#and gender nonconforming or not we should at least have someone we know will understand and respect gabrielle's queerness

[adamnablelittledevil]

I don't see Emma D'Arcy playing Gabrielle because they're too young and on HOTD already, I don't think the schedules would work. Still, they're actually a great actor and one of the few non-binary performers we have AND Gabrielle is a gender nonconforming character, so this is one of the few fancasts of 30yos that have some logic? Yeah, it's not realistic, it will probably never happen and it's okay, but there's nothing crazy in wanting a talented non-binary actor playing a good gnc character.

[gamesindustrynormal]

I don't know how common this is among trans people, but for many years I spent a lot of time looking for signs that I was not, in fact, trans. And frankly, they are not hard to find. I suspect even most cis people would doubt their gender identity if they had reason to look.

It's the obvious things. The biological differences, the societal pressure to conform. The various alternatives thrown at us - you just have masculine/feminine interests, that doesn't have to mean anything. You're just interested in a surface-level presentation. You're just a pervert. You're just trying to escape responsibility/gain privilege. We really should be dismantling gender roles altogether rather than moving between them. So many excuses for why what we're feeling doesn't mean what we think it means.

But it's also subtle, well-meaning things that get twisted by self-loathing. A trans person telling anecdotes of gendered experiences in their childhood and sure you found a lot of similarities to your own life, but also things that you could not relate to. Their description of dysphoria involves panic attacks and anxiety, but what you are feeling is more akin to a constant sense of hopelessness. They talk about benevolent friends seeing them for who they are and helping them come to terms with it, and no-one has ever seen that in you. At least not exactly like that.

Surely if your experience is so different you can't be trans. It's one of the other things.

And the more trans people I talk to, the more I understand that where we are coming from, what is important to us and where we are going is wildly different. Even for people who want nothing more than to pass as cis the ways in which they realized this and the journey they are taking there has a lot of variance. There's a reason good therapy focuses on what, specifically, would make you happier rather than how many trans boxes you check.

So I think it is fair to want to shy away from responding to gender-nonconformity as a joke but rather take it as a serious expression of identity and be curious about that. I think for someone who is just doing it as an act they will be quick to point that out. But responding with insincerity to a trans person taking their first trembling steps into finding their true selves just adds to the mountain of small excuses keeping them from happiness.

[magentagalaxies]

making my own post bc i have thoughts and i don't want to keep having to go back and forth with tags and replies on someone else's post:

anyway original post i started this conversation on: @charlotterenaissance

my tag essay:

@liliana-von-k's reply:

(all this context is bc i have even more thoughts so i thought i should make my own post)

anyway to respond to that i 100% agree!! it also reminds me of something from my very first conversation with bruce (when we did a zoom interview before we knew each other) which idk if i've posted this aspect of before: i forget what my exact question was but i essentially brought up this kind of paradigm the KITH's female characters are often discussed in and how it's kind of strange comparing it to the actual representation of female characters in the show. like, sure dave "passes" the most as a conventionally-attractive female character, but also i'd honestly say any of the kids in the hall can pass as female, not even just from a genderqueer perspective but from a not all women are "conventionally attractive" perspective. like i know cis women who have a jawline like bruce's or a nose like scott's or any other feature that isn't seen as "feminine" from (often white-eurocentric) beauty standards and many of them are gorgeous.

and the fact that KITH's female characters are often discussed through a lens of "who plays the best woman" (meaning the one who "passes" according to beauty standards) is as frustrating as it is fascinating bc i really do think it points to the way the media tries to comprehend this gender nonconformity and shove it into a box they can understand. because the kids in the hall have already destroyed the most obvious box their female characters could be put in - yes, they are male comedians, but even though the most often way society rationalizes men dressing femininely is as a comedic act (whether as a man purposefully trying to elicit comedy via feminine actions and dress or via a man who genuinely enjoys feminine expression being made an object of ridicule via comedy), the kids in the hall break this framework (this "binary", if you will) by being comedians who are in control of the audience's laughter, but playing their femininity as genuine. you don't laugh with them at their femininity because they do not laugh at femininity, but you also can't make their femininity the subject of ridicule because their position as comedians means they are at once in on the joke and steering the joke in another direction. this technique is more subtextual (and likely subconscious) in the portrayal of female characters, but it's a tactic scott knowingly (and expertly) employs when playing buddy cole

so since the "men in dresses equals comedy" box is eliminated, cishet society feels the need to create another box for them to rationalize this gender nonconformity in, by attributing it to a spectacle other than humor. so they decide to instead view these gender transgressions through the lens of beauty and sexual attractiveness. this also helps rationalize any confusing attraction a cishet person has to one of the kids in the hall dressed as a woman - they pass too well, or at least whichever one you're attracted to (most often dave) does. making a spectacle of the kids in the hall playing women eliminates any confusion or implications that maybe gender and sexuality isn't as rigid as we think, by othering these performers as a special case and convincing yourself that there is no real woman who looks like dave foley in drag, and if there was she would be cis.

it's a slightly better box to be in than having the femininity be the target of ridicule, but it still misses the point that the femininity explored in kids in the hall is not meant to be othered. it leaves out so many of the show's most iconic female characters - fran is not glamorous, but she is a realistic woman. chicken lady is more chicken than lady, but she is still a well-written female character - and reduces others to their attractiveness when the sketch itself is not about that at all. and when i brought this up to bruce he sounded as though he had been waiting for someone to make this analysis, because even though the guys joke about it themselves it is at times uncomfortable to be in an interview that focuses so much on how the interviewer finds dave in drag sexy, or picking apart which physical aspect of the guys passes best. i think i remember bruce saying something to the effect of "no one's asking which one of us is the most hot playing a business man, but that's just as different of a person from us as playing a woman"

and it's interesting to think about this in the context of how the media in general treats people who identify as women in this framework of focusing on physical attractiveness all the time. in recent years, this behavior is more widely known to be sexist af so the overtness has declined (tho is it absolutely still present to some degree), but since the kids in the hall are all male it's fair game to make these sorts of comments about their female characters to their face, because it's spectacle and separate from them. even the exact same people who would call out a comment being made about a cis female comedian are often oblivious of how it could potentially apply to these male comedians, or have other bizarre lines within their ability to rationalize this gender nonconformity for themselves.

take the "wedding dresses" sketch that was censored from the amazon revival for example (this sketch was showcased at sketchfest's "scenes they wouldn't let us do" and has appeared in kith live shows since 2015). this sketch was censored because even though amazon would let the guys play women (and even then it was often an uphill battle), they would not let the wedding dresses sketch air because it featured men wearing wedding dresses in a comedic setting. the rule of thumb seemingly is: men wearing dresses is always comedic (and therefore transphobic), unless he (typically dave foley) passes too well, in which case trans people have nothing to do with the conversation. but the fact that they were men dressed femininely was never the point of the joke, it was the idea of a wedding dress, a significant garment symbolizing an event meant to be only worn for one day, being these guys' everyday wear and all the conflicts and community that came from that. it was an ode to the outsiders, a celebration of those who live and present unconventionally. and the fact that it's never about gender is in itself the most upliftingly genderqueer thing of all.

[mackmp3]

Dress could be interpreted to be about feeling the pressure to be a stereotypically girly girl and trying to navigate social situations where it's expected you have a boyfriend

sorry but this is not "Gender nonconforming behaviour" this is female behaviour. literally 100% of female children experience this, because this is a cornerstone of misogyny - enforcing male-invented social stereotypes of how a girl should behave (aka "femininity"). please read some feminist theory instead of saying basic female experiences are queer gender experiences! this is why we have a million white afab they/thems who think not liking pink and having a personality means they aren't really a girl and that the evil cis dykes are oppressing them by saying gender is a rightwing social construct that no one actually has.

warning for transphobia towards non binary people, please keep scrolling and don't read the ask if this will upset you

nice to know i found a terf! please kindly unfollow me now if you haven't already thanks :)

i'm pretty sure i say at least twice in that post that what PJ is singing about is totally normal experience for cishet girls, and that there are lots of cishet readings of her music that make sense, just that i personally find them interesting to view through a queer lens.

yes, i'm sure a lot of cishet girls also experience discomfort with having to wear a dress and find a boyfriend! i never said they didn't! but to an audience that is sapphic *and* is gender non conforming, the song is more likely to really resonate with them. which i say about two paragraphs down, if you'd have read the rest of the post -

'[...] but failing to do so because it's just not you. feeling uncomfortable in a dress, trying and failing to have normal interactions with guys - which of course cishet girls can feel as well, but hits particularly hard as a queer, gender non conforming, girl adjacent person'

i don't think i need to read feminist theory to post my *completely subjective media analysis* about pj harvey on the internet, these things are just theories after all! this is how *i personally* interpret some songs. in any case, whatever you have going on is clearly not as feminist as you might like to think, as feminism last time i checked was about trying to get equality and fairness for *all* genders, not annoying teenagers on tumblr for daring to think about gender on their own.

also 'the evil cis dykes are oppressing them by saying gender is a rightwing social construct that no one actually has.' i'm really sorry that you think that way but literally no one thinks this. i have never seen one single thing ever saying that someone thinks cis lesbians are oppressing them. they think terfs are harassing them. which now you are too! the world isn't seeing some major downfall in gender because there are now 'a million white afab they/thems', it's because on the last few years, some parts of the world at least have had a massive shift towards accepting non-binary people as a thing that exists, and more visibility, which had led to more people, especially young people, having more tools and language with which to understand their own gender. even just five years ago i probably wouldn't have been able to think of a non-binary character, now i could list you dozens. non-binary people were always there, there just weren't always conducive environments, or the words, for people to realise that that is what they were feeling. also by implication you're saying that liking pink and not having a personality are parts of being a girl? i don't think that what you meant to say but that *really* isn't feminist. in case it's not clear enough

NON BINARY PEOPLE ARE VALID YOUR GENDER OR LACK THEREOF IS REAL

TERFS GO AWAY

[theliterarywolf]

Alright, let's compile some spoiler-related asks under a Read More. There's four here so, uh... Plenty of reading

Anonymous asked: Holy shit, Submission-anon here. I was actually considering mentioning how much Zora's domain bothered me in Totk this time around. Glad to see I'm not the only one, and I hope it's fine I add my thoughts on that to my submission about my observations on Yona's character, since I feel it REALLY plays into WHY the entirety of Zora's domain feels a lot less... fun, emotional and personal, like it did in Botw, or even Aoc. Anonymous asked: Zora's domain was my fave in botw 🙃🙃🙃🙃🙃 sounds like it'll be my least fucking fave this time around fuck Anonymous asked: Dorephan deciding Sidon is straight, so he can have a go at Link. I'm only saying one thing: 20 liters. Anonymous asked: The straights are at it again /J But seriously, not going to be "QUEERPHOBIC!HDHUYDB!" Bullshit argument for loz, but I will point out that when someone says "This chick kinda sucks I think link fits better with this other fem character!" You get shitton of support or at least no real backlash, even if she's "only a friend". But if you say "I don't like Yona." even non shipping related, so many people will throw a tantrum and claim it's because "you wanna make link gay, dudes can be friends"

Anon 1: Feel free, anon.

Anon 2: I mean, you'll probably still have fun. I will say that reassembling the Zora Armor was interesting, at least...

Anon 3: First of all, I can't get over 'deciding' because I want anyone who has played through the Zora's Domain portion of TotK to look me in the eyes and deny that it honestly felt like Dorephan was more excited to see Link than Sidon was.

Like, yeah, after the Water Temple when Sidon went down on one knee to present his vow to Link and all, but still...

...Also, you just had to add that cursed tidbit at the end there, huh?

Anon 4: I feel that we have been seeing a more vocal amount of headcanon brainrot with ToTK as of late. Because, yeah, even though me and another anon were joking about Yona being a beard, they were just that: jokes. Some people out there are legitimately trying to cry homophobia because of her introduction and it's just, like I said, Sidon is a Prince (well, now a King but whatever), he is Dorephan's ONLY HEIR because Mipha DIED, he has to get married in order to keep the bloodline going. This isn't hard to understand.

But, also, I want to take a moment to point out the obnoxious level of 'this character is X and if you don't agree you're a bigot' as well as 'why do the alphabet-soup people ALWAYS have to make characters gay or trans?!'

Because I know where the upsurge in all of this came from: that interview that Aonuma gave where he was talking about 'oh, we always develop games with Link being more nonconforming to gender'.

And, of course, that should be taken as Link is more of a slate for the player to project themselves onto, no matter what gender or sexual-orientation, to create a more immersive experience.

But then we ended up with people going 'So, Link is trans then? It's canon, suck it homophobes!' And then legitimate edgelords going 'Link can't be a tranny, stop projecting onto everything!' And then there's that back and forth while rational people in the middle are just trying to live and vibe with 'In my headcanon, Link is a GNC man and Sidon has two hands and I'm happy and not bothering anyone'

So there's what was mentioned above and that animosity leaches over to conversations about Yona (people on both sides thinking that the only reason she's disliked is shipping)

Anyway, I'm just going to stay in my corner, enjoy this game at my slow-to-medium pace... And brace myself for the 'jealous wife'/'fujoshi wife' fics that will inevitably fill up the SidLink tag on AO3 because people forget that polyamory is a thing.

[detransdamnation]

it was absolutely worth the wait. I went over your answer over and over, at least 5 good times and i feel like i take something new out of it each time around. I will probably write something longer soon to touch up on some things (as long as you dont mind of course) In the tags you mentioned being willing to give your opinion on other potential factors and well i know its a bit of an open question but you got my attention spark there and i wonder now what other factors you would name besides the ones we brought up up there?

(Also the part where you explained that specific feeling of wanting to start over, have something you can call your own after being mistreated-having control over something. This was just…huge.) also x2 i wish you didnt hate the things you write so intensely but at the same time i understand. Just know its nowhere near what your head tells you it is. You are one of the most raw and at the same time coherent and brilliant people talking on those matters, in my opinion. Cheers☁️

Gender roles—and hatred of, or discomfort with, those who do not conform to them—is a massive factor in most cases of dysphoria. Directly intertwined with that, as well, is social influence. What is essential to remember when we speak on the latter aspect is that it is not something particularly unique to dysphoria, nor does acknowledging it make someone’s dysphoric distress any less real; it simply exposes the—perhaps uncomfortable—fact that we are who we surround ourselves with and can (and do) make unconscious decisions about ourselves and who we are based off of what others around us are doing, feeling, or expressing.

The fact of the matter is, gender, like any other social construct, requires participants in order to exist, and through participating in this construct, we influence others to do the same. This starts young and could be (in fact, largely is) as covert as, for example, raising a daughter “like a girl” or a son “like a boy”—“unless they tell me they are otherwise.” This is something that I have actually heard multiple parents say word-for-word when faced with the prospect of having a transgender child. I specifically bring it up here because it is typically said under the impression that this approach does dysphoric young people well—but although their hearts may come from the right place, they also miss the mark entirely.

By treating people differently according to their sex at all, we reinforce these gender roles and stereotypes that harm us in the first place. We continue to place a certain gendered value on all of these things that should be neutral—behaviours, clothing, toys—and instill in these children that, if they happen to fall outside of those boxes, they are atypical. Despite my own family actually voicing that it didn’t matter what I liked so long as I was happy, I still never sought out my “nonconforming” desires until after I had told them I was transgender because they, themselves, did not take that initiative to expose me to anything outside of what was “normal” for children of my sex. The truth was, the thought of my existing as anything outside of that made them uncomfortable, and moreover, made other people uncomfortable, which they never challenged—and even though I wasn’t able to voice any of this as a child, I did pick up on it. Everything outside of this box was like “The Forbidden Fruit” and it was very clear to me that, if I reached for it as the sex that I am, I would stand out. I would be “different.” I didn’t want to be different. I wanted to be me.

The sentiment itself also insinuates that the parent would raise the child differently only if they came out as trans, which implies that they would only allow this hypothetical child to be themselves if they took on an identity that was more palatable to them. It is an eerie echo to how so many trans children’s stories start out—Jazz Jennings, Josie Romero, Kai Shappley—and it shows a great lack of insight on as to why children would even express the desire to be another gender in the first place. If the only thing standing between a “wrong” and a “right” is our sexes, of course we will come to despise them. Of course we will decide that we are another gender. We have internalized that this is the only way that we can be accepted as ourselves. We become influenced into transgender identity because we see no way to peacefully exist as “cis.” It should go without saying that this does absolutely nothing for children who are predisposed to dysphoria.

Which leads me to the last point I will make in this post. Something I know influenced my own dysphoria was certain personality traits. For example, one of my most pervasive personality traits throughout my life has been self-consciousness. To add insult to injury, I was also a fairly “early bloomer” as a child, puberty-wise, and developed relatively fast on top of that. So, you can imagine how detrimental it was for an already hypersensitive child to be given even more reason to “stand out.” I started to spend a lot of time just looking at myself and my body and how I presented very quickly became a constant underlying monologue. I wasn’t even dysphoric at this point, just painfully self-conscious—but that set the perfect stage for my dysphoria to develop because I was already uncomfortable with myself in the general sense. I just needed something specific to latch on to.

Although only a personal experience, if even a small fraction of dysphoric people could relate to it, it would track with what has already been established in many other mental illnesses. Self-esteem is a huge factor in anxiety disorders: Someone who is confident and self-assured is probably going to be a lot less likely to develop an anxiety disorder than someone who is meek and dependent on others’ reassurance. Perfectionism could be a factor in obsessive-compulsive disorders: A child who needs things to be “just right” will logically be more likely to become clinically obsessive over that as opposed to a child who only cares about getting things done. Similarly, I think that a barrage of traits could be a factor in dysphoria and whether or not our brains go through with its development depends on both the environment we grow up in, as well as just how these traits develop when faced with an onslaught of pubertal hormones (so, a matter of luck).

This about covers most of the rest of my thoughts, albeit condensed as much as I reasonably could. It is difficult (not to mention time-consuming) to lay out the whole crux of my thoughts and beliefs with every single detail and nuance in a blog post, so this definitely doesn’t encapsulate absolutely everything I could say. I’d certainly be okay with you sending in something long. I’ve enjoyed hearing from you, Anon, and I cannot describe how happy I am to know that you enjoy my writing. Thank you for listening. I give you my cheers in turn.

[man-squared]

I think we need to talk more about misgendering on individual levels on top of what we already talk about.

People have focused on how some people use "gender nonconforming pronouns," but I don't think we talk a lot about how it is misgendering as much as being disrespectful.

You see, every being essentially has their own gender that is composed of many parts.

There are many individuals whose genders and the parts of their gender overlap with others, but those individuals aren't a venn diagram of a circle over a circle with the other individuals.

Each individual has their own gender and the presentation of that is unique to themselves. These categories we have created are useful identifiers and descriptors for the individuals, but they don't explain the complete and complex reality of an individual or even a group.

For example, I am a man. I am also genderqueer and nonbinary. I sometimes express my sexuality as a bambi lesbian (or an asexual lesbian). My pronouns are they/them/theirs and he/him/his.

You see, my identity may seem to have contradictions based on your identity or your understanding of my categorization of a whole, but to me, it just is some words that have explained what the hell I am.

What I mean to point out, though, is that just because one part of my identity may seem like I am misgendering myself because it isn't the norm for that group I fall under, doesn't mean that I am.

Being a man with they / them pronouns doesn't invalidate or misgender my manness, but it might someone else's because they / them isn't a part of that person's gender composition. The same goes for the rest of my identities and pronouns. Being a trans man and a lesbian with very little to no connection to womanhood (besides a queer attraction to women) doesn't misgender me, but it can misgender a trans man who is very similar to me in other aspects. Because that is not him, nor the reality of his gender.

My queerness isn't going to look like yours, and anything that I share similar characteristics to the majority (or even un-marginalized) isn't going to look exactly like theirs.

That is because there are so many parts that are moving, fluid, and also set that make up an individual; therefore, there is an infinite (or at least innumerable) amount of parts that make up a category or group.

This post was brought to you by the degendering of people using they/them and the fact that there are people (even cis people) who use pronouns that aren't typically associated with their gender descriptor's demographic (like he/him being the default for men or agender and they/them or women and she/her). Using he/him for a nonbinary person who uses they/them is just as misgendering as using she/her for a trans woman who uses he/him if you know that is the case. (Also brought to you by everyone who acts like they/them is always a neutral identifier.)

And don't try to act like I am saying that you should always automatically know someone's gender composition/pronouns upon meeting them and never be without fault when talking to or about someone. Think a little. Obviously defaulting to they/them for an individual who you don't have access to or may have forgotten what pronouns they use is fine, but if you can find out, find out and use their pronouns.

[equalitymattersallaround]

So I took a screenshot of this ask instead of just answering the actual ask because I wanted to block this anon & I couldn’t do that AND answer the question. Here’s my actual answer below.

I am fully within my rights to block whomever I want whenever I want. I will not take grief for that. Especially because I clearly didn't block you, the oh so brave person who's giving me a hard time on anon, as you can send me this message. I block bigots for this exact reason: I don't want to deal with their nonsense after calling them out.

I know the odds of changing a bigot's mind are less than 1%. The reason I comment is not to start a conversation with you. It is in the hopes that someone hurt by your bigotry will see that someone is on their side. And maybe people on the fence about trans issues will see what I have to say and think, "Oh, that makes sense." And it is in that spirit that I will now address your frothing hatred & block you. I have no desire to speak with you ever again, but I hope someone will see what I say and either feel seen or have a new understanding of the situation.

Gender ideology is not oppression but freedom (or at least it is to those who use it). Trans & gender nonconforming folks who lean into the idea of gender do it because it's a language & understanding that allows them to be who they are. It's not a cage or a form of oppression it's (& I know I'm repeating myself here, but there's no better word for it) freedom. Freedom from the limitations and oppression society put on us based on what they saw between our legs (not to mention what's ACTUALLY in between our legs, as I'm sure intersex people can speak up on).

Do you want to know what a woman is? A woman is anyone who feels seen & represented in the word woman. And I know that's one of those circular answers you hate so much but it's better than what TERFs usually say, which is usually inherently racist. I'm mostly pulling from this post as a source on my next point (for those interested in reading more), but TERFs assume the western ideology of "genitals = gender" is the only valid one out there, completely ignoring things like Two-Spirit folks and Hijra. The typical TERF definition of womanhood is also heavily based on white women's experience, leaving many cisgender women of color out in the cold. We saw that at the Olympics this year when a cisgender woman of color with higher testosterone was banned from competing. So I know my answer to, "What a woman is," is better than yours.

I'm already getting tired but what's next? Sexual orientation? Geez, you do spiral into transphobic nonsense as this goes on, don't you? Sexual orientation is another thing where whatever sexuality you define yourself as should be freeing not limiting. At the end of the day, it's more about just who each person is attracted to not, "YOU MUST STICK TO THE TEXTBOOK DEFINITION OF THIS SEXUALITY EXACTLY." You don't HAVE to be attracted to women with penises, no one is saying you have to be attracted to women with penises and honestly women with penises are not attracted to you so don't think so highly of yourself. Here's the problem though.

"I'm sapphic and I'm not attracted to women with penises." That's fine.
 That’s the same as not being attracted to women with small noses or big feet, it’s just a physical characteristic.

"I'm sapphic and I'm not attracted to women with penises because they're men." You're a bigot.

I don't even know what you mean by, "and in that case which one is it? are humans the only species with sexual orientations or do other animals have gender" There are a lot of things humans have that most animals don't that are still real even though we made it up. Like money and language.

Most of the rest of what you say - "It's the fact that yall call sexual orientation a genital fetish and something we have to unlearn," and, "It's the fact that there are receipts of trans women sending death and rape threats to lesbians," - can be addressed by the fact that the internet is a wide & sprawling place. You can find awful, horrible people in any marginalized community. But using their behavior as an excuse to demonize an entire group is bigotry. It's like saying all women are anti-queer racist conservatives because of people like Anita Bryant, Phyllis Schlafly, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And it's not okay to send death or rape threats to anyone, so if you could please tell your fellow TERFs to stop sending them to EVERY TRANS PERSON I KNOW that would be amazing. Since it's such an important issue for you.

Let's rapid-fire these next ones, shall we? If you want a space that only allows cisgender women in, that's weird but ok. The problem here again is that what you say is, "This is a place for females and you're a man because you have a penis." And since sex has nothing to do with gender, why do you care so much about a person's genitals? Honestly, TERFs are obsessed with monitoring people's private parts as much as Republicans.

To your point on Transandrophobia, all words are invented as their use is required and all communities have issues of internalized bigotry. You are an example of that bigotry since you & I are both a part of the larger queer community but you seek to oppress trans people. But again, defining a marginalized group by its worst minority is more a reflection on you than it is of that community.

Is that everything? I think that's everything. Good because that was exhausting.

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

On why “not like other girls” isn’t a useful criticism anymore (and maybe never was)

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the way people have been talking about femininity in feminist spaces for the past few years really fails gender nonconforming queer and neurodivergent girls.

In particular, I’ve noticed and seen others talk about the tendency to push the ideas that women never enforce gender norms on other women, never punish other women for not conforming to gender norms, and that female bullies essentially don’t exist because girls would never do that to each other. I’ve also noticed how the “face” of internalized misogyny has become the blatantly queercoded, neurodivergent-coded girl who’s Not Like Other Girls. That’s not an accident.

There are feminist circles made up mostly of women who have never had a problem with being accepted by other women, and their ideas about how girls and women treat each other are very influential. The things is that they don’t realize that how other women treat them and how other girls treated them growing up isn’t universal. They’re unaware that they aren’t accepted just because they’re women but because they’re able to check off a number of conditions that signal to other women that they “belong.” One of the more important conditions is being able to do femininity the right way. They’re unaware that there’s a huge difference between women who can do femininity the right way and choose to subvert it for feminist reasons versus women who can’t do it the right way at all, and that difference has a huge impact on how other women treat you. A lot of these women are probably well intentioned, but that doesn’t make it okay that their viewpoints, which erase women who are marginalized in ways they aren’t, have become so mainstream.

This, of course, has a disparate impact on gender nonconforming queer women, who can’t do femininity right because it leads to things like dysphoria and depression, and autistic women, who often can’t do femininity right because of sensory issues with makeup/tight clothing/certain fabrics, because they’re unable to understand the social rules that govern things like fashion trends or matching clothes, or because their special interests aren’t seen by their peers as acceptable things for girls to be interested in.

The problem arises because women in the first group, the influential feminist circles, seem to have decided that the idea of female bullies is a patriarchal trope pushed by men (girls wouldn’t do that to each other) and that only men enforce gender norms on women (girls are so much more accepting of other girls uwu). Gender nonconforming queer and autistic women, who grew up as gender nonconforming girls, know that this idea is frankly bullshit because they were bullied and ostracized by other girls for not being able to do femininity right or enough, but when we try to talk about this, we’re shouted down by the first group of women as just having internalized misogyny. The entire time I was in middle and high school, I only remember having my appearance insulted by a boy once. It was almost exclusively something other girls did. And yet we’re told that our own lived experiences can’t possibly have happened because “bullying is a boy thing, girls are all friends.” You would think that this conversation would at least be happening in queer circles but even there, gnc queer women are the only ones talking about it, while everyone else is all, “It’s so great how lesbians never enforce gender norms against each other. Anyway, here’s my fanart of a canonically butch character wearing a dress.”

So here’s where the girl who’s Not Like Other Girls comes in. The stereotypical girl who’s Not Like Other Girls is blatantly queercoded and blatantly neurodivergent coded, and that’s not an accident. It’s because those are the girls who are disproportionately likely to be rejected by other girls because of their inability to do femininity right, and that’s something that the women who love to talk about the girl who’s Not Like Other Girls have subconsciously picked up on.

Now, I’m not going to try to claim that no one who thinks they’re not like other girls has a sense of superiority about it, but overwhelmingly, the girls who think that aren’t thinking “I’m not like those dumb sluts.” They’re thinking “why am I not like the other girls.” For me (an autistic lesbian), my Not Like Other Girls phase was never about thinking I was better than everyone else. It was an attempt to explain to myself why I was being picked on and excluded by other girls, even the ones who were my friends. I knew I was different from other girls because I was told that by other girls. And the idea that girls who hang out mostly with boys are doing it because they hate other girls is largely false. Lots of teenage gnc queer and autistic girls hang out mostly with boys because they find that there are fewer unspoken social rules between boys, boys are less judgmental about their appearance than other girls, girls their age are starting to develop interests they find alienating, and/or because they’ve just given up on trying to befriend girls after years of rejection. It’s not internalized misogyny, it’s a trauma response.

All this vilification of the girl who’s Not Like Other Girls really accomplishes is making gender nonconforming girls and women into the main perpetrators of internalized misogyny and gender conforming girls into the main victims. It should give us pause that our idea of a stereotypical victim of internalized misogyny is a thin, blond, pretty queen bee-type and our stereotypical perpetrator is a queercoded, neurodivergent-coded girl with no friends, because it’s a blatant example of homophobia and ableism in mainstream feminism. It’s because the women with the loudest voices want to feel like they’re always the victims and never to blame. It should concern us how many posts are dedicated to condemning girls who think they aren’t like other girls when I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a single post condemning girls who bully other girls for not conforming to femininity. That’s an incontrovertible example of internalized misogyny that’s honestly a much more widespread problem, and everyone either wants to pretend it isn’t happening or has decided they’re okay with.

Gender nonconforming queer and autistic women grow up being ostracized for their gender nonconformity and no one can even make a post telling them its okay to be the way they are without having to add about a dozen disclaimers to avoid hurting the feelings of gender conforming women and still having 20 people in the replies reminding them that “some girls like to wear makeup :)” Meanwhile people will make 380 posts about how feminine girls should be celebrated without a single thought to how that contributes to the alienation and exclusion gnc queer and autistic girls are experiencing. Not everyone needs to learn to love pink or whatever. It’s so okay for gnc women to have deep negative feelings towards femininity as a concept when it was the reason for their abuse at the hands of other girls. That’s not internalized misogyny. 

Anyway, I remember around the turn of the decade when the idea of the girl who was Not Like Other Girls really took off and I remember being able to picture exactly who it was about, but looking back, I can’t for the life of me remember whether that person was someone who actually existed irl, or whether it was the result of a popular media trope that everyone just assumed was also a problem irl, or whether it’s always just been the most acceptable women with the loudest voices blaming gender nonconforming queer and autistic women for something we weren’t doing.

mod k

tl;dr - Blaming girls who Aren’t Like Other Girls for internalized misogyny is victim-blaming bullshit. Girls thinking they aren’t like other girls is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself.

[sapphos-darlings]

So, for context: my father used to give me hell over the probability of me being gay and over the fact that I look like a dude. I've been fighting against this nonsense for many years, but as I just started winning, I feel like giving up and becoming normal.

Finding out that I'm gay and not bi is already too much for me. Obviously, I cannot change that. But I want to be normal in at least one aspect in my life. Yes, unisex and masculine clothing make me euphoric. I'm at my best mood when I look like that. However, I'm not gonna die if I try to apply some makeup or put on something more feminine. The downside is if I do, guys might start checking me out. I know that in a few years I'll probably move out, so this advantage won't matter, but at least I'll cause less suspicions for my family and I'll look more like my favorite alternative character. Recently, while looking at myself in the mirror, I got flashbacks to what I heard and it completely messed me up. Yes, I'm winning the fight for my preferences, but at what cost? I do not feel like a winner, I hate myself for being tomboyish/soft butch and I feel like a stubborn teenager who was arguing over nothing (I'm in my mid twenties). I just wish I could be normal in at least one aspect of my life. Sure, I may hate wearing all that, but it won't kill me to switch things up. I'll look cute, my family will leave me alone and I'll get to look like one of my favorite characters. Everybody wins, so what's holding me back?

Hello, Anon!

Ah, I relate to your stuggles. I too grew up gender-nonconforming, I'm to this day pretty regularly mistaken for a man despite what I wear, and I'm also a lesbian. That is indeed a lot. I understand how it can feel like "too much".

But this is not all you are. You are focusing on your looks and your sexuality a lot here, and for a good reason. You are right, they do affect our lives drastically, and not the least because other people - even those closest to us, such as family - have their own strong opinions and may even judge us solely for those aspects. You write that you wish at least one aspect of you could be normal, and that certain clothes make you feel "euphoric". You use very strong words for these feelings and experiences, but at the same time you feel like giving up.

So what's holding you back? Probably your self-respect. Because even though you're tired and feel this immense pressure, you still want to act loving towards yourself. You have struggled a lot and want it to get easier, of course you do. But I think that deep down you know who you are, and you know you deserve better, and you want to protect these personal, valuable parts of you.

It's very normal to have strong emotions about subjects this close to your heart, things that are so personal, and things that you have put a lot of energy into. You have been through a lot. People you should have been able to trust and rely on to protect you have not done that, but instead caused you pain. You have fought for yourself for a long time. I'm sorry for all the pain you have endured, but very happy that you are here today.

As a woman pushing thirty, I have good news to you: It gets better with age. Things get easier. You are in your mid-twenties and you are looking towards an independent future. I think at least some of your "giving up" feeling is just you are growing out of old pains.

You are so much more than your sexual orientation and your clothes. I know it's a lot to take in and come to terms with, but you can take babysteps. Ground yourself first, solve small problems, take on everyday challenges, do simple things that make you happy. Maybe you are not a confident butch lesbian in perfect harmony today, but you are you every day of your life, no matter what. Maybe tomorrow you are someone who simply does her best, works on silencing negative self-talk, and separates opinions of others from your sense of self worth. Then the day after that, you do it again.

You said you wish you were normal in at least in one aspect of your life, and you definitely are. There's more to you than these two things, and I would bet that you have basic interests, basic hobbies, ordinary worries and beautiful, wonderful hopes and dreams that many people share with you. You might feel hyperaware of some things, but I promise you, those are not be all end all.

Now, actual concrete advice for changing your situation: How can you change your circumstances? You need a long term plan of how to get on your own. Have you made plans to go to school? Or to work? How about move out on your own? What you might need is a step-by-step plan with short-term goals leading up to your big target goal. Have you thought of a profession? Do you have one? How about living on your own, or perhaps with roommates in order to cut costs? Maybe you need a job now and a saving plan to get enough money to do it. Research is your friend, and online you are bound to find people who have been through something similar, and resources on how to get out of difficult family situations.

Meanwhile, focusing on your hobbies, interests, school work, job, friend group activities, whatever you have in your life or you are interested in having, would divert your family's attention too. The very least those will keep you out of the house.

Also, company and friendship of women like you is the balm to your emotional wounds. Seek out other butch and gender non-conforming women, however you can. IRL would of course be the best, but online communities can be just as wonderful and giving, and perhaps more easily available.

Sure, you wouln't die of some mascara, but giving yourself away piece by piece doesn't mean that everybody wins, it means you lose. You are worth so much more than that. You are special.

I wish you all the good luck and strength! Don't give up.

-Lavender

[writcraft]

Gender Reform (UK)

In case anyone needs to hear this from me, allow me to make it abundantly clear. I feel strongly about protecting women from the gender-based violence and misogyny they experience throughout their lives. I unequivocally include transgender women within that remit and do not distinguish them as separate or apart from that purpose, because they are women. I wholly support the use of the phrase ‘people who menstruate’ as a more inclusive term which captures our trans men and my non-binary siblings.

I have been mulling over what to post about JKR’s ongoing statements, hoping to use my own research and experience working with trans people who are in the process of transitioning to add something valuable, but I’ve found myself becoming increasingly exhausted and angered by my concerns that the crux of the issue is getting entirely lost. That was exacerbated today by the bringing out of receipts with this scientist said one thing, this scientist said the other, this is one trans experience, this is another seems to me to risk descending into academic back and forth. I want to go back to the very basics of the issue at hand, which are driven by proposed reforms to UK legislation.

In the UK there have been numerous calls for a reform of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to enable self-determination of gender on passports. Despite my personal feelings on the matter, which are the right of transgender people to live peacefully and without harm is paramount, the knowledge (from multiple first hand accounts and my activist work) that it takes literal years to medically transition in the UK and the fact that as a queer person I find debating someone’s identity deeply problematic, here’s the very bare bones of what I consider to be the two key GRA issues and why you should, if you’re in the UK, be writing to your MPs and lobbying for these changes.

The UK government intends to scrap plans to allow people to gender self-determine on their passports.

The ability to allow people to do this has been debated for a number of years and somewhat surprisingly it was the Tories (under Theresa May) that suggested this idea of ‘gender autonomy’ would be progressed. Now, from proposals leaked to the media, it seems those advancements might be ditched. So why does the ability to determine ones own gender identity on a passport get met with such fearmongering? I’m honestly not entirely sure, and that’s not because of my ‘pro-trans bias’ or inability to consider any possibility of abuse, but rather because we have a comparable precedent.

In July 2015 Ireland passed the Gender Recognition Act which basically allows exactly what those of us lobbying for gender recognition reform in the UK have been suggesting. As far as I’m aware in the eight jurisdictions have introduced self-determined legal gender (Argentina, Malta, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Colombia and Belgium) there have been no reports of this power being abused. There are checks and balances in place and I don’t understand why in this ‘debate’ we’re not discussing the countries where this is already good law.

According to research in Ireland 230 people have relied on the Gender Recognition Act so far and by way of reminder Ireland has a population of over 4 million, so there has been no ‘floodgate.’ There also hasn’t been any erasure of women’s rights or of same-sex partnerships. In actual fact, as a country whose politics was controlled for many years by the Catholic Church, women’s rights in Ireland were kind of terrible. The Abortion Referendum was a huge turning point in 2018 and same-sex marriage became legal in November 2015, a couple of months after the Gender Recognition Act was implemented. There has been no erasure of ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’, the fight for women and queer people more broadly continues and the ability of people to self-determine their gender on their passports appears (at least on my research) to have had literally no impact on those movements.

Part of the leaked reforms suggested a form of ‘bathroom bill’ might be introduced in the UK which would deny access to people based on biological sex.

You cannot say you stand in solidarity with trans people and support this because you are supporting a legislative shift that would strip away the rights trans people already have. In the UK the notion of a ‘bathroom bill’ would be a new piece of legislation. That means that all the debates and arguments about men masquerading as trans to try to gain access to these spaces would already be a thing and yet these issues aren’t being reported about why? BECAUSE TRANS PEOPLE ARE NOT PREDATORS. The problem DOESN’T EXIST. To your ‘well if ANYONE can self-identify’ point above, when was the last time you took your passport to use the loo?

My suggestion is the government works on providing more funding to already desperately underfunded crisis centers and supporting those in need of those spaces which in many cases will include the trans women who already use them. Violence against women is heinous and it is not disputed. That it primarily occurs at the hands of men is also not disputed. Introducing some new legislation that vilifies trans people and allows random members of the public to police a vaguely ‘queer’ looking person’s right to access safe spaces (or just go to the bathroom) does literally nothing to address the violence that women are routinely subject to and arguably runs the risk of inciting more violence.

If you are queer and not trans but you are in any way gender nonconforming, I would suggest these proposals should be of a concern to you too.

In conclusion

There is SO MUCH NOISE on social media about this right now and arguing with someone like JKR on Twitter is something you (I’m speaking to my trans, queer people) need to do in a way that doesn’t harm your own mental health, because there is a POWER IMBALANCE involved. I’m not saying don’t speak up at all (silence = violence and all that) but just, be careful. Please.

We are not in some deconstructionist, queer theory, fourth wave feminism etc. debate. Of course you can find scientific, psychological, feminist, social justice, whatever field of study you’re working with, arguments on the pro side and on the con side. Arguing about someone’s right to mental and physical safety like it’s an academic point scoring debating competition is gross.

You cannot read that 91% of transgender murders in America 2019 were Black women and say that is not a feminist issue. You cannot say you stand with those transgender people but not the transgender community as a whole when you understand that the trans panic defense continues to be used today in America as a justification for violence against transgender people. You cannot know that and fail to recognise how the narrative of the trans villain infiltrating ‘women only’ spaces plays into precisely those hands.

As LGBTQIA people we literally owe our rights to gender nonconforming people. Don’t do them a disservice now by gatekeeping access to a space we all want to call home.

[bisluthq]

*WARNING Domestic violence topic* Could you explain to me why seven could sound queer?, Like I can see how many Taylor songs can be interpreted in a queer way, but with seven I can't see it, like for me it's clearly about domestic violence and the only possible queer thing I can hear it's the closet part...but in this particular case I do not think it refers to sexuality but to literally hiding form your abusive parents. Sorry if this was asked before or if it's disrespectful to ask.

So firstly let me just say that victims of abuse who hear that in the song are so valid. And I’m not here to “take away” a song that speaks to that experience. If it brings you comfort and relief, that’s amazing.

Do I think Taylor meant it as a song about domestic violence or escaping from that? Honestly, no. Because she described herself in LPSS as longing for that time in her life and talked about how she misses being able to throw tantrums and feel more freely and without judgement; in her head she’s thinking about this period in her life very fondly. Now, this is one of those death of the author moments because if you’re an abuse survivor who found comfort in this you... shouldn’t care wtf Taylor meant by it, what matters is what it means to you. Same as how if betty speaks to your sapphic teenage love triangle, it shouldn’t matter that Taylor imagined James as a boy.

But yeah, so for Taylor it was not meant to be about abuse. It was about feeling stuff more freely. And let’s take a look and examine at why it feels so fucking gay to... like... basically every queer woman.

Please picture me

In the trees

I hit my peak at seven

Okay so Taylor is setting up a narrator - presumably herself. Especially in the context of her hyperconfessional marketing and the LPSS explanation we’re literally meant to picture Tay. But tbh that doesn’t matter so much - it could be any little girl. This little girl is “in the trees”... which isn’t really where little girls are supposed to be. In these very first lines Tay is setting up a little tomboy character.... and then she says “I hit my peak at seven” - ergo this rugrat period of abandon, where I was free to play in the trees, is “my peak”. It was the best time in “my” life.

Lots of people feel that, it’s not inherently gay, but for queer women - I don’t know about other shades of queer but suspect yes - childhood often represents even greater freedom than to hets because it’s before we felt deviant. There was nothing to compare ourselves to. Sure, we might’ve played families in het couples like heteronormativity is felt by children too, but that kind of thing was largely asexual and we didn’t know yet that other people felt differently about it all.

Like I only realized I was different in late middle school and I didn’t have the word for it for ages tbh. Like I just knew I didn’t get the fuss about boys. When I was a little kid? I didn’t know what the fuss was really. It was a kind of “peak” so yeah, I feel that in my bones.

Feet

In the swing

Over the creek

I was too scared to jump in, but I, I was high

In the sky

Here we have her playing, once again with reckless abandon - she’s standing on a swing (naughty!) and swinging high over a creek. But she’s slightly nervous. I relate to that too, it’s not a gay thought it’s a little kid thought I think - because while she’s enjoying her freedom and the chance to play, there’s an awareness of the risk. That’s a lot of childhood and what makes her such a greater songwriter is how she’s able to capture these feelings we’ve all had before, in this case the rumbunctious nature of free play paired with the cautious nervousness of knowing you can fall.

With Pennsylvania under me

I mean this simple makes it more autobiographical for her, like if we didn’t know her was her that was the me , now we really do.

Are there still beautiful things?

This is speaks to her nostalgia for this time period and serves to highlight how much she misses it. She wishes she was young and innocent and had that freedom of playing in the trees and above the creek and feeling like she’s flying just because she’s standing upright on the swing. This is meant to be her “peak”.

Sweet tea in the summer

Cross your heart, won't tell no other

The first line is setting up mood again, it’s innocence and suburbia and freedom and the hot days of summer vacation. The second is a common English phrase - for the ESL folks - that means “let’s keep a secret”. It’s extremely common for little girls especially to have secrets with each other. “You’re my best friend and I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anyone else before but cross your heart you won’t tell anyone else” is the kind of thing that has probably happened at a sleepover for every woman (gay or straight). So Tay’s whispering and telling secrets to her best friend aged seven in the heat of the summer and the neat rhymes kinda remind me of those clapping games you play as a kid.

And though I can't recall your face

I still got love for you

Again, I think this isn’t specific to gay kids necessarily - it’s that idea of having lifelong affection for your first best friend even when you don’t know where they are, can’t imagine them in adulthood, maybe can’t even remember their surname and frankly don’t really want to or care... but you still have warm feelings towards them.

Your braids like a pattern

Love you to the moon and to Saturn

So the friend is a girl. And here’s where the non wlw readers will have to work with me a little bit because as I’ve explained before a very common, enteral part of the queer female experience is obsession with other girls’ femininities. We notice things like hair and clothes and makeup on girls far more than straight girls seem to and waaay more than het guys do. A friend of mine who is v butch noticed like minor shit that any of us change in our appearance. Describing in detail a girl’s appearance feels - on a gut level - pretty gay. Now this isn’t a detailed description, but she links this physical trait - this pretty, braided hair her friend has - to loving her.

Now, she is a child in this story. This isn’t a sexual kind of thing in the child’s mind. She’s obviously not “in love” with her friend aged seven. But she is saying her deep, overwhelming love for her friend is inextricably linked - via rhyme scheme - to her feminine appearance.

This incredibly close, quasi homoerotic friendship is a near universal wlw experience and I’m sorry but it differs from straight girls’ close friendships because it’s... a lot. It is “love you to the moon and to Saturn” and obsessing over her clothes and hair and little habits.

And there’s no vocab for this, nothing to prepare you for it and nobody bats an eye because little girls are supposed to be friends with one another but like... you’re way overinvested and often that other girl isn’t and starts to drift away because she isn’t having this language free connection and it’s legit heartbreaking.

Passed down like folk songs

The love lasts so long

This childhood friendship becomes an anecdote, a moment of folkloric storytelling, but it never completely fades away and tapping into this first - not quite sexual but very sapphic - experience is super easy.

And I've been meaning to tell you

I think your house is haunted

Your dad is always mad and that must be why

And I think you should come live with

Me and we can be pirates

This sets up the narrative some people - I understand where y’all are coming from and I am here for it - hear of domestic abuse. The thing is, it’s not Tay’s character who is getting abused. Tay is a small child - and she’s envious of and nostalgic for that era of her life, when she thought that her best best best friend’s asshole dad was simply reacting to ghosts. It speaks to an innocence her character has which may not be shared by her friend, the girl with the braids.

But Tay is innocent and she says “come with me” and run away so we can be pirates together. Now, on a very basic and superficial pop culture level it’s worth noting Keira Knightley in POTC is pretty fundamental to any queer millennial woman’s sexual awakening. However, that’s not what Tay’s referencing here. She’s saying, at least on some level, let’s run away and be gender nonconforming. Again, she’s a small child. She doesn’t know why she wants that. But she doesn’t tell her friend “let’s run away and be princesses” - she wants to be a pirate. It links to the first scene in the song of her being a tomboy in the trees and on the swing, honestly. There were also a number of cross dressing female pirates, many of whom were gay back in the day so it’s a subtle nod to how a lot of childhood fantasies actually are rooted in possible historical fact.

But also come on, every queer girl wanted to be a pirate idk why really we just did. Like I say I can explain it as a desire not to conform to gender norms but it’s also just... another weirdly common fantasy that she’s tapping into.

Like idk this song is so fucking gay and it’s not trying to be but every line is just... felt in my bones. Like little me is seen by this song.

Then you won't have to cry

Or hide in the closet

This is obvi the line people go on about and look. The friend’s dad is clearly an asshole like that’s established. But the line has a double meaning. She’s saying if you run away with me to be a pirate on the high seas you won’t have to cry anymore and you won’t hide in the closet. It’s an innocent thought but it’s also a double meaning, right? You won’t be abused, you won’t be sad. And you’ll be with me out of the closet. It could’ve been “hide under the bed” or “behind the curtains”. But she picked closet. And that word gives this verse a second meaning, which is particularly palpable given as I say this is a very gay song from a thematic standpoint.

And just like a folk song

Our love will be passed on

Again, this is a deeeeep love. This is someone she wants to run away with. And she probably doesn’t know why, she probably doesn’t have the words. She’s a little kid. But this friend of hers is the person she wants to rescue and run away with and be together with even though she - Tay - is pretty content otherwise. In fact, she longs for this time in her life. It was full of beautiful things. And yet despite being happy, she was willing to drop it all for her little female friend she was clearly preoccupied with.

Please picture me

In the weeds

Before I learned civility

I used to scream

Ferociously

Any time I wanted

I, I

Again, this reiterates she is nostalgic for this time period. It was a good time in Taylor’s life. It was a time when she could be herself, before she had learned civility and what was expected from her by society. Which ties back to that thing I said right in the beginning, about how this first quasi sapphic friendship is cherished by queer women because we didn’t know it was weird. We hadn’t “learned civility” yet. We could scream, we could run around and climb trees, and we could ask our friends to run away with us not knowing those thoughts didn’t occur to them with the same intensity.

Sweet tea in the summer

Cross my heart, won't tell no other

And though I can't recall your face

I still got love for you

We’ve discussed this already. It’s still queer coded to me.

Pack your dolls and a sweater

We'll move to India forever

Passed down like folk songs

Our love lasts so long

So she’s once again cementing the fact that this is a little female friend with the dolls, and again suggests running away together and says even though none of that happened and she grew up and realized this... was actually a fairly specific experience not a universal universal one and she learned civility and heteronormativity but this foundational, pure, innocent gay love... will always remain in its complete innocuous harmlessness but immense power.

And so, yeah. This song is probably Taylor’s gayest shortly followed by Treacherous.

But if it means something else to you, I’m by no means taking it away. Anyone can enjoy her music in any way they like.

It’s just weird that most queer women feel their childhood selves are completely seen by this song if it was a complete accident 🤷🏻‍♀️

[fidespeaks]

Laying The Groundwork For How Privilege Works

Okay, so before I get into any other topics on this blog I want to talk about privilege.  I feel like it’s something we’re all simultaneously very aware of but a lot of us fall into this trap of very quickly forgetting about how it works.  Or, alternatively, it’s something we know exists because we frequently use the term for it but we forget the nuances of multiple layers of privilege when it comes to talking to people in marginalized groups that aren’t our own.  So, that’s kind of what I want to discuss with this post before anything else: multiple layers of privilege, how they stack, and how we should stay conscious of them while being allies to other marginalized groups.  

A lot of what I want to talk about today is pulled directly from and reflection upon the book: Me & White Supremacy by Layla Saad.  If you haven’t read the book before, it’s similar to a guided journal that’s meant to be completed over the course of a month and if you’re serious about your allyship and supporting BIPOC & BLM, I highly suggest you read it.  But be sure you’re in a decent state of mind - some of the things you may uncover while doing the work can be pretty heavy, especially in my experience. 

Now I know a fair number of people are probably thinking: "but Fides, I’m (multiracial, biracial, a good ally, def not a racist, have experienced discrimination, am a person of color, ect).  Why do I need to read this book?”  to which my response would be to point you towards one of the very first sections of the book, titled “Who is this work for?”  which actually inspired the entire post that I’d like to write today.  Layla begins that section by clarifying:  

This work is for any person who holds white privilege. By any person, I mean persons of any gender identity, including gender-nonconforming persons, and by who holds white privilege, I mean persons who are visually identifiable as white or who pass for white. Therefore, this includes persons who are biracial, multiracial, or white passing People of Color who benefit under systems of white supremacy from having lighter skin color than visibly Brown, Black, or Indigenous people. 

And that seems pretty simile, right?  Not all people experience privilege or discrimination to the same degree and sometimes the ways that we do experience discrimination are vastly different from one another.  I’m completely aware that this seems like... honestly really obvious stuff, but I remember first reading this and the first week of work titled “Me and White Privilege” in which Layla discusses that lacking one kind of privilege does not mean you don’t still have white privilege and thinking... wow.  I’ve definitely tired to pull this “oppression olympics” shit before.  Sometimes I didn’t even do it on purpose.  Sometimes I was just trying to explain that I understand and I can relate.  But that brought the conversation back to me, and that’s exactly the problem. 

In the chapter “Me and White Privilege”, Layla specifically goes out of her way to point out that white privilege specifically is separate from, but can sometimes intersect with, other kinds of privilege (class, gender, sexuality, age, able-bodied, and so on).  She then goes on to make a slew of examples, stating that just because a person lacks a certain kind of privilege, doesn’t mean they don’t still (in the case of her topic) have white privilege.  She also clarifies that it works in reverse and finishes her thought with off with: 

“...and having white privilege with other privileged identities adds to the amount of overall privilege that you hold.”

it’s this thought that brings me to my idea of the day: in my own personal experience, people on tumblr tend to forget that just because you are in possession of one form of privilege it does not mean you suddenly don’t still benefit from holding another. Layla uses white privilege as an example, but it goes in any direction.  If you’re straight and BIPOC, you still have straight privilege.  If you’re white, gay, and neurodivergent, you still have white privilege.  And I’d like to even take it a step farther, to incorporate a concept I’ll be discussing later: your experience does not define the experience of a person who is lacking a type of privilege. 

What I mean to say is: someone who is eastern asian is going to face an entirely different, albeit similar, kind of discrimination vs someone who is latinx or black.  If you’re of color, or if you’re gay, or if you’re transmasculine, you don’t get to speak for or over other people who have similar but different circumstances to your own.  Every voice matters and each voice ought to be given a chance to speak and add it’s opinion.  The experiences of someone who’s nonbinary are going to be completely different from the experiences of someone who’s binary trans.  Hell, even the experiences between lesbians and gay men are incredibly different:  minorities aren’t a monolith and treating them as such silences other voices.  You cannot decide just because you belong to a group that you get to speak for them. 

But that’s a different topic that I want to tackle in multiple different forms, because it goes in a lot of different ways.  What I mostly mean to do today is to clarify that when someone else who has lacks a privilege you have speaks to you - listen.  And I know it’s really fucking hard not to be like “oh yeah, I've been there dude, I’ve had xyz happen to me before so I get it” because it’s a way of empathizing, especially for neurodivergent people.  But you have to listen and you have to make sure that you’re not overfocusing the conversation back onto you.  A simple “I understand” is enough and if you don’t, as for clarification.  And if they don’t feel up to giving it, try to research yourself or ask if you can ask another time. 

Most importantly to all of this however is this: we have got to stop hiding behind our own lack of privilege as a way of excusing our shitty behavior.  If someone calls you out (or in, which I highly encourage over calling out because... people on tumblr don’t fucking know how to call people out in a productive fashion but I’ll get there trust me) you CANNOT say as a defense: oh, you can’t talk to me like that I’m neurodivergent.  Or if someone calls you out for being transphobic you can’t say “oh you can’t talk to me like that, I’m POC”.  Hell, if someone calls you out for being a fucking asshole, you don’t get to flip it around and be like “naw, you can’t say that, because I’m this that and another thing”.  You can clarify, especially if there’s a cultural difference or you’re neurodivergent, but you don’t get to hide behind shit. 

And you especially do not get to turn around and tell someone who’s calling you out for abusive behavior that they’re (racist, transphobic, homophobic, etc). They aren’t calling you out because of your identity, they’re calling you out because you’re a manipulative brat.  That doesn’t have to DO with those things.  Lack of privilege does not give you an excuse to be abusive.  End of conversation.  But... I suppose to end this conversation today, I’ll say this: CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE, which is actually another book that I want to read and incorporate into these essays.  So I’m trying not to put the cart before the horse. 

Anyway, hopefully that clarifies at least a little bit the trend I’ve noticed of people forgetting that lacking one kind of privilege doesn’t magically mean they don’t have another.   The fact that you’re trans doesn’t exclude you from being racist,  your race doesn’t exclude you from being homophobic, and none of those things give you a right to be a jerk.  But they all do make it a little bit easier to understand when someone else comes to us with their own story of oppressions. 

Thanks for reading <3

[tiredofthedrive]

Why I Decided to Stay

tw: suicide

Last thursday, I thought about killing myself. I'm not really sure why. It wasn't a bad day; my sister had just come home for the weekend and it was nice to get together as a family again. School was going okay; a little stressful but nothing out of the ordinary. Something in me just could bear the thought of going on living, couldn't imagine a life in which I was really happy. I wasn't really thinking straight and part of me knew it, but it didn't stop the feeling from being there.

I didn't do it, obviously. I've thought about suicide a lot over the years, but I've never actually tried to go through with it. There's always something that stops me. Most of the time it's thinking about my mom, or my dogs. She'd probably never recover if I did it, and they'd never understand where I'd gone. I've had other reasons throughout the years but few of them have really stuck with me.

The problem, in my mind at least, is that the conventional wisdom when it comes to pain sucks. A million useless phrases jump to mind. It'll get better. Time heals all wounds. Focus on the positive. Find the beauty in life. You'll be okay. They sound real nice, but think for a second. Is there really anything to them?

Saying that things will get better or be okay is just plainly bullshit. No one knows if things are going to get better for anyone. There's no reason to believe that things have to get better for you, there's no cosmic scale weighing all the good and bad things that happen to people. Things happen. Sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes they don't. That's it.

And the ones that tell you to get through it, that you're strong enough to make it through? They

don't really hold up either. Because even if I can go on, why should I? These platitudes place this inherent, untouchable value on life when that just isn’t a reality for everyone.

I’m reminded of this Theodor Adorno quote: "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

What he meant by this, or at least one interpretation of it, is that the horrors of the Holocaust couldn’t be expressed in a medium as subtle and as playful as poetry. The facts need to be stated conclusively, the horror needs to be acknowledged outright, and playing linguistic games after such an atrocity is disrespectful to its victims.

I think the same is true of platitudes. You reach a point where being told that it'll be okay,

that everything will work out, is insulting. You don't know that, so why tell me? The truth is that 

you think my life will be easier if I believe it. But it's too late for that, I know that it isn't true. There are too many people who have suffered too much, too many horrors and injustices for me to ever believe that justice is automatic. I don't believe you anymore, I'm sorry.

So that's where I was on Thursday. Sometimes, reading philosophy helps. A while back I read Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus and thought it was what I needed. The book is about how one can go on living without hope. The central metaphor of the text is Sisyphus, who is forced to roll a boulder up a hill and watch it roll down again, forever. Camus' argument is that even Sisyphus could find contentment with the right mindset, that "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." The problem is this just isn't true. Not for everyone anyway. Definitely not for me.

Not all philosophers are so optimistic, and I tend to be drawn to the ones that aren’t. There’s something about pessimism that so easily seduces me. I have to consciously fight it, and I don’t always win. 

That week I'd been reading about Thomas Ligotti and Phillip Mainlander. Ligotti is a horror writer who specializes in psychological and existential horror and Mainlander was a 19th century philosopher who committed suicide after the publication of his first major work. In their eyes, life is a burden, not a gift. They believe that human beings are capable of causing and experiencing so much meaningless pain that trying to justify this world is absurd. Both argue that existence isn’t worth the cost of admission, that it would be better if we gave up the goose. Mainlander specifically says that death is the only redemption we are capable of.

I can’t bring myself to disagree with them. Too many terrible things have happened to innocent people for me to be able to make a legitimate defense of life. That inherent, untouchable value that we prescribe to it? I don’t think it exists. I think Sisyphus would want to end his torment any way he could, and I don’t think anyone has the right to take that away from him. Your life is your life, and no matter what anyone says the choice to live or die is always yours, and yours alone.

So why did I, in spite of all of this, decide to live? Well, part of the answer is cowardice; suicide is scary, really scary. But more than that, as I said before, I also knew that if I killed myself I’d also be killing my mom, and my sister. I could never do that to them, even if I really wanted to.

And that, I think, is the point of all of this. If I forget myself for a moment, and remember everyone else, the picture shifts. Most people are suffering, in one way or another. Most people want to live. And all of them need help. 

Capitalism, racism, imperialism, sexism, abuse, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism; there are so many cancers destroying the lives of so many people. If we lived in a perfect world without suffering, or if I were completely alone like Sisyphus, I think I could go right ahead and take my leave. But to do so now would be to abandon all my brothers and sisters and gender nonconforming siblings. If I can’t justify living, then so much the less can I justify leaving them all to live without me. People are hurting and we just can’t let that stand.

So fuck optimism, fuck platitudes, fuck “things will get better”. I’m going to live because I’ve got these two hands and the world is full of people who need someone to help them up.

And as for you, what I want you to get from this is that you don’t have to believe in life to keep living. If you’ve known enough hurt to consider suicide then you know just how much good you can do if you help ease the burden for others. All we have is each other. We can’t afford to lose you.

[the-bloody-masquerade]

Bloodlines 2 - They/Them Pronouns and Trans and Asexual Representation

There has been some discussion recently regarding information that was presented in a recent podcast interview given by Bloodlines 2 writers Brian Mitsoda and Cara Ellison. I think it is important to know what was and what was not said and understand it in context so I would like to provide a transcript to the passages in question for us to reference as we continue to have discourse around the issue.

I also want to try to give a little more insight as to why they/them pronouns were not able to be added to the game as there are some substantial programming concerns when it comes to adding conditional content that cannot be accessed in versions of the game where the language used only has two pronouns instead of three.

This comes from episode 22 of The RE:BIND Podcast. Published on June 22nd, 2020. The interviewer is Emily Rose, the interviewees are Cara Ellison and Brian Mitsoda, lead co-writers of Bloodlines 2 (Mitsoda having been the original Writer on Bloodlines 1)

Character Creation and Pronouns (passage starts at 1:14:45)

Note: [...] denotes a false start or when they start their sentence over a couple times.  

Emily: In Bloodlines 2, how is character creation being handled in terms of gender?  

Cara: Oh, character creation. So, one of the major problems we have is, and actually this is not unique to us, but the entire industry, is that localization severely limits the way you can write characters and we’re actually coming up against this problem now even though we have made a bunch of decisions on like how you refer to the player character and the characters in our game. But like, a major problem that we always have in video games is that English has a way to refer to people who don’t want to have a gender. And a lot of languages around the world, don’t have that.   

Brian: Currently, there’s like, movements in some languages to get that.  

Cara: Right like, so if your Quebecois, there’s a term that’s like generally recognized as being ‘they’ that you can use, but a lot of languages might have people who for example are agender, but the terms that they use to refer to themselves are not thoroughly recognized throughout their language and country. And that provides us with a humungous problem because we are making a game about Seattle, and there are a large number of people who live in Seattle who don’t want to have a gender or don’t want to be referred to as a particular gender or they frankly don’t identify as a particular thing, so we represent those characters like we normally would, but we run into a bunch of problems when we try to localize. So like, in the character creation section what we decided was the best option for us is to essentially let you create the way your character looks in like, entirely separate of gender, so you can make your character look any way you like as masculine or as feminine or whatever you like. […] You basically can then say ‘I want to be referred to as ‘he’ or I want to be referred to as ‘she,’ and that’s the option that we give you. The reason we don’t give you the they/them option is because […] I think there are four or five languages that can do this, but a lot of European languages can’t refer to the player character as ‘they’ or ‘them’ because they have to choose one or the other, so, we ended up not being able to do the they/them option for the character creation. So we basically tried to give you a way of expressing yourself and how you look, whatever, but we do end up actually asking you to specify ‘he’ or ‘she’ because it actually is just the way we had to do it for localization. […] For example, when I worked at MiniMolecule they had the exact same problem and it’s a problem of scale as well, because if the scale was just like we only release in English, we could have done the third option, we just couldn’t do it. And also because, we actually systemically throughout the game, its structured to be able to like have lots of interactions based on your identity so we had to sort of choose that early on, so it kind of got structured that way as well. But we do have main characters in the game who do not have a defined gender, and at least if you play the game in English they will be referred to as ‘they.’ We did have the option for NPCs at least in English, to have that referent, but unfortunately, we were very limited by localization on that point. And we’re not the only game that’s limited by that, but as this is kind of more, this kind of specific thing in language rolls out across lots more languages I think actually it will become easier to do this over a time, I think, as well. I’m hoping, at least.  

TLDR; You will create your characters appearance separate from physical sex or gender and then you will pick he/him or she/her pronouns. The reason why they/them is not being included is because most of the languages that the game is being localized in do not have a 3rd/gender neutral set of pronouns and [presumably] would require all version of the game that only include 2 pronouns (because of language) to have their dialogue systems reworked/separately programmed. 

This is a bit different than “they should just put they/them in the English localization then.” If pronouns will be a character creation option that probably means they will be set up as a content trigger, which is what determines which voice and text lines you get (to correspond to your gender). For languages that only have two pronouns, what would you do with that third content trigger representing the they/them pronouns? They also talked content “structured to to be able to have interactions based on your identity.” If there were interactions that were only triggered by the they/them choice in character select, this content would effectively be lost in localizations that only had two pronouns in character select, (barring a comprehensive structural overhaul for regions with only two pronouns) 

The quicker way to do this would just be to have most NPCs use as little gendered language as possible to make most lines an content universal/not have to trigger alternate text/content based on the pronoun choice, but then this may defeat the purpose of being able to customize your PC’s gender and pronouns to begin with.  I do not mean to be an apologist. Gender neutral pronouns in RPGs are frankly overdue as an industry standard it is disheartening to hear that they/them will not be a choice in Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines 2. I just wanted to try and elaborate on why the inclusion/exclusion of gender neutral pronouns in a game slated for world release is from a programming standpoint more involved that one may at first think.

Trans Representation in Bloodlines 2 (1:19:37)

Emily: So obviously we have some kind of gender-nonconforming representation. What is there in terms of maybe more specific representation, like say, are there any transmen are there any transwomen? Anything like that. Is that brought up at any point during the game?

Cara: […] I think what we want to do in the future is, actually have some main characters be transmen or transwomen, but I don’t—unless the junior writers have actually—actually no the junior writers have written some characters new that we have specified to be trans. But I would have to check, unfortunately, I don’t think we have actually put anyone who’s trans into the game currently unless I’m forgetting about someone. But yeah, I think our plans are to do that, but we didn’t want to do it like we’re just oh, we’re gonna just put it in…

Brian: Yeah there’s definitely […] when you’re doing the [game] design stuff, you’re looking for a character that might fit for the scene or the quest or the story beat that you’re doing and so one thing I never want to do just try to shoehorn in everything that we want to do.

Cara: By the time I had joined the main cast had been very clearly defined, so we didn’t have the option to add a trans main character which is what we have wanted to do.

Brian: Yeah, I would also like it, if we do add a trans character, we can find a voice actor who’s also…

Cara: …trans as well.

Quests with Trans Themes and DLC  (1:21:24)

(immediately follows last section)

Emily: That was gonna to be my next question, so that’s really good to hear actually. So I totally understand how it goes just in terms of like, the preplanning and establishing the world and things like that, and the main reason I bring it up in the first place is just because so much of Vampire does tend to gravitate around people’s identities their expressiveness with both their sexuality and who they are and so it’s just something that’s like kind of been kind of been some sort of undertone in the series for a long time so I was just curious how it was being handled in Bloodlines 2. Those are pretty sufficient answers.

[…a brief interlude where they talked about a random quest from Bloodlines 1]

(1:23:00)

Cara: We actually have a quest based on the idea of dysmorphia, like feeling like you’re trapped in your body and it doesn’t match the way you perceive yourself. A lot of our writing is based on what it actually feels like to be in this state of stasis when you weren’t expecting to feel that because it has happened suddenly to you. And so there are loads of issues that would be really valuable to explore in that way, and you know we have staff who are super interested in giving their input on that, so I think we should definitely approach it, we just haven’t actually put it in the game in terms of main characters. We wanna make a trans main character, I think that’s important to us. We’ve got some DLC coming up that we’re gonna like make a greater effort on that front, like its Seattle, it would be so weird if we didn’t have trans characters. [Note: Cara lives in Seattle currently. 

Brian: Mmhmm

Cara: So, yeah. [to Brian] Ask Margaret as well, our voiceover director, if there are any trans actors that she would recommend we could cast for the role and maybe write it for them. So yeah.

Emily: So that’s the thing and even I struggle really to think of many games that have a trans character in a main role, let alone--I can’t actually think off the top of my head unless they’re very like micro indie stuff any games that feature like a trans woman protagonist. I think the last time I saw a transwoman in a game was I think I wanna say like Dishonoured 2, one of the semi-core side characters you encountered for one of the quests is a documented as trans.

Cara: And I think the Dishonoured 2 team really really really made a huge effort on that front to be able to represent a huge variety of different backgrounds of people. They were very interested in [doing that] from the start, so yeah I think there are like some games where it does matter too, and it really feels like the world is bigger when you actually provide those characters.

In-game Asexual Characters and Their Ideal Approach to Portraying LGBT+ characters.  (1:25:29)

Cara: But yeah, like we have tried to represent asexuality as well in the game.

Emily: Good good.

Cara: We have characters who are asexual. Who are canon asexual. And yeah, […] We try as well, not to write it sort of clumsily, we don’t write characters that like, out themselves, because that’s not—

Brian: No, because generally someone does come up and say that immediately.

Cara: when you’re from a background that has been marginalized, you’re very aware of your own safety. Especially if a stranger who looks shady approaches you, like our characters, you’re not gonna like immediately say it. But we make it explicit that this is who they are, but not in a way like ‘Hi, I’m Cara! I’m transgender!’ You know?

Brian: Yeah, yeah.

Cara: I think some of the ways in which people have done it in the past have been a little clumsy so I’m very aware of that as well.

Brian: Yeah, I would never want to handle it in a way that’s like ‘The main thing about that character is that they are trans’ like that’s not right at all

Cara: I want the main thing about that person to be something that they’re interested in, like, actually like exploring with the player character and I think like, most people are coming from somewhere when they approach you and its not going to be about I want to talk about my…[they both trail off laughing,]

Brian: They probably want to talk about a way in which they’re going to fuck you over. Or get something from you, or get you to do something for them.

Cara: Yeah and I would love to write a trans character who is like really really interesting and really really involved in something and I don’t want it [their transness] to be their defining [feature].

~~

Thank you for reading.

[girl-debord]

A philosophical anti-essentialism is so central to how I understand myself in the world as a trans person that it’s mind-boggling to see other trans folks who aren’t truscum/transmed/whatever who still hold onto essentialist ideas about gender & identity.

So here’s the basics:

1. Existentialism. There is no essence, or at least, essence does not, as the classical philosophers held, precede existence. This means that things exist before ideas about them or their purpose exist (what Plato calls “forms”). We find ourselves in a certain set of conditions and we ascribe meaning to those circumstances, not the other way around.

2. Gender is Not Real. Gender exists in our world sort of the way that the forms existed for platonic philosophers: as abstractions that are unattainable yet supposedly desirable. No one can fully conform to everyone’s expectations of what it means to be a man or a woman, and no one can really claim authority on knowing what those categories entail. Even radfems who fall back on “biology” (as a defense of what is basically gender, even though they wouldn’t call it that) don’t really have definitive answers when it comes to, say, intersex people.

3. Gender is a System of Control. If gender can never be fully realized, why do people try to conform to it? The answer is that gender is a method of imposing behavioral norms on people based on the role power structures want them to play in things like reproduction and the institution of family. Presenting people with established roles, appearances, and activities based on notions of gender (and punishing them for nonconformity to these things) makes them easier to control.

4. Gender is Enforced both Externally and Internally. The enforcement of near-ubiquitous systems like this will involve just about every aspect of society. Gender norms are imposed by authority figures, of course, but also by peers and even by the individual upon themself. We grow up in a gendered society, and in order to escape the punishment not only dished out for deviancy, but for the perceived deviancy of anyone who questions this system, we learn to internalize gender, both conforming to it and adopting its logic. We police ourselves, even internally, in how we talk, look, act, and think.

5. Being Trans is Not a Discovery. Since there is no essence and gender is just a set of imposed ideas, being trans is not discovering the essence of a different gender within yourself. This social system of gender is hostile to the variety of human experiences because it imposes monolithic ideas about behavior and appearance upon people. Because of this, many (if not all) people will have hostile encounters with gender throughout their lives. Transness is a particular response to these encounters: a way of taking control of your body and your perceptions of it.

6. “Dysphoria” is Not an Internal Issue. Gender, among many social systems, forces us to understand our bodies as symbols of a deeper, essential identity. What psychiatric professionals call dysphoria is a feeling of discontinuity between what the body symbolizes and what we would like it to symbolize. Part of this, of course, is the way that we are perceived by others, behaviorally and in appearance. But it also extends to the way that we perceive our own bodies and even believe (whether consciously or not) our essence to be. From a young age in a world of essentialism, we conceive of essence (with regards to gender) as related to many things: at the most shallow level, appearance and voice, but at a deeper level, behavior, social roles, and “biological factors” like hormones can become divining rods for essence. Transmeds engage in this kind of practice all the time, establishing standards by which they judge the essential transness of a person. This is just a microcosm of a larger tendency that dominates a cis-normative society.

7. Complete Identity Autonomy. So rather than try and judge whether a person (yourself or someone else) really is trans, how do we respond to these issues? Understanding that identities are not a result of essences but rather socially manufactured categories, how do we navigate a society built upon identity? The answer is to demand complete control, wresting your autonomy back from everyone who will try and police you, including yourself. Foucault says (and I’m paraphrasing) that identity can be a sort of game we play, but that if we try to place bounds around it, it becomes a prison again. As trans people, I think it should be easy enough to see the ways that social demands to conform keep us imprisoned. But I think, for many people, the trans experience (if you’ll pardon me talking about it as though it were one monolithic thing) lends itself to new forms of expression, and an understanding that even as we navigate these social categories, the categories themselves and the systems that produce them are really just violent bullshit.