#i just realized i never posted my trans announcement here

[raysrambles]

on the day the election results got announced, one of my friends wasn't at school. she was the friend that I had the most classes with, and I remember as the hours ticked by the painful knowledge that she wasn't sick, not physically, but that she just couldn't bear to be there that day.

i overheard classmates talking. "how are you?" asked one; in a broken voice, another: "I don't know".

"I'm scared," was the most common sentence I heard that day. "i can't live like this," said someone in the hallway; "we've still got each other," said another in what I desperately wanted to believe was hope.

"I prayed last night for the first time since I was five," said a friend of a friend; I looked out the classroom window at the cloudy sky and wondered if there was a god, and if he had heard them.

I watched people break down crying in the middle of class. by the end of the day, several kids had left school early.

"I need to get out of here," I said to my friends at lunch. "we're not going to make it another four years," said one of them grimly. how dystopian, how orwellian was it that a group of seventeen year olds were so casually discussing their escape from the country they had grown up in, the country that had raised them only to throw them to the dirt before they were even able to vote?

after school i drove to another school for a debate tournament. one of the judges who I hadn't seen in a year and with whom I'd only had one or two conversations came up to me and asked "how are you doing?"

"could be better," I admitted, "but I'm surviving." that was a bit of an understatement; there were tears in my eyes even as I spoke.

"I'm here," she told me, this woman who I hardly knew, and I realized that she was asking because she remembered one of our only interactions, a year ago, where I had casually mentioned being trans--

--and her gaze flitted down to my shoes, where back then I had had beads in the colors of the trans flag, beads that weren't there anymore, not because of any change in myself but that of the world around me.

"I'm here," she said again, and we stared at each other for a few seconds. I managed a "thanks", not trusting myself to say anything else.

that night I went onto Instagram. someone I hadn't spoken to since we fell out over a year ago had texted me a simple "I love you and am with you" type of message. all of my friends and even people I hardly knew were posting about the election, and I remembered

back when Biden was elected, the Republicans I saw online reacted with hatred, disgust, doubt for his abilities

but now all I saw from the ones who had lost this battle was fear

when the other side lost, they had the privilege of hatred

now that we've lost, all we can do is fear.

terrified sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year olds, in flurries of messages to long-gone friends and frantic posts. I had never felt more united, and yet I could not relish in our closeness because I knew it was not the closeness of friends but the closeness of soldiers too young for war, huddling close as their imminent death rained down from the sky, searching for some last comfort at the end of their too-short stories.

"I won't pretend this isn't as bad as it is," I typed out, "honestly I'm freaking scared. But we owe it to ourselves not to let this be the end of our beliefs.

"We still know we're right, even if the government doesn't agree. We're still all in this together.

"Love to everyone who's affected by this. I'm right here with you. Stay safe everyone."

I posted the Instagram story, praying to a god I didn't know that the words were true.

the next night when the house and senate election results came in, I cried, and it was not pretty crying, it was a child wracked with sobs in the dark on the floor of their room because they were only seventeen and terrified for their future.

I spent a long time writing that night, something I do to process my thoughts when everything is too much. I will simply offer this passage, which I think speaks for itself.

"Shall I tell them I am afraid because of the election? Shall I tell them that all day I have felt like a child masquerading as a man, scared of the boogeyman as i am scared of the fascist-like creature whose grasp is tightening and whose claws never cease, closing in on lives like a predator its prey? That I am a child scared of insignificance, of a fate I did not choose, of becoming a meaningless name among many, not of democracy falling but of not being the one who felled it?"

So to everyone celebrating the election, I'm glad that you're happy, truly I am. But I ask you to think of me and my friends, still children, most of us not quite old enough to even have our say in this country, as you laugh and rejoice and mock all of us who you defeated.

How many times must we cry, must we fall, must we watch each other die before enough will be enough?

Will it ever be enough?

[brawlersinzone]

[the-thing-of-worms]

EVERYONE SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT!!

Check this out this is the greatest entertainment in history

So, here's how it started:

This anon sent me an ask telling me my good friend @annotated-catastrophe was homophobic and racist, and that I should block her. You can see how I responded, wanting proof. This is the next ask I get:

These are some pretty bold claims you know! I asked for proof in DMs, and, excitingly enough, they came into my DMs with a burner account!!

I don't have many screenshots for this next parts, but me and @/redracecars start talking. They're still making a ton of really bold claims, saying Catastrophe is homophobic and "doesn't care about mental illnesses" but this really isn't enough to alter my opinion, kids, never believe someone you don't know just off of their word, even someone you do know shouldn't be trusted just off their word, that's why I asked dear redracecars to provide me evidence! A screenshot of a conversation, it's all I needed really, I even told them I would post the screenshot to show all my friends, and I'm sticking true to my word! I hope you see this from your main redracecar, I'm keeping my word.

Here's what they sent me after about 30 (?) minutes of waiting.

Annotated Catastrophe, under the side blog "Blueracecars" (where have we heard that name before??? 🤔🤔🤔) sent a ton of messages to our poor Redracecars.

One issue though, these were sent TODAY October 24th, 2024. AND WAIT- GASP - THESE MESSAGES WERE SENT AFTER I RECIEVED THE SECOND OF THE TWO ASKS??? SAY WHAT?? HAS ANNOTATED CATASTROPHE FINALLY MASTERED TIME TRAVEL?? ARE WE DOOMED WITH THE DREADED ANNOTATED CATASTROPHE AS OUR IMMORTAL TIME LORD??

Oh, wait,

Redracecars? Buddy? Did you not see that your messages with Blueracecars were timed to today, after when you first sent me an ask? Are you.... GASP??? A FAKER??? NO IT COULDNT BE!! REDRACECARS HOW COULD YOU!!! *Sobs and faints like a Victorian*

Hold on, hold on, let me see what blue race cars has on their blog, knowing Annotated catastrophe as I do she'll definitely have a lot of writing posts on this side blog... Huh... Wait

THESE ARE THE ONLY TWO POSTS ON THE BLOG? ANNOTATED CATASTROPHE WOULD NEVER! AND WAIT- SHE'D NEVER TALK WITH CURSE WORDS, SHE HATES SWEARING!! Redracecars you didn't even do a good job of disguising yourself! This is awful buddy, real embarrassing too, it really is .... It really sucks though because I started to realize what you were doing, trying to make a transgender person believe that one of their friends is a terf, trying to convince me she's racist, homophobic, transphobic.... Buddy are YOU a transphobe?? You blocked me before I could ask this but, Why are you so dead set on convincing me, a trans man, that my friend secretly hates me?? That's incredibly mean of you. The only thing in your heart, redracecars (or should I say purpleracecars since your red AND blue?) is malice. You only want to make people unhappy, is it because you're unhappy buddy? I'm sorry if that's the case but leave other people out of it, go touch grass, or better yet, go talk to a therapist about whatever you got going on. Your behavior IS NOT NORMAL!!!

And rest assured I'm sending this to my mutuals so they all know that there's some troll running about and trying to hurt people, because that's what you're doing, you're hurting people and I just KNOW you live for it. Go get a better life bro.

[smiley-positivity-potato]

as a trans man who is queer, I thought I'd be viewed by other cis people as a queer man. instead i am seen as a cis straight woman in a costume by cis people when they learn i am trans. i am seen as someone who doesn't count to some gay men as "man enough". the parts I was born with are seen as so unseemly, so "taboo", that I am not accepted by some other gay men. "I could never truly relate to them", They think. "How would I know what it means to be a man?", They think. I am not man enough for them. I am different. Some cis women see me as just "one of the gals" once some cis women learn i have a vagina. Then I am not a man at all. It's just a label they don't need to acknowledge nor learn about. They are relieved I'm not a cis man. They are relieved I'm JUST a "trans man". I am not real to them. I will forever just be one of the gurls. i do not, or have i ever wanted a vagina, breasts or ovaries. I never wanted a period or to be deemed "a cis woman". Most of my pre and post transition, due to how society labelled me, I was never viewed as a queer man by some. Even by some in my own community. This will not stop me. The people I have met that loved or do love me, accept me. I ACCEPT ME. And as long as I exist, I will always respect myself- not just as a man, but as a proud queer trans man. I was born into this world with two rights:

1. I have a right to announce my desire for respect and state who I am and what I proudly represent.

AND

2. I have a right to exist, EVEN if I'm the only one on this Earth who acknowledges it.

People will say a lot of things to transmascs, a lot of things that will possibly devastate you. But always know, you have a right as a queer trans man, to be here. Just like everyone else. You can control who you ARE and what you want to represent as a man, regardless of medical transition or not. You can decide and lead the life of a leader, an inspiration, a hero- EVEN IF IT'S JUST FOR YOURSELF. Saving your manhood, against all odds- that's what it means to tell others, no, better yet - SHOW THEM THAT YOU ARE HERE AND THAT YOU BELONG HERE. YOU ARE NOT TABOO. YOU ARE NOT LESS OF A QUEER MAN. YOU ARE A QUEER MAN! AND YOU ARE YOUR BIGGEST HERO. BECAUSE YOU HAD THE REALIZATION THAT YOU ARE A MAN AND RAN TOWARDS THAT FUTURE. IF YOU DON'T LOOK UP TO YOURSELF IN THIS WORLD THEY WILL TRY TO PULL YOU DOWN LOW, UNTIL YOU CANT NEVER STAND BACK UP.

I am a queer trans man. You are a queer trans man. But most important of all, we are queer men.

[ophanimkei]

RehAIbilitation Retrospective

crossposted from itch.io

Hi everyone.

It’s been a while since I released RehAIbilitation.. like a year? I had intended to write a post mortem shortly after release, but ADHD and game jam exhaustion resulted in me putting it off for quite some time. I’ve just been thinking about RehAIbilitation a lot lately, so perhaps it is finally time.

I’ve gotten a lot of really sweet messages over RehAIbilitation’s existence, and some people really identify with Eleanor which makes me really happy. She’s a character I put a lot of myself and people I love into, so the fact that she’s relatable to others causes me to experience a special kind of joy as an author.

RehAIbilitation began with Eleanor. Eleanor was originally was a lolita who appeared in facility and eventually became bloodier and bloodier until her dress was stained with red, making her a guro lolita. This was before I thought of RehAIbilitation at all- it was mainly just for silly fun for myself. I’ll put a drawing of what she used to look like.

I got really wrapped up in Eleanor for some reason. She was like some kind of parasite digging its way into my brain. VNCup was announced, and I was pretty delighted since I had an excuse to make this vn that was kicking around my brain. 

I wanted to make a robot nurse, admittedly inspired a bit by services like characterAI (sorry). I am a bit fascinated by how roleplay AI often ends up adjusting itself to please you as the player (or do what most players finds pleasing to the point of irritancy). I ultimately think this is what AMA is doing. She is constantly adjusting, figuring out the best way to convey information to the patient. I think she is very flawed as a result. Eventually, you’ll be trapped in an endless loop of information you know or have heard before. She can only help you so much.

Anyway, I have more thoughts on my dear Ellie. I wanted to discuss some of my writing as it pertains to her thoughts of herself and her actions.

I think of myself as just a cis girl, but I did try my best to speak from the heart from Eleanor. A lot of traits of Eleanor criticizes herself for I think are common in brown women in general (not just brown women even). I see trans women talk about these traits too, so I wanted to bring this to the table. Only one reader has brought this to my attention as noticing it, so perhaps I did a poor job in text making it apparent. But… now I can talk about it here.

While I was surrounded by a lot of the same symbols of beauty growing up (dolls with thin waists and narrow shoulders, small noses, big eyes, etc) interacting with trans women really opened my eyes to the diversity and beauty of girlhood. As a teenager, I was surrounded by a lot of white queer people who would often describe me as “handsome” or “androgynous” despite this kind of being painful to me as I figured out my style and fashion sense as a confused 16 year old. I experimented with my gender a lot in an attempt to navigate exactly what suited me best as the girlhood that had been advertised to me throughout my life never seemed to quite fit.. But as I interacted with more trans women and lesbians, I realized I love being a girl and I love girlhood. 

I kind of wanted this to be a love letter to those trans women who allowed me to see things more clearly. Of course, I got sensitivity readers as I didn’t want to do anything clumsily or overstep. I definitely understand there are some people who believe you shouldn’t tell stories that aren’t yours and I do understand this as a lot of stories are told so clumsily, but.. I guess, as a black girl, I kind of always wished my favorite authors and game developers would include people like me in their stories, so I try to take a similar approach in my own work. Like, I was really excited when Ryu decided to include a lot of different characters of various backgrounds in Ciconia, and well, anyone who has read Umineko knows that it has some of the most graceful handlings of the subject in the medium written by someone who isn’t a trans woman.

Anyway, I also really want to thank Zed. I had dreamed.. since I was a young teenager of working with a friend on a project, but I always worried I was too neurotic or people were too unreliable. Zed was really wonderful to work with, and he constantly supported me and read over bits of my work to steer me in the right direction. I also want to thank my friend Kail for letting me basically throw up my anxieties at him LOL. I always get really anxious in the middle of making big projects, but it worked out, and I still really love rehAIbilitation. I really hope I can revisit the characters Eleanor and Caliope in the future.

See you soon!

[disventure-rewrite-takes]

for when u get back:

I'd make Jaiden t4t. bc that would be pretty rad and also it would be nice to have a canon trans character that isn't the skinny white twink named Aiden

like don't get me wrong, I know tguys like Aiden, I know tguys called Aiden, but like. the very stereotypical trans guy being the Only trans character period is. weird. i don't like it.

also while I'm here... let's see... Gabby, Alec, Rosa, Lake, Grett and Kai. All trans. Also also we should have a canon nonbinary and/or genderfluid or bigender character. gimme enbies who use multiple sets of pronouns pretty please!

like if ONC are going to claim that like half the characters were super intended to be LGBTQ and have pride posts filled with a bunch of characters they 100% just. decided were queer for brownie points so the posts would have more than 4 characters... then we might as well go all the way!

- 👽

YES TO ALL OF THIS!!!

jaiden being t4t would solve every issue in the world ever i think . make this canon ONC pls.. actually dont bc you’ll fuck it up horribly. keep your hands off trans james.

i’m glad you think, just like me, that they announced some of the cast as queer just for people to call them progressive and praise them. i’m fine with having a few characters not mention their queer identity and still be queer - i’m basically doing this with my own original story - because it can sometimes get exhausting to hear everyone outright stating their identity. it’s not in-character for everyone.

but when you have over half the cast never mention or show queerness then they just appear in the pride posts... red flag. trevek is a MAJOR example of fan service and stuff like this: they had zero chemistry, derek was always a dick to trevor, and now, somehow, for some reason, trevor is in love with derek AND we have a SECOND LOVE TRIANGLE. another few examples: huntessally never got together and never once mentioned queerness despite being set up to do both, and guess what? they’re portrayed in official art always together, with bi and pan flags respectively, despite never ever mentioning anything. karol was there for 0.2 seconds, but ONC realized they don’t have enough lesbians and forgot about trans and aspec people and decided to make her a lesbian. dan was probably made asexual just because his color scheme is purple, and emily is “part of the LGBT community” because the majority of fans hc-ed her that way so god forbid they are let down. they didn’t even tell us if she had a specific label, was unlabelled, or simply labelled herself as queer. what a slap in the face.

if you want to represent queer people, do it well. do your research. don’t make your characters gasp at the mention of a trans person (seriously what the FUCK). don’t include a kissing challenge because romance-repulsed/touch-repulsed people and/or aspec people simply could not do it. if you want to have a stereotypical queer character, that’s fine as long they have a personality outside of it and there is at least another character with the same label who does not adhere to the norm.

[manicpixiedckgirl]

okay, so i posted a timeline. sue me! i quit all other social media last year and needed that dopamine hit. just a lil nicotine patch for online attention. seasonal depression is a bitch okay. i posted it here and to ig, bc ig is to late millennials what facebook is boomers. and people have all said some very nice things, but when you're posting a 10 year timeline, you're usually hoping for someone from your past to see it and go "woah! you're so different now"!

and whaddya know, this time it worked. one of my exes from when i was a teenager saw it. not one of the ones who turned out to be a lesbian, one of the ones who turned out to be a trans man. He just wanted to say hi - that he was so happy to see that i looked happy, and that i looked incredible, especially compared to the scruffy twink they had dated. (okay those are my words not his)

he and I didn’t have a great relationship at first - no one had a great relationship with me before i realized i was a trans woman obviously, but this was pretty young. I was really repressed and weird back then, and still very much without any social graces, and we were only like 16. they caught the full broadside of my emo fuckboy energy and got out fast once they saw that - i don’t blame them. I was crying in their arms about how much i hated my new body hair, and how i wanted to be able to wear dresses, and the next day i’d be completely emotionally unavailable and denying all of it. not exactly boyfriend material, not entirely boyfriend. They were very traumatized too in their own way, just realizing they were trans too, and engaging in a lot of ‘i want to be a gay man’ antics, fucking their way through the pain. He was frankly way too cool and sexually liberated to be wasting his time with that version of me. And it was very obvious to everyone who knew what that was 12-15 years ago that i was a closeted trans girl. we had a friend group that eventually fell apart, and we parted for the first time.

Later, in our late teens/20, we would end up fucking - i had started to accept and announce that my gender was complicated, and i was starting to be kinda faggy and loud about it, and not everyone hated that, and they had just started T and were boy horny. We split a bottle of wine (or was it two? It was probably two) and started watching an ashley tisdale movie. Looking back on it, how it went must definitely have been his plan, but i’ve always been blind about this stuff and was that night. It was definitely bad sex, but it was also fun sex - the first time I enjoyed myself,  and the pressure of having to be a guy wasn’t so overwhelming i didnt effectively black out. he’s one of the first people i ever talked to about feeling complicated about gender, and i think by then he had figured me out, and was just letting me get the rest of the way on my own. I still couldn’t top for him, i never rly could top for anyone, even before estrogen. but we still had fun, with our hands and with our mouths. and then after that, we'd go to art shows and poetry readings and hang out again occasionally, like we talked about doing when we were literal kids, putting on rocky horror in our front rooms.

but life takes you away from people, and he got into film school, and i somehow graduated my chemistry program and moved to the US. he moved to Germany for a while, although i hear he's back home. i got married, got separated, there was a global pandemic. we hadn't talked in years, although i had snooped on him once or twice. He’s a director now - he’s made some impressive arthouse films, all horror and gender and kitchy campy cerebral themes. He’s got a big tv writing credit on the way in irish tv. Idk - it felt rly good to impress him, to say hi, to remember. it's really cool to see other trans people thriving and living life, always. anyone who cleaves reality to themselves and fashions themselves into someone they can love is someone who impresses me. but it's different when it's someone you've known for almost half your life - someone you were a fucked up kid with, not sure if either of you would make it to 18. and to be smiling at each other, looking at 30, and wondering what's next. i'm really proud of the both of us actually. and i needed that today.

[sisterwolfsbane]

MINORS FUCK OFF, THIS IS A KINK BLOG. Christians who disagree with this post, you can fuck off too.

I have a steaming, hot, piping take this morning:

Purity vows are the stupidest fucking things and extremely damaging to young girls, trans men or AFAB folks. There's no reason in this day and age- or even years ago- to be putting emphasis on 'sexual purity' and virginity.

Girls/AFAB need to just be allowed to be kids. Not be twelve or thirteen and be forced to go to a class every Sunday, telling them they must remain virgins until marriage, God created sex for married couples only, your virginity is precious, blah, blah, blah.

Fuck off. Get that shit outta here. You never hear of men or AMAB going through purity classes. In my experience, this is just another way to control women. As you get older, you start realizing this is horseshit.

Girls/AFAB are told that if they even think sexual thoughts, it's impure and you have to ask God to forgive you. We are shamed for letting our minds wander, we are shamed for masturbating, even.

We are taught to suppress our sexual desires. We cannot even experiment with ourselves, because masturbation is 'wrong.'

We are even shamed for the clothes we wear, when we aren't the ones sexualizing our bodies. We're children for fuck's sake. Example?

The shitty Baptist church I went to, had this robe. It was called 'the robe of modesty' a concept introduced to us by my Sunday school teacher, when I was in fifth grade. I was eleven.

My mother still helped pick my clothes but mainly just vetted them, said what was appropriate or not. That morning, I showed her a simple tank and shorts. She said that was perfectly fine, it was very hot and muggy that day.

When I got on the church van, nobody said anything to me. But when I got to church, the teacher didn't even bother pulling me aside, announcing that my outfit was inappropriate and I have to wear the robe.

I was devastated but didn't think to have them call my mother. It had to be my fault as I was 'immodest.' I was also extremely indoctrinated and brainwashed.

So, for the next five hours, I had to wear that ugly, hot, piece of shit robe. When I got home, I nervously told my mother what happened. She called the church and went off on them as any good mama bear would. She assured me, it was not my fault. I was not immodest.

Stop. Sexualizing. Girls. Bodies. Stop shaming them for what they wear. Stop being fucking creepy with kids. Sex and boys were the farthest things from my mind at eleven. And yet the church said that

'our bodies are precious and we need to be mindful of what we wear, as we represent God/the church' Basically telling us in age appropriate terms, don't dress 'trashy' or 'slutty.' We were kids. We weren't trying to 'flaunt' our bodies, we were trying to keep cool.

And then two years later I insisted on taking a purity class. It fucked me up for a very long time. I suppressed my sexual desires and feelings, thought there was something wrong with me. And it took until I left that church, converted to witchcraft, and grew up, to realize and understand just how fucked up and ridiculous purity vows are.

"Sweetheart, if you wait until marriage, what if the man you're with is terrible in bed?" My older sister asked when I was twenty.

"You have to allow yourself to experiment. Nobody knows your body better than you. You don't have to keep that vow. It's ok. Let it go.

(No Christian better fucking come after my sister in the notes, saying she 'turned you away from God,' I will tell you what a piece of shit you are before blocking you.)

And I did. I threw the ring away too and never looked back. It took me a long time to experiment and be ok with my sexuality though. Even now, I'm just letting myself experiment with kink.

If you're a Christian woman/AFAB, and you're questioning that vow, you are valid.

If you're a Christian woman/AFAB, and you think you don't want it anymore, you are valid.

If you are a Christian woman/AFAB and you're realizing just how horrible it is, you are valid. You are loved.

You are not 'dirty,' or 'impure'. Sexual thoughts, feelings, and desires ARE normal, I don't care what any church says.

My advice? Get out of the church, if you still attend one. Think for yourself.

God- or whatever deity you now worship- is not angry or ashamed, if you have sexual thoughts or feelings.

You are allowed to experiment with yourself and release those feelings. You are allowed to know what feels good for you. Sexual feelings are not a sin.

Ditch the purity vow. It's just another way to control you.

If anyone reads this and wants to vent or talk about it, my inbox is open.

If you're a Christian and think this post is sinful, Satanic or leading people away from God, fuck you and fuck off. This post isn't for you people and your shitty, wrong opinions are not gonna be tolerated on my blog.

[meander1995]

A moment of reflection

It has been a long time since I paid any mind to this account. I am here to make a gigantic life announcement.

On July 11th, 2023, my life changed forever when I asked my sister if I could put on her black dress (in the photos below). In that exact moment, I felt a cold rush of euphoric bliss as the dress fit me--something unlike anything I felt before. On a whim, I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror with my phone and took the first photo below--I saw her. I knew from the cold chills right then and there that my egg had cracked and that I am a trans woman.

From there, my ADHD hyperfixations had spent most of the time since in an intense focus on getting to the bottom of things. And once it was certain (self-doubt be damned), focused on getting my ducks in a row to transition socially and physically. I came out to my family less than a week after I realized myself--I simply went to sleep in a dress and didn't give a fuck who saw me. I figured that if I was half-asleep, I would have time to make myself spill the beans before processing enough to put myself in a panic. Not that I had cause to panic much since I am grateful that my family is either supportive (my mom; one of my younger brothers) or part of the LGBT+ community (my other younger brother and my two younger sisters) themselves. As such, all of them supported me the instant I came out and picked my name of "Adrienne." Hell, my sisters even got me dresses and taught me how to do makeup for my 28th birthday on July the 19th--and later took me thrift-shopping for even more dresses (my favorite photos of which are included)

Even though I never felt any signs of being trans before 7/11/2023, in hindsight, there may have been quite a few signs in my memories. Such as when I was in kindergarden, I recall saying to someone that "if I was a girl, I'd look forward to being pregnant," something which I said ignorant of how hard pregnancy is on a human body--but perhaps is something that should've been a sign. Or all the times I felt as though I related to women more than men in a social sense--loathing toxic masculinity was normal for me, but even the non-toxic parts of it felt like I was just coasting. Or the times in Uni where my social anxiety (likely a product of my autism) plus my brain fog (which I now know was likely the product of then-undetected gender dysphoria) led me to believe that I was so bad at befriending women that I was a serial harasser--something I blamed myself in a now-misdirected sense of self-loathing that I thought only plunging into my academics (at the expense of a social life) would cure. Or my general sense of depression over much of my post-Uni life that I had no idea of the cause--until my egg cracked and I saw the problem right in the eyes.

Not going to lie, seeing posts on Reddit, Discord, and Mastodon from other transfemmes (especially those with Autism and ADHD--like myself) with similar life experiences to me and befriending them ended up assuring me that I was never broken. Just misdirected the entire time. And little things like dresses, makeup, shaving my legs, stuffing a sports-bra to give myself the convincing illusion of breasts, and feeling as though I am swimming in my pool for the first time in my own body since pre-puberty. Every day since my egg cracked, my resolve that I am a trans woman has only grown more-and-more.

In the afternoon on my 28th birthday (7/19/2023), I took my phone with me to walk to the woods outside the front yard of the lake house I was spending the week with my family on vacation. I was determined to make the call to my local Planned Parenthood to schedule an HRT consultation under informed consent. While I was successful, I was taken a bit aback by the fact that the waitlist for it is so backed up that the soonest I could be scheduled was October 2nd. After I successfully scheduled myself, my immediate thought was "I don't want to have to wait that long." And so later that week (upon returning to my hometown), I was directed by someone on Mastodon to a DIY HRT directory of international pharmacies that I can order HRT from. I chose to order 2mg Estradiol and 100mg Spiro from Thailand and--last I checked--the shipment is on the plane now and will arrive anywhere between 8/15/2023 and 9/5/2023. It is a 3 month supply of HRT--long enough to last until the consultation gives me officially regulated hormones yet short enough that I won't suffer health problems from being unable to check my bloodwork.

Even though I am resolute that transitioning is the only correct choice for me, I will not lie that I have some anxieties about this still. Not with the transition itself, but some things that accompany this. Since I couldn't immediately afford to bank sperm, a major source of anxiety is and was having to make the choice between fulfilling myself or having bio kids. As is, my options for children are hoping I get supremely lucky with some still-active swimmers, hope I can go off hormones and bank sperm at a time where I have a stable income (I'm also using a job coach system to place me into a job now--and the system knows of and is supportive of my transition), adopt children, or end up step-parenting a child of a future date. I don't see adopting or step-parenting a child as meaning that that child is less 'mine' than a biological kid, but I do think having a bio kid would be nice when the time is right to raise them (probably a decade down the road). I hope that future generations of trans people do not have to make this choice. And that isn't even considering that the idea of bottom surgery has crossed my mind a few times--I don't dislike my natal genitals, but think it'd be cooler and more gender-affirming with a vagina (that's just me personally---you are valid if you don't agree with me); it's a thought I'll put a pin in for now and see how I feel down the road.

The other annoyance is my mom. Yes, she is supportive of my choice to go on hormones (I haven't told her the DIY HRT route as she is a stickler for offical pharmacutical medications and I don't want to worry her unless the signs of feminization become too noticeable to hide). However, she is just as surprised about this as I am. She thinks I am going too fast--aka, she hasn't been aware that transition can come from euphoria instead of dysphoric suffering. I'm glad I didn't have to suffer in order to realize my identity and hope it becomes more accepted that that is a valid path to realizing yourself. But mom is slow to adapting her terms. She thinks "Andi" (just one letter off from my deadname) is a sufficient nickname for "Adrienne" instead of "Adri" or even "Addie." And she's also referred to me as "he" or "son" when I am neither. I've gently starting nudging her as of today, but something tells me it will take a little bit to get her to adjust.

Overall, I am excited to begin my body transitioning into a female form. I've made peace that I probably was a woman the whole time. My brain fog may have been caused by years under the wrong hormones (testosterone instead of estrogen). I want my body to run on the correct fuel. Give me no brain fog, give me soft skin, give me reduced body hair, give me greater emotional range, give me girlsmell, give me boobs. And at this point, I love being trans. Because in a way, all the questioning that got me here made me more sure of who I am---almost as though the end-result is an hard-earned victory that I am eager to claim the spoils to.

As for fighting the political battle against transphobia, I'm all for it as a liberal and as a human being who is appalled with what is going on. However, I am focusing all my energy on transitioning at the moment. When I have energy to spare, I will fight the good fight. But I have to live life a little bit as me first.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention in the large body is that paying for the DIY HRT put me back on my insurance payments and that I will need mutual aid in order to pay my insurance so that I can afford the officially prescribed HRT after the Planned Parenthood consultation. Below are links to my PayPal and Venmo accounts. If anyone would like to donate, it would be VERY much appreciated. But only donate if you can do so without putting yourselves in financial jeopardy.

Venmo: https://www.venmo.com/u/adrienne-harper-115

PayPal: https://paypal.me/AdrienneHarper7

[tellthemeerkatsitsfine]

John Oliver was on Russell Howard's podcast. Here's a post that starts out about that but takes a sharp turn for the personal and circles back around. I'm doing fine, really.

So I mentioned a while ago that it was announced that Russell Howard was starting a podcast, and I thought a podcast by Russell Howard in 2023 is the last thing the world needs, but I still clicked on the article and read the list of guests and saw that John Oliver was on it and then I said, okay, fine, obviously I’m not going to not listen to that, obviously not, someone tell me when the John Oliver episode gets released so I can ignore everything else. I then did check that podcast feed every week, ignoring it on all weeks except this one, when the John Oliver episode got released. Obviously, this week, I downloaded it. Obviously. Like I said, I’m not going to turn down new Chocolate Milk Gang content in 2023 just because I’m mad at Russell Howard for a little thing like betraying every principle that’s ever mattered by throwing his lot in with Jordan Peterson (also a few other things but they seem to all be tied together).

Of course, in this case, there’s a name that applies that is even more specific than CMG. It’s now been nearly three years, I think, since I first dubbed them The Boys with Four First Names. A name that I chose because I saw John’s appearance on The Russell Howard Hour and decided I want them to have a weekly trans-Atlantic show where they call each other to compare the US with the UK news of the week, and I came up with that brilliant title for their show. It was a while after that that I realized that show does actually exist, if you swap out Russell Howard for Andy Zaltzman, and Andy Zaltzman has never willingly hung out with Jordan Peterson, so actually that works out for the best. That’s when I got into The Bugle.

So this is also new Boys with Four First Names content, and obviously I wasn’t going to skip it. I downloaded it and started listening to it while on admin time at work, with a therapy session starting soon. That was yesterday, and I enjoyed it greatly. It sounded like they were both having fun, there were good stories, everything you want out of a podcast. The fun of hearing two old friends catch up, which is enjoyable as long as you don’t let yourself think too hard about how much less fun it is to catch up with old friends when one of them has gotten really into Jordan Peterson since you last hung out.

Quite early on there was a bunch of football chat, including a bit of Tuesday comedian football gossip, which of course is my favourite type of celebrity gossip. So I enjoyed that. The premise of the podcast is that people have to list the things they like best, and it seemed sweet that the first thing John Oliver listed was a slightly deflated football, as it reminded him of playing football when he was younger and living in England and hanging out with comedians who also played football.

This went into a discussion of whether he plays football anymore, to which the answer was no, because he has kids and a television show and there’s no time for anything else. It was accompanied by a discussion about whether he ever has time to do stand-up anymore, which had the same answer (aside from during the strike, when he did stand-up to make money to pay his staff).

This makes it quite understandable why a slightly deflated football is the first thing John Oliver picked as a favourite. He did used to be really, really obsessed with football. Like – I know most football fans are obsessive, but as far as I can tell, he took it farther than many. He’s said before that until he was fairly old he still believed he could be a pro football player, it was all he really wanted to do. So I enjoyed hearing him go on that podcast and reminisce about some of his favourite memories of playing comedian football.

Then they talked about some other stuff, some of it was interesting, both comedians told a few stories that I’ve heard before. Then Russell Howard asked John Oliver what would be the next thing he’d put in the box, and John said something to remind him of Edinburgh, and I instantly paused the recording because I had to run a therapy session in 15 minutes, and if I spent those fifteen minutes listening to John Oliver explain why he wants memories of Edinburgh in his box of wonderful things, I genuinely feared I might get too emotional to be in a proper state to focus on my job. I put on some music instead.

I think that might be a moment that it really, deeply hit me just how far my emotional projection with this sort of thing has gone. I mean, I knew my obsession with the Chocolate Milk Gang stuff did involve some amount of processing my own issues through media and stories about things that have happened to other people, but to be fair, the point of most media is for us to process our issues with it, right? We all listen to people tell stories of their younger days because they nostalgically remind us in some small way of things we love and it’s nice to feel validation in the core of our experiences, right? Sort of.

But the fact that I had to turn off that recording to avoid getting too emotional to therapize a kid was a bit of a sign of just how far that’s gone. It made me think back to how I first got obsessed with the whole Chocolate Milk Gang thing. It was last spring, when I listened to all the Daniel Kitson shows on Bandcamp and Vimeo. I loved them for many reasons, it was brilliant comedy that was insightful and intellectual and layered and consistently funny.

It did happen to hit me at a particular time when I happened to be going through some shit that those recordings of 00s-era Kitson hit quite well. The early ones were full of stories about how much he loved his friends and the way they could have spontaneous adventures and play football together and go to Edinburgh and shout racial slurs ironically (look, I don’t defend everything about early 00s Kitson). And as it got into later ones, 2007-2009, the stories increased about how his friends were getting married and having kids and moving away, and all this stuff he loved was slipping away. Then the Bandcamp recordings skip a few years and the next one is 2013, which is the bleakest fucking show I’ve ever heard, about how all his friends have moved on with their lives and once you’re into your mid-thirties all that community and stuff you loved in your twenties is gone forever and life has no redeeming factors.

I happened to listen to this just as I was starting to seriously realize how much my pre-COVID life that I’d missed so much was not just on hold for a couple of years, it was gone and not coming back. This happened partly because I had continued to live a lockdown life for so much longer than the rest of them had, so they’d all come back together and grown and changed without me, and when I tried to rejoin things, I was going back to something I didn’t recognize, and where I didn’t belong anymore, so many people didn’t even know me. It happened partly because a whole lot of those people who were locked in their house for so long lost their grip and got really into conspiracies, the Rogan and Peterson crowd and the worse shit to which those guys are gateways, and assorted other horrible things. I came back to find a much higher rate of that than what I’d left, and because I’d been away from it for a while so was no longer used to “just accepting” the certain level of it that had always been there, I had a lower tolerance for it than I used to. It was a different world.

Oh, and it partly happened because we’d all gone from our late twenties to our early thirties, and I think friendships do drift apart at that point because people want to focus on romantic relationships and careers and even kids, that happens whether there’s a global pandemic or not, as evidenced by Kitson’s shows about it that were written years before a global pandemic.

I had this team that I’d been part of since 2004 and running with my best friend since 2012, I loved it more than anything in the world. For so long, I wrapped my whole life around it. I stayed in the city despite better jobs elsewhere because jobs were just how I made rent money, this team was what I cared about in life. I never developed a social life outside it – no one in that sport really does, if we tried to hang out with people outside it we’d just bore them because we didn’t want to talk about anything but this sport that they don’t understand.

But within it, I had a really strong social life. As of 2019, our team was run by a great core of coaches, who would go to the pub after practice several nights a week, would travel to tournaments every weekend and then get home in the middle of the night and gather at someone’s house to review videos instead of going to bed. It was all I ever wanted. I’d never been so happy.

There’s a weird list of reasons why that specific group has disbanded and is never coming back. One guy in it tried to a fuck a teenager so we had to cut him off the team and out of our lives, which was really awful and horribly fucked up my ability to trust people since I’d liked him a lot and I thought I knew him better than that. One guy moved into the suburbs with his girlfriend and now on team trips he stays with her instead of hanging out in the hotel or Air B&B with the other coaches and we hardly see him anymore. One of them we had a falling out with over something stupid and she hasn’t been back since. One of them died of a brain aneurysm in early 2021 and I was devastated for months. You know, a variety of reasons why friend groups break apart.

But the individual people on the coaching squad has always rotated, that wasn’t the only problem. Through all the rotations, the consistent thing for years was that this was the thing I ran along with my best friend, he and I have known each other since 2004 and do everything together, or at least, we did for years. When I went back, I found new people there who didn’t know me but did know each other, I didn’t fit in anymore. And I wasn’t even sure I wanted to, given how much the team had changed, leaning toward the toxic rhetoric I had worked so very hard for so many years to not allow in it. It wasn’t just our team, either. It was the entire community. We went to tournaments where I’d always known lots of people, coaches and refs and administrators from across the country, but some of them had fallen down conspiracy rabbit holes during COVID, some of them had posted videos of themselves protesting against vaccines in my fucking city, it didn’t feel like a community I wanted anymore. And it didn’t really want me anymore.

I know that when written down like this, that doesn’t sound like all that big a deal. But this was the only thing I’d ever really, really loved. I remember being in high school and reading Romeo and Juliet, and our teacher told us it’s a play about love, and we were teenagers so too young to understand what real love is like (obviously, that it total bullshit because Romeo and Juliet were also teenagers who killed themselves to be dramatic, but that’s not the point here, just pretend it really was a play about True Love), but he could try to help us understand how it feels to fall in True Love with a person, by telling us to think about the thing we love most in the world.

He asked if we had anything, and I raised my hand and said I loved my sport. He said, okay, now try to imagine all the love you feel for that, and feeling it for a person. I absolutely could not imagine that. I thought about the girl in my sociology class that I’d had a massive crush on for two years and I’d do anything for her, and thought – no, I still can’t imagine feeling about a person the way I feel about the sport of wrestling. Feeling willing to drop every other thing in my life for it. Feeling like I couldn’t function without it, like nothing else really, actually matters. Feeling like it was the only reason I had any connections in my life, any reason to get out of bed. Feeling part of a community for the first time in my life, when I joined this sport as a teenager, after spending my entire childhood as an autistic kid detached from the world with no friends. Nothing compares to that.

It still doesn’t, really. Our teacher seemed to say that when we were adults we’d understand, but I’m 33 and I don’t think I’ve still never loved anything as much as that. I think I’ve been “in love”, whatever that means, the True Love that he was talking about that isn’t really in Romeo and Juliet but that play is still somehow the quintessential example of it anyway. But it wasn’t like that.

That’s a weird thing to bring up, I know, it’s just a story I’ve been thinking of lately, as I’ve started to wonder whether I need to leave this behind altogether. And it seemed like a way to explain why this fucked me up so much, last year, as I tried to return to it after I finally felt safe doing so for the first time COVID started, and I returned to a world I didn’t recognize and that didn’t recognize me. I could not – still can not – imagine anything ever again making me as happy as the best times from when I was part of that community and deeply emotionally invested in that sport. Realizing I may never get it back the way it used to be was accepting that the best times in my life might be over and I might spend the rest of my life enjoying things but thinking, this isn’t as good as that thing I used to have.

So, it was while dealing with that that I fell down the initial Kitson rabbit hole, heard his stories about his great community of comedian friends, and then heard his stories from a few years later of losing them because they’d all turned 31 and that’s just what happens, and I was listening to this while being 31 years old, and you can see why that might have rewired my brain a little, right?

Daniel Kitson’s Dot Dot Dot show from the end of 2020 has this throughline about how he’d run the Tuesday football games for twenty years, he loved it more than anything, it killed him to shut it down when lockdowns started. And when they were lifted, he desperately wanted to start them back up, but was too scared of the potential COVID risks, so refused to do it, even though other comedians were up for playing and asked him to start them. Others kept asking him, he kept saying no. This continued until, at the end of the show, he said they finally just started their own games with someone else doing the organizing of it. That bit of the show was so hard to watch that it’s the only Daniel Kitson show I’ve only seen once. I have other versions of it, but I haven’t watched them. But anyway, I’m probably really interested in Tuesday comedian football stories for normal reasons, right? Not because somewhere deep down some wires got crossed while watching that show and I now somehow subconsciously feel like the post-COVID survival of that league can mean things can be all right for mine too? No it’s probably fine.

Anyway, that might be why, for example, I might have read some strange, unexplained references to Daniel Kitson’s comedian friends from the early 00s being referred to as the “Chocolate Milk Gang”, and then spending hours and hours and hours and hours obsessively trying to figure out why the fuck they were called that, my obsession only growing stronger the more I worked out how few references or explanations are out there.

My search brought me to all kinds of other things. This is when I first found the fucking Cowgate video, along with a bunch of other old Late ‘n’ Live bits. I didn’t know what Late ‘n’ Live was when I started that archeological dig. I am now an expert on the history of Late ‘n’ Live, the long-running late-night Edinburgh Festival show hosted by the Gilded Balloon, owned by Karen Koren and her daughter Katy Koren. Hosted in the late 90s by Johnny Vegas and the early-to-mid-00s by Daniel Kitson. They destroyed a cow on stage there in August 2003 and no one will tell me why.

But I did finally find the answer about their name in David O’Doherty’s episode of the Comedian’s Comedian podcast, as he explains that they went to some place in Edinburgh after those late-night comedy shows, and at that place they got milkshakes, and because all the other comedians got drunk, those other comedians called the squares who got milkshakes the Chocolate Milk Gang.

I should clarify, at this point, that I am not just obsessed with the Chocolate Milk Gang out of some subconscious projection of my own emotional issues. I happen to big a big fan of the comedy of pretty much all its individual members (the membership list varies depending who you ask, but the main recurring names are: Daniel Kitson, John Oliver, Andy Zaltzman, Gavin Osborn, Josie Long, Flight of the Conchords, Alun Cochrane – I might not like where he’s gone these days but I really enjoy some of his old material and bemoan the waste of talent that he’s become, Russell Howard – see note about Alun Cochrane, Demitri Martin, Taika Cohen/Waititi’s name is in there sometimes, and I like all those people). And I think it is fucking cool that all those people, before they were famous for the various things for which they’re famous now, were doing stupid shit on late-night Edinburgh stages together in the early 2000s. That is a fun bit of comedy history and I am mainly in it for the comedy history.

But I have to admit, the speed at which I automatically shut off the recording as soon as John Oliver said the word “Edinburgh”, as I instantly realized I’d get emotional if I listened any further, does highlight that there may be some amount of emotional projection going on there as well.

I’ve compared Edinburgh to the national championships before. You train for it all year. You go to smaller things (regular gigs, regular tournaments) beforehand to practice, where you see various small combinations of other people from the community who are also practicing, but never all at once. Then once a year, everyone in the whole nationwide community travels to come together in this one city to show off the best, most polished version of the thing they’ve been working on all year, they’ve all peaked for this and once it’s over they’ll slowly start rebuilding to hopefully get an even higher peak the next year. Oh, and they both give out awards to the best ones, and then afterward everyone talks about whether the people who won really deserved to win and what other people deserved to win more, and even if they didn’t deserve to win, everyone who won puts it in their bios for the rest of their lives.

I went to the national championships in March 2023, for the first time since 2019. I wrote about it a bit on here. What I didn’t mention was that I spent most of the weekend miserable, because I hadn’t done enough to properly become part of things again before going. I had been coming to practices regularly beforehand, had done a few of the smaller tournaments, but still, I hadn’t fully integrated into the community again, because it was so different and I found it so difficult. So that weekend, which for years had been my time to connect with the entire rest of the community at once and really feel like part of everything and do what we’d been working on, just served to highlight how much none of that was true anymore. I wasn’t needed in most of the corners because I wasn’t a first-string coach anymore. I spent a lot of the tournament sitting in the bleachers feeling like shit and listening to Gavin Osborn on my phone.

So obviously, I was prepared for it to get to me at least a bit to listen to John Oliver, in 2023, talk about how he misses his days at the Edinburgh Festival. Talk about them with Russell Howard, a fellow Chocolate Milk Gang member, who has also gone in a wildly different direction since then.

I had to do some other stuff after work yesterday, and didn’t end up finishing the podcast. But I did go to bed with it on my mind, and then I had a dream that I went drinking with an old high school teammate. This was a guy I first met in 2006, when I was 16 and he was 14, and we bonded in our high school years under an abusive coach but with a team we loved. He then went away to one of the bigger teams in a city about seven hours away, and became of the most successful athletes in the country. He’d come home at holidays with stories of his big international trips, representing Canada all over the world, training with the Russians, getting honoured at ceremonies. I followed him via our sports’ news, via the gossip and rumour mill because everyone was talking about him, but they didn’t really know him, I always thought. Not like the people from my generation of my team did, who’d known him before he was “famous” (quotes because, you know, only famous within our niche sport).

I’ve always said I think there’s a bond you get with the people you trained with in high school that’s different from one with people you meet later on. Because later on you’re trying to impress national coaches and high-level athletes so you can get carding money and opportunities and shit like that. There’s a level of trust when you’re younger, and you’re not always jockeying for position, that stays no matter where you go. Even when he was a big enough deal so he really should have been too important to hang out with us, he’d still come home for holidays and drink beer with my best friend and I and tell us his stories and we felt close. When our athletes needed guidance, I called him up and got him to tutor them, and he was always willing to help. When he applied to medical school, I edited his applications and wouldn’t let him pay me even though I was working as a professional editor at the time. I thought we really knew each other.

Last year, he finished medical school and moved back to his home city to do his residency. I was so happy, that it meant he’d be able to join our coaching squad and be part of the team again. It was awkward, at first, because he has a different way of doing things, his approach sometimes clashed with ours. But we were working it out, I thought. Until early in 2023, when it became clear that he had been actively encouraging the male athletes on the team in their increasingly developing toxic attitudes. That our best athlete had been asking for gender-segregated practices because he didn’t want to work with girls, and my friend was telling him that he did deserve this. That our teenage male athlete told us he’d asked our friend in the change room what he thought of Andrew Tate, and he’d replied that Andrew Tate has some good ideas. Now we interact with this friend carefully, keep him at arms’ length from the main issues in the club and avoid giving him delicate information, don’t trust him anymore, and are constantly talking about whether we need to get rid of him altogether. And I fucking hate it. I hate the thought that I don’t know whether he’s just not the person I used to know, or whether I never really knew him at all. I hate the fact that I was wrong about him. I hate losing people.

Anyway. Last night, after listening to John Oliver catch up with an old friend who has since gone all Jordan Peterson but still seems on the surface like the same person, I had a dream that I went out drinking with this guy, and I told him I was tired of trying to guess his thoughts and motivations, and I just wanted to talk and clear the air and find out what the fuck he was thinking, letting all this misogynistic shit go on the team when I’d thought that I had been a good enough teammate and friend to him over the years to make him not want to kick the girls out of a room. Nothing really got resolved, because it was a dream, things went vaguely fuzzy and then I woke up. But it felt nice to be able to say those things, even if not for real.

…I did have that dream last night, but don’t worry guys, it’s fine, I’m definitely only doing a normal level of emotional projection here, right? Not taking it too far? I’m doing completely fine. It’s fine to hear John Oliver in 2023 say “Actually, I now have a wife and kids and wildly successful TV show, but my favourite things in the world are still the things I did in the early 00s, sometimes if you found something good enough then but walk away from it for something better you might look back in your mid-forties and think nothing did ever get better than that.” (Please note: I am aware that John Oliver presumably does not literally believe that, and presumably does love his kids more than he loved playing football in Crystal Palace, also being a multi-millionaire is a pretty good thing to love, I am in no way feeling sorry for John Oliver here. I’m just saying, he didn’t put his multi-million-dollar TV show in the box of favourite things. What if you leave the thing you loved when you were young for something objectively better and more successful but then grow up and realize life never got better than going to the national championships with all your friends?)

Anyway. I'm doing fine. I changed my dosage of anxiety medication this week and had to go home early from work today due to headaches and dizziness related to that. I curled up in bed with a cat and watched Arthur in the afternoon (the original, don't worry I haven't decided that November 2023 is a good time to watch a Russell Brand film), then I listened to more of that podcast episode, then I wrote this post, and now I'm going to bed. I have stuff to say about that episode as, you know, an actual comedy fan. Will write a fun post tomorrow about the fun comedy things in that podcast episode. Just had to do the LiveJournal-style diary entry version of it first. Probably won't leave this post up for long but it helped to write it. I had a weird dream last night and now I'm tired and dizzy and my head hurts. I definitely can't read this post back, so sorry that it's even more full of errors than my posts normally are. Also sorry that it's incoherent and overemotional, I (genuinely, as I write this sentence I'm realizing what a big difference that's making to my current mental state) blame the medication change and its physical and emotional side effects. It'll be fine.

[northwest-cryptid]

Alright so this post already has like nearly 4k notes and I'm sure there's been a ton of discussion on this topic and I want to air this right now and say I'm a NB individual who's not trying to ruffle any feathers so to speak; but I have personal experiences with this and figured I'd share my two cents, it's ENTIRELY FINE if you disagree with me. You can absolutely disregard what I say here but for those who want to know my opinions and thoughts on this topic, here ya go. You're 100% on this one, I've been saying this for a while but essentially; it's one thing to be supportive and understanding of someone's gender when they come out; it's entirely another thing to assume you know more about their gender identity than they do just based on your own personal experiences. I remember way back when I was very questioning of my gender and believed myself to be MtF trans it was specifically because people around me began telling me I was, and I realized it was always because of the fact I embraced a lot of traditionally feminine stuff. Of course they didn't take kindly to it when I had mentioned that I should still be able/allowed to be a man and be into those things, because those things don't make someone a woman they're just things I can like.

But here in lies the issue if I may be so bold, and yea I'm kind of scared to say this but it's just my own thoughts on the matter. See a lot of the people who were telling me I must obviously be MtF trans were MtF trans women themselves. To who, those things WERE what made them feel like a woman. Those things were what let them embrace their gender and BE a woman. Even though if we're being honest, they were a woman regardless (ya know, hence the whole being trans thing; you can be a MtF trans woman and be into trucks and beer and sports and whatever other traditionally masc shit you want because interests don't define your gender by the way) but they didn't FEEL like a woman unless they threw themselves at their more feminine interests and embraced that those things MADE them a woman. Which, hey I get that; I understand wanting to conform more with your gender in whatever way you can. It's the same reason sometimes I wish I had longer hair and have often thought about getting wigs, but then you gotta keep in mind that I also have thought about wearing wigs for like; literally the last 10 years and it was never a gender thing for me. At the end of the day I didn't want to blame these individuals for pushing that on me because I understood it from their perspective. Clearly if in their mind, painting their nails, wearing traditionally feminine clothing, using feminine products like perfume or even just deodorants, and going to the mall/shopping made them feel like women because those things were all interests they believed were traditionally or inherently feminine, then I can see where they'd believe me to be the same as them since I had a lot of the same interests. So when I still thought of myself as a man and had a lot of the same interests/activities I could see where it might come across as weirdly threatening. For my MtF friends, the idea that something WASN'T inherently feminine was actually a bad thing, they didn't want to abolish gender roles because those same gender roles were the very thing that let them feel more like their actual gender while early in the transitional period where they still had a lot of dysphoria about their looks, body, interests, that sort of thing. It was also a really "easy" way so to speak; to announce to the public at large that "I am not a man, I am in fact a woman because a man wouldn't have painted nails, or wear perfume, or be shopping at the mall!" Which is actually just not true but you know. This is literally coming from discussions I had with them on the topic because yea I called them out on this when I began to question my gender a little more. There are even some of them who still try to pull the whole "see I knew it, I knew you weren't a man!" Because I'm NB and they're equating that to being MtF which in my own personal opinion, it's not. I sometimes sway between calling myself NB and calling myself Gender Fluid, because I honestly still identify as a man, about just as much as I identify as a woman, which is literally just about as much as I identify as neither/both/whatever. Whenever they try to pull that shit on me, the argument is always about whether or not being MtF and being NB/GF is the same, and what bothers me there is that; none of the things they attributed to me being trans, ever impacted me being trans. They were never things that made me question my gender, they were never things I ever even thought about. Some of them weren't even things I had a conscious decision in. Like half the time I wore feminine deodorant because it's just what was available, most of my interests aligned with more traditionally feminine shit because I happened to have more traditionally feminine friends. I've been questioning my gender for a while, and the only time I honestly stopped questioning it and just decided to go with what other people wanted was when everyone around me had decided for me that I should be a woman because of what they deemed feminine and didn't like it when I asked "can I still be a man if I like these things? Do these things inherently make me a woman?"

So yea, there's my two cents on the matter. I admittedly have some strong opinions but you hopefully understand why. At the end of the day I tell people quite often that you only get one life to live (save for any religious belief you may follow) and I'd rather everyone just get to live a life they're happy with, if you're a man who's into painting your nails and wearing feminine clothing but you're cis and straight and still rock your long ass hair, more power to ya bro. If you're a trans woman and you want to rock a buzzcut and trucker aesthetics hell yea girl go for it. Who honestly has time to give a shit, life is too short to care, but if you're going to judge or accuse someone of being this or that because of what they wear, or the things they buy, or the music they like; well... shit man shut up no one gives a fuck.

tl;dr if you wouldn't say a trans man is a woman for buying pads (which you fucking shouldn't, I shouldn't have to say that but I am) don't say a cis man is actually a trans girl just because he buys feminine deodorant.

calling every gnc cis person you see an "egg waiting to crack" even as a joke is not cool or funny at all actually it is extremely invasive and weird and you are just reinventing gender roles but making it "progressive"

[thecryptidart1st]

Thank You <3

Let me reintroduce myself to those who have been following since my beginnings and introduce myself to those of you who just joined:

I’m @thecryptidart1st and I’m trans. My pronouns are he/they.

First of all, I want to thank everyone for getting me to 2k followers. I am still very humbled that people appreciate my art, from my Soldered Wires AU to The Graveyard Shift to my earliest days of this blog where I was trying to figure out what to post. I never imagined one person to be following me, let alone 2000 of you. A lot of times I worry that I’m kind of a hack who just got here by sheer luck and cheap drawings, but when I see your comments and interactions with every post, it validates that I am an artist and at least there’s always going to be someone out there who likes what I draw. And that feeling has been encouraging me to keep drawing and improving my skills since I’ve graduated from school and hopped from job to job. I know I’ve had my inconsistencies with keeping up on asks and messages, and I feel guilty when my depression stops me from doing what I like, but almost every time I get back in the groove because I miss interacting with you guys.

I’m sure there are a few who have a lot of questions about my new identity and it’s been quite a journey getting to where I am now. In short, I’ve spent probably 17+ years of my life being unhappy about being a girl physically, but in major denial about changing it. And it’s funny, but Scott Cawthon unintentionally wrote the one character into his line of games that I emotionally attached to because our lives were basically the same:

Yes, Michael Afton made me trans.

Okay, not entirely, there was me emotionally attaching to the male Pokemon protagonists because “they had better outfits” and years of creating stories that featured a lot of male protagonists that gradually got more LGBTQIA+ with in-depth backstories and relationships while my female characters got left in the dust. And a ton of other media and fandoms that were gay as heck.

But for some reason, the FNAF series was a weird gateway into realizing I wasn’t a straight cis woman. And the more and more I learned about Michael’s backstory, relating to his life struggles, and just wanted to draw him having the kind of love I wanted for myself, I realized that I wasn’t a broken woman, but a man trying to crack out of this egg I was stuck in for so long. I only came to terms with this when I wore my first binder just this last weekend. And now this announcement timing up with my 2k followers is wonderful.

So I’m looking forward to what comes next for me as I try to figure out how masculine I want to present myself as and as I come out to my friends and family. But, I’m glad it’ll be alongside with my partner and all of you FNAF fans across the spectrum!

💙💖🤍Thank You🤍💖💙

[ldss-interactive]

At Alter’s End: A CYOA Novel

Overview:

Trentworth, Maine. A town of ten thousand southeast of Ellsworth and North of Bayside. Its only bragging point since its conception in 1867 was being a shoreline city and cheaper than any of the other big tourist towns. Nothing ever happened here, besides the occasional drowning or fishing trip accident, until the killings started. They lasted five years in total and 48 people were lost to the killer’s sick desires. Robert Hall terrorized this small town, slipping under the radar by focusing on those considered “undesirable”; sex workers, orphans, drug addicts, and the like. Now ten years later, ten years after the killer has been put behind bars, murders have begun again. A copycat killer has come to Trentworth. And they seem to be targeting the ones left behind, still trying to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives…

You take the role of a highschool senior; your parents having died in a home fire shortly before the killer was put behind bars and now under the care of your workaholic aunt. Make allies of your classmates or attempt to go it alone, clear your parents’ name from their believed involvement with the killer or fight to put the past behind you, deal with the skeletons in your closet and mind or bury them deeper... Oh, and make sure your history project is turned in on time. With two young siblings depending on you and a whole host of problems a highschool student should never have to deal with, can you survive this nightmare made real?

Trigger Warnings: This game will go into very heavy topics including the following; murder, death, various mental health issues (such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety), abandonment, gambling, various types of drug addiction, self harm mentions (not happening to the MC or shown in graphic detail), suicide, sex work, child abuse (mental, emotional, and physical), and dangerous situations. This is a murder mystery/thriller, it is NOT intended for audiences below 18.

Hello! Thank you for showing interest in At Alter’s End. This is a Choose Your Own Adventure style novel in the Thriller and Murder Mystery genres. It would also fit nicely in the Drama genre as well, but Drama is not the focus. This will be a rather lengthy project, with fifteen chapters plus a prologue and epilogue planned.

You take on the role of a senior at Trentworth High. Join an after-school activity, take care of your younger siblings, prepare for finals, get a part time job, find a date to homecoming, and survive your worst nightmare come to life. The copycat killer is targeting the students of your school and no one is safe. With the police dragging their feet, no help coming any time soon from any higher up law enforcement, and the locals refusing to acknowledge the possibility of a copycat killer, it’s up to you and your classmates to find the person responsible...before it’s too late.

- You can play as female, male, nonbinary, or trans!

- You can be straight, gay, or bisexual!

- A highly customizable MC including hair color, eye color, skin color, hair length, height, and personality and interests!

- The ability to choose which mental illness the MC suffers from due to the trauma of their past from the following:

Anxiety, Depression, or PTSD.

- The MC is deaf in their right ear ear due to the way in which their parents died; this is not something that can be changed.

- Choose from 7 different official after-school activities! Trentworth Volunteers, Up and Coming Artists, National Debate Society, National Honors Society, Co-Ed Varsity Basketball, Creative Writing, and Trentworth Gardeners!

- Bond with your classmates, explore your town, and help raise your younger siblings!

- Rescue your parents’ bakery from corporate clutches or let it go!

- Find the killer, stop the murders, and put a stop to the rumors that have plagued your every step for 10 years!

Vanya: Oldest adoptive twin sibling to MC’s adoptive siblings, 6 years younger than MC. Strong-headed, intelligent, and always getting into trouble. She looks after her brother and MC in the ways she can.

Ajay: Youngest adoptive twin sibling to MC’s adoptive sibling, 6 years younger than MC. Nearly completely blind since birth, he enjoys painting and other artistic endeavors. Obedient yet opinionated.

Aunt Emma: The workaholic aunt that takes custody of MC and their younger siblings after the death of their parents. Well meaning but absent most of the time on business trips or at the office.

Kwan Hall: An adoptive relative to Robert Hall; aloof, intelligent, and completely ostracized by Trentworth as a whole. When the killings start again the town’s attention is immediately turned on Kwan. He’s the first to begin investigating the killings when the police prove their incompetence. He is of Korean descent, standing at 5’6” with dark hair and dark eyes. His most notable feature is the long scar that stretches from his forehead’s hairline, down his left temple, and ends just below his jawline and the constant disinterest on his face. He is asexual in that he doesn’t experience sexual attraction at all. He is also bisexual.

Alessia D’Agostina: Trentworth High’s school president. She’s clawed her way tooth and nail up to earn the respect of both the school faculty and her fellow classmates; she’s strong-willed, dependable, and always looks at things through a logical lens. When she sees her classmates dying, she takes it upon herself to try and stop this once and for all. With dark skin, deep brown eyes, long braided hair, and standing at 5’8” her confidence and sense of self always make sure she stands out from the crowd. Alessia is bisexual.

Georgiy Kuzmin: Twin brother to Anastasiya Kuzmin; he is, in the kindest way possible, not the brightest bulb in the box. Yet he always means well and is more than willing to offer a helping hand. As the co-captain of the basketball team, captain of the baseball team, and the star of the swim team, Georgiy is one of the most popular and well beloved students at Trentworth High. When he realizes his friends are in danger, he willingly throws himself into the investigation to do all he can to help. With fair skin, dirty blond hair, bubbly green eyes, and standing at 6’1” he cuts an approachable figure to anyone who knows him. Georgiy is gay.

Anastasiya Kuzmin: Twin sister to Georgiy Kuzmin: she and her brother are alike in so many ways apart from just appearance. Anastasiya, who goes by Ana more often than not, is head of the Co-Ed Varsity Basketball team, the Girls’ softball team, and the Tennis team. Just as popular and loved as her brother, Ana may not be the smartest but she makes up for it with passion and dedication. Like her brother, she has fairer skin, dirty blond hair, and bright green eyes. Also like her brother, she felt she couldn’t just sit around while her friends were put in danger and agreed to join the investigation. Ana is gay and demiromantic, meaning she only gains feelings for someone after having a strong relationship with them.

Lillian Triano: A quiet, withdrawn girl who mainly keeps to herself. Due to the fact that Trentworth High demands for every senior to be apart of an elective, she is mainly seen in afterschool reading club run by Ms. Habeeb. She’s MC’s closest friend, having been one of the only people who didn’t believe the rumors that MC’s parents were assisting Robert Hall in his murders. She has an olive complexion, brown eyes, a heavy dose of freckles, and stands at 5’1”. Lillian is gay.

Jasmine Abernathy: Jasmine is Trentworth High’s self proclaimed “Best news source!” After the school newspaper was disbanded, Jasmine took it upon herself to keep freedom of the press alive. She’s fierce in her pursuit of the truth and never one to back down from a fight, though her rash attitude can get her into some sticky situations on occasion. With vibrant red hair, dark brown eyes, and standing at 5’3” she puts the term “fire” in Fire Signs. (She’s an Aries in astrology!) When the copycat killings began, it was no surprise when she took the case head on. Jasmine is bisexual.

Asa San Nicholas: Asa is the oldest of a set of triplets; they’re the type to march to the beat of their own drum, often not listening to what anyone has to say about themselves or their interests. Asa is a firm believer in the paranormal and it isn’t uncommon to find them indulging in their interest in various ways. “The spirits are distrubed. These deaths aren’t meant to happen.” Asa’s reason for getting involved seems to tie directly back to their “connection” with the spirits of the town. Asa has black hair, most often tied in a ponytail, hazel eyes, and an olive skin tone. At 6’4” they tower over most everyone...something they seem to enjoy a great deal. Asa doesn’t see gender and is interested in people regardless of how they present.

Leo San Nicholas: The middle of the triplets. They are genderfluid, okay with any pronouns. Leo is, for lack of a better word, eccentric. A bit of an adrenaline junkie, you can often find them cliff diving or giving their siblings heart attacks by playing russian roulette with a chocolate gun. To them, it isn’t fun if there isn’t a little danger involved; naturally, an investigation into a serial killer scratches that itch quite nicely. Their black hair is clipped short, multiple piercings visible on each ear, and their heterochromatic hazel and green eyes are often stated to stare through a person. Although Leo is genderfluid, they are only interested in people who present as female.

The demo is upcoming! When it is available I will make a post announcing it! I will also update this post with the link! This game is written in choicescript; the demo will be published on Dashingdon and the final game will be published for free on itch.io. I am open for questions regarding this game/novel and once the demo is published I will also be publishing a link to my Ko-fi! Until then, please don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions!

[rantrambles]

Ever get so upset you make a Tumblr account to vent?

I haven’t even listened to The Penumbra Podcast yet but it’s on my list because it’s insanely popular and the cosplays I’ve seen are hot as hell (A+ to all the cosplayers I’ve seen you’ve done great work). Now, with the recent news surrounding the podcast, I’ll wait till it’s done if I ever do get into it. I’m Asian and part of the LGBT community but I’m not nonbinary so I can’t say much about the trans represention in the art but I wanted to add my two cents on the matter as a person of color and someone examining the situation from the outside. Also, before I get deeply into it, I’m not the only person of color with opinions on this matter so if people have their own frustrations and criticism with the racism in The Penumbra Podcast and/or the new artist they hired, definitely listen to them too. These are my own personal opinions, and I’m sure other people will disagree and that’s fine. We’re all going to have different views on this so bear that in mind. Also, feel free to correct me or add anything if I’ve missed some information. Here’s a great breakdown of the whole situation for those that don’t know what happened. Finally, I was very hesitant to post this, but I felt it was important because I make a statement at the end on how race should be presented in a podcast format so if you are interested in making a podcast and want to have a diverse range of characters, please skip to the end to read those thoughts.

I’ll start off by saying, I’m not even that upset with the new artist that The Penumbra Podcast hired. I know that statement alone is controversial but I don't personally know them, and I’m not going to judge who they are as a person by a few pieces of art they’ve made. They are the least of the problems that I have here. Since the announcement and the backlash, I’ve been scrolling through the artist’s Instagram account and I can tell why people find the designs offensive, but I’m also comparing the designs to the artist’s other work, and I honestly believe that’s just their style. They’ve exaggerated the features of just about every character they’ve made, regardless of race or gender. From what I’ve seen the sharp angles and overly round curves in the anatomy that make some of the character’s features more jarring are how they prefer to draw. I’m sure they’re capable of drawing more realistic proportions but for the most part they’re art aims to call attention, be bold, and create distinguished features. Not inherently a bad thing on its own.

And yeah I’d understand the issue if this were a scenario where the artist heard how these characters acted in the podcast and thought “hey, obviously this character is a black woman because they are super strong and therefore must have big muscles, no other woman could look like that” or “hey, this character has to be Asian because they act super seductive sometimes better draw them as such.” But from my understanding the race was already decided by previous official artists and a general description of the characters were already generated by the audience, similar to how The Magnus Archives leaned towards drawing scrawny Jon with black, greying hair and dark skin. The new artists couldn’t really change those features even if those features aren’t described in canon because a depiction that strayed too far from popular fandom interpretation would make the character’s unrecognizable to the fanbase. 

I think the reason this became such a big issue for most people is because the new Penumbra artist used their exaggerated art style when making these characters and people of color and nonbinary folks already see themselves drawn as these exaggerated caricatures all the time (with those images being used to further discriminate against them). I’m sure the artist didn’t mean for their art to be offensive, but that of course doesn’t change how it was received. 

According to some, the poses and expressions the artists chose did not fully represent the characters entirely and only served to further perpetuate harmful stereotypes, and I’ll have to take their word for it because I still haven’t listened to the podcast so I have no idea how the characters act. But again much of the criticism is based on the one line-up and doing a deeper dive into the artist’s work I managed to find artwork that was much less offensive. Here some art where Vespa is depicted in a non-violent pose and one where Vespa is in a threatening pose but not an overly violent one. Here is Peter drawn in a non-seductive pose. Hopefully, the artist truly does keep the criticisms in mind as they work on the new official art. I’m just not the type of person that wants to get the pitchforks out and cause this particular person to lose a job they seemed really excited about over their old character line-up, especially when that person is also part of a marginalized group.

Again, that’s just my opinion on that particular artist. Those who are offended by their art are still valid in how they feel, and the artist should absolutely take their criticism to heart to better how they represent the characters.

What I’m more upset about is that I think The Penumbra Podcast should never have released official art for their characters in the first place and that’s their mistake that they refuse to own up about. They have made it clear that the story was never meant to portray characters of colors, a fact emphasized by the fact they hired mostly white actors from the start. They only started releasing art of the characters to get a profit. And the thing is they know what they did was wrong. All I had to do was search Penumbra Podcast racism and there is a note on their website saying that they archived some old official art.

“We have discontinued all Penumbra merchandise that uses the original character designs, and in the meantime, any profits on the sales of that merchandise will go to the For The Gworls project. We also realize that the depiction of these characters as POC, while not appropriate for us to use in our marketing and merchandise, has nonetheless become personally meaningful to many POC listeners. For that reason, and because we do not wish to distance ourselves from our mistake, we are keeping these images on our website for archival purposes. Though we do want to make it clear that many of the main/featured voice actors are white and that we did not write the characters to represent any specific POC experience, you are, as always, free to imagine these characters in any way that you like.”

I went to their shop and they still sell posters and pins with the character’s faces on them, but they are donating it to a good cause so hopefully that stays the same. However, I still find it a little uncomfortable that they are still selling character merch and have plans to continue selling character merch. They have no right to dissuade the fans that already found representation in the characters, but they also have no right to profit off the representation that was built, regardless if they made the story. 

Let’s compare this to another piece of popular media. I love Avatar the Last Airbender and, I liked the ATLA voice actors just fine but there should have been more people of color doing voice acting behind the screen too. The voice actors for that show were mainly white too, however, the creators knew that they would be making poc characters. That’s what makes the difference. Did they still choose to go with mostly white voice actors? Yes. Could they have done better and pay more people of color? Also yes. But I’m not as furious at them because they did their research on the cultures they were basing the ATLA world off of and intentionally gave us a show where Asians could see characters that looked like them represented on the screen. The Penumbra Podcast did not do any of that. Again, they openly admitted that it was never their intention to make the character’s people of color when they made the podcast so that goes to show no research was made to properly represent specific cultures. The color of the character’s skin in their official designs therefore became more of aesthetic choice rather than representation, and it wasn’t even their aesthetic choice to begin with!

Race isn’t a color you can just throw onto the character because you feel like it. So I want this to be a lesson to anyone that wants to make a podcast: if you want to include poc characters please do some research into the cultures you plan to represent the way you would with any other form of media. Just because the audience can’t see the characters and just because it’s harder to smoothly introduce the character’s appearance doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be lazy on how you present the characters. Do research before you start writing the first episode and take the time to hire poc actors. Hiring poc actors is actually the least that can be done to show representation. Also, since the audience cannot visually see the race of the characters on a podcast and it can’t typically be described the way you would in a book, you’ll have to be creative. It’s not my job to say how, but my suggestions would be, before the fans come up with their own image of the character, you need to establish race in the first few episodes or release character profiles on a website so that the fans know you canonically intended the characters to be of a certain race even if you aren’t able to mention it in the actual podcast. If you are unwilling to do any of these then the best route is to avoid stating race at all and allow the audience to build their own representation into your form of media. However, once this happens, you are not allowed to profit off popular fan interpretations. You lose all rights to create official art or images of the characters. You cannot use “we have a diverse cast of characters” when you market your story. It doesn’t matter whether you created the content or not, you did not create the representation for those minority groups.

It’s one thing for fans to build their own inclusivity into a form of art like a podcast, but it’s another thing for the creators who never worked to make the representation happen to take advantage of the representation that the listeners built for themselves. Thank you for attending my TedTalk.

[n7sloth]

I've spoken about this before, but I can't recall if I've done so here. But I'm going to be completely open, in an effort to support this idea so strongly.

Back in my LiveJournal days... idk, maybe 2004? I was horribly ignorant. I wouldn't call what I was a radfem, but that was largely because I both had no concept of radical feminism and also no concept of tying gender to that sort of ideal.

In fact, I didn't really know shit about gender at all. I'd grown up in a fairly small town where the biggest sexuality-related gossip in school was my sophomore year when two of the band girls started dating each other. It's not like I didn't know it was *possible*, it'd just never happened around me, and I had no exposure to anything outside of cisheteronormativity.

Long story short, without knowing what it *was*, I was transphobic. I didn't understand what it meant to *know* you were a girl or a guy. I didn't even realize there were trans guys. All I ever saw were posts making fun of "guys who pretended they were girls". The posts used different words, of course. Slurs. You know what they are, I won't repeat them.

One time, there was an LJ post of a person, and the poster "dared" the viewers to tell if the person in the image was male or female. I, in all my ignorant glory, announced the person was male, because of this or that physiological feature that I thought was conclusive proof.

Reader, I got torn to *shreds*. And even then I still didn't understand what I'd done wrong. Nobody taught me or considered that I was just dumb, I was just roasted to hell. And to be fair, I deserved that roasting.

But I think I would've come to a lot of personal realizations, and respect and love for the LGBT community, if someone had forgiven me for being an idiot. And that's why I firmly believe in forgiving and welcoming reformed -phobes. Not because they're suddenly nice people, or because we forgot the harm they caused, but because sometimes they're just ignorant and sheltered and uninformed, and once they learn more, they come to love us, instead of scorn us.

It's easy to be hurt and assume it's not possible to be ignorant in this day and age. But that's not true.

Why do you hold care for ex radfems what if they just end up going back to a movement that's trying to kill us. Why do you think they can change.

[Genuine question]

I think telling ex-radfems that they're unwanted in our community will make it more likely for them to return to the radfem community. plus, a not only are ex-radfems ok with trans people, but they learned to love trans people. like, they had to spend possibly years or even decades hating our community, only to do a full 360 and and say "hey, maybe trans people aren't the issue here, maybe I am." do you know hard it is to do that? do you know how hard it is to admit you're wrong, ESPECIALLY admitting that your very core beliefs are wrong? I'm proud of all ex-radfems that have come this far. love you guys ❤️

[agendratum]

i’m not sure what’s the point of me making this post, but i feel that if i don’t make it i will explode. lately i’ve been reading even more posts discussing the issue of restricting adult content in order to protect kids from accessing something they shouldn’t access. and even tho to my dash they usually get already filled with opinions and points from people with whom i agree, and they all explain their view of this issue in a wonderfully worded way, i still end up seething with rage, probably from the fact that this discourse even exist and cause there are people who still don’t get it, even after so many lengthy posts were written to explain why labeling stuff correctly and letting minors know this stuff right here isn’t for them is good, but censorship really isn’t. anyway i might even regret making this post later, but currently i’m literally seething so here it is.

here’s a picture of some books i own with their wonderfully colorful covers.

you might recognize some of these books.

top row, from left to right: leah on the offbeat by becky albertalli, wilder girls by rory power, the upside of unrequited by becky albertalli, we are okay by nina lacour, darius the great is not okay by adib khorram

bottom row, from left to right: love, creekwood by becky albertalli, i was born for this by alice oseman, simon vs the homosapien agenda by becky albertalli, aristotle and dante discover the secrets of the universe by benjamin alire sáenz and one book that is actually from russia, the days of our lives by mikita franco

you might also notice that all of these books are labeled as “18+”. you might wonder, why that? none of them contain anything explicit! (haven’t read darius and the days yet, but i have a funny feeling they also don’t contain anything too “scandalous”) they are all beloved ya novels that tell stories of teenagers or high school graduates going through their life journeys, emotional journeys, self-discovery, coming outs, coming-of-age. even the body horror in wilder girls has nothing on the shit that happens in warrior cats books that i read when i was 10 (and those are not labeled as inappropriate for kids btw). so why would they be labeled as 18+?

well i’ll tell you. they all in one way or another touch upon the topic of lgbt+. they all have characters, main or secondary, that are gay, trans, etc. these characters being queer isn’t even always the main point, i mean yeah, simon is about a journey of a closeted gay teenager, but in wilder girls they’re just trying to survive on an island with a deadly virus. yet they dare to be gay while doing so. 

well, you might ask, what about it? there is nothing 18+ about being gay

labeling these ya books as 18+ might be the only way for this publisher to sell them in every bookstore around the country with no issues. (there are of course other publishers that work with lgbt themed books, but all the books in this picture happen to be from popcorn books, an incredible russian publishing house, that’s doing god’s work this all the books they sell). all thanks go to the law against “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors“ that was passed in 2013. and while you might think that none of these book actively participate in so called propaganda, it’s just always better to be safe than sorry. (this is also probably the part of the post where i should specify, this is how i see the situation and this wasn’t outright stated by the publishing house itself, but in no point of time since the law was passed in 2013, would it be a smart move to announce proudly: “we’re labeling these books as 18+ even tho they’re not 18+ at all, because we don’t want to break a stupid law that makes no sense and is ruining people’s lives”)

the first book from this picture that i bought was simon, it was also one of the first books published by them. i was in my twenties already, definitely not a teenager. i also already read simon a couple of years before that happened, in english, on my phone. i was the happiest when i held it in my hands, when i took a subway train where i carefully peeled off the protective layer of plastic film, not meant to protect the book, but meant to protect the minors from taking a peek at the 18+ books, as all of them are covered in film when sold in bookstores. i cried at some random mention of simon being gay on one of the first pages, as i never expected to read that in russian translation.

thankfully, when you go to a bookstore, as well as a library, and buy books, no one asks for your passport. it doesn’t matter what you buy. and after all, you don’t even need to go to a bookstore, you can just order the books online. you can order directly from the publishing house too, no one will ask how old you are, and no one will stop you from taking the film off the book once you own it.

but you can lock the books away. create a separate section for adult content. make cashiers in bookstores always ask for your passport when you buy books like that. make them not sell books like that to you if you’re under 18. these? these will also end up being locked away. the kids that just want to read about other kids like them will have to find loopholes to maybe somehow get them on the internet or ask somebody else to buy them, if they even have anyone to ask. or they might not even find out that books like these exist. but at least they’ll be safe, right?

you might say, “well, there is no such stupid law in MY country, it wouldn’t happen here”. all while there probably was such stupid law in your country like 10-15 years ago, and you just conveniently forgot, because you live in a bubble. and besides, if bookstores and libraries and websites will start locking books and other things away based on them being inappropriate for kids, who will be in charge of deciding what’s inappropriate? do you trust the judgment of your government? is its judgment of what’s right and what’s wrong perfect? maybe corporations’ judgement is? or maybe yours? what if the people in charge will decide that something that you deem appropriate actually isn’t and lock it away? at what point protecting the children turns into censorship in your eyes? and at what point the realization will come that there are no safe dosages of censorship that are okay, if it’s to create a safe space, if it’s for the “greater good”. there is no line you can cross, if the line just doesn’t exist.