#intersex trans people exist!

[vagrantclown]

“Elendira is neither a man nor a woman” “why would you make her not trans”

IMPLYING INTERSEX PEOPLE ARENT ABLE TO BE TRANS?? IM GOING TO START BITING THE FUCK OUT OF YOU

[theforesteldritch]

I’m begging people at this point to realize that hate towards intersex people isn’t just. Fucking misdirected transphobia. Please for fucks sake learn that intersexism is a thing and that while transphobia and intersexism often go hand in hand and are used to reenforce the other, intersexism is not collateral damage from transphobia. They don’t just hate us because of a perceived proximity to transness, they hate us because we’re intersex. And will go about acting on this hate as such

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[miraculouslumination]

You know sometimes it just hits you that so much of queer "discourse" is basically one group of queer people trying to cultivate a subcommunity for themselves and their identity while another group of queer people cry and scream about how that group, who is just trying to exist and have their own bubble, is the cause of all their own group's problems

[uncanny-tranny]

Was looking through one of my courses presentations and my reaction:

[identitty-dickruption]

the reason it's a bad thing to only talk about a certain group of people when it benefits your argument is that it shows that you don't actually care about us as people. you can bring us up in an argument if the argument calls for it. whatever. but using an entire community as a gotcha and then attacking that same community when they ask for rights and recognition is complete bullshit. you don't get to use us as an argument if you clearly only see us as a thought experiment and nothing more

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

sorry just every day i think about how people not only use “transmasc” and “transfem” as a new rigid gender identity but also a sex binary where if you’re a Vagina Haver and trans you’re automatically transmasc and if you’re a Penis Haver and trans you’re automatically transfem and if you don’t fit neatly into that I guess you just don’t exist or something bc people forget intersex people exist even more than nonbinary people yet steal their language 🙄

like, bro. male and female, or even “masculine” and “feminine” are not the only options. you can be both male and female. you can be a third gender. you can be neither. as long as you have very rigid sex and gender binaries like that you’re inherently explicitly excluding any nonbinary or intersex person who doesn’t fit into your extremely narrow view of what being trans is

[lilac-set]

Sentence in a post i just saw:

“manhood ONLY exists as the antithesis of transfemininity. men are a class that only exists because they are not trans women, which they define by inferiority, frivolousness, superficiality, inhumanity, perversion, and subordination”

Fuckin. what

- a cistrans intersex man

[sickly-sapphic]

shaking ppls shoulders to make them realise a lot of complicated identities are important to the intersex community and that yes, some "afab" people with be transfeminine and some "amab" people will be transmasuline, and yes turigirls and lesboys will always identify that way for specifically intersex reasons and that you can't... deny people that right

[burningsolarsystem]

I hate periods. Fucking hate them. But sometimes it feels like I don't have the right to complain. So, I guess imma give some love to those whose symptoms might not get attention.

Obviously, sympathy to those who get debilitating cramps. I'm lucky mine are average.

Shout out to those who have mental disorders who symptoms get worse with their periods. My depression and anxiety always seem to spike when I'm on mine.

Shout out to those with chronic illness who get flare ups and worse symptoms when on their period.

Shout out to those who are like me who get upset stomachs and digestion problems when on their period. I know for me, it feels like having a stomach bug on a good day. I've had times where I've questioned if I ate something bad because my stomach is rolling like it did that one bout of food poisoning I got. (It was minor food poisoning, don't worry)

Shoutout to those who get strong cravings, but I also want to shout out to those who lose their appetite or desire to eat when on their periods. Sometimes, I feel like I'd rather die than eat anything.

Shout out to those who experience hot flashes. I don't get them often, but they suck when I do.

Shout out to anyone who gets a period. There are so many symptoms we don't talk about that make things suck.

Your issues are valid. Even if they aren't the ones mainly talked about. Even if they aren't "severe enough." Even if you can function fine but are still experiencing discomfort. You are valid and your discomfort or pain is valid. You can complain even if you aren't one of the people who get extreme cramps. It's okay. You are valid.

All the love and sympathy to you.

Feel free to reblog with any other symptoms you experience that people don't seem to talk about.

(And sorry if this seems too much like a vent. I am, probably obviously, on my period and suffering.)

[shr0mwzrd]

I'm convinced by the way y'all are acting about it that these alleged AFAB transfems don't exist outside your brains - like all y'all are just vaguing and pearl clutching without mentioning or linking to a single instance of this alleged atrocity. Even if they did exist, just block them and be normal for fucks sake. I'm so fucking tired of seeing these same bullshit takes over and over, especially from nominally leftist queers...do better

[lovelyrotter]

can ppl in this fandom like... stop... implying that transmasculinity in hcs or (especially) canon is shallow or misogynistic or even transmisogynistic on princible, like literally just by being prescent in someones mind or in the text. like that doesnt fuckin feel good. thats kind of really nasty to imply. if its not okay to say about other trans experiences, maybe dont say it about this one either. why is there a weird little exception here. yall KNOW how much that sucks to hear all day every day. what the fuck

[stopper-my-heart]

"Nick/Charlie & Arthur/Merlin (AU Past Lives) – [Taylor Swift's] 'Timeless'" by @imagine-dragonlords

This is a Heartstopper blog and will remain a Heartstopper-only blog 99% of the time.

But this video really hits me hard.

Imagining a hypothetical historical Merlin-and-Arthur trying to be together and the meta level of remembering what it was like with the BBC / world and Merthur as recently as 2012, compared with having Heartstopper on Netflix and Nick & Charlie now.. There's so much further we have to go, but I have a lot of feelings about the progress we've made, too.

Also: "I'd like to think we'd find each other in any universe".

------------

This post was originally going to end there but then I discovered this Merthur fanfic by @queerofthedagger and it's a perfect antidote to the video and goes towards healing my Merthur-broken heart.

The fanfic shows what Merlin and Arthur could've been if they'd had the time and freedom to talk about the things that matter. They become so "Nick & Charlie" in it and it's glorious. Also, Merlin's mum = Sarah Nelson. I think you'll need to have watched and cared about BBC Merlin to appreciate it, but recently isn't necessary (10+ years is fine).

The author has their own summary that you can find on the page, but I think this sums it up very well:

Happiness is bubbling in his chest, his blood singing with it and this, this is what they’re supposed to be. Carving their own way and finding alternate routes to be themselves, without being tied down and crushed underneath some distant destiny* that cares nothing for them.

*or the BBC, society, etc.

Below the jump are content warnings for the fic plus some quotations from it that remind me of Nick & Charlie, which are more for my sake than anyone else's.

CW: violence, murderous intent, 1 non-graphic sex scene (near the beginning of ch. 13, easy to skip)

Quotations:

“You don’t have a weapon,” he says because Merlin might’ve turned him into a lovestruck fool, but he’s never going to stop poking and prodding him to make up for it. Of course, it would be far easier if one symptom of said lovestruck condition wasn’t that it clearly makes him as much of an idiot as Merlin loves to claim he is.

-----------------

“You’re brilliant,” he breathes into the safety of Merlin’s hair, revelling in the way Merlin tightens his grip on him. “It’s brilliant.”

-----------------

“I—yeah no, I’d rather not,” Merlin agrees, though there’s something resigned lurking in the black of his eyes. “I’m—” “If the next word is 'sorry,' Merlin, I advise you to stop right there.”

-----------------

“You’d miss me!” Arthur calls, having to raise his voice for Merlin to hear him over the distance as he’s walking away. He gets a rude hand gesture in response, and he can only be thankful that there’s no one else around to witness the grin splitting his face.

-----------------

“Maybe it is,” he cuts in, shrugging. “But not so much that you have to sacrifice your own happiness for it. You’re—can’t you see how important you are, simply because you’re you? Because of what you mean to me and how you make my life better?" [...] It’s so much more than he meant to say, but he doesn’t regret a single word of it. He would say it a hundred times over if it got Merlin to finally believe it.

AKA Sports Day speech -----------------

The clarity of what, truly, is the root of the problem hits Arthur like a punch. “Gods, you—Merlin. Merlin, you don’t have to make up for it,” he croaks out, his voice cracking and breaking. He shifts closer, pressing his forehead against Merlin’s, and he can feel Merlin’s shallow breathing against his chest. “It’s not a burden, alright? It’s not a burden, and you aren’t a burden, and I will fight anyone who dares to tell you otherwise.”

-----------------

His whole body is singing with it, his skin feeling too small to contain the magnitude of emotions rushing through him, and he has to break the kiss before it overwhelms him entirely.

Insert Nick gasping for dear life breath -----------------

Arthur keeps his eyes closed, their foreheads still pressed together, trying desperately to not unravel at the seams. He’s almost afraid that this is a dream, that he’s going to wake up any second now, with Merlin still close but not like this. Not like Arthur has been craving for aeons.

In which Arthur is also Charlie -----------------

Arthur splutters, though he doubts that it sounds anywhere as indignant as he’d like it to. “How could I not know? If you recall, I was the one who kissed you first, all those months back when we were travelling to Ynys Gybi.” “Yes, and then you never brought it up again.” “Because you never brought it up again. I thought that you simply wanted to forget about it, or that I crossed a line!” Merlin huffs out a laugh, but his eyes are still brimming with affection. “I thought you regretted it,” he says quietly, lips quirked at the corners. “I thought you were just panicking, and that if you had meant it, you would’ve said something.”

A.k.a. conversation in Charlie's bedroom after their first kiss (except it's later on here) -----------------

Hunith takes one look at them the next morning before she smirks. “Finally figured it out, did you?” Arthur promptly chokes on his food, coughing and spluttering as his face grows warm. Merlin isn’t much better off, even the tips of his ears turning red, though at least he’s spared the coughing fit.

In which Hunith continues to be Sarah Nelson (or the Sarah Nelson Charlie expects, anyway) -----------------

Snow starts falling in big flakes about an hour in, and Arthur didn’t count on how much of a distraction it would be. It catches in Merlin’s hair and his lashes, a stark contrast to the black of it, and his eyes appear even brighter than usual. It’s a struggle to not drag him off and kiss the crystals of ice off his face, and Arthur can’t remember when he’s become such a terrible, utter sap. That is, until he steps out of Hunith’s house after lunch, just about warmed up from the thick stew she made, and a snowball hits him straight in the face.

If Nick & Charlie's Snow Day came slightly later. Or maybe this is just the same -----------------

[indianchindian]

JKR stooped to a new low by literally denying that the holocaust had a detrimental effect on trans people and saying that she won't consider Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe's apologies as if they even apologized to her lol (and why should they?)

Literally Daniel, Emma and the rest of the Harry Potter cast don't owe her anything. She made the books but Tom Felton said that she was very less involved in the making of the films if I remember correctly. How is she standing up for women if she spends five years belittling transwomen and transmen?! She has a huge platform and she's putting it to good use by making a marginalized community feel even more unsafe. Please don't prove me that she isn't a transphobe because there is ample amount of evidence that she is a huge one and she's not even a feminist lol.

Literally feminism started with gender being performative by Simone de Beauvoir saying that no one is born a woman, but they become women. Yet JKR and other trans exclusionist claiming to be feminists stress on "biological sex" as a way to exclude transgender people! Why?? Thank God I don't use X anymore, or stopped following JKR after her "people who menstruate" tweet, or have never been a crazy Potterhead and only was interested in Harry Potter through the movies. But I really admired her when I was younger! Why JKR WHY??!!

In all honesty I can't stand terfs! I don't want them or even hear of them because they're so dumb and unbearable! Do they even know that transgender people KNOW about their biological sex and they don't transition out of a whim! Transitioning is a very lengthy and difficult process for fuck's sake! And there are even many transgender people who don't transition medically, maybe because they don't have the money or their bodies aren't suited for it. Still terfs love to misgender them and put on their dumb logic of "biological sex" on them. There was one proud terf who called a content creator who was a transwoman a "man" and constantly misgendered her on her YT channel! I'm not gonna name that terf or that transwoman because I don't want to promote that terf's content and her comment-section seems culty because there are hardly any people (or no people) disagreeing with her or even calling her out! Maybe because she deletes comments? It's fucking scary! And she basically boot-licks JKR and Posie Parker (urgh this woman!)

Plus there WERE fans who were transgender that connected to the Harry Potter books on such a personal level and admired JKR so much, only to find out that she's such a big transphobe and would stick to it! Can't imagine what they went through or are going through!

Anyways, thanks for reading through my rant if you did. If a transphobe is reading it, please back off.

[uncanny-tranny]

Your body isn't meant to do anything beyond housing you, and it's really harrowing how many people don't recognize this.

It's harrowing how people talk about how bodies must "serve a purpose", to be little more than breeding stock. That if your body doesn't serve a purpose - serve the right purpose - that it is, essentially, a "useless body"

You are a human being. You aren't breeding stock. You aren't a sounding board for other peoples' desires. You aren't a "worthless body". Your body houses you, and beyond that? That is up to you.

[variousqueerthings]

i do sometimes think about community histories that come from similar spaces, especially pre-certain-words-being coined, and while i do understand the drive to go "no you [x identity] go away, this one is for us!" because often certain queer communities are woefully ignored and talked over, i also have an instinct for wanting to bring communities together because they were often one and the same community, or the words were conflated in certain ways and there's almost never a "this one is for us" that is as neat as people like to pretend (flashbacks to "butch and femme are lesbian-only terms" although ofc sometimes it really is importantly a closed community term, like the word "stud")

sometimes historically you cannot neatly map a label onto a person/group/event/idea because that terminology was different, and we cannot go back and ask what would work best using today's terminology anymore than we can travel to the future to see what it'll evolve into that might work better than today, but also maybe it's important to find some middle-point between a lack of clear terminology and community spaces that are divided into their own, clear sections

but in order for people to not feel overlooked and mocked the work needs to be done from all facets of the queer community to go outside ones own personal identity to make a history queer rather than "just" [insert x here]. and i hope that one day that work will make us more unified as a series of political and philosophical ideals and less disparate groups without bleed-through or overlap, even when one personally may feel quite easily placed within an identity

idk, it's the idea of "personal identity" vs "political coalition" but it's also just quite sad to try and box us in again