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#I accidentally called myself a women I meant us as in women and queers.

remix-of-your-guts · 1 month

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insisting that you're 'literally trans' over and over sounds kind of like the terf line about how everyone's non binary, so given that and your post history it looks really suspicious

okay i legit can't tell if this is bait or something because?? what???? i said i was "literally trans" one time because someone asked if radfems reblogging my post meant i agreed with their beliefs and i chose to interpret their question in good faith so i gave a legit answer. i haven't bothered to respond to a single comment from obvious terfs because im not into giving them the time of day.

i'm not sure how me simply existing as a trans individual is agreeing with the argument that terfs make to try and erase the existence of us that "everyone is basically nonbinary because gender isn't psychological at all it's just what's in your pants" (im assuming that's the line you're talking abt and if not then idk what that is) and that's frankly a bizarre leap to make. especially because i don't even call myself nonbinary, im just a genderqueer (as in my gender is inseparable from my queerness) transsexual man.

and just what the hell is suspicious about my post history? i've been posting about trans rights and trans-inclusive feminism since i started this blog, though i can't guarantee every hot take i've had on incredibly niche intra-community discourse aligns with my current beliefs (which mostly boils down to "internet discourse is stupid" and idc)

i don't understand the phrasing here as though i'm fighting widespread accusations of transphobia or transmisogyny when this is literally the first comment i've ever gotten insinuating something like that??? of course that's not including the terfs saying "so close bestie" right before calling me a "retarded tra" but since when do we base our claims of who is and is not a terf on what the terfs themself say, instead of what the person in question has actually said/done? plus making fun of how im "close but missing the point" because i said that a trans woman may have a bit of internalized misogyny is hardly saying i clearly agree with everything they stand for (in fact it's fundamentally about the fact that i dont). if thats what you consider being claimed by terfs, and if being claimed by terfs is what you consider the deciding factor in whether or not someone is one, then basically every blogger who's ever mentioned general feminism, periods, or being a woman on this website would be a terf (even trans femmes cuz ive seen posts from them accidentally get passed around terf circles without them knowing who op is). especially every transmasc on this website would be a terf then considering that they're so bizarrely determined to get us to join them while being violently bigoted against us and dehumanizing us (obv not to the extent of trans women but still it's hardly an effective recruitment tactic) and allying with the people that explicitly want our extermination.

i'd once again like to remind everyone that all i did was point out a woman who happens to be trans accidentally veering into perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes (something that i will call out even quicker when cis women do it, which they do all the fucking time) in a way that made it clear it wasn't a big deal and expecting no one except my followers (which i'm pretty confident in saying none of whom are at least obvious terfs) to see. hopefully we can all agree that trans women are not immune to accidentally perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes- not because of their gender but in spite of it because all women can be misogynistic because MISOGYNY 👏 IS 👏 NOT 👏 STORED 👏 IN 👏 THE 👏 GENDER

and for the record even in the tags of the og post i was saying that it's really sucky that people totally are going to overreact to this and give dylan disproportionate hate because there 100% is a double standard in how society at large responds to these things, and that terfs are going to use it as "proof." but i don't think that just because accusations of misogyny are often weaponized against trans women we can never engage in good faith criticism of them??? in fact i think that makes it very important to help each other make sure there isn't any grain of truth terfs can latch onto (by which i mean being conscious of misogynistic patterns for everyone in our community, including anyone who considers themself an ally to trans people, not unfairly policing just trans women).

however obviously i regret making the post now since it clearly just encouraged the transmisogyny hate-train. and has caused my asks and notes to be flooded with transphobic bullshit directed at dylan, obviously, but also at myself. seriously, i've been deleting all the anons that are from terfs (like ive always done cuz they've targeted me before) but it's been some nasty shit. and it's really fucking annoying having to block every one that crawls over here to tell me why i'm apparently retarded for being trans and supporting my trans sisters. (sorry about the r slur- their words not mine)

okay done talking abt this forever now

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transmasc-wizard · 2 years

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queer terminology, the basics of the basics

So, i've noticed that a lot of posts about queer identity education start at things like demisexual and xenogender. And that's good! We should be teaching that. But when i was first figuring myself out, i had nothing. I did not know what a "lesbian" was. "gay" meant "stupid", according to my classmates. "LGBT" sounded like a bank name. I didn't even know the word "transgender". i was too scared to look it up; i didn't know what it was, and my experience was all negative, so i guessed it'd bring up something bad.

i spent at least six months on the internet cobbling together a mental glossary until i felt sure enough that this wasn't something terrible to actually look it up. And to this day, i'm so fucking bitter it took investigation and creative search terms and poking around buzzfeed. I know many people who've grown up in extremely conservative households. I had to teach my friend what "lesbian" meant, because to her, it was synonymous with "dirty sinner".

That's a long way to say this is a guide, for anybody that doesn't know what these 'obvious' words mean. Here you go.

(if your first reaction is to reply "this is stupid" or something like that, fuck off. here, we support people who haven't had the privilege of accessing queer education.) (also, if your knee-jerk reaction to a label is "thats fake, everyone feels that"... you're probably that label.)

lesbian: a woman who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to other women.

gay: a man who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to other men. (lesbians also often call themselves gay, as do many people who are attracted to multiple genders.)

bi: a person who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to multiple genders. (sexually is bisexual, romantically is biromantic. if you're both, typically you go by bisexual.)

trans/transgender: a person who's gender in their head is different from the sex of their body. Trans men/boys are people assigned female at birth who's gender is male. trans girls/trans women are people assigned male at birth who's gender is female.

cis/cisgender: not trans. if you're a cis person, your gender in your head is the same as the sex of your body. Most people are cis.

queer: a catch-all term for a person who is LGBTQA+ in some way.

cishet: a catch-all term for a person who is not LGBTQA+. (e.g. they are heteroromantic, heterosexual, cis, and alloromantic allosexual.)

straight/hetero: a person who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to the opposite binary gender. (you can be heterosexual, heteroromantic, or both.) Most people are straight.

asexual/ace: a person who does not feel sexual attraction. they may or may not also be aromantic.

aromantic/aro: a person who does not feel romantic attraction. they may or may not also be asexual.

aromantic asexual/aroace: a person who is both aro and ace (me!).

allo: a person who is not asexual or is not aromantic. (You can be ace and alloromantic or aro and allosexual.)

LGBTQA+: the acronym "lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, asexual/aromantic, and more".

pan: like bi, pan people are sexually and/or romantically attracted to multiple genders. Specifically, all of them, and usually pan people don't have a preference. (You can be pansexual, panromantic, or both.)

nonbinary/genderqueer: some people do not feel like they are either binary gender. They may feel they switch genders, have no gender, are more than one gender, or are only partly a gender. this is called nonbinary because you are not in the gender binary (100% man or 100% woman), or genderqueer because your gender is queered. (I am a genderqueer guy; i feel sort of, but not completely, like a man.)

(note: some nonbinary people call themselves trans, some don't. I personally do, but it varies.)

if anyone has questions or wants me to elaborate, just ask. i promise your questions are important, i promise there are no stupid questions, i promise i will not get angry (even if you accidentally say something offensive! i used to do that all the time), and i promise i will treat your question with care and importance.

Additionally, if you're wondering about another term or experience you saw talked about elsewhere and want to ask, do! I'm always happy to help.

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shanie-the-toyaddict · 4 years

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Shanie’s Dream Fic: A Masterpost

The following is a Masterpost of all my various finished, started, and sketched out dream stories. They are listed here as the dreams originally were, not as the stories the dreams became. Listings are by Saga/Series, Story Title, and Month/Year of original dream. Also listed are the fandoms of the dreams and any specific warnings the fics might carry. For the record, this isn’t a post really for anyone on here. It’s mostly for my own records. I do have a copy on my cloud storage but I’m putting it here as well on the off chance anyone is curious. BTW: I’m putting this here so that I don’t have to list it every time. As far as the WWE dreams go. Absolutely NONE of them are Kayfabe compliant. That’s the problem with not watching the shows regularly. I don’t dream about the TV side of it often. The Zowens dream is close though. It’s sort of a hybrid. The rest? Well, all of them are some level of NKC, but some are not only non-kayfabe, they are straight up AU. BTW2: In every single one of these stories involving me I am some manner of queer. I’m pretty sure in all but maybe one or two. I’m either wlw, ace, or both. NOT ONE of the first person dreams contains romance between me and another character. The best you get is a single platonic fake-relationship story. (That one did have a smut scene in it but it isn’t romantic.)

Anyway, list behind the cut!

ADVENTURES IN DREAMLAND Master Post

SAGA A Family Beyond Blood

Part 1 Darkness Fallen (August 2019) I find myself trapped in a world where I died as a child. Now as a spirit I must find a way to restore the universe to it’s proper order. (Somehow my young death caused the entire universe to splinter) *McMahon Family and MCU Dream* Part 2 Death and Life on Planet Earth (August 2019)

Having saved the universe but not ourselves, I vow to do whatever it takes to return Shane to his rightful place with his family. *McMahon Family and MCU Dream*

Part 3 A World Restored to Fall (August 2019)

The universe has been reset again, and I have been returned to my proper timeline. Or have I? There’re odd happenings in a local bookshop and it’s up to me to figure out how to stop them *Original Dream Featuring IRL People*

Part 4 World War Winter (August 2019)

Nuclear Holocaust has occurred. The world is at war with the machines. As a soldier in the CAMP forces, I must leave everything I know behind and face down the android army. But, maybe there’s a familiar face or two in CAMP after all... *McMahon Family Dream* *VIOLENT*

Part 5 Of Queens and Kingdoms (August 2019)

The world is reset. AGAIN. This time, it’s me, Shane and Marissa in a new land where the middle ages and modern times are happening simultaneously and women are the dominant gender. And, somehow, I’m the bloody queen. *McMahon Family and WWE Universe Dream*

Part 6 Titans Reign (August 2019)

Having ascended to the throne and filling the royal court with WWE superstars, I must now find a way to rule over a land I barely know. Meanwhile, a sinister plot is brewing to put the patriarchy back in power. *McMahon Family and WWE Universe Dream*

SAGA That’s What Friends Are For

Part 1 Death of a Fangirl (and Birth of a Friend) (October 2019) [Only Published Story on List]

I find myself being given the chance to meet Shane. Unfortunately, my mental illness turns the dream into a nightmare and my life unravels. But don’t worry. Shane will save the day. He always does. *Shane O Mac Dream*

Part 2 With A Song In Her Heart (October 2019)

Shane has been ignoring my texts, so I hunt him down. My search finds me at a pride festival where a spontaneous song catches his attention a little too well. *Shane O Mac Dream*

Part 3 One Last Birthday to Celebrate (November 2019)

It’s Christmastime in Squirrel Hill. For some dumb reason, Shane McMahon has decided to visit me the day before his birthday. Naturally I surprise him with a present. The other surprise (getting caught in a domestic dispute) is far less pleasant. *Shane O Mac Dream* *VIOLENT*

Part 4 The Pink Rose (Not a Dream)

I survived the shooting. Waking up in a hospital, I find my mother and a room full of flowers from the WWE Superstars. But one flower, a lone pink rose, is unlabeled. Wanna take a wild guess who sent that one? *WWE Universe Story NOT Based on A Dream*

Part 5 Dreams and Demons (December 2019)

So, it seems that watching your friend nearly die in a hail of bullets isn’t the best for your mental health. At WrestleMania 37, Shane is presented with a choice. Me, or TV. Of course he chooses me, this is my dream, what other choice would there be? *WWE Universe Dream*

[Are you starting to see why I never publish any of these. They are painfully bad self inserts and woefully self-indulgent. But they are also therapy, hence the writing]

SERIES Trippy Shorts

Story 1 A Little Fall of Acid Rain (August 2019)

The world is ending – but only in NYC. I’m there. So are the McMahons. Destruction and danger abound. *McMahon Family Dream*

Story 2 I Know Who I Am (September 2019)

All of my favorites from TV, movies, music, and wrestling are turning up murdered. Each time, a cryptic message is left behind, written in blood. Can I figure out the connection before everyone I like is killed? *General Pop Culture Dream* *EXTREMELY VIOLENT AND DISTURBING*

Story 3 Fixed Points and Fixed Pairings [An Unfinished Symphony] (September 2019)

One night, outside the bar, I am approached by an older version of myself. She brings a time machine and a mission – go back to the attitude era and change time so Shane remains the heir apparent. But some people are just meant to be together, and others just refuse to listen – even to an angel from the future. *WWE Universe Dream*

Story 4 A Song of Summer [A Snapshot] (October 2019)

As an Agent of SHIELD, it doesn’t take a genius to see that Black Widow and Hawkeye are in love. So, through the power of music, I decide to try and hook them up. *MCU Dream*

Story 5 Journeys Beginning [A Snapshot] (December 2019)

One day at school, I find myself amid an alien incursion. But don’t worry, the Doctor is on the case. Also, Shane is involved because of course he is. *Shane O Mac and Doctor Who Dream*

Story 6 Arson, Murder, and Revolution (January 2020)

At a Hollywood LGBTQ party, I find myself caught in a plot by the Trump administration to commit mass murder. When it goes awry, revolution stirs and it’s up to me and several other progressive celebrities to light the fuse *General Pop Culture Dream* *VIOLENT*

[See, they aren’t all about Shane. Just... most of them]

STAND ALONE STORIES

Once Upon a Dream (August 2019)

I black out drunk in an alley one night and awake to find myself in a dream. It’s 1990 and I’m somehow a middle-aged black woman. Also sharing the dream is a young and angry Shane McMahon. Together we use the circumstances of the dream to fuck shit up for the NYPD. *Shane O Mac Dream* *VIOLENT*

The Many Deaths of a Tabhead (August 2019)

Five years after getting hooked on a new drug called Tabs, I find myself in an endless loop of getting murdered. The only way out is to survive. Too bad I have no memory, and everyone wants me dead *Original Story Featuring IRL People* *VIOLENT AND DISTURBING*

Champion of the Faerie Queen (December 2019)

Did you know that Marissa McMahon is the Faerie Queen and Shane is her consort? Neither did I. And, it seems, when war comes a calling, it’s up to me to save the McMahons and the country. But I’ve got superpowers now, so that helps. *McMahon Family, MCU, and DC Universe Dream*

To Earthquakes, Lovers, and Newfound Friends (May 2020)

In lovely SoCal, I’m watching a movie when an earthquake strikes. I soon find myself both blind and badly burned. The only hope I have to survive is a certain pair of lovers who just happen to be in the area for some R&R. *Zowens Dream*

Penny and Kicks vs The World (June 2020)

As a longtime WWE employee, I’ve been best friends with Shane for years. But in the fallout of Coronavirus, the public is looking for a scapegoat. Vince is more than happy to offer up my father. Now, the entire wrestling world is in turmoil and Shane and I are just trying to weather the storm. *WWE Universe Dream* *VIOLENT*

Virginia Gothic (October 2019)

In a world where my highschool sweetheart and I never broke up, we must forge a path on our own through hardship and rejection. But what is the meaning of the mysterious Jesus statue? And why is Bacchus being so damn shifty? *Original Dream Featuring IRL People*

Uzil (January 2020)

An mystical being from the horsehead nebula takes up residence in a little boy’s guinea pig. The miracles come quickly and soon they are inseparable. *Original Third Person Dream* (I wasn’t in this one)

The E-Manual (February 2020)

The end of days is drawing near. I have been chosen as a prophet of the end times by the Almighty himself. I must go out into the world armed with only scripture and a mystical magazine, trying to convert as many people as possible before time runs out. *A Mostly Original Dream* (Shane’s in the last two pages)

Seraphina and the Seven Wishes (April 2020)

The world is a video game and the McMahon’s are the Addams family. It only gets weirder from there. *McMahon Family Dream*

A Matter of Science (And Opinion) (May 2020)

I accidentally set fire to my apartment during a spell. I’m promptly arrested and call The Doctor as my defense. Sadly, the call is rerouted to Stormcage and SpongeBob SquarePants ends up on the case instead. This one is every bit as absurd as it sounds. *Doctor Who and SpongeBob SquarePants Dream*

A Revolution In This Century (Enter Me) (November 2019) The year is 2027. Climate Change has decimated the globe and revolution has reduced the Ruling Elite to food reserves. However, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and soon the new ruling poor become as ruthless as the 1% had been. In this horrible dystopia, I am a powerful government official who has taken on the McMahons as consorts for the sole purpose of saving their skins. *McMahon Family Dream* *VIOLENT, DISTURBING, AND A BIT SMUTTY*

Crystal Vision – A Dozen Birthdays (December 2019)

After showing kindness to an enchantress, I am given my hearts greatest desire – a place in Shane’s life. I am sent back in time to 2005 as a WWE Makeup tech and given 12 years in the life of my childhood heroes. But a lot happened in the WWE from 2005 to 2017 and not all of it good. How much can and do I dare change? *WWE Universe Dream* *Painfully NKC. Disturbing subject matter involved because 2007 is a thing.*

Dr. Slime and the Wondernerds (August 2019)

Three high school nerds find themselves in possession of a mysterious green substance. When it explodes during an experiment, they find they have been given superpowers. However, this is the real world and super-powered “freaks” get picked apart, not celebrated. Can the teens resist using their powers? *Original Third Person Dream* (I’m not in this one)

Planeswalking Like A Grecian (October 2019)

After death, Xena finds herself on the Astral Plane. Promptly running into Joxer, they must find a way to survive the dangers of the afterlife. But don’t worry. Gabrielle has a plan. *Xenaverse Dream* (I’m not in this one)

The Foresight Curse (June 2020)

The problem with knowing the future is that you usually don’t have the ability to change it. So when Radar O’Reilly realizes Henry’s fate the day before it happens, he has to spend the next day trying to drown out the feelings of dread and sorrow, if only for the Colonel’s sake. Funny thing though, sometimes fate takes a left turn and you get a second chance to say goodbye. *M*A*S*H Universe Dream* (I’m not in this one) Vampires, Wraiths, and Shades, Oh My! (December 2019)

In the middle ages, I am orphaned at a very young age by vampires and taken in by Vampire Hunters (AU Shane and Stephanie). Now a teenager, I fight alongside them to protect the world from the dangers of the night. *McMahon Family Vampire AU Dream*

WHEW! I’m pretty sure that’s all of them! I have so dang many dreams it’s hard to keep track of them all! Anyway, out of all of these, only a handful are finished, ONE is published (Death of a Fangirl) and a ton of them aren’t far past the sketch stage. So, this is my list. Every story on here I at least have sketched out. I doubt I will ever even bother writing many of these, but the intent is present.

#Shanie's Dream Fic Masterpost

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poison-prayer · 4 years

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Restructuring New Eden Teachings

Okay! I have had enough of the Catholic church so it’s time for some major overhaul of Daniel’s religion. Rather than preaching New Eden Catholicism, Daniel’s doctrine is being changed to New Eden Baptism.

Daniel’s teachings have always been closer to Baptism than Catholicism, because I, as a person, cannot bring myself to act like Catholic values are Normal And Okay! I’ve also been calling Daniel a Pastor since the beginning of this blog, which is incorrect for the Catholic church, in which he would be a Priest, so that’s one less thing I have to think about.

Since the conception of this blog I’ve strived to write Daniel as realistically as I can, relying on months of research regarding the operation of cults, poisons, manipulation, and abuse. One thing that always eluded me, however, was the accuracy of Daniel’s religion in accordance with the Catechism. This change, allowing Daniel’s beliefs to align more with his proposed religion, is meant to rectify that.

Priesthood, Celibacy, and Marriage: Because Priesthood involves the vow of celibacy and the inability for Priests to marry and have a family, it would be literally impossible for generations of Bakers to have led their church - there would be no family line, and no Daniel (which, as you can imagine, would be a problem.) In addition to this, Daniel himself would have taken a vow of celibacy upon committing himself to pastoral duties, and ultimately would have to choose between his position in the church (which, as a cult leader and alleged prophet, he is unable to give up without abandoning the church all together) or the religious and moral and religious implications of breaking his vows to pursue marriage and the possibility of a family, which is ultimately something he wants.

Family Issues: The church holds the belief of the goodness of familial hierarchy and that the woman should be under the authority of her husband, as the husband is under the authority of the church, and mankind is under the authority of Christ. This is not to say that women are inferior to the husband, but that she should look to him first and foremost for guidance and love and safety - and in the reciprocal, that he should look to her for compassion, understanding, and support, effectively creating a balance of partnership. In the matter of same-sex marriages, there is no patriarchal authority, and they should look to the church for ultimate guidance and each other for the support and compassion that should be inherent in any healthy relationship. This does not, however, mean that a woman is under subjugation by her husband, or must mold herself to traditional gender roles. It’s believed that a woman can both devote herself to her husband and maintain a sense of independence.

New Eden Baptism strongly maintains the right to bodily autonomy. The husband being the head of the Familial Hierarchy does not supercede a woman’s bodily autonomy. This includes matters of abortion - though support and resources related to childbirth are offered first and foremost in matters of accidental, consensual conception.

Contraceptives aren’t considered sinful, and are considered a deeply personal decision to be made by a couple for whom children would be a possibility otherwise.

Infertility or Impotence, or any complications that prevent a rightfully married couple from having children, is not sinful and will not invalidate a marriage in the eyes of the church.

Adultery and other forms of spousal abuse is a grave offense and can only be forgiven by the wronged spouse. Counseling will be offered in an attempt to repair a marriage, but annulment and divorce is considered an option in which one spouse is the victim of adultery or abuse in a marriage.

Queer Issues: Baptism is much more inclusive and accepting of queer people and, specifically, same-sex marriage. In Catholicism, no matter how nice someone is about it, they still consider it a sin, and any union between same-sex partners is considered invalid and non-sacramental. Within the baptist denomination of New Eden, same-sex marriage is considered valid so long as the requirements of a valid marriage are met. Marriage within the baptist church is not considered a sacrament. Daniel, being bisexual, refuses to perpetuate that doctrine that refuses validity to same-sex marriage. His father though, despite not being Catholic in this scenario, is still a really terrible person and homophobic in his doctrine - also which Daniel refuses to perpetuate, and thus is one of the reasons he left the church his family has led for generations. That part doesn’t really change all that much.

Baptism: Baptism is done by full immersion in the Baptist church, rather than by sprinkling or pouring water. Baptism is done upon conversion to the church for adults, and confirmation for children born or brought into the church once they can understand the importance and true meaning of religion and God’s grace. This refers to genuine baptism and excludes Daniel’s use of “baptism” as a mechanism of control.

Church Teachings: New Eden Baptism does not subscribe to the One True Religion ideals that the Catholic church does. Community with other denominations, and the idea that all Christians who believe that Christ is the savior and give themselves to his salvation are saved - rather than the Catholic idea that only those within the Catholic church are worthy of salvation. The church does, however, teach that New Eden Baptism is the only correct religion, thus dissuading members to seek religious fulfillment elsewhere since it is still a cult.

Daniel’s church, unlike the Catholic church, is an independently governed body. There is no religious government like the vatican. Daniel is the ultimate authority in his church and teachings. He is the one and only prophet of New Eden Baptism and his word is law in the doctrine.

New Eden Baptism believes that the bible is the final authority on the teachings and history of Christianity. It is an honest account of humanity and our relationship to God and faith, but should be interpreted through the lense of the limits of human understanding and literary tools such as allegory, hyperbole, and metaphor.

#About Daniel #About the church #god this took me ALL NIGHT #but........ i think it was worth it #im happy with this #and i NEVER HAVE TO READ ABOUT CATHOLICISM AGAIN!!!!

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lachryphage · 5 years

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heh. I feel like it’s been a while since I posted something super long and personal so I guess it’s due time, eh? a lot of that is because I know that ppl read these, and like I’m not asking you to NOT read them -- putting words into a semi-public space is actually a KEY component of the catharsis otherwise I’d just write this shit in a journal but... idk. the more someone knows me the more I feel as though I should be keeping myself secret. that’s a whole other casket of worms tho, today we’re talking about gender and sexuality. it is pride month, after all.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about not only my own identity, but also the space I have (and haven’t) occupied in the queer “community.”

Maybe, in a different life, in a more accepting world, or a different body, maybe I would identify as a gay man.

Now there’s A LOT of qualifiers on that statement, which is why I haven’t really said it before. I mean, I don’t really feel like a Man, and I am certainly very attracted to women, to all genders, so being neither a man nor exclusively attracted to men -- well then how could I ever be a gay man? Those are, however, not the reasons I’ll likely never identify as a gay man.

So what’s making me say this in the first place?

Before I really get into the meat of this I have to say that so much of what I’m exploring here rides the line of “””problematique””” which is a huge reason why I keep avoiding this conversation -- even when the conversation is only with myself. But so much of my identity has always been “problematic.” Ha. I’m never what people want of me. I’m queer and I’m trans and I’m kinky as hell and I don’t hate my abuser and I don’t give a SHIT about what words people use I prefer to withhold judgement even in situations I understand and doesn’t that just make you HATE me :)))))) and if it doesn’t I guarantee you there’s a part of me that makes you uncomfortable but that isn’t the point here, so once again, we’ll unpack that Pandora’s box another day.

So with those disclaimers...

The people I identified with growing up were always people who 1) I interpreted as men and 2) were very “weird” -- which usually but not always meant queer. As a child I didn’t often understand when jokes were supposed to be mean. I didn’t see “men in dresses” jokes as mean because I always saw men who were having fun and being cool and I wanted to be just like them! I wanted to be like blatantly gay men, I wanted to be like men who were made fun of for being “accidentally” gay or were queer coded in a way that was meant to be belittling... bad rep didn’t hurt me. Because I’m not the identity those things are meant to harm, I’m not a trans woman. I’m not even, really, a gay man. At least not a cis one. And in general, as a child I just didn’t get when things were meant to be hurtful. I saw people having fun and I wanted to be like them.

(To kind of explain the problematic gender fuckery going on here I’ll go through one scenario so that MAYBE the intricacies are somewhat clearer: I often identified with characters that were SUPPOSED to be trans women -- superficially this seems bad because I am by no stretch of the imagination a trans women. But these characters weren’t trans women, they were how cisheteronormative society sees trans women: as men who are defying sexual and gender norms -- which is also bad because that’s not what trans women are. But the mockery went right over my head so what I was seeing in these characters were what cisheteronomative society sees (men breaking norms) without the judgement and bad connotations and THAT is what I identified with/admired. Is that still problematic of me? Most likely, but I’m fucking tired and this isn’t the point.)

So I found myself feeling more comfortable around boys and men (actually, once again, there’s a lot more than just sexuality and gender going on here but... come other time) and I especially felt comfortable around gay guys. Well. Sort of. While I was feeling harmony and understanding, they were rejecting me. You see, cis gay guys delight in talking about how disgusting “women’s” bodies are. Everything my body has, they hate. And I get it, it’s horribly traumatic to have something you don’t want constantly shoved down your throat by society. Trust me, I get it.

This happened again and again. I’d find maybe someone my age, or some older guys to look up to, that were gay and I’d finally start feeling comfortable and then suddenly I was hearing about how repulsive my body was. Even if I wasn’t trans, that’s pretty fucking damaging to hear in this stupid patriarchal society. Bodies with breasts and vaginas are already seen as lesser is it really necessary to say those things right in front of, right to someone with that kind of body? but I’m not cis. I get that extra layer of disconnect from my body called dysphoria and let me tell you that beast of a feeling really doesn’t need more fuel to feed my hatred of myself.

I know I’m wordy so let me simplify that. I identified with and felt comfortable around gay men more than any other type of person I had met at the time. And they told me I was disgusting.

It hurts. And I am angry. I see gay men and the culture they’ve created for themselves and even though it’s horribly cis and white and fatphobic there’s still so much of it that calls to me. And every time it’s a goddamn slap in the face because I know they’d never want me.

It doesn’t matter if I was 100% certain of my identity as a Man and that I only liked Men. They wouldn’t want me. It wouldn’t matter if I started T, if I got top AND bottom surgery, I’d never get to be one of them. And so you know what? Even if I decided all of those things about me, I will never identify as a gay man.

I know they’re not all like that. Not all cis people, not all men :)

I desperately need to find more trans people to hang out with, because no matter how much I may have ever identified with gay men, they don’t want me and they don’t fucking deserve me.

That’s why, in different life, in a more accepting world, with a different body, I could identify as a gay man. But here and now, I never will.

#i'm 98% certain this doesn't make any sense #i'm super emotional and hurt and myfingers hurt from my knuckles subluxing from typing too much and i think i have a fever #personal shit #it's a long one folks #i just am not over it #i want to cry #nobody fucking wants me #everbody thinks i'm gross and you know what they're right and so what #i'm disgusting and i love it fuck you #happy pride

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pissedofflesbian-blog · 7 years

Text

In Response To “Queer” Discourse: Not Using a Slur To Refer To Ourselves Isn’t a Privilege

So tonight I read this post and I am completely shocked. I tried to reply on the post, but Tumblr fucked up, which is a blessing because I am able to write this post in a more clear and coherent manner.

What this post will be is a breakdown of the issues I commonly see discourse about reclaiming the word “queer”, specifically amongst pro-”queer” people. I believe that these arguments often make a few very big mistakes, and I’m here to correct them.

I don’t expect anyone to read the whole thing, but if you’re going to reply to this, you better have read it. And while I am trying to write in the most “professional” manner, I’m just an angry girl at a computer late at night, so if I make any mistakes, just think about what I probably meant and go with that, because this bitch is tired.

1) The most important thing to remember about people who refuse to reclaim the word “queer” is that there is a reason for this.

First of all, it is still commonly used as a slur in MANY places.

Second, the word originally has very negative definitions. Weird, strange, odd, spoiled, sick. This is why it was used as a slur in the first place.

Third, countless people in our community (even the young ones) have directly experienced violence involving this word.

Let’s use my personal history with this word as an example. I accidentally came out when I was 11, and a family member verbally abused me for years using this word. When I got older and tried to defend myself, he physically attacked me. I have PTSD because of this, and being directly referred to a “queer” or being called “a queer” can and has triggered flashbacks of this event.

I am just one of many with a story like this.

2) They imply or state that cis lesbians and gay men have it easier than or are privileged over cis bisexuals.

This is 100% false. It completely ignores the complex issues that both gay and bisexual people face.

Bisexual people face a specific struggle for not only being attracted to the same gender, but being attracted to multiple genders.

Gay people face a specific struggle for not only being attracted to the same gender, but being attracted to the same gender to the exclusion of others.

A quick way to demonstrate this is a look at how people often react to bi and gay people coming out. Bi people hear a lot of, “pick a side”, “you’re selfish”, “you’re confused”. Gay people hear, “but if you’ve never been with the opposite gender how do you know?”, “you’re being close-minded for only being with one gender”*, and things like that. We both get the standard, “oh that’s gross”, “oh you’re a sinner” bullshit. (*Yes gay people do get told that.).

There are specific struggles for being bisexual and being gay, and instead of making shit up, we should be supporting each other for the issues the others face, and supporting each other for our shared experiences.

2.5 A lot of people seem to think that being a gay man and being a lesbian are the same.

They are not. Lesbians have a very specific struggle as being: a) women, b) attracted to women, and c) not attracted to men. Our position as women who are not interested in men means we face a different sort of violence and oppression as gay men. Yes, we have many shared experiences, but we are not the same.

3) They assume that all people who are uncomfortable with the word are “privileged” cis gays and bisexuals, and that everyone who reclaims it is less privileged and has a more complicated identity.

It’s worth again noting that I am writing this in direct response to another post. Here are some quotes from OP and a commenter:

“Saying “I’m gay/lesbian/bi” is pretty simple. Just about everyone knows what you mean, and you quickly establish yourself as a member of a community. Saying “I’m a trans nonbinary bi woman who’s celibate due to dysphoria and possibly on the ace spectrum”… not so much. You’re lucky to find anyone who understands even half of that, and explaining it requires revealing a ton of personal information. The appeal of “queer” is being able to identify yourself without profiling yourself. It’s welcoming and functional terminology to those who do not have the luxury of simplified language and occupy complicated identities. *That’s* why people use it - there are currently not alternatives to express the same sentiment.”

and

“There’s another dimension that always, always gets overlooked in contemporary discussions about the word “queer:” class. The last paragraph here reminds me of a old quote: “rich lesbians are ‘sapphic,’ poor lesbians are ‘dykes’.” Bourgeois gays and lesbians already had “the luxury of language” to describe themselves - normalized through struggle, thanks to groups like the Gay Liberation Front. Everyone else, from poor gays and lesbians to bi and trans people and so on, had no such language. These people were the ones for whom social/economic assimilation was not an option.”

I do understand, and almost completely agree with OP. The commenter... not so much.

First of all, almost everyone I have met in real life spaces who uses the word queer is a cis gay or bisexual person. I’m not saying that my experience is universal, I’m just making an observation. Similarly, I have met many people with more complicated identities (bi trans people, ace gay men, nonbinary people) who do not use the word. And, I’m an ace lesbian... people find that hard to understand. Doesn’t mean I want to use that word.

Second... Oh lord. The implication that if you are a gay or lesbian who does not use the q word, you are probably upper class. This is just wrong. I don’t know how to else to state it. Maybe it’s right somewhere, but I can guarantee it’s wrong for a majority of places in the world.

First of all, I am a lesbian who is by no means rich or bourgeois. I am a poor girl who has struggled her entire life and lived in very poor neighbourhoods. Off the top of my head, I can think of a bisexual women, a gay man, and a trans gay man I know from similar areas that do not use the word queer.

Second, many of cis gay and bisexual people I’ve met who use the word queer are ones who went to private schools, are supported by their parents, and are otherwise upper to upper middle class.

Then there’s the implication that rich communities are more educated or accepting of our identities... Many upper class families are incredibly religious. Many upper class families are insistent on “traditional families”. These families often cut off their children who come out, and this can force their children into... guess what... the poor classes where social assimilation is apparently so much harder (but where they often find acceptance, because many lower class families are accepting and loving and educated.) I just don’t think that kind of distinction should be made when we’re talking about this word.

4) We’re not taking anything away from you while asking for you to keep your language respectful.

Time and time again, I see people acting as though those who do not use the q word are somehow oppressing them.

Nobody is saying that you shouldn’t use it for yourself. Nobody is saying that you can’t use it in your groups.

We are simply asking that you do not refer to us as “queer”. This means not directly calling us queer, and not referring to us as a part of the “queer community”. Is our comfort in our own spaces worth less than you saving a few syllables? Is our comfort worth less than a word?

And people who say queer is a slur? Say that because it is. It was, and it still is. Don’t go on a huge rant about how we’re calling your identity a slur, or we’re forcing you to feel oppressed by it, or whatever. The whole point of reclaiming a slur is that... it IS a slur. When you use that word to refer to yourselves, you cannot ignore the history associated with it. The fact that many ID with it in spite of and BECAUSE it is a slur. They’re making it there’s. That’s what reclamation is. That’s where the power comes from. Don’t go tell me that me saying it’s a slur is incorrect. That’s just ignorant.

In summary: Stop making shit up and over-thinking the issue surrounding this word. Stop acting like people who don’t use the q slur are privileged. We don’t avoid it because of our class or our specific labels. We avoid it because it does NOT empower us like it does you. We avoid it because many of us have trauma associated with it. My PTSD isn’t a privileged, you idiots.

Go learn how to think critically and stop making up bullshit discourse and bringing other issues into this discussion because you lack the respect to be sensitive when referring to others in this community.

#q slur #queer #queer discourse #lgbt #lgbtqia #lgbtq #lgbtpn #my post #i'm pissed

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eevachu · 7 years

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There once was a girl called kate/most think she’s very great/some people are wrong/They’ve been bad for very long/for their standards no person can abate

EDIT: The person who sent this came forward and clarified that this ask was meant to poke fun at anti-Kate trolls, not Kate fans. I misinterpreted it and flew wildly off the rails (as I am oft want to do lol). The person who sent this couldn’t have known the depths to which I have grieved over this issue as of late, so do not fault them for it. They wanted to send me a joke and I took it the wrong way (ah the similarities here to Kate’s comedy).

I appreciate someone trying to make me laugh. I don’t really appreciate further spreading this drama, but people are entitled to their opinions, so they are also entitled to the consequences of those opinions. I will say, however, I don’t really like comedy that punches down (accidentally or not), because I think many of the people, who, wrongfully justified and misinformed about her or not, are doing it out of a genuine desire to help trans people. I think the puritanical environment that spaces like tumblr create for this type of discussion creates a toxic mindset that looks ridiculous compared to a properly moderated formal debate environment.

I’m keeping the full version under the cut, because they are things that should be said and I am so very tired of seeing people drag her name through the mud based on hearsay. You may use the examples I’ve provided to draw your own conclusions on the matter, as I have drawn mine. I’ve included some footnotes and clarifications. Skip down to the bolded paragraph above the video to avoid the majority of my emotional outburst.

Thank you for sending needless and harmful negativity into my inbox, I really wish you had instead put your time towards a positive goal like volunteering at an animal shelter, working to raise awareness over the plight of indigenous people in Canada or even just telling someone their hair looks nice today. (The thank you was sarcastic, in case that wasn’t clear.) Or hey, maybe you could have just said, “I know you love Kate, but here’s some problematic things she’s done you should be aware of.” Not write a patronizing little ditty. Catch more flies with honey than with open condescension and all that?

Since you seem like one of those sick people that get off to seeing people feel bad and subscribe to tumblr’s toxic black and white morality and witch hunt culture, here is what you accomplished with this ask:

You’ve made me upset, and I’m sure that was your goal. Congrats. I am an adult woman of 25 and I am crying now because of how upset this made me. This is nothing special, I am weepy person, so don’t pat yourself on the back. I tend to care too much and feel too freely; but anon, did you want me to cry? Because here you are. I am crying. Trembling a little too. You getting your rocks off to this? Happy to be of service then.

My being upset has triggered my anxiety over the issue of my admiration of Kate as an openly lesbian comedian versus the occasional problematic content of her comedy. I think about it a lot, because I am a critical person. The anxiety is going to affect me for several days. Right now I’m nauseous. I will now sleep poorly because of it. I will get less work done because of it. I will be in a foul mood for a week, which affects the people around me. I may self-medicate with alcohol or take what I like to call “a gravol nap”. I will lose money because of lost productivity. So you’ve lost me money anon, I’m sure you enjoy that. What is it about suffering that gives you your jollies, anon?

I work freelance, and you’ve interrupted my work day, because I cannot let this stew, so I have to take time out of my day to write out my thoughts as a reply you probably won’t see and take other measures for my own well-being. This really isn’t for you anon, this has been stewing in me for months and this is the last straw.

So here under the cut are my full thoughts on Kate Mc /.Kinnon Berth/ old, they will be rambly as, hey look, I’m dissociating a little (how fun):

Did you know from 2007-2010* Kate played a problematic character called Fitzwillia m that portrayed a dmab character that wanted a vagina? I’m sure you did. Anon, have you actually watched the Fitzwillia m skits? Here’s a link to all of them:

vimeo

Watched them? Opinions? I want your real opinions on them, not just what the witch-hunters have told you to think. You’re probably a smart person, you can make up your own mind.

They’re in poor taste certainly, but a lot of comedy is. I think in the grand scheme of life, in the grand scheme of all human suffering and portrayals of queer characters, Fitzwillia m isn’t the worst. Certainly not great and certainly transmisogynistic, but like… watch a lot of TV from this time, this is practically progressive.

Is Kate maybe attached to this character because so many people loved them, approved of this character, and brought this character back for 3 seasons? That sometimes you do bad things because you don’t know they’re bad or that you do, but damn if you don’t need the money? That sometimes you’re ill-informed about something? That to create a character is to send part of yourself out into the world, and you always will love them even when you shouldn’t? That she hasn’t addressed it because to do so would be a PR nightmare for her publicist? That she likely doesn’t know this is even an issue because she’s not on social media? Probably. I’ve made some terrible characters, who did much worse things, who I am lucky to let die on paper stuffed in a folder where no one can see them. She was 22* when she made this character, in a completely different cultural climate than in 2017. Does it make it right that a whole team of people approved this character out into the world? Not to me. However, I don’t have the right to decide anything about the trans-related nature of Fitzwillia m as a cis person, but context is always important to me.When I was looking for a compilation video, I found trans people who genuinely enjoyed this character. I know I love some absolutely problematic gay characters.

Let’s put this into MY context anon, 2010 is when I met my first ever trans person. Ever. I was 18 and in college. I think it took me like… 2 years to figure out what trans actually was in a healthy way that wasn’t tainted by my culturally ingrained transphobia. I didn’t know dick all about social justice or politics or the queer community. I thought I was maybe bisexual. I thought I knew everything. By coincidence, I’m actually going through my blog today and clearing out posts from that time because they’re terrible, because I was terrible. I’ve changed so much from then, I don’t even recognize this person on this very blog. I’m not famous and those words are entirely mine, so I lose nothing by saying I’m wrong for what I said. Kate could lose jobs and colleagues and friends for addressing her past in a similar manner. She worked collaboratively on those works and people will take offence at her backtracking. It’s all very damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Is it right? Probably not, but it’s understandable. She works for Saturday Night Live, a place where they are constantly making things like:

youtube

That was made in 2015 and this is very mild. In 2015, I had a more senior coworker make a joke about how a couple we could see in the building across from us were “swapping their gay AIDs blood.” I think that’s a much worse “joke” than anything on SNL. I didn’t tell HR because I was afraid to lose my job, as shitty as it was. She wasn’t exactly in a position of power when these things were made, and she isn’t really in a place to speak out against them now. She’s just now hitting her stride. If I can’t stand up in my own workplace, I can’t fault her for not standing up in hers.

Did she joke about never seeing a penis in an interview? Yes. Did I make the same type of jokes until someone came along to tell me what was wrong with it in a nice way? YEP.**

Does she even know it’s an issue is another thing. She doesn’t use social media, certainly not tumblr. I learned basically all I know about the queer community from tumblr. I have no idea where I’d be without it; probably still making transphobic gold star lesbian jokes.

Anon, I’ve read her receipts. I always do. I know what I’m doing by supporting her is a bit problematic, but so are most of the things I do in my life. I eat meat from factory farms. I have a pedigree dog. I live on unceded First Nation’s land. I benefit from systematic racism. I don’t know what the hell my mutual funds are actually invested in. I’ve made rape jokes and said r*tarded. I was a schoolyard bully redirecting my anger onto other because of my home life. I’ve ruined people’s lives by things I’ve said. I have been a truly godawful person.

Here’s why I still love Kate, if always cautiously and never uncritically: from 2014-2015, I had a mental breakdown, until 2016 I lived in this sort of haze. I remember wanting to die a lot. I remember staring at the subway tracks and thinking, “what if I just jumped?” Do you know what that’s like anon? To constantly want to die? To be in a dead end job, to feel like you’re absolutely worthless? To have a pet die and just think “I deserve this suffering, I’m a failure”?

And then I saw her as Jillian Holtzmann and just… something changed. Something truly changed in my life. She helped me figure out I was a lesbian. She helped me see that out lesbian women could succeed. She got me through that 2016 election where I lost all hope again.

Did she actually do anything? I mean, not really. But she represented something to me and to watch people tear her down is to watch a part of myself be torn down with her.

Why do I still love Kate, even if only as an idea, not an actual person? Because her saving my life outweighs the blights in her career. Because I give people the benefit of the doubt that they don’t mean harm, because they aren’t aware of the underlying social issues they are dealing with. Because I do not minimize the harmful way that ra// dical fe /.minists are recruiting young lesbians into the T /.ERF community by calling anyone who creates transphobic/transmisogynistic content TE /.RFs. Because I do not idolize, I admire. Because her job is to make people laugh and I truly don’t think she wants to hurt anyone by doing so. Because people are complicated and good intentioned people can do bad things. Because I want to believe she’s a good person under everything.

Because I am willing to forgive other people for things I have done myself if they seem the sort to be open to learning.

If all else is still unforgivable to you anon, I leave you with this: there’s a part in the movie Julie & Julia, where the main character Julie finds out that the Julia Child, this woman she has idolized and who’s cookbook inspired her to change her life, doesn’t like her work. She is devastated. And her husband says that there’s two Julia’s: the real one, and the one in Julie’s head, who she sees as her savior. The Julia Child in her head is the one that really matters.

Let me have the Kate in my head.

In conclusion: anon, I wish you all the best, just very very far away from me.

Notes:

* I was wrong about the original dates that this aired, BGSS aired from 2007-2010, not 2008-2010, which means season 1 was likely shot in 2006 with Kate was 22-23 when she created Fitzwilli am. I was pretty stupid at 22.

** I am actually really angry about being misled by this quote, because I had never watched the full interview, which you can see here:

youtube

The interview was filmed in 2007, 10 years ago when Kate was 23, she’s 33 now. 10 YEARS. I know I don’t want to be compared to 15 year old me, or really even 23 year old me. Like I really don’t want to be out here “making excuses” but you have to think critically about the context of the things she’s said and how blowing them out of proportion is harmful to people who are actively trying to harm the trans community. Sure, she’s buying into the gold-star rhetoric for a laugh (because it’s a funny joke straight people in my life STILL make to me and so that’s what most young lesbians think is what you do), but she immediately says after “I don’t think [penises] are gross, I think they’re fun! Fun to play with.” That’s not a typical transmisogynist lesbian dialogue (they usually say penises are disgusting). Which yes, equates genitals with gender, but like… I remember in this time period of my life I was doing the same thing. Not out of malice, but because I didn’t know any trans/genderqueer/nonbinary people, I didn’t even know trans men were a thing! In the same interview she says she’s more 98.5% lesbian, it’s very clear that she’s not sure about these things.

You can tell this interview is more an open dialogue between friends trying to have an honest conversation about sexuality in a time that information about sexuality and gender was much harder to obtain. 2007 is long before it became standard for people to qualify that genitals didn’t equate gender. And it’s definitely still not comedy’s standard, and I get what it’s like to constantly be bombarded with cissexist rhetoric that sometimes you just give in to make it easy.

So in real conclusion: I personally think, from my standpoint as a cis lesbian of 25, that tumblr needs to forgive and needs to draw their own conclusions by watching these examples, not repeat this cycle of screaming examples at people without linking those examples. Let people draw their own conclusions and be open to being wrong about something. I was wrong about the entire catalyst for this post, and I am so deeply sorry about it, and will be more careful in the future.

And for the love of god tumblr, stop holding people to such high standards when you probably wouldn’t meet those standards yourself if you were in that same person’s position.

#prefer if you didn't reblog #don't @ me i'm done arguing this #i just really needed to get all this off my chest it's been festering #eevasks #anon #discourse #transphobia #transmisogyny #suicide #anxiety #depression #mental breakdown

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englishchinesetranslations · 4 years

Link

This is a piece about me visiting Riyadh, several times, for Formula E.

Formula E is an electric racing series that says OK, boomer to 20th century petrolhead culture.

I am a high-performing, self-absorbed diva who writes about cars for a living.

Riyadh is the capital of Saudi Arabia.

Riyadh. It’s not a place, in the western imagination — which despite my scattershot efforts to broaden my horizons I definitely have — it’s a synonym for the Saudi Arabian state. Which, again, in the western imagination is one millennial and a network of shadowy contract killers.

The name Riyadh inspires fear, like a monster under the bed, something unknowable and threatening that doesn’t say anything about a city nine million people live in. Like most people, I hate admitting I’m afraid of anything real so in my mind it’s never been more than an imaginary metaphor to shield my own delicate ego.

I don’t think about the place much outside headlines. Or well, didn’t used to.

If you asked me if I’d ever imagined going to Riyadh a few years ago, I would’ve had to first work out if I could imagine Riyadh. In my mind — and I have an international relations degree so this is extra embarrassing — it was a mediaeval fortress. Perhaps some heads on spears on the walls. I’d seen some pictures on the Daily Mail or something and for some reason never considered whether this was a bit racist.

This starts in Berlin, 2018. Formula E, a street-racing electric motorsport series, announce the championship is going to Riyadh. Which is a ridiculous concept because Riyadh isn’t even a place with streets, in my mind, because I have not yet managed to stop being racist about this and actually learn anything.

More ridiculous is that I can’t go — I’m one of half a handful of full season journalists in this series that I decided to upend my life for completely a few years ago and I can’t go to the season opening race for the next ten years.

Because of strict Sharia law in the Kingdom, I can’t work in Saudi Arabia without my dad or husband giving me permission. Which at then-31 years old, divorced and resigned to my parents disapproving of everything I do for some time now is extremely laughable. I can’t work in motorsport there at all, classed as a dangerous profession. And how the hell am I going to get in in the first place?

There is some quite emphatic shouting on a street near Tempelhof when a fellow journalist asks me what I think of it and accidentally triggers the nuclear codes on my brain. I can’t do this, are they joking? How can I even continue in the series, I used to work in the humanitarian sector, for crying out loud.

I spend a night stewing in my hostel bed and wondering how all this can be thrown back into my face so hard. And then, trembling with rage and the less hot emotion I don’t like to think I’m capable of, demand answers from then-Formula E CEO Alejandro Agag in a press conference where he’s meant to be passively introducing Nico Rosberg.

The press conference is important because he tells me that there will be women there, that there will be arrangements made, that I can go. Which is the moment Riyadh has to stop being a fictional, mythical fortress to me because if I can, then I can’t not. No matter what else I think right now, I can’t let my male peers go and exclude myself so now even worse than being banned from Riyadh I have to actually go there.

Then my handbag gets stolen on the U-Bahn and I have bigger problems in the immediate, because the British embassy’s closed for a royal wedding.

Why is going somewhere so bad? Especially if you’ve already sucked down the moral serving of working in motorsport, gone the distance and done the deeds to get there.

I don’t want to shy away from the facts, here. Firstly, that motorsport is an intensely conservative world — all sport is. Formula E is by miles and miles the most liberal, even confrontational element of at least the cars bit of it but there are no openly gay drivers at a top level, there are very few women.

It’s bizarre to me, as someone who lives in London’s very leftwing queer scene, to work somewhere where shaving half my head was a bit edgy not just ‘had a breakdown on Tuesday, lads.’ I am more left wing than most normal people and motorsport as a whole is considerably more right.

I love my job. I whine about doing it, constantly but I love motorsport. I am obsessed with it, it’s what makes me feel the most and I am fascinated by the tech and I adore my friends in it, this is a job I have worked insanely hard to get — not something I am being forced to do, disinterestedly. But there is a disconnect between the realities of it and myself as a person.

Even motorsport people, however, were shocked by us announcing we were going to Riyadh. Until this event, the FIA (motorsport’s global governing body) had never sanctioned an event in Saudi Arabia, not because there was no interest from the Kingdom (Saudia, the national airline, have been an F1 sponsor for decades) but because until recently, women were completely banned from driving.

That changes, in the months between the announcement and the race — because it had to, as a condition of the event happening. You can view that as the Eprix clearly directing positive change or not if you want but the fact that it had to is important as part of the situation, as part of understanding why people were shocked we were going there.

Saudi Arabia operates a guardianship law for women, who require their husband or male relative’s permission to do things like open a bank account, get a job or a passport. Women are required to wear an abaya (the usually-dark coverup garment that covers you from foot to neck) as well as modest clothing and muslim women must wear a hijab. All Saudi Arabians must be muslim and a religious police force exists to enforce strict adherence to sharia law.

Kissing in public is absolutely banned, as is alcohol and western music. There are no cinemas and media is restricted. LGBT acts can get you imprisoned, publicly whipped or even executed. Human Rights Watch lists the “dissidents” who are detained on long charges in Saudi Arabian jails — they are women’s rights activists, people who have criticised the government, protestors who in most countries would be considered very mild. Torture is documented by HRW as being widely used as an interrogation tool against detainees.

It’s not fully whataboutism to say “well, other countries have terrible records on human rights, too and sport still happens there.” But Saudi Arabia has been off the table for a long time, not least because events like this — people congregating and especially in mixed gender settings — have been banned for a long time by the government themselves.

So is Formula E so financially or morally bankrupt to take the Saudi Arabian money and go there? It’s not like the country has a longstanding connection to electric technology and green solutions — absolutely the opposite, Saudi Aramco is the world’s largest producer of crude oil.

It’s complicated. WWE were the first big sports brand to announce an event in Saudi — but WWE isn’t really a sport and isn’t governed by a sporting body, wrestling a strictly choreographed entertainment product, despite the athleticism. As a consequence, the event in Riyadh could be bent to meet existing Saudi restrictions — no female wrestlers, no women in attendance, etc.

The FIA couldn’t do that and neither could Formula E. The event was somehow going to have to cater to, well, people like me. And they could have done that by spending the Saudia money on ferrying us around so we never saw anything but for whatever reason, they didn’t. They’ve never told me what to tweet or what to write about it. I don’t work for them, they didn’t sign this off and if anything happens to me as a consequence of writing it it’s not their problem.

They’ve got me access to princes to ask questions and put me in front of an exhaustive list of local TV and newspapers to prove that, yes, there is a woman — I’m aware I’m a bit of the PR to all this. And that that’s why people question whether what I think about it is true and why I’ve spent over a year writing this and why it’s so long.

I am incredibly sick of the persistent accusation Formula E journalists do not ask about this. That the media has not had to think about it, that nothing’s been written. So here you go, I’ve written it all.

There’s a view that these big, international events happening in Saudi Arabia is ‘sportswashing’ — that the intention is for Saudi Arabia’s international reputation to be rehabilitated by being thought of as a sports venue. That brief, highly-controlled environments are giving an unrealistic view of life there.

The events are short, for sure. I have made three brief trips to Riyadh and I am not about to pretend that I know about ‘normal’ life there in any meaningful way. This isn’t intended to be documentary about Saudi Arabia writ large, it’s about what it’s like to go there as a journalist to cover the events and what I’ve seen and the people I’ve spoken to. A lot of it’s just about what goes on in my head during the weekends — it’s part travelogue.

I don’t think about Riyadh very much for the next few months because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it, until Formula E call me a few weeks before testing and ask if I’d like to go on a trip. Would I. My entire method of managing my fragile psychology is dependent on going off somewhere every few weeks and the pent up home time is sending me scratchy, I say yes before I’ve even heard where it is.

It’s Riyadh, obviously. They post me some abaya and I read some not very reassuring travel advice, most of which doesn’t make much sense, while trying to work out a way of covering up my confrontationally queer hairstyle.

At Jaguar’s season launch I scope out who else is going — it’s all men but then again, there are not many things like me in motorsport. I contemplate my own death in a mediaeval fortress a lot, because this, for some reason, seems likely to be something Formula E would be sending me to.

The flight over is blandly sober. My hobbies and interests are pretty much covered off by “getting extraordinarily lit on flights” so the self restraint to ask for coffee instead of wine, before we enter Saudi airspace and they stop serving it, is an immense struggle. I also keep falling over my abaya and still can’t do anything with the headscarf to save my life.

My male peers are not having these problems. One of them has a gin and tonic, for a start.

In my head, Riyadh airport is a jail. The entrance to fortress Riyadh, machinery of a despot. In my mind, this is where it goes wrong — where my hastily-issued travel authorisation is judged invalid, where the men are let in but I’m not, where somehow this turns into The Gang All Go To Saudi Prison. Sitting nervously on plastic chairs, we wait for our visas to be done and I try to be sanguine about my upcoming, certain death and consider if I could actually fancy one of the dudes or if I’m just surprisingly horny about my own mortality.

Spoilers: I am not dead.

When we get through customs, the Saudi fixer shakes my hand. My very limited googling has informed me this is absolutely illegal unless we are married and my heart leaps out of my chest because oh here we go, here’s where I die. It’s so stupid it’s unreal, my tabloid-mythological Saudi overlayed like VR on what’s in front of my face.

I’d say it’s the fact it’s 40 degrees centigrade at 1am but realistically it’s just me being ignorant as all get-out and believing whatever I read, especially the most ghoulishly outrageous bits, instead of being willing to find stuff out. Which is a particularly stupid situation for a journalist.

Riyadh is, through the window of the taxi, very clearly not a mediaeval fortress. It has Starbucks. It has Nando’s. Its late but there are people walking around and when we get to our hotel, it’s easy enough for me to buy a coffee, go for a quick wander around the block and then stare out of my thirteenth-story window at a sprawling city glittering with lights. Not as built up with forbidding glass as Dubai, not quite as antiquarian-ramshackle as my beloved Marrakech and there’s something somewhere to it, a little chaos and disorganisation, a little… rule-breaking tendency that twangs on strings tied to Tbilisi.

Riyadh suddenly isn’t a story to scare naughty children with, it’s a place — where nine million people live. And I realise I have been quite stupid about this. Embarrassingly, shamefully so. I don’t get anything like enough sleep, thinking about it because I hate being wrong and I’m not quite sure how I so bullheadedly was so off the truth.

At the showcase I interview some Saudi princes. In the back of my mind lurks a vociferous argument I had with my ex-husband once, where I called him morally bereft for even considering working with the Saudi state. It is funny when you schadenfreude yourself.

My image of a Saudi Prince at the time is very limited. And by limited I mean I can name one.

I have not thought about HRH Abdulaziz bin Turki AlFaisal Al Saud. At this point, he’s the person personally tasked with making Formula E happen and he is vibrating with anxious tension about making it work. In my steady realisation that Saudis are people, too, I clock that they’re as nervous about screwing this up for us as we are of doing something wrong. Maybe a lot more so.

Abdulaziz is funny. I worry halfway through the interview I’m going to get in trouble for flirting with him because when I listen back to it, we laugh a lot. It’s the slightly anxious giggling of people doing something weird they’re not sure will work, at the start and then just genuine jokes. We “do a bit” about everyone telling Saudi they need to make changes for decades and then telling them they’re going too fast when they do.

I find out most Saudis, in fact almost all Saudis, are aged between 15–30 and think about what that means for the life expectancy in this bakingly hot, dry country. 90% of the population works in agriculture, which must be backbreaking in the extremities of the peninsula’s climate and that quality of life is poor, especially compared to the state’s wealth. It is very obvious he is a devout reformer and wants to urgently improve things for Saudi Arabians, starting with what he knows (he used to race in Blancpain GT in Europe) by bringing motorsport and technology to push the country away from the oil enriching — and endangering — it.

He’s not a cold despot, or a charismatic liar — there are plenty of both in motorsport let alone other fields I’ve covered — he’s a little bit thousand-miles-an-hour, talks more like Formula E’s bouncy kiwi Mitch Evans than a politician and with slightly more honesty, not offended when I push things and offering more to ask about than he tries to hide.

If the whole trip has wrongfooted me a little by just bringing Riyadh out of the mythical then this does something else. I do some gormless, rapid recalculations, brain as vacant as that meme because despite my almost unshakable sense of western entitlement it has finally got through that there’s a chance the race in Saudi is not actually about me.

In all my righteous, ask-a-manager fury about having to do this myself, I haven’t thought about the Saudi equivalent of me. Who wants to watch motorsport, work in it, has been denied it right up until now unless she was privileged enough to get to other states — and 90% of the population isn’t. Doing the maths in my head, that 70% 15–30 year olds includes about 13.6 million women my age or younger who’ve just got the right to drive as part of the FIA negotiations for the race. And the right to work at it. And here I am pitching a fit because I have to comply with what might as well be a uniform, to a tourist, for a weekend.

Ok, somehow I have got some perspective. But that doesn’t make this all automatically fine, does it.

Aseel Al-Hamad, a Saudi woman who’s just driven an F1 car at the French grand prix, is there. There’s a flamboyantly camp young Saudi YouTuber or something who is flirting with everyone. I still can’t drink coffee without dripping it on my headscarf.

Everyone keeps saying “it’s just a normal place.” Which is true — it has coffee shops and supermarkets and I eat an extremely salty salad with two other journalists after we get back to the hotel and none of us get arrested for not being married to each other. But also that dumbs it down, to just our own flighty concerns about how to exist here.

I can’t stop thinking about those stats. Saudi, which I’d thought of as ruled by old zealots, is so modally young that I am above the average age here.

There are young, excited Saudis at the showcase. Obviously, because that’s what 70% of the population are. 39 million people live here, who I’ve either thought of as generically oppressed or generically oppressive, drawn on some very primitive gender grounds. When I worked in humanitarianism, no one ever mentioned being humanitarian to Saudis and to my genuine horror, against all my ethics, I’ve casually dehumanised an entire population.

Don’t tell me, sitting from the west and spitting blood on social media at the idea of racing series going to Riyadh, you haven’t done something the same. Because I’m pretty good at this and yet somehow I can get my head around going to New York while toddlers sit in ICE detention, can get on with living in the UK despite knowing full well the horrors my own government is committing but I didn’t know any Saudis, you see. So somehow it hadn’t occurred to me they might want things like entertainment and sports and other things I take for granted and don’t assume I should be denied just because the prime minister’s done a racism again.

Formula E wasn’t taking a compromised event — not like WWE’s male-only show for a select few. It was going to be an Eprix like any other, bar the podium champagne. Not only that, there’d be women on track.

Saudi Arabia was about to go 0–60 by never having had women driving to hosting an event where, during a test, the largest number of women, anywhere, ever would be driving current, top flight machinery alongside men. A statement, yes but not intended to me about Saudi but to Saudi women about motorsport. I mention it to the prince, who thinks it’s quite funny as a statistic — he’s raced in Europe, after all, he knows what the numbers are like in our glorious egalitarian societies.

(If you don’t: they’re atrocious. I can name every woman who’s ever got as far as single seater racing, while I can’t remember which men were in F1 5 years ago, there’ve been so many.)

I tell someone on Twitter that if other countries wanted to do it they’ve had the preceding 70 years and well, where is the lie?

The flight to Dubai, en route back, is weird. I rip my hijab off in the airport terminal, no longer able to cope with my own inept wrapping and try to stop the side-shaved bit of my hair standing up. A male journalist asks me why I bothered with it in the first place and I try not to give him too much of a death glare because actually it’s becoming apparent things aren’t what I assumed.

I absentmindedly delude myself into thinking I’ve been invited to hang out with the guys, not just tagged along by proximity, for the rest of the journey and it hurts for about half the subsequent season that I’m incapable of learning not to make assumptions, despite the big ol’ wisening experience I just got lavished with. But those are other places.

Jamal Khashoggi is brutally murdered in an embassy in Turkey shortly after our showcase trip and the number of names of Saudis most people can think of increases to two. One deceased.

I nervously ask Formula E, at testing, if we’re still going. We are. It’s fuel for some very gory nightmares for a few weeks and can I really go there? I feel pretty strongly about dismembering journalists.

As the days tick down to going, mythical Riyadh re-descends on my mind. I forget the place I saw in broad daylight and brood on the fact I’ll be arriving at 1am, totally alone. It’s stupid fear, not the healthy respect I have for the fact travelling so much on my own, anywhere, is generally dangerous.

My usual attitude to being presented with a dangerous opportunity is to immediately take it. My sense of self-preservation isn’t impaired but my survival skills are over-developed, it’s left me with some excellent stories I can never put my name to and which I often only tell softened versions of, to avoid upsetting anyone. I can think or… Well, let’s say manoeuvre or lie or cheat or manipulate myself out of almost anything and the things I can’t, I can chalk up to a big bucket of Things That Are Making Me Weirder And Weirder But I Just Can’t Stop Doing Them.

I don’t think that will work in Saudi Arabia. And I’m so incapable of behaving myself. I’ve already forgotten the manifest demonstrations I saw that Saudis handle strict rules the same way everywhere else with them does, ie by each pretending they must apply to other people and look like you’re doing it when it matters, my own MO for everything.

Meanwhile my own unelected leader in the UK nearly tanks us out of the European Union for the first of what will be several, increasingly grim times and I have this vague feeling of unassailable doom.

All the thinking about going to Saudi has stopped me doing any thinking about actually going to Saudi, which because I booked my flights late and am permanently broke, is via two Ryanair flights, a gruelling overnight layover in Milan Malpensa (0/10, do not do) and 11 discombobulated hours in Jordan that I thought I was going to enjoy but it turns out the fear is kicking in.

The silly thing is, the thing that scares me is a taxi driver in Ammam who I throw some Jordanian dollars at while bruising my thumb forcing the lock down at some traffic lights to escape after he tries to essentially extort me. But if I can’t handle Ammam how am I going to handle Riyadh? A lot of me wants to turn around and go home.

I get to the airport for my final flight much too early and when they tell me I can’t check in yet, it all suddenly hits and I unexpectedly sit down on the terminal floor and cry hysterically for ten minutes.

By the time I get on the plane, I’m delirious with panic. The insane idea I am going to get arrested at the airport dominates my entire thoughts — after all, last time I was with Formula E but I’m not normally in the group, the showcase a one-off excursion.

Also, most pathetically given I’m 32 not five, I have not told my mother I’m going to Saudi Arabia. My mother disapproves of most things I do but I feel like there’s a relatively legitimate case for that here and also that I am a gutless coward for not being able to take that on. Gutless cowards afraid of being told off probably shouldn’t be trying to do this.

I cry so pathetically with fear the Flynas staff, who are spectacularly kind, give me a free coffee and one sits with me, thinking it’s the thermal-buffeted take off that has me hysterical, not the country they live in.

It is, obviously, not Formula E’s responsibility to check I get anywhere. Or where I’m staying or in particular I’d really rather they didn’t attempt to regulate what I’m doing because I reserve my right to get up to all kinds of things without them trying to stop me. But sometimes there are moments when I think anyone would quite like to think there’s someone who’ll know if they don’t make it to their hotel and I’m having one, feeling much too vulnerable to be able to do this. The monster under the bed is scaring me, mooom.

Needless to say, it’s fine. Uber is very well-regulated in Saudi Arabia and the process of transferring to my apartment hotel is extremely straightforward and despite my sudden inability to do maths convincing me it costs three times more than it does, really cheap from a London perspective.

The guy at the check-in desk thanks me for respectfully wearing Saudi-compliant clothes; my hair at this stage is still difficult to not look aggressively asymmetrical and I’ve finally learned how to do a hijab but it sort of unnerves me. Am I either appropriating or colluding with something, here? After all, I’m not muslim. I’d be a terrible muslim, I already miss wine.

I really need to sleep but don’t, which turns out to be basically what I spend most of my time in Riyadh doing because my brain won’t stop turning over and there’s not enough hours before I have to get up and go to the track anyway.

Here is where things get interesting, of course. Because I’m not staying in a hotel full of Formula E people, I’m not staying with anyone else at all, I’m just any old regular person in Riyadh, staying in the kind of place an average-income Saudi might if they were visiting from Jeddah.

Formula E don’t have my address, I didn’t have to put it on my visa application (handled by the championship so I have no idea how difficult it would be to get one as a journalist otherwise) and unless someone very carefully trailed me from the airport then I’m just out here alone. I’m staying in Al-Aqiq, which is a neighbourhood sort of near Diriyah and as decentralised as the whole of Riyadh seems to be.

Riyadh is a weird city, from my perspective — it seems to have no centre and there’s motorways everywhere. In any 500m walk, you can find at least two demolished buildings with the rubble in situ and another one under construction, a petrol station and a kebab shop. Every road feels like a dual carriageway and I don’t understand the shops.

Not for the reason I assumed I wouldn’t understand the shops, which was more specifically cultural issues. I don’t understand the shops because they sell things that make absolutely no sense to me whatsoever — I’m staying in an apartment hotel and there’s a petrol station nearby, a coffee shop on the forecourt.

That’s reasonably sensible to me. I can also get my head round the oddly Roman-themed kebab shop and the phone shop the other side — fine, that’s how modern life works right?

What I do not understand is the stationery warehouse that also sells party gear and interior design trimmings that seems, by all accounts, to be the big shop in the area. It’s sized for a DIY shop and stocked by the crazy crap aisle in Lidl and although it sells me an exceptionally good pencil sharpener that I’ve jealously guarded ever since, I cannot work out what the heck its deal is. It opens at like 7am and has supermarket trolleys available but every time I go in everyone’s buying like one box of paper plates?

There will be no answers. Some elements of Riyadh, I have to accept, I will not fully understand.

But I find myself going in a lot. I buy some weird new stationery that doesn’t really set me up for the season, because Al-Aqiq doesn’t have much else going on. I get really invested in trying every type of latte flavour the petrol station coffee shop does because it sort of gives me a sense of direction in my attempts at exploration that are otherwise coming up short because I can’t find anywhere to poke around, sleepy residential and mosques the main features of the area.

I assumed it was because I was sort of on the outskirts but this continues to puzzle me a year later. I’m used to cities with centres, high streets — I don’t know if it’s the heat or just a different, dispersed way of doing things or because (and I definitely have noticed this) Saudis don’t really have a culture of congregating places, turning up in crowded scenarios or what. But the structure of the town kind of makes no sense to me, and maybe never will.

There’s, seriously, no public transport on the enormous roads and coming from London that confuses the heck out of me. Contrary to the imagined SUVs of gulf state, most of the cars on the road are old and Japanese — Toyota Camrys and Hyundais, clearly proudly cared for but long in the tooth on mileage. There are almost no European or American cars and the ones that exist look weirdly out of place, a Renault Megane looking like an undersized curiosity in a line of Honda estates.

From that, you can probably gather I walked around a bit. I actually walked around a lot more than I initially intended to, especially on the first day I was trying to get to the track.

This is where it gets a bit technical about the business of motorsport, which is that for the first and only time this year, I need to get to the accreditation centre and pick up the pass that will let me into the circuit — and the rest of the season. This is a very minorly stressful process — and only so because I haven’t been to the circuit before so there’ll be a degree of wandering around trying to find the right place.

What happens is that I initially book a taxi to the wrong place, as it turns out there are several bits of Riyadh called Diriyah. Then I rebook a taxi and it goes to a different version of the wrong place, including having to get through several military checkpoints that my taxi driver is increasingly confused why I think I should be going through — and to be fair, so am I. There wasn’t any of this last time.

I bail out when I see some Formula E hoardings on the basis I must be nearby. This is a stupid idea. I’m the wrong side of the track and have to walk through it to get to the thing that will let me get the lanyard that says I am allowed to go through it but there doesn’t seem to be any other sensible way of making it there.

This feels like the sort of thing you could get into a lot of trouble for. It feels more like that when I get to some catch fencing that hems me in so totally I realise the only thing I can do is walk a long way back, to possibly not be able to find a way through or to climb it. Reader, despite the clothing situation and the fact I am carrying a rucksack full of precious scarred Macbook, I climbed it.

Jumping down the other side, I realised one of the reasons was because it was next to what looks really like a military compound and there’s a bored-looking dude with a gun staring at me. To quote Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye: ok, this looks bad.

There’s a sort of weird thing that happens when you are in a genuinely bad situation. Like, this is obviously not what I am supposed to be doing and it’s hard to guess whether the FIA or the Saudi government will get angry at me wandering into places I am clearly not meant to be first — or most severely. Technically I haven’t signed my behaviour waiver with the FIA for the year yet and also they probably have fewer guns.

As you can probably guess by the fact I’m writing this a year later, the next 45 minutes are quite stressful but ultimately end up in the accreditation office with extremely smudged eyeliner but no permanent damage. And for the record, the Saudi soldier I end up speaking to through Google Translate is nothing but helpful.

Which should probably be the end of me getting lost in various places in Riyadh except it’s kind of only the beginning. I very rarely get lost, I’m great at yeeting myself round the world and reading cities from their layout alone — I don’t know if it’s just that Riyadh is so decentralisedly alien to me or if it’s just the same thing that happens where I cannot stop myself trying to read Arabic the wrong way round and it’s just that I’m too stupid to understand it.

Whatever it is, I get lost a lot. Nearly continuously. I have to develop an uncharacteristic level of chill acceptance for not knowing where I am or when I will next be able to work that out. For sometimes wandering at length down motorways, in the rain, trying to hope that there’s a point on the horizon where GPS will work and maybe I won’t run out of road before then. It’s never that horrible, as an experience — Riyadh actually has fairly decent pavements — it’s just slightly bizarre and adds to my sense of being constantly wrong-footed and out of my depth, which is the kind of on-the-edge-of-fear feeling that makes me crotchety and unobservant and the whole problem ten times worse.

Anyway, that’s for later.

Occasionally, people call me inspirational. How inspirational of me, pursuing a career in a male dominated field. How inspirational of me, tootling round the world on my own and with no budget. How inspirational of me to not have ended up dead given all that.

It’s a weird feeling. I am outrageously flattered by it but I don’t feel very inspirational; I’m broke, I have a professional respect level probably best described as ‘tolerated’ (and barely that) and I’m hardly out here getting awards. When I finish a season I mostly feel a crushing sense of disappointment at myself for not having done that better.

Which is the kind of thing, when the drivers say it, you feel moved to say something encouraging. But it’s true — I’m frustrated by the number of times the titanic effort to get to a race limits the ambition of what’s possible there. And I’m kind of breaking myself a bit and in denial about it.

Anyway, should I really be an inspirational figure for dragging myself to Saudi Arabia on budget flights and white-knuckle bracing to hang on for another season? Probably not. After all, the whole reason I can do this sort of thing is because I’m an overpaid London media professional with a devastating sense of entitlement about travel.

It gnaws at me a bit, because all weekend when I’m in the Riyadh paddock young women keep coming up to me. They grab at my media pass, newly-minted and full-season heavy in the folds of my abaya and we stagger through conversations in Arabic via google translate or if they know enough English to talk.

It’s very exciting and inspirational, seeing a woman journalist succeed. I know because a few months previous to this event, I got amazingly drunk and embarrassed myself telling Suzi Perry how much she inspired me. I look up to the broadcasters and the journalists I find digging through old magazines and suddenly realise that’s a woman’s byline, often from a point when I assumed there weren’t any.

To be honest, I think most people just assume there aren’t any of us either way. Women in motorsport are grid girls or PRs — at least, in that same spooky, popular imagination where Riyadh’s barely a map location but you definitely have an opinion about it even so.

As far as the young women grabbing at my pass are concerned, I’m as ludicrously mythical as I can’t seem to stop myself thinking about their city if I let my mind wander for even forty seconds. A female motorsport journalist, travelling around on her own and from their perspective the most extraordinary thing, which is that I’ve apparently come to Saudi Arabia of my own volition. In fact, I’ve had to work really hard to do so, when I could have just… not.

This is kind of incomprehensible, to the Saudi teenagers. They’re excited by the idea I’d do it but when I live in London and can go anywhere, why would I? And on my own? I must obviously be the kind of incredibly celebrated and important person who thinks they can get away with that sort of behaviour and I don’t have the heart to tell them I’m actually panicking a bit about whether I can get anywhere to even take my coverage this season.

Riyadh’s one of the problems, actually. Editors don’t want to be seen to be endorsing it and the ones I can get to take it say they have to include critique of the situation, which is maddening when they won’t let me write about anything I’m actually seeing.

Ok, yes. Here is the situation: the Saudi government has paid for the race. Someone, somewhere, always pays for a race — championships sustain themselves on hosting fees and Formula E doesn’t go for the scalp like F1 but ultimately ‘who is willing to pay’ is a major persuasive factor to an events’ viability. Not to peel back the final veil but this is how big sporting events work, everywhere.

It’s proved controversial in the past. Montreal paid extra to host a season-ending double-header over several seasons, then it turned out the (I’m compelled by journalism standards to write the word ‘allegedly’ here) corrupt mayor had made promises the city wasn’t willing to keep.

It put Formula E in a position where, contractually, they had to sue the city for a settlement — not the most popular thing to do but FE itself can hardly just wave away a contract or they’d look like mugs everywhere else. Also probably, you know, needed the money for something because no one knows more about how much doing all this costs than my Ryanair-seat-shaped arse.

And why? Why wheel and deal to make a global car racing championship happen. Well, I don’t know — there’s no actual point, is there? There’s not a moral at the heart of this, a heartwarming lesson for humanity that’s perfectly illuminated by the chance to watch one millionaire athlete smash another millionaire athlete into a concrete barrier in a shower of carbon fibre.

You’ve got to tell yourself something to sleep at night though, right? There’s got to be some reason you’re doing it. We make it up for any job, the reason you’re logically doing these things. Here’s mine.

The planet is dying. That’s not hyperbole — the seas are emptying of whales drowned by plastic as fast as they fill with Antarctic meltwater. We can’t put either of those things back, there isn’t a fix except prevention.

The sky is choking, we’re shutting off the stars with satellites and smog and after a few hundred years of building a world dependent on massive — and mass — mobility, we’ve realised we can’t use the types we’ve been reliant on. We talk about the screaming, hurtling destruction of the only place we can live in bland, corporate terms, these words like ‘mobility’ and ‘transitive economics’ neatly editorialising the end of the world as the closing remarks of a conference on disaster mitigation.

It’s terrifying. It’s so incomprehensibly, mind-crushingly fearful that even if you can somehow get yourself together enough to think about it, it’s really hard. Scientists say the risk numbers are into the bit where human minds actually don’t understand them because we just can’t really be that scared.

Which is a problem, because the last thing we need right now is numbness. A few years back, I’d slipped a long way into it — not really specifically the planet but more that some very immediate things were going very wrong in my life and the only way I could continue to get up and go to work instead of lying down and screaming was to just not feel anything. Which isn’t very sustainable, you need a cathartic ability to make sense of things even if they’re terrible.

There’s lots of crutches people use — alcohol (a generally reliable and disastrous one for me) and other mind-altering distractions, getting overinvested in box sets, obsessively hyperfixating about your OTP, pinning your emotional wellbeing on the success of a sports team.

I went for pinning my entire psychological and professional future on Formula E being the thing to dive into right that moment. In the moments where I couldn’t think of a reason to carry on, there’d be another race on the horizon. In the long nights where I didn’t want to live anymore I could motivate myself with the sheer, stubborn desperation of throwing myself into getting in.

Frivolous, yes. But Formula E does also have a point: on this dying earth, amidst the keynotes on the end of transport, we need to do something. Just stopping flying or transporting or using the massive systems we’ve rigged to plug the earth in won’t work. Same as we can’t put the whales back in the barren sea, we can’t just pull the brakes on a tangled juggernaut we’ve spent decades chaotically assembling because as much as we urgently need to, to save lives, if we do then people will literally die.

It’s complicated. It’s those things too big to think about and we needed solutions before I was born, are living through the dying moments of panic while we scrabble for a fix that makes things least-bad. The trolley dilemma between apocalypse and slightly mitigated endtime.

We’ve got to be brave. We’ve got to do things like say ‘we actually cannot use oil anymore’ — for fuel, for plastic, for millions of things that keep us alive in abstract or direct ways. The 20th century was built on such a proliferation of oil products it’s hard to imagine extracting them from your home, you can’t even extract them from your supermarket trolley without making a very contorted list.

And there’s so little time. There’s so much to do. We’ve got to fix cars and planes and medicine and supply lines and food and it’s really hard to think about it all because there’s nothing you can do, you need some sort of thing to rally around.

Yes, it’s cruder than a barrel to say that Formula E can be that thing. It’s a racing series, it’s a day out, it’s entertaining sport — but it’s also a test of shame for automakers caught out in dieselgate, it’s an on-track annoyance that says actually it is possible to make electric cars populist, you can do this.

If all the absurd, awful things we have to deal with now were built in the panicked competition of the twentieth century, then welcome to the 21st edition of that scrap. There’s no time to tear into the companies and people that have orchestrated it — half of them are dead and none of them care but if you can make a system where to succeed, they have to do what you want then that’s something else.

There’s never been and I hope there never is again a moment where motorsport, as inch-grabbing competitive hot lab for transport, has had such a crucial moment. All the years of F1’s development need to be drowned out in the next half-decade by the wind-up banshee howl of electric technologies making up for decades in absence.

And you can’t politely do that on the streets of Monaco as a nice little spectacle. You have to go where you’re not wanted and explain that, actually, you are what is needed. You can’t disrupt anything without causing a little chaos and you’re gonna have to do some stuff that scares you and other people might not approve of.

So for all that, I’d better be fucking inspirational. If I’m the in, I’d better live up to it. If I’m, somehow, the lens that someone can see something worth getting excited about through then I’d better wipe off the grime and get on with it. If I’m how someone can see themself being part of this, across whatever incomprehensibly vast gulf, then I’d better not be churlish about it.

Yes, I am a colossally privileged westerner. Yes, I am ignorant and disastrously naiive — no one looks at me in a paddock and takes me seriously. Formula One journalists consider my curious electrical proclivities like discovering the intern is into something kinky and I’m never going to get a Pulitzer.

But in a paddock in Riyadh I’m a thing people haven’t seen before because all that colossal western privilege means I get to do things they’re not allowed to. And things people have never seen before are inspiring, whether they’re race series screaming round a UNESCO world heritage site or grandstands where women sit with men or Jason Derulo’s shiny jeans.

And the government paid for it, yeah. It’s a little incomprehensible. Why would the Saudi government pay for an event that’s hardly aligned with an oil state’s economy?

One answer is the propaganda. A greenwash over ARAMCO’s continued production of the majority of the world’s crude oil. But New York has an Eprix and no one looks across the Atlantic and says ‘well, the US is green now’ any more than anyone thinks of Oman as the home of football.

So if you talk about greenwashing, you either think the Saudi government is hopelessly naiive or that the entire world is, stricken by lack of knowledge about the place. Formula E is part of a plan, though — the Vision 2030 programme of reform and transformation, which includes a focus on opening Saudi to visitors.

Saudi Arabia has a lot of visitors per year, to Mecca. But visas for non-Muslims were very hard to come by until recently, with tourist visas not at all and a lot of the country restricted.

The first year, lots of journalists were flown out by the Saudi tourism board and taken on an ultra-luxury, whistlestop tour of the Kingdom. I obviously wasn’t one of them. This doesn’t come from a place of delusion where I think those lovely people from Saudia took me on such a nice trip, I learned so much during the cultural briefings between private jet flights…

The thing about being the unexpected element, that weird thing no one expected to see in a paddock anywhere let alone Saudi Arabia, is that no one notices what I am doing most of the time because they assume I’m just recording a Vine or gazing wistfully at a drivers’ hairline or something. I don’t really get fussed around by teams or pushed out of garages or moved away from conversations because despite it being pretty obvious by this point that I do know what I’m looking at, I am also still the comedic relief.

It has turned into a bit of an act. If I actually am I tremendous dumbass then I can’t get mad when everyone treats me like one.

And no one cares what I do or where I go. As soon as I leave the circuit I’m a black shape as swaddled as any of the others. Which is why I think I can trust what I saw and what I think about Riyadh, why I don’t think anyone there was trying to impress me.

The teenage girls, after all, were there for the Black Eyed Peas concert. It was purely incidental that they discovered nice western ladies women could be motorsport journalists in the process, that my big, heavy permanent pass drew so many eyes because I couldn’t get the lanyard to bend to sitting right yet.

One of the women I speak to wistfully says she’d like to be a journalist herself but she’s been arrested before and couldn’t face it happening again. Which is where the teenage excitement melts away.

The reality is that I’m seeing Saudi Arabians get to do stuff they haven’t been able to previously which I take wholly for granted. I’m not inspirational, I’m just an exotic glimpse of someone who, for all my bleating and crying about going to Riyadh, is in absolutely no danger whatsoever.

And when I blend away into the night the only thing that stood out was I have no cocking idea how to keep an abaya out of the puddles from the unseasonal downpour. But going to Saudi is not about me.

I don’t think you can fake teenage girls. You can fake loads of things but you can’t pretend it’s plausible a restrictive state faked teenage girls’ enthusiasm. (the next year I’d get in a mosh pit with them but that’s later)

I meet a really lovely, wonderfully dedicated Saudi journalist out there. She’s a credit both to her youth and frankly to motorsport and I don’t think she even half realises how great she is at making both internet content and quality traditional journalism.

(I’m not putting her name here because this is a reasonably low-risk piece for me, I think — but I wouldn’t force anyone else’s name to be put to my words, any more than I was willing to let my own be edited)

So there are Saudi women doing this. And you should listen to them about the race far more than me and what they say is obviously the same thing I say about the London Eprix; of course you want the sport you love in your city.

Boris Johnson’s an odious prick and I’m allowed to say that. I don’t have to express gratitude to him for facilitating the event, when it happens next year. He didn’t have anything to do with it and I can be British without having a single miligram of respect for the people running the place.

I can’t tell you what Saudis think about their own leaders because I don’t know — but the attitude is definitely quite different. The situation is different, the structure is different. I don’t want to say that people are lying when they say they’re grateful to the leaders for bringing sporting events there because I don’t know that they are.

The politics of anywhere is complicated. There’s not a requirement to engage, except when there is. When you have to go somewhere the issues loom in massive print or your prime minister keeps straight-up lying about things that will get people killed.

People think we don’t ask about this. But what is there to say? I can tell you what was said in a press conference, I can tell you what I inferred from the total disregard for a lot of the stricter rules that’s obviously running through Riyadh.

Saudi Arabians like being Saudi Arabian. Much more than I think most British people like being British but that’s kind of cultural. It will come as no surprise that a young population finds strict religious law grating and wants reforms, that the handful of cinemas that have opened in the past few years are popular, that people like being able to go on dates and go out for dinner without being strictly separated into male and female and they love to party. Some of them probably wouldn’t say no to a beer.

If I tell you that Saudi Arabians (largely) approve of the race, will you approve of the race now? If I tell you that there’s young Saudis, especially women, getting the chance to do stuff they really want to do because we bring the circus to Riyadh, are you onboard? Not if you weren’t before.

I would say: why do you think you deserve the opportunity to go to things and they don’t? What are you gonna tell my friend, ‘hey, an accident of your birth location means my politics ban sport from your country?’ I don’t know if that sits right with me, personally.

Here’s some tea: the Riyadh paddock, in that first year, is the nicest motorsport paddock I’ve ever worked. As a woman. I mean, I always work in paddocks as a woman but like in terms of me being there, womanly, it was the nicest.

Within the Formula E paddock, people behave pretty much like they do in a lot of the rest of Riyadh, from what I can tell. Western women uncover their hair and some fully do away with the abaya, by year two that ratio increases to pretty much everyone but me shedding it as soon as they’re through the gates.

Women have never been banned from motorsport, in liberal western Europe. We make up 1.5% of race license holders — over the course of 125 years of motorsport events — and it’s conventional for men in racing to be able to say wildly misogynist things without it affecting their careers but we’re not banned and never have been.

Women always have been in motorsport, working and as pure fans. Most people in it start as one, end up as a combination. It’s a passion field, you can’t commit to the schedule otherwise.

But we’re a minority. And people quite often either forget we’re there or forget that any group who are so completely marginalised actually kind of needs some extra catering-for. You get used to it after awhile and kind of forget but you will never be one of the boys.

Riyadh isn’t like that because this is a totally new event. They have to make sure that it caters to a population not used to attending these kind of events at all and also that it specifically advertises to and makes itself welcoming to women, because otherwise they’re at risk of getting in trouble with the FIA. The organisers here 100% have to prove how liberal and reformed they are.

Which means everything includes me. People add “and ladies” every time they say “guys,” everyone asks for my opinion about things, I get brought to the roundtables and possibly actually given more time with people than the men.

It’s so strange and flattering, it gives me not a weird impression of Saudi Arabia, who I completely understand the motivations of about this and yes I know it’s PR and an act. But it’s an act that’s working, I do feel welcomed not specifically to Riyadh but to motorsport in a way I simply never have back home. It makes me a bit genuinely hysterical about having to go back to normal paddocks.

I don’t think Riyadh deserves a medal for it or anything — but it makes me think a lot about the ‘regular’ motorsport events.

Back to that first year; it’s fine. I distract myself by looking after one of my friends, who is finding it all much harder and who I designate myself the food and drink carer for the majority of the season.

By the time we’re leaving the circuit I promise to come back for a week next time, to see more of the city. I’ve already made myself a playlist for the way home and although I’ve been cheerfully, relentlessly convincing myself I am coping fine and the kilometre and a half down a dark motorway I’ve walked every night doesn’t bother me and I feel perfectly safe, there’s a cathartic reason it opens with the Pet Shop Boys’ Home & Dry.

But it’s done. We’ve been to Riyadh and nothing bad happened and I ate some really great falafel. Also had one of the best experiences of my life when I walked up to media pen on the test day and there was a near-equal number of female to male drivers due to a test stunt where teams were allowed to run a second car if a woman drove it.

Yeah, it’s a stunt. But it’s the one that means Saudi Arabia has now had the most women driving in a mixed-gender, top flight motorsport series, simultaneously, of any country ever. If anyone’s mad about that then motorsport has been happening for 125 years and somewhere else could have done it first. I mean, this is just sport. Somewhere could have done that. Somewhere could do it now with a larger number. In the interim, well played HRH Abdulaziz.

I decide maybe I don’t want to drink any wine in Cairo airport on my way back, for roughly the amount of time it takes me to get off my plane, walk to a place that sells wine and immediately order some. It tastes so good, I have a little cry.

Thus ends year one of what’s going to be ten years of me taking myself to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as a lone woman and trying to get around.

Something weird happens the day after that season’s final race in New York, which is that I go to a lunch with a load of other journalists. They’re all F1 and important and cool, I probably shouldn’t have even been invited. Especially given I’ve just got off a heavily delayed overnight flight from JFK and I am not feeling it.

Anyway, I inevitably mention I’m from Formula E and this guy goes off at me about Riyadh. Then when he discovers I actually go, he goes even more in on me and my moral decay. I’m genuinely shocked by the ferocity of it, especially from a group of people who go to Bahrain.

I’ve got used to having to explain myself but this guy just won’t let it lie, says I’m dancing on Khashoggi’s grave and and mocking the idea of journalism, supporting crimes against women. I kind of think, privately, that that’s a bit much coming from the lofty podium of working in, uh, famous humanitarian agency Formula One but then at the time I also do that so perhaps that’s not a great stone to start throwing in a room full of people who do too.

I don’t manage to get my brain together enough to sell it to him. I mean, I don’t know if I want to sell it? Do I actually think it’s good that we go, not just survivable?

You know what, I do. I think it’s difficult and it stresses me out and every year it makes the season opener tough and you know, people shout at me over lunch and things. But look, if you just close the door on Saudi Arabia then how’s there gonna be reform? How is freedom of the press and rights going to improve if you don’t know anything about anything that happens there? Or anything about the country? The people that live there?

It’s 2019; the same way that Saudi Arabia can’t stop the flow of information as a young, internet-savvy population gets extremely online, you can’t stand in the way of things

My most succinct summary of why I think we should go, though, is simpler: Formula E getting paid to race in the home of oil and sit there going ‘that’s bad’ without getting censored is the biggest middle finger move.

Ah, Riyadh alone: round two. Now, surely, I would be armed with enough knowledge to not screw up constantly by disappearing into my own bizarre alternate reality.

Guess what? I absolutely do not. If anything else I’m even worse. I get really, really anxious in the runup — partly because this year my mother knows I am going and oh boy am I getting told off. Which is pathetic, what the hell, what kind of tiny, baby child am I?

I booked my flights really early this time, before testing. They were way better flights and I was excited to be going home via Beirut because apparently I am a lot better at inventing fictional versions of countries that sit in my brain like mirages than I am at reading the news.

Anyway, great life choices aside (it’s not like this is even my worst one) I, in theory, should be really chill about this. Except I miss the FIA email to apply for a visa and end up doing it late and it doesn’t turn up for ages and I get really stressed and then also ill and I start a new job and everything is really full on and I want to throw up.

I don’t do my packing until the last minute, then prepare by drinking too much wine and sleeping through my alarm so I have to book a last minute Uber to Stansted. Which isn’t ideal because I’m not sure if I’ve been paid but better than missing the whole thing.

Anyway, my point-blank refusal to ever check my bank balance is very much a me thing rather than anything directly connected to Saudi Arabia. So, off to Stansted and I have to re-buy everything I need and obviously forgot in the airport but again, this is pretty standard behaviour for anyone who’s as much of a total mess as me.

This doesn’t seem like the way to do it. I can get most places half-cut and sloppy but this is not most places. Nevermind — also it turns out Pegasus serve surprisingly pleasant in-flight wine and by the time I get to Istanbul I’m feeling quite relaxed; I have hours of stopover for it to wear off in, don’t worry.

I don’t want to go. It’s got into my head. I’ve been getting all these weird emails with hate-filled fantasies about me getting killed and I keep thinking about the guy at that lunch and also about the texts from my mum and the way I don’t feel cavalier enough to be doing this.

Why am I going? Because it’s my job to go. Because I have stuff to do. Because I have this endless compulsion to do it and it’s a massive privilege. I don’t know. It’s all weighing on my brain, am I an instrument of state PR now? I wouldn’t put up with that from anywhere and besides, I don’t think I am. I’d probably be on a fancier flight if I was.

But getting onto my late-night flight in Istanbul, I know it’s descended again. The fictional, fearful Riyadh is in my head and every radical thing I’ve tweeted from the past year is haunting me. What the hell am I doing going to Saudi Arabia?

And the thing is, I can’t (at this point) recognise it’s the VR. Yet again, I’m expecting to get arrested at the airport, to get trailed, a million paranoid things that won’t happen. But now they’re incredibly real in the sort of simulated reality everyone’s told me definitely exists and is more important than my own memories.

I’m not normally like this. I haven’t been sleeping enough (I’ve had ten hours sleep over five nights) and it’s really starting to show.

Still, on the plane now so better live with it — obviously I get to Riyadh without incident and am through the airport with a warm bag of falafel and a coffee, into an Uber where I manage to stagger through a mostly-Arabic conversation and send a selection of my wilder and more enthusiastic tweets about politically safe but morally questionable topic: Lando Norris is really hot lately.

I know I said I’m never going to win a Pulitzer but with that kind of bold reporting, I really should.

Finding my hotel takes a bit (it’s another, different dubious apartment hotel) and by the time I’m in and arrived, it’s like 3:30am so I just pass out in the massive bed. By which I mean, look at memes on my phone and rewatch the camping episodes of It’s Alive and wonder at which point I stopped just writing about semi-teenage idiot sportspeople and actually became one.

Nevermind, anyway, soon enough it’s time to revisit ‘finding the accreditation centre.’ This year I am determined not to have to climb any catch fencing so pick my Uber dropoff point VERY carefully. It is to absolutely no avail and I end up lost in the enormous Diriyah Season compound down near where Ruiz and Joshua will be going at it in a few weeks but certainly there are no electric cars currently.

Because I’m still freaking out and only managing to psychologically sustain myself by internally commentating on the situation it gets steadily worse as I wobble across the paddock on a combination of caffeine, adrenaline and inadvisable 4am hotel tap water. Once I actually find the place, collect the thing and get in the media centre things feel less out of control, except that I need to write two season previews before anyone wakes up in the UK still.

At least there’s fruit and coffee.

Thursday is a bit of a mess, for me. I don’t eat enough (I’m vegan and it’s a genuine problem in paddocks) and I’m so sleep deprived I’m really not coping very well and keep having to watch Calming YouTube Content to get a grip on myself and churn out another thousand words. To be fair, all of this is just the business of being me, doing journalism so can’t really be attributed to Riyadh or anyone there.

A team are doing an event later where I’m meant to be interviewing someone who I inevitably don’t get to interview because scheduling is a nightmare and also it’s really obvious that I am about one second from falling asleep on the floor and considerably over my stress limit. Another woman in Formula E asks me why I’m letting the side down by wearing an abaya (most team personnel are taking them off the second they enter the paddock) and I just snap.

It’s because I’m on my own. Because I arrived at 1:30am. Because everyone’s spent the last month telling me how stupid I am by going here and how certain I am to get killed and it turns out even I have a limit to self-determined risk enthusiasm. Because if anything happens to me, no one knows where I am and Formula E don’t look after me -

This comes as a surprise. They don’t? Surely no one lets me run round Saudi Arabia totally on my own?

Oh, they do. And being alone is psychologically testing and I feel so pathetic at how pitiable it all sounds. One of the drivers sympathetically tells me that sounds “really fucked up, to be honest.” It, err, doesn’t help.

By the time I get back to my hotel the absolute most I can manage to do is go to a shop and buy the ingredients for a big night in in Riyadh. Which is to say, some crisps, some mystery thing in a jar that turns out to be definitely not vegan kind of fake cheese with the consistency of mayonnaise that tastes amazing on crisps (food waste is bad) and one of everything from the drinks section.

I love foreign supermarkets. Full of weird stuff. This one is crucially full of men who are understandably surprised to see a western lady wandering around shaking like she’s on a billion drugs and trying to find the hummus (I can’t) or work out which colour of water is fizzy in these parts.

Obviously there’s no beer in Saudi Arabia but there is a wide selection of like beer-adjacent malt drinks that have weird fruity flavours and also cider-adjacent things with frightening coloured labels. I go for a beer-adjacent thing in flavour ‘original’ and a threatening can of Mirinda which poses the question about itself: watermelon or cantaloupe?

(my investigative powers don’t stretch that far, it mostly tastes of heavy-handed corn syrup)

I’m freaking out, though, because when I was in the supermarket the guy packing my bags gave me a present. It was just a chocolate wafer thing and I was concentrating on understanding what number I needed to pay so didn’t really pay any attention until I left and suddenly thought: what if they’re setting me up to be done for stealing it?

There was no evidence for this at all. Every Saudi I’ve met has been genuinely helpful or openly friendly, the worst reaction being a kind of morbid curiosity about why anyone would do what I am doing. But instead of using all 10ft-across of my weirdly gigantic hotel bed to get the sleep I really, really desperately need I obviously just send myself insane googling ‘setup to be arrested Saudi shops’ and variants thereon. It’s so stupid and I am only getting stupider as I waste precious resting hours on doing the opposite of that.

Now fully convinced I will be in jail before the end of the day, it’s time for the Friday race. Either you’re into motorsport and therefore know how race day works or you’re not and so don’t care but basically a lot of things happen all at once and I have to stop writing worryingly thirsty things about drivers in other series and do some work for once.

I’m really in the toilet, brain-wise, by this point and have to cry in the loos three times during the day. Which is difficult when the loos keep being closed because of some kind of water supply issue (Formula E uses temporarily-built paddocks so these things happen) and requires quite a lot of timing effort.

Also people keep interviewing me, which actually now seems to happen more than I interview other people and the whole thing feels completely ridiculous. Why are you interviewing me? I’m an idiot and I can’t remember my own name or feel most of the left side of my body because I last had ‘adequate sleep’ about three weeks ago and for some reason I forgot to bring any socks with me so I have these really aggressive blisters and I’m probably going to go to Saudi jail over a chocolate bar.

A lot of stuff is happening to me and very little of it is conducive to doing anything useful. Which then gets in my head more and this is how every weekend goes, except with an added, imaginary carceral threat.

I relay my woes to one of my friends who advises that maybe it really would be a good idea to eat something that isn’t crisps and get more than three hours’ sleep and like ok, I can believe that.

My Saudi friend notices I am having a meltdown and says she’s worried I hate her city. It finally kicks me into functional gear — I can’t be coming over here, making people feel bad about the fact I have a wholly imaginary version of their country down over my head like a visor.

So that night I first go to the concert after Formula E and purchase ‘potato,’ the most vegan thing I can find to eat. This helps somewhat and gets me into the mindset where when my taxi drops me off, I head off to the malls near where I’m staying (which are not the grander, designer sort you find in some of Riyadh) to complete the incredibly trivial task of buying socks and ordering stir fry.

Socks it turns out are easy, as there’s a shoe shop nearby and I could’ve saved myself a world of pain really easily. Which is pretty much the moral of this entire episode: stop making your life really hard and driving yourself insane and instead of just doing things like a normal, woman.

Dinner is also easy in that I get an absolutely monumental quantity of stir fry vegetables from a mall food court place and eat them in a sort of blissful semi-coma while listening to the sounds of Dr Dre’s seminal album 2001, over the mall tannoy. I seem to be staying in a very Asian district this year and most of the restaurants seem to be authentic Indonesian places.

This helps the sleeping problem enormously. It turns out just ‘not being scared’ is really key to getting six straight hours in bed and so being able to operate normally. And that’s the thing, what am I even scared of? Myself?

(to be fair, I am definitely the biggest danger to me)

It feels better. But I’m still relieved when I leave — it’s all the things: my own stupid ideas, the judgement from other people, the pressure of trying to make sure I’m doing it right.

Before I do though, I go to the last concert with a group of Saudi young people who I’ve tagged along with. Everyone is covered in glitter and dancing suggestively and jumping on each other and starting mosh pits. It feels like being at a gig I am about 15 years too old for in any other country, except that unlike if it was in London no one sloshes a pint of Tuborg down my back at any point.

It definitely does not feel like government collusion when at the end of his set, a Lebanese rapper does a dubstep version of Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do (I Do It For You) and I, an old person, absolutely lose it in front of this surreally gigantic stage, surrounded by excited young people.

For me, I could go to a gig like that every night of the week in London. But this is one of a handful. The first western music concerts were played at the Eprix the year before and there’s something there that feels big. You can claim the sport is a distraction for the rest of the world but you don’t televise concerts, these are for the Saudis.

(The concerts actually caused a really problematic ticketing situation this year where people were buying them, looking like the Formula E numbers were good because it was a combined ticket and then not turning up — when the organisers were asked they admitted they screwed up and would be trying to fix it next year)

This is what it comes down to, about the race. It’s a good track, it’s one of the best ones we have in fact — it’s produced two exciting races this season and despite torrential rain making the first year difficult, it worked then too. And yes, we have done all the bits about turning up to torrential rain in Riyadh; it snowed on the Sahara when we were in Marrakech once, too.

Climate change doesn’t really deal in imaginary metaphors.

So it’s a good track, the drivers like to drive on it, it produces a genuinely good sporting event. It takes electric racing and green principles, confrontationally, to one of the homes of oil. It has forced some small changes — which should not overshadow the achievements and struggles of Saudi Arabians themselves in getting those.

If you think it is just sportswashing then that’s too simple, it isn’t. It depends if you think the Saudi 2030 Vision plan is for you, probably sitting in the west and still thinking of this as some distant horror theme park, or for people there.

There’s an open PR angle, but those stats — the ones from way back at the show case, about how low life expectancy is in Saudi Arabia and how generally Saudis have a poor quality of life — well, a lot of this is not about how you see it. It’s about things like the massive investment into grass roots sport (especially motorsport, a nice upside to the now-head of the Sports Authority being an ex-racer) might improve things for regular Saudis.

You want to know what going to Riyadh is like? It’s a bit boring. People want stuff to do, same as you. And to meet people — each other and weird, jetlagged British women who can barely hold a coffee without tipping it down themselves.

So long as we acknowledge the other stuff (and we should do it everywhere) then I think you’re taking the wrong side, if you believe your opinion trumps their right to access that.

Ok here’s some more tea: Riyadh is covered in rubbish. If you want proof I’m not lying, here it is: the whole place is absolutely bedecked in trash.

This happens a lot in places with poor infrastructure, which Riyadh absolutely has. Because making life easy for people to get around and to meet up and to get places hasn’t been a social or specifically political priority, Saudi quality of life suffers in more ways than one. Who cares if the streets are filled with garbage if you never go out?

But people do now. Young Saudis go out in big groups and nearly all Saudis are young. Stepping around overspilling rubbish becomes the first thing I get the hang of keeping my abaya out of because man, it does not smell ok.

Rubbish in a city is a pollutant and I really hope, for the people living there, that Riyadh sorts this out. It’s all the ‘being a metaphor’ thing, isn’t it? Metaphors for governments don’t have extensive municipal recycling programmes.

I can’t tell you to unconditionally support Formula E racing in Riyadh. I don’t think you should unconditionally support anything, really, apart from maybe Lando Norris but we’re all just having a big one about that at the minute.

But anyway, this wasn’t to tell you what to think. It was slightly just to write about going there because not many people do and slightly because everyone keeps insisting no one in the Formula E media is thinking about this stuff when I have tortured myself for weeks with it. Also some of the anecdotes are funny. I could write a lot more, from my run-ins with ‘rose Lattes’ to the time I bought a lime juice and recklessly refused extra sugar in it only to discover I’d got an actual pint of just undiluted lime.

But this is long enough and it’s already much too much about me, for something that really shouldn’t be. We all have to live in our own heads.

0 notes

transgenderteensurvivalguide · 5 years

Note

Are genital preferences transphobic?

Lee says:

Personally, I am attracted to women and some non-binary folks. I used to call myself a lesbian before I realized I’m transmasculine, and now I use “queer” as my sexual orientation label.

And I also do have a genital preference. I’m not turned on by penises and penises aren’t something that I think about when I’m fantasizing about stuff.

But that isn’t something that determines who I’m attracted to, because when I meet someone who I think looks cute then I feel attracted to them, and that happens before we’re at the point where I’ve taken off their pants and underwear to view their genitals.

For example, I met my partner (mod Devon) in Algebra II when I was in high school, and I thought they were cute but I hadn’t yet taken off any of their clothing before I formed that opinion. I just saw them and (eventually, like several months later) talked to them and then hung out with them and so on.

Generally, I don’t inspect someone’s genitals before I decide if I’m attracted to them. For me, seeing people’s personal parts is usually something that happens in the relationship after I’ve already developed feelings for them and found them attractive, otherwise I wouldn’t be in the situation where started asking questions about their body or taken off their clothes.

So I am not attracted to people with vaginas as my sexual orientation, I’m attracted to women and some non-binary folks because those are the genders I’m attracted to.

And if we get to the part of the relationship where genitals come into play, what parts they have is going to be relevant for me. How a couple chooses to navigate that depends on the wants and needs of both people, and it might mean finding alternate ways to be sexual or having an open relationship or even breaking up. But their genitals aren’t what determine my sexual orientation or initial attraction.

I think most people find someone attractive before they know what genitals that person has, but they don’t always realize that’s true because they’re so used to assuming that they can tell what genitals someone has based on their gender identity.

So it’s fine for you to say “I am not interested in having sex with someone who had a vagina” or “I’m not interested in [doing a particular sexual act]” (not every person with a penis wants to perform penetrative sex, and not all people with vaginas are interested in receiving vaginal penetration) but it’s transphobic when someone assumes that all women have vaginas (given some trans women have penises), and it’s transphobic to assume that all trans men do have vaginas (because some trans men have gotten lower surgery). Basically, don’t assume you know who has what parts or assume how/if they want to use those parts.

Genital preferences can exist, but that isn’t covered under the word “sexual orientation”. And while it isn’t inherently transphobic to say you prefer one part over another, the issue comes in when people make assumptions on who has those parts when the person in question hasn’t told you about their parts or shown their genitals to you yet.

And in many cases, genital preferences are used to prop up transphobic assumptions and beliefs— how many times have we heard a certain group say something along the lines of “all trans women have penises so my sexual orientation is cis-women-only because I’m not attracted to trans women. I can always clock trans women because they’re not real women, so I’d never accidentally find one attractive because I like vagina!”. So I think the trans community has rightfully become suspicious of people who say “my sexual orientation is penis!” or “my sexual orientation is vaginas!” because that’s A) misusing the term sexual orientation, and B) indicative of a certain set of assumptions about trans people’s bodies.

Personally, I don’t meet someone and say “I don’t know if you’re cute yet and I can’t tell if I’m interested in you because I haven’t taken off your pants yet. Could you take off your underpants real quick and give me a good look at your junk from all angles before I decide if I think that you’re attractive?” And if you try that with a potential partner before you ask them out on a first date uhhh…, good luck… I think you’d be single for a real long time.

Again, we aren’t saying that you are required to be interested in having sex with genitals you aren’t interested in, but we are saying that you shouldn’t assume who has those genitals and recognize that it’s possible to be attracted to someone without knowing what their genitals are.

And if the genital preference is a relationship deal-breaker for you, and you discuss your options with your potential partner and you don’t think you could have your sexual needs met in a relationship with someone who has those parts, or you aren’t interested in a hookup, or whatever the situation is, then it’s fine to say you don’t think staying together is the right choice and that isn’t transphobic. But it isn’t fine to give someone a once over in the club and decide that you’re attracted to them because you think they have a penis because you can’t actually know that for sure.

One thing I think you might find helpful here: When you’re watching a TV show or movie, have you thought that any of the actors are attractive? Have you ever had a “celebrity crush?” And did you actually need to inspect this celebrity’s genitals first before you determined that you found them sexually attractive? Probably not, right?

I don’t know if there is a term that means “preference for penises” and I also don’t know if a term like that is strictly necessary because you could just say it in words, like “I like to have sex with people who have penises,” instead of inventing a new label for that. But a lot of trans people are also wary of adopting new genital-based attraction terminology because we know that kind of label is likely going to be immediately misused by people who are going to apply it in transphobic ways (back to the “assuming you can tell if someone has a penis” thing) and use it to mean they’re not interested in trans people, even if that’s not what the label was meant to convey.

TLDR; there isn’t a sexual orientation word for “attraction to penises/vaginas” because sexual orientation is about the genders you’re attracted to, it isn’t a term that describes whether you prefer a certain body type or body parts.

So sexual orientation is about gender, not genitals. Genital preferences are a different things, and they aren’t inherently transphobic but it depends on the assumptions you’re using about who has what genitals and what they want to do with said genitals.

And because sexual orientation is about gender and not genitals, if you say you’re attracted to women that means you’re attracted to cisgender women and transgender women because trans women are women too. Similarly, if you say you’re attracted to men, that means you’re attracted to men, which includes transgender men and cisgender men because transgender men are also men just like cis men are.

Kii says:

Whether genital preferences are transphobic depends on a few things.

First things first:

You are not ever required to have sex with anyone you don’t want to have sex with. We are not going to tell you you’re required to have sex with a trans person or you’re transphobic. The only reason you should have sex with someone is because everyone involved mutually consents to having sex.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s some other information.

If you find someone attractive, and then you find out they’re trans and are instantly no longer attracted to them, that’s transphobic.

If you are a lesbian and dating someone who later comes out as a trans man, and you want to break up with them because you’re not attracted to men, that’s not transphobic. (Same goes for if you are a gay man dating someone who comes out as a trans woman.)

It’s okay to not want to touch, penetrate, or directly interact with a certain type of genitals during sex, but if you have a partner where this would be an issue, you can choose not to have sex with them, or you can work on alternative sexual situations that you’d both be comfortable with. (Examples may include: use of toys, touching through clothing, mutual masturbation) If you’re making assumptions about how a specific type of genitals is going to be used during sex, that’s generalizing. (ex: just because a penis is involved doesn’t mean the penis has to enter an orifice / just because a vagnia is involved doesn’t mean you have to put something in it.) Sex is very personal and individual. If you like someone, you two can work out what your sexual needs and wants are and you might find they match up even if you didn’t expect them to.

If you say you refuse to have sex with trans women because you don’t like penises, or you refuse to have sex with trans men because you don’t like vaginas, that’s transphobic, because you’re generalizing what trans peoples’ bodies look like. Some trans men have penises, and some trans women have vaginas. Some trans men are some of the most typically masculine people you’ll ever meet and they still have vaginas and some trans women are super stereotypically feminine and still have penises. Some trans people are intersex. Some trans people seek out alternative bottom surgery (two examples). Bottom line: you don’t know what’s in a trans person’s pants until they tell you.

If you’re cis and you’re only attracted to trans people, that’s a fetish and you’re still generalizing trans bodies. This is generally referred to as trans chasing.

If you’re trans and you only feel comfortable dating other trans people, that is generally a safety and security concern, or wanting to date someone who first-hand understands what you’re going through, and that’s okay.

Genital preferences are often heavily skewed against trans women with penises, so it’s important to evaluate why you dislike penises if you feel that way. Transmisogyny is a real problem, and many people use “I don’t like penises” as a blanket statement to avoid dating trans women (yes, this includes some AFAB trans people).

Another person explaining it, via @otherparenthesepleasespecify’s post:

‘what is it called when im attracted to only a certain sex?’ nothing. thats not an orientation, thats a physical preference. one might generally only find themselves attracted to blondes, but that just happens to be what theyre into. one might find penises the most attractive genitalia, but that just happens to be what theyre into. it’s not an orientation to be attracted to physical characteristics, it’s an orientation to be attracted to people.

‘what if i am attracted to a gender but dont feel comfortable interacting with a certain set of genitalia?’ nothing. thats not an orientation either. you are whatever orientation you are, with a repulsion to sex with certain characteristics. thats fine. there are heterosexual people that are sex-repulsed. there are asexual people who aren’t. people of all orientations might be made uncomfortable by certain types of sexual interactions and not others. your comfort with sexual interactions and comfort with certain genitalia can be defined by your personal preferences, your history, trauma, or just complete happenstance. it is perfectly valid to be attracted to men, for example, but not want to get involved with cis men, because of perhaps a history of abuse or oppression. you do not have to justify your choices to participate or not participate in sexual or romantic relationships with anyone, regardless of your orientation. ever.

what would be problematic would be identifying your entire orientation as trans-exclusive or -inclusive, because that quantifies transgender persons as a holistic group who have a single identity, which is not true. anyone you know could be trans without your awareness, and if your interest in or perception of them would wane upon this knowledge, you should consider inspecting yourself for internalized transphobia.

And now that you’ve read all that, please return to the main idea at the beginning of my answer: The only reason you should have sex with someone is because everyone involved mutually consents to having sex.

TLDR: No, genital preferences aren’t inherently transphobic. But it is transphobic to make a blanket statement saying that you wouldn’t date a transgender person because you assume that all trans women have penises (this is wrong because some trans women have gotten surgery and do have vaginas).

It’s also transphobic to equate gender to genitals and say you’re interested in women because you’re attracted to vagina, which assumes that all women have vaginas (this is wrong because some trans women have penises). You can say that you’re attracted to women and you can say you’re attracted to vaginas, but those are two separate statements and saying the first doesn’t necessarily mean saying the second one for some folks.

So don’t assume that all trans people with a particular gender have a particular set of genitals, or assume that you know if/how they want to use those genitals, and then you’re fine.

#Anonymous #kii says #sex m #genitals m #genital preferences #genital preference #penis m #vagina m #transmisogyny #chasing #chasers #fetishization #our own articles #discourse

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