#a real Trans Man Moment

[pidgefudge]

really feeling the lack of people like me irl. most of my friends are cis girls or fem enbies who just. don't get it. the few trans guys i DO know have very supportive families (one of them has been on t for years). like. what am i supposed to do with this. what am i supposed to do with my incredibly queerphobic parents and inability to cut my hair even though it kills me to look in the mirror and forced dress-wearing that makes me feel like shit all day.

[sunnist4rs]

I hate men because today after years of my brother mocking me whenever I talk about something I’m well informed on by saying I did no research I finally told him how much it upsets me. So straight after he brought up my male assault statistics and called them fake before leaving.

[blood-choke]

hiiii… i wanted to ask more about this particular val scene where mc and her talk about that portrait and mc is a bit stuck on the word husband and wants val to know theyre not a man. can i ask what inspired that type of convo? i wanted to know if it’s something you’ll touch up on again? is this underlying feelings mc had before their entombment… worried that val sees them as a man just because mc is masc? cause i know that’s kind of broader discussion in the lesbian community iirc….. was that why you wanted to incorporate it? this ask has so many questions LOL but basically i wanted to say i was intrigued and it did made me think more on those type of dynamics (thinking back to those resources you rb’d a while ago that go more into depth about diff things in the lesbian community)

oh boy get ready for another long-winded answer from me!

a lot of the feelings mc has about their gender are inspired by Leslie Feinberg's work (mainly Stone Butch Blues)

Feinberg was someone who lived & passed as a man for years of hir life, and wrote a lot about the complexities of hir gender and what it was like being a "gender outlaw."

there was actually a scene in particular from sbb that kinda put the kernel of an idea in my mind that led to this narrative of the mc feeling overshadowed by Standard and anxious about being perceived as a man. it's towards the end of the book when Jess (sbb's protagonist) meets Ruth (a trans woman that Jess falls in love with)

Jess offers to help Ruth carry groceries up to her apartment, and Ruth takes this the wrong way & is offended, partly because she thinks Jess is a man.

One Saturday afternoon I found her clutching two huge bags of groceries and fumbling with the downstairs front-door lock. I pulled out my key.

“Here, let me.” She didn’t say thank you. She hurried ahead of me on the stairs.

“Can I help you carry those?” I offered.

“Do I look weak to you?” she asked.

I stopped on the stairs. “No. Where I come from it’s just a sign of respect, that’s all.”

She continued up the stairs. “Well, where I come from,” she called out, “men don’t reward women for pretending to be helpless.” Once I heard her apartment door close I kicked the stair in anger and frustration.

later, after they get to know each other better, they have this interaction:

I laughed and picked at my salad. “Do you know if I’m a man or a woman?”

“No,” Ruth said. “That’s why I know so much about you.”

I sighed. “Did you think I was a man when you first met me?" She nodded. "Yes. At first I thought you were a straight man. Then I thought you were gay. It’s been a shock for me to realize that even I make assumptions about sex and gender that aren’t true. I thought I was liberated from all of that.”

I smiled. “I didn’t want you to think I was a man. I wanted you to see how much more complicated I am. I wanted you to like what you saw.”

i think the inspiration here is quite obvious, hahaha. i figure anyone that's read sbb can sense the similar through-line here in my work. though the conversation between mc and Valentina has a much different tone.

there's another scene later as well after something happens to Jess and she has to have her jaw wired shut. she's working at a new job and is unable to speak, and she's also passing as a man at this job. she overhears some of her female coworkers talking about her and they refer to her as a "creep" and speculate that she's always watching one of them. Jess overhears all of this and then walks out of the job, goes home and pulls the wires out of her mouth herself:

After I was sure I’d gotten the last piece of wire out of my gums, I rinsed my mouth with whiskey and then drank the rest of it so I could sleep without remembering how Marija’s words had stripped me of my humanity.

butches & gnc women still face this kind of dehumanization; compared or likened to men in a derogatory way, accused of being "heteropatriarchal," the predatory stereotype of the fat ugly lesbian, and on the other side they're also hypersexualized, especially online and in queer spaces. butchphobia is a specific kind of misogyny that hits from all sides, even from the people that are supposed to be a part of your community. and this attitude especially effects trans women and women of color, who are already experiencing all of these things due to transmisogyny and racism.

i also really wanted to use this to touch on the kind of gender essentialism that we see in a lot of these cis feminist discussions - to these women at this job, Jess had committed no real crime other than being quiet and being the “wrong” kind of man. something about this scene has always stuck with me and really bothered me, but it's hard to put into words; on one hand i can admit i have probably been one of those women who made some kind of similar remark about a man i barely knew, but i've also been someone on the receiving end, too, because of the way i look. the mc in blood choke is put into this box, but they can't fit in, as someone who has been on both sides and doesn't really understand where they belong because of it; how can she stand beside Valentina or Hana or Clear when they might see her as a perpetrator, someone who can't be trusted? how does this mindset harm both the women and the men of the council and everyone in between? how can we break this cycle?

one of the films i mentioned recently when talking about the character designs was The Same Difference, which is specifically about the Black lesbian community and the discrimination within that community based upon gender roles (though this is not something limited to just the Black lesbian community)

a lot of the women in that doc talk about the boxes they're put in as AG or stud lesbians - they can't have their hair long, they can't wear makeup, they can't do this or that, they have to be aggressive and hard or else they're not real studs. they discuss stud on stud (or butch4butch) and how other lesbians look down on those types of lesbians, as well as the disdain for bisexual women for "betraying" the community. it explores the way misogyny and the patriarchy still oppress these women and forces them into this restrictive gender role despite their refusal to adhere to the other role originally assigned to them, and the way racism specifically intersects and exacerbates it for Black lesbians. there's a stud that's an exotic dancer and wears a weave, and a lot of other studs have a problem with this because a weave is "a female thing." another section follows a pregnant stud, and how the community shuns her for that, because she "dresses like a man and acts like a man" so why is she getting pregnant when she should be "the man"?

mc doesn't remember how they felt before entombment, but waking up they feel this need to prove themselves - both in that they are hard and aggressive like a butch should be, but also in that they want to be this person for Valentina or Clear or Hana (or all of them) that is safe and comforting. but they aren't sure how to do that when the world perceives them as this one specific thing - as a husband, as Standard, as a man, specifically this man who hurt Valentina.

of course we've already seen this to not be true of the companions with the last chapter as the mc learns more and spends more time with everyone. but this is kind of the foundation of where this whole idea came from. it started with my novel & i chose vampires for that story & this one because there is a long history of lesbian vampirism (and also because it's sexy) but there's this "curse" that both Hana & Valerie talk about in their respective stories, the first one being the racism she's had to face, the transphobia, along with this alienation and perception of lesbians as predatory and conniving and aggressive, as vampires, which i just think really lends itself to expanding upon these issues lesbians & trans women face both in general and within the community.

anyways if you want to read more i suggest Stone Butch Blues, which you can get for free on Leslie Feinberg's website, as well as S/he, by Minnie Bruce Pratt, available on the internet archive, Gender Failure by Ivan E. Coyote & Rae Spoon also on the internet archive, and you can rent The Same Difference for $10 on vimeo.

[daeluin]

also not necessarily related with the last post but with the og, like uhmmmm i don't like going farther than calling a man babygirl/wife bc actual truthing about someone's identity is fucking weird

but. like. since others brought it up. it is weird how you can go around calling miss asian fetishism gway a woman like nbd all based on that time he wore drag & some comments about gender that were cringe even back then. but the second you say something like that about a nonwhite guy you got the gender police on your ass like..... uhmmmm wonder why.

[miodiodavinci]

(head in hands) man.

[gdsplicer]

Taking T at the beginning really is like that last scene in Finding Nemo when the fish in the bags all get to the ocean and one just goes "...now what? 😃"

[markiafc]

thai lesbian documentary visible silence 2015 was very good. but the bit where those middle-aged lovers start having a passive-aggressive argument on camera was really special. shout out to that long scene. loved them generally discussing the "don't ask, don't tell" policy - not being explicit about their relationship and keeping it on the down low - to a more personal reveal that one of the women would refer to her partner as "(best) friend who i love" instead of "girlfriend" because it doesn't feel like the right word + her feelings and their life together is more important than words.

to a controlled dispute of sorts where they start talking over the other and questioning repeatedly; "but do you actually think of me as your girlfriend? [...] it really means you don't fully accept it." and then hard cut to the woman who doesn't like the word "girlfriend" suddenly with a magazine, flipping through, and saying "at least i dare to take you out in public."

most of the documentary was one-on-one interviews with an unseen interviewer behind the camera, landscapes with voice-overs and the like. but this was the only sequence where the subject was collective and there's insight into a relationship as opposed to an individual. and that authenticity... these little moments where some organic emotion or some piece of their everyday selves seeps through. primary reason i love non-fiction films so much, i love that complicated realness.

[theophagie-remade]

I don't have much to say about Magne other than there was an Attempt, but. That time when Twice and Toga got angry with Overhaul for misgendering her was already indicative of what I'm going to get at in a sec, and obviously it was especially relevant because it was a direct show of respect and support from people who very clearly cared about her (and who called her big sis already as it was!!) (×2 imo because Twice was intentionally written to be the readers' insight into the LOV, and the character with whom they were supposed sympathise with the most at/since the beginning, so it's especially important that the first one who spoke up was him), but the story's progression (especially in recent years) is what most assures me that despite a rather poor execution (definitely not the best, but also certainly not the worst) Horikoshi did mean well with her. "People bound together by the chains of society always laugh at those who aren't" :(

[2pen2wildfire]

Y'all I was just vibing in Hot Topic earlier today when suddenly I find myself SEVERELY dysphoric, having an Autism Moment (derogatory), AND stuck in a cat shift. What the hell. Why did my brain do that to me.

[orcelito]

I dreamed last night that I came to the conclusion that I was a trans man & started transitioning

I also dreamed I made a giant ground beef dish with a million spices and vegetables and also added ramen noodles to it. So really I was just living it up in my dream apparently

[jesuisgourde]

listen listen listen i am reading Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton right now and i am halfway through and it is so fucking good like so so fucking good. please read it, it's so amazing. it's a novel about being an obsessive fan of a band (in this case, a fictionalized version of the beach boys) and also a novel about being trans and also a novel about alienation/loneliness and the ways in which transness exacerbates that rut but also how to get out of it and it's so fucking good.

it was pitched to me as a novel that asks "what if brian wilson of the beach boys was actually a trans woman?" and i was basically sold at that but it's so much more than that because it's that question from the point of view of a trans woman who's an obsessive fan of this fictional band with a long lost final album and it's told through letters she's writing to the leader of the band sort of dear mr henshaw-style recounting the story of the band and then also her own life and her desire to find the band leader who vanished from public eye after the band broke up and the fact that it becomes an actual possibility when the leader's granddaughter shows up at her workplace by chance one day.

anyway i'm not doing it justice just read it, it's so good.

[sammygender]

me when my dad is actually like weirdly supportive abt the trans thing (to an extent) and weirdly open to learning abt it and all it takes is… me directly communicating it! who the hell would have thunk

[5a-alf]

I am now unable to sing real men by mitski as testosterone lowered my voice

Poetic irony

[chisatowo]

Watching videos essays abt political stuff is fun except for the fact that it's abt real life and it's not fun

[postmortemmen]

Immediately opening tiktok to pointless queer discourse while coming down from psychedelics is a surreal experience

[apparentlysimon]

for years, even before I knew I was a man, I always noticed something the men around me would do. every time they told a joke and I laughed, they would keep it going for as long as humanly possible. I have always struggled with my masculinity, but one day I caught myself telling a joke over and over and over again to my best friend, desperately trying to extend it further and further to keep hearing them laugh because I loved them and the way it sounded. when I noticed what I was doing, it felt like something clicked. I wanted to thank all the men and boys before me who made me laugh, then helped me become a man.

You know that Ada Limón poem where she’s like “i can’t help it i love the way men love”? my dad recently confessed to me that he became a shoemaker because they buried my grandma shoeless

oh…………………………………