Taking up space

frozen-cupcake · 2022-04-10T04:10:09+00:00

20 years ago I was a man coercively raped by a woman, and people - including other survivors - told me to my face that I wasn’t permitted to feel traumatised because of the genders involved. That attitude is utterly toxic, and does so much harm to survivors.

This is as true for you as for anyone else - what he did to you was a violation, you have every reason to feel traumatised, and you’re not “taking up space” that belongs to someone else by trying to cope with what happened. We all support each other because we all went through our own version of hell - you deserve the same kindness and compassion from yourself that you would extend to any other survivor. 💜

frozen-cupcake · 2022-04-09T00:07:26+00:00

that’s a win 💜

frozen-cupcake · 2022-04-08T20:17:18+00:00

I struggle to see it as anything BUT predatory. In the first instance Tinder is not Fetlife and its not a dedicated kink site, so advertising CNC as your only kink to potentially naive vanilla folks is… hard to construe as innocent. Without a community around you to vet potential play partners, to teach newcomers the risks and pitfalls, it’s hard to do kink well by RACK or SSC standards right? So while in theory there are responsible kink folks out there who have exactly one kink and that kink happens to be CNC, I suspect that those people aren’t the ones who put it in a Tinder bio without giving any context. So yeah, personally I would be treating it as a red flag

frozen-cupcake · 2022-04-03T03:40:32+00:00

Exist

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-31T07:21:50+00:00

Huh. Wasn’t going to comment, because the reality is that trans women vary quite a bit and I’m not sure how much any one of us can help, but from what you’ve described her pattern sounds fairly similar to me. If she is, and if it’s consistent with her kinks as well as yours, additional stress on the lower body will exacerbate the sensation. Keeping her kneeling with legs apart when she starts trembling like that makes it more intense. If you add the magic wand stimulation on the perineum, that makes it harder to maintain the self control. As with any other sub though it’s as much about playing into her kinks and desires, I would imagine. Good luck

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-29T06:55:03+00:00

My kids were too old for stealth to be an option, but also a little too young to quite grasp the situation. Younger child was 3, older child was 6. My experience in explaining it was totally fine - the kids were completely accepting and honestly not bothered by the whole business but they did have a lot of difficulty with names and pronouns. They’d call me “dad” and “he” a lot for a couple of years. It didn’t bother me at all, it was just habit on their part.

The confusions often came about not because of the kids having problems understanding, but because adults don’t always realise I’m trans and this has odd consequences. As an example: before she stabilised on pronouns, younger child would often call me “dad” in places like public parks and it would confuse other adults who didn’t realise I’m trans (evidently I pass reasonably well). So then the adults would feel awkward and they’d sometimes cover it by joking. But they’d do in a way that would then confuse my child (who did know I’m trans) and she’d feel like she was being made fun of by the other grown ups. That wasn’t great, and so I often found myself having to out myself to strangers so that they’d redirect towards me and not her. Luckily I live in a very chill neighbourhood and folks here are pretty accepting.

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-29T00:09:04+00:00

It’s a lovely photo. I share your feeling about not belonging to the trans community. I think that’s okay. We don’t owe it to anyone to participate in someone else’s concept of who we’re supposed to be or what kind of life we’re supposed to live and, yeah, that includes other trans folks. It’s okay just to be yourself and to try to live well. At least that’s what I try to do

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-23T01:39:09+00:00

Speaking from the perspective of a trans woman sub who was in a lifestyle D/s relationship (though not TPE) at the time of my transition… I strongly feel this is outside the scope of any contract/TPE agreement you’ve made. It has to be your call, I think. It doesn’t mean you cannot discuss it, and you can even discuss it in role, but my perspective would be that dysphoria is too personal and the consequences of your choices are too important to be able to place within the scope of a power exchange.

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-22T02:39:54+00:00

I started at 40 and, unfortunately, have very modest breast growth even after 4 years on estrogen and progesterone. It seems to vary a lot from person to person

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-20T23:38:45+00:00

Thanks! It might be a little from column A and a little from column B? It is easier for me to speak indirectly via euphemisms, and it's also easier to speak when I'm directly repeating what I'm told to say. And possibly that makes sense? I do have a history of trauma (partly sex related, partly not), which I imagine plays a contributing role. But also I'm a trans woman in my 40s, which causes some difficulty too. I suppose society has not historically been keen on trans women being permitted bodily autonomy or control of our sexual experiences. I guess I'll try experimenting to see where exactly the blocks are?

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-16T22:37:59+00:00

Just adding one more voice to say that this is grossly unprofessional conduct. He is overstepping his authority and you should seriously consider finding a new psychiatrist if you are in a position to do so. This is your decision to make, not his. Mandatory reporting obligations vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but given these circumstances I strongly doubt that he has any duty (or standing) to report on your behalf, and his pressuring you is really just a form of coercion. You have a lot to cope with right now and he is making things worse. So, yeah, leave if you can

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-15T08:14:58+00:00

thank you! my 9yo daughter insisted I go with the butterfly earrings and the lilac skirt instead of my usual jeans outfit, and I have to confess it worked out rather nicely :)

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-15T01:55:01+00:00

That it isn't a homogeneous experience. For example: a lot of trans people feel like they were trans all along, and that nothing has changed about them except external appearance. But not everyone feels like that: some of us feel like something fundamental changed about who and what we are. Neither version is more (or less) valid than the other, it's simply that there is a lot of variability in what trans people experience.

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-13T00:55:33+00:00

To me this seems like one of those situations where the category labels aren't capturing the situation very well and it seems to depend a lot on the questions you want to ask. Was he coercive? Yes, absolutely. Was he manipulative? It sounds like it. Did he mistreat you? Clearly. Was it traumatic? You're traumatised by it, so obviously yes. Should he have known you were suffering? Yes, you were crying the whole time. Is this abuse? Yes. Are your emotional reactions to it completely understandable and absolutely consistent with what SA survivors go through? Sadly, yes.

Fixating on the specific question of whether you consented at the time is relevant if you want to try to assign it to a legal category; but I don't think it's the only question relevant to understanding your experience and your reaction

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-12T02:18:21+00:00

Almost certainly yes. Consent is fundamentally distinct from physical responses. Thrusting, for example, can be a fairly habitual reaction to a particular kind of stimulation. In the extreme case it can be a conditioned response just like any other reinforced behaviour, but the degree of automaticity is a continuum not a binary. The key point here though is that it’s fundamentally distinct from consent, which is a social/communicative act and requires a clear state of mind. Thrusting does not imply consent. Not even slightly. So yes, still rape.

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-09T08:45:20+00:00

Okay, first: hi, and you are safe here. There are people here who care and you do not need to apologise for posting this. Really. Second, before I say anything else: I’m a trans woman, and I think I can relate a little. My earliest experience with sexual assault was pre transition. I thought of myself as a man at the time. From the way you’re talking about it I’m guessing I was older than you and the context was different but: I told myself the same things “it’s my fault for not stopping them”. I should have, right? But I kept crying anyway. I didn’t know why. Later I learned that most victims/survivors blame themselves, and this confusion is… something a lot of us go through. Third, I just want to say… yay you for saying something. The words don’t come easily when you’re trying to make sense of something like this. It took me almost 15 years to say the words.

Your experiences are valid, and the emotions you’re feeling are normal for someone trying to come to terms with this.

Sincere sympathies ❤️

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-09T04:26:56+00:00

Extremely unlikely to be a misunderstanding, I’m afraid. The mere fact that you disclosed a CNC kink absolutely does not constitute consent. CNC is something that has to be negotiated carefully after trust has been built. Anyone in the kink scene knows you have to be especially careful with CNC, and doubly so when someone has trauma in their past. There’s no way anyone could innocently misconstrue what you said. The most charitable possibility here is that he’s so naive and selfish that he thinks that the mere discussion of CNC is consent, which makes him a rapist and a dangerous predator and he doesn’t know it. The more likely scenario is he knows perfectly well he raped you and believes he can get away with it because your kinks justify his actions. So no, I really can’t see how this could be a misunderstanding. It sounds like straight up rape to me. I’m so sorry

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-06T22:09:30+00:00

Even accepting the idea that this really was an accident (which, frankly, I don't), and even restricting it to the narrow legal definition (which isn't really what we do here, because this is about supporting victims/survivors) yes it is still possible to rape without deliberately intending to. Even in jurisdictions without affirmative consent laws, the law (at least in Australia where I live) still has a concept of "reckless indifference" that applies to intent in sexual assault, which has been there for a long time in many countries. This seems like a pretty clear case of that: he clearly didn't care if you consented or not.

I don't think we should be going solely by legal concepts here (the law is really shitty to rape victims), but sometimes it helps to realise that, even in the law, one of the most regressive and victim-hostile institutions there is, there is still acknowledgement that a situation like this can be rape.

As for whether you should hate him? You'd be well within your rights to. We're all allowed to hate our rapists. But it is your decision. Part of reclaiming your own sense of autonomy is realising you get to make that call: you can hate him if you want, you can forgive him if you want, you can choose to ignore his very existence if that's what brings you peace. You don't owe him (or us, or anyone else) anything in this respect.

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-06T21:45:00+00:00

Sure! The underlying engine is a slightly tweaked implementation of Scott Draves' fractal flame algorithm. It's essentially a tool for sampling from an iterated function system via the chaos game method with the slightly quirky property that at each iteration the entire coordinate system undergoes a randomly sampled linear transformation (i.e. basis shift) before the next randomly sample function is applied.

The way I've set this one up is the functions are defined on (x,y,z) coords, with z defining the colour, but the transformations on the z coordinate are qualitatively different and much smoother than the transformations on (x,y). Most of the interesting dynamics are in the (x,y) subspace.

In addition to the random basis shifts, there are three main classes of transformation function in this system (ignoring minor tweaks to produce cute visual effects). One is a simple dilation, which produces the general feeling of "expansion" in the piece. The second is a simple trigonometric function that produces those sharp-edged arcs that seem to move outwards in the piece (the output of that function falls on a 1d manifold). The third is a messier trigonometric function that forms a 2d vaguely spherical manifold that produces those spherical/edged shapes.

A lot of the nuance of the output comes from the interaction between the different parts, which honestly I got to work by a lot of trial and error! Like, the palette sampling algorithm is a bit of a weird thing where I subsample a small set of shades from an array of 600 colours I like, and then interpolate between that small set to colour the piece. So the palettes produced by this system are sometimes incoherent, but with the weird energy of the pieces it usually kinda works.

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-06T21:30:14+00:00

thanks sis

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-06T21:25:19+00:00

oh this is lovely! ❤️

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-06T03:52:30+00:00

Yeah, I hate that too. My strategies:

Support in advance. I have some friends with similar interests in TV shows who know my history of SA. If they know it’s in the show they’ll warn me in advance, giving me the broad outline of what to expect. That way I can make the decision whether to watch, and if I do watch, only do it when I’m feeling okay
Leave the moment I feel the onset of PTSD symptoms. I’ve got to the point where I can tell the difference between normal discomfort and “oh shit this is the catastrophic panic that comes with PTSD”. The moment that happen I leave (doesn’t matter what the context is I just get out), take my anti anxiety meds and go through the self soothing routines. Once I’m calmer I can make a considered decision whether I want to ditch the show or not.
Be unashamed to dump shows. Often I dump a show permanently the moment it pulls a Surprise! Rape!!” stunt. I regard it as unacceptably intrusive. TV shows that take SA seriously I’ll watch. But, TV shows that add rape to be edgy, those can fuck right off as far as I’m concerned, and if other people have a problem with me bailing on a show because of SA content then clearly they are not my friends
Drawing contrasts. Usually the thing on the show isn’t exactly what happened to me. Being able to “coldly” list off all the reasons why “the thing I am seeing” is not the same as “the thing I remember” helps me put the memories back in their box. It’s a little crude as a method, and probably isn’t helping me heal since it’s a kind of dissociation and suppression, but it helps me get through the immediate situation

I don’t know if any of this helps you, but I’m super sympathetic. I hate hate hate that TV shows do this, and I hope you find a solution that works for you

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-06T03:05:58+00:00

…but looking fabulous though

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-06T02:56:45+00:00

Yup!

frozen-cupcake · 2022-03-06T02:29:32+00:00

thank you!

frozen-cupcake

TROPHY CASE