#but like the mutual understanding

[swagspren]

While I would have loved more on-screen Kaladin and Moash interactions in WoR, I very much think that most of their time spent together was like having an extremely long, uneventful shift together but having your best friend there. Like how when things are insufferable, but your best friend is there so you can kind of be satisfied anyway.

[pissed-whizard]

my blog is a gateway drug to cooler and better blogs (my mutuals)

[holographings]

my troubled perfect princess who deserves 400 years in jail <3

[stuckinapril]

friend wanted to see my tumblr, and when i told him i can’t show it to him bc it’s basically my personal diary he went “oh so I can’t see it but a bunch of strangers on tumblr can??” he literally does not get me. no one will get me like the people in my phone get me

[lotus-pear]

yeah sure therapy is nice but teen soukoku is faster and a lot cheaper

[chalkrub]

strange fellas

[karvviie]

have i mentioned that i’m a red team locus truther

(this is old art. earliest is from 2020)

[trans-axolotl]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[dykesynthezoid]

There’s this potential in vampire Daniel of embracing his own monstrousness only to get tripped up over the fact that there are other parts of him he’s still got buried. And not just memories (although I’m all for that).

Daniel as an old man is presenting this very specific curmudgeonly identity, and it’s a very armored acerbic one. There’s already something hunter-predatory about him in the way he navigates extracting a story. The transition to vampire does not seem so difficult from there.

And yet.

In embracing that monstrousness he might eventually realize there are things within him that didn’t die with his humanity. Things he thought he killed years ago, long before Dubai. But they’re still there. It’s harder to keep them at bay amidst all that new freedom, that wild hedonistic abandon.

And it’s the sweetness. The sweetness! The boy who ordered cocktails that taste like after-dinner mints, who was full of bubbly, bumbling energy, who had faltering romantic ideas and so little ability to execute them, who secretly dreamed of being special, who leaned into Armand’s hand on his cheek. “He’s still in there.”

And— all of these things are tethered to his sexuality as well. “I did what I had to,” he defends, and then the reality is that he could not have been more eager, more expressive, more hungry.

If vampirism is about having to come to terms with oneself, to cast off whatever human shames you still cling to, it’s not his monstrousness that Daniel is going to struggle with. It’s his sweetness. Daniel always speaks with so much contempt for that boy he used to be. How the cynic loathes those parts of him that could not be more genuine. Too much sincerity, too much feeling. He doesn’t want to believe any of that is still inside him. But it is, it is.

[bunnyboy-juice]

NO MORE ASSOCIATING THINGS WITH FEMMES ONLY BECAUSE THEY ARE PINK!HYPERFEM FEMMES ARE GREAT AND I LOVE YOU CAMPY FEMMES WHO EMBODY PINK BUT ALSO JESUS CHRIST CAN YOU GUYS NOT GO MORE THAN ONE DAY W/O TRYING TO SHOEHORN FEMMES INTO BEING ONLY PINK UWU BABIES. I AM FEMME AS IN GRASS AS IN DIRT AS IN TREE BARK AS IN WEEDS SPROUTING THROUGH THE SIDEWALK CEMENT. FEMME AS IN GENDER NONCONFORMITY AS IN FUCK YOU MY FEMININITY IS WHAT *I* SAY IT IS. FEMME AS IN DEPTH AND DARKNESS AND WARMTH AND TERROR. FEMME AS IN CAVES. FEMME AS IN LIGHTNING. FEMME AS IN AN AMALGAMATION OF TRAITS THAT I HAVE DECIDED ARE FEMININE REGARDLESS OF WHAT SOCIETY SAYS. FUCK IS IT THAT HARD TO UNDERSTAND?!???

[tenderjock]

i love you. no, you don't. but thanks for sayin' it.

[ryutarotakedown]

i'm dehydrated and it's giving me alice dyer thoughts i think that a key component of her being the way she is is that she's an older sister and she plays the role to perfection

the teasing/needling everyone around her? yeah that's just how she interacts with people. eldest sibling behavior. crucially it is also definitely a mask. sam knows her well enough to ask her to "turn it off" in ep 5 and she does! and we know she's capable of being serious with her brother, and she takes gwen's information about lena planning redundancies seriously

underneath that persona i think she is also a very protective person, but specifically in a calculated sort of way. she knows how to social engineer; as aforementioned she can turn her mask on/off at will. she also asks sam to call central it specifically because he's new and will be questioned less — which makes sense, actually. and there's the redirect she does when gwen says "are you all done talking about me" and alice says "oh you caught us" (note: alice and sam were not talking about her)

specifically the protective part is what pings me because like. she keeps advising sam to not get lost in the weeds, to just do the job without researching, and as Horror Podcast Fans we can all agree that is probably sam's best way of survival. she reassures gwen about the redundancies thing. i think it's implied this episode that she's also helping her brother with finances?

i think that the silly mask she puts on is specifically for deflection. it's something she has developed over time and can weaponize to great effect. but underneath that isn't some evil antagonist or whatever, it's an older sister who's very tired of her job and just wants to keep everyone safe

[dragon-spaghetti]

Forever thinking of Blake being amused at my name LMAOOOOO

[2deadboys]

one day Charles says something about still being 16. and of course Crystal has to look at him and say all breathy serious

"how long have you been 16?"

and you can hear the audible thud of Edwin putting down his book to give her a look of Disgust.

And she just gives him a look back like 'ah yes, but you knew what i was referencing...'

meanwhile Charles who only kind of paid attention to the twilight movies (when he and edwin watched them once) is looking confused like "since 1989??? when i died?? Crystal you know this"

[coffeelovinggayidiot]

Like all of tumblr, aparently: we 💜 love ✡️jews✡️ and we would 👊 punch nazis and we reblog five 5️⃣ different haukkah 🕎 posts a year we are like so progresive 💁✨️

Also all of tumblr, aparently: death to all jews 🚫✡️ if you're a jewish person who lives in IsNotRaEl then you're an evil 👺 bad jew and you deserve to be raped and murdered ☠️☠️ what? You fled to israel because we were murdering you by the millions??? Well you should have all died lol ☠️☠️ happy hanukkah btw 🕎

[nychthemeron-rants]

I really love Marcille and Laios' relationship so much. They have such a deep connection and clearly care about each other a lot. They have such a beautiful friendship that I don't understand how people genuinely think she hates him.