Formal education, within the system we’ve built, isn’t about enlightenment. It’s about initiation. All that Greek stuff on-campus in higher education is the social dimension of the enforced Pledge of Allegiance at lower levels. The structure is part of a mechanism to pass the rites of supremacy to a level of society. That’s why our schools and universities are so ineffective at doing what they claim to. Knowledge, wisdom—that’s not the point. The institution serves not to enrich and equalize but to select, prepare, and preserve the social order—all while pronouncing its innate virtues to the spirit of Man. No, in our world education is an arm of the system, built to enshrine a Way and a doctrine of the powerful and unique. A military of the mind, as it were.
We could have a system that does what ours pretends to. But we don’t and we won’t, because then our caste-based society of heredity and capital would crumble. So instead we make our gestures and code our language, and make it look like we’re serving a social good.
The thing about that passing revelation in “Growing Pains” is, one can’t help but think of Lars. For the entire show we’ve seen Steven just take these extreme cartoonish injuries and thought little of it, so it came as such a shock when Lars banged his head, and that was it.
There was this tangible confusion. We’re watching this silly cartoon. He’s got to be fine, right. Steven lives through this all the time. Why get realistic now? The Off-Colors kind of echo our instincts, if not for the astonishingly brutal signifiers. They don’t quite get it.
But, like. Steven wasn’t any different. Episode after episode, his own bones were getting shattered over and over again. The only reason he’s still alive is the magic holding him together, knitting his pieces in real-time.
He was just used to it; he always seemed fine, no one showed him any particular concern, so he just dealt with the pain and kept going. So he didn’t really have that much reason to think other humans would be all that different. Yeah, they’d probably be a little more fragile but…
Lars’s death is the first moment the real implications of mixing this fantastical and the mundane really land. Like, you’re mixing normal people with relatively normal physics into this cartoon nonsense—and they’re going to break. They can’t play by the same heightened reality.
And it turns out Steven literally embodies that. Since the beginning the show has involved him staggering that line between the worlds, not treating either with the appropriate gravity, not quite understanding the separation or the consequences. Even after he sees the way this stuff affects the people he cares about, this danger and disregard that surrounds them every moment that he’s never taken all that seriously, it remains unclear how much he himself is affected. He seems fine.
But he’s not. He’s just being kept alive.
Which in turn brings back that sort of chilling line from the movie, not that much earlier.
It’s like. Steven, you’re disregarding your own pain that much, your own body’s signals, you’re getting that much neglect, that you don’t even realize you’re basically dead a hundred times over already. That’s your normal. Even after seeing your friend die, you don’t get it.
Life is fragile. None of what you’re doing is normal or healthy. You’re just as breakable as Lars, you deserve the same level of care. You’re only still here by virtue of a miracle, and you can’t even rely on that always saving you. Priyanka has some serious asses to kick.
The amount of neglect in Steven’s life that would lead for this revelation in episode 174 out of 180 to be any sort of a surprise… like, we saw it. We saw how reality works in this world. All it took was one knock, and Lars was gone. And yet, Steven just keeps eating the abuse.
Aside from some passing contextual alarm out of Greg, Priyanka of all people is the first adult in Steven’s life to show him an appropriate response, to treat him as a human child with his own physical and emotional needs. And he just has no fucking clue what to do with this.
This is how things get normalized. Our attitudes toward ourselves and others. Our assumptions about how the world works. How we build up unrealistic expectations. If there had just been one adult in Steven’s life showing him appropriate care, he would know what it looked like.
Just so we’re clear, the Bow business was not great. Not malicious, it would seem, but just so very Dumbass White^TM, in a way that can only go unchecked if there are no Black people in the room. Everyone concerned seems aghast in hindsight, and so on. Fine. But that’s a legitimate grievance. Everything else about the livestream, though, and the online firestorm in response? It’s in such intense bad faith, and in such a specific familiar way, that I can’t help but wonder.
There are a few things that precede these events, you see. Not long before this livestream, Noelle came out as non-binary—in some puttering, early, confused capacity, as one does. (Speaking from personal experience.) They also began to express they may be neurodiverse. And then they had a long, long interview with Rebecca Sugar, where the two of them compared notes. As it turns out, Double Trouble was… sort of, in part, a self-insert character. Stevenson had been thinking about this character for years and years, and using them as a way to work through some things before they really understood why.
Up until all of this, Stevenson was held up as some bastion of progressive showrunning. But after this series of revelations, we see baseless accusations of lesbophobia (?!?!), of ableism, and of creepy attitudes toward non-binary people.
You see how this works, right. It’s all great to talk about marginalized identities until marginalized people start doing the talking, at which point everything they say comes under the most intense scrutiny. When Noelle came off as a normal white lesbian girl, they were largely free to talk about whatever. But now that they’re exploring their gender identity and neurology, and revealing how much of this stuff was actually personal—and that they’re on good terms with, comparing their own work to, the last person to take this dark turn toward the margins of society? Oh, ew, throw them to the wolves.
The specific way that passing statements were twisted out of context with the worst possible interpretation, it’s like 2018 SU Crit territory all over again. Or just the TERf/alt-right playbook. Not that there’s any real ideological difference. Once you nail a plausible accusation, it doesn’t matter if it gets refuted; the impression remains: there’s something off with this person; it’s best to approach with caution.
Of the scurrilous accusations, lesbophobia is especially pointed and significant. Where it comes from: the host of the stream, when introducing a participant, read off the name of her podcast, which includes the word “dyke†because it’s a podcast by a queer woman about queer stuff. Right? So this gets abstracted out to, THE PRODUCTION TEAM USED THE D-SLUR. Which by metonymy gets translated into Noelle Stevenson in particular. Which is… not what happened, and just, you know, fucking hell, come on. There’s no good-faith way you could come to this reading.
What’s important is why we see this bizarre frame. It’s important because Stevenson just came out as non-binary. To emphasize this, there’s a similar kind of misrepresentation to suggest that the production team was intentionally creepy about Double Trouble, casting them as sort of a predator. Again: Double Trouble is Noelle. (Sort of, partially.) Similar story for the purported ableism, in regard to Entrapta’s neurology, etc., when Stevenson is also apparently neurodiverse.
What this framing is trying to assert without saying it directly is, okay, Noelle is creepy, deviant, and lesbophobic. And the Bow thing, which sucks and is real, comes as a convenient wedge issue so that people don’t examine the other claims too deeply. It’s a perfect storm to try to take down a gender traitor, basically.
A thing to remember is that cis people often have a strange and fraught relationship with gender too. There are consequences in failing to adequately perform one’s assigned gender, even if one agrees with it. Achieving Maximum Gender is a big power goal for many cis people, especially neurotypical ones. It’s something more to win at.
When cis people feel undermined or shown up in their gender performance, or are misgendered, it’s a Big Fucking Deal. So if you’re trans and feeling weird about your whole situation, take solace in understanding it’s not you. It’s the concept of gender. Everyone struggles.
Well, not everyone. But anyone. That’s the nature of performance. People are just people, really, the lines we draw are arbitrary, and everyone’s faking this thing to try to meet some external standard. Not everyone picks up the skills or applies them the same way if at all. Some are years behind their peers.
What’s important in the end is just figuring out a way to like yourself. Be the person who you recognize as “me” and can feel feel comfortable inside. That’s it. That’s all. Whether you’re cis or trans. Playing someone else’s game is just a recipe for despair. People are people.
The rich see success as a matter of effort because they don’t actually have any obstacles beyond bothering to do a thing. “Feeling hungry? Then why don’t you just order something, you lazy shit!”
This leads to the natural conclusion, if you didn’t succeed that means you didn’t try. If you really tried, then how could you not have gotten what you want? It doesn’t make sense. You just need to try harder. Want it more. Force of will. Make the world bend to you.
This also ties into, I think. a reason that rich people are so bad with numbers and statistics and probability and so prone to magical thinking:
They’re unused to the concept of wanting a thing and not getting it; it’s this binary thing. Either things are, or they aren’t.
If things aren’t the way you want them, and if you’ve clearly wanted them enough to say you put in the effort, it’s because they’re being kept from you specifically, maliciously and for a reason.
So when you start talking about, like, 1 in 12 million odds, they’re like, GREAT! So it’s not impossible! And I’m a person who wants it, so it might as well be me, and it probably will be. Numbers mean nothing, because there’s nothing they can’t make happen through force of will.
Me, I’m not even used to having my basic needs met. I’m unused to knowing any sort of agency over my life, and have only ever felt ashamed to want anything for myself. The notion of anything turning out for me, with the odds as they are, has seemed too ludicrous to entertain. So put me in a room with a rich person, and just see the panic and disgust creep into their face. Am I serious? How can I exist? Oh no, I’m raising the wrong questions! I’m citing references! I’m one of those people! The unclean! I’m thinking poor! I’m going to infect them! Fuck fuck fuck! Stomp it! Get rid of it! Before it brings us all down with it!
I’m not speaking rhetorically, either. I’ve got… maybe a decade of intense experience here.
For allistics, every interaction is on some level a power struggle. It’s not about understanding; it’s about asserting. You can see this in politics as well; the more explanation a candidate gives for a position, the less people seem to respect that candidate. If they just assert, “this is how it is,†no matter how irrational or unreasonable it is, then people back away and go, okay, clearly they know what they’re talking about.
I don’t like to fight, I have no interest in controlling anyone, and I want to know the reasons for things so that I understand how stuff works. But the more that I try to earnestly engage with allistics on my level, giving them all the tools I need to deal with a situation, the more aggressive they become. Because they see it as a fight they can win.
So the more quickly and bluntly you can shut them down, give them no leverage to even question your decisions, the smoother things will tend to go—as unintuitive as that feels.
“No.”
“I’d rather not.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I just can’t.”
I can’t stress this enough: allistics don’t want to know things. They don’t want to understand reasons or methods or meaning. They think they have it all under control, and that you’re undermining them, insulting them, if you give them anything to work with that interferes with the conclusions that they will form on their own.
You’re controlling the story, they think, with all these facts and details, and not letting them write it themselves. How dare you. Well, they will show you who’s in control of the story.
The only solution is not to engage. Don’t give them anything. Then they can’t throw it back at you.
“This isn’t a negotiation. This is me telling you no.”
I think this is why consent is such a big issue for me. I don’t do power struggles. I don’t do negotiation. For me to say something, I’ve already worked out all of the angles I can and proposed the most generous possible solution, reserving as little as I can manage for myself. For someone to question that and say, no, you’re being a dick; I need more than the 95% you’re giving me, it’s just…
No.
I said no.
Fuck you, I said no. I won’t let you kill me.
I am so vulnerable to manipulation and guilt, to give up what autonomy I have over my own mind and body and emotions and needs and desires. I’m so prone to giving more than I can spare, even after I’ve drawn the final line, just to keep the peace.
No more explanations.
Just, no.
Setting boundaries is hard as hell. But if you don’t, it’s an invitation for abuse.
Guy: “You’re just my size! I said, you’re just my size!”
I: [dumb stare]
Guy: [peers closely] “Whoop!” [turns robotically and walks away]
Later, on my way back, two different cars began to honk energetically, accompanied by more shouting, as I passed.
…
I guess it’s starting.
It was broad daylight. The first guy at least seemed amiable enough, if… a poor judge of how to communicate with people. I was too baffled to feel threatened or anything. But yeah, I guess I knew this was likely to become a thing eventually.
So. Here’s a new annoyance, then.
Today, this was just stupid. But if this is going to be how things go now, I guess I should start to be more careful.
All hail the monkey’s paw.
(Incidentally, this is not what I was feeling a few days ago. This is not the charming part. This is not what I find attractive.)
I need to get rid of this facial hair at the earliest moment I can. This is driving me nuts. Right now, it’s this and my voice that are the two big things that give me problems. I mean, I can manage both, but I’d rather not have to. And this is such an easy thing to deal with… if one has the money. And there doesn’t happen to be a pandemic outside.
My priority for erasing this mess:
upper lip
chin
throat
jaw
cheeks
The upper lip is most noticeable and darkest and hardest to hide and most psychologically… troublesome. The chin is viscerally annoying and prickly and hard to deal with. Other areas, decreasingly so.
With this neurology I’ve got here, it’s hard to express how much energy it takes for me to shave, and how dizzy and ill I feel afterward, what with all that standing around and waving my arm around and close scrutiny. Physically it wipes me out, never mind the emotional exhaustion from acknowledging it, focusing on it, engaging with it. So, often I don’t. Which on its own makes me feel worse and worse until I do.
When I do—it’s not perfect, but it feels like my whole face shape changes a little, and it’s soft, and I can stand to look at myself, or rest my chin on… anything, really. Part of the mask is scraped away, and I feel like me. It’s this big achievement. All this effort, and now there I am again, Christ. Then repeat the same cycle tomorrow, forever.
What, another day? I only just finished the last one.
It would be such a difference not to have to outlay all that energy, making myself feel awful, so as to not feel a little more awful, every single day. And for it to be completely effective, which this isn’t. For it no longer to be a concern, so I can move on.
I remember when I first heard about laser treatment, maybe 15 years ago—I think it was offered in Japan at that time but not here, so it was this novel thing—and I thought, wow, that would be really desirable, but how could I excuse it? I didn’t have the right yet to want anything. I didn’t see the point of making myself better. I just wanted to not exist, really. So I filed it away to chew over at some indeterminate point that was unlikely ever to come.
It says, I think, a lot that this has been such a growing point of insecurity for me since maybe 1992, and for a decade there it was used as a major point of control over me. I wasn’t allowed to touch it. I was told in so many words that my body didn’t belong to me anymore. (When had it ever?) The odd time I couldn’t stand it anymore and I shaved it off, they were so aghast and disgusted. I looked like an alien, a child, a girl. I wasn’t to just do that to them without telling them. What would people say?
Anyway, without going back down that well again, this is the next thing I need to wrangle. And in practical terms it’s… like, theoretically it should be simple and straightforward. All it takes is money, which I don’t have but I can maybe figure out. But again also: pandemic.
One of the places around here, they had some kind of a deal where you paid a flat fee for forever treatment—however long it took to get rid of everything, which I know can take several visits —and could pay that in small installments. Something like $40 a month. Which, y’know. That’s… not terrible. It’s a thing I could maybe figure out how to manage. Except, it’s plague outside. Even worse, it’s plague inside, particularly with self-care facilities where people will linger. And technically this is not vital, time-sensitive treatment. So that’s a barrier.
I’ve held out for 30 years, so I guess I can wait a few more months and see if we can fix the problem every other fucking corner of the world has figured out. (Ha ha, have I even met America?) But I don’t want to. And for once, that matters. I never let it. But this time it does.
I matter.
So. This is a priority. We’ll figure it out. Somehow.
Now over six months into HRT, there have been some clear effects. My body has taken well to the regimen, reacting strongly even to low starter doses. It seems obvious this was something my body was starving for. The first thing I noted, within moments of the first pill hitting my bloodstream, was how much clearer my head got. This thick fug that’s always been a part of my mind, it lifted a little. Soon I became able to feel emotions. Like, viscerally, physically. I had always thought of the term “feelings” as poetic, but now there was this burning sensation in my chest. Looking online, it seems like the shittiness I had felt every day since I was maybe eleven, it’s… similar to menopause. It seems like for decades my body was physically waiting and looking for chemicals that it wasn’t getting, and so just made my life hell demanding them. Just mentally, emotionally, this has been a revelation. Is this the way normal people feel, because suddenly I feel like a real person.
The physical side also kicked off quickly. Skin, scent, eyes. What small hair loss was happening in the corners of my scalp turned right around. I am still waiting for some more pronounced fat redistribution, around my face and hips and thighs. As impatient as I am for that, my body has other priorities at the moment, it would seem.
So.
Despite frequent pressing questions from medical staff, I wasn’t really asking for boobs. The notion didn’t factor into my ideas for myself. I’m not a sexual person, right, and that was the frame I used. Now, though, I am struck daily with how cool and validating this is. It’s just this obvious marker that I am who and what I am. That I exist. That my body belongs to me. That this is all really happening. And, it’s just neat.
People are people. Humans are not particularly sexually dimorphic. Any differences between what we arbitrarily define as the two sexes are subtle and inconsistent. As a result, then, any small change makes a big apparent difference. Psychologically, more than physically.
I just wasn’t prepared. It felt weird or pervy to dwell on. But, it matters. So many people have laid claim to me over the years, telling me what I could or couldn’t or must do with my body, most of which just caused me to hate myself more, dissociate further from this tangible thing I was attached to. This body, it belongs to me now. It is an aspect of me. This part of me, this physical form, it’s becoming a thing that I want to inhabit. That I am starting to feel attached to, that has begun to reflect me. I am turning into an actual person, who exists in the world.
With boobs.
Look, boobs are hilarious. And cool. And I get to have them now. Because I am kinda-sorta a girl. So I get the Cracker Jack prize.
I feel like I just went back to complete some certification I was forced to drop several ages ago. Picking up life wherever it was I left off.
I am real, and I am awake. And maybe someday soon I will be able to push through my trauma and take care of myself. Make a home. Build a world that I want to live in, filled with kind and sincere weirdos who just appreciate each other for who they are. I deserve to be a person. And I think I am figuring out how to make that work, bit by bit.
Of the three main Gems, Garnet’s story has always seemed the most muted and hazily defined. If you go back with the understanding that she is trans (as one of many dimensions to the metaphor she embodies), her whole character arc of learning to be honest and open about who she is, embracing her inner complexity and allowing herself to be vulnerable, it takes on a lot more color. It all starts to open up and make sense in a similar way to Amethyst’s and Pearl’s inner journeys.
From the start it’s just taken as read that Garnet is who she says she is. But she asserts this so strongly as to be rigid in her attitudes toward herself and her potential, and as to not let anyone in. She has to learn how to be a verb, and not just a noun. A person, not just an identity.
There’s this sort of fear that letting people know her too closely, or performing outside of this narrow definition she’s made for herself, will negate her identity, cause them to respect her less on her own terms. Which is not an entirely unwarranted fear, as we see in the show.
So her journey is about learning that essential trust in the truth of who she is, so that she doesn’t have to be defensive about it, protect it all the time. So that she can feel free to just live.
So these hormones have been doing a lot to my head, all of it I think good, as well as what more incidentally is going on with my body. What’s curious to me is the things the process continues to reveal to me. It’s hard to say how much of this is the change in hormonal balance, how much is the shift in perspective on myself and the parts of me I never liked, and how much is just overcoming internalized garbage that I didn’t have opportunity to address before.
It feels like my queerness keeps increasing, in my typically equivocal way. I don’t adhere to the gender binary—but I am in fact medically transitioning. I don’t actually experience sexual or romantic attraction—but what appreciation there may be, it turns out it is regardless of gender.
That was… difficult for me to sort out. But it really doesn’t matter. People are people, and the toxicity that put me off one side of the spectrum is neither innate nor exclusive to that end. Anyone can be lovely or awful, based on what they individually bring.
Which is to say, I now seem to be pan-aroace. Which I, uh, decisively wasn’t before this rejiggering. But now pretty clearly am. It’s… a little weird. I haven’t yet figured out what that means in real terms, given, you know, the aroace part. It’s taken a couple of months to grapple and come to terms with. Like, what is that, and why is it here now? And, there it is.
I feel like I’ve unlocked a massive shrug here. It’s as abstract a notion as possible, since I can’t imagine a situation it could pertain to. But hey. How else could it possibly be with me?
“None of this really applies. But also, I am diving in completely.”
My therapist told me today, it’s night and day, comparing me now to when I first came in to see her. It’s like I’m transformed, she says. There’s a lot of mess still to deal with, but, like.
I’ve said how the real me is taking over recently. That other person is being depreciated and packed away, and Azure is in control of their own body for once. It seems like this is a visible change.
Your new captain on this expedition
I mentioned the nurse and some other interactions I’ve been having, and how it just seems like the last few weeks people are being nice to me to a degree that I’m not accustomed. What she said, it was… interesting. She described how the attitude one expresses toward one’s self serves to prompt others’ responses. It becomes this feedback loop, where if you treat yourself as someone deserving of respect, people tend to respect you. And, the reverse—well. I’ve been living the reverse for most of my life.
It’s always been very clear to me how wrong I am, you see. Ergo the mask. It was only ever good for surface-level contact if that, maybe a few memorized scripts, because I can’t fake a damned thing. And when it faltered, yow did people make this clear.
Knowing how this works, it doesn’t help in itself, right. But it does help to clarify some of the dynamics I have experienced (particularly over that last decade, but really for the last 40 years). And why the more distraught I feel, the more toxic the situation seems to become.
This whole concept sucks and is unfair and is gross, and it feels like the opposite of the way people should behave to a person in distress. But that seems to be the situation. And now, it seems I may be entering the early stages of the reverse kind of a loop—what with this new self-possession and what scant interactions I have experienced with others.
It’s so frickin’ weird, I said to her. It puts me off my guard every time. Why are people being kind? Why now?
Well, it seems that may be part of it. It’s because I have found who I am. And, people seem to like them.
So how many times has Greg seen Pearl poofed? He seems to know exactly how it works—using language that suggests first-hand sensory experience that he struggles to articulate—and to know that Pearl’s reboot is unusual for her.
If we take Pearl’s memory as accurate, both when Steven enters her gemstone and in the later context of musical theater, then she seems to have remained intact from the night she met Greg up until she learned about Rose’s plans for the future.
Then she seems to have regenerated at least once sometime between her initial meltdown over Rose’s pregnancy and what seems to be quite late in the process.
From there, Pearl keeps the same form through Steven’s childhood (God, her body language in “Three Gems and a Baby”), into season 1a.
If Greg saw her regenerate—likely more than once, given his familiarity with the process—that would have been somewhere in the few months before Steven was born. That must have been a, uh, rough period for her, huh.
Dare I say, her regenerated form—after she realized Rose was going to be leaving her—to my eyes it’s coded as markedly less independent than her prior, somewhat with-the-times style. She becomes more, well, Pearlish. More delicate, reverting more to type. So her mental state…
For millennia, Pearl just sort of expected she and Rose would be together forever. Then in just a few blinks of her lifetime, she’s pushed to the periphery and Rose is about to die. And with that, suddenly Pearl takes on more of the appearance of a traditional Pearl: devoted, subservient.
A Gem’s physical form is a manifestation of how they see themself—so it’s as if Pearl is asking, what did she do wrong? She must have strayed too far from her purpose. She dropped her guard, let a threat in, due to her lack of devotion.
It’s like her very body is pleading by way of her subconscious, please, don’t go; I’ll be who I was supposed to be, see. I’ll always be here for you.
But it wasn’t enough, because it was never really about Pearl.
