#Anyways!!! trans rights??!? AG transed my gender??!

[ffc1cb]

i’ve always found it peculiar how during meeting the chargers cutscene the game just assumes your character automatically understands what krem is talking about when he mentions binding (though, granted, it’s all very unsubtle). like, this is a roleplaying game. what if i want to play a character who just doesn’t get it

[dead-lesbians]

happy pride month to the autistic lgbt+ people who watch tomska. and i guess everyone else too.

[gor3sigil]

Tailor your skin

[TW for mention of ED, rape, bullying, transphobia, sexual assault, transandrophobia]

[This text is one of the selection I'll put in my next issue of my zine, "From behind Tinted Windows and Cracked Screens", focused on transandrophobia. I was too happy with it not to share it. It's like the one I shared a while ago, but better, to me.]

My birth was a disaster. A disaster of closed call death, disease in undevelopped lungs, veins and poisoned flesh.

Growing up to be overprotected and neglected simultaneously. A clumsy and awkward kid trying to fit in, yet struggling to see the appeal of being like everyone else. My face hidden behind my long hair and my body behind baggy black clothes covering a starvation that no one was going to see anyways, I was still the curvy “looks-older-for-her-age” teenager. And then, I was trans.

What a surprise it was. Suddenly the mean girls who were making fun of my wasted attempts at femininity were claiming I was a woman too beautiful to be anyTHING else. My parents who complained about me being a tomboy all my life were scared to death of being right, after all these fights !

For my peers, the proud bisexual girl I had been had been eaten alive by my desire to escape my True Nature. Cis straight women who never were my friends would have switched up and given me head for me to stay the Holy Female their flawed feminism was forcing me to be, and to stay, for sisterhood, for the Cause.

I was turn in turn a victim or a traitor. My femininity raped out of me but not my love for men. Men scared me from being a woman but not from becoming one of Them. I was bullied from being an outcast but not out of being trans. I was a Lamb enough but not so weak I couldn’t be the Big Bad Wolf.

I started drinking almost at the same time I realized I was trans and I lost more friends over a simple switch of pronouns than I ever did after a drunken meltdown.

The sisters who swore to protect me told me now to catch the blows for everything I had never been nor done. And the final straw was seeking euphoria using a gender swap app and seeing my father staring right back at me.

What do you think I fled, then ? Do you think I doubled down ? Do you think I went head first into the pool of a manhood made with my bare hands and spite ? Or did I melt myself into a mold I didn’t fit it, so sure I was to never find safety or softness or tenderness or bonding ever again ? Did I ran away in the moods like a wounded animal, did I rather got sick from dehydration than having to risk seeing my reflection in the water I drank ?

I could go on for eternity, there are so little words to describe the isolation, the alienation you feel when being on your own makes you unsafe and seeking your kin makes you a predator. I went from a healer to the one taking the blame for men who broke me just as much, whom I also swore I’d never become, not in a million years. But in the confusion of trauma, it’s easier to bite someone who won’t bite back, isn’t it ?

I could tell you it gets better. I will tell you, in fact, that it does. It does get better in yourself, when you find your inner peace, your inner strength. When the mirror becomes a friend that shows you excitedly all the subtle changes that comes with shedding out of your shell, that there is a community waiting for you out there. That you deserve every bit of love and support, that you are not a traitor, that your manhood is holy, oh so holy, your transness is too, in short, YOU are. My beloved, as much as I hear your raw suffering, the weight of the fear of becoming the ones who hurt you, it won’t happen. I promise you. You are a treasure, you make this world a better place, and you deserve no shame, no pointed fingers, no mean laughter. If you can’t trust yourself, trust the process.

I assure you that when the sun will rise, one day, and you open your eyes to see the big blue sky, you’ll feel it. The comfort of belonging. The warmth of your skin, finally fitting right.

[gwydionmisha]

Personal: Transness and Physio

Wednesday I was at physio as is generally the case on Wednesdays this physio cycle. (Current goals: Arm unsupported above my shoulder prolonged to the front at all to the side, Undoing damage from the wrong sling the first two weeks of healing, and strength building). My main pre-op physio had a free moment and stopped over to check on my between patients.

Him: How are you doing?

Me, cheekily: ready for this to be over.

Physios *laugh*

He turned to ask my physio for more detailed info. Which involved pronouns. Look, my pronouns are on file. My prefered name is unfailingly used by staff in this facility and all the healthcare settings I routinely used for… most of a decade or something like that. I used to have to pioneer a lot of health care providers, including Poverty clinic (second trans patient getting trans related health care there, back when there was one ignorant and low key transphobic provider, but it was far better than the extremely transphobic endocrinologist who wasn't taking new patients anyway so everyone had to trek down to seattle for everything), and just about every specialist I saw for years and years, often with people for whom English was a second language who were flat out confused my my medical charts.

For the record, once word spread (and trans provider word spread FAST on the trans grapevine) and Poverty clinic got deluged by desperate poor people who flat out couldn't afford 150-300 per health apointment and a whole day of travel, a second super cool doctor self educated and started taking patients. Within a year or two the whole staff had training. A couple years later they did a big survey, flat out changed the name of the clinic so as not to scare trans people, added prefered name/pronouns/gender to all forms and are a makor provider for two counties, providing an ever expanding range of care. Poverty clinic's main population had been HIV, kids who's parents couldn't afford health insurance, and unhoused. They are so much more now, and my whole reason is the better for it, because a whole lot of other practices got better and new services opened up all over the western part of my state to deal with demand that having two cities with trans heallthcare drew to the reagon. (A whole lot of other places have safe clinmics now and if you are in a blue county, you are likely okay to be fairly open. People can live in cheaper towns and cities and still have care a reasonable drive or bus away. It absolutely wasn't the case fifteen years ago. For some things the choices were seattle, san franscisco, and that one city in colorado. For hormones and trans friendly psychiatry it was only slightly better.) I am incredably proud of all the medical practices I pioneered and made safe for other people.

Thing is though, it's still not perfect. I'm pretty relaxed about pronouns, but where people are super careful about names, some people are waaaay better at pronouns than others. I bowl down the middle on purpose, in non-medical customer service settings, people take their best guess and I don't make a fuss unless someone else does or is obnoxious or I get duling customer service people who are in conflict and each sure they are right (Which is hilarious, but I consider it polite to step in at that point). I will back up a child if their parent corrects them to the wrong thing. I will happily give pronouns when a polite person asks.

In medical settings outside of places trying really hard to get it right like Poverty clinic or weirdly the Christian Hospital, people mess up pronouns about a third of the time. I think the masks make it more confusing for them and I am always in a mask in a medical setting unless I need to take it off for a medical thing.

The room in the physio clinic where I go, it is pretty much middle aged straight guy therapists (There's a woman sometimes and a younger guy I see doing legs now and then, but mostly it is middle aged straight guys who look like gym teachers. Guys like my late Uncle when I was growing up who was also a physio). Trans stuff doesn't come up. I spend the entire session working one on one with these guys, so while names get used now and then the pronouns are all 1st and 2nd person, you follow? There is enough conversation that I'm pretty sure none of the three guys who've worked on my arm are MAGAS. I peg them as likely democrats, but where on that spectrum? No fucking clue. They are all good guys and good physios. I do not know their stance on right to pee, you follow?

So the most classically straight ex-college athlete guy turns to the very gentle, very pacific northwesty type married with children postsurgical guy (I have no idea how to describe this type of northwest guy to someone who's never been here, but if you have it's really obvious. Loves being out in nature and likely has nature based hobbies. Cares about feminism and the environment in a genuine way. Relaxed about their masculinity and masculinity in general, so are usually some degree of queer friendly. Other stuff. It's hard to explain, but trust me. If you live here, you will meet a lot of this kind of guy. The two people I had my longest relationships with were this kind of PNW guy. I dated a bunch more. ), who is currently super slowly and gently stretching my arm, and asks him more technical stuff about my progress because he was worried I hadn't put on quite enough muscle before surgery.

This involved pronouns. Get this: THEY WERE THE CORRECT PRONOUNS. Both guys used correct pronouns. They also included me in the conversation. Bravo, Physio Dudes! Seriously, I had no idea how that was going to go when the pre-op guy opened his moth and it was A+.

[nuancefem]

i fully didn't realise until now that tirf isn't just you jokingly misspelling terfs omg lol. Is the discord just for reidentified/trans folks? Don't wanna intrude if so :)

LMAO yeah it apparently used to be more popular ages ago and is now getting a bit of a resurgence which i love! :]

also the discord server is for anyone who is directly affected by misogyny - passing transfems included, so long as they're respectful & supportive of female/afab rights and exclusive same-sex attracted rights - who is a feminist and orbits radblr! we have really complex conversations about all kinds of feminist topics, gender, male/female socialization, transness vs gnc expression, and we call out bullshit from both the mainstream trans activist side AND bullshit we see from radfems who lack nuance or are just showing mean girl type behavior with other female ppl.

we also have a no-misgendering rule, though if the person doubts the person's trans identity in a genuine manner they can 100% specify that. we aren't 100% against transition (some of us are happily transitioned or plan to) but we view it very critically and hate the way it's currently handled. we have several transmasc ppl, two transfems (iirc?) who are super chill, many detrans/post-trans women and just radfems of all kinds. we only let a few folks in at a time so everyone can be properly welcomed and things don't get too crazy, bc we're a very tightknit lil community of tirfs/nuancefems! we also started doing movie discord streams and we're planning to do lots of spooky ones!! & the server is where you can apply to make content on @pokegyns (it can be anonymous) and/or be a part of our new pokegyns collaborative youtube channel. we also at times screenshot things members say and post them, with consent ofc. anyways, we have tons of fun and everyone is super nice <3 i love my server gyns!

DM me for a link if anyone is interested!!

[fanonical]

So in your mind what’s w the garudo? To me they seem to think presentation = gender way more than the other peoples.

But in your version what’ll you be doing? Sorry if this one’s a bit blugh

no, i think you hit it square on the head. there is some semblance of a gender binary culturally recognised by the gerudo (they, after all, interact with men all the time) but as of BOTW/TOTK, the traditional gerudo culture dictates young gerudo girls of a certain age move to Gerudo City, which forbids men from entry. that's how it is on paper, anyway -- in actual fact, Link can walk right up to the guards in front of Gerudo City, be perceived as a "guy" and thus refused entry, then change into women's clothing IN FRONT OF THEM, and be allowed in, whereupon there is nothing Link can do to be kicked out from Gerudo City other than change out of the outfit.

In reality, the Doylist answer to this is it's a videogame abstraction -- and the whole thing is rather transphobic & racist too; a lot of the stuff going on with the Gerudo is between "kinda" and "very" racist just in general. i don't know how to (or if i adequately can?) address all of the problems there in my fic? . "desert race of giantess middle eastern warrior women" goes pretty deep to the core with this one, and that's before you get onto Ganondorf. and the whole stuff with the crossdressing... look man, if other people thought the Vilia storyline was meant to be progressive or sympathetic, i guess i'm glad they got that out of it, but it felt like a big transphobic joke to me. i'm changing pretty much all of this, and a bunch of other stuff. i still think it's not gonna be perfect (not really for me to say how unsalvageable some of the Gerudo stuff is in terms of racism, but i think i'm gonna reach out and talk to a couple of my friends about it and how they feel and what they might do etc) but i'll be changing stuff, and emphasising the good changes Nintendo has made over time whilst rejecting the worse ones

one thing i think i will do on the transphobia front is change it so that Gerudo City will allow trans women inside the walls if we are actively performing femininity to some degree. now, this is of course transphobic too, but i think it's kind of interesting to explore a more complex situation where trans women are a recognised type of person, and by the official legal policies of Gerudo City accepted in as women, but because of overtly binaristic, cisnormative overtones to the society, culture, politics & history there are probably still quite varying reactions, responses to transfemininity etc. because, well, that's my experience in a lot of gendered/women-only spaces! and i'd love to explore that through Link.

i also think that just before the Great Calamity, maybe there weren't as many openly trans people across Hyrule, perhaps due to social conceptions about gender at the time; i think maybe in the pockets of surviving towns and cities and villages 100 years later whilst Link has been asleep, trans people have become more recognised and embraced to some extent -- including in Gerudo City -- but, like in the real world, the change is slow, and some people struggle to see past their preconceived notions about gender. i just think it's more interesting to relate aspects of a #trans Hyrule to the trans experience now (i.e. in a time of great cultural shift for trans people both for good and for bad) but also exploring how and why it would be different in a fantasy post-apocalypse lol. i also don't want to overdo it into a depressive circlejerk of trans misery, either though, so don't worry, it won't be like that, i am making sure to steer very very clear of this.

i do also have maybe some potential reasons as to why there's been a cultural shift on transness in Hyrule (and particularly Gerudo City) in the 100 years after the Calamity though -- and i'd love to say more, but unfortunately, i've already said too much 🤐 gotta leave soooome stuff for the fic, and i have to check some stuff against lore before i commit to it.

great question!

[bisexual-in-every-gender]

Right, I don't know if this is just me being new to realising I'm trans but my wife (who is also trans but realised MUCH earlier than me at the age of four and is binary, whereas I'm a genderfluid trans man who fluctuates between nonbinary and binary man), she said something that irked me. Thing is, she doesn't tell people she's trans, she goes stealth, some of her closest friends have no idea she's trans. The only people that know are those that knew her prior to physically transitioning, including me. And that's fine. While I don't see a reason to be ashamed of being trans, she does and it's her choice to not disclose it. Fine. The thing she said that irks me is that she told me that once my T takes effect and I "pass" as a cis male, I should NEVER disclose the fact I'm trans to no one ever, because if I did, then people will immediately stop seeing me as a man and start seeing me as a woman. And it would be my own fault for telling people I'm trans.

It just bothers me on so many levels. Why is it MY fault if people stopped respecting my gender identity, were I to come out as trans? I'm also a nonbinary trans man a lot of the time and fully intend to keep putting on dresses or skirts if I so chose because fuck gender norms. Should I, according to her, not do that either? I also love colourful flamboyant clothing that many people might read as "gay". Should I stop doing that, in case someone then misgenders my wife?

For the same reason, she told me to keep my nipples after top surgery because if I don't, I'll immediately be outed as trans and therefore people would stop respecting me. But I'm pretty sure I don't want to keep my nipples, especially considering I can't control how they will heal and look like later. I'd rather see what it looks like without and have them tattooed on later, if I so chose. But she says that's just setting myself up for mistreatment. I'm a 4'11" fat flamboyant trans dude, it's not as if having nipples would earn me more respect anyway?

She's also SOO convinced that the moment people know you're trans, you're somehow less to them and everyone's gonna start misgendering me and seeing me as a woman, whether they want to or not. According to her, even if I had the deepest bass voice and a beard like Santa Claus, they'd start seeing me as a woman then. I mean.... am I just naive or does that seem exaggerated?

Her experiences aren't my own and it's her prerogative to decide whether to live her transness openly or not and yes, she passes for the most part and is happy with that. Fine. But I literally don't care people know I'm trans? I don't see shame in it. All I want is for people to respect my pronouns (he/they). As long as they do that, who cares? And if they don't, they're wankers. I shouldn't be held accountable for THEIR transphobia. Am I wrong?

[circuslollipop]

need you to know trans jace is so based. will be deeply in thought about this

ty!! ive been in deep thought about this for a while but havent really figured out how to bring it up skjfksjd. i've seen a couple headcanons of him as a trans girl, which are very compelling in their own right, but havent seen any of him as a trans boy yet? anyway i have some thoughts but fair warning they are suuuuuper jumbled

idkidk i already mentioned this but the thought of rhaenyra walking in on pre-transition jace stuffing his long hair into some sort of hat the way she did when she was his age,,

of course it would definitely change a lot about the story in a world as gendered as westeros. would rhaenyra still name him heir? if she did, and i think there's a good chance she would, of course there'd be people who are all like 'well all three of them are bastards anyway', but i could see other people thinking he's usurping luke and joffrey.

and what of rhae herself? well, rhae is a lot of things, but ultimately i think she, especially her show version, would accept jace for who he is and be his biggest supporter. i definitely love the idea of her having a trans son with her complicated feelings on her own gender. would she hesitate given the feelings it brings up, would she feel saddened because in her mind she's losing her only "daughter", or would she try to live vicariously through jace transitioning? either way i think she'd ultimately support him. i could even see her pulling some targ exceptionalism stuff w getting her allies to accept him like 'in old valyria the dragons changed their sex all the time, this just proves my son is a true dragon'. betrothals and stuff would probably get complicated and messy, and i could see a lotttt of people opposing a prince"ss" transing their gender like this. otto's pr campaign probably jumps at the opportunity to spin this whole situation in the greens' favor

i could also see jace, despite the support from his mother and her allies, stressing and posturing even more than he already does when he has gender as well as bastardry stacked against him. poor guy probably has even more of an uphill battle trying to prove himself as a worthy crown prince. but even so, through accounts and histories passed down through the ages, eventually the history books would only ever remember him as prince jacaerys

anyway there's like so many different directions this could go and what im spitting out here is only one of them so yeah skfdjhskdj

[amethystblack]

Why is there an ever increasing amount of people on internet demanding people refer to them by weird ass pronouns (like bun/bunself or wtv)? or children supposedly needing novel hormones and their perfectly fine genitalia chopped off or else they'll kill themselves? This has never been documented in history... am i the only 1 seeing this nonsense is clearly astroturfed? asking in good faith

oh boy there is so much to unpack here.... you say you're asking in good faith, so i'm going to choose to believe you, but let's come back to that.

i have a number of issues with the way you've phrased this, but i think what you're trying to ask, to put it another way is-- "Why is this happening now? Why are there more and more people with non-cis and divergent gender identities now, and, rather than being a genuine human problem, is it not being artificially pushed as an agenda?"

You're right in your implication that the answer to 'why now' is the internet, but not because of astroturfing or any kind of disingenuous plot. I believe the internet, and the distance, anonymity, and resources it provides, has finally given a large number of people the privacy, confidence and understanding they need to express who they are in ways that most rigid local societies simply would not have permitted before. In addition to that, there have been many in-person LGBT circles over the pre-internet decades and centuries, but the internet has also made all of those communities more visible than they were in the past.

Contrariwise to communication in the present giving people the space to be open to other possibilities, and making it more visible, there is already documented history of divergent gender identities having been actively excluded from history even when they are known to have existed for hundreds of years. History is written by the winners, and for years, the winners have been old christian white men who do not abide homosexuality, let alone practices outside the gender binary. Why would they write into history books for children to learn about?

Your recourse, as I take from the astroturfing comments, is to doubt the sources of those accounts as I doubt the intentions of your history book writers. There are plenty of articles about it all across the internet though-- could they all be lies? Neither of us can actually prove the accuracy of history, so I believe it is best to not waste our efforts with it. Let's focus on the present, and I will give you my personal experience.

I assume you've asked this question to me in particular because you already know I'm trans (which to be fair, is perhaps a mark in the 'good faith' column for you). When I was growing up, I met exactly one other trans person. As a twelve year old, I vaguely felt like, wow that's cool, i wish i could just be a girl too (lol), and to my memory we never talked about it in depth. I also recall, around the same age, having a chat with two other teenage friends who also knew her, where we all agreed in confidence, yeah, being born a girl would've been preferable. To my knowledge, both of them still identify as male today and are happily married to women. A few years later I would ask my first boyfriend to call me his girlfriend, but I had completely forgotten about everything related to being trans-- I just thought, if I were in a gay relationship anyway, that would feel better. Later I had difficulty with a girl I dated because I told her, again having forgotten trans people existed, that I wished to be a girl. My discomfort with my own body and my resulting disinterest in intimacy ultimately led to us breaking up. Three years after that something online finally reminded me that trans people exist, and I finally realized, wait, maybe I am trans??? And began looking into the matter seriously.

The point of me saying all this, is that nothing pushed transness on me in those seven years. I had fully forgotten that it existed even when I technically knew it was a thing, and I felt the way I did independently of it. When I started exploring transitioning, it was because I sought it out. I had those feelings, I wanted a solution, and turned out a solution existed. The increasing prevalence of non-cis gender identities in all directions is because these feelings are, to varying personal degrees, normal, and the means to act on them finally exists. And as society as a whole becomes more accepting, it is safer to make the leap too. Had I been born in a more transphobic time, I might not have decided to transition, opting instead to swallow the dysphoria and self-hatred and live miserably. Or not live at all. In this epoch, I had permission to transition, but I did not get an invitation, let alone have anyone pushing it on me. Hell, I would've liked an invitation.

So this is all to say, though it may not be your experience, dissatisfaction with one's gender and body are not new in the human condition; we can just finally act on them. Thanks to advances in medicine and culture, it is safer than ever, and sure, there are more trans people, but that also means that people have more agency, and are less miserable.

...Now let's talk about all the problems I have with your ask. Let's start with the questions themselves.

Why is there an ever increasing amount of people on internet demanding people refer to them by weird ass pronouns (like bun/bunself or wtv)?

So I read this as two separate questions -- why weird ass pronouns? -- why are they demanding it?

Okay, so neopronouns aren't everyone's cup of tea. I see their increased usage as a matter of-- 'as long as we on the internet here are exploring new ways to respect people and use language, why not have some fun with it?' It's not hurting anyone, so why not? Unfortunately, it gets strawmanned as a way to take trans and especially non-binary people less seriously, so that just sucks for everyone, but I really don't think it's that serious. In my experience, I've never actually met anyone who's been obtuse about them-- it's just "it would be nice" and they've always been reasonable about if people aren't up for that or don't remember it. There is a basic level of flexibility and understanding to assume from normal social conversation, and I assume that most people who use neopronouns aren't about to insist on them right off the street.

...But, shitty people exist in all demographics. And I'm sure there are some who use neopronouns and are very obnoxious about it out there. I really consider that to be a problem with the specific people rather than the concept of neopronouns... but for how often it gets brought up in these arguments vs my personal experience, it really seems blown out of proportion for the sake of delegitimizing trans people. Let me ask you anon, have you ever met someone like that, who asks for that and is combative when it isn't followed to the letter, or is that just a story you've heard secondhand?

or children supposedly needing novel hormones and their perfectly fine genitalia chopped off or else they'll kill themselves?

I think I've answered the why of this already, so I'm going to skip that and just talk about the phrasing-- the hormones are not novel. they are just the normal hormones that exist in people already, and they have the normal effects, but for the opposite gender. it's also pretty rare for children to go out and request that. teenagers, maybe. i would have loved to get on some blockers as a teenager though. as it is, i don't feel like i had much of a teenage life, and that's exactly because i was already so uncomfortable.

'perfectly fine genitilia' is also such a gross phrase. it might be 'perfectly fine' in your view, but it is not your body to make the call on, and you are not the soul living with the discomfort from it. that also is definitely not a thing that happens as much with children, and the reductionistic point of view where [this thing that some trans people choose to do] is now applied to children as a growing social problem sounds to me like some well-workshopped rhetoric. moreover, why are we making an argument over other people's genitals??? to whoever is spreading that one, gross, mind your business.

i imagine the last few paragraphs inspire some amount of defensiveness because i'm just ripping into your phrasing. and that's fine, but set that defensiveness aside and come back to the table with me. i said at the start that i am choosing to believe you're in good faith here, but for reasons apparent in the prior two paragraphs espeically, you really do not sound like you're in good faith here. like, just saying that does not make it so. i am hoping there are real intentions behind those words you've typed.

and if that is the case-- if you really mean that, then respect to you firstly, but i want you to know that, rather than you being in bad faith, wherever you're getting these talking points from, about 'novel hormones', 'bun/bunself', etc, they are not in good faith. you are concerned about disningenuous information in the internet environment, but the arguments you're representing in this ask are coming from people who are themselves disingenuous, taking only the most extreme parts of gender divergence, and needlessly applying them to children as a moralistic charge. i implore you to prioritize your own, personal, actual experiences with real trans people in the world when making judgments about them-- not just the talking points of others about them.

[transgenderer]

Ok. Lets say I buy that youre presenting as you truly "feel inside". How is separating trans women from womens sports (where high school age males regularly outperform olympic level females) or prisons causing violence to the trans women? And if it is, is it causing more or less violence to the women raped in jail or denied scholarships or assaulted in changing rooms?

hmm. i wanna break this down into pieces

first of all, my personal experience doesnt really accord with the idea of transness expressing who i am inside. i think of it more in like...lower-level terms? like, i experience immense discomfort ("dysphoria") when seen/referred to as a guy, or when i percieve myself as having features that would cause people to see me as a guy. i take hormones to modify those features, and ask people to use she/her, etc for similar reasons. ANYWAY

okay, so first of all...i dont really care about the sports issue! i have a lot of trouble caring, basically at all. my defense of the pro trans-women-in-womens-sports positions comes from the fundamental arbitrariness of the categories involved. theres no particular reason to separate sports into mens and womens, instead of say, short and tall, strong and weak, or even categories that dont really affect performance, like black and white, blue eyed or brown eyed, left handed or right handed. people like watching sports, so we have a system to organize them, and at some point people decided men and women shouldnt compete against each other. but like....it doesnt have to be that! is it any more fair that a short guy cant get a scholarship for basketball than this hypothetical cis girl who cant get a scholarship because shes been beaten by a trans girl? i dont feel like it is! the whole sports scholarship system is kind of dumb

i feel like the sports issue isnt really about sports? like, sorry, but nobody cared about womens sports already. i mean i dont care about any sports. but people who care about sports care about mens sports. because of sexism or whatever. so it FEELS to me like the role of gender-in-sports is much more about public signalling/consensus-building about who counts as a woman

okay, so now that weve got trivialities out of the way...prisons. prisons are fucked up, i think having a penal system is important but prisons are such cesspits of rape and abuse and suffering. trying to apply harm-reduction considerations to prison policies is weird, because theyre systems that are just...totally uninterested in harm reduction, that actively choose harm increasing. but lets try anyway. i think, pretty inevitably, an out trans women who is sent to a mens prison for longer than...idk, a couple weeks(?) is going to be physically or sexually assaulted, just...as a certainty. theres a lot of men who are aggressively hostile towards trans women, and it only takes one among the whole population of people who interact with her for there to be a bad incident.

heres my argument for why putting trans women in womens prisons is probably harm reduction, even if you assume trans women are just as dangerous as cis men. imagine if 1 in 10 men want to assault a trans women, and 1 in 10 trans women want to assault a cis woman. (i think this is pretty generous to your argument!). if you put the trans woman in mens prison, she interacts with enough different men that she definitely gets assaulted. if you put the trans woman in womens prison, there's a 90% chance nobody gets assaulted, so unless that bad apple is assaulting TEN cis women without getting caught, its harm-reduction to put the trans woman in with the cis women.

oh, and changing rooms. changing rooms are crazy! i dont know why we have communal changing rooms. building a bunch of changing stalls is not that expensive. being made to strip naked (or like, to your underwear) in front of a bunch of your peers is terrible, its absurd and awful we make kids do it, we should stop.

[hms-no-fun]

was there anything in particular that inspired the concept of june eg8ert?

there are lots of little things! i talked about it some in my video about writing godfeels 2.1 and 2.2, but the short version is that a lot of the post-toblerone june fanart i saw was really frustratingly bubbly. and like, i understood why. who doesn't love art of a character who has happily transitioned being happy in public? to be clear, i loved that art and i still do, it made me feel SO GOOD to see so much explicitly transfem june and transpositive homestuck art in general at the time! but after a while it struck me just how little any of that art reflected my experience of transition, which has been slow and full of false starts and lots of dysphoria and disappointment. and good things! see it wasn't like i wanted the polar opposite, a grimdark genderangst june. what i wanted was something that reflected both the euphoria and dysphoria, the good and the bad.

typically when i start fics they're less based on a scene or a plot than they are a question. like i started godfeels 1 because i wanted to know how it felt to live this extraordinarily lonely life as someone with unfathomable power and seemingly no will to use it. but i was also fascinated by john's dynamic with jade specifically, how difficult it had to have been for both of them to go through with typheus' deal and force jade to live alone on a ship for three years. honestly that's the origin point for a LOT of godfeels when i think about it.

so following on from that, my big questions with gf2 were, what if june comes out and her friends don't take it very well? and what if she decided to go back in time and retcon herself to be trans when she was a kid? now if you've read gf2 you'll know that the first question is resoundingly answered, while the second is... basically never touched on outside of like one dialogue exchange with jade i think. this is because of vriska, and i think if you've understood everything else i have said so far then i don't need to explain to you why that makes sense. anyway my idea for how that second question would be answered was june would take jade back in time and be like "i'm gonna give myself a better future by making myself realize i'm trans at a younger age, and i want to give you the opportunity to give yourself a friend on your island." i always wanted to find a way to make jade less lonely at some point in her life, like in 2.3 my original plan was to have june rescue nepeta from a dead timeline and basically give her to jade as a friend and mentor, but then she decided to become silverbark instead.

(this is completely tangential but i think the reason i didn't go that direction is kinda related to what i talked about in my last ask about catboy dave, where i had to really stop and ask myself what story i wanted to write. because i feel like if you build a narrative about maybe going back in time and transing your gender as a kid, and you have it be this big weighty question about whether or not she should do it or if it would even work, and then you conclude by having her not go through with it would be... pretty inherently unsatisfying. like even if it's a profound or interesting conflict to have in prose, when it's over what you're basically left with is a bottle episode that doesn't really have to impact anything that comes after. but then, on the flip side, if you DO follow through with it, the result would be that there's a happy early-transition june running around living her life, and then there's our june, for whom nothing has changed. and the more i thought about what that story would look like, it just seemed so inevitable that it would become this depressing dead end where june just winds up right back where she started, living alone and isolating herself. idk maybe she could have instead built a new life with new characters and that could potentially be interesting on its own, but that wasn't the story i wanted to write.)

as far as other stuff, i've made no secret of just how autobiographical many aspects of june are. a lot of her development as a character mirrors my experiences, and i guess if you wanted to make it pathological you could say godfeels is a story i use to help process some of my more complex emotions about transitioning and living in the world as a trans person. in places where you can modify text color, i've adopted june's blue as my own. she's messy and difficult and makes mistakes but she always says what's on her mind and asserts herself and has this core sort of RESPECT for her identity that i find really compelling to write and that i wish i had more of in my own life.

i have no idea if this answered your question but i sure did say a lot of words

[xxxvomitboyxxx]

FOUND THE PAGES (image ID under the keep reading)

I remember when my mom had gotten me the old American Girl body image book, The Care and Keeping of You, it had made me soo uncomfortable and made feel what I now know as dysphoria. It would have been so amazing for that book to talk to me about gender identity and expression ;-;

I really hope I did the image ID correctly, please someone correct me if I did anything funky! I think everyone should have access to the text on these pages because they're fucking amazing.

[Image ID: 3 pages talking about gender from the new American girl body image book. The first page is titled “Gender Joy”. The upper half of the page has text, and then an image on each side. The first image is of a heavy set person with a green tshirt and jeans and short hair, above them is an image of a skinny woman with long blonde hair and a pink flowing dress. The second image is of a thin person with long hair and a yellow tshirt, above them is an image of a shirtless man showing off his many muscles. The text between reads: “messages about how bodies "should" look are different depending on a person's gender. Girls tend to face more pressure to have thin bodies and long hair and to wear clothes like skirts, dresses, and blouses. Boys tend to feel more pressure to have a muscular body, keep their hair short, and wear pants and shorts. Luckily, it's not your job to look the way people expect - it's your job to be you. The way you show your gender to the world through clothes and behaviors is your gender expression. Your gender expression can be feminine, masculine, or somewhere in between - and it might change! Maybe you'll experiment with bright dresses and long, feminine hairstyles. Or you might try baggy shorts, plaid shirts, and a buzzed haircut. Your gender expression should make you feel at home in your body." There is an image below this text of 3 children, one with short buzzed hair and a dress, one with long hair wearing a Pendleton and jeans, one with shaved sides and pink dye in their hair wearing a teal tshirt and a skirt. They are all different skin tones and weights.

The second page has a block of text at the top, then a large image in the second half of the page of a young Black person with short hair wearing one dangly earring, a tan jacket, and 3 buttons, one button with she/her pronouns, the other button with a trans flag. There is a large trans flag in the background. The text at the top read: "While gender expression is what you show on the outside, gender identity is how you feel on the inside - a girl, a boy, or someone who doesn't quite fit into either category. When a baby is born, a doctor looks at the baby's body parts to assign its sex - whether the baby is female or male. Most kids grow up feeling comfortable in the sex the doctor assigned. This kind of person is cisgender. (Say it sis-jen-dur.) But for some, that assigned sex doesn't match who they know they are inside. A kid who was assigned as male might know herself to be a girl inside, for example. Someone whose gender is different than the sex they were assigned at birth is transgender. Some people don't feel like a girl or a boy inside - which is totally OK! People in this group are usually called nonbinary and might use a pronoun like they instead of he or she."

The third page is text heavy, with a smaller image to the side of the same kid from page 2 in a doctor's office with a doctor. The text reads: "Being transgender is not an illness or something to be ashamed of. If you're questioning your gender identity - or if you already know for sure that you're trans or nonbinary - talk with an adult you trust, like a parent or school counselor. That person can connect you with a specially trained doctor, who can help you and your family decide what's best for your body. At first, you and the doctor might talk about wearing the clothes and using the pronouns (like he, she, or they) that make you feel most like the true you. If you haven't gone through puberty yet, the doctor might offer medicine to delay your body's changes, giving you more time to think about your gender identity. And if you've already gone through puberty, a doctor can still help. Studies show that transgender and nonbinary kids who get help from doctors have much better mental health than those who don't. If you don't have an adult you trust, there are organizations across the country that can help you. Turn to the Resources on page 95 for more information.

On the second half of this third page is a large pink rectangle with text. On the top corner of this box is a large heart with the trans flag as the background, with the quote: "Being transgender isn't a medical transition. It's a process of learning to love yourself for who you are. - Jazz Jennings." The text in the pink box reads: "If you're transgender or nonbinary, loving your body might feel a bit different than it does for a cisgender person. Parts of your body might make you feel uncomfortable, and you might want to change the way you look. That's totally OK! You can appreciate your body for everything it allows you to experience and still want to change certain things about it. When you're feeling out of place in your body, do things that make your body feel more like home, like dressing in your favorite clothes and doing something you love. Celebrate the good feelings you have in your body right now. Remember, you deserve love and respect, no matter what your body looks like or how it changes." /end image ID]

Well. I did not have "conservatives cancel the American Girl doll company" on my 2022 bingo card but somehow here we are.

[rittz]

thoughts about being trans, idk where else to put them so here u go

it’s not like i don’t have trans guy friends to talk to about this, it’s just usually in the form of jokes or passing comments rather than an actually serious conversation. also, the transmasc people that i’m closest to identify more with the label “nonbinary” than i do-- it’s not like they couldn’t understand or relate to things i’m saying, but i’m just assuming that they probably don’t feel the exact same way i do

anyway, as a trans person we get often asked “so why do you feel like a [gender]?”, and the answer is usually some variation of “i just feel like it”. this is the most accurate but also vaguest possible answer, so i kinda wanted to break down my personal answer to that question?

basically, i identify as a man because i identify with men. in a general and also personal sense. gender stereotypes are something that trans people by necessity both embrace and reject. i relate to gender stereotypes about men more than those of women-- i’m less outwardly emotional, i like being handy, i don’t like kids, i have questionable personal hygiene, etc-- but obviously these things alone don’t make someone a man. however... you can’t deny that there is some general truth about behavioral differences between men and women (bc of society, not biology). men and women both experience different problems in the world, and each have trouble understanding the experiences and problems of the other. generally, i can relate to the experiences and problems of men more than those of women, even if it seems like i shouldn’t (for example, i am not afraid of walking alone at night, even though i am very tiny).

i, from a young age, have had a constant yearning for more male friends. i would occasionally choose to play video games as a male character. i was upset that i couldn’t be in boy scouts. i have been jealous of my younger brothers being treated by my parents the ways i wished i was treated. when i imagined myself older, i pictured myself less like my mom and more like my dad. when i’m around men, i want them to treat me like one of them. i want to be seen as a man.

and i think that’s what being trans really boils down to. wanting to be seen as someone other than how everyone sees you. wanting what you see on the outside to match how you feel on the inside. this obviously extends to nonbinary individuals, who face their own struggle when it comes to presentation. but at the end of the day, i think that presentation is equally important to gender identity as internal feelings. i mean, i think we’re all familiar with the research proving that transitioning makes trans people happier. surgery is an invasive, expensive, painful process that i DON’T think is necessary for every trans person, and HRT isn’t always easy to get. but changing a name, getting a new haircut, dressing differently, binding, etc. counts as transitioning. you don’t have to hate your body to be trans, but wanting to alter it in order to better connect your internal identity with your presentation, i think is necessary in order to consider yourself to be trans. 

i will admit i am confused by “GNC trans men” i see on tumblr and insta, who use he/him pronouns but exclusively present femininely. i’m not talking about trans guys who don’t yet pass, i mean trans guys who don’t want to. i don’t harbor any ill will, i’m just confused. if i understand being trans to mean “wanting what you see on the outside to match how you feel on the inside”, you can see how. doesn’t that make you feel dysphoric? don’t you want people who see you to read you as male? how is your life different from when you didn’t identify as male but presented the same way? this isn’t me trying to gatekeep on who’s “trans enough”, and especially when it comes to nonbinary identities it’s arbitrary to harp on presentation like this. but like, what’s going on here?

taking a turn here that will come back around, an extremely key component to why i identify as and with men is my sexuality. i have always idolized, envied, and evoked various queer icons from media and real life. the hunky, grunting, macho, hetero version of “man” never appealed to me the way that the fashionable, artsy, flirty, homo version of “man” did. drag queens, my mom’s hairdresser, glam rock stars, i could go on. associating my more feminine qualities with GAY stereotypes instead of FEMALE stereotypes suddenly made more sense, and made me feel less dysphoric. it’s also something that took me a long time to realize, because i had surrounded myself with queers who were mostly attracted to women. transmascs and butch lesbians historically have a lot in common, but personally, i didn’t relate as much to lesbians as i did to drag queens. in dating and loving men, i developed my understanding of them. but my attraction to men was why it had taken me so long to realize i felt more like a man-- i thought i was just some weird straight girl.

now, am i calling these “GNC gay trans men” with long pink hair and poofy skirts and conventionally attractive bisexual boyfriends “weird straight girls”? ...well, not to their faces. but i have to admit that i’m thinking it. these people would never go to a predominantly-male gay bar, these people would never be harassed on the street. i’m not saying i know someone’s identity better than they do, but i don’t agree with the liberal utopian ideal of “let everyone do whatever they want as long as they aren’t hurting anyone” when taken to mean that we can’t question other people’s choices. “why do you feel like a man?” is a question that, coming from another trans person, isn’t inherently transphobic. it’s not “forcing” someone to “prove” their “transness”, no one “owes” me an explanation of their identity. i’m just confused. i don’t disapprove of the way these people live their lives, i just want to know why.

a straight girl being feminine is different from a gay man being feminine, because it has less to do with personality and more to do with society’s historic view of gay men as closer to female than male because of the loving and fucking men aspect. an AMAB gay man wearing makeup and a crop top probably just wants to look good, but he is also signaling to other men that he’s gay via gender non-conformance. by being AFAB and female-passing, wearing makeup and a crop top is not GNC. in fact it’s pretty GC, and gay men will not recognize you as a gay man.

it’s easy to say “gender is fake so do whatever you want”, but like, we have to acknowledge reality. time is a social construct too, but we still use days of the week when talking to each other. strangers will treat you differently depending on what gender they interpret you as. different people will be willing to date you or not. you have to choose which public bathroom to go in. if being misgendered doesn’t bother these people, then who cares? but if it DOES, which it usually does, wouldn’t you want to take steps to prevent being misgendered in the future? if your desire to present femininely is stronger then your desire to be seen as male, then like... why call yourself a male at all? ultimately nothing these people do will really affect me in any way. it just makes me wonder if these people will eventually go on to present as male, or if they will later ID as nonbinary or even cis. i encourage people trying out different labels and exploring their identity, so it’s not like i think these people SHOULDN’T identify as trans guys. it’s more like, i wish they were able to articulate WHY they identify as trans more than “because i said so”. not wanting to be a woman doesn’t automatically make you a man, it just makes you not a woman.

maybe i’m particularly cynical because of the MULTIPLE times that people with larger online followings who identify and present this way have later turned out to be lying, manipulative people. hopefully it goes without saying that i do NOT think that everyone who identifies and presents this way is a toxic liar. the reason i bring it up is because some people genuinely can’t understand the possibility or purpose of misleadingly claiming a marginalized identity, but it can and does happen. an analogy could be made here about white people claiming indigenous heritage. we all WANT to believe what people say about themselves, and asking for “proof” is a social no-no. but we shouldn’t just... automatically trust everything someone says about themselves, right? and as bad as i WANT to live in a world where gender doesn’t matter and everyone default uses neutral pronouns and there are no divisions in clothing stores and bathrooms, we don’t live in that world (yet). when you are AFAB, /extremely/ femininely presenting, and have little to no plans of transitioning, saying “i am a man” will not make other people see you as one. and if you don’t want to be seen as a man, then maybe you aren’t one.

[mr-kamiyama]

A Word for Zoomers Who're Told They're "Making Up" Genders and Orientations.

I'm an Xer.

Well, actually I'm in that b.1977-85 throe where no two people can agree what I am. I'm Post Dankai Junior in the old country, but I was too old to be a kid for Pokémon, Harry Potter, I caught Digimon 02 during its premiere US run a rare Saturday the firm I worked at, that normally had Saturday hours, was closed. I met Windows Millennium Edition because a housemate, as back then, I'd realised I wanted to live with company, wanted to upgrade our computer to the newest version of Windows (and I promptly made AMVs using GIFs and lost them to the sands of time all before YouTube even existed) So that gives you an idea of my age.

I came out for the first time in high school. I came out as bi.

In Japan, transness, like here had different words we no longer use, but unlike here, wasn't a secret.

If I'd stayed in Japan just one more year, in '95 politician Kamikawa Aya began advocating on NHK for trans rights.

Maybe I'd've learned that transition *to* male and actual medical treatment like HRT to make that possible existed a whole lot sooner.

But I didn't. And so, I didn't realise it was actually something I could *do* and I wasn't doomed to be stuck until about 2010.

I claimed "bi" in the '90s, and mistook "you're a really cool person and really nice to me when few people are and so I really like you in a platonic sense" +aesthetic attraction for crushes of a romantic and sexual nature.

The SAM model was developed by bi people in the '70s, but where and when I was, there weren't exactly highly visible LGBT centres where I could learn this. So I thought any orientation had to be "x-sexual"

And I only knew about straight, gay/lesbian, and bi.

Which, the term "laaaaaaaabelllls" was coined by biphobic people my age. See, we weren't like people today, who literally can't live because of unfettered crony capitalism. You could get a nice studio on the nice side of town for eight days' work at minimum wage (of course, being POC, you had to find the right realtor), which back then was under four dollars an hour. You could get a 2br/1.5ba rowhouse for about two weeks' worth, which is half a month, but these days, that much work will get you a barely-studio in shoot-you-in-the-face-in-broad-daylight territory.

But we were still plenty suspicious of marketing. So queerphobic Xers went "don't make me acknowledge your filthy non-mono sexuality! What if I told you naming what you are is dehumanising, like labelling a jar of mayo, and you're the product!"

Which is no different that queerphobic Millennials claiming "Queer is a slur uwu call it gay because cisgay and cishet are the only valid IDs uwu Gay has never ever been used as a pejorative uwu"

Which is also bunk because back in the '90s, if one young man did ANYTHING another didn't like, the other one could call it and him "gaaayyy" and that would be a homophobic attack via toxic masculinity on the first young man. Heck, I don't listen to much grunge, though I did at the time, but it's used this way in some Nirvana song. I just can't remember which one.

Anyway, so I claimed bi and spent the next 23 or so years fighting for it even against physical violence to make me claim something in the false straight/gay binary

All along, I thought "the mushy stuff squicks me because I'm a guy (insert ways I justified things before I realised that yes, I actually am male for prior to 2010)" which, yeah, I'm still sorting through the myriad manifestations of toxic masculinity and learning to spot them. What that actually is is romance repulsion.

I'm actually aroace.

To go further, I actually have very strong platonic affection feelings, and "idemromantic" is not necessarily my actual identity, but that, and at least some idea, if even wrong, that the other party was interested, was how I sorted whether I should approach the other person as "friend" or "potential partner" subconsciously.

Plus to further complicate things, I'm sex-favourable ace/cupiosexual, which meant that just hearing limited definitions of things like sex repulsion in aces didn't clue me in. It wasn't until discussing what sexual attraction was with a newly-realised gay first wave Xer last year that I realised I had no idea what that was and had never felt it, and was therefore asexual. Which after the discussion with that guy, I dove into readings by you all on Tumbler first.

And I only realised I'm aromantic last month, though I've been questioning for actually a year this month.

Now, I'd say my aesthetic attraction is definitely bi, and yes, I accept the redefinition made with the info we have now of two or more genders including your own" which *I read* as "but not necessarily all genders, and perceived gender is a factor" whereas pan seems to me like "perceived gender is not a factor in attraction" ??

Now, I still actually don't have an idea about my potential aesthetic feelings towards people who present NB. The men and women I feel it towards tend to have this or that decidedly masculine or feminine traits, and I may never, because people my age are less likely to come out.

Whether orientation or gender, people my age are products of a very binary 20th century. We were really all sorts of shape pegs, but many of us were and still are dodecahedrons and whatnot with choices of only square, circle, and mayyybe triangle holes.

Naturally, the dodecahedrons and the hexagons all tried to jam themselves in circle and square holes, whichever ones it looked like we could maybe wedge into.

This means plenty of us are going around thinking things like "I guess I don't like sex because I'm a woman" or "I guess I don't like the mushy stuff because I'm a man" or "I don't feel female so I guess I'm a man because I'm AMAB and that's all I got" etc.

Those most likely to come out are those with very strong NB/aro/ace feelings WHO BECOME INFORMED. And some may still not, or those with feelings they can't sort, because they've lived so long the previous way, they may at least feel they have too much to lose.

There's also people like me that need a lot of info to realise they were misreading their own feelings due to decades of amatonormative/heteronormative/binarist/toxic masculine brainwashing.

(I still don't like the term "toxic masculine" because I really want a term where we have more room to redefine "masculine" as decidedly masculine but wholly without the toxic stuff that's so married to "manliness," room to reject that stuff and revision manliness, but whatever)

THE REASON OLDER GENERATIONS DON'T HAVE THIS STUFF IS NOT BECAUSE YOU'RE INVENTING IT. IT IS BECAUSE OUR TIME DIDN'T ACKNOWLEDGE IT.

Yes, I think it's funny imaging how lost you'd be trying to use an 8-track player, or a library card catalogue actually made of index cards.

And had I not miscarried in December 2003 and had a sixteen year old, I'd have had them set up the internet TV device I got instead of three hours barely restraining myself from breaking it into pieces just like I was the only one who was able to figure out how to set the VCR clock and VCR+ timers when we got one when I was young. Which my difficulty with this stuff is more like a Boomer than an Xer. Most of my peers are pretty savvy. Sometimes my friends can tele-help me.

And I think new music,which I define as post-Y2K, stinks.

So I'm not hip and new. Plenty about me is just like your parents.

But no, you aren't making this up. And you're informing a lot of us. You're waking us up to how truly diverse humanity is. You're waking some of us up to who we really are.

And as for those of you who have crummy and even Karen parents, two things:

A. The Latino kids took me and the other Asian in in high school. There aren't many Asians in FL. (The "Another Chinese Family" bit on Fresh Off The Boat is so real) There are definitely some crummy Xers out there, and that's been true all along. There was even a right-wing youth org called "young republicans." There were Regean-loving racist queerphobes all along. They made my life miserable in high school, too.

B. There are also others like me that believe in you. That actually need you. You're bringing *back* a diversity that was smothered by colonial Europe. Historical precedent is actually on your side.

Thank you. I mean it. You're doing good, you're legit, and there are a lot of us who believe in you, too.

[transrightsjimin]

I'm asking as a confused trans and gay person regarding some of your recent posts saying aphobia doesn't exist, etc. Do you consider asexual people to be inherently LGBT even if they are cisgender and straight (heteroromantic)? I don't want to discriminate at all, I'm just confused because I see people fighting on here all the time about whether aces are part of the LGBT community or not. Do you have some insight for me as an ace nonbinary person? Thanks in advance!

no it’s fine lol dw!

i’m not sure how to explain this w/o being too extensive in what i say bc i’ve talked about this before but more in private conversations (and maybe some rants in tumblr posts) nd i tend to ramble abt it.

first of all i do not actually like the common conception that there is one way to define LGBT or the idea that everyone should fall within that category term or not, for example because the English language is colonial and rigid and does not reflect on experiences of all cultures, bc being gay or trans are not distinctly different experiences everywhere while they would be divided into different categories. so whereas i was more insistent on saying ‘you must be gay / bi / lesbian / trans to be LGBT / suffer from homophobia or transphobia’ i’ve come to realize now that this argument is rather exclusive of many gender diverse identities that do not correspond to all experiences or cultures. so i will stay away from using that argument.

however, i am speaking from my experience with online LGBT and asexual communities and have seen how the latter has tried to force itself into the other. i think a large issue with the asexual and aromantic communities is that they are partially based upon the creation of AVEN, an online forum founded by a homophobic and antisemitic man, and partially (though related to the former) by just blatantly made up statistics and history. not once have i seen a good argument or research or even personal accounts that illustrate very well why aphobia is a thing. i am asexual myself but do not want to take the lack of discrimination i faced for it as proof. there have been accounts of ‘aphobic’ discrimination that are either 1. much more a general concern with the OP facing misogyny and girls being sexualized, 2. someone making a remark based on a misconception of OP’s experiences or 3. misappropriation of terms and applying them to asexuality, e.g. ‘corrective rape’ was coined to refer to (African) lesbians who were assaulted under the presumption that it would turn them straight. asexuals have appropriated this term years ago to claim asexual people face rape on a large scale because perpetrators try to force them into liking sex. some people don’t even know the original meaning of the term because of this. i’m also not a big fan of this new interpretation of the term anyway, because legit sexual attraction is not the main reasons people commit rape; it is to seek power. this kind of mindset of asexual people being inherently vulnerable to sexual violence due to lack of feeling sexual attraction is seriously harmful; in the crime show Law and Order SVU, a suspect was let off because some main character said the suspect was asexual and this couldn’t have done it. people can be and sometimes are raped by an asexual person, because it is about taking advantage of someone and not attraction. the sole fact that so many authors of overly fetishistic fanfiction are asexual should prove this much, but instead the lack of attraction is used to distance oneself from the harm one can still cause.

and yes, asexual people can face discrimination, especially if you’re a girl you’re expected to be sexually submissive, which is pretty horrifying on its own. but this is not the same as targeted discrimination on a mass scale or institutional whatsoever. we are not thaught as we grow old that asexuals are disgusting, are a joke, or need to be violently murdered. my biggest issue with the asexual and aromantic community that we (as i have removed myself from it years ago) keep telling it that anecdontal accounts of being mildly discriminated is nowhere near the same as risking being kicked out of your house, being violently attacked due to the way you appear or having a partner of the same gender, being systematically discriminated by all sorts of institutions in society and being thaught that what you are is bad from an early age on. and then the counterargument is that LGBT is more recognized but asexual and aromantic isn’t, so ‘ace / aro’ people deserve to be included because they are underrepresented in media. but that is not the case at all. the speed at which asexuality has suddenly been incorporated and included into LGBT spaces, also offline, has been ridiculously fast. nowadays when you see a bunch of LGBT flags you see the asexual one being included a lot, sometimes in 3 different versions, while the lesbian flag is nowhere to be seen. lesbians are consistently excluded from their supposedly own community and they are not included in LGBT due to a need to change underrepresentation or lack of awareness, but because they face their own version of homophobia. the most mind-boggling thing about cis / cishet asexual and aromantic people being told that they are not oppressed, is that the response is not relief (’oh i’m glad i don’t face systematic oppression for this thing’) but anger (’how dare you not let us into your group!’). LGBT is seen as a fun party that is unnecessarily mean to anyone it gatekeeps, as if it is not actually necessary to keep out cishet people who benefit from their privilege and can use that against the rest in the group if they join.

my largest issue with the asexual community however, and i’ve touched upon this a bit before in the post, is that it victimizes itself, to such a degree where it puts itself oppositional to ‘allosexuals’. the whole idea that people who experience sexual attraction to another person are inherently privileged over abd hold power over asexual people is just not true (and the same goes for this rethoric for aromantic people). this idea is so wrong and the whole concept of the ‘allosexual’ as oppressor collapses once you consider that people who are attracted to the same gender are actually in danger and oppressed for their very attraction. not only are those who experience attraction (that isnt platonic) to other people portrayed as oppressors, but also as perverted freaks. once i decided to stop associating myself with acearo people and instead interact with LGBT people with other experiences, i realized just how much stigmatizing abd frankly, homophobic and transphobic bullshit i’ve adopted within the spaces i used to be in and that i still see gather a lot of traction (now their harmful points are also used on twitter and IRL in the public domain). the community has a huge issue where it teaches you to be puzzled and grossed out by people who want to date / kiss / have sex with other people, and this results in GSAs that now include asexuals to prohibit kissing your partner per request of asexual / aromantic members, asexual people showing up at pride with ‘can we just hug?’ signs, the common serophobic jokes (’at least we dont get hiv!!’ blergh), and for me it led to a great discomfort with kissing and sex imagery and it wasn’t until i left the community that this was in fact subtle homophobia because so much content on here is lgbt themed and to combine that with the increasing aversion to romance or sex without critically looking at that is... very toxic to say the least.

so where it’s standing right now, i don’t think including asexual or aromatic people in LGBT spaces on the basis of those identities is a good idea. one community advocates for the acceptance of sex, whereas the other is stigmatizing it and painting off those who are in fact oppressed for their transness or homosexuality, as the oppressors. it clashes and it doesn’t work. the ‘ace / aro’ community (quote unquote bc i see ‘ace’ being used a lot to imply superiority over ‘allosexuals’ like, theyre being the ace at something) has too many issues, which it is largely based on, to figure out. it can be a community on its own and i do not think you need to join LGBT to have a valid identity that has something to do with sexuality or gender and deals with a form of stigma.

it woukd be a rant, i warned you lol

[scriptlgbt]

My story is about pirates. The MC is a trans guy and the captain is a lesbian who is some sort of big sister/mother figure to him. It's quite violent. I was wondering if it could be problematic? I know it's problematic to show trans woman being overly violent in fiction but what about cis lesbians and straight trans guys? Also, do you know about real any queer pirates i could read about? And what did pirates think about homosexuality/transness?) How was it being queer in the pirate world?

A conversation that I had, that is relevant:

ME: [PARTNER], do you know anything about queer pirates?

PARTNER: I know that there were many, and they’d sometimes be like -

ME: Sea husbands kind of thing?

PARTNER: Yeah, and one would inherit from the other’s booty, and when it was divided up, they’d share their share of the booty.

ME: [mischievous grinning face]

PARTNER: [nodding] And they might share each other’s booty.

Disclaimer: This whole thing is going to largely focus on what is known as the Golden Age Of Piracy. I’m also not a historian, I just hardcore, love pirates with my heart and soul. This is going to be a long post.

So, this is super generalized, but pirates, and even sea-faring folks in general (see: - or sea, hahahahaha - the LGBT+ history of Brighton in the UK), have tended to have a much higher rate of LGBT+ folks and minoritized people in general, throughout history. As far as most research I’ve done goes. Being in a travelling situation and having the anonymity of being able to move around with chosen family generally has great appeal to folks whose existences are filled with oppression and a sense of not belongingness. This has also applied for racialized people, women in general, impoverished folks in general, a lot of different people who wanted to reclaim a place in the world that ostracized them.

Another fun fact, the use of the term “Friend of Dorothy” as a euphemism for gay folks was investigated by the US Navy. They misunderstood it as meaning that there actually was a woman named Dorothy who could be routed down and coerced into outing her “friends” to the military. Cruise ships and others have also used this phrase to covertly advertise that there were meetings for these folks. (Source: Wikipedia | “Friend of Dorothy”) 

But to get to the pirates, specifically.

Most pirate ships largely had their own code that everyone on their ship had to agree to. Some had things like, “you’ll be marooned with one knife, and no food if you are caught not reporting loot to be divvied up by the crew fairly” and things like that. But generally, whoever ran the ship, the Captain, would get to pick the rules. And with the partial-democracy that comes with the idea of mutiny, and the more notable reliance on the labour of it all, in general, things were able to be slightly more consensus-based than the on-land governments.

There are numerous women who became pirates to take ownership of their lives in ways that weren’t permitted on-land. Anne Bonny and Mary Read are historical figures that might be worth looking into. The two of them shared lovers, sailed together, had intense care for one and other and with their dressing up in masculine-coded attire and the like, there’s a lot to go off of in assuming they may have been romantically involved with each other. If not, at least they had some iteration of what a lot of contemporary folks might find comparable to a QPR.

The concept of “sea husbands” was also called matelotage (or bunkmate) depending on your crew. It was kind of the buddy system, but gayer. With little need to consistently explain it to outsiders, folks at sea were freer to explore the different ways a relationship with another person can be, without so much worrying about how it looks to others at a passing glance. And as pirates, there’s less concern that you’ll get shit from the law for gay stuff Of All Things. 

Buccaneer Alexander Exquemelin wrote: ‘It is the general and solemn custom amongst them all to seek out… a comrade or companion, whom we may call partner… with whom they join the whole stock of what they possess.’  (Source)

It was just normal. They also had a version of health insurance where someone was compensated if they ended up disabled from battle. The compensation of death of your partner also works into this.

As for transness, these kinds of things have had fickle definitions and historically, it’s hard to be able to pinpoint specific people as fitting cleanly into contemporary cultural definitions of transness, because frankly, the past had different culture to now. When it comes to writing canonically trans characters in contexts where the language might have been different, it’s important to focus on making sure that a trans reader can identify the personal connection with that character’s experiences and feelings, just as much as it is to use language to name folks as trans. 

Representation can go deeper than surface terminology and the like, and in cases where the terminology doesn’t necessarily match, it has to. Language like, “I never really felt like a [assigned gender] - I see myself more like [desciption of actual gender identity or name for it].” - is as good as just saying the character is trans in my opinion.

Depending on where the character is from, they also may have just outright had a word in their language for their identity. 

Gender presentation was significantly freer with pirates than it was for folks on land. Things like earrings, frilled sleeves, varied hair length and similar, were not uncommon, although the gendered coding associated with these aspects of appearance had different implications than they do now. Gold earrings on seafarers were there to fund a proper burial if someone’s body washed ashore. Gendered clothing was also coded in more binary ways on land. Folks who wanted to be coded as men could do so by wearing pants and folks who wanted to be coded as women could do so with skirts and dresses. (Tangential but fun fact yet again: dressing in those big poofy skirts usually included massive pockets. They were generally not physically attached to the skirts, but if you wore it all properly you would easily be able to reach into them.) 

Pirates and other seafarers also had clothing referred to as ‘slops’ for cleaning (if they were of the rank that cleaned anyway) which were pretty wide-legged pants that could almost pass for a skirt. 

Material that pirates used for clothing was largely what they stole, but it was cut and sewn into the same shapes a lot of other seafarers wore. At the time, it was largely illegal (under English rules anyway) for people who weren’t the bourgeoisie to wear anything made with nice fabric. Rich people saw this as deceitful, and these laws enabled richer people to not mingle on an equal level with those of a lower socioeconomic status.

As pirates, if you’re already shunning the law, may as well wear full calico suits. (Like Calico Jack Rackham.)

There’s more info on pirate and privateer clothing here. (The link is to a free book in HTML format, complete with illustrations and talk of materials, and how the clothes worn at sea varied from clothes they wore when they came into shore and towns.)

I could write a book on this and still not have covered enough. But the gist is that pirates were a big counterculture of outsiders living their lives. LGBT+ people and racialized people got thrown into the mix (and jumped right in) and experienced much more liberated lives than they might otherwise. That isn’t to say they were flawlessly inclusive - there still definitely were a lot of things people thought of in congruence with colonial beliefs. There was racism and homophobia - but it looked a lot different, and was a lot lighter than you’d think. And there were some ships which banned women, but mainly I think that was because they typically didn’t have the background to hold their ground on the ships, and were considered more of a plus one to certain crew members (who brought them - the rules were specifically about bringing them onto the ship rather than them being there of their own accord) than part of the crew. Sometimes women were part of the crew.

Notably, Anne Bonny and Mary Read were in a polyamorous triad with Calico Jack Rackham. (I think a cis + het historian might argue about this but that would seem like denial to me tbh. There is much, MUCH more evidence pointing in this direction than against it, and it would be extraordinarily hard to argue otherwise.) I would definitely do some research on them!

I also recommend this book (link is the free text on WikiSource), A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates. It is perhaps the most famous contemporary record of the lives of a number of pirates from the time, including Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

As for the sensitivity aspect of this ask, I’d say that what you are describing is completely fine. As long as the violence isn’t used to dehumanize or completely demonize, I would even say that I don’t have any warnings for you about it, or precautions to advise on.

Thank you for this opportunity to infodump about LGBT+ pirates. I hope this is not overwhelming, but I’m also happy to parse out segments of this better upon request. (Our ask will be open eventually, I promise.)

- mod nat