#i also understand that sexualities and genders are not set defined things

[poorlymanufacturedgirl]

at this point i dont care enough to say what people can or cant label themselves because theres obviously little point to that. however the incessant need for people to continuously make strictly lesbian content and posts about men and to insist that attraction to men and desire to be with men and have sex with men doesn't mean you're not a lesbian and call anyone who even slightly disagrees a terf or an exclusionist or a fed and how that doesnt happen on this kind of scale for literally any other sexuality is kind of like. hmmm! whats going on here! obviously no one is forcing me to be interested in men but it would just be fucking nice if i could go one scroll through this stupid site without seeing "yeah but did you know its okay to like men! fucking men is great! what about men though? why arent you including men in this! this but with men!!" fucking everywhere! i know its okay to like men we live in a fucking patriarchy why dont you get off our fucking backs god damn!!

i think in a male-dominated society its actually incredibly important to have a sexuality label that unequivocally excludes men from it. again i dont give a shit what you call yourself personally because what the hell am i gonna do about it. but you have to realize how defeating it feels to constantly be reminded that men are the important ones here. what about the men wont someone please think about the men

[copperbadge]

Hey Sam! Since it's currently AO3 donation time, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it? I'm asking because you've written RPF and it's one of many "anti-AO3/anti-AO3 donations" people's favourite things to bring up when they're complaining about AO3 getting so many donations that it continuously obtains an excess of its donation goal whenever donation time rolls around? (Wow, how many times can I say "donation" in an ask?) Sorry if this question bothers you! I don't mean to offend or annoy.

Hey anon! Sorry it took a while to get to this, I don't even know if the drive is still going on, but the question came in while I was traveling and I didn't really have the time for stuff that wasn't travel-related. In any case, let's dig in! (I am not offended, no worries.)

So really there are two issues here and as much as some people who are critical of AO3 want to conflate them, they are different. While some criticism of AO3 may be valid, rhetoric against AO3 tends to misinterpret both in separate ways.

First there's the issue of what AO3 hosts -- RPF, yes, but more broadly, varied content that some people find distasteful or think should be illegal, which is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the archive and more broadly a dangerous attitude towards the concept of freedom of expression.

Second, there's the issue of AO3 generally outpacing its fundraising goals while not allowing monetization, which is a misunderstanding of the legal status of AO3 and to an extent a misunderstanding of philanthropy as a whole.

The longer I watch debates about content go on, the more I come to the conclusion that I was fortunate to have a teacher who really wanted to instill in us an understanding of free speech not as a policy but as an ongoing dialogue. It's not only that freedom of expression "protects you from the government, not the Justin" as the meme goes, but also that freedom of expression is not a static thing. It's an ongoing process of identifying what we find harmful in society and what we want to do about it.

Should the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater be restricted? Should the freedom to yell slurs at drag performers? Should the freedom to teach prepubescent kids about gender, sexuality, and/or safe sex? Should the freedom to wear a leather puppy hood at Pride? Who gets to say, and why?

I was nine when my teacher did a unit on freedom of speech and the intersection of "harm prevention" and "censorship", which is (and should be) a discussion, not a set of ironclad rules. This ambiguity has thus been with me for over thirty years, and I'm comfortable with the ambiguity, with the process; I'm not sure a lot of people critical of AO3's content truly are. Perhaps some can't be, especially those affected by hate speech, but RPF is not hate speech. It's just fiction. Or is fiction "just fiction"? This is a question society as a whole is grappling with, although fandom seems to be a little out ahead of society in terms of how explicitly we discuss it.

The idea that prose can incite violence or cause harm is both valid to examine (witness the rise of fascism on the radio in the 20s, on Facebook and Twitter in the past ten years; they're very similar processes) and a very slippery slope. Because again: who decides what harm is, and what causes it, and what we do about it? Our values align us with certain beliefs, but those are only our values, not universal truths. So AO3 is part of the ongoing question of harm and benefit both to society and individuals.

AO3 itself, however, has a fairly defined policy that it is not meant to police content; it is an archive, not a bookstore or a school board. AO3 refines its TOS and policies as necessary, but the goal is always open access and as much freedom of expression as possible, and if that's uncomfortable for some people then that's a discussion we have to have; ignoring it won't make it go away. But it has to be a discussion, it can't be a unilateral change to the archive's TOS or a series of snaps and clapbacks, and I don't see a lot of people ready to move beyond flinging insults. Perhaps because they were taught a much more binary view of freedom of expression than I was.

So, self-evidently, I support AO3 and I don't have a problem with RPF. Whether other people do is something we're going to have to get to grips with, and that's likely to be a process that is still going on when most of us are dust. I'd rather have a century of ambiguity than a wrong answer tomorrow, anyway.

But whether AO3 hosts RPF is truly a separate issue from its donation drives, because it's a criticism some people level at the site which exists whether it's fundraising or not. So people can criticize AO3's open policy and they can give it as a reason not to support the site, but it's just one aspect of the archive and the fundraising as a whole should be examined separately.

I think AO3's fundraisers are deeply misunderstood (sometimes on purpose) because even people who are anticapitalist get a little crazy when money gets involved, and this is, to fandom, a lot of money -- a few hundred thousand, reliably, every fundraiser. To me, a fundraiser that pulls in three hundred grand is almost quaint; my current nonprofit pulls in better than ten million a year and my previous employer had an endowment of several billion dollars. At my old job I didn't even bother researching people who couldn't give us a hundred grand.

On the other hand, AO3 is an extreme and astounding outlier in the nonprofit world, because basically it's the only one of its kind to work the way it does. It is entirely volunteer-run on the operational side (ie: tag wranglers, coders, lawyers, etc) and has no fundraising staff (gift officers, researchers, outreach officers) as far as I'm aware. To pull in three hundred grand from individual one-time donations, without any paid staff and without even a volunteer fundraising officer? That's insane. That doesn't happen. Except at AO3.

What people misunderstand, however, is the basic status of a nonprofit, which is a legal status, not simply a social one. (I'm adding in some corrections here since it gets complicated and the terminology can be important!) The Organization for Transformative Works, the parent of AO3, is a nonprofit, which indicates how it was incorporated as an organization; additionally it is registered federally as tax-exempt, which carries certain perks, like not paying sales tax, and certain duties, like making their financials transparent to a certain extent. (Religious nonprofits are exempt from the transparency requirement.) If you're interested in more about nonprofits and tax-exempt status a reader dropped a great article here.

Nonprofits, unlike for-profit companies, cannot pay a share of their income to stakeholders. Nonprofits don't have financial stakeholders, only donors. They can have employees and pay them a salary -- that's me, for example -- but if a nonprofit pulls in $10M in donations, my salary is paid from that, I don't get a percentage and nobody else does either. That's what it means to be a nonprofit -- the money above operational costs goes back into the organization. The donations we (and AO3) receive must be plowed under and used for outreach, server maintenance, further fundraising, services expansion, et cetera. You can see this in the 990 forms on Guidestar or ProPublica, or in their more accessible breakdowns on Charity Navigator. Nonprofits that do not put the majority of their income towards service provision tend to get audited and lose their nonprofit status. So nobody's getting paid from all that money, and the overage that isn't spent goes into what is basically a savings account in the name of the nonprofit. (I'm vastly simplifying but that's the gist.) Using that money for personal purposes is illegal. It's called "private inurement" and there's a good article here about it. The money belongs to the OTW as a concept, not to anyone in or of the OTW.

So the biggest misunderstanding that I see in people who are mad at AO3 fundraisers is that "they" are getting all this money (who "they" are is never clearly stated but I'm pretty sure people think @astolat has a special wifi router that runs on burning hundred dollar bills) while "we" can't monetize our fanfic. But "they" get nothing -- nobody even earns a salary from AO3 -- and you can easily prove that by looking at the 990 forms they file with the government, which are required to be made public. You can see the most recently available 990, from 2020, here at Guidestar. Page seven will show you the "highest compensated" employees, all of whom are earning zero dollars or nonmonetary perks (that's the three columns on the right).

Either AO3 is entirely volunteer-run or someone's Doing A Real Fraud. The money the OTW spends is documented (that's page 10 and 11 primarily) and while they may pay for, say, the travel and lodging expenses of a lawyer going to DC to defend a freedom-of-expression case, they don't pay the lawyer for their time, or give them a cut of the income.

Despite what you've read, the reason "we" can't monetize our fanfics on AO3 has nothing to do with the site being the product of volunteer handiwork or AO3 having it in their terms of service or it being considered gauche by some to do so; it's because

IT'S ILLEGAL.

I cannot say this loudly enough: It is against the law for a nonprofit to be used by its staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries to earn direct profit from the services provided by the nonprofit.

You can be paid to work at one, but you cannot side-hustle by selling your handmade friendship bracelets for personal gain on the nonprofit's website. If the nonprofit knowingly allows monetization of its services, it can lose nonprofit status, be fined, be hit with back taxes, and a lot of other unpleasant bullshit can go down, including prosecution of those involved for fraud. If you put a ko-fi link on your fanfic, you are breaking the law, and if AO3 allows it, they are too.

Okay, that was a sidebar, but in some ways not, because it gets to the heart of the real complaints about AO3 fundraising, which is that people in fandom are sick or unhoused or in some form of need and other people in fandom are giving to AO3, a fan site that is financially stable, instead of giving to peoples' gofundmes or dropping money in their Ko-Fi or Paypal. And while it is a legitimate grievance that there are people who are in such desperate need while we live in an era of unprecedented abundance, that's not AO3's fault. AO3 doesn't solicit actively, there's no unasked-for mailings or calls from a gift officer. They just put a banner up on their website, and people give. (Again, this is incredibly outlier behavior in the nonprofit world, I'd do a case study on it but the conclusion would just be "shit's real, yo.") You might as well be mad that people give to their local food bank instead of someone's ko-fi.

You cannot lay at AO3's feet the fact that people want to give to AO3 instead of to your fundraiser. That's a choice individuals have made, and while you can engage with them in terms of why they made the philanthropic choices they did, to blame an organization they supported rather than the person who made the choice to give is not only incorrect but futile, and unlikely to win anyone over to supporting you. We know from research that guilt is not a tremendous motivator of philanthropy.

It is also not necessarily a binary choice; just because AO3 gets a hundred grand in $5 donations doesn't mean most of the people giving don't also give $5 elsewhere. I support the OTW on occasion, and I also fundraise for UNICEF and the Chicago Parks Foundation and BAGLY and others, in addition to giving monthly to several nonprofits that I have longterm relationships with -- my alma mater, the animal rescue where I got the Cryptids, my shul. And I give, occasionally and anonymously, to fundraisers that pass through Radio Free Monday, which are mainly individuals in need, because I was once in need and now I pay it forward. These are the choices I have made. Nobody twisted my arm. I respond poorly to someone making the attempt to do so by attacking places I've given.

I think the upshot is, after all of this that I've written, that we cannot begin to come to grips with questions of institutional inequality in philanthropy, or freedom of expression and censorship, until people actually understand what's going on, and too few do. So all I can do is try and explain, and hopefully create a forum for people to learn and grow when it comes to charitable giving.

Archive Of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works are products of our community and as that community changes, we will necessarily continue to re-evaluate what aspects of it mean and how AO3/OTW express the community sentiment. I hope that the ongoing discussion of support for AO3 also leads to people learning more about their philanthropic options. But criticizing AO3 for fundraising by attacking it for fulfilling one of its stated purposes is silly, and attempting to guilt people into giving in the ways one thinks they should give rather than how they do give is just going to make one extremely unlikable.

As members of this community, we have to be a part of the push and pull, but it's difficult to do that competently in ignorance. So, I do my best to be knowledgeable and to educate my readers, and I hope others will do the same.

[mesetacadre]

How do transgender people fit into a materialist framework? I'm genuinely struggling to describe my own gender in a way that doesn't come across as idealistic and struggling to figure out if my identity even IS compatible with a materialistic framework even though this is supposed to be the Transgender Communisr Website.

The way I've always thought about my sexuality since being more educated in this is that identities are nothing more than a label for a more or less defined set of relations of oneself with wider society. There is no bisexuality essence or ideal that makes me be very into men. Sexuality is, instead, the way we interface with other people in the relevant contexts. In my opinion, being trans is also like this, gender being the set of outward appearances and rituals that influence social relations. Understanding it in this way, it follows that sexuality and gender are products of material conditions, and we can reject the idea that there is such a thing as a gay gene, or an inherently male or female brain. Since gender is primarily a social relation (as much as it is influenced by primary and secondary sexual characteristics), trans people are people whose preference and predesposition (influenced of course by upbringing and social experience) do not correlate with the socially expected set of primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Gender then has its own social and economic functions and although that is beyond the post, I think recognizing this is a good first step in understanding the broader point.

[phoenixyfriend]

Was watching a ContraPoints video (popular trans lady YouTuber) on some gender philosophy and got to thinking about trans girl Ani nuances.

OKAY SO: Contrapoints makes a comment in the video (transcript here) that she views herself as a boy who became a woman, not a girl who didn't realize it yet, which is a relatively uncommon approach among trans people, and that's in the middle of a longer discussion on the flaws in radfem theology (which I watched right after this PhilosophyTube video, and accidentally conflated the two since the former talked a lot about systems/structures of gender).

Anyway, I'm rotating that in my mind with regards to Anakin, who grew up in a setting that could easily be interpreted as having a much foggier distinction between Man and Woman than between Slave and Maste,r or human and twilek, etc.

It's entirely feasible that, on Tatooine in particular, the social elements of gender came down to very practical concerns (reproduction) and very superficial signs (e.g. hairstyle could maybe broadcast intended gender, and who wears skirts) outside of the specific situation of highly gendered and sexual forms of slavery (Jabba's dancing girls), which was relatively rare compared to more standard forms, like shop work or janitorial or what have you.

So you have an Anakin who grew up in a setting where "am I a girl?" isn't necessarily a question that would have the same answer as in another setting with more defined gender distinctions, in terms of both expression and role, and of the matter of identity at that confluence.

Then he--still he, at that time--meets Padmé and the handmaidens (very feminine, very girl, but not in a way that's at all like the way women on Tatooine willingly engage with), and encounters Coruscant culture (lots of gender dynamics due to the culture mash, but a low-key Western Misogyny vibe in the Senate and other non-Jedi settings Anakin's liable to encounter), as well as the Jedi classes on gender and sexuality and respecting/navigating those parts of culture on other planets.

As a result, Anakin starts developing a new, more nuanced and expansive understanding of gender, where it's more than just a few small differences, and the people around are mostly Jedi, who are also pretty dang open to nontraditional gender approaches etc And Anakin sort of… grows into wanting to be woman? In a way that isn't the usual "I always knew I was a girl" and more of an "I've learned what people consider a girl, and I'd like to be one."

And like. Ani COULD go back to thinking of gender in Tatooine terms, but why bother? Being a girl makes her happy. She wasn't unhappy as a boy in that gender framework, but she's happy as a girl now.

But because she didn't mind being raised a boy, she might say things a "when I was a boy" or "back when I was still living as a boy"

Me every time I hear a new, interesting take on gender: How can I apply this to a fictional character?

Also tbf this settles pretty well with my general thoughts on nb Anakin as well, where gender is like… It Sure Is A Thing That Exists. Anyway, Where's The Blasterfire?

[cypionate60mg]

Hi! I love your work. It's really thrilling to find art at the intersection of philosophy, gender, and the erotic. You seem to be really thoughtful and intentional about your presentation of these pieces, so I'm curious about why you tag everything with "autoandrophilia" which IME is a pretty loaded word with a complex etymology. Would love to understand more!

Thanks, and good question. My answer is very long.

Before we go any futher, Blanchard's typology is transmisogynist bullshit. It's oversimplified, misinformed, and unimaginative. He actually abandoned the term 'autoandrophile' and has since switched to 'autohomoerotic'. More controversial online circles of trans people half-ironically identify with Blanchardian typology. For some, it's like MBTI, and for others, it's their self-diagnosis. Depends on the person.

When contemporary Western psychology began to take shape in the Wednesday Psychological Society's weekly meetings, one of the 'defects' they discussed was homosexuality. According to E. James Lieberman's biography of Otto Rank, he said in an informal setting that homosexuality is "love for one's self as seen in the persona of another like oneself whom one admires...strongly built up on narcissism. It is an ego symptom and not a sex symptom." Sound familiar? I don't think Blanchard's typology is all that different from that of early European psychoanalysis.

We see this same critique levied against trans people. That we're confusing attraction for identity, our self-love is fetishistic, and we're narcissistic neurotic perverts. But we can't just dismiss and ignore it, because we do indeed see trans people say things like "I can't tell if I want to be him or fuck him" or "become the person you'd want to date." 'Autoandrophile' starts to sound a lot like 'gender envy'. So what is actually happening here?

To even approach answering that, let's ask more questions. What does it mean to love people who look like you? If you are estranged from your own body, or if your body changes over time, is it morally objectionable to love a specific version of youself? Even a future one? It it also morally objectionable for that self-love to have a sexual dimension?

Trans people are expected to have the clarity of mind to separate who they are from who they're attracted to. (It's one of the demands society makes to ensure you are 'of sound mind' while still being suitably pathological to deserve hormonal/surgical treatment.) But if you don't necessarily identify with your body, then you already exist outside of that distinction. Like an open window, the barrier between inside (self) and outside (everything else) becomes troublesome.

Do you see now why I like the mirror metaphor so much? When you look in a reflection, that's not technically you. But it only exists because you are there to cast an image. The room's mirror image, too, is not necessarily real, but you gain insight into the room, maybe even see it in a new way, precisely because it's reflected back inaccurately. Your conception of yourself is filled out with detail when you cross-reference it with another version of yourself, one that doesn't exist in the same way you currently do.

It's some ontological quantum gender shit. And it's not unique to trans people. Cis people can experience it too, but they rely on the assumption that it's natural to have an oppositional 'counterpart', a 'complementary' partner. Somebody who completes them. Why, then, can't I complete myself?

We find ourselves back at your question. If Blanchard isn't going to use 'autoandrophile', then I will. One man's trash is another man's treasure. I'll use it to:

disrupt its definition.

challenge trans assimilationists.

discomfort cis men with my desire to be like them, or worse—to encourage them to define their masculinity.

provoke people into thoughtful discussions.

make people feel less alone.

But mostly, I use it so that when people look for the term, this blog will come up, and they'll see my porn. Or art. Or whatever they'll want to call it. And they'll start asking themselves the distinctions between any of these things.

There's so much more I could say about all this. Autoandrophilia's relationship to beauty standards, its usefulness (or lack thereof) as a coping mechanism for the limitation of transition, etcetera. But I'll stop here for now.

Much love, CYP60MG

[saintsenara]

Ooh more about the subtext around James/Sirius? I’ve always read the text this way too!

thank you for the ask anon!

this question could have been prompted by any number of posts i’ve made, because i am a great proponent of the idea that...

unrequited prongsfoot is canon. 

why?

i’m so glad you asked!

let’s begin with a small caveat which - regrettably - involves some engagement with discourse.

the things created within fandom aren’t real - an individual fic can’t cause actual, material harm to a reader, even if it contains tropes that would be harmful or distressing if they happened in that reader’s real life; an author’s use of certain tropes or interest in certain characters is not indicative of their actual morals and values in real life; thought crimes are not real crimes - but fanfiction is produced by human beings who are themselves products of the societies and communities in which we all live, and these societies and communities all have flaws and failings.

which is to say, those of us who prefer to read male friendships like james and sirius’ as romantic do need to be aware that, no matter how enlightened on gender and its foibles we think ourselves to be, we are nonetheless influenced as modern humans by a modern tendency to discourage platonic physical and emotional closeness between men - especially straight men - on the grounds that two men having this sort of relationship is inherently queer and, in being queer, implicitly sexual [an understanding of queerness which is another powerful societal influence on our thought, even if we know we don’t agree with it].

we should also be aware that reading a friendship as defining and life-altering as james and sirius’ as romantic gives weight to a modern tendency to prioritise romantic love - and one of its expected outcomes, the love of parents for their biological children - over platonic love, and to regard people for whom romantic love is not a priority as not properly having achieved the milestones of adulthood, nor as properly fulfilled, adored, or satisfied.

everything which follows here, then, can be taken to refer just as validly to a purely platonic relationship between james and sirius if the reader prefers. and, indeed, my view is that this is how the canon narrative wants the reader to understand james saw the relationship... 

but i also think that the canonical text wants us to infer that, for sirius, his relationship with james was one of unrequited romantic love.

it must be said, however, that the narrative doesn’t show this explicitly. of course, it emphasises sirius and james’ compatibility, their similar personalities, their shared affection for each other, and a certain element of codependency [the thought of these two boys, unable to be apart even for a detention without talking through their mirrors! my heart breaks!], but it also sets up these shared elements as - broadly - fraternal: sirius is quasi-adopted by the potters; harry thinks of him and james as like fred and george, at least until he sees snape’s memories in order of the phoenix. when sirius speaks to harry about james, the profundity of his love for him is obvious, and on the two occasions when we see them physically together [snape’s worst memory and the prince’s tale] it’s clear that each is the primary driving force behind the other’s decisions. but we have nothing which indicates unambiguously that sirius’ feelings for james were romantic.

until we dive into a bit of narratology. because the text does do something to suggest that its intention is for sirius’ relationship with james to be read as non-platonic.

and that something is its use of narrative mirrors.

the harry potter series loves assigning its characters to narrative pairs - harry and voldemort are the obvious one; ron and draco malfoy are the one which deserves more attention - and it assigns to sirius a narrative mirror whose own story is one of unrequited romantic love...

severus snape.

sirius and snape are incredibly similar, personality-wise. they also serve identical narrative roles, in that they function as the guides who lead harry through an emotional arc which begins in earnest in prisoner of azkaban and concludes in deathly hallows, in which he sheds his childish, black-and-white view of his parents and comes to regard them as real, flawed, and complex people. harry does this with james in order of the phoenix - after the realisation that he was a bully stops the hero-worshipping which defines his earlier attitude towards his father - with sirius as his guide [sirius is then killed off the second this narrative sub-arc is complete]. he then does it with lily - who spends the earlier books as secondary in importance to james in her son’s mind - in half-blood prince and deathly hallows, in which snape [via the proxies of slughorn, the discipline of potions, his textbook, his patronus, and his memories] serves as his guide, until the fact that lily is the key to the whole mystery is revealed just before harry sacrifices himself to save the world.

in the course of this, it comes to be revealed that each of them considers their life to be defined by their relationship with and love for one half of the pair of james and lily [although the series hides this in snape’s case - making it look as though he is also motivated purely by his antagonistic relationship with james - right up until the last moment]. their mirrored relationships with harry - while the idea that sirius is incapable of distinguishing him from his father is an invention of the films - is also driven fundamentally by their relationship with one of the two halves of his parents.

sirius and snape’s mirrored motivation-by-love is shown most clearly in their identical approach to guilt and grief, the two things which overarchingly drive their individual character arcs across the seven-book canon [or three, if you’re sirius - rip king].

both sirius and snape indirectly trigger the death of the person they love - and, let’s be frank, if we’re going to excoriate snape for reporting the prophecy to voldemort, exactly the same level of ire needs to be reserved for sirius and his plan to switch secret keepers [what we could do instead, of course, is recognise the life-altering tragedy of making this kind of mistake, which we all have to hope we never experience ourselves, and treat the lads with compassion] - but it’s clear in canon that neither accepts the idea that their involvement was, in fact, indirect. sirius openly tells harry that he considers himself to have "as good as" cast the killing curse on james and lily; snape rejects dumbledore’s [back-handed] comfort that james and lily’s deaths were caused by "putting their trust in the wrong person" by wishing to die himself.

wracked by guilt and hollowed out by grief, both of them then decide to punish themselves in an effort - one which, i think, they both consider futile, since they clearly regard their sins as too great to be redeemed - to atone for causing james and lily’s deaths. both of them do this by subjecting themselves to the pain and humiliation of imprisonment.

in sirius’ case, obviously, this is literal. we know from canon that he refuses to profess his innocence at any point during his show trial - and why would he, when he considers himself to be guilty? - and that he remains in azkaban for twelve years, despite possessing the means to escape before then. he leaves the prison only to attempt the one action which he thinks will redeem him in james’ eyes: murdering peter pettigrew.

in snape’s case, the prison is a metaphor [foucault just sat up]. snape entombs himself both at hogwarts - not a place he seems to have been particularly happy - and in spinner’s end, allows dumbledore to repeatedly humiliate him, and risks his life as a spy as a means of self-flagellation. like sirius, he fails to profess his innocence - through ordering dumbledore to tell nobody of his true allegiance - because he considers himself to be guilty. he leaves the self-constructed cell in which he is skulking only when dead - when harry, who takes on the burden of fulfilling snape’s atonement himself by preparing to kill voldemort, starts screaming his true motivations in the dark lord’s face - although there's some implication in canon that dumbledore’s intention was for snape to end the series by attempting himself the one action which he thinks will redeem him in lily’s eyes: murdering voldemort.

[after all, why does dumbledore say to harry at king’s cross that his aim was for snape to control the elder wand if he wasn’t hoping he’d use it to give the dark lord his death blow?]

snape and sirius mirror each other exactly in their response to the death of the person they love. we can justifiably assume, then, that we are intended by the text to read that love as identical in type. 

jkr has been very clear that snape’s relationship with lily is one of unrequited romantic love. we obviously don’t have to accept this in our own readings or in the way we write the characters in our own work - i love a queer snape sacrificing everything for his platonic best friend as much as the next girl - but we do have to acknowledge it as the doylist text’s stated intention. it stands to reason, then, that the text’s intention is for us to regard the mirror-image of snape’s love for lily - sirius’ love for james - as romantic as well.

or, unrequited prongsfoot is canon.

[communistkenobi]

i know next to nothing about queer theory, but i did exist online during (what felt like) huge exclusionary periods (ace discourse, bi/pan discourse, and transmedicalism were the big ones i remember)

i wonder if the first drive for sexuality being something unchangeable and intrinsic to you had something to do with those things, that queerness was fixed and definable, which meant that there were strict lines to be drawn about who was and wasn't gay/lesbian/bi which was only made worse by trans and nonbinary people who didn't exactly fit the previous molds

ill be doubly honest and say i only interacted w/ the community online at the time bc living in a homophobic country doesnt give you a lot of opportunities to meet up in person which means my view of the whole thing is skewed. im not sure if this makes any sense

What I’m about to say isn’t a diagnosis of the causes behind those discourses (partly because i don’t think there is a single reason animating those arguments), but like I guess in general a very baseline authority people fall back on is biology. Dominant reactionary discourses describe being gay trans etc as a lifestyle choice, as an active decision to participate in sexual and gendered degeneracy, and so a very appealing counter-claim to make is to point to biology - we are born this way, we can’t help who we are just as cishet people cannot help who they are, so you should accept us because we can’t change our identity. That rhetorical strategy requires/assumes a stable sexual and gendered ontology, a primary authority of the body that can’t be altered. While I believe this argument is fundamentally flawed, I think this is a straightforwardly easy argument to make re: sexual orientation. With trans and non-binary people this is more difficult because the foundational claim to our existence is that gender is mutable, is alterable, is subject to change (and also “I’ve felt this way since I was a child” is a pathological model of gender dysphoria that is enforced through medical and psychiatric institutions, not a reflection of lived reality for many, many trans and non-binary people). That doesn’t necessarily mean being transgender is a “choice” (although if someone said they woke up one day and chose to be transgender then that is a perfectly authentic justification), especially because “choice” in these discussions is often framed as individualised, private, detached from the social world - we are all just free agents making rational autonomous decisions in a field of equally rational choices, etc. which I think is a very impoverished way to understand choice and agency. Gender is an institution, it is a set of behaviours and performances that we choose to engage in in many different ways, and my use of the word ‘choice’ there does not imply these choices are free from coercion, violence, or harm. I chose to transition, I chose to engage in performances and behaviours that signal to the social world that I am a man - where that desire to make those choices arises from is another matter, and honestly not one I’m super interested in figuring out. Like if I discovered the ‘origin’ of my transness it wouldn’t make any difference to me. Similarly, how I choose to signal masculinity is very obviously bound up in dominant gendered assumptions. Trans people get accused of upholding gendered norms a lot, but that’s only because we aren’t taken seriously unless we do so! It is a survival mechanism that allows us to better navigate incredible amounts of violence and social exclusion, and arguing that our desire to do gender with our bodies comes from some grade-school assumption that dress = woman and pants = man or whatever is pure projection on the part of cis people. cis men think if they drink pink wine they’ll become gay - trans people are not the ones enforcing these norms here.

Getting a bit far afield here, so to loop back around - I think a stable state of sexual and gendered subjectivity or “being” is very appealing to a lot of people because it’s a way to dismiss reactionary fears and to justify to yourself that your oppression is entirely out of your control (which is true obviously!). Again I think these arguments are flawed because they buy into cisgendered and heteronormative ideas about gender and sexuality, that it is a biological burden imposed on us, that deviance is not a choice, that gender is done to us as opposed to being gendered agents, that we are similarly trapped in a sexual prison and should be accepted on those grounds, etc, but they have massive rhetorical power.  

As I’ve said before I’m a pretty staunch believer in Butler’s assertion that it is social all the way down, that gender is not discoverable in the body but rather the body is the medium through which gender is done in the world. Cis people choose to do gender just as much as trans people do! The only difference is that institutional architecture is set up to facilitate and make invisible (in very misogynistic and racist ways) those gendered practices. I think the stronger counter argument to make is that cis- and het-normativities are deeply violent and miserable status quos that need to be dismantled and discarded, that true choice can only emerge vis a vis gender and sexuality once those institutions are abolished, and that choice is actually a desirable end-goal - I want people to be able to participate in gender and sexuality as free agents, as non-coercive practices that are sites of great joy and wonder and pleasure. And this world is only possible if we accept that there is no gendered or sexual ontology, that it is all smoke and mirrors, that this current system’s primary function is to reproduce the nuclear family, to maintain the hereditary nature of class and wealth and race, to provide a standardised system of labour division, to maintain a distinction between the public and private labour realms, and so on.

So again like, is this what animates discourses about who gets to be counted as lgbtq/queer/whichever label you want to use? I don’t know. Probably some of it has to do with that. Queerness is in party a pathological category that is used to describe a failure to meaningfully reproduce cishet norms and practices, it is a set of relationships you have to legal and political and medical and administrative institutions (which is especially true for trans/non binary people). I like this definition because built into it is the possibility of change - I do not want trans people to be assimilated into cishet society, I want society to become transgender, thereby making transgender an irrelevant medical and legal category of person. Much like communism aims to abolish class by universalising the proletariat, I want to abolish gender by universalising the legal and political and medical mechanisms of transition. Only then will cisgenderism be abolished.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about is something a friend said to me, which is that human rights to do not begin with a definition of human - in the same way, I think trans rights do not require a definition of transgenderism. Just universalise and de-pathologise the mechanisms through which transition is expressed. Make it easy to change your name, remove all barriers to hormones and surgery, make everyone economically secure enough that they can change their wardrobe however they please,  desegregate all gendered spaces, de-gender clothing, remove gender markers from all documents, and so on and so on. Doing so would make both cisgender and transgender an irrelevant legal and political category and, again, allow choice to emerge as a meaningful mechanism of gender expression. 

This isn’t a comprehensive policy platform, there are many things I’m sure I haven’t thought through and a large portion of this discussion has to contend with the colonial and white supremacist nature of the western binary gender (bringing us into discussions of decolonial efforts, socialist efforts, and so on), but this is already getting long and I feel like I’m rambling. But like fundamentally I believe in a radical political imaginary that argues that all of this is subject to change and therefore any arguments about an essential gendered or sexual being is, at the end of the day, a reactionary description of gender and sexuality 

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

The other thing too about the "they were just friends" debate in history is how we define sexuality can vary GREATLY from society to society, from time to time. So you can't even label a historical figure if you wanted to because our modern labels might not have bearing on that.

Yes! This is part of it too, because it is often better to use the terms the actual historical people are using. And sometimes they do just call each other friends in correspondence.

Maybe they are friends, and maybe there are also other feelings there. Did they act on them? Would they tell anyone if they did? Does it matter if they did? Is someone only gay if they provably did something sexual with someone? Oh boy, that's a high bar to clear if that's a case.

And that's not even taking into account that we may be talking about any spectrum of things between "gay" and "straight" as we understand them. If you're just looking for someone who never married, never had children, and exclusively experienced same-sex attraction, the list is going to be small.

Part of what frustrates me about this is that at least a majority of people understand this in a modern setting. You can be gay without ever having had a sexual encounter. Or you can be married to someone of the opposite sex and still experience same sex attraction. You can have complicated thoughts and feelings about your own gender and sexuality without externalizing it, and most people understand that.*

And we kind of get (in most cases) that the person gets to say what they are, and you don't as someone on the outside with limited information. That also works retroactively with historical figures.

As I pointed out in another post, your friend that you slept with who got married and is living a seemingly heteronormative life is the premise of Good Luck Babe. Things are complicated; sexuality can be very messy across someone's life.

*in non-exclusionary spaces at least. I don't want to get into the discourse there.

[perplexingluciddreams]

An exploration of gender as a nonverbal autistic

This is going to be an attempt at expressing my feelings about my own gender and queerness, as a nonverbal autistic with language difficulties, low awareness of the world around me, barely any sense of self, and so many other things that affect my ability to understand and be aware of the concept of gender and sexuality to begin with.

I tried to write this like a properly structured essay, but because my thoughts are so disorganised in general (and I have so many thoughts on this topic), I couldn’t manage that. So, I have decided to present this as if it is a collection of journal entries; that is basically what this is, in truth! You will just have to experience the disorganisation in a similar way to how I experience my own mind. The most organising I was able to do was split it up into some categories, to make it slightly easier for you, reading this. Some things that I wrote could fit into more than one category, but this is how I chose to divide it up.

I have written a lot about the words I use to describe the way I feel, how I choose those words, and how that has changed over time. My delays in certain areas of development, and the other ways my various disabilities affect me, have a significant impact on the ways I have come to understand my gender identity and the internal (and partially external) process I went through to get to where I am now.

I have no doubt that things will continue to shift and change and as a result, the way I define myself in different contexts will also change. This is just my first attempt at getting a lot of this out of my brain and into words, for other people to read.

I wrote this is many fragments, so it doesn’t flow or connect, and there may be some repetition. Each paragraph may have been written at a completely different time, and therefore doesn’t relate to the last paragraph, or the next. Some of this is just stand-alone statements, some is longer examinations of my feelings. But all of it is true to my experience of the world and of queerness.

I have never been able to express the majority of this before, so I think it is pretty good for a first attempt!

**Note: I make a reference to having speech at a point in my life. I am nonverbal due to late autism regression, and grew up semiverbal with very unreliable speech, and language issues. I had very poor communication.**

Here we go!

I am inserting a “read more” here because this is very long. Really, very long.

Part 1 - The Words

I don't really think of myself as a man or a woman, or a boy or a girl. I have called myself a transsexual man before, simply because that is the clearest way to explain to someone where I'm coming from and where I'm headed. But I don't particularly like the word "man" to describe myself. I like the word boy, just because the word is nice. But that doesn't mean I am insistent on people calling me a boy. 

I choose the words I use for myself simply from what I like the sound or feel of the most. The last thing I want is to be boxed in, though. I only use labels as descriptors, to explain to other people - they are a tool to communicate something, not a set of limits and boundaries to put on myself.

I know a lot of people might read this and think "that sounds like nonbinary", but I don't use that word. Again, simply because I don't like the way it sounds or feels when i read/write/hear it. And yes, I suppose I do exist outside the conventional binary, but that would be the case regardless of whether I was transsexual or not, because of my autism. So that is not something that needs to be labeled in my opinion (for me personally). Because the conventional binary is not something that exists in my experience of the world.

I hate that there's one set of accepted terminology to label queerness - such a fluid and complex piece of identity - and that I am even more "other" if I choose to say that I AM female, I WAS a girl. I don't like the word transgender unless it is being used as a verb - transing gender. I like the word transsexual because it describes something I will DO (top surgery, eventually). And partly because of how it sounds and the pattern of typing it on a keyboard.

My gender is what I DO, not what I AM. Gender as a verb.

Socially, changing my name and pronouns is much more connected to my barely-there sense of self, and past trauma. I needed to start again, because I felt that my life had changed completely (and it *had*). I like he/him pronouns because they sound different to how i was always referred to growing up. And they simply sound nicer. 

Even though I don't understand most of the social stuff that comes with gender stuff, I still have positive and negative connections to certain gender-related things. And relating to the way I was raised - it still affects me, even though I can't grasp the complexity of how and why.

I enjoy the fact that I am fucking with gender, fucking with expectations. I am a female that is also a boy. I love the contradiction.

I still call myself female, because if people really mean it when they say "gender and sex is separate", then "female" does not mean "girl" or "woman".

Most words I used to describe myself as a child were put on me by other people. I used to repeat them over and over in my mind, as if to explain to myself that that's what I am. Especially my own name. I felt that if I just repeated it enough then maybe those words would stick and feel real. They never did. I don't know what words I would use to describe myself now, but I don't think I need to know. I'm just me. No words are needed for that.

When I just exist as myself in the world, words are barely relevant. My world is so sensory-based and rich in sensations that there's no point even trying to put words to it.

I don't think there's anything wrong with creating new words for things that already have words to describe them, language is constantly evolving and different people will have different experiences that they want to describe in different ways. However, I don't think it is useful to argue for stopping the usage of "outdated" terms, as there are always going to be people who prefer those terms. Not all people are going to agree on a word that they find most fitting or appropriate, even in one community.

I try my best to examine my feelings about myself and what causes a good reaction in me and what causes bad reaction in me. And then I use whatever words I have to try and explain it as best as I can.

Often the words I have are not enough and either I cannot communicate something at all, or I try and it is inaccurate and/or inadequate.

It is very difficult for me to put such abstract thoughts/concepts/feelings into words, I lack the language for that and often also the awareness - there is so many steps to communicating something for me. For example, most people have the automatic urge to communicate things, and know that option is always there. For me, it takes mental work to even remember other people exist and I am capable of interaction with them. And of course after that follows so much more work to do the actual communicating.

For years I thought of the words "transgender" and "transsexual" as off limits. "Those are the things I am not allowed to be".

A lot of words have shaky definitions and that makes it hard for me to even understand what they mean, never mind use them to describe myself.

I would often rather use a phrase, or a paragraph, to describe myself, rather than a singular word. I really don't want to be misunderstood. 

I think that the way I experience gender cannot be put into words, and it certainly can't be labeled with one thing. I'm just grateful to have the opportunity to even try and communicate these things, and to explore it openly in the first place. Because of course I would still explore it inside my own head, even if I didn't have the words or couldn't tell anybody - I was already doing that, before I had access to all this new language.

I know a lot of people don't like the word "tomboy", but since I was a kid I've always really liked it. It brings to mind a mental image of young girls (in a time when clothing for men and women was much more separated) dressing up in boys clothes, boys school uniform, and the feeling of freedom from that. I always wished people would call me a tomboy when I was a kid.

I had a feeling of "oh, that's what I want to be when I grow up", when I first learnt of what butch is. Even though I am not sure at all of my sexuality, because that relates to other people and I am never sure how I relate to other people, or if that’s even possible, especially in a romantic or sexual way.

The words I use will always be slightly "out of date", or "not right", because of the time it takes my brain to catch up with everything. I will never find words to properly describe myself in a way that feels fully correct. I live in a world of my own that doesn't need words, only the acknowledgement of a feeling inside my own head. However, that is not very useful when trying to communicate things to other people.

Some words just taste and sound like defiance.

Part 2 - My Physical Existence

With puberty, I had so much discomfort with the change in my body, not only because it felt as if I was developing wrong, but also because of age and developmental stage - I felt it was too early, I was not ready for that. Big changes are bad.

I do have dysphoria, but only really around my chest, and the way people refer to me (which is also complicated and related to trauma). And other than that, I don't care a lot about how I am viewed, as long as I feel free to express myself however I want.

Aside from my chest, I am comfortable being female. I like having a vulva (as much as it intrigues me about what having a penis is like), I don't want to change that about my body. I don't mind having a uterus (apart from menstruation, which is not fun, but it's not the worst thing ever and it doesn't make me feel overly dysphoric).

I recognise that I have a physical form. I did have to develop the awareness of that, but I do not see that as ME. I am just a floating mass of thoughts and feelings and experiences.

My body was made for me, it wasn't made wrong. There are things I need to change about this body to make it more comfortable to exist in, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was made wrong to begin with, despite feeling that way sometimes.

Disabled bodies inherently break the rules.

Many times I have wondered, perhaps, if my chest were much smaller, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. The main thing I struggle with due to my very large chest, is the physical discomfort. It aggravates my sensory issues in a massive way, it causes back and rib pain from the weight and pressure. The ways that having a large chest increases symptoms of my disabilities are the biggest reason for needing top surgery. Gender wise, I think I would be unbothered by a more “neutral” body, where I could easily forget about my birth sex. If/when I get top surgery, I will be removing my entire chest - the end result being a flat chest - however if I naturally had very small breasts I wonder whether I would pursue top surgery at all. I’m not sure of the answer to this, I can’t imagine hypothetical situations well, but it’s something I think about often.

I find relief in having physical reminders that it is different now (to when I was a child) and I won't get hurt again, I am safe now. I now have a buzzcut that I touch every time I am scared and remember it is not like when my hair was long, not anymore.

Sensory issues and physical limitations affect my physical appearance. And, my mannerisms are affected. I cannot look how I WANT to look. How I WISH I looked. As a result, my perception of myself and my external appearance, are even further divided. My generally low awareness and weak sense of self comes into play here as well. There is such a disconnect.

Part 3 - Awareness and Understanding

I can't stick labels on myself because in order to do that, I need to perceive myself as a person first. If other people want to use certain words to describe the way I am and the way I try to find joy and comfort in this confusing and scary world, that's absolutely fine by me - words are important and helpful and useful. But I don't know enough about the character that other people see and perceive, to say those things about "me".

I don't understand the concept of gender at all really. For me being trans is just about having more of the things that make me happier and more comfortable. I don't know what it means to BE a boy, versus being a girl - just that, out of the two, I would much rather be a boy. It is complicated, having such strong feelings towards and/or against things that I barely grasp the concept of.

My (lack of) understanding of gender and awareness of the world and myself definitely impact the way I define my identity. I would like to say that I am not bothered about labels much. That, to me the human experience is too complex and varied and colourful to be fit into black and white labels, I am just somewhere on the spectrum of human, but as descriptors they can be useful. And all of that is true, however, I do have intense preferences on which words I and others use to refer to me, even if I don’t at all understand why. Those preferences have shifted over time, as well, which sparks a period of questioning and examination, every time I hear someone use a word I previously preferred and find myself physically recoiling from the discomfort.

I cannot understand social constructs such as gender and gender roles. It just add to the confusion that surrounds my brain every day of my life.

If someone views me as a woman (or a girl), nowadays I am okay with that. It definitely would have bothered younger me, because I couldn't yet wrap my head around the complexity and fluidity of identity, and how it can't always be described by words with strict definitions. But as long as people use the name I chose for myself, and refer to me in the the way I ask, I am okay with any assumptions they may make about me based on my outward appearance. Because it's me, and how I define my own identity, that matters. Not how I look to other people. And my appearance is not something I have much control over at all, anyway. The first thing people notice about me is that I’m disabled.

Part 4 - Growing Up

The stages to breaking down my identity enough to identify it as a trans experience, for me, were this. First, it was necessary to understand what gender and sex is, and that there’s a difference between the two. Then, to understand social roles assigned to male and female that create "girl" and "boy" expectations. Thirdly, to have enough awareness of myself and understand my individual experience (and be able to compare my experience to others’) enough to figure out how I feel about gender. Lastly, to finally get communication skills and the control over my life to be able to TELL anyone. This last step is a work in progress!

The way I see it, I was by default a girl when I was younger. Because I had no control then, and that's what was assigned to me. I really couldn't say what I wanted almost at all until I was about 16 years old. And one of the first complex things I finally could communicate (at a very basic level, just scraping the surface) was the gender stuff. I attempted this a lot of times before 16 but I simply didn’t have the language, the understanding, the awareness, the communication skills, etc. to get my point across. The first time I tried to tell another person about experiencing queerness, I only had the words “gay” and “lesbian” to use. I knew that these were not right, but that was all I had. The only words I could use were ones I had read or heard, from other people, and that greatly, greatly limited my ability to express my unique internal experiences. Instead of trying to find other words, I instead became very insistent upon being gay/lesbian, only because I knew it was more than that.

I have a lot of memories of scary experiences where my unreliable speech took over and blurted out scripts (delayed echolalia) about being queer (using words I wouldn’t choose), simply because I was trying to learn and understand my feelings about queerness better with watching/reading media from other people. And that lead to ridicule and more exposure than I was ready for or wanted. I didn’t want other people to know, at that stage. I wasn’t done with the processing, and I needed it to stay internal. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice in the matter.

I was one of those people where it was always obvious I am queer, or at least “different” in just about every respect. I have never had a choice to hide it. I mourn the fact that I was never allowed the chance to inform other people of this part of my identity in my own time, with my own words. I am grateful that I even have the privilege of writing this, but there is a reason that there’s so much to write here in one go. There is so much I haven’t had the ability to say at all, until now, and even more that I haven’t had the chance to say right.

Sometimes I have the feeling that, even in the queer community, with the accepted labels and identities, I don't fit. It makes me sad sometimes, that I couldn't fit an accepted “role” or label. I have come to an understanding that that is not what being queer is about at all, which helps. I think part of the reason this upsets me, is because I am so disabled that I will never “fit” in any real queer space with other real queer people. I am left outside, watching from the edges. I am outside of everything. 

But - It comforts me that there have always been people like me, just existing in the world. We have always been here. When I was younger and had all these thoughts and feelings about gender that I didn't understand yet, had no context for, couldn't express and didn't have proof of anyone else who had the same experience - it comforted me to think "if i am feeling this, then statistically another human at some point in time must've felt the same way".

When I was younger I used to believe - queer is what people say when they mean "dirty" and "wrong". It’s what people say when they mean something worse but don't have a word for it.

My identity of being trans is simply my identity of being me.

When I think about "passing" and wishing things to be easier for me, I don't think "I wish I passed as a boy", I find myself wishing I was just a girl, and then my life would be so much less complicated. But, of course, it will always be complicated for me, because of how others perceive my autism first, before anything else. I feel I struggle to be seen as a whole human with a complex human experience, because to so many people I am just my autism. Then also lacking of awareness of gender and only knowing my own feelings - even if I was a girl, I would still have this difficulty! - but still, in this situation, I think "I wish I didn't have these feelings to begin with". I think that shows it is more about the difficulty of coping, rather than other people's view and opinion based on my appearance and outward expression.

When using words to refer to my younger self, those experiences and the way they were labeled and explained at the time does not cease to exist just because I choose to use different words for my present-day self. I am more accepting of this now, I used to really struggle with the fact that it had changed over time and my black-and-white thinking of “one or the other is true”, made it very challenging.

When I was younger, the only way I knew how to make everything “wrong” with me (autism, physical disabilities, queerness, lack of faith in God, etc.) an understandable concept, was to come up with the overall explanation that “my brain is broken”. I just thought that must be the only answer. It was the only way I could process how many things I thought were completely and utterly wrong about me.

It feels like two facts colliding when I see my birth name, and it makes my brain hurt and my understanding of the world shatter.

Part 5 - The Choice

When people misgender me, it is more upsetting to me that people ignore my choice than that they perceive me "wrong" or make the wrong assumption. I actually don’t mind assumptions much, if someone looks at me and thinks I’m a woman that’s okay with me nowadays - I understand that I appear female, because I am, and a lot of people connect female with woman (or girl, as I am often also assumed to be quite young). But I also can easily forget that someone might not know my pronouns straight away, simply because of struggles with theory of mind - I forget that other people don't automatically know what I know, that they can't read my mind.

It is upsetting only because my choice is not being respected or understood or seen, from my brain’s point of view. Having the ability and opportunity to choose the way I am addressed, the way I identify, the way I talk about myself and want others to talk about me, is incredibly valuable to me. For so long I have only had other people’s words, both for them to freely put onto me, and to use in my laboured attempts at communication. Attempting to grab onto the closest words to my true meaning and piecing them together like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles that don’t quite fit.

Now that I can write something like this, with so many words that are mostly my own, to have someone go against that (whether it is intentional or not - it doesn’t change things because of my low theory of mind, I can’t think from another’s perspective and understand that they don’t know what I know) is spirit breaking.

A lot of the parts of my transition can be (partially) attributed to different things, different reasons. I changed my name partly because I had no connection to my birth name, and struggled to remember to respond to it. It also reminded me of bad memories that I don’t want to relive every day. Having a new name was part of a necessary process of changing every part of my life so it never feels the same way it used to - at least, not in the ways that I can control. I already wrote about how I need top surgery for reasons including but not limited to dysphoria, pain, sensory issues, and so on. I love having my hair buzzed (as much as I have the occasional urge to grow it), because it feels like me. It feel different to when I was younger, and it’s a physical reminder that I am safe now, every time I touch my head or catch a glance of myself in the mirror.

Technically, with these other reasons to attribute many parts of my transition to, I could choose not to identify the way I do. If I didn’t feel a strong connection to queerness, I don’t think I would spend so much time trying to sift through thoughts and feelings and experiences and memories and holding them up against different words to see how it fits. I have basically no awareness of gender outside of myself, I can’t figure out my sexuality because I don’t know how I can even relate to other people. I could put a mental block between me and this topic, and never call myself queer or trans or anything like that ever again.

But - I DO choose to collect these parts of me, and spend the time holding them up to the light and squinting at them from every direction, to come to align them with these words. That is my choice.

I am the same person I always have been, I just get to choose now. I have the power and control.

Thank you for reading, if you got to the end! I love to know that my words are seen by other people.

[lazyyogi]

The 3 Qualities of Authentic Spiritual Practice

A spiritual path and practice can take any number of forms. Just as there are many ways to climb a mountain. However, if you are actually climbing a mountain, then there are a few reliable things happening: you are going higher on the mountain, you are experiencing the change in perspective that comes with going up higher, and eventually you will reach the top.

Similarly, there are 3 qualities that mark authentic spiritual practice. 

They are:

Defragmentation of the mind and emotion. The passage of life inevitably puts us through a gamut of experiences. We respond to those differing experiences and challenges as best we can in those moments. Yet inevitably we wind up with fractured aspects of our psyche and emotions. Half-baked dreams and desires, cyclic thoughts, collected ill-defined self-images, a number of blind and sore spots, various triggers, and fragile barriers. Spiritual practice guides us toward an inner state of seamlessness and non-separation. Our inner field of awareness awakens and embraces every aspect of self until they are healed and then either integrated or released. 

Freedom of perception from filtration. The conditioned and "educated" mind perceives the world through many filters. We may view other beings in terms of gender, status, sexuality, nationality, and even other more subtle nuances. We may perceive the world as threatening or comforting, interesting or terrible. Instead of raw moment-to-moment perception, we have grown to rely on certain habitual ways of seeing and therefore thinking. Education is a fixed way of seeing and understanding whereas creativity is a form of spontaneous non-conditioned perception. A balance between the two is healthy and powerful, yet also something that is not taught and few rarely figure out on their own. Spiritual practice cleanses perception such that it is freed from the limits of our past. Then new insights become possible as well as fresh ways to live, love, and have fun.

Facilitation of genuine self-contact. Most of our day is spent either regarding the world around us or regarding ourselves as if we were an object in said world. There are few moments set aside for profoundly intimate self-contact, let alone living from our most intimate core of awareness. We overlook and even grow numb to the aspect of ourselves that is always there with us. You can see it in the restlessness, in the semi-conscious feeling of being incomplete that drives people to seek themselves in the world around them. It lends to the drive of our consumerist culture, the false belief that we can be fulfilled through acquiring the right things, experiences, or identities. Spiritual practice directs us to come into contact with the living aspect of our existence, the part of ourselves that is actually alive, without relying on any self-definitions or stories. The most living aspect of ourselves is also the most real--quite literally! You are the most real thing you have ever experienced, everything else you have experienced is secondary to your own body and consciousness. There is immense freedom in this realization.

I always encourage daily meditation because it serves all three of these functions at once. Other practices that also serve one or more of these functions are: prayer, journaling, gratitude lists, lucid dreaming, yoga/qigong/intentional movement, mindfulness, guided meditations, intentional art, pranayama, and laughter. 

Ponder what some daily spiritual practice might do for you. A little goes a long way, as it reverberates through every aspect of your life. 

LY

[hailmaryfullofgrace55675]

This might a false equivalency but why is identifying as an afab trans fem not ok but identifying as transmasc/male lesbian or as an afab femboy is fine? I'm confused that some categories are fluid and others aren't. I understand that gender and sexuality are queer and flexible but does that words don't have set meanings any more?

/ser

Rather than thinking of words’ meanings being “set”, I prefer to think of meaning as being based in a situationally appropriate balance of consensus and function. “Transfem”, “transmasc”, “trans woman”, and “trans man” being defined by assigned gender is 1) very, very strong consensus and 2) integral to the words being useful for their consensus uses.

“AFAB femboy” is fine because it means “feminine boy who was assigned female at birth”, which contains no contradictions. Similar to “butch” being initially used almost entirely by people who were assigned female, “femboy” was initially used almost entirely by people who were assigned male. Similarly, “butch” and “femboy” are each used to signify a maybe-kinda-trans-adjacent gender nonconforming identity for AFAB and AMAB people respectively. But neither of them is defined by AGAB, and indeed it is kind of important to understand that transfems can be butches and transmascs can be femboys, and that inasmuch as butch and femboy can function as nonbinary gender labels they can function as nonbinary gender labels for people of any assignment.

“Transmasc lesbian” and “male lesbian” are each different from each other, and each more complicated than “AFAB femboy”. Inasmuch as neither “transmasc” nor “male” means “not other things as well”, it’s not contradictory for someone to, for example, be bigender and identify as both a man and a woman, and see zir exclusive attraction to women as lesbian due to zir being a woman. In practice, people tend to see gayness as overriding straightness, in queer communities and in the broader culture - sure, ze could also identify as a straight man if ze wanted to, but is ze likely to want to? Some people do, see themselves as both lesbians and straight men, and some people see themselves as straight men who are incidentally also female. But the people who ID as transmasc or trans male lesbians are people who are inclined toward and invested in lesbian identity over straight male identity. Most transmasc and male lesbian identities rely on this “it doesn’t mean only”-ness, explicitly or inexplicitly.

That said, a lot of people who identify as transmasc lesbians cling to lesbian identity and spaces out of an (implicitly transphobic) sense that, having been assigned female, they are eternally female for whatever purposes suit them no matter how they might transition away. Not all of them. I make no claims whatsoever about the proportion. But in absolute numbers, a lot. This has been a thing for decades, to the extent that Julia Serrano articulated it as an issue in her early analyses of transmisogyny.

It’s tacky, it’s self-misgendering, it’s assignment-essentialist, and yes: it’s transmisogynistic.

Worth noting that “lesbian” and “gay” don’t really “mean what they mean”. It’s not even really “anymore”, they just never did - lesbian never purely meant “a woman who is exclusively attracted to women”, it was and is centrally defined as “a woman who is exclusively attracted to women” and has always also meant the messy cluster of women and adjacents and people-who-aren’t-really-women-but-who-society-perceived-as-such who had intimate partnerships with other women-and-adjacents-and-etc and people who came up and out in the social scenes those people formed. And that has always (always here meaning like, since the emergence of modern lesbian identity concepts and, more broadly, modern ~Western concepts of sexuality in Europe and the Anglosphere in the early 20th century) come along with all the complicated shittiness of bisexual erasure and cisnormative smoothing of people into assigned gender categories.

In my opinion, there isn’t really a way around the word for “woman who is exclusively attracted to women” also meaning “and bi chicks and any tboy who doesn’t feel like moving out of it post-transition” in a world where bisexuality is still seen as less committed and permanent than monosexuality and people are seen as always, on some level, the gender they were assigned at birth. The social circumstances shape people’s decisions around language and affiliation.

This is all to say: gender and sexuality language is flexible, but it is not randomly flexible. When an identity label contains more meanings in practice than it does in its base definition, it’s because the social circumstances make those additional uses intuitive and desirable for people.

[tobiasdrake]

With your tonal language I can’t tell if you are exaggerating or genuinely hating Yakou.

My relationship with Yakou is complicated, in large part because his creator and I have very different sets of values. Yakou is a character designed to be complicated, but to leave you with an ultimately positive feeling towards him. He's a man haunted by his past, but also one with strong enough values and convictions that he can serve as something of a role model nonetheless.

My issue with Yakou is that a lot of the things that are designated as his flaws - his heavy drinking and willingness to murder - are things I don't have a problem with. Meanwhile, the things that are designated as his virtues? Well....

Kazutaka Kodaka is a man with profoundly heteronormative views on gender that come out in his work. He has strong opinions about binary masculinity and femininity, which get expressed in his writing - and his record with trans and non-binary characters is spotty.

With Yakou, this comes out as a sort of inadvertent foot-in-mouth syndrome, where he can become incredibly obnoxious in the moments where he's meant to be likable simply as a consequence of what Kodaka thinks are good values.

Yakou and Desuhiko are the two characters through which Kodaka explores masculinity. Fubuki, Yuma, Kurumi, and Vivia all have genders, but their stories aren't about gender. Halara, meanwhile, has neither a binary gender nor a story about gender. But Yakou and Desuhiko have masculinity itself as a major topic of conversation.

Which. Means. Kodaka, a guy with spotty views on gender, uses these characters to talk about gender. That's. Okay.

Desuhiko is used as a negative portrayal of masculinity. His worst traits are derived from trying too hard to express his masculinity. He's a kid with low self-esteem chafing under the yoke of trying to live up to a cultural standard, to earn respect by Doing The Thing whether he even understands why he's doing it or not.

This leaves him drifting through life constantly exclaiming "HAVE I MENTIONED HOW STRAIGHT AND NORMAL I AM!? OH BOY I SURE DO LOVE WOMEN!" to everyone he meets. He's identified The Womenz as the cure for his insecurity, even though he doesn't actually seem that invested and is honestly surprisingly chaste. He's just performing masculinity, hoping he'll get an A+ grade in Manliness and that maybe that will finally give him value as a person.

For as much as I dunk on Desuhiko, this is a fairly good commentary on what a patriarchal and heteronormative society does to insecure boys.

But then we have Yakou. He offers the counterpoint, as a more positive portrayal of masculinity. But. Like. His central thesis isn't that different from Desuhiko's. He's a romantic at heart who's central thesis is that the true measure of a man is defined by his relationship to a woman.

He's the heteronormative ideal: A man who controls his emotions, loves with all his heart, objectifies women to demonstrate a healthy sexuality but is committed in his heart of hearts to this one woman, who he would give his life for without question. He would be happily married with a white picket fence and 2.5 kids if not for this one asshole who stole his woman from him.

The moments where you're meant to roll your eyes and chuckle at Desuhiko are when he's trying to express masculinity. And the moments where you're meant to like Yakou are, similarly, moments when he's successfully expressing masculinity.

But the values he expresses in those moments? The things that come out of his mouth that are meant to make you appreciate him more? They're things like "Men exist just for women" and "You'd be prettier if you smiled more", confidently asserted in what's supposed to be a touching moment of emotionally connecting with the player character and, by extension, the player.

Most of the time when I'm dunking on Yakou, it's just for fun. He's far from my favorite character but he's harmless, and there are things I do enjoy about him. But the moments Kodaka writes when he's trying to make Yakou look good are the times when I can't fucking stand him at all.

[genderqueerdykes]

heya

i can't sleep because my sexuality in relationship to my gender has been bothering me.

im transmasc, but genderfluid. not just boy/girl genderfluidity, it's all over the place. and i feel like i identify with being a gay man sometimes, and i also go through periods of feeling like a masculine lesbian.

i know how controversial this is and it breaks my heart because i can't figure out what to do. i know my identity should be for me, but i don't want to make people uncomfortable if i come off as a boy who's a lesbian sometimes.

also i feel intense imposter syndrome over this when i switch around. but it undeniably makes me feel like myself when i say I'm a transmasc genderfluid bi lesbian, which makes me feel good of course. i just wish i could stop feeling bad about it

is any of this normal and is there any other genderfluid ppl with complicated relationships to their sexuality? i feel alone here i guess

love your blog btw makes me happy and validated when i read what you and your followers have to say to people 💖

hello! thanks for stopping by!

i think it can be very easy to work ourselves up and over think things when it comes to how people will receive us in queer spaces- online queer spaces have been needlessly hostile over the past few years, mostly due to the relative anonymity and virtually zero consequences for being harmful and rude. it's okay to get scared sometimes

it may seem 'contradictory' or 'controversial' but it isn't that uncommon to go from identifying as a gay man to identifying as a masculine lesbian! genderfluidity means your genders can be. whatever. there's no set rules, and it's okay if your attraction changes when your gender does. mine does, as well. abrosexual and abroromantic may suit you

you don't have to pass any tests or anything like that to be successfully seen as genderfluid, it's okay if you change to be whatever, whenever. i always identify as a butch lesbian & a femme gay bear, all the time, no matter how I feel or who is fronting in my system. while some cishets may not get it, most queer people i explain this to say "oh yeah, i totally caught that vibe"

it can be scary to have "Strange" identities, but the meaning of "queer" is literally "weird" and having a weird identity falls right in line with the community. you're allowed to be a transmasculine lesbian, and you are even allowed to be a male/boy lesbian- there is no actual cosmic rule stating that lesbians cannot be men, partially men, or be genderfluid and be men sometimes

regardless of how others perceive you, you know who you are. you are the arbiter of your lived experience, and while someone misinterpreting you can be painful and inconvenient, it shouldn't define your experience. if people don't understand, keep going til you find the ones who do, and the ones who try to. even if people don't "Get" your gender, there are a lot of folks who will respect it, anyways, and you deserve that

hope that helps and makes sense. take care of yourself, good luck out there. there are no rules when it comes to be genderfluid. genderfluid people are encouraged to fuck with gender, rules, roles, presentation, etc. and it's only natural that a genderfluid person will have identities that "conflict" when approached through a non-queer lens. identities don't have to "make sense", they are mostly comprised of feelings !

good luck out there! feel free to stop by again

[theaquinn-misc]

A-spec Lesbian

I decided to make my own list of things that have helped me realized I'm gay. Disclaimer: I'm not the arbiter of what makes someone an aspec lesbian, however if you experience some or most of these it's something to consider. Disclaimer 2: I've also not had a lot of experience dating so I can't include much of that here. This post will be divided in 3 sections: Men, Women and NBs and media

Men:

only crushing on "unavailable" men: married, in a relationship, much older, gay, fictional, celebrities

"crushing" on men and enjoying fantasizing about them, but not trying to flirt or even get close to them in any way

"crushing on a man" for a set period of time and then and thinking he's the hottest thing since sliced bread, but later (especially after a physical separation) finding him meh or cringey

fantasies about men having more to do with being happy and fulfilled in life and being seen as someone to be jealous of, not so much about the specific person

having a crush/attraction to a man only for him to return it and you realize that you feel uncomfortable

meeting a guy who is conventionally attractive and meets all your standards and telling yourself you are attracted to him but still feeling a weird pressure in your stomach/chest because "something is missing"

liking a guy, until he changes something minor about his appearance (shaves, does his hair differently) and then finding him basic/meh and losing all attraction to him

never understanding what women see in the men they date or like in media, at least looks-wise

finding even extremely conventionally attractive men to be kinda meh and thinking women attracted to men must be exaggerating how hot they find them

being uncomfortable when you find out a man has a crush on you and wanting him to stay away, but with women/nbs it's just a bit awkward and overall no big deal

having to force sexual and romantic fantasies for men and getting bored of them after a while

finding the most aesthetically attractive man in a group and deciding you are attracted to him (bonus points: being relieved when you find out he's taken/ and/or you could never date him for some reason)

being anxious or sad or bored when you imagine your life with a man

only wanting to date men if it's polyamorous (note: this is not to invalidate poly people, but if you can only imagine dating one gender ONLY if it's poly and having no issues to be monogamous with another gender... that might be something to look into)

getting sad/anxious/bored at the idea that your first boyfriend could be your forever partner. thinking "of course i want to experience life before I settle down"

wanting to dress sexy and reveal your body, but wanting to hide it when a man pays attention to you

Men expressing their attraction to men is more relatable than women expressing their attraction for men Women/ NBs:

finding only a few men aesthetically attractive but nearly every woman/queer/nb person (esp more femme ones) being gorgeous to you

wanting to impress and/or be liked by "special" women

going on dating apps and switching to "women only" even though you are (supposedly) bi/pan (note: some people may do this for safety reasons but if you can't even IMAGINE finding a guy off an app, even if you take all possible precautions, well...)

finding the fantasy of sharing your life with a woman/nb person far more rewarding and satisfying than the fantasy of doing those same things with a man

having some inkling of attraction to trans women pre-coming out, but suddenly thinking they are the most gorgeous people ever post knowing they are women(especially if they go on HRT),

really "admiring" masc/butch women and women who break gender roles (women in suits, women with defined muscles etc.)

thinking that everyone thinks women are more aesthetically attractive than men (hint: ask a gay man about this)

having deep feelings about a female actor, singer, teacher growing up etc. that feel special and unique

feeling guilty in locker rooms, not wanting to look at women too long

getting really excited at the idea of having a gf, or being a girl/nb person's gf/ partner but not feeling the same way about dating boys/men

wishing to be a lesbian because you think lesbians are cool and/or to avoid dating men

feeling uncomfortable feelings about the label lesbian, especially when applied to you (but not gay/queer/sapphic/wlw/nblw etc.)

not getting crushes on women IRL often because you're still aspec

getting crushes on fictional women, influencers, celebrities etc. Media:

never relating to m/f pairings even if they have bi/pan characters or the m/f relationships you see in media or around you.

shipping m/f, but thinking "that's cool for them, but I don't want that" (note: this might also have to with gender, if you're nb)

imagining yourself as the "man" in m/f ships never the woman

not relating to f/f ships with two thin conventionally feminine and usually white women (esp if you are fat, gnc, WoC, and/or are attracted to butch/masc women)

seeing posts about the attractiveness of men but relating them to m/m ships, not yourself

wanting every bi/pan character to be in a "gay" or at least, in a visibly queer relationship

only relating to m/f ships if they are more obviously queer. Like say, masc woman with a twink boyfriend (side note, I've never seen that, so if you have recs please send them my way)

only being able to get off on gay/lesbian porn, finding straight porn to be unsatisfying or boring or uncomfortable (note: porn is not a great way to determine sexualaity as most actresses are fetishized and fake prgasms, and most lesbian porn is not made for sapphics. but still) Things you are allowed to do as a lesbian/don't make you less gay:

Have m/f ships you feel strongly about

read/write m/f smut

relate to/write bi/pan characters

joke about liking celebrity men & fictional men

not be attracted to the women the lesbian community has decided are the hottest thing since sliced bread (Kristen Stewart is not everyone's type)

not be comfortable with certain sex acts or sex as a whole

[educating-bimbos]

What is your best advice for a girl who tries to become more obedient?

So this is a topic I feel I could go down a huge rabbit hole about, but for now I am going to keep it simple. I will also be making a few assumptions beforehand so that it is more clear where I am coming from.

Assumptions: - I will talk about this as a hypothetical between a monogamous, heterosexual relationship with more traditional gender roles. These ideas will carry over to other kinds of relationships, this is just an easier way of communicating it. - Obedience is taken to be a more benign set of expectations outside of a sexual context - Abusive relationships are an immediate deal breaker and are just a non-starter for the relationship going forward - both parties have consented to and understand the limits, expected behavior, communication skills, etc. needed to have this kind of relationship

How to build obidience

Mutual trust - So for obedience to work requires that the dominant party in this situation is not someone who will abuse their position in a way to hurt the other person and that this is clear to the submissive party from the start and clear and present throughout.

Defined limits - There should be broad and clearly defined limits on what is and is not acceptable requests with "No" being a present and always available response.

Start small - If you want to try and build out and become more comfortable with this it helps to start small. If something is asked of you that you do not feel comfortable doing, say no. As you build trust it will become easier to be more obedient.

Ask why - as you are getting used to being more obedient it will help to ask why a request is made. Sometimes it is done for no reason, other times they just want a sandwich.

Make it clear that there is some way of without vocalizing it, that a certain level of obedience is and is not on the table on a given day. Maybe you have a bracelet or article of clothing that you can associate with being more obedient and when you are wearing it your partner will know that it is okay to be a bit more demanding. Only you can put it on and take it off. If it is off then obedience is not on the table and not going to be entertained. The dominant partner can also not request to have you put on the accessory, but they can ask if you want to put it on. The decision ultimately is up to you.

This is already getting a bit lengthy so I will end it here. Obedience is a fun thing when done right and building that trust and finding who it is okay to be obedient to requires a good judge of character. Be safe and don't do anything I wouldn't do.

[scuderlia]

haircut!anon again: ok. wow. had to slam my phone down in my uni computer lab and wait until i could string together a coherent thought again. first off like au itself on back burner your MIND and the way you construct this narrative is INCREDIBLE and so raw adn true and pulling on the queer (as in deviant and as in gay) hair experince sooo deeply i feel soooooo deeply you are a magician. further. i was PICTURING max in braids and god fuck the tenderness of charles and max setting their mise en place and sitting together and braiding her hair before their prey comes in…. god. jesus. i can't stop re-reading the snippets. FUCK! sorry this isn't coherent thoughts after all. max and control and cutting charles' hair. fuck me uppp….

anon! i spent so long smiling like an idiot because of this ask, at this point you're basically my betrothed <3

but yeah, you get it. at the core of max and charles' relationship is truly their hounded devotion and acceptance of one another. the queer experience really is defined by those you hold close, and it's been interesting (for me) to try and thread that idea through this greater story about desire and hunger in a way that feels genuine. i've pulled on a lot of my personal experiences of being a young lesbian and being guarded about sexuality, but ultimately it all comes back to (like you mentioned) the idea of relinquishing some control and feeling comfortable enough with someone to let go of the safety of doing things alone.

i also love love love giving characters their own little rituals, and seeing as how max and charles both have a lot of emotional connections to their hair/haircuts/etc. the braids were an easy decision.

(more about max and her relationship to hair below the cut)

there's this really interesting article by Amelia Abraham titled 'What butch queer identity has to do with hair' that got put out by Dazed in 2022. it primarily covers a photography exhibition called Close Shave—which centers itself around butch haircuts and identity—but also goes into the cultural relevance of 'masc' hairstyles and their role in queer (mainly lesbian) expression.

i remembered and re-read it when i was in the early stages of fleshing-out max's character. i recommend the article to everyone, but especially people who are maybe looking to better understand the history of butch optics, and kind of where i'm coming from with some of max's characterization.

(see one of my favorite quotes from the article below)

While having short hair and identifying as butch don’t necessarily come as a pair, for butch people, haircuts can be transformational – getting your hair cut off brings you closer to your gender identity.

like I mentioned in the the answer to your previous ask, max's haircut kind of serves as a physical manifestation of her relationship with her father, and more specifically, how that relationship influences her feelings of shame (and eventually acceptance) towards her own sexuality.

part of the reason that max is so struck by charles saying she'd let her cut her hair is in large part because, for max, hair is incredibly representative of an individual's ability to control how others perceive and relate to them. by breaking the ritual with her mother, charles is essentially showing max that she not only finds comfort with her, but also trusts her enough to have her identity placed in her hands.

i could honestly talk about this forever... since body politics and queerness are things i'm just genuinely very passionate about... but i will save the innocent bystanders of this blog from having to read through all of that in one sitting.

(anyways, i'm so happy that people are as invested in this as i am... keep sending me long asks like this... if you couldn't already tell i'll take any opportunity to talk more about this au)