#if you want me to use cis as a slur i will use it as a slur. zero complaints

[phoen1xr0se]

I do not agree with this, but I recently saw someone on tumblr say that the only queer coding in the good omens book was aziraphale being called a slur, and that neil gaiman's books featured gay charactera being pedophiles.

I havent read all of his books, so I dont have any idea about the last statement, only coraline and good omens and I am reading the graveyard book right now, but what do you think about this sentiment? Is there any truth in said statement?

Have a lovely day!

(Those ppl really sounded awful, im a good omens fan I dont know how that post found its way on my dash, but ppl were in the tags questioning why he hadnt been shot yet and they actually said they wanted him to kill himself. Horrid ppl rlly)

If the source of those accusations are the kind of people suggesting anybody go kill themselves, I'd wager their thoughts are largely worth ignoring.

Neil Gaiman is a kind and empathetic human who has canonically queer characters in many of his works, as does Sir Terry Pratchett, the co-author of Good Omens.

Good Omens the book, in its entirety, is an allegory for 'love is love' at the same time as poking holes at the religious institutions that claim otherwise. The queerness is subtextual, yes, but that's literature for you - the greatest works of art are never the ones that shove the point in your face, but ones that deliver truth wrapped in beautiful lies. It is a sad fact of life that some minds cannot grasp beneath the surface, but here is an article that might help those people get a better understanding of the subtext:

But that can also be summarised very nicely and accurately here:

I would hazard a guess that the people who said those things about Neil are probably deeply unhappy, angry people looking through a narrow and shallow lens.

(The paedophile thing is, I think, referencing a character that appears in one episode of the Sandman TV series -- possibly the comics, too, I haven't read all of them -- and yep it is an uncomfortable scene but there are so many other queer characters that are positively represented in so many of his works, and plenty of straight/cis characters that do awful things in that same episode, so... *shrugs* I really don't see their point.)

I haven't read everything Neil has written (although I am working on it!), and I am not fortunate enough to know him personally, but we have interacted a handful of times on here, and in my experience he has always been inclusive, considerate and supportive of the queer community. He spoke kind words to me when I was worried about my nonbinary kiddo's safety with the Tories trying to ban gender affirming language in school, and said he was so glad when I told him that Good Omens had healed mine and my dad's relationship and brought us closer after years of rifts due to my sexuality (update: my dad now wears a Pride pin). When I was at my lowest and my life was falling apart and I sent him a message just thanking him for giving me something to hang on to, and again, he sent the loveliest message of hope and kindness.

I'm not going to tag him here because I wouldn't want him to see the things that were said, but if anyone has any doubts about the man just go to his Tumblr. Take twenty minutes to scroll and see for yourself.

I know I, and many others here, are very grateful to Neil, not just for his representation of queer characters, but his unwavering support and advocacy here and in the real world. He is a light.

Stop trying to put it out.

🕯

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

"cis is a slur" i'm completely fine using it that way

[transmaverique]

gonna be honest I see anyone talking about this "my gender is more complicated than yours" shit as someone who genuinely cannot comprehend that other people that don't share certain traits with them can still in fact have rich interior lives. as an agender trans woman who uses she/her I've never had anyone say it to me who wasn't (usually unknowingly) transmisogynistic

see but im not talking about "rich interior lives" and the assumption that i am is exactly what im talking about. i am talking about the actual physical way that reality treats and percieves me in comparison to the way it treats and percieves you. saying my gender is "more complex" means to me that i am physically incapable of existing in a strictly binary world and that there is no thing i can pass as bc "binary man" and "binary woman" are both incorrect for me. and the Cisiety in question does not allow androgyny to exist - it is exclusively the timeframe people have to decide whether they think you are a cisman or a ciswoman, or a failure and a freak. i dont subscribe to that "binary privilege" shit, thats not how privilege works. but there are differences in the ways both you and i can navigate this strictly binary Cisiety!!! and those differences deserve to be named, imo

like. again. i dont have to comfort you about your own internal sense of gender before youll listen to me about my experiences in the real world as genderqueer. as a different sort of transsexual than you.

(and bc i Know what binary ppl love to say: i know not everyone is 'capable of passing'. what i am talking about specifically is the difference between being unable to pass as a cis woman or a cis man vs being unable to pass bc what i am does not exist AT ALL in a binary society, and both of those things are incorrect ans unattainable.)

(anyways if that language is too imperfect for you thats like fine but. its just confusing to me, i dont get why its hard to understand what we are talking about here. our experiences w our nonbinary genders are completely different! why do i have to discuss them like theyre the same?)

[321sluggie]

Hey, considering the majority of people use “transandrophobia” to mean either 1) any transphobia specifically against transmascs or 2) the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that affects transmascs, I would really reconsider your thoughts on it in light of your sexism/pedophilia post

Ok

[capricioushobbyist]

STOP putting your rant in your tags!! That shit needs to be in the post so that the message is preserved when you reblog. Considering like 90% of tumbly content gets to us via reblogs, this is quite important for the transfer of information.

in jokes can absolutely go in the twgs for ardent followers, however :p

[genderkoolaid]

The transandrophobia brainrot has hit tiktok hard. There's a sound going around right now that uses the T slur in a reclamatory way, but whenever a transmasc person uses the sound people lose their minds saying it's transmisogynistic for them to use that word. But when cis male drag queens use the audio it's a slay.

My answer to those people is Get Kate Bornstein'd:

Tranny. Many people don’t know the history of the word, they assume it was an assigned hate term or slur along the lines of the “n” word. That’s not how it happened. Tranny was invented by us in Sydney, Australia in the 1970s where drag was a big deal, and still the best drag shows ever are in Sydney, Australia – they’re amazing. So a lot of trans-identified women who were assigned male at birth did drag, that’s how you made your living. And so they were transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, and they were all doing drag to make money. They all bickered amongst each other who is better than who, “Well the drag queens are better,” “No, the transsexuals are better.” “You are all freaks, we’re better.” And on and on and on. But they worked together and they were family together, so they came up with a word that would say family and that was tranny. In Australia they do the diminutive, that’s how they come up with words. So tranny. I learned the word in the mid-1980s, late 1980s from my drag mom in San Francisco, Doris Fish, who was the city’s preeminent drag queen and she’d come from Sydney. And she schooled me in this word tranny, she said, “This way it means we’re family, darling.” “Thank you mama.” [...] So we used it and we were trannies together. And F to M was just beginning to start, the trans men were just beginning to become visible, Lou Sullivan was a neighbor of mine around the corner, and he was the first big out trans man, wrote his book. So trans men and cross dressers . . . cross dressers were also family. Transsexuals, we were all trannies and that felt good. That got into the sex industry and became a genre – there was tranny porn, there were tranny sex workers – chicks with dicks, she-males. [...] And, my only guess is that people who . . . because the only way they would have found out about the word is if they were watching tranny porn or having been with a tranny sex worker and then hated themselves so much that they turned it into a curse word. So it’s not really technically correct to say we’re reclaiming a word – it was always ours. So, many people mistake the word for the hatred behind the word and, in my generation, and I’m sure in future generations of trans people, tranny is going to be a radicalized, sexualized identity of trans in the same way that faggot is a prideful identity in the gay male community – not all gay men are faggots, but those who are are proudly fags and those who are dykes are proudly dykes within the lesbian community, trannies are proudly tranny within the transgender community. Does that mean we can’t call ourselves that because some trans woman does not want to be called a tranny? No. I’m going to keep calling myself a tranny. To the trans woman who gets called tranny, I’m sorry – as soon as . . . you’ve got to look at why you’re getting called tranny and if you don’t pass, you’re going to be read as a transgender person and then you fall back on the cultural view of trans folk which is freak, disgusting, not worth living, we can hurt you. It has nothing to do with the word, it has everything to do with the cultural attitude. So the word has stirred up a shit storm, but it’s not the word.

^ From this interview

Four weeks ago, Bear posted a call for submissions on his blog. In the interests of keeping the call as open as possible, we agreed to include as many trans-identities as we knew, so we used the word "tranny." And that's where the activist shit hit the postmodern fan base. People have been pissed. Here's their argument: FTMs are co-opting a word that belongs to MTFs. The word "tranny" belongs to MTFs, reason those who were hurt by our use of the word, because it was a denigrating term reclaimed by MTFs—ergo, only MTFs could be known as trannies. I spoke with Bear, and we agree that’s wrong on several counts:

Tranny began as a uniting term amongst ourselves. Of course it’s going to be picked up and used as a denigrating term by mean people in the world. But even if we manage to get them to stop saying tranny like a thrown rock, mean people will come up with another word to wound us with. So, let’s get back to using tranny as a uniting term amongst ourselves. That would make Doris Fish very happy.

It's our first own language word for ourselves that has no medical-legacy. 

Even if (like gay) hate-filled people try to make tranny into a bad word, our most positive response is to own the word (a word invented by the queerest of the queer of their day). We have the opportunity to re-create tranny as a positive in the world.

Saying that FTMs can’t call themselves trannies eerily echoes the 1980s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word woman to identify myself, and the 1990s lesbians who said I couldn’t use the word dyke. 

At one phase in the evolution of transpeople-as-tribe, it was the male-to-females who were visible and representative of trans to the rest of the world. They were the trannies. Today? Ironically true to the binary we’re in the process of shattering, the pendulum has swung so that it's now female-to-males who are the archetypal trannies of the day. The generation coming up beyond the next generation, i.e. my tribal grandchildren are the young boys who transition to young girls at the age of five or six. They’re the next trannies. None of us can own the word. We can only be grateful that our tribe is so much larger than we had thought it would be. How to come together—now that’s the job of the next generation of gender outlaws.

^ From Who You Calling A Tranny?

We've been having this debate forever and its been stupid forever.

And its an increasingly outdated debate. More people know about trans men&mascs than ever and there are plenty of TM&Ms who have been called tranny by transphobes who don't give a shit about this distinction. And not just people who have been mistaken for transfems, either, but men like Andrew Jonathan Blake-Newton and Saye Skye who were attacked by people who knew them. Do they have more or less of a right to say tranny than a trans girl whose never been called it by a transphobe? (Neither. Because no one owns this word.)

[vaspider]

Hi! I’m in my early 20’s and a baby gay and i was wondering if you could help me understand the nuances of a particular issue (or point me towards recourses to find some answers). I’ve heard that as an afab enby i shouldn’t be using the f slur because historically it has been used to attack/demean gay men, but i’ve also seen (mostly on tumblr) a push by the queer community to reclaim the word by any queer identity. I want to be inclusive and intersectional and not insult people to the best of my ability so my question is: can i participate in the reclamation of the f slur or should i leave this word to queer men? (I’m also not clear on wether it’s just cis men, includes trans men/amab folks, etc). You don’t have to answer but thanks for your time regardless!

You can do whatever you want forever.

Seriously, though - whoever is telling you that you can't reclaim a particular slur because that doesn't get used against people like you should come review my history sometime. I've had faggot yelled at me (often out of moving cars or in connection with physical abuse) more times than I can count. They need to talk to Hannah Gadsby, who talks in Nanette about a man who pushed her, thinking she was a faggot and then found out she was a woman, realized she was a "lady faggot" and thus outside his definition of woman and able to be beaten up... so he did.

That kind of "I have decided that people like you haven't been hurt by this so you can't touch this word" cop nonsense is genuinely harmful. We need to bring back the 90s energy of "it takes all of us to take the sting out of a word" where gay men showed up to lesbian marches with "fags for dykes" signs.

This infighting over terms is fucking cop garbage meant to divide us. It's bullshit. If you find strength in calling yourself a fag, a dykefag, a fagdyke, a ladyfag, a girl homo, a lesbo, whatever the fuck, it doesn't fucking matter.

This "no one uses that against people like you" bullshit is just that. Ignore it freely, because it's utter nonsense on many many levels.

[gibbearish]

so this post has been made unrebloggable now (shocker) but ive been feeling the need to address it since i saw it on my dash multiple times, so let's explore how lying on the internet works. more specifically, how blending truth, lies, and omissions to whip uninvolved people into anger works, because i think this is an excellent example and that pointing out the misinformation and the tactics used to spread it here is important, both in correcting the specific falsities but also in helping recognize similar tactics in the future.

so here we have several things that are technically true: staff has been very openly shitty to trans women for a long time and them banning predstrogen is clearly part of that, there is currently a movement regarding discussing transmisandry/transandrophobia, transmisogyny and transphobes sending transphobic asks is by far nothing new, and baeddel is/was a slur. however, among all of this are half-truths, unprovable speculation, or outright lies made to make you believe these events are originating specifically from transmascs.

firstly, the transandrophobia movement has been drastically misrepresented here in the same way it has been for the whole argument, "they're just trans MRAs" has been repeated so many times now that i'm gonna be hearing it in my dreams when i'm 80. i can understand not being willing to address the nuance of that whole discourse in one post that isn't directly focused on that, i'm certainly not, but in this example it's not unwillingness to address a complicated topic, it's a deliberate misrepresentation to frame one side of the discussion as The Evil Bad Ones That Can't Be Trusted. additionally, this post IS about that discourse and is just pretending it isn't to mislead a wider audience, so refusing to address it at all beyond this brief mention is deliberately misleading people about the goals of the group because They're The Other Side Of The Discourse. "transmisogynists" is used as a buzzword here, it doesn't actually refer to Anyone Who Hates Transfemmes, it refers to Transmascs Who Discuss Transmasc-Specific Oppression Using A Word They Coined To Point Out That Queer Spaces Have A Big Problem With Masculinity and just. doesn't tell you that's what it means, relying on the structure and framing of the post to create the Transmisogynist = Transmasc association in the audience's head so op doesn't have to say it outright (and of course the implied Transmasc = Transmisogynist association that follows because creating THAT association is the Actual Point of this post). the mentions of transmascs in this post are designed to look like afterthoughts, op says "typically those who espouse transandrophobia" to make it look like they're saying there's other people they're referring to here too, but almost everything in this post draws from the transandrophobia discourse. some random cis transphobe in texas has never heard the term baeddel in their entire life much less used it in a debate about transphobia, this is an intercommunity argument through and through, but op is trying to mask the fact that they're just referring to "transmascs who disagree with me specifically" and make it look like it's part of a wider trend. and again, i'm not going to go into the nuances of transandrophobia here, but i highly recommend reading some of the theory on it by @nothorses (x) and @genderkoolaid (x) because the "theyre just trans MRAs" argument kinda just collapses under its own weight as soon as you look into it even a smidgen. i've linked a couple broad overviews there but they both discuss it frequently and in-depth, specifically nothorses has a pinned post linking to many different discussion threads that i would recommend checking out if you do want to learn more about what the actual conversation surrounding these words is.

so, after framing the movement this way, they go on to say that the reason predstrogen was banned wasn't /just/ because staff has a long and established hate boner for trans women, but because the transandrophobia movement was teaming up with TERFs to mass-report her and other transfemmes, and implies that this is part of a deliberate conspiracy between Transandrophobia Truthers™, TERFs, and staff. you'll notice that there are no, say, screenshots of transmascs saying theyre deliberately reporting her or of that they're working with TERFs, behind-the-scenes lists of people who reported a certain account, or any evidence for this beyond "she was a trans woman, they're trans men who hate trans women, she got banned, so these must be related". which i find especially funny now given that photomatt has continued melting down about this since it happened and made it pretty clear it yknow. was just part of staffs ongoing hate campaign against trans women that has been going on much longer than the transandrophobia debate? and that maybe the fact that The Literal CEO is having a personal meltdown about this might explain where that could be coming from or at least why it's been allowed to continue for so long, moreso than any individual users reporting someone could? but i digress.

who reported what account is completely unprovable as a casual user unless people directly admit they did it, so to bring it up like this begs the question of what actual reasoning they have for saying it beyond trying to tie a current display of bigotry into an unrelated discourse. that's not to say it's impossible people who discuss transandrophobia were wrongfully reporting her, because again, thats something we have no way of knowing, and the internet is a shit place so i wouldn't be surprised. but given the circumstances and the rest of the lies here, i have my doubts about this being an actual yknow. Thing That Happened rather than just another lie to make people mad at transmascs. now one could make the argument that op wasn't saying transmascs are /deliberately/ teaming up with TERFs/staff, that "teaming up" was just a poor choice of words to refer to multiple groups who happen to have the same goals in mind at the same time but aren't actually coordinating with one another, but given the deliberate misinformative slant of the rest of the post and the overall phrasing in this section, i have trouble extending that grace. regardless, however, that doesn't change that who is reporting who isn't something verifiable, so stating it here as a confirmed fact is disingenuous at the absolute best, and a lie chosen specifically because it's unprovable at worst. if op /does/ have proof that transmascs have been teaming up with TERFs to get trans women banned, not including that with this post is just uhhhhh dumb, and if op /doesn't/ have proof then Why Would You Go Around Telling People That's What Happened Unless You Were Lying To Them On Purpose With Ulterior Motives.

next, op goes on to discuss the rise of the term baeddel. now as i said before, the truth here is that it certainly was a slur and certainly can still be used as one, again the internet is a shit place so i would be a fool if i tried to say "no one is using this as a slur". however, this is once again a drastic misrepresentation of the situation. baeddel's rising use is due to certain trans women reclaiming it and aligning themselves with the original group's politics, namely that femininity is good and masculinity is bad (aka terfism 101), with the added caveat that by abandoning femininity for masculinity, transmascs are evil and betraying devine womanhood and their community by putting more Evil Manhood into the world. of course that in turn is a drastic oversimplification of their politics and i highly recommend checking out this post with an actual in-depth exploration of the history (and without my added flavor), but the important part to note here is that this is not a term transmascs just Started Using one day because they hate transfems so very much as is implied here, its use is directly tied to a group of people saying "hello, here is what i am, and here is what this word means about what i believe," so others went "ok, these specific beliefs are called this." bringing up the fact that it historically was a slur is misdirection here, when you look closer this is almost a 1 to 1 translation of TERFs crying that TERF and radfem are slurs because People Don't Like Their Politics And Therefore Them, so the name for their politics is used negatively, so therefore it's a slur. that argument just has a little more oomph behind it this time because It Was A Slur Originally. and again, that isnt to say no one is now using it as a slur, the rate of decay for online discourse is ridiculous so it being boiled down to and used as "evil transfemme" has certainly already happened, but to act like /every/ use of it is a slur is literally just a lie, when you self-identify with a term based on your shared politics with the original group then you do not get to claim everyone using that term to describe those politics is doing so exclusively to attack you. also this part is entirely speculation but given that op's url is basically just. baeddel switched around to dae bel, i would hazard a guess that they perhaps are indeed aware of the origins of its re-use? but again, that's entirely unprovable and based just on wordplay, but like. given the Everything here i wouldn't be surprised. now, there's definitely an argument to be made about calling users baeddels based just off of their politics when they don't personally self-identify with it, if that constitutes calling someone a slur and if TIRF should be used instead, but crucially, that is not the argument being made here. the argument being made is "ANY AND ALL use of this term is calling someone a slur," and that literally just Isn't The Case.

finally, to tie the whole post off, op reminds us 1) if you hear anything bad about any trans woman ever, it's probably a lie to make her look bad, and 2) if you hear anyone say anything about transandrophobia, disregard everything else they have to say because they hate trans women. not "be critical of the things you see or get sent" or "be on the lookout for things following a certain pattern," a unilateral "anything bad is probably fake and anyone who uses the bad words is probably evil." that is not something someone does if they are genuinely trying to raise awareness of an ongoing trend, that is what someone does when they want you to turn your brain off and be mad at a group no matter what they say.

so yeah, in summary, do be critical of the things you see and be on the lookout for certain patterns, because sometimes people will just Lie to you. or, sometimes people will tell you portions of the truth while leaving out crucial bits so that you'll come to the conclusion they want without anyone being able to say they lied to you without typing up a thirty paragraph long hell post. transmisogyny is absolutely a problem on this site and there are 100% valuable conversations to be had about it and its presence within the trans community, but this post is not that. this post uses real transmisogyny and the wrongful termination of a trans woman's account as set dressing to say that it was all because of evil transmascs who run the trans community behind the scenes conspiring to take out transfemmes, so you should ignore anything they have to say because All of it is secretly motivated by transmisogyny. they're never discussing transandrophobia because it's something that actually effects them, they're doing it to hurt trans women by saying they have it worse. they're never telling you about shitty things a trans woman did to spread awareness, they're lying to make her look bad, or even if it's true they're only talking about it as part of a hate campaign because she's trans, they wouldn't care otherwise. they're never using a specific term because People Use That Term For Themselves, they're calling someone a slur because they hate trans women. there's always an explanation you can think up that ties it back to transmisogyny, and op says that instead of assessing all of what someone says and the context behind it to determine if that's what's happening, you should assume transmisogyny is the answer and refuse to engage any further as soon as you see a word you've been told is bad.

this post is discourse recruitment masquerading as a public service announcement that doesn't offer you any routes to actually learn more about what's going on, it just tells you Here's What's Happening, Here's Who's Evil And Should Be Ignored, And If You Disagree You're Also Evil And Should Be Ignored. content of the actual post aside, i think anything framed that way should be taken with a MASSIVE grain of salt and this would have raised my alarm bells even if i wasn't already pretty familiar with the arguments, people who genuinely want you to know something just because it's good to know will give you options to learn more or encourage you to actually use your critical thinking to assess things, not tell you to sit down and shut up and ignore anyone who disagrees with them.

anyways i guess tldr

[gods-no-longer-tread-here]

oh another little detail about Nimona that fucked me up:

I thought Bal refusing to call Nimona a monster, instead saying “You know what you are”, was him struggling with caring about her but also fearing her. After further thought, no.

It’s respectability politics.

He’s a cis, presumably gay man, who lived his whole life in the same confines as Ambrosius. The same rules, the same “don’t be Weird, don’t be Defiant, Kill Monsters On Sight”. Just because he was expelled for being accused of being the wrong kind of gay murder doesn’t mean he isn’t still chockful of “I need to be accepted by the people in power.”

Which always, always results in trying to be more straight than straight people, more cis than the cis. It’s part of why the ‘queer is a slur’ bullshit spread so far. “Monster” replaces “queer” in that scene. Bal can’t bring himself to call his friend a word that he has since learned is painful and was used to hurt her, but he still means it. He won’t let it out of his mouth, but he still means it, with the same spitting hate as everyone else.

Monster. Queer. Faggot. Dyke. Tranny.

Bal still hated That One Part Of Her. He loved Nimona, his friend and ally, but she was Monster, and just like all the “LGB without the T” fuckheads, he was scared Nimona’s transness would drag him down even further. He still wanted to assimilate, be accepted.

It’s impossible to do that. We are not different. Cis people are not “more acceptable” than trans. Gays and lesbians are not “more acceptable” than bi, pan, and ace people. We’re all monsters to the people who hate us. Stop polishing their boots with your tongue and fight.

[thegirlmirage]

Saying femboy is a slur seems sort of silly when gay was also a slur. Do you not know how your house is built? We empower each other. Yes I know people would use that against people like me. But there's a group of femboys that feel this label describes them and gosh darn it we owe them the enthusiastically protected right to do so.

I don't personally think anyone who has an issue with that is being particularly honest about about their intentions, or particularly understanding or compassionate.

I don't have the study to hand but there was one floating around queer Tumblr about how opposition to the label queer was almost wholly from people who self identified as terfs and straight cis people. Personally I get a lot of love in my heart from being able to cross-identify with all the little sections and subsections and identities and questions that can contain, as Queer. And gosh darn it I will put myself out there to make sure they all feel welcome to it. You don't feel like you're queer enough to be queer? I'm rooting for you, I'm reaching my hand out and I'm helping you into something that has always been yours.

Our compassionate unity is our strength, hence why they want to undermine it

[ticklepinions]

Everyone should read the following. If we are a community you need to understand a few things.

Are you entitled to say anything you want due to "free speech"? Hell yeah!

Should you? Absolutely the fuck not!

The blatant racism, anti-queerness, transphobia, misogyny and fatphobia I have seen is down right abhorrent. And if you display any of these ideologies or opinions, you simply do not belong here. You shouldn't be comfortable making a safe space for yourself as you make this lovely community unsafe for the rest of us.

There is nothing political about human rights. But unfortunately that's where we are in this life. I'll try not to be biased but certain political leanings tells me all I need to know about you. POC conservatives will always make me laugh. You are nothing but a pawn for the cis/hetero/whites who don't give a shit if you live or die. Nothing but a slur, a body to dispose of. You may share their views but they are not sharing the power and privilege they have with you.

Let's talk about certain individuals who act so tough under the "big strong amurican sharing their views just to get shitted on, fucking snowflakes". Why do you want to be oppressed so badly? Why do you purposely antagonize people and then when they defend themselves you try dismissing them by saying how they're wasting their time... The irony of it all. The sheer ignorance.

I feel sorry for you people. Truly, I do. But I'll be damned if I let any of you try to tear any of us down for having opinions and ideologies (hint hint see the irony?) that fight for the rights of people who don't have them.

And let me get something clear- from the river to the sea. We all should not stop fighting till all of us are free. There are so many resources out there to educate yourself, yet you choose to remain ignorant. You do not belong here. You act as though you are better than everyone else because you have "edgy" opinions, opinions that literally call for the deaths of the marginalized and oppressed. You do not belong here. You have the gall to tell people they are wasting their time, when their sheer existence alone is putting them at risk for isolation and death (by the same bigoted people you support). You do not belong here.

If an elephant (Israel) has it's foot on a mouse's (Palestine) tail, tell me which one is truly the one at risk. There is a gen0cide going on. If Israel is trying to reclaim it's "land" why bomb it? Why destroy it? With a military with their degree they should be able to eliminate all these "terr0rists" with minimal to no "collateral damage" (aka the 30,000 innocent Palestinians, 2/3rds of which were woman and children, with countless injured, orphaned, homeless and starving). Why bomb hospitals, mosques, sacred places? Standing with Palestinian people is not antisemitism, it's anti gen0cide and war crimes (a multitude of which Israel has shamelessly committed).

And I'm not on anon. I stand for the people of Palestine. I stand for justice. I stand for equity. I stand for the freedom of all oppressed people.

And I implore everyone who follows me to educate themselves. The right path does not lead you to discriminate against the marginalized. Continue to fight my friends, continue to amplify the voices of those unheard, continue making this community and those you belong to, safe for all and unsafe for those who think otherwise.

For you @knismosexual + @littleonelee

I hope you truly reflect on how your actions impacts this entire community and the communities you live in. Until you learn how to act right, unfortunately this community isn't for you. You shouldn't feel welcome here. You shouldn't feel like you belong here. DMs are wide open if you have any thoughts. But again I say, supporting transphobic, racist, anti-queer, misogynistic, discriminatory views is not simply an "opinion" or personality to adopt. You are hurting real people, accepting the deaths and harassment that plague them every single day. You have no place in this community.

[butchfeygela]

Ive been rereading this over and over again

and i just feel so bad for the internalized transphobia/transmisogyny embedded in this view like why is going 'hey you know you can be a girl if you want right? bc u say/do a lot of things that trans women often describe experiencing before coming out' being categorized as an accusation! like that alone portrays a lot of internalized hatred for being trans. you cannot accuse someone of doing smth good or neutral. you accuse people of doing smth bad or harmful or illegal.

also like telling an egg they might be a women is not the same as "reclaiming" the way bigots mock gnc closeted people in the slightest. like me and my at the time trans gf saying to a dear friend that she was too pretty to be a boy while we were all high and her coming out as a women within the year is not the same as the middle schoolers who called us slurs bc they could tell smth wasnt normative abt us

also maybe im stupid but i cannot for the life of me understand the claim op makes in the first line. like i sorta get she is saying its not a sin for a cis person to question if theyre trans and decide theyre cis. but is she trying to stay that not only trans people deserve the privilege of being believed abt their gender? bc if so like are the 'trans people being believed' in the room with us rn? in a world deeply escalating its genocidal intent towards trans people, especially tma trans people? are cis people less believed abt their genders? what am i missing here?

[doberbutts]

twlvie

transphobes on the street trying to figure out what kind of queer i am before calling me a tranny to make sure i can reclaim it

Just makes me think of Gadsby’s Nanette where she tells the story of when some man approached her aggressively accusing her of being a faggot, goes “oh wait you’re a girl nvm”, walks away, fucking comes back, and says “wait a second you’re a lady faggot, you’re still a faggot which means I’m allowed to hit you”, and beats the shit out of her.

It doesn’t matter that “faggot” is a slur directed, for the most part, at cis gay men.

It was used to harm a lesbian. It was used to harm her. So if she wants to say it as a part of her telling her story, as part of her comedy routine, as a recounting of her experience, she can just say “he called me a faggot” and not “he called me ~the f slur~” because he called her that as he was beating the shit out of her. He directed it at her, on purpose, as a means to hurt her. She carried the shame of the word and the experience as she continued her walk through life. She’s allowed to fucking say it if she wants to.

“Well it doesn’t apply to you so you don’t internalize it” fuck all the way off oh my god

[butchbarbieagainstterfs]

i'm so tired of cis women going "do you KNOW how terrifying it is to be a cishet white woman in a first world country and have to potentially share a bathroom with a MALE???"

like my nemesis in hell i can get hatecrimed, harassed or even killed at any time by anyone for any reason at all just because i exist as a trans man. i have to deal with dirty looks being thrown my way because i'm not closeted but also don't pass, people throwing slurs at me and calling me a dirty tranny on the street. i have to listen to a hysterical transphobic weirdo shouting "TRANNIES ARE TAKING OVER THE WORLD! WE HAVE TO STOP THEM!" in a middle of a busy shopping mall. i have to see my trans friends come to me with bruises from assault.

so my answer is, do YOU know how terrifying it is to be trans in a fucked up transphobic society that wants you gone? because i think sharing a bathroom with a stranger who wants to piss isn't as bad as being scared for your life every time you go outside.

Yeah like

a) they do not understand misogyny is not The Only Oppression and that oppression isn’t some competition. They can talk about their experiences, sure, but don’t use them to take away from other people’s experiences.

b) I have literally told one of them before that people like them make me as an afab butch human they would claim is a woman kind of afraid to use the women’s bathroom. More so than any trans woman ever would make me afraid. I was told I needed to seek help basically.

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for triggering someone’s epilepsy (unknowingly)?

So I’m (19F) in this relatively small Discord server for a fandom. We occasionally get new members but there’s always been a “core” group of 7 of us who started it originally. We’re pretty close and consider each other genuine online friends, and we all admin the server.

A couple weeks ago, a new member (?M) who I’ll call K joined and I immediately felt a little sketched out by him because in his Discord profile in the pronouns section he put “goon/gooner.” I’m cis but I worried for the rest of the server (mostly trans), though they either didn’t see it or didn’t point it out. K seemed okay, he wasn’t very active other than reacting to stuff with emojis so he faded into the background and didn’t really bother me.

So we have a channel in the server for holiday stuff and yesterday one of the admins sent something for the first day of Hanukkah (the 8th) and pinged everyone. The last message above that was about Transgender Day of Remembrance (the 20th of November, before K joined) and after getting pinged for the new one I guess K saw that because he suddenly replied to one of the articles (about a trans boy-to-girl getting murdered) and said “rip king, sorry to see a brother go down.” It was very obvious in the article’s thumbnail that the teenager murdered was a girl, and it said she was trans in the title.

I was livid. Most of my friends are trans and I would (metaphorically) die defending them. I was too angry to write an actual response so I just sent a GIF (the “You should kill yourself now” one with the guy with white eyes and lightning flashing in the background, except it was sped up). K didn’t reply and another admin deleted his message and I wanted him banned, but they said we should wait for K to reply and give him the benefit of the doubt in case he was mistaken or misread it.

K started spamming in our general channel about half an hour later, super mad and saying stuff like “FUCK YOU YOU [R-SLUR] YOU MADE ME HAVE A FUCKING SEIZURE I HAVE EPILEPSY YOU DIPSHIT” and was just basically saying variations of that over and over until we kicked him. Apparently K had mentioned his epilepsy at one point but I don’t remember it ?? An admin pulled up a message though (his intro) where he listed it.

The other main 6 admins are very conflicted on this, but they mostly seem to think I’m an asshole and a couple of them have even unfriended me. I would be the asshole if I knew about K’s epilepsy, but I shouldn’t be expected to read every single message sent in the server, and honestly K took the risk of being on the internet where there are tons of flashing images, and I’m pretty sure there are accessibility settings you can have on Discord and your computer in general. Plus, K was being transphobic, and I was very angry and didn’t respond well. The others said I could’ve put a flash warning or something, but I wasn't thinking straight in the moment.

So, is this a NTA, JAH, or ESH? Because K was definitely an asshole too, even if he had epilepsy. I don’t know, the situation is complicated and he could be lying, so.

What are these acronyms?

[naughtybg3confessions]

(Not a confession.) I've been working out submissions for the trans day, and there was also an interesting discussion on the topic on r/okbuddybaldur, and I've been wondering - where do you think the line is drawn between 'naughty confessions' and 'fetishization'? I'm trans (transmasc-leaning NB), I have trans hcs, many of them are smutty, I find them hot, trans people ARE hot! We are! But is there a point where it just becomes fetishistic?

Related, what about stereotyping? Tall, buff transfem Karlach, or slender, pretty transmasc Astarion, for instance (which I genuinely do love, especially together). Questionable if you're ONLY going with the more stereotypical view (ie. 'Shadowheart is small and fem and definitely cis, Karlach is tall and butch and definitely trans'), or questionable at any time?

(Relatedly, this comes up in the discussion on Reddit - someone shared their frustration with always seeing Aylin as trans and Isobel as cis, and shared their frankly incredible trans Isobel headcanon.)

Not at all trying to start Disk Horse or anything, just a trans fan writing up submissions and overthinking things. Have an excellent day!

Well let me start by saying that I'm cis, and not exactly an authority on this subject. I have no magical way of knowing where all our confessions are coming from, but I do have some safeguards in place to reduce harm.

First of all, confessions that fetishize real life groups of people are strictly not allowed in our rules. It's up to my own discernment (and that of our followers) what constitutes that, but generally any use of slurs or reinforcing negative stereotypes is a clear tip off. If someone is making trans folk out to be freaks or fetishizing things about them that belittle their gender identity, that's obviously a no go. But so far, no one has said that. There was one confession sexualizing dysphoria that towed the line for me, but my gut told me the submitter was trans themselves and simply had a humiliation kink. Which they later confirmed!

Not speaking for the fandom at large, but on this blog at least it seems like all the characters are "transed" pretty much equally, from Shadowheart to Halsin. With the exception of Gortash, who seems to get the lion's share of those confessions, but that doesn't ring any alarm bells to me.

I certainly wouldn't want to disallow trans hcs for any particular character. After all, it is a fact of life that some cis women are big and tall, and so are some trans women. Should they be excluded from being found attractive just because of a few bad eggs? But I'm always happy to see more variety, thought, and creativity put into confessions overall. Y'all are certainly encouraged to break the mold around here.

I do my best to use my best judgement in moderating confessions so that everyone feels safe and welcome here. But I'm not perfect, so if anything ever slips through the cracks I won't hesitate to listen to our trans followers, remove the confession and learn from the experience. Should that ever happen, I may ask the anon to clarify their intentions as well, as sometimes people just phrase things unintentionally poorly (Hanlon's razor and all that).

Anyways, I hope that answer was satisfactory, it's an interesting and nuanced topic to be sure. And I bid thee an excellent day as well!