#I would prefer people not reblog this...

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[we-cool-beans]

the people have spoken

[enlichened]

I literally saw someone say laios is too autistic for romance... you guys HAVE to start being respectful to autistic people. like I know he's just a character but its emblematic of real problems. Even if it's just a joke, it is NOT FUNNY to perpetuate ableism in the form of jokes. I see like a thousand posts a day about how he has autistic swag and in the SAME POST joke about how his friends actually hate him, nobody could REALLYYY like him they're all just pretending <3, he's too autistic for sex or romance or love.

He has canonical problems in the text with people pretending to be his friend, or people secretly hating him. We've gone over and over again about how divorcing autistic people and characters from sex and romance on the whole is infantilizing. (individual ace/aro headcanons are fine, but maybe also examine where they're coming from when its characters widely seen as autistic). I feel like a lot of fans don't even realize what they're doing. oftentimes what you think is funny fan content is actually you making fun of him and excluding him from things based on his autistic traits.

And this isn't even MENTIONING the racism in making kabru be aggressive to laios for no reason all the time when kabru has genuine reason and understanding even when he thinks he might need to kill laios. OR how weird it is that people will boil down falin's autistic traits for farcille and say like "yeah she's similar to laios, but she's less of a 'freak' (AKA has developed people pleasing social skills) so marcille likes her still :)"

[altschmerzes]

seen one too many snide posts about this in the last week or so but did you know that if you don't enjoy scenes in smut establishing consent or checking in then you simply don't have to read them and you don't have to go online and whine about how they're Consent Posturing and Purity Culture and Sanitizing Everything and God Just Kill Me Now. like you can have a preference without making it into a three act morality play, which is ironically what you are accusing other people of doing.

the same goes for like, detailed content warnings on fics. or content warnings at all. you can just skip those. they're not a sign of Purity Culture Gone Too Far or Those Damn Puriteens or whatever. you can dislike things without being an asshole about them or implying they're Taking Away What's Good And Correct About Fic Or Creativity.

[lavenderfeminist]

For same-sex attracted people ONLY

Have been discussing this with the woman I'm seeing; I am personally only fine with lavender, but she made the good point that it was also very much a derogatory word. I think the origins are different and so the enduring sentiments are different, but am very curious what others think.

[gomzdrawfr]

every time you comb through my blog and like/reblog all my art i consider that a marriage proposal, so let me know if you want a spring or summer wedding

oh fuck i just saw this mb- UHHH *sweats nervously* + *rizz of a teapot*

if you're not allergic to pollen...👉🏻👈🏻 Spring wedding...hehe

[mokeonn]

Before I go to sleep I leave you all with this piece of advice: sometimes you don't actually have to answer big political questions, sometimes you can just say "I am not smart enough to know that, I just know the small things I do to help." Like you can often times completely avoid making a fool of yourself if you just say you don't know.

[goblin-social]

Ok chat, how should we do reblogs in Goblin?

Basically, I've been discussing with folks here and in discord about two possible options:

Option #1

See, by default, the parent project (firefish) uses two different buttons for 'normal reblogs' and 'quote reblogs'. The first option just reblogs a post straight away (after choosing which privacy level you want for the reblog) and the second open the editor to add a quote (like what we do here in tumblr every time we reblog):

Option #2

Then we have the option to just get rid of the 'straight reblog' button and use a single reblog button for both, as tumblr does: The editor is always opened so you can add extra content or tags, but if you reblog without adding anything, the result is the same than clicking on the first button in option #1:

For this particular case, we could also make it that if you click while pressing ctrl, for example, reblogs straight away without opening the editor.

So tumblr, talk! What would you prefer?

[pidgefudge]

maybe it's the winter past 4pm talking but. ive always been 100% that ill never make a fandom sideblog bc this is my space and i do what i want and if you want to follow me then you have to put up with all my bullshit but idk. maybe i should make a video game sideblog bc i feel like im just being annoying

[katvazamo]

i think the consensus of the watcher situation is that people would pay a subscription service but seeing the content as it is now they cant justify

[autism-purgatory]

Girl help people who’ve never written anything are saying it’s bigoted to give queer, disabled, or poc characters flaws and depth and that its just a watsonian excuse for the writer to be bigoted. Yes that CAN exist (like the “she looks 12 but is actually 1000 years old! Bullshit) but to say it’s bigoted for a character to make stupid decisions or be mean with in-universe explanations (not justifications, explanations) in the writing, then you’re just trying to enforce the Hays Code Tumblr 2012 edition.

[ellearts]

I've asked this question on insta and so I'll ask here aswell, since I'm very curious about people's opinion on this

Please reblog it for wider scale I'm very curious 🥺

[saturncoyote]

The talk of a sentient race being "domesticated" or being "selectively bred", like they're animals, is edging into a territory with uncomfortable narrative implications. I mean no ill will when saying this! It's just adding to it the idea that Creek betraying his own people because he has "obedience bred into him" seems.. I'm sure the other anon meant no harm in that statement, but comes off as a statement made from a place of ignorance about past historical propaganda in the real world alongside the rest stated. The Bergens throwing out grey trolls makes sense, but beyond that I'm not sure if it is only me that feels this is uncomfortable to hear. I hope this makes sense. I apologize if this comes off as rude in any way!

Oh no yeah you're 100% right and you SHOULD say it

I'm sure everyone here meant no harm whatsoever and is just exploring the possibilities of speculative biology but at the end of the day Trolls are still a sapient species that's like a pretty big deal

Really i thank you for sending this ask, if anything i should have noticed those implications sooner and i apologise

Again the "horror" of this speculative conversation should come from the fact that trolls are still, at the end of the day, just tiny people, and the fact that they were being kept for food is pretty fucked up for a children's movie, and that conversation should probably end at that

[dnpformsprings]

i’ve noticed a rise in people using “adhd people” and “adhders” and was wondering how common this was and how much of an issue it’s seen as across the adhd community !! hope the options make sense lol

rb for a wider sample size pretty please

[sunriseverse]

i know 7s probably pays their translators like shit since we’re not exactly, like, a vaunted profession, but god sometimes i long for the prestige (that exists only in my head) of having a real translation job with monetary benefits. instead of my realistic path which will be graduate -> find some job that i can handle working consistently -> do translation as a hobby if i have the time