man. a couple nights ago i read this post about the backrooms and internet horror and basically had the realization that i truly, at no point in my life that i can remember, believed in my heart that the world would be better within my lifetime.

i have always seen the general moral curve of the universe to be upward, but i have always seen the immediate future as a downward trajectory. for most of my life, i have believed that this trajectory is not inevitable, that it could be changed, but i have never believed that as it stands right now it will. changing the future has always been possible, but separated from me by several years of collective organizing that was not happening and didn't seem likely to happen, and that i could not meaningfully influence.

and this is all despite having seen my favorite video essay, the 90's neoliberal fantasia as experienced by daria morgendorffer, millennial, maybe 20 times, in which ian danskin says the sentence "young people don't feel trapped by the future, because nobody believes in the future anymore," and having that line deeply resonate with me. i didn't internalize it until a couple nights ago.

and i get by on hope. messages like "if ur trans, you have to live" and "you cannot kill me in a way that matters" and "queers bite back" and "sunrise, parabellum" and "may death never stop you" and "do no harm, take no shit" and stuff like that. extracting hope from little sayings, wherever they come from. doesn't matter if they're actual leftist slogans or if they're from a band or a fucking tumblr shitpost. hope is hard to come by and i have to find it wherever i can.

it seems inevitable at this point that being queer is going to get even worse, be so terrifyingly hard, in the near future. was it easy to be queer in 2015? no, but god at least it wasn't this. but the queer liberation movement turned into the queer rights movement turned into the gay marriage movement, and we never did anything to secure our position. the cis white gays thought we won.

capital continues to coalesce, the police state gets stronger, global tensions rise, fascists take over entire U.S. states unopposed.

what kind of person am i to be, now? it seems no answer is right.

i want to fight, but god, i want to live, too.

the girls in the darude sandstorm music video are girlfriends. they love eachother. in a gay way. pass it on.

if they wouldn’t make a deal with the Devil to bring him the souls of a thousand evil men in exchange for being reunited with me, i don’t want it

it doesn’t matter who you are, how you identify, or what your body is like. there is no shortage of binders, buying a binder does not deprive a transmasc person from getting one.

cis women can wear binders! trans women can wear binders! you can wear a binder even if you don’t have anything there to bind!

i know more than one person who is closer to a cis woman than they are to anything else, who would sometimes like to not have boobs for the sake of certain outfits. that’s cool and they should get binders. binders are cool, and it is not appropriation to buy and wear one.

that all being said, if you’re cis and you’re gonna wear a binder, please do your best to avoid making it a tiktok trend that ignores and erases the history of binding by trans people. i think i would be very upset if binders became a commodity fashion item, devoid of meaning. binders are for trans people first, and cis people second. in a perfect world, it wouldn’t be that way, but we have seen what happens when the clothing and styles of marginalized people, particularly black people, are co-opted by their oppressors.^[1] we should seek to first avoid that with all marginalized communities, and reverse it when it happens.

and of course, always bind safely if at all possible.