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My parents divorced when I was four and both remarried wonderful people who've been in my lives for over 40 years. I am, and have always been, especially close to my stepmother. So close in fact that we still visit and speak regularly, even though she and my dad divorced amicably five years ago. She's told me I'll be her sole beneficiary when she dies, though I hope she lives to be 100. I'd gladly move her into my own home to care for her in her decline. I love her more than I can articulate, even though her boomer liberal politics have aged poorly, and we no longer discuss current events for the sake of comity. She is one of the most important people in my life.
That said, she is not my mother. Nor has she ever aspired to be. Nor does she have any illusions where she stands in relation to my mother in my heart.
Many people, including myself, have tremendous sympathy for the startlingly small number of truly dismorphic people in the world. How perpetually disorienting and disturbing must that be? I bare no feelings of disgust or resentment toward them. And there is room in the world for women and dismorphic men. But I won't be bullied into LARPing that the two are eqivalent and accepting as true all the accompanying logical and societal absurdities.
A broader but related observation: our current age reflects a culture utterly consumed by its leisure. Nowhere is this more evident than the gamification of personal identity--endless optimization, zero constraints. Don't like your character? Choose from an array of popular prebuilts, or create your own custom build from scratch! What's the overlap of gamers and silf identified queer folk? 100%?
It might even be a harmless quirk of the marginalized weirdos and atypicals whom I once counted as my tribe, did they not insist, quite uncompromisingly, that everyone else must play. For verisimilitude. For an immersive experience.
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