People Are People - Blog Posts

Hello! Can I ask about your "children shouldn't be given adult responsibility" post? (genuine question) Instinctively I agree as I believe children should be treated like human beings but not like adults, but I am confused on what you mean by adult responsability. Could you clarify? Thank you for your time, and have a nice day!

When I was younger, folks seemed pretty comfortable with telling me I was "an old soul", or, "acted like an adult". I was a sharp kid with a large vocabulary who spent a lot of time reading quietly, so I guess the perception was that I was therefore more "grown up" than other kids my age.

Which, you know, made an otherwise lonely and isolated child feel pretty important and special, so it was easy for me to feel flattered when it signed me up for extra responsibilities.

I was six when I was first left alone to take care of the baby. I was seven when I got my first summer job. I was eight when I was put in charge of my own chicken coop; feeding, cleaning, buying feed and all.

I was special, I was different, I was "treated like a grown up". I was proud of that.

Then I got older, and more tired, and the limitations stayed the same while the responsibilities and expectations kept piling up.

No, I couldn't stay home while my family went on an overnight trip, I was too young for that.

But the adults were both out somewhere overnight? Sure, I could take care of two younger kids, cook dinner, put them to bed by 8 and have them off to school in the morning.

I remember, once things began to decline, repeating rather often: 

"Either give me adult responsibilities and adult privileges, or child responsibilities and child privileges. Don't give me child privileges and adult responsibilities- either I'm an adult or a kid. Make up your mind."

It turns out that "adult responsibilities" isn't quite the same thing as "adult respect".

But even if it was, though- even if I was treated with all the benefits and freedoms of adulthood alongside all the work, I was still a kid. 

Kids need free time. Kids need sleep. Kids need to *not* have to lay awake at night wondering what they're going to make for school lunches, or how they're going to cook dinner for six when the stovetop burners went out.

And it's not necessarily because they can't handle the pressure, but because there should be Actual Adults in their life doing those things. If not for the labour aspect, but for the respect and security of it.

My parent says I can't wear shoes in the house? Why do they care? I'm the one who mops the floors.

I'm not allowed to stay home alone? What, you trust me with your baby but you don't trust me with your house?

The family pet died and I'm tasked with burying it? Cool, grief is isolated and nobody cares, and when I'm scared or in pain, the authority figures in my life will be distant and emotionally unavailable. I have no reason to believe anyone will support me through emotional hardship in the future.

When it comes to responsibility, its not so much a question of, "can the child handle the work?", but, "what precedent is this setting for their perception of the future?", and, "What is this teaching them about actual adults?"

A child who sits quietly and draws is no more an adult than a child who eats glue and sticks pens up their nose, but both deserve to be respected as people, and both deserve to feel as though the adults in their lives are stable, reliable, secure, and have their best interests in mind.

Responsibility is not the same as respect, and there is a mile of difference between "can" and "should". 

you all need to think about how you interact with trans men online, like really think

recently one of my posts about being a trans man and casually interacting with another trans man got about 90,000 notes and the tags and comments are full of ‘too pure for this earth’, ‘i’m a dirty sinner i don’t deserve to read this post’, ‘adorable cute sweet precious boys’ despite the fact that it’s mentioned that i am in college and not a child in the post and you all need to think about how some trans men do not want to be referred to that way and being okay with being referred to that way is pretty much exclusively a young teenager tumblr thing that makes a lot of guys uncomfortable. i’m just a man. none of this is necessary and it’s very performative, but…

along with this infantilizing, with this obsession with the proposed purity of another man and myself just for existing, there’s also dehumanization that comes with it, for example:

somewhere along the post, someone decided it would be a good idea to add, ‘all i can imagine is two eldritch horrors trying to get their voices as horrifying and fucked up as possible’ (not exact quote but that’s the gist of it)…

and someone decided that it would be a good idea to take my experience, wildly change the context and make a FANFIC, on MY OWN POST, of two eldritch MONSTERS upset because their voices didn’t sound ‘as horrific’ as the ‘monsters’ around them, and bonding over it together. nowhere in this fanfiction was being trans mentioned.

this is, quite possibly, the most horrifying thing someone has added to one of my posts and going beyond dehumanizing my experiences as a trans man enjoying my voice getting deeper, but also writing a fanfiction onto the post that changed the context of ‘two trans men finding validation between one another and our voices’ into ‘two monsters are sad they’re not scary enough and bond over trying to be scary together’. i shouldn’t have to explain how horrible that is for me to read, and how horrible it is to see that added on my own post & circulated through hundreds with no criticism.

quite frankly, it’s devastating to see how people talk about and interact with trans men. we are either children who must be protected and are weak and vulnerable and ‘too pure’, or we are fuel for your fanfics that completely strip us of our humanity. i consent to neither and if you think that any of these things are okay to do to a complete stranger, all you’re doing is patting yourself on the back for your performative ally points while making trans men uncomfortable with sharing their experiences and talking about their lives and trying to be happy with themselves. stop it. 

This is a NON-PARTISAN movement of the American people who are tired of the inadequate options we have to choose from for our next US President. We are NOT MAGA and we are NOT Radical liberals. We are average Americans who want something better for our county and people.

This is kinda a funny thing I noticed, sooo nearly no one would judge you if your an adult liking gravity fall, but if you like my little pony a lot of people think your weird, the weird thing is that they are both kids shows

You will share this because you know it’s true.