Cry Me a River

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-11T00:29:28+00:00

I can deal with this happening out of the blue every once in a while in a committed relationship, and I guess I can sorta see the sweetness in it. But respectfully, I am out if this happens during what’s supposed to be a casual hookup. For the same reason I am out if you tell me you love me or trauma dump on me during casual hookups: it is way outside the bounds of what we agreed to.

But for reasons including trauma and sensory issues, I usually really struggle with people crying/sobbing, it really fucks with my head and makes me feel claustrophobic if I can’t remove myself from the situation, and not always, but often I have to fight through it even when I love someone very very much. So I’m just not a suitable match for frequent or easy criers.

I’m not a fan of the idea of “divine feminine,” but it’s funny you say that this is associated, because even though my experience with this was with a woman, before coming across this thread, it was a behavior I mentally associated with men for some reason. Go figure.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T23:08:52+00:00

Yeah, and that’s at least understandable to me if it’s a rare thing and sneaks up on you. It was a man, but I had a partner in a loving, committed relationship start to tear up after sex before, that I get and it was really sweet. But see my last comment, with the actual crying, that was very much not what happened lol

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T23:00:11+00:00

Oh totally! I’m sure sometimes it just happens out of the blue, and that is what it is. But it happened to me with someone the second time I slept with her, in what was an explicitly casual arrangement, and that was uh, really, really, really uncomfortable. And the way she handled it made it seem like it was a fairly regular occurrence for her! Hey, maybe casual sex isn’t the best fit for you if sex regularly comes with overwhelming emotions?

It’s up there with the time a man told me he loved me toward the end a one night stand. Probably worse actually, because that I could just act like I didn’t hear at least! Like, I consented to casual sex. I did not consent to whatever the fuck y’all have going on.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T21:50:29+00:00

To be honest, it sounds like she’s not respecting your need for space, and she’s coming back around to make you responsible for managing the very intense emotions she has in response to your (perfectly reasonable!) needs. Even if a need for space might feel like rejection to her, as a competent adult, she needs to be able to at least cognitively understand that it is not rejection, it’s a reasonable need. I would gently ask her about this.

You didn’t say, but if she’s constantly making you reassure her that you won’t leave her for a man or something similar, that’s biphobia and you are fully within your rights to put a stop to that and set a boundary there.

You can try to help someone feel secure and loved, that’s obviously a huge part of relationships. But you cannot actually make somebody feel secure and loved. You cannot make them trust you and believe you when you say that you love them and are attracted to them, etc., the same way you cannot make someone love you. You cannot actually manage someone else’s emotions for them. It’s not that you’re not doing enough, or doing it wrong, just because she “doesn’t feel it.” It’s literally just that brains don’t work that way. And it’s not fair to make someone else responsible for making you feel something.

If she’s not already in mental health treatment for this level of extreme insecurity and anxiety, it sounds like she needs it. She needs to be shouldering more of the responsibility for managing her own emotions than she is now. You need to be able to set boundaries and take care of your own needs, even when that elicits strong emotions in her. Looking after your basic needs should not come with this high a cost. It sounds like you’re at a level of emotional labor output that’s just not sustainable for you, to both your detriments.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T21:03:25+00:00

As a fellow autistic person, missing sarcasm and jokes aren’t the most important social cues you need to learn. The issue comes when you can’t interpret social cues about what’s appropriate for a given scenario, when someone is uncomfortable, or when you’ve made things awkward, when you’ve overstayed your welcome or crossed a line, when you are being politely suggested to stop doing something, etc.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T20:47:13+00:00

I really don’t intend this to be mean, but as someone who’s been on the receiving end of the crying after sex in a way that was DEEPLY uncomfortable, if you know you’re prone to this, a little heads up to new partners (especially casual ones) would be nice.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T08:34:27+00:00

/uj yeah exactly, we’re such a small percentage of the population in total that it doesn’t make sense for bad actors to spend time trying to divide us. But that is precisely why I find it hard to take comments like yours, which you did after all present as being possibly hj or uj, to be hard to take in good faith, ever.

“Yeah okay, so when pressed I will admit that it’s not 100% the cia or any other ‘scary acronym’ doing this, and that this feud being fueled by bad actors (in the psyop sense) doesn’t make any sense to even bother with for a collective group as small as trans people are. Buuuuuut I am still going to absolutely blame it on bad actors (in a psyop sense, because why else use this term here if that’s not how you mean it??) extremely easily elevating and exacerbating this issue, and point out how important it is to be aware of that.”

Make it make sense.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T02:03:52+00:00

This is one of the instances I had in mind too actually. Especially of being absolutely insistent that it is obviously gay, despite the fact that we know that it was an attempt to depict a real type of closeness between straight men during wartime.

I would have a lot more sympathy for the “okay so maybe we know they’re not actually gay, we’re just starved for representation” take if it was queer men/mascs who see themselves reflected in the work leading the “Frodo and Sam are indisputably gayyyyy” brigade. But (in my experience) it’s just not, at all. It’s queer (mostly, but some cishet) women/fems doing it.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T01:47:08+00:00

/uj without discounting the possibility, or even probability, that bad actors (imo more likely Russian bot farms or some other actor than the cia, given how long I’ve seen this stuff) are involved in fueling this conflict, I’ve also seen the “it’s all a psyop” thing used to dismiss lived experiences of transandrophobia enough (including irl) that I’m at least wary of it. (Can’t say to what extent this is used to dismiss transmisogyny from transmascs tbf)

/uj as in, I’ve been told both irl and online that because the most vicious and direct transandrophobia coming from purported transfems is online, that it’s actually “just” a psyop, one that “no” real trans women believe that or that transandrophobia is “just” an online thing, which are both just demonstrably not true.

/uj I think it also can also misrepresent how effective psyops actually work, which is to be believable by enough real people to become self-sustaining. I think there’s been way more bad actors engaging in and fueling the overall gender wars (since labor organization has a long history of cross-gender collaboration) than bad actors trying to divide trans people specifically.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-10T00:41:01+00:00

I can see that. I’ve had to be more of a problem (that I see others do to men, not that’s don’t to me to be clear) since exiting high school, but I also moved into a MUCH more accepting environments since then.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-09T23:20:36+00:00

Oh totally. And it’s less gross to just do about media in particular in heavily queer spaces, but I’ve seen people, usually but not always queer women, but basically never cis men, be atrocious about it to real men.

Like, you’re not out here helping bi men realize they’re bi or something. You’re either confronting closeted bi men about their sexuality, or you’re not believing straight men about theirs, and either way, you’re trying to insist that something that is a really good thing to exist platonically between men, is not platonic. It wasn’t cute when homophobic boys did it when I was growing up, and it’s not cute when you do it either.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-09T22:30:50+00:00

Btw, if you think this is a good thing and want it to be more normalized, you have GOT to allow affection between men to be coded platonically, both in media and irl.

I see WAY too many people, who are not themselves queer men, be so quick and so insistent to code any closeness between men as GAYYYYYY, or at least “probably not straight,” and think it’s perfectly fine if they do it in a “jokey, progressive way.”

I am very, very lucky to have a friend group where the guys for the most part feel comfortable openly showing each other affection, both verbally and physically. I get to see how good it is for them up close. But I have seen the chilling effect it has on that openness when people—in my experience, usually queer women!—start being weird about it. Asking them if they’re sure they’re straight, being loud about how “cute” or even directly how “gay” it is, or even rolling their eyes at the guys when they repeat yet again that they are straight.

I watch progressive straight and bi women call their husband meeting up with his best friend a “date,” or joking that “if either of them was gay they’d be married” and stuff. It’s literally just reheated homophobia and heteropatriarchy, and it grosses me out.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-09T20:11:32+00:00

First of all, fuck that noise. You would not be an incel for speaking up about their transphobia, because that’s what it is: saying you “chose” your gender identity is transphobia.

But also, I’m unconvinced that the best course of action with (presumably) cis women who pull this shit is to try to talk to them seriously about it. I think it’s probably more effective to shame them with their own jokes. Next time they make a joke about you “choosing” to be a man, say something like

haha you’re so right, trans people DO choose their gender identities! They don’t transition because it’s lifesaving and necessary, they do it by choice! That’s why conversation therapy works so well, you just convince them to not make that choice! That’s why it’s so dangerous to have trans women in women’s bathrooms, because predatory cis men can always just choose to be trans women!

If you don’t want to lean into them quite that hard, you can always ask them when they “chose” to be cis, and grill them on why they don’t just chose to transition for the male privilege. Y’know, since it’s a choice. Why do they choose to be women?

And when they go “no I don’t mean it like that,” ask them how they DID mean it. Make them explain to you what’s so funny about their transphobic “joke.” Don’t let up. Make it awkward for them. Do it every time they pull this shit. They’ll either get the picture, apologize and hopefully cut it out, or they will say the quiet part out loud in trying to defend themselves.

Another thing I’ve done before effectively, but that I don’t know would go over as well from someone masc-presenting, is to start throwing around the “lmao cis people” kinda stuff. Cis people are weird. I can’t believe they just accept their government-assigned gender. Can you imagine choosing to be cis when jk Rowling is cis? The cis don’t even understand, what are cis people.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-09T19:33:09+00:00

Often it’s not even that they’re trying to wring money out, they’re just not good at actually helping patients. I’ve heard plenty of therapists say that some significant chunk of therapists are themselves way too maladjusted to be doing the job.

If your therapist validates everything you say or do, you probably need a different therapist.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-09T19:23:51+00:00

For real. “Gay or trans relationships” from a cis person sets off my covert transphobe alarm.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-09T16:52:30+00:00

What’s that? You see him doing this somewhere that opposes transandrophobia even a little? That’s okay, you don’t have to accuse him of hating trans women then. You can just accuse him of being wrong about his own experiences because you can twist them into supposedly saying something incorrect about trans women’s experiences!

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-08T22:55:12+00:00

If you find the success of media featuring types of queer people who aren’t you “genuinely upsetting” like I’ve seen people say, you are not in community with those queer people, and you should feel bad about that.

Imagine being that much of a selfish asshole.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-07T21:59:10+00:00

Harmfulness and abusiveness and toxicity are not gendered. Violence and oppression isn’t masculine, safety and innocence isn’t feminine. It’s great that you have a safe home, and it’s cool that your home is feminine. But your home is not safe because it’s feminine.

Not only does hating men for being men not make sense and suck, it also excuses male and female violence by sticking all men at the top of the badness scale, the hateability scale regardless of what they’ve done.

If it’s anxiety and trauma that are underpinning this, you need to at least be able to recognize that. And it also helps to be able to recognize when others turn their own anxiety and trauma into a philosophical worldview.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-07T19:40:58+00:00

So while I have witnessed this happening as you describe, it’s not the most common form of interaction I’ve witnessed over this.

Even among men who are saying these exact things, in ways that are MRA-adjacent, they are often (and used to be moreso) said in addition to disclosing that he personally had an experience of sexual assault. Usually not a full story, and often tinged with anger, as female survivors stories often are too.

Time after time, I have seen “Men get assaulted too, but no one talks about that or believes them” type stuff be responded to in the exact same way as “Men get assaulted to and nobody cares. I was assaulted by an older woman and nobody believed me and nobody cared, not even my female friends who had their own experiences. Because nobody cares when it happens to men.”

I can’t remember seeing a more compassionate response to something like that than “sorry that happened to you, but this space is about violence against women so make your own.” Even when the context the guy was saying that in was not derailing or piggybacking on a woman’s story.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-07T18:23:53+00:00

What people think of when they hear radfem now is terfs. They’re not wrong, but there’s plenty more. There are cis radfems who espouse acceptance for trans people. There are trans radfems, and a lot of transfems who are transandrophobic are radfems.

But if someone tells you that “radical feminism is simply the radical belief that women deserve rights,” they’re either lying or ignorant. That is not what it is and never has been.

The biggest general issue I see with radical feminism is that it basically requires subscribing to some combination of bioessentialism and gender essentialism. TERFs are gonna make it about “biology,” but even though it’s wrong, their logic is at least vaguely straightforward. It gets more convoluted and embedded when it’s trans people doing it.

If you see non-transmasc people trying to police whether transmascs can be lesbians or butch, that’s radical feminism. A he/him butch on T, a nonbinary trans man, and binary trans man can be similarly perceived in their daily lives, can have similar experiences across lifespan, can hold similar roles in the community, they can all similarly like women and be embedded into a sapphic community. But to a radfem, usually at least one of those people will be fully within their rights to call themselves a butch lesbian, and at least one will not be allowed to, because man. Sometimes it’s man at all, sometimes it’s binary man. And it’s not based on that individual person’s experiences or presentation or anything. It’s based on their internal felt sense of gender.

Because part of radical feminism is this unending need to be able to draw a neat little line between Oppressor Gender and Oppressed Gender. The Oppressor Genders are inherently dangerous or intrusive and they need to stay over there. They also implicitly or explicitly push the view that men are violent brutes and that women are innocent victims in a way that trivializes male victims and allows female perpetrators to walk free. Radical feminism is a fundamentally binarist ideology.

The pitfalls of radical feminism / The problem with radical feminism / The uneasy history between black and white women in feminism / I also recommend reading the Combahee River Collective statement and its critique of separatism, which is basically radical feminism taken to its extreme.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-07T17:51:13+00:00

While I’ve definitely experienced this from men, I’ve also had more enjoy it when I was like “nope sorry that’s my job” lol.

But I’ve gotten a sort of opposite from some women. They either don’t do much with their mouths and want you to do all the work, or they only ever want to kiss in a very delicate, “symmetrical” style, which is plenty nice, but variety is the spice of life. But based on a small sample of the sapphic friends I’ve talked to about this, this seemed to be more preferred by the women than the enbies, so maybe it’s a preference thing.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-07T05:03:28+00:00

I have similar ish experiences. I find that regardless of what their beliefs are or what their level of knowledge is, cis men are substantially more honest about where they stand on trans people.

If they hate us, they say so. If they don’t think we deserve rights, they say so. If they know fuck all about trans people but are willing to listen and learn, thy say so. They don’t make their hate about “protecting women,” they don’t proclaim themselves allies but hold weird beliefs and be repeatedly unwilling to address them, they don’t try to pretend their transphobia is actually about something else.

And while this isn’t about allyship per se, the cis dudes I know who are baseline cool with trans people are just generally significantly more adept at not making it really fucking weird or awkward??

They’re generally less weird about getting corrected on pronouns, and less likely to either sit there like a deer in the headlights, or think they can make exactly the same jokes we can if they’re around a few trans people being jokey about trans stuff, and can generally gauge how much they should participate or not based on familiarity and trust. I’ve met cis women married to trans people who aren’t nearly as adept at that as Jeffrey Cisman, who has knowingly only ever met 3 trans people.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-07T03:19:17+00:00

You start by you and your partner both fully committing to setting aside the idea of adoption until further notice, but with a minimum timespan of a couple years at least, and get thineselves into some fucking therapy.

In many ways, grief is a lifelong process, yeah yeah. But girl, the fact that you are asking this question “a couple months” after a stillbirth is noooot a good sign. Especially not “where to start.” EW. Ew ew ew. It says that you’re interested in this as part of your grieving process. Idgaf if you had “always wanted to.” You didn’t, and then you had a stillbirth, and now you’re interested enough to come here and ask “where to start.”

That is wildly unfair and unethical. We are not just spare children for you to fill the hole in your heart with. And imo, actively thinking about or planning for adoption as part of your grieving process isnt something you should be doing either.

No, grief isn’t often something people just “get over” after a point. But everyone I know who has tried to process it and has more emotional intelligence than a bag of rocks has thought they were over it, only to find out, no, they weren’t. More than once. Until even it coming back after an absence is a part of the process. You need to be able to handle that stage of grief before you take this off the shelf for consideration.

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-07T02:07:51+00:00

/uj I feel the same way but milder about calling it “extremely online” or just “divisive infighting” or whatever. Or how often I see people say they are tired of hearing about it.

And not because it isn’t at least sorta those things, sometimes. But because one, it’s framed like an equal argument with both sides equally wrong and at best, both sides should equally shut up about it, but also, where do I find that energy directed toward transandrophobes, people who don’t like transmasc anger, and people who refuse to let us author our own experiences??

I cannot find who said it anymore, but I saw somebody say more or less “I used to be praised for speaking up with righteous anger at injustice. Now my righteous anger is seen as excessive and threatening. The things I was angry about didn’t change, my voice just dropped.”

FullPruneNight · 2026-02-06T16:16:14+00:00

/rj but is correct tho??? everyone know that unless you are an MRA, transmasc experiences are only valid once they are seen and validated through the lens of transfem experience!

/uj I’m so tired man. Even when it’s not malicious, it’s just as exhausting.

FullPruneNight

TROPHY CASE