#i'm the only one. i'm the only cis person of some of my friend groups!

[bitchkay]

"Did you just she/her me?😕" Me asking if someone still perceives me as a woman because I'm offended they misgendered me.

easy to get over

—

"... you think I'm lying when I say your attractive..?😕" Me being offended that someone dosen't still perceive me as a woman because I have a crush on them and they imply that their straight and I have mixed feelings because yes you did gender me correctly and I love you for it but that means you're not attracted to me because I'm not straight or a woman.

i'm in shambles

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

aita for calling out someone for being manipulative towards a trans friend? Names have been changed for privacy reasons and TLDR at the end because this is long.

I (24f) am cis but have had a lot of trans friends (binary, nonbinary, and neopronoun) throughout the years and am very supportive so i take this very seriously. So I met this girl my first year in college (we were 18 at the time) and we became friends. We're polar opposites, she talks a lot and I don't, she parties a lot and I like to do more sophisticated things, she's a typical extrovert basically, and I'm more introverted. Anne (24f) was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I don't know when, she just told me this years ago. I've seen tiktoks about bpd and researched Google about bpd a little so I know all about how they have fave persons and will "mimic" people in the friend group and become clingy, manipulate, etc. I've seen pics of her in high school, noticed that she was a theater kid, she said she was good at acting and even said she thinks her bpd helped with her acting although I'm not sure how, but she said she only joined the theater club because a boy she had a crush on was in theater. That should've been my first red flag but I was naive. She has a degree in something else (not theater) because our second year in college her favorite character in a TV show did a certain job, she got interested in that, and now she also does that as a living. She doesn't talk about her bpd, she's only mentioned it a handful of times. I can count on one hand how many times. And I get it because she said someone once told her people with bpd should be sterilized and not be allowed near children. Which is really messed up and I hate that someone said that.

However on with the situation. One of our friends Mike (25m) is a trans man. We met him four years ago. He's very handsome, broody, introverted, intelligent, great listener, very accepting and understanding, similar to me but opposite to her. Now we didn't know he was trans until two years ago, because I asked him on a date and he turned me down, and when I asked why he told me that he was mostly T4T and only viewed me as a friend. We were like woah you're trans, okay that's cool, etc. He explained that he was lucky enough to get on puberty blockers and transition young etc which is why he passes. I said okay I'm not trans and you're mostly T4T fair enough.

Well last year Anne suddenly tells us that she is trans too. She says she's bigender. She says she is okay with either she her or he him because she feels like a man and a woman at the same time. Some days she's a woman, some days she's a man, and some days she's both, according to her. She says she does not like they them pronouns. Suddenly her and Mike are spending all this extra time together. Last month he confided in me that he thinks he's in love with her, after years of him only seeing her as a friend, and then they started officially dating.

Here's the problem: she has not changed her outward appearance, her name, started any kind of medical stuff, joined any groups, bought a binder etc. We all continue to call her she and her because she fully presents as female and doesn't have a problem with it. Also she's very effeminate in body language, the way she talks, etc. I know technically I could call her a he or a him, too, but she never asks me to or corrects people when they call her she because well technically she is a she too. Mike is the only one who uses he and him pronouns with her as often as she and her, but she has never thanked him. It really feels like she's saying she's trans and then going about her life exactly as a cis woman simply to convince Mike to date her.

First off, Anne and Mike are NOT compatible. She likes to party, smoke weed, talks a lot, I'm not sure how she graduated with such good grades or why she does so well in her job because she is honestly a LOT to handle and I'm saying that as nice as possible. Mike would never touch weed or go to clubs and he says he would be fine staying home while she does those things but how could you trust someone to party while high and not hook up with others? I've seen her make out with five people in one night at a frat party. They also had wildly different childhoods, such as she grew up in a conservative community and doesn't speak to her family, and he grew up in a liberal area and is close with his family. But more importantly she has a history of joining theater because she had a crush on someone in theater (plus she admits she is good at acting, so maybe she is acting now?) and getting a degree and job in a field because a favorite fictional character did that and now this? It feels like she was attracted to him, found out he usually dates other trans people, and found a way to continue being cis but claim to be trans without having to do anything trans related, basically mimicing her favorite person. As soon as they met they hit it off, or should I say she clung to him and pretended to have the same likes and dislikes whenever they were alone I assume.

It sounds terrible I know, which is why I discussed this with a group chat first that neither of them are in, and the group chat not only agreed that she is far too "obnoxious" for him (those were NOT my words!) but that she is faking being trans in an attempt to make him fall in love with her (which seems to be working.) I would NEVER have gone further without making sure with them first. So then a few of the people in my group chat and I held an intervention with Anne alone. The six of us (the others don't live close enough to come) met up with Anne at her place and told her what she was doing was wrong and gross and that she needed to get help for her bpd and to stop catfishing Mike. She didn't take well to what was said, which I anticipated, but she went crazy. She was screaming at us, insulting us, sobbing while yelling etc, literally said if we ever contacted her again she would call the cops, so we left.

I immediately called Mike before she could and asked him to meet me at a restaurant nearby and that it was very important. Since Mike doesn't know anyone in the group chat I went alone and I explained EVERYTHING before she could gaslight and manipulate him even further. He left, did not finish or pay for his food. I messaged him several times, but a few hours later he texted me to never to speak to him again, and then blocked me on everything. I showed up to his house and Anne was there. Mike said if I ever contacted him again he would get a restraining order on me so I left. I've discussed this with the group chat and now suddenly half of them changed their mind and don't want to talk about it anymore. Several of them left the group chat. Not only that but several of my friends who know either Mike or Anne or both have blocked me on everything. When I've tried to contact these friends through other means and explain everything, they either didn't respond or said for me never to contact them again because I was being transphobic. Listen I know under NORMAL circumstances you shouldn't question when someone comes out but this is NOT a normal situation, and now I am concerned Anne is unsafe for Mike but also an unsafe person to know, as she literally is trying to destroy my life because I called her out on some seriously messed up and abusive behavior.

TLDR am I the asshole for trying to protect my trans friend from a potential stalker?

What are these acronyms?

[whatdaikesneed]

One of the girls I broke in my early 20s is happily married to a man now. I went to their wedding! I even fucked her after the rehearsal dinner. (As hot as it is when women cheat on their partners for me, in this case they're open, and he was off with two of the bridesmaids.)

She was a trans man when we met, and "straight," meaning she only dated girls. Skinny, and little, but with some intense curves. This was before binders were everywhere, and she has absolutely gigantic tits. Great ass, too. And she had real fakeboy energy about it, she had a lot of tight and low cut shirts, like she was just daring people to call her a girl.

She started taking T while I knew her, and she got so horny about it. We got a lot closer as friends because of that: I was the only person in the group who wasn't kinda put off by how much more sexual she got in regular conversation.

We started hanging out when she did her shot every week, because she had started really sexualizing it. I started helping her do it, and she would pull her pants way down and show me her whole ass when I put the needle in. She liked seeing me get hard over her.

One time, when she'd been on it for about four months, she asked me if I wanted to see her bottom growth, and I said yeah. Her clit had gotten huge. Apparently the order in which changes happen in HRT can be pretty random, and for her, it seems like her body went full tilt on growing that clit.

She stroked it with two fingers to make sure it got all the way hard, and kept gently playing with it as I got down on my knees in front of her to get a close look. I'm sure she could feel my breath on her labia. She started stroking herself harder, then she said "fuck," like something in her had broken, and she grabbed my head and pulled me into her cunt.

That became part of the ritual. I'd come over, inject her bare ass with a drug that made her clit swell and caused debilitating horniness, then I'd suck on that clit until she came three or four times. And of course, that escalated. I'd masturbate while I ate her. Then she'd slide down to my cock and put it in her. I'd suck on her tits. She'd eat my cum.

We started skipping the shot part and going straight to fucking. Her sex drive never returned to pre-T levels. In a couple months she came out to our friends as a cis lesbian, while she was still gorging herself on my cock every Thursday.

When I had to move for work, we kept our weekly appointment via phone sex, and she kept me up to date with fresh nudes, her own and the ones girls were sending her. Somewhere in there she started dating men, too, and I guess started saying she was bisexual.

The guy she ultimately married caught us together in his bed when I was visiting her in Providence. This dude went full cuck in zero seconds flat—she made eye contact and kept riding me, and he took his dick out and started stroking to us. He came fast, and she looked at me and said "That's why you're underneath me right now."

After that she started letting her friends use him as a sex toy, and he's never been happier. I drop in unannounced and fuck her in front of him whenever I'm in Rhode Island.

[genderqueerdykes]

your post makes no sense? all of the identities that you named are NOT cis men??? and quite frankly it feels transphobic for you to consider them that

i'm a trans woman so i'm part of the group i'm commenting on. you do realize that a bigender trans woman who identifies as a trans woman and a cis man is still partially a cis man and that's not transphobic and it doesn't invalidate their trans womanhood, right? you do realize that a transfemme cis man is still a cis man and that doesn't invalidate their femmehood, right? you do realize a transfemme genderfluid person who identifies as a cis man is still partially a cis man and it doesn't invalidate their other genders, right? being bigender doesn't completely erase 1/2 of the identity. being a woman doesn't cancel out being a man. are you seriously saying that because that person has a queer identity means that it totally erases the fact that they are literally also identifying in plain english that they are also a cis man?

immersing yourself in the transfeminine community will help with this drastically. i don't know you or your history, but most of my IRL friends are transfeminine, myself included. there are many of my transfem friends who never want to be considered a man, and that's perfectly fine. however, i would say a good 1/3rd of the trans women i've met have also still identified as a cis gay man on some level. without shame, without it taking away their womanhood. existing alongside each other; parallel. if you meet and befriend a good number of transfeminine people you will find out that a lot of transfems identify as cis men and trans women at the same time. that's not new. many trans women identify as cis gay men and trans women at the same time. like, it's an extremely common thing. bigender means having two genders- one is trans woman, the other is cis man for people who identify this way. this person is a trans woman, a cis man, and a bigender person.

this doesn't make that person a bigender person, and a trans woman only. why do you think it's okay to completely erase that person's male identity? why do you think it's okay to completely ignore someone's manhood for the sake of their other identity? cis manhood isn't "icky". it doesn't get cancelled out by queerness. them partially being a cis man does not invalidate their trans womanhood. wake the fuck up, you're being transmisogynstic as hell right now and it's embarrassing.

a question you must ask yourself: why are you insinuating that it is transphobic to refer to someone correctly? my post specifically referred to trans women who also identify as cis men in their own words. why, in your mind, is this a bad thing? you MUST ask yourself why it's "transphobic" to acknowledge these identities and refer to these individuals correctly. you must ask yourself why you're putting your comfort before someone else's representation. there are transfemme cis men. there are transfeminine genderfluid people who identify as cis men when they are men. there are non binary cis men. why do you think that cis men cannot be queer, or trans? why are you assuming that a trans woman being a cis man at the same time is transphobic? why

this reeks of "woman cannot be man at the same time or else woman get cancelled out"

what is confusing about trans women having multiple genders? what's wrong with a bigender, multigender, genderfluid, genderqueer, genderfuck, gender non conforming, and/or intersex trans woman having a male identity that's also cis? what's wrong with that? how does that erase or "conflict" with the rest of their identity in any capacity?

there are bigender trans men who are cis women and trans men at the same time. there are bigender trans women who are cis men and trans women at the time. literally how does that not make sense. please explain to me how it doesn't make sense. every single person who has told me i'm not making sense hasn't told me why. please explain to me why you proudly and loudly saying that bi/multigender trans women don't exist is okay, but me fighting for people to understand that they do is transphobic.

stop virtue signalling and shoot the cop in your mind dead. in your attempt to look like a hero and earn brownie points all you did was show that you literally don't understand multigender, genderqueer, non binary, and other gender vast experiences. trans women won't magically like you more now because you decided to show everyone that you think it's transphobic to call someone who overtly in their own words identifies as a cis man, a cis man.

cis men aren't the devil. calm down and stop freaking the hell out over the fact that you can in fact be a cis man and a trans woman at the same time. the sun will still rise. the world will keep turning. it's not transphobic to refer to someone by the terms they ask you to use. get over yourself on this one, anon. that's your cross to bear: you are the transphobe. do yourself a favor and look into multigenderism before you decide to comment on trans theory again

you thought yourself into a corner and you can't find your way out.

[pawberri]

thank you for all the posts you've made, your takes are always so refreshing to hear.

I want to know your thoughts (if it's okay with you, you can also totally ignore this) about all the "men hate" I see online. like I (poc transmasc non-passing) get it, there are genuine societal gender problems. transmisogyny does exist-women face more challenges than men do. but it genuinely hurts when women, especially trans women, think it's funny/quirky to call men trash or say they want all men dead or whatever. idk I just am hoping someone else understands, you know?

There's a lot of nuances to this question. First, I just want to caution against focusing too much on trans girls as the perpetrators of this. A lot of the asks I get from trans men seem to really fixate on trans women as the perpetrators of hard line gender essentialism. I really think trans girls are not the main people we should be focusing on here. If a trans woman is saying this stuff, take the time to analyze her ideology outside of that pithy comment and consider how much trauma and how little power she has in the world. That said, trans women are affected by this kind of ideology just like us, and they rarely have the power to wield it against others in the way cis people can. I know it hurts to feel isolated by your own community, but that kinda gets into my second point.

Part of dealing with this is learning an impulse progressive cishet dude have had to get used to over the decade. Sometimes, "men are trash" or even "kill all men" are not literal phrases. They are things women say when they're in the throes of trauma to vent their frustration. "Men are trash" in particular is generally pretty lighthearted and used to complain when you have a bad date or something. You have to get used to analyzing what someone actually means and airing on the side of empathy. You, as a man, are the one with some amount of systemic power over that woman, so you are the one who needs to prove you are dedicated to not being a misogynist. The same thing happens when my friends say they hate white people. I have to assume they don't hate me given that I'm their friend, but that I still have some of the negative traits of whiteness. I need to care enough to be a good friend by being anti-racist and checking myself on my behavior. I need to be willing to prioritize their comfort over mine. That includes not becoming this meme:

Now that that's established, there ARE times when "all men are evil and should die" is an actual ideology. It's an ideology that hurts tons of minority groups before it hurts the most powerful, but it's also not really great if we assume it only hurts cishet white guys. Following it to its logical conclusion, it just proposes a reversal of oppression dynamics. This gender essentialism is a key part of radical feminism, trans exclusionary or not, but it leaks out of that community to general feminism all the time.

As a young person on Tumblr and Twitter, this deeply affected me. I internalized the idea that you can "just be a girl." It was repeated by some trans girls, but also a LOT of TME people. It was framed as trans inclusive, but it's trans inclusive in the way "political lesbianism" is lesbian positive. It posits gender as a moral choice that is completely up to the individual and unrelated to biology. It's the lazy version of "gender is a social construct." I felt sick and disgusting for wanting to be a boy because tons of well-meaning friends of mine had made it clear that "being a boy" was a choice, and it was the wrong one. "Boy" was a social category that could and should eventually be eradicated. Trans women were conditionally supported because they, in theory, made this future possible. This didn't amount to actual support, of course. It was an ideology mostly spread by afab queer people that mostly benefited afab queer people. There were a few trans girls who spread it, maybe some due to genuinely believing in the ideology and some due to social pressure, but there were also a lot of people straight-up grifting as trans girls who used this thinking to feel powerful in a niche community of teens. Remember fucking Yandere Bitch Club???

At a certain point, I genuinely thought of being a man as an unambiguous moral failing, and I lashed out at out trans men because of it. I wanted to feel powerful, and here was a type of man in my community I could shame and exclude. I still feel bad for making a bunch of ~girls only~ stuff in HS that excluded the one out trans dude at our school, my friend, because he was just a ~binary man~ and leaving him with no friends and no community. I treated transphobia like it wasn't a real oppression on its own and, in doing so, perpetuated transphobia. It happens a lot.

I wasn't really able to accept that there was nuance to the concept of manhood until I read this article while struggling to accept my own gender:

This is a pretty seminal piece of writing. It has its flaws, of course, but the empathy and intersectionality it highlights was life-changing. It also shows that this kind of thinking is largely perpetuated by TME people and hurts trans women greatly.

Gender essentialism is a bad ideology, it's a transphobic, transmisogynist, racist, etc etc ideology. It's literally essential to patriarchy. But it's also very easy to repackage into leftism and easy to dogwhistle. As a result, it's natural to be hesitant when you see someone saying they hate all men, but you have to tread extremely lightly and actually care what they're attempting to express. Because, yeah, men as a social class still hold power over women. They still have reason to fear and hate men.

I'm writing a comic about this stuff, actually, so look out for it in the future..........

[riotsux]

I know it's scary sometimes being trans in this world so here are some wonderful stories from my life (preface: I grew up in a large metropolitan area and went to an arts conservatory for high-school that housed IB, naval and neighborhood schools in the same building):

- one time in the breakfast line I was talking to a cis male friend (former "no homo" and "faggot" as an insult dude) about why I wanted to take testosterone and I mentioned my voice and he said "you sound like a dude now, like a 13 year old but still a dude"

- I once won a hairy leg competition against cis men pre testosterone

- once upon a time I was in a band and after a gig this twink came up to me and said "you know, we need more queers in metal" (I was wearing a "faggot" tank top)

- when I started testosterone, I asked the only older trans person I knew at the time to come with (a key holder at my job), it brought along a few friends and between the 4 of us, we all had only two hair colors (neon red and lime green), the nurse helping us all with our paperwork was very confused

- that same day my insurance was acting up and my clinic waived my fees completely for my first year of testosterone

- a girl my sister met in outpatient wasn't doing to well and being the only other trans person they knew at the time, asked me to write the girl a letter, we met again years later, she's an incredible drummer, and after a gig, I was waiting with a pedal board outside the lead singers car and she's hanging out her friends window pointing at me and yelling "this mother fucker saved my life!"

- when my own mother was working at a methadone clinic, she met this older trans woman, hoping to give me some guiding light, she connected us, she kept an eye on me for years

- the day after I came out publicly, during my freshman year of high-school, my brother's friend's (upper classmen) all clapped for me when I came into the lunchroom

- my senior year I was barely in class but one day this girl I had known for years stops me to tell me I was on her "top 10 hottest guys in the school" list

- in high-school whenever a boy was being unhygienic in the group (typically someone's boyfriend) I would be used as an example for how he should be (ex. Putting on chapstick properly)

All I'm saying is there's kindness out there for us, amidst the violence there is so much love there, there's humor to be shared when others are comfortable with us.

I know I'm privileged to have grown up surrounded by queer people and to have been so accepted but

It's all here, I promise, and I promise you can find it

If you can't find it at the moment, make it

[ohara-n-brown]

[WARNING: Rant]

Sometime made a post going 'Love the trans women in your life while they're still here'

Someone added 'Trans men and Nonbinary too!'

And this was the response.

My response: Cut this shit out, you're acting literally ridiculous.

First of all - no it's NOT an All Lives Matter moment.

ALL LIVES MATTER was created by white people who DON'T experience racism to silence the experiences of those who DO experience racism and die at the hands of it.

A transmasc or nonbinary person saying 'Us also!' is a not the same.

It's a group of people who DO experience transphobia adding to the experiences of those who ALSO experience transphobia.

It's A LOT MORE like a black person going 'BlackLivesMatter' and sometime commenting '#StopAsianHate too :)' and OP going 'wow fuck you read the room you're being racist.'

That's like a Gay person speaking out against homophobia and how it's wrong. And then a trans person says 'Transphobia too!' and suddenly it's 'Read the room. This isn't about y'all. Why do y'all have to bring yourself up always. This isn't about gender. Read the room-'

Sounds familiar to y'all? It should. I'm reading the room and the room is saying you just fucking hate another group of oppressed people lol

Another oppressed person who experiences the same violence as you adding their voice to your choir is NOT the same as white people using their privilege to silence others who experience racism when they themselves don't.

SECOND OF ALL - (tw death mention under cut)

YEAH THEY HAVE A RIGHT TO ADD 'Celebrate your trans brothers while there here' on a post you know..

considering a transmasc non-binary person got fucking beat to death on school grounds exactly a month ago.

Remember that??? The one whose death is being actively covered up by school, law, and state officials on a systemic scale??

Also - a fucking trans man from NJ is still missing as we speak (Elliot Ganiel)

But calling attention to that is like being a MRA??? Talking about a children deaths in a school bathroom and missing people are like being MRAs whose main concerns are women playing video games or some shit?

No. No it isn't.

Y'all misusing terms like MRA and yelling 'That's like all lives matter!!!' clearly show youdon't understand how oppression works in the slightest.

If you try to compare any white racist movement to an oppressed group of people - YTA.

One of us gets fucking killed with no justice, LGBTQ crisis line calls skyrocket, and when asked about it state officials say and I quote 'We don't want that filth in our state!!'

- and when we talk about it amongst people in our community it's 'read the room!!' or 'wow really MRA like'

Fucking bite me.

And before - 'Oh but they didn't have to put it on THAT post, they could've made their own'.

Did you not hear what I just said. A transmasc teen was beat to death and misgendered publically statewide.

Maybe transmascs would like to feel included by the community at this time? So they can feel safe? Safety in numbers? And maybe want to feel like the wider community cares when shit like this happens - which clearly.. y'all don't.

Cause when a transmasc kid is literally killed - and we see a post saying 'Love your transfemme friends whine they're here!' and add the same - only to be told to read the room - it tells us 'You only have a month or so to morn. They died last month? Why are you bringing it up now on a post about appreciating trans people before their death??? Read the room. That was for us only. Stop trying to hog all the attention'.

Like damn sorry for wanting to feel like my community would care if I got wiped off this fucking earth silly me. Silly us.

When we start the conversation on our own we're ignored. When we try to contribute our experiences to other conversations we're told to shut the fuck up and read the room and then compared to actual racists and sexists.

You constantly compare us to people who DO NOT face oppression - cis men and white people - in order to silence us, despite the fact you know we face oppression in ways both groups could never even imagine. You think you're slick. You're not.

BITE ME. HARD.

[velvetvexations]

i wanna say this is not said in anger or an attempt to say nonbinary people are privileged over binary trans people, thats certainly not the case, im just here to state my thoughts. the "binary trans people having the resources and genes to pass perfectly to match a changed gender marker in the eyes of cis society affords privilege to binary trans people" is disturbingly reminiscent of "if trans men pass perfectly they get cis male social privilege meaning trans men are oppressors" and ignores it for what it is - conditional hyperspecific privilege that a grand majority of binary trans people will not be able to access. it largely depends on where you live, access to hrt, and access to gender marker changes - being able to change one but not others(extremely common) is an instant out no matter how cis you appear.

as for spaces being less understanding of nonbinary people, i believe thats also a vary-by-location thing. ive been iced out of friend groups for being gnc and not wanting to id as nonbinary. ive been to trans groups and a trans event that was geared for trans women and nonbinary people without advertising that fact. seeking out community irl in the previous two states ive lived has left me usually the only binary trans man, and isolated and shoved aside for it.

it also inherently implies binary trans people's goals are to assimilate perfectly into cishetero society which is also rarely ever the case. and when we don't, we're punished for it by both cis and trans people. binary as an identity does not mean upholding the gender binary, like any other its a personal identity term, typically just meaning "a man" or "a woman". the "gnc binary people(too far from the binary)" feels like its missing the point and trying to other binary people who dont wish to perfectly assimilate which again, is not the grand majority of us.

again im not saying nonbinary people are privileged as a class above us. i dont believe any trans people are privileged above any others. some of us may have specific, rare access to conditional privilege in some situations but i feel like its splitting hairs to try to afford that some tangible place to split apart trans people, who are all one messy glob of Other Freaks to cis society. ive seen so much "binary trans people are privileged because they experience X and nonbinary people experience Y" when ive been living my whole life experiencing Y. i think a lot of us subconciously invent a new gender binary thats "binary(cis assimilationists)" and "nonbinary(everyone else)" and cling to the idea that binary people could never be treated as weird outliers and freaks.

one final go of this was not said in anger to that person's ask. i genuinely mean no ill will or attempt to shutdown discussion or claim that nonbinary people are privileged instead.

Yeah, like, I'll say that I am an example of a binary trans person who does not fit very well into the binary by virtue of my identification with being male and being proud of my "male" traits, so I don't have access to most of the relative benefits. Even being called "male" and having the symbol I like so much on all my shit is not necessarily the best because that always comes with the idea that I'm also necessarily a man, which I'm not and I really do not like being tagged as.

[the-great-ladyg]

So, I watched the James Somerton second apology video so you don't have to, this are my highlights, feel free to add more if I missed something important:

He monetized the video to donate to HBG's team and Wikipedia, apparently, he said also he has reached some of the people who he plagiarized but still, if he did he would have explicitly said "I'm donating to them"

Did he really said "well, I'm a white cis gay man, I don't have the same experiences as others in the community" as an excuse on plagiarizing others' works? And the "I thought I might be able to won over some people" sounds like some white savior shit

He still throws Nick under the bus, it really shows that James doesn't regret any other times he did that and it sounds like he hired Nick as a shield for criticism and not to have a more diverse work team

He apologizes to Jessie Gender and many others, but doesn't explicitly addresses why he might have offended them on first place (except for the police incident), yeah, he says he was reactionary, but he has been on many occassions. I'm not expecting a full detailed explanation, but at least he could have said "for the Nebula drama" or something like that

James says that at one point, due to covid economic consequences, he and Nick became poor and that led him to plagiarize more since they had to upload more videos, and look, I suck at organizing my time, I tend to do everything with little time before the date, and I wrote most of my thesis on the last minute with one or two days of investigating and I still didn't plagiarize, I could cite all of my sources the correct way, if my early 20s procrastinating ass could wrote a 70 page thesis on my own without plagiarizing, he could write a script with a second person without stealing but he prefered to do it anyway

Also the alegedly head injury, I'm not going to say that's a lie, but knowing how this guy uses any card on his favor, this might be something he pulled from his ass to justify himself

I don't know why but some of this Telos drama explanatiom sounds again like he didn't even know how to do all of this, and I get what is to start a project having little to no idea on how to start or continue, but he tried to do so much with so little without asking for any help when he clearly needed some help other than Nick, and also sounds like another excuse to justify plagiarizing

"Misinformation made its way into our past videos", no, my friend, it doesn't make its way when you investigate or check a site other than the first one you see, James loves to say he likes to investigate but still says things like this. "It wasn't malicious", (seriously, the audacity of this bitch), oh yeah, there's nothing malicious coming from the mysogynist biphobic and transphobic dude who misgenders trans people and erases a woman's bisexuality, specially when this lady told you she wasn't a straight woman as you said and this was a known fact for a few years

The ADHD thing feels like some ableist shit, like "don't blame me, I have ADHD uwu", James has offended many groups and communities through his youtube career and in his apology video he still finds the way to insult another group that suffers from many harmful stereotypes

As I said on a post addressing his first apology video, James can't create a space for everyone if he's transphobic, mysogynist, acephobe and racist, and he pretends he's convinced he was creating an "inclusive space"

Just as many people have said before, he didn't address anything of the things he's been accused of except plagiarism, he only says "I'm sorry to everyone who I have offended", no dude, you don't address mysogyny, racism or transphobia this way, James is a piece of shit and a coward.

And this idiot has put on public display some of his videos, specially the ones that show his racism (yeah, the Killing Stalking and Painter of the Night videos), I'm not clicking on them but I'm pretty sure he didn't cut his racist mysogynist rants, because they might not be plagiarized (if James is to be trusted) but they show the worst parts of him when he's trying to be original, and putting this shit videos on public shows he regrets nothing on being a piece of shit.

[red-hibiscus]

BL characters I relate to most as a mentally ill gay trans man

Daisy from SCOY

Surprising no one, I, a trans person, relate to Daisy. They're outgoing and seemingly don't care about how people view them. They know they're visibly queer and they normally don't mind it (from what I see). But at the end of the day, society does affect them. They're hesitant to believe Touch genuinely cares and is attracted to them despite Touch being an absolute green flag who is very direct with his flirting. Even after, Daisy was worried about people would view their relationship with Touch and tried to become Day, a more masculine version of themself. Impossible of course and they broke down emotionally exhausted. I feel that so much because I also don't believe it when people, especially cis gay men, are attracted to me. I've caught myself trying to change my behavior to be more masculine (as I'm a bit on the nonbinary side of things). It's bad, but I know how Daisy feels.

Wang from 180 Degree Longtitude Passes Through Us

As a 26 year old trans gay immigrant in a country that doesn't want me, I have a shit ton of pent up anger that has been building up since I was a child. I've calmed down over the years, but I can still be stubborn and argumentative when it comes to politics and human rights. I'm also a linguistics major, thus an academic.

Wang is so much like myself and like a lot of people around me. Like me and Wang would be close friends irl I know it. We're young and stubborn. We're angry at the older conservative people around us, too much sometimes. So he lashes out. Many of his points are correct, but they're not hitting. Partially because the people he's talking to don't want to change, partially because he himself is stubborn. People like us yearn to be free, to be ourselves and to learn. Wang has a passion for the humanities like myself. Yet he knows society really only cares about STEM fields. I've compromised and am getting a master's in computational linguistics. Even though really I just wanna learn as much as I can about sociolinguistics.

Karl from Gaya Sa Pelikula

I haven't watched GSP in a hot minute, but I do remember feeling very seen.

So in the show Karl has his gay awakening, tries to internally and externally deny it, and eventually let himself be free to feel everything and be himself (at least in private).

Now I didn't have a gay awakening, but I guess you could say a trans awakening. In middle school I felt different, I suspected maybe some flavor of LGBT, but wasn't sure and I was too afraid to think about it too hard. Come high school I secretly wanted to join the LGBT club, but was afraid. Then I was essentially adopted into the LGBT club and dragged into the friend group during lunch because I was a loner like everyone else. At the time still "identified" as a cishet woman. As time went on people started to suspect. "Why are you in the club?", "why did you cut your hair", "why do you dress like that?", "your voice is low for a girl haha", etc. Much like Karl, I was not ready for any of that. I was still struggling to make sense of it all and come to terms with it myself. So I kept rejecting it and every time it hurt.

I kept rejecting it until I couldn't. Until someone I resonated with so much came out as trans and it clicked. My trans awakening was complete. I became able to be more myself, but only in private safe spaces. I wouldn't come out and live as a man until after high school and it was terrifying.

Adachi from Cherry Magic

I've only watched the jpn ver, but I'm sure that character remains the same.

I'm anxious and used to be quite shy. Now I'm just awkward. I'm really bad at seeing the good in myself cause I feel like I'm wandering around aimlessly in life. Not that impressive. So when people compliment me I think "haha they're just being nice" (refer back to me never believing people are actually attracted to me).

Adachi is the exact same. He has the same routine every day. Just going through the motions and not really thinking anything of himself. But then Kurosawa comes along and the ability to read minds. Adachi then realizes "wait, someone I respect so much actually loves me? And thinks I have a lot of good qualities? Makes me wanna cry." And me too Adachi. I'd be the same.

Jared from 7 Days Before Valentine

Jared, my precious baby, is described throughout the show as kind, but weird and different. We later learn that he has dyslexia, and honestly he seems to be somewhere on the autism spectrum. Even if he isn't, he has a behavioral difference people pick up on and then shun him for it.

I too was seen as kinda weird growing up. Maybe it was the autism, maybe it was the social anxiety. Probably both. And then of course there was the gnawing feeling that I was different than everyone else and it turns out it's because I'm trans.

So when Jared said that people didn't talk to him because he wasn't like other people it hit me so hard.

Myungha from Love For Love's Sake

The whole show is sad yet cathartic for me. Myungha is depressed yet spends his time comforting others. He has a hard time loving and receiving love. If you give him a fictional character who is very similar to him he will love them and see all the good, but he doesn't see it in himself. Relatable as hell.

I have an incredibly hard time being honest with my emotions and letting people love me and express attraction. Mostly in a romantic/sexual context. Dpdr is cockblocking me. So dating is hell, but I'm lonely and yearn to not be.

Probably if you put me in a situation like Myungha I'd also go "yep, that right there is my blorbo" and then not realize that all the things I like about the person and make me care about them are things I have.

Honorable mentions:

Both Akk and Ayan from The Eclipse

Nozue from Old Fashion Cupcake

Oh-Aew from I Told Sunset About You

Cher from A Boss and a Babe (I headcannon him as autistic)

Amber from DNA Says Love You

Uea from Bed Friend

Mitsuomi from Restart After Come Back Home

Jao from SCOY

Maybe I'll make another post for those later

[opossumanon]

I just got reminded of an experience of mine a year ago now that serves as a pretty good example of the kind of shit trans men, transmascs, and transneutrals often go through.

(Full yap session ahead)

So I'm sitting with my new friends at the same spot in the hallway as always. We aren't exactly a small group. We're all different, but one thing that's obvious is that in the eyes of bullies we're all fucking losers.

So this one group comes up to us and starts to make fun of us. Every fucking day. Like clockwork. They're puny little shitheads who have barely started puberty. Their leader, who was shorter than me, couldn't even say "cavalry" correctly and was pronouncing it as "chavalry" for some fucking reason.

Every day, this kid and his buds come up and try to harass us, often by asking us about gay shit and asking me about my pronouns. Every day, I roast him and the group into oblivion and they sulk away to regroup and come back the next day.

One day, this kid is mad enough about me making him look like a small-dicked loser in front of his friends, that while walking away he calls out at me "I would fight you but I don't know if you're a boy or a girl"

He never acted on the threat thankfully (Probably cuz I literally chucked him out of a classroom), but the point still stands that this fucker and his friends were threatening to attack me for being trans.

This fucker and his friends looked at me, someone they knew had a vagina and tits, but used a deep voice and had short hair, and they couldn't tell if I were a binary tranny, a nonbinary tranny, or an ugly dyke. They wanted to beat me up for it, and also cuz my tranny/dyke self was making them feel emasculated.

This is the kind of shit that trans men, transmascs, and transneutral people put up with more often than some of yall realize.

(To clarify right now NO, I AM NOT SAYING THAT TRANS WOMEN, TRANSFEMS, AND FEMININE CIS WOMEN DON'T GO THROUGH THIS. THEY DO. WE ALL KNOW THIS. I AM SIMPLY POINTING OUT AN EXPERIENCE THAT MASCS, AND NEUTRALS TEND TO HAVE THAT THE REST OF THE COMMUNITY TRIES TO DENY THE EXISTENCE OF)

We're still threatened with violence. Our existence makes perisex cis men uncomfortable, makes perisex cis women disgusted, and makes both scared for one reason or another. The more masculine an "afab" queer person is, the appropriate it is to beat the shit out of them. Because she's a man, right? If she wants to be a guy and wear guy's clothes and speak with a guy's voice, then she can take the fucking beating that we give her, because that's just what guys do.

So transmascs will walk into a queer space and become the emotional punching bag of insecure queers, and then turn around and walk into a cishet space and become the literal punching bag of insecure cishets. We just can't win.

Obviously the queer space is still safer, which is why we're still invading with our disgusting testosterone-filled bodies. But it isn't exactly fun to try and engage with people we see as "like us" (queer) only to be pushed away because we're men, and if we're men we never deal with oppression, right? We can handle violence, cuz that's what men do. As men, it's our job to let the ladies and fems verbally diminish us because they were hurt by men and so they have a right to take out their pain on us. If we don't agree to this, then we're misogynistic pigs, and then "trans men really are the men of the trans community".

Transmascs with functioning uterus' are conveniently left out of abortion rights discussions, and when we try to announce our presence we're told to shut up. Transmascs who are passing are conveniently left out of trans discussions, and when we try to announce our presence we're told that we don't count because we aren't oppressed because we fully pass now. Transmascs who don't pass are conveniently left out of safety discussions, and when we try to announce our presence we're told that we don't count because we pass as cis women, and cis women have more privilege than trans women. (That last one is a real line I've seen on this site btw)

Trying to say "I want acknowledgement" as a transmasc present at a more friendly queer space doesn't result in vitriol, but what happens instead is that there will be a "transgender recognition" night that has maybe one trans man if we're lucky, and then dozens of trans women and more feminine-looking nonbinary people.

I'm gonna cut this post off right here before I accidentally type out a full-blown book of all the gripes I got, but the point is that you can't apply the baby-level radfem idea of "man bad, woman good" to the queer community. It's dumb as fuck in the cishet world, and it's so much worse in lgbt spaces. Literally the point of being queer is to fuck with gender roles. This doesn't just mean everyone is feminine. You can't walk into a queer space and go "men are evil" without it affecting half of the queer population. Trans men aren't attacking trans women by saying "I want to be respected as a human being, please". Trans men aren't trying to trick gay men into fucking them by saying "I want to be respected as a gay man, please". Trans men aren't trying to trick lesbians into fucking them by saying "I want to be respected as a boydyke, please".

If everyone in the community were to take a fraction of the energy and love they dedicate to feminine queers and use it to "reach across the isle" and try to connect with and understand masculine queers, the community as a whole benefits. Also masculine queers deserve to be treated well even if it doesn't give good things to the entire community, cuz we're people too. We deserve decent treatment because we're human. Who woulda thought.

(P.S. I still see the leader of the dumbfuck squad walking around sometimes. He's still shorter than me, but his hair is taller. I swear it looks a little more tall every time I spot him.)

[bloggingboutburgers]

cw: discussions of bullying and aphobia

Hearing aroace peoples' existential crises over their friends discussing crushes, as someone who was socially isolated and severly bullied for their whole childhood and most of their adolescence so had NO friendgroup until adulthood and NO community or inclusion in literally anything (and when it came to sex and romance the other kids explicitly considered my potential involvement in either to be impossible / laughible because of how "weird" they found me (my autistic traits before I even realised I'm autistic)), felt like starving while listening to someone else complain about the food they're actively eating.

Food intolerances and dislike of different foods (as metaphor for being aro/ace) ARE important and difficult to grapple with when you're expected to eat specific foods in specific proportions at different times - but man did it sting until I realised why I felt that way and gave myself a talking to since my trauma doesn't justify belittling the very real struggles of aroace people.

I guess since the choice between 'stay alone or conform' was never really a choice because I was rejected no matter how cis straight or allo I was it taught me to go "fuck it" and accept myself regardless of what other people do or say (which ironically has lead to me becoming dramatically popular all of a sudden at uni, which has been weird to get used to since I have literally no experience with any of this - platonic or otherwise - which did lead to some advantage being taken of me but f*ck it we ball ^^'). And I guess it's just been difficult understanding why anyone would care so much about whether they're "normal" or not? You really have nothing to gain from that, safety is not guaranteed in conformity so best to live aroace and damn all aphobes to hell if they have a problem with that.

It's a mindset I'll never understand and that's only ok now insofar as that lack of understanding no longer results in misplaced anger at people who, for a time, I had once considered spoilt, ungrateful and out of touch. Basically, I'm full of sh*t and to every aroace person reading this you deserve good friends that actually respect you for who you are and do not even TRY to get you to change your mind about sex or romance. Have a lovely day x

Sincerely,

An aggressive emotional support anon

I'm genuinely sorry for all the hardships you went through. I don't mean to equate at all, truthfully from reading you and considering I WAS asked some of those questions as a kid regardless (the "who's your crush" bullshit and whatnot), it definitely sounds like I had it less hard than you did, but... I was bullied in elementary school and middle school, also not necessarily because I was aroace (I don't know why it happened really, I don't know if anyone ever knows, I boil it down to... me being me and there being something fundamentally wrong with me ig), and I definitely also get some of those feelings of "oh boo hoo you call that struggle" boiling in me when people discuss their own past struggles sometimes, so... Yeah, every one person's experience is unique, but I can at the very least very much sympathize.

I think a way it manifests in me is that I now have that compulsive, debilitating fear of being "othered" in any way, shape, or form, so I guess being aroace doesn't help my case. But at the same time... Well, like you brilliantly put it, when you're in a situation like that, no matter what you do, you won't be accepted anyway, and having that knowledge back then is probably also what lead me to figure myself out as aroace so early in life. Because I was treated as this much of an outsider, I ironically had that much room in my own head to form my own identity, far apart from others and the need to conform. Yeah, that identity may include a "piece of shit that doesn't deserve to be supported of part of a group" side that's been forced in, buried deep down and can't be erased, but... It also includes asexual and aromantic, and it's been cemented so hard from so early with such self-affirmation that later down the line, it saved me from a lot of stuff. I never had to force myself into a romantic or sexual relationship because I was undoubtably aroace – and people saw me as an outsider and an eyesore anyway. I spent years of being scared to go to school or out in the street every day, but later down the line, somehow, I feel it saved me from doing so many things I wouldn't have wanted to do.

...Bleh, sorry, didn't mean to turn this into me-me-me crap when you had the courage and sincerity of not only showing your experience, but finding the strength to show more love, understanding and support than a lot of people probably cared to give you for so long, despite all the pain you felt for so long. I guess I just wanna say... This take is definitely inspiring, so thank you on behalf of myself and others I'm sure, but also... I hope that, for yourself, you're also managing to own what you lived through in a way that allowed you to affirm yourself more strongly (it sounds like you are, I hope it IS the case), and most importantly, I hope you're in a much better place in your life now and you'll never have to return to that level of loneliness again.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for accidentally outing my fiance?

I (27F) am engaged to a 24M guy. He is trans, but he doesn't identify as trans anymore - he's post-everything, passes 100%, lives stealth/as a cis man, and no one who didn't know him pre-transition knows him as anything but a cis man. I know keeping that up is very important to him, we've had a lot of conversations about how happy he is just being seen as cis and being able to pass. I know getting outed and 'found out' is also a big worry of his, for example for our upcoming wedding he's rushing around trying to make it clear to his family that they shouldn't mention him being trans or refer to him as she/her at our wedding because he has so many friends coming who don't know he's trans. It's not that he doesn't trust them or he's ashamed of being trans or anything, he's very supportive of his trans friends, but he just doesn't publicly live as trans.

We're in a big Discord server of friends that have been quite close for about a year now, enough that we've met multiple of them in person and two of them are going to be in his wedding party as sort of 'best man' equivalents (we're not really sticking to bridesmaid best man stuff just our mixed gender friends). He has kept his Facebook very private for as long as I've known him, the only people on there are IRL friends and family because he has in the past posted trans stuff on there, like transition updates, it still has old pictures of him pre-T or in early transition, etc. I knew he didn't want this found. He also hadn't told any of this group aside from the people he was especially close with and had invited to the wedding his surname and location in case they looked him up and found something.

People in the server were sharing their Facebook profiles and I shared mine so people could add me. My fiance messaged me right after pointing out that me sharing mine would dox him as I had him in my relationship status and friends list, but I unfortunately didn't see this message for a while as I was distracted and doing other things. By the time I saw, everyone in the group had already clicked and gone through my profile and found his.

He tried to go through and speed-delete everything he could find that was public that mentioned him being trans or showed him pre-transition, any comments from family referring to it, etc but pictures that were set to friends only were still popping up in previews on the side and some of his family have public profiles that show cover images with him pre-T and things like that.

Our friends were making jokes about finally knowing his surname, going through his whole account down to the time it was first made back in 2018, commenting on old statuses of his, so they definitely saw his profile and went through all of it. He was panicking because he had no way of knowing if they'd seen that he's trans or not and got super upset and freaked out about the possibility, and he couldn't ask without outing himself or making them suspicious.

I apologized and deleted the link but obviously by then it was too late.

I do think it's not a huge deal as much as he thinks because I know our friends would be supportive and wouldn't think of him differently, but I know it was still important to him. I'm not sure they did see because some of our friends are the type to have just blurted out "You're trans?!" in the server without thinking about it (not because they're malicious or judging it, but some of them aren't as online and don't really know how to talk about it sensitively if that makes sense) and they didn't say anything. However he thinks they did because they were talking about statuses older than the ones he managed to get to deleting in time.

Like I said i did apologize but I feel like he's still upset with me for not thinking before sending my profile. On top of that I have kind of a habit of doing things impulsively and without thinking (I have bpd and bipolar) and not always taking into account how it will affect him or what consequences it will have,which I've been working on for years but I worry this is just adding to that which I know already wears on him.

What are these acronyms?

[elizabethrobertajones]

I wish to hear the tales of siren Lizzy driving men into rocks with disinterested lesbian asexuality! Those sound like fun stories!

Oh my god, like, the most recent event, I think I manic pixie dreamgirled a dear friend, who we'd met in weird circumstances (he and his brothers were notable town characters being small business owners with a visible presence and themselves as a trio came across a lot stranger than they actually were. A bestie of mine met his brother and married him and he's the nicest most normal guy, so his brother (much nerdier) became a sort of friend-brother-in-law and we became friends, but I'd reacted in shock and awe to my friend having met her husband by chance since I recognised them in a very silly way and when I was a teen had used their appearance for characters in a story on account of them being Notable Strange People In Town and I'd thought they were only background characters in my life forever until then and therefore fair game to take inspiration from.)

I was just being me at him (chatty, fun, extremely weird, trying not to admit I'd basically made up spy fanfiction about him and his brothers a decade earlier) and he also was sort of weird in a benign normal nerdy way so I didn't think there was anything strange, until I realised he was coming around regularly and bestowing quite large gifts and writing really really really nice birthday cards specifically to me (easy to tell when you're a twin and your twin also gets a present and card from him) which made me start to realise he miiiight have a crush on me, and then I thought about it some more from his perspective of meeting me and how I can be rather full on in person and he was a wallflower who rarely got any attention especially compared to his two more conventionally normcore brothers, and realised I'd accidentally enabled him up to the point that I briefly considered just marrying him to avoid the embarrassment if he did proposition me. But I sort of gently ghosted and just toned back the interaction to group chats and collective meetings and while I feel sort of bad and miss hanging out with a friend who is in town, it was probably very sensible because he was way too nice to accidentally destroy through awkwardness :P

since I'm biromantic and demisexual I do end up crushing on guys and giving anyone a really long time to shoot their shot because I can't tell if I'm just mildly crushing and it could be more or if it's going to turn into more but it is Always a catastrophe and makes me feel More Gay Than Ever in the aftermath and I know now after so many failed attempts I am Not Meant to date at the very least any guy who is excessively cis, het, shy, or normcore in interests because I just end up in a spiral about not matching them in any way whatsoever despite my surface ability to start crushing, and it causes an enormous communication gulf that they are never equipped to handle and I always end up feeling like I'm trying to explain myself to a brick wall until I give up and things fall apart, because in the same time I was giving them a run up, they had already fallen completely in love or else thought we should already be having tons of sex and were hurt I wasn't interested yet and couldn't SAY that so they get passive aggressive and super weird and - aaurgh. Sometimes I just want to be friends, also, but that can also be seen as interest from some people so then they hit a double brick wall where I only ACCIDENTALLY led them on and I sometimes don't even know myself which one it was if I did crush on them at least a little at first.

I do catch myself thinking sometimes that I should just shave my head to try and get some sort of visible barrier up XD

[genderqueerdykes]

Hi. Here's a lot of words that y'all don't have to read and I have a question that y'all don't have to answer. I think you all make a lot of great points. I'm sorry if this is on the blog already.

I think I might be what you call an egg. I just try not to think about it. I'm going through a lot of stuff right now that needs processing and I can get to the gender thing when I can get to the gender thing. That said, I'm trying to let myself exist in queer spaces and it feels like everyday women are bashing men without batting an eye. Actually, that's happening not just in queer spaces. Nobody says anything except to agree. Even people that I've known for a while and know that I'm married to a cis man whom I love and respect (and who actually got me interested in feminism). I told one friend that I was uncomfortable by her comments and she flipped it around, pouted exasperatedly, and said, "I thought you were a safe space!" I didn't know that there was a safe space for sexism!

What the fuck do I say to people? I'm autistic and have an extreme sense of justice and can't just let things go but I want to be at least somewhat respectful-sounding because when you yell at people they shut down and think you're wrong/the problem. I also don't want to talk their ears off/write paragraphs like this. 😬

🌀

jesus, i'm so sorry people are treating you like that. it really hurts my head to see people do this. you don't deserve that kind of behavior, you're not a shitty person for trying to figure out your gender. you're not shitty for being happily married to a cis man. i have so many words so i hope i won't give you a reply that's too long to parse

no matter what people's beliefs are, everyone is reinforcing that women need to hate men. like you're right it's just everywhere. not just queer communities. it's weird. it's like, i get it, the way we force men to act is absurd. we need to focus on helping men snap out of the shitty things we force them to do and support them in growing and changing. also like i don't get how people dont see how terrible it is to openly admit that they see trans men, queer men, gay men, bi men, disabled men, men of color, intersex men, multigender men, and so on. there are so many groups of men affected by this i dont get why people don't care

this "safe space" thing has gotten abused to hell and back. it's out of control, now it's being used as a gatekeeping tool. it's weird to me but people are defining things like this:

general lgbt/queer communities = women's safe space

lesbian community = women's safe space

nonbinary community = women's safe space

butch, gender non conforming, genderqueer community = women's safe space

genderfluid, bigender, multigender communities = women's safe space

bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, & polyamorous communities: women's safe space

like it's gotten way out of control. people think that every experience that doesn't outright say man is a women's safe space. and even then, we see entitlement there in the transmasculine and trans man communities as well. the thing is is like. these are intended to be communities. not safe spaces. like

women's groups exist. there are groups dedicated to providing safe spaces for just women, irl. a lot of the time they're based out of crisis and sexual assault survivor clinics, but there's also ones for homeless women, and so on. like i honestly guarantee you that if you googled "women's safe space" you'd find some local, brick and mortar places designed to be there for women and only women. like. those. exist.

we don't have to turn the entirety of queerness into a women's safe space. i feel like women who have been hurt by men are running to the wrong place a lot of the time. or they expect every other queer person to have the same trauma as them. like i think people in general are very queerphobic and assume that most queer people are women, for some reason?

i don't know why people view this as the "running away from men club". that's how terfs define the lesbian community. if you want to show people why this is dogshit, it's because that's literally how terfs define lesbianism. that's how rad fems define lesbianism. the "we hate men, we never want to be around men ever again, men are inherently dangerous" club is the lesbian separatism club.

people often say "why is there a lot of talk of lesbian supremacy lately?"

it's because so many people got indoctrinated into rad feminism without ever realizing it. queer communities are not the "we hate men" communities. those are rad fem communities.

so many queer spaces need to involve men, because men are very important in so many queer experiences. erasing their experiences and denying them the right to be in those spaces isn't helping anyone. if people want to be in all woman groups, they need to search specifically for that. if someone defines "lesbian" as "women's only safe space," they're looking for a women's space. honestly, maybe people just need to be nudged in the right direction. maybe not enough people know there are literal all woman safe spaces irl that help women with homelessness, sexual and domestic abuse, childcare, substance abuse, mental health, and many other resources.

sometimes there are behavioral health and crisis centers that accept just women. some psychiatric hospitals have spaces for just women. it really is possible to create, nurture and participate in womens only spaces. people are just trying to take over something they personally don't belong in, and it's insane that that's the norm right now. people are obsessed with going backwards in terms of progress in accepting diversity in queer lives.

anyway, i hate this shit, so i hope things improve for you soon, people are just. so proud of being mean right now. people are proud to be assholes and they take it out on disadvantaged men. isn't that sad? people are pissed off about patriarchy, the establishment ABOVE us, so they attack poor, mentally ill, disabled, neurodivergent, intersex, trans, queer men and men of color, as if that'll solve anything.

[confessionsofareindeer]

Not to like totally rant but like let's get this out of the way, Season 3 Heartstopper Spoilers:

They kind of ruined the show a little for me with this sad ace rep., the carnival scene takes out the depth of Tori and Micheal's relationship, it makes it look like they're just dating, it cuts out their queerness and just makes them look like a messy straight couple. They barely had any screen time, which is fair, they're just Charlie's sister and the guy that's always around her, (no one even seems to know Micheal despite them having had class with him in the comics, but whatever, Solitaire erasure it is) I wasn't expecting to see all of Solitaire played out on my laptop for me, but I wanted some sort of complexity around aceness and maybe a reference to its existence. But instead, you're telling me a group of queer teenagers needed a fish analogy to understand aromanticsm? Really? In school I only had to tell the cis boys and the girls who stared at me funny what it meant, not my friend group that is majority LGBTQ. I thought this was supposed to be a dreamscape to actually show me and my friends, not-a-water-everything-down-for-the-straights-and-alloscape, that comes with every other story, this was made by a queer person who is aro/ace so why did we end up like this, why did I bother having hope?

I really respect how the storyline made room for Darcy and Elle had trans and non binary identities and that they were expanded upon in the show, I love it really and I think that it felt like things my friends would actually talk about. We have a slight reference to Darcy having an unlabeled gender but even this feels wrapped up as they come out as non binary, I wish it was just all less clean cut, less perfectly fit so that everything works out, do their's and Tara's sexualities shift to reflect changing Lesbian identity in a more inclusive world? Do they decide to be unlabled or does the idiotic queer discourse not exist for them? Can we have people who don't particularly lean one way or the other, or who reject this modern idea that we should fit into the straight designed trap of conformity for the heads to comprehend something outside their simple world of the nuclear family? I want sexualities nuances to be explained like gender's was. Micheal talks about it, so why is there not a large discussion or plot around it? WHy does it end up a somewhat hollow scene?

Maybe my friends and I are weird and philosophical, but we'd spend lunch arguing about this sort of stuff, so I really wish they'd show it, I have the backing of the kids who loved Perks of Being a Wallflower and Catcher and the Rye (don't ask me about that one I haven't actually read it, on principle) that found Solitaire, and all the depressed outsider protaganists a little too relatable for our own good, that maybe Tori and Micheal shouldn't have even kissed in the book because people are only ever going to misinterpret it. So now looking at the show, I guess of course this happened. Tori and Micheals story meant something to me and so yeah, I'm going to be a melodramatic whiner on Tumblr about it.

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