The #MutualAid Housewives of Bluesky County

[Ethan]

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

ChatGPT, write a short story about a witty and quirky trans girl (think Juno or Gilmore Girls) trying to use the women's bathroom, but being interrupted by a cis security guard who'll end up being an expected ally and potential romantic partner. 

"Come on bucko. Let the cis boy explore his boundaries."

[Tektonic]

itle: "Stall Tactics"

It all started because Avery really had to pee. Like, hands-on-hips, baby-giraffe-trying-to-walk, desperate. The kind of urge that turns you into a philosopher, questioning the hubris of humanity for inventing iced coffee and walking malls.

She’d been shopping for a dress she didn’t need at a boutique she couldn’t afford, because “retail therapy” is cheaper than actual therapy — until it isn’t. The cafe attached to the shop served three-dollar espresso shots in pretentious little glasses that tasted like burnt regret. Naturally, she had two.

So now she was power-walking through the food court of the Magnolia Heights Galleria Mall, weaving between strollers and slow-walkers, her boots clicking like an anxious metronome.

The women’s restroom was a sanctuary. Light pink tiles, mildly scented soap, and a kind of sisterhood-in-the-air that whispered you’re safe here. Avery pushed the door open, sighing relief.

“Ma’am?”

She froze. The word landed on her spine like cold water.

Avery turned, ponytail whipping like a suspicious horse. There stood a mall security guard — early 30s, tall, clipboard-holding, with the crisp energy of someone who took their minimum wage job very seriously. He had this Clark Kent vibe going on: glasses, gentle curls, an earnest kind of nervousness.

“Can I help you?” she asked, arms folded and eyebrow arched — the sacred stance of the Defiant Girl.

He hesitated. His eyes flicked to her tote bag, her boots, her eyeliner.

“Sorry, I… just wanted to check. There was a complaint. Someone said they thought…” he trailed off.

Avery smiled. Not the nice kind.

“Oh! Someone thought I might not be a woman,” she said brightly. “Well, let’s all give Karen from Lane Bryant a round of applause for her bravery.”

The guard’s ears turned red.

“I didn’t say that—”

“You didn’t have to,” she interrupted, casually leaning against the doorframe like a dramatic novel heroine. “Look, Officer...?”

“Eli,” he said quickly. “Just Eli. Not a cop. Just… mall.”

“Well, Just Eli, unless you’re here to hold the door while I monologue, I’m going to pee before I break the Geneva Convention.”

He blinked. Then — the miracle — he stepped aside.

“Right. Sorry. I—wasn’t trying to—just doing my job,” he mumbled.

Avery gave him a quick once-over, half-amused, half-curious.

“You always interrogate girls before they pee?”

He chuckled, sheepish. “Only the interesting ones.”

That stopped her. A beat of silence. She tilted her head.

“You flirting with me, mall cop?”

He looked horrified. “No! I mean. Maybe. I mean—I didn’t mean to—”

She laughed, stepping inside the bathroom with a wink. “Hold that thought. I’ll be back in five minutes and slightly more hydrated.”

When she emerged, he was still there. Holding a coffee now. From the pretentious cafe.

“Peace offering?” he said, holding it out.

Avery eyed it. “Is it poisoned?”

“Only with capitalism.”

She took it.

They sat on a bench by the decorative fountain, the kind that was always broken. He told her he was saving up for grad school. She told him about her band — Funeral Glitter — and how she played synth and existential dread.

He asked if it was hard, being her. She said, “It’s harder not to be.” He nodded like that made perfect sense.

Eventually, he checked his watch. “I should get back. Someone’s probably stealing socks from Macy’s.”

She stood, brushing imaginary crumbs off her skirt. “I should get back to pretending I can afford dresses that cost more than my phone bill.”

He hesitated. “Hey, um… Would you maybe want to… I dunno, get coffee sometime? Like, not as a peace offering?”

Avery grinned. “I don’t date cops.”

“I’m not a cop.”

“Exactly.”

She scribbled her number on his clipboard with eyeliner. “Next time you try to stop a girl from peeing, at least buy her dinner first.”

Then she turned on her heel and strutted away, boots clacking, ponytail bouncing, heart a little warmer.

Eli watched her go, blinking once, then twice, before muttering to himself:

“…Definitely the interesting ones.”

[End.]

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

[DavidCroquet]

My favorite part about plagiarize’s little story is that he himself is every character: the minxy trans bulimic, the cool-girl drunken friends who condone her disorders, and especially the well-meaning #NotAllSherriffDepartmentITWorkers, aw-shucks dude that is praying that identifying as a liberal will get him a pass—socially and sexually.

Let the cis boy explore his boundaries, indeed.

[benji]

I appreciate how the "plot" has to revolve around a bathroom encounter because bathrooms are the only way to acceptably frame any of this within trans rhetoric since cissies aren't supposed to be able to tell just by looking.

But really it should have been a female security guard so she could be a lesbian and this could be a wlw story.

[benji]

Here's a real (ABSOLUTELY TRUE, NOT COMPLETELY FABRICATED) tale of woe from another struggling 40 year old trans woman who can't get a job:

I have been really preoccupied lately with some heavy thoughts, and I think I need to just get this out there before I can get back to being productive and properly streaming and all that, and for reasons I'm going to get into I don't have anyone I can just dump all this on so I'm shouting into the void here. If you have no interest in seeing that sort of thing, cool, skip reading this thread, simple enough. For everyone else though, hey, I have had to completely restart my entire life from scratch entirely too many times over the years, and it's harder every time.

The first time or two, are nothing particularly special I don't think. I'm a trans woman, and a big ol' nerd, so I have the same basic childhood story the rest of us have. Excelling at everything in school for a bit, gifted program, bla bla bla, but messed up violent kids have a really amazing trans-dar if only on some kinda subconscious level, so I faced some real serious violence regularly all the way through school. Thrown to the ground and kicked in the stomach, stabbed with pencils walking down hallways, pelted with rocks. Had my leg broken real bad being tossed out of a bus. Never healed right. Sexually assaulted.

Tons of property destruction too. Both my own and the school's. Books destroyed with tearing and water damage. Scientific calculators I was borrowing because yeah, I was in a scary financial situation too. No heat, food assistance, threadbare clothes etc. And I've had serious health problems, some from those circumstances, some just from bad luck of the draw, some long term disease effects. That meant I kinda needed some sort of pricy assistance devices, which the school was on the hook to pay for, which seriously ticked a lot of people off, so I never actually got those, and was dealing with a lot of abuse from administrators and teachers too. Had to jump through some serious hoops to graduate, and even then they had some 11th hour gachas like refusing to give me a diploma because my falling-apart clothes were disrespectful or whatever. Another student saw that, called it BS, and let me borrow some stuff, which was a huge deal from someone I didn't even really know. Sucked that he was about half my size and none of this fit at all, but whatever, I got out of that. Anyway, not a great experience. Left me real damn socially isolated, bit traumatized interacting with people in general and despite acing every standardized test and taking AP classes and all that, people made damn sure there was no way I was getting a scholarship anywhere. So there I am fresh out of highschool, all of one friend not related to me, no real prospects. Gotta start over.

Had to start working before I was out of school, because oh, my single parent ended up out of work. I don't want to go into detail on what I did for the next few years for privacy reasons, but I made a surprisingly big name for myself in my chosen field, was kind of a minor celebrity for a bit, got speaker engagements and stuff, and also I had a boss who was exploiting the hell out of me, shorted my pay real bad when I actually got a check, which was rare. Months and years went by when he'd just "forget" or be having personal budget problems. I got really seriously sexually harassed basically the whole time too, because hey real vulgar crap goes so far over the head of this incredibly sheltered very much underage trans girl who was a pariah at school that she doesn't even understand the sexual nature of all these comments, that's hilarious right? Anyway, stuff of mine was also stolen, I got regular violent threats, and the whole thing fell apart under really traumatic circumstances, which also included me dealing with a few people's deaths. I don't like talking about this period, and I don't generally mention it on my resume. I left that with nothing. No contacts of any kind, no means of staying in touch with the people I liked. Clean break, again.

Wound up recovering from a really dangerous mental health situation by getting laser focused on game design. I self-published a few things. They reviewed pretty well. I of course got seriously ripped off by parts suppliers left and right. Had a fun time with a shady shipping company trying to just kinda seize the entire shipment of a completed game I went into serious debt getting out there. Also had a publisher I was briefly negotiating with just straight up clone a project of mine... and someone else lift one title and all after an early con demo.

Lawyers cost money. I was, again, in massive debt. Random hackers completely nuked the page for my company and I never got it up and running again. Plus this was all pre-transition, so the name slapped on all these games is my dead name. Consequently, none of them ever go on my CV. Oh yeah, and a small game store pulled some crap inviting me out to run a demo on the promise of a big order, had me drive out across a couple states, jumped me with "oh I meant I'll take a bunch on consignment." Never got paid for those. So again, broke, nothing to show for another 7 or 8 years of my life. Welp.

I spent a few years after that writing. Tons of that were on my own websites. Hosts went under, that's all gone. Contributed to a couple anthology books as kind of a free thing. Did some games journalism stuff for a few outlets and someone's personal side project. Generally didn't get paid for any of this work either, and once again, it's all under my deadname. Also quite recently my main point of contact for all that work, who is very well-known and established in the relevant circles decided to ROYALLY screw over the staff on some of these years after the fact. I heard how it all played out secondhand, since the guy in question did not maintain or ever try to reestablish contact with me when I transitioned, but aside from once again missing out on a paycheck, I'm pretty sure I still ended up mentioned by name by other people, repeatedly, while that was all playing out, so I am almost certainly persona non grata with most of the press and industry people I knew back then. With the obvious exception of the people I heard about all this from, who are of course in that same boat.

And then of course I transitioned. Which also didn't go great at all in terms of support from anyone in my life. Several people are just straight up gone, many many more haven't formally cut ties in any way but sure as hell haven't talked to me on more occasions than I can count on one hand in the decade plus since. And of course on the medical side of things there's a bunch of stuff I really like, in an actual, there are serious health complications from me not having this done sort of way, need to have happen that I've been denied for again, over 10 years. And there's a bunch of fun hidden costs to transitioning like you know, the shape of your body radically changes so none of your old clothes remotely fit, which I've barely made any headway on.  Hell I still don't own a single bra, besides a couple people wildly guessing at my size for gifts and being dead wrong.

And then ya know, Gamergate started.

Here's me, a newly out trans woman with a ton of experience in and around games. Here's a bunch of nazis hellbent on getting any and all trans women killed, and especially focusing on anyone remotely connected to games in order to try and rewrite the history of where the term "gamergate" came from to something less embarrassing than a washed up actor getting taken in by a video from a nazi about another nazi making up the most debunkable pack of lies ever about his ex because he couldn't handle being dumped. I've lost count of how many credible threats on my life I've had to deal with, or how many friends of mine actually ended up dead. I think I can count up the number of famous losers who either personally used their social media platforms to attack me or had weird creeps running them on their behalf and doing so. Let's see if we keep it to just people who had their own major network TV shows I want to conservatively say 3? Maybe 5?

And that's not even getting into how a weirdly large number of people when this stuff was making headlines got bafflingly jealous of the people being targeted with all the stochastic terrorism, so I have this whole separate people of bloodthirsty creeps who have been trying to end me in every possible sense for 10+ years, but instead of being obvious nazis, they to this day enjoy the reputations of being cool leftist people in and around games mostly, who just happen to have a deep passion for hunting trans women for sport that everyone turns a blind eye to.

... and then there's the fact that I was doing some real legit antiterror work while all this was going on, and while I REALLY don't want to get into specifics, there's another well known well liked person out there as a result of doing that who never once paid me, subjected me to some really messed up treatment, absolutely threw me to the wolves and badmouthed me to that entire sphere of influence. A few such people, really. And that's not even getting into people who came to prominence as public figures because of the sheer volume of awful nazi crap they were dealing with, who I got to know very well as someone helping people survive that sort of thing, and later went on to become absolute frothing menaces to, among other things, the whole trans community.

So yeah I got subjected to more supremely viscious witch hunts than I can count, had my personal info leaked to nazis and TERFs. The number of friends I had back in 2014 who are even still willing to talk to me still could all fit on a single couch, and I had to straight up flee my home. Multiple times. In panicked single-day moves where I had to leave a bunch of stuff behind.

But wait there's more! Here again I need to be really vague because the game industry is very very small, and everyone talks and I'd like to be able to do SOME work in the field in the future, but shortly after transitioning I had to start my game design career from scratch again, had that actually starting to go pretty well for a bit, but wouldn't you know it, women in games get treated horrifically terribly all over the place, and trans women get it extra bad, and at some point everything just sort of converged and I'm reeling from absolute horror at stories from a whole bunch of coworkers/friends about being stalked and sexually harassed by major creeps at their companies and others, lots of huge staffing changes, major product launches, personally dealing with a real freaking creep as a direct superior of sorts, early Covid panic making my home literally unlivable and my legs being crushed, and when all the dust cleared I no longer had contact info for anyone I'd done freelancing for and also a hell of a lot of people I like & respect quite a lot not talking to me any more via some combination of not wanting to think about anyone in games for a bit/dealing with the aftermath of abuse/generally needing to keep a low profile/not wanting me getting drawn into the whole mess/not realizing I have their backs

Oh and all the Gamergate and associated but non-affiliated gang-stalking and witch hunting also pretty regularly obliterates any sort of social circle I manage to temporarily form every few years like clockwork.

And THEN of course Elon Musk went and bought Twitter, I got kicked the entire hell off the site immediately, maybe due to some nazis with particularly strong antipathy towards me, specifically, very much having his ear?

So I spent something like 2 years just kind of alone in my undisclosed location with nearly no one to talk to losing my mind and getting further and further below the poverty line. I was kinda starting to crawl back to... something with the whole Twitch streaming thing I started doing on Mondays, and got onto this site here with a new handle to avoid some of that stalker heat... and then hey here's my biggest most consistent support abandoning me, here's Twitch nuking everyone's archives completely so nobody can watch my stuff there, and Youtube's current policies making it basically impossible to get anywhere from scratch over there. Plus hey, turns out Bluesky has community toxicity levels pretty on par with pre-Musk twitter, so I'm pretty sure the day I signed up I got added to half a dozen "dangerous people" lists because the people who run those have absurdly itchy trigger fingers, reconnecting with anyone has been going real real poorly due to some combination of being semi-incognito, it being a few years, and people not wanting to reassociate with someone so... gangstalking prone.

So here I am, in my 40s, in a really sketchy housing situation I'm hanging onto by a thread. I basically can't apply for any jobs because my work history is under various names, redacted for security and full of scumbags who probably don't want to admit to how they exploited he hell out of me and could never be bothered to cut a regular paycheck, half a dozen games or so I can't safely take credit for designing, a lot of contacts in the fields I've worked in who don't want to go helping me find work because it'd upset some broken stairs in prominent spots

I basically can't go outside since I don't own a pair of shoes that aren't falling apart or the wrong size, nor clothes that don't have me flashing big ol' high beams because I didn't have this chest when I got them 10+ years ago, and it really doesn't seem like this is a climate/environment where people in general are willing to so much as plug a link now and then to help a down on her luck trans woman rebuild her entire life from scratch for the 8th or 9th time.

So I dunno. Might end up dead soon? Not really seeing a lot of paths to survival here.

In the meantime though, now that I've had a chance to vent for a while here, I guess I'm going to install a bunch of random stuff and continue to do the whole day long stream thing every Monday I'm not making a dime off with as chipper an attitude as I can until that's no longer possible.

It was taking too long to scroll back to some of their begging posts to show because they actually hadn't posted too much recently, but here's one of the examples of the unending struggles they did post:

[Tektonic]

i don't get it. if gamergate was such a leading form of trans genocide, why do so many new media (games/movies/tv shows) have trans representation? 

i mean there are more transgender people now, and yet all we hear about is these people literally dying from the crushing weight of the system. Is it just, and hear me out here, just because these are actually lazy people who wanna sponge off the system? Like it started off as morbidly obese, then lime diseases, then mental health, now trans.... what's the next title you can give yourself to blame anyone else but yourself for your self-inflicted situation?

sorry.. insert no1curr emote

[Jansen]

It's a brand new day...



...oh FUCK

[Jansen]

So easily influenced

[Jansen]

[kaleidoscopium]

It's a brand new day...



...oh FUCK

Be hilarious if we learned the “pain” is from twisting his wrist trying to open another jar of pickles

[Kyon1988]

People like Melody and that irritating dog are causing more harm towards the reception of "trans" people than JK Rowling ever did. Stupid idiots

[nachobro]

 these people are so corny

[nachobro]

[Jansen]

It's okay Melody is actually sorry this time so it'll never happen again

[Jansen]

These people really seem happy after coming out as trans. I wonder if there's a deeper unresolved issue here?

[simiansmarts]

You know the classic saying among women: “always the bridesmaid, never invited to the polycule”

[Besticus Maximus]

All I wanted was a link to the polycule discord 

[Jansen]

Gimme a fucking break 



 

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

[kaleidoscopium]

“I hope it gets better” 

“It won’t” 💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀

[BIONIC]

Trans joy?

[Potato]

"I'll never be a girl."

The only true statement in this thread.

[Potato]

I think actually meeting each other in real life and being confronted by that she-cock would cure most of these transbians of their delusions. 

None of them like cock. They want a real woman. The realisation that the "woman" they're about to fuck is actually a guy would be a reality check.

[Jansen]

It's a brand new day...



...oh FUCK

Btw what you did wrong is give up on life

[Jansen]

Britt is too busy for your bullshit. Money now. 

[kaleidoscopium]

I think actually meeting each other in real life and being confronted by that she-cock would cure most of these transbians of their delusions. 

None of them like cock. They want a real woman. The realisation that the "woman" they're about to fuck is actually a guy would be a reality check.

Except for Fagatha, this is what he wants. I think the wakeup call for him will be smelling Malds hood burger stench 

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

It was taking too long to scroll back to some of their begging posts to show because they actually hadn't posted too much recently, but here's one of the examples of the unending struggles they did post:

I'm on medication I need to take for the rest of my life (Warfarin), and the pharmacy doesn't just "automatically refill my order without prompting" because why the hell would they? That's not how things work. I go there and tell them what I need and they give it to me, providing I have a valid prescription. That's how things work.

[Snoopy]

She's talking about Kyuuji's mob.

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

She's talking about Kyuuji's mob.

With that hairline, I can't imagine Kyuuji doesn't wear wigs.

[Gamegirl Nostalgia]

"We're never invited to the polycule"

Women 👏 are 👏 not 👏 expected 👏 to 👏 sleep 👏 with 👏 you.

stop being an incel.