#(also: this is far from the first time cis people have been weird to me in public i get dirty looks/ misgendered all the time lmao

[asterlark]

two guys were talking on the train behind me today and i couldn't hear much of their convo bc i had headphones in but i did hear them say "it's a she" and then when i was leaving at my stop they were really weird to me so i'm like 99% sure i'm the "it" in question; all this to say i feel like i just had a transgender rite of passage (getting dehumanized in public) ✌️✌️✌️

[drdemonprince]

Thanks for talking about child sexual abuse and child sexuality. I have some clear and many hazy memories of abuse as a child. I was also sexually active at the age of 7 or 8. By that I mean my friend and I engaged in sexual activity on a regular basis. I believe she was being abused by her dad although she never told me that it was something I always had a sense of even that young. Anyway we didn’t feel that what we were doing was wrong as such, but there was one time in particular that my big brother almost caught us and I was terrified he would tell my parents. But aside from other people knowing we had no shame around it and how we felt about it and I’ve always felt kinda neutral looking back on it. But I have always been curious as to how that began and why. I don’t remember the details of how two 7 year old girls decided to get into bed together or what other conversations we had. But it did feel completely natural and fine at the time. It wasn’t until I was much older I started to realize that other kids that age weren’t into those same things. I first had sex with a boy at 13. I was a super slutty teen. Had the reputation around that. Didn’t have shame around that either. Was actually kinda proud of it. But I do think I equated sex with my worth as a human and thats probably tied to what I was taught as a child. That has been something that’s kinda haunted me my whole life.

Anyway I don’t know how this tracks with what you’re saying but it’s nice to be able to say these things somewhere and not feel like a freak. Being abused is one thing to deal with. Having sex at such a young age is more of a taboo and something no one talks about.

Thank you for sharing, Anon. It sounds like you and your friend were able to have positive, exploratory experiences together that offered a hell of a lot more safety and agency to her than the abuse going on in her life. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, the only issue is the societal stigma surrounding it.

And beyond that, some kids are just sexual earlier than others. I have a cis, straight female acquaintance who used to gather around all the neighborhood boys and "play married" (as she called it) by asking them to let her suck their dicks. She has no clue where she got the idea, but it was all completely initiated by her and she has no negative feelings about having done it.

It might be *weird* to hear about, but if anything I wish that more women's first sexual debuts were that harmless, playful, and pleasant as that seems to have been for her.

Of course, there's an entire cultural backdrop that makes sexual exploration far more fraught and outright dangerous for children, and some kids' motives for exploring sexuality are patriarchal values, insecurity, and abuse, and that complicates things. But shaming children or treating them as defective for having interest in this massive aspect of human life does nothing to benefit them. We seem to be very very far culturally from being able to speak about this candidly, farther away from it than perhaps we've ever been in my lifetime anyway.

[olderthannetfic]

You recently mentioned that you've been out since your teens. As a person who managed to overlook a shitton of signs and only realized she was bi in her early 20s, I am wondering how you realized you were bi and also how you found out bisexuality exists?

Sorry if the phrasing sounds weird, I only noticed I was bi because I stumbled over the term on tumblr in 2016 and was like "oh, that's possible??" and then my earlier identity crises during my teens due to feeling attracted to multiple genders and being like "I'm crushing on [female person]. Am I lesbian? Nah, I've also felt attracted to [male person]. But I can't be straight either because this attraction feels the exact same. Am I broken?" were suddenly resolved with the realization that bi is also an option and that I'm not broken due to zigzagging between heterosexuality and homosexuality, but rather just bisexual. In retrospect, it's absolutely ridiculous that it took me so long, considering that as a kid I had crushes on Anna and Carter and Doctor from Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, and Vitani from Lion King 2, and back in primary school, I used to go to the kids' section in the library and look at the first pages of a sci-fi comic which had one or two women get out of a lab or space station thingy and go bathe in the nude in the first few pages. I don't remember what it was called or what it was about, but tbh I'd love to find it and actually read it properly this time lol.

--

Horniness. The hornier you are, the easier it is to notice.

But also... well...

The 80s were all about combating the AIDS crisis and trying to get basic recognition of the humanity of gay people (at least in the US circles I was familiar with). The 90s saw the rise of a much more organized bi rights movement.

And then we backslid.

In the 2000s and 2010s, interest in bisexuality as a distinct thing fell off a cliff as far as I can tell. The "hey, it's not just cis gays and lesbians" energy moved first to trans topics and then to asexuality but without bisexuality joining the stodgy old guard.

The 90s were different. I was hitting my teens just as Anything That Moves hit its stride. I bought that shit at the bookstore. Yeah, this was the Bay Area, but they carried it at all the regular bookstores, not just the gay ones.

On Usenet where I spent a lot of my tween years, one of the big groups was soc.bi. I even spotted them having an in-person meetup in a restaurant in Berkeley where I happened to be having dinner with my parents. I didn't go say hi because I was like 14.

My big eureka moment, though, was on alt.tv.x-files when two groups were having a satirical argument about who enjoyed The X-Files more: people who got to lust over David Duchovny or people who got to lust over Gillian Anderson. Someone showed up and was like "Hah! I get to enjoy it twice as much as all of you! I'm bi!"

I was like "That's a thing????" I'd grown up with very liberal parents and lesbian neighbors, but like a lot of boomers, my mom was pro-gay and deeply clueless about all other queerness.

--

So the answer is unsupervised internet access in an age with no algorithms plus things like bisexual magazines actually existing.

RIP Anything That Moves.

[yukishirostar]

So people are talking about a post in the Zolu tag by a certain tumblr user in regards to their issues with Zolu as a ship. They shall be unnamed because i dont wish to bring attention to them and instead just want to focus on their arguments because they're not the first people to make some of these points and so this is also an opportunity for me to talk about these things (a tweet is going around on Twitter containing these screenshots with the username so you can find it there if you need to anyway).

The way this person dismisses the relationship between Zoro and Luffy as a result of needing to pair gay Zoro with someone is too laughable, they must be very fit in order to be able to do these mental gymnastics. I believe that many people who are going on about the Zolu scenes in the OPLA were already Zolu shippers who were familiar with the original story and are enjoying the moments because they were well, really good Zolu moments? And there is actually, shockingly, many good Zolu moments in the original story too which is why many people ship them. Wild, I know.

Then there's 'straight-washed Sanji'. Equally if not more of a bizarre thing to believe. I might make some people mad especially the Sanji stans out there who constantly insist on the 'repressed queer' narrative with his character, but Sanji is written pretty explicitly to be seen as a cisgender and heterosexual character. The way you say with your whole chest that Luffy is 'canonically' aroace but don't acknowledge that Sanji is 'canonically' cishet is beyond hypocritical. If you believe Sanji looking like a 'misogynistic straight man' is different from the way he is written in canon then maybe you should go back and reread/rewatch series with your eyes open this time. If you wish to headcanon him with the frankly offensive repressed bisexual/transgender cliché then go ahead, but that is clearly not the intention Oda has with his character.

There's also the fact that aroace people can uh. Be in relationships. Get married. Have children. Did it occur to you that many people who ship Zolu ship them as an ace couple or-

First thing I want to say here, as a trans man who is 'mlm', can other dudes stop with this idea that women or fem-aligned individuals enjoying homosexual relationships between two men is inherently fetishising or that as a masc-aligned individual your enjoyment of a ship is morally superior in some way. Stop pulling out your 'mlm/ transmasc / cis gay' card in order to justify why your ship is superior. Its cringe af.

But if we are to insist that 'cishet female gaze fetishising mlm' is going on then ironically Zosan fits that the better than any ship in the fandom. It being by far the most popular mlm ship means there is likely a higher proportion of people who identify as cishet women who ship it. Its also the classic 'two men who dislike/hate eachother and have a toxic relationship but hot sexual tension' slash/yaoi stereotype. Majority of Zosan I've come across is depicting Zoro as the masculine male man in the relationship while Sanji the effeminate twink that Sanji stans project themselves onto and they go crazy for the bickering that is apparently reminiscent to them of a toxic heterosexual marriage. Meanwhile every Zolu/Luzo shipper I've interacted with has been some flavour of queer and Zolu is closest to the 'falling in love with your same sex bestie' narrative that the majority if not every non-heterosexual person has experienced at least once in their lifetime. This is just my personal view of course, but I think noting a difference in perspective on this topic is interesting and reveals that at the end of the day this is totally subjective and based purely on anecdotes.

Also it's just a very weird point here that apparently OP has 'plenty of varied queer rep' (it actually doesn't have that many canonical queer characters in relation to its cast size but anyway) and other media doesn't so shipping aroace characters in gay relationships is valid in those but not in One Piece … HUH???? So you're saying if One Piece had 'less' queer rep, then Zolu would be fine to ship? Idek my brain hurts.

"I have black friends so I'll speak for the black community and get offended for them" (btw this person then proceeded to block aroace people who had issues with their depiction of aroace people).

Also if we're talking canonical depictions, the only thing Zoro has been canonically depicted as is also aroace, equally if not moreso than Luffy. So by your own rules, you can't ship a cishet (sanji) with an aroace (zoro), therefore Zosan is now invalid. Stop erasing Zoro's aroace identity bigot.

'Categorically wrong' makes me laugh. I don't ship Zoro and Nami but like, people can ship what they want to??

'The general public is aware enough of gay people and how to spot them these days' uh... firstly this sounds very homophobic. Secondly the general public (cishet ppl) are famously bad at recognising queerness even when its in flashing lights before them. Thirdly you make it sound like Zoro was going around on roller skates and booty shorts listening to YMCA and Madonna in the show. I do agree he was gay-coded but it was mostly because he had sexual tension with every man he interacted with, not for the strange reasons you pointed out...

Its kinda the elephant in the room too but like. These are just headcanons. You can have multiple headcanons and interpretations of a character's sexuality. I can see Zoro as aroace virgin one day and a gay h*e the next. I'm actually allowed, legally, to do that.

The way they think shipping Zolu is harmful to aroace representation when BOTH characters are closest to being canonically aroace than anything yet ship Zosan, label being anti-Zolu as some kind of pro-ace activism, and then proceeded to block aroace people for criticising their incorrect depiction of what being aroace is...

This was a lot of words to say that you don't like a ship. Just say you don't like it, and it gets in the way of the ship you like, instead of writing a virtue signalling essay to justify your reasoning. Please.

They had some more to say on future posts I'll just pick my favourite bits

They really have this narrative that Zolu is only popular because of OPLA and can't fathom that its just a popular ship in general and always has been huh. And they couldn't make it more obvious that they're totally salty about it ranking in the top 100 most popular tumblr ships, lmao.

Your classic case of 'self-identifying ally who speaks over the people they are supposed allies of'. Its a general rule that you feel the need to declare yourself an ally you're probably not an ally, actual allies know they need to just shut up and do the work. Saying 'this character's aroace' and 'I have aroace friends' actually isn't what allyship is, thats just accepting that ace people exist which is like... the baseline.

Calling a wholesome loving ship like Zolu an icky ship is a severe consequence of online brain (this person is 26 years old btw)

[grainjew]

On Gallifreyan Vestigial Gender

[this is the revised and expanded version of some rambling i initially did in my cowriter's discord DMs. i tried cite sources where i could, but a lot of this has been marinating in my brain since half-absorbing posts twenty pages deep into peoples' dw tags 3 years ago, and also i spend way too much time on the wiki, so please excuse anything i can't quite source, which is most of it. huge thanks to @oriigami for being my original conversation partner and contributing extremely to the concepts here, and to @bird-of-paradox and @waywren, neither of whom I am being allowed to @, for bothering me into not leaving it as unreadable discord screenshots]

-

There's this tendency among queer Doctor Who fans to look at Time Lord society, with its alienness and regeneration, and ask, frustrated, "Why do they even have gender?"

I sympathize with this extremely. I've been the one asking this question plenty in the past, and I do think it's a bit silly, and even sillier that the genders are "man" and "woman" and there are apparently two of them. But I also think that the section of canon most insistent about the Gallifreyan gender binary, the 7th Doctor novels from the 90s, also has the potential to be the most interesting about it.

Now, this is not to say that the text of those novels isn't weird about gender in a flawed, written by (as far as I know) cis people in the 90s way. But I think that you can extrapolate and queer what's there in very interesting ways, often because it's so flawed in the first place: Gallifrey, too, is an extremely flawed society. Decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core, as the show put it.

So, VNAs Gallifrey: living Houses and their female Housekeepers, cultural and literal planet-wide sterility, Loom birth, rigid overcomplicated bureaucracy, the enduring legacy of the pre-Rassilon Pythian regime. The gender binary as presented here goes something like

women: chaos/magic/psychic powers/superstition/the house (scary)/biological childbirth/fertility men: cold rationality/order/science/bureaucracy/loom-birth/sterility

The Pythia and the Lord President. Magic and science. The House and the Web of Time.

Obviously a lot of this is classic gender binary stuff. But let's put the exasperated question of "Why must we do the gender binary like this?" aside for a moment and think about Gallifreyan society instead.

Pythia-ruled and Time Lord-ruled Gallifrey have a lot of the same problems in the end, just wearing different faces: they're both very much totalitarian states that believe themselves to be above everyone else. But while the Time Lords observe and micromanage the Web of Time from their Panopticon, maintaining its integrity to their standards, the Pythians didn't have time travel, so this preoccupation with control manifested--as far as I know; this is the bit in the meta where I admit I haven't actually read Time's Crucible yet--as keeping the entirety of society in one psychic hivemind, leaving nobody any privacy, plus a lot of future-reading and prophecy and whatnot.

The main relics of that societal layout into post-Rassilon Gallifreyan society are the Matrix, which has every single dead Time Lord's brain in it and does their prophecies for them, just couched in a little bit more science than Pythian magic, the Houses, which are alive all around you and in which you're constantly being watched by the Housekeeper through her mirrors, and, of course, the gender binary.

The Pythia was always a woman. Women were the ones with vast psychic powers, with magic; women were the ones in charge. Pythian Gallifrey was a heavily gendered society. This is because Gallifreyans are a kind of bug /shot with the "irrelevant to the point at hand" gun.

And so, when Rassilon rebelled, he was very much playing the part of "opposite gender with opposite worldview." The Pythia had female magic and superstition; he had male science and technology. His most trusted Founders were either all or mostly men, depending on the version of events you prefer. (Personally I have my doubts about the Other.) Rassilon built his new society as a man, among men, in opposition to the matriarchs before him.

Gallifrey, despite the invention (or theft, depending on the story) of regeneration allowing people to trans their gender randomly and sometimes unintentionally, never left the gender binary behind.

The whole point of modern Gallifreyan society is that they're still stuck in that exact same moment Rassilon took over (and the Pythia cursed them to sterility, if thats the version you're going with). You could easily make an argument for this being some cycle of abuse type situation; Rassilon and co overthrew the Pythia and immediately did exactly what she was doing to them to the wider universe. I tend to read it as a regeneration: it's the same society, really. It just died and was reborn, and now it looks and sounds different.

-

The downside of trying to translate a discord conversation into a proper meta post is that sometimes making a coherent transition between thoughts is impossible. So to introduce the next bit of this post, I'm going to hand you off for a moment to this post about the 8th Doctor's "I'm not sure I've ever even been a man" quote from Interference. As op of that post says, the Doctor is genderqueer even by Gallifreyan standards- he's being questioned in that scene by another Gallifreyan, who doesn't understand his experience of gender.

The EDAs are full of "Eight is nonbinary" quotes, of course. Every queer fan who's ever engaged with them has a collection (and if anyone knows where that one google doc compilation that was going around awhile back went I'd be in your debt, because I'd love to know if my collection is missing any), but almost all those quotes refer to his genderqueerness in human terms, as observed by human companions, or in response to human assumptions. Except that one. Not only is Gallifrey's gender binary alive and well in a society where people can literally change their gender when they die, but the Doctor doesn't fit inside it.

All this to say that being a renegade Time Lord is a nonbinary thing to do. Especially the Doctor, with all sorts of weird Other Timeless nonsense in their biodata. Women stay on Gallifrey (or Karn!) and do magic and watch you. Men stay on Gallifrey and do science and watch other people. Renegades go out and do whatever they please. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

-

So. Gallifrey has a gender binary. It's vestigial, a remnant of an earlier iteration of society with a much sharper male-female divide, and it doesn't make logical sense for it to exist. So: How does it manifest? And what function does its continued existence serve in the interests of the status quo and ruling class?

Let's take a look at 7th Doctor novel Lungbarrow.

Lungbarrow introduces us to (among many other things) the living Houses of the Time Lord Families, and to the family structures within: the patriarchal figure of the Kithriarch, the always-female Housekeeper, bound in her ritual marriage to the House itself, and hordes of petty squabbling Cousins.

Kithriarch is already an interesting title. It's obviously a gender neutral version of matriarch or patriarch, but the role itself seems to be almost entirely a male sort of thing in opposition to the feminine Housekeeper.

The Housekeeper, meanwhile, seems to be in a direct conceptual and societal line of descent from the Pythian priestesses: she can see anything within her domain, she has a psychic connection to the House, from whom she cannot hide anything, she can command the wooden Drudge servants and other House subsystems, she prioritizes the House above all where the Kithriarch is supposed to prioritize the Family. Women are frightening and powerful psychics. They know everything you want to keep secret, and prioritize the collective.

(There's also something here about how Lungbarrow presents duelling dualities--the Doctor and the Master, the CIA head and the Lord President, the Kithriarch and the Housekeeper, the masculine and the feminine--but I haven't quite tied it into the rest of this yet.) (Although while we're mentioning the Master. He's girlcoded by Gallifreyan standards and the Rani is boycoded by the same. I will not be expanding on this at this time just trust me.)

I think Housekeepers and women who want to be Housekeepers try to keep their self-image as women strong enough that they never regenerate into a male body (whatever a '"male body" means, of course, but I'm not sure Time Lords have gotten that far in their queer theory yet). I also think that there are more female Kithriarchs than male Housekeepers, because Housekeeper is much more heavily ritualized role in keeping with the Pythia's more ritualized general vibe, but I do think female Kithriarchs are still few and far between.

I also think that these are probably the most explicitly gendered occupations on Gallifrey, although of course you'll see some drift. Most women are out there getting the same scientific, military, and bureaucratic positions as men. But there's this lingering specter of gender roles, a Pythia-shaped hole that exists around the concept of womanhood. As my cowriter put it when we were talking about this, an "ideal of womanhood. not ‘ideal’ as in desirable, [but] ‘ideal’ as in the quintessential image of the thing."

This is further amplified by the continued existence of the Pythians in the form of the Sisterhood of Karn, living in their perfectly functional all-women magic society just out of sight. Their presence at the edge of the Gallifreyan consciousness must haunt the Time Lords, as any imperialist power is haunted by its own past and its own ultimate impotence.

Because that's the other thing. Gender roles are, to quote my cowriter again, "stupid and antiquated and historically potent tools of authoritarianism." Of course the Time Lords have them. Have you seen them?

They're tools of control, of conformity, of idealizing the past. Of conservatism. Consider, to once more quote my cowriter, "the weird traditionalist psychosis of having gender roles in a society that can’t bear children."

The ideal woman on Gallifrey is still the Pythia, millenia or even billenia on. And the ideal man is still the Lord President Rassilon.

-

[thank you for your time! if you liked this please consider checking out my fic Something Old, which is about lungbarrow, the adventuress of henrietta street, and the gallifreyan concept of marriage, and in the writing of which i initially articulated most of the thoughts in this post. i've previously characterized it as a fic that's actually a meta post. and please don't be too mean to me for anything i got wrong in here! i'm just a little guy]

[ghnosis]

*rips bong* (this is my bong in case you're curious)

so some of you have asked me, over the course of the 80-someodd interviews I have so far conducted, why I am doing my PhD on Ghost.

tonight a participant asked me in a manner that sort of finally clicked for me - because I assume all of you live inside my head with me and know why I do everything.

Rose, why are you doing your PhD on Ghost fandom?

when I was 12, American Idiot by Green Day came out. I lost my mind immediately. Green Day were my first hyperfixation. I promise if you ask about "Green Day Girl" to people I went to high school with, they would remember me. not only did Green Day teach me about the Iraq War, and American progressive politics in general, they also taught me, a bullied and weird child, what it meant not to give a shit. someone thinks I'm wrong/bad/inferior? cool! I don't fucking care. "now everybody do the propaganda," etc.

if I kept talking about everything I learned from Green Day, we'd be here all night. but. Green Day *also* taught me that music didn't have to sound like pop, or like country. that music could be written because someone felt something. that music could be used to express rage, a thing I felt in spades.

so from Green Day, my door is blown wide the fuck open and I get to learn about Dead Kennedys, about David Bowie, about Nirvana.

the other thing I know I love, back then in 2004, is learning. and teaching.

fast forward 15ish years, give or take (or pack me a second bowl and I'll tell you the middle), and I'm looking, halfheartedly and in a bummed-out manner, for a PhD program. I have my master's, I didn't like the experience, but I want that Dr. I've been presenting at conferences and doing some piddly academic writing on video games and the use of games in education, and I'm on a listserv for other people writing about games. I get an email from someone at Falmouth University about a PhD program there in "Dark Economies." who's listed on the email? none other than Tanya Fucking Krzywinska, my number one academic girl crush (in my subject area. my actual number one is a historian)!!!!!!

so I read this email and it's talking about the intersection of the occult, video games, and heavy metal. as I said, I've been writing about video games. one of the things I'd been writing about was a certain thing that happened in that industry ooooh, 14 years ago now. something in my brain slots into place.

the occult: I know what that is. occult rock, certainly. I maybe could squeeze in some punk or pop punk. the goffik. we got some MCR.

heavy metal. well, I'm a punk girl through and through, but I used to date that guy in the metal band and have seen Slayer et al multiple times live. sure. I can occupy that world. wait a minute. Ghost.

video games. the thing I'd been writing about, specifically the mistreatment of anyone who wasn't a cis guy. you know what that sounds a lot like? sounds a lot like going to metal shows with my ex. WAIT A FUCKING MINUTE. GHOST??? on TUNGLE DOT HELL???

so I log my ass back on to this website and I look at you, at all of you beautiful people I'd been reblogging ass wobbling gifs with for years, and I said "oh my god. are they me? is whatever is going on in there just a bunch of me's, except it's Ghost not Green Day?

are all of you finding the most beautiful thing there is to find, namely, empowerment and freedom, in the goofy Satan band music band? was it the heaviest thing you had heretofore encountered? did it crack open a yawning chasm in your soul? were you hurting in ways you didn't know how to articulate? are you learning what it means to take up space, to demand rights for yourself and for others, to truly let your fucking freak flags fly? are you feeling the stirring in your heart that only comes from religion (read: witchcraft) or from seeing the most important band in the fucking world live, in the flesh, singing TO YOU, sweating FOR YOU? if you are, I think we are fucking important and vital. I think that we can tell our stories and make a bunch of other weird little girls realise that they, too, have rights - including to transition.

cos immediately in doing this research I found out - you're also NOT me, in some really important and specific ways. maybe being AFAB in the US isn't part of it. maybe it's bigger than that. and I feel so lucky, so truly fucking blessed and lucky, to have gotten to speak to over eighty of you beautiful people, to have been trusted with your stories. to learn what makes YOU ache in your soul and how it is different to but also the same as mine. I have to stop now I'm gonna cry!!!!

[rainbowninja00]

so I read the post by @/xpecially (they wrote the why cross isnt trans post) and I have some thoughts... I will put them under keep reading so if you dont want to read it you dont have to! remember you are all valid and we love you <3

Imma do this shit in order and NOT post the images they used in the post cause I do not wish to upset this person. REMINDER!!! DO NOT HARASS THIS PERSON THEY ARE LITERALLY A CHILD NO FUCKIN NOT

my first gripe is with the wording on the first image "why the trans coding of cross sucks" sucks???? wdym my gamer?

these head-canons are not farfetched, they aren't as farfetched as one in particular they mentioned later on which I will touch on. also this seems like a super bad faith take???

Here's a fun PSA for everone: DO NOT use an artists art without their permission! this person used @/dustcrumbs art without permission in their post and you can see in the replies that dustcrumbs asks for them to take their art out of the post.

also its not that he doesnt want to "admit" he's a sans, its that he doesnt feel like a sans anymore, he has become an outcode, an other, he has been cast out by his family and friends because of his actions, which is also something trans people can relate with when it comes to unaccepting family members and friends.

queer, and in particular, trans people are the ones making these headcanons in the first place, this is not people stereotyping cross, this is them finding familiarity in his story and assigning him a label that he at least somewhat fits in with. Also, anyone who has read anything UTMV related on AO3 knows that cross is often trans or trans coded in peoples works.

I SHALL NOT BE EXPLAINING MY THOUGHTS ON FLUTTERSHY BECAUSE I DONT WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW HOW CRINGEFAIL I AM ABOUT MLP:FIM

putting a little doodle that says KYS on a little essay about why cross isnt trans feels kinda icky but okay gamer. I agree that some labels can kind of deconstruct the history of characters and their stories, but it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things! cause people will tell them hey! this is kinda ooc, and usually people will make their own version of the character/au/etc or fix it up a bit to be more in character.

the next take quite literally justifies the trans cross headcanon but alr. just because it isnt directly gender related doesnt mean people cant draw from it and add that in, since we never see all of cross' formative years so we'll never know if he is actually trans... what if in his first timeline he was made as a girl hm? that seems pretty trans to me.

making cross trans doesn't DESTROY his current history or anything like that, if anything it provides greater context for his suffering and adds another thing for him to be traumatised by. (yippee angst authors rise up

I... only trans people have deadnames right??? im not crazy right??? I vividly remember discussions like this on tiktok about cis people changing their names and them asking if that is now their dead name and trans people responded saying it wasn't a dead name because it wasnt dead to them or stuff like that (it was a couple years ago i dont remember it exactly) but specifically, the term deadname is for trans people I THINK!

Time to get onto this persons own diagnosis on cross, SOMEONE TELL ME WHERE IT IS CANON THAT CROSS HAS DID??? I have never once seen that it is canon that he has DID, which makes this a headcanon if this person, and if you ask me DID headcanons can be FAR more harmful within their community than trans ones. DID is already so terribly stigmatised, and when you describe cross theyway they do with extreme agression, "going crazy about the past", no control over emotions expecially anger, and willing to do anything to get what he wants, these are all pretty HARMFUL STEREOTYPES buddy pal chum friendo. Cross being trans seems much less harmful and damaging of the integrity of the character/their story than this persons own personal diagnosis.

"jakei is doing weird and incomprehensible things again..." what like making a character trans/trans-coded? in the queer fandom??? how odd, how strange, how absolutely peculiar. Jakei did that because Jakei is based af and cares about their community. She cares about the people consuming underverse and supports the trans head-canons cause she knows they are just headcanons and arent going to ruin the story she is working on telling.

Once more I shall state DO NOT HARASS this person, especially because they are a minor.

overall, cross being trans is just a headcanon that the community likes a whole lot cause we are all gay af, at least most of us. this headcanon does not ruin the story, the character, or anything like that, its just for funsies like most headcanons and people need to get their heads outta their asses about it istg. you are in the gay fandom, what do you expect???

[musicfeedsmysoul12]

All the reviews I try to watch (without spoilers) all come down to people saying ‘oh they have to say this’ on positive ones and then complaining about ‘not being how Dragon Age is’ on negative ones in the comments (and I know I know, don’t read the comments but… yeah.) and it’s… frustrating.

Dragon Age has always been an evolving franchise that has vastly moved away from its ‘Baldur’s Gate Successor’ state.

I never liked DAO combat, but then I’m a story person. I want a good story that’s intriguing and fun to play, which I hear is what is happening so far. That’s one thing even a die hard combat fan reviewer said is good. The story was interesting so far. And I’m excited for it. I want a good story. I want to have fun with the game. But even then, my brothers who both enjoy combat, call Origins mid. It’s not a great combat system for them and they find it kind of annoying that’s there’s so much that just doesn’t matter.

How many people actually use the poisons and the traps in game? How many of the specializations are that useful? Not many. And acting like Origins was flawless and ‘all the games should have been like it’ is just a bunch of elitists who can’t get over the fact the games rapidly change and grow over time. The franchise has always been a very fluid one. Inquisition wasn’t like Origins at all and half the diehards who complain about nothing being like Origins hated it despite Inquisition being one of the best selling BioWare games.

Then the comments on ‘what’s the play length’ are just as frustrating. Game play length is one of those things that honestly are hard to gauge anyway! ‘It has over hundreds of hours’ can be said about so many games. But how many are actually enjoyable hours?

I’m sick of open world bullshit where it’s the same 50 fetch quests in an area. I want to run around, have fun in a linear mission sense and have fun. This is my prefered game. Even the OG Mass Effect was more mission focused even if you could fuck off to run around planets for a while. If you focused only on the mission, I legit will say it took me three days to beat the first Mass Effect. And that is counting sleeping, eating and tedious tasks like a social life. I like those games where there is a mission and some side quests. I don’t want to have to run around a giant area full of nothing again.

Inquisition sucked in that regard. How many of us actually bothered with going to the Hissing Wastes more then once or bothered with the Shards more then a couple times? Fucking few I know.

So I’m excited about it being linear. I’m excited about seeing the combat. I’m excited about the story.

Everyone complaining lashes out about the combat, the art style and it being woke. But Dragon Age art style has always been fucking weird (let’s be real) and the combat has always been something to complain about.

And then the people going ‘oh you can just change names and it’s not Dragon Age’ you can do the same thing with Baldur’s Gate 3. Change the setting, edit a few D&D things and boom- same game. Same with Skyrim. Same with Call of Duty. Same with ANY game.

Also NGL- it’s telling a lot of the people I see do the most complaining are cis heterosexual white dudes. I legit have seen a couple ‘I’m not to sure’ comments from women but nothing to the level I see from the dudes.

Just putting it out there.

[homestuckreplay]

The Fatherly Gent’s Daunting Text of Magical Shaving and Almanac Japery

(page 542-555)

8/27/2009 Wheel Spin: Dramatic Irony Verdict: Dad’s Note Sadly Qualifies

8/28/2009 Wheel Spin: Captchalogue Lore Verdict: Captchalogue Card Within A Captchalogue Card Within A Captchalogue Card

FINALLY we examine the contents of John’s dad’s safe. John sure likes to take his time with these things. We see the contents before the note, but in my mind the note definitely reframes why Dad might have locked these things away – he wants to give these things to John, not hide them from him, but he’s waiting until John is ‘a man.’ He defines this by physical strength instead of age, maturity, or presence of facial hair, but also by curiosity and the prankster’s spirit. Someone else could be physically able to lift the safe, but never think to do so.

Colonel Sassacre’s Book – As p.543 suggests, this is likely the accidental weapon that caused Nanna’s death, and so this object encapsulates the Egbert family values. Clowning and tomfoolery are highly encouraged, but serious, difficult topics don’t get discussed openly, they get locked away, and communication happens indirectly through notes and pie throwing. This is 50% Dad being uncomfortable with emotions in a way typical of cis men who grew up in the 20th century, and 50% Dad wanting John to have a pure, idyllic childhood away from the realities of the world. I would bet 413 boondollars that Dad locked this up after Nanna’s death and bought John his new copy at the same time, so that John could enjoy the lighthearted pranks of the book without it being tainted by death.

The Fatherly Gent’s Shaving Almanac – This is also likely an heirloom that Dad used to read himself. If Colonel Sassacre’s was originally Nanna’s, this may have originally been Grandad’s. Dad is making some assumptions about John with this one. The first is that he’ll want to shave, even though plenty of people have facial hair by choice. The others are that he’ll be a ‘father’ and a ‘gent.’ The idea that John might not want kids, or might not be a man, doesn’t occur to him. Dad’s vision is that John will grow into exactly the same kind of adult that he is, and possibly that Dad’s dad was too. But this book is also Dad admitting that he had to learn and practice his skills somewhere, showing that he’s a regular human instead of the Eternal Dad who came fully formed from the dad factory that John clearly sees him as right now.

Newspaper clippings – OKAY WHAT THE FUCK. Something weird’s going on here. The clearest article is from Monday, April 13 of either 1970, 1992 or 1998, and the ‘downpour of meteors’ could have happened at 4.13am. Hear me out. The mentions of ‘Local Burb’ (Local Sburb?) and the loss of life being brushed off by authorities means that the people behind Sburb aren’t making their first attempt at causing the apocalypse. It’s their most successful attempt by far, but they’ve been practicing for some time, and are rich and powerful enough to pay off the authorities into covering their tracks. Dad is a baker, and a different clipping says ‘Crocker Facility Leveled.’ Dad developed an interest in meteor news after the factory for his favorite baking company was destroyed by one, and that’s why he collects clippings – keeping them in something that might be strong enough to survive a meteor strike. He’s made some progress towards figuring out who or what is behind all this, but hasn’t finished the work. This is why he showed John Deep Impact and Armageddon as a kid, so that John would have meteors on the brain, and be ready to carry on Dad’s investigative work at some point in the future.

02-49-13 – This safe code was definitely chosen for a reason, but it’s not obvious. It contains a 4-13 (with 4+9 equaling 13) but I’m not sure about the 02. If it was a date, February 49, 2013 would be March 21, 2013, which is shortly before John’s 17th birthday. However, my actual theory – based on this safe being for John, and the fact that John’s birthday is in Dad’s Serious Business screen name – is that 02:49:13 is the time of day (to the second) that John was born. Currently imagining Dad gazing down at his baby son for the first time and thinking ‘I gotta get the time, this is gonna be important later.’

In other news, we learn that a blank captchalogue card is 00000000 (answering @tenaciouschronicler's question) while a card holding another card is 11111111. This is a simple binary option of ‘card or no card,’ and we also see the two straight lines of holes that are punched from the 11111111 code. These facts suggest that the captcha codes make sense (unlike a lot of actual captchas) and that both the codes and the hole patterns can be deciphered and manipulated, which is exciting both for what John could accomplish, and for giving fans something to really dig into.

John Egbert would be nothing without Rose Lalonde. He fully launched his PDA – arguably his most important possession right now – into a yawning void of unknowable darkness, all for the sake of captchaloguing a captchalogued captchalogue card, already kind of a silly thing to do. He got fucking lucky with the Sassacre manuever, and did not earn his ‘pesky urchin’ status or his +5 man grit. I question the line ‘From now on it will probably go without saying that you'll nab any grist lying around without making a big fuss over it.’ on p.542 - can this really go without saying? Can we really give John this much credit?

I love this kid so much, but it really feels like he’s speedrunning growing up and using cheats for character development, with his sylladex, his imp combat and his getting into the safe. He’s not actually ready or able to handle any of these things, not even thinking to move away from the giant hole gazing over the abyss before he puts things into his TWO CARD SYLLADEX, but he’s got computers and somewhat more capable people holding his hand. I am thinking again about Rose’s prediction of hackers, and what might happen if John and Rose are cut off from each other in Sburb, and how John might deal with that.

It’s a hard truth that being a kid often sucks because of how little control you have over your life, but being an adult is really hard and takes a lot of practice, and being a teenager often means sitting at this uncomfortable divide. And it’s literally John’s first day.

[scriptlgbt]

How should I go about a trans man character meeting someone with his deadname who doesn’t use the same nickname he did but almost always goes by her full name cause she likes it more?

The story is told from multiple perspectives but the girls is the main focus and the trans man’s being the second most important so her full name will be said a lot but only the trans man and the reader would have knowledge of this

Is their certain way to go about? Also would is be weird to kinda have him be enamored by her since she’s very different from what he was like and it’s the first time in a very long while where he’s actually know a person with his deadname and hasn’t just heard it in passing 

On the surface, there is nothing overtly wrong with this, but it does seem a bit weird to me.

Personally, I grew up with one of the most common names for my birth year, in the place where I was born and grew up. (In the top 15-30 names, depending how far you want to zoom out in terms of region, with it being more popular in my region.) Even now I know many people who have this name, either by choice or by gift at birth. Personally, I can't escape my given name, so I've had to process that probably more than people who have a rarer given name. But: a name is genuinely just a name.

It's not some kind of implication of any sort of alter ego. These two are different characters who, in their world, would happen to have the same name by mere coincidence. It feels like you might be writing/reading more into this than there is normally, but I guess there can be some creative poetry in that too. But I also wouldn't write a character's dead name to the reader unless it was necessary. (I'd say that an openly* trans author doing so would be an exception.)

With regards to a trans person's relationship to people who have our deadname, it can be a bit jarring at first but mostly it's just kind of normal, and not something super fixated on. However, I know so, so many people who just on principle will not date anyone with their deadname. (Out of the sample size of 6 people who I have been in a relationship with, 1 has shared my deadname, but did not generally go by it.) I also met someone who would block everyone they came across online who had their deadname, but they were very newly self-recognized as trans at the time. I find it gets more benign feeling with time.

I think maybe having a sort of meetcute where the trans man who maybe recently changed his legal name looks up when he's called for something paperwork-adjacent (maybe for Americans that would be the DMV or something?) and thus notices this other person. But I don't think this would really benefit from being emphasized beyond that.

I encourage other trans folks to reply with your thoughts though!

-mod nat

*I specify "openly" because I understand that sometimes closeted people do things that would only be socially acceptable to the wider trans community if it were known that this person was trans. While any trans person should theoretically be comfortable with this kind of thing, there are many instances of closeted writers feeling coerced out of the closet because someone tried to call them on cis privilege. If a closeted author isn't ready to come out, I'd advise against doing things which may only be seen as acceptable if it is known that you are trans. In cases where you're representing or portraying the community in some public way, it matters that the audience knows who is getting amplified. It's also true that being out (by choice or not) comes with unique danger, and we need to ensure safety of people who are out in order to ensure safety for people who are closeted.

[utilitycaster]

oh man did a ton of Veilguarding yesterday. this is why I never got into video games; when I first got into CR I was literally just binging nonstop for like six months to the detriment of literally everything and that was way less destructive to my productivity as I was listening to it as a podcast, so I could like, clean and go on walks. Anyway keeping it relatively brief:

some sidequests require things I still do not have, despite having my whole party. This is irritating to me, a person who loves checking off tasks. what do you mean I have to wait until some caves open. Also I thought my computer was glitching because I couldn't get the quest marker but actually it was because I had to follow some ghost around the Warden fort in Rivain.

Returned to Dock Town for the main quest (meeting Morrigan, more on this later). I know some people have been hard on Neve's voice actor. They are wrong. Jessica Clark keeps hitting that "I am hanging on by a fucking thread and you will not have the pleasure of seeing me break" mark flawlessly. Anyway feels bad feels organic. I did clear a lot of blight from the catacombs and kill some Venatori, so Neve is less mad at me now (she wasn't too mad all things told; while she remains the only party member who like, repeatedly disapproves of my choices, I do take her out questing a lot); this did however go Not Amazing for me when I remembered she can't heal anymore because I was like oh Neve and Davrin seem like the perfect crew for this! and then I was like SHIT IT'S POTION TIME I GUESS. (I was fine because again, I am on Easier Than Easy mode, but I did go through a bunch of potions).

Met Morrigan and also the Inquisitor. Insert Zac Oyama "this is a huge moment for everyone but me."

Accidentally lost a timed Lucanis conversation by triggering a Solas memory. this is the worst. The party conversation was incredible though. I have four of the statues by the way (me trying to get Lucanis and Neve to get together faster by taking them on fun Experience Traumatic Ancient Elven Memories missions) but the fifth eludes me, and I've only watched one of his regrets thus far.

Davrin you gotta get more friends. please fucking talk to Emmrich. I know everyone thinks he's weird and creepy, except for Bellara, who he has explicitly told to relax more, but please have New Dad Bonding Time. You are so chatty and it's fun and interesting but also you're SO chatty.

Had the Taash gender conversation. This was great on two levels. First, while I am a cis woman irl and played this as a cis woman in-game I felt the options were very thoughtful! like yeah actually if you look at womanhood and your response isn't "misogyny sucks, but external forces aside yeah, I feel like this is my body and this is who I am," hit da bricks! Second, I love how Neve is like yeah my contacts who are fighting for their lives in a blighted city can talk to you about being trans! average queer friend group. sorry shadow dragons. I was familiar with your game but I had an impossible decision.

Bellara got the archive up running and it is so fucking mean. I (external real-world person) think this is so fucking funny. Rook is annoyed. I do love Bellara's story though. would love for like, companion quests to happen. I think I have to go to the fucking wetlands which suck. They made Antoine and Evka so charming because FUCK the wetlands.

[olderthannetfic]

It's been really funny watching my far-right conservative relatives and my liberal lefti-ish fandom friends get mad at Gwen Stacy possibly being trans. For the right wing, this is indoctrination/grooming/whatever. For the center-but-identifies-as-left wing, this is not good enough, cowardly, bullshit, etc. Two groups of people with nothing else in common coming together to agree that ew this icky trans thing is bad, shitting on kids who like the trans character and complaining about the same scene in the movie just kind of proves to me that no queerness is ever going to be accepted by most people. Hell, a lot of their complaints are identical: her haircut is too stereotypical, it wasn't told to us at the very beginning of the first movie, why is she into boys that's not okay, it's so cringe that trans kids like her, etc.

This is why I don't write trans characters anymore. There's no reason to. I'm a trans man, but I've never gotten anything but shit for writing trans characters. Being trans isn't a big enough deal, or it's too big a deal, it's too accepted or it's angsty trash, the character's appearance is always incorrect and bad and wrong, they're too weird, they're too normal, it's bad to have a straight trans person because you're pandering to normies, it's bad to have a gay trans person because you're being stereotypical, it's bad to have an ace trans person because you're saying trans people are unfuckable, it's bad to have a bi/pan trans person because it's fetishization, etc.

The best way to do representation is to not do it. Creators who make the mistake of attempting to do so get crucified. When was the last time you saw backlash against not having rep that was remotely as angry and omnipresent as backlash towards media that does? Racefaker, anti, and lover of 3D photorealistic loli and shota (who of course believes anti-antis are pedos, and has also been accused of raping her own sister by said sister) Lily Orchard got a following off of a 3 hour long video essay on how Steven Universe is terrible and tore into every single queer character at length. Shows with no queer rep don't get 3 hour long diatribes against queerness made about them.

Queer rep is a surefire way to get torn into by other queers and queerphobes alike. The easiest way to exist in fandom, even as a queer person, is to make very cishet works and if someone leaves a comment with a headcanon say you support it. Doing that has completely stopped all the hate I used to get.

Personally I hope they confirm Gwen is cis so I don't have to keep hearing how much she sucks from so many people. We're not at a point as a society where we accept imperfect, non-blatant rep. I doubt we'll ever be.

--

It really just depends who "we" are.

Some people will always be disappointed by fandom over-hyping something as 100% overtly canon when it isn't, but plenty of reasonable adults are capable of not nitpicking every minority character to death. Clout-chasing social media drama queens aren't the whole of society.

[thevampiremars]

My thoughts on the trans rep in "The Star Beast"

This episode is haunted by the spectre of Good Representation™. Representation is a topic too expansive and nuanced for me to interrogate fully, so I'll just say I'm sceptical of the approach and the way it reduces trans (or otherwise marginalised) characters to plot points or blandly by-the-book portrayals. Also the idea that any single character can accurately represent an entire demographic is tenuous. Anyway.

Throughout the episode there's a huge focus on how beautiful Rose is, which is... I mean, I'd hardly be the first person to point out how Weird people (cis people especially) can get about how trans people look. And I get that this is probably a deliberate attempt to counter transphobia, to stress that trans people are cherished and deserve the world. It is a sweet sentiment I suppose, but it can come across as a bit... insincere? patronising? fetishistic, even? You have to recognise that correlating a person's worth with how beautiful you think they are is problematic in and of itself.

I actually really like the scene where Sylvia is stumbling on pronouns and worrying about whether or not it's okay to call Rose gorgeous. It's cute. It's genuine. I wasn't sure about the boys on bikes scene that preceded it – I thought deadnaming Rose was a clumsy way to establish that she's trans – but I've watched the episode again and my opinion has softened. I think it works well to have the malicious misgendering side-by-side with the accidental misgendering, showing that, yes, there is a difference. I know this already, but cis people who get confused about terminology and etiquette might benefit from watching this.

Speaking of pronouns... haha. Yeah, I did not like the "are you assuming he as a pronoun?" "my chosen pronoun is the definite article" exchange. Very awkward and nonsensical. It could have worked with some tweaking, but as it stands it feels more like a transphobic joke than actual dialogue. Ditto "male-presenting Time Lord."

Side note: why are some people so thrown off by the Doctor's gender? It's really not that complicated. The Doctor's pronouns vary depending on whether we're talking about an individual incarnation or the Doctor as a whole, encompassing all incarnations. If we're talking about a specific Doctor, they've all been he/him so far except for the Thirteenth and Fugitive Doctor (both she/her). If we're referring to all Doctors as one entity, it makes sense to use they/them since they're not consistently one gender or another. The Doctor is technically nonbinary I guess but only because they have the ability to regenerate into any gender. They're genderfluid only if you squint.

ANYWAY.

Is Rose nonbinary? Again, the "binary, binary, nonbinary" line just felt like a joke. Plus it doesn't make a lot of sense as a plot point/reveal. Rose's gender shouldn't actually be relevant because what's important for the meta-crisis thing is that she's Donna's offspring. There's also the fact that Rose had been presented as a trans girl until that point – no indication that she's nonbinary. Yes, it is possible to be a nonbinary girl, but it seems more likely to me that RTD just thinks nonbinary and trans are synonymous. Which is not the case.

The thing is, as I've alluded to already, Rose is an example of trans rep written by cis people for cis people. RTD's heart is in the right place, for sure, but he doesn't really know what he's talking about. I would say I appreciate the effort? But I don't know what the effort was in aid of exactly. I suppose it's nice for cis people to be told it's okay to stumble on pronouns sometimes, and to be shown that transness isn't a horrible and scary thing. I dunno. It's frustrating that trans people in life and in fiction have to educate and inspire and reassure cis people all the time... but we live in a society, don't we? And I'm sure there will be plenty of young trans people thrilled to see someone like them on TV, even if the execution could have been better.

[infiniteglitterfall]

Ugh I hate this.

So, a friend of mine I haven't talked to in ages, because they're always busy/traveling, posted something to Facebook that said:

It hit me very hard on a Jewish kind of level. I knew I was likely to be told I was derailing if I said so. But I kind of hoped I wouldn't be, just because the friend and I met in trans spaces something like 25 years ago and are both nonbinary.

What I ended up commenting was, "Ditto for Jews, IMHO. Ughhh, what a time to be alive."

What I hate about it is that my friend gave me the Jew version of the boilerplate response you'd give Aunt Nancy. List a fuckton of marginalized groups, add Palestinians here and in Palestine first, close with a line about how focusing on one group doesn't mean anything about the other groups but raising another group is intentionally redirecting.

adhdsskklllljsshjklfff I KNOW. And I know that you "had" to specifically add Palestinians in there to redirect away from antisemitism even while telling me I'm redirecting.

I wrote back,

I'm not trying to redirect. I'm saying yes, it's going to be fucking hell for us as trans people. And also, some of the specific things that are the most terrifying for me as a trans person are likewise going to be fucking hell for me as a Jew.

I fall into five of these categories (trans, poor, disabled, Jewish, have a reproductive system) but I'm fucking terrified of another Trump round on these two specifically.

I'm terrified of having to live through this man once again smacking the metaphorical button that turbo-charges everybody's latent belief that we're pedophiles, morally corrupting society, and/or inherently shady and deceitful and Bad.

I have been watching people cast both trans people and Jewish people that same way since Trump's first run.

I mean, yes, that's been the core of most cissexist and antisemitic tropes for a long, long time. But it's so incredibly open and accepted now.

Trump fucked over disabled poor people, and people with reproductive systems, in a LOT of ways. But I didn't also see a major increase in people publicly demonizing us, and politically weaponizing that demonization.

I'm sure that if he gets the chance, he'll once again defend crucial services, leave them unstaffed, and generally make them a lot harder for anyone to access. He'll tax the poor and waive everything for the rich. He'll strip funding for disabled student services of all sorts. It will be HORRIBLE.

It's just that, while that stuff may affect me personally, it doesn't feel personal to me in the same way that it feels personal when a lot of regular everyday people see people like me as sinister and disgusting.

(And yes, too many people are disgusted by poverty, mental illness, and disabilities of all sorts, and see disabilities, government aid, and any kind of accommodations as a sneaky cheating lie. Maybe I'm wrong, but IME it's become much rarer, instead of much more common; and it's not taken to a "you corrupt society" kind of level.)

Looking back at the original post, I feel like the real issue is that what I was saying WASN'T "Trump will be awful for these specific two groups," or even, "Trump will be awful for Jews, stop thinking about trans people(???????)"

It was specifically that I think most outsiders won't know why this is so scary unless (or even if) they're close friends with us.

And I think, on the left, that's far more true for Jews than for trans people.

I feel like my cis friends understand that Trump would be a nightmare for us. Maybe that's specific to my friends though, idk.

But it's clearer than ever to me that my goyish friends generally don't know the first thing about antisemitism.

Worse yet, the reason I haven't talked their ears off about it on Facebook is one specific close friend not only doesn't get it, but pushes back pretty hard against it. I could still post about it, I could even hide the post from her; it's just got me feeling intimidated and weird and defensive about how others might respond.

[ofdylan]

[ lily collins, cis woman, she/her ] — whoa! DYLAN METCALFE just stole my cab! not cool, but maybe they needed it more. they have lived in the city for MOST OF HER LIFE, working as a FICTION WRITER. that can’t be easy, especially at only 34 YEARS OLD. some people say they can be a little bit CYNICAL and HOTHEADED , but i know them to be TRUSTWORTHY and PROTECTIVE. whatever. i guess i’ll catch the next cab. hope they like the ride back to MANHATTAN!

Hellooo my lovelies! I'm Lola and it has been a very hot second since I've rp'd, so please bear with me as I settle back in. Below the read more you'll find some backstory and information on Dylan, as well as some wc/plot ideas. Please don't hesitate to reach out via dm and I am so beyond excited 💜

tw: parental death, drugs, alcohol, overdose

Name: Dylan Rose Metcalfe Age: 34 Pronouns: She/her Birthday: October 5th 1989 Job: Fiction writer Romantic/sexual orientation: Biromantic/bisexual

Past.

As the second eldest daughter of the Metcalfe family, Dylan always believed that she was destined for greatness, even if it wasn't exactly the same as her father's. While her father dreamed of someone continuing his legacy, she always had a penchant for writing.

When she was 10 and her father suddenly died, Dylan watched as her mom fell apart. She became a ghost of the woman she once was—losing herself in drinking away her grief. It was then that Dylan decided to never let herself fall in love.

Even though she wasn't going to take over the family business, Dylan and her father were close—much more than she was with her mom. His loss didn't just ruin Dylan's belief in love, but also her self-control and hope for the future. As a result, she began partying at a young age—getting drunk or high as young as 13. She didn't see the point in trying to be good without her dad—and if it wouldn't amount to anything.

One night when she was 16, she took things too far and was arrested. Her mom easily made it all go away, and it only proved to Dylan that being anything else but a spoiled party girl was pointless.

After her best friend and her overdosed in one night, she realized if she didn't start caring about something she would die. The wake up call of sorts didn't completely root out her cynicism, but it did convince her to start trying to be a better person. She devoted herself to being there for her younger brother and older sister, and even did her best to help out her mom when things were the worst for her.

She decided against going to college—mostly because she barely graduated high school. Instead, she backpacked around Europe, deciding to work whatever weird jobs came her way and embrace meeting new people.

But she still didn't have a purpose until she started working on her first novel. When it was published and received star reviews, she realized there was something meaningful in this world. In the end, her writing saved her life.

Present.

After traveling around for years, she decided to settle back in NYC when she was 27. She likes being back "home" and enjoys the never-ending pulse of the city. It helps ease her worries about the future and the regrets of her past.

She doesn't think there's anything missing from her life. Well, at least, that's what she tells herself. She lives in denial about how lonely she is, and how much she still misses her father and dreams about a different life where he never died.

Her wild days of her youth might be mostly behind her, but her nature still leans towards her penchant for chaos. She doesn't mean to, but she has caused more than a few scandals in her time in NYC—both as a teenager and now as an adult.

The relationship she has with her writing is still the longest one she's ever had. Most of the time she focuses on one night stands and does everything in her power to protect her heart. But her work always comes first, sometimes to her detriment, but also to her success.

WC.

A friend from her childhood she's still close with. While Dylan was careless with herself when she was younger, she was never one to hurt her friends. Her trust is hard to earn, but once someone has it, they have it for life.

The ex-best friend who she overdosed with. This is someone who Dylan was inseparable with, but after the night they both could've died, their friendship fell apart. Dylan still carries guilt for what happened, and wishes she could fix it somehow, but has no idea if that's possible.

The almost high school love. Dylan likes to believe that she's never let herself fall in love, but the truth might be far more complicated than that.

Enemies/rivals/etc. Dylan is competitive and definitely has one hell of a temper, so there's a high likelihood she's made some enemies/rivals who she's pissed off more than once.

Honestly I'm down for almost anything and also love plotting based on chemistry, so keep these kind of short 💜💜

[tyrannuspitch]

as a trans gay guy, my relationship to the concept of the butch/transmasc overlap is so so weird. because on one level it's by and large a real social phenomenon that underlies a lot of common experiences and draws communities together and so on. but then on another level. like. some of us (transmascs) just Are Not Butch. i recently read fun home, and i was really struck by bechdel's account of butchness and how it... didn't actually resonate with me at all. like, i'm very familiar with feeling uncomfortable with conventional femininity, and with wanting to look male - but i keep re-realising that the experience of specifically aspiring to masculinity is just alien to me. in particular, bechdel describes feeling like she might have been compensating for her dad's femininity, and like... i've never felt anything like that. i've tried to put distance between myself and women's femininity, but i've only ever looked at fem men and felt jealous of them.

but then i look at the cis gay male community for examples of male femininity, and of course, it has its own gnc/trans overlap. and i don't aspire to trans womanhood any more than i aspire to cis womanhood.

so for people on those two cusps, gender and orientation might be very fluid and open-ended, but my personal desired gender expression is actually quite narrow and a very delicate balance - narrower and more specific even than a lot of other fem gay trans guys i've encountered.

what's more, i've heard from a lot of people on the transmasc/butch cusp in particular that, essentially, they know they're queer because they're attracted to women, and the rest is hazier, but maybe also less important. which is an interesting perspective, but again - completely alien to me. gender comes first for me, without a doubt - and even that can be subdivided. orientation comes after gender, but a positive sense of maleness also comes after a completely fundamental sense of non-femaleness. gender and sexuality are entangled for both of us - but once again, in opposite ways.

i conceive of myself as a binary man, but even so, it's like... almost a nonbinary experience, in a way. like, in very old-fashioned views of queerness, there are two basic types of queer - the butch-lesbian-transhet-man group and the fem-gay-transhet-woman group. there are male inverts and female inverts, FtMs and MtFs, or in polari, omee-palones and palone-omees (men-women and women-men). and someone like me just... doesn't fit into that framework. if an invert is a man with a woman's soul or a woman with a man's soul, what is a woman with the soul of a man with the soul of a woman? you need more layers. you need to recognise that gender and orientation are, or at least can be, separable experiences to be able to conceive of me at all. and ironically that often means you have to frame orientation almost like a gender, again - i believe lou sullivan referred to himself as female-to-gay-male, and i can see why.

but at the same time - we've allegedly come so far, and people can now nominally conceive of identities like mine - but it's still a huge struggle to even begin to express it. how do you reconcile rejection of cisfemininity and womanhood with a genuine desire to be subtly feminine/effeminate? i haven't found a way yet. i don't know if it will be possible until i can access medical transition (and even then, it might take years.) so in the meantime, i look butch, and i just have to live with the fact that the identity i'm broadcasting is the direct opposite of who i really want to be.

idk man. i'm a trans man, but maybe i'm transandrogynous. but it has to be the right androgyny, an androgyny i feel is "male", so maybe i'm not! i'm a faggot trapped in a dyke's body. i'm transitioning from one queer gender expression to another, and while i do feel a degree of solidarity and commonality with actual butches, i also feel like butchness is, for me, nearly as suffocating and dissonant as cisfemininity.

and reading this back now, i've realised i'm doing the same thing over again - i'm conflating my own gayness with my own desire for androgyny(?)/effeminacy(?), and somewhere out there, a fem transhet guy or a butch transhet girl is groaning with exactly the same kind of alienation i often feel.

god. gender is so complicated and so important and so stupid at the same time. why does it have to be so hard!!! we all just want to exist.