ILV-83

trans men are the world, truly. thank you for taking this thing we cast off and forging it into something worthy of honor.

after a youth spent confused and upset that i was supposed to be a person i wasn't, i spent a little time really struggling to conceive of masculinity as anything other than something people are afflicted with, and i owe it completely to the trans men and transmasculine dudes in my life for showing me that there's incredible value in the entire spectrum of masculine gender expression. i have never needed to mourn the man i could have been. with hands that arrived at gentleness through hard-won inner strength, transmasc found family and coworkers and lovers and friends have taken this thing i could not bear, scraped and sanded the patriarchy off it, and made a home in it. among them there are freaks and fathers and academics and madmen and engineers and artists and speedrunners and completely normal bog-standard dudes who resist categorization as anything other than "that guy I know", and they fucking love it, they love being masculine, and in loving masculinity they have shown me that i do not need to be the one to be a good man. in me they have seen someone who inhabits that which they escaped, and every single one of them has helped me be a better woman. i will do what i can to pay that forward every day until i die. god i love transmascs.

I didn't realise how omnipresent it is in the media until boycotting it.

Also, if I glanced at the news right, the organisers apologised because one of the opening acts wore a keffiyeh around their wrist as a protest. "We're very sorry one person on stage actually had something resembling a spine. It won't happen again."

____4