Dear god, that "hot allostatic load" article is the most insane powerleveling screed I've ever seen. Who the fuck is the author, because that is some embarrassing shit.
Even if I drink multiple cups of water before bed I wake up with severe dehydration. An interesting side effect of being a trans fem on hormones is that spironolactone (an antiandrogen) is a diuretic, so the dehydrating effects of stress are added to the dehydration of my gender, tipping it over to agonizing extremes, the unspoken tax of pursuing both gender and a career. The amount of water in my body is political.
I wake up feeling burnt. Damaged. Corroded. I crawl up from an insane, nauseating, unreal pit and slowly come back to the world. I have constant headaches.
By the end of the day my neck and left arm are aching from nervous tics.
I forget things rapidly. Triggers leave me exhausted or panicking at inconvenient times, sometimes for days or weeks.
My hair fell out in handfuls. I still have a nervous tic of running my hands through my hair to pull out loose strands.
Having PTSD is like breaking a limb and never being able to rely on it as strongly. The sudden weakness of standing on it wrong, suddenly being unable to hold something, a fatigue and spasm of nerves.
It became difficult to diagnose other medical problems because of the all-consuming nature of the symptoms.
Hmmm, what
could possibly be the reason for all of these "PTSD" symptoms?
It is truly a medical mystery!
I often have the overwhelming physical sensation of having a dead person in my life, someone as close as an identical twin. The sensation is of me being the only one still alive after a terrible accident, lingering like an unshriven thing. The inability to share stigma is even worse than the original act of violation. The greater part of a wound is its inability to heal.
I wonder why this would happen in a community obsessed with "deadnaming" and "starting a new life as the person I really am" and "that person I was before wasn't me."
they call trans fems things that are harder to respond to. Rapist, pedophile, male conditioning, etc. They call us things so bad that even denying them is destructive. Who wants to stand up in public and say they aren’t those things? Who has the privilege to not get called those things in the first place?
When I look at a cis woman these days, the first thing I think is, I bet no one ever casually called her a rapist.
Jealous of women because they're not described as rapists. That's a classy MRA move. The entire screed is about 50% "feel bad for me, I'm so crazy" and 50% "don't believe anyone who tells you I (or any other trans person) is a rapist, ok? If you do, you're reinforcing terrible social structures, so just ignore anything you see said about me."
Oh, cool, they already have a lolcow
thread. Unsurprisingly, the kind of person who'd spend a few thousand words saying "don't judge anyone even if you hear horrible things about them, I bet you never hear that
cis women are rapists so you shouldn't accuse trans women of that."
I feel bad for Alice Sheldon, AKA James Tiptree, a scifi author who wrote about the horror of rape from a male pen name to avoid getting her stories trashed. She died and a fellowship sprung up in her name for women who were writing scifi exploring gender issues. This "Porpentine" dude, a known rapist and abuser, was the recipient of this fellowship in 2016 so he could make games about his fetishes and torturing people. Now he gets to choose the next several recipients of the fellowship. What a world.