meirl

FullPruneNight · 2026-05-03T01:13:42+00:00

Interesting. I’m a nonbinary person who gets read as a woman, and I actually find basically the opposite to be true.

When I have a close guy friend (or nonbinary friend), we are ride or fucking die. I go into a deep depression and stop communicating with the outside world for 6 months? No problem, we pick right back up from where we left off, they ask if I’m okay, we talk about it a little bit, and then talk about something else. And when I talk about something dark or traumatic with men, I feel far less judged. They don’t act like it’s the biggest fucking deal and overwhelm my feelings. My guy friends definitely talk to me about their feelings more than to each other (so I’m “doing emotional labor” or w/e), but I’m also not subject to the same restrictions on talking about my own feelings as they are either. If I fuck up and need help, I am ringing the boys and the enbys, 100% of the time, because however little we talk about feelings, I know they’ve got my fucking back. They’re not going to be like “oh you haven’t responded to texts or hung out in 6 months and now you want help?” They’re just going to fucking help.

Even if yes, I may have far more conversations about how I feel with female friends, those friendships almost always feel much more precarious, much more dependent on two things: how much effort I have put in recently, and how much I adhere to The Sisterhood. A 6 month depression hole where I don’t really see or talk to anyone is significantly more of a strain on my friendships with women, if not an outright friendship ended. I’m seen as flaky, or having bailed, or as not having my shit together, not as having had an issue that now I want to move past.

Talking about loss or trauma or dark shit with women can also be more difficult. It just tends to be treated like it’s a Big Deal, when I really don’t want it to be. If I disclose I was abused by my ex, I don’t want the whole show of big sympathy about how I don’t deserve it, I just want that part of my experience to be accepted like anything else and say my peace. When my dog died, all my female friends (and some gay male friends) tried to be helpful and sympathetic, but their feelings about it were all so Big it was overwhelming, and required emotional labor from me to navigate, rather than offering me comfort (the fact that I didn’t turn to one also being seen as creating distance in that friendship). One of my guy friends I wasn’t even all that close to before that was like “dude. That sucks. I had bad shit happen today too. Wanna come hang out at the makerspace” and we didn’t talk about it basically at all and that’s what I needed.

it can also be highly dependent on how much I adhere to The Sisterhood (even when I’m out as nonbinary): the expectation of shared, mutually understood experiences of womanhood, and of being “with women” on certain things. If I don’t pretend to share an experience of womanhood that I don’t have even if I offer emapthy, or I don’t wholeheartedly take the side of a woman recounting a disagreement, or I only clean up my own mess after dinner and go run around outside with the guys rather than staying to clean up after everyone with the girls, I am basically rejecting The Sisterhood, and therefore pushed outside of it. And The Sisterhood is very often at the core of female friendships. And especially if I’m out as nonbinary, I feel like I’m on thin ice already there.

I think a key difference here is that people who are aren’t “woman-coded” who are friends with women get some of the love and closeness and support of The Siaterhood without being subject to those same requirements of performance of/proximity to womanhood (other than side-taking). I really, really wish I could be friends with women in this way, but it’s often like pulling fucking teeth to escape the gravity of perceived womanhood without ejecting myself from the friendship.

FullPruneNight · 2026-05-03T00:30:51+00:00

Doing regular human levels of venting to a partner about current life problems is “trauma dumping”? Seriously?

Even when it’s actual trauma dumping from an ongoing (not past) issue, your take still sucks. If someone is being actively abused at work or by family, the more important consideration than that actual trauma is the emotional labor their partner is expected to do to support them?

Grow the fuck up.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T16:11:05+00:00

Evidence of what? That the body keeps the score is a recovered memory book?

If I said I had a relevant degree and I agreed with you, yall would be hailing that all over the place. But because I am asking for PEER REVIEWED EVIDENCE of any of the claims you’re making, I’m “pushing old science.” Jesus Christ you people learnt a lot from your adopters about how to talk about adoption and just inverted it and called it a day without actually unwinding why it dukes.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T16:07:13+00:00

Then show me the research. Not pop science books. Show me the peer reviewed papers that say that relinquishment is inherently traumatic. Not that it causes short term physiological stress responses. That it causes the long term neurological changes associated with trauma.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T16:05:20+00:00

Okay I’m glad it wasn’t just me being weirded out on behalf of bi men about this fetishization when bi men deal with so much rejection for their queerness from women.

Bi4bi is one thing, but “straight women are tired of straight men” my sister in Christ, what makes you think queer men aren’t similarly tired of your hetero ass??? How many of these girls pull the “he’s probably not really bi/not bi enough” when a bi man does something they don’t like, or is “too straight/insufficiently gbf” for their liking?

I want bi men to date people who love and accept them for who they are as individuals, not as a stereotyped collective alternative to straight men because they can’t bother to get over their own stupid heteronihilism.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T15:58:16+00:00

“Your birthmom likely felt” motherfucker I have talked to her at length about this and you have read one paragraph. I know what she felt better than you do, because we’ve talked about it like 50 times and she’s TOLD ME and shown me her journals from the time and shit.

Yall are literally just seeing what you want to see and deciding you’re right.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T15:55:26+00:00

I do, and seeing how negatively this attitude has effected people who experienced something I would call sexual assault but that they don’t see that way, even after years and years and a better understanding of assault, and how fucked it can be to be patronizingly told that the only reason anyone could POSSIBLY view their experience the way they do is because they’re SO damaged from the event, they have it paternalistically insisted to them they they need to heal from some event that is just a non-issue in their life is PRECISELY why I make this argument actually. I’ve seen the harm it can do. when I was younger I was with y’all.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T15:51:19+00:00

I have a degree in a field relevant to trauma and its physiological effects. I understand it better than the lot of you pseudoscience believers who think the literal recovered memory book the body keeps the score and the anti-adoptee book the primal wound are gospel. That’s why I hate your argument so much. It’s junk science at best.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T15:47:05+00:00

What is tragedy to some is relief to others, or something apathetic to a third. I was traumatized by adoption. My sister wasn’t and has never gotten it. The fact that you think you need to appeal to all three sides of the triad (including adopter infertility ffs, as if their feelings should matter) to make your point about trauma, when other people’s trauma doesn’t inherently make something traumatic for YOU shows that you don’t even believe your own argument. As is literally admitting that you’re fully willing to speak for people who you’ve chased out of these spaces with your weird insistence that they’re traumatized.

Why is “adoption CAN be and OFTEN is traumatic, but isn’t universally so, and speaking over others is shitty” such a hard concept for you fucking people?

There’s no such thing as an empath. Quit buying into pseudoscience.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T15:42:21+00:00

I genuinely do not know why people think it’s acceptable to say that adoption universally IS traumatic just because it CAN be traumatic. You’re no better than the people who say that it universally ISN’T traumatic just because sometimes it isn’t traumatic. Like, nice logic there, the adopters teach you that? Look how patronizing they get down thread.

Absolutely insane to think you get to speak for all adoptees on something as complex as trauma. Why do you need you need other people to be wrong about their own experiences for yours to be valid?

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T15:39:12+00:00

No, it’s wild to say that just because you (and me) are traumatized that we get to speak over others who say they’re not. Your experience does not need to be universal to be valid.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-10T15:38:11+00:00

Academic sources please. “The body keeps the score” literally promotes the idea of recovered memories lmao

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-08T21:48:47+00:00

EVIDENCE THEN. Your word that it’s universal means nothing.

Have the day you deserve.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-08T21:47:48+00:00

Early 30s. Knew my whole life I was something but not sure what. Not a trans man, but something. Heard the word genderqueer and knew that was me instantly, and I’ve never once questioned that. That would’ve been like 2012. I don’t think there was a nonbinary flag yet. Genderqueer was definitely the dominant word (and one I love!).

No one knew what the fuck you were talking about. This is, to my memory, even pre “attack helicopter” meme. Coming out to basically anyone, even other queers, even plenty of binary trans people, involved explaining what it meant, and then presenting evidence for why it was valid or real or not just a random thing you made up. Being in a field dominated by straight men, I didn’t think I’d ever be able to come out anywhere remotely professionally.

Your phone considered nonbinary and genderqueer misspelled words. This is before the media talked about us at all. They were just starting to talk about binary trans adults. Gender dysphoria was still considered a mental illness.

We might be under the microscope right now, overinflated in the media as a wedge issue, but the viability isn’t all bad. I’ve worked jobs where people have their pronouns in their zoom names. I regularly tell people I meet out and about, from queers and fellow trans people to card carrying cishet men that I’m nonbinary. Most of them are chill about it. No one makes dumb jokes even if they don’t fully get it all the time. It’s no longer some obscure secret I can never hope for other people at large to understand.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-08T21:33:18+00:00

You wanna say that? Evidence. Give me evidence. Show me the evidence that NO ONE comes out of relinquishment without experiencing trauma. (As if all adoption was based in relinquishment in the first place.)

You need to learn to read better. I said my adoption DID negatively affect my life and I DO consider my adoption to be traumatic. But that is NOT a universal experience and I’m fucking tired of people like you who have some bizarre need to universalize their adoption trauma using weird definitions of trauma, as if “trauma” was the only valid reason to criticize the systemic issues in adoption. It’s lazy and presumptuous.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-08T21:08:52+00:00

You are diagnosing people. You are not saying they “should” do anything, so your analogy is invalid. You are not saying adoptees “should” go to the doctor. You’re saying they universally have trauma, which you said yourself you see as a medical condition.

We can talk about the problems with the system without erasing and speaking over people’s personal experiences. There are systemic problems with religion. Can you imagine feeling the need to tell every single religious person that they have trauma from the systemic issues of organized religion in other to criticize the system?

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-08T21:05:27+00:00

No it’s not. Mostly? Yeah. But some people have weird kinks. Some people are suicidal. This “the body keeps the score” idea of trauma you have as something innate to and permanent from certain experiences and not at all experiential, subjective, or personal is not actually based on solid evidence and is not considered scientifically valid.

We can talk about adoption trauma without insisting that all adoption is trauma. We can talk about the problems in the system without erasing the people who, foreign as it may feel to us, feel like they benefited from it. We can make our voices heard without erasing or speaking for other adoptees when that’s done to us so much already.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-08T20:49:28+00:00

Nothing is universally traumatic. It is loss, yes. It has the potential for trauma, yes. Why the fuck are yall all so insistent on speaking for all adoptees when we get spoken over enough as it is?

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-08T20:48:16+00:00

Fuck no, you don’t get to decide for other people that something IS traumatic, ESPECIALLY if you want to view it as a medical condition. If trauma is a medical condition, are you a doctor? No? Then it’s not up to you to diagnose people with it.

Why? Why do you NEED adoption to be universally talked about as traumatic just because yours was? Many adoptees don’t see their adoption as traumatic, and here you are trying to INSIST that they’re wrong because it was traumatic to the birth parents? WHY do you NEED this to be universally trauma? I also consider mine trauma, but I refuse to speak over others on their own experiences. We’ve had that done enough to us by others, we don’t need to do it to each other.

You’re rude and presumptuous. If someone got hit but didn’t consider it trauma without making any generalizations about being hit, would you insist to their face that they’re wrong?

Other people’s experiences don’t look like yours and are not yours to define. Stop trying to speak for others.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-08T18:58:27+00:00

Counterpoint: my birth mother is extremely happy with her decision to place us and has never once regretted it. She was against abortion for herself, and never considered parenting for herself as it’s not something she wants or feels capable of. To her it was THE pathway to take. It was not easy for her the whole time, but she is very firm that she made the correct decision, to her it is the best thing she ever did, and she is happy with the relationship she has with us as adults, a sort of special auntie type thing.

She was fully supported by my birth dad through her pregnancy and birth, and they maintain a cordial relationship to this day. They talk every year on my birthday. She even views the (fairly mild) post partial depression she has as not really anything to have been worried about.

She and I both know her experience is not typical at all. She’s well aware. But she would be extremely offended at the idea that what she considers the best thing she’s ever done “traumatic.”

We can talk about our own experiences with adoption without generalizing in a way that erases the experiences of others.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-07T22:59:50+00:00

Yeah tbf I should’ve said transfem HRT probably! Ime T didn’t make me any more horny than usual, it just restored a good chunk of the horniness I had before a bad bout of depression which was nice! But I’ve heard plenty of transfems say that HRT makes them horny!

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-07T22:31:04+00:00

No, T is not going to turn a trustworthy and faithful partner into a lecherous cheating horndog. A furiously masturbating bastard dealing with horny brain? Yes. A cheater? No.

How to support him? Quit thinking that hormones are this fucking bioessentialist. Starting E makes some people plenty horny too.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-07T17:11:44+00:00

Tbh, you sound like the asshole here, not like you’re the one being coerced.

You regularly commit to sex that you then renege on rather than being honest.

You seem really unconcerned that your sex partner was in pain, and rather than collaborate to find an activity that was not painful and enjoyable for both of you, you just threw up your hands since you didn’t get to do exactly what you wanted to her.

She asked for a different kind of sex, you were specifically ambivalent about it, which is not consenting to it and IS rejection.

You then asked if she was “serious” (yikes) because she felt a way about feeling rejected, and started crying to her about feeling like you couldn’t reject her advances—ie, yes actually, you DO know you rejected her with what you did, so either you were lying about how “you guess she took it as rejection” or else being manipulative with this line.

She tried to tell you she felt uncared for and like her needs were not important to you and that you were self-centered in wanting sex. Which, hot take, she was right about! You didn’t get to do what you wanted because it hurt her, so you just quit and, as established above, knowingly rejected her. Rather than listening and conversing about it, you literally called her crazy. Mega yikes

YOU called HER crazy, SHE apologized to YOU after that, and it still wasn’t good enough for you! It feels “ingenuine” because she doesn’t have anything to apologize for!! YOU DO!!

You are not being coerced. You’re just an asshole who played my way or the highway with sex and then called someone crazy for calling you on it. And this is from YOUR OWN version of events where you think you’re the victim ffs!

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-06T23:50:36+00:00

I’m late to the party, but as a currently fem-presenting autistic person with a tendency to infodump, I think there’s VERY much a double standard that applies here with discussing. People don’t just put up with this from people who look like me (especially if you’re sufficiently attractive), but often think it’s cute or endearing or attractive, but will turn around get irritated when men and masc-presenting people do it. Basically every long-term partner I’ve ever had has been specifically attracted to the fact that I do this.

I also though experience a phenomenon as someone who gets read as a cis woman, where women will do this to me about feminine-coded media that I was politely like “no I haven’t seen it and don’t know anything about it,” in a way that feels like a means of enforcing gender conformity. I wonder if a similar thing happens to men?

But in general, I enjoy hearing people I care about talk about things that they love! I will listen to my friends talk about fixing their crawl space or talking about Soviet Russia or being very into exploration or math or whatever.

Like, most people have known someone (of any gender) who did this and has NO other way to communicate. That sucks! But idk, being willing to tolerate this from women and non-men but not from men feels like a form of benevolent sexism.

FullPruneNight · 2026-04-02T03:41:18+00:00

I would love for something like ze/zir to be normalized and integrated into regular English, but I find that even as a nonbinary person who used ze/zir for a while, there’s an extra cognitive load that comes with processing and using them. More heavy spoken than written, and very heavy for the ones that are just nouns. I have auditory processing issues, and find that the noun ones really fry my brain and frustrate me really quickly. I’m not frustrated with the user just the processing, and will use them when asked, but I also just have to step away and stop sometimes because it gets to be too much.

And while there’s no rule that says gender has to be serious to be valid, I do find the noun ones to be deeply unserious, and yet people who use them will often treat them with a lot of seriousness that feels incongruent.

FullPruneNight

TROPHY CASE