#jennyhypertwin — Public Fediverse posts

@lianna (Oh crap, yours is a Jenny too. (see #JennyHypertwin))

I feel this so hard... and I think the main reason I'm even still around is to fight the kind of bullshit that kills those who represent our souls.

(We keep losing them, though, which makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong. :blobcatcry:)

@Crimekillz@⚧.fm 🕯️🥀

I'm suddenly realizing how much Wednesday Addams there was in #JennyHypertwin:

• unusual footwear
• general deficit in facial affect
• long straight dark hair, often in braids
• somewhat rigid body-language
• dark clothing (usually jeans & lumberjack shirt)
• ever-so-slightly off-"white" skin-tone (Bavarian/Bohemian, not Hispanic -- but whatever)

...except for one thing: Jenny was attracted to cheerful-but-authentic people. She probably would have loved Enid.

I wish I could have been her Enid... but I was never much good at being cheerful, especially back then.

In order of my becoming aware of them:

1. Today is the 42nd anniversary of #JennyHypertwin's disappearance (and presumed suicide).
2. @Harena's mom (age 94) died last night, about a month after having a stroke. They weren't close, so this isn't a big sadfeels thing, but there are definitely some complicated feels and also of course things will be... different, and in flux for a bit.
3. TootCat's SSL cert was apparently failing to renew, so the whole site was down this morning because HSTS won't let browsers bypass an expired cert -- but it got better.

...and how is your morning going Mrs. Lincoln? :spiral_eyes:

#JennyHypertwin appeared -- there was no context for it; we were just face to face in a semi-public building (a business?) and other people were talking. At first I wasn't sure it was her, but on second look it clearly was and I wondered why I was thinking it might not have been. ("Why am I being so paranoid?")

She was making expressive faces at me, so I made a face back in an attempt to react and get into her headspace -- but her reaction made me think I'd done it wrong, so I asked "okay, what does that expression mean?".

She kind huffed in a disappointed way and complained about my tendency to always want to pin things down with explanations, and I said "no no, I'm trying to communicate with you nonverbally but I feel like I'm reading you wrong" or words to that effect.

Her body-language in reaction to that kind of relaxed in a surprised way, like "Oh! That's different, I approve" and she started to try to explain but then I woke up with a headache, with the word "why" running through my head.

Last night I dreamed that I told a somehow-still-alive (but-not-any-older) #JennyHypertwin that she was a very important part of my life. The odd thing was that in the dream, it seemed like she was feeling insecure about whether she mattered to me -- the reverse of how things usually were.

...except for that one time when she asked me, in one of her notes, if I'd been ignoring (?) her (can't remember exactly how she phrased it; I have the note, but don't want to go looking right now). I had no idea then, nor have I any idea now, what I did to give her that impression...

...but anyway, usually it was me being the super-clingy one, and that's why things went badly.

...and I've been thinking lately about how I react to cuteness (Jenny had a very specific and particularly intense version of it), and realizing that I'm pretty much constantly having to override and suppress those feelings. Even now. What does this mean. >.<

(I was aiming it at you, @alienskyler, but I also didn't want to exclude @skye.)

And, wow, this is far from the first time I've run into misogynistic religious programming -- @Harena, for example, is a recovering Catholic and even now, nearly 5 decades later, bits of that stuff still come to light -- but it never fails to make my blood boil. It's so... beauty-destroying. :scowl:​ :kestraglow:​

Here's some irony (is that the right word here?) for you: after I had SRS, when I finally had [a reasonable approximation of] the female parts I always wanted, was when I stopped feeling body-shame. I just wish I looked more fundamentally female, instead of maybe being seen that way on a good day. (Too many decades of the wrong hormones.)

Elsewhere in the tree of this discussion, I've talked about #JennyHypertwin (my high-school rescuer and Harena's little sister -- a recovering Catholic who didn't survive the recovery), and a little bit of history there seems relevant here:

I'd always had an aversion to male parts for as long as I can remember (one memory goes back to age 3), but it was made so much worse by the assumptions J's mom made about me because I was male-bodied. It was assumed that my primary interest in her was sex, or (at best) that I would eventually succumb to The Urge. (IRL: I was not interested in sex.) We were not allowed to be alone in a house together; we were not allowed to be in her bedroom together (even with her mom in the house). I was not allowed on sleep-overs.

We ended up meeting after school several times in an abandoned semi-wooded lot several blocks from her house so we could talk without there being "implications" -- and talk is what we did. She was always incredibly anxious about me even touching her. (I did want to touch her, but not for sex; just affection. We were actually both rather touch-starved... but that's another story.)

What I understood was that her mom was terrified she would get pregnant -- which was only even a practical possibility because of the male parts that I had and didn't want. I already felt kind of gross having those parts, but this just kind of pounded that feeling indelibly into my soul.

So, yeah, certain brands of religion are great at making people feel terrible about their sexuality, even if they're actually asexual, regardless of parts or brain-gender.

[ranty part over, I guess?]

Odd about short skirts being okay but not long ones -- I'd have thought the "immodesty" of the shorter ones would be a cue for "vanity" or whatever thing it is you're supposed to think is Bad And Wrong...

What kind of infantilization do you mean? I suspect I may have some mini-rants about that too.

P.S. My late friend Tigger (to whom J introduced me) had a grey cat named Gandalf when she was growing up.

@skye Flip the gender around and yeah, to a large extent that's my experience too.

Smol diff: I remember early in high school, age 14 or 15, deciding that while I might have to (according to what I'd been taught) be a "boy", I was emphatically not a "man" (their motivations and aesthetics were so clearly different from mine, at least based on the evidence available to me at the time) -- so I never made any real effort to conform to the social expectations around that role... with the exception of getting married, which was basically me giving in to the idea that maybe I'd be happier if I stopped "fighting" against social conventions just because I was repelled by them. "Try it, you'll like it." (Pro-tip: I didn't like it.)

I look at pictures from that era especially and... yeah, I was an actor playing a role (in more ways than one: gender-performance but also autistic masking). I wish it hadn't been 24/7. ...but nobody can say I didn't really give it a fair shake.

"My lost life" is a phrase I've used to describe my first 5+ decades, yep. After I got done with SRS, there was this weird feeling of somehow expecting to be back in ~1983, so I could do it right this time.

There are additional complications around #JennyHypertwin, who also had that kind of masculine, out-of-place demeanor; I can't help but wonder... and yet she seemed quite happy in dresses as a little girl (I mean, I think I can tell which of her smiles are real and which are for show; in the family photos towards the end, it's clearly for show. ...but who knows for real what she was feeling when younger).

Hope I haven't rambled your ears off. >.>

So.

Tomorrow (May 20) is the 40th anniversary of #JennyHypertwin going missing.

I've been thinking about this a lot and I wanted to say some things, but I'm not sure specifically what I want to say. There's certainly a lot to talk about.

I think I'll try doing separate posts for each bit, as they come to me.

I think I've figured out how to articulate something that I've been trying to articulate.

Gender was presented to young!me as an intensely restrictive thing.

I'm sure it was nowhere near as restrictive as it would have been 2 decades earlier (1950s), and I've heard far worse happens even today (and of course TERFs and fundies want to bring all the worst of it roaring back) -- but within the context of much of what I see on the fediverse, it's a much more relaxed thing now.

Consider: purely because of gender-related implications, I wasn't allowed to:

• be alone with my high-school best friend[1] in her house or in mine
• be in my HSBF's bedroom, at all
• sleep in the same tent with one of my closer friends on a school outing
• go to slumber parties with my closest friends

Those are just the items that come readily to mind.

(Those are just the social dysphoria items; there are also the body dysphoria items, which can perhaps be summarized as "not only can't you have these body parts that feel like they are right for you, you're not even allowed to touch them ever or be in spaces where people who have them undress and you have to undress in spaces with people who have the same $%& wrong body parts as you, and who inexplicably seem to revel in that and the world is just incomprehensible".)

Part of the thing that kept poking at me was my own odd internal reactions to the idea of nonbinary gender.[2]

...and I think I can characterize those feelings now, in terms of the above:

When someone identifies themself as nonbinary but doesn't do a lot of medical intervention to remove assigned-gender characteristics and enhance opposite-gender characteristics, on some automatic level I'm thinking:

"How can you feel safe that people won't just... see your neutrality, and peg you as "really just" your assigned gender, unless you do enough to physically repudiate that?" [3]

And, yeah, I know that happens anyway.

I think I may have at least partly answered my own question here (I had to rephrase it several times, as I saw the logical contradictions): this is about my specific experiences of trauma around gender -- and other people have had very different experiences that call for different solutions.

TLDR: The reason I have these thoughts has to do with my own particular experiences of gender trauma. The reason why other people can feel comfortable with things that would make me feel "gender ID unsafe"(?) is because their experiences have been different.

(Apparently "gender trauma" is actually a term, but I just came up with it now independently to describe my feelings; I don't think I had seen it before.)

Footnotes

Mostly for clarification:

1. I'm actually talking about #JennyHypertwin here -- and she was a lot more to me than just "my best friend", but nonetheless she was also that, and we weren't "romantic" with each other in any recognizably heteronormative way.

2. I love my nonbinary friends and on most levels I think I get it; gender is weird and arbitrary and changeable and doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. This isn't about rational judgement; this is about emotional stuff I'm trying to untangle. This is about gender oppression I experienced, and that some of my friends experienced. I can't be genderblind, at least in part because the implications of gender were stamped deeply into me at a young age.

3. I do not support medicalism. I'm not making an argument here about what anyone should do. I'm trying to understand my emotional reactions.

#WoozleGender

I haven't written about #Jenny in awhile...

[aside: I think I need to go back and change the hashtags in earlier posts to #JennyHypertwin, because there are now a lot of other uses of "#jenny" here]

...for reasons I want to get into eventually, but for now I just want to note something I realized a couple of nights ago:

I always felt this intense feeling of devotion to her -- and I'm only now realizing that I don't really understand why.

(Not that I'm feeling differently now; it's just something I've had to avoid thinking about too much because, well, the recipient of those feelings -- the person I cared about more than anything else in the universe -- is fckin' dead, game over, we lost, and that's kind of hard to really reconcile with continuing to exist -- so that was an area of thought best left thinked about as little as possible. ...but I feel like maybe it's time to engage a little more.)

...and I guess I'd better explain the attached image.

Yeah, that monogrammed lettering in the upper left-hand corner is my deadname. Deadname, meet fediverse; fediverse, meet deadname. You two play nicely and let us never speak of this again (which is to say that of course I have some substantial negative feels about that being a thing that exists, and I probably will speak of it again.)

The monogramming is because the family of one of my dad's graduate students owned a printing company (in Texas, I think?) and apparently he was really nice to her after she was almost paralyzed in a car wreck (she recovered fully) and the family was really grateful for that and sent each of us (him and his wife & kids), as xmas presents, multiple notepads with our names monogrammed on them.

I kept mine out on a bedside table for making notes -- and J must have written that when I was out of the room or not paying attention. (I found a small handful of those notes from her scattered throughout one pad or another, substantially later and possibly after she died.)

...anyway... that's a bit of a dangling thought which needs more processing, but I felt like I wanted to share it and start dusting that stuff back off again.

cc: @Harena

40 years ago today, #JennyHypertwin entered her last year of life.

Lotsa links, very little analysis...

7/1 Fri

• It’s Hard to Overstate the Danger of the Voting Case the Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear (via Reddit)
• Christian fascism is right here, right now: After Roe, can we finally see it? (discussion: alexispurslane @ mastodon.lol

USSC EPA decision (WV v. EPA):

• Supreme Court Ends Term by Sabotaging Fight Against Climate Change
• The Supreme Court Tries to Overrule the Climate
  • discussion: TonyStark @ democracy.town
• The Supreme Court restricts the EPA’s power to curb climate change (via anubis2814 @ TootCat
• While decrying the Supreme Six's EPA ruling, [please] give Kagan, Breyer and Sotomayor hugs for their dissent
• The Supreme Court just took away an EPA tool to fight climate change — what happens next?

Related: Roberts joins dissent blasting extremist Supreme Court conservatives for abusing the shadow docket

Durham, NC

• 2022-06-22 Proud Boys disrupt Pride event at Wilmington library
• Durham's Immaculata Catholic School Denies Job to Transgender Parishioner: #JennyHypertwin went to Immaculata; @Harena went to Sunday School at the church which runs it

Pioneers Church

• 2021-11-17: What Happens When a Non-LGBTQ+ Affirming Church-Meets-Coffeeshop Comes to a Particularly Queer Part of Durham?
• 2022-06-29: Ongoing Controversy at Pioneers Church Takes a Turn When the Organization Disaffiliates with Its Denomination Commentary: letter to the editor

7/2 Sat

• A "coin flip": Nearly half of U.S. murders go unsolved as cases rise - apparently we need more officers? But how are they involved in crime investigation? ...and also detectives, which makes sense; courts are also backed up
• New York Democratic governor signs law limiting concealed carry of firearms in wake of Supreme Court ruling
• Supreme Court States That Abortion Is Not Rooted In The American Nation’s History, This Software Engineer Proves The Statement Is Not True -- US history: actually, abortion was long considered ethical, long before it was even reasonably safe; the moral panic over it is relatively new(via)
• Biden warns Republicans will seek a nationwide abortion ban, arrest women who cross state lines (via)
• Ocasio-Cortez Says US 'Witnessing a Judicial Coup in Process' - "independent state legislature theory" -- see Beau for how serious this is

Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word … We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us. – Eleanor Roosevelt.

• Mildred Harnack was beheaded on Hitler’s direct order. - some history about resisting Nazis, which is once again becoming more and more relevant. Party like it's 1939.

7/3 Sun

• Trump was asked if he'd defend his country like Zelensky, and I can't stop laughing at his answer
• Unvaxxed father of 11 dies of COVID. You can't make up what happened next - inside the wingnut silo
• 'Insane': Trump falls victim to McConnell trap that McConnell didn't actually set - when wingnuts battle
• Abortion illegal in Texas again: Texas Supreme Court blocks order that allowed abortions to resume
• Group wielding White nationalist flags march along Boston's Freedom Trail on July 4 weekend
• Leon County School Board approves LGBTQ guide after fierce debate > What drew the most debate was a provision that a school will notify parents — by form — if a student who is "open about their gender identity" is in a physical education class or on an overnight trip. (via JamesGleick @ mastodon.social
• ‘A massive betrayal’: how London’s Olympic legacy was sold out - lots of interconnected stuff
• https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/4/6/2090454/-The-Supreme-Court-strikes-from-the-shadows-to-endanger-water-with-Chief-Justice-Roberts-in-dissent

10-y.o. denied abortion by Ohio 😡

• As Ohio restricts abortions, 10-year-old girl travels to Indiana for procedure
• 10-year-old rape victim denied abortion in Ohio after Supreme Court ruling
• 10-year-old girl denied abortion in Ohio
• Kristi Noem Gets Grilled on Whether South Dakota Would Force 10-Year-Old to Have Baby -- and of course she doesn't have the decency to say "no"

7/4 Mon

• Was the Soviet tendency to produce shoddy consumer goods the result of communism, or of monopoly? - one problem with a centralized economy: quotas -- but modern socialists, as I understand it, have rather more sophisticated ideas about ensuring needs are met. If nothing else, we have far far better information-management tools now.
• What they saw was Franklin Armstrong's first appearance on the iconic comic strip "Peanuts." - history of racism
• Toronto wants to kill the smart city forever - interesting observations about how different cultural attitudes can lead to better or worse government (though I think part of the assumption that "freedom" and "government" are in opposition -- that it's still "freedom" as long as it's a private company doing the controlling -- is more about corporate propaganda than it is a reflection of reality).
• Never-before-seen microbes locked in glacier ice could spark a wave of new pandemics if released - dangers of global warming (via)
• Example of the NYT misleading Rightward: James Gleick @ mastodon.social (This was of particular amusement to me, as someone on Nextdoor had just been claiming the NYT is super-lefty and therefore unreliable.)
• https://cybre.space/@devurandom/108582385529984546 - game about strategy for protests, but I like the strategy-thinking all by itself

7/5 Tue

• What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts? - people in southeast Asia get press-ganged into being scam workers, and enslaved

7/6 Wed

• United Flight Attendants Blast Management Decision to Run ‘Uniform Compliance’ Sweep While Operational Issues Get Put On Hold - there needs to be a word for internal organizational distractivism
• Archie Smith, Durham's Longtime Clerk of Court, Leaves the Office He's Held for Two Decades: Smith helped us with getting legal guardianship for Josh; I didn't know about his LGBTQ+ advocacy
• Aurora Pro Services: a Greensboro NC business to avoid
• These Entitled Millennials Are Cheering for a Housing Market Crash: see my comments here, and also Nextdoor if you have access (my condolences if you do)
• Bell_Riots - near-future history on target
• Wonder Woman star Lynda Carter defends trans women and says to "focus on the real war on women"
• I hope you aren’t expecting the universities to fight back - Nazi history; Hans Spemann; educational politics in Florida