I used to hang around in a lot of 4chan-related spaces when I was a kid. Naturally, obviously, that meant that I inadvertently made friends with a couple of furries, weeaboos, all kinds of fairly innocuous weirdos. I've fallen out of contact with all of them- this would have been a decade ago -but there's this one dude who's stayed on my radar just because he's gotten weirder and weirder. He and his friend group seem to be about twelve deep, they respond to all of one another's tweets and shit like that. I just tallied it up the other day: out of the twelve whose Twitters I looked at, ten of them have come out as trans or non-binary in the period between '18 and today. Some of them used to be gay men, and now they identify as lesbian women.
There's lots of statistical anomalies like that. They're a tiny percentage of the population, ostensibly, but sometimes you see entire cliques of strange people troon out within close proximity of one another. Same thing happened to my ex. I found out they were getting into weirder and weirder porn, they got really interested in ContraPoints, made friends with a weird polyamorous FTM - and came out as trans. Man, that was a shitty day. They got worse and worse, radically reinventing their personality and falling deeper into weird bullshit. I don't want to go too deep into this, but within about six months, it was very obvious that things were over. This is a person I'd been with for almost two years, best relationship of my life till that happened.
Like I said, I could keep going on about this for a while, but the minute details aren't anyone's business and I don't want to relive them. Long story short, they started acting crazy, totally changed as a person. Gave up on all of their goals and ambitions except for the self-aggrandizing ones (becoming a beautiful woman, own fancy stuff, etc.) They popped the "we should open up the relationship a little," and at that point, I was only waiting on the lease to run out so I could just leave. That cracked it. They had a breakdown and begged me to stay, which successfully got me to stay put for a few more weeks, but I was checked out and I think they knew it. So, they were alternatively abusive and pitiful. I've had to deal with crazy people and their crazy shit in my life before, but it was nothing like that. I felt like I was walking on eggshells wearing soccer cleats.
Then finally it was over, and since they're a vindictive little cunt now, they ran around to all of their friends- our mutual friends -and their family saying I was abusive and a TERF. Those friends were like an umbrella on a drizzling day, I could take them or leave them. It sucks, but whatever. Their family was the primary reason I stayed where I was for those six months. I don't have a family of my own, and I loved those people. I made them Thanksgiving dinner every year, went to their Christmas, shit like that. At that point I was beyond my endurance to feel anything toward the situation, so I didn't even defend myself. I just dipped, took all the names I needed to out of my phone, and moved on.
To be clear, I am not a stupid man nor a particularly poor judge of character. The person I was with originally is not the same person I lived with for that half a year. It was like they got body-snatched while I wasn't looking. Honestly, it still confuses me how someone could blow up their life so rapidly, completely shift their values, their ambitions, their entire sexuality, and become a person I could no longer recognize. Kind of scares the fuck out of me, if I'm being real. Nowadays I think they're living in a polycule with two other troons, and all they talk about is coom shit on their Twitter between vagueposting threats of suicide.
Some of our old mutuals have reached out to me and said that they're just bizarre now. That's why I try to resist the urge to get all hateful or MATI in the Sideshows thread. In retrospect, my ex obviously lived a privileged life and wasn't prepared for the stress of the work they were doing. They had some kind of mental break and they got sucked into the tranny cult, started emulating the people they surrounded themselves with. They were vulnerable, unstable -- they're a victim, at the end of the day. Just, you know, so am I by extension.
Oh well! I'm just gonna keep killing it. Plenty of hot gay twinks in the sea.