- Joined
- Feb 4, 2018
Her and Zoe should do celebrity deathmatch
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Hey everybody, this is Brianna Wu. This is a video that I put off making for a really long time, but I need to do some things in my career, and that means being open with you all about some things I've kind of carefully talked around for the last 20 years.
So here's the plan. I'm going to go over some really dark, traumatic stuff with you. I'm going to attempt to tell a few jokes along the way so we can keep it light. And at the end, I'm going to have some really serious health news to share. Stay tuned to find out if Twitter is right and I'm dying. Personally, fingers crossed for not dying, but we're going to have to see what happens.
My earliest memories are of knowing something was really, really deeply wrong with me. Something I didn't even have language for as a child. I get flashbacks about it, even to this day, like it'll be three in the morning, and I'll pop awake in bed when I get, oh no. And stuff like, I remember in kindergarten, I asked my mom, like, when am I going to become a girl? And she just looks at me like really confused. Or I remember when my dad took me to get a haircut, because I just had long hair when I was much younger. He takes me to the barbershop, and I just start screaming. Everyone there is just staring at us because, for me, it felt like I was having a limb chopped off.
You know, my first really, really concrete, strong memory is trying to kill myself when I'm five years old, like, you know, in a really clumsy, ineffective five-year-old way. Mom and Dad had told me that, you know, if I die, I'm going to go to heaven. I thought that if maybe I jammed something in an electrical socket, like I saw in cartoons, that Jesus loved me, and if I went there, he would let me be a girl in heaven. So I get this great idea to copy that, and I try it. So I'm jabbing this in there, and I feel the electricity, and I'm just trying to hold on long enough to get free, and you know, eventually, it knocks my hand back. But the weird thing is, after all of that, my hand is throbbing, and I actually kind of like this pain because I can concentrate on how this hurts, and not this sense that I'm drowning all the time. You know, normal stuff most five-year-olds are thinking.
So imagine it's Mississippi, it is the '80s, and I am tragically a boy that desperately wants to be a girl. It's literally all I can ever think about. When we get separated in kindergarten by gender, I would sit there and feel a shame I can barely describe to you. And like all kids, I'm trying to figure out how I fit into the world. All the feedback I'm getting is that I just simply don't. You know, I would do things like I would ask my mom to teach me how to cook because I wanted to grow up and be just like her. And she'd just look at me sternly and say, boys don't do that. Or I would sneak into her bathroom, and I would start putting on her makeup in her makeup mirror, which I can still see to this day. And she'd see me doing it, and she'd get all angry and be like, boys don't do that. Or sometimes, when I would get super adventurous, I would go into her closet and get her high heels and just go stomping around the entire house. Clump, clump, clump. And she didn't like that either. Over and over again, I'm getting this message that everything I want to do is wrong. And it's not an acceptable way to behave. I'm getting the message that's actually shameful.
It wasn't just the stuff I was interested in. I actually had to learn how to hide all the ways of speaking that felt normal to me. I would often get my vocal inflections mimicked back to me, not just by people at school, but sometimes my parents, which kind of sucks when your dad's doing that to you. I remember this one time, I'm talking to Mom, I'm in a great mood about something or another (I have no idea what it was), but she's sitting at the bar in the house, and I come on by and I'm talking, and I just make some hand gesture like this. And she just looks at me with angry disgust, and she goes, don't do that. To me, this is a really dark message to get, that feeling joy is actually dangerous. So after that, I tried to be really careful and I started to learn to speak to people in a monotone. I would actually talk to people, I would lock my hands behind my back like this, so I wouldn't let anything with my wrists slip.
Eventually, as nice as Mom and Dad and everyone else tries to be about all of this, I get the message. I'm a freak. Every instinct I have, from the way I talk to the friends I want to make, is just shameful. And slowly, day by day, I just start to shut down. A family member told me a few weeks ago, it was like watching a light slowly die inside of me.
Yeah, I remember doing things like I would try out for the girl parts of plays at Bible school, and everyone would mock me for wanting them, and be filled with shame later for saying what I actually wanted. Or I'd have these knock-down, drag-out fights with my Dad about having my hair cut, which I desperately wanted to be long and pretty. I would sit there and sing girly pop in my room alone, but just super quietly, because I knew if my parents heard me, I would get in trouble for that. But actually, one of the most traumatic memories I have of all of my childhood is actually what was one of the very best days of my life. There was a boy in my neighborhood that I got a play date with, which didn't happen very often, so this was something I was very, very excited about. So we go over to his house, and we're going over to his room, and we walk past his sister's. And I see that she has this absolutely gorgeous palace of Barbie dolls, like this bay window, she's got the skipper, the Barbie dream home. It's just absolutely gorgeous, and I'm so excited, so I completely blow him off when I go in there with the sister and introduce myself, and what is amazing is she does not care that I'm a boy. She just wants someone to play with.
So we sit there for hours, playing with Barbies, which was my first time to be able to do this. And I'm just thrilled because for the first time, it's a dream, I'm getting to do something like tell stories with them, about getting married or whatever, and it's just so natural and fun. And I am thrilled because I finally feel like I have a friend to play with. And the next day at school, her brother tells everyone that I blew him off to go play Barbies with his sister. And I remember thinking, oh no, you didn't hide this well enough. Just another reason you're a freak. Now boys are avoiding me, and girls are avoiding me. This one guy, he talks to me, he's like, what, so you want to be a girl? Well, that is the problem, isn't it? Every instinct I had about how to connect with people, it was wrong. So what I learned really early on is the only way to be safe is actually to be alone.
Yeah, I'm not proud of how I dealt with any of this. I basically regret everything I ever did or said to anyone in this year. So if I knew you, I am sorry. I was sullen, I had anger issues, I was weird, I was under-socialized; it was coping in ways that didn't just damage me. It damaged my relationships with everyone around me. I really particularly regret how I treated my sister, who I'd have these jealous, stupid, entirely pointless fights with. If I could go back in time, I really wish I could have had the strength to just tell her what I was feeling. Because I do think she would have listened. Instead, she just has to deal with this difficult, malfunctioning brother, along with all the other hard parts of growing up. And I'm sure that didn't really feel fair to her.
I think sometimes when trans women tell our stories, there's a tendency to lean into the parts of things that were done to us, but not really talk about the male socialization that happens. And personally, I think it's very difficult to be raised as a boy and not pick some things up, particularly when it requires so little emotional regulation or introspection on your part. You know, I leaned into every bit of it, you know: anger, arrogance. I'm sure I was entirely unpleasant to be around. And I know that I played a big role in the loneliness that I felt. Frankly, unlearning a lot of those unhealthy behaviors has taken decades.
It wasn't all bad, though. I did develop some coping mechanisms. Art was a really, really big one. I don't know what other boys hid under their mattresses, but for me, it was Barbie comics. I remember this one. I wish I could find it. So, she has this gorgeous wedding dress on the cover, and the lace on it is just so intricate and pretty. And what I would do is I would wait for mom and dad to go to bed, and then I would stay up super late with a pencil and a sketch pad, and I'm learning to draw the flow of the lines and just this girly anatomy and this girly vibe. And I'm dreaming the entire time, like I'm drawing a wedding and dreaming about my wedding. And then I would erase all the art, terrified that my mom would look under my mattress one day and go, oh my god, what have you been drawing? This is awful.
You know, I'm trying to keep it light right here, but this actually got really, really serious. When I was 12, suicidal feelings really got to a point that they nearly killed me. When I look at my wrist to this day, I still have scar lines from all the practice cuts, which I would dig in with a knife and try to get the courage to go all the way. I knew that I was going to die if I couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. So, I get on my bike, and I pedal three miles through traffic to the University of Southern Mississippi library, which I did because I knew the one at my school was monitored. So, I needed to go somewhere that my parents wouldn't find out. So, I go there, I pedal, I go on in, a bunch of college kids, and I type into the computer, 12 years old, like why am I a boy that wants to be a girl?
This is the book that I end up finding, Transsexualism and Sex Reassignment. This is actually one of the very first books ever written about trans people. It's from 1969, and it's not aimed at 12-year-olds, it's aimed at clinicians; it's written like that. But it's kind of going into the psychology of trans people and treatments like HRT. I'm so young, I barely even know what a vagina looks like. Here I am looking at graphical medical photos of GRS being performed, which is a lot to take in. So, I'm terrified, right? This is a lot to process, but I'm also at the same time, I'm relieved to finally know what I am. So, I try really, really hard to bury all those feelings inside. It doesn't really work.
When I hit puberty, I honestly could not make any sense at all out of my sexuality. I thought girls were the prettiest thing in the entire world, but the thought of being with them sexually, it just felt, I don't have a better word for this, it just felt really gay. And what am I supposed to do? Hi Elizabeth, I think your hair looks so pretty today, would you like to go on a heterosexual date with me? I had no idea how to connect with anyone. So I remember there was a show that all the girls, anyone my age is going to know what I'm talking about here. There was a show called My So-Called Life, and I'd hear the girls in my class start talking about it, and I would secretly watch it at home, like I'm afraid my parents would find out because it's a very girly show. And there's this one episode where Angela gets her first kiss with Jordan Catalano, and it is like, I'm watching this and it is like fireworks are exploding inside of me. You know, I'm having all these feelings that I couldn't understand. I started getting these really, really intense crushes on boys, especially the ones that seemed kind and safe. The idea of being with a man as a woman felt right, but I was so ashamed of how badly I wanted those things.
It's so hard to overstate just how much I wanted to die in those years. I have a sense memory, and I can still taste the gun oil from my dad's .38 pistol, which I stole one time and put in my mouth, and they're trying desperately to get the nerve to pull the trigger. I felt so hopeless. I'm disgusted with my body, and yes, I desperately wanted, you know, I wanted to have a female body, but more than that, I wanted to have a social role where I didn't have to hide what I was thinking and feeling all of the time. Trying to stop the pain inside, I started stealing my mom's HRT, but without antiandrogens and being on such a low dose, they barely did anything. It did help the suicidal ideation a bit, but it also made me look even weirder, you know? This freakishly tall and underweight, gawky half-creature with stick arms and a weirdly proportioned face. I never really cross-dressed after puberty because it just made me sad at how disgusting my body was, and it made gender dysphoria like a billion times worse.
There was one time, I had this older guy at the church, and I knew he was interested in me, like I assumed he sensed feminine things about me. He would always be all touchy and trying to connect, and it made me really set off some alarms that I would later have to learn to really tune into, and this one day, he corners me in the back of the church and starts just touching me, and I did manage to run away. Nothing more happened, but it was very traumatizing, you know? I couldn't tell anyone because I thought my parents would start asking questions like, why is a closeted homosexual trying to molest you, right? I couldn't understand why he wanted me for something I was so ashamed of, and that experience made me really afraid to date or experiment with boys for a really long time.
I got my first girlfriend when I was 14 years old. I figured that if I dated a girl, it was a socially acceptable way to be friends with her emotionally, and I don't know how I pulled it off, but to this day, I have no idea on earth how she thought I was possibly straight. Her mom would go work as a nurse, and we would cook together, or we would go over to the fabric store, and we would look through the drawers for all kinds of patterns to make dresses with, or we would just sit down on the couch and watch hour after hour after hour of E! News, which was really big in the '90s. So we, and this is so embarrassing, but we had this ritual of Seventeen magazine would come to her house, and we would always read it together. It was a big day, Seventeen day.
So, I remember this one time, we're laying, we're both face down in bed, and we're reading Seventeen together, and we're just being so annoying, like laughing, the whole house can hear us, like we're totally annoying teenagers, right? And her mom comes marching in the room and opens up the door, and she just looks at me with disgust, and I see that I'm laying face down in the bed, and my ankles are crossed up in the air, like this, and I'm like, oh no, Brianna, you let your body mannerism slip again. She's gonna know, because there are very heterosexual ways for teenage boys to read magazines about periods and kissing guys and fashion with their girlfriends, right? It's the ankles that gave all that away, Bri. Very nice going.
After this, you know, I spent college and my early 20s really making a world-class impressive attempt to drink myself to death and do literally every drug I could get my hands on. Because at least when I was drunk, I couldn't remember the thoughts of wanting to be a woman, and when I was doing drugs, I didn't have to think about the men that I was experimenting with. You know, a doctor actually told me point blank at one point that I was on my way to liver failure by 40. And the thing about high wire acts is sometimes they go crash, and they did. I eventually overdosed and nearly died. I went to rehab and I got clean. And with that clarity, I finally, finally got the courage to transition.
And look, you know, I'm an adult now. I do understand that none of this was my fault. There were not exactly trans-affirming youth clinics in Mississippi in the 1990s, and I actually think I dealt with things as best as I could given the resources that I had. I didn't die of suicide. Win for me. I developed psychological coping tools to keep myself safe, and I started to learn the skills I would need to then be socialized as a woman and learn things like how to be a friend, how all-girl communication works, all that stuff. I did take that stuff seriously enough that transition was actually, I wouldn't say it was easy, but it felt very natural to me. And I can recognize now that my psychological damage is actually mostly manageable, so another win for me. I'm very excited about that.
At the same time, you know, I can't help but feel a lot of anger because no one did try to help me. You know, there were times in elementary school that I would have just flat-out emotional breakdowns, just sobbing or screaming, you know, or talking out plans to hurt myself. And I know there were parent-teacher conferences. Why did none of those teachers step in when they saw my parents' indifference to what I was going through? You know, I was sent to psychologists for depression, and yeah, I didn't have the bravery to tell them that I was trans, but why couldn't they have dug a little bit deeper and figured it out?
Yeah, I was reasonably smart, but I was in so much pain, I couldn't function academically. My parents might have been Christian conservatives, but they were the adults, and I was a child. How could they not have put two and two together when I told them how I felt so many times?
So why am I talking about this now? You know, I've kind of spent 20 years kind of carefully avoiding just blanket saying in public I'm trans. I've tried to move on, you know, trying to find peace and build a life for myself, and it's never been that I've ever been deluded enough to think people can't figure out that I'm trans sometimes. It's that I never wanted my career focus to be about that, you know, about one of the hardest things I've ever gone through. When you're trans, people who aren't trans will not define you as anything else.
Look at ContraPoints, for instance, who I think is one of the most insightful commentators in all of media. You are very rarely going to see an article about her that describes her as a wildly successful culture commentator, right? It's always a trans YouTuber or a trans activist. You know, for me, being transgender is not my entire life.
It's actually something that I tried to deal with as best as I could, and then life needed to go on, and I tried to fill it with some other things. It's a big world, and there are plenty of other areas of public policy that I care about. So why am I saying all of this publicly now? And this is the health news part.
In the last few years, I've started to have more and more trouble speaking for really long periods of time. So a while back, I went to a really, really, really good specialist to try to figure out what was really going on, and I found out that I am well on my way to permanently losing my voice. It has nothing to do with being trans. It's just another bad genetic roll of the die, exacerbated with the career where I have to talk from the second I wake up until the second I go to bed. My voice is getting quieter and weaker every single day. I'm sure you're hearing it get weaker over the course of this video, and there is going to be a point where I am going to have trouble speaking above a whisper.
A lot of the time, people will ask me to run for office again, and I have to tell them that I can't because I literally could not sit there and do the eight hours a day of call time that you would have to do to finance a successful campaign. So this is, it's really affecting my life, it's affecting the media I can do, and with that countdown clock, I'm finding there are things that I really want to say with the time that I have left.
And the first is, for anyone out there that's skeptical about trans people, I hope you can hear this story and understand there is no version of my life where I survived and did not transition. There's none. For me, it was kill myself or become something that a lot of people hate, which is not very appealing. This is who I am. I've been this person for 20 years now. It's how I talk, it's how I think, it's how my body feels right, it is the only way to interact with the world that feels true to me.
I think that having to face such a difficult crisis from such a young age has made me a uniquely strong person. As I've moved through my career, I find there's very little that fazes me or scares me. I think that being trans has actually made me a unique asset to whatever team I'm on, my community, but also my country. And I know there's a storyline out there telling you that trans people are doing it because it's a fad or it's to make a political statement. It's literally that every other version of my life ended in suicide.
And just getting really honest with you, there's no one that understands what a surgically hacked together, Target knock-off version of womanhood I am more than me. I don't need you to tell it to me all the time. As incomplete and painful as this feels, it is the best life I'm ever going to have for myself. So I would ask you to have compassion for people like me. It's often really hard to see how callously people talk about issues like HRT access because for people like me, estrogen is a miracle drug. Life is so numb without it.
I don't know if I am actually a woman, and that's more of a philosophical question where I just don't do very well, but I'm really, really certain that I can't function in life as a man. And I know that everything I've accomplished that I'm proud of, everything that feels important or real or meaningful, it's been as a woman. As the political winds are shifting harder and harder against people like me and our human dignity, I find I'm not willing to sit on the sidelines.
Which brings us to the second point. To all trans people out there, and especially my sisters, I love you. We share an experience and a profound pain we don't even need words to see and recognize in one another. And I think when it comes to protecting our rights, you deserve so much better than what you're getting right now. I'm going to save my thoughts on that for another video, but I do feel very, very strongly those of us that are medically transitioning need a smarter, more pragmatic voice in public policy. And I think I can be helpful in doing that.
Anyway, that is my story. I am genuinely terrified to put all of this out here, but I needed to say it while I still could. I hope this is helpful. I hope that if you're not trans, maybe you can see some of the struggles that we are dealing with. I hope it changed your mind. Stay tuned, exciting things are coming.
A true fucking American hero listening to this shit so I don't have to rape my ear drums with his tranny squawk.I hope you're not wearing a headset because John fucked up his audio and it's only coming through the right channel lmao. I'll try to give a tldw once I'm done watching unless someone beats me to it.
"Trooning out and being a fag isn't related to being molested as a child, that's bigotted and wrong. Anyway here's my molestation story."At 14 John was cornered by a child molester at his church that started to feel him up. John believes that the child molester felt some inate femininity from him and that's why he was targeted. The story ends with him getting away before anything happened. He never told anyone because he thought his parents would question him on why a "closeted homosexual" was going after him and that would out him.
I wish it was his ability to type.Once he's done with his autobiography John says that he was given a medical diagnosis that he is going to lose the ability to speak.
RIP AND TEAR out my penis and turn it into a surgical wound I'll use medical-grade dildos to keep from healing closedThe Kiwi Farms said "No, John. You are a tranny."
And then, John was a tranny.
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Tonight: A correlation between short-term sexual gratification and long-term consequences? An expert in the field joins us to weigh in, and, 'boy molested by dude with femboy fetish becomes dude with femboy fetish' for our opinion/conspiracy piece. Next: castrating yourself surgically and chemically has irreparable consequences on the health and functionality of the genitals, story at 11.he can't get his goon on over wearing women's clothes properly anymore
This is weird, one of the things that made him stand out from the other troons was that he just wouldn’t admit it (while being weirdly invested in trans rights). I think he actually got off on the fact that he was so obvious, but no one was allowed to say anything. Unless he was just such a narc that he genuinely thought people would believe him over their own eyes.
Anyway, yeah, he’s trying to be Blaire White. That’s why he got the plastic surgery and why he’s pushing the idea that he’s actually super hot.
I wonder if he’s trying to have his cake and eat it. Like, “You conservatives think all troons were molested as kids? I can be that, too!”Tonight: A correlation between short-term sexual gratification and long-term consequences? An expert in the field joins us to weigh in, and, 'boy molested by dude with femboy fetish becomes dude with femboy fetish' for our opinion/conspiracy piece. Next: castrating yourself surgically and chemically has irreparable consequences on the health and functionality of the genitals, story at 11.
It's in the opening song for MATI streams.Did John ever say that? I thought that was a Virgo Rouge thing.
And yet his current favorite insult to other MtFs is "male coded behavior"I do wonder who Brianna thought she was fooling. I've talked to her before, she is local to me (both living in Mass AFAIK) and my coverage of her has always been positive (check out my courtesy pronouns) but she doesn't pass. She's too tall, voice too deep, too apparently interested in cars and bikes. Self-describes as an engineer. You should have seen this hon coming from a mile away.
If two and a half hours of a delusional man trashing on a far more talented woman and doubling down on every stupid thing he has ever said sounds unappealing, Nina spoke thoroughly about the interview and her feelings about it on Meghan Murphy's YouTube channel. This has also been previously spoken of in this thread.
It isn't so much who he thought he was fooling as much as it is who was willing to tolerate the lies and enable Brianna given that he was an "ally" to the cause. Everyone went along with it because Wu provided some form of support needed against people on the right.I do wonder who Brianna thought she was fooling. I've talked to her before, she is local to me (both living in Mass AFAIK) and my coverage of her has always been positive (check out my courtesy pronouns) but she doesn't pass. She's too tall, voice too deep, too apparently interested in cars and bikes. Self-describes as an engineer. You should have seen this hon coming from a mile away.
I have an old OXO pinball machine from the 70's that was given to me by my father when he moved and I had it restored to working order last year.I know I've commented on this before, but I still find John's pinball fixation utterly ridiculous. I'm no aficionado myself, but to me, there's not really a meaningful difference between different pinball tables beyond the imagery. Sure, there might be some different gimmicks that do something neat, but in the end, you're just hitting a metal ball at targets to score points no matter what table you're playing on. (I'm sure that opinion will make true connoisseurs faint.) In that regard, even if I were going to drop a few thousand dollars on a pinball table so I could play to my heart's content, I can't imagine needing more than one. Not to mention the fact you'd have to play thousands of games before you break even, so you're certainly not saving money in the long term, especially after factoring in maintenance costs. Even if you're playing it five times a day every single day, a $10k table would take you five and a half years, assuming $1/game, and I'd be pretty sick of pinball long before that.
But John buying nearly a dozen of them with Frank's money when he's the only one who's going to play them is just absurd. Nobody plays so much pinball that they need that many tables to rotate through, and if they do then they need help. John's only reason for buying these is because it's yet another way he can flex on the poors.