Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"

Ah, yes, this part:



Wish I could find the full thing. Although it wasn't terribly long, you got the most important bits.

Yeah, I had not read the Yoko stuff. Wow, he at least is putting her in her place from the get go. No subtlety there, though I’m sure he claimed he was just being ironic.

He obviously sussed out that Mallory had some imposter syndrome issues and the fact she had a religious upbringing/ education and had not spent years slumming with degenerates made her fearful of Joe’s hip, elite and oh so intellectual friends.

I mean who else could take her to bars to watch men fist each other, introduce her to people who quote Jean Genet, listen to Throbbing Gristle and offer to teabag her once they have enough booze and coke in them. Only Joe can introduce her to this cosmopolitan world she has been so deprived and ensure she is accepted as one of them... as long as she does exactly as she’s told.

Being a girl writer with feminist leanings would never do. Too boring, too normal, too threatening for Joe. She was going to have to subjugate herself to be part of Joe’s (non-existent) hip circle. It all led up to a wedding that could easily been mistaken for really terrible performance art.

Given Joe’s personality I doubt he has many friends or acquaintances that have been around for very long. He cycles through people quickly. I think it’s one of the main reasons he wanted to flee to Brooklyn.

I do wonder who will go first, Lilly or Mallory? It would be perfect if they actually got together and dumped creepy Joe but he’s screened his victims carefully enough that it will never happen. He will ensure they will focus on competing for his favor, until one of them has a mental collapse.

Mallory has already been broken. Lilly not yet, her sticking around depends on how much importance she places on Joe’s favor and how miserable or not she was in her life before hooking up with him. (If she was chasing and flirting with Joe online for months I imagine she was lonely and not a very happy camper in Michigan.)
 
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Some other stuff from Joe's blog. Emphasis mine.

When I met the person who shortly afterwards became my agent last year, she asked me what I would want from an agent. I said I wanted someone to help me make sense of the various things I do. I suppose it is not just writers who have this problem: “does my job reflect my values” is after all quite relatable, on espère, and perhaps so is “why is my partner the way he is, why do I want a partner of this type—do I, even?” (In my case, I do: I suspect one of the less “relatable” things about me is that however complex my thoughts about my husband’s life and work, my feelings about him are quite simple—I’m fucking infatuated, smitten, cuntstruck.) So what are the things I do?

I initially said that it was “writing about sex, and who doesn’t like to read about sex?” My friend responded “don’t pitch me on the topic, pitch me on the reader! Describe the reader!” Suddenly I remembered images of women reading Fifty Shades of Grey on the subway, and perhaps enjoying the bumps of the carriage more than previously they would. So: commuters, which means “young professionals,” where “young” means “millennials.” Millennial women! My friend nodded sagely as I finally began to decipher the riddle. Are these commuting masturbators homosexuals? Probably not, or at least not all of them. Some—perhaps most—are women in straight relationships, feeling for themselves the shittiness of straight relationships. (There is a word for this: “heteropessimist.”) OK: I am pitching to a successful, straight, busy young professional who kind of loathes or resents straightness as a structure of feeling.

Now, I’m a pathological narcissist, and I have some questions about this method—surely my brand, my quiddity, my whatness, should focus on me (of whom there is only one) rather than you, of whom there are many? And yet of course it cannot be so. For there is only one of me, and if my brand depends upon— 37 year old Victorianist transsexual, married to minor (but beloved) celebrity, apt to get into public fights but then appear suddenly morally ennobled—then my book is not going to sell. And how I want my book to sell; I want it, do you hear? I must have. Give, for I want
Source.

Last weekend, I snapped for the first time at colleagues who were routinely referring to me as “he” in a meeting. It has been two years. I know these things are on different scales, but the “backlash” against trans women now produces daily outrages of these kinds and more. It is an absolute miracle anyone still transitions at all, let alone talks about it. I guess I waited until I had tenure.)

Having never taken dick pills before, I did not know whether they would produce or merely respond to a feeling of sexual arousal. (...) I wanted to be cosy, not aroused, and I have a sharp sense of the distinction - but what if the drugs erode that sense, and push me into a sexual intimacy against my own interest? (...). I immediately sensed that I had betrayed myself, that I had given up the thing that I cherished (my womanhood) in the pursuit of something paradigmatically abundant and low-value. (...) I had hoped for feelings of warmth, growth, and power, and instead I spent the first hour of this trip crying uncontrollably, my mind (uncharacteristically) obsessing over bottom dysphoria. I felt frightened that if I got hard, I would run into the kitchen and grab the sharpest knife from the drawer. I felt, and this can only be a disgracefully lurid image, but it is true, in the way feelings are true: as though my body was violating itself.

After the first hour, the panic began to ebb - still, I didn’t get hard, and I didn’t really stop sobbing. My partner was, of course, beautiful and elegant and glorious, and held me kindly and warmly. I felt guilty because I knew the idea of me sprouting a cock was kind of appealing to them - as how could it not be? - and I think they felt a little afraid that they had pressured me (which of course they hadn’t). We lay in bed and watched the final episodes of Bojack Horseman, talking occasionally about addiction narratives, justice, and healing. The previous evening, they had grasped my head and told me that they had always been moved by my capacity for healing. “What choice do we have?,” I had responded, in an effortlessly cool, Rebel Without a Cause kind of way.

For me, I suppose, the dick is a mark of trauma. This, also, is no surprise, though, if I take the metaphor of “trauma” literally, it will change the way I think about bottom surgery. No longer a transformation, but the healing of a scar. It will take a while, I’m not ready yet. But I know things now, many valuable things. I am always disappointed by the simplicity of my transition, especially when it is placed next to other women’s, which always seem more glamorous and subtle to me. “I want to be a woman, of course I don’t want a hard dick, for fuck’s sake!,” turns out to have been the message, and if that seems like genital essentialism or a cumbersome investment in “the binary,” I will just have to own that.

Source.

I watched porn for the first time, in a group: a movie called Edward Penishands, in which Nikki Sixx, the bassist from Mötley Crüe tucked each of his hands, while, into a dildo that had been constructed for the purpose, and adopted a listless, Deppish expression while fisting people with one or both of them. The camera seemed to love his face, I remember.

On or around my birthday, I went into the city for the first time. I was wearing skinny jeans (I was thin, then), a little glittery make-up, and a tight black crop top with a silver print of the silhouette of Brigitte Bardot, with the caption BARDOT. I had a discman and was listening to “Miss E... So Addictive” by Missy Elliott, repeat playing “Get Your Freak On.” I sashayed into the MOMA, the bhangra-inflected opening of the track rattling around my hips, and stood in front of that big Pollock canvas, shaking my skinny ass to the beat. I did this a couple more times: a few weeks later, I met an American friend from Oxford downtown, he took me to a gay bar in the village and I think we made out a bit. I only heard Missy Elliott. That same month, New York had introduced a smoking ban, which annoyed me, since I smoked a lot and thought about my immediate physical needs almost constantly. At some point I realized that American girls liked to kiss British boys, and that was fun too - I realized I had a kind of gift here that didn’t work back home. Some combination of rage, lust, and self-regard - I felt sexy in my jeans, with my art, and my freak on - and, I didn’t want to leave. I wanted sleepovers with porn and kissing with American girls, gay bars and kissing American boys, and art and music and rage rage rage rage rage.

I want to shake everyone’s hand and charm them like the brilliant twenty-six-year-old trans woman I never quite got to be. Though I wanted that more than anything. When I was twenty-six, and living in Philadelphia, I would come up to New York and stay with friends in Manhattan and they were all so fucking cool and happy. God, I wish I had transitioned by then. FUCK, I wish I had transitioned a decade ago, or better two decades ago; FUCK I wish I hadn’t had to transition, and was just estrogenated and pussied from the get-go.

All the surgeries I will have to have in New York City: I want them, but I’m scared. I learned from the same new friend that a lot of the hip lesbians have trans girlfriends these days. I assumed she meant trans masculine partners but no. Apparently trans girls are in now, which we weren’t a decade ago. Maybe I could have been cool a decade ago, or moved to New York, or figured out who I was or what I wanted, rather than indulge myself in a surreal protest against a surreal war happening within my own body. I’m afraid I acquired too many resentments to survive without recoil, and I’m afraid that if I write myself out of them, I’ll be left without desires or skills. Still, there are people, and work to do, and it has nothing to do with the mythology or the ideology of New York in the Seventies, in the end. Write the next sentence. Figure out the one after that. Write that. Fuck, eat, touch, love; be fucked, be eaten, be touched, be loved. Forgive, relinquish; be forgiven, be relinquished. I have been held and now my task is to hold others.
Source.

I remember after a hook-up a few years ago - probably the best one-night-stand of my life, if I’m honest (I’m not built for them, sadly - cuddle puddles, yes) - saying something dopey about sodomy and radical porosity, and then catching myself and saying “oh gosh, this is all getting a bit free-love, I should stop.” And my soon-to-be-erstwhile lover looked at me and said “yeah but they were right.” And so they were, honestly. There is nothing better available in a world made shit by capitalism than our collective potential for sweet, tender sensation. I think New York will be a good place to find sensations of this kind.

My beloved, Danny Ortberg, is the center of my world, and I love him with my heart entire. Here, in the spirit of radical porosity - which is therefore also a profound commitment to radical accountability - are the vows I made to him yesterday.

As an alcoholic who has broken more or less every promise I have ever made
, I approach the question of these vows with care. There is one promise that we have made to each other that, so far, I have been able to keep, though on three different occasions I came close to breaking it: that promise is that any time you ask to pause a conversation, or to leave it, I will respect that at once, however painful or difficult I find it. I further promise that I will never end this marriage unless I feel my physical safety threatened by you - which is a high bar, since you are both a creature of profoundest safety, and a person committed to accountability and discussion.

I offer you a third vow: that I shall endeavor at all times to celebrate, elevate, and champion everything you do that is right, everything you make that is good, which is everything you have ever made and done. In particular, I shall not scapegoat or punish you for the ways in which you are different from is me, from the ways in which your desire and identity are different from mine; rather than chastising you for the sin of masculinity, I honor, tend, and cherish it - I will lavish affection on your differences, tend your wounds, love the places of pain. By honoring your relation to embodiment, and seeking out other places to process my resentments at masculinity and maleness, I hope we can avoid dwindling into mere heterosexuality. Those three vows, and half of everything I own and am, I give to you today.

Vows are scarce, then, but avowal is the foundation of our ethics. We avow what we are, what we want, and what - by wanting - we therefore are not. So I have one avowal today: you, Danny Lavery, are my person; I love every corner of you, the bright and the dull. I am so utterly proud to claim you today. Which I do.

Source.

It's a lot of text (I edited out a lot, which you can read in the "source" links) but there are a lot of...insights about Lavery's sick mind and his relationship to Mallory. And it seems it's just the tip of the iceberg.
 
...I suspect one of the less “relatable” things about me is that however complex my thoughts about my husband’s life and work....
Backhanded compliment, she has to chase his intellect to live up to it.

The previous evening, they had grasped my head and told me that they had always been moved by my capacity for healing.
Oh! There was a brief period of time where Mallory said her pronouns were "he/they," because she was taking a "break" from testosterone. Never mentioned again.

I smoked a lot and thought about my immediate physical needs almost constantly
There is just nothing healthy here. He's turned on by the idea of himself getting turned on, and everything he's ever written is like this!

“I want to be a woman, of course I don’t want a hard dick, for fuck’s sake!,” turns out to have been the message, and if that seems like genital essentialism or a cumbersome investment in “the binary,” I will just have to own that.
This one is so weird. At one time, it would have been 100% true 100% of the time that trans people wanted the full spectrum of surgeries available to them, none of the let's go halfsies thing that seems to be cool now. And I guess sometimes they play it off as a matter of needing funds, but Joe is absolutely horrified that he might have bog-standard dysphoria and a bog-standard desire to be a woman, not a freak. He just has to think that he's the only person whose transition is LIKE THIS in the world. It upsets him when he's pedestrian, even if he's still part of the 0.01% or whatever.

His book is going to be a disaster.
 
There is just nothing healthy here. He's turned on by the idea of himself getting turned on, and everything he's ever written is like this!


This one is so weird. At one time, it would have been 100% true 100% of the time that trans people wanted the full spectrum of surgeries available to them, none of the let's go halfsies thing that seems to be cool now. And I guess sometimes they play it off as a matter of needing funds, but Joe is absolutely horrified that he might have bog-standard dysphoria and a bog-standard desire to be a woman, not a freak. He just has to think that he's the only person whose transition is LIKE THIS in the world. It upsets him when he's pedestrian, even if he's still part of the 0.01% or whatever.

His book is going to be a disaster.


I kind of wonder if getting to be an old, melty, slob in poor shape meant Joe’s dick stopped working properly and his degeneracy had gotten him to the point that getting hard meant shit like Asian ladies in cat suits that like fisting and pegging men in bondage. (ie a lot of effort just to get or stay hard).

So trooning out relieved him of the effort of using his dick and allowed him to infuse his entire life with creepy AGP eroticism and forcing the public to engage in it. Now he didn’t have a broke dick that required boner pills and elaborate fetish material to operate, but a natural limp girl dick which meant Mallory needed to peg him.

It certainly would be better for his vanity and ego. It allows him to be a creepy pervert with far less physical demands or effort. It solves the issue of performance issues with his younger GF(s) and he no longer has to suffer a bruised ego from having a flaccid middle aged dick and the sexual vitality of the average retirement home resident. It makes his limp dick a victory of his transness instead of a reminder of being a soft, flabby man past his prime.
 
You know, I really appreciated the weirdly specific comparison @Legoshi made earlier of Joe to former Irish president Mary McAleese, because it really is uncanny. The more I think about it, though, the more I think what he really reminds me of is a neglected Afghan hound.

Those eyebags are really something to behold, too. I wonder if he has to pay extra for them exceeding the carry-on luggage capacity for domestic flights often.
 
Wish I could find the full thing. Although it wasn't terribly long, you got the most important bits.
The infamous excerpt was posted in the Tranny Sideshows Megathread, but the full post is sitting behind a paywall in Joe's Substack.
I don't think any of us should give this creep money, even a cent, and I don't think the full post is that relevant or necessary either, in the context of Joe's general attitude and behaviour which speak for themselves.
 
His book is going to be a disaster.
I don't know who could bear to read it. Everything he writes is just him scratching out something pompous with one hand and jacking off with the other while staring at his own navel. Most of it makes little to no actual sense. "I contemplate my own luminosity as the pre-eminent queer sage of these times, my quaking nipples somehow resplendent in that familiar, age-old lust of the transbian denied". (Need a ghost-writer, Joe? I think I've got your style down. Multi-syllable words + something sexual + mememememememe + QWEER).

Meanwhile, I agree that he's disaster-and-hilarity waiting to happen as he seems unable to stop trying to control everything and everybody in the whole damn world. You can see the absolute worst of this in his chasing down every little account on twitter that takes exception to him transing George Eliot. Whacking his dick down on the table and trying to shame them for being 'uneducated' and 'non-academic' in the same vein as the TRAs who are always going on about 'ninth grade biology'. No real logic or argument, so just hover over people sneering that you have more credentials than they do and they should therefore assume you are right and feel small and stupid. God help his students.

He's even desperate to control his haters, 'oh no no my junk mail should be addressed to JOS'. What about no, Joe?
 
I bet he has either set up an alert or he searches for the name "George Eliot" just to argue with anyone who mentions him posthumously transing her. That explains how he finds people commenting on it without tagging or retweeting him.

"I contemplate my own luminosity as the pre-eminent queer sage of these times, my quaking nipples somehow resplendent in that familiar, age-old lust of the transbian denied".

This is so on point I thought for a second he had written that. He's so predictable.
 
Joe is not interesting in the way he thinks he is. His bloviating isn't as clever as he thinks it is. His tranny George Eliot theory sounds like something a literal first grader, ignorant of cultural context, would say. "Well, their name is George, so they must be a boy!"

He reminds me of drunk Homer Simpson—an average fat slob who thinks he's the drôle life of the party. At least Homer isn't a washed out Cluster B sinking ship.
 
I don't know who could bear to read it. Everything he writes is just him scratching out something pompous with one hand and jacking off with the other while staring at his own navel. Most of it makes little to no actual sense. "I contemplate my own luminosity as the pre-eminent queer sage of these times, my quaking nipples somehow resplendent in that familiar, age-old lust of the transbian denied". (Need a ghost-writer, Joe? I think I've got your style down. Multi-syllable words + something sexual + mememememememe + QWEER).

Meanwhile, I agree that he's disaster-and-hilarity waiting to happen as he seems unable to stop trying to control everything and everybody in the whole damn world. You can see the absolute worst of this in his chasing down every little account on twitter that takes exception to him transing George Eliot. Whacking his dick down on the table and trying to shame them for being 'uneducated' and 'non-academic' in the same vein as the TRAs who are always going on about 'ninth grade biology'. No real logic or argument, so just hover over people sneering that you have more credentials than they do and they should therefore assume you are right and feel small and stupid. God help his students.

He's even desperate to control his haters, 'oh no no my junk mail should be addressed to JOS'. What about no, Joe?

Someone mentioned that this pervert is on "sabbatical" from his teaching position? I'm wondering now if the university has caught on to this walking, talking queefing liability and greenlit his "sabbatical" while building a case against him. Never mind. Rainbows, and I momentarily forgot that we're talking about a university who refused to terminate him the second he trooned out in the first place.
 
Someone mentioned that this pervert is on "sabbatical" from his teaching position? I'm wondering now if the university has caught on to this walking, talking queefing liability and greenlit his "sabbatical" while building a case against him. Never mind. Rainbows, and I momentarily forgot that we're talking about a university who refused to terminate him the second he trooned out in the first place.
I mean it’s Berkeley so I don’t think there’s any problem with his trooning out but I do think the sabbatical might have something to do his rise in online attention seeking and increasingly embarrassing public behavior. I wonder if the sabbatical was arranged so he could move to NYC to seek another position for a year while being able to wave his “tenured professor on sabbatical” flag.

Berkeley might hope this is the way to unload him elsewhere and avoid the ridiculous headache of trying to fire a very recently tenured professor.

He did admit he waited to troon out until his tenure was secured. I might be wrong, but it seems him publicly posting about his erotic adventures and gross selfies only started after he got tenure. He might be mistaking tenure for “fuck you” money, idk. He’s certainly upped the ante on public exhibitionism once he got it. (But he still needs what Mallory brings to the table to support his Polyester type “erotic lifestyle” in Brooklyn. Even Berkeley doesn’t pay well enough to support bicoastal residences and travel)
 
Mallory is getting a sausage tube in November:
D0C9CC78-06EA-4BCC-9426-081B89034571.jpeg


 
I honestly hope she reconsiders.
In the history of FTM troons I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bottom surgery that wasn’t a complete, horrific joke. I thought most FTM were smart enough to just buy strap-ons.

But I guess Joe won’t be satisfied until he’s got total, irrevocable mutilation that erases Mallory entirely. I’d also bet he won’t ever be chopping his dick off.
 
He's even desperate to control his haters, 'oh no no my junk mail should be addressed to JOS'. What about no, Joe?
Calling him Joe is great because you know even without being told he would hate it even when he was a man. Just the Average Joe, nothing special.
Mallory is getting a sausage tube in November:
View attachment 2052758

The worst part about this is that they are going to post pics. They can't not. We get so many photos of both their tits and they're going to show off how brilliant the dick is and it will be stomach-turning. Joe will use it as an excuse to talk about being bigger and more virile, not that he wants a dick, but at least it's better than Mallory's, har har. Will be interesting to see what Mallory blames her unhappiness on after she Completes Trans Challenge.

gl1 - Copy.jpg

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He is the woooooooorst.
 
(But he still needs what Mallory brings to the table to support his Polyester type “erotic lifestyle” in Brooklyn. Even Berkeley doesn’t pay well enough to support bicoastal residences and travel)

Sigh...

Every time I see a screenshotted photo of this troon, I only hear this background music playing (0:16) in my head:
 
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