#but i think it’s important to get the perspective of trans people of different identities/backgrounds

[gremlin-pattie]

having transfem mutuals is not only recommend but necessary

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

Is it being discriminatory or offensive to think that being mtf is always going to be harder than being ftm? (I am enby afab)

Lee says:

Your question touches on a complex and sensitive topic within the trans community, and it's important to approach this with an understanding that every individual's experience with gender identity and transition is unique, and there are various factors that can influence the challenges they face.

The concept of intersectionality is crucial here. People experience discrimination differently based on intersecting aspects of their identity like race, class, age, disability, and their socioeconomic status, access to healthcare, etc.

And even beyond that, each person's journey is shaped by a multitude of factors including their family dynamics, social environment, cultural context. These factors can make the experience of being trans vastly different for each individual.

You can't compare two people based on a single identity and say "ah this person must have had it worse because they are [X identity]!" because people aren't just one single identity, they're whole people.

Certain things can affect one part of the trans community more than another, like hypervisibility vs invisibility/erasure for example, or the rhetoric supporting laws that prevent trans people from competing on teams that match their identified gender. It's true that trans woman are often dehumanized and seen as either sexual predators, as sexual objects, or as a joke, and as a result are often the targets of a lot of transphobic rhetoric.

Minority stress is real, and it can affect people's physical and mental health even if they are not personally facing a current physical threat to their safety.

While trans people who were AMAB may be more affected by some of that stress, that doesn't mean it exclusively affects them-- often the whole community ends up feeling the effects.

Even if trans women are often targeted in bathroom bills, for example, the end result is no trans person can use the bathroom that aligns with their gender. And being discriminated against for being transgender and seeing others face discrimination for a shared identity can create distress and that should be acknowledged.

Comparing the struggles between segments of the trans community can inadvertently create a hierarchy of suffering, which is not constructive. It's more helpful to acknowledge that while experiences can be different, each individual's challenges are valid and deserving of support and understanding.

We get variations on this discourse pretty frequently and I used to answer this question when it was asked. But recently I started to wonder what good my answer will do-- If I tell you "x group is Most Oppressed tm" how does that change anyone's lives for the better?

If you're interested in this type of thing from an academic perspective then you can study the issue more, and make up all the "What if" scenarios you want. A trans woman who grows up in a supportive white liberal NYC family, starts puberty blockers at age 12, starts estrogen and legally changes her name and gender marker at age 15, has bottom surgery at 18 and goes off to college having been "passing" as female since childhood is going to have a vastly different experience than a Black transmasculine person who grew up in poverty in the South, doesn't have a supportive family, came out at 16 and was kicked out and then never finished high school, manages to start testosterone at 23 but isn't able to afford top surgery until they 34 and is often misgendered as a result of not being able to bind in their physical job. They will have completely different backgrounds, experiences, and privileges even if they both started to transition before middle age. And of course "passing privilege" is another can of worms that I'm not going to open here.

Instead of focusing on which group has it harder, it's beneficial to recognize that yes, there are some differences in our experiences, when viewed on average, but that should be used as motivation to help people who genuinely need it instead of just being divisive.

When you notice someone using transphobic arguments or targeting any trans people, you should obviously speak up and fight back on their behalf if you're comfortable-- we have to support each other, but we're all part of the same community and everyone's safety is important. Don't put yourself in danger.

So yeah, I'm tired of rehashing the Discourse and won't be answering questions about that type of topic. Good vibes only lol. In general, we all need to work to foster a sense of solidarity and support within the trans community and be open to listening to the experiences of all trans individuals. Understanding the diverse perspectives within the transgender community can lead to greater empathy and support, and mutual support can be a powerful tool in navigating the challenges of living in a transphobic culture.

[archaeocommunologist]

imagine posting on the leftist antisemitism tag only to show you're a leftist antisemite. imagine.

The reason principaliteas was getting hate is because they supported peace instead of yelling about killing all the evil baby-murdering Israeli civilians. Not very pro-Palestine of them, since in order for Palestine to be free half of the world's Jews simply must be gotten rid of.

Also you were being absolutely moronic in the comments. "Anyone can know things regardless of their background." imagine telling that to any other minority. Imagine telling a black person calling out racism that, imagine telling a trans person calling out transphobia that. You don't know bigotry better than the victims dumbass.

Whoever you are, and I suspect you're a fan given that this sounds very similar to another ask I received, you should know by this point that I'm not susceptible to this line of argumentation. Anyone can know anything regardless of their background. This is a true statement, and also a good thing.

Compare to your assertion, that only the "victims" of a social system can credibly understand it. This is 1.) very obviously not true, 2.) trivially easy to disprove, and 3.) actively detrimental to good activism. Now, you don't care about any of these things, because the actual purpose of this argument is to use as a cudgel, but I will nevertheless grace you with an explanation.

1.) It just isn't true that the only people who can understand a social system are its victims. This isn't true for antisemitism, it's not true for racism, and it's not true for transphobia, homophobia, and misogyny. This assertion is a corrupted form of the actual insight, which is that it's important to consider the perspectives of people who have direct experience with bigotry. It is important to listen to Jewish perspectives on antisemitism, rather than getting all your information from gentiles. But it doesn't mean that only Jews can understand antisemitism as a social and historical force, and it absolutely does not mean that gentiles need to blindly defer to any particular Jew on the topic.

Also: isn't it funny how you don't apply this exact logic to Palestinians? I mean, logically, as the victims of Zionism, you should be asserting that only Palestinians can understand it, right? If not, why not?

2.) Here, I'll disprove your assertion right now. So as a goy, I need to defer to Jews when it comes to antisemitism and anti-Zionism, right? OK, I pick Meir Kahane. Heck, I pick Netanyahu! After all, they also say that I, as a goy, ought to defer to them when it comes to the meaning of Zionism and antisemitism. Oops, guess I'm a Kahanist now. Am Yisrael Chai!

Obviously, gentiles need to be able to apply critical thinking to Jewish perspectives on antisemitism. We need to develop the capacity for discernment, in order to confront and dismiss the demand from people like Kahane to blindly defer to them based on their identity. You yourself fucking believe this, you just pretend not to when you want to beat somebody about the head.

3.) Maybe I'm biased because of my background in HIV activism and as an HIV+ person, but when I do activism, my goal is to provide people with the tools and understanding to come to the correct political stance on HIV, regardless of their identity. I want HIV-negative people to be able to speak confidently on the history of the AIDS Crisis and on the importance of U=U. Insisting that only HIV+ people have the right to speak is actively detrimental to my political goals. Yes, I think it's important that HIV+ people be able to speak for ourselves too. But that doesn't mean I want to silence HIV-negative people who are working to understand and support us.

You, however, want something different. You are interested in silencing, which is why you insist that only certain people can credibly speak on certain topics. This is also why you insist that I am an antisemite, despite the fact that my views on Zionism are developed in large part by listening to Jewish anti-Zionists. Oh, but of course, they don't count, because they're the wrong kind of Jews. Hypocrite.

Anyway, feel free to come off anon if you tire of this ludicrous game of telephone, and decide to quit being a spinless little coward. Otherwise, get thee gone, and darken my doorway no more.

[cazort]

lol do you want a prize for knowing bi people aka people who are attracted to both sexes exist? they're the only ones with the capacity to be sexually 'fluid' and care about 'gender' in their attraction. gay and straight people are exclusively attracted to the same/ opposite sex respectively, no matter what ephemeral gender someone id-s as. my country doesn't have gendered pronouns and guess what none of that idiotic non-binary ideology here lol, everyone's a they! people are just masculine and feminine yet understand that as a sexually dimorphic species we can never detach ourselves from our sex and our bodies. you just believe in some esoteric regressively heterosexist mind-body dualism at this point. ofc people have preferences for masculinity or femininity, but are ultimately attracted to sex as every scientific source will confirm, including those that are trans-inclusive. het aka female-attracted transwomen have neurologically identical brain phenotypes to regular het males, and it's the same with female heteros who id as trans (study by Manzouri & Savic, 2018) meanwhile gay people share the same brain patterns, trans-identified or not. this proves both that sexuality is solely based on sex and that 'transness' or I suppose the mental illness if gender dysphoria isn't neurologically innate as homosexuality evidently is. either objective science which already tried and failed to justify trans innateness is 'transphobic' or trans rhetoric is just anti-scientific and homophobic.

This is such a trash perspective that I almost wanted to just delete it without mention because on some level I think it's not really worth engaging with.

But then I had second thoughts because I realized (a) there is value in letting my followers know that people out there send this kind of stuff in asks (b) I'm confident enough not to let comments like this get to me, but I know that a lot of LGBTQ people are not as confident. So I thought, hey, maybe I could let people know why I think this sort of ask is bullshit.

The one tip-off about this ask is that it has a condescending tone from the start. It's not worth engaging with people who insult you or show contempt, as this ask does. Which is why I'm not talking to the ask, I'm talking to you, my followers. This ask is from someone I don't want to engage with, and don't think it's worth engaging with. If they were a person I knew in person, I would block them or cut them out of my life.

It's important to have diversity of perspectives, and it is valuable to listen to people with different viewpoints from your own, but in our world, with all the people and perspectives out there, there is no need to ever listen to someone who approaches you in a disrespectful or condescending way as this ask does. What makes this ask so condescending? It isn't trying to listen to me or understand me, it's just telling me I'm wrong. Take note, and don't do it, people. Don't treat other this way, and when people treat you this way, don't interact with them.

As for the perspective itself, it's deep in flawed binary reasoning. I know human sex is not a binary because I have close friends who are intersex. I also know science, I have a pretty strong background myself. I read articles like this 2015 one in Nature, which explain the growing scientific consensus that human sex is not a binary.

On top of this, the perspective equates trans identity and experience with mental illness, which is a common right-wing anti-trans talking point, but is not backed by evidence, and which is being rejected by a growing consensus of medical professionals. This is why the DSM has moved away from diagnosing trans identity as a disorder or mental illness, and instead treated gender dysphoria as the disorder or condition, independently of trans identity. For an explanation of the reasoning behind this, check out this 2017 article in Scientific American.

This ask goes even farther though in its nutcase level of reasoning, in a way that makes it look like a bad-faith argument, and this is that it is trying to spin non-binaristic and trans-inclusive or pro-trans viewpoints as "homophobic". This is a play or strategy to try to elicit sympathy and/or guilt-trip people into listening to or caring about the perspective. Like the idea is, because of the solidarity between LGBTQ people with different identities (such as gay and trans), and the strong negative connotation on homophobia in progressive culture, people are sometimes able to bully or guilt-trip people into submission by accusing them as being homophobic by holding whatever view they do. This person is trying to get me to think I'm being homophobic by virtue of acknowledging nonbinary identity or trans identities more broadly, or even the fluidity of sexuality.

A lot of the reasoning in the ask is focusing on things that to me seem largely irrelevant. For example the ask seems to be obsessed with the idea of whether or not sexual orientation or trans identity is "innate", whatever that means, and it seems to assume that sexuality is "innate" but gender identity is not. Not only does this perspective not mesh with the wide range of scientific research I've read on this topic, but it also seems largely irrelevant. Whether or not something is innate vs. learned or culturally influenced or socially constructed, does not say anything about whether or not it is real, nor about whether or not it is easy to change. There are a lot of things that are not innate but rather, I learned from my environment, like my accent and mannerisms when speaking, that are pretty much impossible for me to change (unless I'm learning a new accent to do as an imitation, I can never do it as a native speaker could.) Even if someone proved that trans identity and gender identity were culturally constructed, they wouldn't be any less real, nor would sexuality if someone showed that it was culturally constructed. But also, these viewpoints seem wrong, particularly, the way the ask frames this as a strictly binary thing, like they are either "innate" or not. It seems obvious to me that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by multiple factors, and that for some people, they may be largely or mostly innate, whereas for others they may be more culturally influenced or socially constructed, and that for most people, there are going to be influences of both. This nuance would be obvious to any mentally healthy person who had lived in the world a sufficient amount of time and just observed people, listened, and learned. And this is one of many reasons I think the ask here is putting forth a trash perspective that isn't worth engaging with.

Lastly, this ask also seems to be really deep in a specific strawman argument that is quite bizarre. Like the premise of the ask seems to be that I somehow believe that gay or straight people are attracted to people on the basis of non-observed "gender identity" of others, which they may or may not be expressing openly. This is silly. I have never made such a claim, and I never would. I'm well aware that gay and straight people tend to be attracted to physical sex characteristics and that these don't necessarily correspond to a person's gender identity. I've never gotten into stupid arguments with people about whether or not someone qualifies as "gay" or "straight" if they are attracted to a non-transitioned, closeted trans person who presents as their birth gender.

And on top of that the post also references mind-body dualism, which is something else I reject.

I don't know what is going on here. Perhaps the person behind this ask wrongly assumed that I must hold some sort of unreasonable viewpoints, just because I am trans and nonbinary and have a more complex or fluid view of gender and sexuality. Or perhaps the person didn't assume that but is just writing the ask in bad faith, trying to use this argument to make me look bad or unreasonable, or trying to appeal to things that it's obvious I care about or believe in, in an attempt to guilt-trip me or make my own views seem unreasonable or flawed. Who knows? I don't know, and I don't need to know, nor do you.

Just know that people out there send asks like this, and that they're bullshit, and educate yourself so that you don't let them get to you at all. And if any of you followers want to talk about any of this stuff, please feel free to message me. I am friendly and I am always here to chat, I love talking about gender identity and sexuality and I love answering questions that are written respectfully and in good faith, and I love supporting people, even people who may hold views different from my own.

I care about all people and I especially care about any LGBTQ people who get asks like this and may feel self-doubt in response to them. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me if you need a sense of perspective on this stuff and you want someone who will listen to you and help you to sort through the bad logic and negativity and clarify what you really believe about this stuff.

[girls-are-weird]

i posted this a little while ago on the discord server in regards to the conversation that's happening about simon's hispanic identity and how people who are not hispanic, including those from other marginalized communities, should write about it. since half the discourse is here on tumblr, i figured i might as well crosspost:

as i just woke up to all of this on like every social media platform and haven't caught up, i just want to say: no one has ever said you can't write simon as trans if you're not latino. as i said yesterday, everyone wants the representation for their own identity, and latino trans people deserve to be represented as well, so i encourage anyone who wants to write simon as trans to have a go.

the point that was made is that IF you do write him as trans, you can't just ignore the fact that he's latino, and how that would affect him differently. you don't have to write every story ABOUT him being latino, but an acknowledgment of that reality is the least that you can do. you can't pick and choose which parts of someone's identity you deal with just because it's easier. that is literally what erasure is. you have to do the work. sorry if that's hard to hear, and i know this is just fanfic and it's something we just do for fun and it's not that big of a deal, but if you truly want to be respectful of other people's life experiences, i think this is something you have to keep in mind.

i mentioned on tumblr yesterday that a good guide is to ask yourself: this thing i'm doing with the character, would their circumstances be different because he's latino (or whatever the character's background is, i'm not necessarily speaking specifically about simon but more as a general rule of thumb)? more often than not, the answer is yes, and ignoring that feels (to those of us who share that life experience) like erasure. and people don't really realize that, but that's why conversations like this are so important: to bring awareness.

so, hopefully we can see that this conversation isn't meant to bring anyone down or invalidate anyone's experience, but rather to make people think about what they're doing and how they can keep doing it without unwittingly hurting others.

as an additional note, i want to say: if you have any questions or any doubts, the best thing to do is ask. some of my fellow hispanic members of the fandom feel we shouldn't have to constantly explain things to non-latino people, and i don't disagree with that. for some of them, it is very emotionally taxing to talk about these things, or they may even find it annoying that they're expected to just educate people rather than people doing their own research. that's valid. please don't go to them expecting them to always explain things to you or absolve you of any wrongdoing. they will do so if they want to, but they are not obligated to it.

however, for myself, i LIKE explaining things to people. i would rather people come to me and ask, than have a go at it themselves and risk getting something wrong. so please, if you have any doubts or would like to try and make your writing more inclusive of the latino/hispanic PoV, feel free to ask me. my ask box and DMs are always open, i'm on twitter, i'm on discord. i do not speak for every hispanic/latino person out there-- we are not a monolith; some of them feel a lot stronger about certain issues than i do. and i can't promise you i will just tell you what you want to hear-- i will give you my honest opinion even if it's potentially upsetting. but i will try my hardest not to judge you, and i will give you the best input i can in the hopes that it will make you understand our perspective at least a little bit better. it says something to me when people at least try.

[coldtomyflash]

I've seen your speech pattern analysis on Flash characters. I was wondering if you had any advice on how to create speech patterns for OC characters?

oh heck this is one of the coolest questions i’ve ever received.

i’m gonna try not to go overboard/overwhelming and just give a bit of advice, and then if you want more details please come back and follow up!

There’s a few things to think about up front with character voices / speech patterns. The biggest and most obvious is language and cultural background. The second is personality. The third is personal history. Fourth, briefly, is gender. And the final one I’d say is idiosyncrasies to avoid ‘same voice’.

Culture and Group Dynamics

Depending on the setting, there’s a decent chance you’ll be writing characters from different cultural backgrounds. Even if you’re focusing on a single culture, there will be subcultures. Even if you’re focusing on a single narrow group of people, there will be age and generational differences.

Think about where your character is from. If it’s a fantasy world, that’s still (and even more, in some ways) important. What country, what ethnicity, what mother tongue? Did they grow up urban or rural? High socio-economic status or working class? What sort of educational background and peer group did they have growing up (and presently) and how does that factor into their vocabulary and mannerisms, if at all.

All of these can influence how people talk. There are regional accents and different modes of speaking to signal your group membership. There is code-switching across groups, for those who have had to learn multiple linguistics codes to survive and thrive in society. 

How much slang does this group and therefor this character use? What references (modern, outddated, topical, etc) do the rely on? What kind of references (pop culture, music, academic, etc)? What colloquialisms and proverbs do they say? Are these the same or different to their characters, even within the same culture, subculture, or group, and is it because they’re from a different place/sub-group or because of their idiosyncrasies?

You can use these to help your reader get to know more about your character’s background without having to spell it all out directly. Speech patterns and style are a great way to show instead of tell when it comes to details that are hard to drop in organically in other ways.

An important caveat: don’t write a bilingual character who switches languages in speech unless you’re ready to do a bit of research on that. In AATJS I did an absolutely horrific job of this because I was thinking more about fronting the fact that character was Italian rather than thinking through how people actually talk, and it came out exotifying and embarrassing. It’s important to make sure that the way you use language to bring in a character’s cultural and/or ethnic background feels authentic and manifests is a way that respects that language and its users. You can write a character with a complex cultural history without using multiple languages if you’re unprepared to do research and talk to bilingual speakers.

Personality

Probably the most salient thing in a writer’s mind when they’re trying to write character voices: is this the funny character? the serious one? the brainy one? etc.

Don’t overuse stereotypes and archetypes for creating speech patterns (or characters in general) if you’re trying to make a rounded, 3-dimensional character. Instead, go about three levels deeper.

Think about whether they’re introverted or extraverted, whether they are neurotypical or neurodivergent, whether they are introspective enough to express their own emotions clearly or whether they stumble when asked why they did a particular thing or feel a particular way (most people don’t or can’t clearly articulate exactly why they did something or how they feel, and come at things a bit sideways to circle around their motives and interior realities when pressed to make them external and concretely verbal).

Is this character calm, is their voice soothing, do they speak slowly? Are they excitable and loud and is their speech free-flowing? Are they angry? Do they swear? Do they use references for humour or are they more into puns? Do they laugh at their own jokes? Do they talk with their hands?

This character has social anxiety: how does that manifest in her speech? Does she clam up and get very quiet when she gets nervous, or does she go rapidfire and a little too loud (does she process by turning in or by distracting herself by turning outward)? Does she get very careful and deliberate in choosing her words (is she a bit high-strung?)? Ask yourself which fits best with the other elements of her personality and what you want the reader to know/interpret about her. 

This character is incredibly smart and a bit awkward: how does that manifest in their speech? Do they tend to use 5-dollar words, or do they expend a lot of energy choosing their words more carefully (how considerate are they to their audience when speaking and does that influence their speech)? Do they stumble over their words and explaining things, or are they good at making points with clear language learned from a lifetime of tutoring and helping others?

This character is the bff, who tries hard to make sure everyone else is happy first: how does that manifest in his speech? How does he switch between his happy-mask versus his more authentic self, and what changes in tone, word-choice, and inflection come in when he does?

-

Personal History

I’m only drawing a distinction between this and personality (archetype, really) so that I can draw attention to ways to add simultaneously unique and shared layers to characters that are distinct but related to group dynamics.

Here’s sort of what I mean: the level of education of a mother (or primary caregiver) of an infant can determine that infant’s vocabulary size. While we can break down all the ‘why is that’ layers to this, the one I want to point is to the simple truth that the more education a person does, the more specialized language they end up learning over time. This doesn’t have to be formal education though -- the more you learn about something and the more you read and access new knowledges and perspective, the more and more words you learn, and then if you start using those words, they trickle down to those close to you.

So.

What’s your character’s educational background? Is it the same as their friends who you are also writing? Is the same as their family’s? How does this character’s family influence their speech? Are they formal, informal, warm, authoritative? 

If you’re writing siblings, they’ll have some shared things! But also some very different ones! Me and my sister talk nothing alike in terms of vocabulary, but a lot alike in terms of mannerisms whenever we spend a bit of time together!

If your characters grew up around each other, they’ll have a lot of the same references. People from the same cities or regions will have things specific to that region, either due to sub-culture effects or because of local references. 

The city of Calgary, Canada for instance has the Plus15 which are a connected pedway system between the buildings in downtown, so named because they are 15feet above the ground. Drive 3 hours north to the city of Edmonton, and you have an underground pedway just called the pedways, no special name. Go a few provinces east to Toronto and their underground pedway system downtown is called PATH. These are all known to locals and part of the vernacular, but are opaque to people outside those cities. And the whole idea of them is probably opaque to people who aren’t from super cold cities that don’t require building-connecting pedway systems for pedestrians to get around high-density areas like downtown (or university campuses) without going out into the cold. 

Friends, families, and groups are like that too. In-jokes, shared histories, speaking in references. What are your characters’ relationships to each other and how does that history influence the way they approach talking to each other?

-

Gender

I don’t want to spend too much time on this one because ugh, gender. What even is it?

But like it or not, it has an impact on our speech patterns. There are cultural and societal norms in how men and women are likely to speak, and breaking those norms will be noticed regardless of whether you’re trans, enby, queer, or not. There are norms that people who are queer may fall into as well, sometimes without even noticing at first. A lot of these aren’t about word choice per se but instead about mannerisms and tone and body language, but some overlap or are specific to language.

Speaking in broad generalizations here, women use more emotional language and tend to speak with more hesitancies/qualifications. So more “i think, i feel” and less “it is”. More conversations that front emotions and dig deeper into those, with longer sentences to explain in detail. The obvious caveat is that personality matters more (i.e., is this a person who likes to talk about their emotions in detail or not) but it is something to consider because there will be general but subtle differences that you can use to help further distinguish your characters’ voices. 

Sidenote: this can also be exacerbated by different cultural backgrounds and languages (a simple example is Japanese which has different words for “I” depending on your gender as well as your personality, familiarity with the other persons in the conversation, and situational appropriateness, so interesting ways that gender and social expectations intersect in language).

Anyway this isn’t typically a huge problem except that I’ve found that a lot of writers have a tendency to overgeneralize the speech patterns that fit with their ascribed gender due to early-life socialization, or conversely to overgeneralize patterns that fit with their gender identity (when not cis) either due to heavily identifying with their gender identity’s speech model (or sometimes possibly due to a knee-jerk sort of backlash). I say this as an enby who both struggles with it and notices it and tries to edit and correct for it. 

I could get into all sorts of examples of ways this can lead to voice issues, but in general i think the point here is to make sure you’re writing any given character in view of that character’s personality and history, with gender only as a modifier for how some of these might come out in subtle ways but which can be important to help tell us about your character (and if you’re writing queer characters, it’s all the more important to consider how their relationship with gender and socialization might impact which speech models and styles they identify more with).

-

Idiosyncrasies

So, you’ve got a character. You’ve got their personality and history down. You know how they manifest in their speech. And you’re still getting some ‘same voice’ issues.

People really are unique snowflakes. Let that be reflected in their speech.

This person uses contractions differently than that one. This one says “ain’t” and that one says “isn’t.”

This person makes Simpsons references and that one doesn’t like Simpsons, and makes Brooklyn Nine Nine references instead. That other one doesn’t use referential humour much at all. This one loves old movies and hasn’t seen any of the new stuff so they make references all the time but no one ever notices.

This one loves the word “excoriate” and that one doesn’t even know what it means because what the hell, who uses the word excoriate?

This one talks about food a lot, it overlaps with their interests. This one uses metaphors. This one grunts in response. This one exclaims. This one says “like” and that one hates it. That one refers to themselves in third person. This other one uses reflective language an usual amount (e.g., “love me some candy”). This other one keeps misusing the word inconceivable and that one speaks almost without contractions but still comes off as more charming and humorous while correcting him.

I have an aunt who says “girl” or “girlfriend” a fuck-ton and she has been my whole life and I don’t know why because none of her sisters do, but she does and it annoys me so much the way she says it. I swear a lot when I’m feeling casual despite never ever doing it in a professional or even slightly-less-than-relaxed space, so the idiosyncrasy of comfort levels has a massive impact on my vocabulary in ways which, I promise, almost no one who meets me first in a professional space expect.

Let your characters be individuals and try to make them as unique as possible without overdoing it, or over-relying on a single verbal tendency or habit. 

-

And ... that’s all I’ve got for now. Completely failed at being concise. I meant to give like 2-3 bullet points or examples for each, not paragraphs, but here we are. That’s one of my verbal tendencies: long flowing verbosity :)

Hope this helps! 

[geshertzarmeod]

Favorite Books of 2020

I wanted to put together a list! I read 74 new books this year, and I keep track of that on Goodreads - feel free to add or follow me if you want to see everything! I’m going to focus on the highlights, and the books that stuck with me personally in one way or another, in approximate order. Also, all but two of them (#5 and #7 on the honorable mention list) are queer/trans in some way. Links are to Goodreads, but if you’re looking to get the books, I suggest your library, the Libby app using your library, your local bookstore, or Bookshop.

The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell, illus. by Ned Asta (originally published 1977). I had a hard beginning of the year and was in a work environment where my queerness was just not welcomed or wanted. I read this in the middle of all of that, and it helped me so much. I took this book with me everywhere. I read it on planes. I read it on the bus, and on trains, and at shul. I showed it to friends... sometimes at shul, or professional development conferences. It healed my soul. Now I can’t find it and might get a new copy. When I reviewed it, in February, I wrote: “I think we all need this book right now, but I really needed this book right now. Wow. This book is magic, and brings back a sense of magic and beauty to my relationship with the world.” Also I bought my copy last July, in a gay bookstore on Castro St. in SF, and that in itself is just beautiful to me. (Here’s a post I made with some excerpts)

Once & Future duology, especially the sequel, Sword in the Stars, by A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy. Cis pansexual female King Arthur Ari Helix (she's the 42nd reincarnation and the first female one) in futuristic space with Arab ancestry (but like, from a planet where people from that area of earth migrated to because, futuristic space) works to end Future Evil Amazon.com Space Empire with her found family with a token straight cis man and token white person. Merlin is backwards-aging so he's a gay teenager with a crush and thousands of years of baggage. The book’s entire basis is found family, and it's got King Arthur in space. And the sequel hijacks the original myth and says “fuck you pop culture, it was whitewashed and straightwashed, there were queer and trans people of color and strong women there the whole time.” Which is like, my favorite thing to find in media, and a big part of why I love Xena so much. It’s like revisionist history to make it better except it’s actually probably true in ways. Anyway please read these books but also be prepared for an absolutely absurd and wild ride. Full disclosure though, I didn’t love the first book so much, it’s worth it for the sequel!

The Wicker King by K. Ancrum. This book hurt. It still hurts. But it was so good. It took me on a whole journey, and brought me to my destination just like it intended the whole time. The author’s note at the end made me cry! The sheer NEED from this book, the way the main relationship develops and shifts, and how you PERCEIVE the main relationship develops and shifts. I’m in awe of Ancrum’s writing. If you like your ships feral and needy and desperate and wanting and D/S vibes and lowkey super unhealthy but with the potential, with work, to become healthy and beautiful and right, read this book. This might be another one to check trigger warnings for though.

The Entirety of The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty. I hadn’t heard of this series until this year, when a good friend recommended it to me. It filled the black hole in me left by Harry Potter. The political and mystical/fantasy world building is just *chef’s kiss* - the complexity! The morally grey, everyone’s-done-awful-things-but-some-people-are-still-trying-to-do-good tapestry! The ROMANCE oh my GOD the romance. If I’m absolutely fully invested in a heterosexual romance you know a book is good, but also this book had background (and then later less background) queer characters! And the DRAMA!!! The third book went in a direction that felt a little out of nowhere but honestly I loved the ride. I stayed up until 6am multiple times reading this series and I’d do it again.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon. I loved this book so much that it’s the only book I reviewed on my basically abandoned attempt at a book blog. This book is haunting, horrifying, disturbing, dark, but so, so good. The character's voices were so specific and clear, the relationships so clearly affected by circumstance and yet loving in the ways they could be. This is my favorite portrayal of gender maybe ever, it’s just... I don’t even have the words but I saw a post @audible-smiles​ made about it that’s been rattling in my head since. And, “you gender-malcontent. You otherling,” as tender pillow talk??? Be still my heart. Be ready, though, this book has all the triggers.. it’s a .

Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender. This book called me out on my perspective on love. Also, it made me cry a lot. And it has two different interesting well-written romance storylines. And a realistic coming-into-identity narrative about a Black trans demiboy. And a nuanced discussion of college plans and what one might do after college. And some big beautiful romcom moments. I wish I had it in high school. I’m so glad I have it now! (trigger warning for transphobia & outing, but the people responsible are held accountable by the end, always treated as not okay by the narrative, and the MC’s friends, and like... this is ownvoices and it’s GOOD.)

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. My Goodreads review says, “I have no idea what happened, and I loved it.” That’s not wrong, but to delve deeper, this book has an ethereal feeling that you get wrapped up in while reading. Nothing makes sense but that’s just as it should be. You’re hooked. It is so atmospheric, so meta, so fascinating. I’ve seen so many people say they interpreted this character or that part or the ending in all different ways and it all makes sense. And it’s all of this with a gay main character and romance and the central theme, the central pillar being a love of and devotion to stories. Of course I was going to love it.

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir by Kai Cheng Thom. “Because maybe what really matters isn’t whether something is true, or false. Maybe what matters is the story itself; what kinds of doors it opens, what kinds of dreams it brings.” This book was so good and paradigm shifting. It reminded me of #1 on this list in the way it turns real life experience and hard, tragic ones at that (in this case, of being a trans girl of color who leaves home and tries to make a life for herself in the city, with its violence), into a beautiful, haunting fable. Once upon a time.

I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver. I need to reread this book, as I read it during my most tranceful time of 2020 and didn’t write a review, so I forgot a lot. What I do remember is beautiful and important nonbinary representation, a really cute romance, an interesting parental and familial/sibling dynamic that was both heartbreaking and hopeful, and an on-page therapy storyline. Also Mason Deaver just left twitter but was an absolutely hilarious troll on it before leaving and I appreciate that (and they just published a Christmas novella that I have but haven’t read yet!)

The Truth Is by NoNieqa Ramos. It took a long time to trust this book but I’m so glad I did. It’s raw and real and full of grief and trauma (trigger warnings, that I remember, for grief, death (before beginning of book), and gun violence). The protagonist is flawed and gets to grow over the course of the book, and find her own place, and learn from the people around her, while they also learn to understand her and where she’s coming from. It’s got a gritty, harsh, and important portrayal of found family, messy queerness, and some breathtaking quotes. When I was 82% through this book I posted this update: “This book has addressed almost all of my initial hesitations, and managed to complicate itself beautifully.”

Anger is a Gift by Mark Oshiro.  I wasn’t actually in the best mental health place to read this book when I did (didn’t quite understand what it was) but it definitely reminded me of what there is to fight against and to fight for, and broke my heart, and nudged me a bit closer to hope. The naturally diverse cast of characters was one of the best parts of this book. The romance is so sweet and tender and then so painful. This book is important and well-written but read it with caution and trigger warnings - it’s about grief and trauma and racism and police brutality, but also about love and community.

The Prey of Gods by Nicky Drayden.  This is a sci-fi/fantasy/specfic mashup that takes place in near-future South Africa and has world-building myths with gods and demigoddesses and a trip to the world of the dead but also a genetically altered hallucinogenic drug that turns people into giant animals and a robot uprising and a political campaign and a transgender pop star and a m/m couple and all of them are connected. It’s bonkers. Like, so, so absolutely mind-breaking weird. And I loved it.

Crier’s War and Iron Heart by Nina Varela.  I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVED the amount of folktales they told each other with queer romances as integral to those stories, especially in Iron Heart. A conversation between the two leads where Crier says she wants to read Ayla like a book, and Ayla says she’s not a book, and Crier explains all the different ways she wants to know Ayla, like a person, and wants to deserve to know her like a person, made me weak. It lives in my head rent-free.

Queen’s Shadow by E.K. Johnston @ekjohnston . I listened to this book on Libby and then immediately listened to it at least one more time, maybe twice, before my borrow time ran out. I love Padmé, and just always wish that female Star Wars characters got more focus and attention and this book gave me that!! And queer handmaidens! And the implication that Sabé is in love with Padmé and that’s just something that will always be true and she will always be devoted and also will make her own life anyway. And the Star Wars audiobooks being recorded the way they are with background sounds and music means it feels like watching a really long detailed beautiful Star Wars movie just about Padmé and her handmaidens.

Sissy: A Coming of Gender Story by Jacob Tobia. I needed to read this. The way Tobia talks about their experience of gender within the contexts of college, college leadership, and career, hit home. I kept trying to highlight several pages in a row on my kindle so I could go back and read them after it got returned to the library (sadly it didn’t work - it cuts off highlights after a certain number of characters). The way they talk about TOKENISM they way they talk about the responsibilities of the interviewer when an interviewee holds marginalized identities especially when no one else in the room does!!! Ahhhh!!!

Bonds of Brass by Emily Skrutskie. Disclaimer for this one that the author was rightfully criticized for writing a Black main character as a white author (and how the story ended up playing into some fucked up stuff that I can’t really unpack without spoiling). But also, the author has been working to move forward knowing she can’t change the past, has donated her proceeds, and this book is really good? It has all the fanfic tropes, so much delicious tension, a totally unexpected plot twist that had me immediately rereading the book. This book was super fun and also kind of just really really good Star Wars fanfiction.

How To Be a Normal Person by T.J. Klune. This book was so sweet, and cute, and hopeful, and both ridiculous and so real. I had some trouble getting used to Gus’ voice and internal monologue, but I got into it and then loved every bit after. The ace rep is something I’ve never seen like this before (and have barely read any ace books but still this was so fleshed out and well rounded and not just like, ‘they’re obsessed with swords not sex’ - looking at you, Once & Future - and leaving it there.) This all felt like a slice of life and I feel like I learned about people while reading it. Some of the moments are so, so funny, some are vaguely devastating. I have been personally victimized by TJ Klune for how he ends this book (a joke, you will know once you read it) but it also reminds me of the end of the “You Are There” episode of Xena and we all know what the answer to that question was.... and I choose to believe the answer here was similar.

You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson. I wish I had this book when I was in high school. I honestly have complicated feelings about prom and haven’t really been seeking out contemporary YA so I was hesitant to read this but it was so good and so well-written, and had a lot of depth to it. The movie (and Broadway show) “The Prom” wants what this book has.

Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth. I never read horror books, so this was a new thing for me. I loved the feeling of this book, the way I felt fully immersed. I loved how entirely queer it was. I was interested in the characters and the relationships, even though we didn’t have a full chance to go super deep into any one person but rather saw the connections between everyone and the way the stories matched up with each other. I just wanted a bit of a more satisfying ending.

Honorable Mention: reread in 2020 but read for the first time pre-2020

Red White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. I couldn’t make this post without mentioning this book. It got me through this year. I love this book so much; I think of this book all the time. This book made me want to find love for myself. You’ve all heard about it enough but if you haven’t read this book what are you DOING.

In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan @sarahreesbrennan​ . I reread this one over and over too, both as text and as an audiobook. I went for walks when I had lost my earbuds and had Elliott screaming about an elf brothel loudly playing and got weird looks from someone walking their dog. I love this book so much. It’s just so fun, and so healing to read a book reminiscent of all the fantasies I read as a kid, but with a bi main character and a deconstruction of patriarchy and making fun of the genre a bit. Also, idiots to lovers is a great trope and it’s definitely in this book.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This book is forever so important to me. I am always drawn in by how tenderly Sáenz portrays his characters. These boys. These boys and their parents. I love them. I love them so much. This is another one where I don’t even know what to say. I have more than 30 pages in my tag for this book. I have “arda” set as a keyboard shortcut on my phone and laptop to turn into the full title. This book saved my life.

Last Night I Sang to the Monster by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. This book hurts to read - it’s a story about trauma, about working through that trauma, healing enough to be ready to hold the worst memories, healing enough to move through the pain and start to make a life. It’s about found family and love and pain and I love it. It’s cathartic. And it’s a little bit quietly queer in a beautiful way, but that’s not the focus. Look up trigger warnings (they kind of are spoilery so I won’t say them here but if you have the potential to be triggered please look them up or ask me before reading)

Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.  When asked what my all time favorite book is, it’s usually this one. Gail Carson Levine has been doing live readings at 11am since the beginning of the pandemic shut down in the US, and the first book she read was Ella Enchanted. I’ve been slowly reading it to @mssarahpearl and am just so glad still that it has the ability to draw me in and calm me down and feels like home after all this time. This book is about agency. I love it.

Radio Silence by Alice Oseman @chronicintrovert . I’ve had this on my all-time-faves list since I read it a few years ago and ended up rereading it this year before sending a gift copy to a friend, so I could write little notes in it. It felt a little different reading it this time - as I get further away from being a teenager myself, the character voice this book is written in takes a little longer to get used to, but it’s so authentic and earnest and I love it. I absolutely adore this book about platonic love and found family and fandom and mental illness and abuse and ace identity and queerness and self-determination, especially around college and career choices. Ahhh. Thank you Alice Oseman!!!

Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray @claudiagray​ . I have this one on audible and reread it several times this year. I love the fleshing out of Leia’s story before the original trilogy, I love her having had a relationship before Han, and the way it would have affected her perspective. I also am intrigued by the way it analyses the choices the early rebellion had to make... I just, I love all the female focused new Star Wars content and the complexity being brought to the rebellion.

[timac-extraversal]

Four Racial Futures

(TIMAC #003, ~3,800 words, 16 minutes)

Summary: Four alternative paths to the current dominant left/liberal racial vision for future America are discussed, including an underestimate of the size of the white population, Castizo Futurism, Landian Hyper-Racism, and changes in society's understanding of developmental psychology.

Epistemic Status: Political speculation.

-☆☆☆-

‘Majority Minority’ America? Don’t Bet on It John J. Miller, Wall Street Journal (2021/02) [paywall]

“The surge in mixing across ethno-racial lines is one of the most important and unheralded developments of our time,” says Mr. Alba, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He rattles off facts and figures: Today, more than 10% of U.S.-born babies have one parent who is nonwhite or Hispanic and one who is white and not Hispanic. That proportion is larger than the number of babies born to two Asian parents and not far behind the number of babies born to two black parents. “We’re entering a new era of mixed backgrounds,” Mr. Alba says.

The census apparently counts those who identify as both white and non-white as 'non-white,' which may be undercounting the number of people who are likely to identify as 'white' in the United States. Sociologist Richard Alba argues that assimilation is bidirectional, but proceeding apace.

The infamous Razib Khan chimes in on Twitter:

The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream [link] haven't read this book but summary supports my exp./priors in 21st century.

"When they marry, 72% of Asian-white women and 64% of Asian-white men take white spouses. The government nevertheless counts them and their progeny as nonwhite." i have a blue-eyed blonde-haired 1/4th japanese friend. she probably doesn't realize she's counted as nonwhite

fwiw, my half brown kids 'identify' as tan. but if they were forced to pick a race and others were forced would choose white more than anything else

On the one hand, we have the largely implicit left-wing theory that if there is no majority race, there can be no organized oppression by a majority race. On the other, the implicitly-left-wing theory that if there are many mixed-race people, it will become too difficult to organize by race - identifying people on the basis of race will be harder and people will have split loyalties.

Either might fail on its own. If people are naturally prone to politics by race and ethnicity, then a lack of a clear supermajority in a majority-minority country may lead to shifting ethnic coalitions, with no group feeling that it's in a comfortable position of power. Even within a mixed group, there might be selection in some specific direction, such as colorism, which is currently its own category of discourse.

On the other hand, it's apparently possible that some form of unironic 'Multiracial Whiteness' could "win," either from widespread adoption of 'white' as a norm even if whites were a minority, or by a supermajority ending up 7/8ths 'white' and the definition of 'white' expanding to match...

[Quora] What is Castizo Futurism? Renatto Belerofonte (2020)

Among the right-wingers, there is also a joke that "the Alt Right is a hispanic movement." And just as there is Afro-Pessimism, there is a 'White Optimism' in the form of "Castizo Futurism," as Quora user Renatto Belerofonte describes better than I could:

Castizo Futurism comes from the idea that the future of whites in the United States and Latin America is not as dire as white supremacists that believe in white genocide think it is. White Identitarians traditionally organize their societies through Hypodescent (the idea that the offspring of an union between two conflicting classes adopts the social standing of the lower class involved) [...] An example of hypodescent would be the One Drop Rule.

[...]

Castizo Futurism is basically the adoption of Hyperdescent by American White Supremacists, the idea that whiteness is a malleable condition that can morph according to the material and historical conjuncture of society. If Hispanics in the US suddenly stop being “non-whites” and start to be perceived as “mostly mestizos and castizos that are already predominantly European with various degrees of native blood” then you can conceive the prospect of “whitening” them overtime. If Mestizos can become Castizos (which according to White Supremacists is the cut-off at which you start to manifest European behavior and appearance) then there is the possibility that White Genocide can be reversed.

As Renatto writes, "if you look at non-anglo societies this paradigm is not the case [...] Spanish, Portuguese and French societies in America believed that you could 'become' white through generations of intermarriage..."

Human beings grow old and wish to create a legacy in their environments. For some people, this is children. For others, it is activism. Suppose you tie your self-identity to a great confrontation to overcome "whiteness," and then just as you saw the traditions of your ancestors as something outdated to be overturned, most of an entire generation simply ignore you and decide that they are now white.

Who, exactly, is going to stop them?

Of course, there is no guarantee that this will happen, but at the same time, there is no requirement that it won't.

One of the great advantages to adopting relatively liberal methods and tactics is that you aren't obligated to pin your hopes on demographic triumphalism - if the future goes a bit off-script, that isn't necessarily a problem. And it may well go off-script; one of the characteristics of the future that I have tried to express in my blogging is that, for most of us, it will be unexpected.

Why does the old conventional racism use hypodescent? Old conventional racism might claim to be based on thinking in terms of evolution, but it isn't necessarily. Often it proceeds as if race is primordial, trailing back into the mists of time. Why embrace hyperdescent now? In part, because 'white' was something that emerged once through evolution and selection, and it's implemented as a statistical distribution of heritable traits (even if those heritable traits are solely appearance). As long as those traits exist, it can simply be recreated if the appropriate conditions arise.

[Landian] Hyper-Racism Nick Land, Xenosystems.net (2014/09, arch. 2015)

Speaking of statistical distributions of traits, there are some pessimists that argue that intra-European political preferences are heritable and conserved.

But even those 'within-white' preferences, should they exist, may end up scrambled...

Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence. The genetically self-filtering elite is not merely different — and becoming ever more different — it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status. Analogical fusion with Cochran’s space colonists is scarcely avoidable. If SES-based assortative mating is taking place, humanity (and not only society) is coming apart, on an axis whose inferior pole is refuse. This is not anything that ordinary racism is remotely able to process. That it is a consummate nightmare for anti-racism goes without question, but it is also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake.

"The problem with ordinary racism," Nick Land writes, "is its utter incomprehension of the near future."

If the conventional racists view race as primordial, as something that can only be either preserved or lost, and the would-be Castizo Futurists view race as something that can change over generations, then the Transhumanists are the most radical. Transhumanists tend to view the body mechanically, as a system of parts, each of which could potentially be replaced. This is the view on the macro level - they would support growing new organs in vats and transplanting them - but it's also true on the micro level. To a Transhumanist, a gene is not the same thing as a person who has it, and a gene is not in itself sacred any more than the radiator on your car is sacred. (Alter someone's genetics unwillingly, however, and you might find far more stern disagreement - not unlike the violent disagreement you might get if you broke into someone's car and stole their radiator.)

Someone once described Americans as 'temporarily-embarassed millionaires.' For temporarily-embarassed cyborgs, much of contemporary race discourse is just not very impressive. For Liberal Transhumanists, a man who has inherited frail leg bone genes is not an inherently unworthy being, but is merely someone who has not yet received robot legs - just as they are human beings who have not yet received anti-aging pills. And if some men have sturdy leg bone genes instead? Rather than a threat of enduring hierarchy, those genes represent potential untapped capital that could be used to raise the standard of living (from the typical subjective perspective).

In the famous animated franchise Ghost in the Shell, the lead character has an entirely synthetic body, except for her brain. If this were possible (and at this point, we don't know that it is, though we're continuing to experiment in fields like tissue engineering), one might describe a society capable of it as "also trans-racial, infra-racial, and hyper-racial in ways that leave ‘race politics’ as a gibbering ruin in its wake."

Are there risks involved with this mindset? Certainly. But many of the basic criticisms will ring as hollow to transhumanists as basic conservative criticisms ring hollow to many left-wing and liberal readers.

This future is not yet etched in stone, but on the other hand, an article in Nature published in 2020 argued that...

Together, these findings suggest that there are, at present, no known insurmountable hurdles to the eventual development of safe and effective clinical applications of genome editing in humans. […] Therapeutic genome editing will be realized, at least for some diseases, over the next 5-10 years.

Part of what makes contemporary race discourse so unimpressive to transhumanists is that it fails to integrate Crispr or PGD-IVF into its moral imagination. Right-wingers are said to look backwards, and left-wingers and progressives to look forwards. But while the right-wing WrathOfGnon would encourage readers think on ancestral time scales by physically building villages out of traditional materials (a view which, right or wrong, is consistent), a number of Progressives fail to imagine beyond the next fifteen years.

...or perhaps they do. Can children consent to what's considered a genetic disease (such as Tay-Sachs, which is quite lethal)? Would having kids the old-fashioned way come to be seen as a low-class activity for rednecks and religious fundamentalists? There are ways in which genetic equity is at odds with genetic freedom.

It's also possible that they are simply technology pessimists, maintaining multiple rings of protection in case technology should fail to pan out this century. Though if this is their perspective, perhaps they should consider the potential dangers of their current rhetoric as well.

Contrary to the Liberal Transhumanists, for someone like Land, everything is highly competitive evolution.

genomic manipulation capabilities, which will also be unevenly distributed by SES, will certainly intensify the trend to speciation, rather than ameliorating it.

I take issue with Land, here. Not just morally (though he writes "this blog generally seeks to spread dismay whenever the opportunity arises"), but in practical terms.

Every time we edit a gene, we risk an off-target result, which may cause disease. The tradeoffs for early genetic engineering favor focusing on monogenic disease, the sort of situation where your choices are to risk genetic engineering or experience near-certain death by age 30. Many traits like intelligence or general health, should they be genetic, are likely highly polygenic. Hypothetically, a rich man could pay for a thousand edits, but this would only work with a relatively mature technology where the rate of error is very, very low.

Something closer to the opposite of Nick Land's idea might come to pass, in which sharp negative points are eroded away except for a few populations such as religious conservatives, including the literal Amish, and medical skeptics, paid for by big institutions like insurance companies and public health authorities. In twenty years, the likes of L0m3z, a right-wing Twitter contrarian, may write about the coming "Planet of Midwits."

As for Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis In-Vitro Fertilization, although it is currently being used for preventing the transmission of Huntington's Disease (if you have $35,000 to spare), the gains from embryo selection for other traits can be more limited than people might expect.

[Video] The Glenn Show: The Dark Matter of Developmental Psychology Glenn Loury & James Heckman, BloggingHeads.tv (2020/12)

GLENN: I'm talking to one of the great economists working on human development. What are you up to at the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago?

HECKMAN: Well, one of the great issues of course, always, is exactly how do you improve the lot of human beings. Namely, how do you measure what improvement is, what are the relevant life skills, and then how do you develop those skills? What's the proper role for social policy, and I don't mean just governmental policy, I mean social policy? There are some very strong interventions, evidence for interventions, showing how if you tell parents a certain amount of information that they lack, it can have huge effects on their children. And the same is true of interventions that occur in adolescent years. Human potential is not being fully utilized. [...] I've been working on this not only in the US, but in several countries around the world - a lot of time spent in China, recently.

[...]

HECKMAN: And then gradually society has become more and more cognitively focused. Well that sounds good. When Governor Clinton was governor of Arkansas, well all of these well-meaning officials were talking about how to improve schools, what do they talk about? Nate scores - reading, writing, and arithmetic. They don't talk about character formation. They don't talk about self-control, executive functioning, the way you can help govern your life. [...]

HECKMAN: One of the main lessons of this body of work, and I'm proud to have contributed to this, is in showing the power of social and emotional and personality skills in shaping lives. Skills that can be actually cultivated, and skills that can be cultivated not just at the beginning of life, but through adolescence especially.

What evidence is there? Aside from more contemporary study in his own field, Heckman mentions discusses the Perry Preschool Project, a topic which comes up sometimes when one is looking into this field. While increases in IQ scores failed to stick, the experimental group had improvements in other life outcomes such as earnings, home ownership, and lower risk of incarceration.

HECKMAN: ...but the way you take the kid to the next step matters a lot. You've got to do it with some patience, and with some empathy - some attachment. And so there's a whole subject matter in child development psychology which we're looking at now - we actively are exploring.

HECKMAN: By the way, I don't want to pretend this is all completely known. This is what makes the work that I'm doing now so exciting. Because now we're measuring these interactions, week by week. This is now not in the US, it's in western China, one of the poorest areas. We can see how the interactions between the parent and the child are leading to the growth of skills on the part of the child. [...]

HECKMAN: This was something that was tried in Jamaica some 40 years ago. I'm working with a group of people with a study that's still ongoing outside of Kingston, Jamaica. It's called the "Reach Up and Learn" study in Jamaica. The China study is patterned after that study. [...]

So the research the Heckman is focused on is not limited to a particular race, country, or culture.

HECKMAN: It turns out that a lot of parents don't really know how to parent. And what do I mean by that? They don't have a clear idea what a normal growth trajectory is for a child, what a child can do. And they often don't understand how powerful they are in shaping the life of the child. So you give them that kind of information. Nobody's being forced to do anything. Just empower people. Almost every caretaker of a young child really wants that child to succeed. [...] When they are told this information, they act on it.

Asian Americans live longer than non-hispanic white Americans, and have a higher median household income. [1☆][2☆] While there is some racial tension between white and asian Americans (see, for instance, ongoing 'cultural appropriation' arguments and other discourse), it's generally considered less of an issue than disparities between the country's white majority and black Americans.

Could parental information and mentoring programs reduce disparities in the United States, even if they aren't resolved? And could this turn down the heat on race discourse?

For instance, at $76k median household income, white households make about 77% of what asian households do. Black American households make about $45k, or about 60% of white American household income. At 77%, they would make about $59k, not far off from the $56k of hispanic households.

What are the potential downsides? The most likely way for the program to fail is for it to have no effect or, at worst, a modest negative effect. [3] It isn't incompatible with an ecological view of human society. It would cost money, but probably not much more than another couple years of additional schooling.

Given the modest downside risk, what are the potential upsides? If the reports on the Perry Preschool Program are accurate and the effects can be replicated, there are a large savings to be had, mostly from the reduction in crime. [4☆]

But can the effects be replicated? The sample size for the Perry Preschool Project was relatively small. As far as Early Childhood Education programs go, the effectiveness of Head Start, which provides more than just preschool and is "based on a 'whole child' model," is disputed. [5☆][6☆] However...

Two older "high-quality" preschool programs mentioned frequently in the research literature are the HighScope Perry Preschool program from Ypsilanti, Michigan, and the Chicago Child-Parent Center (CPC) program. These programs include parent education and support and thus differ in significant ways from the type of preschool programs offered by Head Start, as well as the more recent "high-quality" programs. They are also much more expensive on a per-capita basis. Both the CPC and the HighScope Perry Preschool programs were started in the 1960s, and researchers have carried out long-term cost-benefit analyses for both programs. These analyses conclude that better long-term outcomes more than pay for their higher program costs, mainly in the form of higher career income and lower rates of criminal behavior.

- Armor & Sousa [6☆]

By 2018, the "Reach Up and Learn" program Heckman was speaking of had been expanded to 9 other countries, with varying degrees of effectiveness depending on its implementation. [7☆] (Though its associated US domain has expired.) Heckman's own study is, as one would expect, positive about the effects - and was published in Science.

Early childhood education increased earnings by 25%, enough for growth-stunted children to completely catch up to the earnings of the non-stunted comparison group. The control group remained far behind. In fact, average earnings from full-time jobs were 25% higher for the treatment group than for the control group. Ninety-eight percent of treated children had been employed at age 22, with 94% in full-time jobs.

Jamaica is not America, and interventions that worked under conditions in Jamaica might be less effective in America. However, if it could be achieved, a 25% increase in median income would put black American households at roughly $57k annual income, just above hispanic households, and within striking distance of the $59k target.

A nutritional intervention was also attempted, however, although "Other studies have shown cognitive benefits from nutritional supplementation in the first 24 months," Heckman wrote, "The nutrition supplement for the child was often shared with the family, so it may not have been sufficient to produce better outcomes."

And the nutrition angle might be worth looking into - the study cited (preceded by an analysis, by one of the same authors, of 13 studies on the subject) by Scott Alexander in Society is Fixed, Biology is Mutable showed that vitamins didn't do much for well-nourished kids, but that a minority of undernourished kids may have benefitted greatly.

-☆☆☆-

[1☆] As of 2014, asian Americans lived about 86 years, hispanics about 83 years, and non-hispanic whites about 79 years.

[2☆] In 2019, asian households had a median household income of $98,174 US to white non-hispanic median household income of $76,057. (It should be noted however, as shown in this Wikipedia article that is easier to read than the government data it cites, that household median incomes for groups within "white" or "asian" are not all the same.)

[3] Heckman's program and attitude suggest that an ideological explanation of how we got here isn't included, just an assumption of lack of access to resources by impoverished parents, whether that's in Jamaica, Peru, or China. This suggests the program lacks a loop where program failure just means that the program wasn't tried hard enough.

[4☆] Updating the Economic Impacts of the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program (2005)

At a 3% discount rate the program repays $12.90 for every $1 invested from the perspective of the general public; with a 7% discount rate, the repayment per dollar is $5.67. Returns are even higher if the total benefits--both public and private--are counted. However, there are strong differences by gender: a large proportion of the gains from the program come from lower criminal activity rates by the treatment group, almost all of which is undertaken by the males in the sample. The implications of these findings for public policy on early childhood education are considered.

[5☆] Wikipedia collects a number of studies both for and against.

[6☆] The Dubious Promise of Universal Preschool David J. Armor & Sonia Sousa, National Affairs (2014/01, arch. 2014/01)

[7☆] Reach Up: how a Jamaican early childhood intervention swept the world APolitical.co (2018/04)

[asexual-means-no-attraction]

Tbh the pan people I've known longest are like. 60+ yo trans people who used the definition including trans folks because of the transphobia rampant in the bi community during their youth. Like. Bi radfems and lesbian separatist ideals hit mspec trans folks hard and the pan label at least included them specifically. But that's just a different perspective I've heard that I feel people might want to know.

sorry for the wait on this. I was gonna do a big research things but I really don't have the time. But I have a few things to say about that:

1. It is a different perspective. However, not one I can get behind. Making a new term for the same thing because of issues in the community doesn't solve anything. It creates more confusion and starts changing the definition of the previous term on people who use it. In this case, it's telling bisexuals who aren't transphobic that their identity is transphobic because of the bad apples in their community. It's not fair to them.

Bisexual has ALWAYS included trans people-- as every identity has. Transphobia is awful to deal with, but making a new label to include them only makes things more complicated. The real solution would be to address the transphobia instead.

2. I understand that this is one perspective. But these few personal experiences don't overshadow the much larger number of instances where pansexuality as a concept has harmed bisexuals.

3. The meaning of pansexuality has changed a lot. It was originally all about sexual desire and the "sex instinct." Which I find interesting seeing how now a days pan is seen as "pure" and bisexuals as the sex crazed ones. Then pan meant that it included trans and intersex individuals. And while yes it can be hard to find partners when you are trans and intersex, every identity already includes them. Making a whole new label implies that trans women aren't real women, and trans men aren't real men. Not to mention it just makes me think of chasers.

Even the newest definition of "pans have no preference of gender" doesn't hold up since preferences aren't a new identity. and the fact that the community uses that to demonize bisexuals as well as those with genital preference is harmful. Having a preference isn't a bad thing. And honestly... everyone has some sorta preference, whether it's gender related or not. It's ok to have preferences-- it's normal and doesn't make you a bad person. It's more important to be a respectful person then to act superior for not having any preferences.

4. oddly enough, from the small amount of research I did do, many trans voices talked about feeling more accepted by BOTH bisexuals and pansexuals in even amounts-- often using the terms interchangeably. I'm not saying your story is wrong or anything, just that it doesn't seem to be the more common story. Sometimes where someone is location wise has a big effect too. It's important to look at perspectives of people with various backgrounds and from various locations.

I hope that's helpful. If anyone else has anything else to add feel free to. I just don't have time to find a buncha links and shit.

[kafkasmelomania]

May 22, 2021: The Greatest Mistake of My Life by Holding Absence

*Bandcamp here

Did you know that The Greatest Mistake of My Life takes its name from a song from the 1930s? When lead vocalist Lucas Woodland gave his grandmother a copy of Holding Absence’s self-titled debut album on vinyl, she remarked that it was the second vinyl recording done by anyone in the family. She then told him that his great-uncle “went into Cardiff one day and recorded himself singing. It was like the equivalent of a photo booth where they press it on a small 7’ record and it would have been cheap as hell. She said that it was a song called ‘The Greatest Mistake Of My Life’. So I quizzed her a bit more and all she could remember was the lyric, ‘The greatest mistake of my life was saying goodbye to you’.” (Emphasis mine.) Woodland later looked up that lyric online and discovered a 1939 song by Gracie Fields called “The Greatest Mistake of My Life”. Not only did the band decide to name their sophomore album after the song, they covered it and used that cover as the closing track, which is so cool. As Woodland puts it (emphasis mine):

“I think longevity is truly the greatest achievement a band can accomplish. Some of the best albums of all time weren’t popular when they were released. I’d like to think that this music will last a long time. That’s kind of the point of using “The Greatest Mistake of My Life” as a reference. This song is 90 years old! And now some emo kid from Britain has named an album after it! Everyone involved in that original song is probably not around anymore. But that’s part of what makes it cool. So, if in 90 years’ time, a progressive lo-fi jazz trap band wants to name an album after a Holding Absence song, that would be wicked!”

Longevity comes up more than once in interviews, especially with regard to the Gracie Fields song. For example, from Loudwire (emphasis mine):

“This song has definitely made me realize just how special longevity is in every walk of life! Even things as simple architectural history or the etymology of everyday words. Just seeing how small things can trickle through time and what impact they have is really cool and kinda the ultimate goal as somebody trying to create art.”

Holding Absence took inspiration from a wide variety of places; the Gracie Fields song was just the start. According to Woodland, the song “Beyond Belief” is “the band’s attempt to channel The Cure if they were a 2000s Emo band.” (Emphasis mine) Additionally, “‘Afterlife’ was originally inspired by Mipha off of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s because whenever you die, she brings you back to life.” I thought that was so cool. That whole Aesthetic Magazine interview is really good, by the way; if you liked this album, I highly recommend that you give it a read. One thing I learned from that interview is the origin of the ghostly monologues that appear on several of the tracks (emphasis mine):

“This part was recorded by an American actress with a lovely voice. The things she is saying are passages of poetry that I’d written. I kind of paraphrased comments on a Reddit thread which asked “what are the greatest mistakes of your life?” There were loads of comments and I picked three very different ones and turned them into poems. Then we got the actress to speak on the album. It’s kind of meta and over the top if you think about it, but I just liked the idea of no one having to listen to this album alone. This woman is always there and processing things with you. She’s one of the whispers at the beginning of the album and is also at the end.”

Isn’t that so interesting? Anyway, The Greatest Mistake of My Life has been getting rave reviews and for good reason. There was something in particular that Kerrang said that stuck with me (emphasis mine):

“During the past year, many have tripped over themselves to label certain albums the perfect distillation of the times we’re in. The Greatest Mistake Of My Life is prime for consideration. At a point when our world has been reduced to the walls around us and our thoughts have turned inwards, to lives we may have only half lived before the pandemic began, it’s a document that reminds us not to short change ourselves and seek the happiness we deserve before it’s too late. Nowhere is this sentiment more explicitly captured than ‘Die Alone (In Your Lover’s Arms)’, which agonisingly laments a life spent with the wrong person.”

“[...] to lives we may have only half lived before the pandemic began.” What a fantastic way to put it. Listen to The Greatest Mistake of My Life today!

If you’d like to get involved with stopping the atrocities against Palestine, here’s where you can start (text in bold for readability):

This Carrd is full of information, petitions, and places to donate.

Here are some organizations to which you can donate. This post now includes a list of corporations to boycott.

Here is some information about the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and a list of other organizations.

This is a list of actions you can take (somewhat UK-specific). This is a reading list of texts with more background information.

UK petitions: This is a petition for the UK government to formally recognize the State of Palestine. This is a petition to introduce sanctions against Israel. This is a petition to condemn Israel for their treatment of Palestine and Palestinians.

Here’s the Wikipedia overview of the current iteration of the crisis.

If you’re curious about the United States’s involvement: this is a report about U.S. foreign aid to Israel. This is the Wikipedia page for Palestine-United States relations and this is the Wikipedia page for Israel-United States relations.

Here are some perspectives from on the ground in Gaza. This is also explains why spreading the Palestinian point of view. is so important.

This is one Jewish person’s explanation of the conflation of Jewish identity with the modern Israeli state. They mention the Nakba, which is important – per Wikipedia, “the Nakba, […] also known as the Palestinian Catastrophe, was the destruction of Palestinian society and homeland in 1948, and the permanent displacement of a majority of the Palestinian people.”

Black lives matter and here are some ways you can get involved in the  fight against racism, specifically anti-black racism (text in bold for readability):  

This Linktree and this Carrd are full of ways to confront and fight against anti-black racism: places to donate, advice for protesting, educational resources.

This post is specifically about Daunte Wright and how to help his family. This is Daunte Wright’s memorial fund.

The  Minnesota Freedom Fund is doing good work, and since so many people have been recognizing that work and donating to them, they ask that you  instead donate to Families Supporting Families Against Police Violence, the Racial Justice Network, Communities United Against Police Brutality, the Minneapolis NAACP, the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Minneapolis, and the Black Immigrant Collective. You can also donate to the Bail Project, which operates in multiple states.

Other organizations to which you can donate are the Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, the NAACP, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Okra Project, the Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative, For The Gworls, G.L.I.T.S., the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, the Black Trans Travel Fund, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and the Black Trans Femmes in the Arts Collective.

GoFundMe: Justice for Breonna Taylor, In Memory of Jamarion Robinson, Rent Fund For Black LGBT Family, Esperanza Spalding’s BIPOC Artist Sanctuary, Help the Williams Family Get a Set of Wheels, Survival and Gender Affirming Needs for Black Enby

(via https://open.spotify.com/album/4qY3S2Iz6VpAa2EzhWkrpo?si=m1iGdkTwRFWZk1Lv_3H_BQ)

[love-takes-work]

The Tale of Steven - Outline & Review

The Tale of Steven is a wonderful, timeless-feeling storybook about identity, authority, and finding your own way. It's got an innovative design that requires the reader to turn the book upside-down, sideways, and right-side-up to get the whole story, sometimes all on the same spread of art and text, and as we come to find out ultimately, this "tale of Steven" really is STEVEN'S story.

We begin with White Diamond, matriarch of the Gem homeworld, setting the stage--and not only does she frame the other Diamonds uncharitably (especially the littlest Diamond, Pink), she even sets the tone by admonishing THE READER straight away, scolding us to turn the book her way to read her words. (We must turn the book upside-down to read her perspective. Very nice.)

As we listen to White Diamond tell us how ridiculous Pink Diamond is and frame her as "impossible to understand," we also see exactly why Pink felt driven to leave her home. White apparently appointed herself the authority on keeping Pink in her place, and we're treated to White's huge pale hands holding little Pink Diamond in her tiny pink throne, “right”-side-up. White's perspective is proper, and she is to be praised, you see, for understanding that Pink's desires and attributes are not worthwhile and need to be forced out of her. Pink is shown as having run away to Earth and reinventing herself as a new Gem: Rose Quartz. Suddenly, we are able to turn the book sideways and see what she's thinking too. (White does NOT approve.)

The Earth, where Rose Quartz is allowed to love herself and love her surroundings, is simultaneously called "grotesque" by White, and we're seeing the same planet through two sets of eyes. White sees Rose as "stubborn" and "absurd," while Rose just gives us an aside about not listening to White if we don't want to and giving us a choice to read the book her way. As Rose continues to depict rainbows and falling in love with a human--Greg Universe--White is getting angrier. She shrieks, "You're ruining my story!" Rose, rightly, replies, "This isn't your story."

Soon, Rose has bequeathed her Gem--the center of her being--to her half-human son, Steven, with the consequence of ceasing to be herself. Baby Steven appears with his father and Rose Quartz's three companions--Amethyst, Garnet, and Pearl. White Diamond finally abandons trying to narrate this story, escaping with a vindictive comment and an attempt to frame Rose as simply Pink Diamond hiding "inside an unwitting creature." Rose's perspective expresses that she wanted her son to experience the love and acceptance she never received. And then, Steven's perspective pops onto the scene. We can now turn the book fully right-side-up to read his tale.

As the story slides fully into Steven's perspective, Rose's hopes for him still line up on the sides of the pages, longing for him to experience kindness, to never know the awfulness she went through on Homeworld, to never have to feel the criticism issued by the other Diamonds, and to be able to tell his own story one day. Steven reflects on Rose's influence on his life, how he's heard about her and the more truth he's discovered the more everything frightens him. There are many perspectives, he recognizes. Perhaps there is more than one way to read the story.

White's perspective, upside-down now, returns alongside all this. She suggests "Pink" has come crawling back to turn the world the "right" way again, and she's puzzled by Steven's appearance, but she's determined to rescue Pink from herself by separating Steven from his Gem. Meanwhile, Steven's been wondering what his relationship is to Pink and Rose--is she inside him? Is he actually her? What's real?

But they all learn the truth when Steven's Gem reveals that he was also Steven inside there. All along, he was himself and no one else. This is, and has always been, his story, and he has been right about who he is.

Several wordless frames depict Steven's two aspects finding each other, reconnecting, and becoming one again. Newly confident in who he is and having asserted as much in the face of crushing authority, Steven declares, "This way feels right to me." The orientation of the book AND the definition of himself are the focus here, and for the first time, White begins to consider that her perspective was the wrong side up in someone else's story.

Steven closes by claiming the book as his own (writing his own name in the "This Book Belongs To" space, which is superimposed over a Diamond Authority symbol with the Pink Diamond on top instead of on the bottom). The end dedication is made out "To Trans & Gender-Expansive Kids."

To reflect on this sentiment and the rest of the book, I will say that a large portion of the Steven Universe fandom already recognized some threads of a trans allegory in the animation this is based on. Steven, though he is not specifically depicted as a confirmed trans character in the show, does not demonstrate or seem to experience toxic masculinity in association with his quest to be powerful, and has no qualms about using symbolism, iconography, and apparel that is more commonly associated in today's Western society with women and girls (e.g., the color pink, flower symbolism, protective and defensive rather than aggressive and offensive behaviors, wearing jewelry and dresses occasionally without it being a gag). His assertion that he is Steven and not Pink Diamond or Rose Quartz has many parallels with a common trans narrative--including pronouns that the Diamonds refused to respect--even though it is also its own thing since human beings do not have to defend that they are not literally their mother. 

They do, however, frequently struggle with authorities in their lives "correcting" them on who and what they are "for their own good," brushing off the seriousness of the misery it causes, and these children do find themselves forced to wear clothes, use names, and adhere to roles that do not match who they are. They even sometimes hear authorities mourn the "loss" of a different-gender version of them and accuse the child of being selfish for wanting to manifest their truth instead of being the son or daughter the parent thought they had.

It is my deepest hope that authorities like this can learn to turn the book around.

It is so important for children to learn that they ARE the authority on their identity, and while some well-meaning authorities in their lives may frame their identity as a phase or a fake, they do not have to accept this view of the world, or even that it comes from a loving place. White Diamond did not sound like a stern but caring figure to me. She sounded like a tyrant who is convinced of her own correctness, determined to gaslight and shame Pink Diamond into becoming the person SHE wanted. Love is listening. Love is nurturing. Love is seeing pleasure and pain and letting those things guide you in supporting a happy existence. Kids whose gender is complicated and young people who develop misunderstood identities need books like this to center them in their own stories and empower them to show others how to read their book.

Except for the section of the book where Steven's organic self and Gem self are separated and re-combine, the message is solid for readers who have not watched the show. But because of how important that wordless series of panels is and how much background you actually have to have to understand what's happening there, I recommend this book primarily for fans of the show who have seen "Change Your Mind" and the episodes that support it. The other depictions are more powerful and illuminating for those who have context from the show also, but the main purpose of the book can be readily understood without that background. 

If you haven't seen the show, all you need to know is that Steven is a hybrid Gem/human who has a gemstone in his human body, and it gives him superhuman powers. Gem characters generate a body from their Gem, while Steven's body is organic and presumably NOT generated from the Gem. White Diamond removed Steven's Gem from his belly, expecting Pink Diamond to take form out of the Gem. She thought his organic half was just a human that the Gem was stuck in. But instead, a Pink Steven emerged and went back to his organic self to merge again, proving that he is Steven, not someone else, through and through. And he truly loves and knows himself.

A couple other notes fans of the show might enjoy: White Diamond's hypothesis that Pink Diamond was "hiding in an unwitting creature" is really interesting--she knew what Steven was but believed he was just a normal human hosting a Gem. Interesting. White's disdain toward Yellow and Blue for "spoiling" Pink is an interesting addition to what we know about her, too. Pink is pictured standing on her hands on her throne, upside-down, which is interesting since it's both "silly" and an expression of her right-side-up perspective (since, when we obey White, we're reading the book upside-down!). White's commentary that she kept Pink in line is also interesting, considering we've seen way more of how Yellow and Blue treated her and none of that was very nice either (yet they're the "nice" ones in this story, indulging her even though we know they abused her). There's a really cute image of Rose lounging on the beach with Greg in what looks like a swimsuit. Connie is in a frame with the Gems looking through a telescope. And there's a frame with Garnet holding pink and blue butterflies.

Inventive, beautiful, moving, and so necessary. Buy a copy. Let kids turn the book around.

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

[letterboxd]

Life in Film: Levan Akin

“Someone told me, ‘You are one person when you make the film, another when it’s over’. And that’s really the case with this film, it’s changed me fundamentally.” —The writer and director of And Then We Danced talks to our London correspondent Ella Kemp about masculinity, queer love stories, Georgian cinema and the ever-quotable joys of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.

Love stories come and go, but few have the golden warmth of Levan Akin’s dance-romance, And Then We Danced, which has captivated Letterboxd members enough to garner an impressive 4.0 rating out of 5. The film follows Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), a dancer who has grown up training at the National Georgian Ensemble, and is moved to examine the structures and traditions he exists within when the charismatic Irakli (Bachi Valishvili) arrives at the company.

Akin was born and raised in Sweden, the son of a Georgian family who emigrated in the 1960s. Following the attacks at the 2013 Pride parade in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, the solidarity among the country’s gay and queer communities became more urgent. Akin was moved to turn away from the big-budget Swedish TV productions he has made a name directing, in order to connect back to his roots for this project. But And Then We Danced isn’t solely a political commentary—it moves and feels freely.

Akin’s film gives audiences a long-overdue education on traditions far outside Hollywood: we see the rigid rules of Georgian dance, the way a body is taught to bend and extend and survive, and how spontaneous feelings have no place in that education.

If the film, told from such a unique perspective, also feels somehow familiar, it’s because Akin, who wrote, directed and co-edited, is a magnanimous cinephile. He’s been watching and understanding love stories since he can remember, and speaks of them with immense enthusiasm. There are years of wisdom and observation in the details of And Then We Danced. Every time I admit to him I haven’t seen a film he mentions, he looks sincerely happy for me that my world is yet to experience it.

Answering our Life in Film questionnaire, Akin shares memories of ABBA as a national treasure, the first film that blew him away in cinemas as a child, and why Tarkovsky could have done with being a little more queer.

This is quite a departure from the scale of your television projects. What drew you back to Georgia and those difficult circumstances? Levan Akin: I come from a background of making bigger projects, and this wasn’t obviously what a person like me should be doing next. I did a lot of Swedish TV, but I had grown tired of working the way I did. I started working for [Swedish film and commercial director] Roy Andersson when I was 22 and then I went into TV—I never went to film school. I applied twice and I didn’t get in! I was brought up in the SVT [Swedish public broadcasting service] way of making TV series. You have a script, you break it down, sometimes you write it yourself, sometimes you don’t, you do the shot list, you work with the actors, you block the scene and you move on and that’s all fine and good.

But after my previous film I was very tired. I was 36 then, and had sort of forgotten why I was making films. I had seen this Pride parade, the one where they were attacked in Georgia in 2013, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So I went to Georgia and did some research with my own little camera, and it very organically developed into this film. I never sat down and thought I’d write a story about this dancer. I used what happened around me, and I found a lot of real people. We often weren’t allowed to film in places a lot of the time—we made up stories about what we were doing. We had to have bodyguards, we’d lose locations on a day’s notice. It was insane, so I couldn’t plan out the movie like I would normally.

I wanted to make a very classical story, a very universal story and have the motor be [Merab’s] first love for Irakli and that setting him free. And then I filled it with things that happened while I was working. I’ve never worked like that, but I think it’s the best film I’ve made, and it’s really been a rejuvenation of my creative energy. Someone told me, “You are one person when you make the film, another when it’s over”. And that’s really the case with this film, it’s changed me fundamentally.

One character in And Then We Danced says, “Georgian dance is based on masculinity”. What are the defining traits of masculinity in Georgia? The definition of masculinity is so different in different cultures. In Sweden, where I live, if two men just hug too much or walk arm in arm, it’s considered super un-masculine. It’s like the whole thing about how young boys fight each other because that’s the only way they can be close in Western society. Whereas in Georgia, you can sit in someone’s lap and it’s not considered gay or un-masculine. Over there, traits like being very poetic, being a dancer, being a good singer, things that might be feminine in our culture are considered very masculine.

I thought that was interesting for the film because the regular story might have been, “I want to be a dancer but my family doesn’t want me to because it’s considered to be a feminine job”. Whereas here it’s the opposite, it’s, “I am a dancer, and I can’t be gay”.

Why was it important to use dance as a narrative vehicle to show these changing identities? What they say in the film is that Georgian dance has evolved. It’s based on old folk dances from different regions of the Caucasus, other Caucasian countries too, as well as Georgia. The dances from Batumi have a lot of oriental influences, originally even more than now. And the Kintouri dance was originally created by a queer group of people who lived in Georgia 100 years ago, and they were people working in service jobs.

Men wouldn’t take those jobs because it was considered unmanly, so the ones who worked in those jobs were gay guys or queer, some were even trans. They developed this dance and it’s sort of like a Paris Is Burning. Everybody knew they were gay. That’s what the teacher says in the film, when he says “they were softer but we made them harder”, because then these dances were appropriated by three big ensembles, and they did alterations to them.

Levan Gelbakhiani in ‘And Then We Danced’.

How did that influence the message you ultimately wanted to share? The film is about finding your own place in a traditional society, and not letting anyone tell you what your traditions ought to be, or how you ought to define yourself, to be accepted as a Georgian. That discourse is all around us now. I’m really frankly tired of people telling me that, for instance, I’m not really Swedish because my parents came from Georgia, and I have a Muslim background. Also, Georgia is 90 percent predominantly Christian Orthodox now, so a lot of Georgians think you can’t be Georgian if you’re not a Christian.

There are two major contemporary music cues in the film—ABBA’s ‘Take A Chance on Me’ and Robyn’s ‘Honey’. How did those two come to be? During the Soviet Union, there was an ABBA concert on TV and I think that was one of the only one Western pop concerts that was broadcast in Soviet. I think it had to do with Sweden being social democratic, and we had sort of a good relationship with the Soviet Union so they thought, “Ok, we can show this, at least it’s not American”. It would be on every New Year’s Eve and it would be like a tradition.

So when the Soviet Union fell, ABBA had a new market with new people who also loved ABBA. So ABBA is actually very popular in Georgia! Of course ABBA is super-expensive to [license], and we had literally no money when we made this film—it was a very hard shoot. But one of the producers of the film is the son of Benny Andersson of ABBA… I figured if he likes the film, for them it’s not a big risk. I thought, I’ll try it in the rough cut and either he’ll like it and say yes or he won’t—but he loved the movie, he was crying afterwards.

Levan Akin.

I’d also taken a risk with Robyn because that album had just come out, and we all love Robyn. We just hoped she’d like it and accept it, because we couldn’t pay her very much. Thankfully she did, and also we actually got help from Jen Malone. She’s a music supervisor and she’s so talented, and she’s the one who does the music supervision for [bands including] Euphoria, Creed and so on, so once she also got in touch she made it work for us. I’m eternally grateful to Jen.

[The following answers contain spoilers for several of the movies mentioned by Akin.]

And Then We Danced has many beautiful dance sequences. Which specific dance scenes, or dance movies broadly, inspire you? I love The Umbrellas of Cherbourg as a whole, and it has dancing in it, so that’s an easy one. In Dirty Dancing, I love the last dance, I can watch it over and over. It’s an amazing scene in every way. I also love the scene in Ex Machina where [Oscar Isaac] is dancing. It’s so nice, and so sexy.

I don’t know if there was dancing in it but I really want to mention this film—I love The Diary of A Teenage Girl. Marielle Heller is a genius. And Bel Powley and Alexander Skarsgård, they’re just so good in those parts. He was incredible! That should have won all the Oscars. In my films I never have clear antagonists, even if there are characters antagonizing the main character. I love them all, there’s no clear moral compass, everyone is just trying to do their best with the circumstances. It’s the same with this film. I love that you understand and love Alexander Skarsgård, and the guilt Minnie must have been feeling. It’s just so sensitively directed, with such a precise feeling of how to not veer in any one direction. If anyone is just shaking somewhere in that film, let’s put it in this ranking!

There’s this amazing documentary made by a Swedish documentarian, Martha & Niki. It’s about two friends who are dancers, two black girls from Sweden. Their friendship is really complicated, and they’re competing in a special dance, and you just follow them as they’re touring and competing. One of the girls is from Uganda, if I remember correctly, and another one is adopted, so they also have very different social backgrounds. I saw it in cinemas and I was just sitting and crying.

Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon in Bound (1996).

What are your favorite on-screen gay love stories? Brokeback Mountain. I saw that movie in New York in 2005 and I was so shocked. I just thought, “What the fuck have I just been through”? The ending… Nowadays, I would never want to kill off a character in a gay movie, but then, it’s so vague that you don’t even know what happens to them. It breaks my heart, it still does.

I really enjoyed God’s Own Country. I thought it was really moving and touching. Josh O’Connor is a revelation, and the other guy [Alec Secareanu] is amazing too. They have great chemistry. It’s just so delicately made.

I also love the Wachowski sisters’ Bound. I remember when I saw it, oh my god. Back then, seeing that was really something. I love Jennifer Tilly, what a star!

In terms of a movie that gay communities really love: Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion. I’ve seen it literally a thousand times, I just rewind it and watch it again. It’s so amazing. When we were younger, 50 percent of the lines we would say would be lines from that film. It’s hilarious. It’s such a great story about friendship. If you haven’t seen it, congratulations, you have so much to look forward to!

And how did I almost forget My Own Private Idaho?! I saw that as a kid in the 90s, and it’s just so amazing. River Phoenix. What a movie.

Could you give the Letterboxd community a primer to some great Georgian films? I love My Happy Family, a film by Simon Groß and Nana Ekvtimishvili. They’re a directing couple. They did another film called In Bloom; about a teenage girl, it’s sort of autobiographical I can imagine, as it feels very lived. It’s about a Georgian girl in the 90s. Both films were at Sundance—My Happy Family was there three years ago and I think it won an award. [It was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, and was Georgia’s entry for the 2013 best foreign language Academy Award]. Netflix bought it, so it’s on there now.

My Happy Family (2017).

It really shows this thing in Georgia where there is no private sphere. Families live together inter-generationally for life for many reasons—financial ones for sure. It’s the story of this woman who lives with her mother, her father, her children, everybody is in that house. She decides that one day she wants to move into her own apartment, and it’s the most shocking thing anyone has ever heard of. She says she just wants to sit alone and read books and have her own space, and everyone is so provoked by that because that can’t happen in Georgia.

There’s another Georgian film I love called Street Days, by Levan Koguashvili, which came out in 2010. It was one of the first new-generation movies in Georgia showing the reality of Georgia the way it was then. It’s the story of a man who is struggling to support his family, but he’s also a drug addict. It sounds really bleak but it’s made with such dark humor.

To go really far back to the directors working through the Soviet time, there’s The Wishing Tree by Tengiz Abuladze. So many shots from that film are so, so beautiful. It’s set in the rural parts of Georgia, and it’s about a young girl who falls in love with a boy, but they can’t be married because she has to marry an older person because it’s better for the family. And the boy she was in love with was killed by the husband. She goes insane, because she keeps thinking about it all the time; she’s talking to his ghost. This old woman in the village hears her and thinks she’s cheating on her husband, so they decide to do this ritual where they stone her. It’s so sad and so beautiful, and there’s a woman in the village who’s like the town fool but she’s the only one making sense. It’s so poetic.

Sergei Parajanov is another of my all-time favorite directors—I love The Color of Pomegranates and Ashik Kerib. He’s a great surrealist director and has inspired many directors since, such as Tarsem Singh and Mark Romanek, who did a lot of music videos in the 90s. Madonna’s video for ‘Bedtime Stories’ was really inspired by Parajanov. He worked a lot with tableaux, and it’s so queer. [Parajanov] was gay and he was imprisoned for it many times. He was very close friends with [Andrei] Tarkovsky and he attributes his artistry to being inspired by him, saying that Tarkovsky released his creativity. They were close, but they’d also fight a lot. One time Parajanov told Tarkovsky, “You can never be as amazing a director as me, because you’re not a homosexual”, which is funny!

Finally, what was the film first made you want to be a filmmaker? I love that question. It feels like I’m closing a circle because I think the movie I’m thinking of has some similarities with my movie. It’s Some Kind of Wonderful, [written] by John Hughes and directed by Howard Deutch. It’s not one of the most famous John Hughes movies but it’s one of the first ones I saw in the cinema. I think I was seven years old, I went with my older sister who was eleven at the time.

Mary Stuart Masterson and Eric Stoltz in ‘Some Kind of Wonderful’ (1987).

It’s a love triangle between Eric Stoltz, Mary Stuart Masterson and Lea Thompson. Stoltz plays this working-class kid, he lives on the wrong side of the tracks, the classic perspective that’s always in John Hughes movies. He’s in love with the popular girl in school, Amanda Jones. She is also from his part of the town but is dating the rich guys. He’s really in love with her, and his best friend is played by Masterson, she’s called Watts but her nickname is Drummer Girl, and she’s a tomboy. When I was little I thought she was a boy who was a gay character. I didn’t understand that she was a girl because I’d never seen a girl like that as a kid. It’s just a great movie, it was a love triangle before love triangles were boring. I don’t know if it consciously made me want to direct films, but it was the first film that I saw that that stuck with me.

We didn’t have a lot of movie culture in my house, my parents emigrated to Sweden in the late 60s. My father read a lot, but we didn’t come from any culture. The films I’d find were the ones you could rent in the local store. Mostly American movies. The more highbrow stuff came later when I was older and could search them out myself.

‘And Then We Danced’ premiered in Director’s Fortnight in Cannes last May, and has won several prizes at other prestigious festivals since. The film is currently showing in select cinemas on the east and west coasts of America, and opens in UK cinemas on March 13.

[werevulvi]

This is not a coming out post or a declaration of new labels in any way, shape or form what so ever. This is merely me venting new thoughts and trying to detangle my feelings. I'm just experimenting around, alright.

I took a break from venting to my partner about my endless gender anxieties and instead turned to an online friend for advice on my situation, because he was open to hear about it, and asked me about my wish to go back on testosterone. This barely adult trans guy who's 10 years younger than myself, only been on testosterone for about a year and fairly recently had top surgery, has become a little bit of a mentor for me... ironically. As just a couple of years ago, I was a bit of a mentor for him as an inspirational "trans elder."

Is it right that I unload my deep, heavy inner struggles on him for advice about transition/detransition stuff? Debatable, but I'm pretty sure I have good influences on this kid, as he has matured and wised up vastly for the past couple of years that we've been friends. And yes, he's totally fine with my "terfy" gender critical, radfem opinions, despite being a transmed/truscum himself. We usually get along just fine, despite our different views. He looks up to me.

So, for whatever it's worth, I really value my friendship with him and I have a lot of respect for him.

So, anyhow. I had a chat with him yesterday, in which he kindly tried to substitute for my absolutely useless therapists. Much appreciated. And it helped me to get a new, fresh perspective on it that sparked a lot of new ideas and feelings within me. Even as a gender critical person, I think it's important to not narrow my mind down to only listening to that one world view. If I'd do that, I'd be no better than the hive-minded TRA's, okay.

What's so fresh about his world view is that he doesn't believe in nonbinary, because he understands that the only sexes that exist are male and female, and that intersex is not a third sex, and otherwise has the quite typical transmedicalist view of gender identity being connected to dysphoria and that that's something trans people are born with, alright. Furthermore, he accepts that he's bio female and always gonna be that way, but just feels better living as a man and passing as male.

So he would never shove the nonbinary label down my throat, like almost everyone else has (including my quack of a gender therapist who literally spews fake-science), and he understand that I really have dysphoria when I describe it to him, despite having mostly thought of me as "a regular cis woman deep down." He understands that my traumas fucked with my perception of gender, takes my autism and BPD into account (he's also autistic and his sister has BPD); but is also quite open to the idea of atypical dysphoria in binary trans people, and that trans men don't have to be masculine, etc. He's also totally fine with my sex-based views on sexual orientation, but regards his own sexual orientation as gender-based. So his perspective differs slightly from my own perspective, but we do have a lot of views on trans stuff in common, and are both respectful of each other's differing views.

That should be the necessary background info about him, I believe. So like... he's not like the harmful TRA's on twitter, even though he has shitty views on bisexuals (yes, that was him in my previous, angry post about bisexuals, lol. We got over that.)

What he suggested to me was basically (my rough translation of a snippet from what he said, what stood out to me the most): "Why not be openly FtM? Accept your female traits (then I mean body and terms like lesbian and that too) but put yourself in a male identity? It sounds kinda like that is what fits the best in your situation when the only thing you have dysphoria over is just what's socially male traits och not the directly bodily." It hit me hard because I had never seen it that way before. It opened up a new posibility, and that's really all I'm saying here. It's a posibility, and I want to explore it. Just telling me that I can be FtM if I just feel like it was not what I needed to hear. I discarded that from others in the past, claiming such an assertion to be silly and illogical. I miss my breasts, I regret my top surgery, I love my female body and I'm proudly a lesbian - I cannot possibly be a trans man because I don't have enough dysphoria for it! -I kept thinking.

But then... when I was instead told that I could be FtM based on that I actually want to and like passing as male, and that I can actually totally be a hyper-feminine, lesbian trans guy who is fine with his female body underneath the clothed surface... THAT lit a light in me. So, why I had been repeatedly discarding the option to be a feminine trans man in the past, wasn't because I genuinely thought it was a dumb idea, but because I didn't believe it could even be an actual option, based on my dysphoria being so... female friendly. Now... I feel like it could be an actual option.

I mean I have healed... A LOT. I've healed my connection to being female a lot. I've even accepted and embraced that I'm a lesbian. I made most of my dysphoria go away. Those are HUGE things that should absolutely not be flushed down the drain. But fact is I'm still dysphoric and without really having seen it that way before, I have been presenting as a feminine/gnc male quite a lot throughout my detransing, and that's what I'm the most comfortable with. I've stated it many times: That I love looking like a gnc man. Being a "male-passing bearded woman" oooh sounds like a trans guy to me?! Well, could be. I've felt consistently uncomfortable trying to pass as female, and my dysphoria has gotten worse the longer I've been off testosterone. Quitting voice training and saving out my beard again felt like two huge reliefs; to embrace my beloved T traits and accept that I cannot possibly hate them.

They are mine, they feel intrinsic and crucial to my body and I want them to stay. Now I'm hassling with my gender clinic to get back on testosterone again. I am going to. If at all possible.

I feel a sense of relief, but also defeat, at the thought of going back to my old label as a trans man. However, it wouldn't be the same as it was back then. I'm a proud lesbian now, I have enough pussy power to empower a whole nation of insecure women, I'm fine with being considered a woman based strictly on my biology, I've healed my connection to my female sex. I feel like a completely different person compared to the miserable, self-hating trans man I was prior to mid 2018, and I would never go back to being that sorta trans man again... but I'm contemplating the posibility of being a lesbian, openly female, gender critical trans man. Because as my friend said: why not? Let's address gender identity quickly: Would I then identify as a man? No, not really. If so, I'd wear the label trans man or FtM in the sense of being a dysphoric female who's happily transitioned, (hopefully) back on testosterone, happily male-passing and living as sort of a man socially. Then I mean living as a man in the sense of deliberately passing as male, going by male terms/pronouns (except from labeling myself lesbian and being fine with using female terms on occasion, depending on the context) but not actually identifying as any sorta gender in particular. Then why calling myself a man at all? Well... because I look like one and I love looking like one. People cannot see or hear in my voice that I'm actually female, and they don't need to know that, except from when they actually do need to know that. I want to be open about my sex being female but I feel like maaaaybe I'm not actually comfortable with calling myself a woman. At least not like 500 times a day. Because personal comfort is more important than politics. Repeat that after me.

This does however, unfortunately but of course, make me re-think my wish got get breast implants. Do I regret my top surgery? Yes. Do I miss having boobs? Yes. But it's hard as hell to present male with obvious boobs that I'd be unable to bind. Both because the implants would likely damage my internal tissues badly if I kept them pressed down like that, and because I've already whacked my ribs from previous binding pre-op. It would be way too dangerous for both those reasons. I can't help that the thought of being a trans man with silicone boobs, after top surgery, sounds insane to me... but I'm trying to look beyond that and focus on what I want for myself and what matters to me personally. If I actuallly, truly, madly, deeply, want new boobs for myself and my private personal life because I think that would improve my connection to my chest... then I should do that regardless of how insane it may seem... because of the label I'm slapping onto my ass.

The questions spinning in my head, about my chest, are:

Can I live with it?

Can I accept that I made a mistake to have top surgery, but move on with my life with how things became?

Would it be easier to become fine with it if I reclaim my former male identity, or just another escape?

Was my wish to get new breasts only connected to my identity as a woman?

Would I be able to let go of my grief and regret, and find the silver lining of having a flat chest, as a self-loving and self-caring, openly FtM person, while presenting as male?

Could I allow myself to enjoy going out bare-chested in public and enjoy the summer breeze, or pool water, directly caressing my skin, if I'd embrace that I actually enjoy looking like and living as a man who is actually female?

If I willingly and wantingly present as male, not just skipping trying to pass as female out of convenience, but embracing my male-passability as a positive thing that I actually enjoy; would that also make me comfortable, or at least okay with, not having breasts?

I need to think through all of those questions. I'll soon have my consultation for breast reconstruction. Fuck. I need another summer to explore and experiment with being flat-chested and how I really, really feel about it. My god, why is this so hard?! (breathe... relax... it’ll be alright.) Yes, I have healed my connection to my femaleness, but was that ever equal to me being happy with living as a woman? Perhaps I went too far with it to actually detransition, when there was an in-between option all along, that I just glossed over and discarded without even entertaining the thought. Perhaps the middle ground that I need to be, is not nonbinary... but a lesbian, openly female trans man? I need to experiment and explore this new-old option which I feel just opened up before me. I'm freeing my aching chest from the heavy breast forms and tight bras, even trying out packing my underwear again (I kept my small "Pierre" packer (uncut version) which is perfect for when wearing skirts, as it barely shows any bulge at all... because boner+skirt is just a really bad look alright), while still wearing my usual feminine style. I'm vaguely considering going swimming in just bottoms again (whether panties or shorts). I'm playing with the rare, male name Saphir in my mind as an alternative to my similar-sounding birth name Sara (which I currently go by, officially), and asking myself gently how I would feel about going by he/him pronouns and male terms again; just to play around and feel things out.

So far... it feels pretty fucking good. But it's only been one day and that's not a lot to go on. I need to give this a hell of a lot more time. I am not done yet. I'm merely starting, again. I only wanted to vent these thoughts and feelings while they're still fresh in my mind. So please excuse the mess, I'm still under construction and it's unfortunately taking a little longer than expected. Thank you for your waning patience.

[pens-swords-stuff]

Hello, I don't know if you personally can help me with this, but I thought I would give it a go. I am trying to work on a few new books/ideas and I want more representation in my books. Race, Sexuality, Gender/lack off, etc and I was wondering if you would know of any way for me to do this correctly without offending anyone or making the characters represented, inherently stereotypical. I know that researching will help, but I was wondering if you had any ideas. I want to represent, and not lack

First of all, I want to really stress this:

Research is absolutely necessary.

Racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and any other -ism out there is an extremely complicated, multi-faceted issue with a lot of intersectionality, interaction, history, and variability.

People have different experiences, various groups have their own obstacles that aren’t applicable to others, and it’s incredibly important to educate yourself on whatever group you’re writing.

Read up on issues they face, see if you can find articles or interviews about people talking about their experience, maybe you’ll be able to find someone who is willing to educate you and answer your questions. Look into the culture of the group, their customs, their beliefs, stereotypes and microaggressions that they go through.... There’s a lot to look into, and the resources are out there.

In order to avoid stereotyping and tokenizing your characters, you have to first understand what is offensive, and why it’s offensive. 

Here on tumblr there are some fantastic blogs that will get you started:

@writingwithcolor

@scriptlgbt

@yourbookcouldbegayer

Otherwise here are some very general tips.

Give your characters depth.

Seems obvious, but it’s important. Stereotypes are offensive because it is often the only thing a badly written character is allowed to do.

For example, the ‘quiet Asian girl’ is an offensive stereotype. Does that mean that you can never make an Asian character that’s on the quiet side? Not at all! You can make a quiet Asian girl as long as that’s not the only part of their character. 

A good way to think about this might be to develop a character who happens to be part of a certain group, if you’re worried that you might accidentally stereotype them.

As long as you’re giving them the same amount of depth as your white, cisgendered, able-bodied, privileged-in-other-ways character, chances are you’ll be doing okay.

Avoid tokenism

Tokenism is essentially the act of including minority characters to make it seem like there’s diversity, but there’s not enough of it.

You know the whole ‘token minority’ character thing that happens when there’s only one POC in a cast full of white people? This is it.

Tokenism is harmful because it sends the message that there is only one type of that minority group. There’s a really simple way to try to avoid tokenism in your story: Have more than one POC! Have more than one gay person! Have a variety of minority characters in your cast, and give them all depth. 

Include diversity, but don’t make your story about the minority experience

This is the difference between “My WIP has a Mexican-American character” and “My WIP is about what a Mexican-American goes through in their life”.

It’s generally a good idea to avoid writing about what you don’t experience. For example, I’m Japanese-American; I could write a story about being an Asian person in America and what that is like. However, I don’t know what it’s like to be a transgender person in America, so I can’t write a story about their experiences because it would be filtered through my privileged, cisgender perspective, no matter how careful I try to be.

Of course, I can still include trans characters in my writing! I just shouldn’t focus on their experience of being trans, and avoid tokenizing and stereotyping them by reducing their identity to nothing but them being trans.

Consult sensitivity readers

Sensitivity Reader — A person who reads through a draft to check for issues of representation, cultural inaccuracy, insensitive language, etc. For example, if you are a white author who has black characters in your story, you should have a sensitivity reader who is black, so they can let you know if you are accidentally being offensive, or misrepresenting them in any way. Many writers will have multiple sensitivity readers to give them feedback, so they can make the proper changes to be more inclusive and culturally sensitive. Can be paid or unpaid, depends on the author.

It is incredibly important to find someone of that culture/background/minority group to read through your drafts when you are ready, so they can let you know if there is anything that needs to be changed to be more appropriate and sensitive.

No matter how well you may have educated yourself on topics like this, no matter how much research you’ve done, the only people who can really tell you if you’re doing something right or if something is offensive or misrepresented is people from that group.

And I won’t lie to you, it can be rough. I can be really frustrating, or you may want to get defensive. 

But please listen to your sensitivity readers. Take them seriously when they point out something that needs to be changed.

It’s also best to have multiple sensitivity readers to get several perspectives from the group, because one individual is not responsible for speaking up for their entire group.

This is by no means a comprehensive, fail-proof guide on how to be sensitive in how you represent different groups of people outside of your own experiences. This is just meant as a very general set of advice to get you started. It’s important to do your own research, and be respectful in how you go about finding information.

Chances are, you’ll mess up at some point. You might accidentally be offensive without meaning to. You can fix this, just be willing to listen and be flexible to changing things so that you can better represent underrepresented characters.

I now have an updated FAQ and Ask Guidelines for Writing Advice, please check those out first if you have a writing advice question!

Ask Guidelines | FAQ | Advice Masterlist

[queermediastudies]

Identity, Infidelity, and iPhones: A Critique of “Tangerine”

Tangerine, set in Los Angeles in 2015, follows the journey of two black transgender women through the streets of West Hollywood the day that one of them is released from jail. The main character, Sin-Dee Rella, learns from her friend Alexandra that her fiance, Chester, has been cheating on her while she was in jail for a month. Sin-Dee sets off to seek revenge on Chester and the “other woman”. The film, which takes place over the course of Christmas Eve, depicts sex work, infidelity, drug use, singing performances, transphobic violence, and more. The plot comes to a peak with all the main characters in one donut shop, where the biggest secret of the film is revealed. Part drama and part comedy, Tangerine is a story of revenge, friendship, identity, sexuality, and love. 

The reception of Tangerine was rather mixed. The film was highly acclaimed for its methods of production, as it was shot entirely from three iPhone 5s smartphones. It was also praised for its casting: the two main characters, Sin-Dee and Alexandra, are played by Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor, two openly transgender actresses. Taylor won several independent film awards for her role (Shawan, 2015). Today, the film has a score of 96 on Rotten Tomatoes. However, the film has also received criticism about its portrayals of trans characters. 

While Tangerine exhibits themes that align with aspects of queer theory, it also has some problematic elements within its production and content. As a viewer, my personal subject positionality impacts my interpretations and criticisms of the film, and my identity informs how my reading of the film differs from others’. Overall, Tangerine is a complex text that requires many different perspectives to dissect.  

One of the major themes evident in Tangerine is intersectionality. This film follows the lives of two transgender black women who are also sex workers. This represents an intersection of marginalized gender identity, race, and class, all of which overlap and inform each other to create experiences unique to these particular positions in society. The intersection of these many marginalized identities is not often represented on screen, and this film was made in the 2015, pre Pose era. 

Other apparent themes in the film include trans identity and gender performativity. In one scene, Sin-Dee drags Dinah, the “other woman” to Alexandra’s performance where she sings Doris Day’s Toyland in a club. Dinah later refers to the performance as a “drag show”, to which Alexandra sternly replies “I am not a drag queen”. This exchange challenges Dinah, who, rather than deconstructing her ideas of gender, still thinks of Alexandra as a man performing as a woman. Although Tangerine includes trans characters, the film does not give Sin-Dee or Alexandra much more background or storyline other than their trans identity, a critique that will be explored more in later sections. 

One of the most common praises for Tangerine is for its method of filming: the entire film was shot using iPhones and a four dollar editing app. This cheap, user-friendly technology exhibits a queer approach to production. As Scott & Fawaz point out in Queer About Comics, “low-tech quality makes comics either fundamentally democratic or especially available to democratic practices” (Scott & Fawaz, 2018, p 201). This idea is reflected in Tangerine, as the groundbreaking use of iPhones showed audiences the endless opportunities available with more readily accessible technology. The editing of the film also exemplified some nontraditional techniques. The footage was edited to be quite oversaturated, giving it a slight orange hue, thus the name Tangerine. These film choices deliberately broke cinematic norms.  

Tangerine mirrors Pose when it comes to some of its criticism. Because of the casting of two trans women of color, the film was able to deflect a lot of criticism. Dr. Martin makes this argument with Pose, saying that “These gay and trans actors of color function as a shield for Pose’s problematic representational politics” (Martin, 2018). While the casting of these two actresses seems groundbreaking, the film itself was created and written by two straight, white, cisgender men, Sean Baker and Chris Bergoch. These two men received the praise and profits from Tangerine even though there were many problematic layers within the casting, production, content, and intended audience of the film. 

For one, although Baker and Bergoch may have had good intentions by trying to cast black trans actors, their methods for finding actors were questionable. Their desire to create this film came from Baker’s “fascination” with a particular Los Angeles intersection that was known for sex work. “As straight, white, cisgender men, he and frequent writing partner Chris Bergoch knew they needed a collaborator familiar with the area’s culture. Approaching people on the street proved futile, so they wandered over to a nearby LGBT center. There, Baker instantly “gravitated” toward a transgender woman named Mya Taylor, an aspiring entertainer who had never acted before, but was game for whatever Baker and Bergoch wanted” (Jacobs, 2015). The intense interest in a community that Baker is not a part of seems voyeuristic if not intrusive. Also, the way that Baker found Mya Taylor shows a situation where Taylor has very little power in the creation of this film. While Baker did intend to get an “inside perspective” of the area’s culture rather than relying on his own perspective, his casting of Taylor seems to be solely based on the fact that she is a black trans woman and was willing to participate. This has some connotations of tokenism and performativity that must be looked at more closely. 

Secondly, the film itself has many issues of representation of trans lives. Overall, Sin-Dee and Alexandra have been propped up as “window dressings” of the film. As Rich Juzwiak states in a critique of the film, “We get virtually no sense of Sin-Dee’s interior life, and the sense we get of Alexandra’s is eye-rollingly trite (she wants to be a singer)” (Juzwiak, 2015). We do not get much of a sense of these characters’ lives outside of sex work, such as their backgrounds or even where they live when they are not on the streets. Instead, Baker and Bergoch rely heavily on tropes and stereotypes of black trans women as well as sex workers. On the other hand, they show the family and home life of Razmik, a cab driver who is a regular customer of Sin-Dee and Alexandras. This makes sense with the later plot, but the stark distinctions between these characters are clear.

The obsession with anatomy in Tangerine presents another layer of concern. For one, the fetishization of trans women was a major component of the film. Razmik consistently objectifies and fetishizes trans women. We see this when he unknowingly picks up a cis woman, then proceeds to kick her out of his car when he realizes she is not trans. This fetishization is dehumanizing, as it portrays trans women as objects of a straight male’s gaze rather than people with complex identities. Cavalcante (2017) criticizes films such as Boys Don’t Cry and TransAmerica for “scenes in both films that fetishized genitalia” (Cavalcante, 2017). This obsession with the anatomy of trans bodies is also shown when Dinah calls Chester “homo” for wanting to marry Sin-Dee. Selena, the woman that Razmik picked up, also called him “homo” when she realized he was looking for a trans woman. This implies that Sin-Dee and other trans women are men, invalidating their female identity. There are also consistent references to Dinah as a “real” woman or a “fish”. This reference implies that, as a cisgender woman, Dinah’s biology is what makes her a woman, and that trans women are not real women. While the trans characters use this reference themselves, it is still problematic to use biology as the determining factor for womanhood. Rather than challenging this implication, Tangerine consistently perpetuates transphobic language and ideas.

As viewers, it is important to recognize our own subject positionality when critiquing films. Personally, as a young queer woman of color in college, I often tend to have a critical, almost cynical lens with many texts. For one, as a mixed-race person, I rarely see images of myself in the media, so I understand the importance of representation. When I do come across characters that I identify with, I often will fall prey to the trap of representation without considering larger structures within media. 

Because of my subjective experiences as a queer woman, I would say I am also sex-positive and sex work positive. I had trouble with some criticisms of Tangerine that I found online because many people took issue with the portrayal of Sin-Dee and Alexandra as sex workers. The particular editorials I came across used a lot of anti-sex worker language. While I agree that “trans women as sex workers” is a trope that must be challenged, my own positionality tells me that there is nothing inherently wrong with sex work. Sex workers deserve to have their stories told and they deserve respect and dignity. While there is a lot of questionable material in Tangerine, I don’t think the presence of sex work alone is inherently problematic. However, the portrayal of sex work as indecent, as it was sometimes portrayed in Tangerine, contributes to the stigma against it. My personal experiences and views further complicated my reading of this film. 

At first glance, Tangerine seems indisputably groundbreaking based on its cast and the characters it is representing. However, a closer look behind the scenes reveals that the features praised in the film are a veil for some questionable processes. A close examination of the text recalls Tourmaline’s Teen Vogue piece: “Too often, people with resources who already have a platform become the ones to tell the stories of those at the margins rather than people who themselves belong to these communities. The process ends up extracting from people who are taking the most risks just to live our lives and connect with our histories…” (Tourmaline, 2017). If we truly want a raw, real look at the lives of trans people of color and sex workers, we must leave the storytelling up to them, rather than approaching these communities with nosy voyeurism as Baker did. However, Tangerine revealed the possibility of a full-length film created with very limited technology. Perhaps the next breakout film will be a story created by trans women of color using nothing but iPhones.  

  Works Cited

Critique by Lucy Briggs

Jacobs, M. (2015, July 9). Tangerine may have had a tiny budget, but the film's heart is bigger because of it. Huffington Post. Retrieved from https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tangerine-movie-transgender_n_559bc990e4b05d7587e22881.

Juzwiak, R. (2015, October 17). Trans sex work comedy Tangerine is the most overrated movie of the year. Gawker. Retrieved from http://defamer.gawker.com/trans-sex-work-comedy-tangerine-is-the-most-overrated-m-1717662910.

Martin, A. L. (2018, August 2). Pose(r): Ryan Murphy, trans and queer of color labor, and the politics of representation. Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/poser-ryan-murphy-trans-queer-color-labor-politics-representation/.

Scott, D. & Fawaz, R. (2018) Queer about comics. American Literature, Volume 90, Number 2, June 2018, pp 197-219. Doi: 10.1215/00029831-4564274

Shawhan, J. (2015, August 6). Beyond using progressive filming techniques and casting, Tangerine is expressive and warm. Nashville Scene. Retrieved from https://www.nashvillescene.com/arts-culture/film/article/13060247/beyond-using-progressive-filming-techniques-and-casting-tangerine-is-expressive-and-warm. 

[tiergan-vashir]

I know folks are probably tired of reading about it, but something was brought up on Twitter and in my personal Discord that I felt was really important perspective to add in regards to the whole “fujoshi” discussion. (I also promise I will try to make this the very last thing I’ll talk about on it.)

I think discussing fetishization and its impact on the lives of people is an extremely important talk to have.  It’s why I’ve talked about it at such length on my blog.  However, I also think that it’s equally important that we stress respect for other people as the answer to fetishization and continue to encourage people to RP whatever they would like to as long as they are respectful towards the lives and experiences of other people.

When these kinds of discussions come up, it can be easy to slip into the mindset that NO ONE should ever RP a gender or sexuality that isn’t their own.  No straight women should be RPing as a gay man.  No man should ever be RPing as a woman. It’s obviously just a fetish character!

I mentioned before in another post that myself and some trans male friends I know discovered our sexual and gender identities through RP.   RP was an important key for myself and for others in recognizing who we are and I don’t want that opportunity to be taken away from other people who could find themselves in the same way.

What I didn’t mention was that myself and at least one of my trans male friend went through a lot of fear, doubt, and self-loathing when it came to our gender-identities, because we were often fearful that we were just gross fujoshi who were fetishising so hard that we’d Jedi mind-tricked ourselves into thinking we were a different gender when we weren’t.  There were questions about “am I really feeling gender dysphoria, or do I feel it, because trying hard to be trans?”

The process of self-discovery and exploring your gender is already one that can be fraught with doubts and questions.  Society as a whole is constantly trying to tell you “No, you’re just confused, you are the gender you were assigned at birth.”  Ours were also plagued by the terror that we were actually just horrendously confused women so eager to invade gay male spaces that we’d deluded ourselves entirely.

It didn’t matter that each of us had signs of being trans male/nonbinary going back years before any of us even discovered yaoi existed. It didn’t matter that the rush of gender euphoria at being called the right pronouns, or having just the right haircut, or clothes that fit closer to the gender expression we wanted, or at seeing someone who had achieved what we hoped for, and the feeling of dysphoria at being called the wrong pronouns should have been a big tip off.  The terror that perhaps we were just women who had tricked ourselves into believing we were another gender was potent.

It doesn’t help that this not exactly an unpopular sentiment. Even in my time in the FFXIV community, I’ve seen posts privately talking about how straight women were pretending to be trans in order to invade gay male spaces.  It’s also an extremely common sentiment amongst TERFs - that they have to save the cis male gays from trans men.

A lot of people think of gender dysphoria is a loud, crushing, overwhelming suffering that eclipses everything else.  But how gender dysphoria presents can be different for everyone and there are even multiple types (body and social dysphoria).  

For some folks it’s absolutely that unbearable suffering.  For others, you can go years and years thinking you don’t have it, because it’s settled into something like ever-present hum you learned to deal with your entire life, always in the background.  You never think to explore your gender IRL, because people explain it away with  “Oh, you’re just a tomboy.” or “Everyone feels a little weird and awkward about their bodies.”  So you learn to ignore it.

Then, in RP, where safely exploring a different gender, different sexuality, and a different appearance without alerting your entire IRL family is as easy as words on a page - it’s possible for you get called the right pronouns and there’s a rush of euphoria. A YouTuber I watched talking about this topic likened it to a “bell” and for me that was the perfect metaphor.

This is not to say I think people should go fetishize gay/bi male characters all they like. I wouldn’t have spoken so fiercely about fetishization at length if I did.  I just want to urge others to encourage respect rather than gatekeeping.  Respect for the IRL marginalized groups our characters are modeled after. Respect for their struggles and life experiences. Respect for how society treats them and how we as individuals can either add positively or negatively to that with our own actions.

I was free to explore my sexual and gender identity through RP in ways I never really could IRL in an Asian Christian family where literally no one else is even remotely queer and I don’t want that kind of opportunity to explore gender/sexuality taken away from someone else.