#every day is trans day of visibility if i try hard enough | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

lopsicle · 1 year ago

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Okay,like a couple minutes ago I learned that it is actually trans day of visibility today soo woohoo! Kind of hard to celebrate in this shithole called the UK though, so I’m going to hide on tumblr and talk about which characters I think are trans coded or just Headcanon as trans because it’s my day I can do that now heheheh-

Also, I’m just tryna do a little thing for trans visibility day, I like being opaque, I ain’t trying to start any arguments, if you see a Headcanon you disagree with, just scroll. And if you think I’m biased towards transfem characters, it’s because I am and I ain’t apologising for that, they’re underrated in terms of fandom and obvs I’m transfem so I love them and relate to them more. Transmasc characters still will be on this list though as there’s so many that I love.

Characters That I Think Are Transgender Because Fuck You

Number one: Hunter Noceda (The Owl House)

This was probably the easiest and hardest pick for the list, for a couple reasons. Number one, I don’t think there’s a single person who agreed this pathetic wet cat is cisgender. Whether you think he’s transmasc, transfem, something else entirely, he ain’t cis. It’s clear why the fandom clung to Hunter as the resident trans character, him having a secret identity via The Golden Guard (seriously, any character with a secret identity is immediately trans, I don’t make the rules), the overconfident attitude mixed with deep insecurity and his arc about finding a way to ‘like who he is right now’ in Thanks To Them really just sealed the deal. Other little details like how his hair cuts helped him find his new identity did not help his case.

While I personally think he’s transfem, and am just using he/him because that’s his canon pronouns, Hunter is one of those characters that a lot of people can identify with which is what The Owl House is really about so I kinda had to include him on this list. The reason it was a hard decision is because holy fuck, every single character in this show is trans. Deciding between him and Amity was the hardest choice of my life because transfem Amity is heavily underrated and I love her, but you really can’t compete with Hunter, he’s had an amazing influence on the fandom and the character has probably helped a lot of people come to terms with their identity.

To summarise, Hunter is a great character, I miss him everyday, I miss The Owl House everyday, he was cool as fuck and a lotta people identified with him.

Anne Boonchuy (Amphibia)

This is one that I feel is heavily underrated, and that’s coming from someone that took two years after the show ended to watch Amphibia. With Amphibia, pretty much all of the human characters are Headcanonned (is that a word?) as some part of the trans umbrella but Anne is the one who does not get enough attention, especially for a main character.

At least to me, Anne was very transfem-coded in the show, everything from her raggedy appearance, to her essentially assuming a new life in Amphibia to the arc about accepting who you are to THE SONG ABOUT ACCEPTING WHO YOU ARE-this was the most in your face, trans-coded rep I could ever ask for. But she is criminally underrated in terms of being viewed as trans rep even though I’ve found her story one of the most compelling in terms of trans coded storylines in nearly any piece of media I’ve ever seen. Give Anne more attention, she’s literally the best. Marcy and Sasha are cool too but Anne’s writing deserves so much more praise than it gets.

Dipper Pines (Gravity Falls)

If you haven’t realised it yet, this entire list so far is just one massive fuck you to Disney because fuck Disney. Dipper was the closest we got to having a canon trans main character in a mainstream animated show and it was taken from us, fuck Disney y’all. But still, Alex has all but confirmed Dipper’s identity as trans masculine, you can see remnants of that arc with him learning that he’s a man in his own right and masculinity being something he can define for himself, the whole thing about Dipper actually being a nickname, and him bonding with the men in his life, like Stan.

Even though I didn’t notice it when I was a kid watching the show, rewatching it now with the knowledge of Dipper’s identity makes the experience a bit more personal, I can see bits of myself in Dipper and I think that’s the whole point of his character. Watching it as a kid you can relate to him because of his sarcasm, his bluntness, his comedy but also because of how heroic, adventurous and curious he is, he’s basically the idealistic role of the viewer. But as you get older and think more critically about him, you can see more of his flaws and that makes him so much more real and so much more relatable. Obviously being trans isn’t a flaw, that was just me doing a side tangent because Dipper means the world to me and is only the standard of writing a cartoon protagonist in some ways, I just think he’s a really cool character and Disney robbed us.

Also Pacifica is transfem because TfT couples are hecking adorable

Sallie May (Helluva Boss)

Guess who just realised that (other than Dipper technically) I haven’t put a single canon trans character on this list. Headcanons are better, I don’t make the rules, but Sallie May is amazing. No matter how critical you are of Helluva Boss, one thing it unapologetically does well is queer representation. The amount of characters that the audience can relate to makes it almost addicting to watch as you get to watch these characters live their best lives. Well, their lives are kinda fucked but you get what I mean, they just get to live as queer people, most of the time.

And Sallie May is proof that trans people will eat up absolutely anything, even if it’s a whole thirty seconds of screen time of a trans character. Being fair to her, Sallie May eats up every moment she gets on screen, her dialogue can be equivocated to just a middle child acting like a middle child and I think it is partly that, I feel like we have a lot more to learn about Sallie May and in turn her sister Millie. At least I hope we do, Millie’s writing needs to improve, their family dynamics can be so interesting because every other one of their siblings is a boy, their parents can be judgemental, I feel like even if Sallie May can be a bit taunting to her, those two are probably really close, especially since Millie is one of the people Sallie May would have to go to for girl advice.

To summarise, since I went off on a bit of a tangent, Helluva Boss brings out the worst in me, give Sallie May and Millie more screen time, they’re the best, we love healthy sibling dynamics.

Double Trouble (She-Ra)

Jesus, they’re hot. Anyway, the first non binary entry on this list, the fabulous Double Trouble who stole the entire show from the moment they were introduced. Throughout the entirety of the last season, I can remember just waiting for the point that they’d show up again and nearly screaming when they did.

Double Trouble was one of the most charming members of the She-Ra cast and became effortlessly iconic, conning every single character, playing both sides of a war so that they’d come out on top, and they did win in the end. DT basically had zero consequences and even got to flirt with Sea Hawk when they were reintroduced so they got a win really. Double Trouble was mean, condescending and a liar and I love them so, so much, them being a shapeshifter is just absolutely perfect and fits their character so well. It was nice to see Non-binary rep in a cartoon and have it not immediately be cancelled, looking at Disney and thank God it wasn’t because She-Ra really wouldn’t be the same without this manipulated, child of a bitch

Crowley (Good Omens)

You know the gender’s hitting when you don’t even know what the fuck the gender is. Crowley is a delight of the character from the moment they’re introduced to the end of the show, which nearly broke my heart since I watched it just recently, if anybody would like to send me tissues, that would be greatly appreciated.

From my vast research of one google search, I’ve concluded that they’re gender is up to viewer interpretation which is actually what mine is too so I can respect that. This literal demon stole the show whenever they were on screen, whether it was David Tenant’s acting, the moments we saw softer sides of him, her pinning over Aziriphale of them just being an actual demon, Crowley is a wonderful piece of representation and I hate that because it makes me sad, let them get together, please.

KFC

Not to be confused with that one place that makes pretty good chicken, I’m talking about the protagonists of two of the best RPGs ever made, Undertale and Deltarune.

For those unaware, KFC is the trio name of Frisk, Undertale’s protagonist, Chara, Undertale’s narrator and Kris, Deltarune’s narrator. Despite them being the main characters, they’re not characterised too strongly as you are in control of them for most of the game, minus Chara who specifically says you aren’t in control of them. Due to it being canon to the games that you are playing as these characters, the Internet started a rumour that they are whatever gender you want them to be, which was just never true. Undertale is packed with trans representation, and these three are no exception. It’s the whole reason I added them to the list actually, just to get the message across if anyone was unsure; they’re all Nonbinary.

Frisk and Kris, despite only having glimmers of their true characters in the game, are still very lovable and intriguing with their actions. Even just the idea of these two being controlled, which is more of a heavy theme in Deltarune, is enough to make you interested in their characters, especially when Kris starts fighting back against you. This entire section is just gonna be a couple paragraphs of me fighting back the urge to yap about Undertale lore so you’ll have to forgive me. Chara, being the only one not under your control, has a much stronger character through the lines of dialogue from them or said about them, the latter usually being more interesting as it gives you insight to their tragic life.

Undertale is one of my favourite and given the amount of rep it’s given us, I had to pay homage to its own main characters on this list. Even though I’m hungry cause now I’m thinking about KFC.

Jake Peralta (Brooklyn Nine Nine)

I think it’s been a year since I finished tumblr’s favourite sitcom and while Jake was lovable, he didn’t stand out to me too much. Still, this guy suffered from that overconfidence but riddled with insecurity personality which lead to him being inevitably headcanonned (it’s a word I decided) as trans masculine. I don’t know what the correlation is between those kinds of characters and the transmasc headcanon, maybe it’s the desire to present as being that confident, maybe it’s being that confident but still held back by struggles about your gender identity but that’s neither here nor there.

What is here and is there is that this show was amazing for trans people, even if only in small ways and Jake was no exception to that. He was funny and watching him grow through those eight seasons gives you one of the most satisfying and heart throbbing conclusions to a TV show, largely due to his presence as the main character. Even though it’s not canon that he was trans masculine, the Headcanon is so popular that I had to pay homage to him and add him to the list.

Jack Kennedy (DSAF)

Is this fandom so dead and so unpopular that I couldn’t find a good gif? Yes. Am I gonna talk about it anyway because I love these games and I want an excuse and this is my day? Yes.

Anyway, Jack Kennedy was the main protagonist of the Day Shift at Freddy’s games and if you don’t know what those are, there’s a 50% chance you had an alright childhood. DSaF is obviously a fan game of the more well known horror franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s and I think they are some of the best fa games ever made. They’re hilarious, they’re so low budget it’s insane, it can give you the hardest tonal whiplash of not taking itself seriously to one of the hardest stories you’ve ever went through seamlessly and I don’t even get a fuck. The story told by these games is done so well and evokes so many emotions but one important thing it’s done is actually be really great for queer rep.

Despite it being played for more of a joke in the earlier games, the two characters Jack and Dave Millie clearly have romantic chemistry and that was so important back when the games released since they became so mainstream due to being attached to a popular franchise. Many fans headcanon Jack Kennedy as being non binary, which is a label that I think really works for them, mainly because it fits for the protagonists of roleplay games to be non binary. I can’t explain why, it just makes presenting the character to the audience so much easier and makes them a lot easier to play without having to worry too much about the gender of the character.

Anyway, Jack’s a self described asshole with a noble goal, and playing as them really gives you a feel of their character and makes you understand why this little known indie franchise snuck into so many people’s hearts.

Bridget (Guilty Gear Rising)

You know I had to end off the list with one of the most iconic, canon, transfem characters out of there. Pretty much every single transfem has heard of Brisket and not a single one has played Guilty Gear Rising, I had to look up the name of this game just before this to make sure I got the right one.

Bridget has recently become a meme on the Internet, with every other transfem having her in her pfp, Bridget became a staple in the community. As stated, I can’t talk too much about her character but seeing the Internet come together to just appreciate this one transfem character, despite their being obvious hate and pushback and claiming her being canon transfem was a ‘mistranslation’ (to my knowledge) was actually really heart warming.

I didn’t really get trans day of visibility too much, I was happy for it, thought it was cool we got a day but it didn’t really help us all that much. But the more I thought about Bridget is the more that I saw just how good it can feel when people come together. It doesn’t have to be a movement or a call to action to save trans people from another bill trying to wipe them out, which is just depressing to listen to, it can just be as simple as joking about this character that barely any of us know. That level of community made me understand what this day was actually about; finding common ground and letting at least one other person know that they’re not alone, that there’s so many people just like you out there, that went through the exact same thing as you did at some point. And to let you know, those people turned out fine, so you’ll be okay too.

Happy trans day of viability everyone, even if this list only reaches one person to let them know they’re not alone, I’ll be happy with that.

Anyway, ignore the emotional stuff there, here’s my honourable mention of

EVERY SINGLE SPIDERMAN, SPIDERWOMAN, SPIDERPERSON, TO EVER EXIST, THEY’RE ALL TRANS, YOU CAN’T CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE

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chronurgy · 17 days ago

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Warning for gender and transition stuff under the cut

It just feels very frustrating right now. I've considered myself nonbinary since high school but I'm still at a point where I've done next to nothing about it, not even social transition or anything, 10 years later.

And that isn't to say I haven't had good reasons for that. I have, for the most part. I couldn't be sure of my parents' reactions, so I wasn't willing to come out while I was still financially dependent on them. I knew if I wanted to get out, I needed to be able to support myself, and if I was going to support myself then I needed a college degree. So I got one. But that took time, obviously.

And then, after that, I thought I wanted to go to grad school. Going to grad school involves working closely with a faculty advisor, and based on some of the stuff that various faculty had said to me during my undergrad I was worried that being nonbinary would make me look too "snowflakey" and therefore few or no faculty would be willing to work with me and I wouldn't be able to get my degree. So I didn't come out.

As a side note, during this time I looked into getting my government gender marker changed. I decided not to do it, because not every system or piece of ID offered an X marker, and I was worried that having discrepancies in my paperwork could cause me problems. I guess I was right about that one.

Well, then I decided I wasn't going to go to grad school, so hey, time to come out, right? Nope. I was still going back to school, and still worried about it being an issue. I figured I'd wait it out, make sure I had a full time job, and then go for it once I was in a more stable place, both finances- and employment-wise. I didn't want to be job hunting while visibly nonbinary/non-conforming, especially right out of school. I figured that after I'd gotten a few years of experience under my belt, then I wouldn't run into any issues looking for another job because even if I seemed "snowflakey" or "eccentric" or whatever the hell they wanted to call me, I would have a good enough work history with good enough references that it wouldn't matter.

And I get that I seem overly focused on being employed. I just don't have a reliable safety net. My relationship with my mother is bad enough without the nonbinary thing, so there's no point in relying on her, especially when, to be frank, she is not particularly stable herself. My father was such a nonentity for so much of my life that the thought of relying on him feels simply ridiculous. I don't know him well enough for that. I don't know. It's getting better these days; we're trying. But I still wouldn't make any assumptions. The rest of my family isn't close. These days, I have my spouse. But we also live in a vhcol area, which makes things hard. And, if I must be honest, I don't like being reliant on other people. I'd rather avoid it if I can.

The worst part is that things were sort of lining up. I'm graduating soon, I've got a job. Even before I had a specific job, my plan was to give it a few months at the new place, take the temperature of things, and then come out if things seemed alright.

And I can't necessarily say I would have gone through with it. Clearly I'm very good at letting outside factors derail my plans. But I knew back in November and I know with even more confidence now that it's probably not a good idea to make yourself obviously trans right now. Changing any sort of legal paperwork is off the fucking table. Probably forever, if I'm being honest.

Hormones and surgery? I don't know. I'm not sure. I live in a liberal state, it would probably be fine. But again, I'm not sure how great I feel about being visibly trans right now. And I'm not sure how far "probably" goes. I also worry that the current admin seems to be driving the economy straight into the toilet, and once even their base can't ignore that fact, they're going to look for someone to blame.

I could just do clothes and a haircut and stuff. Go for the look without any of the accompanying stuff. And I think I might. Maybe to a lesser degree. But I'm also just very..... Bad at it. I don't know how else to describe it. I see people online who are very good at using clothes and a haircut to make themselves androgenous. Me? Not so much. Some of it is that I struggle to break out of the jeans/tshirt/sweatshirt uniform for whatever reason. Some of it is that I find thinking about my body and/or my appearance a generally miserable experience for dysphoria and dysmorphia reasons. Some of it is also that I just suck at fashion. Also I'm cheap and hate spending money on clothes, so there's that too. Mostly, the few times I've tried in the past, it hasn't really made me look androgenous. I mostly just end up looking like a weirdo, and not in the good way. I know, kill the part of yourself that cringes. But I don't think I need to explain that gender non-conformance that's considered "cool" or "attractive" gets much better responses than the alternative.

I don't know. I'm still going to try, assuming things don't take a significant turn for the worse. I'm just unhappy that I've let this go 10 years with nothing to show for it. I'm unhappy that things were finally looking like they might work out and then this all happened. I'm unhappy that between my bone structure/body shape/struggles with fashion I'm far more likely to end up looking like someone failing at gender in unacceptable ways instead of looking androgenous. I guess I understand why I made the choices I did and why I'm still making the choices I am but I'm unhappy with how much of a coward I'm being about all of this? I don't know. I don't even really know why I'm writing this. I don't have a grand conclusion or anything. This all just kinda sucks and it sucks for reasons that are my fault and reasons that aren't. And I'm tired of things sucking, I guess.

#Sorry. This is all deeply self pitying in a very obnoxious way #I can't recommend reading it

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pekkhum · 10 months ago

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Are you trans yourself or is it just your daughter? :0

And in any case, how is her transition going so far?

Sending much love <3

I think this will be more fun to answer via story time and the long mode answer:

Around the time of my 37th birthday I started seeing a couple incredibly hilarious and relatable memes about being trans go by on my feed. They were just so great that I found myself seeking out more and learning to understand trans folk more and more. I kept wanting to comment and holding myself back, because, of course I'm not trans, I just feel all the things trans women feel all the time and have struggled with those feelings since I was very, very young. Still cis, though.

There was eventually a day when the dam broke and I admitted online that I am trans, but it was three days later, while reading about internalized transphobia, that it all hit home. I had myself a nice little fit about how I didn't want to be trans, not because it is bad, but because the world makes life suck for trans people. (Actually, 6 months before, in the most egg moment ever, I told a woman that I had been thinking about how hard life as a transgender lesbian would be and that it would be much easier to be a straight guy. I was wrong for reasons most trans folk can guess.)

That day, I sat my child down to explain that I've realized that I am very much trans, that I have resources she can read to understand what that all means, and that I would let her other parent know, so she had someone else to talk to if she wanted. (Thankfully, we are peacefully divorced, so that wasn't an issue.)

I later found out that my child had devoured those resources, stolen one of my skirts my work-mom gave me (she's so supportive) and tried on names, pronouns, and skirts. It was a month later that she greeted me in the morning in a skirt and informed me that she was certain her feelings weren't something else and I discovered that I have a daughter! 😊

I was in the process of trying to get HRT and my insurance changed, then my health network intentionally and willfully screwed me over and yanked my chain, because they didn't want to provide a referral (it turned out to be owned by the Catholic church, here in America), but didn't want to admit their bigotry. I was forced to change health networks and get a new primary and wait months for a new appointment for a referral and my daughter's needs were similarly delayed, but she was even further behind! I had just gotten HRT when I was laid off and left with no insurance. This means I'm on an incorrect dose and my daughter hasn't gotten hers.

To make matters worse, our ADHD has made sitting down for voice training or learning makeup (it is so overwhelming!) difficult for us and we've not found others willing and able to help with the latter. My daughter has gotten a lot of nice clothing from her mama (I'm mom, the ex is mama 🤷‍♀️), and she just looks so cute, but she hasn't felt brave enough to present at school or anything. I'm hoping a GSA in college will help, but I'm making sure not to push her. She's still figuring out her personal vibe, but it seems to lean toward her mama's style, instead of my tastes, with just a few exceptions. Whatever she goes with, I'm proud beyond belief!

I joined a writer's group and only ever introduced myself under my unmistakably femme chosen name and everyone was cool with my very unfemme appearing dysphoria hoodie wearing self. I am grateful beyond belief. The dose may be too low, but the HRT has been very much working. Unfortunately, even freshly shaved with a straight razor, my beard is forever visible (I'm told a little blush or color corrector can hide that, but keep looking horrible when I try), but thanks to HRT, I at least saw a woman with a beard shadow, when last I walked into the bathroom. (Also, I fill out my sundress more, now!)

With family and friends, we are fully socially transitioned, though, and I am grateful, every day, for those we've been able to keep. It wasn't all, but it seems I'd already cut the problems, in advance. Also, we can both wear whatever around the house, so we dress for ourselves, at least.

We dressed up extra for our first Pride parade, though! I won't have a ton of opportunities to wear that rainbow skirt, but I love it greatly!

We are early in transition, with lots of problems yet to solve, but we are so much happier, so far. I'm finally alive and she finally cares about who she will be! We're also so much closer now and have opened up a lot more to each other. I adore my daughter and I'm so glad to be her mom! 💖🥲

#trans pride #transfem #queer #trans joy #trans journey #transgender #trans

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eleanorfenyx · 1 year ago

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I have finished Mysterious Lotus Casebook, and here are some of my thoughts! (Obviously not spoiler free)

The cases are absolutely batshit insane and I loved it every single time they were like 'we totally collected this evidence that incriminates a secret suspect, just believe us and also don't question when the fuck we had the time to do this or when we figured out that we needed to look for it'. 10/10 no notes, that's a hilarious way to have a genius detective. Show us nothing, tell us everything, YES king.

That being said, I could have done with a lot less standing around having the supporting cast repeat whatever Li Lianhua and Fang Duobing announce, maybe in an attempt to make sure their genius is clear for the audience? I get it, but at the same time it felt a little too hand-holdy for me, especially in scenes where LLH and FDB had already discussed their findings between themselves before presenting them to the concerned bystanders. I can read between the lines (or else understand what has just been explicitly stated) without having every conclusion filtered through a slightly different sentence structure to make sure I got it.

Di Feisheng amnesia arc my fuckin beloved

Di Feisheng destroying his 'father' and freeing everyone in Di manor in a vicious act of catharsis that tied nicely into the main Nanyin bug-mind-control-thing narrative my beloved

Di Feisheng my beloved

The amount of times I was like...genuinely surprised he and Li Lianhua didn't kiss is both embarrassing (because I do in fact understand censorship and what I sign up for with these dramas and yet and yet) and numerous enough that I could...possibly...theoretically..write a 5+1 fic of every time I want them to kiss about it. No one hold me to that but it's something I think I'd like to do.

Re: the above point: because what the FUCK was that ending?!!! EXCUSE ME?! I gotta FIX THAT SHIT.

There will come a day when the strength of my hope for an unambiguously happy ending in a queer(-coded? is the source originally bl or is this its own thing?) wuxia drama is rewarded....but it is not this day. I must fix this myself.

Jiao Liqiao's laugh is one of the most annoying things I've ever heard. I was reaaaaally hoping someone would just up and stab her during one of her little evil laughing fits. At one point I was shouting "KILL HER, KILL HER" at my screen because I could NOT take anymore of her (unfortunately, I did in fact have to take more of her).

I still think her insistence on being obsessed with DFS is hysterical when he is so VISIBLY only interested in LLH. Explicitly STATES that his only life purpose is to fuck fight LLH again. Babygirl (derogatory) he is so fucking gay let's get you a nice knife to the gut instead, okay?

I thought the whole Shan Gudao plot was interesting, going from looking desperately for his body -> putting him to rest -> hunting for his murderer -> finding out he's alive/the mastermind behind everything going wrong (which I was proud of myself for realizing before the reveal, I'm normally bad at that) -> thwarting him with sass and superior martial arts at every possible turn -> killing him stone fuckin dead with beginner level skills because he's so up his own hole he can't see that's what's happening - was really fun!

He also has a SUPER annoying laugh he can fuck off

OH OH OH MARTIAL ARTS SKILL OF TRANS YOUR GENDER?! I MARRIED HER SO HER AFFAIRS ARE MY BUSINESS NOT YOURS??? ASKING YOUR WIFE FOR HER FORGIVENESS AND UNDERSTANDING AS YOU LAY DYING AND SHE GIVES IT TO YOU?????? OKAYYYYYYY

The twist at the end that LLH is the one with royal blood was so funny to me. Like it's a good twist and I love that Shan Gudao was just quite literally always a fuckin try-hard loser in ways he didn't even know, but also it was SO funny. Granny coming in clutch at the last fuckin minute with secret knowledge she just literally never shared.

LLH is such a smooth motherfucker. Shame about his insistence on dying when quite literally everyone (bar the people who suck) is begging this man to just live. Just LIVE DAMN IT!!!!! I really liked it when FDB begs him to just consider his own life as important for ONCE and remember that people care about him because YES his self-sacrificing and committment to Chilling Out Farmer Style was not the mercy he thought it was!

LIVE AND GROW OLD WITH DI FEISHENG YOU DAMN IDIOT (the likelihood of me resisting the urge to write at least the one fic for them is zero to none)

Unironically love spitting up blood as a plot device and this show is no different. The Drama. The Panache. The desperation of everyone around you because you have BLOOD coming out of your MOUTH and you are FAINTING. Poison acting up? Spit blood. Someone bitch slap you with their magical palm ability? Spit blood. Get stressed? Spit blood. Get stabbed? Spit blood. It's always good!

Okay I think that might be all I've got for now, if I think of anything else I'll add them in a reblog. I thoroughly enjoyed it, would definitely recommend!

#mysterious lotus casebook #my thoughts #for whatever they're worth #it was nice too because unlike say Word of Honor I didn't mind the overarching plot about the jianghu #and the magical cures/objects that everyone is racing/fighting each other to get to first #WOH was just plain boring outside of the interpersonal relationships in my opinion #but in this there were only a few times I really just did not care about the latest fetch quest and wanted to get back to the relationships

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cowbot-lumberjane · 1 year ago

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Tactile Sensations

Short story about being trans under the cut. I do feel like some of it is a bit on the nose, but I hope you'll humor me. I had a lot of fun writing this, I hope you enjoy.

Morning is different now, the same way everything else is. Light filters into her photoreceptors and she has a difficult time telling if it's real or not. Memories of how the light felt on her skin back home, how the wind felt in her hair, how the sand felt on her skin, all filtered through a dull thrum in the back of her head. “What time is it…?” Her voice called out to the assistance drone parked in its charging bay. Its eyes shimmered to life at the call, and the smooth metallic being lurched forth on spindle-thin legs. “Current station time is eight-twenty-two. Good morning Cassie, I hope you slept well.” Their voice was as monotone as ever, but she could sense the melancholic concern beneath it. She’d gone to bed early again last night, much earlier than ever before. “I slept for…twelve hours?” “Nearly, ten hours and forty-five minutes exactly. Do you feel rested?” She couldn’t tell, not yet, she wasn’t quite acclimated enough. “I…I think so. Thank you, Levy.” “Of course, Cassie, would you like some coffee? I can put a pot on for you while you get dressed and-” “Coffee sounds great, thank you. I’ll be in the bathroom.” Levy emitted a low tone that sounded like a sad animal before strutting off out of the room.

Cassie climbed out of the pile of blankets she slept in and trudged her way to the bathroom. It still rattled her how conscious she was of every step now. The mirror greeted her in the same half-hearted way it had been recently. A being with tired eyes and ragged hair blinked back at her with the soft glow of amber sensors. “You look like shit.” It said in a voice detached from her throat. “You look like shit and everyone looks at you weird now. Aren’t you happy?” Muffled static fizzled behind every word, rotating servos clicked maliciously as she combed her hair and washed her face, she could barely feel the water. She hadn’t showered in days because she didn’t feel the need to now. She could barely feel her skin, and it didn’t create the same day-to-day dirt that it used to anyway. Her clothes made her feel better though. Hiding the barely visible seams of her skin beneath a soft sweater and flowing skirt made her want to sleep less, for now. “Cassie! Your coffee is ready!” That was her que. “Time to put on that brave face, unless you want to disappoint them again.”

With her senses intact she caught the smell of freshly brewed coffee drifting from the kitchen of her small apartment. Levy always stocked real coffee ever since she mentioned off hand that the synthesized packs needed twice as much to taste the same. “Milk and sugar, just like always. I even made some banana-nut nutribars too. You said you missed them the other day and I found a recipe on OuterNet.” What happened in response to this? Pressure built behind her eyes as she took the cup and nodded thankfully. The taste was the same, perfect in every way, and the bars reminded her of home again. “Cassie…?” The assistance drone crooned in that same sad animal tone. She looked over to Levy somewhat confused. “Huh? Oh the coffee is great, Levy. It’s perfect, as always. A-And thank you for making these,” she gestured with a half eaten nutribar, “Just like I remember.” “Cassie, you are crying.” “What…? I’m…” Setting the bar down she prodded her face to find a steady stream of tears dripping into the coffee and wetting her sweater. “Oh, I am, aren’t I? I’m okay. Just, haven’t gotten used to everything just yet. The doctors said it could take time, remember? I’m okay, Levy. Really.” Levy made a small electronic chirping sound, a telltale sign that they were thinking hard about something.

“Cassie… I am worried about you.” They were trying their best to keep their helper-coded voice to its usual chipper monotone, but ever since she learned how to use her new ears she couldn't unhear the underlying emotion that came with every synthesized word. “Levy, I told you I-” “You have been shutting yourself in your room for two weeks now. You have not attempted to contact any of your friends or family. You have not attempted to talk to me…” Those last words stung the most. “L-Levy I'm fine. Okay? I'm still just having a hard time adjusting. The doctor's said this would happen. I'll be fine. I just need to get through this funk.” Levy’s chirping resumed. “Okay Cassie. I trust you. But please, if you need anything, I am here. I have always been here for you, and I always will be.” She knew that, why wasn’t it obvious? If she thought it was a problem she would have said something, right? Levy had been there since she was woken up, through all the medical appointments, all the moving and transport shuttles, all of it. They should know that she would say something. She should know that. “I know Levy, thank you…” Levy nudged her shoulder with one of their manipulators and she embraced them lightly. “I’ll call Leeda today, see if she wants to hang out for a while. I could probably use the fresh air anyway. How about that?” Levy let out a pleased fluting tone and nodded their chassis up and down a few times. “That is a great idea! I will clean things up here while you are out. Let me know when you are leaving!” They scurried off to start refolding the nest she had risen from moments before, leaving her alone to cast a look of dread at her communicator.

“Fuck… What do I even say? ‘Sorry I’ve been gone for two weeks! My family treats me weird now so I needed to shut myself in my room for a while! How’ve you been?’ yeah right… Just, call her, ask if she wants to go to the Atrium. You like the Atrium. Go for a walk. Yeah. Yeah, I can do that. I can…I can do that…” Her thumb hovered over the confirm key for a few moments, the slightest twitch of hesitation surging beneath her numb skin. “Hello? Cassie? Cassie?! Is there interference?! Helloooooo?!” “Leeda! Hey! Uh…How are you?” The rasp of Leeda’s aqualung respirator fired up as her shrill voice screeched through the speaker. “HOW ARE YOU?! YOU DISAPPEAR OFF THE STATION FOR TWO WHOLE WEEKS AND THAT’S WHAT YOU SAY?! HOW ARE YOU?! I’VE BEEN WORRIED SICK! KEEN’S BEEN WORRIED SICK! WE’VE ALL BEEN WORRIED-” “Leeda please don’t yell…” Her reply came like a wounded hound, limping through the dead air it created. “Sorry, Cassie, you know how worked up I get. Do you wanna hang out today? Keen and I were going to walk around the promenade, you could tag along!”

She wanted to tell her that she didn’t like Keen all that much, that the way he put in little effort to remember her name was annoying at best and soul crushing at worst. She wanted to say how Keen had been a large part of her having to talk to her family so early, and that she regretted ever bringing it up with him. She wanted to tell her about all the snide things she’d heard Keen say about her when he thought she wasn’t within earshot, and berate her for not believing her when she brought it up the last time they saw each other, bust most of all, she wanted to just say no. “That sounds great! I was uh, I was thinking about going to the gardens today… Any chance you two would wanna take the walk there?” Leeda’s beak clicked together in satisfaction on the other end. “Yes! Yes yes yes! That’s a great idea! I’ll get Keen and we’ll meet you there!”

Before she could reply the excitable Vessik had already hung up, plans solidified within a contract of silence that hung over her as she examined her appearance. “Levy?” The droid came scampering back into the kitchen, pile of folded blankets in hand. “I’m gonna go meet Leeda and Keen at the Atrium, we’re going for a walk in the gardens.” Levy chirped in reply, “That is great! I will finish cleaning and then go shopping for the week. Would you like me to pick up anything for you? The doctor recommended a particular type of coolant, I can look for it if you would like.” Her face was grim as the front door slid open to reveal the balcony walkway of her apartment building, morning light lapping at the edges of her shadow. “Yeah…that’d be nice… I’ll see you around, Levy.”

Outside the ever-turning rings of Axial-Tilt Four rotated in their never-ending cosmic waltz. She remembered first being woken up on the station. How she was one of just five colonists to be successfully woken up from their methuselah chambers, and how sick she was by the end of it all. “You have a decision here, we want you to be aware. We won’t do anything you don’t want us to. Things are better now, I promise.” Those words played over and over and over as her reflection walked next to her out in the stars. In her mind there was still a piece of her wishing she had perished with the others on that ship, it was louder on days like this. How easy would it have been to just live in that dream forever, to not have to go through all the pain and trouble of changing and fixing herself in the hopes of feeling more like herself. “The procedures are free, you won’t pay anything. We just want to make sure you understand that this comes with a potentially long recovery period. Some people acclimate quickly, but a lot of factors can cause it to take longer than expected. You’re sure?” If she had said no, where would she be? How many layers of trapped would she be in right now? Trapped on this station, trapped in the medical sector, trapped in a hospital, trapped in a room, trapped in a bed, trapped in her old body. She felt something then that stopped her in her tracks a few feet from the tram shuttle entryway. Her skin crawled at the thought.

It was there as she stood staring down at her hand that she failed to notice the fast approaching cephalopod towing along a short wiry human man. Leeda crashed into her with all the force of a wet jacket, vessik didn’t have a bone structure so it was less dangerous and more unpleasant that the two collided. All she could manage was a staunch “Ooufh” before Leeda’s happy trills and pleased beak clicking filled the air. “CASSIIIIIEEEE!” “H-Hey, Leeda, scrap that kinda hurt…” Leeda recoiled playfully, “Sorry! I think my com hit your forehead! Keen! Keen look, it's Cassie!” Keen, who was still tapping away at the keys of his own communicator, looked up for a brief moment with a rather tired look in his eyes. “Yeah! Yeah hey D. Long time no see, half a lunar cycle even, you been okay?” She could only grit her teeth so hard behind her lips before she had to respond. That single letter moniker dug under her nails and made her hands itch as she fiddled with the hem of her sweater. “Yyyyyyep, been fine. We going for a walk, or what?” A little more confidence, there we go, stare him down and make him uncomfortable. The show of half-hearted social dominance came with the tossing of her unkempt hair, pushing tangles of curls well in need of a touch up into a sad ponytail that lagged behind her head.

Axial-Tilt Four’s atrium might have been her favourite place on the gargantuan colony station. Four had been built with livability in mind, and unlike its three sister stations had a vast array of parks and botanical gardens planned out for the populace. Her favourite of them all was this one though. It was themed after the western coastal regions, a place from old Terra known as the Cascade Mountains, a place she knew as the Oregon regional district. The expanse of carefully created land emulated the pine forests and rocky cliffs of her birthplace in a near perfect display. This was where she did most of her thinking, this was where she felt most at home in the future she’d awoken to. “So uh, what have you two been up to?” “Work.” Keen shot back almost immediately, kicking a stone down the path ahead. “Yeah they’ve got him pulling double shifts until the next shuttle gets here, that last expedition crew took a good number of administration officers with it.” Leeda’s tone was more forgiving, still with that cheerful timbre behind it. “As for me, I've just been in school! This tri-segment has been rough. Getting all the certs to join the banking guild is haaaard.” Cassie nodded along to the words, two weeks had passed and nothing had changed, but yet something stirred within her. The three sat down around a concrete picnic table and exchanged a few more pleasantries. Mostly just Cassie listening to Leeda talk on and on about the intricacies of the Quaala Banking guild and how much math she was having to learn. It wasn’t until Keen piped up from whatever book he was clicking through that she felt the need to speak again.

“So D.-” “Cassie, or Cass, or Cassandra. I’m really not picky, you know.” Her tone was quick, sharp, laced with venom and she hoped he felt it. His eyes widened a bit, but the relaxed look he always had soon returned. “Right right, Cass. How’s the ol’ data entry goin’? Heard you guys got a fresh round of computers in at that processing place you work at. I helped sign off on the shipment, reminded me of you.” Her mind scrolled through dozens of possible lies, but settled unfortunately on the truth. “I’m still on leave… They uh, they give you as long as you need as long as you do regular check-ins with a doctor so, I’ve just been uh…around I guess.” gone was the violence that she had struck back at Keen with, replaced by the timid growl of synthesized vocal chords and nervously clicking finger servos. “Aaaah gotcha, gotcha… So uh… How long do you think you’re gonna… You know, how long do you think it’s gonna take?” How did she answer that? How could she face the reality of her situation? How dare he. How dare he put her in this situation. Made to confront her own bodily neglect and unwillingness to conform completely to the form that she wanted. Clearly she had made a mistake, clearly somewhere along the way she had jumped to a conclusion she could have been talked out of, clearly- “I’m not sure, honestly… I’ve been having some difficulty with the nerve bonding part as of late… I can’t feel stuff very well unless I really try and focus. I have an appointment to get them re-tuned soon though, so, maybe that’ll help.”

Something caught her in the arm. A flick sent from in front of Keen’s snide smirking face. Leeda prodded at him to stop, calling him rude but chuckling along with him as he jokingly added, “Did you feel that?” She stood, fists balled so tightly their clicking was audible, or at least she hoped it was. “Why did I do this? Why do I keep trying to hang out with you?” And off she stormed down a branching path nearby. “What- Hey! D.! D.! Come back! Hey!” She gave them one last glance from over her shoulder before she continued her hurried trek down a path and into a small clearing. She felt it this time, the tears on her face, the pressure behind her eyes. The dam she had built had broken, and in a moment of peace among the swaying pine branches, she wept. It happened there, when it all broke down around her. The carefully constructed walls of denial let loose everything she’d been holding back, and there, right there, she felt something. She felt everything. Every blade of grass, the wind on her face, the dirt beneath her legs, all of it. Her sobs mixed with bubbling laughter as something within her clicked into place. Catharsis never happens when you want it to, the same as true right now. She’d always pictured herself having this moment while at home, hugging Levy and quietly crying into a pillow or something. Rarely did the thought of sobbing in the dirt somewhere out in the woods of Atrium park Cascade cross her mind. A voice called out from some nearby shrubbery, and she looked over to see Leeda tiredly making her way up an incline and into the clearing.

“Cassie! Thank fuck, I found you, oh my fucking stars I found you… Just… Just give me a minute…” She reached up with a tentacled hand and clicked in a button on her aqualung to inject a fresh boost of oxygenized kelp mist into the gently flowing blue formula that allowed her to breath in the open air. “Whew! Much better. Cassie!” Once again the squishy woman threw herself around her friend, arms spiraling around Cassie’s in a distinctly vessik styled hug. “I’m so sorry about Keen… I’ve been talking to him about that garbage and I thought he would at the very least behave but I-” Cassie held a feeling finger up to her beak. “Leeda… Hush… Please… I’ve made my decision, I should have said something… I don’t want to hang out with Keen anymore.” Leeda’s head fins flapped at the statement with inquisitive affirmation. “I know! I mean, I figured, I just thought, well, you two had been through so much and… Then he and I started dating and I always felt like I was intruding on your friendship and… I’m sorry, Cassie…” Cassie laid her head on her friend’s shoulder. “I don’t… I don’t like how long it took us to get to this… It should have been solved way earlier… He doesn’t treat me well… He outed me to my family for fucks sake…” Her words were heavy and laden with the memories they carried. Leeda nodded, “I know… And I should have been more active in helping you instead of worrying about getting in the way. I haven’t been a great friend, Cassie, I’m sorry.”

Cassie shook her head. “I don’t want you to be sorry, Leeda… I just want it to stop… I want Keen to go away, I want it all to just, get better already…” Leeda’s cold grip loosened from her arms as she scooted into a position better suited for Cassie to prop herself up with. “It will! It will get better, we’ll start on that right now. Keen and I were already talking about splitting up, to be entirely honest, we were going to talk it out over lunch when you called.” “Really? Shit, sorry I got in the way of your breakup.” Leeda’s trilling laugh shook the pine needles around them. “Oh no you’re fine! If anything this probably sped things up a bit… After you walked off I got pretty mad at him and he brought up me ‘always taking your side’ in things again so I told him to take a hike.” Cassie stifled a laugh. “Did you actually say that while out on a hiking trail?” A cluster of tentacle fingers poked her in the shoulder. “No but I should have! Dammit why do you have to think of all the clever things to say!” For the first time in an honest while, the two shared a laugh. Eventually they decided to simply sit and enjoy the breeze, but Leeda’s curiosity infamously knew no bounds, and it wasn’t too long before a question lingered between them.

“So… I know you two are like, childhood buddies, but how long have you actually known each other?” Cassie was tracing patterns in the dirt, but stopped when the memories of her old home flooded back to her. “We grew up together, back on Terra… Our parents knew each other so we spent a lot of time playing video games and going on hikes in the public sectors. At one point I thought I had a crush on him but that was a whole different thing… When the Methuselah project came along his dad was one of the chief engineers on the whole thing. He got both our families spots on the colony ships. I didn’t want to leave but, it was very clear that Terra wasn’t going to be the future anyone hoped it would be… I remember the last day before we went into the pods he said, ‘see you in the future!’ and that gave me some kind of weird confidence boost… Like, maybe everything would be okay… And you know the rest. The ship got recovered a few centuries later with a few pods in tact, I got cryo-sickness and he didn’t, and I took the opportunity to act on something I was always afraid of doing back home…” She examined her hand then. How carefully crafted it had been just for her. Bulky but still different enough from her old hands so that she could tell the difference. “What made you consider cybernetics?” Leeda’s usual cheer was replaced with a softer, more genuine curiosity, one that told Cassie she could refuse the question if she wanted.

“It wasn’t much of a choice, really. The doctors told me that I could either go for the cyber-bod or just continue to get treatments. The treatments weren’t terrible, but I was in bad shape, I wouldn’t have been living much of a life outside the medical center. So I took the cybernetics, and the chance to finally… be me.” A stray tear rolled down her cheek. “You couldn’t have transitioned back on Terra?” A more complicated question than she would’ve cared for. She could have but she was too close to her original family, too close to Keen, all people who weren’t very accepting of the idea. “It wasn’t a good time to try… And I was scared… But I thought that, maybe since it was just Keen and I, you know, maybe I could go for it. Maybe he’d come around and maybe he’d regret telling my new folks about it without my permission… But here we are, huh?”

Leeda nodded. “Here we are… I’m still so sorry he did that.” Cassie shook her head. “For the record, my parents have been nothing but supportive… It was just the weight of it all… My depression was keeping me from fully acclimating to my cybernetics and that piled on just so fucking much dysphoria you have no idea… But, you said it… We can make it better now. Keen can take a hike, fuck that guy. I think I’ll call my moms when I get home… Haven’t talked to them in nearly two lunar cycles now, bet they’re gonna tell me off real good for it… Thank you, Leeda, for apologizing. I still think I need some time to like, sort this whole thing out in my head but, I’ll be in touch, okay?” The two stood and exchanged another hug. “Whenever you’re feeling up to it, we should hang out again! I know this really cool thrift shop on the promenade, I could show you!” Cassie chuckled, “I do love a good cheap sweater.” She twirled a bit, striking a half-hearted pose before collapsing into laughter. It felt good, to get some of it out. Her shoulder still slouched a bit on the walk to the tram shuttle, and she felt exhausted when she finally did get home. But the tactile sensations she felt along the way brought a delicate smile to her face.

When she arrived at her apartment she greeted Levy with a solid hug and took a shower while they made lunch. She ran the water cold and stood under to feel the chill snake its way up her spine. The face in the mirror didn’t sneer at her when she looked at it this time, and with a wry smile it repeated the words she whispered aloud, “There she is.” The rest of the day was quiet. A long conversation with her mothers about what had been going on, a conversation with her doctor about how her acclimation had finally progressed, and then some of the most restful sleep she’d gotten in weeks. That night she dreamt of the gardens, she dreamt of visiting her mothers up on Hab level two, she dreamt of standing on that beach back home as the water around her crashed into the rocky cliffs of the coastline. When she finally woke up, half past noon this time, her eyes fluttered to life with the bright glow of amber sensors. Morning is different now, just like everything else is.

#my stuff #my art #my writing #scifi #sci fi #sci-fi #trans #todv #trans day of visibility #cyborg girl #cyborg #writing #short story

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mxgoldenwood · 4 months ago

Text

I might delete this later but sometimes you just need to scream into the void.

I feel like I’m spiraling out and my emotional state is SO bad this week, and I’m not willing to make myself a burden to any one person by reaching out to talk about it (I know this is not a healthy mindset but, well, see above, re: spiraling out). This is about the best I can manage right now.

It’s hard to describe how it feels to be trans/NB, mostly not out in my day-to-day life, and to be watching current events play out as they have been this week. Maybe other people in my position will read this and be able to relate, but maybe not. I’m just screaming into the void here, in the hopes of easing this pit in my stomach. There’s a lot of fear, and guilt, and general distress— feeling afraid and angry for those folks who are facing the most immediate and dangerous effects right now, and feeling guilty about not being more visible alongside them. Distressed about the state of the world in general. I hesitate to label “self loathing” but there’s something a bit like that in there, too, because I feel like I’m not doing enough and at the same time I feel like I’m overwhelmed to the point of barely keeping my own head above water.

I feel like I’m too trans to be entirely safe from what’s happening right now and like I’m not trans enough to actually seek out support or take up anyone’s time and energy to talk about it. I feel like I’m lucky compared to a lot of folks because I pass as my assigned gender at birth and I haven’t ever taken steps to transition beyond using they/them pronouns sometimes online. I’ve never brought it up in medical appointments or even with my previous (deeply wonderful) therapist, because I was too afraid of the response I would get.

I have a supportive partner and friends who know and respect my journey, and I still feel like the world is caving in, every time I think about anything beyond that small circle.

So I’m more thin-skinned than I’ve been in years and I’m touchy and anxious, and it takes so much of a struggle to reach out to anyone, but I’m still trying to stay connected where I can manage it, and I’m trying to appreciate and be grateful for the ones who have reached out to me. It’s hard to stay positive right now but I want to try. I know we’re all struggling and I don’t want to place unfair expectations on my friends or family, so I’m reminding myself that we all deserve a little extra grace right now— myself included. If it’s hard to be optimistic, maybe I shouldn’t be mad at myself for that, just like it doesn’t help to get mad at anyone else, either, if they are having the same problem I am.

TLDR: I just feel like my vibe is off right now, like I can’t help but expect too much of myself and the people around me, and like my distress is a burden that no one else asked for.

I usually prefer to end on a positive, helpful note in some way or another— even when I’m stressed out and spiraling. I’m just screaming into the void here, but all I can say is that I want us to be able to give ourselves grace, because I feel like we’re going to need it.

#text post #personal #us politics #no real comments on this beyond what’s in the post #I just feel tired and angry and stressed out and I’m sorry to everyone I’ve been weird with lately

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jeankirsteinsgrlfrnd · 1 year ago

Note

NSFW Request:

I’d love to see Trans fem reader finally letting her boyfriend Armin touch her down there after feeling so insecure about it for ages!

pairing: armin arlert x transfem!reader

word count: 1.2k+

tw: body dysmorphia, insecurity, mention of sex, sliiight dirty talk, kissing, sort of smutty??

a/n: im not transgender myself and have not gone through any experiences you might have, so i tried my best to craft this as beautifully and thoughtfully as i could. this fic is mainly very sweet, lots of fluff from armin. please, please let me know if you like it!

18+ | MDNI | NSFW

armin was the best boyfriend you could have asked for, truly. he had the kindest soul you’d ever known and a certain type of patience you couldn’t quite grasp. no one had ever been this gentle with you or been so understanding. armin was a god-send, crafted meticulously by angels themselves.

you were proud of who you were. you felt no shame in being transgender and neither did armin. he was never embarrassed to be your partner; he was only ever infatuated with you and your femininity. he adored you from head to toe and he begged you to let him show you just how much. despite being mostly comfortable with yourself, there were still some lingering insecurities that couldn’t just be washed off at the end of a long day. you were just a girl, after all.

armin wasn’t pushy when it came to sex but you could tell just how bad he wanted you. it made you feel guilty. you wanted to be able to do this for him, to strip down naked, baring your body and soul for him to see. it was just hard. incessant worries flooded your brain every time you thought about the topic. would he still love me? what if he changes his mind?

the day you decided to show armin all of you was a day you’d never forget, even if you had tried to. the way he was unflinching at your naked body, eyes filled with lust and love, was still burned sharply in your mind to this day.

the day you took that next step was a lazy one. it was pouring rain and armin was off from work for the day. you two spent the day together, reveling in the company of one another from the safety of your couch. your legs were draped over his and you let out a sigh. it was blissful here in your own private slice of heaven. the sound of your exhale drew the attention of your lover.

“hmm, what is it?” armin asked, peeling his eyes away from whatever romcom was on the television and turned to face you. he squeezed your calf lovingly. the simple gesture was enough to let you know he was listening and that he was here.

“i’m just happy to spend the day with you.” you admitted, a slight smile tugging at the corner of your lips.

“i’ve never been so happy for a rainy day, either.” he softly smiled, his voice calm and sweet. armin was truly beautiful. the way his blond hair was just slightly a mess…it was captivating to look at. you found yourself falling into silence as you studied your boyfriend, the pitter patter of rain in the background. “what’s wrong, baby?” he questioned, hints of concern emerging through his voice.

“nothing,” you sighed and turned back to the movie. “nothing at all.”

“(y/n.)” armin’s voice changed from concern to a certain kind of demand. it was enough to make you turn back around to face him. “what’s bothering you?”

“i want you, armin.” you looked out at the window, afraid of making eye contact.

“you have me. i’m right here.” he raised an eyebrow, unsure of just what you were trying to get across.

“no, armin. i want you.” you repeated, your voice quieter the second time around. feelings of anxiety you’d tried to push away were now bubbling violently in the pit of your stomach, begging to be heard. you swallowed loudly.

armin’s face fell and it became too silent for your liking. the way he was looking at you now, you felt like you were already naked. you crossed your arms over your chest because you felt entirely too visible for your own liking. “you do?” he asked, voice just above a whisper. there was a twinge of excitement dripping from each word. he had been patient with you, understanding your hesitation of taking it another step farther. he was never able to ease your nerves, no matter how much he reassured you that it wouldn’t change anything and that he’d still love you, perhaps more if that was even possible. so, hearing those words from your mouth was a dream to him.

you nodded, biting your lip. questions raced through your mind so loud, so furiously that you almost didn’t hear what armin said next.

“you’re sure?” it was a question, tumbling out a little forceful. armin couldn’t mask his eagerness to feel you, to have you. nodding was the only thing you could do. he shook his head. “i need you to say it for me.” his eyes, blue and serious, were unshifting.

“i’m ready, armin.”

“if you want me to stop, you tell me to stop, alright?”

“okay.”

as armin positioned himself just over you, some of the anxiety turned into butterflies. his lips were against your neck now, soft, leaving little trails of kisses. “thank you,” his breath was hot against the side of your neck. “i’m going to make you feel good, okay?” armin’s voice was gentle and his hands were just the same, cruising along your curves. soft moans came from your mouth as he nibbled the sweet spot on your neck.

“armin.” your voice was hushed. he mumbled a ‘hmm?’ into your neck, hands sliding under your shirt. “i love you.” it was true, you loved him. and your love was enough to mask the deep rooted fears that once tore apart your brain.

armin pulled away from your neck, his face now inches from yours. he leaned in slowly and gently pressed his sweet, pink lips to yours. “and i love you.” he murmured, going in for yet another. his hands wandered down away from your chest to your waistband. you could feel his fingers teasing you. “do you want me to touch you?” he asked, the same gentleness still there, now just with a hint of hunger.

“please.” you didn’t need to say anything more. armin left another tender kiss as a response. he sat back as his fingers fumbled with the button of your pants. you couldn’t take your eyes off of him. you raised your hips, allowing him to slide your pants down. left in your underwear, you felt vulnerable. part of you wanted to squeeze your legs shut and curl into a ball, shielding yourself from his prying eyes. then, you felt one hand on your hip and another pressing against the front of your laced underwear. swallowing, you looked up at armin with wide eyes. his face didn’t change, waiting for you to say something, to encourage him or stop him.

“tell me to stop, (y/n.) tell me if you don’t want this.” his voice was husky. you could see he didn’t want you to turn him away, the lust in his eyes all to prevalent. there was an insatiable hunger.

“touch me, armin.” you pleaded, words dripping with anticipation. his hands were warm against your skin, soft and making goosebumps appear on your stomach. you knew you had made the right decision in giving yourself to armin from the way he was touching you. the carefulness, the hesitation in his hands. he wanted to devour you whole but he was restraining, just for his poor, sweet, girlfriend.

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auggieoof · 6 months ago

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Diary entry #17

Vent I guess

Ed warning and dysphoria and sh

I wish I could be normal about my weight. I'm overweight. If I looked like a guy then I think I could forgive it but I don't and know my curves are more visible everyday and I want to die!! /hj on that last part

The universe is cruel in the way that I can't lose weight unless I eat like triple digits (calorie wise) every day because I binge so fucking much. So I don't fit in normal or even ed communities online because I'm like that.

Nothing I have ever done has ever fixed my binging problem. I think it's a medicine side effect thing but my grandparents don't want me to change them. I don't know why.

When I was in my active ed phase I wanted to shrink to the point where my chest would become small enough to be male passing. That was the main reason. I know I wouldn't pass as male bc of my voice but I just wanted some control over my stupid life.

I feel like a hamster on a wheel, going nowhere. I can't go on T in my house because i would be quickly caught, so I have to move out but moving out is hard. I just want to be a guy and I don't understand why it's a problem.

I wish that there was a way to make my grandparents understand that this dysphoria will kill me one way or another. But I think they've already made their mind, there's nothing I can say. I could try to cut my breasts off and they would just think I'm more mentally ill and send me to the ward.

I could kill myself and they wouldn't wonder why for a second, they would think "oh she was just mentally ill." They don't listen to me and don't want to. I think me killing myself would be a better ending for them than me being trans and thriving, although they'd never admit it.

They aren't even bad people, they have a lot of flaws and this is one of them. A really, really bad flaw, but they really think being trans is evil.

Just ruminating here I guess

#august's diary #trans #transgender #trans rights #trans man #transmasc #ftm #pansexual #lgbt #lgbtq #hrt #cw vent #transmaculine #trans ftm

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saltymcsaltything · 1 year ago

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I know I am conditioned by trauma to see red flags everywhere and assume the worst of anyone I don't know and trust because experience has shown that it's the safer default, so it's very hard not to see malice and contempt in the behavior and words of @photomatt

But I am trying to turn that off enough to appeal to reason, because in reflecting on his most recent posts in particular, I think it's possible, however much my instincts scream otherwise, that he's just ignorant of what the trans community experiences and actually can't understand why we see his words and actions as harmful and transphobic.

This entire debacle keeps making me think of the double empathy problem - he cannot possibly understand the truly vile hate and abuse we are exposed to on this site or the lengths even small blogs have to go to in order to curate our experience into something that feels remotely safe. Many of us have been physically and sexually assaulted because of our gender and we are at risk of being murdered. TERFs on this site *gleefully celebrate the deaths of trans people including children* and actively target people with a history of self harm and suicidal ideation. That is the context of trans lives that has him painting us as toxic for mocking him and his overreaction to 'threats' that most of us wouldn't even bat an eye at. I don't doubt that anons and DMs have been sent to him that are far worse than the hammer car thing, but he's still only seeing a tiny sliver of the hate levelled against trans people. Maybe if he considers how what he is experiencing happens every day ending with Y for any trans blogger with a sizeable following and that Tumblr's track record for taking action against that is beyond abysmal, he might snap out of this pattern of centering himself over the user's who have been pushed past their breaking point by the years of failure in addressing biased moderation and complete lack of visible action against hate speech. If he does, maybe there's an opportunity to actually see something positive come from this.

@photomatt, I am going to attempt to put aside my visceral aversion to so much of what you've said and done over the last few days and try to get you to understand *why* you've faced the backlash you have, because it is clear you do not really understand our experiences and cannot empathize with them. And please don't claim that you do, your actions and tone towards us say otherwise and it's insulting to watch you claim allyship when you have contributed to the harm we endure on a daily basis. You need to sit with th knowledge that you have hurt us because of your ignorance, reflect, and start actually listening to us. Stop centering yourself and work to see what your actions, words, and the past and present failures of Tumblr as an organization have done to the trans community. Keep in mind that you admitted to having a contract moderator that was actively targeting us and colluding with others to do the same, and understand that the harm done by that didn't disappear when they were dealt with - if anything disclosing that ripped open gaping wounds, and your actions since have poured salt in them.

I doubt this is worth the effort at this point since you seem to have fully entrenched your defensiveness and your framing of a community in the current political climate that is constantly under threat of actual, life threatening physical violence for the crime of existing as "toxic", but if you have even an ounce of humility and genuine desire to support us, I hope you'll consider taking a step back and reflecting on your recent behavior from the perspective of users who have seen communities they have painstakingly built on Tumblr where we had a modicum of safety repeatedly decimated by disastrous policies and practices, and who have for years been actively targeted by bigots who want to see us erased from existence and openly brag about their attacks. Put yourself in the shoes not of a CEO but someone who's existence is under theat on multiple levels on a daily basis, and then read the way that you, the most powerful person on the platform talks about a member of the community who was the target of a malicious campaign of harassment, mass reporting, hate speech, vile accusations and death threats. Try to see what we see - especially the avoidance of the biggest issue for the community, which is the harassment campaign that TERFs are gloating about in the notes of your posts.

Behavior is communication, and your behavior feels *abusive* given your position of power in the context of what we face on a daily basis. Users desperate for a scrap of hope that the common threats that we are faced with on this platform might be dealt with in a meaningful way saw the most powerful person on the platform focusing solely on the "violations" of a single user who was being brigaded by one of the most vitriolic and toxic groups on the platform. Not addressing the harassment being visited on her spoke volumes - it told us you *do not care* about the harm that is done to us on a daily basis by bad actors, but you absolutely care about whats directed at you and @staff. While I sympathize with line level employees who are caught in the cross fire of the backlash you incited with your ignorance and callous disregard for a community that is routinely traumatized, I don't have much empathy to spare for those in leadership who have a level of power and privilege no ordinary user on this platform comes close to having, especially after witnessing how quickly you will wield that power to protect *your* in-group and yourself from a *sliver* of the abuse the trans community endures on a daily basis. It was sickening witnessing how quickly blogs mocking you were banned when people who have done *far worse* to us for years have been able to do so with impunity under your watch when all it would take us for you to look at a single report of the hate and abuse we report and wield the same ban hammer against people who should have been held accountable *years* ago. Knowing you would do for you and yours but not for us is utterly depressing.

And it's not only the trans community dealing with hate speech, death threats and harassment, but in this instance that was who your behavior was harming when you showed what you were capable of doing to protect your people when the issue you repeatedly failed to address but clearly could have was the *massive* flood of hate that the trans community repeatedly reports but sees scant evidence of any response. If there *is* meaningful action in the background, the lack of transparency makes it meaningless because from our perspective there isn't anything being dive to address mass coordinated harassment campaigns that *should* be easy to mask since so much of it is copy/paste anon hate spammed in asks. You claim standard policy is to not comment on moderation decisions but then decided to make an exception in this instance to, from our perspective, shit on a victim of a targeted smear campaign and make claims about their behavior that did not match the evidence you made available, while invoking law enforcement action against someone who is at increased risk of police violence and then doubling down on how much *you and your people* were being hurt when criticized for failing to address the entire situation and for centering your own feelings over an entire community who's suffering on your platform you fail to acknowledge.

Make an exception and tell us what you've actually done to address transphobic harassment. Not doing so when you made an exception to talk about the victim of one of their campaigns is a bad look and is part of why you are being accused of upholding and enabling systemic transphobia. Sticking to your policy of silence for transphobes but making an exception to talk about a banned trans user looks pretty biased,and given the well documented track record of Tumblr when it comes to bias against the LGBTQIA+ community, it's a really bad look. As CEO you should be sufficiently cognizant of the history of these issues and the ongoing problems with moderation to recognize how easy it is for users which have been conditioned to expect the worst to see this as biased. You desperately need to gain some perspective before putting your keystrokes out there on these issues

Your behavior has hurt vulnerable people. It has made people feel unsafe. You're angry about being called a transphobe, but your actions have harmed the trans community and your inaction in addressing those targeting us looks like tacit approval of their behavior. If you cannot clearly and unequivocally commit to take action against the transphobic harassment we face from malicious users on the platform, then your inaction creates and upholds systemic transphobia. Your intentions and principles are immaterial when the impact is harmful. If that hurts you so much to be called out for upholding and enabling transphobia, *do something about it*

I don't think you can be reached at this point and I am not even sure that assuming your intentions are not deliberately malicious is even reasonable, but I would sure like to be proven wrong for once.

But I won't hold my breath. Long before this situation I had blocked you for your ableist behavior regarding forced animations. Suggesting that disabled users could simply pay for premium features in order to have a safe user experience was a stunningly insensitive take. That comment belied your ignorance of the potentially fatal effects of visually triggered seizure disorders and the widespread prevalence and debilitating symptoms of other visually triggered conditions like vertigo and migraine. Your embrace of the prevailing societal opinion that actually, making disabled people pay more to exist at every possible opportunity is just good business was disheartening and caused me to write you off as a fake ally. All you have done recently is provide further evidence that my suspicions were well founded, and at this point if you don't wake up and start actually working to address your failures instead of becoming defensive and painting people you have hurt as toxic, you won't have any users left on this site but the transphobes you are protecting, inadvertently or otherwise. I guarantee other communities are watching you closely and spotting the sane red flags that the disability and trans communities have. You have a lot of work to do to repair the damage you've inflicted and to start actually fixing the problems that have plagued this site for years. None of us are going to want to support this site financially ever again if you continue to behave like this, so your threats to abandon Tumblr are toothless because people are already leaving. You have a chance to salvage this situation if you are actually willing to do the work, and then maybe you can actually monetize things on here in a way that doesn't alienate the user base so that people are actually happy to support the platform.

If you actually believe in the principles you posted, actively work to uphold them *here* take action to protect and support the trans community instead of stepping on a landmine you easily could have avoided by seeking perspective before responding. Prove that you are actually doing something about Nazis and transphobes - give us an option to report transphobic hate speech specifically and release metrics - reports submitted and actions taken. Hell, release metrics on all of the reports - some of those mass reporting campaigns should be pretty easy to spot.

Please actually give a shit about users. You have a great deal of power and you have welded it against vulnerable people. However justified you may feel in doing so, you're still contributing to harm, and you should rethink the way you respond because it makes you appear vindictive and capricious.

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visibun · 1 year ago

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Funny note about me suddenly being more openly passionate about lamias:

By default, I have prey brain. Full rabbit mode. I am bnuy. Hop hop wait why are you licking your lips like that

But, like... every very sudden once in a while, I get this "predator brain" impulse. And in those moments, lamias are all that I can think about

I seem to like projecting on the idea of a hybrid kind of lamia, that has the serpentine body of an African bush viper, with the tail ending of a rattlesnake. The human half is brown like me, but with pointed ears, and longer black hair that's either kept loose, or is tied back into a ponytail. The serpentine scaling will most likely extend into her human half; to what extent, I'm not sure just yet, but it might be covering everything up to and including her neck and minus her chest and stomach, leaving just her head/face, chest, and stomach down to her hips covered in human skin. These scales are tough, allowing her to take hard/sharp blows with minimal impact as if she were wearing armor.

She's wearing something light and easy to move in (maybe adjacent to a belly dancer's outfit, in black and antique gold), and is also kitted out with antique golden jewelry for vanity reasons. She's got teeth like a vampire's to showcase the marriage of her human and beast parts (all normal human teeth, but with sharper/more pronounced upper canines; those canines are where her venom flows to, and they don't retract since visible fangs are The Best), slitted golden eyes, a forked tongue, and sharp black nails (she's okay with melee weapons, but her combat preference stays at "hands, claws, and biting, with uncommon constricting").

She's also trans, has a small chest, and has defined/toned abs and arm muscles, of course, since this is me my hard projection that we're talking about. I just want her to have a body that's strong enough to do constricting, if deemed necessary! No thinly-veiled thirst motivations behind this choice at all.

The snake half is more along the lines of the colors/scales of the bush viper here (black scales + alternating black and yellow underbody), plus the rattle tail ending:

She's wearing jewelry on the tail, too, that's tied into the bottom-most notch there, that can be loudly and aggressively jingled about and clashed together as the tail is being shaken. Not sure what kind of jewelry, but something stringed/tasseled comes to mind.

She's long as fuck, by the way. To the song and dance of this visual:

Which, when laid out more accurately, looks like this:

So, like... picture this. If you will.

The enemy or target's been spotted, and now she's rearing up nice and horribly tall while hissing and bearing those sharp claws and teeth, all while there's a mix of heavy and rapid rattling and loud metal scraping and clanging behind her that all together are disheartening, distracting, and disorienting for whoever is standing in front of her, but is practically like a heart-racing and blood-pumping hybrid war song and battle cry to her for what's about to happen next. All the while, her eyes are locked on theirs, and she's got that confident, ruthless grin painted on her face, as if this fight was set to be the high point of her day.

And, because I exist for music, she fights to this song. Or, this song. I often choose either one of these two songs for exercising with kickboxing (to the point where I manually extended both of them to play on a nonstop loop for an hour, just so they last for the whole routine), so they always gets my blood rushing by default. And, with that scene description up there, it'd feel more like you're fighting a dragon rather than a serpent.

Do you get it. Do you see what I'm putting out there. Being a bunnygirl is nice and all, but I very badly want to be her, too. If I could draw, I would absolutely detail this as a sona for myself. But, at this rate, I might end up feeling enticed enough to just try and doodle her, anyway.

#v.txt #lamia #this has been a tangent. enjoy #can you see the part where this went from a quick 'i love lamias' post to 'here's my hard projection sona that i've clearly had for months'#i've just never had a moment or reason to bring her up until now. and clearly this was very long overdue because look at this fucking post #right down to a predefined choice in fighting theme music. she's been in the works for MONTHS (since i think early last summer)

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easily-bullied · 8 months ago

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alright updates. I texted them. things blew up. I was made to feel like my feelings exist to make the other person feel bad. that my having needs was unreasonable. and bigggg realization... that was a microcosm of the whole relationship. making myself as small as possible hoping that would be small enough and then it wasn't. real bad. a roller coaster. and I I was addicted to it. at least I have closure. at least I know that I can't and I won't go back. at least I know that they hurt me and I hurt me. at least I know I have the capacity to dilute myself still. that I can still go to that toxic well. I'm so fucking used to it. daddy issues. god.

so I move forward? god I'm desperate to be loved again though. like I have this need to have someone tell me I'm special. I was reading back what I wrote last time and it was both sad and enlightening. that girl was still so love sick. I'm sorry baby but that was a waste. not that I blame you. but I'm glad to see that lookin back in it feels like almost someone else. and it wasn't long ago or anything, just that door is firmly closed. by me. but hey girl in the past, they did miss you, they told me. and then they still couldn't prioritize your feelings in any way. same as always. me doing all the work for them. apologizing to myself for them, making excuses for them, limiting what I say for them. huh sounds like there might have been a reason you were so tired Momo.

god I'm loving writing again. mosa, don't forget this helps you. I forget every thought I have lol. when I record them and look at them again it's like oh RIGHT ya she figured that out. I need to give myself more credit.

a lot of people telling me that I have a life they're jealous lately. that's something to think about I guess. not to placate my depression or convince myself of something untrue, but to at least be grateful for the good things, the things I started to take for granted. a full social life, a found family, a great apartment, the perfect kitty, an identity that's growing and changing but there, firmly planted. I've been feeling like I'm not filled in lately, like I'm an outline. mosa give yourself grace. you're a sapling still. just planted. you still need extra water, you're still just making roots. but you're out of the soil, you're reaching for the sun, you're definitely visible and here. there's still lots to go and isn't that exciting? the tree you're becoming. the tree that you are, the seed that you were.

I hate that I'm going to have to just love myself. that that's the solution. god doesn't someone else wanna do that for me? can't I have someone be like oh wait you like vacuuming and I like loving you?! let's split the chores! oh well. more improvements needed I guess. never gonna be finished. always fighting my demons. guess I'm gaining exp (barf)

not me trying to focus on how at least I've fucked hotties all summer. like that's something I can hang my hat on. so stupid Mosa. well if I participate in hook up culture, I get to hook up with cuties. unfortunately I want to be WIFE. I am good at wife I think. apparently I'm good at hook ups too but thats less fulfilling. and I'm always trying to be good enough at hook up to become wife.

hey mosa, can I talk to you for a second. don't creep on ex's socials. bad idea. we've now felt bad again for 24 hours. stupid and you knew it. let's be stronger than that. let's brag about how strong we are. you deleted all that shit for a reason. let's forget about it. god mosa, you're a teenage girl at the end of the day. and it's cute but fair warning... those years suck. remember?? oh but I love so hard, oh but my feelings are so big. what a blessing. fuck me. seriously fuck me. I want a big feeling.

my new job is waking up and checking every dating app for new trans cuties and then swiping left on everyone and then being mad. it's GREAT for my mind. it's been so helpful. I feel so settled. I don't feel desperate and crazy AT ALL. can you settle down for one fucking second mosa? would it kill you to be alone?? you did it for 2 years, then after 4 months now you're like AAAAHHHGHH. pathetic.

you're not tho babes. it makes sense. we all want that. everyone you know wants that. and hilariously you're the one who had it most recently. why do you think you're never gonna find it? you're having the most luck! you're having the most sex! ingrate! (jk jk baby. you just got hurt bad.)

I should end this. but it's good to get down the big things. they hurt you. you're mad. you're moving on. it's their loss (classic bs) but you know they feel that too. how do I stop people from falling in love with me they said. and I know the answer, it's don't tell them you're falling in love too. that would help. minimize their own feelings, maximize mine. that fucking sucks. and meanwhile I did the opposite lmfao. I fucking suck. ok now go find love or else you'll have to die

#transfem #breakup #diary

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transmenopause · 1 year ago

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Windy Roads

Transition looks different for everyone, if and when it happens, but my road is was definitely not what modern medicine considers "typical".

I was 35 when I came out as nonbinary/genderqueer - Genderfuck was my preferred term, but in professional spheres, it's hard to justify using. I'd been seriously considering what gender was, how I relate to it, and my relationship with society around gender since my early 20s. I'd played with gender expression and gender roles at home and in the bedroom, and with my partners, a lot. I was certain that I was not a cis woman, in any case.

But it was at a tech event, where they asked you to choose a pronoun flag to add to your lanyard, where I had a crisis of self, resulting in me grabbing all three flags (she, he, and they) and hiding in a closet for a couple hours trying them on. I couldn't be she, and he didn't fit right; they it was, and they it's been.

And even "they" isn't right, exactly; it's closer than the binary, but it isn't an excellent fit. I'd rather just not be referred to at all; but, that's not really feasible when I have to exist in the world.

Once I'd decided to be public about pronouns, I felt freer to experiment with presentation - not that my presentation had really ever been static. To look at me now, you'd never know I went through a period of high femme, or a seriously goth phase, or the earth mother hippie phase (okay, that one might not be too far of a stretch). But the first time I put a binder on, the gender euphoria was through the roof. I looked in a mirror and saw myself, not a reasonable facsimile thereof.

A few years later, at an organizing retreat, a friend of mine, who was in med school, pointed out that top surgery is a thing, and I meet all the prerequisites for being considered for it. I was fortunate enough to have health insurance that covered it, and a clinic that made it easy - literally got my therapist's letter, meeting with a provider, and a referral to a surgeon in a few hours time. [Sometime later I'll tell you about the experiences of getting top surgery through Kaiser in Portland; but, that's another topic.]

While all of this was going on, my periods were getting more and more painful; and, every month my dysphoria was lasting longer and longer. But the doctors said that it was just because I was getting older; it was just because I was overweight; it was just because I was a vegetarian. Clearly, I can fix my own pain. Finally, after too many hoops, I got a hysterectomy in August 2022. That's another story for another time, as well; so much was involved in that process because nothing can be simple when you're visibly, vocally queer.

And all along, I've thought to myself, "If I ever go on testosterone..."

And one day a couple months ago, I was talking to my partner, and instead of saying "If I ever," it was "When I go on testosterone..." and I realized that I'd made the decision with no input from my cognition; it is something that needs to happen. So, that's coming soon - I have a doctor's appointment mid February, where hopefully the process will begin. "Typically", transmasc folks start on testosterone, then look at surgeries as needed. I went the other way. There is no "right" way for transition to look; doing what you need to do as the opportunity and need arises is what a right transition looks like. Sometimes, that looks like no medical intervention whatsoever; there's no right way to be trans. But for me, my experience has been pretty atypical, at least according to the loose survey of trans folks I know, and medical professionals I know.

#transgender #transmasc #transition #queer

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utopianparadoxist · 2 years ago

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I think I'd like to chime in here to echo Sarah's heartbreak and fury with my own experience of the fandom harassment, because I know a lot of people wonder why optimisticDuelist doesn't post on his youtube channel anymore. While these days the reason is that I'm very busy with a full-time job and grad school and barely have the time to breathe, let alone record and edit audiovisual content that doesn't pay enough for rent, it isn't exactly the reason I first *stopped* posting.

The extent of the trauma the fandom's brutality to, frankly, mostly my trans girl friends inflicted on me indirectly, simply as a consequence of having to watch it play out and having to try to be there for them and care for them as they got hurt over and over and over and FUCKING over, was in fact so massive that at one point, it put me in the hospital and almost got me institutionalized.

The fact that it got that bad for me is why I left Hs^2, ultimately, and during that transition it was kate gamblingant, the local fandom meangirl bogeyman, that made sure I kept getting paid from WP for my participation in HS^2 MONTHS past the point when it was clear I would not be contributing much of anything to the project and was in fact probably a liability to it!

And Do Not get me wrong and start some bullshit anti-WP discourse with my wording: I am under the vague impression that offering me that kindness was something everyone on the team was on board for. I just also know for a fact it was Kate sounding the loudest horn on that call.

And why? In the hopes that that little bit more money would be just a little more stability for me as I recovered from that psychological breakdown. Because she wanted me to be safe and healthy and taken care of, as much as she could manage with our extremely limited resources. Because that's just the sort of extremely kind and caring person she was to me, every step of the way.

And Let's Be Super Goddamn Clear:

I barely got harassed during the period of time Sarah's describing, and that was partly because I was less interested in advancing new ideas about Homestuck in ways people would pay attention to and talk about than I was in making sure everybody liked me enough that I wouldn't get too much mean shit. I very deliberately crafted my online persona to be very very very outwardly kind and polite and gentle and non-abrasive.

If Kate's firebrand approach to the Homestuck conversation was channeling the spirit of the Homestuck/Undertale model of Mean Girl, then I was always really deliberately presenting myself as a non-threatening and non-confrontational Fuzzy Boy, as a preemptive defense mechanism to the backlash and hostility I ALWAYS feared would come for me from moment one.

And my survival tactic worked. Even as I worked on HS2 and publically affiliated with pgenpod, nobody ever really seemed to think to give me shit *directly*. I just had to watch people do it to my friends.

Having to deal with the cognitive dissonance of that fact, knowing that this fandom that was turning so vicious over the Homestuck Epilogues tarnishing the comic's original supposedly progressive values that they were acting in defense of...was also sparing me in a sense, and that part of the reason why was PROBABLY that I visibly present as a boy online instead of some uppity girl?

Was just one of many angles through which my experience of the fandom became something so dissonant and alienating I didn't know how to talk about it. It's hard to explain how broken it made me feel the culture of Homestuck actually is, or how many times I started thinking about doing something stupid and inflamattory and mean just to get people pissed off at ME TOO FOR ONCE, GOD DAMN IT.

I did have one memorably creepy little dudebro haunting me in DMs for a while, acting sycophantically nice while also occasionally trying to ""Present ideas"" that were invariably barely thought out reactionary right winger bullshit. But he was a bad actor from the reddit, not even an entity that qualifies as one of the Homestuck fans that were so earnestly and savagely furious at WP for the Epilogues from a progressive or leftist angle.

Shoulda just blocked him, but what can I say? I'm hopebound and at the time I was very invested in Being Kind and Hearing People Out and Giving Them Chances To Learn New Ideas, and being determined to offer that kindness to conservative Homestuck fans I thought could benefit from sincere conversation ultimately turned out to be absolutely devastating to my own life. Sometimes its better to just be a bitch, who could've guessed!

Eventually that guy posted me on a list with the other hs2 writers and made a death threat joke about it shortly before we were all due to make a public appearance, prompting the mental health spiral that eventually put me out of commission in the HS space for years. But really, he was just some loser fucking dweeb, and it was only happenstance that he put me over the tipping point.

It was, in fact, mostly watching what happened to *Kate* that so unsettled me. To the point that even saying her name here feels wrong, a betrayal. Because she left this place deliberately, and as far as I'm concerned, none of you people even deserve to hear her name anymore after what this community did to her.

There aren't words for the kind of frothing at the mouth, choking on the poison in my own heart, deeply bitter Rage I feel on her behalf when I think about those years. It's not healthy or even fair to every individual in the fandom, of course. I obviously need to go to therapy over it. But what therapist do I fucking go to who could fucking understand this shit??? I'm LITERALLY a mental health professional, and it's taking me YEARS just to unpack and try to move past this trauma trying to think myself through it. I wouldn't know where to begin trying to explain it to some random professional.

THAT'S what killed my fucking channel! I ended up with some kind of selective goddamn mutism when it comes to talking about Homestuck in any professional way that involves interacting with this community, trying to talk around the social realities of dealing with NDAs and the harrassment and the things in the future I hoped we'd get to show you and the things in the past of the comic that I always hoped people would rediscover and genuinely embrace and all sorts of other things I could never figure out how to talk about, after a certain point of complication and infinite heartache. I still WANT to talk about the comic and characters and story and themes and I can still sort of sometimes *write* about it, but I don't know how to use my voice to TALK about it without my brain at some point derailing into just, fucking, this PAIN and this ANGER that are inside me about 2019, always, every second of every day.

And it's particularly heartbreaking to have to say that to me, because...

Look, Sarah talks about the Homestuck Rennaissance as something that started in 2018, and in large part that's true. But its true because that's when her and Kate entered the scene, and Kate in particular did SO MUCH networking and connecting people together in the scene that she was basically responsible for the analysis scene during that period actually taking off as a noticeable zeitgeist.

But that isn't when this shit started for *me*. *I* started working on Homestuck analysis in 2016 with Apotheosis and Creation Myth directly in the wake of Act 7, and my first video on Homestuck explained went up on January 2017.

I was here a couple of years early, MOSTLY banging the war drums that the epilogues WERE INDEED A THING THAT WAS EVEN COMING, and that there WERE INDEED meaningful things going on inside the context of Act 6 and 7 that contextualized the comic's ending and improved the readings of things like davekat and dirkjake and rosemary's relationship executions!

Because back in those days, THOSE were the big debates that were going on. And those were very fun years for me, where I made many friends in the fandom I still deeply cherish and treasure the memories of, even though frankly it feels like I lost most of them to the vitriolic division of the post-Epilogues fandom and the many ways I hurt and failed far too many people I cared about in my messy attempts to grapple with my traumatized brain and broken heart at the time.

But they were also deeply lonely years for me, because most of my friends were...from precisely the fandom asking the questions I was trying to answer, and my brain was already racing ahead imagining the post-Epilogue, post-canon future of the story.

Back in 2016, I was already imagining timelines in Earth C with the kids in their 20s, having adventures across quantum realities and figuring out life and love and their trauma and sex and all these other things I was so excited to embrace and explore in my own adulthood, in lockstep with them, since I had been from the moment I fell in love with this thing.

But even though I had friends who were homestucks, I didn't *really* have friends who saw the vision of the future *I* was seeing. Except then I met Kate, and *she* fucking got it.

The first time I was on PGENPod was, unironically, the first time I felt really seen and understood and embraced in full for what I was saying I thought and believed about the story of Homestuck.

I know I had a lot of fans who believe my theories and friends who were supportive of my readings and encouraging of my passions, even back then, but Kate made me feel like she could SEE it the way I could see it. She saw what I was saying and said that she believed me, and not just that, but believed IN me, to the point that SHE was the person who connected me and Andrew and brought me into the fold for HS^2.

She told me once that it was partly my content that inspired her to do PGENPod and see this space as something worth thinking about in a deeper, intellectual way. It is hard to describe what that kind of validation meant to me after 2 years of working in the dark, entirely off the fumes of my own hype and the memory of my heroes.

It's even harder to describe how it felt when the fandom took the joy of that memory and smashed it to pieces, poisoned it irredeemably by simply burying it under the onslaught of all the pain Kate had to endure simply as a consequence of having been as passionate and in love with this thing as me, and choosing to express it a little bit differently.

The fact that in a way, it feels like everything that happened to her is my fault, for inspiring her into making a mistake as profound as believing in all of you.

Do you understand it? How fucking crushing that is? Do you understand that even saying this is just pointless, shitty man whining from a boy who barely got any flack, compared to what Kate got put through?

...

In fact, I started and continued my channel VERY SPECIFICALLY as a way to survive the Trump years, because Homestuck is SO fucking good that I legitimately believe it was a story capable of bringing our culture together to fight back against the darkness that I saw coming, and holding onto that was the only way I could survive those years psychologically at the time. Call me nuts or too into it for that if you want, but at least I had SOME kind of hope for the future in the face of oncoming fascism, and between that and nothing I prefer the possible laughter-worthy insanity.

THAT is the kind of potential I saw in this space, and holding that kind of faith is what made my channel possible. That is the kind of hope I was trying to reach for. That is what I meant when I made my channel's catchphrase "Keep rising". I thought we were going to save the world, god dammit, and everyone else was going to have to watch and boggle in awe at how fucking amazing and ridiculous we were, with all our love and passion.

How far we fell short of that dream, I guess.

And yet, it is in fact so good that a substantial part of me still believes that, even now, after everything. There's no fixing what happened to Kate, and yet somehow I still can't let go of this love and faith I have for J00n and Roxy, for Dave and Karkat, for Rose and Kanaya and Calliope and Dirk and fucking Jake. Fix me up with the clown paint and put me in front of the Undertale mirror, I guess.

You wanna know the funny thing? The really hilarious joke at the center of this intellectual holocaust of empathy and basic human decency?

I don't even believe the Epilogues are all that mean spirited. I basically think this entire fandom is completely, just...wrong about that. Understandably wrong! I certainly understand the pain the Epilogues inflicted, even if I will never ever ever agree that the response the fandom took was appropriate, even as I look back and think it was probably inevitable. I still think it's wrong.

You know why I think Dirk is as mean as he is in the epilogues? It's because this fandom is fucking mean about Dirk, WAS mean about Dirk consistently and enthusiastically for the span of 2016-2019 in between the end of the comic and the release of the epilogues, and the epilogues were a reflection of us in the first place.

What keeps coming to my head is this fandom's fucking obsession with Dirk killing himself. The way it's not just a trope, but a joke to us. The way I spent those years seeing post after post after post after post pairing him with Caliborn--a genocidal homophobe and misogynist--or John--a more masculine, more "normal" guy who still carried the baggage of being coded as "straight" by comparison to Dirk or Jake.

Both kinds of content regularly featuring both Caliborn and John just being fucking assholes to him. The subtext and punchline often being that Dirk deserves to be with someone who's an asshole with him.

Because it's funnier and easier than engaging with the very complex and difficult but also very mutual and sincere and complicated (and plenty funny and capable of including mutual assholery) dynamic that already canonically exists to be read between him and Jake.

Oh but also, I remember one piece of fanart of Jake putting a picture of Dirk in the garbage, setting it on fire, and sending him a picture of it.

Any one of these pieces of fanart is just a whatever shipping post or joke, who cares obviously. But in totality, honestly?

It turned interacting with content about Dirk, as a gay-aligned man with struggles with self-hatred, suicidal ideation and chronic guilt/anxiety myself, into a brutal gauntlet of merciless homophobia.

A culture that thinks if you fuck up a little too much as a consequence of being messed up as a gay teen, you kind of deserve to be punished for it forever. That after a certain point, the best thing you can do for everybody is decapitate yourself and spare everybody the trouble of dealing with you.

Homestuck might have Dirk decapitating himself a lot, but he does it in moments of perceived necessity, mostly to save the lives of the people he cares about.

On the Epilogue's Earth C, there are Dirk dolls with detachable heads. In the snapchats we see the kids throw Dirk a birthday party where Dave fucking beheads one as a Piñata while Dirk is watching.

Remind me why Dirk should care about any of these people?

Remind me why he should care about any of you?

Remind me why I should, when he and I are so similar.

The callousness with which Dirk's life is treated originates in the fandom, not in the comic. The epilogues just reflect that fact back to us.

And in the same way, I could trace back almost every major character conflict in the Epilogues that pisses people off back to undercurrents of discourse and jokes the fandom was perpetuating in that stretch of 2016-2019.

There was a time when I wanted to do that, and I didn't because there just wasn't ever a moment to breathe or sort out all my thoughts and anxieties enough to figure out what I wanted to say, precisely because the vitriol of the fandom made every day an exciting new splash of some secondhand retraumatizing for like a solid year there.

Now I'm just stating it as a fact, along with the fact that multiple Homestuck^2 writers were explicitly and publically on the record literally advancing empathetic readings of the characters and expressing desires to see them happy.

I barely knew anything HS^2 was planning back then and I certainly have no idea now, so DO NOT TAKE THIS AS COMMENTARY ON THE DIRECTION OF THAT NARRATIVE AT PRESENT, but I think it's obvious that the hideous state of affairs of the epilogues was always meant to be temporary and transitory to some extent. It just never got to finish the transition to anywhere because, yknow, pure hatred smothered it. Even though we were literally right there, literally telling everyone it's what we were doing. I understand why the backlash happened anyway, but it's still deeply frustrating.

Sigh. At least the fanfic scene is great, as Sarah helpfully outlined.

Even now, I am trying to figure out ways to start putting content up on the youtube channel regularly again. To continue writing my fics and hoping that when i post them they excite and move people and help shift the fandom culture's inertia, just a little, in a direction that could eventually somehow, someday, take us back to that dazzling energy I remember so well from the 2013 era, when I was just some nobody fan enjoying fanart and loving bladekindeyewear and dahnithewitchoflight's and lildurandal and whoever else's posts.

I'm still here. I still care. I still love and want this. I just wish people could be fucking kind to each other and to the story that's bringing us all together. It's such a shame how that feels completely impossible.

Post-postmodernism in Pop Culture: Homestuck’s Revenge

I recently saw an excellent video essay titled Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now? by Thomas Flight. Though the title is opaque clickbait, the video is actually about major artistic zeitgeists, or movements, in film history. Flight describes three major movements:

Modernism, encompassing much of classic cinema, in which an earnest belief in universal truths led to straightforward narratives that unironically supported certain values (rationalism, civic duty, democracy, etc.)

Postmodernism, in which disillusionment with the values of modernism led to films that played with cinematic structure, metafiction, and the core language of film, often with more unclear narratives that lacked straightforward resolutions, and that were skeptical or even suspicious of the idea of universal truth

Metamodernism, the current artistic zeitgeist, which takes the structural and metafictional innovations of postmodernism but uses them not to reject meaning, but point to some new kind of meaning or sincerity.

Flight associates metamodernism with the “multiverse” narratives that are popular in contemporary film, both in blockbuster superhero films and Oscar darlings like Everything Everywhere All at Once. He argues that the multiverse conceptually represents a fragmented, metafictional lack of universal truth, but that lack of truth is then subverted with a narrative that ultimately reaffirms universal truth. In short, rather than rejecting postmodernism entirely, metamodernism takes the fragmented rubble of its technique and themes and builds something new out of that fragmentation.

Longtime readers of this blog may find some of these concepts familiar. Indeed, I was talking about them many years ago in my Hymnstoke posts, even using the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism,” though what Flight calls metamodernism I tended to call “post-postmodernism” (another term used for it is New Sincerity). Years before EEAAO, years before Spider-verse, years before the current zeitgeist in pop cultural film and television, there was an avant garde work pioneering all the techniques and themes of metamodernism. A work that took the structural techniques of postmodernism–the ironic detachment, the temporal desynchronization, the metafiction–and used them not to posit a fundamental lack of universal truth but rather imbue a chaotic, maximalist world of cultural detritus with new meaning, new truth, new sincerity. That work was:

Homestuck.

That’s right! Everyone’s favorite web comic. Of course, I’m not the first person to realize the thematic and structural similarities between Homestuck and the current popular trend in film. Just take a look at this tweet someone made yesterday:

This tweet did some numbers.

As you might expect if you’re at all aware of the current cultural feeling toward Homestuck, many of the replies and quotes are incredibly vitriolic over this comparison. Here’s one of my favorites:

It’s actually quite striking how many elements of the new Spider-verse are similar to Homestuck; aspects of doomed timelines, a multiversal network that seems to demand certain structure, and even “mandatory death of parental figure as an impetus for mandated personal growth” are repeated across both works. The recycling and revitalization of ancient, seemingly useless cultural artifacts (in Homestuck’s case, films like Con Air; in Spider-verse, irrelevant gimmick Spider-men from spinoffs past) are also common thematic threads.

As this new post-postmodern or metamodern trend becomes increasingly mainstream, and as time heals all and allows people to look back at Homestuck with more objectivity, I believe there will one day be a rehabilitation of Homestuck’s image. It’ll be seen as an important and influential work, with a place inside the cultural canon. Perhaps, like Infinite Jest, it’ll continue to have some subset of commentators who cannot get past their perception of the people who read the work rather than the work itself even thirty years after its publication, but eventually it’ll be recognized for innovations that precipitated a change in the way people think about stories and their meaning.

Until that day, enjoy eating raw sewage directly from a sewer pipe.

(Side note: I think Umineko no naku koro ni, which was published around the same time as Homestuck and which deals with many similar themes and then-novel ideas, will also one day receive recognition as a masterpiece. Check it out if you haven’t already!)

#Homestuck #The Homestuck Epilogues #Homestuck^2 #grief and mourning #rage #i love this fandom but it sure is telling how terrified posting this makes me feel of it

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descubriendo-aurelia · 3 years ago

Text

tl;dr trans origin story

So, what have I done so far? How did I arrive to this point? Well, I kind of always knew that I wished I had been born a girl, but for many years I suppressed these feelings. I can remember as far back as age 4, seeing my older female cousin Jaimie and wishing I could look like her.

(Warning: I talk briefly about a sexual encounter below.)

I'd been somewhat familiar with feminizing HRT, FFS and vaginoplasty since I was an early adolescent thanks to cable TV, and transitioning seemed like such an extreme process (because it is) that it seemed impossibly expensive to achieve the results that I wanted for myself. I'd always been fascinated with hearing the stories of trans people and would watch anything related to them them any chance I got. My favourite movie since I was 16 years old was, and still is to this day, Breakfast on Pluto, a story about an Irish transwoman. How curious that it didn't occur to me until later in life that I loved this movie because I wanted to be like the main character.

Throughout the years there were other signs, like playing dress-up with my best friend and wearing their femme clothes, which led to the appearance of my Southern belle alter-ego Annabelle in our late teens while the True Blood series was still popular. Yes, with a big, floppy hat y todo. 👒

Shortly after moving to Seattle, I'd come to the realisation that I'd never been comfortable with a male identity and decided to start identifying as non-binary and using they/them pronouns.

There were two main catalysts that made me come to terms with my inner womanhood this past year. The first was a sexual encounter I had with a bisexual man who wanted me to wear panties for him. As we had sex, he sexualised me as a woman and referred to me as a woman. It made me feel validated and desired in a way that I had never been before, and it felt so right and perfect somehow. This encounter, as you might imagine, made me reflect long and hard about my gender identity.

The second catalyst was an Italki Spanish conversation class. My teacher is a trans woman, and the topic of discussion was gender identity. At one point during our discussion, she asked me, "What part of you wants to cling to the masculine?" and I realised that I didn't really have an answer for her. I realised that I was clinging to masculinity (or vestiges of it, lol) because I wanted to please other people, rather than make myself happy and discover my true identity.

A couple days later, on July 20th 2022, I decided that it was time to start doing something about it. I started by telling close friends, and it wasn't long before I settled on the name Aurelia and started to try presenting as female to the best of my ability. I'm very fortunate to work in a very trans-friendly city at a very trans-friendly business with exceptional health insurance for individuals who seek in gender affirming care. Having already worked alongside several trans people at my job, I felt comfortable enough to start coming out to my coworkers right away. They, of course, accepted me with open arms and have been amazing at using my preferred name and pronouns. A few of them even gave me clothes!

I then, of course, started shopping. In addition to makeup and clothes, I bought an epilator, silicone breast forms, mastectomy bras, a few different styles of gaffs as well as tucking tape. Not at all once, of course, 'cause all that shit was expensive. (Especially the gaffs! I tried two styles, a cheap $20 Amazon that was bulky and inaffective, and a $40 that works amaaazingly. $40 is a lot, but after I started ordering one every paycheque, I think she took notice and started sending me two per order, which was super sweet of her. Thanks, Lexy B Blair!)

I found a doctor who specialises in transgender care through my insurance and on September 6th, I started taking my HRT medications. After 5 weeks, I've seen slight (though not yet visible) breast tissue growth, skin softening, and thinning and softening of body hair. It's hard for me to gauge any emotional or psychological changes, since I was a very emotional person before HRT, lol. I guess I get angry way less often, but I also feel like this was true before I started HRT and has more to do with the relief I felt immediately after coming out that I was finally allowing myself to present female.

On October 13th, I got registered for laser hair removal, and I'll begin my first treatments in November! I'm so tired of shaving every day and having to use orange colour corrector and a full face of heavy foundation just to have a "natural" look. My facial hair comes in really dark, so no matter how close I shave, they leave behind a greenish undertone to my skin, which is why I need the colour corrector.

So, now what? We wait for the hormones to do their job. I probably won't notice any major changes until a year in, and the full effects could take 3-4 years. I asked my doctor about progesterone to help with breast development, and he wants to try it when I'm 6 months to a year in. Depending on how well that works, I may or may not eventually want breast augmentation.

Another procedure I'm definitely interested in is facial feminisation surgery. Because I went through a testosterone-based puberty during my adolescence, my jawline is very angular and I have a protruding brow bone compared to before I started puberty. HRT is supposed to help a little bit with rounding of the face via fat redistribution, but this won't be noticeable for at least a year. So, I suppose the plan will be to see how satisfied I am after the three year mark, and if not, look into getting the procedure.

And then, of course, there's the surgery that cispeople are most obsessed with: ✨vaginoplasty✨. Will I get it? First of all, if you don't already know this, please don't ever ask a trans person this question. As for me, I'm still conflicted. I don't believe in the concept of "completely transitioning" and don't think that genital surgery is a necessary step in a gender transition. I would be completely content keeping my genitals and would still feel as complete of a woman as any other. And yet, when it really comes down to it, I think I would still prefer a vagina to a penis if given the choice... which, I guess I have? But then, of course, there's the whole surgery itself, which is very extensive and scary, with a rough recovery. Plus the extensive dilations. Hmm, I just don't know about all that. If I did it, which I honestly don't think I will, I would want a very talented doctor who will perform a labiaplasty, clitoroplasty, and vaginoplasty, and who has multiple photographs of the results of former patients.

So, that's all, folks. If you're still reading this, thank you for listening to me overshare, lol.

#hrt update #mtf trans #trans #transgender #transfemme #transfem #trans woman #transgirl #trans positivity #vaginoplasty #gender affirming surgery #gender affirming care

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