#also despite me mentioning gender dysphoria they kept writing she and even mentioned female gender as a thing that made me less of a risk???

[saintedbythestorm]

Just realised I only got 11 more days of meds... and I still haven't gotten a day to go to the doctor for the follow up...

[sunbunnyyy]

So I just saw your tags on the Mo Xuanyu art I reblogged - please talk Mo Xuanyu headcanons to me!

(I saw fanart with him and Jgy the other day and I'm like actual Mo Xuanyu is not explored enough. I need more of him)

Thank you ♡

hello friend!!! sorry I’m getting to this after so many days have passed—obligatory work life etc commitments that left me drained and not ready to answer!

I’ll list my biggest headcanons—I’ll admit that I haven’t explored him as much as I’d like, but these are the things I take into every scenario regarding him!

1. Mo Xuanyu is trans!

There’s something a little bit tragic to me about the way gender is handled in Ye Olde Ancient Societies. As much as I love what The Untamed did as far as removing some of the perceived gender biases of MDZS (such as female cultivators being Kept Apart in Cloud Recesses and showing us maybe?? one? female sect leader?) I do love playing around with two types of characters—those I can shoot with my “trans laser beam,” and tragic ones.

My specific headcanon for Mo Xuanyu (which gets explained in wi3!) is that his mother was told if her child was a girl, she would not be acknowledged and Second Madam Mo would be cast aside. Knowing what that would mean not only for herself but for her child, she raised Mo Xuanyu as a boy, and it wasn’t discovered until much later by a certain Jin that the truth was revealed. For his part, Mo Xuanyu never felt like a girl, and never wanted to portray himself as one.

I think Mo Xuanyu being trans also adds a fun little layer of struggle to Wei Wuxian’s return—he went from a cis man to a trans man and suddenly has to deal with that dysphoria, too.

2. Mo Xuanyu is a little crazy, but not the way he’s described in the books.

This is another thing that comes up in wi3–Mo Xuanyu’s mental health vs. his intelligence!

While Mo Xuanyu never thought twice about being a boy, it sure doesn’t change the dysphoria of being told you’re something that your body doesn’t reflect! Not only that, but the poor treatment from the Mo family against him and his mother that I can’t believe didn’t happen in the ten years between when Jin Guangshan abandoned him and when he brought Mo Xuanyu to Carp Tower? During such formative years, it’s not a wonder to me that Mo Xuanyu’s not quite all there.

(I resonate a little with this headcanon. Okay, I resonate with this headcanon a lot, actually.)

But! I don’t think Mo Xuanyu’s unintelligent. The opposite, actually—I think he’s very intelligent, although not quite as smart and calculating as our boy Jin Guangyao. Because of the treatment at the hands of the Mo family, I don’t think Mo Xuanyu’s mother was healthy enough to have as much of a hand in Mo Xuanyu’s life as Meng Shi did with Jin Guangyao, but he was a young master of an affluential family who were under the belief that Jin Guangshan could, at any point, come back and claim Mo Xuanyu like he said he would. They would’ve given him at least some education, because it wouldn’t have reflected well on them had they not. And, given that they were an affluential family—they have a Manor and a Village, after all—they likely could’ve afforded much better learning materials than Meng Shi (who did her best!).

3. The Incest.

The allegations that Mo Xuanyu came into Jin Guangyao and whether or not they’re true are such an interesting thing to play around with in my brain.

I think this aspect for me will vary greatly depending on what I’m writing. They may be true in one fic, or completely fabricated in another. Or maybe they’re only slightly true! As mentioned previously, Mo Xuanyu isn’t quite in full control of his cognitive thought processes. I’m not sure if I read it as a headcanon or part of canon or one of mxtx’s interviews or even a different fanfic or the wiki, but I read somewhere that Jin Guangyao was actually quite kind to his half brother, despite the pointed way with which Jin Guangshan brought him around as a way to bully Jin Guangyao. I think that would have a very lasting effect on Mo Xuanyu, who likely only saw kindness from his mother by that point in his life.

Whether or not Jin Guangyao takes advantage of it… 🤷‍♂️ again, varies on the fic I’m writing, I think!

These are my big three at the moment. I’d love to hear any that you or anyone else might have! I really want to write a modern fic and it’d be fun to have Mo Xuanyu in there being the annoying younger brother to Jin Zixuan and Meng Yao* he deserved to be.

[thefudge]

Just out of curiosity, did you read JK's essay? I don't support everything in it but many parts resonated with me. Not to mention the horrific online abuse hurled at her, especially the countless, countless "choke on my dick" phrases thrown at her which are so violently misogynistic, it left me with a deep seated feeling of not only discomfort but fear as well. Idk I guess I just felt safe sending this because your blog seems more open to discussion from the other side instead of instant cancel.

i’m glad you think so about this blog and i hope that remains the case.

i didn’t have a chance to read JK’s essay until today (my previous ask about her was written before that) but here are some very, very imperfect thoughts on it:

the essay confirmed my previous take that she has inoculated herself against certain outside arguments but it’s also made me wonder about JK’s understanding of gender and sex. She is very attached to “natal women” and calling all people who menstruate “women” because of “common experiences”, despite the fact that her beloved de Beauvoir, whom she quotes in the essay extensively, acknowledged that “woman” is a social construct. JK herself at one point complains about having to comply with the rules of femininity while growing up and how it made her want to stop being female, so what is the truth? She argues that young girls shouldn’t be thinking about transitioning just because they are made to hate their femaleness but that’s!!! exactly what!!! pushing the term “woman” as sacrosanct does to girls!!! most of what JK felt in her childhood was the kind of misogyny which connects women strictly to their uterus. it made being male a better alternative precisely because of the gate-keeping of penis/vagina. a young girl who acted like a tomboy, for instance, would be criticized for trying to deny her sex, because deep down her biology still made her a “woman”. both sex and gender cannot be divorced from socio-cultural realities, because we act with our bodies and embody what we act. so, if we expand what it means to be a “man” and a “woman”, we liberate, not confine. JK wants young people to feel free to be whoever they want to be, but they must be called “women” when discussing menstruation or else (i won’t even go into the obvious addition that many cis and trans women exist who cannot or no longer menstruate).

Now, she does bring up some fair points about cancel culture and freedom of expression that I will level with, but the problem is that the nuancing she is trying to achieve also serves as weirdly specific dog-whistling. So let me address that:

(warning: spoilers for the Cormoran Strike series)

Right off the bat, we have this explanation added in her intro: 

“On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself (...)”  

and already, i’m asking questions. how is Robin Ellacott, one of the protagonists of the Strike series, “affected" by these issues, personally? she’s “of an age” to...what? be gender critical? there’s not a lot of that in the novels (unless you count Robin being tall and knowing how to drive well being framed as anti-girly...).  How does crime relate to it? How is she connected to this really? 

the real connection JK wants us to see because she’ll reveal it later in the essay is that Robin was r*ped in college. she’s a sexual assault survivor, which must make her critically engaged with the fate of trans women because....because underneath JK’s empty statement about her female detective....is the correlation that men “disguised” as trans women can perpetrate the same sort of horrific abuse.  she keeps making this correlation throughout the essay.

Here she talks about various people who’ve reached out to her:

They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.

And again here:

“So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”

This one is my favorite because it’s so twisted (here she’s listing her charity work):

“The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.”

“safeguarding”

hmmmm

What JK wants to spell out with these “common sense” arguments is that she fears that trans women are predatory, and the most convincing argument she can bring, ultimately, is that she herself has been the victim of sexual abuse and therefore, that potential fear never goes away. That’s a very dangerous leap to make. The climate of “fear” she mentions is also connected to cancel culture, of course. She fears women won’t be able to express their opinions online without receiving various amounts of vitriol. But you see how she has merged all three issues together? So that if you agree with one, you must agree with the others. Because yes, cancel culture often goes too far, and yes it is a real issue, but to say that the trans community shutting her down foments the same atmosphere of “fear” as boogie trans women hurting children in bathrooms and her being abused by her cis husband… that’s a veeery slippery slope. Instead of sticking to “freedom of speech” and whatnot, she keeps correlating these issues that should not be correlated (some of them being false issues, as well).  

Is there too much opprobrium around discussions of trans identity? Yes. Are there worthy discussions to be had about young women, homophobia and gender dysphoria? Absolutely. Can being trans become a fashionable trend/identity among kids, like the bygone goth and emo labels? Sure, but these discussions shouldn’t be had at the expense of trans people who have to constantly prove that they “mean” it. Because by stringing up all these issues together, JK is saying “the kids don’t know any better, and the adults are faking it”. Yes, cancel culture is impeding dialogue, yes, we shouldn’t shy away from discussing young teens’ identity problems, but if you pile up all of these things in a giant “trans women are the problem and they might be predatory too” milkshake, you won’t get anywhere.

I want to come back to this quote:

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

Beyond the (in my opinion) not very tasteful enumeration of things she’s done to help, JK’s mention of “education” there is veeery interesting. On the one hand, she probably feels that schools will try to censor “free speech”, but on the other hand, I bet she’s also concerned schools will not do enough censoring, so that impressionable kids become pressured into adopting a trans identity. You see how it flips on a dime? What does she ultimately want children to learn about this? Does she want them to be kept in the dark completely? Does she want them to be allowed to critique or invalidate trans identities without being censored? On this second point, things get complicated. Schools and institutions will naturally censor free speech.  Kids are there to learn how to express that free speech; they will be told “hey, don’t say that to your colleague, it’s not very kind” or “you need to structure your argument appropriately instead of just saying “I don’t like it””. Is there room for criticism in how schools operate that benevolent censorship? Obviously. Hell, Foucault & co. have been talking about this for decades. So what does this argument about education ultimately mean? What are we protecting the kids from? Imo, it goes back to that covert argument about sexual violence.    

Since I’m a teacher too, I’ll talk about my own experience: I brought some texts to my undergrad class about the trans experience with the goal of 1) building empathy, because literature is the grand unifier of experience and 2) showing different literary perspectives which i also included within literary theory. ultimately, the trans experience is about being human. we were learning about being human, nothing more, nothing less. if younger kids end up treating it as a fad it means that a) they need more, not less education,  b) parents and schools should work together to make them understand that being trans is not the same as being “emo”, for instance. this partially resembles the trend of white kids adopting black culture just because it’s cool, but not actually engaging with the black experience. who do you sanction for this? black people? because in this analogy, the trans community should be responsible for children not benefiting from education and parental support.

oh, I know what JK is saying. the trans community is responsible for shutting down conversations about this. it’s part of the general climate of tiptoeing around trans issues. yes, here I can agree with her that Twitter discourse either helps build sympathy or loathing for the “cancelled” person instead of seriously grappling with what that person has done. it’s the nature of Twitter and I hate it, but to go from that to saying women and young girls are in danger from other “fake” women really undermines her own argument. There are normal pitfalls as we try to incrementally do some good in this world. Cancel culture and the deplatforming and ruining of lives of certain individuals will not promote the cause and is certainly to be frowned upon, but JK will be absolutely fine. there are hashtags right now like “istandwithJK” and there’s a slew of people who support her. the misogyny she faces is deplorable, but we shouldn’t conflate valid criticism with trollish vulgarities. I don’t want to minimize the dangers of online culture; I know people have lost jobs and livelihood, but that is a discussion to be had under different parameters, admitting the responsibility of both parties (for example, maya forstater realizing that maybe saying some hurtful things about public figures and proudly talking about the “delusion” of transwomen will come back to bite her in the ass) and the fact that under capitalism, your job is always at the whim of appearances and simulacrums. essentially, you are the job. this is a state of things that deserves a larger discussion not on the back of the trans community. should we live in a world where you are allowed to say anything, free of consequences? some of us do, because we can say whatever we want in our head, in our room, in our house (other ppl aren’t so lucky), but the trouble starts in the public sphere. even if we wanted to build a public sphere where everything goes, we’d be at each other’s throats in five seconds anyway because we’re human. the most we can do is educate and correct where we can.  “facts don’t care about your feelings” discourse is often not informed by facts at all and forgets the vital importance of feelings.

anyway, that’s my incomplete take. still lots to think about and debate. ultimately, i think any fair points JK brought up were tainted by other bad-faith arguments and i wish she’d use this time to self-reflect because this isn’t a topic that should be breezed past in 3k words. nor should young trans ppl be called “adorable” (facepalm). i myself have many questions and constantly grapple with all of this, but since she’s a writer (and for better or worse, i still like her books), she is in a perfect position to investigate the matter with kindness and stop giving ultimatums. and i hope this post fosters discussion and doesn’t shut anyone down.

( forgot to mention that other nifty subplot in the Strike series about these really unlikable kids who are transabled and experience BID ( Body integrity dysphoria)  and want to have a disability. Strike is super-offended by them since he’s genuinely disabled and we as readers are meant to think they’re real pieces of shit, and while transableism is suuuuper complicated and my thoughts on it vary wildly, i do think those BID kids also stand in for other folks in her mind..again, food for thought.)

[femslashrevolution]

"Writing Yourself by Accident" by Recourse

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

[TW for dysphoria, depression, mentions of suicide and abuse]

The funny thing about the prompt “I Am Femslash,” to me, is how unnervingly accurate it is.

I started writing femslash around the same time I started taking writing seriously in general. I’d always wanted to be a writer, but found myself having trouble in developing the kind of long-form novels that I’d always wanted to do. As I started to actively work on my writing and putting out my first hundred thousand words or so, I somehow stumbled into writing Fallout: New Vegas fanfiction. I had an idea for my Courier, who she was, what her plans post-game were, who she loved, and was mildly pissed that Cass, the obvious choice for her, wasn’t available. So I started a little something.

I’d always played my main characters in western RPGs as women, and gay women at that. When I first picked up KOTOR, that was really when I should’ve known, as I just…selected the female option, because it felt right. And later I downloaded a mod to make the lady love interest bi.

This trend continued in my New Vegas fic, and this is where you start to see where I actually am my work, even when I didn’t know it at the time. I wrote Courier Six as a woman with deep-seated intimacy issues, who hated what the world had done to her body and despite loving other women found it difficult to make real connections with them because she hated being vulnerable. Funny how all that turned out to be me, too, dealing with dysphoria and self-hatred and the influence of toxic masculinity.

But I didn’t know this, at the time. I didn’t think I was writing me. I was writing a fucked-up woman, an interesting character to me. Definitely not relatable, I’m just a normal straight guy, right?

I was sixteen and in deep denial.

As I moved through high school, and then college, I kept writing femslash in the background. I felt ashamed of it. I didn’t do anything to separate it from my main online identity, but I never talked about it on my Tumblr (which gained a fair amount of popularity for my gifmaking stuff and feminist ranting) and I thought it was somehow a black mark against me. Despite the fact that I didn’t write smut at the time, I still thought somehow I was being that cringe-inducing straight person who writes gay stuff about the opposite gender as a fetish. It was just something I did, almost as a compulsion, when I couldn’t manage to pull together the inspiration to do my original work. It came so easy to me.

It never became terribly popular; partly because I was posting on FF.net instead of AO3, and partly because I almost exclusively wrote for dead fandoms. I didn’t mind. They were things I put out for myself, to excise my own persistent ideas of what should have happened in this, that, or the other thing. I didn’t even realize how I was expressing myself; how writing Commander Shepard as a sixteen-year-old girl convinced she’s ugly and worthless, suffering from mental illness and suicidal thoughts, was actually cathartic for me. To me it was just something I was doing, adding depth to characters who didn’t have it in the base game. The fact that I too felt ugly and had suicidal impulses was just a coincidence.

I also came to find that I just couldn’t write straight romance to save my life. I found it weird and alien, like I just didn’t understand how a man and a woman could even be attracted to each other, despite having a goddamn girlfriend (and a great one at that.) I started writing erotica as an experiment, and couldn’t even fathom writing it for straight characters or couples. It just didn’t interest me, and the idea of doing it actively disgusted me. So femslash it remained, constantly questioned, like I was dirty or disgusting or broken for writing it.

I put out my first public, smutty fic the same year that a friend committed suicide. I threw it up on AO3 under an alternate account, a different persona called Recourse, with no ties to anything beyond AO3. It’s pretty twisted, featuring (surprise!) a main character with deep intimacy issues and a strong dislike of being touched. I wrote this as stemming from trauma, but I already knew I was suffering from massive dysphoria in that area (and my girlfriend had figured it out herself by this point) and I was starting to get why I kept writing people like this. Why all my protagonists had mental scarring and intrusive thoughts and suppressed urges. Why they were all women, and why they all loved women, even if they didn’t want to.

I got closer and closer to working myself into my stories. My first halfway emotional work for Life Is Strange, the fandom I’m now known for, dealt with grief for a lost friend in a way I couldn’t in real life. I still pulled back on that work, though, thinking I needed to please an imaginary audience, not go too dark, not go too deep. They’re here for the smut, right?

It was when I finally threw away my inhibitions that I started to actually understand myself. I wrote a story that was explicitly about mental illness, about fears of abandonment, about suicidal urges. It was called Pedestal. Sure, I included a little smut, but once that work was finished, I realized that all the real attention from people was focused on exactly the stuff I feared would put people off. People connected to Chloe’s depression, her fears and anxieties. They thanked me, wanted to talk to me more.

I put she/her on the profile page.

I set up a blog for that persona. Didn’t post anything, just created it. Then I set to work on something else.

My friends, including my girlfriend, had been subject to massive abuse in 2015 (and before.) I was obsessed with the subject. And I was still grieving, still screwed up about how to grieve for someone I still have very complicated feelings about. So I wrote a story called Little Blue Pills, all about a spiral of self-hate and grief resulting in abuse and a suicide attempt. I tried to cap it off with something hopeful, and the strange response to that ending made me break down publicly on the blog. Writing parts of it had already given me anxiety attacks, and now I was struck with a feeling of imposter’s syndrome, like I shouldn’t have written this, like I should just be dead.

Someone followed me on that blog. I started talking to her. I found out we were both closeted trans women, and through the act of sharing my experiences with her, I started to make them make sense.

And I kept writing, and kept writing, and kept writing. I found more and more friends, more and more people who connected with my work, because I was finally being honest about where it all came from and it shone through clearly in the authenticity of my work. And the more honest with myself I was, the more I wanted to be honest to the world.

I showed my girlfriend the account, the stories I’d written. I admitted that I’d become certain in my identity as a result of them. (Turned out later she’d found my first story a long time ago, but she kept quiet and waited for me to be ready, bless her.) With her following me, and my new circle of friends, I became more and more confident. I lost a bunch of weight. I chose a name. I started laser treatments. I got a prescription for HRT. I came out in November, went full-time, and I’ve never been happier.

Without femslash, without this outlet, I literally wouldn’t be who I am today. I might still be in the closet had I not met the people I have, processed my emotions through this medium. I might be dead. It is through the sapphic community surrounding Life Is Strange that I’ve come into myself. Thank you to all the authors and artists out there who showed me I’m not alone. I am femslash, I am part of this world, and I couldn’t be happier.

  About The Author

I’m Mogatrat, or Recourse, or Gloria, a 23-year-old trans woman from Colorado. I write largely for Life Is Strange, but have dabbled in various other places.

Where to find my writing: http://archiveofourown.org/users/Recourse/works and http://archiveofourown.org/users/Mogatrat/works

Main Public Blog: http://mogatrat.tumblr.com

Unlisted sideblog for LiS and writing: http://recourse-ao3.tumblr.com/