#have you literally not employed a trans person before????

[emodennis]

i have a horrible feeling about my new job.

[mr-president]

I don't know if you've been asked this before, what is your opinion/headcanon on Levi ? Personally I headcanon him as trans but because of how malnourished he is, you can't see any physical differences.

(I really liked how you said Levi and Marina were narrative foils to each other, that was really cool)

thank you! my original draft of this opinion was something of a marxist-critique on levi, spiraling into a critique of funger as a whole. i decided that’s really not the way the games are “supposed” to be interpreted, so instead, here’s a reading of his character rather than how i think he “should” be

i think levi, in place of “the girl” from the funger 1, continues to represent the series’ stance on suffering, on the pure visceral horror of modern existence. they are the “negative extremities” of a ulta-utilitarian system: levi needed to be a child soldier to uphold the war effort and potentially overturn the bremen empire—the girl needed to rot in a dungeon all her life to potentially ascend into a being that could overturn the old gods.

that is to say, levi in fungermina is yet another example of the flaw in the logic of “the end justifies the means”—was it worth it for this literal child to endure this? except, instead of ascending into a god that epitomizes his suffering, levi has the infinitely more realistic outcome of being shoved into a death battle scenario and relive the horrors of war or burn in the pits of fart hell with salami-jesus-satan.

levi in the game is a further testament to this ideology, moreso than the other characters. if you want to use levi, to have him live up to his “fullest potential,” to be “useful,” he needs heroin. all the characters get powered up, but levi practically requires it—the end justifies the means.

that’s my i’m-trying-my-best-not-to-be-too-marxist-about-this interpretation anyway, but it’s important to note that levi isn’t pure pity. a sort of “resolution” to his existence is by coming to prehevil, by living with other fellow absolute shitshows of lives, and Fungermina employs its second major theme: suffering as a form of empathy/compassion.

rather than levi’s pain being a simple fact of life on the battlefield, in Termina, it is acknowledged. therefore, levi is acknowledged. in essence, to exist in any capacity is to have your suffering acknowledged for what it is, and further to connect with other people using those experiences. to recruit levi (give him heroin, go to the orphanage) is to, in some small way, acknowledge his shitty existence and not merely pity him but actually do something about it. connect w the boy.

anyway, that’s my somewhat surface-level reading of levi fungermina.

my headcanons! i personally think levi is transfem.

i do also agree that he’s malnourished as shit, but i find the idea of levi not really living at all in his life finding purpose in marina’s existence. it’s almost like levi is—and forgive me if this is an awful interpretation—marina had she not transitioned. marina would have had to dedicate her life (without her will) to the servitude of old gods and live a cruel and painful life, supposedly a glorified dark priest. ain’t that like levi being forced into the army as a child, a talented and exceptional soldier, but ultimately a horrible, unfair life?

beyond that, i think it’d be cool if transness could be a vehicle levi can distance himself from his past as a child soldier and potentially become a version of himself that he can actually live as, not merely survive.

tldr; levi is “the girl.”

[hag-lad]

I’ve vented about this before, but it really does bother me when women who wear makeup on a regular basis try to make it sound like it’s some kind of non-negotiable requirement of everyday life. “We HAVE to wear makeup or we’re not taken seriously!” “Every time I go without makeup, someone tells me I look tired!” “Didn’t you hear about that one woman who didn’t get the job because she wasn’t wearing makeup at the interview?”

Like.

Do these women even realize how many of us go without makeup literally every single day??? How many women are employed, happy, healthy, and taken as seriously as we can be under patriarchy, without having to paint a face on top of our face? Lmao.

Here’s the thing: I understand this is more complicated for trans women, I understand that some industries actually literally do require their employees to wear makeup, I understand some people just enjoy it artistically, I understand all of that shit. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about women who are afraid of looking “ugly” or “less presentable,” women who reinforce beauty standards rather than rejecting them, women who pretend that their personal fear of judgement is the same thing as systemic non-negotiable requirement. I think that’s an amazingly cowardly way to pretend to be radical while interrogating NOTHING about your participation in and collaboration with the values you were spoonfed from birth.

Rubs me the wrong way.

[transgymbro]

As I gain followers I feel like I need to be crystal clear on this: This blog is not meant to be a discourse blog or an activism blog. I've been talking about transandrophobia lately because I could go on about it quite awhile, being a trans man, and because thank god people are talking about this. Also because sometimes people are REALLY good at wording things that I've been thinking about but can't really describe.

But this blog started as a way for me to talk about stuff related to my personal journey with being trans. I'd like for it to stay that way as much as possible. That's why I'm not talking about Every Single Issue Ever. If asked, I'll give my stance, but for my own sake and lack of time, I can't possibly spend time talking about all the issues trans people (and other minorities) face.

This is not to say that I don't care about those issues. I do care. There are more issues, other than transandrophobia ("other" meaning: not more important, but also not less important), that also require attention and action. But I'm literally just a guy. College has made me tired. I'm still financially dependent on my parents and have to worry about getting employed soon. My living situation is up in the air, being dependent on whether or not I get a job. I need to figure my life out first and foremost.

This isn't a "goodbye" (at least not yet. We'll see how much worse this site's policies and CEO get). Just letting people know what they're getting into before I get asks going "why aren't you talking about _____?" If you need clarifications or want to have a POLITE discussion, feel free to send an ask or DM.

[stirdrawsandreblaws]

If tumblr staff is too tiny and powerless to deal with hate speech effectively, they should also be too tiny and powerless to obsessively flag trans content.

Hope this helps ❤️✨

tell me you know nothing abt site moderation without saying you know nothing abt site moderation

do you honestly think a couple hundred people At Most are fully capable of effectively moderating, last i checked statistics, around 13 million posts per day? 13,000,000??? per day???

assuming even a moderation-only staff of 200 people working every single day (which tumblr def does not have--that one leaked memo said they had ~200 fulltime employees *total* before the recent downsizing, not all of which are moderation), that works out to around ~65k posts per person per day.

do you have time to review more than 65k posts every day? of course not. even with a filter algorithm (100% essential btw, because staff should not be forced to comb every single post for shit like literal actual csem, never mind hate speech and gore posted in popular tags as part of a 4chan raid or whatever) that's basically impossible. and you NEED to manually review posts for shit like hate speech, because overly-aggressive filtering is more likely to fuck over people explaining dogwhistles to look out for than, y'know, actual hate speech/symbols

also, sorry you came from the dimension where staff loves to play flag-the-trans-posts, but in this dimension that's a combination of:

- necessary algorithm (reasons listed above) having been trained pretty fuckily during the Verizon occupation, and

- the (usually offsite-organized) terf groups who stalk and mass flag trans people, especially popular ones, and remake accounts to keep doing it when they get blocked (which is the unfortunate tradeoff of an easy account sign-up process)

the vast majority of maliciously flagged trans posts i've seen get unflagged within a few weeks. yes, that sucks to wait on, but it's also a reasonable time frame when one considers the ratio of staff to staff-tasks-per-day. check the notes on any post about a flagged selfie or trans art older than abt 2 weeks; chances are good you'll see the humans blog, or another staffer, apologizing for the delay.

disclaimer: im trans and am not/have never been employed by tungl dot hell, and i also take issue with some of their decisions, but at this point i'm a lot more worried abt the user-led conspiracy about staff being made entirely of cryptoterfs (despite multiple accounts from current and former staffers, plus their own published info, showing tumblr has more queer people on board than the average socmed/tech company by a significant margin) who are supposedly paid to sit there and maliciously flag us icky trans users for funsies and enrichment all day

tl;dr y'all are on that reverse gaylor shit. stop it.

[hardtchill]

You can not like someone and also know that they have more info. She has far more info than like, YOU.

Or you can realize this disgusting piece of trash is a homophobic racist asshole who enjoys the attention and will sacrifice every inch of decency for it.

It's not about information, it's about her outing T&C during the world cup because she felt like it. It's about her claiming Rose would be more well known if she was black. It's about her organizing a witch hunt on a rookie because she liked the attention it got her. It's about her calling Re-inc out for not being inclusive towards trans people (because she couldn't be bothered to check the story about the literal trans person in the campaign she was critiquing). It's about her deleting all her tweets and making her profile private before she applied for the job at ACFC because she knew how horrible those tweets were.

Also, she was employed at ACFC until january 2023, how do you think she gathered this information? Yeah, exactly.

[snekknack]

Is there even someone at the wheel over at tumblr? Did they read a psychotherapy textbook and decide all blunts/cigars/smokeables are but thinly veiled phaluses? Even if that was the case, why would they keep it on the site like this?

Your bullshit rating system makes no sense tumblr, except as an exercise in your rampant transpbobia; the only reason I can assume this post was labled as sexually explicite is that it was reblogged from a trans persons account that got flagged with your infamous black-spot (the one that permanently locks people out of being able to change their profile pic)!

Whoever the decision maker is for what constitutes sexually explicite material over at tumblr HQ, you make me sick. Literal straight fucking porn rolls across peoples dash every day in the form of your "tumblr live" service that no one fucking asked for and everyone wants to fucking eliminate from their dash (not silence every week or month or whatever arbitrary time you've decided on at the moment)! And that's not even getting into the rampant porn-bot problem that seems able to send mass follows to every user, but it's somehow the responsibility of unpaid users to do your flagging for you?!

To borrow a phrase from a UK friend of mine, are you taking the piss? Are you for real? Is this what eight dollars a fucking month is supposed to justify for those that don't want to be bombarded with ads disguised as posts?

Of course you don't have any human employed in quality control, because you get the people who pay for your platform to do it for you; you have found the golden goose and decided to turn it inside-out. You've been ordered, by the courts, to stop this blatant biggotry against LGBTQ+ users, and yet you persist! How many lawsuits is it going to take before you fix this problem? How much money are you going to waste defending the decisions of an outright bigot before you pull your collective heads out of their singular ass?

Your biggest threat to your bottom line is not queer people, it is the person(s) that has carried out this sorry excuse of "moderation" policy as a vendetta against the very people that made your platform what it was at it's peak!

[subbyfoxelf]

[tv review] rise of the teenage mutant ninja turtles (2018-20)

okay, well, hi the best interpretation of the teenage mutant ninja turtles ever!!! and a very warm hello to all of the good guy human characters being black.

it took me a minute to adjust to this approach but now whenever i watch a different version of my turtle boys, i find that i really miss this one! wild, right? like, i think this has largely surpassed all the other versions of the ninja turtles as the ur version that i subconsciously compare all the others to.

all four turtles have very distinct personalities, quirks, and relationships with each other. and in a first for the series, they also all have drastically different designs that suit their personalities and make them easy to differentiate from each other. (yes, this has been done in a more limited way before, but this is the first time i’ve seen it be really effectively employed.)

this series has the best version of basically every character, aside from shredder and splinter who already have pretty great fully-realized versions elsewhere. but this series' version of both characters is perfect for the rest of the series around them.

but maybe most noteworthy, this series has by far the best version of april. no other version of her comes even remotely close.

the only reason that this next character reimagining isn't as big of a deal as april is because you don't find out who they are until literally the last episode. but it's one of the most genuinely delightful twists i've ever seen in a television show, and the amount of patience required to pull it off is just ridiculous, like i genuinely cannot believe they did this. it's also very genuinely fulfilling to me because i usually do not care about this character in most versions, but i actually love them here.

now. i don't usually worry a ton about spoilers, but i consider this next to be probably the most major spoiler of anything that can possibly be spoiled in the entire show. despite not usually caring even a little about spoilers i am extremely glad i didn't know this until it happened, like i basically shrieked in delight when it happened. so for once i do genuinely recommend not reading these next few paragraphs if you think you're likely to check out this show anytime soon. if you don't think you're gonna watch the show, though, please read them because i want to gush about it.

(begin spoilers.)

still there? cool. so there's this super hyperactive tomboyish foot clan ninja who kicks all kinds of ass throughout the show. and the show is super cagey about their identity throughout, but in a way that either doesn't register, or feels very wink-wink, nudge-nudge. and (and i think this is exactly what they intended), from the character's very first appearance, i was like, "oh, okay, hi karai." and spent the rest of the series wondering why the show was being so cagey about karai's identity. like, this was obviously karai! a much different version of her, sure, but it couldn't be more obvious, right?

i was actually super smug about it, every time the character showed up i was like "hi, karai." my boyfriend had to be laughing at me the whole time. because here's the thing.

it's not karai.

literally in the last episode of the series, you find out the character is cassandra jones, but prefers to go by casey.

AAAAAAAA.

look, guys, i'm pretty sure the last time i thought casey jones was cool, i was twelve, but this casey fucking rules, and i cannot believe they kept their secret until the end of the damn show. just. damn, guys!!

and that's before you even factor in the gender stuff! because whether this is the first female version of the character, or if you want to headcanon them as a trans guy for bonus points, either way they're just amazing, guys. i love them so much.

(end spoilers.)

this show as a whole is just so good. it balances action and comedy so well. it can be serious when it needs to be. and every single character is so good, it makes you care about them so much and the turtles (and a lot of the side characters) are just the best boys, and you end up so invested in their happiness.

i love this show so much, you guys. CANNOT recommend highly enough.

[enarei]

I think this question is more approachable if you compare to other (completely unrelated, I'm not implying they're culturally equivalent) conceptions of male gender-nonconformity that are variously interpreted as trans. The word for crossdressing in Spanish/Portuguese for example, travestir, which if literally translated, always implies crossdressing (etymologically related to the English transvestite), but in how it is effectively used is more complex than that. A male could be a "travesti" as a different category from a male who is only temporarily cross-dressing (travestindo), say, for carnival festivities (a common occurrence to this day), where this form of dressing in female clothing may have them labelled a transformista today, but originally there wasn't a distinction, it could refer to both people who cross-dressed occasionally and those who employed hormones and plastic surgery to look female.

So I suppose for a brief period of time, before the notion of "transsexuality" was brought here by western psychiatrists, which popularized the marriage of female gender expression with innate brain sex, inadvertently linking travestis to binary cis & trans women, but after the conception of travesti as a distinct gender identity had been reclaimed by activists, people could conceive of a subset of travestis (the label), particularly the ones most engaged in sex work, as being both female in the cultural sense, that they aren't altogether male, it was culturally acceptable for a heterosexual man to sleep with them in a way that it wasn't for someone deemed actually male, and one should use female pronouns to refer to them, yet they were broadly by their own admission and popularly perceived as different from women, they were open about the fact they had male genitals, unlike transsexuals, and at the same time, they weren't just "crossdressing", in the sense that, unlike the usage of travesti reserved for transformistas today, if you took out their clothes and makeup they generally couldn't pass for male, save for having a penis.

I think the "considered to be female" may specifically be about how an Otokonoko might be gendered and gender themselves in the first person (Japanese is not gendered in the same way as Romance languages but I know you still have your boyish and girlish connotations), rather than being about their inner identity in the gender binary, though in the west we typically think of those things as intrinsically related, as with the travesti, she doesn't fit in the traditional mold of crossdressing because she doesn't need to wear female clothing to be perceived as having female qualities, yet she's in a different category from "woman", because of the presence of the penis (feminine).

i'm interested in the narrow section of the diagram where a person is: 1. considered to be CAMAB, 2. considered to be female, 3. considered to be an otokonoko, but 4. NOT considered to be crossdressing.

[theprideful]

(this is kinda long, sorry. when i started typing this i did not mean for it to get this long. like i 100% understand if you dont want to post this but i just had some feelings)

like as an afab lesbian i understand that a some of the terfs who have hurt trans women the most are lesbians. not "most terfs are lesbians" or "most lesbians are terfs" because neither of these are true but like, a lot of terfs that trans women (especially trans lesbians) have had specific transphobic interactions with have been lesbians or people who use lesbian allyship as an excuse for their transmisogyny

but like people have GOT to understand that lesbian does not equal terf and terf does not equal lesbian. i guarantee you there are more non-terf lesbians than there are terf lesbians. there are more lesbians who love and support trans women and trans people as a whole than there are terf lesbians.

if you think a specific lesbian might be a terf, look at their blog, look at what they're SAYING and DOING to back up your claim before you go "sounds terfy :-/" to every lesbian you meet, and its especially :-/ to say that on a POSITIVITY POST about an actual homophobic stereotype that a lot of cishets ACTUALLY BELIEVE about sapphic women. there are still plenty of cishets who still firmly believe that sapphic women/girls and gay men/boys are inherently predatory because of their attraction and that is what that post was about. it wasn't saying "lesbians can't be predatory" which is what i guess some people were assuming- it was saying that "being a lesbian does not make you predatory"

if you think lesbians making positivity posts about lesbians is terf-like, or you think it sounds like terf propaganda, you are lesbophobic. also like.... a post like that could have been made with full inclusion of trans lesbians (who get, i would say, twice the reputation of being "predatory"), it could have been made by a young cis lesbian who was being groomed by terfs to their cause and those replies caused them to think "wow, i guess they're right, trans people do hate lesbians", it could have been made by a trans lesbian. assuming that lesbian positivity is automatically terfish helps no one.

yes literally this! you’re right and it makes me so frustrated to see people being blatantly lesbophobic and then saying “well im just trying to be an ally to trans people ://“ like how is that being a good ally to just accuse random lesbians of being terfs? like i understand why that person was a bit wary because a lot of terfs do use that kind of rhetoric (i.e. (cis) lesbians are pure and never violent) but that’s not what my post was implying, it’s not transmisogynistic to say that lesbians aren’t predatory, and it couldn’t even really be construed that way unless you’re like, terminally online and intimately aware of how terfs employ those kinds of tactics. idk im just really sick of the knee-jerk reaction to any sort of positivity or discussion about lesbianism being drastically taken the wrong way and assumed to be “terf propaganda”. we can’t ever really be liberated if we’re always avoiding talking about ourselves and our sexuality out of fear of either being harassed by people who think we’re terfs, or actual terfs who want to lump us in with them, which is like really fucked up considering how cishets have oppressed and silenced us in the past by saying we’re preying on the poor innocent straight women and we shouldn’t talk openly about our attraction. and also, focusing on blaming other minorities and using lesbians as a scapegoat distracts from the very real issue of transmisogyny, which is at the heart of it. we should be fighting transphobia, not each other. im over it tbh

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

↑ Everyone @ Boris Johnson right now.

I am so annoyed that this is happening in a week with no News Quiz, no Now Show, no Mock the Week. The Last Leg doesn’t come back until next Friday, and God knows what things will look like by then. I can picture the Last Leg writers frantically writing jokes as the story unfolds, constantly having to scrap and redo them when things change. Late Night Mash doesn’t start again until the fall, and there’s no point in even guessing what they’ll have to talk about at that point.

This, more than anything else, might be what finally gets me to check out the post-Oliver Bugle. If they put an episode out tomorrow, I might have to listen to it just because it’s the only topical comedy happening this week, and if I can enjoy that one without constantly thinking, “no this is incorrect where is the trans-Atlantic Smurf man?”, it might make me decide to try the other ones too. And that reminds me, Last Week Tonight is also not coming back until the end of July. This is more than big enough so even that generally American-focused show would have to cover it, but it’s not happening either.

For the second time in a few weeks (the first being post-Roe v Wade), I have become a person who looks at Twitter, because I don’t want to wait for the next episodes of topical comedy shows to get released before I hear what these people have to say. I found some stuff, enjoyed it, but am already feeling how potentially lethally dopamine-inducing the quick hits on Twitter could be, so I shall be careful not to get drawn in too much. This is a temporary thing to only be employed on special occasions, like when an entire country rolls back women’s rights by very literal decades in one fell swoop, or when the British PM goes down in a blaze of fire and brimstone.

Frankie obviously has a bunch, but for some reason this is the one that made me laugh out loud:

And of course, there is one voice we can always count on. If the shitshow he was put through in the last couple of days caused mental health triggers, due to its similarity to another time when white people being mad at Nish Kumar somehow made the actual real news - which it genuinely might have done and that genuinely upsets me on his behalf - Nish Kumar is not letting it stop him from being all over this today.

This makes me even more glad I’m going to see his show at the end of July, even though I already saw it in May. Boris-based material didn’t make up too much of the show, but it definitely made up some of the show, and he’s going to have to rewrite that now. So I will not be seeing the exact same show again, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he updates it.

Is it weird that even when I went to sleep last night, with over 40 resignations and counting, I didn’t think this would happen? It’s sort of the same as how I never thought the Brexit referendum might pass until the moment it actually did, even though looking back, there were good reasons to believe it was a possibility. It was just such a huge change from the status quo, and I was used to the idea that the status quo does not change that much in one fucking day (oh God, what simpler times those were).

Now, the status quo is that people at high levels of power do unbelievably horrible, stupid, incompetent things, and never face consequences. And I just expected that to keep being the case. Not that this is some great example of power being held accountable. Boris Johnson got away with accomplishing pretty much everything he wanted to do, including many things that will be very difficult or impossible for future governments to fix (I almost left out the word “impossible” there, because anything can be overturned if you try hard enough for enough years, as we recently learned with the Roe v. Wade decision, but then I remembered that no amount of political or legislative will can bring back people who’ve died of COVID). And he’s only going to be replaced by someone who’s just as bad. But still, I really didn’t think this would actually work. I think I might be a little impressed with some of the worst people in the world. This doesn’t make them not the worst people anymore, but they did manage to do... something. I guess time will tell what the hell they actually did.

Anyway, hope everyone in the UK is having a good time. In the words of the great Zaltzman and Oliver, isn’t democracy fun?

[katierosefun]

hi so ive seen you been posting a lot about k dramas so it has me kind of curious. do you have any that you recomend starting off with if you want to get into it?

hi anon, you've come to the right place!!!!

i have a few posts about kdramas that i personally recommend: this one (which is just kind of a general list), this one (which is mostly,,,tcw characters but as kdramas they would probably vibe with), and this one (which is......kdramas that i think would make a good tcw au fic). they say what you loved as an 8-13 year old makes up a solid portion of your personality, and what i loved as an 8-13 year old was star wars, taylor swift, and kdrama, and it shows.

BUT if you don't have time to look at those lists, here's some kdramas that i recommend that literally anyone who wants to watch kdramas should look into:

1. crash landing on you (available on netflix): 'tis about a south korean woman literally crash landing into north korea. it's wonderful, lots of found family, a solid romance plot, really wonderful writing and an a+ cast. i cried literally so many times watching this. also just like...a good reminder that before anything else, north koreans are people with dreams and fears and like, of course the government is corrupt and terrifying and this kdrama doesn't let you forget that for a second, but like...also? north koreans have been so demonized for years, and i think it's just nice to finally have a piece of media that says "north koreans aren't monsters so stop acting like they are. they're literally just born on the other side of the wall".

i recommend this one mostly because it's incredibly beautiful and hits so many wonderful tropes (fake dating! forbidden romance! found family! there was only one bed! snow kisses! there's something here about fate!) that are so common in kdramas, but like...also just has so many strong characters and says a lot about korean culture as a whole, so i think this could very easily be a gateway to kdramas.

2. goblin (available on viki, which is free!): about a young woman who can see ghosts and an immortal being who won't know peace until his future bride pulls out the sword from his chest. honestly, this is known as one of the best fantasy kdramas out there, and for good reason. when i say that i think it literally changed the fantasy kdrama world, i mean it because i think literally every fantasy kdrama out there is still trying to live up to its standards. really wonderful cast, solid chemistry between the main leads, a beautiful plot between the secondary couple, and just like...really aesthetically pleasing.

3. hello my twenties! (available on netflix): complex, and this kdrama really goes into the power of female friendship. that said, there's also some romance subplots, but they all feel mostly really natural and like...typical of the relationships that you would find in college. that said, it's worth noting that this could be triggering for anyone who might have come out of an abusive relationship, because this kdrama def.a-20 episodes a kdrama usually has).

all of the characters are super complex, and this kdrama really goes into the power of female friendship. that said, there's also some romance subplots, but they all feel mostly really natural and like...typical of the relationships that you would find in college. that said, it's worth noting that this could be triggering for anyone who might have come out of an abusive relationship, because this kdrama def. also explores that!

4. school 2013 (available on viki but you would need to pay, dm me for a more accessible link): this kdrama's a little older, airing in 2012-2013 and all, but it's honestly...such a classic, and for a good reason! like hello my twenties, this kdrama isn't really romance focused and instead focuses on an unruly high school class. i'm someone who considers herself to have outgrown kdramas about high school (purely because i myself am no longer in high school), but i watched this kdrama in the span of two weeks and really, really loved it.

i think this kdrama is honestly a must-watch for anyone who wants to get into kdramas because i think it hits one of the most moving themes of kdrama, which is have a dream. there's teacher characters who really are learning alongside their students, and the student characters are all incredibly relatable, and this kdrama is wonderful in that it...really is sympathetic to teenagers and validates all of the problems teenagers, especially high schoolers, face. i definitely was sad to finish it, and i would recommend everyone to give this a watch, especially if you feel a little lost with your life. (i just think everyone could use a teacher jung or teacher kang in their lives.)

5. itaewon class (available on netflix): this is another kdrama that doesn't really focus too much on romance. that said, there's a romantic subplot, but the emphasis here is really on...just...fighting for what you believe in. the plot follows a young man who's building a pub...basically to avenge his father's death. there's this whole revenge plot, and brooo...korean dramas are SO good at revenge plots. like, wonderfully good and satisfying with revenge plots.

what i really loved about this kdrama though was that yes, there was a revenge plot, but like...the protagonist was so. fundamentally. good. honestly. he just wants to employ people who have been kicked down in society. so as you can imagine, there's quite a bit of found family here. additionally, there's a storyline that even explores what it means to be black in south korea, as well as what it means to be trans in south korea. i kind of wish the trans representation was better, seeing that the person who acted as the trans character was cisgender, but considering that south korea is still incredibly conservative when it comes to lgbt+ representation, i'm glad that this kdrama at least really fleshed out a trans character and gave her like...a really moving and compelling storyline. (as opposed to...treating being trans or being lgbt+ in any way as a joke, which is unfortunately the trend with a lot of kdramas. not in any of the kdramas i've recced above, obviously, but like. if you go back to a lot of older kdramas, that's the case, just as you would find with media in any other culture, i'm afraid.)

but anyways, this is just a solid kdrama. will 1000/10 make you want to do something good with your life. :')

[fake-wizard]

How did you become a trans terf? This is really interesting!

Thank you for this question because I can now delay watching my lectures for like 30 min. 

I got tumblr my freshman year, started my deep dive into the realm of tumblr’s lgbtqianpd+++ stuff. I did a bunch of ace discourse as an “inclusionist” then as an “exclusionist”, started iding as nonbinary demiboy, ace/aro, he/they, got a binder i think during the winter of my sophomore year and came out to a couple friends as nb. Went more towards ftm. Started dating my current boyfriend winter of my junior year, told him I was id’ing as ftm (he’s bisexual, didn’t matter) and the rest of my friends, changed my name and pronouns socially. Start of my senior year I told my family and had them change pronouns and name as well. My bday is in October, so turned 18 and was going to start testosterone. 

By the winter of that year however, I had been hate-reading a lot of “terf” blogs. And what I found was that I could not argue against what they were saying. I was experiencing a lot of cognitive dissonance about it all, repeating the same mantras but knowing they didn’t quite add up. 

Specifically about: If sexuality is based on an internal sense of gender, how can you be attracted to anyone until they tell you what gender they are? If a lesbian sees a woman and she says “i’m ftm” does that mean the lesbian is now a bisexual because they were “attracted to a man” or is a switch supposed to flip and they stop being attracted? If sexism is based on “being perceived as a woman/passing as a woman” then why do butches who pass as men still experience sexism? If being gay is about “being perceived as gay in society” then wouldn’t that make all the homosexual couples historically who passed as hetero for safety suddenly become actual literal heteros? If transmen have male privilege, why are they not represented in politics, are targetted for sexual abuse by straight men, and need access to abortion just like women do? If transwomen don’t have male privilege, why are they the main voices of the movement? They can reap all the benefits of a male life for 50 years, and then suddenly none of that mattered? If me and my boyfriend’s relationship is “gay” now that i id’d as ftm, how come we could legally get married and adopt in any country in the world? I was raised being told I Should like and date men, I never once believed my attraction to men was a sin, and gay men experience the Exact Opposite, so how could we both possibly be gay men? Why do transwomen have male patterns of violence? Why have I only ever heard of stories of transwomen abusing transmen, and not the other way around? Is it possible to only be attracted to the same sex? To say no is to say that it’s possible for all women to like dick, which is obviously fucked up. What is so different about a man and a transwoman that means a lesbian is supposed ot like the latter? Why can’t anybody define women? first woman, then female, then afab, the goalpost kept moving. What is there to being a woman besides being female, isn’t all that extra stuff just stereotypes? When my sister is distressed with her body and denied herself food, or I cut myself, that’s a bad thing because it hurts your body, but hrt and a mastectomy hurt your body, they even risk killing you, but that’s okay? I took a sociology class and it’s clear socialization effects behavior - but somehow magically trans people grow up uneffected by it? If socialization can influence women to wear makeup, dress, and act in specific ways that arent’ innate, and cause higher rates of eating disorders, couldn’t it effect dysphoria as well?

And so much more!!!

And that’s only on the trans side - I also had my eyes opened to the horrors of pornography and prostitution, the rates of domestic violence, and all the other terrible sex-based oppression that women are subjected to globally. There is so much more to being a radfem than the trans issues too. 

So for two years (winter of my senior year to winter of my college’s high school year) I decided not to transition. I engaged with radfem tumblr and talked about all these things with my female friends in person as well, it was like getting a huge weight off my shoulders too. And it really did help lessen my dysphoria to an extent. I came up with a long list of coping mechanisms to employ for dysphoria as well. 

But by this february, I was just so tired of that. I still supported everything I say about radical feminism, about sex based oppression, protecting homosexuals, and the dangers of medical transition. But dysphoria is just this constant painful presence day in and day out, and I pursued medical transition in february. I applaud every woman who chooses not to transition, and ultimately view transitioning as giving in, because I can no longer be a role model to young dysphoric women, who shows them that you don’t need to transition. 

At this point, I love my body more than ever and I can’t imagine regretting these changes really. I will miss connecting with women the way I used to, especially as a woman in science, but the women in my life from before transition will always see me as one of them still, and I appreciate that. 

The way I see it, words don’t hurt me at all, they are immaterial, and as a scientist I value coherent definitions, and I understand the realities of sex. So my goal with transition is to pass as male in society and to alter the parts of my body that bring me distress - I know i’m not literally male. And I think all trans people need to get to the point where they understand that, it really helps mentally. 

And I’ll always think, maybe if i had different friends (half of my friends understand, half think i am or would think i am an evil terf) or was dating a woman instead of a man (i’m bisexual, thought i was hetero in highschool (but called myself a gay man lmao), and dating someone with the same body seems like a big deal in handling dysphoria), if i tried harder with my coping mechanisms, if I saw a therapist who understood all this and didn’t just encourage me to do whatever I wanted, maybe i wouldn’t be transitioning. But I’m happy now, so that’s what I focus on as mattering to me, and that’s what I want to pursue. 

I do caution others from doing the same though. 

Also tangent at the end here, I call myself “trans” because I’m medically transitioned. To me, “cis v trans” makes no sense and is sexist. But “dysphoric vs not dysphoric” or “medically transitioned vs not medically transitioned” make more sense to me. 

[ariainstars]

TRoS Speculation: Maybe It Was Intentional…

All right, since the subject obviously doesn’t let me go, new speculation on my side. WARNING: this is a longer post.

 Ever since the 80es, Star Wars has become a universal phenomenon with millions of fans all over the world. And while fans often agree, they more often than not disagree about the characters, the themes, the different turn of events etc. Star Wars touches very many different kinds of people deep down due to the emotions it provokes. Many of us have grown up with the saga, some with one trilogy, others with another. Others have read the EU novels or watched the TV shows first. The saga’s themes are so many that they appeal to all kinds of people, and the approaches are varying. There are very many topics on which we will never make everybody agree. Being the foundation for many fan’s view of the world, the root to a lot of their ideals, the source of many a dream, the saga has become a hugely personal matter. No wonder viewers all over the world can quarrel about it so venomously and get downright aggressive if you only introduce a new line of thoughts. Many fans feel that the saga belongs to them and not to the man who created it and the creative studios who are now employing it to develop new stories.

We have made our mistakes in our fandom, too, in the years since The Force Awakens came out. We were so excited in what we believed was investing into a redemption arc, love story and happy ending, connecting all kinds of dots throughout the saga and analyzing it from almost every angle. Some of us simply thought that who didn’t think like us was stupid. But many other fans believe that this saga is only about Good against Evil and not about human feelings. They keep seeing it as some superhero story, a comforting world where to retire when reality got too much, a place where bad things happen but then the hero eventually comes to take care of it. They stick to their conviction that the good guy (or the one you root for even if he’s a villain) is the one who’s the coolest. Many of them love the OT above all and plainly refuse to see anything positive about the PT or ST because they always expected to see the New Adventures of Han, Luke and Leia. Some of them have waited for literally decades for the OT’s continuation. We, who also love the other trilogies (or at least the sequels) were at times disrespectful and arrogant looking down on them and believing that they simply don’t know what the saga actually is about. And all of us need heroes. We apply our own problems, needs and expectations to them and wait for them to fix the problem as an example for us. That’s also why we expect them to get their happy ending.

I have seen videos and read articles about how highly divisive The Last Jedi was. Some fans (a few of them even with tears in their eyes) openly declared that the saga was ruined for them. Similarly to us, who identify with Ben Solo and / or Rey, they had often found courage in the examples set by their heroes and it was offensive and hurtful to them to see Luke Skywalker reduced to a hermit who drinks green milk, rejects the ways of the Jedi and was personally responsible for his nephew’s fall into his abuser’s clutches. They were entitled to their feelings of disappointment and inner numbness as we are now. I know of people who actually survived many ugly periods in their lives finding solace in the saga. Some in one part of it, some in another. And we all got duped and let down, each by one chapter of the sequel trilogy, like some naughty, sadistic kid was kicking apart our favorite doll house a few days before Christmas.

I assume now that The Last Jedi was an experiment to gauge the audience’s reaction. It touched many a sensitive issue. My personal approach is that in order to like it, you don’t only have to be a fan of the sequel trilogy and its characters in general, or a hopeless romantic who wanted to see Rey and Ben Solo’s love story. You have to accept in the first place what the prequel trilogy painstakingly tried to explain to us (though it wasn’t actually said but more shown): that the Jedi were no heroes but got destroyed by their own hubris, and that Anakin Skywalker was largely a victim and not someone who became a villain because he enjoyed being evil, like the typical Batman or Superman villains. The prequels are not a fairy tale like the original trilogy but a cautionary tale following the lines of “society creates its own monsters.” It was only logical to deduce that if the Jedi were so perfect and the Old Republic so idyllic as Obi-Wan described them to Luke when they first met on Tatooine, Vader’s rise and the creation of the Empire couldn’t have happened in the first place. This was never said as clearly and concisely as by Luke to Rey during their second lesson on Ahch-To:

“Now that they’re extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But strip away the myth and look at their deeds: the legacy of the Jedi is failure, hypocrisy, hubris. At the height of their power they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire and wipe them out. It was a Jedi who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader.”

This is the message of the prequels in a few sentences, and a pivotal change to the “superhero approach” to the Jedi which might qualified if you only watch the OT and never question its themes on a larger scale. If you accept the Jedi’s failure for a fact, all of the rest falls into place - Vader being but a broken, sad old guy, Luke’s disillusion, his decision to give up the ways of the Jedi, his first lesson teaching Rey that the Force is not some kind of superpower, his forgiveness towards his nephew, the glimpses of goodness we saw foreshadowing Ben Solo’s redemption. The prequels also make much more sense this way than watching them expecting to see the Jedi being super-cool heroes and Anakin becoming Vader because he thought it might be fun.

But many fans chose not to see or accept what The Last Jedi actually was trying to say: that things couldn’t continue the way they did, because the Old Republic and the Jedi (though they didn’t actually have bad intentions) were deeply flawed. Leia tried to build another republic without any major changes that we are aware of, and Luke wanted to rebuild the Jedi Order without effectuating the considerable changes their Code would have needed. Both failed. It was e.g. never explained why Luke spirited his students away to a lonely planet for their training, but the fact that they were taken from their families when they were too small to make a choice and stick to it - Ben e.g. wanted to be a pilot like his father and not a Jedi - already shows the same pattern. Luke had not learned from the faults of his teachers until his exile. Logically, Episode IX ought to have continued these themes and showed the ST protagonist finding a new and better approach to the Force. Instead, what we got was another (in my opinion: redundant) Ultimate Battle of Good Against Evil, in other words some kind of superhero film which largely ignores the themes of its predecessor.

Any fan is entitled to his opinion. If someone hates the PT because it shows a stagnant society and the Jedi as highly flawed, because they didn’t get to see Darth Vader becoming over-the-top cool but were confronted, in Anakin, with a deeply compassionate person crushed by expectations he never could meet in the first place, if they judged him a whiny brat instead of an intelligent guy who clearly saw through the flaws of the society he was forced to live in and simply didn’t find the right words to express it: they’re entitled to it. Same goes for not feeling the tension between Rey and Kylo in the ST, for judging Kylo quickly (again) as a whiny brat instead of a complex, tormented character, for not appreciating new characters like Rose on account of not being Star-Wars-y enough. These feelings mostly stem from the fans’ long-standing wish to see an actual continuation of the original trilogy, not a new instalment where a new generation takes over and the old heroes are relegated to the background and, additionally, their characters and past decisions are openly criticized.

We may claim that fanbros are simply too stupid to understand what the saga is actually about. Well, maybe they are, or they are just too lazy to look at the bigger picture. But they have a right to that.  Of course, it doesn’t entitle them to harass the studios, directors, creative team or actors the way they were, mind you: what e.g. Kelly Marie Tran, Ahmed Best and Jake Lloyd had to endure was a disgrace. There are very many fans who disagree with the PT and ST without getting bitter or even vicious.

This doesn’t mean I have changed my mind. I still believe that the Jedi were everything but heroes, that Darth Vader is a tragic figure, that the main themes of the saga are family, hope and new beginnings and not “the coolest ones win, ka-boom, the end”; that what it means to say is that human feelings are in the end more important than power, even an enormous power like the one the Force can provide.

We who are angry and disappointed with TRoS now like to blame how it went that way due to the influence of angry white dudebros, misogyny, Calvinism, racism, the overall political situation, the Mouse only wanting to make money etc.

But we ought to consider that The Last Jedi, which was so deeply controversial, hit theatres only two years ago. Have mentalities, politics and social structures and Disney’s overall approached changed so considerably, in so short a time, to produce two so radically different approaches to the saga within the scope of two years?

Sorry, I can’t believe it. it doesn’t really make sense.

The Mandalorian is met with universal acclaim, no doubt partly due to the fact that it’s a standalone story without the huge dynastic weight the saga has on its shoulders. Being a TV show, it had more time to introduce characters and situations and develop them. And it worked out fine. It had all the Star Wars themes - a lot of action scenes, sure, but it was also about belonging, family, redemption, protectiveness, friendship. Meaning that the studios didn’t lose track or are too dumb to think up a good story.

The Rise of Skywalker seems to bring the saga to a closure, but it could also be a wholly new beginning; the beginning of what I was foreseeing and still believe was in the cards - a new galaxy with a new and better political order kept together by a common belief in the Force as a whole; a new Jedi order where Force-sensitive children are not torn away from their families but can choose whether they want to become Jedi or not; and where Jedi are not taught emotional detachment. This would mean balance at last, a balance from which everyone would benefit. I have no idea how Ben Solo could be revived but I still am certain that he would be an excellent father figure, the perfect foil to his grandfather; and that the best thing for Rey would be to take care of children who are lost and abandoned the way she once was. And with Rey being a Palpatine, there is an interesting ground from which to explore her character’s tendency to the Dark, mirroring Ben’s. The basic approaches for this kind of development were all there in The Last Jedi. But a project like that would be something completely different from the original saga, and it would take a lot of time. Maybe that’s why the studios dropped it in favor of appeasing the angry fanbros who didn’t receive The Last Jedi well at all.

Anyone has the right to think that the original trilogy is the one and only and that the rest is rubbish. But the heroes of that story had their friendship, their family, their adventures, their successes, their happy ending. Even the heroes of the prequel trilogy had their moments, including Anakin Skywalker. Our heroes didn’t. That’s why this ending is so bitter for us and so hard to stomach. Essentially, we were right - we knew that Ben and Rey belong together, that Ben would redeem himself and make peace with his family, that balance would come. What we didn’t get was our happy ending.

The Force Awakens was still more or less accepted, because despite the many new themes and choices it wasn’t subversive and controversial in its approach. The actual wasps’ nest was stirred with The Last Jedi. No argumentation could convince antis that it is actually a well-made film and that their personal approach on the saga is too narrow-minded to appreciate it. They wanted the same villains, the same settings and costumes, the same heroes (or at least rehashes). And they had a right to want that, exactly as we had the right to expect a better development and ending for our new heroes. The hardcore OT fans wanted and expected The New Adventures of Han, Luke and Leia kicking ass. Well, it seems The Rise of Skywalker took care of that, finally giving them what they wanted and ignoring or “correcting” the course of events from The Last Jedi.

So, that’s it now. The OT fanbros got “their” Star Wars. I hope they’re finally appeased. They can ignore anything that happens next. That the saga is finished does not mean that the Star Wars universe came to a standstill.

If fans of the original trilogy felt entitled to ask for The Last Jedi to be removed from canon, or at least to be “fixed” in some way, so can we. In case you didn’t see it yet, the petition is already there: https://www.change.org/p/lucasfilm-continue-ben-solo-s-story

Let’s tell the studios to keep TRoS the way they prefer, but that we wish to have our Star Wars now. Let us not steep down to the level of who made the lives of actors who played characters they disapproved of a living hell (see above) or say over and over “Star Wars is dead” when we don’t know what’s in store for the future. With the Star Wars universe, you always have to be patient. In the meantime, we can write and read fanfiction and other stories and purse our own lives, telling our own happy endings.

Happy New Year everyone. Feel free to reblog. 😊

  P.P.S. On a side note: Rey’s last scene shows her where Luke used to be, on Tatooine watching the suns set. The twin suns. In A New Hope, this was shortly before he met the other half of his soul who had been separated from him right after birth - his twin sister. Considering that it was explicitly said that Rey and Ben Solo share the same soul, it might be a hint about the future. I’m not trying to make false promises or to fuel wrong expectations here. Just sayin’. 😉

[a-queer-seminarian]

Edited March 30, 2020

__________

currently thinking about how Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem was hailed and celebrated by the people -- how they shouted “hosanna,” an exclamation of adoration and praise; how they waved palms and spread their cloaks for his arrival........and then turned on him. let the Romans take him and torture him and brutally execute him.

and how because this happened to Jesus, he knows intimately what it feels like when similar things happen to us. when we are welcomed at first and then, when we fail to meet expectations, we are vilified and thrown out -- Jesus gets it. God really, truly, has been there.

a Black woman is employed by a church as part of a diversity initiative, and is welcomed by all -- until she starts pointing out things that need to change, pervasive issues of racism and misogyny and cissexism that should be addressed. excitement sours into resentment, openness into anger; she is ostracized, treated rudely, isolated until the environment becomes so toxic she leaves. she is blamed for the way things “didn’t work out.”

parents promise their son their love is unconditional; he grows up hearing the promise to “love him no matter what.” but these parents are also not quiet about making their anti-gay views known. he has to wonder -- will that unconditional love survive him going out?

a trans person comes out to their loved ones, who express support, a willingness to learn and a promise to work on the new name and pronouns. but months pass by and those loved ones are still misgendering them and growing more and more frustrated, not at themselves but at the trans person -- “Why are you making life so hard?” “Why can’t you just be normal?” “Why would you even want to change your body like that?”

a congregant comes out to her pastor and some of the elders of the church, who respond with compassion and a promise that she’ll always be welcome at the church. the congregant is relieved, and even emboldened to bring her girlfriend to church a few weeks later. but the pastor and some church members confront her, horrified -- “you can’t hold hands with another woman in a place of God!” “This is not okay! If you’re going to act on your desires, we will have to take severe action.” She realized that when the pastor promised her welcome, he’d assumed she would remain “celibate”...she goes home disillusioned brokenhearted. Church will never feel safe again, she tells her girlfriend.

i and people i love dearly have lived through some of these scenarios, and that kind of pain seeps into your psyche and nests in your bones.

but i do find comfort in knowing that my God has been there too -- that the God who throughout the scriptures professed to know, really know the pain and suffering of Their people (e.g. Exodus 3:7) did experience it firsthand. it breaks my heart that Jesus, whom i love, knows this pain too....but it also brings me comfort. because he gets it -- he really, really gets it.

and the God who knows, who sees, who feels with us, is a God whose power is compassion, suffering with and being moved to act -- God does not leave us alone when faith communities abandon us; God shares our pain when others afflict us; and God will act to make things right.

as we enter Holy Week, i plan to meditate more on Jesus’ pain -- the pain of rejection, of having loved ones turn on you, of being handed over to torture and death -- and offer my deepest gratitude for that ultimate act of solidarity with all whom the world rejects and tortures.

thank you, Jesus. you share our suffering always -- give me the courage to try to share your suffering with you, so that i may be moved to act for all who suffer today.

________________

So. I wrote this little reflection during Holy Week last year. We are now approaching Holy Week once again. I will be preaching (via the internet) at my home church this Palm Sunday, and so naturally I remembered, “Oh, I wrote a little something about Palm Sunday before, let’s dig that up and see if it was any good!”

I re-read what I wrote below, and was aghast. embarrassed. ashamed.

Because what I wrote has the same kind of antisemitic tinge to it that has enabled hate crimes against Jewish communities across the centuries.

“But I didn’t say ‘the Jews killed Jesus’ -- I made it clear that Romans are the ones who executed him!!” Sure, but I clearly imply that his Jewish community “let” the Romans kill him; I literally used the language “they turned on him” and rejected him.

When I wrote this piece just last year, I was so sure I was a Good Christian who Knew About The Dangers of Antisemitism In Christianity -- I patted myself on the back for knowing that the Romans are the ones who actually tortured and crucified Jesus. But I wrote this! Even while checking over everything I wrote and thought about Passion Week in particular, being aware of the horrific violent history of this week, this not-even-subtle antisemitic thinking completely flew past me.

What antisemitism continues to lurk in my theology, unchecked?

I think I’m ~so good~ at noticing antisemitism and other dangerous bigotry embedded in my beliefs and language. Clearly, I’m not.

This post spoke to a lot of people, you can see in the comments on it. Last year, I was happy to have moved them with my words. Now, I blush, knowing I let antisemitic thinking spread.

Now, I have no clue how to rethink the Passion narrative that is so central to my faith but so corrupted by antisemitism. How do we read the stories of Jesus being handed over to death without being antisemitic? We can remind the listeners that “The Jews” of Jesus’s days don’t = the Jewish communities that came after them and that continue today. We can remind the listeners that Jesus and his friends were also Jewish, and his was an intra-community struggle. But I don’t think that’s enough.

I have to preach in just six days about Palm Sunday -- a Triumphalist passage if there ever was one! How do I preach it without indicting “the Jews”? Especially now, in this time of pandemic, when people will be expecting my message to be about that very immediate crisis, rather than the timeless crisis of antisemitism in our scripture.

If anyone has articles for me, thoughts for me, I’m all ears. Here are a couple resources I’ve got so far:

I just downloaded an ebook called Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews: Reflections for Christians in Lent

An article about the “Moneychangers in the Temple” that Matthew’s Gospel shows Jesus “driving out” directly after the Palm Sunday scene

A church’s reflection on Passion Week

“A Note on ‘The Jews’ in Palm Sunday’s Passion Reading”

I especially appreciate any Jewish person’s perspective, but don’t expect it -- I know y’all don’t owe me anything. I am deeply sorry for my role in perpetuating antisemitism, and I’m going to be working on doing better.

[cardentist]

the transmisandry “debate” and the attitude towards trans men is so transparently a retreading of literally every exclusionary movement of the last few decades and Yet it’s being perpetrated and tolerated by what otherwise should be inclusionist spaces because it’s once again being pointed at a more “acceptable” target

like, on some level I understand the gut reaction, the term itself is associated with a lot of negativity and “mens rights activists” and the like have made the idea of men specifically facing oppression for being men at best laughable and at worst a red flag for violent misogyny. it’s one of those things that a lot of people in left leaning spaces take for granted as being true across the board, something they don’t need to think about or examine. and to be clear “they” included me for quite some time, I do understand where the feeling comes from

but it’s not about oppression for being men, it’s oppression for being trans men, it’s transmisandry for the same reason that transmisogyny is transmisogyny. it’s a term specifically meant to cast a net over the broad array of experiences that people have specifically as trans men to give them an outlet to both examine their experiences in relation to the wider community of trans men and to specifically seek and give reassurance and solidarity to each other. 

the bigger problem with this argument is that many people will resort to denying what I’ve just said in order to reject the proposed term, whether it’s something they’d actually believe once they examined the situation in earnest or not. because people act as though acknowledging that trans men face oppression for being trans men will open up the floodgates leading to cis straight white men convincing people that they’re oppressed for being men. so trans men Can’t be oppressed for being trans men because trans men are men and men aren’t oppressed.

so leading from this line of thought what you’ll generally see is the argument that what trans men experience is “just” transphobia, and if you press the issue or bring up a personal example you’ll almost as commonly get that anything else is “just” “misdirected” misogyny. and just, there’s so So much to unpack there that I’m almost tempted to just leave it where it is, but ignoring the issue won’t make it go away and I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t want the issue to change.

the point with, I think, the least baggage is one that I’ve already touched upon, that being that the experiences of trans men and trans women are just naturally going to be different from each other and it’s useful for both parties to have language to talk specifically about their experiences, in the same way that it’s useful to examine the differences between the experiences of binary and nonbinary trans people. it doesn’t matter who you think has it “worse” because this isn’t a competition to see who’s oppressed enough to Deserve having their experiences heard. the urge for trans men to make a term to describe their experiences isn’t some way to try to argue that they’re more oppressed, it’s born from the inherent need to be understood and to see that other people exist in the way that you have. it’s the solidarity that brought the trans community together in the first place

a point leading off of that with probably significantly more baggage is the idea that queer and lgbt+ spaces are a contest to measure your oppression in the first place. don’t get me wrong, it Is useful to recognize different axis’ of oppression, to recognize larger patterns of violence faced by specific groups of people at a disproportionate rate. it helps us, as an entire community, identify the most vulnerable groups of people so we can lean into helping them on both a systemic and individual level, so we can see whose voices need to be boosted so they can be heard both in and out of the community. and moreover having these numbers and experiences together can help people outside of the community see that it’s is a problem as well. 

however, the issue comes in when perceived theoretical oppression is used as a social capital to decide who is and is not allowed to be heard. I’m sure I’ve already lost the ace exclusionists ages ago by now, so that’s a perfect example. at it’s most extreme ace exclusionism is blatant bigotry and hatred justified with the excuse that they’re protecting the queer and lgbt+ community from privileged invaders, and even when in it’s milder form ace exclusionism is powered by the idea that asexual people don’t face oppression. marginalized people are denied resources, solidarity, safe spaces, and voices because they’re painted as not being oppressed or not being oppressed Enough. this wouldn’t be able to happen if your worth as a member of the lgbt+ community wasn’t measured by how oppressed your particular minority group is, if it didn’t have the sway that it has. creating a power structure in any way at all leaves people with the ability to exploit that structure, and the specific one that’s emerged within the queer community and leftist spaces in general allows people to exploit it while hiding it as moral, while hiding that they’re causing any pain at all. it’s the same frame of mind that’s made bullying cool in activist spaces 

another reason why this hierarchy tends to fail on an individual level is, of course, that the level of oppression that an entire group faces does not dictate someone’s lived experiences, which is an idea that goes both ways. the argument over whether or not asexuals are oppressed is ultimately a meaningless distraction from the lived experiences of asexual people. it is a Fact that asexuals face higher levels of rape and sexual assault than straight people, you can deny that what they’re facing counts as oppression specifically but what does that matter? there are people who are suffering and that suffering can be lessened by allowing those people into our community, shouldn’t that be enough? likewise, comparing the suffering of individual people as if they were the same as the suffering of their respective groups combined is absolutely absurd. someone who is murdered for being a trans man isn’t less dead than someone who was murdered for being a trans woman. a trans woman isn’t Guaranteed to have lived a harder life than any and every other trans man just because of a difference in statistics, and the same can be said for literally every other member of the lgbt+ and queer communities. other community members aren’t concepts, they aren’t numbers, they’re people with unique lives and sorrows and joy. neither you or I or anyone else is the culmination of our respective or joint communities and some people need to learn how to act like it.

again, there is Meaning in seeing how our oppression is different, it’s not inherently wrong, but creating a framework where it can be used to paint a group of people as both lesser within the community and less deserving of help is creating a framework that can more than readily be abused. and because it positions the abused as privileged it creates a situation where the abuser can justify it to themselves. you use another minority as an outlet for the pain you feel under the weight of the same system that hurts them while denying their pain.

but to pull the conversation back to trans men specifically, lets examine lived experiences for a while longer. “misdirected misogyny” and “just misogyny” are both employed commonly in exclusionist spaces to deny that either someone’s oppression happened to them for the reason they say it did or to deny that their oppression is their own, and often times it’s both. for instance, the claim that ‘asexual people may face higher rates of sexual assault but That’s just because of misogyny (and/or misdirected homophobia)’ is used to deny that what asexual people face is oppression for being asexual. if you can’t deny that an assault victim was assaulted without either violating your own moral code or the moral code of the community you’ve surrounded yourself with then denying the cause of their assault is a more socially acceptable way of depriving them of the resources they need to address that assault. their pain wasn’t their own, it belongs to someone else, someone who’s Really oppressed.

in the context of trans men the argument is, of course, that they’re men. if they just so happen to face misogyny then it’s because they were mistakenly perceived as women. this works a convenient socially acceptable way to deny the lived experiences of a group you want to silence both in the ways that I’ve already illustrated And with the added bonus woke points of doing so while affirming someone’s gender identity in the process.

again, I want to reiterate, even if it were objectively true that all trans men face transphobia and misogyny totally separately, like a picky toddler that doesn’t want their peas anywhere near their mashed potatoes, that is ultimately an insufficient framework when talking about individual lives. there’s literally nothing wrong with trans men wanting to talk about their lived experiences with other trans men in the context of them Being trans men. being black isn’t inherently a part of the trans experience but being black Does ultimately affect your experiences as a trans person and how they impact you and it’s meaningful to discuss the intersection of those two experiences on an individual level. 

but it just, Isn’t true. this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but trans men were born in bodies that are perceived as being women, misogyny is a Feature to the experiences of trans men inherently. even trans men who are fully transitioned, have full surgery, have all their papers worked out, completely pass, move to a new state and changed their name, and have zero contact with anyone who ever knew them before or during their transition still lived a significant portion of their lives under a system that was misogynistic against them. of course there’s still a spectrum of personal experiences with it, just like there are with cis women and trans women, but to present the misogyny that trans men face as “accidental” is just absurd.  and moreover, most trans men Aren’t the hypothetical Perfect Passing Pete. I’ve identified as trans for seven years now and I frankly don’t have the resources to even begin thinking about transitioning and won’t for what’s looking to be indefinitely, I don’t even begin to come within the ballpark of passing and it Sure Does Show. misogyny is just as present in my life as it would be for a cis woman but the difference is that I’m not supposed to talk about it.  and even barring That there are transitioned trans men who face misogyny specifically because they are trans men, before during and after transition. you could argue that that’s “just” transphobia but you could do the same for transmisogyny. if we can acknowledge that trans women have experiences that specifically come from their status as women who can be wrongly perceived as men then we should all be able to acknowledge that trans men have experiences that specifically come from their status as men who can be wrongly perceived as women and that both the similarities and differences between these experiences are worth talking about. 

another issue with painting it as “just” misogyny that ties pretty heavily into what I was just talking about is the fact that men don’t have the same access to spaces meant to talk about misogyny that women do.  again, this is something that makes sense on a gut level, it’s not like cis men are being catcalled while walking to 7/11. but like, a lot of trans men are. misogyny is a normal facet in the lives of trans men but male voices are perceived as being invaders in spaces meant to talk about misogyny, both in and out of trans specific spaces and conversations

trans men lose a solidarity with women that they do not gain with men. there’s a certain pain and othering that comes with intimately identifying with the experiences of a group of people while being denied that those experiences are yours, of being treated the same way for the same reason but at once being aware that the comfort and understanding being extended isn’t For you and feeling like you’re cheating some part of your sense of self by identifying with it.

part of that is just the growing pains of getting used to existing as a trans person, but that in and of itself doesn’t mean that we aren’t allowed to find a solution. if trans men can’t, aren’t allowed, or don’t want to speak about their experiences in women’s spaces then why not allow them to talk about their experiences together? the fact that we even have to argue over whether or not trans men Deserve to talk about their experiences is sad enough in it’s own right, but even sadder is inclusionists, people who should frankly know better at this point, refusing to stand up for trans men because someone managed to word blatant bigotry in an acceptable way Once Again.