The Vulture and the Little Girl, which is apparently considered “explicit” despite being an extremely famous image.
I have been reflecting on how trans people really underestimate how much of their internal struggle is religious trauma, often with Christians, often their parents. I can’t think of any other reason so many people see my videos and conclude I’m somehow trying to save trans people who are already halfway down the walls of the Sarlacc pit, if not deep in the proverbial belly of the beast. Then they notice I also do not seem to be catering to them, and this leads to concluding, I am doing it wrong.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Some will come to me to explain that I don’t realize how to better adjust my messaging and tone to be more popular with the trans community I am allegedly trying to “reach.” Use their pronouns! Use their fantasy no-ball name! Just call them trans women! That will make them more likely to listen to you! You’ll be able to save these people from the cult! Pull them back from the brink of castration and we can all live happily ever after with catheters on the house. But this is a zombie apocalypse-type situation. I cannot save those who are already too far gone, I will only be risking my own time and energy attempting to save them, and so I am not opening the door. I radically don't try to save trans people. They are not the main characters in this story. They are a mixture of the already-fallen and the villains.
This expectation is stemming, I believe, from the fact that culturally, they are used to being centered. They further expect to have Christians trying to save them, because that's what Christians are trying to do. Christians want to find the fallen and pick them back up. And that’s so nice of them! They’ve certainly helped pick me up repeatedly when I needed some saving, like the time I was in Turkey trying to find a rabies vaccine and the person who helped me was a Christian missionary and complete stranger, who was there to be helpful to expatriates.
There’s plenty of those types in the GC sphere. But that’s simply not me. While I attended Lutheran school and consider myself Biblically literate, while I do try to be helpful in my own way, Christian evangelicism is very much a second language. My default spiritual operating system of Scientology (now obsolesced) is not as common as the Christian mindset, which I was not really exposed to until middle school.
Scientology has a diametrically opposed view of your role in other people's lives and the amount of effort you are expected to put forth to save the salvation-resistant and the help-phobic. You are here to do you, boo, and other people are either on board with that because they're your bros from the beforetimes when you were spaceghosts, or they'll get in your way because they're haters (SPs or “suppressive persons”) you should avoid so hard you minesweeper that shit and avoid their friends (PTS or “potential trouble sources”) too. That's it. That's my summary of Diabetics or whatever the Ron’s book was called. But that’s my starting point. So I am not here to be evangelical. I’m not here to save. I’m not attempting to extricate anyone from their own nightmarish and predictable existence. I’m here to learn, to know, and to speak to that, to those who want to hear and have ears to listen.
So I’m really not trying to “save” trans people. I'm not going to go over there and reason with them for their sake. I'm not their mom. I'm here to document the horrors for the benefit of the pretrans, the detrans, and the trans-enduring, as I've said from day 1. When I engage, it is in pursuit of that goal. It is to establish rapport, coax desired information, illustrate a logic tree I've already discerned, practice dialectics for myself, or for the propaganda value of the public exchange.
But saving them? They're already lost. They're already in the pit by choice or because their own parents threw them in. I cannot cool their burning tongue with a single drop from my smallest finger. I'm not Jesus nor Abraham. My powers are limited. They're cooked. Only they can get themselves out, and they will be badly burned if they manage that. I am still healing from my own time in the pit, having thrown myself in. No one got me out. Those who tried got hurt. I'm not going back in for them.
I’m not trying to be palatable so they’re coaxed away from the boyjuice. I’m trying to document their foolishness, their gullibility, how they were deceived, and the resulting misery, to prevent more people from being misled and harmed. I’m trying to inoculate the average person and be a resource for people who are already out. This project about trans people is actually not about trans people. The treacherous image is not a pipe either.
I’m more like the guy who took this photograph at the top, “The Vulture and the Little Girl,” and then walked away. Kevin Carter kept walking for four months before killing himself, with many attributing his actions to the psychological horror of what he had seen, which could not be unseen, and how he knew he had chosen not to help.
For me, I think he was already prone to those thoughts and behaviors, and that's perhaps why he was there documenting what he was documenting in the first place. Similarly, I am documenting the horrors that never cease, that I did not cause and cannot directly stop. Like him, I’m haunted by what I have seen when I could not or chose not to intervene.
But I have an ideology that protects me from guilt over other people’s personal consequences for other people’s choices. I am sharing some of that ideology with you now, in the hopes that you will all stay in the 59% even as you watch the horrors unfold on this blog. Sometimes, all you can do is survive and tell the story. Sometimes, saving yourself has to be enough.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
