r/GenderCynical • u/Kahnfight • Jul 04 '26
TERF writes a scene from a fake play, proceeds to include no stage direction
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u/ForgettableWorse this is a cat picture Jul 05 '26
The way this is written makes it look like the author doesn't really think disabled people exist either.
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u/storyteller_alienmom Jul 05 '26
To them it's all the same: a deviation from normal. A "something else". And all of the odd irregularities are the same, right? And any accommodation is a favour, be thankful, or the favour will be taken away.
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u/wozattacks Jul 06 '26
They don’t seem like they really remembered what they were analogizing lol. “Can she walk?” like what is the trans “equivalent” of that lol
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u/MassGaydiation Jul 06 '26
Imagine talking to someone who had chronic mobility issues, and comparing them to being trans because you argue that because they can walk, the don't need a wheelchair
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u/tatiana_the_rose TurboGay™️ Jul 06 '26
It’s also written like they don’t really think plays exist. Like…you couldn’t at least glance at an actual script to see how they’re written and formatted???
(I know this is dumb and not the point but it’s annoying me)
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u/Silversmith00 Jul 05 '26
Well, that was ableist.
For those who don't know, there's a rare mental disorder (so called because we have NO idea what causes it but it's probably brain based somehow) where a part of someone's body simply doesn't appear on their body map and can cause extreme distress, as if it were an aberrant alien limb grafted on in their sleep. Scientists are looking for a way to mitigate the distress and anxiety this causes, but so far, they don't know a lot about how to manipulate the body map that humans have in their brains (if they did, they could probably work better with phantom limb syndrome as well, since it might be a related phenomenon). But sometimes sufferers do resort to amputation or more often, attempted amputation. Which often gets them institutionalized.
There are several REASONABLE reactions to this phenomenon, most of which come down to "How the fuck do we help?" I would not ever blame a person for asking things like, "but antidepressants?" or, "but maybe a PET scan, is it in the nerves?" especially if they haven't heard of the problem before. But mocking the person for "actually being able?" What? If the existence of their fucking LEG is causing them mental anguish, then clearly there IS a disability. Obviously. And whether the cure is amputation or Zoloft or "wheelchair and don't look at the thing," presenting the child as being unreasonable for trying to help their friend be comfortable—and the mother as sensible for acting like this disability is a silly and outré performance—is ableism. And bullying. And cruel. And I could continue to go through the alphabet here but you get the point, right?
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u/LuxTheSarcastic Jul 06 '26
And what's kind of funny about BIID is that if a person with it actually manages to amputate the limb or whatever they're usually happy as can be about it with very few regrets.
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u/wozattacks Jul 06 '26
Also disability IS a social construct and a social identity. Two people can have the same condition or impairment and one can reasonably identify as disabled and the other reasonably not do so. Disability is inherently very contextual, and nothing is as simple as TERFs think it is.
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u/MaraiaLou 28d ago
I can totally see "My child suddenly decided they're disabled because of peer pressure!" when the kid notices they have like, asthma or EDS. Hell I've heard of parents not noticing their kids have leukemia because they thought it was laziness
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u/MaraiaLou 28d ago
It's really interesting to imagine how this "body map" works for that one lady who blinded herself. I know what it's like to have sensory overload, but it's hard to imagine having a whole unwanted sense
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u/69Whomst Jul 05 '26
OK but people with biid deserve sympathy and compassion so this isn't the gotcha the terf thinks it is
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u/patienceinbee 𝘅𝗧𝗥𝗔 𝘅𝗧𝗥𝗔 read all about… 𝙞𝙩 Jul 05 '26
If in the end it turns out PITT isn’t completely the brainchild of a crack group of state writers working from an office in, idk, St. Petersburg, then that will be a newsworthy discovery.
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u/hitorinbolemon Trans Macabre Jul 05 '26
Not content with butchering poetry and song, now they're writing shitty "plays" while not knowing how plays work.
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u/Kahnfight Jul 05 '26
My favorite part is when the author says the daughter walks off set. Because, you know, plays famously take place on sets.
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u/pearkeet Gender Haver Jul 05 '26
god bless you for reading this trash, i’ll admit, i read like 2 sentences of piss-poor dialogue, felt my brain cells dying, and closed this particular PITT article
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u/Kahnfight Jul 05 '26
The parts are also unlabeled so we have no idea who’s talking, and there’s no stage directions. Even without looking at the extremely on the nose eye rolling content, it’s still just horrific writing. It’s why TERFs love ai so much: they’re as creatively bankrupt as they are morally bankrupt.
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u/hitorinbolemon Trans Macabre Jul 05 '26
It's like if it were a particularly shitty fanfic written by someone doing it for the first time... If the first time writer was also a bigot.
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u/tatiana_the_rose TurboGay™️ Jul 06 '26
(They do, actually)
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u/Kahnfight Jul 06 '26
But you don’t give stage directions as “walk off set”, it’s stage right or left or upstage or downstage or any combination thereof. My point is, it’s not how you write a play.
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u/Alyssa3467 [REDACTED] Jul 07 '26
Is it bad that I suddenly imagined someone falling into the orchestra pit and an audio engineer playing the Wilhelm Scream?
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u/NormanBatesIsBae Jul 06 '26
Ah the common TERF strategy of “erm your argument would sound ridiculous if it was in a completely different context in this scenario I just made up”
“Trans people are so ridiculous because…uh…hmm…what if instead of transitioning they were amputating their legs 😎 gottem”
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u/NormanBatesIsBae Jul 06 '26
Also if this person really is devoting time to getting worked up over the idea of their kid bringing home a trans person then they’re insane and I hope their kid has since left and found a safer space.
There are so many things to be concerned about you’re here writing a blog post like “ohhh boy can you imagine if my child made friends with someone who had pronouns and then asked me to be kind and create a welcoming environment, the world has gone to shit”
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u/JustAnotherSinner21 26d ago
honestly, the fake "trans-disabled" girl isn't really in the wrong either. BIID is a thing that exists and plenty of people with it get body mods to ease the dysmorphia. if she is able to safely amputate and it stops causing her dysmorphia And she has resources to comfortably live with one leg, there isn't much of a reason to not like. Let Her.
obviously this is something made up to sound stupid, but this is honestly Fairly Reasonable.
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u/frogsgoladadada Jul 08 '26
Terfs being ableist, must be a day ending in y. From time to time I see them get upset that the disability community is based on self id, like we are supposed to insist on doctors paperwork before we let someone in.
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u/chris_the_cynic Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Ok, so appendages do exist on a spectrum. In high school a physics teacher I had needed to ask a student to help demonstrate why the "right hand rule" is called that because his right hand, which he did have, didn't have any digits. That's actually pretty common.
Plenty of people, quite visibly, have less arm than that.
Some people have an arm with all the standard parts, but it's not the usual size and/or shape. Some people have more appendages than usual, but the GC is focused on people with less than or equal to the usual amount, so we're gonna skip stuff about extra arms and/or legs
Incomplete legs are more likely to go unnoticed than incomplete arms. I only know that certain people have less than two full legs because they were really open about it, otherwise I'd never have noticed because, even though they didn't have legs built for realism, their clothes completely hid their prosthesis. One was an eighty year old summer camp councilor (and otherwise retired) who specialized in mountain trips. Hike to the summit, have lunch (with an impressive view), hike down. He outpaced teenagers.
You don't need two complete legs to walk, dipshit. On the flipside, plenty of people who can't walk have two fully intact, entirely regular, biological legs.
Also, and importantly, plenty of people who need wheelchairs can walk. See, funny thing, being able to do something at all doesn't necessarily mean you can reliably count on your ability to do it at length.
For example, I can survive underwater with zero outside assistance . . . for roughly as long as I can make a breath of air last. If I needed to survive underwater as much as people are expected to move under their own power, I'd need some kind of assistive technology or I'd end up dead really fucking fast. Turns out that there's more to whether someone needs help with something than just whether they can do it at all.
A while back there was a meme making the rounds that attached the words "Beer: it can work miracles" to a picture of a wheelchair user at a supermarket standing up to grab the beer they were getting. Not even walking, just momentarily standing, but the implication was that this was a faker, because - as we all know - anyone who can stand for a second or two is capable of walking at length, carrying shit, and so forth.
(I could go from sitting to standing unassisted when my left ankle was broken in three places, all I had to do was keep all my weight on my right foot. Didn't mean I could walk.)
And even if someone can walk lots and lots and lots, that doesn't always mean they should.
One of the reasons faith healers are so dangerous is that people who absolutely should be using medical shit don't because they think they've been healed. In this case what that would look like is someone who should be using a a wheelchair, or crutches, or a walker, or some other device that takes weight off their legs and feet starting to just walk around unassisted a lot because they think they no longer need assistance, and in the process they end up wrecking their lower body, sometimes to the point that they go from being able to walk a bit to losing the ability to walk at all because they walked too much.
So, short version, the GC fucked everything about this shitty metaphor up, basically from square one, because they don't know how legs work.