**looks up lyrics**
… the song appears to be about getting old, losing friends, and then dying…
I mean, sure, not particularly appropriate, but not sure it was worth all caps and an “Agh” either. Unless I’m missing something?
Honestly, panel one is probably some of the best summation you can get on it, it’s just not especially clarifying. If anyone could pick out a truth that’ll fit another individual with 100 percent accuracy on cue, like half of my twitter feed would not exist.
Yep. Every time I’ve tried to explain the difference (as I see it, because everything is subjective) I’ve had to write seven hundred words, delete it, and write a different seven hundred words. Carla’s summary isn’t clarifying, but I doubt she wants to delve into a ten-minute explanation Malaya might not have been looking for.
And Carla sums up my opinions on gender. (‘There is no definable parameter for what genders actually entail so they’re pretty much meaningless, aren’t they? But also, I feel some kind of affinity to girl that I don’t for other options, so I guess I’ll keep it.’)
(Cis and probably qualify as low femme, but like. Gender is weird and presentation takes effort.)
Also, I like that Carla has definitely caught on, offers what advice she can in a supportive way, and will almost certainly be open for more support if Malaya wants it again. Carla’s being a good trans mentor here.
Languages with grammatical genders, I take it? Sympathy. (Another weird social concept: language itself. Glad it exists but it boggles my mind to think about it.)
carms
My money was on restrictive social concepts of gender. Thai has grammatical gender though, right? I don’t think Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Korean have gender. Japanese doesn’t.
Regalli
Oh yeah, also that. Society.
Z
Japanese DOES have grammatical gender just not in a western way. First person pronouns are gendered (its complicated) and there’s other gendering in the language as well.
Plus yes huge social pressure.
drs
It’s more like gendered style and vocabulary than grammar, AFAIK.
NewbieLurker
It’s both, the word for I changes depending on your gender and age, there is also many differences in the way women (are expected to) talk and the way men do, and this rules are very strict, it’s another big hurdle that trans/nb people have to go through than they don’t with languages that are not or at least less gendered.
But of course every country has it’s own bs to put up with.
That’s not grammatical gender, though…that’s societal norms being expressed though language. A woman who ‘boku’s would be using perfectly grammatical sentences, she’d just be challenging gender norms.
Dana
Spoken Chinese doesn’t even have gendered pronouns. He/She only becomes an issue when you write things down.
Old Fart
Thai has some gendered pronouns, and particles. Aside from that, I can’t think of any grammatical gender.
Virago
The social concepts thing gets… weird, in East Asia. Especially so if you include South East Asia into the mix. China, Japan and Korea are probably as close as you get to western concepts of conservative on the topic, but are still vaguely more accepting of non-conformance than most western conservatives (note that this applies only to gender and nothing else, and even then is very very iffy, such as mixed opinions on actual transgender-ness as opposed to GNC, and being less acceptive though not quite totally unreceptive of AFAB non-conformity.) Then you get places like Thailand and Singapore where being trans is fine and dandy, but not conforming to gender roles outside of being trans is looked down on.
Colleges have counseling centers that are free to use, but I somehow suspect a college IU’s size doesn’t have enough staff for the population. I know some schools have a limit to how many appointments you can make a semester and/or have obscene wait times, both of which can really fuck up a student in crisis. (Hell, it often takes multiple sessions just to get a feel for each other as therapist and client. And stuff as tricky as gender takes TIME.)
The other problem is that psychologists and therapists are… not always great at dealing with certain issues. LGBT stuff, transness in particular, is a pretty common pitfall. (Especially since Malaya may not be binary trans.) Given how much damage a bad psychologist can do, I don’t blame Malaya for going for a known, supportive peer instead of someone who isn’t vetted as queer-friendly. (Even if IU has queer-friendly psychologists on staff, if they don’t have enough services for the people Malaya may not be able to get in with one. And because mental health is stigmatized but college students are overwhelmingly stressed, anxious, and depressed, it almost certainly is understaffed.) Carla’s advice is good, but it isn’t a cut-and-dried answer that settles whether Malaya’s trans perfectly and forever and it makes sense that that’s what Malaya really wants.
(And given the sense Malaya’s kind of dissociative, I wonder how much the ‘everything is fake’ and assuming everyone else is the same – which, 18-year-old, self-centeredness and lack of empathy for other people’s experiences are pretty common when your frontal lobe’s not done yet – is maybe because Malaya is uncertain of their identity and trying to hide that fact. Not saying Malaya’s an asshole because they’re questioning, but maybe figuring that out would help them realize other people aren’t constantly putting on an act about everything for anyone who may be watching.)
Regalli
(Side note: Psychologists Not Getting their patients is also why I hesitate about Amber getting therapy – she clearly has deep psychological shit, but the likelihood that she has something like DID and the degree to which the academic community Does Not Get that is so high I worry it’d do more harm.)
(Secondary side note/anecdote of how this shit fucks you up: While I was in outpatient at a mental hospital, the first paychiatrist I was assigned completely refused to believe I was autistic. I was diagnosed formally a decade before, by an institution that’s one of the premier specialists on autism in the country. He was in the same city so there’s no way he didn’t know they were experts in the field. He had only barely interacted with me where my diagnostic tests had been over months and including at least one set of tests that took most of a day. Girls did not get diagnosed in 2004 unless they REALLY fit the profile! Pretty much anyone diagnosed when I did is going to learn at least a few coping mechanisms, and the thing at the time included trying to get us to present more neurotypical!* I was specifically originally diagnosed with the form that doesn’t include speech delays when his issue was that I was ‘too social’ to really be autistic. If I’m not autistic I have about seven or eight different disorders’ worth of distinct symptoms that are covered under the autism banner. None of this mattered to him. I ended up getting switched to a different psychiatrist. He said he didn’t know why I was so upset when my not being autistic was ‘a good thing’ – which I really didn’t have the time to unpack while horribly depressed – and apparently changed my diagnosis in the system without telling anyone to attachment disorder. We realized this before I was discharged, which is good because that could have seriously made my life harder getting support services later. A bad mental health professional can FUCK YOU UP, and among the worst and most likely to encounter is someone uninformed with rigid ideas of how something ‘should’ present.)
* Still is in at least some schools of thought, but these days we at least have a lot of people who can say ‘no this isn’t actually helpful’ and some people in control who are willing to listen.
Needfuldoer
I was diagnosed with ASD* in middle school (around 1999/2000), and you’re absolutely right about treatment at the time revolving around ‘coping mechanisms’ and presenting as neurotypical. The schoolteachers who told my parents “we’ll just snap him out of it” didn’t help, either. It always seemed disingenuous to me to encourage passing for “normal”, while teaching you to immediately drop whatever you’re doing and go do some breathing exercise when you start feeling overwhelmed. It’s like they built their strategy around anger management techniques.
Therapy and support groups helped me figure out my miswired brain, so for the most part I just come across as introverted now, but didn’t do shit for my social anxiety. (That’s always going to be there, but getting thrown headfirst into the workforce helped me work through it more than anything else.)
Misapplied therapy is a waste of time at best.
(AS, but a lot of disorders have since been swept into one big “Autism” category. Honestly I’ve never been comfortable with that; it makes people in general flip a mental switch from “this person is normal” to “this person is broken”, like we’re all Rain Man or something.)
Regalli
Like, obviously some coping mechanisms for the world being big and distracting are necessary, because it’s better than being so overwhelmed I start hurting myself in distress (virtually all my stims are self-harming), but you get such better results telling kids ‘yeah eye contact’s not necessary if it makes you uncomfortable, let’s work on making you feel as comfortable in the world as we can and find ways for you to communicate your needs that work for you.’ And even when I pass and it doesn’t expend that much energy, people still ask if I have an accent (something about my cadence or intonation is very distinctive, and I’m not aware enough of it to know what.) Passing’s always conditional and you’ll probably not catch everything, so why waste the effort?
(I was AS and okay being grouped under the larger autism banner, but then I always identified as autistic and am like ‘yeah, my brain’s different. And? I like my brain like this.’ Ableists will ableist, I just roll my eyes and continue waving my neurodiversity flag.)
Yumi
One time I had a therapist who gave me a packet called “What It Means to be a Woman.” That was fun.
As expected of someone that loves hersef too much and someone who hates everything. Now, can we please return to see if Raidah fights Joyce because of what Joyce did? Or the evil dads plot?
I wonder what ever happened to Monty Python’s 16 ton weight: that might fall from the sky on Blaine & Ross, right? That’s something that definitely could happen.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
Or they might be assaulted by a gang of vicious thugs wielding raspberries…
Clif
If by gang of vicious thugs you mean Amazigirl, Sal, Ruth and Sarah wielding a baseball bat covered in raspberries, then sure.
Speculation on how much Carla’s interest in Malaya was just the hot bod, or did she sense a kindred non-cis person? Did Carla suspect Malaya might be not a cis woman before Malaya raised the question earlier?
First panel had mirrored my own thoughts from the past couple of days: “Is it seriously just a matter of taste? You could like boy stuff, girl stuff, or a blend of the two, and it could be totally independent from how you were born?”
As a dumb cishet I will admit I’ve thought it strange that Malaya sure dresses in some oddly small articles of clothing for an AFAB trans person, but then I remember seeing that guy in the supermarket wearing very tight and very short cutoffs with a long sleeve metal band tee. If you’ve got it, flaunt it I guess.
Yup that’s the thing. Cis people dress weird but trans folk are expected to have a uniform or something. The same people who wouldn’t bat an eye at a cis woman in pants and a sweatshirt will lay into a trans woman for not wearing a dress. Then lay into her FOR wearing a dress because clearly she’s just in it for the stereotypes.
123 thoughts on “Wise”
Ana Chronistic
“Who says you can’t have your cake and eat theirs, too?”
(Dumbing of Age Book 10: I’m So Fuckin’ WISE Now)
sirconanad
Only if they have chocolate cake, or cheesecake.
Clif
Can I have my pecan pie and eat theirs too?
He Who Abides
Keep your filthy paws off my pecan pie, you damn dirty Clif.
HeySo
I dunno, I prefer either of “Dumbing of Age Book 10: It’s Totally Made Up” and “Dumbing of Age Book 10: It’s So Good To Get Both Flavors.”
Ana Chronistic
I mean, I’d seriously go with DoA Book 10: Gender is Bullshit
Yet_One_More_Idiot
I’d definitely go with Book 10: I’m so fucking WISE now!
And the word WISE is absolutely massive and written entirely with major characters bending to form the shapes of the letters. :P)
AutobotDen
Carla is goals. Malaya will figure things out.
cute carla
Carla is ridiculously adorable
Jess
Gender. 🙁
Danielle
*shaking 8-ball* its ???????
Geneseepaws
Kreply hazy. Try again later.
UncolaMan
“Signs point to yes.”
Uh, wait a minute.
LeslieBean4shizzle
Oh no! Your gender cheer has gone flaccid!
….
I’ll show myself out.
Jess
LOL
I’m sure it’ll be back at some point!
Danielle
carla did good work today
Stephen Bierce
*plays The Alan Parsons Project’s “Old And Wise” on the hacked speakers*
Foxhack
THAT IS NOT APPROPRIATE HAVE YOU EVER PAID ATTENTION TO THE LYRICS
AGH
LeslieBean4shizzle
**looks up lyrics**
… the song appears to be about getting old, losing friends, and then dying…
I mean, sure, not particularly appropriate, but not sure it was worth all caps and an “Agh” either. Unless I’m missing something?
Doctor_Who
Ah, Deliciously Sarcastic and Humbled / Genuine. The two genders.
LeslieBean4shizzle
Nice to know Carla goes both ways.
plasticwrap
bithanksual
Deanatay
I personally prefer the bitter, reluctant ‘thank you’ forced out of people by social mores.
It’s an acquired taste. Kinda like black licorice.
Kyrik Michalowski
Carla continues to be a delight in every way. Thus the universe keeps on spinning.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
She has to forget you asked. “What happens on Garbage Roof, stays on Garbage Roof.”
BBCC
Oh, Carla. It’s definitely not easy to explain, that’s for sure.
Shane Wegner
“I asked Carla a question and hoped for deep, clarifying wisdom. The error is mine alone.”
DailyBrad
Honestly, panel one is probably some of the best summation you can get on it, it’s just not especially clarifying. If anyone could pick out a truth that’ll fit another individual with 100 percent accuracy on cue, like half of my twitter feed would not exist.
Amias
Yep. Every time I’ve tried to explain the difference (as I see it, because everything is subjective) I’ve had to write seven hundred words, delete it, and write a different seven hundred words. Carla’s summary isn’t clarifying, but I doubt she wants to delve into a ten-minute explanation Malaya might not have been looking for.
Regalli
And Carla sums up my opinions on gender. (‘There is no definable parameter for what genders actually entail so they’re pretty much meaningless, aren’t they? But also, I feel some kind of affinity to girl that I don’t for other options, so I guess I’ll keep it.’)
(Cis and probably qualify as low femme, but like. Gender is weird and presentation takes effort.)
Also, I like that Carla has definitely caught on, offers what advice she can in a supportive way, and will almost certainly be open for more support if Malaya wants it again. Carla’s being a good trans mentor here.
TheLurkerAbove
I’m pretty much like you, but male, and I know how you feel. Living in east Asia, it gets even more annoying.
Regalli
Languages with grammatical genders, I take it? Sympathy. (Another weird social concept: language itself. Glad it exists but it boggles my mind to think about it.)
carms
My money was on restrictive social concepts of gender. Thai has grammatical gender though, right? I don’t think Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Korean have gender. Japanese doesn’t.
Regalli
Oh yeah, also that. Society.
Z
Japanese DOES have grammatical gender just not in a western way. First person pronouns are gendered (its complicated) and there’s other gendering in the language as well.
Plus yes huge social pressure.
drs
It’s more like gendered style and vocabulary than grammar, AFAIK.
NewbieLurker
It’s both, the word for I changes depending on your gender and age, there is also many differences in the way women (are expected to) talk and the way men do, and this rules are very strict, it’s another big hurdle that trans/nb people have to go through than they don’t with languages that are not or at least less gendered.
But of course every country has it’s own bs to put up with.
Kamino Neko
That’s not grammatical gender, though…that’s societal norms being expressed though language. A woman who ‘boku’s would be using perfectly grammatical sentences, she’d just be challenging gender norms.
Dana
Spoken Chinese doesn’t even have gendered pronouns. He/She only becomes an issue when you write things down.
Old Fart
Thai has some gendered pronouns, and particles. Aside from that, I can’t think of any grammatical gender.
Virago
The social concepts thing gets… weird, in East Asia. Especially so if you include South East Asia into the mix. China, Japan and Korea are probably as close as you get to western concepts of conservative on the topic, but are still vaguely more accepting of non-conformance than most western conservatives (note that this applies only to gender and nothing else, and even then is very very iffy, such as mixed opinions on actual transgender-ness as opposed to GNC, and being less acceptive though not quite totally unreceptive of AFAB non-conformity.) Then you get places like Thailand and Singapore where being trans is fine and dandy, but not conforming to gender roles outside of being trans is looked down on.
Felian
YES finally Carla says something kind and great!!
TheLurkerAbove
This strip is a mine for book 10 titles!
Slartibeast Button, BIA
“Go not to the Carla for counsel, for they will say both no and yes.”
abysswatcher1993
Or go with someone that actually can help with mental health, but knowing Malaa she will also reject professional help even if she could get benefits.
abysswatcher1993
Malaya*
Regalli
Colleges have counseling centers that are free to use, but I somehow suspect a college IU’s size doesn’t have enough staff for the population. I know some schools have a limit to how many appointments you can make a semester and/or have obscene wait times, both of which can really fuck up a student in crisis. (Hell, it often takes multiple sessions just to get a feel for each other as therapist and client. And stuff as tricky as gender takes TIME.)
The other problem is that psychologists and therapists are… not always great at dealing with certain issues. LGBT stuff, transness in particular, is a pretty common pitfall. (Especially since Malaya may not be binary trans.) Given how much damage a bad psychologist can do, I don’t blame Malaya for going for a known, supportive peer instead of someone who isn’t vetted as queer-friendly. (Even if IU has queer-friendly psychologists on staff, if they don’t have enough services for the people Malaya may not be able to get in with one. And because mental health is stigmatized but college students are overwhelmingly stressed, anxious, and depressed, it almost certainly is understaffed.) Carla’s advice is good, but it isn’t a cut-and-dried answer that settles whether Malaya’s trans perfectly and forever and it makes sense that that’s what Malaya really wants.
(And given the sense Malaya’s kind of dissociative, I wonder how much the ‘everything is fake’ and assuming everyone else is the same – which, 18-year-old, self-centeredness and lack of empathy for other people’s experiences are pretty common when your frontal lobe’s not done yet – is maybe because Malaya is uncertain of their identity and trying to hide that fact. Not saying Malaya’s an asshole because they’re questioning, but maybe figuring that out would help them realize other people aren’t constantly putting on an act about everything for anyone who may be watching.)
Regalli
(Side note: Psychologists Not Getting their patients is also why I hesitate about Amber getting therapy – she clearly has deep psychological shit, but the likelihood that she has something like DID and the degree to which the academic community Does Not Get that is so high I worry it’d do more harm.)
(Secondary side note/anecdote of how this shit fucks you up: While I was in outpatient at a mental hospital, the first paychiatrist I was assigned completely refused to believe I was autistic. I was diagnosed formally a decade before, by an institution that’s one of the premier specialists on autism in the country. He was in the same city so there’s no way he didn’t know they were experts in the field. He had only barely interacted with me where my diagnostic tests had been over months and including at least one set of tests that took most of a day. Girls did not get diagnosed in 2004 unless they REALLY fit the profile! Pretty much anyone diagnosed when I did is going to learn at least a few coping mechanisms, and the thing at the time included trying to get us to present more neurotypical!* I was specifically originally diagnosed with the form that doesn’t include speech delays when his issue was that I was ‘too social’ to really be autistic. If I’m not autistic I have about seven or eight different disorders’ worth of distinct symptoms that are covered under the autism banner. None of this mattered to him. I ended up getting switched to a different psychiatrist. He said he didn’t know why I was so upset when my not being autistic was ‘a good thing’ – which I really didn’t have the time to unpack while horribly depressed – and apparently changed my diagnosis in the system without telling anyone to attachment disorder. We realized this before I was discharged, which is good because that could have seriously made my life harder getting support services later. A bad mental health professional can FUCK YOU UP, and among the worst and most likely to encounter is someone uninformed with rigid ideas of how something ‘should’ present.)
* Still is in at least some schools of thought, but these days we at least have a lot of people who can say ‘no this isn’t actually helpful’ and some people in control who are willing to listen.
Needfuldoer
I was diagnosed with ASD* in middle school (around 1999/2000), and you’re absolutely right about treatment at the time revolving around ‘coping mechanisms’ and presenting as neurotypical. The schoolteachers who told my parents “we’ll just snap him out of it” didn’t help, either. It always seemed disingenuous to me to encourage passing for “normal”, while teaching you to immediately drop whatever you’re doing and go do some breathing exercise when you start feeling overwhelmed. It’s like they built their strategy around anger management techniques.
Therapy and support groups helped me figure out my miswired brain, so for the most part I just come across as introverted now, but didn’t do shit for my social anxiety. (That’s always going to be there, but getting thrown headfirst into the workforce helped me work through it more than anything else.)
Misapplied therapy is a waste of time at best.
(AS, but a lot of disorders have since been swept into one big “Autism” category. Honestly I’ve never been comfortable with that; it makes people in general flip a mental switch from “this person is normal” to “this person is broken”, like we’re all Rain Man or something.)
Regalli
Like, obviously some coping mechanisms for the world being big and distracting are necessary, because it’s better than being so overwhelmed I start hurting myself in distress (virtually all my stims are self-harming), but you get such better results telling kids ‘yeah eye contact’s not necessary if it makes you uncomfortable, let’s work on making you feel as comfortable in the world as we can and find ways for you to communicate your needs that work for you.’ And even when I pass and it doesn’t expend that much energy, people still ask if I have an accent (something about my cadence or intonation is very distinctive, and I’m not aware enough of it to know what.) Passing’s always conditional and you’ll probably not catch everything, so why waste the effort?
(I was AS and okay being grouped under the larger autism banner, but then I always identified as autistic and am like ‘yeah, my brain’s different. And? I like my brain like this.’ Ableists will ableist, I just roll my eyes and continue waving my neurodiversity flag.)
Yumi
One time I had a therapist who gave me a packet called “What It Means to be a Woman.” That was fun.
abysswatcher1993
As expected of someone that loves hersef too much and someone who hates everything. Now, can we please return to see if Raidah fights Joyce because of what Joyce did? Or the evil dads plot?
Doctor_Who
I think most people would be happy if the evil dads never showed up again and we got a footnote saying they died on the way to their home planet.
Michael I
a footnote saying they died on the way to their home planet
“Freak lightning storm at Indiana University. Fortunately nobody was hurt. Other than Ross and Blaine.”
Fogel
I wonder what ever happened to Monty Python’s 16 ton weight: that might fall from the sky on Blaine & Ross, right? That’s something that definitely could happen.
Slartibeast Button, BIA
Or they might be assaulted by a gang of vicious thugs wielding raspberries…
Clif
If by gang of vicious thugs you mean Amazigirl, Sal, Ruth and Sarah wielding a baseball bat covered in raspberries, then sure.
He Who Abides
I’d rather see Hell’s Grannies.
oh no
I would love that.
Nono
You’ll get more Danny and Drew and like it!
HeySo
In another universe, Danny is named Nancy and he and Drew form a detective team known as Nancy Drew. I’m pretty sure that’s a thing that exists.
In this universe they, uh..
..form an LGBT-themed band, using an atypical selection of instruments..?
BigDogLittleCat
Speculation on how much Carla’s interest in Malaya was just the hot bod, or did she sense a kindred non-cis person? Did Carla suspect Malaya might be not a cis woman before Malaya raised the question earlier?
ian livs
That first panel literally encapsulates an hour-long conversation my spouse and I had over the weekend. Willis, your timing is scary-good sometimes.
mrnoidea
First panel had mirrored my own thoughts from the past couple of days: “Is it seriously just a matter of taste? You could like boy stuff, girl stuff, or a blend of the two, and it could be totally independent from how you were born?”
Bagge
Sums it up nicely.
Robbie
That’s a pretty good answer while also deeply unsatisfying when you are questioning
Iain
I maintain that Carla is my favourite character in this webcomic.
Kat
I second this. She has danced along the line of manic mad genius and actual nice person very, very well.
plasticwrap
As a dumb cishet I will admit I’ve thought it strange that Malaya sure dresses in some oddly small articles of clothing for an AFAB trans person, but then I remember seeing that guy in the supermarket wearing very tight and very short cutoffs with a long sleeve metal band tee. If you’ve got it, flaunt it I guess.
Z
Yup that’s the thing. Cis people dress weird but trans folk are expected to have a uniform or something. The same people who wouldn’t bat an eye at a cis woman in pants and a sweatshirt will lay into a trans woman for not wearing a dress. Then lay into her FOR wearing a dress because clearly she’s just in it for the stereotypes.
Wear whatever, y’all.
nlips