#I'm just imagining her on a farm for therapy and she's just stuck on this tractor with no idea where the breaks are

[tincansamurai]

a long post about my exp figuring out gender

i'm seriously so glad that it's so easy to find information about gender these days. just knowing certain things are possible is so important to figuring out who you are.

when i was like 11 and becoming a Junior Poster, even with all the lurking i did i only saw people talk about trans women. of course, this was because people are fucking horrible and love to make fun of trans women. i liked to read webcomics and therefore also read people talking about webcomics and webcomic drama. there was this one woman who got shit on all the time. her webcomic was bad, that's true, but there was also a lot of precursor-kiwi-farms type shit about her personal life and her other website about being trans. people were accusing her of being a groomer (wow! things sure have changed!) because she had a quiz up for boys to take to see if they were trans. for some reason who knows why i was really fascinated by this and read a lot of drama about other gender-y webcomics, and of course i took that quiz. the result was essentially "you're not trans, you're a regular boy." i didn't really know that you could be trans in a way other than being transfem, so i just kinda shrugged and went "ok, i'm not trans". like, i wasn't stupid, and even the tg fetish webcomics everyone liked to laugh at included women turning into men sometimes. but no one talked about those fictional moments with the same terms, and i didn't have any examples of real life people, so i guess i assumed that transmasculinity was a separate, theoretical thing. and if it was only theoretical it couldn't apply to me, of course.

then when i was around 13 or 14 i was reading tab's khaos komix and when a gay trans dude was introduced i kind of broke. like, wait, you can be trans in that direction, for real? wait, you can be trans AND gay?? two big parts of why it was obvious i wasn't trans crashed around me and i absolutely had a crisis about it. entirely internal, of course, because i knew how much everyone hated trans women. and if they thought being a trans woman was stupid and fake, there was no way this new (to me) thing would be well received either. i can perfectly picture standing in the shower, staring at the faucet handle, completely still - or more like stuck, and thinking "i'm a gay man". without qualifiers and everything, no "i think" or "i might be", like i 100% came to that conclusion. it made sense.

i talked myself out of it because it was terrifying. some of the stuff i used to talk myself out of it turned out to not be signs i wasn't trans, but signs i wasn't binary, but i wouldn't know that existed for even longer. plus i had mentally shock therapied myself hard enough that when i did find out you could be nonbinary, i avoided learning more. honestly thank god for tumblr and patient art school mutuals, who have probably (more like hopefully) completely forgotten me arguing with them about how nonbinary identities don't make sense, lol. sorry for being a dickhead. but thanks to this space i couldn't avoid exposure anymore, and that was really good for me. i can't even imagine how miserable i would be. actually that's a lie, i can picture it pretty easily lol.

anyway the fact that kids can get online and learn about just about any kind of gender anybody has ever thought of, and find real people talking about their experiences, and form or join any kind of community about those shared experiences is so so good. meeting nonbinary kids makes me so fucking happy. i'm so glad that it's at least a little easier to figure out who you are these days.

[starfleetwitch]

Listen lads. Yes I have a temperature. Yes I'm drowsy. And yes! YES I'm board af. But I'm sorry, the idea of Zoe Evans trying to stop a run away tractor is the funniest fucking thing to me right now. If this is the admission that proves my insanity I want it to be known that @iordio put the thought in my head and I've been crying ever since.