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nostalgicatsea · 4 years ago

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Common questions about and excuses for racism in fandom

I noticed that the same excuses, justifications, and questions that have come up in response to racism in fandom over the years appear in the notes for my post, so here’s a FAQ of sorts to address them. Hopefully, this will help people understand why these arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny and have something to refer to in lieu of writing a new reply every time someone says these things.

Due to the length of this post, I made a Google doc for easier reading. Please note that several points are specific to the Marvel fandom and to the post linked above and are often M/M-focused (I explain why in that post), but generally speaking, the following can be applied to any fandom and various relationships.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I can ship whatever I want. Stop being the fandom police!

Shipping isn’t activism.

Fandom is supposed to be fun. Being told what to do or not to do isn’t fun.

I put a lot of different people in my works, and I do research about the groups they’re in. For example, I have a *marginalized group here* character (e.g., disabled), and I did research to represent them accurately. It’s not fair to say that I don’t care about diversity.

I don’t think people should write about POC if they’re white, just like I wouldn’t want anyone to talk about *insert topic you’re passionate about or interest group you’re in here* (e.g., the BDSM community) if they didn’t know anything about it.

I really don’t have any knowledge about what it’s like to be a POC, though, so maybe I’m not the best person for this. If POC want to see themselves represented, they should make their own works.

I’m not comfortable with writing POC as I’m unfamiliar with the struggles they experience. I don’t want my writing to come off as inauthentic, inaccurate, or offensive. Why are you saying it’s harmful to use this as a reason for abstaining from writing POC?

It doesn’t make sense to include every single POC in my work.

What you said and the data you have don’t necessarily point to racism. It might just be individual preference. I prefer certain ships over others, and it has nothing to do with race/I don’t see color.

A big part of what informs my shipping is physical attraction or interest in the characters.

I don’t ship _____ because I see them as brothers/sisters/siblings.

Some white characters and ships are popular in the MCU fandom because people bring in canon characterization or material from the comics to the character(s)/ship. Your MCU-only examination fails to account for ships with one character from the MCU and one from comics (e.g., MCU Bucky/616 Clint or Spideypool).

Some subfandoms just have fewer POC which means there will naturally be fewer ships featuring POC. To say that the Marvel fandom is racist as a whole is disingenuous; you can see how more diversity in the cast leads to more diverse ships in fanworks.

Some of the characters and ships are popular because white characters get the lion’s share of screen time and development or they appeared in canon earlier.

Is it racist to racebend a character?

Racist language in fics is more important than fandom representation.

My fanworks tend to focus on one ship and don’t really include other characters in general. When they do, the others mostly talk about that relationship. Am I falling into the trap you mentioned?

I feel guilty about not including or writing about *character of color’s name here*.

How do I ensure that I don’t offend anyone if I include POC in my work?

What should I do to examine myself for any implicit biases?

The rest of the post is under the cut.

I can ship whatever I want. Stop being the fandom police!

As explicitly stated several times in my post, I agree that you can ship whatever you want. I’m not targeting a specific ship. I’m not telling you to stop shipping what you ship. All I’m asking is for everyone, including myself and other POC, to regularly examine ourselves for any implicit biases. If you’re a multishipper, are all of your ships in the fandom white? If you only have one ship and it’s white, are most or all of your ships in your other/previous fandoms white? Is the only media you consume predominantly or all white?

Shipping isn’t activism.

No, it isn’t and in many cases, shouldn’t be seen or treated as the same thing. However, by responding this way to POC who want to see themselves represented in fanworks more and not be ignored or written stereotypically, you’re telling us that our mere existence is a “political issue.”

Fandom is supposed to be fun. Being told what to do or not to do isn’t fun.

It should be fun for us POC too, and it’s not when we’re consistently misrepresented or we don’t exist in this fandom. By using this as an excuse to exclude POC from your works, you’re saying that only some people are allowed to have fun or that having fun is conditional. Also, no one is forcing you as an individual to do or not do anything. See two paragraphs above.

Just like you do research for those groups, you can easily do research on POC. Also, please be aware that this statement is similar to the “I’m not racist because I have a ___ friend/have a ___ person in my works” argument that many people use to prove they’re not racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. We aren’t interchangeable with other groups.

Something like BDSM is a lifestyle and preference. It is a choice. Being a POC isn’t. We can’t take off our identity every time we leave the house, the way you might keep it secret at work that you’re in the BDSM scene.

We do. Also, all of us fanwork creators make works with characters who are different from us all the time. Fandom is largely composed of people who aren’t straight cis men, yet the bulk of works on AO3 features characters who are canonically or implied to be straight cis men even if we end up changing that in our works. Most of us aren’t billionaires, but we don’t have a problem writing Tony. We don’t know what it’s like to be a WWII-soldier-turned-brainwashed-assassin who was kept in cryo for decades except when deployed on missions, but we don’t have a problem writing Bucky. The list goes on.

Your concern isn’t harmful. Reducing us to our trauma is, and you’re doing that if the reason you’re not comfortable with writing POC is that you don’t know how to write our struggles. We’re not only our pain. We’re more than that.

Not every fic has to be about the trauma of being a POC. We deserve to have fun, silly fics in addition to serious, plotty drama. We’re not thinking about our suffering 24/7 even if we do think about or are affected by it a lot. It’s not like if you write a Sam/Bucky fic, Sam is going to randomly lecture Bucky about the history of Black people in the U.S. and modern enslavement through the prison industrial complex while Bucky is trailing kisses down his neck in bed. We don’t need everyone being racist to MJ in a Pride and Prejudice AU. If you do want to include their struggles because that informs the way the characters think or act in your story, you can do so in ways that feel organic.

Additionally, this is an excuse that we hear often; you may have heard it as people in Hollywood have used it to explain why they don’t have any, or at least any major, characters from marginalized groups in their works. If we allowed this excuse, an overwhelming majority of who we see in the media would be straight, cis white men considering who has power in the film and TV industry—and we would have to say that’s okay. We would have to say that the only people allowed to write about a certain group are members of that group, e.g., only women can write women. That’s not acceptable especially considering the gatekeeping, oppression, and high barriers to entry and success that make it difficult for marginalized people to even be in the room let alone make a name for themselves.

Fandom is no different. You’re saying that you can’t relate to POC because you’re white, but none of us POC have any problems making fanworks with white characters even though we don’t know what it’s like to be white. There are straight women who write fics about gay men and don’t feel uncomfortable doing so when they don’t know a single thing about being a gay man and the struggles of gay men (M/M can include bi or pan men, fics about gay men by straight women can sometimes include problematic portrayals, and straight men, queer women, and non-binary people write M/M too, but this is just an example).

You should be more careful when writing a POC if you're not a POC. The same goes for men writing women, cis people writing trans people, straight people writing queer people, able-bodied people writing disabled people, etc. However, there ARE ways to go about it, and while I understand the fear of messing up, the truth is everyone is racist, sexist, etc. Everyone including people in marginalized groups. Being a white lesbian doesn’t mean you can’t be racist. Being an Asian man doesn’t mean you can’t be sexist. You can see that within groups themselves. POC are not exempt from racism against other POC or from internalized racism against themselves or their own group. Women aren't free from internalized misogyny. The best we can do is to not make that prevent us from making inclusive works; if you make a mistake, which may happen, all we can ask is that you try your best to be open to feedback and grow.

It doesn’t make sense to include every single POC in my work.

No one is telling you to. Choose characters who make sense for the story. Don’t choose them just so you have a POC in your work. We don’t want them to be tokenized.

This argument is identical to the “not all _____” rebuttal (“not all men,” “not all white people,” etc.) which places the blame on a few lone individuals and shifts the conversation away from an existing widespread problem. When there’s a consistent pattern and there are many examples of it both within the fandom and in other fandoms, it no longer is about individual preference.

I urge you to consider the following:

If most people say they don’t write about or include a POC in their work because it’s too difficult or they’re afraid of making that character inauthentic, but they don’t seem to have an issue with writing other characters from groups they’re not in (e.g., if you’re a straight woman who writes a lot of M/M fics despite not knowing what it’s like to be a bi, pan, or gay man), doesn’t that say something?

If most people have the same reasons you do about not being interested in POC (e.g., “they’re not fleshed out enough” while being interested in or fleshing out minor white characters who get the same or even less development as those characters) or ships with POC (e.g., saying “they’re like brothers” while being interested in a white ship with similar dynamics and tropes or seeing why other people might ship it if you don’t), doesn’t that say something?

If most people give characters of color the same roles in their works even if that makes them OOC and/or the role reduces them to a (frequently stereotypical) trope, especially if they’re never fleshed out beyond that trope (e.g., the funny sidekick, wise friend who always helps or gives advice/free therapy, or responsible, mature, and sometimes stern friend who “parents” the protagonist), isn’t that saying something?

If race truly isn’t a factor for you when it comes to liking characters and ships, then this isn’t about you and you don’t have to distract people from the conversation by announcing that. That said, we should all look at characters and ships we like anyway instead of assuming that’s the case as that’s good practice. How much of your list is white? If it’s mostly or entirely white, why is that the case and why do you feel differently about ships of color?

A big part of what informs my shipping is physical attraction or interest in the characters.

What characters and actors do you find attractive or interesting? Are they all or mostly white? If they aren’t, are you drawn to any ships that include those POC? Refer to the section above.

I don’t ship _____ because I see them as brothers/sisters/siblings.

Part of this is preference as it comes down to perceived chemistry and relationship dynamics. However, POC are often not seen as romantic leads both in fanworks and the media and are just friends or “brothers/sisters” (this is why Crazy Rich Asians was a big deal). Sometimes, people even argue against POC being or having love interests in the name of diversity. You see this a lot with WOC in the media where the explanation against a love interest is “she’s a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need a man”; yes, they don’t and sometimes the story doesn’t need a romance, but WOC deserve love too and it’s strange that while white women can get the guy and be independent, WOC can’t and it somehow belittles or reduces them if they do.

The way you can gauge whether it’s just preference at play or biases you may not have been aware of is to see how many relationships featuring a character of color fall under the “just friends/siblings” category for you, what you need to ship something, and how you feel about white ships with the same type of relationship or same lack of chemistry. For instance, you may say that there needs to be enough interaction for you to ship something and that’s why you don’t care much for Rhodey/Sam. Do you feel the same way about Clint/Coulson then, which has much less interaction (actually much less than Rhodey/Sam in this case)? If it’s about chemistry, are Steve and Sam just “brothers,” but Bruce and Thor aren’t or, if you don’t ship Bruce/Thor, you still “see it” and get why other people might be into it?

What do you ship, or what ships do you understand even if they’re not for you, and how is that different from ships that follow the same beats? Why are Steve and Bucky not brothers, but Rhodey and Tony are (there are many parallels between the two relationships—and one can argue the latter is more nuanced—than appears at first glance, and Rhodey/Tony can be just as sweet or angsty)? If you like the rivals/enemies-to-lovers or meet-ugly aspect to Steve/Tony, Sam/Bucky, Scott/Jimmy Woo, and M’Baku/T’Challa have that dynamic. You like that superior/subordinate-to-lovers dynamic that Clint/Coulson has? Coulson/Fury. Flirty meet-cutes or love/trust-at-first-sight? Steve/Sam.

I explained why I focused on the MCU here and that most of the fics that feature an MCU character and comics ’verse character tend to be heavily or entirely MCU-influenced here.

Also, characters of color exist in the comics, cartoons, and games too. By this logic, Steve/Sam and Rhodey/Tony should be juggernauts in the MCU fandom considering the depth and history of the characters and relationships. Ask yourself why people are happy to ship MCU Spideypool, to draw on the comics for that relationship and even bring a non-MCU character into the MCU and write him based on his comics history and characterization. Ask yourself why people are unhappy with MCU Clint’s terrible writing and lack of characterization and decide to give him his 616 (usually Fraction-era) characterization. And then ask yourself why people don’t do that for characters of color and then use “___ is a minor character/doesn’t have much development” as an excuse for why they’re uninteresting or not shippable with others.

There are many strong and interesting relationships in the comics, but only a few make it to the MCU fandom and almost all, if not all, of them are white.

It’s more important to see how many fanworks there are for ships of color in a fandom than how many ships of color there are in that fandom. See how few works there are for POC ships other than MJ/Peter in the MCU Spider-Man fandom despite the diversity of the cast. See how the most popular ships are white and three of them involve white characters from the Iron Man fandom (explain to me how Harley/Peter has over 1,000 works, but Ned/Peter has 436).

And sure, you can say almost all of the Black Panther ships feature a character of color so there’s “more” diversity, but see how few works there are for them and how works with a white character fare compare to POC-only ships (almost all have 100-200 or fewer fics, with many having so few that I didn’t include them in the post, while BP ships with a white character have more works despite little to no interaction between the characters).

Both of these, by the way, are critical and box office hits with characters who are clearly supposed to be the faces of the MCU now that the OG6 are gone. Black Panther is an award-winning critical and box office hit, and it is, more than any other film in MCU history, a huge cultural phenomenon with tremendous impact. It broke so many records and milestones, and it’s STILL breaking and making them. It has the most nuanced and balanced ensemble cast with side characters just as three-dimensional as the lead, a rarity in MCU films. Yet, its tag only has 3,966 works, fewer in total for the whole fandom than some of the white M/M ships on this list. Even if you account for BP fanworks that may have been tagged as MCU instead of BP, the number is paltry as you can see in this post. People simply do not want to make fanworks for characters of color (in this case, specifically Black characters) and don’t. It’s not about how diverse or successful a film is.

Some of the characters and ships are popular because white characters get the lion’s share of screen time and development or they appeared in canon earlier.

Yes, that’s true, but fandom has no problem catapulting white ships with minor characters into extreme popularity. See Clint/Coulson. See fics prioritizing Happy and having him show up more than Rhodey in Steve/Tony fics.

It’s not about chronology. Many ships of color came before white ships as a whole and before white ships with the same white character they have. See Bucky/Clint vs. Bucky/Sam.

Lastly, please don’t tell me how certain white M/M ships came to be to explain how they’re exempt or how I’m failing to consider other factors for their popularity. I’ve been in the fandom since 2012, and I’ve seen almost all of the white ships in the fandom be born or boom into popularity. Don’t try to explain, for instance, that Clint/Coulson is big because Coulson has his own show and his fans followed him from the show (this logic falls flat when you look at something like Luke Cage); that ship became huge way before that happened and way before Agents of Shield became “big.” Also, see the section above regarding screen time, development, and fame.

Is it racist to racebend a character?

People’s opinions differ on racebending—and often that comes from personal background and on the situation—so I can’t speak on anyone’s behalf. However, I think everyone can agree on the following:

Racebending a white character is not the same thing as whitewashing a POC. For example, making Tony Stark Indian vs. turning T’Challa white or as canonical examples, making Fury black in Ultimates and the MCU vs. making the Ancient One or the Maximoffs white. The latter (whitewashing T’Challa, the Ancient One, and the Maximoff twins) is racist for various reasons. There’s a long history of POC being erased and white people taking roles from POC, a huge imbalance in representation between white people and POC, the unfortunate perception by the public and media that “white = neutral/standard” (Bruce’s whiteness doesn’t define his characterization and development), and the way race plays a role in influencing the way POC feel, act, and are treated.

Racebending a POC from one ethnicity or racial group to another is also problematic as we’re not interchangeable. Hollywood often does this and goes, “But they’re still a POC! We’re being diverse!”

In general, people who racebend white characters to POC want to see more POC in canon and in the media! These aren’t mutually exclusive.

Sometimes people racebend because they’re not represented at all in their works. (This happens with other marginalized groups too; for instance, some people make cis characters trans in their fanworks as there are few to no trans characters in the canonical source.) For example, there are, as of now, no Latinx superheroes in the MCU films. Even if people wanted to, they can’t make works with an MCU Latinx superhero unless they bring one from the comics or the one Latinx superhero from Agents of Shield (if they know the comics or AoS), make a minor Latinx film character like Luis a superhero, or racebend their favorite white character and put a fresh spin on the character, drawing from their personal experience and background.

There’s a massive difference between fans racebending a character and a creator taking credit by pretending they viewed a character as non-white or didn’t see race all along when it’s clear that the character is canonically white (this is different from a creator saying they support anyone, POC or white, playing that character onscreen or onstage).

Racist language in fics is more important than fandom representation.

We don’t have to pick our battles. Both are important! I focused on fandom representation as it’s much more quantifiable and easy to find and analyze data for than racist language on a fandom-wide scale on my own without any tools. You’re right that the latter is a problem as is racist representation in fanworks, though.

My fanworks tend to focus on one ship and don’t really include other characters in general. When they do, the others mostly talk about that relationship. Am I falling into the trap you mentioned?

If the story is about a relationship (examining that relationship and the feelings of the characters in it) and there isn’t much of a plot outside of that, then that makes sense. However, even in situations like this, consider how much time you dedicate to characters of color vs. white characters. If the story is about a ship featuring a POC, do you spend more time on the white character of that relationship? Their white friends and how they feel about that relationship? If it’s about a white ship, do white side characters appear more than side characters of color even if the latter have a closer relationship with the protagonists? For example, does Wanda show up more than Sam or play a bigger role than him in a Steve/Bucky fic? Do you have Pepper show up all the time (or even Happy), but Rhodey is chronically absent? Do only the white characters get to be more than the tropes you’re using, if you’re using any, while the POC don’t get to be nuanced? Are there any stereotypes that you’re reducing the POC to?

I feel guilty about not including or writing about *character of color’s name here*.

See “It doesn’t make sense to include every single POC in my work.” Include the character(s) who make sense for the story, perspective you’re writing/drawing from if applicable, and central group or ship if this is a ship-specific work. For example, if you’re drawing the Avengers and you include the newer Avengers, Rhodey and Sam should appear too, not just Wanda, Scott, Bucky, and/or Carol (this happens a lot). If you’re writing a Tony POV fic that includes other characters, depending on the story, it may make sense that Sam doesn’t appear much as he and Tony aren’t close whereas he would in a Steve POV fic.

How do I ensure that I don’t offend anyone if I include POC in my work?

You can’t ensure anything as POC aren’t a monolith, but you can try to be as informed as possible and avoid common pitfalls while writing. You can do research, just the way you might research anything you’re not familiar with. You can ask if anyone is willing to do a sensitivity read while you write or before you post. You can look for betas. There are a lot of resources out there, but these are good places to start if you’re looking for more information and help:

Writing with Color - resources

Writing with Color - Stereotypes and Tropes page

Reference for Writers - POC tag

What should I do to examine myself for any implicit biases?

We should all take stock of:

our feelings about different characters and relationships, both platonic and romantic, who we prioritize in our works, and how much they’re prioritized

our decision whether or not to seek or make content with characters of color. This includes content for white ships because sometimes every white character in the MCU shows up as a side character, but characters of color don’t or all of the white characters play bigger roles than the POC despite how close they are to the protagonist(s)

the way we interpret and write/draw those characters. For example, is Sam a yes-man? A figurative or literal therapist for white friends? The bro who only cracks jokes and/or gives sage advice but seems to not have any flaws, struggles, or life of his own outside of his white friends? The BFF who thinks his white best friend is being ridiculous about another white guy and wants them to get their act together already? Does the character of color talk in the way you perceive everyone of that race to talk rather than the way they personally do (e.g., does Luis randomly and awkwardly switch into Spanish when he talks just because he’s Latinx despite never speaking Spanish with Scott? Does Sam use AAVE with Steve, Bucky, and Natasha when he doesn’t do that with them?)?

Also, here’s a Google doc with more anti-racist resources.

Even well-meaning people can slip up or not be as proactive as they hoped they would be so it’s just good practice to check in with ourselves every once in a while and see if there’s anything we missed or didn’t notice.

#fandom #marvel fandom #mcu fandom #resource

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csykora · 4 years ago

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A thought about meaningful change

I don’t want to distract from the most recent thing Benn did. I’m going to be talking about several different things, and some might seem smaller than others: I know. I’m not saying that the newest thing isn’t important enough on its own or that everything’s on the same level. But I think patterns can be useful.

(I have also made myself sick with nerves a couple times so I’m posting this as is: sorry for typos, and while I’ll stand behind my ideas there may be some sentences that are a little long or awkwardly worded).

Back in 2015, Jame Benn and Tyler Seguin were doing a radio interview.

Some of you might be thinking, “You want to talk about THIS, AGAIN?” Yes. More of you are probably thinking, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Yeah, that’s what I want to talk about.

cw for discussions of sexual harassment, incest, homophobia, bullying, misogyny and transmisogyny, transphobia

So during this interview, one of the radio hosts asked Benn if he and his brother were ever road roommates. Benn said no, and the host commented that Henrik and Daniel Sedin probably roomed together.

“Well yeah…that’s the Sedins,” Seguin said.

“Who knows what else they do together?" Benn said. Everyone laughed.

“Seriously,” Seguin said.

"Dude, it's creepy," the radio hosts said, "In fact, it's a good example to future brothers in the NHL on how not to do things." Then they reassured Benn, “In no way am I implying that you have a Sedin-type vibe going about you.”

Benn and Seguin laughed. The conversation continued, calling the Sedins creepy for wearing similar facial hair, leaving nearby and spending too much time together.

When asked pointblank, “Are the Sedins weird?” Benn answered, “I don’t know. I can’t say.”

To finish the sentence he didn’t: he was implying that the Sedin brothers fuck each other.

Now, these were shock jockeys. They were almost certainly hoping Benn and Seguin would say something homophobic. That said, even shock jockeys pre-screen an interview. They’re not going to invite just anyone on the air and try this with them, because all it takes is someone saying, “I don’t know what you mean,” or “No, I actually respect Dan and Henke a lot as my colleagues” to ruin that set up. If a shock jockey thinks you’re a mark, you’ve probably said something off-air that made them think you’re a mark. And if they dug a pit in front of him, Benn is still the one who decided to stick his dick in it and make things overtly sexual.

After, the Stars stated that Benn had “reached out” the Sedins to apologize. Seguin did not reach out but was “included” in whatever Benn wrote or said. Neither of them gave a public explanation or apology. As far as I can tell the Sedins never commented on whether they received that message, what sort of apology it was, or whether they accepted it. Henrik Sedin’s only comment was, “I think it says more about them than it does about us.”

Ways that homophobia is working here:

-the idea that two men having any degree of physical or emotional closeness, even family members, is suspicious.

-Benn roomed with his brother. Course he did. The hosts spell out what he was afraid of: that the other men in the room might think he had the wrong vibe. He was so afraid of them thinking he had unmanly vulnerabilities like liking his own brother that he misrepresented the situation and pushed someone else forward.

-the idea that a man having any relationship to another man’s physical body or appearance, is suspicious.

Dressing or looking too similar to another man—which means you’ve paid attention to how another man’s body looks in order to copy him, like you’re trying to take ownership of his body, which = fucking him—is a really common accusation. Gay men are seen as lusting after and trying to copy other men’s real masculinity for themselves (but of course never quite succeeding). A man thinking that another man who he knows or suspects to be gay looks too similar to him, and so must have been watching and ‘copying’ him, is a common spark for homophobic attacks.

-the idea that any of this could have been a joke depends on the idea that two men having sex is wacky and unrealistic. Imagine if that happened, wouldn’t that be weird.

Now, someone might say, “It’s not that gay sex is wacky, it’s that the incest that is!” First, incest accounts for a lot of childhood sexual abuse, so I wouldn’t say it’s wacky either. And while it’s true that people can say awful things to different gender twins as well out of a combination of gender prejudices, in this case there were also homophobic ideas about men and masculinity at play.

Ways that power is working here:

-People forgot this fast. It was treated as settled because the Stars said it was settled. People gave “kudos” to Benn “doing the right thing” afterward, or for seeming to realize what was happening and not saying yes to the final question.

I would argue that “I don’t know, I can’t say” is somehow a worse answer to a yes-or-no question, because it means that either you want to say yes but you’re scared of the consequences, or you sincerely don’t know what to say. All he had to do was say “No.” After he said “I don’t know,” Seguin continued and said, “They are weird.” If Benn had said, “No, actually they’ve been professional when I’ve worked with them and I won’t comment any more on their personal life,” Sequin might have noticed, and Benn might have encouraged him to change his behavior. Not saying “no” was a direct, demonstrable failure to show any kind of leadership.

-This counts as workplace sexual harassment. I’m not saying a case should have been pursued: that should have been at least partly up to the Sedins (although there should also be workplace rules about what is and isn’t acceptable without the victims having to ask for it). But that’s a word we can use for this, this could have been counted as that. Sexual harassment are actions based on a person’s gender, assigned sex, sexual activity, or other qualities related to sex, not just sexual attraction. I worry that often, conflicted feelings about putting people into the category of “Sexual Harasser” lead people to think that actions “aren’t bad enough” to be sexual harassment when they definitionally can be. In other lines of work, if you talk about your coworkers fucking their twins in the office, there are rules about that: at the very least, you’ll be getting a bunch of trainings and be moved to a part of the office where you won’t see them again.

In the NHL, it seems frighteningly clear that people don’t have recourse for sexual harassment. This was discussed and handled as a “childish insult”, not harassment against two coworkers/employees. Often, there’s a logic that something is just an insult, not a ‘real’ threat, because the person who did it couldn’t possibly be sexually attracted to the person they did it to.

-In 2015 Eric and Jordan Staal were living in identical houses outside Raleigh and ‘playing’ together every night. Seems super suspicious. Unless beefy Canadian boys’ behavior is normal, and European masculinity always has to be questioned as being softer-spoken, slimmer, more intellectual, scared of heavy hitting. There are a lot of reasons you might not call Eric Staal gay—maybe you know he’s bigger than you, more successful on Team Canada than you, more popular with the other Team Canada guys than you. Or maybe you just don’t look at him and think he could be gay. Or both. Eric is positioned so you’d have to punch up at him: Benn tried to position himself closer to that kind of social standing, by pushing someone else who already doesn’t quite fit in further out. This isn’t directly in the words, so I’m not all-out accusing them of xenophobia: what I mean is that it’s always worth asking if and how and why feminization is applied to Those Other People.

There’s the eating out thing. Which he sent to teammate Jason Demers, commenting “I feel like your (sic) the kind of guy who would”.

How misogyny is working here:

-the idea that this could have been funny or interesting or worth saying at all depends on the idea that vulvas are weird. Imagine if someone willing touched a cis woman with anything but their dick. Gosh.

-There’s no good explanation for what ‘the kind of guy who would’ was meant to mean. No one says, ‘Hey, do you do this widely mocked sex act? I don’t, but I think you would, and that’s cool and doesn’t affect your masculinity at all, bro, life is a rich tapestry.’

How power is working here:

-This counts as sexual harassment again. Even if asking a coworker (or really more like someone you shift-manage or who reports to you) ‘how do you fuck your partner?’ wasn’t, saying ‘you seem like you would do ___’ is. Again, I’m not saying that Demers has to feel that way about it, but he should have had options.

-Demers was also in a new relationship at the time, so this could be harassment to both him and his partner, who had no recourse when someone her partner has to work with/for comments on her body.

-I don’t think it was intended as sexual harassment. But there’s not really a nice explanation of what he meant to say. It seems like it was intended as an insult or a ‘warning’: ‘this is the way men are allowed and no allowed to be in our group, do you know your place?’

Around that time, the Stars shared a video of Benn, Seguin, and Valeri Nichushkin. Each were supposed to say a couple lines, including their name. Valeri pronounced his nickname ‘Vall’, with a native Russian accent, more like “Wall” in English. Each time Benn and Seguin laughed and questions him and the producer cut. After a couple takes Benn said, “I thought your name was ‘Val.’”

Sequin physically turned away from Nichushkin and laughed. Nichushkin, not understanding the comment, and not laughing, turned to Benn for an explanation, but Benn only turned toward Seguin, both continuing to laugh.

It was part of a pattern of comments from observers: “If Tyler Seguin and Jamie Benn are having a laugh in the locker room, Nichushkin can only guess what’s so funny.” They themselves commented on how “His English is really not good at all…A lot of times we find him just sitting there.” “(In) normal conversations, he doesn’t really know what’s going on.”

I’ll give them credit—they said they felt pity and “try to help” too. I just can’t find any examples of them doing it, compared to teammates like Sharp or Spezza who can more concretely describe spending time with him.

Nichushkin chose to burn contract time in the KHL rather than Dallas before being bought out, expressing that he no longer felt like he “belonged in the NHL.” He felt that the Stars didn’t “trust” in him, was “nervous” in the locker room, and said his family worried for his mental health because of the culture.

“There is a bit of it because I want to be part of the conversation when someone says something,” Nichushkin said. “But I don’t have enough words I know so I can join in.”

-Is it the worst xenophobia in the world? Nah. It’s not free from xenophobia, when the only joke is that someone speaks differently than you. It’s not Benn joking about his own misunderstanding to invite Nichushkin in. I often point to Tripp Tracy, who asks players to teach him words in their language and then sets up jokes about his accent so they can deliver the punchline and laugh with him.

-Is it bullying? It kind of came off like it, to make a joke about someone you know can’t understand. At least it was unnecessary, and unkind. It’s just reminding someone they don’t belong.

-It’s unimpressive. It’s deflecting. Oh, he doesn’t know what’s going on? What did you do to tell to him? My family communicate through a mix of finger-signing, Scrabble tiles, and interpretive dance: I guarantee you, if you can’t communicate concepts like “we’re going to get dinner now, you’re welcome here, we’re having fun!”, you’re not trying. Which is fine, I guess, you don’t have to talk to people, unless it’s like, your job to work with your teammates.

Wanting to ban trans*feminine athletes from competition is based on a complete misunderstanding of math, medicine, and athletics; it’s unnecessary, unethical, and unkind.

It’s an unsurprising continuation of the ideas that there’s a line between men and women and transgressing it is suspicious, that women are gross, that people who are different are shocking and funny, that social pressure can and should be used to remind people who are different that they don’t belong.

It’s a fascist use of power, which I don’t say to mean that “He is A Fascist in every sense,” but that those beliesf express a desire and a comfort with using power to control other people’s bodies, and which bodies have access to certain spaces, to maintain “purity”.

I’m not saying that anyone should have looked at any of these things and easily decided in that moment, “That’s it, he’s shouldn’t have a platform or power over other players, he’s irredeemable.” You might look at a couple of them and think, “That’s not even a problem at all.” I’ll agree to disagree on some of them, but my point is about a pattern of how this dude uses the power he’s given.

I have a phrase, or more a series of words I sometimes yell when I’m talking about subjects like this—“STRUCK A TIM HORTONS.” I shout this in commemoration of the time that Ryan O’Reilly got drunk and drove his pickup into the wall of a small town Ontario Timmies.

“Struck a Tim Hortons” is a very good phrase to read in a police report. And, also, I’m an ACoA. I’ve experienced impaired driving, I’m terrified to shaking of it, and I know that other people have experienced much worse consequences. This isn’t a perfect metaphor (it’s not an example of prejudice or violence against a class of people, etc) but my point is that I try to hold it in my heart because that’s one case where I know what it’s like to really, really want something to just be NBD. Where part of me wants to just think it was a funny mistake so I don’t have to really think about the serious implications of it, and part of me super doesn’t. I have an instinct to resolve those feelings, to come down and decide that it’s either insignificant enough that I don’t have to think about it, or significant enough that I can hate him and then also stop thinking about it, and then I can have the relief of feeling just one feeling at a time.

I don’t think it’s bad to feel conflicted learning something about someone. I think it’s important.

But the problem is that if one thing isn’t significant enough, and we decide to keep thinking someone is fundamentally Good, we often toss that thing out. So when another thing happens, we only look at the new thing, trying to decide: is this enough? And that next thing might not be enough either. So we can go on and on, until you add up to a lot of things that have each done some harm, but none of them have been enough to change how we see and talk about someone.

Now I, personally, decided that the Timmies wasn’t so bad that ROR couldn’t ever make it up to me. But I didn’t decide to feel fine about it: I tried to just put a pin in how conflicted I felt. It’s been years, and over the years I think his actions have showed meaningful change. He hasn’t struck a Starbucks, a Dunkin, or even a Caribou. There’s a pattern.

I think a lot of people who don’t really like the things Benn says or does or believes have given him a lot of chances to make up for them, because they don’t want him to really mean those things. By which I really mean that I know there are a lot of women and queer fans who liked the guy. I get it (I don’t actually get it get it, but I mean I can try to understand people coming from a very different place than I do about him).

I’ve read a lot of ways that people who are themselves vulnerable in our society try to empathize with him by imagining him as vulnerable too--he’s also experienced fatphobia, homophobia, he wasn’t expected to succeed, etc! I think that’s a wonderfully human instinct. But often I think people have more empathy for those experiences than he expresses for himself--he agrees that it was Bad to be fat and he’s Worked Hard to fit into the masculine norm, he agrees that it’s Bad to be close with another man and works to avoid it--and certainly more than he has showed in his actions toward others. If you’re going to say I hate him for saying that, I don’t--I want him and everyone in our society not to feel and do this shit!

I see a lot of people starting from the idea he is a good leader trying really hard to spin his choices as a smart strategy when he plays dumb with media, when he doesn’t give specific action plans or give public statements or apologies. (I actually agree with the first one, I think it is a strategy for him to avoid transparency and not do a part of his job that he doesn’t want to do.) It just…it seems like a lot of work to reach a pre-determined goal. It’s okay to like someone and for them to still not be good at their jobs! When I say I think a guy’s not a good leader, that’s not always the same as saying he’s a bad person. And if we keep on promoting a guy as a good leader because we like them regardless of their demonstrated leadership skills…that’s how we end up with a lot of shitty policies in the NHL.

Over the years he has consistently avoided stepping up to his captaincy and using his personal power to say things like, “No,” “Tyler, cut it out,” “This is what I’m going to do to fix a problem,” or “I believe in…” anything, really.

I really, really want to ask people to be mad as hell and advocate for the NHL to improve its code of conduct and harassment processes. I do. But I’m also tired. I don’t think, if I did ask you that, it would work. I don’t have an argument for why you should be mad at someone who’s mad at my existence. I’m not trying. I just want to encourage you, if you’re feeling the tug of feelings and just want to be able to simplify someone’s behavior and love them in simple terms, to put a pin in the more complicated parts, and remember them the next time, and look for patterns.

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bungoustraypups · 3 years ago

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it’s honestly so funny to me when like. terfs and/or radfems try to claim afab trans people are only trans because patriarchy or whatever makes them “hate being feminine/hate their womanhood” like. bro idk how to tell you, not only do i love being feminine as an effeminate gay man (yknow, the thing a lot of gay cis men are also punished under the patriarchy for because the patriarchy simply views all femininity as bad no matter who is doing it, yes, that includes those “xy males” you keep going on and on about who don’t perform masculinity the way the patriarchy demands it be performed), i also do not hate “my” womanhood because it never existed? i can’t hate being a woman if i never was one and am not one???

even when i thought i was cis that was literally only because i didn’t know there was any other way to identify like. when i thought i was straight, i wasn’t doing it because i really was, it was because firstly i hadn’t realized even yet i was a non-binary man and very much not a woman (in fact i at first thought i was a lesbian! turns out i wasn’t attracted to the women, it was actually specifically masculinity in those women, not even the women themselves), and secondly because i simply hadn’t heard the other terms yet! it wasn’t even that my family wasn’t accepting i just didn’t know any other words because uh yknow that’s. how life works. you don’t know things, and then you learn them, and now you know them! wow! K-12 educations system basics summed up in a single sentence!

i wasn’t brainwashed or convinced by some nonexistant transgender genderist cult or whatever buzzword terfs and/or radfems are using for today’s news cycle. i literally had not met a single trans person in my life when i started identifying as trans! not in real life and not online either! it was a cis person actually who told me, upon hearing what i was feeling and had been feeling for as long as i could remember, that “hey you might wanna look up transgender resources” and i did it on my own!

oh, and guess what? at no point did me being trans, on its own, cause me suffering. i was dysphoric at one point because i had pre menstrual dysphoric disorder, which can affect cis women as well as anyone who is not a cis woman who also menstruates and has that disorder, but once i got the right combination of meds and such, my dysphoria lessened and eventually disappeared, and i don’t have it anymore. (i was on birth control for several years of the hormonal type but i’m not anymore, but even now i still don’t have PMDD symptoms and haven’t in like seven or eight years at least, my periods are also not as bad, but i’m also on like different meds in general from then so maybe some of it is that too idk really but i just don’t have it anymore)

i don’t want to “mutilate” myself or anything, i literally don’t want any surgery at all lmao. aside from general fear of surgery, i like my boobs, they’re fine and not that big a deal and honestly fun to play with too, i don’t want to “chop them off” or w/e, i don’t want a penis, i like the vagina i have, it works just fine and if it ain’t broke don’t fix it lmao, and a penis doesn’t make me any more of a man than your vagina makes you a woman (that is to say, penises don’t make men men and vaginas don’t make women women, no matter what your middle school biology textbook told you). all i really want is testosterone to achieve like... the standard of passing i wanna have, so that if i meet someone new, they won’t automatically assume i’m a woman without asking me and misgender me, which does actually bother me, because it’s disrespectful, not because of anything else. i don’t care about like, forcing anyone to accept me, idgaf if you accept me! you can use my name and correct pronouns without giving a single damn shit about me! it’s about basic human decency and respect and treating each other like human beings because that’s what we are unless yall wanna start claiming trans people aren’t human beings now which. man if you do that i can’t help you anymore LMAO so

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with-my-murder-flute · 4 years ago

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Hi everybody, thanks for the asks letting me know I made the top of @yusuftiddies’ list of Homophobes in TOG Fandom, you can stop sending them now.

So.

I can make mistakes and fuck up and own that. I am serious about listening to marginalized people. But... in this case, while @yusufstiddies generally describes factual events that happened and factual posts that exist, I have to say that I can’t actually apologize for the things I’m called out for because I don’t think they’re homophobic. The things he criticizes me for are things that come from a lot of personal experience as a queer bisexual cis woman, as well as a lot of reflection, research, and study. I believe in them really strongly and stand by them.

I’m really sorry if this makes TOG fandom too hostile, because it is not my intention to make this place so unpleasant that anyone feels driven out. I understand if my stance means people no longer want to follow me/read my stuff/participate in projects I’m involved with (though I’d rather hand off the Research Hub to someone else than see it go down with me). I’m posting this so people can know where they stand before they decide whether to keep interacting with my blog, or “deplatform” me as @yusufstiddies recommends.

I would recommend, for anyone who doesn’t want to see my posts, using Tumblr’s new post content filtering feature. If you type a username (like star-anise or with-my-murder-flute) into it, Tumblr will hide all posts featuring that specific string of characters, and therefore any post or reblog of mine.

To address the accusations against me:

I am an anti-anti: Yes. I’ve reblogged posts of mine about this before. I care passionately about preventing child abuse, but I think there are better ways to prevent child abuse in fandom (like concrete harassment policies so predatory behaviour can be reported and stopped early, and education about digital consent and healthy relationships) than attacking people who write “bad ships,” not least because the first people it hurts are abuse survivors trying to work through their trauma, and because the research says you cannot actually tell who’s a sexual predator based on what they write about. Fiction affects reality, but not on a 1:1 basis. My mainblog, @star-anise, has a really extensive archive of my writing on the subject.

I said cishet men aren’t more privileged than gay men: Kinda. What I actually did was question whether Every Single Cishet Man benefits from more privilege than Every Single Gay Man. If a man is cishet but gets beaten up because people perceive him as gay, he’s not exactly feeling the warm toasty glow of heterosexual privilege in that moment. Oppression is complicated and there are times when someone’s lack of privilege on one axis is way less important than someone else’s lack of privilege on another axis.

The post above also includes me reblogging someone else’s addition about how straight men can be included in the queer movement: I’m queer. @yusufstiddies has made it very clear that he isn’t comfortable with the word “queer” and doesn’t like it. Therefore I think it’s understandable that he might not understand that the queer community sees ourselves as a coalition of people dedicated to dismantling the structures of sex and gender that oppress us, not a demographic of people whose gender identities or sexual orientations can be neatly mapped. However, I would say that doesn’t make queer theory inherently homophobic.

There are also some related points @yusufstiddies didn’t level at me specifically, but I would like to address:

The constant focus on the unsafeness of cishet people:

I’m not cishet. I’m a bisexual woman who’s dated women. Sixth-light is a queer woman married to a woman. This is not an issue of non-LGBTQ+ people blundering their way into something they don’t experience the daily consequences of. This is an issue of people from WITHIN the LGBTQ+ community who sincerely disagree with @yusufstiddies about the pressures we experience and how best to deal with them. I think that even if @yusufstiddies were to filter his fiction input to only LGBT-written work about LGBT experiences, or even only trans-written work about trans people, he would still find a lot of things he finds upsetting or transphobic, because sexual and gender identities are really diverse and not everything will suit one person.

The contention that saying “’Queer is a slur’ is TERF propaganda” is transmisogyny because it dilutes the definition of “TERF”:

People who point out the phrase is TERF propaganda are not calling every person who says it a TERF, and we are not trying to argue that telling a queer person that queer is a slur is inherently equal to the kind of damage a TERF does when she attacks a trans woman out of transphobia. Queer people being able to use the word “queer” does not have the same importance as trans women being able to live, work, and survive in public. Rather, we are literally saying, “This is a thing TERFs say when they take a break from attacking trans women and try to recruit new members to their group, so it’s in our best interests to not give it too wide a currency.”

Some people have experienced the word “queer” used as a hateful word hurled against them and don’t want to hear it ever again. I get that. It happens. Where I grew up, “gay” was a synonym for “shitty” and it took me a lot of years out of high school before the word “gay” wouldn’t shoot my blood pressure through the roof. I actually do understand that and think that’s valid (and again, support using post content filtering for that word).

One of the things I do at @star-anise is argue with young people who are headed into full-on transmisogynistic TERF territory, and work at reeling them back and deradicalizing them. I use a tag called “weedwhacking” so my followers can filter out the sometimes lengthy back-and-forths we get going.

Something I’ve learned, interacting with so many TERFs and proto-TERFs, is that one way they frequently get recruited into harassing trans people was through discourse around the word “queer”. For one, it encouraged them to want to distance themselves from any perception of LGBT people as “weird” or “not normal”, which led to seeing trans people as “weird” and “not normal” and therefore not good members of the “gay pride” community. For two, repeating “queer is a slur” predictably causes a lot of queer people to react in a defensive manner, so by teaching young or new people to say it, TERFs can set them up to feel alienated from the larger LGBTQ+ community and more open to TERF propaganda.

The next issue isn’t mentioned in the original callout post, but I think it’s key to this entire issue:

@yusufstiddies has made several posts about what cishet people should and shouldn’t write. For example, cishets shouldn’t write Nicky experiencing internalized homophobia. Another is a detailed post of things cishets shouldn’t write about trans people, including which sexual positions only trans people are allowed to write. I would imagine that part of his frustration with fandom has been the lack of traction those posts have gotten. I know I very deliberately didn’t reblog them.

That isn’t because I don’t agree that the things he complains about are rarely handled well by cishet authors. I agree that there’s a lot of bad fic out there that contributes to negative stereotypes against LGBTQ+ people and is basically a microaggression to read.

I have two very deeply-seated reasons for my position:

LGBTQ+ identities are different from many other political identities because most people are not born identifiably LGBTQ+. It’s something we have to figure out about ourselves. And one really important way that we do that is using the safety of fiction to explore what an experience would be like, sometimes years before we ever admit that we fit the identity we’ve written about. So banning cishet authors from writing something is really likely to harm closeted and questioning LGBTQ+ people. It will lengthen the amount of time questioning people take before finding the identity that really fits them, and force closeted people to be even more closeted.

There’s a lot of undeniably shitty stuff in fandom. However, I fundamentally believe that trying to target the people creating it and forcing them to stop doesn’t work very well, and has the serious byproduct of killing the creativity and enthusiasm of the rest of fandom and resulting in less of the actual thing you like being produced. I think that it is infinitely more productive to focus on improving the ratio of good stuff in fandom than trying to snuff out every bad thing.

Like I said: I understand if this means former followers, mutuals, or friends no longer want to interact with me. I’ll be saddened, but I’ve obviously chosen this path and can deal with the consequences.

I wish this could have worked out differently.

#my stuff #the old guard

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im-the-punk-who · 4 years ago

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Hi! I’m new to the fandom and I’m simply curious (not trying to start a feud or anything), why don’t you like Steinberg?

Hello dear anon! And welcome to the fandom!

Oof. That’s a question. xD

I’m going to try and stay as uh. neutral as possible. Because I’ve already written the post I know I failed but, the intent in answering this is also not to start a feud or hurt anyone’s feelings.

Okay, so I got fairly negative in this chilis tonight, so I want to start by saying that even in light of the opinions I’m about to express, Black Sails is one of, if not my number one, favorite TV shows of all time. Certainly in recent memory - I’ve been hyperfixating on this show for 18 months with no sign of stopping, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for everyone who worked on the show - even Steinberg. (The one exclusion is Michael Bay, he can go twist.)

AND I think Stienberg is an incredibly talented writer. Black Sails is one of my favorite shows because it does such a wonderful job of weaving stories, creating characters, and melding things in a way that is both unexpected and makes sense narratively. I have changed as a person because of the show, and they will have to pry James McGraw and Thomas Hamilton from my cold dead knives-attached-to-them hands. None of what I’m going to say is meant to detract from that.

I will also say that a lot of these issues are not particular to Steinberg and are in fact a systemic problem with American TV + Film. And I’m not leaving Robert Levine out of my criticism, it’s just that Steinberg had the biggest hand in the pot(he wrote a full half the episodes) and a lot of what I’ve heard as far as talking about the show comes from Steinberg. So, he gets the brunt. But it isn’t that I think Steinberg was the only problematic element of the show.

Also, these are all my opinions and are colored by how I interact with my fandoms. I am not only a fandom veteran, but I work and pretty much live in the entertainment industry. I work in indie film and theatre and am surrounded by artists and creators of all walks of life, like, constantly. I know what is possible, and when I see something that can be improved, I want to note it because it is important to me to always be striving forward. Like Miranda says about Thomas, this isn’t out of malice, or out of hate. It’s because I genuinely love this show, and I love entertainment as a whole, and I think in order to get to a better, more inclusive industry we have to have hard conversations and look critically at the media we consume, and it is frustrating to me to time and again see the same faces in the room.

But if that isn’t your cuppa, that’s fine! Fandom isn’t meant to be stressful and if all you want to do is watch a show about gay pirates that is your tomato and I applaud you. Have at it you funky motherfucker.

OH! One more. At some point I’m going to talk about Silverflint. When I do, it is NOT meant as a ‘you shouldn’t/cant ship this’ or ‘this pairing is bad’ or any negative attack on the people who ship that pairing. My criticisms in this post are exclusively about what it means for Steinberg as a writer and Black Sails’ representation of gay and mlm men. While it’s not my cuppa, this is a sail your own ship blog.

OKAY! SO!

My main criticisms of Steinberg & Co boil down to:

The homozygosity of the writers and directors shows a complete lack of desire to include marginalized people in the writing of a show that is about them. Which leads to:

The centering of white men while choosing a historical setting and time period that was in fact dominated by people of color and specifically a black woman,

The gratuitous inclusion of violence against women, particularly sexual violence, and again, that the female characters are often sidelined for the central male characters.

SO.

Black Sails is a show centered around queer, female, and black leads, and yet there were only two non white-male directors (one bi-racial man and one white woman) and only 7 female writers - one of whom was Latina. The entire rest of the major creative staff was white men. I’m not going to comment on sexualities but none of the writers or directors are out as queer according to a quick google search.

Let me reiterate the important bit there.

In Black Sails, where the last two seasons specifically feature around a real, actually-happened-in-history event that shaped black history in the Caribbean, there was not a single black writer on the entire show.

This is the main difference between inclusion for inclusion’s sake, and actually centering marginalized voices. Black Sails has a ton of gay, POC, and female rep in front of the camera but practically zero representation behind it, which leads to storylines and implications that Steinberg and his writers, as white men, simply would never realize.

It’s like why Silver and Miranda never realized the true reasons James was waging war on England. They just did not have the life experiences to realize they were missing a piece of the puzzle, and so they filled in their own without even realizing they’d done so.

Because no one in the room of Black Sails was a part of these marginalized identities, nuances get lost or mistranslated, motivations get muddled through a white man’s gaze(or a straight person’s) and implications that someone within those communities might think is obvious won’t even come up.

And again, because there were no writers or directors of color in the last two seasons (the biracial man directed episodes 2x02 and 2x04 - WHICH MAKES SENSE IMO) the entirety of the historical lore that the show bases itself on in its latter half is filtered through a white man’s lens. And so there is no discussion of how changing something changes the meaning, how leaving someone out or changing their role to be more minor might affect people for whom that is their heritage. How the entire story they’re telling might change with one simple exclusion or addition.

So, how does this relate directly to Steinberg, you ask? Well, simply, because it was his show.

Steinberg(and Levine) were involved in every major decision about the show, from its conception, to the script, to choosing the writers and directors. They chose how they wanted the show to look, to think, what stories to tell and how they wanted to tell them. Their decisions(and the biases that formed those decisions) are woven into the show.

And look. I don’t for a second believe any of this was willful or malicious. I don’t think that John Steinberg and Robert Levine sat down one day and said ‘you know what would make the gays really angry? If we locked the only two canonically gay men up in a prison camp.’

But the decisions that were made in the show were based in ignorance in a way that shows more than just simple negligence or laziness(especially given the attention to detail in everything else). The things they leave out or change in the Maroon War plotline for instance are not small details easily missed. They are big, giant waving flags. They are things that are irreplaceable to still have the same events and stories and tell them respectfully.

It shows an insane amount of privilege to, for instance, write a show airing during a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was at the forefront of the American conscience, include black characters and black storylines, and yet not include a single black voice on their creative team.

In a show that centers a gay man’s love and his journey in attempting to process the horrible things done to him and his lover because of it, we are given just forty minutes of the entire show dedicated to their relationship - and just fifteen of those minutes actually feature the lover!

(Relatedly, the entirety of the gay romantic rep is two kisses, and a forehead touch. That’s the entirety of your gay intimacy representation. And yet there are in the first two seasons alone - because that’s all I’ve clocked so far - something like twenty seven minutes of scenes involving a naked or half naked woman. Five minutes of that is explicitly wlw sex.

Again, I just want to reiterate this because it’s important in recognizing bias.

There is fully twice as much female nudity in the first two seasons, as the entirety of the time the two gay characters have together on screen. )

Steinberg is a perfect example of how a lack of understanding why the diversity you are representing is important, matters. I dislike Steinberg because he, just like every other straight white cis man I have known, profited off of marginalized voices without including them or creating with them in mind.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. You cannot create something - especially something as back breakingly, intensely a labor of love as Black Sails - without putting several pieces of yourself into it. But those pieces color your narrative. They will expose things about you that you don’t even realize. And it’s in these places we are weakest, and why a diverse group of writers with a diverse group of experiences can help a piece be stronger. But for whatever reason, John Steinberg thought that he could make art with only people who looked and thought and experienced like him.

The lack of representation behind the camera in Black Sails was evident in front of it and yet Steinberg is out here getting to pretend like he created the most inclusive groundbreaking show that ever existed. It is important to me, personally, to acknowledge that. And that it kind of makes my skin crawl in the way all media made by straight white (cis)men makes my skin crawl. I wish I didn’t have to feel that way about my favorite tv show just because it was created by a man of privilege, but here we are.

SO. I hope that helped? Feel free to take what you want and leave what you don’t!

Below the cut is a more in depth look at things that I think show what I’m talking about, but that up there ^^ is the gist. <3 |D

SURPRISE!

The Maroons and the Maroon War

So the first thing I want to point out is that the Maroon War was a real thing that happened. It lasted ten years, and resulted in the most substantial victory the Maroons ever achieved against the British. Not only that, there was in fact a KICKIN’ badass female leader of the maroons named Queen Nanny, who is to this day honored as a national hero in Jamaica. While they weren’t able to drive the British out, the outcome of this war led to a mostly self-governing Maroon population in Jamaica from the mid 1700s on. This was a long term fight that had a very tangible and real outcome, even if it didn’t end in the destruction of colonialism.

And what is this war turned into in Black Sails? A white ‘madman’s revenge’ that is doomed to failure after six months.

That, my dear pirates, is a problem for me. (And those familiar with my brand of spiceyness know that I do not ascribe to the ‘Flint is a Madman’ trope, but that IS what Steinberg ascribes to, what he seems to have written the show thinking.)

There was no narrative reason to include the Maroon War in the narrative of Black Sails. The Maroon War didn’t happen until a decade after the Golden Age of Piracy, and aside from Silver’s wife being a black woman there is no mention of Silver ever having contact with them. To me, this feels like the choice of a showrunner who found a cool historical event and saw a chance to up the stakes of their white male heroes while getting in some sweet sweet POC rep.

Except that they then took the major events of the Maroon War and gave them to their white characters, Flint and Silver.

Here’s the thing. If you’re going to take a piece of culturally important history and use it for your show, you NEED to have sensitivity writers. You need to have people who are at least familiar with those events and who care about them to do them justice. Have an expert come in and read your script or go over your ideas. Or just like. Hire a black writer. Hire ONE black writer. As a treat.

The important Maroon figures, Nanny, Cudjoe, and Quao, all get sidelined or ‘sexified’ and then used as plot points for the white characters. Nanny gets split into two women - the older mother queen and Madi, the young naive warbent visionary. Quao(Mr. Scott is the closest, or Kofi possibly) gets killed off because the writers realized they didn’t exactly have a place for him in their writing. Cudjoe(Julius) gets a few scenes and one good speech but his entire role in the war gets given to Silver. And THEN. That sexy Queen Madi figure gets used as emotional bait for Silver and then has to learn he has betrayed her and destroyed the hope and freedom she had wanted to bring to her people.

Gross, pirates. Gross.

Anne Bonny/Max/Mary Read - a heads up, this section includes a semi in-depth discussion of both Max and Anne’s sexual assaults. If that bothers you, the paragraphs talking about that begin with a ***

COOL NOW LET’S TALK ABOUT LESBIANS. Words my 20 year old self would never have imagined coming out of my mouth.

Specifically, I want to talk about Max, and Anne, and their backstories both involving extreme sexual trauma at the hands of men. And then Mary Read and the once again sexification of female characters.

(Actually while I’m here another criticism I have of Steinberg is that his writing does not seem to recognize how queer people existed in the past - again, likely because he didn’t have any gay historians to be like ‘actually buddy that doesn’t make sense also why is Anne not dressing as a man? If you want to fuck with anything and insert modern day terminology and ideas into this show, make her non binary and REALLY piss off the hetties.’)

(This same ficitonal gay dramaturg who is definitely not me has also questioned John Steinberg repeatedly about where Mary Read is, unsatisfied with the answer ‘well we wanted her to be hot so we made her a sex worker and then had Anne have to rescue her but then we realized it would be weird not to include her actual character so we gave her a five second cameo at the very end of the series and also made her like 13.’)

Anyway! So my main point in bringing up Anne and Max is the sexual trauma they are exposed to in the show, particularly being that they are the two primary wlw in the show, who Steinberg has said he views as being completely gay, and what THAT whole unexamined idea looks like.

***Max. My dear Max. There was literally no reason to have her be repeatedly r*ped(and for the love of god there was even less reason to make it that gratuitous and graphic). Max being assaulted like that did not add anything to the gravity of Eleanor’s betrayal. The traumatic event was being tossed aside by Eleanor, and that could have been just as emotionally damaging without the sexual assault. And the only reason for her to be continually assaulted was to bring her and Anne together.

***The reason imo that Max’s r*pe plot was added was because it was the only thing these white straight men could come up with that felt emotionally damaging enough to them. The act of betrayal itself wasn’t enough, the act of being thrown away, of having a lover put your life in danger because of her own ambitions wasn’t enough, they needed her to be r*ped to really drive home the point.

***Anne, on the other hand, is never shown being sexually abused, but we are given an explicit account of her own traumatic history and how Jack saved her from this vile beast who was passing her around to his friends.

But here’s the thing pirates - that never happened. According to every account we have of Anne Bonny, she chose her husband, and married him against her father’s wishes. They were probably relatively happy until her husband started being a pirate spy and Anne started cheating on him with Jack.

And yes, when they were found out. Her husband had her beat. That’s not fucking cool, and if they really wanted to go the damsel in distress route they still could have had Jack ‘save’ her from that. But at no point was she sexually abused by her husband(at least not in any accounts I’ve read.)

You know who did likely sexually abuse her or at least manipulate her and Mary for his own benefit? If you guessed our Rat man Jack Rackham, you would be correct, because when he found out about Mary and Anne’s (supposed, but probably real) relationship, it’s implied he extorted both of them into fucking him to keep their secret from the crew.

The addition of sexual abuse to Anne’s past isn’t done to be true to her character and was in fact explicitly untrue. Now of course I don’t know the reasons why they chose to do this, but I can guess. Just as with Max, the most traumatic thing a male writer can think of for a female character is for them to be sexually abused.

And the most disturbing part of this to me? The parallels it has to the real world of why straight men think lesbians exist. These characters who would be called man haters in present day are given these incredibly traumatic man-centered histories. It brings up something very uncomfortable in me about particularly wlw sexuality being viewed as a reaction to trauma at the hands of men. It’s just gross, I dont like it, and honestly there is no fucking excuse for it besides a room full of white straight men writing this bullshit. A room that Steinberg chose, because they fit his ideas.

In Fact heck, the women of Black Sails in general

***I honestly struggle to think of a single female character who I think was treated fairly in Black Sails. Miranda and Eleanor are killed for taking sides and not understanding their partners, Madi is betrayed in the worst way possible, Max is given a pseudo empowering ending but has that fucking terrible start. Idelle ends off fairly well, but tied to a man she may or may not have any actual feelings for, in what is essentially a political marriage. And Anne has her entire identity tied to a man who will be dead in two years as she is robbed of any agency whatsoever without him. (Oh, and the whole r*pe thing. And also her support for Max’s r*pe or death until she started having fee-fees. Who wrote this stuff. >_>)

Even though the characterization of each and every one of these women is PHENOMENAL - and again I will repeat that I absolutely LOVE these characters as they exist in a vacuum. I think they are well rounded, real, feeling people given motivations and drives and FEELINGS and they SHOW THEIR ANGER and i LOVE THEM.

But the show punishes them for it. Miranda is essentially fridged to move Flint’s storyline along, and to make room for Silver. Eleanor is killed for the emotional damage it will cause Rogers. Madi is placed at the center of a conflict she explicitly says she is willing to die for and then not only is her entire cause taken from her, but when she tells Silver to fuck off he - in possibly the most predictable white man move ever - says ‘no i will stay until you change your mind. I will never leave you. I don’t care about your choice in this matter, I will wait forever for you. I’m your biggest fan. I’ll follow you until you love me. papa, - paparazzi.’

And I touched on this before, but I want to talk in more detail about what is possibly my hottest take to date, the sexification of Mary Read and Queen Nanny, as they are presented in the show.

Max is to Anne what Mary Read is, historically. She is the lover that Jack Rackham discovers with Anne, and then he joins them in their bed. They form a triumvirate that upholds Jack at the expense of the women. But for some reason, Steinberg didn’t want to just include Mary Read as an actual character. For some reason he needed to make Anne’s love interest a sex worker who was in need of saving (and who, coincidentally, we never see working the brothel after she becomes lovers with Anne, because she is now a madam. :) Gross.)

And Madi. My dear sweet fucking Madi who didn’t fucking deserve any of this bullshit send tweet.

So, historically, Queen Nanny was the Queen, spiritual advisor, and the military tactician of the Windward Maroons. She would have filled both Madi and the Queen’s character roles(and Flint’s, but who’s counting. A BLACK GAY LEAD? Inconceivable. I digress.) But, I guess, because they were wishy-washing with Silver’s sexuality or felt they needed to give him a female love interest because of Treasure Island, or because they were leaning a bit too hard into the gay shit and needed to backpedal, they took Queen Nanny and split her into a character who is for all intents and purposes powerless in the war and Madi, who is young and naive and does not have any real world experience outside of the Maroon camp.

Because that’s sexy, or something. They could have had the Maroon Queen be a fucking badass lady who works and fights alongside Flint and Silver and one ups them and teaches them shit and has her own ideas about where the British can stick it, but instead they made her into the perfect caricature of a female monarch, letting the big strong men handle the dirty work or something. Because white male power fantasies.

Just let women be powerful and not nubile and let them have character arcs over fucking thirty and let them be CENTERED in their own. fucking. narratives.

God damnit Steinberg.

James Flint, mlm extraordinaire

Oh, my love. My most amazing child. The light of my life. My purest cinnamon roll.

~~And now we’ve come to the dreaded Silverflint criticism part of our programming. Please please know and remember this isn’t a criticism of people who ship Silverflint. As I said up top, Your Tomato Is Not My Tomato and that’s cool. Please don’t take this next part as an attack on Silverflint as a fandom ship.~~

My criticism of Steinberg as it relates to Flint is related to:

What a romantic/sexual relationship with Silver being the basis of the tension and plot means for Flint in particular as a gay or mostly mlm man.

Refusing to confirm Thomas and James being alive at the end and honestly the whole finale in general but like I’ll try and focus.

The major problem I have with Silver and Flint being coded as in love with each other is the implications there in terms of gay men’s relationships to other men.

From every corner, men are inundated with the idea that any close relationship between them must be gay. That intimacy cannot exist unless there are sexual feelings involved. That a relationship cannot be close, deep and soul shattering and life altering, unless one guy secretly(or not so secretly) wants to bone the other dude. That two men cannot value each other as partners or friends or truly know each other unless they are gay.

Seeing both of the meaningful relationships Flint forms with other men be sexually coded feels a bit the same way as Anne and Max’s sexual assault plotlines does vis-a-vis being wlw. (Even with Gates, Flint never spoke about Thomas or his plans - Silver is absolutely the closest person to Flint besides Thomas and Miranda.) And this is just as true for Silver. Having both Flint and Madi - the two people he trusts - both be people he’s in love with also just feels. I don’t know.

It feels like a confusion between male intimacy and male love that is so so familiar to me as a gay man I could choke on it. Where they wanted these men to have a deep and really lasting connection, but could only figure out how to do it if they were in love. Friendship wouldn’t have been enough - only romantic and sexual love is enough for the gay man(or men, at all).

Just because it isn’t queerbaiting doesn’t mean it’s good rep, and I would have liked to see truly deep male friendships that did not center on sexual attraction - particularly for Flint as a confirmed mlm(and Silver too, if you’re counting him. The same arguments for why I dislike Flint being paired with Silver are also true in the reverse.)

Even if both Flint and Silver were confirmed mlm I still would have LOVED to see a platonic relationship between them. In fact I would have loved that EVEN MORE. Men! Who fuck men! Not needing to fuck each other to be important to one another! Who made this. Very delicious.

But because there weren’t any queer writers on the show, writers who understand this kind of struggle that gay and mlm men face, they thought ‘oh, let’s also have them be in love with each other. More gay rep is better gay rep, right?’ False. THOUGHTFUL gay rep is better gay rep.

Okay and here’s my last thing. The fact that Steinberg refuses to say whether or not the explicitly mlm men are alive at the end of the show - that the words he specifically uses are ‘up for interpretation’ is. Fuck, it’s gross, okay? It’s fucking gross.

I have been around enough men, enough people in power, enough people with leverage who also know how to play the field, to know that when someone wants a group’s support but does not agree with them, their go to phrasing is that it is ‘up for debate’ or ‘up for interpretation.’

Say the gays are alive. Steinberg refusing to acknowledge the reality of the ending of his show to maintain his own sense of artistic integrity is what, honestly, really sets me off about him and I don’t care if this is a nuanced take.

Like yes, death of the author. I honestly don’t care if he thinks they’re dead or alive. What I care about is that he thinks he can get away with being clever and leaning hard into a story is true/untrue’ - doesn’t realize what the implications of that are, and didn’t when he was writing, and didn’t have anyone else in the room who would think about it either.

ANYWAY. So this is....my long drawn out explanation for why I do not like Steinberg. Uhhhhh tune in next week for more of my totally unpopular opinions!

#good....fucking lord #i am so sorry #how many opinions can milo fit in one post #i mean i have more but yknow lmao #black sails #behind the black sails #milos black sails meta #long posts #my increasingly devoted attempts to find tumblrs word limit #Anonymous #john steinberg #js critical but the js is jon steinberg

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antiterf · 4 years ago

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I would really appreciate if people talked about this more

I’ve never mentioned this before on here, but I used to label myself as a truscum. I never outright said anything on it or about it online, and never attacked people with it, I’ll get that down first. I mostly used that for myself because those were the blogs that I went to for issues with dysphoria as a trans man.

This post isn’t about how truscum are bad, those who are going to reblog and listen to this post already think that truscum are bad. This is me pointing out that trans men and those with severe internalized transphobia need more of a community to avoid falling into truscum rhetoric.

Trigger Warning: Description of my self injury, internalized transphobia, and a lot of depression under the cut.

I originally went to truscum to figure out if I was dysphoric or not. I know I’ve had an anon on here try to ask me somewhat of the same question. The reason why is because I had a lot of internalized transphobia and live in a conservative Christian suburb. I seriously was born and raised in the same town my life and that town was that suburb. I was around 14 at the time.

Basically, the only reason why I wanted to find out is because I wanted to know if I could force myself to be cisgender. I was terrified of being transgender, and I hated myself for the possibility of it.

My logic though is that if I was dysphoric, then I couldn’t do much about it. Yeah, terfs would say that I could cope with it with anti-depressants, but my disassociation and sickly feeling was not helped by my anti-depressants. I was at the point of being constantly suicidal and with cutting I ran out of room on my arm and started to go for my legs (because I said that I would never go to my right arm... I was a creative little shit). I was put in an 8 hr a day outpatient program, and they legit kept me there as long as they possibly could before I was sent back to school, before I just went back to self injuring but kept it way more secret that time. I had been getting mental health treatment since 10 and puberty started, with it just getting worse, I was way out of options

I related to a lot of what truscum were saying with my dysphoria, and while they did tell me that they could not ever tell another person that they experience dysphoria or not, that they did relate to some of the things I was saying. One linked me to a list where someone gave a lot of specific symptoms of dysphoria, and boy, did I fit a lot. I also learned how to explain my disassociation. It was the first time I ever related to something when it came to my mental health issues instead of just hearing “yeah these people are just like you” before I didn’t actually relate to them at all. I felt so much relief.

I continued to go to them for advice on dysphoria and it wasn’t anything more, but you start scrolling through and things start to stick. Especially when you already have a lot of internalized transphobia.

“Yeah, why would anyone be trans? If they weren’t suffering like I was, I was at my breaking point to actually start accepting myself, how are they the same?”

It went on from there, and I started to believe what they said. I shared it to one cis person, and that cis person ultimately ended up harassing me because I was trans even after I explained honestly the entire pity story I shared above along with truscum beliefs that you need dysphoria to be trans (this is actually how I finally snapped out of it, thank you fucker, I’m more intolerable now). I mainly shared this shit with cis people in order to try and see me as more tolerable, and honestly, I just wish that I could have surrounded myself with trans people where I didn’t have to feel like I needed to prove a point. I was so vulnerable at that time, and didn’t nearly stand up to cis ignorance as I do today.

I mentioned trans men in the beginning too, and part of the community I was lacking in, was trans men. I would see more positivity for trans woman and nb people. I did and still see lack of support for issues trans men face both with the rest of the trans community and things that are trans man specific. Something I feel like I can relate it to is the bisexual limbo of being too gay for straight people but too straight for gay people. I’m looked down upon by my oppressors, but I’m too privileged to really access my own community. Especially when I identified as straight. It’s isolating, it’s isolating to a point where I would be happy that someone included trans men specifically in their “I hate all men” posts, I would be happy about it. And I know I can’t possibly be the only one.

I don’t have the power to create a community name for trans men where we can all find each other. I don’t have the power to put a name to struggles that trans men face specifically. I know that there’s transmisandry, but that gives everyone who doesn’t know what it is a fight or flight response. While it makes sense, it gives the same impression as calling the biphobia I face as a form of heterophobia.

I’m as proud of this as I am just as proud that I used to shoplift at 14 and believed things that my racist cop father said. I think that the shitty parts of your past self can be shared for some sort of benefit of others and that’s why I’m sharing this. If other trans men would like to add their own experiences, I would encourage it.

#notaterftip #not sarcasm #extruscum #xtruscum #transmed #truscum #tucute #Internalized Transphobia #self harm tw #cutting tw #trans men #trans man #transmisandry #transandrophobia #transmen #transman #trans rights #transgender

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dekusbrokenarms · 5 years ago

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Class 1-A Gender and Sexuality Journey Headcanons

This is mostly just me really liking messy self discovery because I am a messy bitch.

Kyoka Jirou

First off, Kyoka is a trans girl. She socially transitioned when she was really young and began medically transitioning in high school bc her parents are super supportive and great (we stan a supportive parent)

She first thinks she's bi when she's 14 and comes out as such at 15

She dates Kaminari for a while second year and after they break up she's pretty certain she's a lesbian

After high school, she has a couple years where gender is kinda nebulus. For a while thinks she's a nonbinary lesbian but then decides she's just GNC and punk but definitely full girl

She gets more comfortable in her gender after that, but starts questioning her sexuality again

And ends up back at bisexual, but like not attracted to dudes. Girls and nonbinary people only please

Also she and Momo reconnect in their mid twenties and hit it off and get married

Denki Kaminari

Denki is completely comfortable calling himself straight up until he's 17

But don't get it twisted, he definitely was already acutely aware he was into dudes

Because wow boys are pretty

But he also just kind of ignores it because OMFG GIRLS

But after his other friends start coming out, he gets more comfortable thinking about his sexuality but doesn't bother labelling it

Specifically he doesn't want to label it because he gets comfortable with it after her starts dating Kyoka and doesn't want anyone thinking he's calling himself not-straight for dating her

But a couple months after he breaks up with Kyoka, he starts fooling around with Hitoshi and like really he's at the point of no return so he just slaps the bi label on himself and goes about his day

Towards the end of third year, he starts playing around with GNC and really vibes with the genderqueer label, but still uses he pronouns because he's used to them

He and Hitoshi break up after graduation and Denki really throws himself into exploring his gender and sexuality

And starts using he and they pronouns and typically dresses on the masculine side of androgynous but with lots of cool makeup

He gives polyamory a shot, but he keeps finding himself feeling like he's third wheeling other people's relationships and decides its not for them

In their late twenties, he and Hitoshi hook up at a reunion party and hit it off. They keep things casual for several months before suddenly they decide to move in together and in a blink of an eye, they're in a legit committed relationship without knowing how it got there but it feels right to them.

Eijirou Kirishima

No flavor for this one. He figured out he was gay when he was 12 and it stuck. His moms are lesbians and support him wholeheartedly.

Katsuki Bakugou

I think Bakugou also grew up with queer people in his life so he was never really in the closet

He was pretty certain he was asexual and aromantic until Kirishima weedled his way into his heart

At 17, he decides that he's probably demi-pansexual and demiromantic but that feels like too much so he just says queer.

This boy knows all the words though. Keeps very up to date with the local and global state of queer communities but doesn't talk about it unless prompted or provoked

At first he was very private about his relationship with Kirishima because it was no one's fucking business but after seeing the rampant homophobia in the hero business, he became very loud and very proud of his boyfriend very fast

Eijirou and Katsuki probably got married at, like, 21 and did not give one shit when people pointed out they were young. And they're together for the rest of their lives so those fuckers can suck it

Mina Ashido

Mina is your classic bisexual disaster and spends her teens and early twenties going between calling herself straight, bi, and a lebsian depending on who she's currently into because this bitch has zero object permanence

She chills out in her twenties though and is comfortable calling herself bisexual at long last

Hanta Sero

Sero is pretty comfortable being straight right up until all his friends come out

He spends a couple months questioning his sexuality before knowing for certain he's straight

But he's that one straight dude that always ends up dating bi and pan girls by complete happenstance

Hitoshi Shinsou

He really does not know what his sexuality is

Sometimes its yes

Sometimes its no

He says queer because he can't be assed to look into any of the microlabels

He just knows he's not straight and that's good enough for him

Momo Yaoyorozu

This girl is a lesbian but trying to convince herself of that was A PROCESS

She denies it for years and years

Its not until after graduation she thinks, but doesn't dare say, she's bi because she tells herself she's "mostly into guys anyway" so "it doesn't really count"

Slowly her percentage shifts away from guys and to girls

She's 23 before she accepts she's a lesbian

But she doesn't come out until she's 28 because she's scared since her parents expect her to end up with a man

Ochako Uraraka

This girl is mostly into guys. Like she's pretty sure she's straight because all the crushes she had so far have been on boys

When she's 18, she starts to suspect she might like girls too but is really too shy to explore that feeling at first

But when she does? Oh boy she will not stop talking about how wonderful and perfect girls are and how unfortunate her attraction to men is because she feels insecure in her validity as a bisexual woman with a preference for men

Tsuyu Asui

Tsuyu has known she's a lesbian since she was 15 and was very comfortable with that

She questioned if she might be bi a time or two but always came back to being gay

She does realize she's an ace lesbian at 18 though but she's also okay with that

Her goals in life are to own a house by a lake with a beautiful wife

Tenya Iida

Tenya is pansexual

Literally he just cannot see why gender would be a factor in choosing a potential partner

He never came out because he was 20 before he realized that this was not the default state and others weren't just being picky by having a different sexuality

And by then, every knew because he made no attempts to hide his partners

He was really stressed at first about it, and asked Tensei why no one ever told him he should be more careful with publicly showing his sexuality but Tensei was just like "we just thought you knew what you were doing, dude. And it looks like it worked out"

Izuku Midoroya

Again, Izuku is too swept up in "nghh girls pretty" to think too much about his sexuality when he's younger

When he gets a crush on Shouto, he doesn't recognize it as a crush at first because it felt so natural and comfortable and he was used to being uncomfortable around people he liked

So he has a crush on Shouto for years before it hits him: Oh I'm not straight

He stays in that nebulous not-straight state for months because he does not have time to deal with that

But once he stops procrastinating his sexuality, he cannot decide if he's bisexual or pansexual or polysexual and he gets super wrapped up in researching microlabels and its super overwhelming

He even questions his gender for a little bit but settles on he's a cis man pretty quickly

He does eventually start dating Shouto and just calls himself gay for a while because it's easier than trying to piece together ten microlabels like he's tempted to do

However after Shouto begins exploring his gender identity, Izuku gets more comfortable just calling himself pan because he realizes that gender never really played a part in who he likes.

Shouto Todoroki

He came out as gay at 14 to piss off his father depsite the fact he didn't actually have any feelings about his sexuality at the time

No he decided he didn't care what his sexuality was. He was gonna be gay.

And he forgot he did that until he was 17 and was like, oh- I should probably figure out my actual sexuality, after being questioned due to his close relationship with Izuku

So he thought about it for about 15 seconds to say, well, I do like Izuku so I'll just be actually gay now

That stuck until after graduation and into his twenties when he started questioning his gender

He figured out he wasn't particularly attached to masculinity or femininity and found comfort in the agender label

They started using gender neutral pronouns and grew their hair out long but that's really all that changed

They came back to their sexuality after that and decided it was just "men"

Izuku tried to be helpful and offered terms like androsexual, but Shouto didn't find them very useful so they like to tell people their gender is no and their sexuality is dude

It gets the point across

Yuga Aoyoma

Okay, so we all know he’s gay

But despite how flamboyant he is, this boy is a closet case

He definitely had a crush on Izuku first year, but he couldn’t handle that yet so he definitely lived vicariously through Ochako’s crush on him

I don’t think he came out until after high school

And zero people were surprised

He probably does drag too

And he’d look fabulous doing so

Kouji Koda

I think Kouji is ace

I don’t think this is a word he had for himself until he was in his mid twenties

He just assumed he was a late bloomer and he’d been told he just had a low self esteem

But he finds the ace community and suddenly everything makes sense and he feels comfortable in his own skin

Once that falls into place, he discovers he’s also aromantic

He ends up having a platonic life partner and they have lots of pets and plants together

Fumikage Tokoyami

Fumikage figured out he’s bisexual when interning under Hawks. Like fuck, he had the most embarrassing crush on this guy who’s aesthetic is so embarrassing

I don’t think he had much trouble accepting that he’s attracted to guys though

Like a demon lives in his head

He’s mostly suffering because he has a crush on his cheerful, friendly mentor

Dark Shadow is very happy about this development because it’s a chance to embarrass him and make him uncomfortable

Fumikage gets renewed interest in being able to control Dark Shadow to shut his whore mouth

Unfortunately Dark Shadows outs him to his mentor

Fortunately Hawks is really cool about it and tells DS to have some chill and doesn’t give Fumikage a hard time about it, but Fumikage doesn’t get invited back for another internship with him and finds himself assigned to do work with sidekicks afterwards

Mezou Shouji

Mezou doesn’t fuck with gender

It’s not that he necessarily feels disconnected from his masculinity but rather that he just feels like gender is archaic and useless

So he’s pan and bigender (male and agender)

Definitely would make jokes about be attracted to frying pans and this is how he comes out to Fumikage in their third year.

Rikidou Sato

Rikidou doesn’t really date in high school

Soon after graduation he ends up in a relationship with a girl that lasts five years before he realizes he’s gay

One time someone tells him he should have known sooner since he likes baking so much and he punches them in the face (I like to imagine this person was Mineta for face punching purposes)

He ends up good pals with the woman he was dating and she’s his maid of honor at his wedding :’)

Tooru Hagakure, and Mashirao Ojiro

I’m sorry if one of them is your fave. They’re both straight and cis and have never questioned it even once.

#bnha headcanons #bakugou katsuki #kyoka jirou #kaminari denki #midoriya izuku #todoroki shouto #kirishima eijirou #mina ashido #sero hanta #uraraka ochako #tsuyu asui #mezuo shouki #rikidou sato #tokoyami fumikage #iida tenya #hitoshi shinsou #aoyama yuga #kouji kouda #lgbt headcanons

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pseudoneiiric · 4 years ago

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meta post: lili and her gender

let me go on the record to say that i fucking love lilian eyler with my whole heart, like, i typed all this out and im so fucking emotional about her! in the past, i've written things about hello charlotte and how the lgbt representation is... lacking, let's call it, and i've also made a few headcanon posts here and there about lilian's transition and her relationship with gender. so i thought, you know, let's actually write a whole ass thing about it. so here it is.

content warnings: gender dysphoria, suicide attempts, homophobia/transphobia in the original source material

PART 1: ETHERANE'S BAD TAKES so... etherane did not handle lgbt stuff well, like, in the slightest. lili is canonically genderfluid, as seen in one of those little profile things that etherane drew that doesn't actually show up in any of the games. but her genderfluid identity isn't handled well at all in the actual source material. actually, in general, hello charlotte is pretty transphobic. to cite one example, there’s this journal entry in hello charlotte 3 talking about “defective” charlotte vessels, and one of the things that can make a charlotte vessel “defective” is for them to be born amab or intersex. this already has some really bad vibes, but then we remember also that one of the big functions of charlottes is apparently for them to be sexualized (yikes!!!!!) and so we also get this weird kind of like, “trans people aren’t hot” kind of take?

but anyway. when it comes to lilian specifically, she never actually states in canon that she’s genderfluid or otherwise trans, not even in the spinoff visual novel, which, by the way, would have been the perfect place to address her gender identity, and she consistently uses he/him pronouns. we don’t actually get to see any of her thought processes about her gender at all — like at this point, i can’t even say it’s a non-issue because that would imply that they even mentioned her gender in canon. the only time we can potentially extrapolate from canon that lili might not be cis is when anri mentions that charlotte is lili’s self-insert oc. that’s kind of heavy-handed with the whole “charlotte being the female name for charles”, but that’s another matter. the point is, with the lack of any canon basis that lilian’s even vaguely questioned her gender, the reveal that she’s actually genderfluid with like, two pieces of artwork that are detached from the actual game feels very pxrfxrmxtxvxly xnclxsxvx (performatively inclusive) especially considering how.... etherane talked about lilian’s gender in particular within the actual canon material.

after all, the story behind lilian is effectively that, after she was born, her mother was forced to abort her second child, a daughter that she would name scarlett. doing so plunged her into a really deep depression that eventually took on delusional qualities. so ever since lilian was about three years old, her mother has been referring to her exclusively as scarlett, asking her to ‘ be a good girl ’ and similarly raising her as a girl. we can see here that etherane seems to have implied that genderfluidity is something that happens because other people make it so, and isn’t an identity and lived experience. (bad take!) although, albeit unintentionally, i think etherane did lay some groundwork to talk about lilian’s relationship with her gender, specifically with regards to her projection onto her oc, charlotte. in high school, when she’s more active on the internet, we see that she’s going by charlotte and using she/her pronouns. anri, her irl friend, is pretty openly critical of that, but she sort of brushes off anri’s complaints and continues to present as feminine online. now, there’s this fanfic writer who goes by the pseudonym “c”, and lilian very quickly takes an interest in him. the way she talks to c, who doesn’t know her irl, compared anri, who does, is just like flat-out like they’re completely different people.

compare, her with c:

to her with anri:

i also wanted to mention that lili does occasionally act more “femininely” with anri, but it’s never to the extent that she does with c, and in general, affectionate banter is sort of... outright ridiculed in their friendship both ways. see this one exchange:

anri: >:) always up for some roasting lili: right? <3 <3 anri: now you’re the one being gross

unrelated but it fucking kills me that anri was like “ily <3” and lili went “gross” so she went “kys” and lili deadass goes “that’s better” like that’s what anri is referencing when she says “now you’re the one being gross” and im like... please just be healthy friends who don’t wish death on each other???

it’s also worth noting that c doesn’t know that she’s not “actually” a girl, and literally when they meet, she goes like, “it’s you who should be disappointed in me. charlotte turned out to be charles, whoops! i bet you were hoping that i’d be a cute girl.” and that’s... really depressing, like, she ended up really leaning into that cutesy side of her when she was talking to c and now she feels the need to be a lot more... sarcastic and bitter, like how she is with anri, because now c “knows the truth about her”, that she’s “actually been a guy all along”.

in any case, i think the intent that etherane was going for with this was kind of like... “lilian’s actually a repressed cis gay man!” which is . not great. it gives off this really gross vibes where it’s implied that since lili was raised as a girl and is into men, she got “confused” and started going by she/her online because she couldn’t come to terms with her sexuality or whatever. and that’s just such a bad take!!!

not to mention that a really important part of lili’s backstory is... her germaphobia. she has persistent delusions accompanied by visual hallucinations where she sees people as “parasites”, which visually manifests as them rotting or decomposing. because of that, she wears gloves all the time and is repulsed by physical touch. but when she meets c (whose real name is vincent) in person, she pretty much instantly goes for skin-to-skin contact with him, where she takes off her glove and holds his hand. and like, sure, that’s sweet, but that’s really not how mental illness... works. in the slightest. she doesn’t react at all when his hand touches hers, despite the fact that she has literally had panic attacks in canon from touching things without her gloves. and it gives off this implication that mental illness can be cured with romance somehow, and that’s a really bad take!

this feeds into fandom understanding that like, well, if lilian sees vincent as pure and allows him to touch her, then Obviously she’d let him kiss her, they could probably have sex, etc. and like... she’s canonically asexual though! and that brings us to the other implication, that asexuality is somehow... caused by something. like, there’s nothing in canon to state that lilian experiences sexual attraction (or even really romantic attraction, like i know etherane went off in heaven’s gate and did a lot of ship tease, but she never really outright says she’s crushing on anyone), but judging from the way etherane handled lilian’s gender identity, i have a sneaking suspicion that she established lilian’s asexuality with her mental illnesses specifically in mind. lilian’s autistic, germaphobic, has severe ocd, and she’s been sexually assaulted in the past. therefore, she must be asexual! that’s the sort of vibes i get from the game, and im not here for it. similarly to how her genderfluidity was handled, she makes no actual statement in canon that she doesn’t experience sexual attraction. the closest she’s ever come to this is when she says to anri in heaven’s gate that she is just straight up not interested in kissing (to which anri is like, “well what if it were vincent owo??” which. ugh. anyway). it just seems really strange to me to design a character with severe mental health issues with regards to physical touch and then just sort of treat it as a given that she’s asexual. it’s another example of etherane implying that lgbt identities are results of traumatic experiences or symptoms of mental illness and not an identity or lived experience. you can be sex-repulsed and not be asexual, and while i understand that many people do identify as ace due to trauma and other such things, it still feels like really bad rep when taken with the way lilian’s genderfluidity was portrayed.

PART 2: HOW “CHARLES” IS DIFFERENT FROM “LILIAN”

throughout hello charlotte, lilian identifies herself as a passive observer, someone who doesn’t directly interfere in events. this applies mostly to her existence in false realm, where she’s like... a god, and doesn’t want to interfere in the balance of the world. but i believe she also has always seen herself as an observer. in her very first scene, the one where she and anri are watching someone get bullied, she’s the one who tells anri that there’s no point in getting help. because her role is just to observe. to take pictures for anri, to be a good girl, to say yes to everything and to never express her opinions, feelings, thoughts.

and honestly, i think the main reason for that is that she’s dysphoric. whenever she talks about herself, she’s really self-deprecating, especially compared to when she talks about charlotte. i feel like the main reason why lilian detaches herself from the world and refuses to really perceive herself is because she’s fundamentally disgusted with her gender presentation. and like, we can see in the two times that she’s presented femininely (with c and in that one comic) that lili is just so much happier and more bubbly when she’s presenting as feminine. you can literally see her stop dissociating and becoming more present in the moment because she’s just. so much more comfortable in her skin. compare:

these pictures with this one:

it’s funny i was going to say that there is a picture where she’s presenting as masculine and actually smiles like a person, but guess what! she’s texting c! so she’s actually performing femininity!

but the point is, like... when she’s presenting as masculine, especially in the canon pictures rather than etherane’s art, she just doesn’t look... happy. and then we compare that to how much more present she seems when she’s presenting as feminine, and how much more comfortable she seems in being, like, happy! and cute! but there is a downside to this. and that is...

PART 3: DIFFICULTIES IN LILI’S TRANSITION

in my sort of... “main verse” for lili, i have it so that her suicide attempt failed and that she was somehow... saved from drowning. mother passes away and she starts to... soul search a little bit and find a reason to live, and somewhere along the line she starts to transition socially. that means she starts transitioning at a pretty... extremely vulnerable point in her life. in the year between 18-19 years old, she’d be a wreck. she’s growing her hair out, but she feels insecure about it. she starts to wear skirts, but only at home. she buys makeup and never wears it. it’s a long process for her, because it’s one thing to go by she/her online or to claim she’s just a gender-confused gay boy and a completely different thing to come out as a trans woman and to actually see herself as a woman and not some kind of imposter. considering that she was raised as a girl, she would have a large amount of guilt over transitioning, feeling like she’s going to be seen as confused, or that her gender identity is a direct result of her childhood trauma. but she’s not just worried that others will see her that way: she’s worried that she’s going to see herself that way.

and for a long time, she probably does see herself that way. for a long time, scarlett would probably treat her transition as some kind of attempt to personify her unborn sister and comply with perceived expectations rather than an attempt to feel comfortable in her own skin. she’d get nervous that she’s somehow becoming scarlett, because though she’s always thought it would be easier if she’d just been her sister, she’s never really wanted to be scarlett. she’d be scared to wear mid-length skirts, scared to put her hair up in a bun, probably even scared to wear red for a time, all because she’s scared of somehow losing herself and becoming her alter.

because of her caution and concern with identifying as a trans woman and not as the “safer“ gender identity of genderfluidity (where she can say she’s trans but never actually have to “push boundaries” by wearing feminine clothing or using any pronouns besides he/him), it would likely take her a very long time to take the step to medically transition. she’d likely never get any gender affirmation surgeries just because of how invasive the procedure is, but hormones would probably be something she’d look into once she’s much older and has a more stable income.

i mentioned before that before her transition, she uses dissociation and observation as a way to cope with her gender dysphoria. she saw herself as someone who didn’t really participate in the world, was a class ghost, invisible to everyone and a minuscule part of a vast universe. but upon transitioning, she’d feel much more actively self-conscious. once she starts to present in a feminine way, she’d feel like she’s being seen, like she’s actually participating in the world, and that’s both a blessing and a curse.

she’d be much more prone to stammering, especially when saying her name, and would blush far more often. she’d be afraid of saying the wrong thing or messing up somehow. and on top of that, she’d likely feel predatory for talking to others, always wondering if others find her cute or repulsive, always wondering if someone will perceive her and harm her in some way.

she’d very likely also feel really guilty about her own emotional experience. because she’s so used to being a passive observer, a puppet that only does what others want, she would feel like it’s selfish to be just... content. she’s so actively disgusted with herself before she transitions that she’s never allowed herself to be mentally present for a happy moment in her entire life. she always second-guesses, always dismisses positive things as a mere coincidence, and after she transitions, when she starts being more present in her life, she’d feel so guilty for just allowing herself to be happy.

because of that, she has some trouble with presenting as feminine consistently — she’d vary the “level” of her feminine presentation from day-to-day, where she might go full femme one day and another day stick with a beanie and a pair of slacks. she’s much more comfortable with presenting as more traditionally feminine when she’s at home or with trusted friends in a private space, but around 19 years old, she makes a vested effort to remain in public spaces. she’d time herself, saying, “for one hour, i’ll stay in this café while wearing a skirt, and then i can leave,” and she’d gradually increase the amount of time she spends in public spaces. and eventually, eventually she does end up feeling really comfortable with her gender presentation and falls into a more static sense of style. she really likes clothing design, so she ends up wearing a lot more dynamic outfits when she’s more comfortable with herself, and she probably also mildly gets into cosplay.

i also like to think that she reconnects with anri during her young adult years. either it’s like, right after her suicide attempt (i’ve written before that she’d had anri listed as her emergency contact and forgot to change it when she moved), or it’s at some point after she starts transitioning socially. i think it’d be really sweet for them to be friends in a more real way, and the sheer concept of anri teaching lili how to properly apply makeup and to set her hair is just so fucking sweet i might die. they both deserve to have friends so i think this is just a step up from hello charlotte canon.

#long post //#lilian eyler: study.#ive been working on this post for days. im fuckign emotional about her

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transgenderteensurvivalguide · 6 years ago

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Are genital preferences transphobic?

Lee says:

Personally, I am attracted to women and some non-binary folks. I used to call myself a lesbian before I realized I’m transmasculine, and now I use “queer” as my sexual orientation label.

And I also do have a genital preference. I’m not turned on by penises and penises aren’t something that I think about when I’m fantasizing about stuff.

But that isn’t something that determines who I’m attracted to, because when I meet someone who I think looks cute then I feel attracted to them, and that happens before we’re at the point where I’ve taken off their pants and underwear to view their genitals.

For example, I met my partner (mod Devon) in Algebra II when I was in high school, and I thought they were cute but I hadn’t yet taken off any of their clothing before I formed that opinion. I just saw them and (eventually, like several months later) talked to them and then hung out with them and so on.

Generally, I don’t inspect someone’s genitals before I decide if I’m attracted to them. For me, seeing people’s personal parts is usually something that happens in the relationship after I’ve already developed feelings for them and found them attractive, otherwise I wouldn’t be in the situation where started asking questions about their body or taken off their clothes.

So I am not attracted to people with vaginas as my sexual orientation, I’m attracted to women and some non-binary folks because those are the genders I’m attracted to.

And if we get to the part of the relationship where genitals come into play, what parts they have is going to be relevant for me. How a couple chooses to navigate that depends on the wants and needs of both people, and it might mean finding alternate ways to be sexual or having an open relationship or even breaking up. But their genitals aren’t what determine my sexual orientation or initial attraction.

I think most people find someone attractive before they know what genitals that person has, but they don’t always realize that’s true because they’re so used to assuming that they can tell what genitals someone has based on their gender identity.

So it’s fine for you to say “I am not interested in having sex with someone who had a vagina” or “I’m not interested in [doing a particular sexual act]” (not every person with a penis wants to perform penetrative sex, and not all people with vaginas are interested in receiving vaginal penetration) but it’s transphobic when someone assumes that all women have vaginas (given some trans women have penises), and it’s transphobic to assume that all trans men do have vaginas (because some trans men have gotten lower surgery). Basically, don’t assume you know who has what parts or assume how/if they want to use those parts.

Genital preferences can exist, but that isn’t covered under the word “sexual orientation”. And while it isn’t inherently transphobic to say you prefer one part over another, the issue comes in when people make assumptions on who has those parts when the person in question hasn’t told you about their parts or shown their genitals to you yet.

And in many cases, genital preferences are used to prop up transphobic assumptions and beliefs— how many times have we heard a certain group say something along the lines of “all trans women have penises so my sexual orientation is cis-women-only because I’m not attracted to trans women. I can always clock trans women because they’re not real women, so I’d never accidentally find one attractive because I like vagina!”. So I think the trans community has rightfully become suspicious of people who say “my sexual orientation is penis!” or “my sexual orientation is vaginas!” because that’s A) misusing the term sexual orientation, and B) indicative of a certain set of assumptions about trans people’s bodies.

Personally, I don’t meet someone and say “I don’t know if you’re cute yet and I can’t tell if I’m interested in you because I haven’t taken off your pants yet. Could you take off your underpants real quick and give me a good look at your junk from all angles before I decide if I think that you’re attractive?” And if you try that with a potential partner before you ask them out on a first date uhhh…, good luck… I think you’d be single for a real long time.

Again, we aren’t saying that you are required to be interested in having sex with genitals you aren’t interested in, but we are saying that you shouldn’t assume who has those genitals and recognize that it’s possible to be attracted to someone without knowing what their genitals are.

And if the genital preference is a relationship deal-breaker for you, and you discuss your options with your potential partner and you don’t think you could have your sexual needs met in a relationship with someone who has those parts, or you aren’t interested in a hookup, or whatever the situation is, then it’s fine to say you don’t think staying together is the right choice and that isn’t transphobic. But it isn’t fine to give someone a once over in the club and decide that you’re attracted to them because you think they have a penis because you can’t actually know that for sure.

One thing I think you might find helpful here: When you’re watching a TV show or movie, have you thought that any of the actors are attractive? Have you ever had a “celebrity crush?” And did you actually need to inspect this celebrity’s genitals first before you determined that you found them sexually attractive? Probably not, right?

I don’t know if there is a term that means “preference for penises” and I also don’t know if a term like that is strictly necessary because you could just say it in words, like “I like to have sex with people who have penises,” instead of inventing a new label for that. But a lot of trans people are also wary of adopting new genital-based attraction terminology because we know that kind of label is likely going to be immediately misused by people who are going to apply it in transphobic ways (back to the “assuming you can tell if someone has a penis” thing) and use it to mean they’re not interested in trans people, even if that’s not what the label was meant to convey.

TLDR; there isn’t a sexual orientation word for “attraction to penises/vaginas” because sexual orientation is about the genders you’re attracted to, it isn’t a term that describes whether you prefer a certain body type or body parts.

So sexual orientation is about gender, not genitals. Genital preferences are a different things, and they aren’t inherently transphobic but it depends on the assumptions you’re using about who has what genitals and what they want to do with said genitals.

And because sexual orientation is about gender and not genitals, if you say you’re attracted to women that means you’re attracted to cisgender women and transgender women because trans women are women too. Similarly, if you say you’re attracted to men, that means you’re attracted to men, which includes transgender men and cisgender men because transgender men are also men just like cis men are.

Kii says:

Whether genital preferences are transphobic depends on a few things.

First things first:

You are not ever required to have sex with anyone you don’t want to have sex with. We are not going to tell you you’re required to have sex with a trans person or you’re transphobic. The only reason you should have sex with someone is because everyone involved mutually consents to having sex.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, here’s some other information.

If you find someone attractive, and then you find out they’re trans and are instantly no longer attracted to them, that’s transphobic.

If you are a lesbian and dating someone who later comes out as a trans man, and you want to break up with them because you’re not attracted to men, that’s not transphobic. (Same goes for if you are a gay man dating someone who comes out as a trans woman.)

It’s okay to not want to touch, penetrate, or directly interact with a certain type of genitals during sex, but if you have a partner where this would be an issue, you can choose not to have sex with them, or you can work on alternative sexual situations that you’d both be comfortable with. (Examples may include: use of toys, touching through clothing, mutual masturbation) If you’re making assumptions about how a specific type of genitals is going to be used during sex, that’s generalizing. (ex: just because a penis is involved doesn’t mean the penis has to enter an orifice / just because a vagnia is involved doesn’t mean you have to put something in it.) Sex is very personal and individual. If you like someone, you two can work out what your sexual needs and wants are and you might find they match up even if you didn’t expect them to.

If you say you refuse to have sex with trans women because you don’t like penises, or you refuse to have sex with trans men because you don’t like vaginas, that’s transphobic, because you’re generalizing what trans peoples’ bodies look like. Some trans men have penises, and some trans women have vaginas. Some trans men are some of the most typically masculine people you’ll ever meet and they still have vaginas and some trans women are super stereotypically feminine and still have penises. Some trans people are intersex. Some trans people seek out alternative bottom surgery (two examples). Bottom line: you don’t know what’s in a trans person’s pants until they tell you.

If you’re cis and you’re only attracted to trans people, that’s a fetish and you’re still generalizing trans bodies. This is generally referred to as trans chasing.

If you’re trans and you only feel comfortable dating other trans people, that is generally a safety and security concern, or wanting to date someone who first-hand understands what you’re going through, and that’s okay.

Genital preferences are often heavily skewed against trans women with penises, so it’s important to evaluate why you dislike penises if you feel that way. Transmisogyny is a real problem, and many people use “I don’t like penises” as a blanket statement to avoid dating trans women (yes, this includes some AFAB trans people).

Another person explaining it, via @otherparenthesepleasespecify’s post:

‘what is it called when im attracted to only a certain sex?’ nothing. thats not an orientation, thats a physical preference. one might generally only find themselves attracted to blondes, but that just happens to be what theyre into. one might find penises the most attractive genitalia, but that just happens to be what theyre into. it’s not an orientation to be attracted to physical characteristics, it’s an orientation to be attracted to people.

‘what if i am attracted to a gender but dont feel comfortable interacting with a certain set of genitalia?’ nothing. thats not an orientation either. you are whatever orientation you are, with a repulsion to sex with certain characteristics. thats fine. there are heterosexual people that are sex-repulsed. there are asexual people who aren’t. people of all orientations might be made uncomfortable by certain types of sexual interactions and not others. your comfort with sexual interactions and comfort with certain genitalia can be defined by your personal preferences, your history, trauma, or just complete happenstance. it is perfectly valid to be attracted to men, for example, but not want to get involved with cis men, because of perhaps a history of abuse or oppression. you do not have to justify your choices to participate or not participate in sexual or romantic relationships with anyone, regardless of your orientation. ever.

what would be problematic would be identifying your entire orientation as trans-exclusive or -inclusive, because that quantifies transgender persons as a holistic group who have a single identity, which is not true. anyone you know could be trans without your awareness, and if your interest in or perception of them would wane upon this knowledge, you should consider inspecting yourself for internalized transphobia.

And now that you’ve read all that, please return to the main idea at the beginning of my answer: The only reason you should have sex with someone is because everyone involved mutually consents to having sex.

TLDR: No, genital preferences aren’t inherently transphobic. But it is transphobic to make a blanket statement saying that you wouldn’t date a transgender person because you assume that all trans women have penises (this is wrong because some trans women have gotten surgery and do have vaginas).

It’s also transphobic to equate gender to genitals and say you’re interested in women because you’re attracted to vagina, which assumes that all women have vaginas (this is wrong because some trans women have penises). You can say that you’re attracted to women and you can say you’re attracted to vaginas, but those are two separate statements and saying the first doesn’t necessarily mean saying the second one for some folks.

So don’t assume that all trans people with a particular gender have a particular set of genitals, or assume that you know if/how they want to use those genitals, and then you’re fine.

#Anonymous #kii says #sex m #genitals m #genital preferences #genital preference #penis m #vagina m #transmisogyny #chasing #chasers #fetishization #our own articles #discourse

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rowanthewizard · 5 years ago

Text

Let us take a moment, in these dark times, to laugh at how out of touch JK Rowling is.

This tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269389298664701952?s=20

No one is saying sex isn’t real. Sex is a medical construct, the same as blood type. Your doctor is the only one who really needs to know it. If some rando on the street walked up to you and asked what your blood type was that would be real fucking weird. Same if some rando walked up and demanded to know you’re chromosomes. It’s kinda weird.

Gender is a social construct, which also means it’s real but not intrinsic to humanity. It’s just something society came up with to help organize. Seeing as reproduction isn’t nearly as crucial and surviving is a lot easier now, the construct of having the population that has to carry children and nurse them separate from the part that doesn’t have to do that isn’t really necessary anymore. It’s like an old filing system, still usable, and many people still love it and are attached, but it isn’t wrong for some people to start using the newest model.

Tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269401983095648259?s=20

You... you wrote a series... you wrote a series where you called every woman a witch...

Also I call myself way worse words than bitch. I can’t speak for anyone else but bitch and cunt have lost all effect on me. Like, thanks for the giant red flag Mr uncreative, I’ll be leaving now. Has anyone heard the word ‘feminazi’ used in the last, what, 4 years? It seems to have died with gamergate.

Tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269406094595588096?s=20

“The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades”

Hahahahahahahahahahaha! Tell that to Rita Skeeter! Did you even read the books you wrote??????

Article: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/

“accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline“

Stop listening to Twitter! It’s a dumpster fire! Twitter is not real life!

“I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.“

I don’t know if this is a joke or not. But I really hope someone composted them. The image of someone chucking all 7 books onto a compost pile is fucking gold. Can the next brand boycott be a composting one? I want to see angry fanboys fucking composting their nikes! I can’t stop giggling, it’s like 1am.

“because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender”

I don’t have a joke for this one. She never says what she thinks gender is, so I have no concept of why this would be a bad thing seeing as she’s been conflating the two in every post.

“The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.”

ThInK oF tHe ChIlDrEn!!!!!!

“The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it”

People being mean to you on twitter is not an affront to your freedom of speech. Freedom of speech protects you from the government not the internet. Why is this such a hard concept?

“I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition ........ Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.”

... do you think transphobia is easier than homophobia???? You’re more likely to face a hate crime if you’re not cis than if you’re not straight.(both are high, but non-cis is higher per capita than non-straight) https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/06/28/anti-gay-hate-crimes-rise-fbi-says-and-they-likely-undercount/1582614001/

“Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.”

Now, is this 5 close friends realizing at the same time that they are all binary trans people, because that would be statistically weird. Or, is this a group of children where one of them realized strict gender performances are kind of pointless and a pain, explained it to their friends, and they didn’t have the words to describe it other than ‘trans’. The second scenario sounds much more likely.

“The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.”

Well that’s simplistic, but even so google the suicide rates. It’s that simple. They are very fucking high. All this takes is one google search. Also, you don’t have to medically transition right away. Puberty blockers won’t hurt you, and buying a teenager a binder or a packer really isn’t that hard. Some trans people never medically transition.

“When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’”

Maybe... that’s cause... you know... you’re human. There’s not much different between male and female. one chromosome, three hormone differences, and like four genes. That’s it. That’s not really enough to make differently functioning brains. The only differences are learned ones.

“As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s”

Yes you did. There were plenty of trans men in the 80s. Trans women were the ones who led Stonewall! A nonbinary person is the hero of a Babylonian(?Sumerian?) myth that’s several thousand years old! This is not a new thing! Pick up a book!

“A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.”

What country are you living in cause it’s not England! I follow a trans youtuber and he started sobbing when he got the sex on his birth certificate changed to male because it had taken years and he had had to jump through so many hoops. It’s not even legal to change a many documents in several US states.

“We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced.”

Ah yes, gaining the right to vote doesn’t hold a candle to the evil trans women who want to *checks notes* live peacefully. Doctors diagnosing women with hysteria and giving them lobotomies is nothing against people wanting to go about their day!

“Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now.”

I remember the day when my father sold me off to my husband for 20 goats, 5 cattle, and a magnificent draft horse!

“None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people;”

...Sure... they just “don’t agree with the lifestyle” don’t they?

Anyway, I read her entire essay. There’s nothing interesting in it. I dug through the poop to find the gold nuggets for you. That rest of it is just the standard “But predators in the little girls room, think about the children” shit we’ve heard for years. I also recognized a lot of conservative talking points and gotchas which surprised me for a moment, but after thinking about the two positions it made sense.

#tw transphobia #jkr #jk rowling #transphobia

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