#and us expressing how little space we have in the queer community - hell even in the aspec community IS NOT AN ATTACK OF YOU OR UR SEXUALIT

[redysetdare]

I've yet to find someone who can ever give a good answer as to what places repulsed people have to go when it comes to pride being unwelcoming.

"Just go to a different pride!" how many pride do i have to go to until i find one? Some people only have 1 pride nearby and if there are more some of us cant drive or travel long distances to get to them.

"just don't go to pride then!" Then where am I supposed to go? where can i go to celebrate my identity and part of the queer community?

it's all "There are other places you can go!" ok where? I cant go into queer bars. What if there are no queer groups or programs? what if those queer places are not supportive of aspec people let alone repulsed people?

"we should make a tent for people who dont want to see sexual stuff" so basically relegating us to the kiddy table? not allowing us to enjoy the rest of the event? we are forever stuck only in a roped off area, away from the rest of the queer community?

Do you get what I'm getting at here? do you see what the issue is? do you understand how there is no place to repulsed people? do you understand?

[transzilla]

True I think it is a real phenomena but it is a double edged sword and I don't think it's like people will immediately write you off for presenting masculine. Like it does vary from community to community so we can't really talk about it in like vague oh masculinity this femininity that. I really dislike this conflation between butches and trans males and gnc transfems as OHH MASCS because again it's not like this masculinity club, from group to group it's going to be a new can of worms just based on whatever people have going on. Like some groups might just be more chill with transfems, like maybe they had too many experiences with asshole trans men and they're bitter and take it too far. Still sucks but like everyone has their own reasons.

Like in a lot of discourse it's hard to put your own experiences out there because people are hurting and it's the internet so you can't really put a vulnerable time of your life out there to explain your reasoning because someone might come for u about it and insult the fuck out of u because they disagreed so thats y you see a lot of mascs talking abt "queer communities reject me for being masculine" without specification. Its just easier to use hypotheticals. But then u get people kind of running a little too far with it and its like ok what the hell did he mean by that nd we get other people to validate it and we come up with shit like transmisandry.

In my experience my gender expression as a like oooh hypermasc trans male it was only conditionally accepted by my immediate community. at the first like... mild discomfort i butted heads with someone then the jig was up because it was very easy to use my expression against me and sensationalize the idea that i "look scary" like people jumped to the conclusion that I was in the wrong because it was easier to admit oh well he's toxic he's overly masculine he's making me uncomfortable than to examine a situation closely and to think damn am I in the wrong here. Like if I was feminine they would have just found any other thing to demonize me because I was a transsexual male in the way.

This is a problem I think in these white college-y queer tumblr agoraphobe communities that really stoke the fire of being terrified of everything, which I do support like making yourself comfortable and dealing with your anxiety about men because you will not be making rational decisions if you just endlessly validate your own anxiety and that's a part of the reason why we still deal with so much transphobic crap in lgbt circles, too many ppl seem to be trying to win a race where they have it the worst and there's no way to get better and here's how they're being victimized by all these other people.

I do agree with getting people to be less neurotic about a fear of men, even tho like in very many cases it is correct! Like im not devaluing anyone's trauma, like I get it men are uniquely fucking demonic and we want spaces where it's like ah fuck now I can breathe. But at some point it really does not help with your own survival at all. to extend this to men that YOU allow into your communities, as well as all masculine expression, including what just you consider masculine which is absolutely not the case like.. You end up sounding and being transphobic, butchphobic, transmisogynistic, all that fun stuff.

Plus like some dudes really will just talk out of their ass and I understand the response is going to be just as gauche like haha what do you mean trans men are ALWAYS accepted for being masculine nobody is EVER going to pressure you into being feminine you suck etc. Like i really dont consider it transphobic to say other people have it worse who aren't men because like... yeah they do LMAO i don't envy any of that shit

my personal interest is management and that's really not gona happen if we r still holding onto a masculine/feminine boys vs girls dichotomy cus lije it really is easy to just see how people look and think that's all there is to it. Like what I consider masculine is going to be very different than what another trans male considers masculine and one lil tribe might have a problem with either one of those things. masculinity and femininity isn't real. Like it's easy to look at it like a kindergartener like grr these trans men with feminine expression are being treated better than me, it's because I'm masculine. Like ok that may be the case but you need to examine it more, are they treating you like shit because you're masc or because they are transphobic? Why are people more comfortable with trans men with feminine traits? How do these feminine men act and talk about themselves around these people? Like a lot of the time when that was the case where I felt like a outsider and it was definitely because I presented and acted masculine it wasn't that simple, it was because I worked with conservatives, it was because I had advantages they didnt, it was because they had a token idea of a trans male in their head that I didn't fit, I didn't let people walk all over me and that made them very fucking uncomfortable. Like it was easy to say it's cause I'm masc and in some ways it was true but A strong reaction doesn't mean oppression and if your community can't handle a masc trans male they probably have a myriad of other fucking issues that you don't have to and should not want to deal with. The beauty of that is like construction and finding new ways.

the point of my masculinity and male positivity posts are to underline that masculinity and manhood are seen as a threat or in direct opposition to queerness, and that often times in order to be seen as queer you have to be partially or wholly feminine or gender neutral, or express your manhood in a feminine or gender neutral way in order to no longer be threatening, invasive, or a problem.

it is very difficult to exist in queer spaces as a hyper masculine person & a man. you're made to feel like you need to walk a tight rope feeling like you're inherently out of place, as if you existing and being masculine or a man in queer spaces makes others uncomfortable inherently.. just know that when i make positivity posts it is to remind us all that masculinity/manhood and queerness are not opposites and that you do not have to be a feminine man or masc person to be viewed/seen/heard as queer.

chasing men, masculine people, and masculinity out of queer spaces isn't helping anyone currently and won't help anyone down the line. please accept masc enbies, butches, bears, and masculine trans men with the same kindness, love, and passion that you do neutral and feminine people. that's the point when i make these kinds of posts. thank u

[xtinacherry]

Matsumoto's Funeral Parade of Roses 3/3

The minute I saw this film was queer-centered made me really excited to watch it! I love seeing queer representation during this time period. The film was a little hard to follow at some points as it jumps into different memories and scenes pretty abruptly and also implements a documentary feel. I personally really enjoyed how this movie was produced and directed, I feel like it kept me tied in and itching to know what the hell was going on, which I'm sure was the intention. The way the film portrayed the actors in the film made it a little fuzzy on their gender preferences, so I tried looking it up and it says they are transgender women, so I will be running with that unless anyone can correct me on otherwise! 

We seem to follow Eddie through her trials and tribulations with her past and present as an employee at a gay bar underneath Madame Leda, who she seems to fear and hate, and Gonda, the partner of Leda and the person she is sleeping with. There is a rivalry between Leda and Eddie. Gonda and Eddie are secretly sleeping with each other, and Leda is well aware of it. Gonda intends to replace Leda with Eddie as the Madame of the bar, which we see come to fruition toward the end of the film. However, one night when Eddie is showering, Gonda finds an old photograph of her and her family, in which he discovers he is her father. This leads to the suicide of both of them.

We see how the past affects her even into the present day, jumping into flashbacks of her traumatic childhood surrounding both her awakening into her gender and sexuality and her complicated (very complicated as we learn in the end) relationship with her parents. I really appreciated this film because it really brings queer culture to life during a time I did not know had a lot of standing in media. After looking more into the movie, it had really great receival, which was also surprising to me. I also read that the movie allowed for a wider audience to gain a perspective of the lives within the queer community, whether receiving satisfaction in their own curiosities or even gaining sympathy for the lives they endure. I thought the documentary-esque direction they used offered the ability to pull the audience outside of just the depiction of queer life but the reality of it as well, displaying how the actors themselves are queer, their identity within it, how it relates to their own lives and gender expression, and their genuine opinions on how they are represented throughout the film. I was blown away with how much I enjoyed this film, and its probably my favorite we have watched thus far. 

I love how Eddie’s character was depicted. She is this beautiful, hyper-femme, happy, young, and care-free individual. She seems very comfortable in her gender expression. From what I remember, she never denies that she is a man, and even calls herself gay, but in terms of queer theory this can be a more complex explanation to this. I feel like this film was trying to express this complexity of gender expression and identity, and how there is no use to apply one’s identity to a binary. Not only this, but it is up for the person to decide how they wish to express this. 

Overall, I really liked this film. Not only did it provide some insight on queer representation and expression, but it provided vital queer history during the time and displayed queer spaces as well. 

[themollyjay]

The Myths of Forced Diversity and Virtue Signaling.

In my novel Mail Order Bride, the three main characters are a lesbian and two agendered aliens.  In my novel Scatter, the main character is a lesbian, the love interest is a pansexual alien, and the major side characters include a half Cuban, half black Dominican lesbian, a Chinese Dragon, a New York born Jewish Dragon, and a Transgender Welsh Dragon.  In my novel The Master of Puppets, the Main Characters are a lesbian shapeshifting reptilian alien cyborg and a half black, half Japanese lesbian.  The major side characters include three gender fluid shapeshifting reptilian alien cyborgs, and a pansexual human.  In my novel Transistor, the main character is a Trans Lesbian, the love interest is a Half human/Half Angel non-observant Ethiopian Jew, and the major side characters include a Transgender Welsh Dragon (the same one from Scatter), a Transgender woman, a Latino Lesbian, an autistic man, three Middle Eastern Arch Angels, and a hive mind AI with literally hundreds of genders.  In my novel The Inevitable singularity, one of the main characters is a lesbian, another has a less clearly defined sexuality but she is definitely in love with the lesbian, and the third is functionally asexual due to a vow of chastity she takes very seriously.  The major side characters include a straight guy from a social class similar to the Dalit (commonly known as untouchables) in India, a bisexual woman, a man who is from a race of genetically modified human/frog hybrids, and a woman from a race of genetically modified humans who are bred and sold as indentured sex workers.

Why am I bringing all of this up?  Well, first, because it’s kind of cool to look at the list of different characters I’ve created, but mostly because it connects to what I want to talk about today, which should be obvious from the title of the essay.  The concepts of ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’.

For those who aren’t familiar with these terms, they’re very closely related concepts.  ‘Forced Diversity’ is the idea that characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males are only ever included in a story because of outside pressure from some group (usually called Social Justice Warriors, or The Woke Brigade or something similar) to meet some nebulous political agenda.  The caveat to this is, of course, that you can have a women/women present as long as they are hot, don’t make any major contributions to the resolution of the plot, and the hero/heroes get to fuck them before the end of the story. ‘Virtue Signaling’, according to Wikipedia, is a pejorative neologism for the expression of a disingenuous moral viewpoint with the intent of communicating good character.

The basic argument is that Forced Diversity is a form of virtue signaling.  That no one would ever write characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males because they want to.  They only do it to please the evil SJW’s who are somehow both so powerful that they force everybody to conform to their desires, yet so irrelevant that catering to them dooms any creative project to financial failure via the infamous ‘go woke, go broke’ rule.

What the people who push this idea of Forced Diversity tend to forget is that we exist at a point in time when creators actually have more creative freedom than are any other people in history.  Comic writers can throw up a website and publish their work as a webcomic without having to go through Marvel, DC or one of the other big names, or get a place in the dying realm of the news paper comics page.  Novelists can self-publish with fairly little upfront costs, musicians can use places like YouTube and Soundcloud to get their work out without having to worry about music publishers.  Artists can hock their work on twitter and tumblr and a dozen other places. Podcasts are relatively cheap to make, which has opened up a resurgence in audio dramas.  Even the barrier to entry for live action drama is ridiculously low.

So, in a world where creators have more freedom than ever before, why would they choose to people their stories with characters they don’t want there?  The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t.  Authors, comic creators, indie film creators and so on aren’t putting diverse characters into their stories because they are being forced to. They’re putting diverse characters into their stories because they want to.  Creators want to tell stories about someone other than the generically handsome hypermasculine cisgendered heterosexual white males that have been the protagonists of so many stories over the years that we’ve choking on it. A lot of times, creators want to tell stories about people like themselves.  Black creators want to tell stories about the black experience. Queer creators want to tell stories about the queer experience.

I’m an autistic, mentally ill trans feminine abuse survivor.  Every day, I get up and I struggle with PTSD, with an eating disorder, with severe body dysmorphia, with anxiety and depression and just the reality of being autistic and transgender.  I deal with the fact that the religious community I grew up in views me as an abomination, and genuinely believes I’m going to spend eternity burning in hell.  I deal with the fact that people I’ve known for decades, even members of my own family, regularly vote for politician who publicly state that they want to strip me of my civil rights because I’m queer.  I’m part of a community that experiences a disproportionately high murder and suicide rate.  I’ve spent multiple years of my life deep in suicidal depression, and to this day, I still don’t trust myself around guns.

As a creator, I want to talk about those issues.  I want to deal with my life experiences.  I want to create characters that embody and express aspects of my lived experience and my day-to-day reality.  No one is forcing me to put diversity into my books.  I try to include Jewish characters as often as I can because there have been a number of important Jewish people in my life.  I include queer people because I’m queer and the vast majority of friends I interact with on a regular basis are queer.  I include people with mental illnesses and trauma because I am mentally ill and have trauma, and I know a lot of people with mental illnesses and trauma.  My work may be full of fantastical elements, aliens and dragons and angels and superheroes and magic and ultra-high technology and AI’s and talking cats and robot dogs and shape shifters and telepaths and all sorts of other things, but at the core of the stories is my own lived experience, and neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males are vanishingly rare in that experience.

Now, I can hear the comments already.  The ‘okay, maybe that’s true for individual creators, but what about corporate artwork?’.   Maybe not in those exact words, but you get the idea.

The thought here is that corporations are bowing to social pressure to include characters who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males, and that is somehow bad. But here’s the thing. Corporations are going to chase the dollars.  They aren’t bowing to social pressure.  There’s no one holding a gun to some executive’s head saying, “You must have this many diversity tokens in every script.”  What is happening is that corporations are starting to clue into the fact that people who aren’t neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white males have money.  They are putting black characters in their shows and movies because black people watch shows and spend money on movies.  They are putting queer people in shows and movies because queer people watch shows and spend money on movies.  They are putting women in shows and movies because women watch shows and spend money on movies.

No one is forcing these companies to do this.  They are choosing to do it, the same way individual creators are choosing to do it.  In the companies’ cases the choices are made for different reasons.  It’s not because they are necessarily passionate about telling stories about a particular experience, but because they want to create art to be consumed by the largest audience possible, which means that they have to expand their audience beyond the neurotypical cisgendered heterosexual white male by including characters from outside of that demographic.

And the reality is, the cries of ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ almost always come from within that demographic.  Note the almost.  There are a scattering of individuals from outside that demographic which do subscribe to the ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ myths, but that is a whole other essay.  However, within that demographic, lot of the people who cry about ‘forced diversity’ see media and content as a Zero-Sum game.  The more that’s created for other people, the less that is created for them.

In a way, they’re right. There are only so many slots for TV shows each week, there are only so many theaters, only so much space on comic bookshelves and so on.  But at the end of the day, its literally impossible for them to consume all the content that’s being produced anyway.  So, while there is, theoretically less content for them to consume, as a practical matter it’s a bit like someone who is a meat eater going to a buffet with two hundred items, and then throwing a tantrum because five of the items happen to be vegan.

The worst part is, if they could let go of how wound up they are about the ‘forced diversity’ and ‘virtue signaling’ they could probably enjoy the content that’s produced for people other than them.  I mean, I’m a pasty ass white girl, and I loved Black Panther.

So, to wrap out, creators, make what you want to make, and ignore anyone who cries about forced diversity or virtue signaling.  And to people who are complaining about forced diversity and virtue signaling, I want to go back to the buffet metaphor.  You need to relax.  Even if there are a few vegan options on the buffet, you can still get your medium rare steak, or your chicken teriyaki or whatever it is you want.  Or, maybe, just maybe, you could give the falafel a try. That shit is delicious.

[bisexualamy]

hi. hello. i've only been following you for a short while, so apologies if there's already a post about it somewhere on your blog, but would you be willing to expand on duck newton a little bit? the thing is that i'm terribly stupid and i feel like i see your point but don't know. why exactly...

Hi! There’s not one comprehensive post about it but I’m more than happy to make this one it. And don’t beat yourself up!! I think some of this does come from “I am a trans man and his experience resonates with me” and personally, I think that being an argument for identifying someone as gay/trans/queer coded is valid. But that’s not, imo, the only reason why many folks (including myself) really see Duck as a trans man. So here are a few more. Spoilers for the ending of TAZ: Amnesty ahead.

Goes by a nickname & treats revealing his “actual”/proper/non-nickname name as a sign of intimacy - I think this is the most obvious one but the way that Justin plays it gives it a genuine quality that really fits with Duck being trans. I love the exchange between Duck and Aubrey where she asks for his name, he replies “Duck” and when she presses him he says “we’re not there yet” and she says “we’re not at names?!”

Names being an intimate symbol is not exclusive to trans folks, but for many of us, choosing our names is often a literal and symbolic first step towards redefining the lens through which the world sees us. This time, in a way we want to. Duck’s earnest insistence that no, he is Duck, and that’s enough, comes off as very trans. So much so, that I wasn’t sure initially how I felt about his name reveal to Minerva in the finale. But the more I sat with it, and after my Amnesty re-listen, I think it actually puts a really fine point on this.

Choosing a name for yourself is really vulnerable. From what we know about Duck’s past, it really sounds like Duck has gone by Duck since he was a kid. Juno has known Duck since they were both teens, at least, and she’s always called him Duck, even in flashbacks. Duck remarks in another flashback that his mom doesn’t like the name Duck, yet he still insists on using that name. To me, it’s very easy to take a trans reading of Duck here. Duck has had clear discomfort with his birth name since he was a kid, whether or not he realized it was for a trans reason. He starts going by a nickname very early on, and later chooses a more traditionally male name (Wayne) as his legal name when he transitions. But in a sense, he was Duck before he was anything else. Revealing the secret name he chose for himself to Minerva, in this reading, just makes that an even more intimate moment.

Part of an alternative subculture as a kid - this is somewhat anecdotally based, but we know Duck was a skater and kind of a punk as a teenager when he was going through his own period of self-discovery. Alternative subcultures are often refuges for lgbt and gnc folks as teens, because they can be safe spaces for alternate gender expression. For me, being part of the pop punk/emo subculture as a kid gave me a lot more freedom to experiment with gender neutral and masculine gender presentation. I see Duck’s past as a skater and a punk a good parallel for this. We also know that Duck had kind of a fraught adolescence, and this was an outlet for him. I think this reading is even stronger when you consider him as a trans character, trying on the identities of different subcultures in parallel to understanding his own gender identity. His character arc redefining his identity as the chosen one is a genuinely great parallel for the trans gender euphoria, self acceptance, and taking an active role in reshaping one’s identity - this is absolutely my favorite one. Duck’s literal journey as the chosen one works really well as a metaphorical trans narrative, and I honestly think it strengthens his character arc to read him as a trans character redefining what it means to be the chosen one. Duck is caught between who he is as part of the Kepler community and who he is as the chosen one in an interstellar war. And his character arc is finding what it means to be all of these things and also Duck. From a young age, Duck is told he’s the chosen one, and his whole life is redefined in front of him. He’s very resistant to accepting this fact. What will this mean for his family? What will this mean for him and his future? What if he doesn’t want this? Why him? Who picked him? What if I don’t want all this baggage? Can I please give this to someone else? His first scene with Minerva is very reminiscent of the first moment of “wait, am I trans? What does that mean? Who am I, actually? I don’t want this.” Many trans folks, myself included, sort of know they’re trans before they know they’re trans. In our transphobic society, it’s a lot easier to just not be trans. It sort of sits there in the back of your mind, and sometimes you can ignore it, sometimes you even forget about it, but it inevitably always comes back. Because to ignore you’re trans is to ignore the truth of your life. The same thing happens to Duck and his identity as the chosen one. Minerva literally reappears to him throughout his life to remind him that he can’t run from his destiny, as much as he tries to shut her out. Duck even goes through periods of accepting “hey, maybe this chosen one thing isn’t so bad” only for something to go a bit wrong and him to completely reject it again. Minerva gives Duck Beacon, and for a moment he’s like “hey, this is kind of cool” before his destiny scares him and he falls back into what the hell am I doing and eventually gives Beacon to Ned. He shuts away a symbol of the identity he’s running from, much like a trans person might hide objects or experiences that give them gender euphoria, because to accept them is to start to accept the truth of who you are. I also like this reading because it makes Leo Tarkesian a great parallel for older trans mentors. Leo lived the life of the chosen before Duck. He’s gone through this all before and now his role is to keep Duck safe and make sure he safely comes into his own identity as the chosen one. The found family? The generational mentorship? The fact that Leo and Duck talk about the emotional weight of being chosen in a way Duck can’t really express with others? Even Minerva? Very trans. When Duck stops running from who he is he realizes he might actually like being the chosen one. When he loses his abilities, he realizes he misses them. But the solution isn’t to just become what Minerva tells him. The solution isn’t to just abandon all of his principles and values, abandon everything that makes Duck Duck and transform into the model of a chosen one. Duck won’t kill anybody. Duck chooses to make decisions with arguably worse outcomes for himself to avoid killing anybody (like saving Billy the Goatman). Duck gets to define what it means to be Duck The Chosen. He won’t settle for anything less. This, to me, is a really awesome parallel for not just accepting one’s gender but accepting oneself and your experiences of gender, and making it your own until it feels euphoric. Two other quick things that are more my opinion than textual analysis:

Duck’s brand of a softer masculinity made me feel euphoric as a trans man and it’s a kind of masculinity I see a lot of trans men aspire to have. Yes, not all trans men are masculine in this way. However, I think the gentle streak in his masculinity codes him as this type of trans man. This great thread goes into more depth on that.

Duck is characterized quite strongly as a staple of the Kepler community. He knows everybody and they all know him and they all call him Duck. It’s just, “that’s our Duck.” That’s a wonderful thing for me as a trans person, to see a community come together around accepting a trans person they’ve known all his life, and certainly known since before his transition. That just makes me happy.


This was long but I hope it helped better understand why Duck is so important to me as a trans character! Thank you for the ask. I had a lot of fun writing this up.

[saintjosie]

you start small.

my gf and i have been wanting more trans friends here for years and so she reached out to a friend she had spoken to a little bit on her and simply asked her if she wanted to hang out cause we wanted to spend more time with trans people. and so we did! we had a low key night, she came over for drinks and pinball and we had a great time just hanging out.

and then we hung out a few more times after that. and at one of those hangouts, we went to an event for the local queer bookstore that just opened and met a new friend. and our new friend was also looking for more trans friends because hey guess what, being trans and in the south is incredibly isolating.

and then our new friend invited her friend and the five of us went out to brunch on trans day of visibility. and it was absolutely incredible, and incredibly healing for my soul.

and that’s where it clicked. every single one of us there were all talking about how amazing it was to be able to be around more trans people. and i’m sure as hell that we weren’t the only other people who felt that way.

and so we made a discord. we decided on a few key things. one, it would be inclusive for all trans and gnc people. two, everyone would be an adult. three, boundaries and consent would be paramount and absolute. four, there would be no nsfw channels and no nsfw images shared. five, everyone invited would be someone that had met or knew someone in the discord.

we wanted to make sure the group was sex and kink positive and so nsfw discussion is allowed with spoilers, but we also wanted to make sure that it was a comfortable environment for all, including people who don’t want to participate with those kinds of things online.

and we said these things because we wanted the focus to be on building community in physical space. the discord would serve to be a way for people to meet and organize hangouts and such but would be for the express purpose of building community in the real world.

and then the next thing i did was get on her again and started looking for new friends and only new friends. no dating, no hookups, just friends. and i made sure to explicitly say this in my bio. and then i just started swiping right on every single person with trans identifiers or pronouns in their bio within a certain radius.

i talked to so many people in the first few weeks and had so many amazing conversations with people who just really wanted to connect with other trans people in any kind of way. i asked them what their interests were and about the things they enjoyed. i told them about the things that i knew we shared in common. i just had conversations with people, with zero expectations other than just get to know people. and then after i had gotten to know them a little bit, i asked if they’d be interested in joining a discord to possibly meet more trans people. and nearly every single one of them said yes. because hey, guess what, i wasn’t the only trans person in south carolina longing for community. turns out there were tons of us.

and now after a month, there’s more than 40 people in the discord! and i sure as hell didn’t bring in all of those people. i may have brought in the first handful but then people started inviting more folks they knew, cause hey, guess what, there’s a lot of trans people just wanting to be in community. and when you create a space with inclusivity and positivity at its core, people will come.

if you decide to try to do this, it may not grow as fast. or it may even grow faster! but the speed of growth is nowhere nearly as important as planting the seeds for community to grow with genuine human connection.

turns out that people just wanna connect. who coulda thunk?

being in south carolina and having trouble finding community was hard and my gf and i have considered moving bc of it. but recently we decided that we were going to try to help build the community we yearned for rather than search for it.

and so we did! we started a local meetup group and found many other trans people searching for the same. and through that we found other already existing community and helped our local community connect and grow. i’m building my home and i’m so proud of it 💜

(posted with permission of everyone in the photo 🙂)

[shoezuki]

cracks knuckles. i promised to elaborate and i will.

the one common perspective that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that techno / sbi + schlatt + tubbo + ranboo are just genuinely funnier than the dteam, and honestly yes it's because if the popularity. if you go back and watch the dteams older (im talking before 2-3mil subs) videos they are funnier than their current ones and i think it's because they're trying to shift their humor to a broader audience?

the minecraft community has always been mainly queer/poc/ndv kids because it was exiled away from "acceptable society" for so long that only the people who had already been "exiled" continued to enjoy it. I, as an example, stopped playing when it became a cringy thing because I was so worried about being seen as weird. now that ive discovered, come to terms with, and enjoy my queerness, i realize that if i had known i was queer back when mc was exiled i wouldve continued to play because i alrwady would have known what it was like to be part of that seperate society. (Please keep reading i promise I have a point)

but then minecraft came back. minecraft became mainstream again, and it came back HARD. watching it go from something that you would be bullied immensely for to something that you would be bullied for not doing was an extreme experience. in all honesty im still angry about it, but that's another topic. when minecraft became mainstream it brought with it all of the people that hadn't been part of the exiled societies yk? including... the dream team.

dream blew up. we all know how much he blew up. i personally dont believe he cheated on the speedrun but to each their own (although after reading your stuff and becoming more critical of them im realizing i might need to reexamine that), and the speedrun controversy brought even more people to his base (cough drama loving straight white girls cough).

when they were brought into the fanbase that's when it started to go downhill. they shifted their humor to fit that, or maybe their humor was always that and they just got more confident in showing it after they had gotten a fan base to back them up. which is also why techno / sbi + schlatt + tubbo + ranboo (who ill refer to just as techno&co now because he's the main one but also that's long as hell lmao) are funnier than them!

for one, their fanbases are smaller. now 5 mil is by no means a small number, but compared to dream's 16 mil? yknow. especially with techno's wack upload schedule he's never had to worry about having a stan fan base because the only people who stay are people who genuinely enjoy his content the way it is.

two, techno&co are mostly ndv. techno has adhd, tubbo has dyslexia, wilbur had and maybe still has depression, ranboo has anxiety, tommy hasnt confirmed or denied his adhd but im betting he at least has borderline. i am in no ways saying that being part of one minority (in this case ndv) gives you free range over another (queer), but all minorities have this understanding about what it is to be part of an exiled community (if that makes sense).

philza and schlatt, not so sure if they're ndv, but they're also older and generally more mature and esp in philza's case, theyve had their chance to make their bad jokes and pull stupid shit and theyve grown out of it (if they ever had that phase at all). techno&co have that understanding and even if they dont know where the boundaries are they know that queer humor (and all humor! other than techno, sbi doesnt really make gay jokes) going to have boundaries, and they respect that.

three, techno is the funniest bitch because he has adhd. i dont take criticism on this point because im right.

i probably missed a lot, probably got some stuff wrong, but all in all i think i hit my mark. i can come off anon to chat anytime if youd vibe w that. no pressure to respond to this! have a good day, etc etc, it was fun getting to tear into the dteam in a safe space. respect for them and their fanbases, their humor is a little off but i still gotta respect how well theyve done. btw i woke up and rolled over and started typing I haven't proofed this at all so yeah. :) - andy

And your brain is fucking massive yo like u must got chronic back pain too from holdin up all these Thoughts in ur head

I really like. Minecraft fans is So varied cuz like u said it was so very 'cringe' before. I got into mc again n playin it w my siblings years before it Popped Off again entirely cuz i stopped Giving a Shit that it was 'weird' or any a that. N sbi have been goin strong through it So Long both when it was hotshit and when it was "cringe"

N definitely like minecraft ive always noticed has a Massive ndv community. I dont know entirely what it is like definitely part of the 'cringe' factor like u said and also cubes make our brains go brrrr? The aspect of self expression in it? I dont know but we Been Here

I do think dteam's content and shit like. It obviously moved in sync with perceptions of mc to garner a Big General audience. Dream blowing up entirely had to do w the Trends and how mc got popular. Therefore hes audience is Huge and Varied

In contrast w techno n like. He has blown up quite a bit too. But i feel its fair to say he Hasnt altered his content significantly. Or at least like. How its presented, what he does, etc. For fucks sake he doesnt have a stream schedule. And although his content is Still garnering a Large and really varied audience it feels more like. Isolated and homogeneous almost

Like. I can go into the technocord right now and say 'dont forget to take your meds' and at least 20 or so ppl would be all like Oh Fuck Whoops. Theres SO many of us adhd ppl in there. I always goof bout techno jus sayin pspspsps and the neurodivergents crawling up from the floorboards but honest to god. His content and jokes and i suppose Personality jus appeals to us So Much. Same goes for sbi pretty heavily honestly altho i feel its most evident in techno's most Dedicated fans

Also. Lbr. The people who stay through technos schedules and content Droughts are the ones who be hyperfixating Abskfvdkdsjsjsl

BUT going into sbi as a Group like. They are friends. And together they are fucking hilarious. N i feel it strongly like. The fact theyre all such Varied people of different ages and such helps w that shit. It Works So Well.

Long story short being neurodivergent makes you funny as hell letsgo

[femmefoxbeast]

I’ve been thinking a lot about body positivity and self-image and how to deal with that as a trans man.

This is a long post. The rest is under a read more because of this. It’s a bit rambling too. I’m just working through my thoughts.

CW: surgery mention, abuse mention, unhealthy eating/thoughts about eating mention, lots of discussion of social beauty ideals and how people are treated poorly for not meeting them. Nothing graphic though.

The pressure to transition into an ‘ideal man’

So - in September I had top surgery. It was definitely the right decision and (combined with starting testosterone in July 2019) it’s had a huge positive impact on my mental health. I look at myself in the mirror and finally see myself looking back. I feel like life is full of possibility at the moment. It’s pretty great honestly.

Here’s the thing - I’m chubby - I was in an abusive family situation for a while and ended up with some food issues which resulted in me losing a fair bit of weight and then putting a bunch back on.

Because I’m a bigger guy I’ve got dog-ears (excess skin and fat) at the ends of my top surgery scars. I feel mostly okay about them and am not planning to get a surgical revision. But I feel weirdly guilty about being okay with them.

I feel like there’s this pressure and expectation that if I want to look like a man (and I do because that’s what I am) then I should look like society’s ideal of a man. People seem to think I should want to be thin and muscular and to have a sharp jawline and just the right amount of body hair.

But to be honest I don’t want that. And I feel guilty about not wanting that.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings about this - on one hand, I have this feeling that I’m doing something wrong or wasting my transition somehow? Logically I know those thoughts aren’t mine - I know that this external pressure I’ve experienced has put these thoughts into my head. But the idea has bedded itself surprisingly deep into my brain so I haven’t been able to get rid of the nagging voice going ‘you’re doing it wrong’.

On the other hand, I’m pretty repulsed by this expectation that I should conform even more strictly to societal beauty standards because I’m trans. I shouldn’t have to thin, I shouldn’t have to work out unless I feel like it, I shouldn’t have to try and look cis. I want to look like a man yes. But I want to look like a queer trans man because that’s what I am and if I look like a cis dude then I’ll start seeing a stranger when I look in the mirror again.

It doesn’t help that the pressure to conform isn’t just interpersonal but structural - for example, trans people often have to be below a certain BMI to access surgery on the NHS and even in some private hospitals. Because of this, every time I’ve had to interact with the clinic that prescribes my hormones they’ve made some pretty yikes remarks about my weight.

I still remember, in our first meeting, how the person assessing me commented that if I could lose some weight then I’d be very handsome due to being fairly tall and broad-shouldered for a trans guy. It made me feel like they saw me as an object that could be shaped and moulded into whatever they wanted - into a symbol of their mastery over medicine.

It was dehumanising as hell.

Femininity, fatness and autism

Being overweight and a man who is slowly starting to present in a more authentically femme manner is interesting.

It makes me feel like some kind of horrible pervert a lot of the time.

I think we’ve got this image of a fat, effeminate, creepy dude so embedded in our collective consciousness that it’s poisoning my self-image a little. It doesn’t help that this collective caricature has a lot of autistic traits and well - I’m autistic.

It sucks because I try very hard to be respectful and non-creepy. I don’t think other people perceive me that way, from what I can tell.

But my brain keeps insisting that if I wore a dress or lipstick or high heels then I’ll transform into some Silence of the Lambs-type figure.

So I’ve been restricting myself to just painting my nails and wearing necklaces sometimes.

But I don’t want to do that any more. I want to be myself as hard and joyfully and authentically as I can all of the time. I feel like I’ve spent so long repressing myself - first because I was in the closet about being queer and trans and then because I was trying my hardest to pass due to not being about to handle social and physical dysphoria at the same time.

I guess it’s something I need to work through... but I’m not going to give up and hide away again. I won’t do that.

Transandrophobia

The other thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is how the sex characteristics primarily associated with men - for example, facial and body hair - are seen in a negative light. Largely in social justice spaces and communities but in the wider world to some extent also.

In social justice spaces, there is a lot of fear and dislike of maleness and masculinity. I can understand why but it doesn’t make it any easier to deal with as a man who is marginalised due to his gender. I don’t feel very safe or comfortable outside of these spaces but it’s often a pretty tough experience to exist in them too.

This dislike of male things extends to physical traits that are seen as male also. Even in supposedly trans-inclusive spaces, I’ve seen this vocal repulsion to things like body hair and facial hair. Disgust towards traits like this is harmful to pretty much everyone who doesn’t fit cis, perisex, white beauty standards.

People who express this disgust in trans inclusive spaces often seem to think that their words will only hurt white, straight, able-bodied, perisex cis men and that it’s therefore fine.

However, I don’t think it’s okay to talk about cis guy’s bodies like that - for one because it’s just a mean thing to do and for two because even if you want to go out of your way to hurt cis men’s feelings then there’s still no way for you to prevent unintended collateral damage if you say horrible things about someone else’s body in a public place.

So if it’s wrong to make comments like that towards relatively privileged people then it’s very, very wrong to say such things about the bodies of trans people, intersex people and people of colour.

Another factor that harms trans men and other transmasculine people specifically is how people tend to react towards our bodies at varying times during medical transitioning. People (especially cis women) tend to react very positively towards us having feminine physical features - being soft and hairless and pretty-looking. Then we receive backlash if we choose to transition - we run into this idea that we’re “ruining” our “precious, sacred, feminine bodies”.

This nasty, entitled rhetoric tends to crop up strongest among TERFs but I’ve come across less explicit, less obviously transphobic variations in trans inclusive communities also.

This demonisation of “male” traits messed with my head when my hormones started to take effect. I was really happy to feel my dysphoria decreasing but at the same time, I had to come to terms with looking well, ugly. At least - ugly according to the spaces and communities I am a part of.

[davidmann95]

So... Crossover #1: any thoughts?

Anonymous said: You seemed not to think much of Crossover #1 on Twitter. Your full thoughts?

wcwit said: So Cates' Crossover #1, best bad comic of the year or just regular pretentious trash?

An incidental note upfront: What you’re seeing there is the apparently SUPER-RARE SECRET VARIANT COVER I unwittingly picked up at the store - at first glance indistinguishable from the standard cover, the kid getting four-color-fucked by mysterious comic book rays is in fact themselves reading a variant cover of the book, rather than the main cover again in an infinite painting-within-a-painting sort of deal that’s the standard.

So I wasn’t gonna get this: my initial post on the comic and what an obviously awful idea it was back when we only knew half the premise and it was known as Pray The Capes Away actually got some out-of-nowhere traction recently, and I’ve grown rapidly tired of Cates’ Marvel work. Even learning that it was going to be Image’s biggest debut in decades - Jesus fuck, how and why - mostly just made me wish it was Commanders in Crisis getting those kinds of numbers. But Sean Dillon/@deathchrist2000 and Ritesh Babu both got early looks at it and assured me that I, specifically, needed to see the last page, so in I dove. I’ll be posting my reaction to the last page below because I recorded it for their amusement, and below that I’ll talk about said last page. It may surprise you, however, that that wasn’t my main takeaway from the issue.

Let’s accentuate the positive first! This book is gorgeous. Geoff Shaw was terrific back with Thanos Wins, but this is an incredible stylistic level-up aided and abetted by Dee Cunniffe’s colors: it’s rote as hell to say “They mix the elevated and the mundane so well!”, but even beyond the obvious ben-day dots stuff there’s such a tangible sense that the comic book beings don’t belong here, that they’re of higher, misty, platonic stuff and we squishy non-paper-people inevitably crumble and break and bleed in their wake, communicating that big idea so much more powerfully than the actual loads of text on the subject. And if we’re talking good things, I’ll concede it’s possible that there could be subtleties that play out in more interesting ways as it goes on, and that not everything is meant to be taken at face value: a smart friend who actually did like it mentioned being interested in it as clumsy but potentially effective exploration of ‘what if the fun hobby you had inadvertently became contaminated and stigmatized by forces beyond your control?’ In a post-Comicsgate world where we recently ended up inches away from the Superman logo almost certainly becoming a fascist propaganda symbol ala the Punisher skull for at least a generation, that’s a defensible lens to view this book through.

For all Donny Cates��� legitimate talents however, I don’t think an expectation of subtlety is gonna work out with this one.

Okay first off getting into the rest of it the main characters’ name is Ellipsis because “Those three little dots...they can become anything”, so there’s that. More importantly, in the world of this story where comic fans face social oppression after superpeople materialize and fuck up Colorado, they face EVERY KIND OF OPPRESSION: there are clear parallels drawn in here to the violence and harassment faced by people persecuted for their religion, people seeking abortions, queer people, and people of color; this motherfucker even drops a “hates and fears” to let us know comic collecting basically makes you one of the goddamn X-Men. Which in theory could be a purely misjudged allegory rather than stemming from actual, obscenely inflated to the point of disgusting fears of ‘nerd oppression’, except that the book literally opens with a quote from Wertham. If Cates didn’t want to make the message “Hating comics? That’s bad. Like, racism bad”, he utterly, grotesquely failed by inextricably intermingling imagery of real-world bigotry with systemic, deluded fanboy paranoia, at least as of this first issue that’s supposed to meaningfully convey the premise. As a queer dude I think I’m somewhat in my lane to say it’s too blunt and broad and dopey to be particularly offensive, but the co-opting of oppression is what this is rooted in.

The idea of ‘comics good no matter what people think, ain’t it?’ extends to the last traditional local comic store standing in this world: much as superheroes are the primary cause of suffering in this world but the point of the story is still supposed to reveal the beauty in them, part of this is that the comics community isn’t perfect but it sure is great. Which is expressed here via Ellie’s boss Otto, a loveable asshole who yells at people coming in trying to sell the wrong kind of comics to fuck off, but at heart is we’re supposed to understand a good enough dude that the shop he runs is “the only home a lot of (the benighted nerds) have left” (because I guess in this alternate universe the physical stores are still the main hub through which comics fans talk with one another?).

So here’s a story of my very own! That’s me in 2013, it must’ve been some kind of special day because I’m wearing a shirt with a button. I’d at that point only frequented one of what would be my thus far four regular comic shops. The first was a great place, and while to say I had a sense of community there would be overstating it a bit, I was on really good terms with the owner and we regularly chatted when we had the time. When I left for college my store there wasn’t as well-stocked, and for some damn reason all variant covers were double-price, but I got along really well with the owner there too. The third I wasn’t so lucky; the guy regularly behind the desk was never overtly hostile, but clearly wanted to wring my neck every time I asked when a missing comic might get in or if I could update my pull list, and given I’m in the ‘ideal’ demographic for being a comic book store regular and was dropping a solid lump of money there every week, I wonder how others were treated there (the store nearly went under, was saved on the last day of operation by another store that wanted to incorporate it as part of its franchise, then shortly afterwards DID go under and is now I believe a beef jerky place). My current store is fine, I didn’t chat much with the folks behind the counter even before we all had medical incentive to get in and out of places fairly quickly but it almost always has what I’m looking for.

Just because those were my regular stores of course doesn’t mean those are the only ones I’ve ever gone to. About a year before that picture was taken - it’s the closest I could find - when I was 17 my store didn’t have something or another I was looking for, so I head across town to see if another place I had looked up had it. This other place didn’t have what I was looking for either, though I distinctly remember picking up a few issues of Hickman’s FF while I was there since I had foolishly fallen off, hence my remembering the year. I bought a couple issues, but hung around for a bit looking to see if I might grab something else out of a dollar box, setting my comics down. Without realizing it, I’d set my books down on top of another issue, and when I decided I wasn’t getting anything else, I just picked that up along with the rest of the pile and was about to walk out before the owner stopped me. He explained what I had done though assumed it had been deliberate, and because I was a good-hearted little geek I even recall thinking “Well, he’s gonna chew me out, but I guess I deserve it. I’ll try and take this to heart as a learning experience.”

Then he pulled up his shirt a little to show me the gun on his belt. He pointed at the security camera monitors at his desk, and explained to me that if I ever did something like that again, he would have it on tape, and he would pull that gun on me and hold me there while he called the cops.

As it turned out, the comic was free.

The whole thing was so sudden and bizarre and unexpected I didn’t actually freak out until the drive home. It wasn’t until weeks or maybe months later that I managed to tell my dad about the experience, because I *had* nearly stolen a (free) comic and my guilt was mixed in with my nerves and I guess I was somehow too close to register just how disproportionate his response was. It wasn’t until now, nearly a decade later and thinking about it for the first time in a long time as I write this, that I wondered if that might have gone differently - especially living in the midwest - if I hadn’t been a white, squeaky-voiced 17-year-old.

So, minor spoiler, when our cantankerous but well-meaning LCS owner yells to call the cops and grabs and yells at a small kid for pocketing a comic (and later displays fantasy racism towards said kid), I am not filled with nostalgic love for the brotherly safe space that is comic book stores, where this guy while not meant to be seen as perfect is still framed in part as a charming, witty representation of Why We Love These Places, And This Community, And This Genre, And This Medium. Cates is clearly drawing on real time at his local stores, but he equally clearly has a very different takeaway from those experiences than me. And I am, again, in a demographic - white, cis-male, abled, bi but more interested in women, disposable income, a lifelong collector - that the industry and a lot of the guys who sell it to us contort themselves around catering to, even if I had a single very negative experience and later an ongoing low-key uncomfortable one to help disabuse me of any notions of the purity of the dork community. In the world of Crossover as of #1, toxicity is intertwined, deliberately or not on the part of the creators, with what we love on the cosmic and small business scales alike, but at least in the latter case it’s the whole picture that’s beautiful, not any single kernel that needs to be worked on to be dug up.

So underneath is my video reaction to the last page of Crossover #1. Very minor spoilers because I mutter the last two words of the comic to myself, but under the video I discuss said final page and some other scattered thoughts. Whether you read that or not, my takeaway is this: I’m fascinated with wherever the hell this thing is going, I’m glad my dad liked it well enough to want to keep getting it because now I’ll get to see where it heads, but my first impression is that this is at heart meant as cheapass Oscar-bait for people who only read Batman. It’s big and high-concept but also small and intimate! It’s meta and about how great you, the reader are for your consumption, especially the consumption of this! It’s going to be in large part about a forbidden love between a couple divided across impermeable social lines (a couple where they’re a seemingly straight white man and woman, but one likes comics)! Maybe it’ll become Not That, and I’m sure it’ll do at least something interesting along the way because Cates has done good stuff before and there are some inherently interesting big ideas for him to play with here, but for the love of god if you’re thinking about getting this buy Commanders in Crisis too or instead, it’s another new book out of Image about superheroes dealing with the collapse of the multiverse but that one is really fucking good.

So the final page splash reveal is that when the comic book child discovered in here got out of Colorado, which has had an impenetrable energy shield erected around it by one of the heroes for years, she and others were ferried out of there...by Superman, as the narration declares that “This is a story...about hope.” They don’t say the word, but she sketches her savior, Ellie and Otto freak out and go “Is that---” when they see it, and on that last page we see that while a crude drawing it isn’t a rough analogue character, it’s a guy with a cape and trunks with an S on his chest. Surprisingly, I don’t have much to say: it’s just another blunt signifier that superheroes rule and are the best, paired with the most utterly devalued notion as of late of what makes Superman special in ‘hope’. I mean, I’m perversely excited to see whether this is building the entire series on a hook it can never deliver on, or if Cates actually has talked DC into an intercompany crossover; believable given they’ve done a bunch of those over the last several years, and why else would Mark Waid be supervising as ‘story editor’ on this? I guess it’ll shake out one way or another with #6 given Cates has said it “has one of the more epic and — I would argue historic — sequences in comic book history in it.” But I’m far less convinced this is gonna truly go into the meaty question of “What does Superman mean and what makes him unique in this world where superheroes in general are indisputably either failures or monstrous bastards given the scale of destruction their presence has brought about, and he himself failed to stop that?” than as some kind of holy grail of how great superheroes are despite how dang violent they’ve gotten these days for the crew to chase after, whatever additional twist will surely be placed upon it. At least he’s kinda helping an immigrant kid get over a wall, if that’s deliberate?

Random final thoughts:

* If I wrote the opening essay and turned it in in a college course, I would be expelled for plagiarizing Grant Morrison. This is not a joke.

* If mainstream American superhero comics ended January 2017 in this universe, its own last ‘crossover’ was Civil War II, which is hilarious.

* God, please tell me if it takes the dive after all that this isn’t somehow tied into whatever Waid’s Superman project is.

* I wouldn’t normally crap on issues with the finer details of worldbuilding, but A. This is rooted in a nominally ‘real’ world playing by recognizable rules, B. I’m ragging on this anyway so what’s the harm, and C. It’s really obvious. So: Why is one of the racists against the superheroes the guy who loves superheroes so much he’s the last holdout in the entire world still selling comic books about them? How does this modestly-sized shop exist long-term with apparently a significant regular customer base if there are no new comics or even reprints to restock with, ever? Who’s buying the serialized cop/cowboy comics that the U.S. government apparently created pretty much overnight (nobody, it’s just another Wertham dig)?

* The solicit for issue #3 proclaims “Don't miss this one, folks. If you do, it just might drive you...mad.”, so now I fear some kind of Ultra Comics riff.

* “Kids love chains” is the most metal-ass quote of all time and I hate that it’s being wasted as an arc title on this book.

[pb-dot]

This is a question I have been dealing with a bit lately as well, albeit from a slightly different angle. On one hand, I want my books to be unmistakably and inescapably queer, both as a way to underline the rebellious spirit that animates the thing and to find the audience I'm hoping to reach. On the other, I feel kind of weird about the space "Queer Fiction" occupies in the literature space these days. This thing turned long on me, so the rest of it is below the cut.

On one hand, it is nice to see books not getting shunned for queer content after decades of authors, many of them queer, fighting their assess off to get books published with as much as a non-hetero glance or vague vibe, or even the slightest mention or allusion to being non-cis in a non-villainous context. Making the queerness a selling point in itself is perhaps a bit crass but it may very well be that it's how it has to be under the auspices of the ever-chewing never-digesting insatiable blind idiot god of the 21st century that we call Late Stage Capitalism.

On the other, it also feels a bit like quarantining The Queers off to their own little playpen to keep us out of the mainstream. Similar criticisms have been levied at, for example, the R'n'B genre by POC artists most recently SZA and Lizzo. It's not a 1-to-1 comparison obviously as queer/lgbtq+ fiction is rather open with who the category is supposed to be for, and I am not well-versed enough in either genre to say anything helpful or illuminating about their roots and how that informs the comparison, but I am noting the topic down for further research time and energy permitting.

Another issue I have with this whole Queer Fiction label is that I just don't super vibe with it as a reader. I love reading books with all manners of queer characters, and I'm positively overjoyed about how there's more of them now. With that in mind, I have tried, and so far failed, to get into the books I can find on the "Queer Fiction" shelves. Part of it, I suspect is the slight inaccuracy in the labeling as a lot of these books fall under the YA or NA umbrella, and that's seldom the kind of litterature I'm looking for.

Despite this being a personal preference more than a strike against the descriptor itself, I do think there's a larger point that's worth looking at here. Part of the above comes from how there's been a perceptible shift in how sexuality and gender is percieved and talked about between my generation (Milennial if anyone was wondering) and the younger generations. To be clear, it is a change for the better in most way I can think of, and these generations being the prime focus of the queer litterature.

This isn't to say that there isn't some problems with this youth focus, of course. The queer community in general has a bit of a problem with aging, which is of course understandable considering the wide generation gaps left by queer elders stolen from us by cruelty and inaction during the AIDS crisis and generations worth of hostility and violence. It's a problem that is correcting itself fortunately, but I still see queer people in their late 20s and early 30s expressing the fear that their life is over, hell, a few years ago that was me. I'm not going to say that how we categorize litterature is a major driver of this anxiety, but all the little ways we treat queerness in media has to carry at least part of the guilt.

This is all to say that we may be shooting ourselves a bit in the foot by segregating queer stories into "Queer Stories for young people clearly labeled as such" and "Queer Stories for adults that you just kinda have to luck into or find by word of mouth." I'm not entirely sure how to solve this problem without either making a bunch of overly specific subcategories or worsening the problems with ghettoization that I mentioned initially.

So in conclusion, my answer to this question is a resounding "uh, I'm not entirely sure. It's complicated?" as I seem to have reached a bit of a cul-de-sac on this one. I hope that some outside perspective on this might help me get my thoughts in order, and it's one of the (many) reasons I'm probably going to try going with an indie publisher for this thing.

I've come to realize that I don't want my books or stories to be defined or categorized by the gender or sexualities of the characters.

Is everyone a little bit gay? Yep. Are some of them very gay? Probably. Do I think you should read it based solely on that? Absolutely not.

[ofcloudsandstars]

Amber and orchard for the fall asks!

amber - share an unpopular opinion that you may have.

Hahaha this is like cracking open pandora’s box. I feel like I have too many. 

I think my primary one though is I absolutely despise capitalism’s affect on witchcraft. I DO NOT think it’s made it more accessible for people, I feel like the only very minor positive thing is that you can now tell people you are a witch and into tarot cards and they won’t find you as weird anymore. Otherwise people don’t realize how capitalism is a force that actually strips culture of it’s meaning in order to sell it for profit and it’s affects on this practice has left a lot of damage not just to some aspects that are sacred but towards the earth since it’s a practice that works really closely with nature. 

(added a read more to spare you poor scrolling souls from my rant lol)

Anyway what crapitalism does is it takes a culture and turns it into an easily consumable concept- almost like a brand, so that as long as you slap something ‘witchy’ seeming together then it qualifies as that brand. It boils everything down to an aesthetic. And no one has to actually believe in it anymore, or practice it or make any effort towards learning it or incorporating it into their lives. As long as they buy into the brand or embody the aesthetic then they count. Sometimes you can try to express that some traditions and materials and such do have meaning (I mean of course they do no one just sat around and made this shit up) people kind of have this nihilistic view that’s fed from this weird modern capitalist society that like: nothing truly has meaning anymore. But it’s like they are feeding this consumerist culture by repeating this mindset and gaslighting others when they appropriate magical practices or other cultures that are still very much alive and still tended to (often by indigenous people still being prosecuted) that are focused on working with the earth. 

Then you see this ripple effect on places like instagram or the big mainstream like magazines and shit and do not get me wrong cause there are a lot of cool and creative people that practice this that are on there but there is so much cashing into this field now and oversaturation that comes with seedy and shady background stories that show creators being completely disingenuous because they really just want to make money. And then going back to my point that this practice works closely with nature, capitalism exploited the fact that we like working with certain herbs, woods, crystals etc and is overharvesting and mining and tainting the very tools that we want to work with, with greed, pollution, child slavery etc. And it’s irritating cause you can make your own tools and don’t have to import anything and you can tell everyone how bad some industries are but they don’t listen cause they are buying into capitalism’s lie that they can sell you anything at a price, even if it’s sacred. Then if you try to defend your point they tell you that this is the only way it can be accessible to everyone, but it’s NOT accessible to everyone, it strips it away from people that could be working with these tools for generations and protecting the climates that these guides and resources for the tools grow in. It also disempowers people in their craft to begin with because witchcraft is about finding that connection to your own power and magic and the bridge with the universe’s power and magic and when you venture down into this practice you will find tools and guides local to you and find ways to make your own magical tools but capitalism disempowers us by telling us that we are not legit until we can put a price tag on it. So people don’t believe in their ability to find the sacred in themselves or nature, they just keep consuming whatever herb bundle or tool capitalism spits at them because it’s the only way to feel legit in this culture. 

And then since it’s seen more of a title or aesthetic and less of a way of life or set of ethics or practice, you have people interested in this spiritual or witchy community that don’t do any work or want to work on themselves that bring their shadow baggage into it. So you get racism seeping into it, homophobia, I also am so fucking confused how TRANSPHOBIA has made its way into here like transfolx are magical by just existing they are walking manifestations and works of alchemy like wtf; and like if you guys were friends with any queer people and hung out with them, they get the idea of magic, ritual and manifestation so well cause so much of their daily life already embodies some of that. But that’s a whole other topic. I vibed well with my queer friends on this and they were the only ones I could talk to about it before witchcraft became mainstream. 

 Then in general it’s seen as like radical if you tell people that are supposedly practicing witches that our energies should be focusing on restoring balance and we should put our energy towards healing nature or towards human rights (since humans are apart of nature) you will literally have witches being like: don’t tell me what to do!!! Like!! Gurl wtf lmaoo I don’t know how people claim to be empaths or into this but they don’t see that maybe if there was a so called “Great Awakening” to “Empower Ourselves” that’s probably what the fucking point was? Not to say that you need to spend every waking moment protesting (another contribution of capitalism- showing some kind of documented proof on social media that you stand for something instead of little daily actions embedded into your everyday life) but you can find ways to change your daily patterns to make space for the societal change that’s coming to bring in a more compassionate world and better community. But since we are so indoctrinated in this consumerist culture, so many people don’t know how to incorporate their values into their everyday lives anymore. It’s all about quantity and showing off on social media. And that negatively impacts witchcraft cause witchcraft is a daily practice you do little things for everyday that just gets embedded into your everyday life, but people get confused and think to be legit it’s something you gotta buy into or show off as proof with stylistic rituals and of course for many people that’s exhausting or financially inaccessible. 

And for the sake of clarity cause the internet hates using critical thinking sometimes, of COURSE you can have a fun and flashy craft I’m not saying you can’t, but there is a massive imbalance here I am pointing out with how people are developing insecurities because they cannot attain this aesthetic overnight without dropping a shit ton of money. Yes witchcraft is very aesthetic-heavy but that’s because it’s a really creative practice that people pour their creativity and energy into and capitalism saw a way to put a price tag on it and now it’s confusing everyone else that’s mistaking this as something else to consume in exchange for money. 

And then I hate that I feel often I cannot talk about this cause instead of people using their critical thinking braincells and realizing how bad capitalism is, they somehow turn this conversation into thinking that I just don’t like when a culture becomes mainstream cause not everyone should enjoy a culture or whatever and it’s like fucking hell of course I would LOVE more witches and to have more people into celebrating nature or finding their own magic and connecting to the universe and whatever, but capitalism isn’t helping at all. It’s separating us from it’s connection and the meaning behind it’s practice. (Also one day I dream of living in a witchy town or community so yeah, the more the merrier, but right now with capitalism, this method is not the way to get into this practice lol). 

You really see the negative effects of capitalism marketing witchcraft because people now treat it as like this commodity they can jump into without finding a way to genuinely connect with it cause it’s all just a gimmick until the next zeitgeist. This either manifests in two ways where they think they can just buy a book or read some posts and not do any work on themselves or thinking on stuff like cultural appropriation so when they start experimenting they might bring harm to themselves by evoking spirits that do not want to work with them, or taking in some sacred herb or substance that can fuck them up leaving deep psychological damage or death- or they can harm others in a myriad of ways. 

Then the other way it manifests are people feeling like witchcraft is suddenly inaccessible because you need money to practice it because capitalism put that veil over their eyes. It’s now another thing gatekept by money. So they try to reclaim it by being like: it’s just a title you can slap on yourself; but they give capitalism more power because that’s what capitalism was doing all along by stripping the meaning. Stripping it down to a concept that only matters as a label that evokes a brand or idea but not an actual practice. In a way it’s very counter culture to not buy into the aesthetic or put in effort anymore. Even if you want to put in effort you feel like you are not good enough cause you will never fit capitalism’s standards of quantity and money to spend to showcase it on the internet to feel legit. So people develop this no-effort approach to it. And ONCE AGAIN for clarity for the internet’s lack of critical thinking and jumping to conclusions I am NOT referring to anything like spoony witchcraft or energy based witchcraft (I am an energy witch primarily thank you very much) I am talking about people calling themselves witches but then when you want to sit down and chat about the craft they have a blank stare cause they were never serious and sometimes judge you for how much you cared about it cause they don’t really believe in it anyway. Not even cause it’s woowoo it’s cause capitalism doesn’t make you believe any anything anymore. The only thing it wants you to believe in is money and what you can consume with it.  

And then when people online try to talk about this and point out it’s a practice these guys get angry with you like you are gatekeeping but it’s like BITCH it’s a FREE FUCKING PRACTICE like GO TALK TO A TREE go COLLECT A ROCK YOU FOUND IN THE CLEAR STREAM OF A BABBLING BROOK and maybe you’d CALM THE FUCK DOWN. Capitalism making it seem like you gotta buy all this shit to be seen as legit is not what this practice is about and it makes me upset how there is like this massive group of people that want to access this culture but are so lethargic about actually doing anything because they are disenchanted and it’s really because they are mentally bogged down by capitalism’s grip on it making them feel like they aren’t shit cause they can’t afford all that bullshit that ain’t gonna help them anyway so they just call themselves witches to get them 2 drops of serotonin and feel included but never really go anywhere beyond that cause capitalism strips the fucking joy and meaning out of everything. The only reason why this bothers me is cause I could be staying in my lane drinking my herbs and shit and chilling but then people either judge me for the effort I put into my practice’s aesthetics thinking I am shallow and buying into this or they think I am being reckless and dangerous believing in something not real by practicing a craft that tbh has a lot of dangerous aspects to it so it’s not rated E for everyone. Like you can fit it to what you want it to be since it’s your journey but it’s always been a bit edgy in some ways and it’s annoying when you get people judging you now for your lifestyle or they wonder why you are so invested cause they don’t get it. 

Anyway that was a rant but you asked for it lol. 

orchard - share one thing that you’d like to happen this autumn.

Get some more weed 

Thanks for the asks lol. Kept the last one short haha but it’s true I have been trying to manifest for a while after my quarantine rations went out. Here are the autumnal asks if anyone else wants to ask or reblog them!

[tuesdayisfordancing]

A few loosely connected thoughts about ship wars, fandom purity culture, antis, etc. Apologies for the awkward attempt at nested bullets.

Almost everyone has natural selectivity where they remember bad things said about the stuff they like more than bad stuff said about stuff they don’t like, interpret it as harsher, etc.

Once you’ve received even one actual hate message, gotten harassed even one time, this bias to interpret someone mentioning that they dislike your fave as an ATTACK intensifies.

Ships and characters that get a lot of hate, that become Acceptable Targets(TM) are almost always also REALLY POPULAR - sometimes (often?) the most popular ship by numbers. I think, in combination with the fact that we all make judgements without full context (most people don’t actually publish the anon hate they get, and if you don’t follow someone you don’t necessarily know how they got harassed for X opinion a while back and Y seemingly innocuous comment is or seems like a renewal of that harrassment) this can lead to non shippers-of-the-thing-or-likers-of-the-character thinking that the shippers or stans just have a persecution complex. “Not everybody has to cater to you, I’m allowed to not like things, yeesh don’t take everything so personally” goes the thought. This overlooks how vastly unpleasant it is to be the Acceptable Target for nasty comments even if you have a lot of friends in the boat with you.

Something feeling like an ATTACK is not necessarily about the intensity with which dislike is expressed, but the WAY dislike is expressed. It can be hard to express why a particular statement felt like it stepped over a line, further giving the impression of overreaction.

   >  An example: the first time I saw the “Gay Ship for Gay People vs Gay Ship for Straight People” meme it fucked me up, and I’m still probably not going to do a great job of articulating all the reasons, but here goes:

   >     >  First, the particular meme I saw was one where some people clearly meant it as friendly teasing, some people clearly didn’t, and others were somewhere in between. The cumulative effect was the sensation of my middle school bullies going “haha you’re a loser, just kidding, but not really, why aren’t you laughing about my funny joke about what a fucking loser you are?”

   >     >  Fandom is overwhelmingly queer and the bits that ship same sex pairings more so. As far as I can tell there aren’t any “gay ships for straight people”. The ship I first saw this about you can tell is mostly queer with the briefest of glances around tumblr. It’s hard for me to express why this matters, when the inaccuracy isn’t the point - I think it would be a shitty meme even if a same sex ship did have a higher proportion of straight shippers than queer, but I do still feel like it matters that mostly they don’t.

   >     >  A lot of queer people are insecure about their place in the queer community, either because of youth, past experience, not fitting the Awesome Queer image, general personality, whatever. Telling anybody they’re not really queer because of what they ship is a bad move, even if you meant it as friendly ribbing or contrariwise even if you can’t imagine how a queer person could enjoy that ship.

   >     >  Man, imagine if I fucking switched it. Hell woulda rained down. So maybe it’s not such a joke?

   >     >  Having been exposed to this meme in a few other fandoms and contexts now, it doesn’t explicitly say it, but it has strong connotations of the whole “queer things are more moral and more moral things are queer” attitude that... I don’t know if it’s actually more common than it used to be or more sincere than it used to be or what, but *gestures inarticulately* Bad! Increases shame in people whose well-being you care about!

   >     >  It’s a meme making a direct claim about “the type of people who ship x” which is, in fact, in type if not intensity, an attack on the shippers rather than an expression of dislike of the ship. Even if it’s a technically neutral claim - first of all come on, it isn’t neutral around these parts, and actually I’m not sure there’s a second of all because I don’t think anyone makes these generalizations about actually neutral-in-fandom-spaces-attributes. And it’s perfectly set up to make you look dumb and oversensitive for getting defensive.

Okay, done with the example, sorry that took so long. Where the fuck was I. Oh right, onto: Tumblr Infrastructure Makes Things Worse, Verse 700. One of the ways people try to get along despite differences of opinion is delineation of spaces. Tumblr deliberately fucks with this (in order to provide other things, but still):

   >  Did you know you can no longer prevent your organizational tags from causing things to show up in the searchable tag by using 5 filler tags? So much for that. Plus even now there are people new to tumblr who don’t know about searchable tags.

   >  But even beyond that just posting something on your tumblr is more like shouting it into the crowd than it was on livejournal, because the main way people interact with your post is to reblog it. The nature of the tumblr post as something that travels makes the difference between shouting at fandom as a whole vs. shouting to your friends vs. shouting to yourself indistinct. “May a bitch not be catty and judgmental on her own blog?!” asks the tumblr user. Well, it used to be good manners to keep the cattiest and most judgmental posts friends-locked but that isn’t an option anymore - and even the unlocked livejournal post offered a little more room for a difference between a post mostly for yourself and your friends vs a post directed AT fandom as a whole. If you were aiming your post outward you deliberately indicated that. Now people kinda... take their best guess based on Vibes? And of course everyone’s more likely to take it personally when it’s their fave and more likely to roll their eyes and say “people are allowed to dislike things on their own blog” when it’s something they dislike too and also more likely to take “X character is scum” as a neutral opinion statement if that’s the General Assessment vs. an inflammatory remark if it’s not and everything is a mess.

Pretty sure I had one more thing but meh this is long already and also if I don’t post it now I’ll start to overthink shit and never post it.

[unfolded73]

Five Times Ronnie Was a Friend to David and One Time She Was a Friend to Patrick (1/1) - schitt’s creek ff

"I think it's less about Ronnie disliking Patrick, and [more about] Ronnie seeing this person come in and having a huge effect on someone she cares as much about as she does David," Robinson said. "Ronnie likes to take her time and figure things out, and err on the side of suspicion." -- Karen Robinson in The Advocate

Rated Teen, 3876 words

___________________________________

1.

When Ronnie saw Stevie get out of the car that morning with David Rose, she almost spit out her coffee.

Ronnie had been going on Roland’s annual turkey shoot since before she’d run for town council almost a decade ago, when she’d shot more turkeys than any of the men on the trip and had earned a lot of grudging respect. This morning, she’d been standing there with Bob and Roland, shooting the same kind of shit they always did. Their council meetings often devolved into this kind of idle chatter, which was one of the many reasons it was hard to get anything done in Schitt’s Creek.

The day was cool and crisp and Ronnie’s thermos of coffee was warm in her hand. She was already looking forward to swapping it for beer later, after they’d hopefully bagged a few wild turkeys. Then David and Stevie arrived, and Ronnie’s attention was thoroughly diverted.

Ronnie hadn’t really spent any time with David Rose yet. She knew Johnny because he’d made a nuisance of himself at a couple of council meetings, and she knew Alexis, thanks to her court-ordered community service. (And yes, Alexis was a princess — the type of person you’d see on one of those ridiculous reality shows on basic cable. But she showed up for her community service dates and made some kind of an effort. Plus she was pretty; not Ronnie’s type and way too young for her, but admittedly enjoyable to look at.) Ronnie had even spoken to Moira, the most baffling of the Roses, a couple of times at the café. David, she hadn’t really given much thought to yet.

Okay, that wasn’t exactly true. She’d clocked David as queer right away, and she couldn’t say she was sorry to have another queer resident in Schitt’s Creek. But she’d also assumed he was vain and probably an asshole, and she didn’t have room in her life for assholes. Seeing him at the annual turkey shoot didn’t fit at all into her preconceived notion about him.

The way he handled a gun, that fit into her preconceived notion about him. Still, he was trying, and she had to give him credit for that. Ronnie took pity on him and helped with his grip on the gun so that the recoil wouldn’t knock him flat. And when he shot his first turkey in the neck and had to watch it slowly die, she did feel sorry for him, patting his back to commiserate.

When they paused for a break in the early afternoon, Ronnie took it upon herself to bring David a beer. He accepted the bottle with a poorly-restrained grimace. “Thanks.” His voice was quiet, the edges from earlier filed off.

“How did Stevie talk you into this, anyway?” Ronnie asked. “Doesn’t seem like your scene.”

He looked down his nose at her. “How’d you guess?”

She just raised an eyebrow and waited.

David huffed. “I don’t know. Stevie asked me, and there had been this bug thing, and… I figured if I said no, it would just confirm her assumption that I have no practical skills. And… I don’t know. She’s been a… friend… to me. So.”

Ronnie nodded, impressed with his openness. Maybe it was brought on by the trauma of killing a turkey, but it was openness nonetheless.

“Plus, I had nothing better to do,” David added.

Ronnie clinked her beer bottle against his. “Fair enough.”

2.

Ronnie couldn’t help being curious when word got around that David was starting to get things set up inside the general store, that maybe he’d be opening his new store soon, although no date had been announced. There was a lot of buzz around town about it — Brenda had been telling anyone who would listen that David Rose was a fan of the moisturizer she made at home and would be selling it under his label. If Ronnie was honest, Brenda was getting a little too excited about it given that the store hadn’t even opened yet.

Still, when Ronnie came out of the café one afternoon and saw a sign painter starting to work on the windows outside, she wandered over to have a look.

She tapped on the door, waiting until David looked up and beckoned before she went in.

Already, she could see David’s mark on the space. All the metal shelving from the old general store was gone, replaced by wood furniture that gave the store a much more upscale look. David was busy sticking labels onto bottles in the middle of the room, his tongue between his teeth as he concentrated on his task.

“Hi, Ronnie,” he said, his eyes darting around nervously. “Are you here to revoke my business license?”

She laughed. “I don’t have that kind of power.” Sticking her hands in her back pockets, Ronnie rocked on her heels. “I just wanted to get a look at the place.”

David gestured around. “Here it is. There’s a lot to do still.”

She looked around at all the boxes of products, at the empty shelves left to fill. “You don’t have any help?”

“Oh, I do, actually? Not at the moment, but I have a… I guess I have a business partner now?” A furtive smile flickered on his face. “Not officially, yet. But I will have a business partner.”

Ronnie raised her eyebrows. “Who?”

“Um, Patrick Brewer? He works with Ray right now, but—”

“That guy? Isn’t he brand new in town?” Gwen just so happened to have introduced her to Patrick last week as the newest player on the Café Tropical baseball team.

David shrugged. “I guess.”

“And so you trust him to help you run your business… why exactly?” Ronnie had gotten the impression of a hypercompetitive bro type, what little of Patrick had caught her attention during the game. She hadn’t been impressed.

David’s eyes widened. “Because!” She stared at him and waited for him to elaborate. “Because he knows about taxes and grant money and food product licenses and I don’t know about any of those things.”

“So you’re going to entrust your business to him,” Ronnie said flatly, shaking her head. “Isn’t that exactly the kind of trust that led to your family losing all your money?”

“Patrick’s not going to embezzle money from me,” David said with an eye roll. “For one thing, I don’t really have any money for him to embezzle. And for another, he’s not that kind of person.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.” David huffed, flailing his hands around. “Now can you please stop trying to give me more things to be anxious about? Believe me, I’m anxious enough as it is.”

“Okay.” She sighed. David was like an innocent lamb in some ways, she thought, and not just because of his fuzzy sweaters.

“Look, I know the town council would have preferred Christmas World, but—”

“Oh, that was mainly Bob and Roland,” Ronnie said. And Moira, it had to be said, but she wasn’t about to mention that to David in case he didn’t already know. “Personally, I think year-round Christmas stores are tacky.”

“Thank you.”

“Whereas this place looks like it’s gonna be…” She scanned the room again. Somehow it seemed brighter than it ever had under the previous owners. Maybe it was just that the windows were clean. “Really nice. Classy.”

David gave her a charming, lopsided smile. “That’s the plan.”

3.

“Where the hell is Bob?” Ronnie said, looking at her watch. The sooner they got this council meeting started, the sooner she could get on with her day.

“Robert does seem to have a rather dégagé relationship with the clock, doesn’t he?” Moira said, flipping the page on the book she was reading.

“How late is David’s store open?” Roland asked. “Jocelyn wanted me to pick up a couple of things on my way home.”

“I’m afraid I don’t monitor the hours of my son’s place of business, Roland,” Moira said with a bored sigh.

Roland leaned back and put his feet on the desk. “I mean, assuming they aren’t making a habit of closing early so they can get up to some hanky-panky in the back room,” he said with a snicker. And then when no one commented, he added more directly, “Twyla told me David and Patrick are an item.”

Moira finally looked up. “Are you asking me to gossip about my own son’s romantic liaisons?”

Roland was undeterred. “Just curious if the rumours are true.”

“I’m not sure which rumours you speak of, but yes, I understand that David’s relationship with his business partner has grown into an affair de coeur.”

“So you are going to gossip about it then,” Ronnie said, her chin resting on her hand.

“I shall give no further details, Veronica,” Moira said, going back to her book.

Ronnie didn’t give it any more thought until she saw David in the café a few days later. She was lingering over her breakfast at the counter when David came in and ordered a coffee and a tea to go from Twyla.

“How’s the store, David?” Ronnie asked when Twyla went to make the drinks.

“It’s… great, actually. People seem to want to buy the things we sell, which is nice.”

“Well, that is sort of the whole point of owning a store.” She hesitated, unsure if she should say anything else, but then she figured, what the hell. “The scuttlebutt around town is that you and you and your business partner are more than business partners.”

“Oh, so people are talking about us,” David said with a frown.

Ronnie shrugged. “It’s a small town and there’s not much else for people to do. You know how it is.”

He looked insulted at the idea that he would know how it is.

“It’s an awful lot to share with one person, David,” she said, because she’d been there before, when she was young. Madly in love and certain that she’d found the one, the stereotypical U-Haul lesbian, moving too fast and getting her heart broken. She’d learned the hard way.

“Are you giving me relationship advice?” His head moved a complicated dance on the end of his neck, somehow expressing his anxiety better than his words ever could.

“I’m saying that getting involved with the person who you have to run a business with can get messy when things don’t work out.”

His eyes flickered down to his shoes. “I know. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I fuck it up.”

“So sure that you’re going to be the one to fuck it up?” she asked, feeling that same protectiveness that he’d always engendered in her for some reason.

“Well Patrick isn’t going to be the one to fuck it up, he’s… perfect, basically?”

Him? she wanted to ask. Instead she said, “Nobody’s perfect.”

Twyla brought over David’s to-go cups.

“Just… be careful, that’s all I’m saying,” Ronnie said, accepting the check from Twlya and pulling out her wallet to pay.

“I will,” David said softly. “I mean, I am.” But she could tell that he was already a goner, his cheeks flushed and bottom lip pulled between his teeth. He also pulled his wallet from his pocket, handing over some cash to Twyla. “He’s… new at this. Being with a man,” David said, so quietly that she almost didn’t catch the words.

“Oh, boy,” Ronnie said, because she’d been down that road too. She’d been an experiment to a few girls who later decided they weren’t really all that bisexual after all. She’d been forced back into the closet by girlfriends who weren’t ready to be out. All of it sucked. She guessed David had been through his share of those kinds of relationships too.

Fighting every aloof instinct she had, Ronnie put a hand on David’s arm. “If you ever want to talk, I’m around. You can give me a call.”

David looked as surprised by this moment of tenderness as Ronnie herself was. “Thanks, Ronnie.”

“Any time, David.”

4.

Ronnie was on her third whiskey when David and Stevie arrived at the Wobbly Elm.

David was wincing as they joined her at the bar. “I hope my partner hasn’t driven you to drink, Ronnie.”

Ronnie glared at him. As if she cared enough about Patrick Brewer for anything he did to drive her to drink. “I finished the bathroom when I said I would, didn’t I?”

David held his hands up in surrender. “The bathroom is beautiful, Ronnie. The calligraphy workshop last night went off without a hitch.”

“Glad to hear it,” she muttered, her drink back at her lips.

“Will you shut up about the damn bathroom, David? We’re here to drown my sorrows, remember?” Stevie said, poking him in the chest. “Go get us drinks.”

“Fine, fine,” he said, moving down the bar to get the bartender’s attention.

“Drown your sorrows?” Ronnie asked.

Stevie sighed. “The guy I was seeing turned out to be an asshole: the Stevie Budd story.”

“Mm.” Ronnie took another sip of her whiskey. “I’d say the problem is men, but my love life hasn’t been much better lately,” she said just as David rejoined them.

“I thought you were with… what’s her name? The gravel lady,” David said.

“Karen,” Stevie said at the same time that Ronnie said, “We split up.”

“I’m sorry, Ronnie,” Stevie said, lifting her hand as if she was going to touch Ronnie’s back, and then wisely thinking better of it and dropping her hand back to the bar.

Ronnie shrugged. “It happens.”

“Wow, this has, like, never happened to me,” David said.

Stevie narrowed her eyes. “What?”

“I’ve never been the one with the successful relationship in a group of people at a bar like this. I’m always the one crying into my martini.”

“Shut the fuck up, David,” Stevie said.

“Does that sound like a thing you should be saying to us right now?” Ronnie asked, her voice going high with indignation.

“Just for that, you’re buying the next round too,” said Stevie.

“Okay.” David said, biting his lip. “Sorry.”

***

“And so apparently a casual fuck is all I was good for,” Stevie said before drawing more pot smoke into her lungs. She and David sat on the hood of Stevie’s car at the far end of the Wobbly Elm parking lot. Ronnie stood beside them, holding herself steady using the car’s side mirror and sharing a joint with these children because apparently that was how low she had sunk.

“That’s bullshit, Stevie,” David said, taking the joint from between Stevie’s thumb and finger.

“Well, you’d know,” Stevie said.

“That’s exactly it, though,” he replied before pausing to hold the smoke in. “It’s because you are such an excellent person in other ways that it would have been a mistake to ruin it with sex,” David said in a long exhale before passing the joint to Ronnie. “Or, with more sex, I mean.”

“Maybe I’m also bad at sex,” Stevie said.

“You are definitely not bad at sex. You’re great at sex,” David said.

“Really?” Stevie asked.

David nodded. “Yep. Yes.”

“You’re great at it too, David.”

“Uhhh, yeah. Of course I am.”

“I am getting such a fascinating window into your relationship,” Ronnie said as she passed the joint back to Stevie.

“I bet you’re great at sex too, Ronnie,” David said.

“Damn right I am.”

“Stevie and I tried the friends with benefits thing a long time ago,” David explained, the marijuana freeing his tongue. “And although we’re better off as friends and I’m very much in love with Patrick, that doesn’t stop me from seeing that you are the whole package, Stevie Budd, and if Emir didn’t see that then he can suck a bag of dicks.”

Stevie laughed wildly.

“Same goes for Gravel Karen,” David said, gesturing up and down at Ronnie.

“Uh huh,” Ronnie said impassively, although deep down she was pleased.

Stevie’s head dropped until her chin touched her chest. “I’m gonna have to leave my car here. We should call a cab.”

It occurred to Ronnie that she wasn’t anywhere near sober enough to drive either. She was out of practice at this whole going out and drinking in bars thing, and she was even more out of practice with this smoking pot thing. “I’m too old for this,” she said with a heavy sigh.

“I’ll call Patrick,” David said, fumbling for his phone. “He’ll pick us up.”

Which was how twenty minutes later, Ronnie found herself climbing into the back seat of Patrick Brewer’s Toyota next to Stevie, who immediately let her head fall onto Ronnie’s shoulder. David was planting a sloppy kiss on his boyfriend’s cheek in the front seat, making Patrick wipe the saliva off his face with the sleeve of his hoodie.

“Wow, you guys reek of pot smoke,” Patrick said, looking at Ronnie with his stupid Bambi-eyes in the rearview mirror.

“Just drive, Brewer,” Ronnie said.

“Straight men are the worst,” Stevie murmured. “Why do I bother with them?”

“You’re asking the wrong person, honey,” Ronnie said, petting Stevie’s hair.

5.

“So they tell me I have you to thank for all the extra flowers,” David said, sinking into a chair next to Ronnie as she put a forkful of wedding cake in her mouth. She caught a flash of his inner thigh before he crossed his legs, and while Ronnie had no interest in the male half of the species, she’d have to be dead not to appreciate David Rose in that skirt and those boots.

“Well, it was the least I could do,” she said after she’d swallowed her bite of cake. “You deserved a nice day.”

“And you and the Jazzagals learned our song,” David said with one of his lopsided smiles, a glass half-full of champagne dangling carelessly in one hand. “You, Ronnie Lee, stood in a room full of people and sang the song that Patrick sang to me at the first open mic.”

“That was Jocelyn’s idea,” Ronnie said with a frown. “I had to go along with the group.”

David elbowed her. “Come on. Admit it. You don’t totally hate Patrick. You like him a little bit.”

She was going to admit no such thing. “I don’t hate that he makes you happy. I don’t understand what you see in him, but I’m glad that you’re so happy.” And then she felt tears welling up again, as if it wasn’t bad enough that she had cried during the ceremony. She fervently hoped no one had seen her wiping away tears.

He grinned more widely, so she guessed she’d given him a satisfactory answer. Ronnie looked over at the dance floor, where David’s husband was currently dancing with his sister-in-law.

“I hear you’re buying the place out on O’Beirn Road,” she said.

He nodded, his face positively glowing with happiness now. “I’ve been admiring that cottage from afar for years. We’ll be moving in next month.”

“A place like that, it might need some work done. I trust you’ll come to me first if you need a contractor?” She took another bite of cake. It was delicious cake, moist and citrusy, and she savored the bite on her tongue.

“Of course we will. I have some ideas for the kitchen, although we might have to wait a year or two until there’s enough money to do justice to my vision.”

“Well, we wouldn’t want to do anything that didn’t do justice to your vision.” She ate some more cake and watched David watching Patrick until she couldn’t stand it any more. “Ugh, your heart eyes are giving me a stomachache. Go dance.”

David held his hand out to her. “Come dance with me, Ronnie.”

She hesitated for a moment, then shrugged and took his hand and let herself be pulled out onto the dance floor.

+1.

Ronnie had almost dozed off at her desk in Town Hall when he came in.

“Patrick Brewer,” she said, eyeing him up and down. “Shouldn’t you be off on a honeymoon somewhere?”

He approached her nervously, his hands clutched together in front of him like a supplicant. “We decided to hold off on the honeymoon until we could afford to go somewhere really nice.”

“It’s not time to renew your permits for the store already, is it?”

“Nope. I’m here about council, actually,” he said.

“Public meetings are the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month,” she said, leaning back and putting her feet up on the desk.

“Okay, but I was more curious about the open council seat. With Mrs. Rose gone.”

“There’ll be an election to fill the seat,” she said, her feet thunking back down to the floor. “Why?”

“I, um… was thinking about running.” He chuckled nervously. “To keep it in the Rose family, I guess.”

“Assuming you’d win,” she said. “That’s presumptuous.”

“Is anyone else running?” he asked, a little of his usual, annoying self-confidence showing through.

Ronnie sighed. “Not yet.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “Is that really the reason you want to run? To keep it in the family?”

Patrick cleared his throat and stood up a little straighter. “No. Since we’re settling here pretty much permanently, I’ve been thinking about other ways I might be able to contribute to Schitt’s Creek. I have ideas about bringing more business to downtown. And David and I have gotten to know several of the farmers in the area, selling their products in the store, so I hear a lot about their concerns.”

Ronnie stared at him for another few seconds, and then opened a file drawer, pulling out a form. “You’ll need to fill this nomination form out and get five signatures to support your nomination,” she said, pointing at the blank spaces on the form. “Think you can do that?”

Patrick took the nomination form from her. “Do I think I can get five people to sign my nomination form?” he said, sounding a little bit testy. “Yes, I think I can manage that.”

“You’re a real joiner, aren’t you?” she asked, hand propped up on her hand. “Baseball, community theater, town council… next you’ll be joining the curling club.”

He smirked. “I would, but it interferes with my hockey practice. Besides, Ronnie, you do all those things. Plus the Jazzagals. I’d say it takes a joiner to know one.”

She huffed out a laugh. “Tell you what,” she said, reaching for the form. When he handed it back to her, she signed on the first nomination line. “I’ll give you your first signature.”

Taking the form back, Patrick gave her a bemused look. “I figured I’d be the last person you’d want filling the empty seat on council.”

She shrugged. “Not the last person…”

“Okay, thanks,” he said with an eye roll, turning to leave.

“I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas,” she called, making him stop and turn back. “And if you win, I’m looking forward to kicking your ass on a regular basis, just like I do in baseball.” And then Ronnie laughed, loud and long.

“Good to talk to you too, Ronnie,” Patrick said, headed back toward the door.

She was still laughing. “Say hi to your husband for me!”

[gettin-bi-bi-bi]

1. A lot of times on lgbtq media, I’ll see things that include all wlw but will be labeled as for lesbians. Like “lesbian term”, “this song for lesbians”, or they’ll be posts or media talking about “lesbian only” experiences that could apply to all wlw. What bugs me is that bc lesbian has a very strict definition, I really don’t feel included in these. Whereas “gay” is an umbrella term and I often feel like I wouldn’t have these problems as a bi man cause I feel like gay covers me.

2. Lesbians of course have their own things, but I’m only talking about stuff that def includes all wlw but is called “lesbian”. Like “lesbian” couples that may have a bi women in them. I feel like there’s this split between communities bc any time I see a bi girl use the term lesbian(not as a label; for anything else) there gets so much crap thrown. While I know bi men prob feel that same sometimes, gay is such a universal term that I don’t see it as much. Idk if that’s invasive of me to feel

disclaimer: I was typing and typing and.... this kinds turned into a rant so. Take it or leave it, I don’t know how much sense I’m making. You know, up until ~50-60 years ago the word “lesbian” just meant every woman who had sex with women. That 100% included women who also had sex with men. (Note that at the time those labels were about sex acts and not about an identity based on attraction.) So many lesbians back then were what we would now call bisexual or pansexual.

However, lesbian separatists and “political lesbians” (basically the OG radfems) decided that a true lesbian should not have anything to do with men. And thus they started to exclude bisexuals from lesbian spaces and terminology and we were forced to make our own community. Which we did.

Now in the last couple years, especially on tumblr, there’s been this attempt to “reunite” lesbians and bisexual women into a shared community called “wlw” or “sapphic”. Unfortunately there’s still lesbian separatists. And that’s how you get entire campaigns on tungle dot hell where people recycle radfem rhetoric to tell bi women we aren’t “allowed to use butch/femme because those are just for lesbians” and other historic revisionism like that.

Most of the time I see people use “wlw” or “sapphic” it's bi/pan women who make that effort. And I notice a development in which the same thing happens to wlw/sapphic as it did to “lesbian” back in ye olden days: bisexuals are being told to keep their mouths shut about their male partners because “this is wlw safe space and this shouldn’t be about Straight Things” and as a result many think that “sapphic” is just a synonym for “lesbian”.

And note that this is all something that happens in relatively niche online communities like tumblr. When we’re looking at mainstream media then it’s a whole other piece of cake because mainstream media, especially when created by and for cisgender heterosexuals, just doesn’t fucking care about these distinctions. Sometimes it’s “just” ignorance and not even malicous - they just really don’t know the difference. Sometimes (often times!) it’s textbook bisexual erasure.

Personally, I totally get how you feel. I don’t feel connected to the “lesbian community” at all. I have a couple of lesbian friends but I don’t engage in any lesbian community events (even though Berlin has plenty to offer). I don’t feel like I have anything to add there and frankly, I don’t feel like I can openly talk about the fact I am bisexual and dating a man.

Even terms like “wlw” and “sapphic” - even though I do use and appreciate the sentiment behind them - don’t really give me a sense of community or belonging. Maybe that’s also a generational thing. I also don’t feel like I have one type of attraction that’s sapphic and then another type of attraction that’s [insert adjective] for men (and another again for enbys?) - all of my attractions are bisexual so I don’t feel comfortable describing my attraction to women as “sapphic” bc it implies that it’s something different than my attraction to other genders. But again, that’s just my personal feelings. I don’t mind those terms and I don’t mind if someone would use those as umbrella terms for me or as identity labels for themselves - go for it. I just don’t feel any significant connection to them personally.

I’m also a petty asshole though so if some event or media or whatever is advertised as “lesbian* .... party / movie night / pride / book club” then I’m just like, well, I’m not a lesbian so that’s not for me, guess they’ll be missing out on getting to know me. And I get even more pissy when they add in small print “*also welcome to bisexuals” because if you wanna make an event for lesbians and bi women then why not advertise it as that? Putting us in parantheses or small-print is at best tone-deaf and at worst an expression of how little they value us.

Many lesbians aren’t actively biphobic and would never want to exclude us and would actually genuinely welcome us. So, don’t take this as me slagging off all lesbians. However... many, especially the younger ones, are still incredibly oblivious to the history of their own label (because radfems work very hard at erasung that history so it doesn’t include bi and trans women) as well as ignorant about the struggles that bisexual women have to face in particular both in mainstream society as well as within the LGBTQIA+ community. They often don’t realise how alienating it is for us to always only being an after-thought at best. Which is kinda hilarious given that they often (rightfully!) voice the same criticism when everything is made about cis gay men and lesbians are just the after-thought.

So long story short: I get it. It sucks. That being said, bisexual men also face a lot of issues and biphobia affects them in some specific gendered ways that are also pretty shitty. They really don’t have it better or easier then other bisexuals when it comes down to biphobia.

Now, you can either say “fuck it, lesbian stuff is for me, too” and ignore all the separatism and basically reclaim your rightful place in this community. Or you can stick to the bi community and seek out media/events that are explicitly for all the queers.

Maddie

[lesty-xx]

Okay but if Jane Foster was in Endgame...

So it starts with Tony, because like all things, it always starts with Tony.

Because Tony is a genius, and he's worked out time travel, but he's also a scientist, and a scientist knows that you need more than one opinion to make things full proof.

So he checks that Jane Foster is alive - and she is so they need to bring her in, because she's the worlds leading expert on portals, and they're essentially making controlled portals through time.

So they call Jane.

And Tony goes with Bruce to tell Thor that she's coming, because of course it would be Bruce who tells Thor.

And Tony wants to be there, because he's seen how Thor has - or rather, hasn't been coping, and he cares about Thor.

And Thor... freaks out a little bit.

Thor cleans himself up, he trims his beard, showers, Natasha braids his hair, and he wears better clothes. It's practically a Queer Eye transformation.

It takes Rocket laughing and then kindly telling Thor that he's "not going to get back your six pack by the time the broad shows up", that stops Thor from obsessively working out into an early grave.

And then Jane arrives.

After a quick and somewhat awkward introduction, she glues herself to Scott, Tony, and Bruce, sharing information and ideas.

It hurts her head a little bit, and it's worrying how little Scott understands quantum mechanics, since he's the closest thing they have to an expert - but she's here.

And Bruce notices Thor puppy dog expression, and he has never been able to ignore that expression, not now, not after everything they've been through.

So he - not so subtly, suggests that they go away and work on their own thing and reconvene to discuss things more.

Which is bullshit to Jane, Scott, and Tony, because that plan seems counterproductive, how are they supposed communicate if they're not communicating.

But Tony follows Bruce gaze and realises what Bruce is doing, and Tony's not sure if he should be helping this plan, lord knows Jane has a right to her privacy, and none of them know what went down between Thor and Jane.

But he also remembers helping Thor sit down after having a breakdown about Jane, he remembers how lost Thor was.

So Tony nods towards Bruce and agrees with Bruce's plan, and just like that, the four of them part ways.

So Jane is in one of the many labs Tony had built in the compound, and she's working on her own section of their time theory, because even though the machine is built, they need to get the kinks out before they send actual people through time outside an experiment. So she's cross referencing what Tony has written to her own research, when Thor appears.

And he looks... rough. It's clear he's been battling with himself on whether or not he should have come down and seen Jane, so she thinks she should give him a chance.

And they talk for a bit, and their break up comes up rather quickly in the conversation, and it seems Thor has a gross misunderstanding on their break up.

"Thor, I love you, that will never change, but I broke up with you because you left," she says, "and I had no way of contacting you. You could have been on Asgard, hell, you could have been in Australia for all I knew. 

“Time and time again you left and I stayed, I always stayed, I stayed behind, I stayed and waited for you, until I couldn't anymore. You were gone and it wasn't fair of you to ask me to stay, and with your life, it wasn't fair of me to ask that of you either."

And Thor's broken expression turns into one of slight hopefulness. "But Agard is on Earth now, I'm here, I'm here now."

"Everyone and their dusted dog knows Asgard is on Earth, the news was kind of hard to miss," she says with a chuckle, and Jane gives a soft, almost broken smile, because that was never the point, and it's going to hurt Thor to hear this. "I'm not going to be with you because it's convenient for you now, I'm not some sort of side quest, I love you, but it's too late."

And Thor takes a shuddering, shattered breath and Jane wants to take it back all over again, find a way to take away his pain.

But she can't let herself be in pain to give him happiness, that wouldn't make Thor happy anyway.

The research matches up and so they finish the portal, they finish determining when they're going to go, and they're ready to go.

And Jane is going too, because like hell she's letting them tamper with the ether in her body without her help.

And they all return with relative ease.

Well, almost all of them.

And it breaks Jane, a little bit, because she's not sure what they could have done differently, how they could have stopped it from happening.

She's not sure how they could have saved Natasha, and that hurts.

So she's there when Tony's gauntlet forms around Bruce hand, and she cowers with Tony behind his shield when Bruce snaps his fingers.

And it worked.

And everything... is okay.

Until it wasn't.

Thanos shoots the compound into a ruin, and she picks herself up from the ground, grateful she wasn't hurt, and she runs - because she has to find someone, Thor, Tony, anyone.

Because Thanos is here.

And she looks at the battlefield and sees Tony unconscious against rock, she sees Steve struggling to stand, and Thor - Thor needs help.

And when she looks back, Jane doesn't know what compels her to run out into the battlefield. But she does, she runs because she has to do something, she has to help. And she sprints towards Mjolnir because that's something Thor can use, that's something that will protect him.

It doesn't even come into her mind that only the worthy can pick the damn thing up.

She's there next to Steve and her hand grips around the handle of the forgotten tool. She thrusts it up into the air, her only thought on Thor, on Thanos, on the battle.

Then she realises what she's done.

Lighting surrounds her in dramatic, sporadic bursts, reshaping her clothing, her hair, and she doesn't see it but she knows that she's a beacon, because everyone is staring at her. It's as though time is frozen, the fighting, the battle, the aliens, and the people - are frozen.

Because Jane has the power of Thor.

And they rally behind Captain America, and she fights for all she's worth.

And when Spiderman - a kid, needs help, she's there with her fellow Avengers and they protect him and get the gauntlet through the battle.

And when Tony snaps his fingers, she's there too, and she mourns. Because he was a friend, he was a friend who she respected and who respected her back.

And he deserved so much more.

And later, after the funeral, with her heart full of loss, she is in New Asgard with Valkyrie and Thor. And she thinks, maybe, she had been wrong about Thor.

Not fully, he should have made time, he should have been here, or he should have at least provided a way so they could communicate.

But she understands now.

"When I held Mjolnir," she says, "I felt this all encompassing sense of responsibility that I've never even imagined before. Do you always feel like that?" And Thor looks at her, with a shine in his eyes that Jane can only see as pride, and says, "I used to."

"I'm not sure if I'm ready to be with you again, if I ever will be ready to be with you like we were - again, but I think, now knowing things from your perspective a bit better, that I've been a bit harsh on you, and I want us to be in each others live, if you want that too, that is." She flushes because she knows she has been rambling, but she said her piece and Thor - Thor looks like he’s seen the sun again for the first time in centuries.

She doesn't notice Valkyrie, not then, and how Valkyrie was almost physically refraining herself from either rolling her eyes or falling to the floor in laughter.

They must have been a pair, that’s for sure.

And Thor says yes.

And then he's leaving to go on space adventures with the Guardians of the Galaxy - as they call themselves, and like hell Jane isn't going with them.

So she leaves Earth, and she travels for the stars.

[daely-trans-life]

Thoughts on gender and other matters (letter to a friend)

Dearest [Friend],

I finally got around to writing this email, god knows it's long overdue.

You've asked me to explain what lead me to the realisation that I might be transgender and well, that's a larger subject than what I can summarise in a text message (in fact this email might turn into a novel, in which case I'm very sorry), so here we go.

I can see how from an outside point of view it might come as a surprise, albeit for me this realisation is something that's been long in the making... Probably ever since I became aware of the concept of gender itself. 

To begin with, I need to explain a little bit about the culture I was raised in, because it ties into the delay significantly. It has to do with the societal expectations as much as the language... Hungarian has no gender markers for words and doesn't use gendered pronouns at all, which also means that in a way, the concept itself is way less defined and pronounced in the cultural context. That, coupled with the strict and rigid code of conduct regarding politeness and formality means that it's generally not discussed in society on any level, neither in family, between friends nor in public education.

It's a binary concept that's dependent on one's genetic makeup and primary sexual characteristics that is assigned at birth and never discussed further. It doesn't involve choice or exploration, and it's not viewed as a  spectrum the same way as it is customary in Western countries. But at the same time, traditional gender roles are built into society on every level, and while it's never mentioned, it's enforced and engraved in people way stronger than it is in for example Denmark.

So while as a teen/young adult, I could feel I didn't fit into the box of "girl" or "woman" the way others around me did, I had no vocabulary to describe my experience, and I definitely didn't have a platform for exploring it. On the few occasions when I mentioned it to some friends that I kind of view myself as both a man and a woman or maybe neither, the general answer was something to the effect of "well no shit?! are we meant to be surprised by this?", which was both baffling and very validating at the same time.

And then I moved out of the country and a whole new world of concepts and options and spectra opened up to me, where I also had the opportunity to learn more about my identity when it came to gender and sexuality. I quickly discovered that me not being straight was definitely a thing, and I learnt about labels that finally fit my experience and I found a community that welcomed me and that had people similar to myself in it. And that was all great, but it also taught me that gender was a Thing, and not only that, but it also had way more to it than just binary man and woman. 

And I went down that rabbit hole hard. I started identifying as non-binary, tried on a lot of labels and pronouns, some really out there ones too, mostly privately, while trying to find the one that felt right. And of course in the meantime I've met and learnt about trans people, and it kind of hit me how that specific experience resonated with me. But of course, I couldn't just BE a guy... Could I?

Well, no, of course not! Because I had parents that raised me as their daughter, I had a husband who married me to be his wife, and I had always been presented and perceived as a woman... It's not like I could just uproot my entire identity and claim a new one just because it would make me happy... I had others to think of and consequences to dread, and in general, I was too fucked up anyway to really be concerned with something like what noise people make to address me or what concept do they identify me with. So I buried the question deep, never touching it, because as long as I wasn't looking, it didn't hurt and I didn't get confused. And this worked for a while, until it obviously didn't.

And then years had passed and a few things happened. For one, I met my other partner, who also identifies as non-binary and who is way more into the queer aspects of life than my husband. And with Them, I got to talk about the things that have always bothered me and that I previously was unable to talk about. They taught me the language to express myself, not only with words but also with presentation. And while confined in the safety of our shared home, I've stepped onto the Rocky Road of Recovery, that involved a lot of mental healthcare, therapy, exploration and coming to terms with my identity in more than one way.

In a way, unraveling the tangle of issues I've been carrying around helped a lot too. I've been living with the vague sense of "there is something wrong with me" for so long that it just became the everyday reality of my life, and I kind of accepted that all the things I now know are symptoms of certain conditions, were just how life was supposed to be, that the world was supposed to be this hostile, low-key but always uncomfortable place with occasional bursts of horrible pain. And through all that, I still held myself to the expectations I was presented with by my upbringing, because throughout my life, whenever I tried to ask for help in any way, I was generally met with blame and dismissal, and I was taught that the only option was to bite my tongue and power through. So I bit down and did what I could and every time I broke down, I just dug my heels in and kept going until one day I couldn't go on anymore. 

And in a way, this was a blessing. Because finally, at the point where I completely gave up, I was presented with an abundance of care and actual help I've never received before. I went to psychiatry, I got my diagnoses, I got a social worker to help me, I got a therapist, and a damn good one for that, and I got the time to heal and figure myself out without having to worry about things like where I was going to live or what I was going to eat. And lo and behold, things started getting better. Of course, a year of therapy cannot undo 20 years of trauma and abuse, I didn't expect it to either, but it gave me tools to work with, ways to address and manage my symptoms and space to explore ways in which I could be happier, healthier and more stable than I've ever been before.

I'm on a good path, and in a good place now. I'm engaged to my partner, still happily married to my husband and we live in a loving, if a bit crooked family in a beautiful place at the countryside. For the first time I'm hopeful about the future and I feel like I have realistic expectations about my life and what I would be able to make of it. Of course there is still a lot of work to be done and a lot of ways I wish to improve, but these dreams had finally stopped being just that, and slowly morphed into goals, things I could actually achieve and I can see ways in which to do so. 

And so, now that happiness suddenly became a viable option, I started wondering about the questions of identity again, and well... I guess I just felt like my time has finally come. I'm almost thirty. Yeah, that's a bit late compared to many who had this figured out by their late teens, but hey, I'm young, I have most of my adult life ahead of me! And I finally have the space and the support network that gives me enough confidence to pursue my true identity and everything that comes with that. 

I'm taking it slowly though. It's scary as hell, and it's a huge step, and I still have a million questions and a million obstacles to overcome. But if my journey so far had taught me anything, that is that no decision is irreversible, there is no such thing as too late to change things, and that fear is never a good enough reason not to do what's right for you. I'm at square one right now, and I don't know if this is the path I'll stay on forever, but I feel like I owe myself to at least try. If I never committed to anything just because it might not last forever, I wouldn't be having the amazing life I have today, if I was even still alive. 

So that's where I stand. Sorry about the insanely long ramblings, now you know everything you never wished to know about my inner workings, but I don't quite know how to explain this in any other way than the extremely winded one. 

I miss you. I wish we could hang out and I could be, you know, not an absolute wreck for once :D I swear I'm a way funner person these days than I was when we used to hang out.

Lots of love,

Dae

P.s.: I guess this DID turn into a novel, sorry about that again! :$ xoxo