#and I love how the trans and nb community has connected with it I think that's so special and amazing

[man-down-in-hatchet-town]

One of my favorite things about actually joining the Starkid fandom after so many years of loving Starkid but not being a part of the community is seeing how much love and enthusiasm for Starship is still out there. Like, ya'll really love the silly alien-bug-Little-Mermaid musical I was obsessed with twelve whole years ago and it warms my heart so much <3

[thedrarrylibrarian]

Several people have been kind enough to let me publish their thoughts on fandom, community, and queerness to celebrate Pride in the Library. Today's piece comes from @lqtraintracks.

I got into fandom a long, long time ago, way back before I found HP in 2012. My early days in another fandom (days meaning years) are not a time I want to revisit, even though it started out really good. I got to explore my sexuality for the very first time there. I met my first gf there. And those things were beautiful, for sure; they were just short-lived. After a couple of years, I met an abuser, and from then on my fandom life was predetermined by them—what I could and couldn’t read, could and couldn’t write, who I could and couldn’t form friendships with, etc. And even in the midst of that, there were those friendships that bolstered me. @elrhiarhodan, I’m looking at you.

But after 13 ½ years of that… I found HP. And I found a wonderful person who would change my life. I met Shelly / @unmistakablyoatmeal. For the first time in a very long time, I saw someone writing queerly and freely, who, far from being limited to one pairing for life, was writing all kinds of pairings (and threesomes), dynamics, and stories! I was so powerfully drawn to that freedom, and to her, and in no small way, she and this fandom are why I survived, and how I escaped and started to change my life and reclaim it as my own. 

I’ve met so many wonderful people here, many of whom have become close friends, my best friends. I’ve been writing all the queer smut my little queer heart has desired for many years now, and it’s been beyond amazing.

But something changed for us a few years ago, and our community hasn’t been the same since. The person who wrote the canon turned on us. She revealed herself to be all kinds of monstrous. 

There were clues, of course—the antisemitism inherent in her Goblins, the fat phobia, the queer baiting without any actual rep, the racism and ignorance shown in naming Cho Chang, etc. We knew but maybe we didn’t want to know. And being white and not Jewish, I lived under an umbrella of privilege that meant I didn’t have to see it until other people began pointing these things out to me.

But then the transphobia started. And kept going. And it became her platform. And it got worse, and worse, and fucking worse

As painful and horrific as that has been, it seems to have done what that sort of vile bigotry has always done though: It’s shown us that we are and will always be stronger, wiser, more loving, and ultimately undefeatable. I’ll speak for myself: I wasn’t writing trans characters before. I was afraid I’d get it wrong. JKR’s evil bullshit is what pushed me to get over myself. 

This fandom is where I have learned the most about the queer community I love. It’s where I’ve truly learned to write. And it’s where I’ve learned about facets of queer life I’d never connected to properly before out of the fear of trying. 

Here’s what I’ve learned: Bloody no one comes together like we do! No one supports one another like we do! We’ve forged a stronger bond because of some terf’s hate, and I feel closer to my fellow queer creators than ever.

This fandom, you beautiful people, have taught me so much, continue to teach me so much. I’m honored to share this space with you. Happy Pride to all you gorgeous people being your trans, nb, fluid, ace, bi, pan, poly, intersex, queer, powerful selves.  Thank you from the bottom of my little queer heart. I love you.

Thank you, LQ, for joining me in the Library. I love your declaration of fandom as ours, and the recognition that we are a stronger community because of what we've overcome. Thank you for celebrating Pride in the Library with me.

If you want more @lqtraintracks be sure to check out their work on AO3! I just finished reading her Phoenix in the Fire and I was hooked the whole time! I couldn't stop until I'd devoured the whole thing. I think you'll be just as hooked as I was. I also want to throw in how much I loved A Strapping Young Man - I loved reading about Harry's desire for Draco, and how Harry's desire is bolstered by Draco's confidence.

🏳️‍🌈 Lots of Love and Happy Pride! 🏳️‍🌈

[confusedraven1]

how fucking cool is it that “bonafacia” seems to truly “die” as soon as jackie says “adios, bonafacia” and burns the wanted poster with her cigar? obviously, it’s meant to show jackie’s satisfaction with fulfilling revenge but it’s also at the point when jim’s truth is revealed and is no longer in hiding. the next episode plays out with them struggling to know who they are and they end up deciding that they like who they’ve found themselves to be with the crew of the revenge, and so they directs them to “just keep calling me jim.”

nana saw jim’s “divine purpose” as bonafacia’s, hence the deadnaming despite using correct pronouns and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) let it go. it shows how well meaning nana is but still gets it really fucking wrong due to her own stubbornness. because of all of this, i think jim feels a bit hopeless up until they go find their tree. a big chunk of their life seems to be over and they seem a little lost. then olu comes and literally “finds” them, and they share their family’s land with him. olu says he can be their family and it reignites that hope in them.

when they say “nana’s right, i have to finish the job. not for her, for me,” it didn’t make sense to me for them to refer to nana, cause, altho they care for people, they are not a people pleaser & clearly didn’t do exactly what she wanted in the first place, so it makes more sense that they’re referring to bonafacia.

alfeo de la vaca was bonafacia’s kill, but, like olu says to stede: “when you kill, a part of you dies as well.” that act killed bonafacia in the crossfire and allowed jim the space to grow and become more of themself. this i think is a sign of their “growing up.” they killed the man that killed their father in front of them as a young child, almost out of a sort of childish, tunnel-visioned vengeance that was only exacerbated and manipulated by nana & her own anger. they now realize they aren’t the only person impacted by the siete gallos, and that they have more sins to answer for than what they did to the jimenez family. you have to dismantle the entire system, not just a figurehead. (“god’s not a fan”)

nana looks sad when she asks olu “where’s bonafacia?” probably realizing her mistakes & knowing her last words to them were “you’re such a disappointment.” it really drives the nail in the metaphorical coffin when olu responds with “gone,” because, really, bonafacia has been gone for a long time. he continues, saying, “they said they’re to finish the job.” i think that’s when it finally hits nana that they aren’t the same person anymore, hence the grief rather than joy/relief.

“siento, mijo. la vida es dolor” is more than a simple apology to olu…it’s an apology to both bonafacia AND jim: an apology for raising them the way she did, and the pain that caused them, & for inadvertently pushing them away when they needed her. she recognizes the strong connection between them and olu & trusts him to pass the message along.

we don’t see jim kill anyone on screen throughout the season and jackie spares them by killing geraldo herself, then tells them to move on. they do decide to let go and, after we’ve seen them pull back the bitter, protective layers of themself (like an orange) we see all the sweetness they’ve harbored inside that we’ve only caught glimpses of before: going back to the revenge, back to olu, allowing themself to love him, whole heartedly agreeing to a talent show, etc.

i am so so excited to see how we’ll get to see jims growth in s2 🍊

(i’m sure a lot of this stuff was probably obvious to a lot of people, especially the trans/nb community, but it’s such fucking good characterization and i love it. i’m continually blown away by the insane subtle details they put into this show 🖤)

[intersex-support]

recently found out I was intersex. prior to this identified as nb and feeling kinda bad and weird about the whole thing because it really feels like I'm just a stereotype, yanno? like. I know tons of intersex people are cis and conflating intersex and nonbinary is a dyadic misconception but whew. I feel like the reaction I would get from people is like "well of course you would be nb and intersex" so I haven't told anyone 😬 sorry this is more of a vent than anything 🥲

Hey anon <3

You're totally allowed to vent here. Dealing with other people's expectations and stereotypes is so difficult. And it sucks when we have to deal with so much misinfo and are often the first intersex person that dyadic people have ever met. I'm sorry that you've been having to deal with these uncomfortable feelings while you've been figuring out that you're intersex. You deserve to exist fully as yourself, no matter what anyone says.

I absolutely love intersex nonbinary people--I think we all are so cool and honestly have the most interesting relationships with our gender. Like, even within being nonbinary, every intersex person I know has their own unique interpretation of what that means and how that connects to our intersex identity. And I know so many intersex people who are trans but not nonbinary, or are cis, or are intersex-specific genders, and there's really just so much diversity in our community. Anyone who's dismissive of you being intersex and nonbinary is honestly just a fucking asshole, and like, as intersex people, it is not our responsibility to deal with the ridiculous assumptions and stereotypes that dyadic people create. People should be able to respect that your identity is complex and that it's not like you just automatically became nonbinary because you're also intersex.

Sending love and solidarity your way, and I hope that if you do choose to share that you're intersex with people that they react in a supportive and accepting way.

-Mod E

[nothorses]

I hope it’s okay that I just lowkey vent, I’m not requiring actual mental or emotional labor from you, but if you or your followers have any opinions, I’m open to them.

I’ve been out for like a decade, and at first ftm mlm spaces were a refuge for me. Cis gay male spaces can be really really toxic with their body requirements and their judgement of gnc men and their enforcement of a binary between masc emotionally unavailable tops and sensitive unreasonable demanding twink bottoms and their hookup culture and just everything. Not to mention that jokes about vulvas and breasts being disgusting are EVERYWHERE.

But in trans mlm spaces the vibe was so accepting. I felt really comfortable and understood. I could go up to a trans mlm guy and know we more or less had similar identities. We could commiserate about binders and the limitations of phalloplasty and how weird it could be to try and fit in with cis gay men. Talk about learning to love ourselves and the more ‘gross’ changes that came with HRT and how it gave us a flat ass and zero waist definition. It felt like there was a massive sense of camaraderie and mutual understanding based on us all being men who loved men?

And over the past decade I’ve seen the community turn more and more to include nb people. I respect nb identities and I think they deserve support and respect as members of the trans community (when they identify with the term and all) etc etc, but now I feel like I can’t get away from nb identities in trans mlm spaces? Like… I feel like almost everyone identifies as a nonbinary trans man or a trans masc enby. The communities are filled with jokes about wanting to destroy gender and how gender isn’t real or is meaningless. Inside jokes about how people will be called he him but they’re not a man but you can call them a boy or a boy girl girl boy. Or their gender is a werewolf cryptid boyfriend. Or how their gender is just Gay and they aren’t male outside of loving other men.

This sounds like I’m complaining about Those Damn En Bee Trenders, but I genuinely am happy for them. I’m really glad that they’re learning to be comfortable and love themselves and connect with others like them, but it makes me feel really lost. Every post is geared to include them in a way that makes them alienating to me. Nothing feels like it has the feeling of simply being a man who likes other men, and all of the gross sweaty oily hairy jockstraps getting caught in your newly grown leg hair moments or whatever. Everyone is a picture perfect hairless vampire bf in expensive lingerie, and again I’m undesirable and unloveable.

It’s started to make me reflexively really bitter about nb trans mascs. I don’t want to be a bitter transmed or something. I want to love the community and not quietly be an awful seething hateful person. I feel like I’m a bad person nowdays. I never attack nb men, but I just… feel so angry that they’re always mlm AND nblm AND nblnb spaces now, and there’s nowhere to go to get away and just see the niche content that makes me feel seen and supported anymore.

How do I stop being a toxic nbphobe? Feel free to roast me or call me problematic or point out what an idiot I am, because I KNOW I’m awful and I sound awful. I just don’t know how to stop.

I hope it’s okay I sent this to you. I just feel like you’re a levelheaded person who would care and. Yeah.

I think what you're feeling is pretty natural, actually. I don't mean that it's Good or Reasonable, or that nonbinary folks are actually doing anything wrong- because they're not! And I think both of us understand that here; it's a good thing that transmasc spaces are broadening to include more people, that our community is growing, and that there are more and more ways to be transmasc & be accepted for who you are.

It is hard, though, to feel like the spaces you had to be who you are are being narrowed down to nothing; and it's normal to feel some reflexive resentment in response to that.

I think there's a valid point here, too, that some of this is probably coming from internalized transandrophobia. A lot of folks are exploring their identities without really unpacking the ideas they hold that have prevented them from doing so in the past, and finding these middle grounds where they can be "acceptable" transmascs: boy but not man, cute and pure and digestible, respected as A He/Him without ever being seen as the gross ugly sweaty monster they still believe men are.

And at the same time, a lot of folks are just genuinely boys but not men, want to be cute, want their he/him pronouns respected, and don't really feel they are Men in the way lots of other men are. A lot of them have honestly unpacked those feelings, respect the men who are men in those ways, love them, support them, and fight for them to have space here as well. They're a part of our community, and we both need to support each other.

We can't always tell one from the other, and we can't reject the transmascs who don't associate with the same kind of manhood we do just in case some of them might be doing it out of internalized bigotry- in the same way that we deserve space in the community, despite some of us clinging to these versions of manhood out of a different kind of internalized bigotry (i.e. nbphobia and truscum ideology).

You know all that, I'm sure, but I say it anyway because sometimes it does help to remember that all of us feel these things, to some degree. All of us have to get over it.

It doesn't make you a bad person to have those feelings- they're natural, and beating yourself up for experiencing normal human emotions isn't going to help anyone. Take a deep breath. Accept that the feelings exist, and understand why they do. Then let them go.

You are choosing not to act on them, you are choosing to understand that they're not reasonable or correct or helpful, and you are choosing to move past them in order to do better. That choice is what defines who you are and what you "really" believe, and that's what matters.

[starbright-cobweb]

I'm thinking a lot at the moment about the term "genderqueer", and about genderqueer/nonbinary terminology splits.

When I was coming out the first time (~2010) both terms were around, but GQ was the more popular. NB has definitely won out, quite comprehensively, and my sense is that this is because nonbinary is more of depoliticised term, but also more of an open space. you know what the fuck you're about with genderqueer: tits OUT, glitter beard ON, cock HUGE, skirt GORGEOUS. it's never not confrontational. But nonbinary is a better umbrella term, a better community term that can contain so many things within it - including, at times, overtly political and confrontational genders (permanent and temporary, preferred or unavoidable), but feeling like a broader space too for other ways of being. "Non" is right there in the title: a term that's clearer about what it's not than what it is. Which means, in practice, it can be anything, and that is its power to bring-together.

I was lucky(ish) to come out into a trans community, but in practice this meant meeting no men, and no one on testosterone, for the first six years: experiencing a transmasculinity that had no space or interest in people like me. Consequently, I've never felt like either NB or GQ were concepts that included me: as labels, they tend to be flags for environments, theory, or media that are hostile to parts of who I am, typically without intending or recognising that this is the case.

I think a lot about these terms as 'chosen' categories rather than 'lived' categories. I'm still ruminating about a hookup message I got last month, from someone who was interested in me - but had 'afab' and NO MEN blazoned very loudly all over their profile. I followed up and they clarified "I'm sorry I thought you were queer or non-binary". This, in a nutshell, is why I have so little faith in Queer as a project. It's just rude: messages from fellow trans people which are contemporary twists on "i saw you and thought you were a woman", whose self identification is "between genders but fyi definitely not a tranny". What about me is not queer? We're all on a queer dating app after all. Everyone here is queer. Nonetheless, clarifying that I am a man is enough to elicit "I thought you were queer, but now know you are not". What about me is binary? Is there any conception of a "binary trans person" that makes political sense in a cissexist world?

This person has a mental image about what these categories require and contain; it's just the most recent occurrence, but feels fairly typical. If there's a purpose of trans scenes or trans4trans dating culture, this violates them: having your gender taken seriously, being around people who understand gender in complex ways, and being desirable despite-or-because you are a gender weirdo. The majority of messages I get from cis men meet a higher standard of respect. What, then, is the value of connecting over supposedly shared gendered-queerness?

It's on my mind because as I transition, I have increasing need for the political space genderqueer promises to create (but in reality, does not) - that is, the steely-earth of living like this, or finding ways to talk about your pelvis bone that honours yourself and uplifts others - but is honest as well. My hips doesn't lie, and neither should I about what that means for me.

There's ongoing community tensions about how fun it is to be trans - people frame it in different ways, as binary/nonbinary; transitioning/nontransitioning; transmed/truscum; euphoria-centric/dysphoria-centric; and none of those are useful or accurate, but a split exists all the same. Some parts of trans life include kinds of gender incongruity which the subject has chosen, enjoys, curates, or has found a way to love. Other parts include incongruities the subject cannot love, did not choose, is valiantly working around, is not their ideal. These things are not in tension and the temperature of these conversations would come down a lot if people would ask "are we talking about different experiences here?" more often.

But for all that I reject these experiences/discourse should be split in two groups, I am going to thingmake that split again: it certainly feels true that a lot of outside-the-binary theory and community is more naturally welcoming to, and therefore formed and dominated by, people who are loving their incongruities over those who are surviving them. I read a lot of anthologies, and rarely find parts that speak to me; a lot more nonbinary as preferred strategy than genderqueer as lived experience.

Maybe it'll come in time. I don't bind, for health reasons, and eventually began experiencing this as a male chest regardless. I have so much newfound confidence about how I look that I'm dressing up more, taking photos from a place of pride to show off, and then my hip width just kills me. I just need to sit with the idea that that is the incongruity which is most valuable; that's my visibility as a trans person that counts politically; it feels like my facial hair and my packing because those are the parts I love, the parts I've chosen; but the genderqueer-that-matters is where it gets hard - the sense of difficulty is a clue to its importance. I just need to keep taking photos, pray for wisdom, keep writing and making art that's honest but doesn't replicate or pass-on unhappiness and shame; make a genderqueer with the answers.

[soulvomit]

stuff with gender anguish about not fitting in with today’s current gender constructions

From another post I made: I need to talk about 20th century gender norms at some point as a living breathing 20th century fossil and how different it was. To most straight people, being gender non conforming meant gay, trans was on the far end of the gay spectrum, and gay was associated with being socially Not Normal at a time when you had to be Normal to get a white collar job. (The whole Normalhood thing im gonna talk about is VERY connected to mid-late 20th century construction of the white middle class.) Apropos of gender specifically... I’m not sure how 90s/00s genderfluid/genderqueer map to NB, or whether they do. It’s a big reason I am weird about IDing as NB - because it seems to mean something else than my particular understanding of my identity as it was formed in the 1990s. (Another thing is my social world being more people over 45 at this point and also I’m in a hetero relationship.) Part of 90s GQ stuff was that you could identify as a man part time, a woman part time, you could contain multitudes. “Woman-identified person with a male side” was a legit identity within that, so was “man-identified person with a female side.” You could be one person in the streets and another in the sheets. You could be several people in the sheets, especially if you were aligned with kinky culture. (And for a long time... I was.) There was a greater sense in the 90s and early 00s in genderqueerness culture that you could be GQ for no other reason than wanting to be and it wasn’t assumed to be bundled with physical dysphoria or even desire to change your public social identity. Some spaces - like West Coast geek culture and goth culture - had enough flexibility baked in that we didn’t really need to go to LGBTQ culture to explore our identities, and there was a whole geek queer sensibility that was evolving alongside of the broader LGBTQ culture that was definitely its own... thing.  And while people *say* that NB doesn’t mean any one particular thing or any of these things, that’s not always the message I get when visible NBs on TV/in film are almost always at present one very specific image or “type” of person, and that doesn’t resemble me. NB representation on TV amounts to presenting NB as a third gender with very specific codified behaviors (androgynous AFAB person who binds and has body dysphoria).   The message I get is that whatever my experience is, is better described some other way. Also the discourse around relationships with NBs is that a relationship with an NB is necessarily a queer relationship yet having been in relationships in and out of LGBTQ culture, I’m not really sure how to distinguish “a queer relationship.” My relationship is non-traditional in lots of ways and we’re both gender non-conforming in lots of ways though it doesn’t parse to most people because it’s along the lines of stuff that shouldn’t have ever been gendered in the first place. What my partner does not ever question however is his actual gender identity.  The thing is, actually publicly identifying as anything but a woman would create weird problems in my life in terms of social dynamics, and other stuff, and probably an unpredictable series of ripple effects downstream. But - that... just means I’m closeted, right? And closeted doesn’t mean your identity doesn’t exist or isn’t as unreal as someone who isn’t? And what if - as a “shapeshifter” - my relationship to myself within my relationship *is* part of that shapeshifting?  One of the things is that I’m in a heterosexual relationship. My relationship *is* one of my few spots where I’m happy in my skin, let alone happy in the world and I have no complaints with how I’m perceived in this relationship, and part of it is that practically every assumption about my gender is true, or has been true at some point, including the fact that I’m fine with being seen as a woman in the context of my relationship.  It’s in other spaces besides the intimate, that gender stuff makes my skin crawl. My deep interior gender identity is “pixels floating in the ether, which can assume any shape or form.” My gender identity among other people in non sexual friend spaces is “friend.” My partner identifies as a cis het man. I don’t feel like my relationship has any special quality that’s different from queer relationships I’ve been in, other than identities people have. If my partner doesn’t feel our relationship is queer then I don’t feel it is, either... though it’s not exactly *traditional.*  I don’t feel like our relationship is different from our hetero neighbors’ relationships regardless of whatever history I have. I have no way of knowing what my ostensibly-female ostensibly-heterosexual neighbors’ interior identities really are, or what their history is. And because we’re monogamous, it just never ever comes up. Our social world is about half queer and half not so nothing has changed. After decades of only dating people who had LGBTQ identities, and having a particular social world, now I’m with a cis het man from that same social world and nothing really has changed about the shape of my life.   I’ve moved between different spaces my entire life, sometimes I perceived myself as a boy in a girl’s body, but sometimes I didn’t, and don’t. And gender is one of the spaces in which I feel like a chameleon. There seem to be a ton of gender expression based communities that disappeared since the 90s that either disappeared or were erased from discourse and that makes this weirder/harder to talk about.  Another thing is that a lot of the discourse around pronouns (if pushed I’ll say I’m she/they but I am literally comfortable in anything, depending upon context) makes me really uncomfortable. Even in LGBTQ spaces it makes me uncomfortable. There’s the me that my friends know, and some of my family knows, and it’s a big enough world to contain that part of me at this point. I would rather not put my identity under a microscope in any space that matters. It’s weird but I wish I could just be “they” in the work, creative, etc, spaces, without the loading of what “they” means. I wish it meant nothing about the people who love me, or who I love, or how I love, or how I live my life, besides what pronoun I use. But it doesn’t mean nothing. That is why I hope more cis identified people will actually identify as they in the public sphere. There are plenty of spaces in the public sphere that I don’t think should be gendered at ALL. My wanting to be a “they” is in some ways more about wanting public anonymity and having formed my sense of self - at a tender time - online, than about my gender identity. Which means I’d be potentially appropriating “they” from people for whom it IS a deep identity, and yet... haven’t I spent half of my blog talking about how I’m not exactly the gender identity I advertise?? Haven’t I spent a long time up to now advocating for “they?” Isn’t feeling like a they, evidence that I’m a they?  And the thing is, this is such a YMMV issue and the problem is that EVERYONE has competing access needs with EVERYONE ELSE. Anything one queer person wants or needs seems to oppress some other queer person, and it sucks. But sometimes I wonder if I even need to just recognize how cis het passing my life is and acknowledge my privilege. The thing is though at that point... is it how much oppression we’ve experienced or are currently experiencing, that alone makes our identity? That’s as silly an idea as saying I’m less of a Jew because I haven’t personally experienced a hate crime. And yes there’s a lot to shared oppression experiences forming group identities, but I’m not talking about group identity. I’m talking about personal feelings of identity.

[aegialia]

self-indulgent reflection on being on tumblr

so i recently hit 1000 followers on here and this blog has existed for almost exactly 8 years, so i wanted to ramble about tumblr and my experience of it for awhile. under the cut so definitely feel free to ignore this.

i started this blog right around when i was fourteen and had just started high school. at that point, i was out to my parents (and no one else) as bi, i had an inkling i was Struggling with something but i had no idea what and felt like i couldnt actually acknowledge it, and i had left leaning but very vague politics. tumblr definitely has shaped my journey around sexuality/gender/mental health/politics, both for good and for ill. 

for good: 

seeing other ppl talk about being lesbians helped me realize i could be a lesbian w/o being a traitor to the concept of bisexuality. hearing trans ppl talk about their experiences and explaining non-binary stuff and dysphoria helped me understand what i was going through 

i don’t like talking about my mental health stuff in detail on here, but suffice to say, i was Going Through it in high school. i’m still going through it now, but i am in a much better place (thank you medication and 7 years of therapy!). seeing ppl talk about the weird, dumb, awful parts of mental illness let me acknowledge that i was going through those things too, that i wasnt like evil for feeling like that, that i could change. people talking about adhd/autism was particularly helpful---being able to identify why i’d always felt like my brain just didn’t work right is the first step in the (ongoing) process of not hating myself for the way my brain works

politics is definitely the area where i think tumblr was the best for me. i got exposed to so many opinions i definitely wasn’t hearing in school, from intelligent, well-read people who could articulate theory in ways i could understand. tumblr didn’t give me my politics and i didn’t learn everything i know about theory from it, but the communities of people i was around pointed me in the right directions. tumblr was also a good place to learn how to react to criticism. this doesn’t seem to be most people’s experience, but getting called out over minor things on tumblr genuinely helped me learn how to take a step back, look at my behavior, apologize, and try to change, which, as it turns out, is a helpful skill irl as well

for ill:

wrt sexuality and gender, it’s probably pretty obvious someone who’s journey is ‘cis bi girl -> cis with a million different microlabels -> nb w a million different microlabels for both sexuality and gender -> nb butch lesbian who’s not super into romance’ would have some bad times on tumblr. the bi circles i was in made being a lesbian seem like an immoral choice, the ‘’’mogai’’’ (or whatever u wanna call them) circles made me feel like i had to divy up and perfectly label every aspect of myself in a way that really wasn’t helpful for me, the lesbian circles i was in made me feel like being a lesbian was about ending up in a monogamous butch/femme cottagecore relationship and that there was something wrong with me for not really wanting that. to be clear i think microlabels can be very helpful for people/a monogamous butch/femme relationship is a perfectly fine thing to want, they just didn’t work for me. im very very glad ive reached a point in my life where i dont feel the need to stay up to date on the latest discourse and am more focused on finding a way to exist that is comfortable for me and supporting my community irl. 10/10 would recommend to everyone

not going to get deep into it, but social media is. not good for my brain in general. i still enjoy using tumblr, but these days im pretty careful to step back from it frequently and treat it as an occasional hobby. 

the cons of political stuff on tumblr are probably also very obvious. there are some just awful discussions on here and the culture surrounding the way we handle bad behavior and justice and accountability and working to become a better person and make up for the harm you’ve caused has historically been fucking awful and trying to unlearn it and find new ways to engage with this stuff is exhausting. 

for all that i’ve changed over the course of having this blog, this blog has stayed pretty fucking static. i started out being super into diana wynne jones and the iliad and those are still two of my biggest interests and things i talk about the most on here. there are definitely specific things that have petered away (i started this blog almost entirely to keep up with good omens fan stuff and i pretty much haven’t touched it since the miniseries came out, i haven’t sought out pacific rim/supernatural/elementary/mcu content in years), but im still pretty much interested in the same things. i like relatively small fandoms, i like weird side characters, i like to be a grumpy child playing with my toys in the corner. when a fandom im in gets popular, i tend to stop engaging with it entirely (hello rqg/tma/good omens/enola holmes!). i dont think its a pretentious ‘i liked it before it was cool’ thing so much as a ‘people get Weird and awful when a fandom hits a certain level of popularity and there’s too much content and i really, really hate the bad faith arguments larger fandoms tend to spawn’ thing. i’ll consume content from big fandoms, but i pretty much refuse to actually engage with them at this point.

one of the stranger parts of my experience of tumblr is the social side. i’ve never really known how people make friends online---how do you go from liking each other’s posts and occasionally replying to them to actually being friends who communicate off social media? i’ve had conversations with ppl on tumblr and i’ve had sort-of friendships that are contained to tumblr where i’d like to get to know them better, but i’ve never figured out how to do that. my best friend’s job is pretty much to make friends/connections on the internet (she’s an activist and artist), my dad knows people everywhere in the world from twitter, and i’m just sitting here like a little old grandpa who doesn’t understand how you can have internet friends. 

at this point in my life, i’m fine with this, but this has made me feel real fucking bad in the past---like, if everyone online, even the ppl who say they’re weird and brainbad in a similar way to me, can make friends on the internet, what’s wrong with me? particularly in high school and my first year of college, when i was just horribly lonely all the time, it made me feel super disconnected and like there was something fundamentally bad about me. these days, i’m a lot chiller about it. i use social media to engage with stuff i enjoy and share my thoughts about it. it’s okay that my social difficulties extend to me not knowing how to use the internet to socialize.

on a somewhat related topic, it’s wild that i have 1000 followers. obviously, that’s not an actually super large number and a huge number of them are probably bots or inactive. if you post consistently for eight years and follow lots of people, like i do, it’s not a surprise to end up with this many followers. it is also, thankfully, the sort of followers that are not fans. probably most ppl following this blog dont remember why they followed and dont know anything about me or my interests. this sounds like its meant to be depressing but it’s not. i like that my way of engaging w the internet lets me do pretty much whatever i want and no one will care. the mere concept of being. like. tumblr famous in any capacity, even just in one community/fandom, is viscerally horrifying to me. 

i really enjoy the space i’ve created for myself on here. on one hand, going back through my blog is obviously embarrassing and full of hating my past self. on the other hand, i now have a very nice collection of things i enjoy in this blog. i like seeing what i’ve been interested in and (when i’m in a good mental health place) i like to be able to remember how i thought and talked about the things i loved when i was younger. im not at the place in my life where i can love a younger version of myself, but sometimes i can laugh at zir with a level of fondness. 

i’ve always been paranoid about sharing details about my life on here (and the fact that my parents have always been able to see it certainly contributed), so the version of jack on here is a carefully curated version, who’s super enthusiastic about the things they love, was very conscientious about apologizing and trying to do better when ze messed up, and tried to be polite to others. that’s a younger version of myself that i’m closer to being able to have compassion for than the version i find in essays and poems and memories. 

i’m starting grad school in ten days and i’m still using the blog i started when i began high school. tumblr has helped me in a lot of ways and hurt me in a lot of ways, but i still have to admit that it’s been a significant factor in shaping me. i’d be incredibly embarrassed to admit that irl, but it’s true. other than my family and like one friend, this blog is one of the only things that’s ‘known’ me since i started high school. i’ve changed so much in that time and im glad to have this weird little record of myself throughout those changes, even if i’d probably warn my younger self away from tumblr if i could go back in time.

tl;dr i have had a mixed experience on tumblr and i have mixed feelings about that experience. no idea if anyone read any of this very long, very rambling internet memoir

p.s. fun facts about this blog:

i’ve never changed my icon or blog title

i recently got a second version of the poster i got my blog title from. i chose my blog title by looking at what was hanging on the wall directly in front of me. 

my original url was gloomthkin. this was not, as you’d probably assume, an otherkin thing. i had literally no idea what otherkin was at that point. i’d just learned the word gloomth from a bill bryson book and thought it would be cool n edgy to be the child of the quality of gloom. i changed my url after i learned what otherkin was and realized everyone probably assumed something about me that wasn’t true which i hated (not bc i had an issue w otherkin, just bc i don’t like ppl thinking untrue things about me)

during my good omens days, i once sent a tumblr ask to nail guyman which, in retrospect, was kinda rude. i stand by the content but id never send an ask like that now. he replied to it privately in a way that so deeply embarrassed and shamed 15 year old me that i’ve never gotten over it. i still get nervous and embarrassed when i see anything about him or his books

[eye-of-enigmatic-thought]

Finally finished all these Kamal drawings! He was a lot of fun to draw and make up headcanons for!! Sorry for the inconsistent quality of these images, but I hope everyone likes the way I draw him. <:D

Also!! This was getting long but have some headcanons I wrote for him under the cut plus additional information in regards to a VERY BAD mistake I made in regards to the tattoo hc that I only realised was wrong when I was informed about it.  CWs: mild discussion of racism and lgbtphobia.

-He was born on the 5th May 1960, making him 34 by the time Smile For Me -takes place. -Kamal is a transmasculine NB and goes by he/they pronouns. He’s been on T but hasn’t had top surgery. He’s known he was trans since around his mid teens but was only able to start T in his late 20s.

-He’s bisexual, but has a preference to men.

-He’s autistic and stims with hand flaps because I say so lol. He’s very neurotypical-passing, but he deals with hyper empathy and was always very emotional and sensitive. He also had a knack for problem solving and would play with puzzles to help stimulate his mind, puzzles that made use of his hands were his favorite.

-He thinks frogs are cool animals and thinks they’re real neat.

-He can speak and understand Hindi, but is unfortunately not entirely fluent due to mostly using English throughout his life.

-His family were Indian immigrants that settled in New York, where he was born and raised. His family were overall agnostic and atheist, and so weren’t really the religious sort. 

-Due to being a poc and later coming out as bisexual, he unfortunately dealt with a lot of racism and homophobia growing up. Because of this, he found solidarity with some poc and lgbt punk communities and would engage in them, it was also through them he learned he was transmasc and also met his dear friend Wallus.

-His family was for the most part very supportive of Kamal though they didn’t entirely understand him at first, but they overcame their confusion to support their son more. The only things they didn’t support as much were some of his mischievous activities.

-During his punk days he was pretty rebellious and liked getting up to mischief, but never in a way that would hurt anyone. Think a harmless prank here and there and graffitiing some jackass cop’s car, though he’d only ever do them if he was with someone to have each other’s back (*cough cough* Wallus *cough*).

-Despite his mischief he was still the anxious sweetheart we all know and love him for and usually had to have his confidence brought out by friends (hence why he only usually acted mischievous when around friends), as he grew older he began to slowly be able to stand his own ground more. 

-He also always had a strong sense of doing what’s right and helping others (like when he helped everyone out of the Habitat in S4M and how he wanted to help Boris) and would do his best to help others in need. He even acted like a older brother figure to younger punks and was seen as a overall reliable and trustworthy guy. Because why WOULDN’T you trust Kamal?? Like C’MON!!!

-This sense of wanting to help others led him to be a doctor, he chose dentistry as his profession due to the problem solving aspects of it and how it made use of his hands.

-As he grew older his mischievous side subsided a bit, but he still has traces of his old ‘lil shit’ personality. If the right buttons are pushed, his mischievous side can come out like a terrifying wave and he begins to act much more confident and smug than usual. Basically... >:^3

-He’s got tattoos! He has four tattoos all with their different meanings:  -The frog tattoo was the first one he got due to liking frogs and feeling like it fit with his jumpy personality. He also felt connected with the physical transformation frogs go in their life cycle to how he’d eventually want his transition to go.  -The lowercase Lambda symbol was the second one he got. In 1970, Lowercase Lambda was first conceived in as a LGBT symbol by Tom Doerr as the symbol of the New York chapter of the Gay Activists Alliance, becoming associated with the Gay Liberation. Finding solidarity with the symbol, he gained this tattoo.  -The pink lotus and Hindi tattoos were his third and fourth tattoo that he got at the same time. He got them during when he finally started T as a way to ‘tie’ everything that he is and his pride as a Indian transmasc. The idea of a lotus tattoo on the back was actually inspired by a headcanon by @seriously-sarcastic06​! Here’s the post: https://seriously-sarcastic06.tumblr.com/post/631423818054926336/she-uses-scented-markers-so-he-smells-like-lemons

-Kamal was actually pretty scared of having tattoos at first due to how they... hurt to get, even if he thought they were the coolest thing ever and liked how symbolic some could be. So the times he got his tattoos were when he was especially mentally prepared and were pretty spread apart from each other and were usually saved for special occasions. Some reassurance from his friends also helped as well.

-He however, doesn’t have that many piercings, those actually freak him out the most. He really only has his ears pierced lmao.

-Kamal is also chubby and hairy because I say so lol. Soft fuzzy Kamals for all!

And that’s all of my hcs! Now, to address something that I feel is very important after I was informed of it.

You may remember I uploaded some initial sketches of Kamal’s tattoos and how he initially had a Aum symbol on his arm, I have removed the initial sketches from my blog and have removed the Aum symbol as I have been informed that the Aum and other vedic Hindu symbols tend to be tattooed by either ignorant upper caste Hindus or extreme right-wing Hindu supremacists (which is a massive problem in India, with the fascist BJP being one of the two major parties and with Dalits (lowest Hindu caste) and Indians of other faiths being treated horribly). I greatly apologize for this mistake and I will do better, and I’d also ask fellow non-Indians to learn from my mistakes if you ever decide to take inspiration from my work. I would try and explain a bit more on these issues, but I am a outsider and am not the most informed and so will not be able to properly explain it all with the best adequacy, so I highly suggest you look into Indian sources if you want to learn more about this, such as the work and words of B. R. Ambedkar and the Dalit Buddhist movement for a start.

I also decided to settle with ‘paper edits’ rather than a full revamp as at the moment I can’t really draw too much due to how strained my hand is becoming lately, I do hope this is understandable and that the paper edit is enough.

You also may remember from my colouring in videos that I coloured Kamal with more lighter skin, I have now fixed this by colouring with darker browns to make him more his canon skin colour.

If anyone else has other concerns or suggestions, do please try and let me know! Don’t ever be afraid to reach out to me, my DMs are always open and I promise I will do my best to work things out with you.

[sinagrace]

Iceman’s been back on my mind lately. It started with the internet rumor that Shia Labeouf was being considered to play the role of Bobby Drake in a Marvel Cinematic Universe version of the X-Men. My DMs and @Mentions on social media were a mixture of intense reaction and then asking my take on who would make a great Bobby Drake (for the record: in my head I always saw him as a younger Antoni Porowski with a theater background, ‘cuz playing the funny guy with a vulnerable streak requires serious acting shops). My mind went back to the time of BC, when I was doing a lot of touring, and answering this very question because of my work on the Iceman book at Marvel. One thing led to another, and I decided to take a trip further down memory lane to look at my favorite volume of the series: Amazing Friends. Now, I know I’ve spent equal amounts of time publicly stating what a gift working on Iceman was, while also calling out the challenges that came with the experience, but the third volume really was a pure blessing. I was able to take every valuable lesson I learned as a writer, and apply it to telling a story that would be interesting to one person: Me. I’ve been a lifelong X-Men fan, I live and breathe comics, so my own expectations for a return to the series seemed like the only ones to really worry about meeting/ surpassing. The first two volumes had been so bogged down by rotating editors, complex continuity, company-wide events, multiple artists… The third volume was my chance to focus on what an Iceman series was outside of so much context. All that mattered was challenging myself to do an X-Men story that focused on the aspects of the franchise I felt were valuable and relevant, meaning: excuses to have Emma Frost be an asshole and finding an opportunity to make fun of Kitty Pryde’s haircut. Before moving on from Marvel, Axel Alonso made time to call me for a pep talk about the series. I wanted to get the series extended, and he wanted to help me succeed with the ten issues he could commit to. First, he offered an eleventh issue to give me more time on the stands. He took a look at everything I had planned, and basically told me to restructure with an eye for ramping up the pace. My writing background comes from prose and essays/ think pieces… both of which are methodical and provide some allowance from the reader to really take your time and set up the world before diving into the meat. That’s not the case with comics. You gotta work fast. Especially in today’s market, there is less and less room for a retailer to say, “give it two volumes, because shit starts really coming together by the third trade.” That was literally my speech for hooking people on such iconic series as Invincible, Fables, and Strangers in Paradise. Nowadays, every single issue is not a brick to be laid down as foundation so much as a bullet in your gun. Conflicting imagery, but that’s the point. Axel told me to think about the Big Moments in my life and sort out how to inject the mutant metaphor into it and make the most compelling comic book story I could. This was epic advice that I took with me into the new arc, but I struggled a bit with what could be bigger than the “coming out” storyline in volume one. Love was off the table because I wanted to keep Bobby single and ready to mingle. Death was off the table too, because my editor felt like we’d done enough with Bobby’s parents in the first two volumes. Upon looking at my own life, and considering the stuff me and my friends were dealing with, I landed on something a bit more reflective than LIFE or DEATH. I wanted to focus on that moment when a gay guy looks outside of himself and realizes the folks around him may not have it so easy. After everything we’ve been dealing with this summer, Iceman’s “big issue” of the arc feels oddly prescient. Bobby Drake had to reconcile his accidental complicit role in keeping the Morlocks down, and he has to investigate new approaches to being a better ally to those who don’t want to or can’t live under the protection of the X-Men. I used the Morlocks to allegorically speak to the issues that the trans/ NB community face today. Considering that trans folks are facing higher rates of homelessness and murder than other members of the LGBTQIA+ community, all I needed to do was find a perfect villain to treat the Morlocks as “lesser-than.” Cue Mister Sinister, who I wrote as particularly Darwinist with a major flair for interactive theater. While Amazing Friends definitely is the most fun I’ve had working on the book, it was also full of the heaviest shit I’ve written about. I’m so grateful that my editor let me use Emma Frost for a story about the trauma of gay conversion therapy with her brother Christian, but I’m still annoyed he wouldn’t let me put her in a sickening Givenchy outfit for her reveal. Similarly, creating the Madin character required that I chat with several mental healthcare professionals and members of the NB community to respectfully portray them as a resilient and fleshed out hero. I included personal lessons that I learned from years of the therapy (the sandcastle / sea image, a Jay Edidin fave moment). My editor and I weren’t always aligned, but we definitely were on each other’s side. He understood what I was trying to do and asked questions when something flew over his head, and he even had the good instincts to stop me from going too heavy handed with the ending. My original idea for the arc’s finale was to have Bobby become permanently scarred in his fight with Sinister, where he’d have a cool ice gash running across his face or something, a la Squall from Final Fantasy 8. The goal was to show Iceman stripping himself of his ability to pass as non-mutant to save the Morlocks, but the Mutant Pride fight scene being a stand-in for the Stonewall Riots kind of already made enough of a statement. Plus, no one in editorial wanted to deal with remembering to track his scar in other books. At first I tried to balk at his point of view, but when I looked over my original notes for the series, the point was to focus on optimism and hope. Giving Bobby a permanent scar and emphasizing the notion of sacrifice was too bleak a message for a series wherein the hero carbo-loads hoagies while riding an ice scooter and mutant drag queens emcee local festivals. Of course, the crowning achievement of the series… my mutant drag queen :) I’ve witnessed a lot when it comes to the world of pop culture and myth-making, and I 100% believe that you can’t plan the success of something. I’ve seen bands forced into breaking up because labels spend six figures failing at making listeners connect with an album. I witnessed firsthand how The Walking Dead was built from relatively humble beginnings as a buzzy cable drama into a literal international phenomenon over the course of its first three seasons. Everyone hopes for the best, but you never know how something will land with audiences. When the Shade character took off, I was truly astounded. Things I posted on Instagram while half-asleep became official quotes on major news sites. Queens and cosplayers were interpreting her like Margot Robbie had unveiled a new Harley Quinn lewk. The impact was so legit and immediate that we had to jump in and give Shade a proper Marvel hero alias, to truly welcome her into the X-Men canon. Hence the name change to Darkveil. (Funny story: I tried to fight hard for Madame X as an alias, but CB didn’t want another Agent X / “X-Name” character. Three months later, Madonna announced the Madame X album. Phew!) There was a time where I felt uncertain that the folks in charge at Marvel would bring Darkveil into any stories outside of the ones I wrote. My understanding was that Hickman was like the Cylons and had A Plan-- one that didn’t include her character. I made peace with my contribution to the Marvel Universe being contained, but then someone on social media pointed out that Darkveil showed up in an issue of Marvel Voices. After breaking down and reading Hickman’s House of X, I saw that his Plan was one of endless possibilities, and that he was moving EVERY character into new and dynamic places. I have hope now that he sees the possibilities with Darkveil, and takes advantage of her and all of her many body pouches. Amazing Friends really is my favorite thing I’ve done for the Big Two. I made a lifelong friend out of artist Nate Stockman (DC, please hire us for a Plasticman book), and I got to run a victory lap with the most encouraging and supportive readers out there. It was worth every dreadful conversation, every shitty thing a person said to me online, and all of the fun nonsense that goes into being creative for a living. Being stuck at home in quarantine has given me a lot of time to reflect on the gift that my career to date has been, and I feel so grateful to be where I am today. Other people may groan when they have to talk about something they’ve moved on from, but not me. I made people happier, I got to work with my favorite characters at Marvel, and and I'll say it again: it’s a frickin’ gift to make people move from your work. So, I will engage every tweet or message asking me my thoughts about who should play Bobby Drake in the Marvel Cinematic Universe… I’ll just never have a good answer.

[liberalfartsdegree]

seeing a number of people here and elsewhere talk about NBC’s H*annibal series in terms of trans politics with largely 2 main sub-themes: 1. that the relationship between the two central characters “feels” t4t and 2. that the story captures something “trans” in the way that it deals with social ostracism, violence, and (ostensibly) the relationship between creation and destruction. 

To the first, I’ll say that I too am not immune to pointing at characters on TV and saying “that’s trans” for fun, and it can be fun to look at villains for that moment because its satisfying or whatever. 

But to the second, and the way in which it connects to the first, I’m profoundly sad about the way that it sounds like people are connecting to it. The article I’ve seen a lot of people float is about “creation through destruction” focalized through the writer’s experience of their top surgery and DIY piercing/tattooing experiences. I guess I’m struggling with the contiguity that’s established between those practices, and the kind of “self-making” (which isn’t always non-violent) that trans people often go through with the kind of violence on that show. Full disclaimer, I had to turn it off--I couldn’t bear to “read around” the way that psychological abuse and cruelty was the only way to express needs and desires, not to mention the unmitigated gore of the show I found very challenging. 

It reminds me of my experience of reading Nietzsche--which the show references explicitly. The afterlife of Nietzsche has a weird multivalent presence. On face, Nietzsche is a violent racist, misogynist, anti-semite, white-supremacist, etc. and his philosophy explicitly and repeatedly invokes violence in every manifestation as a means of accessing and reinforcing power. However, in reading Nietzsche, ESPECIALLY in “enlightened” contexts with other readers (who I respect and trust! I’m talking about smart people doing good faith readings) there is an explicit desire to recover Nietzsche--to say “well, but his method” or “yes, and his structure of thinking is still useful.” I can’t fully reject this approach either! If nothing else Nietzsche developed a genealogical method that was instrumental in the kinds of reading that I care about. But The real task is’t to stop there, it can’t be to stop there, because we have to hold in our mind the fact that these meanings we can read in the text are co-constituted by the most repugnant and violent imaginings possible. 

Looking at the moment that hannibal is having, my first thought was a question--why are so many people who I would like to consider myself in community with (young AFAB trans people) finding solace in this show that I can’t bear to look at? The article (which I’m not linking deliberately because I am reflecting, not trying to start discourse) seems to be in good faith--I fully believe the writer finds immense power in what they called the “creation from destruction” they read in the text. There was a slip in the discussion though--the writer saw the cutting into of their own body reflected more in the psyches of Hannibal and Will Graham instead of the actual destroyed bodies depicted on screen. I think that’s super interesting if deeply sad: the body was externalized to the dead bodies on the show, while the mind was transposed into the cerebral lead characters. 

I don’t care to psychoanalyze that too much. Like, is it because AFAB trans people I’ve seen tend to connect with stories about the externality of bodies as a way to process dysphoria and lived experiences of misogyny etc? Sure maybe, but I think that kind of symptomatic reading strikes me as almost self-indulgent (that old tumblr meme about ‘some people need murder to cope’ comes to mind). 

I guess I’m just seeing a confluence of something here--and I don’t know how to name it without spending more time on this than I need to--which comes down to a sense that the body is a vehicle for psychological distress and that modification (”creation out of destruction”) of the body is reparative, held at the same time that the body is only ever external to the mind, and seeing violence done to bodies is ok as long as it creates something for the mind seeing it. 

And that’s just not true!!!! I mean like, everyone’s reading and life experience is different and there’s no one way to “be” trans and I’m not trying to prescribe a way of being for anybody. But like reading Nietzsche, taking that message out of that show seems to ignore the horrific, repugnant violence which is  its precondition. I think it’s essential to see the elision between the violently dismembered bodies in the show and the creation/destruction of Will Graham (and I’m not even getting into the psychological violence Hannibal does against him which is nightmare-inducing). Transposing that onto the self seems to miss that key slippage in the show between “bodies that matter” (thanks judy) and the ones that don’t. Taken in real life, either the person’s own body becomes the site of this violence (as happened in the article) or the violence becomes externalized to an Other who matters even less than the person doing this reading (wherever abjection settles itself--from t*kt*k it seems like these readers are nb AFAB people who are trying to negotiate their own expressions of gender within their attachment to femininity who often direct this need for violence against “masculine women” whatever that means)

ive spent way too long on this idk just like what would it be like to experience your dysphoria as contiguous with your experience of yourself and with your embodied experience and recognize the urge to violence as predicated on a construction of something abject, and to instead reject that and start over from a place of care

(and im not subposting at you @ keneinahora if you see this--of course I’d love to hear your thoughts if you want to share them, but this isn’t intended as a weird passive-aggressive callout. I hope that it’s clear from writing this that I’m not addressing any single individual and the value that media has on an individual scale). 

[nbenrey-real]

various hlvrai headcanons

everyone on the science team (+gman & forzen) are autistic. whos gonna stop me, god?

john freeman is canon. hes the one babysitting joshua during all this wondering what the fuck is going on

gordon is trans & bi

benrey is something between nb and agender. they/themry rights

genderfluid tommy & coomer

bubby does not vibe with gender. agender it is fellas

darnold is probably nb but hes just vibing

gregory ‘gman’ goodman is tommys bioparent. he wasnt sure how to raise a half human child without fucking them up, and time passes weird for him so he didnt realize how long it really had been. tommy is understanding given his experiences with time fastness on soda, but gman owes him so many birthday bayblades and he WILL use that power for guilt-tripping 

joshua is in and will never outgrow his mlp phase because i love those funky ass plastic horses

Gordons first language is actually ASL! both his parents were deaf and he’s partially deaf in his left ear. he switched to the black mesa hearing aids because they worked better and kinda slap with the orange, though.

he spent most of his childhood not talking and then most of teenhood dealing with being selectively mute. still prefers sign tbh but cant have shit in black mesa

since he really hates being left out of communication- this also makes things like inside jokes or references irk him, so hes just. very annoyed, most of the time. this really only made the hand thing even more distressing, tbh

speaking of the hand, his new one is a really sick ass high-tech prosthetic courtesy of gman. it has texture and heat sensing and everything, but he still gets phantom pains like hell and sometimes needs to shake it a few times to get it to re-calibrate to his nerves

gordons always been neurotic as shit and had high anxiety, but dealing with a shitty ex and raising joshua by himself really kicked it into high gear right before the whole. resonance cascade thing.

knows he tends to get aggressive when he’s afraid or panicked but has just gone absolutely off the rails after black mesa because hes sick of the varying bullshit thats been going on just. in general. he can have a little ultraviolent crime. as a treat.

ended up becoming friends with chell as a kid, since they were both in the deaf community, lived in the same area, and had a huge interest in science. 

black mesa actually has really good work culture when it comes to lgbtq+ folk and suspiciously good benefits, and aperture science is just happy to have more warm bodies to throw at portals- gordon heard some of the rumors about cave johnsons weird ass tests though, so he elected to go with black mesa. now hes starting to wonder if cave johnson just ran both, because what the fuck 

somehow he keeps ending up with more and more of the science team living with him whereever hes staying, even after he moves to a bigger place for joshua. eventually they just. buy a house specifically to live together. theres an entire seperate house connected by a path thats just for joshua because gordon is paranoid someone will leave out something dangerous

can and WILL have a panic attack at the drop of a hat, this is a THREAT. also please install more battery-powered night lights, the power went out and it scared the shit out of him guys hes serious please pick up more from lowes-

craving ice cream 24/7 because GOD do i want to eat that entire container of cherry vanilla hagen daz right now SDFBGN

benrey is dissociating or spacing out 98% of the time and really has no idea whats going on dude. they just follow the script. or sometimes the skeleton does for them. the audio processing bs really doesnt help with any of this.

will i project my shit memory, audio processing issues, general-spaciness, and inability to tell when ive veered from ‘playful joking’ to ‘oh wait im actually being annoying and making them mad’ on to benrey?? yes. yes i will. 

legitimately has only ever been in black mesa. why hasnt everything reset yet. do they just have to live here until it does so they can go back. he just kind of sits in the bus-stops for the lines that used to go there after he reincorporates, occasionally joining in on heists or hanging with tommy, and just. waits.

after the like 5th night in a row, of the second week of gordon having to drive tommy to pick them up from a soaking busstop at 3 am in the morning, because ‘its storming really bad and they dont have anywhere else to sleep mr freeman and he gets so worried its so cold’- he just says fuck it and makes them join the rest of the household

gordon promptly ends up actually being concerned about this dumb asshole because jesus christ, they dont even know how to microwave things. did they just live in the breakroom at black mesa all this time??

benrey: yeah gordon: gordon: what the fuck is wrong with black mesa they haVE DORMS. WHY DID THEY-

between benrey and whatever the fuck is up with doctor coomer hes starting to think black mesa might have been causing some serious memory issues in their workers. he makes everyone do tangrams just to check, encourage neuroplasticity 

benrey spaces out halfway through one and starts playing terraria on their phone instead. gordon gives them a b- for effort

benrey and bubby are single highhandedly the reasons behind the banning of both tnt and all firespread from the house minecraft server

[nerdygaymormon]

Stages in Coming Out

This is a way to think about the process of coming out to oneself and to others.

Not everyone experiences all these steps or not in the same way. And they’re not a straight line, people often take steps forward and then backwards before moving forward again. 

Stage I - Growing Awareness

Sees themselves as heterosexual and cisgender (gender conforming) but start recognizing they’re different from other people because of thoughts, emotions, physical reactions, and other experiences. 

 Probably feel confused and experience turmoil. 

If they weren’t before, they become aware of the existence of people with different gender identities or sexual orientations. 

 They begin to question their identity as straight and cis. 

Am I different? Could I be gay? Who am I?

Perhaps they avoid situations that cause them to question their existing identity (”that’s not who I am”). 

They could feel uncertain and search for information about trans or sexual identities. 

Starts exploring why they feel positively or negatively towards these feelings.

Stage II -  Exploration

When a person isn’t denying or rejecting their thoughts & feelings, they begin to come out of the "fog" and accept the possibility of being bi, gay, ace, trans, etc.

They’re coming to terms with the idea of having a minority gender or sexual identity and start thinking about the wider implications.  

Maybe I am gay. What are gay people like? Maybe this does apply to me?  

They might hold onto their hetero and cis identity even while accepting they experience some lesbian or non-binary feelings (”It’s only temporary” “it’s just this one person who makes me feel this way”). 

Could start feeling loss for the things they will give up by embracing their sexual orientation or gender identity and work on passing as straight & cisgender with no intention of revealing their identity.  

They may accept these feelings & thoughts are there, but see it as totally unacceptable, and they try to stop any behavior related to these thoughts. If attempts to inhibit behavior regularly fail, the shame they feel about this may lead the individual to attempt suicide.

Stage III - Tolerance

This is where an individual may begin to think “I am probably gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender/etc.” 

Their new identity is seen as something to tolerate, not embrace. 

This is why many will maintain separate public and private images of who they are.

I accept the possibility that I may be gay. Am I okay? Where are other trans people?

They start to feel separated from their heterosexual or cisgender identity. 

May have a sense they don’t quite fit in with other cis/straight people. 

They might start seeking info about LGBTQ+ subculture, and wonder if they fit within the culture and the community.

In an attempt to lessen feelings of social alienation (others don’t understand what I’m going through) or loneliness, they seek out people who are part of the subculture (for example, going to their school’s gay-straight alliance club).

Stage IV - Acceptance

They are internalizing their sense of self as a gay, bi, lesbian, ace, trans, non-binary person and accepting themselves. 

Now instead of tolerating this identity, they accept it. 

They attempt to bring agreement between their private and public view of who they are by selectively coming out to others. 

As people accept them, it helps legitimize themselves and they attach positive meaning to their queer identity.

They have more interaction or connection with the LGBTQ+ community.

I am a lesbian. I will be okay. I can come out to some people. 

Disclosing sexuality/gender identity only to select individuals who will keep it confidential. 

Exploring subculture activities, readings, etc. 

Attempts to "fit in" and "not make waves" within the gay or trans community. 

They may begin to have a preference to be around others who are LGBTQ+. 

They see being identified as LGBTQ+ as fine in private, but not in public. But will start moving towards seeing their identity being publicly known as acceptable. This comes as they accept the potentially negative consequences of being out. 

They learn about their internalized "homophobia" or “transphobia” and the consequences it has had on how they view themselves and the negative effects. 

Stage V - Pride

Incorporating one's sexual identity into one's overall identity, it’s one aspect of who they are and how they understand themselves.

They see being LGBTQ+ as normal.

Typically they are "out" with friends & family, and at work. 

More at peace with themselves and have an appreciation for this part of who they are.

Could feel frustration or anger at occurrences in everyday life when they feel they need to adhere to heterosexual/cisgendered norms. 

I am a good person who happens to be gay. I'm happy to let people know who I am. I’m different and proud of it! 

Accepting of supportive heterosexual/cisgender individuals. 

They explore heterosexism and the role it has in their world and how to combat it.

They have Pride in who they are, in the journey they went through for acceptance and are proud to be a part of the LGBT community.

They’ve internalized positive feelings about their queer identity.

———————————————————————

I’m in a book club with a few LGBTQ people, but mostly it’s parents of LGBTQ kids and the friends of those parents.

Based on their questions, I realized they don’t understand what it’s like to come out. They just know the part where we announce that this is a part of us, they miss all the steps leading up to it. And straight cis people don’t have a similar experience in identifying and accepting their gender identity or sexual orientation, it’s not part of their reality.

As kids, most of us are taught that this is how the world works, boys & girls fall in love and get married and have babies. You’re a boy (or a girl) and that’s how your life will go. We accept it, that’s all we know, but then queer people have a growing dissonance and we have to discover that actually I am different, I don’t fit this story. I have believed this is who I am my whole life but maybe that’s not who I am.

Straight cisgender people just advance to the next step and then the next step of their path without ever having to say, “Wait a minute, there’s something off, I don’t think I fit. Am I broken? Why don’t I have the same feelings as everyone else?”

No wonder a lot of them think it’s a “choice” or that we’re going through a “phase.” From their perspective, we are straight & cis and always have been until the day when, out of the blue, we announce “I need to tell you something, I’m [lesbian, trans, nb, ace, gay, bi, etc].” I suppose to them it could look like we decided on this rather than we went through a long exploratory period to understand ourselves. 

[katherine-mcnamara-archive]

there's nothing wrong with making connections through other characters though? i swear the rpc is full of babies who just want their character to be special and loved and popular.

No nope nada we’re not doing this. 

When you, as a person, look at a female character and want to plot that your two have a connection/know each other, not because you like HER but because she’s friends/related to/connected to/dating, a male character that you want to jump on. that’s just shitty. 

and lets be real it is only really plotting a connection, y’all would never thread with the girl y’all are using to jump on some e-dick you like the look of. you don’t even properly read the dude’s bio lmao half the time you can’t even spell the dude’s name right. 

Do you really want to get into this ok.

How many times have you done this to men? been like you know what I’m going to plot a connection here and then ignore them and their player just so I can get close to this female they’re dating/friends with? YEAH ZERO EXACTLY.

Female characters are only of use to the rpc when they serve a purpose of jump starting y’all with a male you like. 

While we’re on that if y’all don’t stop ignoring trans men and women and aro/ace men and women and nb people too i will come out of your mirrors and choke you!

You all condemn female characters enough for things you praise men for.

You want examples? okay here’s two from RECENT personal experience. people can feel free to add on.

Sofie: (mexican lebanese - bisexual) bounty hunter has a wide range of contacts want ad for a found family type of deal she’s extremely perceptive personable,has a good humour, extremely loving to people she’s close to, family orientated, protective. other traits etc. snake mom. we’re a powers site (she has animal communication as a power) and she loves her two venomous snakes she calls her daughters more than anything, she’s protective of her, they are of her.  human rights activist animal rights activist teaches self defence in her spare time. she’s happy, she’s confident, she loves herself.

Just from that brief description, you’d think she’d have an easy time plotting? she would if she was a man. I get four reactions to Sofie and y’all know whats coming.

1. straight up ignored / ”i’m not racist but her attitude makes me uncomfortable” 2. asked for threads just to “put her in her place/knock her down a few pegs.” (male rpers only reaction to her so far) 3. people just assume she’s easy and dtf any time and oversexualise tf out of her and it makes me extremely uncomfortable.  4. they use her to try to get to my best friends male character and ignore me any time i try to plot these “friends”. 

Cassia: (white - bisexual) hacker she’s extremely smart, has a genius level iq she’s dealing with ptsd and anxiety shes in recovery for being an alcoholic from a traumatic experience she was abused when she was younger so she has low trust in men. preferring women’s company. she’s a genuinely nice person, she’s quiet, she shows her affection because she’s bad with words. she’s protective of her friends, she’s even more protective of other women. she uses her powers (electrokinesis) and her hacking skills to hack into databases and help women/people in danger in general. she’s so damn loving when you get to know her. has an adopted son she raised and kept alive when she was in captivity. she’s funny, not to toot my own horn but her reaction to stress is humour. like people start arguing and she peaces out through the window and scales the drain pipe. she ain’t here for it. Again, prime to be a good friend/more/easy-ish to plot with right? HAH y’all wanna know the reactions I get to Cass? I’ve posted a few horror stories before. but here’s some points.

1. she’s terrified of guns/authority figures. first thread with a person and he goes OFF on her about his right to carry and then taunts her with it. player then OOC calls her a bitch and stuck up because she wasn’t instantly all over him/she was cold to him. 2. people assume she’s a bitch so often with the only evidence being that she has anxiety and is quiet around new people. 3. people try to put her in threads with alcohol because they think it’ll be fun to test her self control. nobody really takes it serious because it’s not drugs. so people use it as a joke. 4. trying to thread with females is a pain in my ass, like she’s specifically geared as more towards threading with them. but people are not interested at all.  5. the misogynistic comments towards her past are usually made by women rpers. 6. on the addiction topic, someone didn’t like that she was being friends with the man said female rper wanted her char with so on purpose left out alcohol beside her and then the player joked about it OOC.  7. people trying to knock her down a few pegs also. 8. or they try to befriend her/plot connections with her just to get to the one of the two men she knows. never any of the females.

another point for both of them is that people keep treating them like absolute shit, as if that would somehow prove to the men these rpers are after that these girls are connected to. that they are better than cass or sofie. and I just sit here like ????? i don’t know about anyone else but if someone was literally being gross to me, to try to impress my brother or a friend i know they would drop them like a hot potato so I have no idea why people think that’s a good idea in the rpc.

Also I know my friend Alyx, has way more worse stories and shit of what people have done to her females, not jsut to try to get to my males but just for daring to exist so like. choke anon.

[star-anise]

why would your social environment affect if you identify as a woman or nb?

I don’t know if you meant it to be, but this is a delightful question. I am going to be a complete nerd for 2k+ words at you.

“Gender” is distinct from “sex” because it’s not a body’s physical characteristics, it’s how society classifies and interprets that body. Sex is “That person has a vagina.” Gender is “This is a blend of society’s expectations about what bodies with vaginas are like, social expectations of how people with vaginas do or might or should act, behave, and feel, the actual lived experiences of people with vaginas, and a twist of lemon for zest.” Concepts of gender and what is “manly” and “womanly” can vary a lot. They’re social values, like “normal” or “legal” or “beautiful”, and they vary all the time. How well you fit your gender role depends a lot on how “gender” is defined.

800 years ago in Europe the general perception was that women were sinful, sensual, lustful people who required frequent sex and liked watching bloodsport. 200 years ago, the British aristocracy thought women were pure, innocent beings of moral purity with no sexual desire who fainted at the sight of blood. These days, we think differently in entirely new directions.

But this gets even more complicated, in part because human experience is really diverse and society’s narratives have to account for that. So 200 years ago, those beliefs about femininity being delicate and dainty and frail only really applied to women with aristocratic lineages, and “the lower classes” of women were believed to be vulgar, coarse, sexual, and earthy, which “explained” why they performed hard physical labor or worked as prostitutes.

Being trans or nonbinary isn’t just or even primarily about what characteristics you want your body to have. It’s about how you want to define yourself and be interpreted and interacted with by other people.

The writer Sylvia Plath lived 1932-1963, and she said:

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars–to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording–all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery.”

She was from upper-middle-class Massachusetts, the child of a university professor. A lot of those things she was “prohibited” from doing weren’t things each and every woman was prohibited from doing; they were things women of her class weren’t allowed to do. The daughters and sisters and wives of sailors and soldiers, women who worked in hotels and ran rooming houses, barmaids and sex workers, got to anonymously and invisibly observe those men, after all. They just couldn’t do it at the same time they tried to meet the standards educated Bostonians of the 1950s had for nice young women.

Failure to understand how diverse womanhood is has always been one of feminism’s biggest weaknesses. The Second Wave of feminism was started mostly by prosperous university-educated white women, since they were the people with the time and money and resources to write and read books and attend conferences about “women’s issues”. And they assumed that their issues were female issues. That they were the default of femaleness, and could assume every woman had roughly the same experience as them.

So, for example, middle-class white women in post-WWII USA were expected to stay home all the time and look after their children. Feminists concluded that this was isolating and oppressive, and they’d like the freedom to pursue lives, careers, and interests outside of the home. They vigorously pursued the right to be freed from their domestic and maternal duties.

But in their society, these experiences were not generally shared by Black and/or poor women, who, like their mothers, did not have the luxury of spending copious amounts of leisure time with their children; they had to work to earn enough money to survive on, which meant working on farms, in factories, or as cooks, maids, or nannies for rich white women who wanted the freedom to pursue lives outside the home. They tended to feel that they would like to have the option of staying home and playing with their babies all day. 

This is not to say none of the first group enjoyed domestic lives, or that none of the second group wanted non-domestic careers; it’s just that the first group formed the face and the basic assumptions of feminism, and the second group struggled to get a seat at the table.

There’s this phenomenon called “cultural feminism” that’s an attitude that crops up among feminists from time to time (or grows on them, like fungus) that holds that women have a “feminine essence”, a quasi-spiritual “nature” that is deeply distinct from the “masculine essence” of men. This is one of the concepts powering lesbian separatism: the idea that because women are so fundamentally different from men, a society of all women will be fundamentally different in nature from a society that includes men.

But, well, the problem cultural feminism generally has is with how it achieves its definition of “female nature”. The view tends to be that women are kinder, more moral, more collectivist, more community-minded, and less prone to violence. 

And cultural feminists tend to HATE people who believe in the social construction of gender, because we tend to cross our arms and go, “Nah, sis, that’s a frappe of misused statistics and The Angel In the House with some wishful thinking as a garnish. That’s how you feel about what womanhood is. It’s fair enough for you, but you’re trying to apply it to the entire human species. That’s got less intellectual rigor and sociological validity than my morning oatmeal.” Hence the radfem insistence that gender theorists like me SHUT UP and gender quite flatly DOESN’T EXIST. It’s a MADE-UP TERM, and people should STOP TALKING ABOUT IT. (And go back to taking about immutable, naturally-occuring phenomena, one supposes, like the banking system and Western literary canon.)

Because seriously, when you look at real actual women, you will see that some of us can be very selfish, while others are altruistic; some think being a woman means abhorring all violence forever, and others think being a woman means being willing to fight and die to protect the people you love. As groups men and women have different average levels of certain qualities, but it’s not like we don’t share a lot in common. The distribution of “male” and “female” traits doesn’t tend to mean two completely separate sets of characteristics; they tend to be more like two overlapping bell curves.

So, like I said, I grew up largely in rural, working-class Western Canadian society. My relatives tend to be tradesmen like carpenters, welders, or plumbers, or else ranchers and farmers. I was raised by a mother who came of age during the big push for Women’s Lib. So in the culture in which I was raised, it was very normal and in some ways rewarded (though in other ways punished) for women to have short hair, wear flannel and jeans, drive a big truck, play rough contact sports, use power tools, pitch in with farmwork, use guns, and drink beer. “Traditional femininity” was a fascinating foreign culture my grandmother aspired to, and I loved nonsense like polishing the silver (it’s a very satisfying pastime) but that was just another one of my weird hobbies, like sewing fairy clothes out of flower petals and collecting toy horses.

Within the standards of the society I was raised in, I am a decently feminine woman. I’m obviously not a “girly girl”, someone who wears makeup and dresses in ways that privilege beauty over practicality, but I have a long ponytail of hair and when I go to Mark’s Work Wearhouse, I shop in the women’s section. We know what “butch” is and I ain’t it.

But through my friendships and my career, I’ve gotten experiences among cultures you wouldn’t think would be too different–we’re all still white North Americans!–but which felt bizarre and alien, and ate away at the sense of self I’d grown up in. In the USA’s northeast, the people I met had the kind of access to communities with social clout, intellectual resources, and political power I hadn’t quite believed existed before I saw them. There really were people who knew politicians and potential employers socially before they ever had to apply to a job or ask for political assistance; there were people who really did propose projects to influential businessmen or academics at cocktail parties; they really did things like fundraise tens of thousands of dollars for a charity by asking fifty of their friends to donate, or start a business with a $2mil personal loan from a relative.

And in those societies, femininity was so different and so foreign. I’d grown up seeing femininity as a way of assigning tasks to get the work done; in these new circles, it was performative in a way that was entirely unique and astounding to me. A boss really would offer you a starting salary $10k higher than they might have if you wore high heels instead of flats. You really would be more likely to get a job if you wore makeup. And your ability to curate social connections in the halls of power really was influenced by how nice of a Christmas party you could throw. These women I met were being held, daily, to a standard of femininity higher than that performed by anyone in my 100 most immediate relatives.

So when girls from Seven Sisters schools talked about how for them, dressing how I dressed every day (jeans, boots, tee, button-up shirt, no makeup, no hair product) was “bucking gendered expectations” and “being unfeminine”, I began to feel totally unmoored. When I realized that I, who absolutely know only 5% as much about power tools and construction as my relatives in the trades, was more suited to take a hammer and wade in there than not just the “empowered” women but the self-professed “handy” men there, I didn’t know how to understand it. I felt like I was… a woman who knew how to do carpentry projects, not “totally butch” the way some people (approvingly) called me.

And, well, at home in Alberta I was generally seen as a sweet and gentle girl with an occasional stubborn streak or precocious moment, but apparently by the standards of Southern states like Georgia and Alabama I am like, 100x more blunt, assertive, and inconsiderate of men’s feelings than women typically feel they have to be.

And this is still all just US/Canadian white women.

And like I said, after years of this, I came home (from BC, where I encountered MORE OTHER weird and alien social constructs, though generally more around class and politics than gender) to Alberta, and I went to what is, for Alberta, a super hippy liberal church, and I helped prepare the after-service tea among women with unstyled hair and no makeup  who wore jeans and sensible shoes, and listened to them talk about their work in municipal water management and ICU nursing, and it felt like something inside my chest slid back into place, because I understood myself as a woman again, and not some alien thing floating outside the expectations of the society I was in with a chestful of opinions no one around me would understand, suddenly all made sense again.

I mean, that’s by no means an endorsement for aspirational middle class rural Alberta as the ideal gender utopia. (Alberta is the Texas of Canada.) I just felt comfortable inside because it’s the culture where I found a definition of myself and my gender I could live with, because its boundaries of what’s considered “female” were broad enough to hold all the parts of me I felt like I needed to express. I have a lot of friends who grew up here, or in families like mine, and don’t feel at all happy with its gender boundaries. And even as I’m comfortable being a woman here, I still want to push and transform it, to make it even more feminist and politically left and decolonized.

TERFs try to claim that trans and nonbinary people reinforce the gender identity, but in my experience, it’s feminists who claim male and female are immutable and incompatible do that. It’s trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer people who, simply by performing their genders in public, make people realize just how bullshit innate theories of gender are.. Society is going to want to gender them in certain ways and involve them in certain dynamics (”Hey ladies, those fellas, amirite?”) and they’re going, “Nope. Not me. Cut it out.” I’ve seen a lot of cis people who will quietly admit they do think men and women are different because that’s just reality, watch someone they know transition, and suddenly go, “Oh my god, I get it now.”

Like yes, this is me being coldly political and thinking about people as examples to make a political point. Everyone’s valid and can do what they want, but some things are just easier for potential converts to wrap their minds around.. “I’m sorting through toys to give to Shelly’s baby. He probably won’t want a princess crown, huh?” “I actually know several people who were considered boys when they were babies and never got one, and are making up for all their lost princess crown time now as adults. You never know what he’ll be into when he grows up.” “…Okay, point. I’ll throw it in there.” Trans and enby people disrupt gender in a really powerful back-of-the-brain way where people suddenly see how much leeway there is between gender and sex.

I honestly believe supporting trans and enby people and queering gender until it’s a macrame project instead of a spectrum are how we’ll get to a gender-free utopia. I think cultural feminism is just the same old shit, inverted. (Confession: in my head, I pronounce “cultural” with emphasis on the “cult” part.) 

I think feminism is like a lot of emergency response groups: Our job is to put ourselves out of a job. It’s not a good thing if gender discrimination is still prevalent and harmful 200 years from now! Obviously we’re not there yet and calls to pack it in and go home are overrated, but as the problem disappears into its solution, we have to accept that our old ways of looking at the world have to shift.

[mllemouse]

Tw Idk gender confusion???? I am throwing this here to the void bc I've been talking to myself literally all day and really very often for the last few weeks and maybe if I write it it will becomeore cohesive. On mobile, can't put in a jump so just be forewarned of a deluge.

Tw cancer and surgery and imagined gore!!!

Okay so. J tells me they're non-binary, that's very cool to me, but embarrassing after I told them I go by my first initial online bc I'm an easy Google, thinking they were a basic straight boy. (Also, the main reason I even liked them was bc in their profile they are beautiful and a lil feminine and I am just oblivious as fuck!!) I started going by an initial like 8-10 years ago and since have slowly been changing up my name where possible as I come across a new place it's stored.

Tbh I originally consciously chose an initial bc I just didn't want people immediately judging me as a woman. It infiltrated my personal life some, there are people who just call me L, my ex referred to me as L in all his notes, my mum addresses postcards and packages to me as L, and it's given me a lot of delight! The idea that people don't know my gender, or that they know and choose to continue using the initial has always left me just chuffed. I knew a couple other people that came out and switched to an initial as their name everywhere, but like didn't connect it to myself until J asked about it specifically bc they had a hunch I was also nb. (Honestly, my opening profile line is 'be the love child of Tilda Swinton and Frances McDormand you wish to see in the world' and then the whole profile is me in my glasses and nerd clothes... It's uh, not a stretch now that I look at it.)

I quickly did some refreshing on definitions and language, which punted me straight back to middle school when I hit puberty and started feeling so! Deeply! Uncomfortable! In my body. I used to stand in front of my mirror in my undies and stare in horror at what was happening. I had been wearing a bra since grade 5 out of shame in the girl's changing room for gym, that was less of an issue (I literally threw out those bras when I went to college bc they just got ratty, not bc I grew out of them!), but I watched my hips develop and envisioned having them sawed back down so they could be narrow again. I also got my period in middle school and have loathed it ever since. I wished I was a boy but only for the ease of keeping my body; I didn't want to dress different or change my interests. I wasn't raised in away that dictated male or female activities/interests or even clothing -- except I hated that my brother was allowed to go topless in public whereas I could only do so in a backyard -- yet gender noncomformity, while always accepted, was just not that actively encouraged. Educators told us what to expect during puberty but never that we should tell someone if we were so distraught over it.

I didn't really get much in the way of boobs but I used a tensor bandage as a binder through middle and high school (not even knowing what that was, I just wanted to be flat and saw Gwyneth Paltrow do it in Shakespeare in Love!), I remember sneaking it into my bags for college, but I don't have specific memories of using it then. I was kind of happy with them at figure skating bc I ended up being like the only girl who didn't need a bra or padding in her dresses, my mum just sewed a triple layer of fabric in the front for warmth and I was good to go. I was deeply ashamed of my hips and thighs however, and we got in fights over my skirts all the time.

By the end of high school I was fantasizing about plastic surgery and a hysterectomy. At one point I wished cancer upon myself so I would have an excuse for a mastectomy and hysterectomy. My mum actually got cervical cancer and I was, I'm so sad to admit, slightly jealous.

I came to Tumblr and found the fitblr community quickly after quitting skating and dealing with mono, feeling a need to get back into something competitive. I quickly came to loathe not only my own but other women's bodies through the inspirational photos. I loved the men's bodies, and operated with a goal of getting my body fat low enough (like, aimed for a men's recommended percentage, my period could go to hell) while building muscle that I would maybe narrow my hips and shrink my breasts, while having visibly muscular abs and arms.

I'm not sure if it's a net positive thing that I crashed on my shoulder and haven't been able to fully return to the training I wanted to? After the crash I really tried to treat myself better. The body positive movement was telling me to vehemently love all of my body (nevermind it's almost solely geared towards able bodied cis women), and I tried. And I got distracted: moved away, fell in love, discovered I am probably autistic, made some significant life goals. So by the time I was settled here and feeling like I could experiment more, I channeled that entirely through clothing rather than change my body. First dictated by what's comfy (we don't do a synthetic fibre or picky knits on this body), then by how I wanted to present myself to the world: obv, Tilda Swinton in a suit. By this point I have forgotten middle school, high school, and college.

And basically, though I was somewhat consciously changing my name to an initial and intentionally dressing predominantly masculine (but like blazers and trousers and oxfords aren't... Gendered??) as a rejection of toxic patriarchy and capitalism, I ended up not even thinking it could be a gender thing until J did a double take on my name. I have thought about it occasionally over the years and honestly just never thought I was uncomfortable enough to even say I may be non-binary, let alone do anything about it. trans? I can't feel like I hold any ownership over the word. Which now seems... Insane. How did I rationalize wishing violence upon my body and putting it through truly damaging physical duress for nearly two decades in pursuit of obscuring the stuff that made me female. And don't get me wrong, I love a good dress, I tolerate skirts, sometimes I wear heels bc I like to be tall and feel powerful, and I like my face and my long hair, and sometimes I wear makeup because I think I look pretty even though it makes me want to claw my face off. (And have realised that a LOT of the way I have styled myself in the past was purely self objectification for men and not actually what I enjoyed.) I just... ???? Is that not trans enough? I still don't know!!

Anyway to end on a positive, shout-out to my mum who just doesn't give a fuck abt what I do, as she quickly changed her correspondence to me to exclusively my initial, and has always shopped in the men's section with me, and is currently making me a historically accurate 18th century men's outfit so I can really be the boyish chaos I want to see in the world. Tilda and Frances' love child indeed.