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xxxvomitboyxxx · 2 years ago

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FOUND THE PAGES (image ID under the keep reading)

I remember when my mom had gotten me the old American Girl body image book, The Care and Keeping of You, it had made me soo uncomfortable and made feel what I now know as dysphoria. It would have been so amazing for that book to talk to me about gender identity and expression ;-;

I really hope I did the image ID correctly, please someone correct me if I did anything funky! I think everyone should have access to the text on these pages because they're fucking amazing.

[Image ID: 3 pages talking about gender from the new American girl body image book. The first page is titled “Gender Joy”. The upper half of the page has text, and then an image on each side. The first image is of a heavy set person with a green tshirt and jeans and short hair, above them is an image of a skinny woman with long blonde hair and a pink flowing dress. The second image is of a thin person with long hair and a yellow tshirt, above them is an image of a shirtless man showing off his many muscles. The text between reads: “messages about how bodies "should" look are different depending on a person's gender. Girls tend to face more pressure to have thin bodies and long hair and to wear clothes like skirts, dresses, and blouses. Boys tend to feel more pressure to have a muscular body, keep their hair short, and wear pants and shorts. Luckily, it's not your job to look the way people expect - it's your job to be you. The way you show your gender to the world through clothes and behaviors is your gender expression. Your gender expression can be feminine, masculine, or somewhere in between - and it might change! Maybe you'll experiment with bright dresses and long, feminine hairstyles. Or you might try baggy shorts, plaid shirts, and a buzzed haircut. Your gender expression should make you feel at home in your body." There is an image below this text of 3 children, one with short buzzed hair and a dress, one with long hair wearing a Pendleton and jeans, one with shaved sides and pink dye in their hair wearing a teal tshirt and a skirt. They are all different skin tones and weights.

The second page has a block of text at the top, then a large image in the second half of the page of a young Black person with short hair wearing one dangly earring, a tan jacket, and 3 buttons, one button with she/her pronouns, the other button with a trans flag. There is a large trans flag in the background. The text at the top read: "While gender expression is what you show on the outside, gender identity is how you feel on the inside - a girl, a boy, or someone who doesn't quite fit into either category. When a baby is born, a doctor looks at the baby's body parts to assign its sex - whether the baby is female or male. Most kids grow up feeling comfortable in the sex the doctor assigned. This kind of person is cisgender. (Say it sis-jen-dur.) But for some, that assigned sex doesn't match who they know they are inside. A kid who was assigned as male might know herself to be a girl inside, for example. Someone whose gender is different than the sex they were assigned at birth is transgender. Some people don't feel like a girl or a boy inside - which is totally OK! People in this group are usually called nonbinary and might use a pronoun like they instead of he or she."

The third page is text heavy, with a smaller image to the side of the same kid from page 2 in a doctor's office with a doctor. The text reads: "Being transgender is not an illness or something to be ashamed of. If you're questioning your gender identity - or if you already know for sure that you're trans or nonbinary - talk with an adult you trust, like a parent or school counselor. That person can connect you with a specially trained doctor, who can help you and your family decide what's best for your body. At first, you and the doctor might talk about wearing the clothes and using the pronouns (like he, she, or they) that make you feel most like the true you. If you haven't gone through puberty yet, the doctor might offer medicine to delay your body's changes, giving you more time to think about your gender identity. And if you've already gone through puberty, a doctor can still help. Studies show that transgender and nonbinary kids who get help from doctors have much better mental health than those who don't. If you don't have an adult you trust, there are organizations across the country that can help you. Turn to the Resources on page 95 for more information.

On the second half of this third page is a large pink rectangle with text. On the top corner of this box is a large heart with the trans flag as the background, with the quote: "Being transgender isn't a medical transition. It's a process of learning to love yourself for who you are. - Jazz Jennings." The text in the pink box reads: "If you're transgender or nonbinary, loving your body might feel a bit different than it does for a cisgender person. Parts of your body might make you feel uncomfortable, and you might want to change the way you look. That's totally OK! You can appreciate your body for everything it allows you to experience and still want to change certain things about it. When you're feeling out of place in your body, do things that make your body feel more like home, like dressing in your favorite clothes and doing something you love. Celebrate the good feelings you have in your body right now. Remember, you deserve love and respect, no matter what your body looks like or how it changes." /end image ID]

Well. I did not have "conservatives cancel the American Girl doll company" on my 2022 bingo card but somehow here we are.

#AMERICAN GIRL BASED????#wait I need to look this up #wait this is sooo funny because I was OBSESSED with ag when I was a kid #but they were too expensive to get 😔#Anyways!!! trans rights??!? AG transed my gender??!#EDIT: FOUND IT #transphobia #tw//transphobia

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aesops-boy · 2 months ago

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Some Affirmations and Neutral Statements to Fight the Imposter Syndrome - Trans Edition

I will operate under the assumption that I am trans. If I truly feel happy and comfortable thinking of myself as cisgender one day, that is fine. For now, I will do what is less painful and brings me greater contentment/joy.

Gender is multifaceted. I am discovering what that means for me. But I don’t need to torture myself or cause myself anxiety by thinking about it every single day if that is not helpful. I will ponder when I am ready.

My identity is my own. The way I present or think of myself is unique. No one can dictate what I have to be. Experiences can be similar, but no one has lived exactly my life, and thus, they cannot tell me that what I feel or have done isn’t “trans enough.”

Even if they could somehow live my life up until this point and tell me that, I deserve to be treated with compassion.

I am the expert of myself. Sometimes, that will still feel confusing or scary, but the experts of any field know that they have much more to discover.

I will find a space one day where I feel safe. I will find people whom I feel safe with.

It is better to have explored gender and realized that I may not be trans than it is to be unhappily cis because I never allowed myself to consider transness.

There is no shame in changing identity.

I am not a faker or a poser or a traitor.

I can try out names and labels as I see fit. Those may change as I learn more about myself. It is not wrong for that to happen. They served their purposes at those times in my life, and it is okay if they are not applicable any more or weren’t to begin with.

It is also okay if I return to them after moving away from them.

My views on my gender(s) and experiences can change. They can seem contradictory or uncomfortable to others. This is okay. It is my experience, not theirs.

I am not less trans just because I present in a way that is associated with my agab. I am not betraying my identity just because I don’t present the same way all the time.

I will do what I must to stay safe. This can mean not being able to present the way I wish. It does not make me less trans.

#this probably works for a lot #such as other queer identities #should i make more?#a lot of these help me #transgender #trans #nonbinary #affirmations #mental health #neutral statement #genderfluid #queer #gender euphoria #gender dysphoria #aesops boy #little red aesops boy

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solradguy · 1 year ago

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has there ever been anything from daisuke on why bridget was amab/an otokonoko to begin with? i feel like i remember reading that he thought it would be a fun trope (interesting, since bridget basically spawned the crossdressing boy trope) but i don’t know if anything else has been said on why he chose that trope.

(btw, this isn’t me disrespecting bridget’s transness! i fully see her as a girl, i’m just curious about this specific issue.)

Funnily enough, the Artworks of GGX 2004 interview I recently found talks about this. Translation by fairymisao:

(27)---The character Bridget, introduced in Guilty Gear XX, looks like a girl but is actually a boy, right? What was your intention in deciding on creating this kind of character? Ishiwatari: The creation of Bridget as a boy happened at the very last second; during development I was drawing him as purely a girl. It's just that when there is a need to give a worldly backbone (to the game), in order for me to try to not forget each character, and in order to revive the character, I give them my very heart. As a result, the creation of Bridget as actually a boy instead of a girl was because I thought he could become my alter ego. Well, if there was a need for the reverse—a girl that looks like a boy—that would be okay too, but it doesn't look pretty game-wise. It's also somewhat calculated (laughs).

I don't have the original text for that second to last line so I don't know what Daisuke actually said/was trying to say about a female character that looks like a male character. It sounds like he swapped Bridget's assigned gender right at the end because he wanted to project his personality through her though haha Daisuke's personal relationship with gender fascinates me. I hope some day he does an interview where he talks about it more in depth. There's also that one comment he made about Testament's gender:

Back then [1998-2002], Guilty Gear creator Daisuke Ishiwatari told fans in a newsletter interview [from 2002] that Testament wasn't really male or female. "They're androgynous," he said. "In fact, they've transcended human existence. Just like me." - via The Gamer

What did he mean... The Gamer sourced the original interview and the word Daisuke used for "androgynous" there was actually 両性具有 (ryouseiguyuu; androgynous), not 無性 (musei; agender), which is the word used to describe Testament's gender in Japanese now.

IIRC there's a comment he said about Bridget's design starting because he wanted to make a cute character to balance out all the gruff battle veterans that made up a hefty chunk of the cast at the time but I cannot for the life of me remember where I read that at. It must've been in one of the interviews; I couldn't find it in documents I translated/edited.

I said before that a lot of the older comments from Daisuke about Bridget and Testament's identities felt like he was trying his best to describe "new" genders that he may have been a little familiar with through media he liked but that he just didn't know the right terminology yet. He always seems very genuine and sincere about wanting to explore gender even though some of it hasn't aged the best in hindsight...

#asks #Guilty Gear is so transgender I love it

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three-maddys-in-a-trenchcoat · 6 months ago

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You're right about trap and wrong about femboy. The former was always a slur, the latter never was. Both come from roughly the same segment of the internet but from wildly different times. Trap was ages and ages ago when "feminine person with a dick" was inherently and obviously bad to cis men. Femboy comes out of those who, many, many years later, appreciated and wanted to be feminine people with a dick. It is, at worst, kinna fetishizing of GNC men, but it it's theirs to reclaim and it does not refer to trans women and never has. In part that's actually because of the 4chan crowd's transphobia, ironically - many of them like femboys and many of those don't like trans women, so why would they refer to them with a term they consider positive? It just doesn't fit.

did you miss the part where i said i was there? where i was a victim? i'm almost 32, i saw it all happen.

this is revisionist nonsense.

you came in here to prove me wrong and then demonstrated what a "third gender" is perfectly. who, pray tell, has always been called tr*ps/femb*ys and treated as a subset of gay men? who is viciously attacked by these same people the moment they gain enough self-respect to call themselves a woman? which labels do these people immediately jump to when an AMAB character is reclaimed as trans? when have they ever looked at a feminine character with a penis and said "yeah, that's a trans woman?"they absolutely both refer to us. the claimed distinction only occurs in the fevered transphobic mind.

for the record, they have also always bashed people they call tr*ps as mentally ill, while saying that femb*ys are not (or at least, not in the same way). it's an abusive relationship designed to keep transfems from ever transitioning while they're exploited sexually ("you don't want to be mentally ill...do you? you're different from the filthy tr*nnies"). they get off on trans women being in the closet, that's what all this "failed man" and "boy wife" shit is about.

oh look, here's a "feminine man with a dick" enjoyer proving my point.

the fact that channers distinguish between the two labels is completely irrelevant because they don't have any concept of transfemininity beyond "feminine man i can exploit." their only concern is "how gay does this make *me*," not any sort of inner world that their victims might have. tr*p was just way too close to approving of transness (despite them still thinking it was gay), so femb*y came in to be a more insidious label that firmly classifies us as gay men.

please explain f*tanari/ot*konoko next. do you think all those guys who go to ot*konoko brothels here in japan are just gay boys appreciating a feminine man with a dick? those labels come from the same subcultures we're talking about here and serve the same purpose.

Daisuke Ishiwatari, a goddamn Japanese cis man who helped seed all this in the first place, figured it out and tried to correct the damage he'd done. Somehow transfems are the most eager to not understand their history of being oppressed and to preserve these systems.

are you afraid that gay/bi men will attack you? if they have a problem with this, fuck em. they helped create this mess and keep giving these labels legitimacy for their own benefit. i know who my allies are.

EDIT: sorry, i need to chill out. i just think you're wrong on this, not a bad person or anything

to quote a more eloquent friend, "femb*y exists to be tr*p but politically correct"

#cw: discourse #cw: transmisogyny #cw: slurs #cw: transphobia

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nervosims · 1 year ago

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my gameplay rules

I constantly allude to the existence of gameplay rules, but I've never outright made a dedicated post about them... so here it is! I'll make a dedicated video for this at some point, but enjoy this lovely wall of text <3.

link to the dedicated video: here!

general gameplay style

I'm quite fast and loose with my gameplay. I'm primarily wants-based, but sometimes I want sims to do certain things so I'll just make it happen. If a sims doesn't roll a want to do certain things, however, then I won't make them do it (i.e going to college). If they roll the want to skip work, sometimes I'll let them do it 'cause it brings chaos.

So, basically, if anything sounds fun, I'll probably do it. I find it hard to stick to rules that are too strict, so most of mine are general rules of thumb. If I ever find myself getting bored, I rarely ever blame the game. The game is pretty kooky, so if nothing crazy is happening, it means I'm simply not allowing anything to happen.

I play with 7 day rounds! Using this mod that makes seasons 7 days long, I just play the whole week. Plus, any holidays I may want my sims to celebrate will be on the Sunday!

🧓 aging and death

Marticore has a great video on Sims 2's aging system, so I pretty much abide by that. Aging sims up when they receive that one day until their birthday notification. I use the Nice Lifespan mod, which adds a bunch of days and makes things make a bit more sense. I also edited the mod to age them up at midnight (because 6pm aging makes no sense).

Because my lifespan is so much longer, I recently started playing with slower skilling all-around. Using the 6-hr version of this mod.

Also, a higher a witch/warlock's alignment is, the longer they live (with the help of BO's slow aging controller). That's why Olive is still very much alive in my game, she's max alignment so she ages once a week.

When a sim is nearing death, I keep in mind inheritance. I use SimNopke's Inventory Inheritance to give away any stray items to their next of kin. If the sims owns a house, then the ownership goes to the child with the highest relationship. If the sims doesn't have any kids, then it goes to their spouse. If they aren't married, it goes to a very close friend. If they don't meet any of those requirements (bro how?!), then I sell the house and give the money to the orphanage.

I also really like playing with trans sims! I'm nonbinary myself so I need to project, obviously <3. So I roll a 5% chance of transing their gender... as a little treat. I'm still in the process of figuring out this mod, that'll let me have the memory of transitioning.

Death is also final in my game (with some extreme caveats). So, sims can't get resurrected unless the sim resurrecting is lvl 10 paranormal, and max witch alignment. And, anyone who's besties with tha sim gets to resurrect a sim of their choice. It's sort of a punishment for letting a sim die.

🌠 aspiration and personality

Sophie the Puffin has an absolutely killer aspiration calculator. I calculate everyone's secondary aspiration, and usually set them. Though, this can change depending on how I'm feeling. If I feel like it doesn't suit them, then I simply just won't set it.

I use the aspiration calculator to age up sims from child to teen as well! Using this interest age mod, it allow child sims to have more varied interests. I kinda stick to their secondary aspirations, because I can't be bothered to change it.

💼 career, education, and finances

I tried using Edukashun is Gud and… it just doesn’t make sense that I can’t be a Lvl 10 Criminal because I don’t have a degree. Like, that’s so silly. So I use Doctors Need Degrees that’s way more detailed.

Unless a sim wants to go to college, I won’t make them go. They need to roll the want on their birthday (or the day before). Once they do roll that want, I note down the day they moved out and play the family as normal. I play a whole round before I move the sims back in, to simulate time passing while they were in college. College is free, because you should never pay for education, but accommodation isn’t so sims will probably need to take out loans (4% interest rate) to pay for bills and the like. If my sims don’t want to pass the year, they won’t (but if they roll a fear of failure, they can pass). I just play it by ear.

Of course, semester changes is used… I’m not a lunatic.

No 20k handouts is an absolute godsend, so that’s an absolute must for me. Usually, graduates move out into apartments, but with the Tenancy and Landlord mod by Monique, I can have them rent out a house. This is what I’ve currently been doing with my La Fiesta Tech grads.

Child support is also a thing! It’s super handy, and also adds some challenge to managing finances.

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 family

Romance sims have a 35% of giving their child up for adoption (or giving their child to their partner). They don’t wanna get bogged down with responsibilities! Similarly, they can’t try for baby (unless secondary family). Unless they roll a fear for having a baby, I won’t put them on birth control. And I’ll only take them off of birth control when they roll a want to have a child. If they roll this fear while pregnant, I terminate the pregnancy (1st trimester only).

I also nabbed this rule from a reddit thread:

Though, I’ll still give the child away, family sim or not. I think it’s pretty realistic to feel in over your head with something as major as a child.

Getting your child taken away is also harder in my game, because I play with kids and pets unattended. You actively need to be evil for your kid to be taken away.

Aliens can impregnate/be impregnated regardless of the situation. They’re aliens! Don’t think about it!

I don’t have a hard and fast rule for number of children permitted (how dystopian), but I have a general rule of thumb. A romance/pleasure sim won’t want to have 3 kids probably, so 1 or 2 is alright.

No super fertility because I love my life! And I play with a quads mod, so I truly do not need it.

And if a gay/infertile couple want a genetic child, they need to either be lvl 10 of the science career (or be best friends with someone who is).

💞 romance

ACR my beloved <3. And romantic standards! I find ACR makes everyone horny freaks, so having romantic standards adds some challenge. Plus, it makes it much harder to just force a relationship. I don’t play with teen/adult romance — nor do I play with teen pregnancy. There’s no rush to have kids! They have the rest of their lives.

✦•······················•✦•······················•✦

Anyway hopefully this adds some context to what I’m thinking of when I play the game. Maybe you’ll adopt some of these rules too? Maybe I’ll add some more? I’ll be sure to update when I do!

#ts2 #sims 2 #sims 2 gameplay #ts2 gameplay #gameplay rules #long post #c://ts2.exe #nervo.exe #nervo.mp4

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haveyoureadthistransbook · 25 days ago

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Transmogrify! edited by g. haron davis

goodreads

Transness is as varied and colorful as magic can be. In Transmogrify!, you’ll embark on fourteen different adventures alongside unforgettable characters who embody many different genders and expressions and experiences—because magic is for everyone, and that is cause for celebration.

Warning for rant ahead!

Mod opinon: One of the biggest disappointments to me in recent trans anthologies that I haven't personally read (but my girlfriend did, which is the reason I took it off my tbr), especially since it includes authors whose work I enjoy and would have been interested in checking out. I dislike it mostly due to its exclusion of trans women's voices (while claiming that Magic is for everyone...) and particularly the editors horribly transmisogynistic twitter meltdown when someone criticised this oversight (at least they apologized afaik, but jeez, still leaves a bad taste in my mouth). I do have an ongoing beef with quite a few trans fiction anthologies for claiming to be a trans anthology for the general trans population and yet, somehow, only including transmasculine voices and characters (or at most one trans woman in a sea of trans man and transmasc authors), so this is in that regard unfortunately just another disappointment, but this was exceptionally badly handled for sure (and since running this blog I've definitely noticed that many trans non-fiction anthologies feature the issue in the other direction, which is equally as annoying). At least have the guts to admit it when you accidentally create an own voices anthology that excludes one type of trans authors, like the creators of the Changelings anthology did or make an anthology with a specific focus on a group of trans people like Resilience or Queeird did.

#transmogrify!#g. haron davis #polls #trans books #trans lit #trans literature #lgbt books #lgbt lit #lgbt literature #fantasy #short stories #anthology #ya #trans man #nonbinary #own voices #trans woman #Not own voices because there are no trans women authors in this anthology :^)#not a full return btw just a poll i found in my drafts already 👍 but it is looking good that i will be able to return this month :)

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nicosraf · 8 months ago

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For the most part, I like M preg Lucifer/michael mainly because there is a point in the Testament of Solomon where Ornias says himelf to be the son of Uriel THE archangel. And I quote:

And Solomon said to him: "Tell me, O demon, to what zodiacal sign thou art subject." And he answered: "To the Water-pourer6. And those who are consumed with desire for the noble virgins upon earth . . . . . [there appears to be a lacuna here], these I strangle7. But in case there is no disposition to sleep8, I am changed into three forms. Whenever men come to be enamoured of women, I metamorphose myself into a comely female; and I take hold of the men in their sleep, and play with them. And after a while I again take to my wings, and hie me to the heavenly regions. I also appear as a lion, and I am commanded by all the demons. I am offspring of the archangel Uriel 9, the power of God."

-----(Translated from the codex of the Paris Library, after the edition of Fleck, Wissensch. Reise, bd. ii. abth. 3.)

And so I was thinking of the many ideas that could appear from the possibility of angels having offspring. Its not canonical i know, ( 〒▽〒) but i do find the idea fasinating, especially considering the fact that Uriel still has its high status as an angel despite having a demon offspring.

(also sorry for the ramble but its pretty funny that Solomon just hears this and goes 'offspring of an angel? alright then go work on stone cutting' and ornias gets on a fight with him that uriel himself comes to reprimant the boy god does this feel like a fanfiction---)

But anyways, michael and lucifer's baby would certainly be.... square. Wild. An oddity. probably loved prob not theres to much drama going on in their relationship (of your book) to say the least. But literary perspective it would be fun to see.

I say this sincerely but this is one of my favorite arguments for why Michael and Lucifer should have a baby — because the Testament of Solomon says Uriel had a baby.

I really do love how so much non-canonical books and demonology and etc., are fixated on angels having children. We all want them to breed very very badly for some reason. (Also I like the gender queerness/transness of this Orias turning into a woman to seduce men).

Well! Angels & Man is definitely about angel offspring! If I speak too much, I will spoil, but you will see.

Anyway, I think if Michael and Lucifer had a child, the baby would be very loved and spoiled despite all the drama. Maybe a baby could save Michael and Lucifer's relationship. (No it wouldn't). Maybe a baby could keep them from divorcing anymore (No it couldn't)

#mine #ask

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cypionate60mg · 9 months ago

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i’m curious if you have any thoughts on the recent kristen stewart rolling stone photoshoot/article?

i don’t generally care one way or another about celebrities but this quote someone pulled really struck me: “If I could grow a little mustache, if I could grow a fucking happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would.”

My first thought is that people should read the full article before they start making conclusions. It's also such a pain that so much of this conversation is happening on Twitter, which is rife with opinionhavers who are allergic to giving or finding context.

Before we talk about that quote, let's start with a different one. Here it is out of context.

"The coolest fucking part of us is that we have this ever-present and unclosable opening, and we’re walking around with it all the time, and we sort of pretend like it’s not there, but it’s our greatest strength."

And I'm not just taking that out of context on my own; it's quite literally removed from its full context by the article itself. We don't know whether Stewart goes on to disclaim this, or if she's really this enchanted with the supposed mystical quality of the vagina. All we know is that she's been reading gender theory and "thinking of female bodies not just physically and sexually, but also metaphorically", according to Morris, the author. Seems like a transmisogynistic thing to say. There's some passing mention of Genesis P-orridge (RIP) later in the article, but no actual discussion, so that doesn't help.

So now that we have a very vague and uninformed idea about what Stewart's gender theory might look like, here's the full quote about body hair.

"She wants the cover image [of the magazine] to send a clear message: hyper-sexualized, left of andro, and flipping the gender script. 'If I got through the entire Twilight series without ever doing a Rolling Stone cover, it’s because the boys were the sex symbols,' she points out. 'Now, I want to do the gayest fucking thing you’ve ever seen in your life. If I could grow a little mustache, if I could grow a fucking happy trail and unbutton my pants, I would. Guys — I’m sorry — but their fucking pubes are shoved in my face constantly, and I’m like, 'Ummmm, bring it in.''"

Seems to me less like she wants those changes in general, and more like she wanted them as a genderfucky novelty for the sake of the cover photo. A way to draw attention to how men are portrayed in the mainstream, using her body as contrast. I don't know how I feel about it. I say that honestly.

Ultimately, we don't learn what Kristen Stewart actually thinks of transness. The article has so many eye-catching one-liners but no actual full-fledged conversations about gender. It ends on this nebulous note about identity being malleable. So sure, maybe Kristen Stewart would like to go on T. But I just can't know whether she should. There are so many layers of interpretation and editing and lost context that there's really no point in trying to psychoanalyze what's there.

#ask cyp60mg #behind the scenes

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aqueousablution · 2 months ago

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(January-February 2023) Don't mind me, just transing a vintage OC's gender

I opted to skip the original palette proposals for her and jump straight to the finalized one (which later got revised with dark sclerae), and that pistol concept is slightly edited from the initial posting to have a shorter barrel, for reference

Original post bodies under cut (warning, long as fuck):

Post 1 (sorXa & her armor)

Update (1/31/23): Now with mostly-finalized color schemes! The design of sorXa's armor itself needs a little more work, but I think these palettes fit her pretty well (I swear I wasn't intending to make her vaguely cohost-colored)

When I woke up I miraculously had the energy to draw, so instead of getting up and taking a shower I spent a few hours brainstorming a massive overhaul of one of my old Lego OCs, because while looking for Zero's missing right hand in my bedroom (as mentioned here) I stumbled upon his old mech walker in a drawer, with him inside it, and because he was vaguely self-insert-y (in the way that many of my long-term D&D PCs tend to be, in that they're not meant to be me per se, but they definitely borrow heavily from my IRL traits) I decided to make him a trans girl¹. I then very quickly hit upon the idea of making her an android (or more properly gynoid, I guess? I'm gonna call her that, anyway), and then further the idea that her old lore was in some capacity canon, but at some point her consciousness was transferred from her old AMAB supersoldier body into a more feminine artificial body untouched by the processes that made her original body a supersoldier. I'm not 100% sure on her name, though I particularly like the Gaelic name Sorcha since it's roughly equivalent to my IRL name, Clara, and I have both Irish and Scottish ancestry²; I might sci-fi it up a bit, maybe, since her deadname was sci-fi nonsense based very loosely on my deadname (same first letter, same ending phoneme, same number of syllables). Maybe borrowing a character from a different alphabet to transcribe the "ch", like Sorχa or something? Possibly just Sorxa, since the voiceless velar fricative is rendered as "x" in the international phonetic alphabet? I'll figure that out later, I guess. Edit: I think I've settled on rendering it as "sorXa"; starting with a lowercase letter gives me vibes similar to chaos from Xenosaga, which I think fits the sci-fi setting (not to mention that her design has some similarities to chaos's, now that I think about it)

I'll transcribe the notes under the cut since I know my handwriting is pretty illegible here (it's not always this bad, but when I'm cramming notes to myself around a drawing on a 3"x5" card, it tends to get sloppy)

Image 1: casual wear

Sorcha(?) | she/her | gynoid, formerly AMAB human

glowy eyes when needed

auburn hair (pointing to darker part of hair)

strawberry blonde? orange? gold? plat. blonde? (pointing to lighter-colored bangs)

chromatophore-like tech allows face markings to be hidden & hair color to change, among other aesthetic things

Image 2: armor

Sorcha(?) | she/her

glowy gold visor

black helm (blue accents? red accents?)

black w/ gold (or copper? rose-gold?) accents (pointing at breastplate and spaulders)

black? (pointing at forearm)

blue? grey? blue-grey? red? (pointing at upper arm, abdomen, and thigh)

poleyns? (next to knee)

MMZ-style big boots (next to side-view of one such chonky boot)

Bridget-like? HJB-like?³ (next to another boot, but with something on the ankle à la Bridget's GGST design)

speaker? (pointing at circle on the bevor of a mildly revised version of her sallet)

add earpiece?

Notes from another drawing I'm not posting on this page but that I think might be relevant:

modular limbs? (i.e. could attach extra limbs or swap out some of her normal ones)

not actual choker, just pigment per... (has arrow pointing to next bullet point)

chromatophore-like skin pigment - can change colors, good for both camo and looking more organic (can hide cheek lines, but thinks they look cool)

Notes: (I feel like I have these on every chost, I guess footnotes are my Cohost calling card now??)

I remember, actually, that one time I played out this scenario where he ran into an alternate universe version of himself who was a girl, and they... teamed up or something? Hung out? Fuck if I remember, and it actually may have been a different sci-fi Lego-based OC, but I'm pretty sure it was an early version of him which had a very different appearance barring the red hair and laser sword (though even then, the not-lightsaber went from yellow to blue). I do remember that their first interaction was passing each other on their not-speeder bikes as she came out of her universe, which was linked to his universe by some sort of cave opening or whatever? I'm getting way off track, the point is this isn't the first time this character has been a girl, even if at the time my younger self had no idea that might be related to me being trans. #JustEggThings

I'm not exactly sure how much Scottish ancestry I have on my mom's side, but in terms of Irish ancestry on my dad's side, my grandfather and grandmother were from a town in County Fermanagh and a tiny village (really more of a homestead, it's only a few houses in a small cluster) in County Leitrim, respectively (my dad and my aunt were born in New York, though). I actually visited Ireland in Summer of 2019 for a family reunion, and we visited the (heavily renovated) house where my Nana Bridie grew up (one of the families who lived there when she was young is actually living in that house now, though it's substantially more modern than the dirt floor and hearth farmhouse she grew up in), as well as the rowhouse my Pop-pop Mickey designed and had built in his hometown when he and my grandmother briefly moved the family back to Ireland in the 60s because of the rioting in NYC (which was, as you might image, the exact wrong time for a family of Catholics to move to Northern Ireland; luckily they were unharmed, but they still returned to New York after only about a year or so).

"HJB-like" refers to the high jump boots from Metroid, which add forward-facing spikes to the ankles of Samus's power suit. In case you couldn't tell, this armor leans heavily on the character design aesthetics of both Metroid and Mega Man Zero, with a splash of late medieval/early renaissance European armor (hence the sallet and poleyns). I'm a huge sallet fangirl, if you hadn't noticed (did you know that some designs of Samus's helm have a very sallet-like shape? I did, and I pogged IRL when I noticed it, like the fucking dweeb that I am)

---

Post 2 (updated unarmored palette and weapons)

I think I've finished all the designing I need in order to finish this drawing of sorXa that I've been working on, namely the dagger/beam sword and handgun she carries normally, plus an update to her color scheme.

A general note that applies to both the sword and the gun: energy-based weapons in the setting I'm developing around sorXa require too much energy for a compact power source to fuel for any significant length of time, so they often have cords to be plugged into an external power source for added functionality. Normally this would be something like a clunky battery pack or generator, but being an anthropoid¹, sorXa's abdomen can open up like KOS-MOS using the X-Buster (Xenosaga Episode 1 spoilers in that cutscene btw), but instead of the X-Buster it contains a set of jacks for said cords, and then she can plug a weapon in to draw from her internal power supply à la Heavy Metal L-Gaim.

To briefly touch on the updated color scheme: Pink is a pretty color. Simple as. (Well, okay, the idea is that it's more of a white jacket with reddish-pinkish iridescence, or maybe it's just a very pale pink, I'm not sure)

Weapon descriptions under the cut:

Dagger ("Devilhorns")

Based primarily on a cinquedea and the version of the Z-saber wielded by Girouette in Mega Man ZX, but also a kabutowari. I need to update the design to reflect that the guard flares out into more proper quillons when it's powered, but still I'm quite proud of the idea of the wire spool being in what would normally be the palm-swell of a typical cinquedea hilt. The name "Devilhorns" is in reference to the fact that relative to a cinquedea, it's missing about 2 "fingers'" worth of physical blade, not entirely unlike some variations of the "devil horns" hand gesture (particularly a hypothetical variant where the thumb is raised flush with the index finger, but I don't know that I've ever seen or heard of that version being a thing), though I'm not particularly married to the name since it feels... clunky? Also, the yellow beam blade is in reference to an ancient iteration of her², when she was some sort of Lego bounty hunter whose main weapon was a lightsaber with an opaque yellow blade (since I didn't have a translucent yellow blade for her to use and wanted hers to be ~special~).

Handgun (unnamed)

Based on the two handguns most heavily associated with Mine Fujiko from Lupin III, the Browning Model 1910 and the Remington Double Derringer (based moreso on the appearance of the Browning than the Remington), combined into what's essentially a MMZ/ZX-style buster pistol. Normally it relies on a magazine-shaped battery that can power... 12 shots, maybe? before it has to be swapped out, but when plugged in it can shoot effectively indefinitely without needing to reload, or it can draw on the internal battery as well as the external power source to fire a charge shot³ (which consumes what would have been 1 or 2 shots from the battery normally) in the vein of Mega Man and Metroid. The ventilation on the obverse (which in this case is the left side, since this is meant as an off-hand weapon for a right-handed character) is meant for releasing excess heat, meaning that while it wouldn't be pleasant to have your hand there when it shoots, it's certainly not going to blow your hand off like the small drawing in the middle might make it seem. I went with Fujiko's iconic guns as a basis for this pistol since they're both relatively small and concealable, which suits the needs of this particular gun as an emergency sidearm to use in self-defense when sorXa isn't necessarily looking for a fight. Considering that this is literally the first time I've ever tried to design or even draw a semi-realistic gun (in no way, shape, or form do I consider myself a gun enthusiast, I'm much more of a "medieval and early-renaissance hand-powered weapons" kinda gal), I'm surprised by how happy I am with how this design turned out (though it probably helps that this borrows so heavily from the real-world Browning Model 1910)

I'm leaning toward "anthropoid" as a gender-neutral catchall for humanoid robots in the setting, since "android" is explicitly masculine, and while I have no problem calling sorXa in particular a gynoid, I feel like having a broader term is important. Apparently I'm not the first person to arrive at using the term in place of "android", but I personally learned of the word via... anthropoid-hilted Celtic swords, of all things (though "anthropomorphic" seems to be the more common term to use for that hilt shape these days).

We're talking, like, gradeschool here, maybe early middle school at the latest. She also had a starry black cape (which would have been from a Harry Potter Hairy Pooper set; the mild irony of a character who previously incorporated something tied to a Rowling IP in their design winding up as a violently anti-fascist trans girl is not lost on me) and a red bandana on her head, if memory serves? A later version of her had a more traditional translucent blue lightsaber (maybe 2 of them?), but that version of her is now part of her backstory when she was a (less-than-willing) supersoldier (I need to flesh out that lore better, so I won't go into it here, but there's a lot going on there), so I'm going back to the classic yellow for her new beam sword.

This particular pistol is actually meant to be a fair bit more robust than some others in the setting, at least when it comes to charging shots. I had the idea that in a firefight while using a temporary civilian-grade body (while her custom combat-grade gynoid body was still being built), in an act of desperation when faced with a hallway full of enemy soldiers advancing toward her, she'd have tried to power a weaker pistol plugged into a port on herself that wasn't designed to handle the amount of power drawn by a charged shot and, in the process, blew up the gun, wrecked both arms, launched herself backwards into a wall, and severely damaged her body's power core (as well as accomplishing her goal of killing everyone in her line of fire, of course, essentially following Mega Man charged shot rules, i.e. they pierce any enemy they destroy). This incident, in addition to helping her gain the trust of her new comrades (who would have mistrusted her as a former member of the enemy forces), also led to her receiving a pistol capable of firing charged shots without destroying itself (the one shown here). (As an aside, she didn't count on the charged shot having that much blowback, since she was used to using military guns while wearing power armor, as opposed to a relatively flimsy pistol scrounged up by rebels while in a body that's not much more resilient than a relatively sturdy but otherwise ordinary human; she certainly figured it would be a risky maneuver for her, but nowhere near the "possibly get yourself killed in the resulting explosion" kind of risky that it wound up being.)

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theclockworkkidart · 1 year ago

Photo

That new ish drawing meme of drawing a character. Nothing changed except style. I make Melone’s hair fluffier. Can’t really show that I trans his gender either on the odd occasion. But you also can’t disprove his gender isn’t transed in canon. He’s a weird little science man too.

I drew him in my quicker style rather than actually trying too hard because it’s how I usually draw him. My headcanon is that he doesn’t discriminate on what gender he’s into and he’s an Italian man from a poor bad household who got into university to study genetics and ended up in Passione. He also thrives off of reactions and calls half the team “babygirl” including his leader Risotto.

Canon style is difficult because the proportions are really weird to figure out. Their heads are really long.

Edit: Included blank template under the cut I don’t know the original poster as it doesn’t include a username

#jojos bizarre adventure #jjba #la squadra #vento aureo #jojo melone #I've been getting comments on other sites: yes I did draw the left one

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arokel · 4 months ago

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10 questions for 10 writers

thank you so much for the tag @strangethings-everywhere ! secretly I've always wanted to do one of these

1. Is writing a hobby or a way of life?

Way of life for sure; I'm basically never not thinking about it. I start to feel awful and purposeless if I go too long without writing at least something.

2. A journal full of notes or a clean completed manuscript?

Clean completed manuscript, unfortunately. I wish I could be less persnickety about my first drafts but so far that hasn't happened. I do sometimes make extensive outlines though and those are always by hand, but they're usually pretty clean too :/ no scribbly scribbly for me

3. Who or what inspired your writing?

I've been writing since I was five years old and telling stories since I could talk, so I guess I'll say that when I was first reading chapter books I asked my parents why books always have a few blank pages at the end and they said it was so you had space to continue the story yourself if you wanted. They made it up on the spot and they don't remember saying it at all, but it's always stuck with me.

4. Which is worse: Someone you ‘idolize’ reading your first draft or listening to you sing?

Listening to me sing, 100%. I post my barely-edited first drafts on ao3 all the time lmao. But I also feel like with a first draft it's easy to say hey this is a first draft, if there's stuff you don't like I'm happy to hear criticism! Whereas with singing, that's just your voice. You can practice the song but at some point whether they like it or not just comes down to something about you that you can't change. (Although I am a hashtag classically trained singer so my feelings of needing to live up to that might not be universal.) (Don't ask me to sing opera for you because I don't actually like opera.)

5. Has writing from someone else’s POV changed your perspective?

I think most of the perspective changes that have come out of stories have been from reading for me? Like the first time I was really exposed to the idea of transness was a Harry Potter fic (suck on that, JKR) and that obviously really stuck with me. But I think the desire to write from queer povs really helped me come to terms with my own sexuality, maybe more than actually doing it. I guess writing narrative essays, which I do less frequently than straight up fiction, is usually a way for me to explore things I feel about myself and about the world.

6. Tumblr, AO3, LiveJournal, or FFN?

AO3 foreverrrrrrr. I was on ffn in my misspent youth and Very briefly on lj, but ao3 has been my home since 2014 and it would take a lot to get me to move.

7. AO3 word count? And are you satisfied with it?

646,046, and soon enough it'll jump another 100,000. Honestly not sure how I feel about that.

8. What movie/book gripped you irrevocably?

I will never not love Tamora Pierce's Tortall series. I know they're kind of dated and don't hold up in some places, but they've been in my bloodstream so long that they're basically a part of my understanding of the world. They shaped so much of my ideas on literature - how to create compelling characters and relationships, what makes a world believable, what fantasy even is - and honestly I think they're responsible for about 50% of my sense of humor and at least a quarter of my relationship to gender. They were my first fandom and in the end I'll always come back to them.

9. What’s the highest compliment you could ever be given, and have you been given it?

One of my plays deals with a very difficult emotional subject and is quite frankly pretty depressing the whole way through, and after the premiere a friend of mine came up to me and said "it was so so funny; I was laughing the entire time." That's what I always want my writing to do, not so much in fic but out in the world - I want to give people catharsis, and I hope they leave the reading or viewing experience feeling a little better than they did going in. And also I want people to laugh at my jokes.

10. What defines your writing style?

Can I say inconsistency? No but really it's definitely dialogue. I struggle with descriptive prose sometimes, but I never have to work at dialogue. I think it's my strongest area and people always tell me it's snappy (thank you Tamora Pierce). Other than that uhh... too many commas probably.

tagging @violasmirabiles @fregata-magnificens @kjxlll @borealopelta @uwu-dowoon @teaforarteza @icegreyrose @shadowquill17 @ris-d-deridex and using my 10th tag for anyone else who wants to participate!

#tag game

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intersexbookclub · 1 year ago

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Discussion summary: Trans-Intersex studies

On 2023-09-29 we met to discuss our first foray into academic intersex studies! We read three chapters from Transgender and intersex: Theoretical, practical, and artistic perspectives, edited by Stefan Horlacher (2016).

Overall reactions:

Dimitri: I liked there were perspectives I don't normally think about or see

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): I found the Costello chapter really useful because I've wondered why there isn't more trans and intersex connections and this explained it for me

Michelle (@scifimagpie): it tapped into and articulated a larger strain in the queer community “the people who want to have a gender” vs “the people who want to destroy gender, there is a fundamental struggle in that can only be dealt with through tolerance and acceptance

vic: multiple chapters make clear that intersex is made by doctors. This thing happens when you give birth and you don't know what to do and conveniently there’s someone confidently giving you a (usually really bad) answer… we're foisting off this thing that doctors aren't trained to deal with it properly plus have medical arrogance

Connections to Disability Studies

Though the book was intended to get intersex studies and trans studies in dialogue, we made many connections to disability studies throughout the discussion.

Elizabeth: The book talks about the dynamic that the doctors are the ones who socially construct intersex, which is similar to how doctors contribute to the social construction of disability.

Elizabeth: And also how in our society, when it comes to who is listened to most on disability/intersex, doctors come first, followed by parents, and it's those of us actually affected who come last (disability/intersex)

Michelle: it was interesting to see the arguments against eugenic abortion… The amount of eugenicist propaganda that's still around in our society, the text addressing the fact that people would abort an intersex foetus didn't surprise me but did alarm me

Elizabeth: Coming from disability studies I felt the question of who is/isn't intersex isn't actually a productive question, in DS we posed those questions for a minute before realizing it's not productive, to instead focus on ableism

Dimitri spoke about the idea of seeing your body as a garden that you tend to, rather than a machine to be fixed, and how it’s been a helpful framing

Michelle: one thing about accepting my intersex identity is that my body isn't broken for having a hormonal imbalance and it's just a way of being

The social and medical models of disability were invoked by Costello in chapter 4, to show contrasting models of intersex (social vs medical) and transness (social vs medical).

-=-=-

Chapter 1: Introduction by Stefan Horlacher, Pages 1-27.

This chapter gave a brief overview of the state of trans studies and intersex studies, and the motivation for putting these two research areas into dialogue.

We didn’t talk much about this chapter.

Elizabeth: I personally learnt a new word, repronormativity, from this chapter! Per Wiktionary, it refers to the “assumption that all humans want to have children, especially within the context of a monogamous heterosexual relationship”

vic rather aptly described it as “so GERMAN”

-=-=-

Chapter 4: Intersex and Trans* Communities: Commonalities and Tensions by Cary Gabriel Costello, Pages 83-113

This chapter reports on a sociological study of trans and intersex communities on Second Life, noting commonalities as well as tensions between and within the communities.

Everybody found this the easiest chapter of the three to read lol 😅

vic: “I really appreciated the breadth of voices that were included. The author clearly has an argument, but still lets people speak. Like with the person who said ‘I'm not intersex’ and the author was like ‘this could come from fragile masculinity’, it was neat.”

Costello’s conceptual framework

To understand both intersex and trans communities, Costello employs a framework which differentiates a:

Medical framework, in which being intersex/trans is framed as “as a biological problem: a physical lack, superfluity, or malfunction” (p98). While Costello doesn’t use the word “truscum”, this is how many of us are used to referring to people who understand transness through this lens.

Identity framework, in which being intersex/trans is “framed as social in nature: social stigma is directed toward those who are in some way physically variant.”

An important insight of this study was that to understand the relationship between the trans and intersex communities, you have to realize there are four communities at play, not two:

Medical framework trans people (truscum)

Identity framework trans people

Medical framework intersex people

Identity framework intersex people (who are the only ones who use DSD)

And as Dimitri summarized, “the tensions [between the communities] arise in the disorder framework, a lot of the problems lie in the disorder framework, and it's pretty important to make that separation”

In Costello’s study, anti-trans sentiment was linked to the intersex-as-disorder framework

Costello writes about how the majority of intersex people are trained from birth to employ the disorder framework, which can easily result in anti-trans sentiment. Many intersex people are raised in a way where the slightest gender deviance is punished, and feel threatened by gender deviance.

Multiple people noted how the intersex participant “Anna” from Costello’s study had misplaced anger at trans people, that it’s unfair to blame trans people for trans fetish porn when trans people have such difficulty getting conventional employment, and that the demand by cis & perisex people is more at issue

Elizabeth: so many intersex people are told they're intersex by a doctor and that they're disordered and the doctor will fix them so they're not given any community because the doctor is like "I'll fix you" and people are just used to the disorder framework because that's what they've only ever seen.

vic: Yeah, being born visibly intersex getting framed as a medical emergency

Elizabeth: really liked the dig that the shame of the parent comes above everything else

Dimitri: many parents don't know what's going on when their intersex baby is born and they're kinda pressured into the surgeries… the parents might have veered to a more neutral stance on their own, maybe they have some hesitance about having a kid being different, that the surgeries are such a pile-on by everyone around them.... the parents of the kids need their own support, what do the parents need or could have had to make them not make those choices

Similarly, intersexism from trans people was linked to the trans-as-disorder framework

Costello discusses how many disorder-framework trans participants made statements along the lines of wanting to be intersex, or have an “intersex variation of the mind”, mistakenly thinking that this means they may be entitled to free gender affirming therapy (it actually makes it harder to access gender affirming therapy).

Costello explains why this sort of sentiment from trans people is poorly received by intersex people: “It alienates intersex people employing the identity framework by working against their mission to recast physical sex variance as diversity rather than disorder. It alienates intersex people employing the disorder framework by implying that trans-identification [...or] gender-confusion should characterize the intersex person. And the stories told by some trans* people employing the disorder framework about having an impossible intersex history angels intersex people of all camps.” (p107)

Michelle: To be intersex is to have a medicalized gender, and how any gender nonconformity is medicalized… it makes sense why so many trans people would cling onto a misunderstanding of intersex

Michelle: the medicalization of being transgender and you need surgery to fix a flaw in your brain, and the medicalization of intersex, they both need an anti-eugenics approach of let people be a little broken/different

Elizabeth: as a disabled intersex person it's been confusing that trans people would want medicalization like they don't know how terribly medicalized ppl are treated, and the chapter helped me realize they are already medicalized and they're trying to get a more "legitimate" medicalization rather than realizing they’re trying to play a rigged game

vic: transness is medicalized, too–the diagnosis is gender dysphoria and the treatment is transitioning. Also transitioning is only seen as a viable treatment because literally everything else doctors did to “cure” trans people didn’t work (they tried *so* many things). Trans people treating medicalization as something that’s desirable sucks, but I feel so deeply for anyone who was put in a place where that seems like their only option–people who feel like their only way forward is to claim things that don't make any sense. They're like “please, I'll do anything, I'll lie out of my ass, help me”. Those poor people!! And, of course, they also cause harm. It's all so sad.

Criticisms of Costello’s chapter:

Elizabeth: I felt a weakness was not talking about the hypervisibility of trans people vs the invisibility of intersex people. Like trans people who have huge platforms to talk about gender stuff and should know better than to perpetuate perinormative ideas about sex.

vic: transmascs tend to really minimize our own difficulties. We're not well studied, and when we are, the data consistently shows we have the worst outcomes of any gender (in things like health, mental health, employment…). Disheartening to see Costello buy into it at times.

-=-=-

Chapter 5: Transgender and Intersex: Unavoidable Essentialism and the Normative Struggle for Recognition by Sebastian Jansen, Pages 115-140

High level notes

This chapter makes the argument that it’s impractical, if not impossible, to avoid essentialism of some form when theorizing about sex/gender, and so academic gender studies scholars should spend less time trying to avoid essentialism and focus more on improving the material circumstances for intersex, trans & LGBA+ individuals.

vic: I think they were saying that we can't do it because it can't be done without throwing trans & intersex people under the bus

Elizabeth: ch5 was how I realized that in the social [identity] model of intersex where we see intersex as a natural variation it is essentialism and I'm okay with it thanks to this chapter

We all agreed this was a challenging read. As vic put it: “it was very ‘as you know’ and I didn't know”, and that the author was probably nervous about writing it.

Jansen’s chapter got us talking about the nature of gender

Michelle and vic talked about how finding out truth about gender is building houses on shifting sand

Michelle: I liked the stairwell metaphor [that female is one level of a building, male is another level, and there’s a stairwell in between]... I don't like the idea of female and male in opposition, they are categories, you can be both/neither/change

Elizabeth: I did like how ch5 talked about how gender isn't just a thing in your brain, it's made through interactions of people interpreting your gender in interactions and they didn't talk about euphoria and I think gender euphoria is that feeling of people seeing you for the gender you are

Michelle: [Judith Butler’s] gender as conversation reminded me of how art and research are forms of conversation... is gender a form of art?? [we then spent some time talking about this]

Elizabeth: I like the idea that gender should be like hair colour - it's there, you can change/experiment with it, it affects how people see you, but we don't organize society around it and I agree that's a good goal

vic: my gender is contextual - it's different depending on whether in an arts context vs. in interacting with landlord, etc

vic: in War & Peace there are four pages spent describing the beauty of a woman with a moustache–Tolstoy waxes quite poetic about how beautiful & beauty-enhancing her moustache is.

Elizabeth: yeah so many cultures see women's mustaches and/or unibrows as beautiful and hate how current Western culture hates hair

Elizabeth: yeah it's SO RECENT the idea that women shave legs, the Gillette company had saturated the men's market and convinced women that their hair is bad

A main critique of Jansen’s chapter was how it only considered Western perspectives

Elizabeth: ch5 was so Western, based on a mind/body dualism and I wanted there to be a discussion of other cultural constructions, like in cultures without mind/body dualism from what I can tell it's often that trans and intersex are not separated.

We then spent some time talking about different cultural ideas about sex/gender such as Two-Spirit and hijra, and the intense medicalization of transness in Russia

Dimitri described how Russian/Slavic culture is big on repressing any kind of sexuality, and being queer is deeply tied to perversion, which kicked off a discussion of Left Hand of Darkness

Elizabeth: another reason I wanted postcolonial stuff was it'd be useful to have strategic essentialism discussed (Spivak), which seems really relevant to a discussion of essentialism.

Overall we were all glad we got to give our brains some exercise, and we’ll be reading more intersex studies in November! 😅 Join us for a discussion of Holmes’ Critical Intersex on Nov 24.

#intersex book club #book summaries #queer theory #gender studies #intersex studies #trans studies #trans theory #sociology #sociology of gender #intersex books #intersex #book reviews #book review #book summary

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