#and also she was one of the only people i could talk about my dysphoria with

[comfortstars]

no actually. Can I be honest for a second. I know I said I wasn't gonna talk about it anymore but idgaf

[gor3sigil]

I’m Trans and Insane and I’m doing fine.

[TW Psychosis, transphobia, psychophobia, medication, psych ward]

“Are you sure ?” she asked.

I remember looking back at her in disbelief, because that was certainly a question I never asked her when she came out.

“Why do you ask ?” I say.

“Dude, I’ve seen you go into depersonalization so hard you even thought you were a human soul in a robot vessel and now, you want me to trust you when you say that you, too, are trans ?”

That’s the memory that comes back to me as I fold and put in my bag my psychiatrist’s note attesting that I suffer from gender dysphoria, NOT LINKED to any psychotic symptoms. Here it goes in my folder with my prescription note, an increase - again - of my anti depressants and Xan, and my endocrinologist’s HRT prescription, increased too - finally.

I go to two separate pharmacies to pick up each prescription for two reasons:

There is only one in this godforsaken town that always had testosterone in stock.

I can’t explain to you with words the look you can get when you give back to back, to someone who, despite not being a doctor, works in healthcare, a note for trans HRT and then a note for psychiatric meds.

And I’m lucky, because I’m not taking antipsychotics anymore. Contrarily to what you could think, it doesn’t magically makes the voices and the shadowy people disappear, but it can make a mess of your head pretty bad and my doctor and I both agreed that I didn’t need more damage up here than what I already had. And no, it doesn’t make your delusions vanish magically too: in fact, I was still pretty certain that I was talking to my soul family out here in Argentine telepathically about my mission on Earth, the meds just made it more difficult to understand their voices, but the belief was still solid.

Anyways, I’m back home with the Hoy Grail I fought tooth and nails to get: a letter from the Sacred Council of Mental Sanity also known as Psychiatry that I was, indeed, a bit delulu, but also trans, and that both things didn’t play into each other. My transness wasn’t a delusion, my delusions didn’t have anything to do with being trans.

Or did it ?

Chicken or egg, you know the drill. Did I have my selves fractured before and one of the piece that shattered my brain happened to make me trans or was I just trans with a shitload of traumas in the back that made me insane ?

But don’t worry, at least, trans people when we’re together, we have each other’s back ! Right ?

“Transidentity ISN’T a mental illness !! We don’t DESERVE to be FORCIBLY LOCKED UP and MEDICATED and MADE TO CONFORM FOR OTHER’S SENSE OF SECURITY !!”

Neither do I, RIGHT ?

Oh

Or do I ?

Remember what she said, my girlfriend, right at the beginning ?

How I can’t be trusted about myself when sometimes I don’t even have a sense of self anymore or I have too much selves who fight against each other ?

And what do we say to that ?

Get treatment. Get in-patient. Take medication. And for the love of God, shut the fuck up about it, you’re giving us a bad name.

Because being trans and crazy can’t exist. It’s absurd. You have to fix one of these two things. Choose which jacket I’ll wear, and they call it a straitjacket for a reason it seems, so am I queer or am I insane ?

All I know today is there isn’t a universe in which I’m a trans without any mental illnesses, or mentally ill without being trans. And yet, I can’t tell you how many time I got asked “do you think you’d be trans if you never got through [x trauma] ?”. I. Don’t. Know. I’ll never know. And I deserve just as much agency as you get despite being mentally ill. If you don’t believe in that, don’t come yapping about “liberation for all of us”, but “if one of us is crazy they’ll all think I am too and that can’t happen”.

No LGBTQIAA+ person deserves to be told they need to be put away, to be cured, to be allowed out in the open only if they’re deemed “acceptable” by society’s standards. And no mentally ill people deserve to either.

No trans person should be going through years of counseling to have the access to HRT.

And I shouldn’t have had to threaten my own mother’s life to avoid being locked in an adult psych ward at 14.

If you ever think, for one second, that these two things have nothing to do with one another, you are far removed from history.

To hear queer people say “yeah but some mentally ill people are dangerous !” feels like you don’t even know where you come from.

And if I want to say, that me being trans is linked to me being mentally ill, or at least, that both are connected in a way, all hell breaks fucking loose.

So I’ll explain very carefully.

See, when I was young, my mind got shattered into a thousand of pieces I had to try to glue back on. All these pieces of myself broke further more down the line because I couldn’t catch a fucking break. And now, it happens that the final puzzle does not have the same face it had before. It happens that its shape changed over time, for reasons over the control of all of us who tried to build ourselves back. Now there’s a bigger picture, less pieces, a few other shadows, and me. Built from the shatters. With my own needs and afflictions.

And whoever you are, whatever your agenda might be, I will not let anyone take any agency away from me under the false pretext that I can’t know anything for myself. They say that about children, they say that about minorities, about physically disabled people, about the people they want OUT. And my trans siblings, you know that.

I came out for the first time 7 years ago, to my then girlfriend, who was the one asking the question that is the first sentence of this text. I came out a second time 3 years ago. Been on HRT, had top surgery, had psychotic breaks, got my meds changed, switch therapist.

Because I am trans and crazy. And yet, all these choices I made, I made myself. It didn’t have to be that hard to get the basic care I needed. It didn’t need to be. But it WAS. And I’m part of the lucky crowd of people who had access to out-patient treatment, who never have been locked up in ward, who managed to stay alive through meds withdrawals without medical assistance when I had no therapist.

Be very careful of when you start to put conditions on the rights you think you deserve. Be very, very careful about your definition of sanity and of how it warps the way you see people. When you start to say “I have access to that, but there’s people like X or Y who shouldn’t BECAUSE”, pause and ask yourself what led you to think this way. More often than not, you’ll find yourself playing the same mind games as the ones you swore to fight against, and when it gives them the upper hand, they won’t hesitate to come for you after that.

[triptychgardener]

i saw you mentioned that transfem!calliope was practically canon, could you maybe elaborate on that? (im not dissing your hcs btw im just confused on where its suggested in canon)

Hey so it took me a while to get to this just because I wanted to solidify some thoughts about it! Won't go into as much detail wrt my other posts, but we can at the very least start with her handle: uranianUmbra

Uranian is an old-fashioned term, generally used for gay men, though also used in different ways to describe other-gendered people or ways of being, occasionally used as a catch-all similar to how Queer is used today. Its history is complicated and occasionally uncomfortable, as a lot of queer history can be, but notably, one potential root of this idea came from Urning

Now obviously conceptions of gender and sexuality were a lot different then, and I don't want to simplify this, but in Homestuck, it's pretty undeniable that Calliope is a woman stuck in a man's body, and this is likely why Hussie used that very specific word in the first place: to foreshadow the eventual Cherubian Twist.

And not that framing: a woman trapped in a man's body. Cherubs (at least as we are told) have two equal halves who can predominate. But the framing of their entire dynamic makes it very clear that this is Caliborn's body, not Calliope.

Callie's ideal self, in Callie Ohpeee, her Trollsona, is positioned as something to be taken off to reveal her true self. She feels that she needs to conform her exterior to match her interior self, something Caliborn never has to do.

Hell, even as she goes to sleep for the last time, she removes her jacket to reveal Caliborn's shirt underneath. It's his body, not hers.

Not only that, but throughout the story, we see that Callie experiences something close to either dysphoria or body dysmorphia. She hates the way she looks, and affects an especially sweet demeanor in order to not scare people away. She sees herself as a monster because her body becomes the most hideous masculine monster the story has ever known! Literally Lord English.

And shockingly, even though it (in my opinion) handles it poorly, the Epilogues do give us a brief insight into cherub gender, where it basically illuminates that Aranea was kind of talking out of her ass about cherub reproduction, and that Cherubs have no actual biological sex or gender. Meaning that somewhere along the way, Caliborn and Calliope CHOSE their genders, likely influenced by the human and troll internet they were permitted. Callie perhaps forming her own gender in opposition to her brother. This also probably created the ouroboros through which gender became a thing in the first place but thats besides the point. Point is, Callie was likely not a woman until she chose to be a woman. I.e. transgender.

Now the epilogues took it in what I find to be a kind of boring direction, i.e. "well cherubs have no real biological sex so that means I have to be nonbinary now" which is just such a lukewarm take on the imposition of gender but whatever. Point is that Callie is transgender end of story goodnight!!!!!

[stairs-feooff]

An Open Letter to White Emo Kids

When I was thirteen years old, I googled ‘how to be emo.’ The music, the aesthetics, the darkness of it all captivated me. There was transgression there, with boys in makeup and girls who weren’t ashamed to be bisexual. The online emo community on google plus (anyone else remember google plus? Just me?) took me in with open arms. I was allowed to be depressed, I didn’t have to hide my burgeoning sexuality or the starts of my struggle with depression, something I now know was caused by intense amounts of dysphoria and life in an abusive and queerphobic household.

Only, there was one problem. I wasn’t white. 

Certainly, nobody would say they had an issue with me being Latino to my face. Most people in the scene genuinely believed they were not racist. After all, they loved Latino people, they thought the guys in Pierce the Veil were so hot. They appreciated the culture too, sombreros and maracas were the full extent of Mexican culture, right? 

But to be emo, you had to be pale. I remember Onision saying that Black people couldn’t pull off emo, and while everyone I knew talked about how horrible he was for saying that, they all secretly believed it. The emo kids I knew stayed out of the sun, they wore long sleeves to stay whiter and some on the more goth side carried around parasols. It was just part of the gothic, to stay white and dead looking. I hid myself from the sun, my skin tanned quickly and well, we couldn’t have that. 

Every guide on emo aesthetics emphasized stick straight hair. Every emo kid I knew reinforced that idea. I begged my mom for a relaxer, she refused. It was alright, I figured out how to damage my hair well enough on my own. Pete Wentz kept his hair straight, spent his time with a flat iron to press down the curls that made him inpalatable to white suburban teenagers. I could too. The burns, the split ends, the fact that my hair didn’t start to return to its natural texture until I cut several inches off this year, that was the sacrifice kids like me needed to take to come into the scene. If not, you would be made fun of. You’d be compared to Ray Toro, everyone’s favorite ‘princess fro fro.’ He was Puerto Rican, just like me. No one talked about that, beyond whispering it around like a dirty secret. No one acknowledged his pride in his country, mirrored by my own pride instilled in me from my mother. Every piece of him, every feature identifiable as nonwhite was sneered at. His hair, his nose, his lips, the white kids said he was the ugly one because of them. I was too, I suppose. 

That was back in 2014. I remember it vividly, still.

Turn back the clock to the early 1980s. Dischord records has just signed seminal emo group, Rites of Spring. There is change in the humid Washington DC Summer air. A new genre would be born from it, branching from the existing hardcore movement. To say Dischord records created emo would be no exaggeration. Without them, the music all of us in the scene know and love would be nonexistent. Dischord was seminal in the scene, Dischord was also founded by Ian MacKeye, vocalist for Minor Threat and later, Fugazi. 

Minor Threat is not emo in the tradional sense. Musically, it’s similar to punk and hardcore groups of the time, lacking the distinct musical flourishes of MacKeye’s later emo group, Fugazi. Still, Minor Threat helped shape the hardcore scene emo was born from and created the record label that signed Rites of Spring, the first emo band. Fugazi is legendary in first and second wave emo circles, influencing bands like Thursday. MacKeye’s stamp on emo is inescapable, even in the third wave. MacKeye also penned the song: Guilty of Being White. 

Guilty of Being White is a minute of MacKeye complaining about systemic racism - or rather, being blamed for systemic racism. He’s sorry for being white, he’s so so sorry, don’t you feel sorry for him, a white man in the 1980s? Isn’t it horrible that white people are blamed for systemic inequality? Isn’t it horrible that he actually has to put work into allyship with people of color? 

MacKeye says he never meant for the song to seem racist. Surely, the fact that it’s become a favorite of white power groups is a coincidence. 

All that is to say, racism was baked into emo from the very beginning. The label that created the genre was founded by white men with very clear issues with racism, even if they did not see it that way. Pete Wentz flat ironing his Black hair and Tyler Joseph refusing to say he’s influenced by rap aren’t bugs unique to the third wave. Instead, they’re features of the genre. 

Now, I’m not writing this to ‘cancel’ emo. I love emo dearly, I still consider myself emo. It, in every wave, is my favorite genre of music. Rites of Spring, Jawbreaker, My Chemical Romance, these bands have shaped my life like no other. Through emo I have met some of my best friends, white and nonwhite alike. Emo allowed me to express my gender and sexuality freely. Emo changed my life for the better, and it continues to do so. No, I am not writing this to cancel emo, whatever that means. Instead, it is because I love the genre so much that I feel the need to point out its flaws, its shielding and harboring of racism since Dischord herself began. 

They say you should end essays like this with a call to action. Personally, I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t been reiterated a thousand times. Really, what am I supposed to say here? Stop being racist? I, like so many other people of color both in and out of the scene are tired of telling white people to do just that over and over. We are tired of seeing white people stop saying what isn’t acceptable anymore, not due to any sort of active unpacking of white supremacy on their part but simply out of a wish to not be ostracized. I am tired of going to emo spaces outside my friend groups and explaining to white thirty year olds what racism is, over and over and over again ad infinitum. I am tired of seeing white people try and take the lead on discussions of racism, whether it is to rapidly assert ‘im not racist but-‘ or to be on the opposite extreme, to jump the gun and form a dog-eat-dog circus, where the end goal is not to actually form a safe place for people of color but to prove how not racist they are. I am tired of watching white people jump on whatever they can to demonize people of color in the scene. I am tired of watching nuanced conversations about racism and complicitness in racism be overshadowed by people upset their pet white man isn’t going to kiss their other pet white man anymore. I am tired of watching children be called slurs. 

Perhaps my frustration is coming loose. It’s hard to be in the middle of all this and not be frustrated. At this point, I am disillusioned. These conversations are seemingly brought up every month, and yet, there is no systemic change. All I can say is I hope that one day, emo becomes actively hostile to racism and racists. Perhaps being aware that racism has been integral to the scene since the beginning is a good place to start. 

[gamzee-simp492]

I’m gonna add onto my last post about transmasc!Dipper in relativity falls because the idea won’t get out of my head. Also yes you’re free to do art or fanfics of this, it’s not exclusive to me to use. But I DO wanna be tagged in any posts of it, just to see where my idea was taken /nf

NONE OF THESE ARE NECESSARY, ITS JUST MY TAKE ON THE IDEA!! YOU CAN CHANGE, ADD, OR EXCLUDE ANY IF YOU WRITE OR DRAW THIS!

So - only for reference purposes - I’m thinking the deadname would probably be something that also starts with a “May” sound. Maybe Mavis or something like that so that’s how Mabel would get away with being called “Grauntie May” cause “May” is the shared part of the name. And - of course - his chosen name would be Mason.

The RF! Version of bill ((different people have different versions of bill here, so whatever that is)) would call him Dipper, and it would also be his nickname from childhood with Mabel before transitioning. Also in my take on it, the Bill from this AU could be that smile dog Mabel saw from the Smile Dip. And then maybe Bill would be seen in that scene with Relativity Falls.

His journals would have the star birthmark and he’d call himself M. in the book. I also think the whole thing with Pacifica being McGucket would work and he’d address her in the book as Paz or just P.

Some ideas I have for lost pages of the journal would be him talking about his gender and the dysphoria, a few about Pacifica ((pre-portal doomed (as in unrequited) FiddAuthor swap)) and how she helped him transition secretly cause I’d imagine those around him wouldn’t be supportive. Like how Stanford’s parents weren’t very nice to him.

Dipper’s equivalent of that project Stanley broke in high school would probably be something equally simple looking but also equally as ground-breaking. Maybe something that’s sensitive to air quality and Mabel’s yarn ruined it? I need more ideas for that-

They’d have another sibling that’s the relativity falls equivalent of Mabel and Dipper’s grandparents, who then have Stan and Ford’s parents, and then Stan and Ford. Name ideas? I don’t have any lmao

That page on the Dream Hipster ((the one who makes a whole nightmare just for a pun)) would have to do with maybe not being the STAR of the family, or something to do with light or stars maybe? I’d love to see ideas for this.

Aaand that’s all I have. I’d love to see more ideas! And maybe an AU ref sheet? I’m lazy and don’t wanna make it ;-; /nf

[kathjack]

"They should've made an emphasis on Sallie May being trans before" "There should be things that openly indicate she's trans aside from the horns" "The merch shouldn't show her with a bulge if she's trans, logically she should hide it"

My brother in Christ shut the fuck up

Aight, I get where most of you are coming from but let me just say that Sallie May is a big breath of fresh air from a lot of canon trans rep I've been seeing in the internet about big projects such as Helluva Boss, let's go point from point

This contains spoilers from Hell's Belles

Sallie May is a transgender Imp, this is not something that was decided just now for the short as her first appearance in the moon harvest festival already shows her with the thick line horns (Which are exclusively from AMAB (Assigned Male at Birth) Imps

If there's only one point these people made that I agree with is the fact that the horns thing should be something implied in the show, not specifically with the intention of outing a trans character but something simple that could give more context for those who do not check the wikis or the social medias that often

Other than that, I feel like they haven't actually meet a trans person irl because they believe that her being trans should be something that everyone should catch the first time they see her, that someone should inmeditaly point out she's trans, yet, they get upset at the fact that she's proudly showing a bulge on the merchandise They want the show to scream verbally about her being trans but not casually

You have no idea how relieved I felt when, at no point in the episode, her being trans was mentioned or outed, none pointed out her horns or voice and instead the problem was her feeling left out of her sister's life, and, again, not because she's trans and feels like Millie doesn't view her the same or some bullshit, but because Millie doesn't go home as often and felt a bit mad when she had to do her work In fact! Her not getting genitalia reconstructive surgery is also a thing that is cool about her, she got tits but didn't chop off the dick and is not insecure about it, most of times trans people are put between not getting surgery or getting ALL of the surgeries AND being extremely insecure about their genitalia, and yes, there's a lot of trans people that feel that way, but I think that aspect of her is really good representation for those that don't want to get surgery or only want to either reduce or enlarge their chest, not everyone gets dysphoria the same way and this doesn't make her less of a woman for that

Even if it's okay to have characters where one of the main issue of the comes from being trans (I have a few myself), It's also nice to see character that are trans but the main issue with their life comes from something completely different and not related

So for people upset about her passing so well you can't immediately tell she's trans Surprise! That's a lot of us want, that's what a lot trans people irl try, to just be a person of the gender we really are, to be normal and not needing to always out of ourselves, to be treated the same no matter what I make a lot of jokes about my lack of dick and my excess of tits, I only out myself as trans when formally presenting to someone and that is just because I'm not allowed to be trans so I don't pass as a boy at all and need to specify, but me being trans is something that most of my friend only bring into the conversation to make a friendly joke or when I bring it up

Sallie May is not only good representation, is one of the best I've seen in a while in the modern adult media, because she's subtle yet obvious You may not like Viv (Me too girl /non gendered), but I got to give it to her, the lgbt+ representation she does is on point

Anyways now that I tackled down that issue is time to actually talks about this short as a whole see ya

[hanni-3]

EVERYONE WELCOME...!!

LUCIA FLOQUET!!!!!!

I've been brainstorming for two days on how to word my thoughts out, specifically for step 2.......

At 10 years old Lucia Floquet moved to Golden all the way from France, she was skeptical with the whole moving out from the continent. But how much worse could it be? She barely bat an eye back in France, not having much friends, when people come up to her she ignores them. But she'll definitely miss the pastries, especially the mille-feuille. Those are her favorites. (Mille-feuille are French pastries that has three layers of puff pastry and two layers of pastry cream. And on top icing sugar or fondant. You can add jam or fruits.)

Lucia is a cis girl — but that's only in step 1. With a few doubts here in there still back in step 1.

If Lucia tolerates you enough, she can be a playful and teasing — if you're a girl. Lucia is the complete opposite. Hell, won't knowledge you once and if she did she'll just be plain with you. Even if you knew her since diapers she'll act as if you two are just neighbors, that's all you'll get.

THE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE LEADS!!!!!

Whenever you would ask Lucia about love, she'll look at you weird.

When Tamarack Baumann popped out of the leaves, Lucia was caught off guard was an understatement, but she tought Tamarack was so pretty, and so she blurted it out and quickly got embarrassed right after, but Tamarack just compliment her back plus her bow. Which Lucia complimented back with her hair tie.

They bonded very easily and attached to the hip! It was easier since they we're both girls, Lucia tought.

When she saw Qiu Lin up at his "hideout", she liked his hoodie, but quickly got annoyed by his personality and ignored him half the time. But as time passes she slowly started to tolerate him.

(

When I was making her outfit I found this one rlly pretty and it suited them)

Gender dysphoria warning!! Read at ur own risk.

Lu personality did a whole 180° when they stepped into teenage hood.

Lu is no more a polite person, barely talks and is biting in general.

Not comfortable being called a "miss" anymore and people calling them their old name just icks her, deciding to shorten it sound it doesn't sound too 'feminine' but that's not their government name, just a nickname. And in this step they go by she/they, but feels less uncomfortable with 'they'.

In their room, when they we're twelve they used to have a mirror in the corner but now it's covered, not feeling comfortable with their look and how their body looked, more specifically their chest and would only wear baggy clothes with two baggy sweater under their hoddie to cover it up.

Their hair was annoying too, it grown over the years and people would come up and braid it for fun and compliment it. Lu we're grateful and happy for the compliments but they found it annoying and triggering when their strand of hair would rest on the back of their neck, feeling like carrying weight on their back which is why they put it up in a bun or ponytail most of the time.

Once they were home alone they really could take it anymore and still in their mind, they decided to cut their hair and that felt like the weight was finally off their shoulder and they could finally breath in peace. And asked their mom if they could them dye their hair.

(their hair went trought it all)

They're still best friends with Tee of course, going on walks in the forest and Lu talking about their gender, talking about they don't feel comfortable with their own skin and not feeling like someone.

And with Qiu? Their relationship grew between their years, knowing Autumn can count on them and they can do in return.

(Also why do people think they're dating or or something??)

BUT THE RAIN DOESN'T FALL FOREVER BABY!!!!!!

Lucas can proudly call themselves a man with he/him pronous but won't mind they/them. After tough battles of the storm the clouds dissipate from the side and the sun shine. He finally feels comfortable with his own skin.

Relationship with Tee? Yeah uhm, they're siblings. Can't tell anyone or them otherwise.

And Qiu? Uhmm....

Yeah so, Lucas knows what he's feeling for Qiu, and what he felt when he still battling. He actually likes them. Like, a lot..a lot, lot. But is scared to commit, scared to destroy the friendship in between of them. Everyone has to suffer and often encourage the other to just give hints and confess but Lucas rather shit himself than 'ruin' what's good between them.

WHOOOOOHOOOO there he is!! Btw he's the mc that I was talking about when I introduced Mariana :3 Thank you for taking your time to read this and have a great day/afternoon/night!!

[chaifootsteps]

Hey I saw someone on Twitter saying you’re transphobic because it said in your Twitter bio “IDW Arcee is still a guy” even though the character is canonically trans. What’s your take on that? I’m not attacking you or anything I just genuinely want to know the context of all that.

Oh boy. Strap yourselves in kids; time for Chai's villain origin story.

So basically, IDW Arcee made his debut under the pen of Simon Furman, the dude who created Arcee in the first place. Simon Furman has a small massive chip on his shoulder over the notion of girl robots, but we're going to be talking in mostly Watsonian terms for now. IDW Arcee as he comes on the scene in Spotlight Arcee is the victim of a nonconsensual forced sex reassignment, we see right off the bat that this destroyed his life.

He's wracked with trauma and dysphoria over this, on a do-or-die quest to take out the mad scientist who did it (he succeeds and tortures said scientist for seven years straight), and is implied to suffer chronic pain.

This got a lot of criticism, but Simon Furman insisted it wasn't meant to be transphobic, just the opposite. When someone pointed out that this was a story about how traumatic it was to be assigned a gender you didn't feel was the one you should have, Furman agreed with this take.

Eventually Furman was shooed out and John Barber was brought in as writer, and nobody seemed to know how to deal with Arcee's backstory. So they just kind of...didn't. They wrote around it for eight whole years, never really acknowledging it, but frequently alluding to how traumatized he was from it. The only person to ever roll up their sleeves and tackle it head on was Mairghread Scott, the only person IMO to ever do justice to IDW Arcee.

By the way, this panel made me weep. This issue also includes a fleeting, but notable moment where someone refers to Arcee with they/them pronouns, and at the time, I was extremely excited for this.

Shortly after this however, the comic came to an end and John Barber decided -- in the very last issue -- to bring in an expert. And by this, I mean he found some trans lady on Twitter and let her write Arcee. The last issue has Arcee concluding that the whole sex change was consensual and the violent murder spree was the result of, I quote, "bad meds."

Yeah, basically Arcee killed all those people because the Spiro was a little off.

I got into a lot of internet fights with people over this back in the day, criticizing it for being worse than what we started with, but also frequently pointing out that it wasn't Twitter lady's fault, as she wasn't the editor-in-chief at IDW and that there's a very good reason professional writers aren't supposed to do this sort of thing. In return, I got accused of hating trans women and still get some real ugly things in the inbox about it to this day. It was the first taste, bitter as wormwood, of what I as a trans man could expect from my own community.

Regardless of all that, Arcee is probably the most important fictional character to ever enter my life. He helped me realize I was trans, got me through some dark days, got me through heartbreak and top surgery. He saved my life a few times, and every so often he continues to. I owe so much to him.

If writing a very gentle fix-it fic where Arcee has a long talk with Anode (one of the trans lesbian bots from the vastly superior sister series James Roberts wrote) makes me a transphobe in these peoples' eyes, so be it. I don't care what they think. They never reached out to baby trans Chai and held his hand and kept him breathing.

Arcee did.

[slay00ryu]

HEAR ME OUT

ronin with a transmasc partner who is basically his little sidekick man. Goes together with him perfectly, both are bastard men who play games. He’s also super sappy (kinda in a luca way lmao) with ronin but HE MATCHES HIS FREAK (the freak is The Horrors™️)

THANK UOU HDHDHDHDG -mothgutzz

The Devil's Hyper Man

Ronin x transmasc!reader

ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ﮩ෴ﮩ__

You and Ronin have always been a chaotic duo, even before you entered a romantic relationship. The chaos he brought into you life was something you could give back to him with a similar energy. Every time he shared his new kill you would react with a bunch of emotes and send a chaotic message like 'Yes bro you've got'em!"

Whenever you were in chat with the other server members Angel would refer to you as "a little less bad shit crazy Ronin" and you wore that title like a batch of honour.

If one of you was somewhere the other followed, it was mostly you walking around Ronin like a good ol' dog. It escalated when the two of you started dating. Ronin is at work? You're there too just to sit in the workshop and pass him some tools. You're in voice call? He joins and keeps your attention on him. Sometimes the server found it annoying, but neither of you gave a damn about that. You just wanted each others company.

You followed Ronin even for his kills, and you would play mind games with the victims, you were almost as fucked up as your boyfriend after all. And how would Ronin react for your little games with his victims? Well, in his original way. "Oh, I'm so fucking proud to have you as my boyfriend." "You really went all out babe, never thought you had it in you, heh." Yeah, he's a proud boyfriend and praises you for fucking with people's minds.

Whenever you may experience a bad dysphoria day Ronin is there for you, he knows how it feels so it's only natural for him to show his support. He will reassure you about how handsome you are, and how perfect your grotesqueness is. "If you want we can destroy something, just say the word and my crowbar is ready." He whispers while the two of you lay on the floor and he rubs the back of your hand.

Ronin isn't a person to show a lot of emotions, but when the two of you have a dysphoric day at the same time, he will cuddle up with you and both of you will whisper reassuring things to each other.

You're definitely a sappy lover, you brag about Ronin on the server, talk mostly to him, suck up to him like you're glued to him. You will kiss him and cuddle up to him a lot. And he will enjoy the contact because he's just so touch starved.

At this point you two could rival with Luca and Feli for the title of the most disgustingly sickly sappy relationship on the server, you and Luca especially take that fight very seriously. "No, Feli is the bets partner dude. She's just so pretty and great, You and Ronin don't compare to us." "Nah, Ronin and I are so much better, at least we didn't need help to break our talking stage." You and Luca argue in the vc while Feli tries to fight the embarrassment and Ronin is amused by this situation.

Some scenarios <3

You were sitting on the cold ground in the workshop Ronin works in. You were curled up in his hoodie. Some times you would move to give him a tool. You enjoyed this time with him, he was working and humming a song while you were scrolling through your phone or sometimes demand kisses in exchange for a tool.

"You're just so eager for my touch, aren't you?" He titled his head to the side and chuckled. Ronin crouched and caught your lips in a soft and quick kiss. "Happy?" He asked with a smirk.

"Yeah, drop that shit-grin you loser." You replied and passed him the tool.

ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ﮩ෴ﮩ__

You were standing in the shadows of purgetory, Ronin just killed a guy. His whole hands were covered in blood, which was splattered everywhere. He turned to look at you and there was that wicked glint in his eye.

"Do you like the view darlin'?" He asked and approached you.

"Yeah, you're amazing when you end those fuckers." You moved your thumb along his cheek to wipe the blood from there.

"Aw, and you're such a good supporter baby." He kissed you on the forehead. "Let's get the fuck outta here." You took his hand and the two of you left the scene.

ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ﮩ෴ﮩ__

Ronin looked at you as you were walking alongside him and yapping about your day, he smirked. You were just so talkative, your mouth never shut up, but he liked it. It was never quiet with you around and he sometimes had to be more creative with his snarky remarks if he wanted to be beat you at your own game.

"Are you even listening to me?" You asked and he shrugged.

"Yeah, it's hard not to listen when you're talking all the time." He smirked.

"Wow Ronin, you're so nice." You rolled you eyes and continued talking like nothing happened.

ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ـ♡ﮩ٨ـﮩﮩ٨ﮩ෴ﮩ__

Hope you liked this my friends ;p

See ya folks

-N :)

[crimsonender]

interested in seeing you discuss how people view intersectionality/ and or just hearing you talk about intersectionality as whole! I saw your Transandrophobia reblog so i wanted to listen to your opinions. A quote i saw people reposting occasionally was about how no amount of shared marginalization between a man and a woman will make men have empathy for women. sorry if this is like too vague to go off, but i saw that same quote a few times and i agree to some extent but i feel like trans men's involvement in these discussions tend to be overlooked. should probably mention my bias but i'm an indigenous transguy but i don't want to hold resentment over online discourse and just want to hear other people's thoughts.

"no amount of shared marginalization between a man and a woman will make men have empathy for women."

This is TERF shit. And if you've seen a trans person say it, it's a trans person trying to reframe TERF shit to fit a trans person. The idea that men are biologically predisposed to dominate and oppress women is the cornerstone of radfem ideology.

Moreover it really sounds like the kind of thing that only a white person could say.

I really recommend reading The Will to Change by Bell Hooks.

Bell Hooks is really good about talking about how while men are largely responsible for their role in the patriarchy, women are complicit in it as well, and both men and women are hurt by it, even if women are moreso. She frames it in a way that doesn't feel accusatory and is very compassionate towards men, but also acknowledges that from the time they are young boys that they are trained and conditioned to be emotionless and even that to be accepted as a man that they must be violent. The titular will to change is about being willing to be cooperative with women, and for women to accept that male pain is not at its core an accusation of the failure of women as a social class. If we can all learn to accept that in our hearts then we can truly find love in our intimate and personal lives but also we can fight for a better tomorrow.

To bring it down, and make it a tad more personal to me, I was. Not a boy. I didn't really feel the onset of dysphoria until I began to fill the social role of a woman, and began puberty. My dissonance with my gender began around nine or ten and I knew in my heart I was transgender when I was fourteen. I came out at nineteen. For the first half of my life, I lived and filled the social role of a girl. I then grew up and became a man. Not all trans people like to conceptualize their transness like this, but there is no right or wrong way to be transgender. This is what feels right to me. There is a distinct who I was before and who I was after. (Though I do prefer other people to refer to my younger self as male and with my chosen name. Not the place to talk about why though.)

My biggest allies have always been women. My sister, my best friend, and my Moms have been supportive of me from day one when I came out to them, and the gratitude I feel... it cannot be put to words. Whereas I don't talk to... Any of the men in my life I knew pre-transition. Not my brother, my father, any of my male friends, my two male cousins whomst I was close with growing up, I don't see outside of very occasional family occasions where everyone is there. My family is not particularly progressive outside of my Moms being lesbians. Feminism is not exactly something any of them care about across the gender spectrum. So this doesn't really surprise me. I also do occasionally run into empathy problems with the women in my life, but all of us have that titular will to change.

Taking it back to intersectionality, in many black feminist writings such as those by Hooks as well as the coiner of the term, Kimberlé Crenshaw, it very specifically talks about how you don't really stack identities into a list. As a hypothetical example, you wouldn't say:

I'm a person of colour

I'm a woman

I'm trans

I'm working class

I'm disabled.

These identities coexist and interact with each other in ways that are unique.

"I'm a disabled working class trans woman of colour."

This lines up with Crenshaw's idea of intersectionality. There are experiences that this person will have that no one other person with part of her identity will, even if you only changed one small part of it. But it's also important to realize there are common experiences that we do have, when sharing parts of our identity. Having empathy for one another and coming to the table with kindness and understanding in our hearts first and foremost is how we coexist and find that acceptance that all of us want.

I think at the end of the day that being a human being is messy and almost always painful. But I think the pain is worth it. I think the best thing we can do is show one another compassion and grace.

[this-is-exorsexism]

Hey, since I saw you speak German (making that assumption based on the fact that you mentioned a exorsexist comment being German in a post. Sorry if that’s a wrong assumption) I really want to talk about instances of exorsexism that I see so often in the feminist German speaking circles and that I’m so so tired off.

The terms “female read” and “male read” to refer to people, both when talking about, you know, just everyday things they saw ex. “I like seeing female read people sporting body hair” (just say you like people who don’t shave their body hair. Cause it’s not just the demographic of people that society pushes to present as “women” that are pressured into body hair removal.) and in context of feminist discussions “Cat calling affects female read individuals more than male read people. And male read people are more often the perpetrator of cat calling”. (This one irkes me so so much, because it’s a sweeping generalisation in general, which is just not okay.)

Another example that also falls into every day things and is even more removed from any “political” statement: “I saw a female read person that reminded me of my mother.” (This quote came from a nonbinary person which made the unnecessary gendering feel even more uncomfortable. There was no forceful gendering of the person necessary. It could have just been “I saw a person that reminded me of my mother” the assumption that it must have been a woman already is a possibility by the association with mother. And you sadly can’t get rid of it. There is no necessity to state it like that.)

One last longer example that is partly feminism related again (that is a near direct translation): “A lot of women and female read people know the feeling of standing in front of the mirror and asking wether or not they want to wear this or if it’s too revealing. Because choice of clothing alone can suggest you want to provoke men.[…] Even if a female read person wears tight clothing, because [she/they] feel sexy in it, is that no reason to insult [her/them] as a slut.” (The “she” could have also been meant in a “they” sense, because this is a translation situation where it isn’t 100% clear. That’s why I wrote it like that.) (This quote is again making assumptions and putting experiences on people and forcefully gendering people who experience these feelings. When these experiences actually can’t be categorised like that. Like even perisex cis men can experience this. It is also very telling here that only the “female read” wording was used when making social commentary, not the “male read”, when men where mentioned.)

(These statements are not always necessarily word for word quotes. They are partly just things I remember seeing in the past. Each example is from a different person.)

The description “female read”/“male read” as you likely know is typically said to be used to “to be more inclusive. Since we don’t know how someone actually identifies and we shouldn’t assume”. Which to me is just very much a “I’m gonna categorise you into man or woman on sight, just as anyone else, but I’ll say ‘male read’/‘female read’ to make it inclusive and not feel bad in case I’m actually misgendering you.”.

The fact that people think it’s more inclusive and isn’t just basically another way to categories man and woman, while claiming to be inclusive, drives me up the wall if I think about it for to long. The idea to be categorised as “female read” is honestly more dysphoria inducing than simply being assumed to be a woman, because it feels even more like failing at being uncategorisable, because the people supposedly not clinging onto the binary are categorising me as something I’m not. And as I hinted at, at the beginning, these two categories virtually ignore any possibility of seeing people who your brain can’t sort into the man/woman categories immediately, and pushes them into one or the other. Which also can ultimately lead to erasure of intersex individuals who could be sorted differently than both their sex and gender. (I hope my wording here is okay and it’s clear what I mean. If not. Please let me know.) The categories of “female read”/“male read” to me are ultimately cissexist, exorsexist and intersexist. This whole concept is just forceful gendering of people wrapped up in a pretty package that says “feminism”.

A big personal pet peeve of mine is people praising people who categorise like that. I’ve recently seen it done by a cis woman, intersectional feminist, who was praising a speaker for using the terms.

There is also the not uncommon occurrence where it’s just not even hidden anymore that “female read” or “male read” is just put in instead of woman or man or used interchangeably.

I just truly deeply dislike how these terms have become a very common thing in feminist circles, even between trans*(= very much meaning nonbinary here as well, hence the trans*) educators, feminists and influencers. It feels like such a gut punch to see even them reinforcing the gender binary in such ways.

(If you disagree with this being exorsexism I’d be very curious as to how. Because to me personally it is a very clear example of exorsexism that I’ve been wishing to talk about since I first encountered it. Also sorry if this is worded a bit confusingly at times. I tried my best.)

this is definitely exorsexism.

i know exactly what you're talking about and i have spoken about the misuse of these terms at length on my personal social media too.

to be honest, i was about to defend ~some~ uses of these terms, but after reading everything you said, i think these terms need to be retired.

i think at least half the time people use "female-read" and "male-read" to just mean women and men, because i don't know, maybe they think nonbinary people think that men and women exist is somehow offensive? a woman is a woman and you can and should just call her a woman, a man is a man and you can and should just call him a man. calling a woman "female-read" is entirely unnecessary and quite disrespectful too, in my opinion. it basically strips her of her identity as a woman and reduces her to how society sees her. the same is true for men.

"male-read people are often the perpetrators of catcalling" is also an interesting one because it proves that "male-read" and "female-read" are just stand-ins for the gender binary and gender oppositionism: "male-read" people have (perisex cisgender) male privilege and the entitlement and attitudes that come with it. they can never be victims of patriarchal violence, only perpetrators. "female-read" people are always more marginalised than "male-read" people. if you want to talk about people who are most likely to catcall, you must talk about perisex cisgender men.

as you've said, this doesn't take into account transgender, nonbinary and intersex people as it doesn't only sort us into a new male-female gender binary but also into a binary of "perpetrator of the patriarchy" and "victim of the patriarchy" in very oversimplified ways. in its attempt at inclusivity, this language completely obscures the experiences of people whom society sees as men or women but aren't. being seen as male when you're nonbinary or female, being seen as female when you're nonbinary or male, i.e. having your gender assumed incorrectly can actually be really dangerous. it also once again reduces us to how society sees us and acts as if our actual genders don't contribute to our experience.

one of the strangest ways people use this language is when they say something like "i saw a male-read person at the shop today". like, what do you mean? you read this person as male. you projected your binary thinking onto this person. using passive voice for this is just a way to try to remove your responsibility in participating in this system of gender assumption. at this point, you might just say that you saw a man at the shop. in this context, they mean the exact same thing.

these terms also don't take into account that there are different ways of being perceived as male or female. some people are perceived as transgender male rather than cisgender male, which are two very different experiences. being seen as transgender female rather than cisgender female is also very much not the same.

people also ignore that a lot the people they're trying to be inclusive of by using this language aren't actually consistently read as either binary gender or are read as something else entirely. "male-read" and "female-read" are pretty much used to be permanent life-long states of being perceived, with the exception of people transitioning and then going from one to the other and will be read as that and only that for the rest of their life. in reality, this looks very different. some of us are called he one day and she another. sometimes it depends on our gender presentation. sometimes it depends on the person perceiving us. for many of us, we actually have no idea how someone's perceiving our gender until they indicate this. also, many of us aren't read as either male or female. a lot of us are just read as "what the fuck are you" or [insert slur here]. none of these experiences can be mapped onto the idea of male-read and female-read.

not to mention how they keep using these terms to refer to body parts. "female-read" is too often just code for "has boobs". it's especially funny when they use this language for internal organs. like, sure, the catcaller on the street totally perceives someone's uterus.

"male-read" and "female-read" are what "women and femmes" or the transmasc/transfem binary will become if we don't stop it. they can always be replaced with other more precise terms that don't reinforce exorsexism, cissexism, intersexism and gender oppositionism.

[mmmmalo]

forgive me if i'm conflating several different things here, but the idea that a cue ball - and by extension doc scratch - represents a cancerous trauma left by sexual assault was one of your earlier analyses wasn't it? the idea seems so ubiquitous to me now but i felt like a lot of people could benefit from revisiting it in the wake of that latest beyond canon update

Mm… like you said, you have my earlier analyses a little mixed up. And honestly my current take on the subject focuses more on how the problem of rape is leveraged towards transphobic ends in political discourse? So... perhaps not what you're looking for.

My old approach was to regard not the cue ball but the Green Sun as an emblem of trauma: for example, Rose talks with Jaspers atop a monolith of the Green Sun, when Jaspers's apparent drowning caused Rose's fear of water. Talking to Jaspers seemed to involve confronting that trauma, and the significance of that interaction transferred upon the Green Sun as a symbol. So later when Jade combines her dreamcorpse with Bec, Jadesprite's tearful inability to turn away from its searing light seemed to imply that fusing with Bec somehow awoke a traumatic memory that Jade was no longer able to suppress.

Various scenes led me to believe this was a memory of sexual assault: the dream sequence where Bec Noir creeps upon WV (who is in Jade's bed) and instigates some distressing fusion of their bodies, as the fire of the Green Sun Burns. The dream where Jade attacks Clubs Deuce (resulting in a DEAD GRANDPA SMACKDOWN in the waking world), only for CD to return later and attack Jade with an explosion of white foam (through which he implicitly continues to embody Grandpa). The point where Jade goes grimbark after spotting Jake's groin (as though it were a distressing trigger) and where Jade is, after again calling attention to the banana hammock, crushed beneath Jake's white hope explosion (which echos CD's shaving cream). I could go on.

But the above is all bait: Jade goes grimbark because the very notion of a man in panties is posed as the violent intrusion of the masculine upon the feminine, posed as rape. The hints of assault function as homophobic scaremongering, feminism of the trans-exclusive strain. Jade is afraid of lightning, which is posed as a masculine pneumatic intrusion into the inert feminine vessel -- which is to say, bringing Frankenstein/Jadesprite to life with a zap comes to represent rape, and the overwhelming urge is to REMOVE THE LIGHTNING, GET IT OUT GET IT OUT (the scene has visual reference to Aradiabot ripping her heart out following Equius's violation), hence Jadesprite's urge to die. Jade earlier displayed distaste for the pneuma via her always-ill-fated reader interactive sections: playing flute, selecting fruit, fighting (and in her own mind conversing with) Grandpa. Though ostensibly early, abstract indications of Jade's sensitivity to violation, these events also just display homophobia: blowing into wind instruments is a cocksucking joke inherited from Problem Sleuth, "fruit" means gay, Jade calls Grandpa a "bag of wind" because his cornball shit is gay (derogatory). It matters that Dirk is a Gay Guy who overwrote Jeanne Betancourt's voice for Pony Pals and now overwrites robot Rose's will on occasion because the story is satirizing a worldview wherein a "boy" adopting feminine characteristics is committing metaphysical rape.

The same goes for Doc Scratch: retroactively, he has the Handmaid locked up in a room because Caliborn got gender envy from the How To Draw Manga girl. Damara speaks in stilted staccato sentences for the same reason, it gives the impression that she is possessed by Lord English, that some insidious masculine force is speaking through her. Which again: transphobia. Or rather dysphoria, in this case, which was a major point of discussion in Openbound -- anxieties about internal and external reproach for expressing yourself abound, the imminent Rufioh/Horuss breakup represents bodily dysmorphia... I've talked about that elsewhere. The main point is illustrated by 583 of Problem Sleuth, where Nervous Broad (essentially a trans woman) looks into the mirror and sees a horrendous beast. This is why the Handmaid cannot escape Lord English: he is how she sees herself. The big bad of Homestuck, the embodiment of all that is foul of patriarchy, is an embodiment of transfeminine self-loathing, or more generally the picture of trans women that transmisogynists like to paint.

Vriska has a conversation with June about how she doesn't actually want to indulge her violent tendencies, how she thinks a life of peace could actually be the way to go. As she says all these, we are treated to a shot of Vriska's red boots crossed in such a way that a huge red X is imposed over her groin: this conversation is about dysphoria! Vriska implicitly declares violence and aggression to be phallic -- an association strengthen by the sexed roles of moirallegiance, in which women must sooth violent men. Elsewhere in the story, Vriska's seemingly inescapable violent tendencies are embodied by Doc Scratch -- therefore he is, in essence, Vriska's phallus, which she resents even as she is compelled to obey its directives.

There's actually a bit with Jake where the cue ball (or rather, a tower orb that resembles a cue ball) is used to represent a dick: "The space in your inventory is mainly hogged up by one incredibly huge thing. You guess you should get rid of it. But you can’t shake the feeling you might need it someday, and you don’t want to risk ditching it and be caught with your pants down later." As Spidergirl shoots her webbing on the floor nearby, Jake briefly considers losing the dick. That Doc Scratch's head is a nuclear bomb makes this motif coincide nicely with Jake's association with the irradiated dick of Doctor Manhattan (and Hulk), which as you've pointed out before was used in Watchmen to illustrate homophobic scaremongering.

Or hey, let's try to establish a new connection between Doc Scratch and Bec: perhaps epilogue!Jade's dog dick, was already present from the moment Jadesprite was born. Perhaps the anger Jade feels toward this newly formed phallic woman (who she calls a pansy) is informed by the contempt she expressed for fursuits, and how the people within them are dumb to think that makes them real animals -- a transphobic barb followed in short order by more slander for Grandpa, a hunter who skins animals and places the pelts by armor and portraits of women. Perhaps all this drama is condensed on page 6630, where Jake's big gay Hope bubble crushes Jade's green fireball, forming a portrait of Doc Scratch.

Perhaps we should pronounce "Doc Scratch" with an English accent, so that it becomes "Dog's Crotch".

[dykeulous]

I'll also offer my thoughts on your post about being cis or not. I'm very tired and tend to devolve into word salad when I'm sleepy so apologies if any of this is scrambeled.

The issue is that it's such a basic term. If one truly only conceptualizes themselves as their AGAB, it becomes a matter of semantics and a seemingly impossible gulf in how we see reality, because to you that's an inherently gender neutral act but to most trans people dividing people exclusively between Male and Female is just dividing them between Man and Woman. Our conceptualization of "female" is on totally different planets.

So it's like, okay, Radfem A doesn't believe in gender, and identifies as lacking a gender. So she's agender? Because that's what it sounds like, but I get that that is itself a gender identity. She can call herself whatever she likes, or not be called whatever she likes, but for her to just go "well I'm just a Female" is at least as much a gender identity since it happens to be the only way most radfems - explicit TERFs, I mean - have conceptualized gender, and how it's been conceptualized by most of humanity for most of history.

It's exceptionally difficult to try and make these two worldviews compatible because at the end of the day you can call a trans woman a woman but that doesn't really mean anything if she's also a male in the way a cis man is. The TIRF viewpoint seems to me to be just dressing up TERFery with trans affirming language. So it's like, okay, someone is doesn't have a gender, but agender still too much identification, so they identify as Female which isn't the same as woman or girl, which means they aren't cis but they aren't trans...again, no one has to identify as anything they don't want to, but it's hard to make any of trans identity at all work with these ideas, because it treats Male and Female as essentially Trve Gender.

Being cis does mean, essentially, not being trans, or at least it does to most** trans people the way certain sexual characteristics make someone female to you. There could be greater discussion on how to talk about people who are dysphoric but do not identify as trans, but the biggest part of the split in ideology here is on such a fundamental level that's very hard to do. Elon Musk was completely ridiculous when he got upset about being called cis and I could never change my mind on that. The absolute aversion to simply being called trans doesn't make sense to me even though I try to understand and respect people who would want to avoid it because they don't feel it matches it them. And then that's a problem, because they feel excluded, but they're the ones refusing to be considered trans in the first place? Like, someone who has dysphoria like that but rejects the label would just be a cis person with dysphoria, I would think.

I personally would support people who identify as their AGAB, but have dysphoria, as being trans without them having to be something else, if that was the primary issue.

*emphasis on most

**again, emphasis on most

thank you for sharing your perspective. that means a lot to me.

yes, “cis” is a very basic, one-dimensional word, and that is the problem. i see & understand that a lot of trans people get upset at the classification of female/male & correlate it to simple categorization of woman/man– because dysphoria, after all, is a condition that includes certain triggers, so i’m not going to complain about that (because i understand). but even before i got into radical feminism, i never really was upset about being called female; like you point out, it was simply gender neutral to me. it was a fact of life. just like it is to me now; a completely neutral, grey fact of life. of course, the way i view it is somewhat different to the way cis radfems do, since i am dysphoric, and i do have a different relationship with my sex characteristics than non-dysphoric people do: but ultimately, i understand that it is a neutral aspect of the human body, and i do my very best not to connate it with any gender stuff.

that being said, i don’t think it’s fair to say that a radfem (or any cis woman for that matter) who says she doesn’t identify as a woman, and rather just is female, has a gender identity “in her own way”. the trans community & the radfem community have a lot of ideological conflicts, which is why i understand why you would think this way. however, to me (i won’t say “us” because i know a lot of radfems disagree with me on this anyway & i don’t want to spread misinformation on general radfem beliefs), “female” is just a neutral state of being, while “woman” is the socio-economic class that was coercively ascribed to the female body. a lot of radfems are going to say, “i am a woman because i am female and a woman is an adult female human”, but i personally believe that is way too simplistic. most of the time, a woman is an adult female human– but i don’t strictly associate this with biology. i recognize two sets of gender: a) gender class and b) gender identity. a lot of radfems are going to tell you, “sex is material reality, gender is not”– which i disagree with. gender identity isn’t material reality. gender identity is personal, mutable, malleable, subjective (however still a production of gender existing as a division of the working-class), however; gender class is material. your experiences rely on gender class, and how you are perceived in society. that doesn’t mean that there is some inherent value to gender class, or that there is a scientific basis to it– it simply means that it is your lived experience, your material reality– which is most of the time, but not always, ascribed to your sex/biology.

i also do not believe that tirfs are “trying to cover their terfery up with trans affirming language”. i do not mean this offensively, but if you’re constantly looking for secret agents & traitors, you are efficiently locking yourself up in an echo-chamber. someone validating & acknowledging trans women’s gender identity, and also taking into consideration their lived experience as women if they have transitioned into the gender class of woman, while simultaneously not erasing the fact that they are male– is not trying to “cover their inner transphobia”. they are simply stating facts. i think the problem here is that you believe radfems hold some fundamental belief of having to do something in order to be male. “at the end of the day, you can call a trans woman a woman, but that doesn’t really mean anything if she’s also male in the way a cis man is”– a trans woman cannot “be male in the way a cis man is”, because a trans woman is a trans woman, not a cis man. i do not believe that anyone can be male in any way, someone just is male. radfems do not view male biology as something inherently evil, monstrous, oppressive, disgusting, or something to be distanced from. we do not believe there is a right or wrong way to be male, and we do not view the male biology as our enemy: we hold the system as our enemy. i understand your deep desire to distance your own self from it, because after all, you are dysphoric; but take this with a grain of salt; acknowledging that you are male, and that this does not define you in any way, shape, or form; and that you still can keep your subjective gender identity, as well as medically migrate into the woman gender class if you so wish– will probably ease your dysphoria a million times. i know it did mine. you can change your sex characteristics, but ultimately you cannot change your sex, the clear canvas that should carry no gendered connotations at all.

i will also acknowledge that some radfems are, in fact, attempting to “revert back to sex categorization instead of gender categorization”, or how you here point it out; “gender has been conceptualized that way throughout the whole of history”. however, i still believe we have somewhat of a different understanding of this. a lot of radfems don’t understand that in order to abolish gender, we also need to abolish sex categorization. that doesn’t mean, “ignore the fact that there are legitimate anatomical differences”, it means– “acknowledge that those anatomical differences hold no social significance whatsoever, and acknowledge the fact that these very anatomical differences have been appropriated by the patriarchy in order to justify the creation of the cultural system of gender”. after the neolithic revolution, female humans became secondary, and this marks the emergence of gender as the ideological, religious, and cultural system, a.k.a. the beginning of ascribing gender to one’s biology. then followed sex categorization, the canonization & essentialization of the gender system; this meant using pseudoscientific measures & approaches to “justify” why males had superior biology, and thus the man class is & should be the natural leader. you are, however, wrong in the fact that “this is just how it has always been”, because human history did not begin at neolithic, and it certainly did not stop there, either. for most of our history, humans have lived in quite egalitarian communes, where neither gender nor sex categorization existed. gender as a system of exploitation expands, develops, evolves, and varies from culture to culture. as an example, we are currently stuck up in the imperialistic view of the colonial binary gender system: this doesn’t mean that the gender systems prior to imperialism were somehow more progressive or less oppressive, it simply means that the gender system has evolved to fit the current era, which is the highest stage of capitalism.

essentially, we cannot separate sex categorization from gender. both need to be dismantled. for that, we need gender communism, or gender acceleration– the process of speeding up, or accelerating gender, until it no longer has any meaning [which it doesn’t on a scientific level, but it certainly does on a socio-cultural one]. humans have lived in egalitarian communes before, or as karl marx explained it through historical materialism; primitive communism. we are currently living under the highest stage of capitalism, and we need to reach for the better, the final stage of human society; communism. anatomical differences between females & males are real, but no classification has any fundamental or scientific basis that explains the gendering of human biology. neither sex is better nor worse, neither sex is superior nor inferior, and neither sex has any inherent personality traits, hobbies, iq, abilities, or capabilities. there is no right or wrong way to be female or male. there is no scientific basis that supports gender identity, it simply exists because of the division of gender, and the division of gender exists because of the patriarchy.

i appreciate your open-mindedness on the existence of dysphoric people who aren’t trans-identified, and for respecting their choice of not wanting to be called trans, while trying to also include them in your conversations about dysphoria. that does clear up some of my concerns, however i will still say that this certainly is not the opinion of the majority of the trans community, or at least how i have seen it. i do ultimately believe it is absurd & ridiculous to be extremely upset at being called cis, as it was originally just meant to be a harmless distinction between trans & non-trans people, and it would be downright insensitive to take away the right of an oppressed group to name the people who aren’t part of their specific social class.

[last-flight-of-fancy]

I would love to hear your trans alphinaud and lesbian alisaie headcanons or more about the subtext you see! Especially alisaie.

AHHH oh gosh i would love to answer!! Though I must admit that these are built from many (MANY) small moments across the whole game more than a few easily pointed at examples, which means its.. kind of difficult to pull up (and remember) all the evidence.

That being said, i do still have Many Thoughts about it :DDD

First off trans Alphinaud was set into my mind very early on by one simple fact: identical twins are almost always born the same sex. like almost invariably, with the very rare exceptions needing some wild extenuating circumstances. and you cannot tell me those two are fraternal.

now ofc this is fiction, and a fantasy world besides. who's to say the writers knew that particular fact? well good news! alphinaud presents a *lot* of other common trans experiances, which are scattered throughout the msq and optional side dialogue.

(shoutout to me for having the exact same thought four years apart before and after playing the game myself. i have absolutely no memory of the first post at all because i also have no memory of watching my partner play shadowbringers even though i definitely did. rare adhd memory loss win! i got to experiance my favourite thing for the first time twice!)

post 1: dated 2019, talking about how alphinaud is extremely trans coded, being an identical twin of a different gender to his twin, cannot swim, is body shy and *extremely* hesitant about using public showers, and having interests that are traditionally coded as feminine in fiction.

post 2: dated 2023, the same thing but this time talking about how wonderfully alphinaud and alisaie are made to complement each other in opposite ways.

he cant swim: related to the body-shyness and hesitance around the showers, its VERY common for trans people to experiance these things due to dysphoria and societal perceptions. i myself started experiancing this (even though i LOVE swimming) when pubescence started to hit. (it sucks!) alphinaud was probably one of those ones who realised VERY early what he was (logic boy who is too dang smart for his own good) so he just.. never learned to swim at all. kept his nose buried in books instead.

traditionally feminine interests/abilities: sure it could be trope subversion, but personally i think theyre also things he just enjoyed before transitioning and thus continued to do.

and one more that i can remember off the top of my head: alisaie's reaction to estinian mistaking her for alphinaud.

"but alphinaud has no problem with being mistaken for-" let me explain, i swear it makes sense.

see, alphinaud is a little logic boy at heart, we know this. he knows he and alisaie share their features, that is simply a fact. alisaie though? alisaie is ruled by feeling, and reacts accordinly. most notably the Incident when she first meets estinian.

what i find especially interesting about this is that prior to that moment with estinian, neither of them appear to have much issue with their similarities. it's only after shadowbringers that alisaie reacts with such contempt

(probably not helped by her not liking estinian much in general lol)

what this says to me is that some time before or during ShB, alphinaud told alisaie that the way people mistake him for her does bother him, but he can't blame them for the mistake considering the circumstances, so he just doesn't mention it.

alisaie however can and will blame them and thus the next time someone mixes them up (rip estinian) she EXPLODES. because it's not about her. if it was about her i honestly dont think she would care nearly as much. but it's about her brother, and how dare you hurt her brother's hidden feelings by not being able to tell them apart.

(completely seperate headcanon but i do think that estinian is faceblind as fuck, which means he never stood a chance on this one, poor guy)

okay now for lesbian alisaie <3

what WAS it that thancred said about battle scars and maidens? and whyfor are you thinking about this alisaie? :3

also: Tesleen.

also also: Emery (A Malm in her Shoes short story)

fr tho alisaie pays attention to and talks about girls a lot. in a way she never does about boys. bringing up my complementary opposites wrt the twins thought from before, it honestly could've been another way the writers COULD have done that, having alisaie attempting to impress boys with her athletic skills the same way alphinaud tried to impress girls with his artistic ones (something he is teased about repeatedly). like the absence of this potential parallel is almost suspicious tbh...

once again, any one of these things in isolation is probably simply a choice in writing, but all these things together spell out to me one thing: alisaie likes girls. exclusively.

(im sorry you wanted lesbian alisaie thoughts more and i have less of that than the trans alphinaud ones, but if you come back in 3-5 years when i've finished my second msq run i will have compiled a far more complete list of evidence for both complete with screenshots, probably lol)

[dev-solovey]

So I just read this awesome LGBT extreme horror book:

(description in alt text)

Content warnings: gore, cockroaches, sexual assault, discussions of prison, gender dysphoria, transphobia

I want to give some context about the author, based on her interview with Asher Dark on YouTube as well as my own conversations with her (she's super sweet!). This was her first book, which she wrote while she was in prison - AND while she was transitioning. She began her transition in prison, and the intersection of those two experiences informs the narrative as well as drawing parallels between imprisonment and dysphoria.

The story surrounds a transgender woman named Vera who's staying in a cabin alone for the summer so she can focus on writing her next horror book. As she becomes increasingly paranoid due to isolation, her writing gets more disturbing - writing that is threaded into the narrative about a killer who defiles women in some of the worst ways possible. Vera is disturbed by this writing because something about this killer feels too real.

From here on, there are spoilers. Also, this is an extreme horror/splatterpunk book, it should go without saying that things are about to get really, really gnarly. This is your one and final warning about that, you are not allowed to whine in the comments beyond this point. Dead dove, do not eat.

So the prologue is arguably one of the most brutal parts of the book. It ends with this killer sexually assaulting the woman he's kidnapped by binding her hands and feet, then putting a jar of cockroaches in her pussy and lighting a flame beneath it, sending the cockroaches fleeing from the heat up inside her. Extremely shocking beginning, but the things that stood out to me most is the parallels to prison.

Prison really is the ultimate violation of autonomy. You're being literally locked up, physically and mentally, in a where things like sexual assault and pest problems are rampant and inescapable. When Carietta told me that this book represents everything she felt and experienced in prison, I didn't expect those feeling to punch me in the face so quickly, but I'm glad they did. It's terrifying and uncomfortable, but that's the point - it sets up what this story is about.

The first chapter tells us a bit about Vera's life - she has a conversation with her (very sweet) fiance, Connor, where they establish that she's going to be at this cabin alone while he's off doing field research for his own profession. From there, the story whips back and forth between Vera writing and going about her day, and the brutal actions of this killer.

Throughout the story, we see more and more details about this killers envy of women, and Vera's own struggles with dysphoria. Much like in prison, she can only talk to Connor over the phone, and she feels she's growing more distant from him to the point where she becomes increasingly envious and thinks he might be cheating on her - a thought fueled by her returning dysphoria. Later in the book, we see that the killer's motivations for tormenting women come from a hatred of them, a hatred which is later revealed to be jealousy in disguise. He wants to be a woman, but believes he can't be - and that makes him want to torment attractive women because it's not fair that he can't be one too.

The two parts of the story meet at the end, and you realize that the killer is what Vera could have become if she repressed herself any longer. As a transgender man myself, I absolutely loved this metaphor. Many people who are trans, before they realize it, put themselves through their own personal conversion therapy, where they tried to stuff down the other gender as much as possible. And that's essentially what this killer is doing - he's not just tormenting some woman he's kidnapped, but metaphorically, he's tormenting the woman within Vera, chaining her up and keeping her trapped and oppressed.

The torment that he enacts really makes the reader squirm, as it should - it's intended to evoke ever-present discomfort, which is exactly what gender dysphoria is too. As I read, I think on some level I always knew how it was going to end, even though it still kept me guessing. Because it matched up with my own experiences so well, I had the suspicion that the killer was just another side of Vera, but I never knew how the two elements were going to come together until the very last page.

The storytelling structure of Unmarked Grave is non-linear, very unconventional. If you're looking for something plotty and straightforward, this isn't it - it's a reflection of personal experiences, which are always messy and never fully resolved. It's raw and brutal.

The extreme horror serves it well for that reason. At best, dysphoria makes you uncomfortable, and at worst it makes you feel like you're going insane. A genre like extreme horror is perfect for evoking that feeling. The constant s itching between points of view is also extremely disorienting, and while that made it occasionally difficult to follow, I see why the author made that choice, as it serves the metaphor well.

I highly recommend this book to any queer horror fans out there - you can purchase it on Amazon, where you can also find Carietta Dorsch's other works, including a short story collection she released just last month. If you want to learn more about her, she did an interview on the Unveiling Nightmares channel with Asher Dark, where she goes into more detail about her work.

Lastly, I wanted to share some pictures of my copy of the book - I purchased a signed copy, and what she did with the packaging was so neat I just have to share it with everyone:

She packed it in an envelope designed to look like police evidence, and included a few horror movies stickers and fake cockroaches to go along with the theme. My favorite touch on the evidence package is under remarks, where it says "STAY OUT OF THE WOODS".

And of course, here's her signature:

If you read it, don't forget to leave a review - much like small businesses, indie authors live and die by reviews. If not, please reblog and share to support a trans horror creator!!

[bunk-bed-blorbos]

1, 2, 6, 9, and 17 (Also don't worry about forgetting to turn on asks, I've had moments like that too ;) )

(lol thank you)

Fluff: 1. What are things they both find funny?

Hilariously wrong tabloids. Even better now that they're public figures, so sometimes they'll get a wildly incorrect article written about Them, and it's always a riot Zuke: So, Who am I cheating on you with this week? Mayday: Apparently, you were caught last night sneaking out of... Oh My God, Club Planetarium! Zuke, scandalized: No... Mayday: Zuke, how could you? Zuke: I'm sorry Mayday, you know how attracted I am to humility! Zuke & Mayday: ....Pffft, HAHAHAHA- They will also laugh at harmless, petty celebrity drama, dumb internet memes, and terrible, terrible puns

2. If they could each describe each other in one sentence, what would it be?

"Whenever Mayday needs to make a decision between what her brain and her heart are telling her, she will pick her heart every time, and she's usually right." "A lot of people think Zuke is dumb 'cause he's quiet, but he just spends a lot of time in his head, thinkin' about stuff like music, art... the people he cares about..."

6. What is/are their love language(s)?

Mayday is a very Physically Touchy person. If Zuke is in one place for too long she will lay across him. It doesn't matter if he's sitting down at his drums to practice, it's canoodling time. She reacts very strongly to Words of Affirmation (See the 1010 fight), and will frequently give Gifts to Zuke of anything that reminds her of him, and squeals like a schoolgirl whenever she receives a gift in turn Zuke not only picked up on Mayday's Words of Affirmation response, but he also has that love language, and puts a lot of thought into what he says (He may not be the talkative one of the duo, but he makes his words count). He values Quality Time, and wants to spend all of it with May. But most of all, his love comes through in Acts of Service.

Angst: 9. Have they made each other cry?

Ah yes, Mayday, known the city over for taking rejection well. I buy into the common headcanon that May has some form of ADHD, and I also sprinkle in that she experiences Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. Because of this, she can feel a disproportionate amount of emotional pain if she feels like she's getting the cold shoulder from Zuke, which sucks because she knows that she's probably overreacting, which just makes her feel worse... As for Zuke, he's only ever cried because of May once... after the argument where she broke his sticks. Both of them agree that incident was the worst argument of their relationship, and both of them feel awful about it. May especially. She regretted it as soon as the structural integrity of the sticks failed. It was the first night since before they bunked their beds where they slept in separate rooms...

Depth: 17. What senses (sights, smells, feelings, etc). remind them of each other?

Zuke thinks of Mayday every time he sees a warm sunrise, vibrant flowers as pink as her eyes. He thinks of her whenever he smells or tastes sweet, tangy fruit and fresh cinnamon. He feels her in campfire and candle flames, in thick leather and the groove of old vinyls Mayday thinks of Zuke every time she sees the ocean, or a crystal clear stream. She smells him in delicate mints and earthy teas, and feels him running her hands through tall weeds or cool, running water. And of course, they hear each other. Whenever Zuke hears the hum of electricity, the crackle of a campfire, or the roar of a great predator, he hears her. Whenever Mayday hears the rain pelting against the city street, the thunder rolling through the sky, or the rumble of the City's districts moving, she hears him And finally, when the guitar reaches its climax.... when the drums kick in and make the song its own.... whenever they discover a new rock album, or listen back on what they've created.... They envision their partner, wielding their instrument with pride and passion, and themselves up on stage with them.