crabnby

[crabnby]

Dear transmeds

Even if you're right and a lot of people are "trenders", you're still not helping anyone by calling those people out.

When I first started questioning my gender my only source of information was youtube videos, since I told myself I was just curious. The videos that I got recommended were by some trans guys, who identified with the transmed movement and tbh their message about how you have to have dysphoria to be trans and how you had to conform to gender norms did nothing good for me. At all.

Whenever I look up dysphoria all I find is the same about wanting breast cancer just so you'll loose your chest and hating your body and yourself because of it. I don't feel that way, and saying that, is scary to me, because to this day it makes me questions whether I'm actually trans or not. I do however feel a disconnect to my gender, which as far as I've seen, can also mean that you're trans.

The thing is, that transmeds are usually trans people who have dysphoria. Really bad dysphoria. They're usually some of the people who knew they were trans from a very young age.

So dear transmeds. Have you thought about, that maybe, because you have so bad dysphoria, that's why you think no one else would be able to not conform to gender roles without experiencing discomfort is because that's how your trans experience is?

I once watched a video by a ftm transmed calling a nonbinary YouTuber out for being a trender. One of the main points I remember was that the "trender" had referred to their chest as their boobs. According to the transmed that should give the "trender" dysphoria if they were actually trans, because that gave the transmed dysphoria. But people experience everything differently. Personally I don't really feel that horrible about using words such as breast, boobs or period. Those are words to describe something. Someone else might find it to be uncomfortable.

I've seen a lot of people start to question their gender all over and go into a small panic because of some of the things transmeds say that you need in order to be trans. I'm one of those people who's done that. Not because I'm not trans, but because suddenly being told you have to be or act a certain way makes you question whether you actually do it.

Dear transmed. Cis people doesn't care, and whenever you call out another "trender" you take their side and also convince them even more that trans people aren't real. You are giving them, yourselves and everyone starting to question their gender a single story about what it means to be trans. And that's dangerous .

Sure, we have a problem with cis people thinking they're trans and then transition and feel awful, but we also have a lot of trans people not feeling like they're trans enough and feeling awful. And you aren't helping them, and most likely not the cis people either this way.

[crabnby]

This is it. This is the entire stupid debate. You’ll never see a more accurate representation of transmeds and alleged neutrals. 

[crabnby]

lesbians who prefer to use he/him pronouns are valid - for example, God

[crabnby]

listen i love posts about gnc gays and lesbians but if your post includes and is for both gnc gays and lesbians you have no excuse to not add gnc bisexuals to your positivity. we do not deserve to be an afterthought in our own community.

[crabnby]

IF YOU ARE CIS STAY THE FUCK OUT OF TRANS DISCOURSE.

YOU ARE NOT TRANS. YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY. "but my trans friend says-" I DONT FUCKING CARE. THEY SHOULD SPEAK ON IT INSTEAD OF YOU.

look, form all the opinions you want. no one can stop you, thats a natural human response. but if you are cis, you cannot accurately represent trans people. because youre not. fucking. trans.

involving yourself intracommunity discourse means you are speaking FOR one side and OVER another. theres no situation where thats a good thing.

you can have opinions, but keep them to yourself. shut the fuck up, please, im BEGGING you. you are not a transmed and you are not an anti-transmed. youre cis. stay out of it.

[crabnby]

Gay men that do drag/are otherwise gender non conforming: *use she/her pronouns for themselves a lot*

Everyone else: *cricket noises*

Lesbians that are also gnc: *use he/him pronouns*

Everyone else:

[crabnby]

America srsly has its police constantly publicly executing black people, or threatening to, but OTHER COUNTRIES are the police state.

Black people are extemporaneously executed all the time for minute crimes, for crimes that they didn’t even commit, and sometimes just because.

Think about this. Imagine for one second if trayvon martin were like, a child born in North Korea, and a North Korean officer shot him (wouldn’t happen, they don’t carry guns, but imagine). Would that not be all over the US media as proof that they are an evil police state? Especially when his murderer gets off without punishment?

The US accuses North Korea of public executions taking place, with absolutely no evidence aside from PAID defector “testimony” which is hardly reliable since money is involved. Meanwhile the US is actually literally murdering it’s citizens in the street with it’s domestic armed enforcers, as well as throwing Mexican families into concentration camps. America has an entire commission, ICE, dedicated to tracking down people of a certain race/ethnicity (I’m sure they don’t mind where you’re from in Latin America, you’re probably just Mexican to them) so they can lock them in concentration camps.

I mean, how do you lay this out any more bare? The US does what it accuses other countries of almost to a T, with quantifiable evidence. We have videos of the insides of these camps where families are held. We have video of families locked in small concrete rooms for days with nothing to do.

I don’t know how to end this, I can’t put into words how much I hate the US.

[crabnby]

the asab/agab post

Bear in mind that since I rbed it and am Not op, it’s possible the way I read it was different from how op intended it, esp when it’s such a short post.

The way I read it, is as saying that the push of “agab doesn’t matter, it’s never ok to ask someone their agab (or, as I’ve seen a few times, even implicitly ask by asking whether someone is trans feminine or not)/even acknowledge the concept of an agab” that has been happening more and more on Tumblr, leads to transmisogyny.

Despite the discomfort acknowledging ones own agab may bring, it’s important to acknowledge there is a big difference in how not just society at large, but specifically in online spaces as well, in the way trans people are treated base on their agab. Recently, there have been a lot of people who have “nb lesbian” or something of the like on their about, overstepping their bounds and speaking on things only trans girls should, then taking extreme offense when a trans girl asks whether they are one or not.

I could write more and if you want me to I will but I think that is a decent enough basic summary and I’m busy playing Apex so

[crabnby]

its really annoying how very transparent transmisogynistic things get labeled as “anti-nonbinary” exclusively (or even get displayed as non binary rep) because people seemingly forget that like, trans women aren’t treated as men or women and you can’t take transphobic media at its word for what its trying to depict 

a writer who thinks trans women are genderless freaks is going to say they’re genderless (Mermaid Sisters in Carole and tuesday) , a writer that thinks trans women are just cross dressers will say they’re just cross dressers (chihiro in dangan ronpa)

[crabnby]

if cis women can bulk up and wear baggy pants and crop their hair short and go without makeup or shaving their pits/legs/anywhere else, co-opt traditionally ‘masculine’ behaviors, and still be viewed as women–even praised for how very feminist they are in doing so–then so can trans women. that’s it. end of.

and if cis men who love fashion and florals and pink, and wear dresses and makeup and love to bake, can be comfortable in their masculinity and praised as revolutionary for doing so, then–you guessed it–so can trans men. that’s it. end of.

not one single person on earth has any right to dictate how anyone else pilots their respective flesh suits. not one single person on earth has any right to claim someone is ‘faking’ their gender or performing a gender incorrectly when gender is arbitrary as hell as-is.

[crabnby]

[crabnby]

[crabnby]

I just think it’s really interesting that once I became more visibly Jewish- wearing a tichel or kippah on a daily basis, wearing my hamsa, learning Yiddish- I was immediately faced with (misdirected) transmisogyny- being called transmisogynistic specific slurs, being followed and harrassed off buses, being followed and watched in women’s bathrooms, etc.

It goes to show that transmisogynists and terfs base their ideas on what womanhood is on a white, European, racist, antisemetic, patriarchal caricature of womanhood, and not actual womanhood, which is intrisic to each women, normal or cis.

[crabnby]

people who are like “hurdur i dont believe in fake genders, voidgender is made up” like im sorry i had to be the one to tell you this, but all genders are made up

[crabnby]

why r all transmeds so ugly, and by ugly I don’t mean outside ugly they’re like spiritually ugly, an aura of ugly, just cause of the way they are and how they act makes them just feel bad to look at.

[crabnby]

SGA/SSA aren’t LGBT+ terms you should be using

In fact, they’re not even really terms from our community at all.

In this post I’m going to be talking about two terms sometimes used by some people in our community: SSA (same sex attracted) and SGA (same gender attracted). Note, however, that this post is NOT about SGL (same gender loving) which is a completely unrelated, lovely term created for and by black LGBT+ people. To clear things up, the SGA term is not based on the SGL term; SGA was already an entirely separate term based in violent homophobia, which I’ll speak on below.

So, what’s wrong with SGA and SSA, and why do I have the right to speak about it?

I was born and raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a church that until recently also went by the nickname “Mormons.” (Yeah, I know it’s a mouthful. Don’t worry, I’ll be using LDS, Mormon, or The Church for the rest of this post.)

This church has a very long, horrible history of homophobia and transphobia which continues to this day, and they’re known for using the SGA/SSA terms to describe LGB+ people, to the extent that the SSA and SGA terms are considered fairly taboo in the queerstake community (queerstake  being what much of lds LGBT+ call ourselves). I grew up hearing the SSA/SGA terms with lot of negative connotation, and to put it shortly, the church has for a long time “encouraged” lds LGBT+ people to call themselves “same sex/gender attracted” instead of LGBT+.

This statement, by the church leader Dallin H. Oaks (more on him here in a post by a gay mormon) is a pretty good example of the kind of rhetoric they use to encourage this: “We should note that the words homosexual, lesbian, and gay are adjectives to describe particular thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. We should refrain from using these words as nouns to identify particular conditions or specific persons.” (x)

This kind of rhetoric is repeated so often in the church that “same sex/gender attracted” is the way a majority of cis straight lds people refer to LGBT+ people aside from negatively using the word “gay” or “homosexual.”  They often use it talking about how we “suffer” from SSA/SGA, are “afflicted” with SSA/SGA, “struggle” with SSA/SGA. Instead of being gay, we “have” SSA/SGA.

It’s used as a way to essentially brainwash LGBT+ lds people into distancing ourselves from the LGBT+ community and further envelop ourselves in the church’s “you should repent from your homosexual behavior” mentality. The two terms are used fairly interchangeably; I’d argue SSA is used more often, but SGA is starting to get used more as well. In any case, it contributed to my younger self’s phase of “I won’t label my orientation” because I’d been trained to think that if I didn’t label it and I kept doing what the church said, my attraction to girls would either go away or I could just ignore it. Which, uh, didn’t really work, seeing as I’m extremely queer now.

A church university called BYU has, in particular, been homophobic to an extreme, actively participating in anti-LGBT+ efforts. In fact, they’ve been ranked one of the least LGBT friendly universities in the entire US! What an incredible achievement! You can read the history of their homophobia (and some transphobia) in this article (including a fairly extensive timeline from the 1950s up to the end of 2018). To sum up some of the really bad parts, though (the sources are in the link):

They repeatedly banned LGBT+ people from their university entirely, then banned students from being openly LGBT+, and are suspected of firing several staff members for being gay, as well as for suspending and expelling students for dating or kissing people of the same gender

In the 60s through 70s, they began administering “electric aversion therapy” in order to “cure” LGB+ students (this “therapy” involved showing gay people nude pictures of the same gender and giving them electroshocks in order to make them associate those feelings negatively). This method was ineffective at making the LGB+ people straight (obviously), but the people who underwent it reported extreme decrease in mental health and increased suicidal thoughts. At one point this therapy was required for anyone suspected of being gay. The therapy ended in 1983, but only because of the overwhelming reports that it wasn’t working.

In 1965 there were 5 reported suicides of gay Mormons at the university in a single year, and the LGBT+ Mormon suicidality in Utah has continued to be high. 

In the 70s, when Dallin H. Oaks was president of the school, he created a surveillance system to “catch” LGB+ people, including literally spying on gay bars and implementing recording devices to watch for any suspected LGB+ students, as well as posting fake gay advertisements to “ensnare” them.

Dallin Oaks also helped create the Institute for Studies in Values and Human Behavior, which was dedicated to proving that being gay was a choice, in order to re-affirm the church’s stance on homosexuality at the time. The freaking director of the institution, Allen Bergin, once said that homosexuality was “caused by some combination of biology and environment.” (thankfully, the church no longer believes being gay is a choice, though they talk about how “SSA/SGA behavior” is a choice as often as they can.)

I suggest y’all also read the Payne Papers (aka Prologue), which was written by two gay BYU students in 1977 in response to a homophobic professor at the university.

In 1997 there was a poll where 80% of students said they wouldn’t live with a roommate attracted to people of the same gender.

“In 2000 a reported 13 students were suspended from the University when caught watching the TV series Queer As Folk. The next year two gay students (Matthew Grierson and Ricky Escoto) were expelled under accusations deemed ‘more probable than not’ of hand-holding or kissing.”

In 2005, The Foundation for Attraction Research (FAR) was founded, run by mostly BYU professors. In 2009 the organization published Understanding Same-Sex Attraction which advocated therapy to change sexual attraction (evidently they didn’t learn their lesson lol).

In 2014, a BYU survey to students only gave the option of “heterosexual but struggles with same-sex attraction" or “heterosexual and does not struggle with same-sex attraction” for people’s sexual orientation. Y’all, this was only a year before same-gender marriage was legalized in the US. That’s just bad.

LGBT+ students are currently still facing risk of expulsion from the school if they hug, kiss, or date someone of their same gender. Celibacy is mandatory.

All LGBT+ groups are currently banned from meeting on campus, so there’s only a single LGBT+ group for the school that meets at a library in the city.

And of course, this is only what happened at a single Mormon university. You’d be surprised how much power the LDS church has, especially in Utah. Ya know Dallin H. Oaks, the homophobe? Yeah, last October he gave a homophobic and transphobic talk in front of over 4 million church members from all over the world.

During the course of all that homophobia at BYU, “same sex attraction” and “same gender attraction” were both terms used regularly in this therapy and in the church, alongside “homosexual.” And as I said earlier, they still use these terms today! In fact, if you wanna see them in action, you can just visit this page on their official website, which has “same sex attraction” right there in the title. The entire website continues to follow the implied idea of “we’ll tolerate you saying you’re gay, lesbian, or bisexual, but we’d prefer if you’d just say you’re same sex/gender attracted, because being gay/bi/lesbian is a lifestyle, and we don’t support it” and the whole website is basically “it’s okay to be attracted to the same gender, but it’s a sin to ever do or think anything gay!”

You can also just search the internet for “same sex attraction” or “same gender attraction” and a bunch of christian articles will pop up with rampant internalized homophobia among LGBT+ church members, and a bunch of homophobia from the church itself. It’s possible this SSA/SGA rhetoric isn’t specific to my church, as I haven’t researched other church’s histories as thoroughly, but the church absolutely contributed to anti-LGBT+ efforts throughout history, using “SGA” and “SSA” the entire time. This isn’t even a thing of the past, LGBT+ Mormons are still freaking here going through all this–conversion therapy is still not banned in Utah.

So, TL;DR: the “same sex/gender attraction” phrase was used in LGB+ conversion therapy, and is still used to perpetuate homophobic rhetoric in the church today. Because of that, a lot of my fellow LGBT+ Mormons are uncomfortable with the terms being used as umbrella descriptors for our orientations. So when someone tells you “SSA/SGA was used in Mormon conversion therapy, please don’t use it,” take them seriously. Yes, I understand that they’re sometimes helpful terms when talking about LGB+ identities, and I’m (sometimes) more okay with the usage of the terms than others, but in general, if you’re not a person affected directly by the church’s usage of these terms (read: an active LGBT+ Mormon or ex-Mormon), please don’t use them liberally, and don’t use them to freaking discourse about who does or doesn’t belong in the community. “SSA/SGA and trans” is not how you should be defining our community, I don’t care whether you’re an exclusionist or an inclusionist, just don’t. And you should never. freaking. use them. to refer to any LGBT+ Mormon who asks you not to.

And, last of all, as a bi person, y’all should not be implying that attraction to the same gender is the only thing about our orientation that makes us LGBT+. I’m not just LGBT+ because I’m attracted to the same gender, I’m LGBT+ because I’m attracted to multiple genders. My attraction to multiple genders makes me inherently Not Straight. Biphobia and monosexism is an issue that greatly affects mspec people, and it’s time monosexual LGBT+ people recognize that homophobia is not the only type of oppression we face. Not even to mention how SGA and SSA terms are exclusive of nonbinary orientations, which don’t always involve even having a same gender to be attracted to.

Exclusionists and inclusionists alike please reblog. Y’all need to listen up. Queer Mormons aren’t here to play.

[crabnby]

❀ he/him lesbian flag ❀

a very dear friend of mine (who wishes to remain anonymous) requested that I create an aesthetic version of the lesbian flag to represent him and other lesbians who share his identity. 

in the light of all this discourse over whether or not pronouns are inherently gendered, and people arguing that only men own he/him pronouns, only women own she/her pronouns, only nonbinary people own they/them pronouns, and no other pronouns are valid, it’s important to take time to make some positivity for those of you who are brave enough to identify in a way that many people in our community don’t understand, or outrightly disapprove of. 

if you’re a he/him lesbian, a she/her gay, or you use pronouns outside the gender binary, remember that you are loved, and please know that anyone who puts this flag on their blog wholeheartedly supports you  ♡ ♡ ♡