#and ones gender identity

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

historical drama/sitcom where two gay best friends (woman and man) get lavender married--and proceed to spend the Fancy European Honeymoon their parents paid for acting as each other's wingman

[oscillatingdichotomy]

An entertainer wanting to entertain in their typical garb and persona seems logical enough. It’s meant to expose children to the big personalities of an art form based in gender performance - not sex performance. Drag as a whole isn’t meant to be mocking physical, sexual traits but rather the aspects of gender that society imposes. This gendered performance can be masculine, feminine, or incorporate elements of both, the same way that a clown takes elements of their personality and heightens them to the point of hilarity.

It doesn’t seem productive to be so worried about how entertainers would like to entertain children in their free time (in a way that exposes those children to art and gender expression in a very personal way) when you could use your time to read to children as you are, or perhaps learn the history of drag rather to better understand it’s significance in society and to marginalized communities.

how come the drag story hour dudes don’t want to read stories to kids as themselves? why do they want to do it as their adult entertainment personas? why are they so hell bent on putting a degrading mockery of females in front of kids who are largely spending every waking hour with their mothers? most of these men are supposed to be homosexual men. would that not be better representation? 

[seldomsee]

Hunter x Hunter is like this is Alluka her incredibly abusive family that doesn’t treat her like a human refers to her as a boy but Killua, the only member of her family that loves & cares about her, explicitly refers to her as his little sister. & some fans are still like What could Togashi have possibly meant by this. We will never know

[knifearo]

ultimately when it comes to shipping and fandom space treatment of aspec characters i just don't accept "aro/ace people can still date/have sex" as an answer from nonaspecs. like yeah. mhm. okay. now i think we both know that you're not saying that out of real interest in the diversity of aspec experiences. so you can turn in your seventeen-page essay on why and how you plan to examine this character's aspec identity within the context of a romantic or sexual relationship complete with evidence from canon and peer reviews from multiple aspec people within the next week or i'm putting you in the pit from the edgar allen poe story

[bunnyboy-juice]

NO MORE ASSOCIATING THINGS WITH FEMMES ONLY BECAUSE THEY ARE PINK!HYPERFEM FEMMES ARE GREAT AND I LOVE YOU CAMPY FEMMES WHO EMBODY PINK BUT ALSO JESUS CHRIST CAN YOU GUYS NOT GO MORE THAN ONE DAY W/O TRYING TO SHOEHORN FEMMES INTO BEING ONLY PINK UWU BABIES. I AM FEMME AS IN GRASS AS IN DIRT AS IN TREE BARK AS IN WEEDS SPROUTING THROUGH THE SIDEWALK CEMENT. FEMME AS IN GENDER NONCONFORMITY AS IN FUCK YOU MY FEMININITY IS WHAT *I* SAY IT IS. FEMME AS IN DEPTH AND DARKNESS AND WARMTH AND TERROR. FEMME AS IN CAVES. FEMME AS IN LIGHTNING. FEMME AS IN AN AMALGAMATION OF TRAITS THAT I HAVE DECIDED ARE FEMININE REGARDLESS OF WHAT SOCIETY SAYS. FUCK IS IT THAT HARD TO UNDERSTAND?!???

[thehealingsystem]

It's so wild to me that as a community we're still so hostile to multigender and genderfluid people existing in gay and lesbian spaces.

You...are aware that people who are both men and women are allowed to be gay, right? And lesbian? Their other genders doesn't cancel their connection to womanhood, or manhood, or whatever else they id with. They are allowed to be gay despite their fem-alignment, and they are allowed to be lesbian despite their masc-alignment.

It comes from these weird online spaces that the standard to be gay or lesbian is to be a "non-woman" or a "non-man," which is inherently transmultiphobic and...extremely ahistorical. And completely misunderstands nonbinary identity. So if you're both then you just don't belong anywhere I suppose.

[mxmarsbars]

doodle dump

(featuring traffic!impulse having an identity crisis, clock duo tweaking out, a team up i want next life series season, and gay people) (nothing’s new)

[soleminisanction]

So a while back I ran the numbers to confirm a suspicion that fandom trends towards a trans Tim Drake, and there's a lot of bits and pieces around his canon material that I think contributes to that interest. But there's a particular, subtle one that's been poking at my mind a lot because I think it might actually be a pretty significant factor that nobody really notices:

His costumes.

The original Robin costume, the one Dick and Jason wore, is childish but exposing. It's innocent enough when they're being drawn as spunky children, but during the period when Dick's still wearing it into his late teens and early 20s, it's practically as revealing as a lot of the women's costumes (and, in retrospect, almost certainly laid some of the groundwork for him sometimes being sexualized by the art and writing the way female characters normally are -- George Pérez, at least, absolutely put him on display every bit as much as he did Starfire and Donna).

Damian's costumes, meanwhile, lean more into archaic/fantasy armor designs and are thus largely genderless outside some vague allusions to the codename's Robin Hood roots. And Steph's is, well, a minidress, and one designed to show off her figure, drawing explicit attention to her femininity.

But then you have Tim's most iconic costume, his original one, which is not only fully covering in a way the original look isn't, it also, by virtue of being designed in the 90s, sports a very specific feature: molded body armor shaped to look like pectoral and abdominal muscles. In other words -- an idealized male body.

Not every artist always included that detail, but it was an explicit part of the design that you don't see as much these days, at least not for teen heroes. Which means it's inadvertently the perfect costume for a trans masculine Boy Wonder. It's got built-in body shaping. The cape and tunic layers even help to make his shoulders look wider.

Tim's second costume, the OYL later suit, doesn't explicitly have this body shaping element, but some artists still hint at it in the same way that Dick's Nightwing suits do (ie, we assume they're not showing off their real muscles with skintight suits for safety reasons, but who knows). Plus it comes with the bonus gay longing of changing the colors to mourn the dead crush he's too deep in the closet to recognize.

And then you've got his modern Robin look which has the same kind of shaping going on in a sleaker, more subtle way, though it can vary from artist to artist how much the red part of his suit is drawn as a breast plate vs. a part of the bodysuit.

As a bonus, the design also has a tendency to make him look lean and lithe, in an interesting contrast to Damian who, despite being physically smaller than Tim, tends to have a presence that makes him come across as stockier and more solid, possibly because he's more heavily armored.

You even see this with some of Tim'snon-Robin looks. I've mentioned this elsewhere but, the original Red Robin look making him look older when the cowl was up honestly makes a lot of sense. That suit was originally designed for a Dick Grayson who was pushing 60 to conceal the extent of his age while still communicating his maturity and development. It makes sense that it'd work the other way, to make 17 year old Tim look like he's in his late 20s/early 30s.

It's tunic over a body suit design is also just aesthetically pleasing in terms of forming an elegant male body type, the same way a well-cut suit can be. Again, it does especially nice things for the shoulders, which is why I personally prefer it to the fully bodysuit redesign they give him in the latter part of the series. Although as we can see from the details in Marcus To's art, even that body suit has seams strategically placed to suggest muscles.

And then of course there's the 2016 Rebirth era Red Robin costume, which is just a more heavily-armored version of his classic Robin look that's trying really hard to make him look masculine and mature, which means... exaggerated muscles.

And the thing is, it's not that this doesn't happen with other characters' costumes. But for various reasons it specifically didn't happen with the other Robin costumes, like I described at the start.

Which is not something I think people consciously notice. But I do know that, when I was writing my transmasc Tim fanfic a few years before realizing that I myself was also transmasc, one of the images that solidified the story for me was how good it would've felt the first time a transmasc Tim put on his new Robin costume and saw the Boy Wonder looking back at him. And I remember specifically thinking about how nice the shaped armor would be for that sort of thing.

It's kinda funny how an obvious attempt to enforce gender norms wound up, for lack of a better term, backfiring, at least in my opinion. There's just something about exaggerating the masculinity of Robin, a role designed to contrast and foil the already exaggerated masculine ideal of Batman, that makes it feel like a performance.

[sforzesco]

BALAK, PANGAGAD

uhhh conspiracy. can be a courtship dance. ritual. so to speak. & hosting one in your house is an act of service

[mistystarshine]

@qdkdraws drew "Eve" (aka amnesiac cursed sinner Adam) from Vile and Blasphemous (featuring bisexual crisis Lute) and requested that I post since her internet connection is bad rn, so here you go!

In Keydid's words:

She dresses like a slut and it's so disgusting that Lute can't stop staring. You know, how sometimes people stare at scary insects.

Just because

no other reasons

[someone-else-entirely]

Me, a child, reading A Series Of Unfortunate Events and seeing that Duncan, Isadora, and Quigley Quagmire are meant to look eerily similar to one another: "Ah. Identical triplets."

Me, a teenager, learning about how genetics work and realizing that a boy and a girl cannot be identical twins/triplets/etc: "Nevermind. Fraternal triplets who just happen to look super similar."

Me now: "They are in fact identical and Isadora is trans"

[bloggingboutburgers]

Sorry, I typically keep my comics strictly about my own ace experience, but I've heard the dumb "exposing kids to trans people and non-gender-conforming stuff will make ALL our kids trans and it's bad for some reason" reasoning one time too many lately, so I felt like trying to be an ally

...Obviously if you were a drama kid for whom roleplaying WAS a good guide in your trans experience, even more power to you! I'm just saying I'm getting sick of bigots trying to oversimplify the reality of being trans in order to demonize it even more

[beebfreeb]

It is kind of funny how much I've detached myself from appearance directly correlating to gender actually. When I design a character I go. Okay. What would they wear that reflects their personality and surroundings? And I make a character who is a 30 year old divorced man who looks like this:

[innitmarvellous]

Exploring your own sexual and gender identities through the means of old man yaoi RPF?

It's more likely than you think!

[weatheredcopper]

my second gender take of the day is that nobody has the exact same gender. that isnt to say that for example trans men and cis men are not both men, but rather that ALL men are a slightly different type of man, its just useful as a way of categorizing the broad strokes of your identity. this is the same for women and ESPECIALLY genderqueer/nonbinary people because that represents everything not covered in two strict categories

[ricofox]

(Been seeing some forcefem stuff recently so heres my contribution.)

Forcefem, but you just have to pick the women's bathroom since the other is occupied.