Talking to a young trans girl beginning her transition.

She's the kind of depressed girl who sees no chance of ever looking like a woman, and spends her time reading doomerist memes and whatnot.

I'm sure some of y'all know the type.

So I got to talking to her, and once I managed to wrench her out of the self-pitying rhetoric and actually get her to think about why she feels she "can't" transition, we went to like, practical stuff.

You know, not magical "oooooh I want to be a cis woman or have full passing" but rather "what can I change for things to work for me".

And we of course got to the subject of shaving. She was surprised (she's seen selfies of me) that I have very thick facial hair, it grows fast and much of it is very dark.

Apparently she thought facial hair is an insurmountable problem without laser or electro.

(and for the record, she describes me as a "regular looking older woman". She doesn't find me particularly clockable based on selfies)

She doesn't know disposable razors are shit, and that shaving with safety razors gets MUCH better results.

Which fair enough, a lot of trans girls do not know that.

But when I asked "OK, so what skincare routine do you have?", she had none.

We're talking a girl who instantly jumps mentally to the point where she's basically done with her transition, and starts despairing that that is impossible.

Younger trans girls, I'm begging you. Think about what is actually achievable and to be done RIGHT NOW.

I can guarantee you if you start taking care of your bodies the way cis women your age already do, you will be a fuckload more feminine.

I guarantee you that any good-looking woman who takes care of herself has some kind of facial skincare routine.

Cis women do not magically look feminine. Start from the basics before you start comparing yourself to cis supermodels.

*sigh*

I like that this phrase invokes and subverts, at least to me, the phrase "Just the facts", which is basically the catchphrase of the protagonist of "Dragnet", a very conservative-minded TV show that was one of the first and most influential pieces of copaganda.

Accidental or not, my game idea is definitely going to move in the exact opposite direction to that show's worldview (or so I hear. I don't watch old musty shows about authoritarian cops).

I literally wrote the working title (The Wokening xD ) at the top of the document I'm writing, and in the tradition of White Wolf games, I added a subtitle describing the game in a few words, like Mage: Ascension is "An Epic Game of Reality on the Brink".

I didn't want to describe the game as being about changing reality, because I don't like the implication that marginalized people's reality is a departure from "real" reality.

So I went with "A supernatural game of restoring just reality".

And I was like... wait a second. "just reality" is the perfect double entendre. I'm just gonna make this the title!

Ooooooh, I've got it!

I am naming the game "Just Reality".

Well, until and unless I find a better title. But I like this one.

(feel free to suggest some must-reads to me! I am not going to become a scholar on any of these topics just for the purpose of writing a game about rolling dice with some friends, but I do want to get some of the basic concepts and schools of thought into my brain, even the broad strokes.

No, I mean it, suggest some books to me that cover the basics. Feel free to Boost this post, or the original post in the thread, as well <3 )

If I want this game to be any good even as a side personal project...

...I am going to have to read a shitload of books on feminism, gender, queerness, race, capitalism, activism, climate change, political action, as well as on various countercultures and how they succeeded or failed to stand for certain values they professed, aren't I.

I am open to suggestions as to what the game should be titled.

I really really want to title it "The Wokening", but for some reason I think it might not be the best name for a game I do want to treat somewhat seriously xD

I mean, I do not want to remake that literal game. Mage is burdened, among other things, by being set in the World of Darkness setting. Try as they might, the creators kind of wrote a Vampire: Masquerade spinoff.

I want more like a spiritual successor. Hence my fascination with TSL. I think you could create a game, and a world, where in broad strokes the premise is exactly the same as Mage: Ascensions, but where details and how the themes are actually laid out differ considerably.

One thing the old game doesn't really pay enough attention to is how the different Traditions themselves have a very narrow view of both reality and enlightenment. Their mutual tensions are alluded to, but not given much attention.

I definitely have a game in mind where that is a core component of the game and a big part of each Playbook (because I am almost certainly base the game on PBtA games).

Like, the hubris of believing oneself to have all the answers, the indifference of someone invested in their own view of the world are interesting things to explore. Like, I can easily imagine, in the old Mage game, a character who is basically an Objectivist. That is not an enlightened view of the world and if you disagree (to quote John Oliver), congratulations on your white penis xD

Like, the only way to write a game about being awakened to a higher reality and seeing the consensus reality as an illusion if you engage with criticism of the world by people who were actually marginalized and oppressed and silenced and killed for a multitude of reasons.

To write a game about waking up, you have to - appropriately enough - make it woke.

Am I up to the task? No xD fuck no. But I am not going to let that stop me from trying.

#rpg #ttRPG #PBtA

I often am wary of starting a new project given how difficult it is to finish anything for me.

But sometimes the joy of working on something is worth it even if you don't make it a whole, complete, balanced, working thing.

Creation, especially in this time in history, has value in itself.

With that being said, time to sit down and work on a project that's been on my mind for literally years.

I've been fascinated with the Mage: Ascension tabletop game for more than 25 years now. I find it to be a masterpiece. The concept is amazing as well. And running a campaign of Mage has long, long been my Holy Grail as a GM. I was never quite happy with it.

One day I will start that campaign set in the bleak gray dull reality of the People's Republic of Poland, about counterculture and freedom and youth and strength in individuality and community both, about politics and repression and violence. I've made gestures in that direction as a GM. But never got there.

But, as to the game.

The themes of consciously agreed-upon reality, the ideas of rebellion and truth and rebellion AS truth, the potential for stories to be told about how big systems present in the world suffocate diversity and beauty and truth are incredible.

There are two problems there.

One, like many games (not just tabletop games) that have a genius core, it's... not a very good game. The game mechanics are clunky and do not support the idea of the game well at ALL. I always had fun with the game despite its mechanics, not thanks to them. The game is very, very 90s in its design sensibilities (derogatory).

But what the game is even more 90s in is its view of the world. It's a very... Gen X view of rebellion. It's a very white, and masculine, and straight, and cis, and wealthy, and privileged view of patriarchy. For crying out loud, the word "patriarchy" does not appear in the book! At all!

The game is the product of the same era as X-Files, the TV series that set an FBI agent as a fearless knight fighting for truth and justice. A literal cop. It's the same era that culminated with the Matrix, a great piece of transgender art but one that is more than a little problematic in many ways. It's a game of an era where conspiracy theories were seen as a pursuit of truth, where coolness was more important than justice in the minds of self-appointed rebels, a much more "sex, drugs and rock and roll" sensibility than anything.

And honestly it kind of shows in what people wrote about the game on the Internet in the decades since. It's not an accident that a large part of the game's enthusiasts painted the mage Traditions as unrealistic and disruptive and the Technocracy (the literal evil world government bent on destroying all dissent, straight out of Orwellian nightmares and married with increasingly oppressive and rigid technology) is often painted by tabletop gamers as a necessary evil, protecting the universe from destructive forces that are above petty squabbles between enlightened mages and the keepers of the status quo.

The bad guys who call dissenters "Reality Deviants" have their own fans among the players. Way to miss the point, assholes.

So I've long wanted to write a game that is basically the same, but removed from this bullshit 90s neoliberal "end of history" nonsense. Removed from the idea that right-wing libertarians stand for any kind of freedom.

Inspired in part by #ThirstySwordLesbians, I want to write basically a version of Ascension that actually has something to say about oppression, marginalization and justice.

And I start today xD

To put it simply, if you are trans, you need trans people, ideally in your immediate area or at LEAST online, you can reach out to when things are really bad.

If you don't, you're not safe.

Nobody but queer people can save queer people.

It is true that a lot of cishets are good people and sympathetic and can be allies.

And they'll side with us eventually.

But the hard work we need to do first is ours to do, because the cishets will not do the heavy lifting.

This is not related to anything big happening in the world today. It's related to something small. A personal conversation with a closeted trans person I barely know.

You need to grab another trans person's hand and pull them onto their feet, once in a while. You need to stick together. You need to talk.

And you need to reach to those of us who do not realize this yet. Because a lot of people, and as a trans elder (what a set of words to self-apply...) I see that it's true for young people in many cases, have been conditioned to forget solidarity, loyalty and community.

And the unfortunate thing is that you don't rediscover those things on your own. There are people who will ignore the hand that reaches out to them. There are even a few who will bite that hand.

You can't stop reaching out. If you're the kind of person who throws people out in the cold when they're being difficult, you need to stop that shit.

Sincerely, a mentally ill person who was thrown out of its most cherished trans community over an altercation that was in large part provoked by someone else.

The baffling thing is, once I've established what kind of woman I want to be, I don't mind in the slightest leaning into a much more masculine energy or or presentation.

I don't mind presenting futch or even farther down the line. All I ever minded was cosplaying as a man.

Case in point: look at these, that's the fit I wore for karaoke tonight. It's, I like to think, female presenting. But it's not exactly high femme, is it.

But I'm comfortable in my skin.

i²

The commonly cited statistic that most people give a fuck which bathroom trans people use is incorrect.

Most people give zero fucks. Toilet Joanne, who gives twenty billion fucks, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

Also, GIMP is, and has always been, a nightmare to use.

I will likely never use Photoshop. I don't need software for photo manipulation, and for creating graphic art I primarily use Krita, which is excellent.

But I'd rather chew my arm off than touch GIMP again. And I've given it a robust chance to win me over on three separate occasions across a good few years.

Using GIMP is a chore, and it has nothing to do with my opinions on FOSS.

This is an amazingly written article and you should read it:

https://fedi.aria.dog/objects/f5782f7c-5204-4921-a4d5-f29d2f72939c

(linking it rather than just Boosting the post because I am really really impressed.

...I'll Boost the post anyway xD )

You know the best way to tell that gendered behaviour is deeply ingrained, inescapable, unconscious and all-consuming?

Colours.

You will find very, very few men who will use words like "maroon" and "chartreuse" and "amaranth" and so on.

And most of these will be queer men.

But that's not all!

Men will say almost reflexively, even if they're not shitty about it, that they don't know all these words and what they mean.

Now think about it for a second.

Are women born knowing what "ochre" or "turquoise" means?

Are little girls of five aware that "azure" is a kind of blue?

No.

I've seen claims that women have a keener eye for colours. It may or may not be true. I do think perception is different for men and women, maybe. I've talked before about how both touch and smell are things I experience differently on HRT. Vastly different.

But you can't explain all that so easily. The xkcd guy did a survey on colors, and color perception is actually very similar between at least chromosomal sexes.

Then why do men not use words like "apricot" or "lilac" that often?

Now, women don't necessarily do that often, either (see the survey by xkcd guy). But it's a thing that happens.

Well, two reasons.

One, women need those color names more often in two very feminine coded situations. Because you need to be specific when talking about clothes and make-up. Men's clothes are notoriously drab compared to women's clothes. And women use make-up an order of magnitude more often than men, at least.

Reason two is... I think the clue is in that exasperated "I don't know those colors" that men utter.

There is almost indignation in that. Women also often don't go for such flowery language, either! But there's not this anger at the presumption that they'd know (unless they're butch lesbians I guess? I don't know).

Men do not feel they are *supposed* to know these things. And that's gendered behaviour. But, other than some toxic dudebros, men will not state that this is so gendered.

That's the insidiousness of gender roles. They're so deep in people's heads they don't even think of them as roles, or gendered.

That's the same reason men are "assertive" and women are "bitchy". That's why men are "bold" and women are "pushy". Men are "dominant" and women are "overbearing".

It's stuck in your head, and it has been since you were a little kid. Same way it's stuck in your head who is supposed to know what the heck "chartreuse" means.

That's why it's important to challenge these things. Because the chartreuse question doesn't matter. But it grows out of the same stem as the gender pay gap.

The oldest recorded sentence in Polish is a guy saying to his wife "daj, ty poczywaj, ać ja pobruszę", which means "Come - you rest and I'll mill the grain".

The two interesting things about this is one, the Polish language has not changed that much in over a thousand years. The grammar seems the same, the words are structured according to the same principles and are recognizable. If you look up the verb "bruszyć" which is not in modern Polish, you understand everything easily.

Two, wife guys existed in what is now Poland even in the early Middle Ages.

(80/300€)

Infuriating and honestly kind of depressing that so many articles of clothing only look any good when the waist is, y'know, smaller than the hips. Which is far from the case for me, and the difference will never be pronounced no matter what.

Maybe I should get that corset I've long dreamed of. Corsets are pretty cool.

I'm pretty sure I could get a corset commissioned from a corset-maker I like for about 250 to 300 Euro.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm broke, jobless and on the 8th of September is both my 40th birthday and my third HRT anniversary.

And my PayPal and Ko-Fi are as follows:

https://paypal.me/oddtail
https://ko-fi.com/oddtail

Do with that what you will.

But it IS a nice round number, that 40 :3

EDIT: aaaargh I just realized this could be read as me thinking a 40€ gift would be a nice round number. I meant my age is a nice round number worth celebrating. I don't expect anyone to give me that much money.

I'm an idiot (but what else is new ^_^' )

"you're old"

Yeah, well, so's your mom but that didn't stop me and her last night.