#and socialization is a term useful for more than just gender and shit id say. like i was sorta raised in a certain culture

[bucephaly]

I keep seeing posts of people saying that a term transphobes stole and are using incorrectly to be transphobes is a Horrible Transphobic Term and Anyone who uses it is transphobic and it's Not Real and Entirely Not True when it's literally an actual anthropological term that has studies about it and is actually very useful for Everyone to think about, cis and trans, and be critical of. I hate seeing people respond to dumb hate by entirely writing off everything even remotely connected to the twisted shit bigots use when the shit the bigots are stealing and twisting is still like... a thing?

[autisticempathydaemon]

your match up game looks so fun ‼️‼️‼️‼️ i wanna try it out hehe (rambling ahead)

1. beast of blood by malice mizer :3 i honestly don't have a reason other than it being chaotic enough that it fills up empty noise in my brain lol

2. 5w6 !!

3. ohh i LOVE youtube essays/analyses whether i'm fully listening or have em as background noise, i love horror youtube deep dives, particularly about analog/digital horror series and that one creepypasta iceberg hehe

4. i don't think i've ever had one ? to be honest i don't think i ever thought abt it until i saw it in like . cartoons n shit , never rlly knew about the concept of imaginary friends as a kid 😭

5. recently i use redacted sleep aid audios but most of the time i just . stay awake until my brain shuts down 🤞

6. honestly? i never thought abt this . but the first thing that came into my mind was veronica (idk either!!) though if i genuinely wanted to change my name i'd want it to be gender neutral, and tbh i doubt i'd have any important meaning behind it i'd just pick whatevr sounds nice

7. guy's sleep audio !!!! i joke about wanting guy angst a lot but to be real . this audio of his is so vulnerable .. like before that we only saw him being a goof and stuff yaknow . . idk that one forreals hit different 4 me

8. as much as i love every character, i do not understand why gavin is the most popular😭 don't get me wrong , love him, maybe it's because i haven't listened to the fl series but i do not get the hype💔

9. i don't know all the words per se but i would have to say mean girls . . as problematic as that movie is now its iconic and i love it and i need to rewatch it BAD .

10. damien tbh . haven't gotten to his other audios but i think i would want 2 be besties w him i relate 2 him a good amount (he also seems like the type id be intimidated into doing well in school for)

11. to be real i wld not be able to ramble if im tired LOL i think i'd be more quiet bcz i have a hard time sleeping to begin with

12. tbh just a soda (coca cola bcz i am basic) i go to convenience stores n stuff after school so im only there to pick up something quick before i go home so im in and im out 🔥🔥

13. the 2007 sweeney todd soundtrack 🤞 i cannawt find the movie ANYWHERE and its nostalgic to me so listening to the songs is the closest i'll get to scratch the itch in my brain

14. fnaf tbh EHWHEHW i've been into fnaf ever since i was a kid and it's stuck with me because it's what got me into horror n stuff  🫶

15. i'm a saggitarius, my mbti is INTP, i love horror and fashion, despite wearing a lot of darker alt fashion, my favorite color is pink (my phone case is decorated to the gods its very ridiculous) i like doing my own nails (funnily enough in bright colors) , i think i relate to honey the most in terms of personality, and i like to analyze most of the media im into!!

So part of my thought process is based on your personality types, the Troubleshooter and the Logician. However, I have to admit a bigger part of my reasoning is I think Asher would love your fashion sense and would contrast you so cutely.

Like, on a deep, core level, your personality types give me the impression of someone who’s thoughtful and analytical and capable of solving problems. Those are good traits for a beta’s mate, especially when Asher can have more social, impulsive tendencies. On a funsies level, I imagine Asher dresses like your typical So Cal dude, kinda surfer chic, and he loves your style and what an odd pair you make. Like, on all levels but especially physical, you are the embodiment of the black cat/golden retriever couple.

Asher loves everything about you, so many things about you he finds it hard to pick a favorite. He loves the contrast between your dark clothes and your bright nails, loves asking you to paint his while you’re at it so y’all can match. He loves watching FNAF theories with you, because he was definitely a FNAF teenager. He even loves watching scary movies with you though he’s terrible with them. (Asher’s the type that loves the adrenaline rush while it’s playing but regrets it once it’s time to lock up the house.)

Song:

In the car, I just can't wait/ To pick you up on our very first date/ Is it cool if I hold your hand?/ Is it wrong if I think it's lame to dance?/ Do you like my stupid hair?/ Would you guess that I didn't know what to wear?/ I'm just scared of what you think/ You make me nervous so I really can't eat/ Let's go/ Don't wait/ This night's almost over

Given we canonically know Asher to be a FOB fanboy, it’s hardly a leap to assume he’s a Blink fan, especially this song. I think this particular track is not only fun and nostalgic to him but captures his energy and vibes, how he felt when he first fell in love with you. It’s also catchy as hell, so you know he’s singing this at you full-volume all the time.

Runner-ups:

Anytime someone says they’re a horror fan, I’ve got to put Guy in their big three; one of my top headcanons is that he writes some gripping horror and loves it as a genre. (I also think he loves FNAF lore and finds it so fun, though he was not impressed by the movie.) I also love Lasko for you because I think he admires your bold, authentic fashion choices and finds them inspirational.

Read this post and send me an ask if you’d like a match-up of your own! 💌

[illnessfaker]

~reclamation~ is not nearly as a big of a deal as most people make it out to be imo but i also don't necessarily decide my comfort around who can ~reclaim~ what words based solely off what someone has actually been called honestly. the only context in which i've been called a cripple is when i sprained my ankle once (though this happened as a result of being wrongbodied) and it wasn't even done with malicious intent. that's not why i call myself a cripple. conversely, i don't think i have any business ~reclaiming~ the r-slur because when people have called me what they're basically doing is using intellectual disability - something i do not have - as an insult, so they're using their prejudice against someone else's experience as a weapon against me. it's ableist regardless but like the venom behind that word is the dehumanization of intellectually disabled people. and frankly i think "well i'm not id and i've been called it, so" is a especially a weak argument in that case cause like. basically everyone and their mother has been called that word lol it's entered the common public lexicon in the same way that faggot has.

like, all slur ~reclamation~ stuff for me is a facetious way of indicating my relationship to sociocultural norms in the same way labels that aren't slurs do (trans, disabled, etc.) i call myself a cripple (or dynamically crippled) because the way in which i move my disabled body, particular in terms of speed, is not to the expectations of able-bodied society and it is something i have been socially punished for since birth. i will occasionally call myself a faggot not only because i'm an effeminate gender mess who likes men but also because it feels like the best way of articulating my relationship to gender as someone who's been read and essentially classified as an effeminate gender mess since i was a kid. i call myself queer because my gender and sexual orientation situation often doesn't slot under more specific labels and it is at odds with the expectations of heteronormative society. these words as slurs are symbolic of the workings of broader power structures (faggot as punishment for transfemininity and gbq manhood or experiences perceived in alignment with such; cripple as punishment for mobility impairment or experiences perceived as in alignment with such; queer as punishment for being not cis and/or straight or experiences perceived as in alignment with such) so it's never been about who gets called what from my perspective, it's about the symbolism and the ideas being communicated, or the sociocultural norms that are being replicated and reinforced via language.

but it's also a show of what groups of people in society i see myself as sharing enough of an experience or embodiment to, in a sense, at least consider us "siblings" if we are not apart of the same communities. and these reasons are why i get pissed off when other cafab nb people call themselves fags or throw around the word faggot while other times treating gbq men or gnc men solely like they're the butt of a joke rather than a marginalized group that they make it clear through their actions that they don't see themselves as apart of in any significant capacity. that's why i get pissed at able-bodied nd people pitching a fit because a physically disabled person who tragically left this world on their own terms started an internet movement that explicitly didn't include them because "able-bodied" and "cripple" are...surprise... mutually-exclusive social locations and just because we're all disabled doesn't mean we need to be obfuscating difference. like it just seems to me like most people just wanna be edgy and say forbidden(tm) words, or in terms of the able-bodied nd people who act like the big bad cripples(tm) that are strangers on social media are "gatekeeping" shit, they outright seem to be playing the victim in circumstances in which they are most assuredly not because they fail to recognize the privilege they hold even if they are also subject to social marginalization.

this isn't me saying you gotta pass some kind of test or be somehow virtuous in the way in which you ~reclaim~ slurs. that'd be fucking ridiculous. but the way in which you view these things can often be pretty indicative of the way in which you address or feel about certain topics/groups of people. if someone tells you "you shouldn't use the r-slur if you're not intellectually disabled because it's using intellectual disability as an insult" and you go "well it's been used against me too, so" the way i read that is "i don't care (about the broader things that this represents.)"

[trickstarbrave]

Asfkghjkl please please give the deets on Baldur (only if you wanna)

uhmmm sure i can hopefully it will be what u want

>uses he/him pronouns and mostly masculine terms so i guess i'd put him closer to the boy side of nb?? gender is hard i think if you asked him he'd say "i'm a guy??? i think??? i guess???? something like that. definitely not a woman"

>uses primarily one handed weapons. knows a bit of archery and also good with a shield. id apologize for giving so many of my skyrim ocs archery if archery wasnt such a useful fucking skill

>for his bg i didn't actually think it thru LMAO he is just on the streets most of his childhood so he learned to steal. this gets ppl to treat him like shit from an early age bc no one wants a scrappy thief running around your home or business potentially stealing from you

>very good looking. other characters are transphobic abt his appearance now but fuck them i love my pretty boys and will make pretty boy ocs until i die probably.

>has faced a lot of SA both pre and post transition and is pretty traumatized and thats mentioned a lot in the story early on esp disassociation from trauma so it might be triggering. i self projected a Little too hard. he learns to fight to defend himself and refuses to die

>obv not every single character was a horrible transphobe but baldur also like to keep to himself due to being burned before and theres also a lot of casual transphobia. he's a smaller guy rather than the typical buff nord warrior (a significant portion of that comes from malnutrition growing up though)

>he makes it all the way to sovngarde actually despite how frankly ill prepared he was

>like i need to stress even with the "blades" backing him and him doing active recruitment for them and getting them to higher numbers than the game allows (for more realism) he isn't taken seriously by most people and was super unprepared. they sent him to get the dragon stone and fight the dragon at the tower bc they were kinda just hoping he'd die. even the blades didn't rly take him seriously except for delphine and esbern and delphine wasn't happy this was their 'hero'. he was kinda scrawny due to not eating properly and not trained well enough. despite this he was a pretty terrifying warrior

>alduin acknowledges this and thinks if he treats THIS dragonborn like a dragon he shouldnt get a miraak situation this time. he gave miraak too much freedom as a priest as far as he is concerned. keep the dragonborn on a tight leash with proper discipline and rewards and he'll hopefully have a good champion on his hands instead.

>i made up some shit for this fic exclusively that is probably not lore friendly. which is dragon's CAN just make oaths they take seriously, but also alduin knows how to etch that oath onto their souls and claim them as his own. breaking the oath can have some dire consequences, but as a benefit you can get stronger and also be brought back from the dead by alduin because alduin is eternal and can't ever really die without seriously destroying time as we know it. normally its uncomfortable and dragons just put up with it but uhhhh baldur likes it a little Too Much

>did i mention this fic gets pretty bdsm? it kinda does. we have soul branding, soul sex i guess???, possessiveness, claiming, probably more im forgetting. alduin learns the joys of a very submissive and compliant sub i guess

>also added is like i said in another ask dragons in this au do just have sex. theyre pretty cautious, prideful creatures though. so usually there is some light combat/wrestling/debating over who is gonna bottom and 'submit'. dragons love dominating after all and who am i to take that from them. they'll do it to blow off steam reinforce hierarchy, for rewards, and also just for fun. dragons don't really need to reproduce and can choose if they get pregnant or not so it serves other functions socially for the most part

>in fact finding two dragons that ACTUALLY reproduce is weirder. they can in this fic but for the most part they don't. having kids with someone requires a level of trust and devotion that dragons seldom like to give up, but it does happen from time to time. those that do are usually mates for life and are pretty exclusive with one another. creation via reproduction is seen as inferior to just shaping the world however you want to (and THAT part is actually lore compliant with tes

>oh yeah and dragons are fucky with gender. they're literally dragons. demi gods to full on gods and cosmic forces of the natural world. what matters is if you're a drake or a jill (god i hate that term but its what we got) and that also informs your duties to time itself. theres drakes that lay eggs and jills with penises. also why dragons vary so much in appearance, they just pick how they wanna look. they don't give a shit. baldur having a vagina absolutely does not phase alduin, nor does his transition--its only right he change his body just as he changes the natural world with his thu'um, its his birthright by akatosh

>i know a lot of the above isnt abt baldur specifically but i hope it can inform you a lot on how his relationship with alduin goes and why it goes that way

>alduin names baldur his champion and doesn't hesitate to start taking care of him. he isn't aware mortals down in skyrim weren't treating him the best yet. he thought they should have been given he is their champion sent by the divines to defeat him according to prophecy yadda yadda so why wouldn't they treat him like a king and outfit him with the best gear they had at their disposal? but baldur well fed, well trained, and geared up is kinda Stupid OP, especially when backed by an army of fire breathing dragons and magic flinging undead. lol. this boy has no problems

>baldur starts conquering cities no problem. the wonders actually being well fed, geared up, and surrounded by colleagues that don't hate you can do

>alduin actually likes having sex with baldur just as much as baldur does with him. alduin theorizes it's because akatosh made baldur for him (to stop him, but same difference in the end), and the dragonborn is the most loyal of his followers so he doesn't really care

>the other dragons get jealous of it though. where is THEIR fun reward. why don't THEY get to fuck the champion. whatever alduin is being nice (by world eater standards) now so they can let it slide

>im actually thinking of alduin having baldur's armor designed after himself. walk up in armor that looks like the scales of akatosh's first born to show how much you belong to him. lol

>does alduin fuck him in a conquered city at one point? i can neither confirm nor deny.

[thatfeyboy]

If I'm being honest, it's often equally invalidating. It's as if the concept of gender has become one with gender roles. For me, as a man, it is very often that if I do anything that isn't within the male norm I am assumed to Not Be A Man. People are sometimes dismissive even when I correct them, asserting that I clearly don't understand what an egg I am. I am already trans, out, and transitioned for context. I don't think this helps nonbinary people because it's not being decided based on whether or not I ID as a man, it's about presentation. It just shows people know they exist. Sometimes it's not even that, they directly jump to seeing me as a woman.

None of this is good. None of this is what trans people want. It's an awful mistake created by the constant pressure that being a gender is a social construct. I don't know how quiet to say this, but it was inevitable with how gender is currently described. If gender is social people aren't going to go "oh I guess people are what they say they are cause it doesn't really matter". They are going to start assigning gender based on social phenomenon. Girly people are girls, masc people are men, everyone else is neither. There was never a reality were gendered terms were going to mean nothing except whatever an individual decides for themselves. It was always going to be ascribed a consistent, understandable definition.

Now I'm not advocating for some draconian right wing sex only interpretation of gender, nor am I saying gender isn't self determined. But it's never sat right with me that gender is just a set of social rules that aren't really tangible. Gender is tangible, even if we as a society don't understand everything about it. It's undeniable it has something to do with sex traits, and something to do with how we are perceived socially by others. Beyond that though we don't know fucking shit.

Bottom line though, advocating for the pure sociality of gender ensures exactly this; that gender is based on social roles and actions. It makes sure gnc behavior will always be scrutinized. It assures that being a man or woman, birth assignment or otherwise, will always be tied to a social class. It guarantees that should you step out of line people will question whether it's better or more accurate for you to be a different gender, even against your will. Most frighteningly it will even further enforce gender stereotypes on people, like women being weak and men being violent, because if you weren't then you would be that gender. Doesn't matter if you are cis or trans. It will affect everyone.

I have already experienced it, as have many others trans or cis. We shouldn't just start asserting that gender needs to be about specific sex traits or forcing people to transition/admit textbook dysphoria either. But it cannot remain as it is. This is getting insane. At the very least, I know I as a trans person and people like me don't have a gender that fits with this social definition. I definitely only feel like a man because of what physical traits I needed to be comfortable. Sure I like being masc sometimes, and sure I like the validation of being perceived as a good attractive man by being masc. That does not make me content with ignoring every other part of the human experience I wish to enjoy that's a part of me, and my desire to do so should not put my gender into question to compete strangers or even closer friends.

If you don't want to read all of that, at the very least, do not ever assert in any way you know someone's gender better than they do. Also, don't role out pronouns based on gender conformity. I get it, we all have to assume at some point and base that assumption on something, and we all make mistakes. But since being nonbinary has usually nothing to do with being socially gender-stereotype ambiguous, and a lot of nb people don't exclusively or at all use they/them, don't give people a they/them for having short hair or a crop top. Those pronouns aren't actually gender neutral for people that usually use them. It is meant to describe their gender or lack their of. It's really fucking rude.

EDIT: I want to add, I know they is the closest we have in English to a gender neutral pronoun. I know people use it when they aren't sure. What I have a problem with are the things that make people unsure, such as really basic gender nonconformity. A woman being kinda butch or a man being kinda loosely fem should not throw you off so much as to assume that they are trans in some way. It's not the brief mistake I'm worried about. It's the mentality that seems to drive that thought process, being the constant studying of gender conformative presentation to assign gender. This idea that they/them is somehow less misgendering than a binary term isn't really true. It kinda goes against solidifying it as a specific identity marker for those that do use it as well. I personally would rather just be asked my pronouns than misgendered by assumption, I promise it's less rude if you have the chance to ask(I understand you can't always/it might not be safe to ask so use your own judgement there). The worst part is still those that assert they know your gender after correcting, but still.

girl help I'm getting they/them'd by well-meaning people who don't know what a tomboy is

[asexual-means-no-attraction]

i don't understand how you don't "believe" in nonbinary genders. you might say "show me the scientific research that proves it exists" but like, doesn't the fact that many cultures around the world have recognized genders outside of the binary for centuries prove it exists? it's just so surprising to still see "there are only 2 genders" people these days, the world isn't so black and white.

For me the issue with nonbinary as a concept isn't "there isn't any science behind it" but rather the way it conflates gender to gender roles as well as how it is described.

It's often times described as 1. A feeling. This doesn't work since gender isnt a feeling. I don't feel like a man. I am a man. There is a similar issue with the trans community doing this too.

2. Not connecting to gender roles. This is not a gender thing at all. Many MANY nonbinary people describe their gender via gender roles and not conforming to them. This is bad because gender itself has nothing to do with gender roles, is different depending on the culture, and also pushes the idea that anyone who goes against gender roles is nonbinary which isn't true at all. I've seen people treat it like a social movement against gender roles while others treat it as a full on gender with gender dysphoria and everything. It's way too many contradictory things. Not to mention the people who insist anyone who is gender nonconformiting is nonbinary, including binary trans people-- which is pretty shitty. It ain't your place to tell someone they aren't their gender.

3. Many saying they're not apart of the gender binary while also saying they are binary. Ex: people who id as a non-binary women. It's like there are multiple different definitions of non binary.

4. The push to use binary terms for people who are not apart of the gender binary. Ex: people who are non-binary calling themselves lesbians/gay. Those are terms based off of binary genders. It doesn't make sense for someone who isn't apart of the binary to use them. Again, it just feels like the rules just don't actually exist or they keep changing.

5. Uses really awful examples of "3rd genders" from other cultures. For example 2 spirit in native american culture (literally how they decribe anyone who's LGBT in their culture and has been pointed out by so many native americans that it is NOT another gender). But I've seen so many people say it's some 3rd gender. There are a lotta other examples too where the supposed 3rd gender is less of a 3rd gender and more gnc men being forced into sex work as the only way to survive and being treated as less than human. I don't remember the exact names of all of the examples cuz it's 2 am right now and I don't feel like doing a buncha research right now. But these aren't hard things to find.

6. Of the gender dysphoric nonbinary people I've met, they seem to describe their dysphoria in ways that feel more like they just haven't realized their gender yet, just that they aren't the one they were born with. I've met many a people who used to ID as non binary but now as a binary gender. This isn't to say that there aren't actual dysphoric nonbinary people, I can't say there are or aren't. But there is something to be said with how all the different and changing rules of what non binary is and what it's like has caused confusion for trans people to discover themselves. And I never see that addressed within the nonbinary community.

I don't have any actual problem with the idea of having more than 2 genders. My problem is how this discussion has been approached. It's treating gender like something that can change on a whim based on culture and many people within the nonbinary community seem to constantly change the rules of what does and doesn't count. Not to mention the doors it's opened to the mogai community which adds on stargender and a lot more ridiculous and transphobic shit.

There's a lot of issues that stem from within the nonbinary community that when someone brings up are ignored and the person demonized. I won't tell someone they aren't non binary. It's not my place and my issue again isn't the concept of nonbinary. It's how it's been treated and how many different directions it's been defined that don't make sense as well as a lot of really shitty shit that's been used to back up their claims.

[monsterqueers]

Nonhuman Still A Decade Later - An Essay

So ive been identifying as a therian for around decade now, and otherkin and fictionkin about 6-ish(7?). I never made huge amounts of insightful posts, and I don't have any hot takes to add to other people’s. My internet presence is largely a fandom one with a side of social justice things, and thus even if I did have something I felt worth saying on the topic beyond yet another awakening story or an explanation of my past lives and whathaveyou, the viewership would be small and those who might find worth in the post wouldn’t see it.

I am no greymuzzle, no queer elder, no ‘fandom old’, I was 12-ish and heard ‘therian’ on a furry podcast and went ‘oh, thats the word for how I am. Everything makes sense now’ and proceeded to lurk mostly thereafter. I don't have all that much wisdom, im just vibing over here. But, I can talk about what its like, ten years later.

'Growing Out Of It'

I mean, you might. You might realize you aren’t a wolf, or a angel, or a pikachu or whatever. You might work through your misanthropy and gender dysphoria and trauma and internalized woes and fraught teenage experiences and come out the other side finding you aren’t these things. There's no shame in that, and it does happen.

These no shame in having a past life that you used to ID strongly as, but don't anymore, or you find you were a different kintype than you thought, or that you were human all along, even years later.

You could still ID as the thing but its not as bright anymore- but rather how humans view being human; barely of note most of the time. You may go from shifting every day heavily to being slightly shifted at all times and spiking rarely.

BUT

But, not only does that not make your experience in-the-moment any less real, but it also could just never happen. You might never have how you identify fade or change.

It might sound scary, it might be scary in the moment, even, but there is nothing truly to fear from change like this, nor from discovering what you are, really. It is a new evolution of you. It may be sad, to say goodbye to a label you've had for so long, that helped you find friends, or got you through tough times, but it doesn’t fit anymore. Marie Kondo has the right of it- thank that label, that community, that identity, and move to what does fit- what helps you.

It might also sound scary, that you will be a nonhuman thing in a meatsuit that doesn't fit until you die, that you might not ever grow out of the uncontrolled shifting and the aching dysphoria and homesickness for places you have never been. And maybe it will never go away, but it will get easier. You will find coping methods, supportive people, have access to resources and help. Eventually, these things hurt less. You get used to it. You settle into your skin, even if it isnt the right one, its still yours.

Cringe

At this point, I am immune to cringe. You will get there too, probably. Im a plural, nonhuman, neurodivergent, furry, fictionkind, genderqueer and regular queer magic-using, anime-watching, kinky fandom freak of a pagan and im living my best life. I wear a collar in public every day. My face mask has a cat face on it and I plan to get more just like it. Im going to be adding a tail and claw gauntlets to my itinerary of everyday wear once I get something properly washable. At some point you just stop caring as much about how others perceive you. So what if what you do is embarrassing and weird? It makes you happy, right? You aren't going to get hurt wearing it? Then go for it! You have nothing to lose but your shame. People will try to shame you, that is true, but as time goes on, you will find you give less of a shit about if people laugh or stare. You can bottle it up, or you can be free. Just be sure to be safe.

The Disk Horse

Once you’ve been here awhile, drama becomes the same cycles- the same drama llama, different day. You’ve already seen that argument, years ago. You’ve read that thread, you were there for that community debate that settled how the forum would do things. You’ve seen the same types of trolls, the same bad actors pop up. It gets old, after awhile.

Maybe you used to have the energy to debate and discuss and keep up with all of that, but you probably don’t now. Or if you do, its simply to inform and lurk and not to debate anymore.

Your love of debate will fade when you have the same one every six months for ten years. Trust me.

Dunking on trolls and rude assholes and debating with KFFs and anti-kin and having intra-community fistfights is going to lose its shine, especially when you look back at the posts years from now and see how many hours you wasted typing at people who aren’t going to listen to facts and certainly wont listen to you.

Daily Life

Its- normal. I am a dragon, I am a cat, I am living life.

Personally, I have some past lives I no longer identify as that I used to- even though the past life is still there. I have kintypes i've since learned I had kinfeels of only because of other identity relations (paratypes, I believe the new word is called). I used to shift often, I don't much anymore, its a low-grade 20% all the time. Since figuring out and coming to terms with our plurality, some kinfeels were found to belong to people who are not me. We have access to buying things that alleviate dysphoria, we no longer have the horrible emotional state we had in high school that exacerbated nonhuman difficulties.

Life is good, strangely enough. And I am still a cat and a dragon in a human meatsuit (with some other folks in here with me!), and that is just how I like it.

All and all- whats being nonhuman like after ten years of having the same label? Normal. It feels comfortable. Like living. I have always been these things, and I very likely will always feel this way. I no longer feel shame for doing things I used to be scolded for, I no longer feel quite so discontent with my physical form, I feel whole (ironically, being many people in one body).

Its just...Living, but as a nonhuman. There isn't much more to say.

[system-of-a-feather]

I get you I do and I feel part of somethi g I left out since I was writing this before bed is that "non-disordered vs disordered" is just not... a good black or white thing (at least for people who do have CDD) and less about it being stigma one way or the other or a bad word or anything.

Cause we absolutely have a Dissociative Identity DISORDER so it should be fair to say we are "disordered" in the sense that this is a medical disorder yes, but to claim our system is "disordered" and our "plurality" (we dont like to ID as that and dont consider ourselves in the "plural community" thus the " ") is disordered sounds incredibly wrong as we are generally considered to have reached functional multiplicity. Does that erase the fact that I still DO have a disorder? No, but does that mean we identify as a disordered system? Also no.

I don't really care for this as a social society wide discourse or anything cause I really don't care too much on it since Im not really a Label Guy and honestly this was just me having an "I dont like it cause it seems inheritely flawed and leaving out a group of people" response to me sitting down and thinking about how poorly we fit into the black and white disordered vs nondisordered verbage and I'm really only saying it cause I haven't seen it brought up much

(largely due to the fact I don't actively read and engage in syscourse, so who knows maybe it is a talking point)

On a personal level, the labels put me in a position of having to choose to either identify with being disordered or reject the acceptance that I have a disorder - which as someone a decent way down recovery are two things I can say are not mutually exclusive or necessarily healthy for someone in my place of healing.

Of course I say this more so as a hypothetical of "if I wanted to use these terms" cause the real practical solution to my complaint on the term is to not use them - which is exactly what I will do so I don't genuinely expect any large change from this or anything. I just wanted to hold a bit of space for those terms suffering from the same "you cant fit humab experiences and psychological phenomenon into boxes without always having exceptions and people left out" thing that literally any description for the human condition has

ANYWAYS, Im just rambling my thoughts so if this makes no sense just ignore me 😂 Im not trying to start shit, just trying to point out an issue in a labeling system cause

Ya know and I guess this probably is the core context, but I am not and never have been a Label Guy - gender, sexuality, etc. Im also decently anti-DSM/ICD cause those labels are also arbitrary but THAT IS A DISCOURSE Ill probably not have on tumblr cause I dont want to deal with the famed Tumblr Illiteracy 😂 (Not shade at anyone other than this being a hellsite social media and not the 2023 Debate Olympics and Research Convention)

Okay I briefly mentioned this on my personal blog but syscourse endo shit aside, I really personally hate that there is a conversation about things being "non-disordered" because it sets up this arbitrary idea of "the disordered and messed up ones and then me" when the concept of disordered is 1) not a solid or concrete thing 2) a matter of self perception 3) highly subjective and 4) more often than not affected by personal biases

Like this isnt me saying "plural experiences" are inheritely disordered or whatever nonsense would require me to give a shit about syscourse stances - but I just hate whenever "nondisordered" is a term used in like.. anywhere cause of the implications

Like if we are using "plurality as an identity and not DID" like endo spaces do sometimes, then it sounds not that different than "nondisordered trans" and "nondisordered gay". The implications just dont vibe right.

(Aggressive bad faith responses per usual will be ignored and blocked. Discussion is ok, arguing/debate is not.)

[werevulvi]

I hope these show up in the right order. This kinda stuff is exactly what makes me feel lost about my transness. Like I was just trying to be nice and agreed with this person's post. I had no interest in being an asshole or arguing what bio sex, or even what butch, is. I was just declaring myself as a bio female because it felt relevant to the topic and how I relate to it. It amazes me how even the pro self-ID types are against self-ID when someone identifies in a way that doesn't suit their narrative, even when it's a trans person whose identity they deny.

They blocked me and I don't want anyone going after them, I just wanna rant. And not even about this specific post or person, but more so about trying to exist as a gender critical trans person in general. I've been thinking about that for days, weeks, perhaps months or even years already, so it's really not about this specific person. I guess it was just what triggered me to finally start writing.

I guess I feel like both most other trans people and most other gender critical people, view transness as incompatible with gender critical opinions, and like that makes me feel pulled in two opposing directions. But anyone of any ideology can be dysphoric and transition because it helps them cope. I don't think that my opinions, or my choice to hang out with radfems, means that I'm self-hating, or even that I'm going against the needs of my own trans demographic. My own trans demographic is just all too good at confusing wants with needs... generally speaking. I see sex and gender the way I do because it makes sense to me personally, and I don't even argue that it's necessarily the objective truth. I don't think there is such a thing. It's just my truth, my perception of the world.

That I can't make myself see myself as a man for real, despite my dysphoria and transition, doesn't mean that I think it's wrong to transition, or that my body is damaged by it, or that transitioning is useless. Because it's not. I love my transition and everything it has given me. I'm comfortable with my transitioned body. It deserves love, especially my love. And although I still struggle with some insecurities, I feel like I love my body. It's been... incredibly good to me. It's stayed very healthy, and even keeping up a strong immune system despite my smoking, self harm, careless sexual escapades, etc. I may still have a fraught relationship with being female, but as long as I transition, I seem to be managing it fairly well. Except then I have a more fraught relationship with society instead. Can't win, but that's life, innit?

I don't think either my transness or my political opinions are my real problem or ever was. I think it's society's constant fighting about trans people's genders, lives and choices, that makes me constantly cave in on myself. Can't handle the pressure.

It feels like it's only ever getting worse. Ten years ago my biggest concern was people not ever finding me attractive because I was turning myself into some kind of a freak, which luckily I was proven to be wrong about. Five years ago my biggest concern was nonbinary people trying to normalize asking people their pronouns, which made me fear that people would never leave me alone about my gender, unless I forced myself to be hyper-masculine, which I still worry about. Three years ago my biggest concern was having been stripped of my sex-based rights and dehumanized for how I had chosen to treat my dysphoria, which I still worry about as well, and now...

...my biggest concerns are being treated as a third gender, fetishistic predator who should be shoved away into gender neutral spaces, and I fear that one day medical transition will be taken away as an option to treat dysphoria if transness is continued to be rejected as a medical condition. My heart rate is ever increasing. Can I even realistically "just go on with my life" anymore? I feel compelled to do something, but I also feel like there isn't anything I can do. No matter how many people I try to "educate" about dysphoria and why transition is incredibly important, all the while being as humble as I can, I am seriously lacking behind the much faster spread of harmful misinformation.

Thing is, I do not blame gender critical people for spreading some of that misinformation. For example of trans women as fetishistic predators, which people apply to trans men when they still fail to understand that MtF is not the only kinda trans there is, or when we dare to be just a little bit feminine while passing as male. If anything, I blame the true sources of such harmful claims, which slowly increase my anxious heart rate, over years, turning into decades, of living as openly trans. I blame opportunistic men who pretend to be trans women for gaining access to women's spaces, be it prisons, spas, shelters, sports, what have you, when they cannot possibly be dysphoric judging by how happily they swing their dicks around women as if it's no big deal and make no attempt at transitioning, but also who cares if they are dysphoric, no one should behave that way either way. I blame the trans rights activists who say lesbians have to suck dick if it's attached to a trans woman, and those who say that gay men have to be into pussy and date trans men. I blame those who say that trans women are bio female by virtue of identifying as female, and claiming that they can get periods, by virtue of... bowel cramps?! I'd also blame those who try to change female specific language on behalf of shielding trans men from our own dysphoria, in the rare cases we'd end up getting pregnant or manage to drag our asses to the gyno office for a pap smear, which... most of us really don't, regardless of if you call us women or uterus-havers, sincerely, please stop. It makes people think trans women are trying to take over the term "woman" entirely for themselves, which of course they don't.

I could go on, but I won't, as this post is not about these things. It's more so about how estranged I feel from the people who spout these things, knowing that they think they're speaking for me and my supposed needs as a tranny. But I see no point in trying to educate them, as they won't listen any more to me than they would to a radfem, and again, I think this post in my screenshots shows just how unwilling they are to listen to me.

I guess living with my transition on constant display is what's hard, and I guess I just need to vent about that, as it's always judged one way or the other; as either me having made myself into a man, or that I'm a delusional woman who mutilated herself; and it's kinda hard to find a kind and sane middle ground, that perhaps I'm just a victim of circumstances, and trying to make the most of my own life, regardless of what the fuck I am. That social shit, on top of dealing with dysphoria, makes it really difficult to not hate myself, I guess. But I have tried to live stealth and that made it if possible even worse, as it felt like I was lying, keeping a huge secret that grew in me like a spreading virus.

What I want is to just live my life, and for neither my bio sex, nor my transition, to stop me from doing that. I want to work through the worst of my autism, enough to be able to pursue a career in some low-paying labor, blue-collar job; get a car and driver's licence, find a suitable husband to have a child and cats with; I want my own garden, an art studio; I want to build muscle to become strong and even more independent (and perhaps strong enough to carry that husband, but at least to carry myself), and so on. When I picture myself in that potential future, it is with this male-like appearance I transitioned my body into, but it is also as a mother and wife.

And thinking about all of that makes me happy, it makes me smile and feel joy, meaningfulness, hope... While thinking about arguing online with some miserable fuck, who's deadset on arguing semantics and calling me a terf, when all I wanted was to show a little bit of kindness, that "hey, I agree with you, you make a good point here, and I'm not here to fight" only to be spat right back into my face... just makes me feel sad. Whatever happened to diversity of opinion? It's gone, it became labeled as bad, and left people like me with no place to be.

There is no point in arguing with such people, or even trying not to argue. There's no winning in that, there's no reward, no accomplishment. It's better to walk away.

I know I just have to get over this, this inner conflict of going against my transness with my gender critical opinions, and that I'm going against my womanhood with my transition - and be stronger than the political climate that's pulling me into pieces. But if it's peace that I want... I can just forget about it. There's no road there. But I have trouble letting go of that simple dream. The internet is constantly manipulating me into thinking I have an exciting social life, when in fact it's non-existent, and the lie is destructive. With internet vs real life, I'm living a double life. One of those lives has a future, the other one does not.

I'm glad I made this rant. It actually made me feel better, and reminded me that it's still worth it. Being trans, moving forward, focusing on what is good and what can become good in life. And it reminded me that the internet is merely an imitation of life, a substitute for human connection, and can... as with much else, be both good and bad.

[ellieottpage]

Just saw a stupid as fuck post on the online about Keira Bell and I want to talk about my feelings on all of it. The poster was denigrating Keria, saying that she was “just confused and using it to set back trans youth in the UK.”

How can someone look at Keira’s case and see it as anything other than wanting to help someone else out of the situation she was in? How could someone look at that and say, well, clearly this is about WEAPONISING and HARMING people. I think a lot of people don’t bother to read her story, because if they did the cognitive dissonance would be too much.

Keira makes it very clear that she was given medication to stop puberty under the guise that it is reversible. This was either blatant lying or willful ignorance on the practitioner’s part and puts her and anyone else at risk due to a major lapse in informed consent, one of the main principles of medical treatment. 

I want to say that these clinics are experimenting on Keira and other kids like her, but that would be charitable to these clinics. Experiments would involve meticulous data gathering and analysis, medical testing, the ability to stop treatment at any time for any reason. They would involve fully informed consent relating to every single possibility of the treatment’s outcome, and often these types of trials involve compensation for those in treatment, as well as legal protections if harm comes to them because of malpractice. Studies have to pass an ethics and safety board to be approved for human trials. These children, like Keira, had none of that.

It goes to show as well that there was no discussion of testing these drugs in any other way before immediately moving to vulnerable (mentally ill, autistic, homosexual, gnc) children. Why not test the effects on adults first to see if they’re safe? We won’t know perfectly the effects but we could monitor hormone levels and use that information to infer whether it’s safe/what effect it might have on a developing person. We could determine whether long-term use of these drugs are safe in normally developed adults - if they aren’t, then it is not safe to use on underdeveloped children.

There used to be a bunch of TRA screeching about how the terven are lying about them transing children, that we were scaremongering, but this is patently bullshit now that people online and even well-known celebs like Ellen Page are implying that not giving untested, irreversible medical treatment to children is “setting trans youth back”, or “criminalising medical treatment”. 

Why do people under the age of 16 need to be on hormones anyway? We are still developing well into our 20s and hormone intervention after 16 still has decent efficacy, especially in the FtM case. But more than that, the trans movement has been moving away from passing politics for some time - self-ID laws in the UK are driving a movement that suggests that transitioning is a luxury, not everyone can pass, and so people can’t be judged on the validity of their gender identity from whether or not they pass.

So if we’re working within this non-pass validity framework, why are we constantly encouraging young people to transition early to “pass” better, and why are we selling this as the ONLY way to alleiviate dysphoria and live authenically as their gender, encouraging them to feel severe anxiety about it? Would it not be better to teach these kids to learn to accept themselves as the body they have and encourage them to not worry about passing? To help them cope with experiences of dysphoria that we ALREADY KNOW aren’t always allieviated with hormones and surgery?

Why indeed. None of this shit makes any sense, even under their own logic, let alone radfem logic. Keira’s case is important too because of the identification of problems at home and school - being ostracised, feeling alone, not having anyone to help or support her with how she was feeling as a young butch lesbian. Why do we not encourage therapy to help these people work through their trauma, fears, experiences no matter what? Why do we throw trans people to the wolves in terms of their mental health in this way? Because it’s likely many kids will change their mind once they see that the root of their issue is not their gender.

The way I see it, is that no social cause or political movement can be furthered in the body of another person. Wars can’t be won in the womb of a woman, social ills can’t be cured inside the body of a child or the body of a woman and those bodies are not to be used to further a movement at the behest of their health, autonomy, and wellbeing. 

[boku-no-abo]

How would transgender people fit into an abo world? Say an alpha male realizes she’s a trans woman, but also doesn’t identify as an alpha. Would there be surgeries or hormones one could take to transition from one secondary gender to another? Also, in our world there are far more gender identities than male and female. Would people who don’t ID as a, b, or o be non-trinary? Would people try to shut them down for ‘going against their instincts/nature’? Are there intersex people by ABO standards?

Beautiful question anon! This one was incredibly fun to think through.

Biology

To start us off, let’s go through some omegaverse biology that you should take at surface level and not give much more thought. Just like in our world, the main hormonal difference between men and women is the differences in testosterone and estrogen levels. However, alphas have higher testosterone levels than the other two secondary genders, and omegas have higher estrogen levels. Omega males will still have higher testosterone levels than beta and omega females however, and alpha females will have higher estrogen levels than beta and alpha males. Basically, each primary and secondary gender combination has its own specific makeup of testosterone and estrogen levels that is unique to that combination.

Alphas and omegas have their own hormones though, which fuel their instincts, create their scents, and control their heat and rut cycles. Nodoreo (derived from the Latin words for “knot” and “father”) is the alpha specific hormone, and gestrix (derived from the Latin words for “carry” and “mother”) is the omega specific hormone. Attributes that are considered beta “instincts” are controlled by brain chemistry, not hormones, and their scent composition is determined by the lack of nodoreo/gestrix, so betas do not have a nodoreo/gestrix equivalent. Nodoreo and gestrix are made by the reproductive systems, just like testosterone and estrogen.

Labels:

Seeing as trans is Latin for “across,” the label transgender would only be used for people who transition from one primary gender to another, as across only really makes sense when referring to a two-way binary, as you can only cross from one point to another. For people who transition from one secondary gender to another, I propose the label vertogender, from the Latin word “verto,” which means swap. For people transitioning from one primary and secondary gender to another, I’d use the label ambogender, from the Latin word word “ambo,” meaning both.

Nonbinary would only apply to people who don’t identify as male or female. I love your suggestion of nontrinary for people who don’t identify as an alpha, beta, or omega, so we’ll use that. As for people who aren’t on the gender binary or trinary, they’d use the term genderless, mainly because I could not think of a more unique one.

Cisgender is tied to transgender linguistically, so it only applies to the primary gender binary as well. People who identify with their assigned secondary gender at birth would use the label cusgender, from the latin word “custodi,” meaning keep (opposite of swap). People who are both cisgender and cusgender would be called resgender, from the latin word “resto,” meaning stay.

Societal Treatment:

Amongst alphas and omegas, being transgender probably wouldn’t be seen as a big deal. Seeing as both alpha males and alpha females can impregnate and both omega males and omega females can get pregnant, changing from one to the other wouldn’t affect a person’s reproductive abilities or their societal status. It’d be seen as “odd” or a “waste of time” by bigots, but overall, it wouldn’t be treated like a big deal. Transgender betas wouldn’t be given this level of tolerance, and would be treated like transgender people in our world are. Because of this, there is some contention between transgender alphas/omegas and transgender betas, as their experiences with oppression can differ greatly from each other.

Vertogender people would be less socially accepted than transgender people. More emphasis would be placed on the gender trinary than the gender binary in an abo society, and they’d be ostracized for it, as there’s no way a vertogender can exist within the societal expectations assigned to them at birth.

Ambogender people would be given the same shit as transgender AND vertogender people, the poor souls.

Nonbinary, nontrinary, and genderless people would be given the same “that isn’t real! Everyone has a gender!” shit nonbinary people are given in our world. They’d definitely be given shit for “going against their nature.”

Transitioning:

For transgender people, hormones and surgeries would be similar to the ones that exist in the real world, though the higher levels of testosterone in alphas can make the transition from female to male easier, and the higher levels of estrogen in omegas means the opposite is true for them. 

For vertogender people, it would depend on their assigned secondary gender at birth. If they were an omega/alpha, they’d be put through hormone therapy to bring them down to a beta’s hormonal levels first. Unlike with testosterone and estrogen, nodoreo and gestrix aren’t natural foils of each other; having one in your system will not lower the other, and will result in you displaying both alpha AND omega instincts, and, if you have enough of both, will kickstart a rut and heat cycle. Because of this fact, doctors give patients a synthetic hormone called anti-nodero/anti-gestrix to suppress their natural hormone production. Once the patient’s hormone levels are consistent with a beta, they’d start taking nodoreo/gestrix, and would receive genital surgery once their levels are consistent. After genital surgery, they’d stop taking anti-nodero/anti-gestrix, and seeing as their body wouldn’t have anywhere to produce it's natural nodoreo/gestrix from, their levels would remain consistent. If they were transitioning to beta, they’d be given genital surgery at that stage, and then slowly be taken off anti-nodero/anti-gestrix. If they were assigned beta at birth, they’d start taking nodoreo/getstrix immediately.

For ambogender people, they’d be brought to beta (if they weren’t there to start with) for testostorone/estrogen hormone therapy, as the absence of nodoreo/gestrix makes it easier to control. Then they’d go through the second stage of vertogender transitioning.

Nontrinary/genderless people that aren’t assigned beta at birth are quite likely to transition to beta, as dealing with heats/ruts and alpha/omega instincts can trigger intense dysphoria for them and beta hormonal levels will remove that problem.

Depending on how progressive the country is, gender transiting might be covered by insurance. However, like in the real world, most countries either make patients “prove” they have dysphoria to therapists in order for insurance to cover it, or count it as a cosmetic surgery. In real life, Japan requires trans people to be sterilized before they can transition, and it would probably do the same in an abo setting.

Intersex People:

In my omegaverse, female alphas have a retractable penis where a beta/omega female’s clit would be, and omega males have a cloaca that switches from the rectum to the vagina when they get aroused (see @fanndists biology drawing here if you’re understandably confused by that explanation).

Heres a list of everything I could think of that would be considered intersex in an ABO setting:

Atypical scents.

Alphas born without a knot.

Alphas who produce gestrix alongside nodoreo and have tame heats and omega instincts alongside their ruts and alpha instincts.

Beta males born with a knot.

Beta females born with a cloaca and a normal vaginal opening.

Betas who produce some nodoreo/gestrix and have tame heats/ruts and alpha/omega instincts.

Omega females born with both a vagina and a cloaca, resulting in two uteruses.

Omegas who produce nodoreo alongside gestrix and have tame ruts and alpha instincts alongside their heats and omega instincts.

Omega males born with a vaginal opening instead of/and a cloaca.

Dysphoria

Dysphoria would be the same for transgender/nonbinary people in an abo world as it is in ours, as there are distinct bodily distances between the primary genders amongst the secondary gender ones, though there would be a smaller divide between the primary genders within alphas and omegas thanks to similar fashion standards and societal expectations that could alleviate some dysphoria.

Amongst vertogender, ambogender, and nontrinary/genderless people who were assigned alpha/omega at birth, dysphoria is quite severe. Heats and ruts would be unbearably awful, and the instincts triggered by their nodoreo/gestrix levels would constantly be working against them. Vertogender and ambogender people who were assigned beta at birth would feel dysphoria from a lack of those instincts and a lack of heats/ruts. Misgendering would be a huge problem for all of them, as their scent would make people believe they’re a gender they aren’t. Gender transitioning is seen as a must-have for all of them, and they’d start as soon as they’re able too.

Gender-Confirming Products:

Real-life products like binders and packers would exist in an abo setting, but there’d be multiple products for non-cusgender people as well, including:

Scented scent blockers, which would suck up your natural scent and release a manufactured alpha/beta/omega scent of your choosing.

Custom perfumes/colognes based on your base scent so you can scent your pack(mate)s with a scent that fits you, as well as let you scent your den.

Synthetic knots for assigned beta/omega at birth males to make sex more comfortable before they transition.

Easily bought pills that stop knots from forming for assigned alphas at birth so they can go through a rut/have sex without popping one.

To wrap this up (because this is a BNHA blog after all), Tiger is OFtAM and has transitioned medically, and Magne is BMtBF and hasn’t.

[direquail]

An NB reading of Grace in Terminator: Dark Fate

Disclaimer:

Before I start, just want to get this out here: I’m in no way insisting that Grace *has* to be non-binary, that we’re *supposed* to read her as non-binary, or that that’s in any way what she’s “meant to be”. This is just some stuff I’ve noticed that, as someone who sits on the genderqueer/non-binary/transmasc side of things, really resonated with me. Again--read her as entirely woman-identified if that’s what you want to do or feels right to you. I am ecstatic that lesbians and wlw-identified folks have someone that they feel represented in, too. I wish I’d had more characters like her when I was growing up and felt so out of place because of my gender non-conformity. 


But I, for one, would love a non-binary or even trans reading of Grace.

So what I’d like to do instead is just lay out a couple ways someone who is NB-identified *might* connect with Grace as a nonbinary character. Starting with the obvious.

Androgyny Now, I do want to be clear that I know that gender presentation =\= gender identity. And again, obviously, people will latch onto things that they relate to in characters, and I really do believe that there’s no “one right way” to read a character. The character of Grace isn’t a real person; she’s part of a story, told by people, who had something specific to say, and her character reflects that. But from the perspective of the people who watch her, who internalize and connect with her character, there can be points of connection that have nothing to do with the author’s/creator’s intent, and so, Grace-the-character can be many things to many people. The only real way to know how a person IDs is to ask them. That’s it, that’s all. You can’t assume. But also, sometimes, people do “ping” a certain way. They give off a sort of “energy”, and for me, Grace’s energy isn’t the sort of “diaphanous femininity” that even visibly-gender-nonconforming AFAB characters are often framed to exude. Grace’s energy isn’t masculine, either. Her mannerisms don’t seem intended to read that way; rather, they seem intended to read as soldier. I’m not very skilled at breaking down movements, especially when it comes to how actors move and what it all means. It’s totally possible that a lot of what’s unique about how Grace moves is because Mackenzie Davis is, self-admittedly, not the most athletically-inclined person. Grace is long-limbed and rangy and sometimes very stiff/poised, but never stiff through the hips like a Straight Dude(TM), or heavy through the shoulders like a musclebound meathead. She takes up space, too; she’s taller than Dani and Sarah both, and the only recurring characters who are “bigger” than her throughout most of the film are Carl and the Rev-9.

To be clear: Women can be tall, and rangy, and androgynous, and take up space, and that doesn’t make them less women--unless they don’t identify that way. My point with all of the above is just observing that Grace doesn’t move like a “male action hero”—but she also doesn’t seem over-the-top feminine in the way that mainstream-y media will “compensate” for perceived unfemininity, and that’s kind of wonderful. Her stature, her physique, all of that, seem to be chosen and calibrated towards an end goal that isn’t gendered: Combat, efficacy as a warrior. Whether you want to read her as a woman or as nonbinary is largely going to be about your personal preference. This also has the effect of giving the impression that Grace is absolutely unselfconscious about her body and how it looks—and she has no reason to be, not because she looks good or bad, but because what she can do with her body is just so vastly more important, and because she’s so willing to put her body and everything it can do on the line in order to fulfill her mission (and protect Dani). If Grace has a gender, it’d be “Protector” or “Warrior”. And in a way, what makes Grace so appealing to female-identified lesbians is the same thing that makes her appealing to NB people—Her character was explicitly designed not to cater to “the male gaze”, and therefore, she also exists outside the typical gendered confines reserved for “female characters” in media. The emphasis is just slightly different: Instead of a different way of being female, NB!Grace has little to no use for those categories at all. Again, it’s all in how you want to read her. Grace comes from a future where survival and fighting take first priority, and you could project the same tired “Gender isn’t a ~problem~ in the future/after the world ends” approach that a lot of cis and hetero men take to sci-fi--but also, why? It’s tired. Give me a Grace who is preoccupied with survival, yes, who maybe doesn’t have time to think too much about this gender shit--but also, a Grace who finds that this “androgyny” (although she might not call it that) suits her, who takes to this way of moving and being in the world, this way of using her body, and identifies more with that than with being a “man” or a “woman”. 


(Sidenote: as someone who took a fair amount of Queer Studies classes, it does irk me a bit that discussions of mainstream-y speculative media seem permanently suspended between this sort of “genderblind” futurism where “identities” just don’t exist because they’re apparently not needed anymore, or copy-pasting our contemporary discourses about identity into a future that is materially very different than ours. The point of these identities is, in part, to describe our experiences, the good as well as the bad, and those experiences of gender and sexuality don’t exist in a vacuum. So, the words we use will necessarily change to accommodate that—especially in the post-apocalypse. BUT, everything that comes after us will also bear the stamp of what came before it; it’s just a matter of what the creator means to emphasize.) Augments & Body Mods This is a little dicey, because there’s some clear tension in the movie between the idea of robots = inhuman/unfeeling = bad, and humans = good/feeling. And in that light, it’s potentially problematic to (even incidentally) imply that nonbinary/gender-nonconforming = not human.

But I’d like to point out that the film does deliberately challenge any neat separation of “human” and “machine” with Carl’s evolution as a person. 
And based on what I’ve read from James Cameron and Tim Miller interviews, there is some “blurring” intended between human and machine in the franchise.

In fact, Carl and Grace are foils for each other, somewhat, in the sense that they’re on opposite ends of a spectrum where human and machine become blurred, and I love that. As a genderqueer person with a very fluid experience, it appeals to me on a deep level because you could spend literally forever breaking down where does one “gender” end and another begin--emotionally, socially, spiritually, and physically.  


So the fact that there’s (1) no hard binary between human and machine (it’s explicitly subverted), and (2) we’re given multiple points of inflection, especially if you count Sarah and the Rev-9--alleviates a lot of the tension I’d feel otherwise in mentioning this. But I don’t think this is something that should be allegorical or a direct comparison; I think that it operates best on a metaphorical or theoretical level. 


And just, it’s the whole vaguely-cyberpunk idea of modifying your own body, not in a mass-produced or manufactured sense, but in this organic and highly individual sense, born out of contingency and necessity, that makes Grace’s Augments so meaningful. It’s one of the things that makes her read as human, too, because it feels more in line with our tendency to stick ink, steel, bone, what have you, through our skins whenever we get the chance--as opposed to some kind of symbolic dehumanization by “becoming a machine”.

Grace routinely refuses to categorize herself in anything other than the most general terms, or explain the details of her Augments, and she seems very protective of them. Rather than seeming ashamed, this refusal reads a lot like the popular queer identity explanation “not gay as in happy, but queer as in “fuck you’”. Her Augments are part of her, and part of her humanity; she volunteered for them, she owns them, and is even protective of them, viewing CBP’s invasive examination of her Augments as a kind of violation of her bodily autonomy. They’re clearly complicated for her, but they’re anything but depersonalized.

And going even further, the reason why she volunteered for them is so that she can defend humanity--and also someone she loves (Dani). They’re an extension of her sense of family, loyalty, love, and willingness to sacrifice.

And I don’t know for sure, but I imagine that Grace is basically one-of-a-kind, even among other Augments, if only because those Augmentations seem to be performed with the tech that’s on hand--salvaged Legion tech, by the sound of it, at least to start with. So the outcome depends on the parts available, the complexity and maturity of the Augmentation technology and process, and the skill & experience of the surgeons, all of which would vary over time. 


And honestly? If that doesn’t qualify as “beyond the binary”, I don’t know what does.

Some other general observations:

- Grace’s short hair is a constant throughout the post-Judgement Day scenes. As someone who started wearing their hair short as a preteen and hasn’t had hair to my shoulders since age 12, that does seem significant.

- Grace only introduces herself by name after Diego shouts “HEY LADY” in the factory before dropping an engine block on the Rev-9. Granted, most women don’t like to be addressed as “HEY LADY”, either, but it stood out to me, especially because she refused to give her name only a couple of minutes before that. Either way you read it, the line feels like it expresses some level of discomfort with or objection to that gendered statement. Maybe she finds that particular reference annoying or even offensive, but also, maybe she doesn’t really identify as a woman. She’s just... Grace.

- there were multiple times I mistook the back of her tank top for the back of a binder, even though she clearly was not binding.

- she constantly steals mens’ clothes--partly because she’s too tall for a lot of womens’ clothes around her, partly out of utility (like at the factory and CBP, where a lot of the guards are men). But also, it pleases the genderfucking queer in me quite a bit. And, I should note, when she had the option to take a female guard’s clothes at the CBP facility... she didn’t.

But ultimately, when I look at Grace, I see someone whose gender is “Warrior” or “Soldier”. And it’s so wonderful to see that so purely represented on a character we’re meant to perceive as female. So, please believe me when I say I don’t want to “take away” what Grace means for other people. 
And, for the record, I do mostly default to using she/her pronouns for Grace, because that’s how she’s canonically referred to. But just for fun--try this on for size: Using “they/them” pronouns for Grace. They (Grace) came back in time to protect Dani. It rolls off the tongue, right? It feels nice. Let’s re-try a couple of sentences from above: 


- “multiple times I mistook the back of their tank top for the back of a binder, even though they clearly weren’t binding” 


- “Grace’s Augments are about their ability to be a soldier. They were Augmented in order to hunt Terminators... Everything else is secondary to that, and their mission to protect Dani”

- “Grace only introduces themself by name after Diego shouts “HEY LADY” in the factory before dropping an engine block on the Rev-9 ... Maybe they find that particular reference annoying or even offensive, but also, maybe they don’t really identify as a woman. They’re just... Grace.”

And finally: 


Can you imagine the poor sod who tried to make fun of Grace for having a “girly” name? lmao rip

[anhed-nia]

i just flaked out of the last session of a series of mycology classes that I signed up for this summer. this is extremely rare for me, as i typically torment myself with feelings of obligation that almost only amount to opportunities to feel bad about something. in this case, i also paid for the damn things, in an amount that turned out to be way more than they were worth. i had really high hopes for these classes; before i started my horticulture program, i was looking for opportunities to study mushrooms, but there didn’t seem to be anything in nyc besides a couple of social clubs. i follow a number of mycology organizations and farms online though, and i was thrilled when one of my favorites announced that they would be coming from upstate to teach a series of five classes in washington heights. during the introduction phase of our first class, i blithely declared that i was excited to do something that was more academic than just meetups with hobbyist groups. nobody disabused me of that idea, and they really should have.

washington heights is technically in manhattan, but for me it might as well be out of town. when the original schedule went out, it said we would meet in the afternoon, and i didn’t find out until shortly before the first session that we are actually starting at 10am. that got me up at ass o’clock to shower, gather my materials, and travel an hour and a half by train, bus, and kind of a long walk to get to the rec room of an apartment building where our first session. i realized i would be travelling a cumulative three hours for a three hour class, but i was still feeling pretty stoked. i didn’t develop a sense of dread until i got there, and saw that the room was empty except for the two organizers. they were playing reggae on a boombox and blazing a ton of nag champa, as one of them shuffled around the room barefoot waving a smudge stick around. i bit my proverbial tongue, trying to shelve my prejudices so they didn’t get in the way of the obviously awesome education i was about to get. a central coffee table was piled with all sorts of text books and dry specimens that i dove right into. i might have left right then, though, if i knew what i heard about an hour later, that they referred to this table as “the Altar.”

other people showed up as much as half an hour later, which annoyed me a little bit since i had woken up in the dark that morning to prepare for this. admittedly i don’t really understand the concept of fashionable lateness, but i felt like casually gouging 30 minutes out of a 3 hour paid event was kind of unfair. as it turned out, the instructor had failed to bring the equipment she needed for her powerpoint presentation, so we were delayed further while she tried and failed to scrounge up cables, and we missed out on visual aids and actual videos that probably would have been pretty useful. once we sat down and introduced ourselves, the second red flag popped up: a lot of the people in the room seemed to know each other. obviously that’s not bad in and of itself, but i could see what was happening. i was in the midst of a clique who were basically there to do what they would do under any other circumstances: listen to bad music, choke on incense, perform pseudo-spiritual rituals, and roll around on the floor. the difference between them and me, bigger than their intimacy and aesthetic values, was that i had paid [redacted] amount of money just to sit on the periphery of their fun hangout and listen to them sling rote revolutionary slogans and sociology jargon. some folks brought up important topics, like food sovereignty and mycoremediation, but we would never get deep enough into our topic to really address anything that interesting.

when it was my turn to talk, i realized that this was going to be an experience that i hadn’t really had since high school--my hair was wrong, my clothes were wrong, my speech was wrong, and i had been marked as a weirdo and an outsider. believe it or not, as an adult, i don’t much worry about what people might think about me, unless they force my awareness of it. i just figure i’m kind of different from a lot of people i encounter, and we can handle that with appropriate levels of polite distance. but, in the class, as the only person wearing black, and the only person in a collared shirt, and one of the only people who kept her shoes on and sat in a chair, it was impossible to ignore the discomfort people had with me. maybe it was also the fact that i failed to cite indigenous religions as part of my reason for being there, or to talk about “holding space” for healing or whatever. i actually went out of my way to be friendly and vocal, thinking i could alleviate some of the tension, but in some ways that seemed to make things worse. but i never thought i would have to worry about any of this; i mean call me crazy, but i really thought i was there to learn about fungi.

when the class finally started in earnest, my mistake became even clearer. A minor point of contention for me was the teacher’s casual snark toward the psychedelic community. i’m well aware of how bro-y that world can be, but i still thought it was kind of lame that she had to toss out barbs at drug nerds who refer to primordia as “pin sets” while doing a mean voice and rolling her eyes dramatically. maybe she felt like it was necessary to clarify that this would not be an entheogen-centric course, but she could have done better than to make fun of the way people talk. i say this because when she introduced scientific taxonomy basics, she mentioned “kingdom,” and pointedly followed it with the correction “OR QUEENDOM.” i can understand why we should challenge gendered vocabulary in non-gender-related areas, but it really made me feel like standing up and saying EXCUSE ME BUT YOU ARE USING VERY BINARY TERMS RIGHT NOW AND I WISH YOU WOULD ASSUME ACCOUNTABILITY FOR MAINTAINING A SAFE SPACE FOR EVERYONE. worse than that, when it came time to describe how substrate becomes inoculated with mycelium, she first used the correct mycological vocabulary, saying “the mycelium colonizes the soil”, and then added boldly, “BUT WE’RE NOT GOING TO USE THAT WORD.” this drove me absolutely insane. first of all, as with the kingdom/queendom distinction, she’s just making things confusing for people who are totally brand new to the topic and will absolutely need to know what the common contemporary terms are before they can make informed decisions about what kind of language they want to subscribe to later. secondly, this isn’t like the debate over reclaiming words like “queer”--”colony/colonization” is not a slur. it also doesn’t carry a moral connotation; even when we describe conquistadors colonizing central america, that doesn’t describe the inherent superiority of the spanish and inferiority of the indigenous peoples. colonization is the accepted description of a population of organisms taking over a certain area. i mean are we also working on changing the term ”ant colony” or even “artists’ colony”? is that a reasonable use of our collective political energy? and secondly, i agree that decolonizing thought is important. i remember the moment when, as an art history student, a professor taught us how to make a certain point by using the word “germinal” instead of “seminal”; i get the concept. but i don’t think that the problem of colonized thought is the use of the word “colonize” itself, and i don’t think that depriving us of the ability to describe colonization is going to help us identify and attack instances of...FUCKING COLONIZATION.

by the end of the first session...well, i couldn’t tell if it was the end exactly people had started milling around and snacking and talking about whatever, and considering our late start and just the general atmosphere of confusion, i wasn’t sure if i was supposed to wait for something else to happen. finally i just walked off, feeling pretty agitated. but, i clung to the idea that maybe further sessions would be of more value, that it was ok for the first class to consist of a bunch of shit i already knew as a result of casual interest, or could have easily looked up on wikipedia. future sessions were supposed to focus on field ID and foraging, and medicinal preparations and applications, among other things i’m ignorant of. i told myself that once the material became more stimulating, i would be naturally distracted from the dirty feet and elaborate yoga poses and insidery preaching-to-the-choir political language of my classmates, and would find myself engrossed finally in one of my favorite topics. probably i also just didn’t want to acknowledge how much money i had wasted.

what should have been the second class was postponed because the instructor’s van had broken down, which was totally understandable, although it kind of felt like par for the course considering the messiness of the previous session. unfortunately, it threw off the whole schedule, so we then wound up having two back to back days together, a regular saturday session, followed by an all-day foraging excursion that started earlier than usual and took place even further away than usual. i might as well have just gotten a hotel room up there for the weekend, but whatever, i sort of understood the risks when i signed up. the foraging session was what i was most looking forward to, and was the biggest disaster. i still hadn’t gotten the memo about how cool it was to show up as much as 45 minutes late, even for an event where we were supposed to meet up at a remote horse stable and then venture into the woods together. we didn’t get started until a least an hour, probably more after the 9am start. i’d been there since 8:50, and had to sit through an interminable playtime in which everybody did chakra-clearing breathing techniques and stretches, improv exercises and vocal warmups, and played some dumb hippy game where everybody tries to steal a stick from one another. my aforementioned sense of tortured obligation has caused me to submit to juvenile horrors like this in other circumstances, even though i thought adulthood was supposed to exempt me from this gym class bullshit, but i put my foot down this time, and sat about 25 feet away patiently waiting for the class to start, suffering some accusative glances.

the actual foraging we did was really fun, but being in the group was worse than ever. there was an excessive amount of anthropomorphizing going on, with all specimens described as “friends” that each student was encouraged to “meet” and “hang out with”, which resulted in a constant stream of high-pitched baby talk among us. i had been strongly warned against this anthropomorphizing mentality, both from a (fabulous, brilliant) druid-like arborist who taught my intro to botany class, and from the animal welfare community, all of whom correctly assert that projecting human needs and emotions onto non-human organisms is both delusional and actually dangerous for both people and the lifeforms around us...but whatever i guess. i had more immediate worries, because at some point, the baby talk gave way to improvised singing. it was brutally hot and dank in the woods, and the thrill of finding all kinds of different specimens was barely outweighed by the intense chagrin i felt as most of the group began stumbling through the creation of a hymn of gratitude to the mushrooms. sometimes we had to stop completely on the path so everyone could get in a circle and sing a round or three together. this was scheduled to be a 7 hour excursion, and by hour 3 i was seriously trying to work out at what point i would declare a family emergency or food poisoning and just run away.

part of the experience included a bit of a plant walk, led by one of the organizers who knew a lot about indigenous flora. this was sort of interesting in and of itself, and also relevant, since different mushrooms may grow on or near certain plants. but somehow, it still didn’t amount to a reasonable educational experience. half way through the hike, i noticed a classmate excitedly snatching up all the mugwort that she came across. she had been told by our guide about the many virtues of this “plant medicine”, a traditional cure-all for everything from epilepsy to PMS. what she hadn’t been told, evidently, is that mugwort is ferociously invasive, and practically impossible to get rid of. mugwort will choke out everything else around it, destroying the biodiversity that is necessary to support a healthy local ecology, losing us desirable plant life and starving out animal populations. i tried to tell her that she should be careful with that stuff, and avoid planting it in her yard if that was the fantasy, but she turned away irritably, clutching gnarled bundles of the sacred healer in her fists. it was a little thing, but somehow it really locked in the fact that i was in the wrong place. i hadn’t learned remotely as much new information about mushrooms as i should have in ~15 hours, and i had reason to believe that information we were getting could be less than reliable, or made unreliable by omission of other important facts. i had to get out of there. at some point we encountered a different mushroom group--a collection of appealing nerds in their 40s-60s called the Destroying Angels (after the deadly white amanita) who had accumulated a way cooler array of specimens than us, probably because they got started at a reasonable hour. i barely prevented myself from begging them to take me with them.

we returned to our spot near the parking lot two hours ahead of our scheduled conclusion, and as before, the situation devolved into a general hangout with no clear indication that the educational portion of the day was over. there were more songs and more games, and though i was coerced away from my boulder in the sun to join the group around their blanket, i managed to feign sleep long enough to get out of most of the activities. i was legitimately exhausted, at least.when i was thoroughly convinced that the lesson was over, i told everyone that i was too tired to continue and left, sparing myself an hour and a half of further agony.

ever since, i had been worrying about the final class. i absolutely wanted to learn about medicinal preparations and tinctures and home-growing techniques. but could it possibly be worth it? could i even be sure that the session would consist of more than what i had already learned from experience, and from unfairly maligned drug nerds on the internet? was i not too annoyed that the date of this class wasn’t even announced until four days ago, even though the class basically requires a day trip for more students than just me? by last night, the answers were perfectly clear. i let the group know that “something came up” without specifying, and bid them farewell, thanking them for their “inclusivity” among other things, which only i know is a joke. (at the end of the last i informed them all that i have ASD and don’t like to be touched, and i had the satisfying sense that they all realized that that was part of the reason i refused to join in their reindeer games) i’m vaguely concerned that i will have to deal with an annoyed instructor who literally owes me a bottle of tincture and growing materials as part of the price of the class, and who should really mail them to me now, but i can’t drag myself back to washington heights again just to avoid that nonsense. i don’t know what lesson i’m supposed to learn from this experience; maybe it’s enough to say that i don’t have to force myself to do everything i ever say i’m going to do, and also that in spite of the long way i have come from being an angry little punk poseur in college, i still hate hippies as much as ever. the end.

[kindabraveandlittlestupid]

Should be noted this post isn't about Shawshank Redemption (which was a damn good movie), this post is however about the term “White Privilege” but also about a less popular but still incredibly important term “Black Oppression”. If you’re not the sort to read a long post and just want the quick answer on how I (a Straight White American Male) feel about those words, I know White Privilege IS real. We see it both social interactions, how the police treat white men, how we are portrayed in popular culture, how we the courts rule in our favor when we break the law and all that doubly so when you start to include economic elements. On the other side, there are things that ARE NOT White Privilege such as voting in certain red states where policies are enacted that don’t uplift white voters but instead suppress black voters. This is where I think we need to use the word Black Oppression and differentiate the two things. Below I will provide some examples of White Privilege, some examples of Black Oppression, and some examples where there is both White Privilege and Black Oppression.

This whole point of the post isn’t to challenge the concept of White Privilege but perhaps add some nuance and shift the way we view things between what is privilege and oppression. If only for us to strive for a more equitable and equal society as well as sharpen our wits for when we encounter white supremacists who rely on flaws in our beliefs, values, and logic to further their own hateful agenda. 

As always this is an opinion piece and if you have your own thoughts on the subject, take your time to reply with your own clear thoughts. I appreciate other points of view regardless of race, sex, orientation, political party or creed. I am always looking to expand my views, understanding complex social issues and develop a better foundation for my beliefs.

Medium

The first thing to discuss when dissecting this issue is the Medium, there are other words for this concept I am sure but basically, this is the expectation of how people should/expected to be treated in society. If you’re a registered voter you expect your ballot to be counted, if you run a stop sign you expect a ticket, and if you go into a store you expect to be able to shop without security following you. I am sure some might argue that certain groups of people have a higher expectation for their Medium such as wealthy thinking society is here to serve them but those people have an Economic Privilege and often White Privilege (though I have encountered a healthy mix of other races who enjoy that same Economic Privilege here in Silicon Valley... still mostly white).

No. the Medium in society is attributed itself to a social agreement, common sense and good dose of empathy of knowing how you would like to be treated and wanting that for other people. It’s why we observe lines the way we do and get pissed off when someone cuts deciding they are more important than anyone else standing there. It’s also why we take a little joy in seeing someone with Economic or Racial Privilege have to observe the social medium like everyone else. You know what I am talking about the lawyer who makes 400 dollars an hour saying her time is precious therefore everyone else should wait in customer service while she is taken care of first? Yeah... that was a real encounter I had once.

So once we establish that baseline we can start clearly identifying interactions that seemingly exceed what is expected in society (privilege) or what interactions are well under the medium (oppression). This seems like a good as a point as any to recognize that all these examines require the human interaction. Interactions plagued with prejudices and biases for our choices every day. Sometimes someone deviates a small degree over or under a medium because they are having a shit day. If we encounter someone who slips up, I always advocate forgiveness when someone makes a mistake.

Privilege

The problem with Privilege; be it economic, social or racial is that when you’re in it you don't always know it. Sometimes you’re so wealthy you're used to people waiting on you hand and foot, simply look to the Kardashians, Bieber, or Jaden Smith. These are some people who enjoy wealth so much that when they have a small thing go wrong they bitch about it all day on their reality shows.

As a White Male, I try to reflect on the privileges I might have enjoyed. I try to differentiate between moments where I received better service or social interactions because of my skin color (or gender). I realize there is a possibility that I could also be “blind” to certain privileges but it if makes you feel better if there are things I am enjoying that others do not, I have full intention of trying to pull other people up to enjoy that privilege so that it becomes the new societal medium. I am ranting a little...

The clear privileges I have enjoyed have not surprisingly been with police. Of the about dozen encounters I had with Police Officers about none of them resulted in a ticket. One incident resulted in a car being impounded but I was under 18 and didn’t have a license and even then I paid to have it unimpounded ($700 Dollars) and had the infraction removed from my record with a driving school class. You can call it luck perhaps but for the most part, I have never been given a ticket and when seeing how police treat other men my age who happen to be black with disdain, its easy to see why African Americans are pissed off and I can only have a vague understanding of how frustrating that might be for them.

Oppression

The problem with being Systemically Oppressed is that everyone living/existing on the medium seems like they are privileged. This leads to a fair amount of anger, frustration and pain in various communities. While the general topic is focused on Black and White, it does not take much imagination to project that same oppression on the gay/transgender community, women, other non-christ based faiths or other minority groups (Latinos and Middle Eastern specifically in the US).

I myself have had only small encounters with oppression myself, most of them taking place at the airport as my ass seems to get selected for extra security screenings. I am not sure what website I went to, if my beard is to thick or if that month in Indonesia has flagged me in the wrong way but that is a personal experience where I am observing social interactions below the Medium.

This post isn't about me though so let's give a clear example of oppression today. That example is voting in the United States. Many Red States have been adopting strategies to disenfranchise black voters by removing voting stations, requiring ID’s and limiting hours while keeping other voting locations (in white communities) open for normal hours. This isn't an example of White Privilege as this is how voting should be like that for everyone. No, this is white voters enjoying their right to vote, while the black community is being OPPRESSED from having a say in politics. Ok, there might be some white privilege in there but for the most part, its mostly Oppression that we are seeing, yeah?

We see other elements of Oppression in the courts, police interaction, and also pop culture, mostly in the film and television industry... which now that I think about it is also white privilege considering Asian and Indian actors are still trying to break through. 

Privilege and Oppression

Most examples share above tend to dabble in both Privilege and Oppression, and as I stated this goes beyond race as sex, economics, and other social qualifiers. I felt compelled none the less to point to politics as a system that both explores a great amount of Privilege and utilizes a great amount of Oppression. Leave it American Politics to show White Wealthy Male Privilege in its full swing while Oppressing Women, Minority Groups, and Non-Christians. It’s easy to see why people don't want to hear from a Straight White Male like me when all these douche bags represent the worst humanity has to offer.

Guess you can say I feel a bit bitter on the fact that I see so many memes on Tumblr telling me to shut the fuck up because I look like them *points to assholes in picture* even though I am on board for a more equitable and equal society. *Slaps Cheeks* Keep things in perspective, Mike!

Coming back to examples of both Privilege and Oppression, another prime example is the police. We look to cities where Stop and Frisk policies exist(ed) and you could see how civil rights were secondary to a police officers ‘gut feeling’ that a black man could have drugs or weapon on them. This is an example of Oppression, clear and simple. On the flip side, you have officers waving on white citizens letting them off with warnings which isn't a bad thing in itself but when the courtesy is ONLY given to fair skinned citizens then it is a problem, it becomes Privilege.

Conclusion

White Privilege is real as fuck. Economic Privilege is real. Social Privilege is real. Depending on your lot in life you might be enjoying a great number of Privileges while others might have lower income bracket, from the wrong ethnic background, and have darker skin having a much rougher go at American life. We, the good fair loving compassionate progressives, should aim to balance these issues out. We need to find the moments where someone is enjoying an unfair privilege (like me not really every getting tickets) and bring me back down so that I have the expectations as everyone else. We also need to find the oppressive interactions (often institutional) and correct them as well and make sure everyone enjoys the same quality of life.

If you enjoy privilege in some form or another you have two options. Either bring yourself down and be held to the same standard as your fellow men (and women) OR start bringing other people up to enjoy the same privilege you do so that it becomes the new medium for society and raises the quality of living for everyone. If you feel compelled to do neither then you might be the problem. Thanks for reading.

Regards, Michael California

NOTE: It’s important to measure subjects like this with data and not anecdotal evidence or experiences. I tend to add a few personal accounts to these sort of posts to better appeal to the emotional side of readers but hard numbers display more of the truth than my personal experiences ever could. Driving While Black is statistically proven in the data where White/Hispanic drivers are pulled over about the same rate but black drivers are stopped in excess. This is also true for Use of Force numbers, Stop and Frisk, Searching of Vehicles and even how the courts decide to process the cases. 

Black Men serve 20% longer sentences to their White counterparts charged for the same crime.

Black students make up 18% of preschool enrollments but make up 50% of suspensions.

Applications with ‘Black’ sounding names are 50% more likely to be passed up by employers compared to ‘White’ sounding names.

And this list goes on and on.

If you’re a white guy, who has had a few moments where you pulled over yourself. It is neither a logical or sound argument to say “I have had difficult encounters therefor my experience is the norm and therefore is no white privilege.” Always! Always look to the data and see the numbers for both the state you live in and the country as a whole. Anyone with half a mind to understand statistics can tell there are some major racial biases in our society.

[stonebutchgreens]

Mtt reduce womanhood to stereotypes and gender roles, and homosexuality to attraction to pronouns. They shout and shout about how real women are feminine, then don’t put any effort into trying to pass. Can’t get much more straight male than that. I’m not going to get into any argument with you. You can go actually look up what ‘terfs’ are saying for yourself. Instead of the lies others claim ‘terfs’ say. That’s all I wanted to say. Hopefully you go do some reading but I doubt it.

“You know what’s transparent? Straight men putting no effort, as is typical, into femininity while shouting about how femininity is womanhood. And there’s levels to this. Gay men who id as trans at least try to follow the feminine look, and it’s messed up they think that’s all women are, but it’s sad they’re struggling with themselves too. where as straight men who id as trans are just fetishist autogynephiles who of course don’t want to have surgery or try to pass.”

“What’s transparent is straight men who found a loophole to be allowed to harass lesbians doing the most typically male thing ever in calling themselves butch as a way to be ‘cis’ men while not having to change a single thing about their presentation. There’s so much transparent and awful there I could go on forever. educate yourself before saying mindless garbage straight manipulative disgusting men tell you to try and get in your pants.”

Ooooooh boy, okay. I am assuming that all three of these asks came from the same person. I considered not responding to this, because I don’t want to subject my trans followers to this shit, but I think it’s important to make it clear where I stand on this. I unconditionally support my trans friends and followers, even if I do not know them personally.

First of all, I would like to clarify that I know EXACTLY what TERFs are saying. I used to be aligned with the radfem community on Tumblr, although I never identified as a radical feminist myself. I was wrong and my beliefs were harmful. Being frustrated with the way liberal feminists discussed gender and feeling isolated because of my own experiences was no excuse for engaging with transphobic rhetoric. I did make a point of never following or interacting with people who singled out individual trans women or used slurs, but after awhile it became clear that even if individual radfems did not participate in this behavior, they condoned it from others, which is unacceptable.

So, I have done plenty of “reading” and have spent years considering and reconsidering my beliefs on gender. I have grappled with it theoretically but also very personally. You seem to think that I am making my ignorance clear in my tags. However, it is obvious that you know very little about trans women and have not taken the time to get to know GNC individuals who fall under the trans umbrella. The false dichotomy you create between “gay” and “straight” trans women in laughable at best. I know trans women who like men who present as masculine, as well as trans women who present as feminine who are interested in other women. (This is a ridiculous double standard anyway- cis women who like NB people and other women are also more likely to present as masculine than women who exclusively like men.)

Cherry-picking stories of a few bad apples in any given community does not prove that the entire community is malicious. Trans women who harm and harass other women do exist, but so do cis lesbians who harm and harass other women. Those “lists” of assault and harassment cases perpetuated by trans women that circulate on TERF blogs are fear-mongering and misleading. You could compile those for any group. Implying that trans women are just “pretending” for sexual reasons ignores the experiences of a vast majority of trans people. Sexualizing a group of people to dehumanize them is not a new technique lmao.

I think you would find that we actually agree on a lot of feminist issues, and could find some common ground in the way we view gender. In fact, I dislike much of queer theory and the way that some of my peers discuss gender, simply because it ignores the everyday reality of many GNC and gay people. But, you can’t say that gender is an oppressive and coercive system and then mock the people who try to exist outside of that framework. If you ask pretty much any sociologist or anthropologist, gender is and always has been a social status, and one that can change significantly and take on different meanings over time. Of course sex-based oppression exists, but modern sexism goes far beyond that, so there is never a reason to completely exclude of group of women from your feminism.

It is clear from the way that TERFs hyper-focus on harassing and excluding trans women over the other core tenants of actual radical feminism that you are more interested in bullying a group of downtrodden people than advancing the rights of women. Note that I do not use the term “TERF” liberally. TERFs are a specific group of people with a specific trans-exclusive ideology. If YOU are interested in doing more reading, I would recommend looking into trans authors and Marxist and/or Materialist feminism instead of Tumblr’s convoluted version of radical feminism.

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rad asks: 3, 10, 16

ah hey!!!!!! thanks for asking 💕💐 sorry this took so long

3. Are there any parts of radical feminism, or beliefs commonly hold by radical feminists that you strongly disagree with?

im actually having a hard time answering this ahshskshdlska i wrote a really long rambly response but i ended up justifying what i was describing as disagreeing with LOL so like. idk no widely held radfem beliefs are coming to mind, sorry im just as disappointed as you are shdkshdlsjds i hope this doesnt sound sheepish or anything. So i’ll say what i do agree with, which won’t come as a surprise to anyone probably.

i’m anti porn, i think porn should be illegal, should not exist and all of it should be destroyed, pornstars should be given justice and compensated somehow for the govt allowing this shit, and all pornographers should be considered lower than dirt and killed publicly LOL. and i don’t feel bad about that, they don’t feel bad about filming rape and selling it, having the pornstars they abuse lie about how they love it when asked. i feel the same way abt prostitutes and their pimps, that paid consent is not consent and pimps can all drop dead.

i’m all for separatism, no it would not stop men from being men, but it would save women and girls a lot of grief, hurt and scarring.

i think gender isn’t real, is used to oppress women and helps no one, and that id rather it be abolished than exist to validate some people who like gender roles, ackshully.

ive been agnostic for a long time; my mom and my brother are atheists, my dad is a deist. but i will sooner believe that the creator of everything is female, having given birth to the universe than a male. A man’s involvement in creation is his ejaculation. No more, no less. life does not begin in the testicles, or you wouldnt see all this anti abortion stuff, you would see more anti male masturbation stuff–if it weren’t mostly about using women as incubators, lol. that being said i’m pro choice clearly.

i am anti surrogacy, for similar reasons. same sex couples should absolutely be allowed to adopt, but no one has the right to have a baby except the woman who can use her own uterus for her own baby. even with infertile women, there is no justification for paying another women to rent out her uterus.

i currently am not vegan but i admire the ideas behind it, and i see the similarities between how animals and women are treated. i do know however that those who are farming this produce are not necessarily treated well either. disclaimer i know literally jack shit about it so i can’t really speak much for it either way at this moment.

i know there are trans identified, detransitioned or reidentified females who don’t like words like “mutilation” to describe the surgeries they have had to remove their breasts or to alter their privates to mimic penises, and while i don’t insist on mutilation being the word used, i don’t see how it is inaccurate and i find it hard to talk about it in a positive light, less i be endorsing that women get these surgeries to ease their discomfort with their bodies. that being said i don’t want tifs or detransitioned/reidentified women to beat themselves up and constantly regret it. it is not their fault that they were made to be so disconnected from their bodies. they did not want that, and with the trans movement there were not a lot of people telling them that there are other ways besides transitioning to deal with these feelings. i don’t see how this can be hard to believe seeing as we call it the trans cult all the time, which is an accurate name by the way.

i like the alternative spellings of woman and women. womyn, wombyn, wimmin, womxn, a mon, wom or whatever it is. i don’t currently use them myself but i love them and i don’t care how “stupid” you think it is. you know whats stupid??? the words “trans woman,” “trans man,” and “nonbinary.” “Cis woman.” yeah ill take wombyn any day rather than agree that i “identify” as a woman for not subscribing to the transgender religion.

political lesbianism is shitty, i understand some straight women don’t wanna be celibate, but dating lesbians to stick it to the men and not because you love that lesbian is selfish i think. if youre bisexual then you are also not a lesbian but by all means be a febfem or just a bisexual who does not fuck with men.

prostitution will never be empowering. make up, nails, impractical clothes, revealing clothes is not empowering, having men think you are sexy or fuckable is not empowering. you are not “doing it for yourself.” “Poly” relationships are not empowering or woke, making yourself more accessable sexually to men is not empowering in the same way that it empowers men to have sex with multiple women.

idk ive been writing this for a million years but thats some things off the top of my head that i know i Do agree with, i know that wasnt the question but i still wanted to say something lol. i realize now this answered multiple questions from that ask post so im sorry if anyone else thought of asking those things that i answered LOL

10. What’s your relationship with the term “terf”?

ah! i do jokingly call myself that occasionally, you can see it right there on my about page. but in all seriousness it’s horseshit and goes to show how narcissistic the trans movement is. I see people, newly self described radfems who haven’t figured out what the point of it all is, who try to say “there’s a difference between terfs and radfems! You can be radfem and trans inclusive!” or whatever. To which I say, 

these are not two separate groups. Actual radfems are called trans exclusionary because they don’t think men who identify as women can be oppressed by women, and that having been born as a woman is not a privilege, regardless of how that woman identifies. 

radfems aren’t even trans exclusive, really. While there are many detransitioned, reidentified women, there are also many who have transitioned and intend to stay that way, or who are even transitioning currently for their own reasons and comfort, while still confronting their womanhood and how they have been affected or are effected by being a woman in our society as well as how transitioning is dangerous. it’s male exclusive more than anything, and rightfully so. any problems men have are created by other men, and as one user on here put it, feminism should not be “all lives matter.” 

i forgot to say this initially but being “trans inclusive” is interpreted by some to mean “trans endorsing,” that being trans is an innate thing just like homosexuality, that brain sex is real, and that there is nothing wrong with trans identified females getting surgeries they don’t need on perfectly healthy genitals, or getting hormones they otherwise wouldn’t naturally have that have life altering side effects. otherwise i would be called trans exclusive. LOL. so it really does not mean anything, ultimately.

16. How do you feel about the terms TIF/TIM?

i think they’re great. it says exactly what it means. it is much more appropriate than trans man or trans woman, and it makes it easier to talk about them with a little less word salad. the term trans man others tifs from females, and the term trans woman others tims from males. this is problematic. there is nothing differing tifs from females and tims from males outside of the fact that they are trans identified. the only differences they may have are if they have surgically and or hormonally transitioned, but it is not enough difference to make them the opposite sex, nor does it erase male or female socialization, and the benefits or consequences of being a man or a women, respectively. i worded this a lot better when i saved this draft last but tumblr seemingly ate it LOL so thats a drag. but yeah. tif/tim is great. i don’t think it should be offensive, there is nothing insulting or cruel about it. at best it is “invalidating.”

thank you for sending me these!!!! i’m sorry if my answers were unsatisfactory or hard to understand lmao i edited a lot of fluffy blabbering out of my responses believe it or not. i hope you’ve had a great day and that you’re having a lovely night 💌🌻😊