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This was an info post on instagram and a thread on threads, here it'll be a text post.

On the exclusivity and harm that non-men vs non-women language does.

Have you heard someone say "non-man", or maybe "non-woman"? Maybe you yourself use these terms as descriptive words or to describe queer terminology, but have you ever thought about the effects of these terms and what they promote - whether intentional or not?

With the goal of making queer identities easier to describe and overall more digestible, two terms have been seen more and more often - non-man and non-woman. But these terms aren't living up to the intention, in fact they're promoting what they seek to destroy - harm towards queer people, exclusion and misinformation.

The idea of these new terms is easier description for terms like lesbian, transfem, gay, transmasc and other terms. But in reality, using these terms to define queer people excludes many, many queer people from their own community!! Nuance and complicated identities have always, and will always exist, and gender diverse people are often the victim when this fact is forgotten.

Bigender, genderfluid, genderqueer... many queer people have heard these terms, many even personally know folks who use them, yet they're forgotten and excluded in even the most basic definitions, conversations and queer language. They exist outside of the non-men/non-women binary created, and therefore don't fit under the common definitions of their genders, sexualities, etc.

Even some of the most historically important queer folks are excluded in this language. Butch lesbians can be men and still lesbians, drag queens often had a complicated relationship with gender and existed as men and women, people have bent and broken the binary for centuries!! When we ignore them, we ignore their strength and contribution to the fight for queer liberation, all in the name of digestibility for non-queers.

Queerness was never meant to be digestible, or sanitised, or easily defined. Queerness exists outside of clear defined boxes, and outside of binaries, where blending and blurring the lines is more common then existing within them. Queer language should never squish out hard to define queerness for the sake of a quick definition. We erase queerness itself when we erase weird queers.

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Ethics & The Artist is Present (the email I sent to my professor after class)

Hi there! I'm Kai (The one with the bright red hair) and I just wanted to say hello. :)

Sorry about being a little late by the way, I actually came to Kendall Campus looking for Room 2600 because I confused it with the course number. The library is nice though, so I'll probably keep coming here for class.

The idea of needing to learn how to speak before being able to interact with people reminded me of a performance art piece by Marina Abramovic called The Artist is Present. She invites visitors to come sit silently across from her for as long as they'd like, and for the entirety of the gallery's opening she doesn't take breaks or get food/water. Some people were crying by the end of their turn, even though they didn't say anything to each other. 

It's interesting how in that little bubble, language wasn't needed to make an impactful social interaction. Here's a quick article on it if you're interested. https://smarthistory.org/marina-abramovic-the-artist-is-present/

Just figured I'd share. Hope you have a good day! :)

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This is my graffiti black book from 2016-17 B

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gender? i hardly know her

I tell everyone I know that I was aware something was up with my gender in middle school. That I started experimenting with being a boy, and that didn't fit right until I found the term nonbinary and that fit me like a magic glove and everything was rainbows and sparkles and Nyan Cats. It's a very digestible story, albeit false.

It was more that I just ignored being a "girl" for nearly the entirety of middle school, until about 7th grade. I was just doing my own shit, being the trademarked Art Kid™ of my class, keeping myself busy with phone games, and- if you squinted- not feeling out of place at all.

I experimented with the term "agender" and for a while it fit me. I decorated the little locker we got in our homeroom with a handmade magnet of the agender flag. I wasn't going to be like those stories I saw everywhere, hiding my gender like some kind of secret. I thought I was better for doing that, not realizing there's fucking nuance to it and it's impossible to expect that from every queer person.

It was all very surface-level understanding of my queerness anyway. I think I just enjoyed the aesthetics of all that compartmentalization.

All of a sudden you have a bunch of new words to describe yourself with. I'm not [deadname] anymore, I'm Kai, my pronouns are they/them, and I'm a Trans Agender Panromantic Demisexual. Even picking my new name was cathartic- something I chose for myself like a badge of honor. Again- compartmentalization.

Even though I'm not the person I used to define myself as, I think that was probably the first time that I took part in a community like that so fervently. The music I listened to, the games I played, I got to look at content about it online sometimes, but only from the sidelines. Gender was something I could take pieces of and run with in my real life.

In freshman year of high school I saw other trans people in these communities, and I now suddenly had a lot of expectations on how I would look. I expected that I'd wear button up Hawaiian shirts and style my hair in a weird up-do forever. How I felt about all of it is pretty fuzzy. I remember feeling proud when I cut my hair short, happy when I wore a binder and full cover shirt to the beach. I was fully prepared to transition to "basically male" because I really didn't see any nonbinary representation and defaulted to White, Skinny Trans Guys to form the basis of what "androgyny" looked like to me.

(Something something internalized transphobia because I was viewing trans guys not as men, but as a "close enough" to nonbinary? I'm not sure.)

Then I finally saw other nonbinary people on my radar in sophomore year, people who were taking a stand against that norm. I followed that for a bit. I wore dresses and made my eyebrows and eyebags dark and vehemently described my style as "kidcore", followed TikTok trends and browsed depop.

I was also kind of dumbing down my transness to be digestible for myself and everyone else. "I'm just nonbinary- no need to get your panties in a twist. Let's just leave it and forget about it and it's just gonna stay like that forever. they/them, I'm not complicating it."

And then after a while I just kind of fucking gave up. Even if I wanted to make it digestible enough for other people, I should at least have an idea of what my gender means to me, regardless of how convoluted it ends up. Besides, so much of the world will want me dead no matter how much I water my gender down, no matter how "cis" I look.

But it's really long and arduous to explain all of that, so it's pretty clear why I'd rather go with the neat and tidy first option.

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dirty

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Writing porn is such a pain in the ass because all of these words are so phonetically fuckin disgusting. antithetical to flow . "chokes on a whimper" fucking log on to my lala and check my happy yay bro . Shaft. Member. Balls . Friction. The only good sex word is cunt.

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attack on nothegarden on artfight!

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They should invent a rattle in your engine thats a good sign

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Visual Experiments Lain Artbook - Illustrated by Takahiro Kishida, 1999

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i’m having a mental breakdown

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"All my homies think capitalism sucks"

Seen in Ontario, Canada

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'gaultier himself, enjoying his role as a major media personality at the mtv music awards' in key moments in fashion: the evolution of style - hamlyn (1998)

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"hows the job search going"