#glad to see that her also being queer/wanting to be butch/trans is another way to deviate from that patriarchal misogyny

[beldaroot]

rhaenyra is so utena coded like "i want to be a prince" well sure, but you're actually just a lesbian :)

[takaraphoenix]

Have you seen Love Victor? If not, do you plan to?

I just finished binging it! So I’ll use this to talk about it. Which means: Spoilers ahead! ;)

Overall, I liked it. I really liked the characters, I liked that they all got their own depth and problems. I liked the family and their dynamic (though kid brother came very short, but it was only 10 episodes so there’s that).

I was skeptical at first, naturally so - I mean, a spin-off show from Love, Simon but with zero of the characters from the movie? That’s... odd. What’s the point of that then? Just make it its own thing? Especially considering I had heard from book-readers that one of the girls was bisexual, so I was a bit put-out that they do a spin-off, but not about that - which would have been a rather natural way to go.

I think it worked very well though. I really loved the way in which it did tie into Love, Simon. Having Simon as his mentor like that, building up their friendship - I was very happy to see both Bram and Simon again! That was a surprise, I didn’t expect them to show up at all, to be honest.

There were things they didn’t handle very well, in my opinion. Namely the cheating. One kiss, in the heat of the moment, still confused and trying to figure him out? I’ll give him that. But the second kiss and then ultimately the third, which Mia saw? That went too far.

And making Mia see it was just such a bad move. I like their dynamic, I think Mia and Victor could have a great friendship, but I don’t... see them coming back from that, because that was humiliating. On the dance that Mia was looking forward to? Having to see it?

I wish they hadn’t forced that to be so unnecessarily dramatic, instead of just giving Victor the chance to come out on his own terms - seriously, it was my biggest upset with Love, Simon already, the forced outing. So that Victor now had Andrew overhear things and Mia witness things... I just hope they don’t turn Andrew into a total jackass who does out Victor to the school, but even on the small two person scale, it was already... too much, for me. Especially with Mia.

Had Victor gotten the chance to tell her on her own, that could have been so great. But this cliche of “and then someone walks in and something More Dramatic happens so the person puts it off and they put it off so far that the secret gets out on its own oopsie” is so cringey and so overused.

When the end came around with his parents and he turned to go to bed, I got very mad there for a moment because seriously, they pull it twice? I’m glad he came out on his own. I still don’t really like the how, because seriously he wanted to tell his parents something and instead of listening to them, they’re like “please sit down and let us go first and tell you that we’re separating”. No, don’t make it about you when your kid declares they have something to say to you?

That cliffhanger leaves me very anxious about how his parents will take it. If they do another beat by beat of the movie and have the dad be cute and awkward and apologize for his previous behavior, which would be better but is also a bit of a let down for they just repeating themselves again, or if they do have him double down on the homophobia, which wouldn’t be very stellar considering the fact that the white boy protagonist from the movie got his happily accepting family so making the POC protagonist of the show actually have a hard-set homophobic dad... would be disappointing.

I kind of wish Victor would have confided in Pilar independently, on the way back home - especially since they walked there, that’d have been peaceful and enough time for him to tell her. I really want to explore their dynamic more next season and see her be a supportive sister, see them grow closer.

I gotta say, I wasn’t big on that Felix/Lake thing. It was such a cliche of “nice nerd pining for the hot girl but never being noticed until guy she likes treats her bad and She Notices Him”... Very tiresome straight nonsense that one.

There was one small thing that bothered me and I don’t know if that is a cultural thing and I am just not actually familiar enough with American terminologies - but when Bram was Victor’s guide into all things gays and he kept using femme and butch for gay men, that... really bothered me as a lesbian. Those are women exclusive terms, aren’t they? I can see the femme being used for feminine gay men, but I have never in my life heard a dude be referred to as “butch”. Especially since “butch” has certain visual connotations to it - but those guys were simply regular gay men, who shocked Victor because they “don’t look gay! :O”. But male jocks aren’t... butch...?

I just think that a show that is supposed to be about discoving yourself and discovering the community... should be a way of introduction for the audience too so the baby gays watching it can learn from it. So I do think that such things should be... used properly, because these “coming of age”-stories do owe the viewer something introductory because the target audience are kids who are in that age and they should be able to look at these things for at least some guidance into figuring themselves out.

And, on that topic, I do wish they had paid more focus to the “figuring out” section. That was an under one minute montage of internet pages with big labels of bisexuality, pansexuality and... foot fetishes. That was it and it was kind of discarded after. This would have been a great opportunity to actually have Victor explore those identities, read up on them, try them out on himself, see if any of them fit - bisexuality or pansexuality or heck after he tried to have sex with Mia but it didn’t click he could have also come to explore asexuality. It was such a quickly discarded moment and while I can read that as him internally already knowing his truth, knowing he is gay and doesn’t really need to explore, I still think that in the overall story, at least one episode of focus on identities and how confusing figuring labels out can be... would have been great.

I also do hope that season 2 will add... more diversity on its LGBT representation. We have two Gay Boys on the show that is a tie-in to a movie around two other Gay Boys. Give me a bisexual, a pansexual, a lesbian, a trans character - just something else than the gay guy that’s been domineering the franchise so far. I think a TV show has the opportunity and time to focus on that in side-plots and not be suffocatingly straight outside of the gay main couple.

So, that’s where I hope they take season 2. His parents coming around on it, him and Mia mending things somehow, more on the sibling dynamic and hopefully some queer friends for Victor to up the rep and variety of queer storylines a bit more.

[butyouvealwaysbeenthecaretaker]

I'm glad we are talking more about "gay genders" and the way that being LG can often produce genderweird experiences, which aren't exactly transgender but are also not uncomplicatedly cis. It's always been true, but I'm happy that there's more discussion and visibility.

But team, the next step is absolutely to consider bisexual people. We are comfortable seeing cis[ish] gay men and women embrace these complicated gender places, it kinda figures, it makes sense, it feels organic. But why shouldn't this be equally true of bisexual people? (It's because on some level, we are seen as essentially straight, as straight people who sometimes have same-sex relationships)

there's no real reason why, if we accept that gay people often develop ideosyncratic genders, that bi people wouldn't too. Possibly, the gaygenders of bisexual people would be even more peculiar, because they are passing through straight and gay spaces, through same and opposite sex relationships, it's super messy.

I've thought before that perhaps we might understand the development of genderqueer, non-binary, agender identities as a bisexual thing. This isn't to erase people with those identities who are monosexual; but I guess I would like to survey how many "straight in every possible way except my gender" people are in these communities, because I suspect it's...very few. On the other hand, I think both bisexuality and asexuality would absolutely predict people who grow up watching gender on the television, and thinking "I'm not really any of these genders". Or, in reverse, I think being non-binary or genderqueer would predict people who can't exactly say whether they are gay or straight, and who would grow up watching gender on television thinking "I have no idea how I fit into any of these relationship structures".

And some partial evidence for this is looking at bisexual community heroes - Bowie, Prince, Janelle Monae, Lady Gaga, Annie Lennox - and observing that not only are they all subverting gender, they're doing it in similar ways, they're part of a recognisable bi genderweird tradition. This includes being kinda circumspect about whether or not they are gay while giving off gay vibes; artificiality and theatricality, but not quite in a camp way; and gender non-conformity. You've got Bowie and Gaga presenting their bodies as alien/other; you've got Lennox and Monae in suits, but in a very sharp and dapper way - not your traditional comfy/earthy butch, it's far more theatrical; you've got Prince's abundance of gender cues, combining feminine dress and styling with almost parodically heterosexual lyrics.

Gaga draws from drag culture, and I think you could also understand Monae as a drag queen (but both of these are gay male artforms). Gaga makes explicit reference in Telephone to the rumours that she is is a man (that people are making assumptions about her gendered body; but this is transmisogynist). Gaga is out as bisexual; she's a cis woman (as far as we know), but her stage persona is being understood as similar to a trans woman, or similar to a gay man. We aren't able to find words for where we place her gender and sexuality, because we aren't recognising that this mess of gender cues...could be a bisexual gender thing. Monae is non-binary, and has written het songs and sapphic songs and a stomping bi anthem. But, for the longest period of time, wasn't putting a label on any of this, aside from that one song about how "I want to be a queer/queen". Queen, of course, being another male-pattern-gay community term. Being a "no labels bisexual" isn't necessarily internalised biphobia or a superiority complex; it can reflect a genuine feeling of vagueness and uncertainty about where to plant your flag. A vagueness which is perhaps inextricable from an equally vague sense of how to fit into a binary gender. Meanwhile, Lennox is heavily involved in AIDS activism. She's clearly identified gay and bisexual men as "her tribe".

Lennox and Prince - who, as far as we know, are straight - but they seem pretty gay - and isn't that the bi experience in a nutshell, isn't that part of their appeal for specifically bisexual audiences? All five performers are characterised by...being simultaneously very out and very closeted. Again, I think that's relatable: a profound desire to be visible, but also a lack of certainty/confidence/ability to define what kind of queer you are. Bisexuality is inherently mute: you are assumed to be what you appear to be. Should we be surprised, then, if bisexual genders seem to take the pattern of "I don't know what I am or where I fit - and neither will you"

So I don't know whether I have the evidence to argue this, but I do think there's an...afab bisexual gender which is blending cues which say "I am a gay woman" and "I am a gay man", or rather, "I am a queer person, and queerness is indivisible from who I am, and so I see myself in queer people who date women and in queer people who date men". And that we should not be at all surprised or disdainful or judgemental or gatekeeping to see bisexual and genderqueer people L existing in this "I'm simultaneously L, G, B and T" place. That's the reality of having a gender/sexuality that never really fits anywhere, which can never really be visible or articulated as it's own thing. One knows one is queer, one reaches for whatever representation and visibility one can get, and it's a magpie gender.

(I don't have any evidence of the opposite dynamic, of bi men being very into lesbian culture or identification or modes of behavior. Perhaps this is a counter argument. But you often can't map the experiences of queer men and queer women neatly together (gay ones, transgender ones...), so maybe this is another example of that. But I would not be surprised at all to find out that femme bi men were into butches, for example.)

CONCLUSION: it is intuitively correct to me that bisexual people would experience genderweird as part of their bisexuality, just as many gay people do. I have some theories about what these genders might look like, but I want to emphasise that I don't think they are objectively correct (there are non-bisexual people in the gender spaces in describe; and I would not dream of beginning to try and gatekeep them as bisexual-exclusive). At the same time, I think it would be politically valuable and personally helpful to bisexual people to develop a sense that bisexual genders exist; that they can be a source of pride rather than embarrassment; that our genders aren't just a mimicry of gaygenders or straight ones but can have characteristically bi elements and be part of a bi tradition; to have confidence and joy in the ways our genders don't fit neatly into straight or gay frameworks, and that we might have additional needs in relationships to affirm our gender place; that being bisexual might bring on actual dysphoria, that being bisexual might bring on things which makes neither cis nor trans frameworks a fit for you...and all that jazz. Bi people may very well develop genderweird that is similar or indistinguishable from gay genderweird; but also produce unique genderweirds of our own.

TL;RDR: being bisexual can produce genderweird, just as being gay does. We should assert this more confidently. It might produce uniquely bisexual genders. We should explore and document these possibilities. We shouldn't do this with a goal to be an asshole to others, because gatekeeping things helps nobody.

[csykora]

I wanted to say this in a way that isn’t directed at anyone, but at this point I also very much want to say it. I want it to be out there for other people to know and hold.

Here’s where my metaphor breaks down. There are ways to judge the relative value of goalies’ skill, and there is no way to judge the value of women. The backup also doesn’t need to be lifted up, and trans* voices do.

I’d also like to say I’m baseline vaguely terrified of what’s going to happen if I write about this. So I’m asking that if you feel like reading it, and then it doesn’t feel at all familiar or true or worth considering in the future, just nod and say, “huh, that’s someone else’s life” and move on. These are mostly personal thoughts that I want to get out and would also kind of like other people to have the chance to see and consider, but if you’d like to respond, I’d probably be happy to chat. I’m not going to debate the basic premises, though.

Trans*misogyny isn’t bad because it exists in “The Lesbian Community”, it’s bad because it’s trans*misogyny. (It exists, and sucks, in other communities too, but right now I’m focusing on a particular thing that happens here a lot.) The problem is that trans*misogynist ideas managed to creep into strongholds of certain lesbian communities, without other corners of the community agreeing, managed to co-opt the language and imagery of lesbian pride, and have been able to grab hold of a particularly strong voice in the larger queer and feminist communities.

The existence of trans*misogyny within certain communities is not individual women’s or feminists’ or lesbians’ fault. It’s not an individual woman’s fault that when she uses the language of WLW pride, I have to doublecheck how she defines “women” and whether I’m going to be physically safe around her. And it’s not her fault that WLW are a majority in the queer community, and so I have to be on guard against this particular problem a lot of the time.

I know a lot of women in this fandom are in college and pretty new to being out and loud and having a lot of fun, and that’s great. What I wish I could encourage individual women to do, in addition to sharing their own pride, is to start looking around at who’s in the room a little more closely. See who is and isn’t speaking, and hold onto that knowledge for a bit, what it might be like for the person who doesn’t have anyone else like them.

I’m not going to talk about the open, active rhetoric here right now, or even the types of assumptions I often see people in the fandom making. I’m just talking about one thing that’s weird, and real, and sometimes hurts a fair bit, and that feels entirely changeable but that I have no power to change.

Athletics are pretty damn embodied. I post about my body, and implicitly about what it’s like when I walk into the room, a lot. And I get a lot of replies from people who identify as wlw in their url, their header, and in their messages, saying things like,

‘I wish I could build muscle like that so I could look more butch.’ 

or,

‘male athletes are dumb and misogynist. I’m glad I don’t have to deal with them and my women’s team was really supportive when I told them I’m a lesbian.’

Each of which are well-meant. (Well, I will not agree with the use of intelligence-based insults, but I understand where other people are coming from). But ladies. Gentlewomen. Cowgirls and butches. I want you to kind of just be conscious that I’m getting these messages from dozens of you, and daily.

I have never gotten a response from another trans* or intersex or physically GNC person saying, “I have to deal with that too!” 

And I can count the number of, “huh, I don’t have to deal with that, but that’s interesting” messages I’ve gotten on one hand. 

Each message is coming from an individual voice. But because of the relative numbers, they add up to a chorus that can make it pretty difficult to hear if anyone else is talking about what I am, and it starts to get hard to hear myself.

The fact that you have a loving community in athletics is awesome. Sometimes, in some places, there are some ways of talking about it that can throw into sharp relief that some of us don’t. “Talking about your life, joyously, in your own space” can slide into “talking about it at me, and over me,” or just, “talking about it when it would be lovely and helpful to acknowledge someone else’s life right now.”

What I see in my inbox reinforces the narrative that lesbian women have a claim and a natural place in sports, and I don’t. That my body and my thoughts are worth something when they’re Relatable, and not worth acknowledging when I’m different. That if I want to belong and be respected, well, I should give up my complicated attachment to Men’s athletic spaces and easily jump to Women’s, just erase that pesky trans* part and my history. (Okay, I get that less now that I primarily write about NHL hockey, but it’s still a narrative I see in fandom and very much run into in real life.)

That, the whole situation, hurts. I kind of want to know what it occurs to people to do when I say, “here’s a thing that hurts.” I’m not saying, “don’t reply to my posts” or “don’t be proud” or “you personally are Bad and responsible.” I’m saying this is a team sport and it’s hard to play it alone, but right now some of us are.

[emilyjanestuff]

So when/how did you know you were trans? Part Two

Trigger Warning for suicidal thoughts, isolation, loneliness, biphobia and self harm.

Primary School had its ups and downs, some good things and some challenges. But Secondary school was awful. I wasn’t just unhappy like everyone claims to be in Secondary Schools. Rather I was extremely dysphoric and depressed. At times I would even self harm and was suicidal. But I didn’t talk about any of this for a long time. I internalized everything I was going through and everything I was feeling. Why didn’t I seek help? Because I had no way to say what was inside me.

I knew what the word transgender was by now but it wasn’t something I had applied to myself yet. Well without further a do lets start from the start. Which is in the way starting from the end: Leaving Primary School. When starting at Secondary School I remember thinking it was time for a new start. I remember being excited at first. But the first thing that went wrong was when I learned sports were compulsory. I felt shocked when I heard that. I had said I didn’t want to go to a school where I had to play sports. Secondly while I hadn’t wanted to go to an all boy school I had gone along with it because I was told I was going to a good school.

The second time I can remember of experiencing  real and strong dislike for my body become more and more masculine after my voice changing happened after P.E. class. I was thirteen and one of the boys in the class saw that I had started to grow a facial hair. He thought it was cool, they all did. But I freaked out. I ran into the bathroom and pulled the hair out with a pair of tweezers. Every other boy in my school enjoyed the idea of getting taller, bigger and more hairy. I hated it but didn’t know why. In the end I suppressed such feelings deep down. I buried them. I didn’t know what else to do with them.

To be fair in many ways the school was a good but it was not the right school for me. I hated sports of any kind as a kid and as a teenager. By the end of my first year I had stopped being part of the sport and the school had stopped trying to make me. I spent six year at that school. Why that particular school? Because it was good for people with learning disabilities. That’s the only reason. So this is where I ended up. I became reclusive and isolated very fast. I disliked the people in the school and would often spend large amounts of time in my room. I would be reading or else I would be on the internet.

Books became my escape. Through them I visited many different worlds and mate many different characters. I read books on every topic and any genre I could get my hands on. It was through books and the internet that I first came across the label bisexual and applied it to myself but later on would redefine my sexuality as gay. The reason for this being that I could never see myself as being with a girl as a guy. I couldn’t see myself taking on that masculine heterosexual role that was well established in my mind. There was also the matter that there was a lot of biphobia both within my school and otherwise. People doubted bisexuals existed especially bisexual boys. So by that strange set of thought patterns I must be gay. To me this explained everything, why I was different to my classmates and felt so isolated. I was the only gay boy in my year. That was why I was so lonely.

The first person I approached about this topic was my school guidance counselor. When I was in third year. It was just after a SPHE class on being gay. We talked about it for a while in her office during which she made me feel a tiny bit better about the subject. It was her who first gave me the idea to ring a gay hotline. So when one afternoon I sat down and called Gay Switchboard Ireland. For the second time I started talking to someone about my feelings around my sexuality. I also started going to an LGBT youth group where I mate other LGBT teenagers and was supported. So a happy ever after right? No, alas things turned out to be more complicated then that.

On meeting gay guys my own age I felt like I wasn’t really one of them either. But alas I kept going to the group. I’m glad I did because it was there I mate other transgender people for the first time. Trans guys, trans girls and non binary people. I also started to make friends at the groups. For the first time since Primary school I was able to function socially.

So where does the word transgender fit into this? I knew what transgender meant by before I went to the youth group so why did I never apply it to myself? The reason for that is actually rather simply. I only had one image of a transgender person in my mind. That being a trans woman who felt like a man trapped in a woman’s body (I really hate that expression). Before transitioning/coming out this woman would have worn women’s cloths in secret, she would have had feminine mannerism, loved the color pink. I didn’t start wearing cloths from the women’s section until I was nineteen after I decided to transition. I certainly wasn’t camp or effeminate. My hair had always been cropped short.

But when I began to meet other trans people I learned that the above story does not fit everyone. Sure it might be true for another trans woman and that’s fine but it wasn’t true for me. From meeting and learning other trans women I learned they could femme, butch, tomboys, writers, hairdressers and mma fighters. That we come from all backgrounds and many different cultures. Two books I read that also helped me along were Whipping Girl by the before mentioned Julia Serano and In Search of Eve by Anne Bolin. I learned the experiences of hating my male development was something known as gender dysphoria and that there was a way out of it: by transitioning.

I came out to my friends and took a new name and pronouns for myself in the youth group.

What did this mean for my sexuality? One of my friends asked me if transitioning now made into a straight girl. All I could say was that I didn’t know. Well at the time I wasn’t really sure but then I met this girl and had my first crush on a girl. This didn’t make me feel like I had to fit into a position I wasn’t. For once. So you might think that I would now identify as bi? No would the answer. I had friends who were bisexual and would often say I was an ally for bi people but not one myself. I instead said I was a lesbian (keeping my past attractions to boys as belonging to a time before I came into my own). Why did I do this? Because I had absorbed a lot of biphobia from a lot of places. I learned these ideas from people in school, my own home and even from other queer people. I just didn’t want to be something that didn’t exist and it took until I was twenty one to realize that it didn’t matter society thought of my existence. My own happiness was more important.

So that is how I knew I am transgender and bisexual and a woman. How old was I ? Seventeen for figuring out I was a trans girl and twenty one for accepting my bisexuality. I hope that answers the question.