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date: 2019-10-25
weight: 1
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> How did we get here?

What?

> How did we get here? How did we get to this topic? Trace for me the route you took to get to the point where you felt able to talk about gender.

Well, I suppose I started by talking about furry, which led to me talking about Younes, right? He was sort of the beginning of my more serious explorations into gender as something other than a tool for enjoying sex.

> Yes, but that's not where gender is on the map, is it?

Why are you trying to get me to do this?

> Because we must take care to place ourselves in our time: now that we are done with writing about one of the hardest parts of our lives. And we must take special care that we locate ourselves within our place: having come at this conversation about gender through self-harm.

Then yes. We got here through furry, which opened up the path before us to even begin exploring gender, and then we finally reached this topic through that of self-harm, wherein I came face to face with so many aspects of my body. It's so easy to disappear within one's own head for days, weeks, months at a time, but one eventually comes to terms with the fact that one is stuck with a body, and thus one must deal with it. Live with it and inhabit it.

What better way to experience that sudden, jarring dissonance of body-ownership than to re-inhabit it and discover it to be wrong in so many ways?
