided that actual babies were boring and not euphoric enough, and then fucked off.
In that case he basically stole all the good parts of pregnancy (like attention and praise) from her, and used her as closeted breeding stock. But at least she got to keep the baby she bonded with.
Oh shit! I was wondering what happened with that. I honestly thought that if there was a baby, he would kill it in some fit of rage fuelled by the insanity demonstrated he had in spades by the preceding months.
I didn't realise he'd skipped out. Happy days.
I also think that Joe's recipes demonstrate the same thing, a nearing violent narcissist blowout. They are so fucking ludicrous as to be actively abusive to his family, good taste, sense, his self.
He is like Sysiphus by choice with this bullshit. He is working himself into a lather with this coffee cucumber shit, mark my words.
Joe will go with whomever will support his dead beat ass to be a writer. I don't see much prospect for Mall to be pulling in money unless her book is a runaway success (but if it's anything like that article she wrote above, then she's clearly been influenced by Joe in all the worst ways).
Mallory just needs to get a fat script for adderall (or buy some meth) to mimic Joe’s half-assed, barely coherent verbal diarrhea on the page. Everything Joe writes the past five years just comes off like a disorganized speed freak with a masters in English. (It matches his bad impulsive decision making prowess too.)
For all his talk about sobriety he does a lot that I associate with some one strung out on drugs. I don’t believe it’s all manic narcissism.
I’m sure she’s so thankful she now has the honor of being in a “family” that consists of her raising the child Joe produced with a former-lesbian in Lansing.
Sidelining Mallory by duping her into claiming/believing "I'm a man" is such a classic narc move (with extra steps!). That type have a knack for arranging and placing people in positions that benefit the narc and advancing their aims.
And it's funny (not funny) - it's not even a matter of being so smart they can plan things years in advance. There's just something innate to that personality disorder (at least some of them) to intuitively set people up to be at their most useful/ exploitable for whenever and however the narcissist chooses to use them.
This seems to be a common tactic among narcissists: Convincing a target to break away from all family and friends so that the narcissist is the only one left and is free to control the target's sense of self-worth, even their sense of reality.
When I saw the first of the Alien movies, the humans glued to the walls as food for the Bitch's larvae clicked together dominance behavior I'd seen of narcissists cutting partners off, keeping them for their own use, rendering them into husks. They then seek new prey that then got treated differently.
The husks seemed to been complacent about being cocooned, either because they had wanted to shed their past lives or were deluded about "all-consuming love" being rapturous, life-long, and mutual.
It seemed like once there was a husk stuck to the narcissist's wall, a new human had to be used as a playmate, someone who could be fed a more glamorous version of the narcissist than the version the husk knew. The jokes would remain the same and the playmate would laugh at them instead of wearily nodding like the husk would after listening to the same self-adoring anecdotes for years.
Tard Baby has a lot of company, but she won't want to know it since that would destroy her deliberately public love story.
Joe has struck me as "druggie" right along, yes. Maybe he's not using. But he lives the pattern anyway. Actually, there are two patterns: The Fasçade-Is-All Pillar of the Community type and the Still as Kewl as When I Was Using type. (And maybe a third, Healed and Going Forward, a category that by its nature would be invisible to me.)
Joe's in the second category.
A book talk on the left that looks like an NA meeting; on the right, the engagement photo he and Tard Baby decided to post that looks like the need for an NA meeting.
If you go to that book talk video on YT here, at 18:20, Joe talks about feeling vitally transformed by his first doses of artificial hormones. I've heard that from alcoholics and street drug users, too. With the first drink or first dose they felt like they became who they should always have been. Life was beautiful and so were they.
Joe does, by the way, clearly state that synthetic hormones made him a woman. If this wasn't in his "I Never Said I Was a Woman" evidence locker, now it is.
Excerpt via YT's transcript - where sentences begin and end may be off; emphasis added.
um I began to take feminizing hormones in January 2018 after many many years of delay
the day that I took my first dose of spironolactone to suppress my testosterone and estradiol which supplemented my endocrine system with estrogens I did not believe that doing so would help me
indeed I believe that I was ruling something out that I would shortly thereafter be able to put aside if not the drive to transition than at least the notion that anything might be accomplished in real life that might manifest that drive
instead what I learned was that altering the levels of my estrogen and testosterone profoundly overwhelmingly and completely transformed my experience of the world and of myself
that Central fact which my experience has ratified over and again in the years since I began hormone replacement therapy is that it's been possible for someone who merely wanted to have been a woman to indeed become one a metamorphosis from present perfect to present continuous as utterly Fantastical as an ovidian Fabio
As with drugs and alcohol, the miraculous properties of synthetic hormones seem to wear off, leaving behind only the destructive not-so-side side effects and a user seeking a new path to their gratifying real self.
What an absolute fool this woman is. Her self esteem must be in hell, she must see what's going on here? Surely?
When the time comes, Lily isn't going to be leaving her house and child with Joe & Mal. Joe being the dad makes Mal the odd one out and I'm pretty sure baby trumps weird wife.
And this is one of the many ways this gender shit is harmful: it creates a massive taboo around the truth (Joe is the father, Lily is the mother, Mallory is the wife-demoted-to-side-chick relegated to the attic) so that the truth cannot be uttered or even thought of.
This religious taboo stops anyone around Mallory from mentioning or even noticing the truth of what is happening to her, because allowing yourself to do that immediately turns you into the worst, most dangerous, and most repellent thing on earth (a TERF, a fascist, a gender heretic). No one is going to say anything to her or give her any good advice, and when she's eventually kicked out and loses everything, everyone around her will just awkwardly pretend it didn't happen.
And this is one of the many ways this gender shit is harmful: it creates a massive taboo around the truth (Joe is the father, Lily is the mother, Mallory is the wife-demoted-to-side-chick relegated to the attic) so that the truth cannot be uttered or even thought of.
This religious taboo stops anyone around Mallory from mentioning or even noticing the truth of what is happening to her, because allowing yourself to do that immediately turns you into the worst, most dangerous, and most repellent thing on earth (a TERF, a fascist, a gender heretic). No one is going to say anything to her or give her any good advice, and when she's eventually kicked out and loses everything, everyone around her will just awkwardly pretend it didn't happen.
I wonder if it's possible that Lily will leave Joe and Mal to it, go and do something else for a few years, but it'll be fine and normal because the baby will be being left with its "mother", and the girl gets to skip out without the guilt of leaving a child motherless, and Mal gets a few more years with her no-contract-pretend-progeny, before Joe gets sick of her too.
She may well end up being the last one with the baby/child by that point, too. I can't see either of the other two being much interested.
That would be the best for her.
And not all that much less likely than being turfed out. Because as much as Joe might be getting tired of her, she is useful with the baby, and can be sidelined into that more and more.
We will see, as suggested, what happens when it gets to about 2.
Its very possible that the narc won't like not being number one, once the baby starts talking, and the jealousy from the actual mother kicks in, and kicks her into pestering him to do something about it. (I honestly belive they just assumed Mal would fuck off when she got preg and were faintly suprised that she did indeed just stick about)
They will be whispering in their bed for sure soon if not already. It surely, surely must rankle, seeing someone else constantly saying "my son" "my firstborn son" about... Your son. Not their son. Especially when you are only attached by attachment to the feckless bloke. It'd be different if there was any actual love between the two women. Rather than housemates who probably wouldn't even be casual friends if not for Joe.
This misery is going to plod on for about another year, he is going to make more absolutely ludicrous "food", and then the real fireworks will start after this period of sinister domestic slow piling of fermenting resentment for all parties.
(also, I'm sure Laurie Penny used to have a thread here? Can't find it any more..)
Oh shit! I was wondering what happened with that. I honestly thought that if there was a baby, he would kill it in some fit of rage fuelled by the insanity demonstrated he had in spades by the preceding months.
I didn't realise he'd skipped out. Happy days.
Unfortunately I went back to confirm and it seems like he's back in the child's life (He goes by "Truthh Nichols" now and has detransitioned and retransitioned in the meantime, along with all other kinds of drama that's not relevant here).
Like damn, dude, you conform to every toxic male stereotype imaginable except the one that would have been for the best (abandoning your kid)?
The daughter seems healthy at least. Pooner broodmares do at least seem to get the childcare done.
I'm curious as to what kind of Rocco paperwork that throuple article was even talking about. I know that a few states allow a third person to be a legal parent but New York (where they lived at the time and where Rocco was born) isn't one of them, and neither is Michigan. California is, but even if Joe was still legally domiciled there surely you can't apply California state law to a child custody situation where only one of the three "parents" lives there and the child never has? Or is there another option where a person other than the legal parents also have some kind of rights? Legalkiwis, do you know anything about this?
Sidelining Mallory by duping her into claiming/believing "I'm a man" is such a classic narc move (with extra steps!). That type have a knack for arranging and placing people in positions that benefit the narc and advancing their aims.
I wonder if that's why he's so insistent that he's never called himself a woman. He thinks it keeps him out of trouble with the TERFs that he desperately wants to impress, but it's also that he made out like they were going to do this together, but he refused to go all the way because he saw her wholehearted commitment to it as degrading and embarrassing. It is like being married but insisting that you always have the option to bring in someone el--OOP! Yeah, he wants people to commit to his suggestions but thinks it's a sign of a weaker will that they believe him. It is also a sign of a weaker will that you hear him say one thing and don't opt to forget it when he insists he didn't.
eah, he wants people to commit to his suggestions but thinks it's a sign of a weaker will that they believe him. It is also a sign of a weaker will that you hear him say one thing and don't opt to forget it when he insists he didn't.
100% I think he had Mallory on the verge of a rotdog but Joe brining in a baby maker with a vagina he liked to plow made her reconsider.
Joe has always loudly proclaimed Mallory was on the troonshine and she got Joe to join in. Given her social milieu and living in the Bay Area I have no doubt Mallory was already entertaining the idea she was trans and Joe realized what a grand opportunity it was for him when they met. I'm sure making a media circus of false accusations against her family was totally Mallory's idea too! Joe's machinations would always involve making Mallory feel like it was her idea or decision, but it's always Joe leading her down the primrose path he intended. It's beneficial because when things blow up or are disastrous, it's all Mallory's fault (or her choice) he was just trying to support her the best he could!
Mallory is a book smart woman but I feel like her emotional and interpersonal intelligence is on par with a 13 year old. The interactions between her and Nicole Cliffe and came off like giddy school girls trying to impress each other with how terribly clever and impressively well read they are.
I wonder if Mallory's angry anti-capitalist streak developed due to years of seethe over Nicole being married to a multi-millionaire. Nicole staying with her safe, wealthy husband instead of falling into Mallory's arms to be the coolest SF literary lesbians, raising the kids, and living off alimony. One thing is certain, Nicole is not a very mentally stable person. Mallory's relationship with Nicole over the years probably was good prep for a toxic relationship with a narc like Joe.
Most babies are rather generic looking at this stage, the characteristics don't start being clear until the get a bit older. By two or three you can clearly see resemblance or features of either parent. Joe is about two or 2.5 in the above photos, you'd need photos of Joe at 7 months to compare. Even his eye color won't be determined until he's almost a year. (Unless a baby is born with brown eyes, but many white babies start with a cloudy blue eye color and then it will develop into brown, hazel, green or blue by their first birthday.) But so far Rocco seems to have escaped any strong features that resemble Joe.
While it would be smart of Lilly and Joe to go with a sperm donor that doesn't have the mental problems and defects of a guy like Joe, there is absolutely no way Joe would be interested in a baby that wasn't a product of his own sperm. This baby is the result of narcissism and Joe getting old. If he could drink the sperm of young men to regain his youth, he would, but as it stands reproducing is the only option he's got.
As funny as it would be in fifteen years for Lilly to have a mini-Joe to constantly remind her of letting a loon like Joe father her child, for Rocco's sake lets hope he doesn't.
That little fragment that includes Married With Children is unintentionally revealing. He thinks Peggy is somehow coded as transfeminine because she is sexually ravenous. This means to some degree Joe sees himself as Peggy and his own marriage as the Bundys. You'd think that would make Mal Al, but she's obviously Bud.
I think what Joe is arguing here is that Peggy being sexually aggressive (and therefore male-coded) makes her husband seem sexually passive (and therefore female-coded I guess), and so it’s the husband that is transfeminine-coded. Which is still retarded but does at least have a coherent through-line of argument.
I wonder if Mallory's angry anti-capitalist streak developed due to years of seethe over Nicole being married to a multi-millionaire. Nicole staying with her safe, wealthy husband instead of falling into Mallory's arms to be the coolest SF literary lesbians, raising the kids, and living off alimony.
Now there’s a thought. Mallory’s missed shot of the (romantic?) former-friendship between herself & Cliffe transitioning into some literary lesbian life, has been a long speculated want of Mal’s, based on her & Cliffe’s publicly flaunted history. Tying Mal’s extreme anti capitalist posing to the eternal wound left by Nicole remaining with her rich husband, seems interesting & possible.
I tended towards chalking up Moe’s anti-capitalism virtue signaling as just that, a typical progressive bandwagoning stance. It’s as likely it could be rooted in the romantic rejection of her previous project relationship, before Joe swept in. It’s okay though because Mal’s her own “man” now instead of just some rejected lesbian. Hell, Cliffe dates men.
What’s funny is that Cliffe ended up doing poly bullshit with a troon anyway, & by choice! Whereas Mal was poly-coerced, & all she got was this lousy girlfriend for Joe. Plus no lesbian of her own. Cliff even dated a man in women’s clothing, Ol Micah of Manhunt fame. Cliffe even bolstered her troon lovers career. That’s rough for Moe, the lil dood. There is the new baby though, in the Lily & Lavery house. Technically the Lily house. But at least Mal has her work. Good nannies can be hard to come by.
