One of the lamest ways people have tried to sidestep Dump Your Puppygirl is by claiming that I wrote the whole thing as a screed against an ex-girlfriend, which would certainly be an interesting explanation if there were an ex-girlfriend who could have inspired it.
I can now confidently reveal that this theory is not true, considering 🥁🥁🥁 I have only ever had one ex-girlfriend, and she isn’t a trans woman.
Sorry. I know this is devastating news for the growing body of Tara Knight scholarship being conducted by people who have never met me.
There was no puppygirl breakup, and there isn’t some mysterious trans woman wandering around with intimate knowledge of which paragraphs are secretly about her. I wrote Dump Your Puppygirl because I kept encountering a recognizable social type in trans lesbian spaces and wanted to understand what produced it. You can think I was unfair, that my argument doesn’t hold up, or that I’m completely full of shit, because those would at least be disagreements with something I actually wrote.
Inventing a romantic history for me is easier because it turns an argument about a social phenomenon into gossip about an individual woman. Once you decide there must be a disgruntled ex hiding somewhere behind the text, you never have to consider whether the behavior I described exists beyond my imagination. My ability to observe the social world apparently requires a breakup first.
This keeps happening with my work. Somebody speculates about why I wrote something, another person repeats the speculation as biography, and eventually somebody who has never spoken to me arrives to explain my own life to everyone else. I occasionally learn new Tara Knight lore this way, which is convenient because personally living my life has apparently left me underinformed.
Since Dump Your Puppygirl has somehow returned to discourse like a vampire that won't die, I figured I might as well give everyone something real to talk about.
DUMP YOUR PUPPYGIRL: DUMB PUPPY EDITION
Tonight I’m releasing an abridged version of Dump Your Puppygirl called Dump Your Puppygirl: Dumb Puppy Edition. It’ll be available on my Substack tonight and in the new magazine.
I wanted a version somebody could read in one sitting and send to a friend without assigning them an entire book about puppygirls. Dumb Puppy Edition keeps the central argument and gives me enough room to develop it while trimming the parts that belong in the full version. If you’ve wanted to read Dump Your Puppygirl and never got around to the original, start here.
And yes, it is called Dumb Puppy Edition. Sometimes I name something correctly on the first try.
While you’re waiting for that, my latest article, MeToo Taught Men One Thing: Fall in Line, is already available on Substack.
The Cornell allegations had me thinking again about something I’ve been circling for a while: the incel didn’t invent masculinity. He took ideas already present in ordinary male socialization seriously enough to expose where some of them lead. The article looks at what happens when men learn the language of sexual accountability while preserving the relationships that teach them to protect other men, rationalize their behavior, and determine which women deserve solidarity.
It’s the piece I want people reading and arguing with right now, so go read it on the Substack if you haven’t already.
Also, since this email has apparently become the Dump Your Extended Universe newsletter, Dump Your Polycule is available in paperback on Amazon.
Dump Your Polycule takes up another part of the same larger question that keeps showing up throughout my work: what happens when people inherit social relations they haven’t seriously examined and then assume changing the vocabulary around them has changed the underlying relation itself? The book deals with polycules, queer intimacy, lesbian social life, and the habits we reproduce inside communities that are very good at declaring themselves liberated.
Get Dump Your Polycule on Amazon
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Dump Your Puppygirl: Dumb Puppy Edition is out tonight.
And I didn’t forget about it. Dump Your Catgirl releases next week.