#even transphobic

[blinday]

Arcane is living proof that u can be woke if your writing is good. You can be many things if your writing is good.

[yardsards]

this site has learned to accept men's tits into their hearts. now i need you all to embrace women's flat chests.

[kvetcher2]

will never get over what happened to the women’s march. the largest single-day protest in the history of the WORLD. 82 countries and 7 million people. an incredible display of female solidarity, hope, strength, and resistance. reduced to “white women in pussy hats.” not by conservatives but by leftists!! who gleefully dismissed this enormous protest because “white women voted for trump.” never mind that the women who attended the march very obviously did not vote for trump. they were all vilified anyway, even though a huge percentage of the protestors and organizers weren’t even white. the whole protest somehow came to be seen as a cringey, frivolous display of white woman privilege. again, the women’s march was GLOBAL and unprecedented in WORLD history. yet it’s pretty much never talked about anymore, except to joke about pussy hats.

[sarasade]

One of the most generally useful things to come out of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video and Todd in the Shadows' similar video on misinformation is how they bring transparency to the internet phenomenon of "I made up a guy to get mad at".

Seriously, I've seen people make up a lot of stupid shit on the internet over the years and it's often just a manipulative attempt to paint a group of marginalized people in a bad light.

That's the TL;DR version of this post. 

ANYWAY here is the long version

Those videos are mostly about James Somerton's plagiarism of other queer people's work. However I'd like to talk about that 20-30% of Somerton's original writing- and oh boy. It's mostly about complaining about White Straight Women and misgendering well-known trans creators such as Rebecca Sugar and calling Becky Albertalli a straight woman while it's pretty common knowledge that she was forced to out herself as bi because she received so much harassment over "being a cishet woman who appropriates LGBT+ stories".

One thing that irks me especially is how in his Killing Stalking and Gay Shipping videos Somerton brings up how straight women/ teen girl shippers exploit gay men for their personal sexual fantasies. This gets brought up several times in his videos.

Being all up and arms about Somerton being a "White Cis Gay Who Hates Women and Queer People tm" is not that useful because the kind of rhetoric he's using is extremely common in fandom and LGBT+ spaces on Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter. We really don't need to bring Somerton's identity to this since he is in no way an unique example.

It's hypocritical to make this about an individual person when I've seen A TON of posts, tweets and videos where queer people talk about these Sinister Straight Women who are supposedly out there fetishizing and exploiting queer men. It's pretty clear to me that this is just an excuse to shit on women and queer people for having any sexual interests. At worst these comments are spreading misinformation about BL, a form of media that has been excessively studied by both Asian feminists and Asian queer women.

This all sounds really familiar and I think it's good that people are calling it out as what it is: misogyny and transphobia. I'd also point out the potentially racist motives behind being this hypervigilant about Asian media.

People can absolutely be misogynist regardless of gender or orientation. I really don't know why we need to create some kind of made up enemy to get mad at. I actually think it's almost sinister how "anti-fujoshi" people call Slash shippers and fujoshi misogynists or claim that they have internalised misogyny while being dismissive about women's interests and creative pursuits under Japanese obscenity laws, China's censorship, book bans in American schools and various other disadvances that are part of being a queer and/or female creator.

I think we shouldn't be naive about the bad faith actors who want to turn queer people against each other. For example Fujoshi.info mentions anti-gender (TERF, GC etc) movement using this kind of rhetoric as well.

Anyway if you want to read more:

- about the false info around BL fandom fujoshi.info

-There is the scholar Thomas Baudinette who studies gay media in Japan. Here is a podcast with him and the scholar Khursten Santos

-James Welker is a BL scholar as well. Here is a podcast interview about the new international BL article collection he edited.

-I've already talked about this Youtube channel by KrisPNatz and his great Killing Stalking video that actually engages with the themes of the manhwa

- There is also HR Coleman's thesis DO NOT FEED THE FETISHIZERS: BOYS LOVE FANS RESISTANCE AND CHALLENGE OF PERCEIVED REPUTATION where she interviews 36 BL fans and actually breaks down why fetishization has become such a huge talking point in the fandom discourse. Spoilers, it's mostly about young queer people and women being worried that they will get judged and pathologized for their interest in anything sexual.

-Great podcast about Danmei and censorship with Liang Ge

[hiimcanadia]

There's a lot of posts out there reminding people that they don't have to respond to every stupid post they see but I feel like it's worth saying that you also don't have to finish reading the post once you've realized it's stupid. Easily one of my favorite things about the internet is the ability to get like two sentences into a post and go "actually I think you're wrong" and then just stop reading.

[carouselunique]

Meet Twinkleshine, the Smug and Dramatic The Illustrious Illusionist of Swap Six/Side Stars!

Fun Fact: Twinkleshine is an absolute glitter fanatic. She loves glitter so much. Shiny things are her kryptonite give her a glitter snow globe and you can distract her for hours. That's how she picked her name, because she just loves twinkling shiny objects.

[lycandrophile]

i absolutely cannot believe people are trying to start discourse about whether nex benedict was actually nonbinary / whether it was okay for him to describe himself as nonbinary to some people if he didn’t actually identify that way as if he isn’t literally DEAD because he was KILLED. this is a MURDERED CHILD and these monsters are so busy getting mad at the possibility that he might have been a trans boy who described himself as nonbinary to his family because that was easier for them to take that they’re turning a CHILD who was MURDERED into fucking discourse. even when we die at the hands of cis people’s violence, our own community finds a way to make us the villains of the story.

and all of this bullshit on top of the ways that cis people are already trying to say our grief over his death is unjustified. all of this on top of people claiming he wasn’t murdered and speculating on other causes of death (i literally saw someone say he “clearly went home and took the coward’s way out” and i have never been more disgusted) or claiming that he started the fight as if any action on his part could’ve been enough to justify his death. i am haunted by the sound of his father screaming that his child was not filth because that is what people have been saying about this poor kid, that’s how cruelly his memory is being treated, and even the trans community can’t get it’s shit together enough to look past the stupid discourse and see the tragedy in front of us. did you all forget that it was supposed to be up to us to grieve him in the way he deserves when the rest of the world fails to care if people like him live or die? did you all forget that this child was our sibling, the future of our community, a life that we should have had the chance to know and treasure while he was still here but that we now have a responsibility to hold close to our hearts in his absence? nex’s life was precious and it was ended far too soon and if you truly believe that anything is more important than mourning his life and fighting for a world where no more trans people have to meet such an awful fate, you’re a traitor to this community and you do not deserve the place you occupy within it.

i’m so tired. i can’t even imagine how tired his family must be, to see the public treat the child they’re grieving so horribly, to see the world fail their baby again. leave him alone. he was already robbed of peace in life; the least you can do is let him finally have it in death.

[gay-otlc]

Obsessed with “I’ll beat them up for you” as a love language in general, but especially when the person saying this has absolutely zero ability to actually beat anyone up

[lastoneout]

Ngl the fact that the guidelines for shinigami eyes say that theyfab is not an anti-trans slur and thus not enough to mark someone as anti-trans and equates transmedicalist as being just as harmful as "tenderqueer" despite it claiming to support nonbinary people is uh. Yeah starting to kinda think this extension has overall been a net negative for the trans and queer communities and was always going to end up like this.

[moon-lords-lower-body]

Get his ass Red, Get his Ass !!

[pokemon-radical-red]

I got this comment on a post that I made about being a trans man and noticing how we’re perceived by others. This person is blocked now because I don’t want some transphobe on my blog, but I want to talk a little bit about this.

I like how this person’s trying to convince me that I’m wrong while saying that the only people who would be attracted to us are lesbians who are into butch women. But they can’t use those exact words or else we’ll all KNOW that they’re misgendering us. It’s interesting. Let’s play a game! TERF or transandrophobe. (I’m not scrolling through their blog long enough to find out.)

Okay. Let’s pretend that we live in their world, where trans men are not also a porn category (as someone pointed out in a response comment), and get to the deep cuts!

Now maybe this person defines oversexualization in a different way, and frequently commenting on our bodies—especially our chests—is totally cool and normal to them, because I literally have a post talking about the Tik Tok trend of “oh trans man wants me to respect his pronouns but he has HUGE BOOBS!!! haha this is so funny, guys!” You may notice that in this example here, she claims to feel bad, but then immediately turns around and makes a joke about it. Is describing transmascs essentially as our chests not sexualization? Not to mention dehumanizing considering they refer to this person as “a he/they,” instead of a transmasc or a nonbinary person or anything else.

But if that’s not enough sexualization for you, or you think that it isn’t valid to be upset over that, you can look under the cuts for the disgusting descriptions of our bodies from some transphobes. From some of those “ladies who just like butch,” since they’re innocent and aren’t oversexualizing us because “nobody oversexualizes ftm trans folks,” as the person in the screenshot said confidently.

I wanna say trigger warning for disgusting oversexualization of trans men (including trans men who are in their teens!) under the cut, but huh… the commenter said that nobody oversexualizes trans men, so this can’t be right. (On a serious note, please do heed the trigger warning before deciding to open the rest of the post.)

[redstonedust]

its wild watching the telephone game of misinformation happening with imane khelif but tbh i think they 100% could put a man in a boxing ring against a woman and so long as they're in the same weight class i wouldnt give a shit. like there are cis people sharing photos of the fight going ''its SO HORRIBLE to watch a WOMAN get PUNCHED this is an OUTRAGE'' its boxing. thats how boxing works? they signed up to get punched? do you not understand sports?

[jesncin]

not attaching it to the poll so I don't rain on the parade for Xanthe fans- but if you want a story where magic respects a character's transness, then might I recommend Dreamer/ Nia Nal (from cw Supergirl)?

I get that Nia's kind of got the reputation for being bland and boring since she had to pave the way for trans superhero representation on tv, but her story actually engages with how her family's magic system created a rift between her sister and herself- where coming to her own as a superhero caused conflict with her family. One of the few plot points that made Nia really interesting.

The part where Nia makes herself smaller so that her sister can inherit powers she feels she's entitled to as a cis girl? That's genuinely a great way of allegorizing uncomfy trans feelings through the superhero genre. This resonates with me way more than talisman shenanigans at the family dinner after being dead for 15 years. Seriously give Nia a shot. Her graphic novel is written by the trans actress who plays as her on Supergirl.

[vivvy-of-the-lake]

im tired.

[lycandrophile]

god, stuff like this is such a punch to the gut. i usually don’t feel that emotionally affected by comments like this other than being angry at them, but it’s so different when it’s someone i genuinely really respect, who seems to be very conscious of these things, who’s making a point of being a vocal ally, and they still just don’t see how people really treat us.

so much of the current legislation against trans healthcare (i would argue the vast majority of it, if not literally all of it) is founded upon denial of our bodily autonomy and fearmongering about our transitions. people call us predators and abusers for having and feeding our children. a huge number of people pretty recently jumped on a singular incidence of violence as “proof” that testosterone turns us all into evil monsters. people talk about how we’re stealing our bodies from them and say that if they could just grope us or have sex with us, we’d see that we’re really women. we ask for something as simple as the use of language that includes us so that we can better access the healthcare we need, and even that is asking too much.

but sure, people don’t really have a problem with us being men, so everyone can just stop bothering with affirming that we are who we say we are because clearly people are already on board with that idea, right?

and of course, it’s upsetting on a personal (one might say parasocial) level because it just sucks to see someone you respect openly state that they don’t think the things happening to your community are really happening. that was the initial reaction i had — i know this is one person, a fallible person, who i have no true relationship with, but it still feels like a betrayal of some sort to read that.

the thing that really gets me, though, is that there are a lot of people who trust him (whether rightly or not) to be a good source of info, and a lot of those people are going to see this and just take it at face value. they’re not going to look into it, they’re just going to accept that people really don’t have a problem with us and they’re going to feel empowered to look the other way when we’re under attack. i’m sure he wouldn’t want people to take the things he says at face value without fact-checking them, but the fact remains that most people will do just that and will proceed to not give a shit about us because they don’t think they have to.

it’s one thing to see this coming from some random person. it’s another entirely when it’s someone you already liked and respected, and who has a large audience who are likely to trust the things they say.

and it just…would’ve been so easy to not say it, to just say “they’re men!” and let that message stand without immediately undermining its importance.

[nightecho50]

People on TikTok think mpreg is funny and unbelievable and weird like "imagine if men gave birth!" and "OMG MPREG REFERENCE???" it's like

BRO. THERE ALREADY ARE. IT'S NOT A CUTE YAOI/BL OMEGA VERSE MANGA, PREGNANT TRANS MEN EXIST??? THERE ARE MEN WHO CARRY? SEAHORSE DADS ARE REAL