#but i think a lot of people on tumblr seem to not realize that if a post is not about you or relatable to you... thats ok

[lawofangie]

hi guys! i've been getting some dms and asks, and since there seems to be some confusion about what the law of assumption is, i wanted to make a post clarifying some things. so here are some things you need to know:

1. the law is not a mystical thing.

it is not magic. its not foreign. it is not a superpower. it is simply making assumptions. not praying, not wishing, not hoping, not affirming. making assumptions. manifestation is about accepting things as true without any proof, the proof comes later. once you've successfully completed this step.

2. you didn't create life, you created your reality.

there is a difference. i remember this one tumblr interaction where someone sent an ask, believing that since they're the creator of their reality, then they also created every tv show they watched. and no, you obviously did not. anything that you obviously didn't physically create in your life, you didn't create. the only thing you are responsible for in your life is how things operate in relation to you.

3. you don't get what you want, you get what you are.

there's a reason why you're told by neville to stop desiring, why you're told to state your desires as a present tense fact. its because no amount of wanting, no amount of desiring, is going to change anything. if our assumptions (what we believe is true without proof) have so much power over our lives, what do you think desiring implies? what does wanting say about you? if you had your dream job, would you be wanting your dream job, or would you already have it and no longer desire it?

it should be obvious that we as human beings are conscious enough to realize certain things. we have the freedom to change our own minds because we are autonomous human beings. therefore, you are completely capable of making the conscious decision to believe something without proof.

4. you are a human being. other people around you are human beings too.

i've noticed that a lot of people within this community seem to be out of touch with reality. i find this very concerning and it's why i no longer say things like "the 3d isn't real" or "you are god", because they can be blown out of proportion. while yes, you are the cause for everything in your life, this is still your life. the 3d can be as unreal or "fake" as it wants to be, but it's all you've ever known. it's all you will ever know. why? because regardless of any material you've ever consumed, we are human beings living a human experience. nothing can change that.

you still need to take care of yourself, you still need to live your life, you should still enjoy your life, you should still be kind to others and treat them with respect. don't neglect yourself and others around you. the 3d is real, it's just not as absolute as we're made to believe. that's all. the 3d is real, but its authority over you is not.

5. again, the law is not magic. it's a natural process.

once you assume something, it's not going to just magically fall into your lap. the law is meant to be a natural thing. while manifestation is instantaneous, there is still the bridge of events that unfold to lead you to what you decided has already happened. and while things can still happen in an infinite amount of ways, the "how", regardless of what i've just said, is still none of your concern. your job will always be to decide it's already done and stick to that.

also, please don't take my words out of context. i'm not saying that manifestation is a process or anything like that, this is simply the way our world works. for instance, if you wanted to manifest a free vacation, the tickets wouldn't magically appear in your hand right that second. you'd decide you were already going on/already on that vacation first. then in the next couple minutes/hours or the next day or that same week, a relative of yours calls or visits and mentions that they won a trip to your desired location, but they changed their mind, so they ask you if you want to go.

this is what i mean by a bridge of events unfolding. there is no process, just events that lead you to where you already assumed you are. your physical reality is a mirror that reflects whatever you tell yourself instantaneously. things will always unfold in a natural way.

that's all for now. i hope this helps. 🩶

[mask131]

This is about Neil Gaiman's work - this is NOT about the rape accusations, but it is about the aftermath of them. I wanted to make a post for some times now about works you could read that were similar to Gaiman's works if you wanted to go see something akin to his fictional world without directly supporting him. Which would have been a VERY easy post since Gaiman kept listing everywhere the works that influenced directly or indirectly his own novels and creations. But I realized other people were already doing this, so I just thought "Heh, let's not bother with this".

And then I randomly stumbled upon this post which is trending on Tumblr. And this post got me a little mad. Because while I do agree that several of the facts in there should be more well-known and more talked about... I also think this post is quite unfair in its depiction of how Gaiman acted towards his inspirations.

People are currently screaming that Neil Gaiman plagiarized stuff by "taking huge inspiration from things and not crediting people". Except... he did credit people. It's just that his fans never bothered to go look for what inspired him. I was there back in the old days - so I saw exactly how it went. Don't start telling me Neil Gaiman purposefully stayed "silent" about the works that inspired him - I clearly saw how people were just apathetic. Myself when I compiled lists and made posts about all the works that preceeded Neil Gaiman or that he explained were his inspirations for things, people didn't bother and had no interest... but when I made a list of Gaiman's work suddenly everybody reblogged. Whether Gaiman plagiarized or not is not the thing I want to talk about today - but I want to HEAVILY criticize the way people are saying "Neil Gaiman never said he took X from X" when in fact, he did, and people were just too lazy to do their research. (Or, if you take the "Gaiman is a villain " angle, Gaiman counted on the fact people would not bother to read the original books and he won his bet!)

I am deeply sorry for this rant but it is a little trigger for me, since I have been studying and exploring the "chain" of inspirations and rewritings throughout literature and the fantasy genre (half for university work, half for personal hobby), and I have seen people literaly ignore all the bibliographies given to them under titles like "If you want to read more of the sort". [For example the original post talks about how Martin was very honest about how he took inspiration from Druon's book series. Fair. But nobody is talking about how he indeed kind of "plagiarized" Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. A lot of people don't know about this series, despite said series having literaly almost all of ASoIaF's supernatural - in fact, the reason Martin seems to be under-using his own supernatural creations, like the White Walkers, is precisely because they don't come from his mind and they are just a copy of Williams' Norns and he seems to not really know what to do with them. But that's a talk for another day.]

EDIT: I realized the post got very long, so all my personal objections and my argumentative points against the post I linked above will be under a cut. And if you want a conclusion to my long rant below the cut, it is this one: You can shit all you want about Gaiman, but at least get your facts right. It is not because someone turns out to be a bad person that you must feel the need to blast cultural misinformation. Heck, I will directly compare it to how the entire Internet wished and wanted Rowling to have "plagiarized" Gaiman's Books of Magic, because of their similarities, only for Gaiman himself to point out, no, it was not plagiarism, it was just a set of similarities and coincidences due to both works coming from a same British culture with a specific background in children literature and fantasy works. It just happened that people didn't know anything outside of Harry Potter and Gaiman's works and so assumed it was the only two pieces of a much vaster puzzle...

Yes, Neil Gaiman is very derivative. Yes he is very imitative. But he never hid it? He always said he was, he always pointed out the works that influenced him, he always listed the stuff that he based his own works upon - down to sometimes helping these works come out of obscurity when they were too forgotten (like the Lud-in-mist novel?). People are doing a "surprised Pikachu face" today but... he never hid his derivatiness. In fact it was a certain part of the "charm" people found in his work back in the days. He never hid anything, it's just that a lot of people didn't want to see it or didn't care about it...

Gaiman posted an entire page on his blog for American Gods (back in the early days of Internet, he had a blog to follow his writing process for American Gods, weeks after week, you can still find it somewhere) listing the three dozen of books that inspired him/that he took elements from/that he learned stuff from. People can accuse him of having plagiarized Zelazny's work in American Gods because of one scene - Wednesday having Shadow drive into the "Backstage", which is a rewrite of the "driving to Amber" scene from The Nine Princes of Amber. But the accusation of "plagiarism" becomes a bit muddled when you know that A) Gaiman has been screaming for years about how the main source of inspiration for American Gods were all of Zelazny's mythological works and B) He literaly dedicated American Gods to Zelazny, first page you open.

When does an homage becomes too much? When is plagiarism allowed? Is taking after public domain a bad thing? What are the moral consequences of your work overshadowing your source of inspiration? These are questions I am not wanting to answer today and this post isn't about them - plus things are even more complex when you remember Gaiman was one of the most fervent defensers and advocates of fanfiction, reacting positively to it and encouraging people to do it a lot ; as well as one of the main celebrities on Tumblr to warn people to NOT send him fanfics so that it wouldn't cause legal troubles of potential plagiarism.

Anyway, my actual angry rant is below.

I/ Tanith Lee and Sandman

The post that got me angry starts with Tanith Lee. I do agree that it is a shame Tanith Lee is not more talked about and didn't receive as much fame as she deserved. I do agree that Neil Gaiman's work was heavily inspired by Tanith Lee's writing. I do agree Gaiman's work overshadowed Lee's own (for a long time I didn't know she was the first one to do a vampiric Snow-White twist, before Gaiman's own). However I have to recuse the idea that Sandman is a rip-off of Tales from Flat-Earth.

It doesn't help that the person who made this original claim clearly doesn't know very much about either Lee's Flat-Earth or Gaiman's Sandman (with easy to debunk claims like how "Delusion" is one of Gaiman's Endless - no, the character does not exist). For example the poster rightfully compares how the top-dogs of the supernatural pantheon of Lee's Flat-Earth are the Masters of Night, Death and Delirium, wth the Master of Night's physical appearance echoing Dream of the Endless' appearance... However the comparison stops there, unlike what the poster tries to claim, because the Master of Night is a demon who rules over hatred, fear, curses and malevolence first and foremost - and is this world's equivalent of Satan/Iblis - and is not a personification of dreams, imaginations and sleep like Morpheus. Also, unlike what the OP claims, the Demon Princes are not like the Endless, "eternal entities beyond gods" - on the contrary, it is shown by book one the Demon Princes CAN be killed, and that there are gods who are a distinct species far above the Demons.

It is also incomplete to try to claim that having Dream and Death be siblings is a "proof" of Tanith Lee plagiarism... Because Gaiman is very explicit in his narrative of how Dream and Death are transpositions of the Thanatos & Hypnos/Thanatos & Morpheus twinship present in Greco-Roman mythology (Ovid's "Gates of Horn and Ivory" are literaly there in the first issues). Plus, since we do have the original manuscripts and the proposition draft Gaiman sent to DC (it is in the bonus of collected editions and in companion books), we know Gaiman originally had just three Endless in mind, Death, Dream (who was a reshape of DC's Sandman super-hero), and Destiny (who pre-existed in DC's universe), Delirium only coming far later.

That being said, I am feeling very sad for Tanith Lee through the testimony of her friend - how, again, she had trouble becoming a recognized author despite her work being very influential and frequently talked about for the fantasy genre (all the fantasy manuals and guides and encyclopedias of France list her among the authors to be read), and I do feel her distate for Neil Gaiman's work vampirizing hers is very justified. But to jump into saying Sandman is a copy-paste or a full on rip-off of Flat-Earth is unfair and very limiting. Flat-Earth was one of the inspirations of Sandman, but it doesn't own "everything" to it.

Plus, the OP also gets very angry at how Gaiman "never" talked about Tanith Lee and ... you know how I got to learn about Tanith Lee, and how I got encouraged to read her? Through Gaiman's Tumblr blog, where he regularly listed her as part of the authors that inspired him/the fantasy authors he enjoyed/the authors he encouraged others to read. I saw her appear like five different times on his Tumblr, and without him I probably wouldn't have started getting curous about her. So he did talk about her and he did present her as one of his inspirations and favorite authors... At least on Tumblr, and for several years.

II/ Coraline and Thief of Always

The comments mention Coraline and the Thief of Always as possibly being another "plagiarism" of Gaiman... I remember when Neil Gaiman was asked on his Tumblr about how similar Thief of Always and Coraline were, and he simply answered with the fact he and Barker had a similar thought process and came up with akin works though very different in the results.

You could say it is a form of copy or plagiarism (though Gaiman at least did an effort to make Coraline the almost opposite of Thief of Always in several ways). But I will have to point out that that Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker know each other, and that it has been reported, talked about and evoked a lot of times how they hanged in the same circles, with the same people, and exchanged thoughts, and talked about their mutual creations. We know Gaiman talked of the early Sandman issues when they were created with Alan Moore and Clive Barker, while Moore talked of his creation of From Hell. We also know that a part of the Sandman's universe was indirectly created by Barker - as Gaiman explained the idea for naming Desire's domain "The Threshold" came from a story Clive Barker had planned but never wrote, exploring the puns "threshold" could offer.

To my knowledge Clive Barker never claimed that Gaiman plagiarized him or stole from him with Coraline? But I might be wrong.

III/Other details

The comment about the "Lovecraft and Doyle" comparison is clearly taken out of context, because it was literaly about a story which WAS a literal Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulhu fanfiction, "A Study in Emerald". The commenter seems to think this comment applied to Gaiman's entire work? No it does not.

I don't know anything about the Lenny Henry situation, I will have to look for this.

[megumi-fm]

.

[neruvevo]

i need to stop reading the notes on posts i like why are there people in the tags of that post about hatsune miku song thats bad and has 300 views talking about world is mine. is this all a joke to you. we are living in completely different universes

[13eyond13]

.

[batemanofficial]

went on a bit of an anthropological excursion today (saw a dni-archive post and fell down a rabbit hole) and i think it's safe to say that we had a good run on the internet but its time to call it and just unplug it all

[999-roses]

@ihatethewest is a radfem who has a huge terf following and often interacts with other radfem blogs (if you search "feminism" on their blog, it's all from radfems)

Anon I think if you go tell them about it directly, it might resolve your issue??

inb4 the rest: I haven't contacted her before posting this reply;; anon i did take your suggestion to search her blog under 'feminism' and originally did see some questionable posts. but as I'm typing this response, I refreshed the search and it appears that she's actively removing rbs from radfems, maybe she got shinigami eyes a little late in the game, who knows. so... anon. did I do anything wrong? I don't think I've reblogged posts with terf radfem content but please let me know if I did thanks 👍

this is not an invitation for any radfems/terfs thinking my blog is friendly to you lot. you will be welcome here once you dismantle the hateful ideology from your mind and are no longer a radfem including you 'cryptos'

[medicinemane]

Jesus fucking christ I get tired of sitting here and hearing my dad loudly ripping ass from the other room

Like listen, I get it, I get that you can't control your guts. Like fuck, for a while... as in like months, I was having trouble even leaving the house... still no clue what was even up which makes me feel like my theory about not eating enough is in the lead given... haven't found any allergies I can identify

So I get it and have sympathy (and fear inheriting my dad's guts), but... it's just so fucking gross man

And it's also like... maybe I'm eating, maybe I'm watching a show... whatever it is the mood's kinda ruined by this just... it almost literally couldn't be louder or grosser

I get you can't control your guts but... do something... anything... see a doctor or... anything

It's just nasty. He's not a bad person, but my dad's just a nasty dude

[ratsandfashion]

#Is archaeology/history my ‘special interest’? Idk maybe. I don’t really define it that way but it could fit#but the point is more that study and mastery of a subject is in fact possible even if it’s not your biologically unique Special Interest™#That saying I know things about archaeology because it’s my ‘special interest’ is kind of demeaning to my professional study and experience#And enforcing this weird dichotomy between people who are capable of having interests and expertise and people who are not#Admittedly I fundamentally don’t believe that many forms of ADHD and many of the tumblr-acceptable forms of autism are materially distinct#But there’s this weird anti-intellectualism response I’m seeing where expertise is only allowed to come from ‘special interests’#Rather than study or experience

I remember when someone on a discord server called archaeology my “special interest” and I didn’t know how to explain, rookie mistake! It’s actually a Master’s degree

[charon-cries]

y'all this post is untagged ai. a lot of people aren't realizing it, but if you take a second to look at it, it becomes very clear

tumblr keeps showing it to me and OP has refused to tag it, so when you go in the reblogs it's a bunch of people who don't seem to realize that it's ai either. i recognized a lot of usernames in the reblogs, from people who i definitely know are against ai stuff. so if you've reblogged this thinking a human made it because OP refuses to edit the original post for transparency— now you know.

[5ummit]

New Mature Content Warning Overlay (And How to Get Rid of It)

More fun community label "features"! Unlike the new mandatory label for #NSFW, this one is a bigger deal to me because it affects my entire blog and it can't be avoided by just using a different tag.

Apparently on custom blog layouts, if you happen to post or reblog even a SINGLE post that's been flagged with the mature content community label, a full-page warning overlay will appear blurring out your entire blog that must be manually clicked through every single time the page is refreshed. At first I thought this was just a bug due to my older layout but I've come to realize it's not. It's a feature (as confirmed by this recent changes post) that affects all custom themes. The formatting will vary based on your own theme but here's what it looks like on my blog:

I don't know about you but I find this is stupid and annoying. If it could be dismissed once and never seen again that might be one thing, but that's not the case. The vast majority of my blog is not "mature" enough to warrant such an aggressive and invasive warning. I also think pop-ups are obnoxious in general and I'll be damned if tumblr's going to force me to have one on MY blog.

After some desperate googling for a known workaround and being unable to find even a single mention of it, I decided to take on the challenge myself. I'm not a theme coder, so apologies if there's a better way to do this, but luckily it only took me like 10 minutes to figure out a simple fix, which I'm now sharing with anyone else who may want it:

.community-label-cover__wrapper {display: none}

Just copypaste that somewhere in your CSS and goodbye pop-up!

If you're not sure how to access your theme code, check out this help article. You can also add the code via the Advanced Options menu, which is actually even better (if you can get it to work, it depends on how your theme was coded), because it will then automatically be reapplied to a lot of themes without having to remember to manually add it every time if you change your theme in the future.

Obviously this will only remove it from your own blog for anyone who may visit it. If you never want to see this warning again on other people's blogs you can also add this custom filter to your ad block:

tumblr.com##.community-label-cover__wrapper

Unfortunately I do not have an easy tutorial on hand for this one as the method will depend on your specific ad block app or extension.

Some additional notes:

After adding the theme code and saving the changes, give it a minute to update as it sometimes takes a little while for the page to refresh.

The warning overlay only seems to appear if a "mature" post is on the FIRST page of your blog, which is still annoying and makes the whole thing even more pointless and stupid because what if someone visits any other page of your blog, and oh no, happens to see "mature" content they weren't warned about?!

The warning also appears on direct links to "mature" posts.

This hack has NOTHING to do with entire blogs that have been flagged as NSFW. It only works for non-flagged blogs with custom themes that happen to have individual "mature" posts.

[tellafairy]

thoughts on shifting + manifesting with ease. (as someone who's shifted many times, alongside manifesting)

coming back to this side of tumblr after spending years away from it has made me realized how many of you are truly the problem, it might sound kinda harsh but really. so many of you ask the same questions over and over again.. "but HOW do i do it?" "how do i shift" "how do i manifest" JUST DO IT. stop looking for signs, stop looking for methods or "cheat codes". just do it man.

your mind is so powerful and it actually kinda irritates me how many of you doubt it, just because it "seems to easy". you don't understand how you've been manipulated by society to not see your power. how have you been on loa social media, shifting social media, for soooo long — yet still don't see it?? let me tell you..

the moment i got off social media, the moment i took time to erase everything in my head and stop overthinking everything, was the moment everything came to me. i already had it, i just needed to stop telling myself i didn't.

it took me barely any time to get used to convincing myself i had everything i wanted, i shifted to my desired realities, and everything worked out in my favour. AFFIRMING IS ALL YOU NEED. I AM YELLING AT YOU. JUST AFFIRM.

really, please, affirm. the routine is so simple.

1. any bad thought is instantly turned positive.

ex: "i really want her waist"

to

"am i stupid ... i have her waist.. tbh mine even looks a little better.. am i crazy?? like actually? this must be a glitch or something cause my waist is practically identical to hers.. i literally love my waist"

exaggerate, say what you need to say to erase the negativity.

2. it's yours, so act like it..

ex: talk about ur DR normally. it's your reality, not a fantasy land you made up in a dream. ITS REAL. it's a reality. for example, i'd watch videos of my s/o in this reality, and speak about our lives in my dr. "i can't wait to see __ tonight... god i love __, it's so nice hanging out with them everyday.. wow they look so pretty in this video — i'm so lucky their mine". it's natural, they're yours aren't they? exactly, so act like it.. this is used the exact same way when manifesting..

you see someone with something you want? thinking of something you wanna do? something you wanna be? ... it's urs... so can you act like it?? like whyre u feeling sad someone else got a job promotion 😹😹 you literally got a better one ...

3. that's literally it

you don't need a fancy method (although it can give u some peace of mind.. let's be real, a lot of methods set y'all back and make you overwhelmed, blocking ur beliefs and making everything seem harder). you literally just need to live. tell yourself it's done, over and over again. nothing matters. it's done, it's yours, you have it, you're happy and fulfilled. other peoples sucess should really mean nothing to you negatively. it shouldn't make you stressed, shouldn't make you feel behind.. why would it when you have everything, you can do everything, go anywhere, and you can be anything.

it'll seem like manifesting blogs and shifting blogs just repeat the same things.. which is true, they do, because i'm telling you there's nothing more to it than what you've already read. it is that easy. all it takes is your mind. decide, and tell yourself.

as i said before, it took me barely anytime to switch my mindset once i actually started focusing on myself, my journey and not every body else's results. repeating stuff to yourself WORKS. repeating is literally ALL i did. choose what i want, told myself it's mine in any way i could describe it. and there, it's mine. ive shifted to many different realities, along side gaining a better life in this one after years of convincing myself there was nothing for me. if i can break out of the cycle, trust me you can too. i cannot describe how desperate i was at the beginning, how long i took in false info and wasted time on methods all while doubting every single thing.

so why don't you believe it? you'll sit there and tell yourself over and over again that you're ugly, or broke, or friendless... but you won't tell urself that you've shifted? that you have your dream body...? girl okay i guess....

once you realize nothing besides your mind truly matters, is when you'll be free with yourself. circumstances don't matter, past feelings don't matter, doubts don't matter, your mind is all you need.

yes this is just loa explained longer, that's the point of the post because some of u still can't get it in ur heads

[liketolaugh-writes]

The other thing about Sam being such a teenager - a headcanon that is nonetheless supported by many canon elements - is that her being a baby activist is... not necessarily a good thing.

It's very promising in the long run! It shows that she cares about other people, she cares about ethics, and she is trying very hard to think about her impact on the world, and those are all good things.

But she's also extremely bossy, extremely self-righteous, and when you're a fourteen year old with two best friends that just... aren't very good at asserting themselves, it makes it really, really easy to hurt people by accident. I think, given what we see about Sam and how she interacts with them, it would be easy for her to dismiss them as Boys™️ and therefore The Oppressor Class.

Because Sam... kind of reads like a terminally online Tumblr kid. And that wasn't an archetype that existed in the 2000's, obviously, but Sam fits it to a T. She seems like someone that would know all the terminology, who would know who all the 'oppressor' classes and all the 'victims' were, who would be really into identity politics in the way where she weaponizes them, because she's fourteen and nuance is still hard for her.

She seems, in other words, like someone who would chew Danny out for using the word 'dysphoria' if he wasn't trans (but was maybe trying to find a word for why his body post-portal felt so bad sometimes.) Like she would demand room to express her emotions without remembering to give Tucker and Danny room for theirs, because they're Boys (even though Tucker is black and Danny is abused and getting space for their emotions is just as hard for them.) Like she would have a list of Social Justice Facts that she applies uncritically, and won't realize what she's doing for years.

And to be honest, I think this would be a really fun character arc for Sam! The sort of thing I would have loved to see in canon. Where she realizes, suddenly, how much she talks over people, how much she talks over her friends, and that maybe sometimes she's... not right, even though she knows All The Right Words.

(But until she realizes that, I also think that Sam could do a lot of damage to Danny and his guilt complex in particular.)

[ourceliumnetwork]

To be so clear I am also regularly in denial about how much pain i'm just in

even with meds, even with rest, even if I haven't done anything in a week, even if i did only good things the day before, even if the exercise was necessary

buuuuut the meds do take the edge off (still in pain but less which is a net good) and i can always tell when they've worn out (naproxen SAYS it's good for 8-12 hours and I get Maybe 7.5 on a good day). I'm attempting to change to preemptive pain relief from chasing pain constantly and it's hard. But we're getting better.

speaking of which. Naproxen time.

i think i'm like. really in denial sometimes about how much pain i'm just Casually In...

OH NO WAIT HANG ON WAIT ACTUALLY MY MEDICINE WORE OFF AND I DID LIKE A LOT OF UNANTICIPATED ACTIVITY NEVER MIND I'M DUMB I'M HURTING FOR ACTUAL REASONS THIS TIME

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.