Zoë “GhostAss” Quinn

This happens kind of a lot. It's the problem with joking around with folks who don't know you well enough to tell if you're being serious or not. It's compounded when you're joking around with someone who is under attack from completely absurd people.

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This whole nightmare would be asinine and hilarious if it didn't cause so much damage to so many people. The absurdity is interwoven with legitimate horribleness, which sucks because it masks the horribleness to the untrained eye. People will see anime hitler avatars shouting memes at someone and go "wow online harassment is ridiculous how could anyone take this seriously" instead of looking deeper and seeing the threats, domestic violence, hacking, and so on.

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It's one more reason not to punch down with your jokes. While all you can control is how you personally act, you might inadvertently be a part of something bigger outside of that.

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Pretty far from it and I'm proud of it. I don't find purity to be a thing to aspire to in my own life. I'd rather be hated as a formidable slut than loved as a nonthreatening ingénue. I know I'm messy and weird, but I like that about myself, and I have no interest in building anything based on a foundation that restricts my freedom to be a lush or a perv (in safe, healthy, respectful ways).

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I'm fully supportive of people who want to have nothing to do with anything sexual though. It's important that everyone's sexual needs be respected (so long as they're not violating anyone else's rights, OBVIOUSLY). Asexuals exist and get far too much shit if anyone acknowledges they exist at all. Similarly, criticizing the ways and contexts things and people are sexualized doesn't make you a prude either.

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The only person the term "prude" should apply to are people who self-righteously deride other people for their (again, consensual and non-violating) sexuality, not just someone who doesn't feel comfortable with sexual things being in their life.

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Have a real goddamned serious talk about it. Entering a relationship out of fear isn't healthy. You have to set boundaries and let other folks know where you're at, even when it sucks and hurts everyone. Quietly trying to ignore your own needs and views of the relationship will do nothing positive, you'll likely just build resentment until a blowout, likely bigger than it would have been otherwise, likely endangering ever having any kind of relationship with that person in the future.

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There is a wide difference between making the choice to love someone and make things work, and simply going along with something your heart isn't in because the alternatives seem worse. When I say love is a choice, I mean it's dedicating yourself to continue to build and better your relationship with someone, even with the warm fuzzy brain chemicals come and go and phases when the sex isn't as interesting or exciting as before. It's a choice that's motivated by deeply caring about someone and knowing that you want them in your life no matter what until something radically changes or you grow apart. Falling into a relationship because you don't want to lose someone and you're experiencing a shit or get off the pot moment isn't driven by something like that, it's driven by fear. Fear *can't* rule your relationships without eating at your heart.

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Imagine if you told this person what you just told me after choosing to get into a relationship with them. How fucking awful would that feel to hear, that someone's heart wasn't in it but they got together with you out of cowardice?

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If you really care about this person, respect them. Trust them with the truth of the situation instead of just going along with whatever you think will make them happy - they likely know way better than you if it'd make them happy or not and should be left to make that call. Respect them enough to be honest with them and put faith in their ability to make the right choice with the full information.

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If nothing else, you stand a way better chance of salvaging things by being honest now than by half assing a relationship you're not really into and getting this person invested in something you're not. Who knows, maybe they're misreading things and want the same thing you do after all? The only way to find out is by talking to them. Talk talk talk.

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And if they can't handle that kind of honest conversation? You absolutely weren't meant to be in a relationship to begin with.

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One of the smartest things I've ever heard anyone say is that the first thing you think is what you're conditioned to think, but the second thought - your reaction to that first thought - defines who you are. Unfortunately the society that conditions us to have specific thoughts and attitudes about marginalized people is a pretty shitty one to those people. But the good news is that making an active effort to correct that thinking can fix it, you just have to let that second thought actively condition that first thought into irrelevance. Any time that first thought that pops up happens, take a second. Actively remind yourself that it's incorrect, forgive yourself for being part of a larger shitty culture that devalues the lives of anyone who isn't cis, and try to mentally remind yourself of what's true - trans women are women, trans men are men, and nonbinary people are neither. You won't get it right quickly, but if you focus more on quietly mentally correcting yourself it'll progressively get easier and easier.

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A good example of this is when I accidentally called someone online "dude" in the way that like... surfers do or whatever. Just a tiny verbal tic, not even trying to gender anyone or anything. The person I was talking to was trans, and was hurt by that. I initially got defensive but then mentally backed off, reminding myself that my doofus habits are far less important than someone's feelings, and that I was currently stepping on toes I had no intention of stepping on. Every time I was about to use it, I'd remember that interaction and how shitty I probably made that person, and it interrupted that thought process. It means being slower and more careful with your words and how you address people, but only temporarily until you're so used to it that it comes naturally. It's taken like, probably years to drop it from my vocabulary because it had been so ingrained, but I'm glad I did. It's important for everyone to examine these initial first thoughts inside themselves and force a different cognitive path to try and eliminate subconscious biases and attitudes that are fallacious and shitty to people anyway. It's a good skill to have in general because it's not like this just extends to treating people who aren't cis with humanity, every single shitty -ism conditions us to think and behave things we might not actually believe in.

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Try not to stress too much about it. Just work on being more mindful and thoughtful and present with people, and more careful with how you approach interactions with other people on the whole. That's generally a good thing for anyone to work on - lord knows I have shot off my mouth and said all kinds of shit I didn't really mean a lot more until I focused on fixing that. And remember to not be too self-flagilating - it doesn't help anyone at the end of the day, and your emotional efforts could be better focused towards doing better anyway.

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I don't know if this helps at all, but I help it do

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