#as though people with complicated relationships to gender havent been thinking about it critically

[burinazar]

speaking as the hypothetical type of person they're supposedly concerned about, it really grates at me that sometimes "GC"/TERF types will be like 'we just want ppl to feel free to be gender non conforming while still being their assigned gender! it's valid for women to be just gender non conforming and not trans!!!'

a) it's not somehow important to me to have the sanctity of this defended against some kind of imagined societal pressure to be transmasc (??? this isn't a thing?) or to imply that there's some hard barrier between 'gnc with a lack of strong link to your gender or conformity to expectations thereof (cool, good, questioning society)' and 'nonbinary (ohh nooOOoOo, fell for 'TRA' propaganda and gave in to society's definition of 'women' and decided you fall outside of it rather than rewriting your own definition of womanhood)' like this dichotomy they attempt to present is so. stupid. because as far as a hard barrier there at all [that presumably people are determined to push folks over or something] for *me* there straight up does not seem to be one lol, it's all about meta and very personal feelings regarding societal context that i generally regard myself as the first and not the second, not some kind of external ill influence one needs protecting from)

b) 'gender critical' kind of' rhetoric *demonstrably* makes life Worse and Harder for GNC women by positioning traits and expressions indicative of masculinity and supposed unfemininity as sources of suspicion and hatred (because of course the ultimate goal of all of it is to attack trans women in particular, hence all women must be scrutinized for a lack of conformity to expected modes femininity) so it's fucking annoying that the same people will occasionally sealion about wanting to increase the acceptability of being 'just' gender nonconforming instead of trans. like no, no you are actually making that harder.

[sixstepsaway]

Great post about purity culture in fandom! If you don't mind me adding on, I think another major contributor is Baby's First Literary Criticism. It as been common online to see people critiquing media through queer, feminist, etc. perspectives, and a push for diversity and positive representation of marginalized groups. Problem is, they use that purity culture framing instead of viewing these issues at the complicated, nuanced matters they are. It doesn't allow room for a particular piece of media to be good in one way or lacking in another. It doesn't take into account that one person from a marginalized group's real experience is another's tired trope. If you try hard enough you can make everything problematic. For example, is it reasonable to argue that Ed is a problematic stereotype of as moc because he is a violent pirate? Well, it's a pirate show about pirates. Lucius might be considered the 'gay best friend' for constantly giving advice, but does that really count when all his friends are also gay? And this stuff is so nuanced it's easy to pick and choose what argument is affective against your least favorite show/character/ship/etc. Voila, now everyone who likes, uh, Blackhands is a racist, homophobic, misogynistic abuse apologist. -dd anon

Oh you are absolutely right and you should say it.

I saw someone saying how nice it is to have OFMD because until OFMD the only queer shows we had were things like Queer as Folk and they said how Queer as Folk was bad rep and cringe and bad

and I wanted to scream because Queer as Folk is not bad rep! QaF was representative of a lot of gay communities. Queer people didn't have marriage equality and couldn't adopt, so they didn't ride the heterosexual relationship escalator instinctively, and so their lives ended up looking entirely different. Club culture and promiscuity was a big part of queer culture even as recently as 2005 (and I would argue it still is) and a lot of that is to do with the conversations that go on at those places about consent or just because going to a gay club you are surrounded by other queer people, instead of having to hope and pray someone is like you at a coffee shop.

Good rep vs bad rep is a reductive argument, in my eyes. The issue is quantity rather than quality, which I realize is backwards to how it usually is, but... in a show like OFMD, where you have [frantic finger counting] I'm willing to say fourteen main characters all of which are stated word of god to be queer in some way? One of them bodying the trope of 'gay best friend' doesn't actually matter

because he's just one among many. I'm-- Okay, my labels are many because my brain is a mess, but to boil it down to something simple I'm a bi ace agender/maybe genderfluid person (idk i havent dug enough into my gender stuff yet i've been putting it off like a knitting project), and I do not fucking care about the discourse around Toni Topaz or Jughead Jones

let me explain: in Riverdale there are two characters I just mentioned. Toni Topaz is bisexual and Jughead Jones in the original comics was asexual but has been in sexual and romantic relationships in the TV show.

Lots of people yell that Jughead isn't rep and he could've been, how upset they are he wasn't made ace like the comics, etc etc

I don't because I am an ace person who has had sex and relationships and plans to do so in the future

so Jughead boning Betty in s1 does not bad ace rep make. He's never looked at Betty or whoever and gone (as far as I know, I'm behind on the show), "Man, I am so cishet. I am so sexually attracted to you in an allosexual manner." though I wouldn't put it past the writers to have him say something like that lmao

so maybe he isn't sexually attracted to her but enjoys sex with her anyway. Maybe he isn't romantically attracted to her but loves her anyway (though asexual =/= aromantic but that's beside the point)

and Toni Topaz has been criticized for being a "slutty bisexual stereotype" or whatever, but... she's fine? She's just... a person living her life? She fucks Jughead, she fucks her girlfriend, she fucks... idk, I think she has a boyfriend now I'M BEHIND OKAY

to me that isn't bad rep it's just... a character. Potentially not a well-written character because Riverdale (again, I am behind, maybe it's not as bad as I imagine) but still just... a character

When the 100 killed off Lexa, the issue wasn't that they killed A Lesbian, the issue was they killed the only lesbian, thus taking away 100% of the lesbians from that show at the time (though I think Niylah became a main character later? I don't know. She was just a one or two-off at the time iirc). plus the writer was a toxic piece of shit about lexa and wielded her as a way of getting his follower count up on twitter and then killed her off but that too is beside the point

We don't need good rep or to delete all bad rep from the universe. We need more rep, period. We need more lesbians and more gays and more bis and more queers and more people of color and so on. We need shows with diverse casts to be so common we don't have a metric fucktonne of people looking at OFMD and hoping for Perfect Rep because it's all they're getting.

Queer as Folk's characters felt real. They felt like real people. Brian's fear of getting old (I had the realization the other day that he was, in fact, 29, and I nearly cried), Mikey's fear of being alone, Ben's fear of bringing Mikey down with him, Justin's fear of never being loved, etc etc. None of them were good or bad rep, they just were, much like the characters in OFMD.

Assuming the party line of 'Izzy is a homophobic homosexual', are (general) you telling me you've never met a homophobic homosexual in your life? Bet you have. Lots of us have. Izzy isn't good or bad rep, he's just a guy, and a guy who could easily exist in real life, flaws and warts and all. Violent men of color exist just as much as cute lute-playing men of color do.

Good rep is not a goal we will ever achieve because the goalposts will always change. The quantity of rep, the variety of characters of color, the variety of queer characters, the variety of queer characters of color are what matters the most.

We need more rep, not to be cherrypicking and pruning the rep that looks a little ugly on the outside to some people.

Real people look ugly on the outside to some people, too.