Genspect AGP-Gate & the Man who "Pair-Bonded" with Himself

Let's take a closer look.

Hey y’all. I already had plans to travel to attend two conferences, one of which was Genspect, and visit some other people on the east coast, including my family. I am also preoccupied with some personal circumstances that are not going to be social media fodder, but which are fortunately self-limiting. Don’t worry. Content will resume.

If you missed it, here is a recent stream I did with Brittany aka A Slightly Twisted Female where I addressed some of the blowback of AGP-gate, which has continued to evolve into its current state where multiple feminist creators are calling for jail to be a consequence of public “cross-dressing,” with one openly saying that if men and women need different legal rights to accommodate this carceral conclusion, so be it. As I said on that stream and maintain, a pathological compulsion to commit crimes is still a disability. I also maintain that we cannot fight for equal rights while simultaneously fighting for sex-specific dress codes to be enforced by the literal fashion police. Feminism is traditionally understood and explicitly defined as the belief in equal rights for both sexes. Belief that only one sex has a right to wear a dress in public is not feminism.

The fact that inappropriate social behavior is due to a disability does not automatically let the person off the hook for consequences or relieve them of responsibility to plan for and control their symptoms to the extent possible. It does not mean we must pity them or that we cannot be angry with them. Instead, recognition of the nature of the disability grants permission for family members and community members that they can ignore empty promises to change, separating out their judgment of what’s likely, from the loved one’s illness-influenced promises, if they have concluded the behavior pattern is stable and long-term. It’s possible that in trying to hold the ill person to account, a family member refuses to adjust their expectations, and so they keep getting hurt because they keep expecting ability where there is actually disability. That is where many trans widows get stuck. They think they can make them change. You see the same situation with other forms of illness and brain injury that cause major permanent personality and behavior changes. The stage of grief this represents is called bargaining. There’s no bargain to be made, I am saying, when I identify it as a product of a disability, at least in the severe cases.

Internalizing the fact that there’s a deeper issue in at least many of these cases, and it’s not even a question of whether they “want” to get better, because they have no capacity to get better, and may even have no capacity to see why they should, specifically due to mental condition such as a history of brain injury, can free a person from unreasonable expectations tethering them to attempting to rehabilitate the loved one. At some point, if that is true that it is a disability related pattern, you as the mentally-coherent loved one of the person have to either adjust your expectations or keep getting hurt. I’ve been there and done that, and I do not want that for other women.