Yay for the social sanctity minding one’s own beeswax!

Absolutely LUDICROUS, they always try and walk it in.

The sort of “Band of Brothers” vibe is something I have noticed talking with the two folks from high school that fell that direction that I know. It feels like a high school clique but with parasocial relationships. Like they don’t want the hassle of being king but they do want to be knights lording it over some peasants.

It’s a very common thing for people to equate queerness with other concepts of otherness like “not from my group!” type pearl clutching. Bigots in a lot of places are weirdly more accepting of individual queer folks when they are noticeably foreign and more treat the concept of people being queer as an outside corrupting influence… Nevermind that the existence of queerness is basically a universal. People from non-permissive places really don’t want to believe that their culture will also constantly manifest new queer people. They often believe something along the lines of if they stamp on it hard enough it becomes more rare instead of just more people hiding and struggling in isolation and silence often risking their lives if they misjudge a social situation or dying because of a pervasive sense of dispair.

But no matter how hard you stomp the “problem” never goes away. You have to keep stomping forever in perpetuity. The boot must always rest heavy on someone’s neck and will never touch floor again because there will always be someone there to rise if the pressure ever stops. It’s in part why the concept of people essentially just being “born that way” has been so powerful.

You are correct in some instances. The construct of gender is for a lot of us just used as a tool. Some of the time it’s to alert people to how we wish to be treated… Which is the passable but non-ideal win. It’s not the fault of people’s brains encoding us to a binary standard that is keyed to read our characteristics as vital information. At some level we are animals and our brains treat info about sex as important. I have friends I know are trying their damnedest to respect my mental health by using language and means of cultural inclusion which don’t hurt but a lot of them slip because their brain isn’t naturally processing me into the correct category. They are looking out for me and trying … but the switch obviously hasn’t flipped.

When the switch does flip and you are properly read people legitimately treat you differently. It feels so bloody natural and fast like you are used to dealing with lag and all of a sudden you are on a fast newly formatted machine not bogged down by bloatware. Moreover a lot of things stop feeling artificial and like someone trying to calculate how they are supposed treat you. Getting that switch to flip is aided by social constructs - gender expression which the brain learns to read as just more markers of sex. It’s the extra power to get us over that hurdle.

It’s imperfect though. To use gender constraints as a tool can get you what you need but sometimes at the cost of what you want. The number of transfemmes out there envying the cis girl wearing the low effort androgynous shlumpy t-shirt and jeans and still effortlessly getting correctly gendered when they go out to do stupid bullshit errands… Is like the trans Cinderella wish… Most of the trans femmes I know are one " Oh fairy godsmother I wish I could go to the 7-11 without eyeliner and not have the cashier call me “sir”." away from selling their souls to the fae.

On the flip side Try being a pre-T flamboyantly gay transmasc with not uber straight masculine vibes… You can perform like a puppet on a string to a rather stupid and arbitrary social convention of rigid gender performance or you can have people hammer on your feel like lukewarm invisible crap button all day making every social interaction you have feel like an exercise of utter pain as your dopamine rapidly flees your body and leaves you an empty husk.

Most of the time you kind of have to pick one. We are slaves to the construct cage of gender more than most. What is underneath it all is something we do not wholly control. What I experience daily makes no logical sense from the idea of gender always being a choice. I can learn how I work but not change it… Furthermore if it were something I could change I don’t think I would. It would be far greater violation of selfhood to change something that has colored every relationship with myself and every human being I have ever known just so I could be comfortable in a body I don’t like.

It is more of a rich trendy thing. I have seen it particularly in mansions and high end apartments and things that I have been given access to via my work but I don’t think I have ever seen anybody who is strictly working class pull it off.

Hoarding is more common but with hoarding there’s more of a psychological element where they are anxious about removing objects from their places. Sometimes it’s from a place of having experienced traumatic scarcity but it seems to me more often it’s more about believing there is a larger connection between memory and stuff than actually exists. Like "I can’t throw out this half melted kettle or I might forget the day it boiled dry on the stove and everybody laughed about it! " - there is a lack of trust that they will remember it without the item or that all memories are worth clinging to to the extent of impacting their physical space. The Archive of memory hoarder is also the worst to try and help because after the fact if they ever feel the need to revisit something they let go for any reason they will blame the people who tried to help them with their total consent to cut down on their stuff and some of them never get over that resentment.

You’re thinking of the more nebulous “decluttered lifestyle”. Minimalism is an aesthetic design choice. Think of those houses where like there’s no shelves, no storage tucked out of the way.

Minimalism primary is an aesthetic not simply a “decluttered lifestyle”. It’s a fashion. There isn’t a bunch of stuff tucked carefully in boxes perfectly Marie Kondoed out of the way. With minimalism if you end up with spares of anything you get rid of the spares because the idea is that you are removing psychological noise for a clean look. Things that are infrequently used are looked at as the enemy of the aesthetic.

What you are thinking of is not the aesthetic movement it is the idea of having slightly less stuff. Low or Zero-waste lifestyles are a very optional part of minimalism and arguably more of a separate sustainable eco movement …but it is really hard to do those lifestyles in isolation because while you might not bring new single use things it does mean finding them elsewhere which requires someone else to have stuff or outside resources.

I realize it’s a joke but actually one of issues with aggressive minimalism is that it’s actually very nessisary to be decently wealthy to pull off. If you can not afford to treat tools and materials as effectively single use items that are frequently expunged from your spaces then it can actually be fairly wasteful and expensive. Extensive lending resources like tool libraries in cities being available makes it more tenable but otherwise yeah… Minimalism is kind of for the rich.

There are actually different models of talking about sexuallity. The one most common that you know where there’s stuff like gay, lesbian, bi… But when you have trans folks that doesn’t nessisarily give much credence to genital preferences. It’s more a reference to the cultural gender expectations. A cis man and a pre-medical trans man is still gay where a cis man and a trans woman in the same situation is straight… But when you are non-binary this model doesn’t serve because if I am culturally neither male or female is me liking a specific presentation gay or straight? If you’re defaulting to what my body type is then neither is correct. I am not pan or bi because I don’t like both and I am not straight or gay because those things frame relationships between physical sexes not fitting neatly into the changing cultural landscape of gender.

The other less used model just describes what someone finds sexy. A gynophile is attracted to feminine presentation, androphiles like the masculine, Skoliophiles are into non-binary people and ambiphiles like all.

It is a little 4D chess but it’s easier to pick up when you don’t have to account for old rules.

Not… Always… The “you can always come back” thing is not something that you can always count on. Being wholly rejected for trying to be your authentic self can leave some wicked deep scars. It’s always on the wronged person to forgive when there’s a lot of pressure to accept someone back into the fold. It can destroy you when everyone around you just wants to forget what happened in favor of social peace when you have to carry that damage with you. Coming out as trans historically is a lot of people’s last ditch effort to live in that they feel they the status quo is killing them. Sometimes they also look at being openly trans as the last resort failure state but are desperate to find any reason to go on even if the tradeoffs are horrible.

The kicks you receieve when you are at your lowest point you never really forget. Sometimes “trying to make it right with the wronged” means accepting you hurt someone bad enough that you don’t get second chances to try again and having to respect that.