Worst goddamn day of my life my bestie professor who is like the only professor in the whole world that gets me is teaching a unit next semester I can't even take because it's the one class you aren't allowed to take for multiple credits this is the fucking worst this is worse than when I couldn't take the Toni Morrison class last fall

if you're comfortable with me asking, why do you personally use it/its pronouns? /gen i recently had a bad conversation with my sister where she reacted badly when i told her i was thinking of using them. i want to explain to her why i like them but i dont know how. do you think you could give a perspective on it?

man, yeah, i guess. i mean, there's a couple reasons, and some of them are as banal and obscure as "it's grammatically more convenient in german". and i figure if you want to be able to explain it to your sister, you might need to be able to give her your reasons, not mine. but yes, sure, i can talk about pronouns!

i like it/its because it represents to me... a certain radicalism of form; a hard rejection not just of gender, but maybe more importantly of gender having fuckin' anything to do with personhood. it challenges a lot of assumptions people make along those lines, and conveniently does so every single time they want to refer to me. i like it because it's very hard to sanitize or ignore, because it trips people up, 'cause it makes them think.

there's this leslie feinberg quote:

For me, pronouns are always placed within context. I am female-bodied, I am a butch lesbian, a transgender lesbian—referring to me as "she/her" is appropriate, particularly in a non-trans setting in which referring to me as "he" would appear to resolve the social contradiction between my birth sex and gender expression and render my transgender expression invisible.

and it's that last part that's really important to me, that "render my transgender expression invisible." that idea that she/her is preferred in public precisely because it goes against the grain, because it doesn't conform, because it sets up a contradiction. and what you want to be a contradiction. what you want to be is outside of the way they imagine you; you want to make yourself unimaginable, except to the people who'd get it right.

i don't like gendered pronouns, in general -- and as dearly as i do love neopronouns and other gender-neutral pronoun sets, they're still gendered, in the sense that they're meant to be a function of your gender identity; they make it necessary for that information to be included every time anyone wants to talk about you. i don't want people to talk about me in terms of gender at all! but because pronouns = gender is so hellishly baked into culture at this point, even gender-neutral pronouns (they/them, etc.) kind of can't actually escape it. at best to me they're still talking in terms of (the lack of) gender, which doesn't quite do it for me.

whereas it/its feels different, 'cause courtesy of it being a pronoun explicitly Not Supposed To Be Used For People, it messes up this whole system! it's Not Supposed To Be For People, which is a vibe that suits me just fine, because i'm not what people are supposed to be anyway (e.g. possessing a gender, among other things). and it sets up an instant contradiction in terms, like leslie feinberg talks about. it makes the transgender expression incredibly visible.

it DOES still convey information about my gender identity, naturally, because that shit's inescapable, but at least all it conveys is more or less exactly Queer As In Fuck You, which is actually fine with me: queer as in fuck you; it/its as in fuck you; it/its as in if you must imagine me as gendered to imagine me as a person, then don't imagine me as a person, you fuck, on account of i have no interest in being a person by your definition of it anyway. (and on the other hand if you imagine me as a person without needing to imagine a gender, then frankly you can use whatever pronoun you like, because you've already got it right. the dang things are only words; they don't mean anything on their own.)

in short: pronouns are literally just charming little grammatical doodads, they serve a useful linguistic purpose, they shouldn't have to make existential statements about who you are. and i like to fuck up the structure that demands that they do by picking one whose existential statement about me has "INHUMAN" written where the gender slot was meant to go

Don't tell people your business because the evil eye is possible from everyone. Just saying that you want this and that will make people to give you evil eye. Jealous people are everywhere! So please next time🤐 and stay mysterious.

And yes for every door that closes another one opens. Don't worry... god has a plan for everyone and eventually you will do that what is best for you.

It's crazy how master in your country gives you more job opportunities while in my country bachelor is as good as master.

And even those who did below bachelor and master have more chance in getting a job then for those who even graduated universities.

The crazy thing is... all the income is almost the same expect for the people that graduates university... well it depends on what you studied.

I wish you a lot of protection of the evil eye and hope you will find your ease and peace with youre study

I honestly don’t think it was the evil eye tbh. Maybe lol but IDK. I’m not really religious or anything, I’m agnostic but I’m also open to believing that higher powers/beings/spirits/etc DO exist. I just think if that stuff is real then it’s more along the lines of the universe/god/whatever testing me to see if I REALLY want that or not. And once I said it out loud it became more than just an idea in my head and more something I was actually declaring that I’m going to do and actually want to do, you know what I mean?

I have a lot of options and I can totally see why this specific opportunity might not even be my cup of tea. So I’m more inclined to thinking that all of this opposition might actually telling me that I might just be trying to squeeze a square block into a round hole, you know? Or maybe explore all my options before I become committed to this specific one. I haven’t even fully fleshed out what I actually wanna do in this field yet and Master’s degrees are historically for people who want more specific instruction and have more defined goals for what they wanna do. Honestly, I’ll be fine without this specific opportunity but A) its cheap B) its at a really good school and in the US school name is a big deal C) it’s only a year long while most masters programs take 2-3. So I was pretty interested.

In the US educational attainment can make or break you. Each step higher up you go (like from bachelors to masters or masters to ph.d),the more money you are likely to make. Unless in special cases,like celebrities or making a successful business, or...winning the lottery lol. But now it’s becoming a thing where degrees are EXTREMELY expensive and so people are going into HUGE amounts of debt (100,000 united states dollars or MORE) but can’t pay it off in their lifetimes cause their salary isn’t high enough + interest keeps making their debt even higher + cost of living in the US is so high. So they spend their whole life trying to pay it every month anyway even though they know they’ll never pay it off (you can’t get rid of student loan debt in the US without just paying it off in full and defaulting on it a.k.a not paying it can actually keep you from getting certain jobs!).

Some degrees here tend to not go into much debt and they can pay it off cause the wages are high compared to other jobs(Computer Science for example. I study this with Linguistics and so I’m luckily not in much debt). But most DO!  In fact, there’s degrees that people tell you to avoid studying (psychology, sociology, english) and careers they push you away from (teaching, psychologist, social worker) even though they are SUPER important in our society. It’s because then you’ll probably be poor and in debt for the rest of your life :( 

So yeah, long story short: American education (and healthcare and like a million other things) is TRASH! The US is literally a 50 state wide ghetto ,but everyone pretends like it’s great even though most of us are poor, sick (physically and/or mentally), and/or drowning in debt.

Anyway, thanks for talking with me and encouraging me! I really appreciate it! I’ll be fine, the whole situation is just hella annoying. So many HOOPS to jump through.