#gender blogging

[anghraine]

Further contemplated the femslash Spirk concept while I was going to sleep, inevitably, and concluded:

I am perfectly aware this has been done before in the last, you know, nearly 60 years of this ship's towering fandom influence; I've definitely seen art and cosplay. However, I'm deliberately insulating myself from reading any other versions until the finer details are more nailed down in my own head.

McCoy is definitely still a man (specifically DeForest Kelley c. TOS) because it only later occurred to me that 1) thematically, I definitely prefer this trio as a mixed gender group and 2) the advocate for emotion and instinct and human warmth being a male doctor and the voice of logic and discipline being a woman and technically his superior pleases me greatly. I also like the McCoy-Kirk brotp as a male-female friendship that is intense, complex, and 100% platonic.

I'm still figuring out how Kirk being repeatedly menaced by the woman of the week would pan out with f!Kirk. With m!Kirk it feels like the show pushes him having an irresistible appeal to women in general (regardless of the woman's morality) that is where this ultimately comes from, but he's got a lot of Odysseus tropes to him as a character that make his femme fatale allure and willingness to use it as a tool more interesting than as the inevitable fate of a female space captain. Also, even in a femslash context, it feels homophobic for it to always be women sexually harassing f!Kirk.

Kirk's going to be Jessica instead of my original idea of Deborah. I was thinking of what would be a sturdy, ordinary name in the Midwest comparable to James that would also abbreviate conveniently to a common short form (Jim / Deb / Jess). I wanted the shortened version to be something that could carry the emotional weight of Spock's very occasional "Jim" without feeling that the nickname itself is more significant than Jim is for a dude from Iowa. I also wanted to avoid the -y/-ie endings of so many English nicknames (sorry, Francophones). Deb seemed to work well enough, except I'd forgotten that I have a considerably older family friend who not only uses Deb (and is named Deborah) but happens to have very similar coloring and background to young Shatner. As I was plotting the femslash, the association with her felt increasingly weird and uncomfortable, so I switched to Jessica (chosen for reasons largely unrelated to it also beginning with J, but that helps!).

Does Jessica Kirk wear the miniskirt and go-go boots while issuing non-negotiable orders from her captain's chair? Definitely.

[caterjunes]

what is it about lesbian media that fills me with the heaviest & most profound sadness in the pit of my stomach, in my throat, under my heart.

[woofgender]

i'm trying to change my name with my car manufacturer's financial services company (so my car payments are under my new legal name). they don't even know about transgender name changes at this call center. they think i got married or perhaps divorced. henry the toyota financial services customer representative and i are both having a very confusing time on this phone call.

at one point he asked me, "what is the reason for the name change today?"

i replied, "uh...i had it changed legally?"

apparently this was all he needed. baffling!!

[antiquery]

man, gender is confusing

if asked, I'll identify myself as a woman: a tomboy, sure, but a woman regardless. I don't experience discomfort with the gendered parts of my body...except when I wish my hips were narrower and my shoulders broader, because then I'd look more androgynous. but I've never thought of that as dysphoria in the classic sense, because it's not exactly that I feel like I should have a Man's Body, or that I'm a man in the wrong body: the version of myself with the modifications I want is still a woman, and still identifies as such.

at the same time: in a lot of ways my experience of gender is more akin to that of a transgender man than a cisgender woman. I'm familiar with the skills associated with passing for male, and I get a certain enjoyment out of it that goes above & beyond the simple privileges of being read as male in public (it's interesting; it's not like boy-me is any bigger than girl-me, but I don't feel nearly as physically intimidated when people read me as male)

I was reading the news the other day and I happened across a story about the bathroom bill recently passed in Florida, that criminalizes using the restroom that isn't the one associated with whatever gender you were assigned at birth. and as I read I realized: this applies to me, too! despite the fact that I have no interest in medically transitioning, and I have a fairly firm understanding of my own gender as female (albeit an...unconvenional flavor of such)

which begs the question: at this point, what does "cis" actually mean? often we use it as a shorthand to discuss power & privilege, and while that makes sense when applied to women who are very gender-conforming...what does it mean when applied to women like me? to many outside observers I imagine my experience would be legible as a trans-masculine one, despite my protestations to the contrary. does that imperil my cis-ness? and conversely, if I were to declare myself male but take no other steps to transition (a perfectly normal and common enough approach to changing one's gender, even in the age of widely available medical intervention), would that shift in (primarily internal) conception be enough to dispel that cis-ness?

I've no definite answers, to be sure, but I'm very curious about other perspectives on this if any of you are inclined to provide them!

[caterjunes]

#yeah literally #of course turned out i was powerfully repressed and actually a girl and a lesbian but you can’t know everything when you’re a kid - @deadciv

i didn't have "i'm broken" teenage asexual angst i had "i'm literally being the only reasonable one about this concept and the rest of you are behaving like fucking freaks" perception issues

[totallycirclek]

Trying to prove a point to my transphobic parents

Reblog if trans men are REAL, VALID AND HANDSOME MEN, NO MATTER HOW THEY CHOOSE TO PASS

Reblog if trans women are REAL, VALID, AND BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, NO MATTER HOW THEY CHOOSE TO PASS

And finally, because it's a part of my argument for this point, and also because they are,

Reblog if nonbinary and genderqueer people in general, are REAL, VALID, AND GORGEOUS PEOPLE, NO MATTER HOW THEY PASS

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

------------

*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

[caterjunes]

i loved having my mom visit for the eclipse but it would be just SO great if she would stop accidentally misgendering me. it's infrequent but jesus christ, i've been out for more than four years now. each time it happens it's devastatingly obvious that she has not put in the appropriate amount of mental effort or practice time.

[indigoire]

You're doing great work, thank you!

(source is Kanojo ni Naru Hi)

[woofgender]

whoever previously checked out this library book about trans history in China was using this as a bookmark 🥹🥰

[prokopetz]

Me: *opens Tumblr dashboard*

Tumblr dash: It's misogynistic not to acknowledge that women are more susceptible to propaganda because our brains have more goo.

Me: *closes Tumblr dashboard*

[jonpertwee]

I really wanna be a twunk but I have to work out.

[inkskinned]

the thing is that they're so fascinated by sex, they love sex, they can't imagine a world without sex - they need sex to sell things, they need sex to be part of their personality, they need sex to prove their power - but they hate sex. they are disgusted by it.

sex is the only thing that holds their attention, and it is also the thing that can never be discussed directly.

you can't tell a child the normal names for parts of their body, that's sexual in nature, because the body isn't a body, it's a vessel of sex. it doesn't matter that it's been proven in studies (over and over) that kids need to know the names of their genitals; that they internalize sexual shame at a very young age and know it's 'dirty' to have a body; that it overwhelmingly protects children for them to have the correct words to communicate with. what matters is that they're sexual organs. what matters is that it freaks them out to think about kids having body parts - which only exist in the context of sex.

it's gross to talk about a period or how to check for cancer in a testicle or breast. that is nasty, illicit. there will be no pain meds for harsh medical procedures, just because they feature a cervix.

but they will put out an ad of you scantily-clad. you will sell their cars for them, because you have abs, a body. you will drip sex. you will ooze it, like a goo. like you were put on this planet to secrete wealth into their open palms.

they will hit you with that same palm. it will be disgusting that you like leather or leashes, but they will put their movie characters in leather and latex. it will be wrong of you to want sexual freedom, but they will mark their success in the number of people they bed.

they will crow that it's inappropriate for children so there will be no lessons on how to properly apply a condom, even to teens. it's teaching them the wrong things. no lessons on the diversity of sexual organ growth, none on how to obtain consent properly, none on how to recognize when you feel unsafe in your body. if you are a teenager, you have probably already been sexualized at some point in your life. you will have seen someone also-your-age who is splashed across a tv screen or a magazine or married to someone three times your age. you will watch people pull their hair into pigtails so they look like you. so that they can be sexy because of youth. one of the most common pornography searches involves newly-18 young women. girls. the words "barely legal," a hiss of glass sand over your skin.

barely legal. there are bills in place that will not allow people to feel safe in their own bodies. there are people working so hard to punish any person for having sex in a way that isn't god-fearing and submissive. heteronormative. the sex has to be at their feet, on your knees, your eyes wet. when was the first time you saw another person crying in pornography and thought - okay but for real. she looks super unhappy. later, when you are unhappy, you will close your eyes and ignore the feeling and act the role you have been taught to keep playing. they will punish the sex workers, remove the places they can practice their trade safely. they will then make casual jokes about how they sexually harass their nanny.

and they love sex but they hate that you're having sex. you need to have their ornamental, perfunctory, dispassionate sex. so you can't kiss your girlfriend in the bible belt because it is gross to have sex with someone of the same gender. so you can't get your tubes tied in new england because you might change your mind. so you can't admit you were sexually assaulted because real men don't get hurt, you should be grateful. you cannot handle your own body, you cannot handle the risks involved, let other people decide that for you. you aren't ready yet.

but they need you to have sex because you need to have kids. at 15, you are old enough to parent. you are not old enough to hear the word fuck too many times on television.

they are horrified by sex and they never stop talking about it, thinking about it, making everything unnecessarily preverted. the saying - a thief thinks everyone steals. they stand up at their podiums and they look out at the crowd and they sign a bill into place that makes sexwork even more unsafe and they stand up and smile and sign a bill that makes gender-affirming care illegal and they get up and they shrug their shoulders and write don't say gay and they get up, and they make the world about sex, but this horrible, plastic vision of it that they have. this wretched, emotionless thing that holds so much weight it's staggering. they put their whole spine behind it and they push and they say it's normal!

this horrible world they live in. disgusted and also obsessed.

[taliabhattwrites]

On Transmisogyny, Feminism, and the Myth of the 'Baeddel'

This will go well.

[anghraine]

I was just writing a vent post about this, so I appreciate running across one that already puts it so well. Something I've noticed is that so many fans take the documentary framework of LOTR (which quickly falls apart if it's taken 100% literally rather than as a common narrative conceit) as a pretext for soft pedaling the raging misogyny experienced throughout Tolkien's work by characters like Éowyn. Instead there are all those attempts to downplay it by manufacturing some (usually but not always Gondorian) historians who mistakenly filter these accounts through their culture's patriarchy but the Rohirrim/Noldor/northern Dúnedain/etc and the specific members of those cultures we encounter in the story aren't really anywhere near as misogynistic as they might seem.

The idea that Éowyn is not enduring profound systematic misogyny in her culture and from those closest to her, that her desperation to escape Rohan is not About Misogyny really but about depression, about Gríma, about her valorization of war, about class, about anything as long as it's not about gender, seems to me a rejection of the most fundamental qualities of her arc in favor of the blorbo dude/culture du jour that then uses the narrative framework as a pretext for denying that her story is about gender. Yes, her story is about those other things, but it is above all else centrally about misogyny.

Éomer is angry about Gríma's pursuit of Éowyn but, quite explicitly, couldn't and didn't really grasp what she was enduring in a broader sense than one uniquely bad guy. His limited understanding of her experiences is, as the OP points out, explicitly stated in the novel.

Théoden shows little interest in what Éowyn's companionship and service through his despair and decay was like for her, as much as he loves her, and literally has to be reminded that Éowyn exists is a popular and valiant leader of the royal house by his door warden when Théoden is going on about how Éomer is the last of the house of Eorl. I've seen justifications for why Théoden would forget her, why this doesn't really suggest misogyny from him, or relate to all the other forms of gendered marginalization she experiences as a woman of the Rohirrim. And yet it's so transparently obvious that he has to be reminded about her because she is a woman. He loves her but that does not mean his worldview is not profoundly patriarchal.

There's a slightly more complex case in Aragorn's refusal to respond to Éowyn's explicit and unambiguous frustration with the restrictions she experiences because of her gender. He dodges the issue of misogyny altogether and gives some anodyne and tone-deaf responses that I suspect weren't intended to sound as tone-deaf as they do in 2025, but certainly fail to address gender as a factor at all. And if your default position is that this couldn't be a failing on his part, then of course Aragorn couldn't have blinders about the specifically gendered marginalization she experiences, it must be Éowyn's lack of vision that's the real problem here.

In certain parts of the fandom, there's a real push back against the notion that Eowyn was left behind first and foremost because she was a woman. That Eowyn was denied the right to ride to battle, or was forced into a domestic role, because she was a woman. Or indeed, that her depression was directly caused by the choices other people made regarding her because she was a woman.

Fans will accept generally that countries like Rohan and Gondor were patriarchal (although they might avoid using the word "sexist"), and will acknowledge that gender roles were at play, but when presented with specific acts of sexism from characters they admire, like Theoden or Aragorn, they shy away from it, they try to find alternative explanations, they try to remove sexism from the narrative. Actually pin pointing moments of sexism from heroic characters is something they resist, even though they wouldn't necessarily deny that the characters exist in sexist cultures.

It seems that they are unwilling to fully acknowledge that sexist societies are sexist because of the choices and conduct of those living within the societies, that agents within those societies perpetuate sexism by making choices that reinforce it. They'd rather shrug the sexism off with a vague "it's just what it was like back then".

"It's just what it was like back then" comes up if you look critically at a character's sexist actions. We're told we can't "judge them through a modern lens", as though everyday sexism only causes harm in modern day, as though the book itself doesn't examine the role gender and gendered expectations have on women like Eowyn.

And of course, much of it comes down to wanting to defend Theoden or Aragorn or whatever character is coming under critique. They would rather look for alternative interpretations, focus entirely on the non-sexist reasoning for their decisions and pretend that gender never comes into it, point out the times characters treated Eowyn with something approaching respect or recognition (which should be enough to dispel accusations of sexism, even when it is nowhere equal to what a male peer would receive) or use the traditions of their culture to exculpate the characters of all responsibility for their actions.

The result of this is that Eowyn ends up being re-written as a misguided woman whose sense of oppression was all in her head, that she was misguided and selfish (tragically so, because we can accept she is Grima's victim, just no one else's), that she was "redeemed" at the end of the narrative by "embracing her feminine role", and that her conflict with gender and gendered expectations are for herself to resolve, with no alterations of concessions made by others.

This, even though Gandalf spells out to Eomer that sexism played a hugely significant part in Eowyn's ultimate despair, and that Eomer himself, after hearing Gandalf, accepted this and reconsidered their entire lives together.

[wired-right]

robot partner, who slowly replaces all of your human body parts and traits with technological ones until you can't recognize yourself