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=== i like maya henry but
maya henry is incredibly beautiful, and her attention to facts (when she has them) is admirable. i think she makes a sincere effort to be fair, and i like that too.
i also agree with most of her take on nikita dragun. nothing im going to say about maya henry here is hate, at worst its a critique, but overall i agree with what she says in her video about dragun.
what turns me off about the video (and shes done this before) is the way she assumes she knows, or seems to assume she knows this or that in a way that makes me wonder how she couldnt know better. no matter how i say this, its probably going to come off as a bigger critique than i want it to sound like.
either way, i wish she wouldnt do this.
dragun comes off as a person i wouldnt want anything to do with. its not the incident, which is absolutely full of problems though none that i feel like discussing.
maya once implied in a video that she didnt know enbies were trans, which i think is a surprising lack of information for someone as far (in time) from the start of her transition as maya is, but i believe its an innocent mistake and she was both apologetic and corrected herself in a followup. so thats totally fine by me, but now she has this new video.
i think people on social media in general, whether its youtube or twitter or instagram, are very into scrutinising people and pushing them really hard into trying to please everyone. and i just dont think its possible to please everyone, so i dont even want maya to do that. not for that reason anyway. still im going to critique.
maya makes two mistakes (or i consider them mistakes, or i imagined mistakes) that i hope people wont take as lessons from this. and first let me agree with what i agree with-- i think the comparison with kanye was fair play.
i find kayne kind of hilarious and sad-- hes honestly a twit because his entire lifestyle is too far removed from most of humanity and rather than try to fix that, he thinks humanity should just be like him instead. hes a twit. but in a way where to hate him id have to stop laughing at him.
if i knew him personally i probably would hate him-- as a celebrity he just doesnt factor into my life the same way. if im going to hate kanye id probably have to devote additional energy to hating justin bieber (who i tend to just ignore, though "sorry" is honestly a great song) and maybe even justin timberlake (who i would probably love, except for the way he exploited britney spears.) and i can find better uses for that energy instead, really-- for things like hating bono. i suppose if maya henry wants to win me over again she could do a video comparing kanye to him.
this is probably an in-joke no ones going to get at all, so let me try to get back to the point. maya talks about draguns "mental health journey" like you can just transition to someone who doesnt have real issues with mental health in their life, like maybe its a struggle but... wait, wait-- next she will be saying she wishes everyone with autism was "high-functioning".
there are a lot of people who treat differences (women, trans people, blacks!) as an inconvenience they wish they just didnt have to deal with, and it bothers me (a little) that maya (who absolutely comes out and says exactly none of the things im complaining about, so its really possible i just imagined the implications) has this vibe of "i dont want to deal with these people, could someone please bring me some normal people instead?"
i dont think maya is this uppity all the time, but it comes off as this super-privileged, super-normative, i dont want to throw around a grenade like the word "ableist" (only because im not trying to get the poor girl cancelled here, instead im only trying to make a point, though maybe just cancelling someone would be easier) but a bit of that, too.
its awkward to say this because if we are only talking about dragun, then honestly fair enough. maya says she demonstrates self-awareness, but from what ive seen dragun comes off as pretty narcissistic and im not sure how self-aware she really is at all. in a clinical sense i dont doubt she knows who and where she is and stuff like that, but self-awareness as in beginning to understand yourself and your own motivations? i do doubt that.
i just found out who dragun is today (i cant name any cis influencers either, in fact ive only seen instagram at all on a handful of occasions, but i did know who doja cat was because of that one song) so jumping on any hate wagon seems unnecessary, but i wont blame anyone else if they want to.
i think maya makes a somewhat reasonable point about people being afraid to call out trans people-- every marginalised community has that, in fact i think they tend to have people afraid to call out anyone on one side, but on the other end of the spectrum has she never noticed trans women trashing each other and calling each other terfs for "not being representative enough" of this or that subgroup?
to be certain, there absolutely are subgroups of the trans community that both need and deserve the support of the broader community, and im not negating that at all. at the same time, theres enough pain and drama to where a perceived slight can be turned into a brigade alleging a lack of support (in a context where support and acceptance clearly exists-- but "its not good enough!") and trans women will straight up call each other terfs over this. which seems a bit vicious, but maybe im just too new at this.
my concern wasnt that maya was unfair to dragun, only that shes so casual about the idea that mental health is used as an "excuse" for "being shitty people"-- which it probably is sometimes, but it reminds me of comments like "oh, being trans is a way to get out of bad publicity".
maybe kanye and dragun both abuse the mental health defence for their actions, but even if maya were professionally qualified to talk about that, i wish she would be a little more careful. the thing is, there are some non-shitty people too, who are quick to gather stigma that follows them for life but it takes so much to get people past those.
i wouldnt dream of denying maya her own youtube channel (or anything like her channel) to express her thoughts about this, i think its okay that she uses it to do that. the issue i take here isnt with her expressing her thoughts even if i disagree with them-- i still wish she would be more careful before (unintentionally) throwing everyone with mental health struggles under the bus just because kanyes kind of a dick (he totally is) and nikita dragun is not the sort of trans woman i hope to find in my social life.
its not that i think maya is a bad person or even that i want her to feel bad or apologise for anything. its just this attitude that people are just going to behave or we are going to lump them all into the "shitty people" category and hey, lets just throw every person who cant mask their mental health issues enough with these two idiots too.
i certainly dont think thats what she meant. its just-- so many people do mean that. and they dont always do it intentionally either. and yeah, i wish people thought about mental health more carefully. maybe then when maya (or someone else) sees a person who is LESS of a shitty person than kanye or dragun acting in a way that maya (or someone else) may not entirely approve of...
kayne may or may not need us to be more understanding. i feel totally okay dismissing him as a stupid privileged dick who is never going to work on himself as a person, and id love to be wrong.
im extremely uncomfortable with the not-so-hypothetical culture we have now, which already treats mental health as more of an "excuse" than an actual need for better understanding. thats why i hate this overly casual, almost karen-like "let them eat cake!" sort of, i dunno, i think sometimes maya henry may lack a bit of self-awareness.
in fairness though, i think occasionally, everyone lacks a little bit of self-awareness. and tapping our feet waiting for people to be perfect is a losing proposition. it also seems like something a surprising amount of the internet really believes can work.
as for people with mental health issues, there are schools where they teach people how to hide their problems more, which i consider troubling as an idea, and we all know there are camps where they teach you how to pretend youre straight or cis or whatever else isnt acceptable to society.
does maya henry get this? because if her followup to the idea that enbies arent trans is any indication, theres no reason she CANT get this. and theres no reason even to assume she WONT get this. i think ive made my real complaint as clear as i can make it, but as an aside and a nitpick-- how did she not...
eh, i dont want to be too hard on anybody. nitpicks aside, maya henry is probably one of the more thoughtful trans youtubers and she probably just doesnt think about this stuff because... most people dont think about this stuff.
and shes learned loads of stuff about being trans that im just learning now. since everyone is (hopefully) still learning and growing, i hope she understands or grows to understand mental health as something more than just people acting properly in public.
because if more people understood these things, they probably still wouldnt think kanye was a reasonable person (he isnt) and they still wouldnt think dragun was being reasonable (she wasnt) but they might not be quick to lump everyone who has problems (in public) due to real issues in with the occasional joker who uses everyone with mental health issues as a sort of human shield.
i dont really blame maya henry for this personally. its a very mainstream prejudice she looks like she MIGHT be displaying, and i consider it a symptom of society being flawed in a way that maybe someday it will grow out of. if i didnt basically imagine it, then at least we were given a good example of this prejudice. you may think i secretly want to shame maya for this, but seriously i dont care what her real opinion on this is, whatever it is, provided that everyone else gets this.
there absolutely is an enormous amount of pressure on advocates of any cause (including trans advocacy) to be flawless themselves. i dont want maya henry, or natalie wynn, or even nikita dragun (who i still think seems pretty narcissistic and clueless) to have to tiptoe around the internet being afraid to say anything.
but id love it regardless, if there was more understanding in the world. which i feel somewhat realistic about-- i mean, when problems have been around for centuries and theyre still here, its a bit silly to think anything is going to make those problems disappear overnight. even acne doesnt disappear overnight, and prejudice is obviously much trickier to clear up than that.
and everybody is an idiot about something-- you, me, i mean everyone is an idiot a little bit. the trick is to be less of an idiot than kanye. or at least, less of an idiot than bono. i feel like bono was already doing this before anyone even knew who the kardashians were.
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<3 zara