#it ends up feeling less like useful social advice for cis people and more like a conformance test for me

[maddiem4]

I swear, it really does feel like Tumblr has an addiction to universalizing common, or even just personal, preferences. Every trans woman this, all trans women that. And yeah, sometimes it makes a sentence punchier. It also signals to everyone in the group who doesn't fit the universal claim: "you don't belong here. You're not really one of us." Do you see why that sucks? Why "you're not a real trans woman unless you feel misgendered by the word 'bro' in every circumstance and context" might not be a very nice message to imply, in a world where our access to community and mutual aid often feels very fragile and easily revoked? Why "real trans women are offended by having their genitals compared playfully to weaponry" invents a novel criteria for gatekeeping gender based on something other than... gender? What's really frustrating is that 99% of the time, these posts are just a word or two away from being very accurate and helpful statements about baseline social norms in a compassionate society. "It's really common for trans women to have a justified sensitivity about gendered words. By default, be careful about that!" Great advice, doesn't trim the fringes of the community. Hell, a lot of these posts are just missing a word, just a "mostly" in the right place or something.

I'll probably catch some flak for being so picky about one missing word. But let me spin that back: you really couldn't put that one extra word in your post?

[butchpeace]

hi, sorry to bother, feel free to ignore this. but i would like some advice?

we actually don’t agree on a lot of views on trans people and identity, but i promise i’m really not here to fight, i just thought it might seem relevant to some things i say, and it also seems important to mention that if i thought it was the right thing for me, i would transition.

what i’d like to know is: how do i deal with dysphoria? i don’t want to transition. i don’t know if i’d be happier in my body (very probably not, i’d feel worse), but i don’t want to be a man or be perceived as one. i hate (cis) men, and i don’t even like talking to them, let alone being perceived by them as one of them, or by others. i mean, i want a wife some day, and i’d really like for us fo be and come across as a gay couple, because that’s what we would be.

but i really am dysphoric. it comes and goes a lot, but sometimes it hits like a ton of bricks and i can’t stop thinking of it. i’ve even started thinking that i should start binding. some of it is the belief that the way i am (for one: my hair and my taste in clothes) would be “cooler” on a man, or less degrading, maybe? i’m very sad with the state of women in this world. every time i see gender roles reinforced (even in minuscule ways) or misogyny go unnoticed i feel terrible. i know these are not reasons to change my body/name and uproot my entire life, though. i’m not even gender non-conforming. i’m definitely more feminine than i am masculine.

but some of it is genuine dysphoria. i’m envious of (skinny) men’s bodies way more than i am of women’s, and the especially thin one constantly trigger my eating disorder, which is really bad because i could never look like them, no matter how much (if i ever relapsed) i tried.

It’s been distressing lately. I’ve wanted to pick up the genderqueer label (i know it wouldn’t make me any less of a woman socially, and that gender doesn’t exist, but i feel that it could make sense for people who feel like me? i feel like it could take a huge weight off my shoulders, but i also feel like i’d just be reinforcing gender roles and giving in to misogyny), i even considered using neutral pronouns online. but honestly, there is such little nuance in the trans community when it comes to sex and misogyny, and i could never participate in that or relate to the people who also identify that way. it just feels like i can’t be happy no matter where i stand, and I don’t know of a way forward. i’m scared that i’ll feel like this for the rest of my life.

You won’t feel like this forever - I promise.

It sounds like you already know what’s causing your dysphoria - Discomfort with the way women (and you) are perceived and treated in a patriarchal world. I know you don’t agree with all my opinions, but I believe that there is nothing deeper than that. I don’t think that gender dysphoria would exist for women, or that you would feel this way, if we didn’t live in a misogynistic world. I don’t think there’s anything innate or biological in your brain that causes dysphoria, it’s all social. Which means that in the right environment, you wouldn’t feel that way.

And it sounds like you already know that using neutral pronouns and a genderqueer label won’t really do anything to change the way you feel. Binding might make you feel more comfortable, but at what cost? Many women end up with pain and rib problems from binding, and it causes the skin and tissue of your breasts to break down and sag. You seem like you already know these aren’t the steps that will lead you to self acceptance and happiness.

My advice is to find lesbian spaces and gnc female friends. Look at art and photography and listen to music made by and for lesbians and gender nonconforming women. I know you said you’re more feminine than masculine, but my opinion is that all women are gender nonconforming to some extent. Gender was made up by men in order to keep women subservient, so I think all women would benefit from getting away from it.

You are not a skinny man, and you never will be. You don’t have a male bone structure, and you never can. You probably have wider hips, a smaller face, and a narrower waist and shoulders than men do. All of those things are neutral, and all of those things are natural and beautiful. You can’t see it right now, but you will if you give yourself time.

Focus on finding the beauty in other women and appreciating them for how they are, and it will help you appreciate yourself the way you are! 🌈

[pumpkinland]

Yo, hope you've had a good week, goodass blog, hope this isn't weird but I need some input. Do you like...find it difficult at all to make/keep trans male friends? I've had awful luck with meeting other trans guys and all my friends are now cis men, cis and trans women, and effectively anyone else who isn't a trans man. Struggled to get along with every trans man I've met, a lot of them turned out to be awful, some ended up detransitioning (but had wavering identities leading up to it), and I have no idea what the hell is going on because I do try to find other trans men to befriend, and it just never works. It's put a massive wedge between me and other trans men to the point where I've basically dropped the trans label in defeat and have been socially stealth for 5+ years both out of frustration but also out of general fears of transphobia. Have I just had shit luck or is it actually difficult in general or something?

Hi thanks so much for reaching out to me! :)

Actually yes I do have this issue. I have a few trans male friends, namely my best friend and a few younger friends I've known for years who are 18-20, but in general I do find it difficult to get along with other trans men.

In my experience, I've found that a lot of trans people put a lot more emphasis on their trans status than on their gender identity (in other words, they identify as trans first and their gender second, im the opposite - I don't "identify" as trans, it's just objectively what I am) and I know a lot of people do that because they find value in the community of being trans and talking to other trans people.

I haven't had that experience though, because what I found through a lot of discussion of our experiences and what it means to be trans and what gender means to us, I have found that for better or worse most trans people, and especially trans men, have very different experiences from mine, but they will often be so used to relating to other people sttictly on the basis of being trans that it almost feels like they get uncomfortable with not understating or relating to my journey at all and essentially try to force me into boxes they're comfortable with to try and relate to me and it gets really uncomfortable and dehumanising really fast. I'm lucky to have a few trans male friends, and a few transfem friends, but yeah, most of my friends are cis people - ironically they just tend to get it better. And I'm not saying all transmascs are nonbinary, but the vast majority of the ones I've met were, and that makes it difficult for us to relate on a lot of things and they tend to find me toxic and hypermasculine for like. Being a man I guess. But that could be part of it? Basically, I think unless you're a very specific kind of trans person it can be very difficult to relate to other trans people because they kind of create these little bubbles where they only interact with people like them and they get so used to it that when they meet any trans person they expect you to be the same and if you're not it's like... They start feeling panicked and threatened. I understand why they create these little community bubbles, and I'm not begrudging that, but it does make it hard to be an individual with unique experiences.

My best advice is I stopped trying to make friends with people on the basis of trans status a while ago. Like, I don't avoid other trans people or anything, but I don't try to befriend people with the intention of having more trans friends or anything. Trans people on this website will have you believe that cis people are the devil and all want us dead, but I have a lot of very kind, genuine, respectful and supportive cis friends, male and female, who never make me feel like an outsider or less than them, which is actually more than I can say about old trans friends.

[ssfertilitycenterchennai]

How To Choose The Right IVF Treatment For You And Your Health

What is IVF treatment?

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The Pros of IVF

Many people find it easier to take care of their health when they have time for themselves. This is especially true for people who might have joint or back issues that limit movement. By choosing to “forgive” your medical doctor, you open yourself up to a much more generous approach. As your health improves, you will naturally start to feel less tired and spent. But before you can reap these benefits, you first need to find a way to take better care of yourself. It’s important to remember that you are not “offended” when your doctor tells you that you can have an easier time of it. You are simply following his advice because you were already on your way (best fertility hospital in chennai).

Cons of IVF

You might end up with a baby boy or a girl, or even a twin or triplet. Whatever the situation, you will almost certainly have a lot of heartbreak after your child is born. You will likely also likely end up with a lot of depression and anxiety. These feelings are normal and inevitable during your pregnancy, and you can often reduce them with simple interventions like eating a healthy(ish) diet and taking a break from social media when you are faced with difficult emotions.

Which Type of Treatment Best For You And Your Health?

There are many different ways to go about things. The best way to decide which type of treatment is best for you and your health is to begin by deciding what you truly want out of life. Think about who you want to be with when you grow up and how you want to spend your retirement. Then choose the type of treatment that best delivers those desires.

More Effective Cis-Only Treatments Out There

While many of the popular treatments for MS are “cis”, that is to say, they target the “males” (i.e. the male sex) instead of the “females” (i.e. the female sex). These treatments don’t affect your actual body, but they affect what your body does, and that is what determines your health.

Decide With Trust!

Although it is easy to feel annoyed when you have to choose between two people you love, you must also be aware of the fact that you cannot “hand Disney World” to either of them. This means that you must pick the “correct” adventure for both of you. You are your “omahas” (i.e. your “dream vacation”), and you must take care of your “omahas” the way you would want to be taken care of yourself. This means that you must decide with some care and consideration whether or not you would enjoy sharing this “omahahism” with anyone else.

Conclusion

When it comes to starting your “vacation” in the world of natural health, you have to decide for certain what you want to do. This includes considering your own health and well-being before making any drastic decisions. The best way to get started is to find out what is available in your area and to drop by your local Planned Pregnancy Center if you have questions or concerns. There are also many options online, where you can find local resources, counseling and help if you need it.

[mikami]

Excuse me for I'll ask you this, because you're the only tumblrer that I've known for a long time; and you are in the lgbtqia+ community. I've identified as non binary for 8 years, recently i discovered i wanted transition. I am male. And right about now, some non binary people go through transition as well. So, did i make a mistake by giving up on my pronoun "they" too easily? Do post-operation people identify as non binary? In other words, can i take back "them"? Because I enjoy being male +

and the "he/him" pronouns but i can't give up on some of my habits of 8 yrs. Like, i have difficulty with long nails and longish hair, i miss wearing some of my old clothes -its a sign that im terribly confused here b/c i didnt throw away any of my feminine clothes at the beginning of my transition- so the question is, I'm a male that lies to "themself" now??

I'm just one person and a cis lesbian at that, so my advice might not be the most helpful, but I don't think there is any lying involved here.

Identity doesn't slot as neatly into boxes as language, so in the end I think we're all struggling to make the language fit us rather than the other way around.

In my opinion, clothes are just clothes. I have binary trans men in my social circle who still enjoy dresses - because they're pretty and comfortable, and if they don't give you dysphoria, there is no good reason not to wear them. You don't owe anybody gender conformity, regardless of how you choose to identify. Cishet people may be less understanding of that, but that doesn't make them right about it.

You can fully transition with HRT and surgery, yet use they/them exclusively. I wouldn't find that confusing - it doesn't feel any different from someone who doesn't want to physically transition at all using they/them. You exist the way that feels most comfortable to you, that's all it is. There's no requirement on they/them bodies.

So I think ultimately the question boils down to, do you want to take back "them"? Do you feel like you miss introducing yourself as non-binary, or are you happy just being a dude who wears feminine clothes sometimes? (Which is fine, gay cis dudes do it all the time and still are fully he/him!)

If you like both of your options, you could do he/they and call it a day with that? Non-binary transmasc isn't an unusual thing to be!!

Figuring out identity labels is such a pain though. I went through a lot of agony with the terming for my orientation, too. Absolute best wishes to you, I hope you find yourself a bit more at ease with this soon!! No matter the specific expression, I don't think your options here are weird - I wouldn't bat an eyelash at any of them!

[himboarcher]

reasons i've seen folks say that grad critics hate grad:

they hate travis (in fairness, i’ve def seen some comments of people shitting on trav for the sake of shitting on trav, but it’s not super common and typically gets downvoted into oblivion on reddit.)

it's not balance / travis isn't griffin (???????)

they hate neurodivergent people (again, in fairness, i have seen a handful of comments that could come across this way! but most of the time when travis being ADHD or his NPD is brought up, it's by defenders saying that criticizing travis is ableist because he's neurodivergent or, in one particular comment, infantilizing him bc of it and literally comparing grad to putting a kid's artwork on the fridge. there were some comments early on that pointed to him being a narcissist as the reason for things people disliked about grad, but everyone seems to have realized that that's a shitty train of thought and left it behind.)

they're just toxic haters (again, there are a small handful of people like this because this is the internet, but the genuine criticism greatly outweighs their bullshit. i 100% think that the people, which is mostly just one dude who is also insufferable on reddit, who have been responding rudely to positive tweets under the episode announcements lately are out of line and need to stop. there's been an influx of that lately, presumably because people are frustrated that after over a year of grad going on, there's been no improvement to most of the major issues. that's still no excuse to be a dick to folks, though.)

vs some of the actual reasons i don't like grad:

the racism / racist tropes, and the way that they’ve straight up ignored this criticism and will likely never acknowledge it. pretty wild considering a core tenet of their brand is their willingness to acknowledge when they’ve messed up and do their best to course correct.

clumsy attempts at inclusion that are shallow and often end up being fairly offensive ("...ask me about my wheelchair," anyone?)

on a related note: i don't think that travis had bad intentions, but as an nonbinary person, it feels othering to me that travis only has enby characters give others their pronouns unprompted. i'm thinking specifically of kai here. having listened to their introduction, i don't think it's as bad or awkward as some people have said, but i can't remember travis ever having another NPC tell the PCs their pronouns, especially not a cis character. it's not a huge deal, but it's something that rubbed me the wrong way. admittedly, i don't think it would bother me so much if travis hadn't dropped the ball so much with performative inclusion in the past.

okay i'm putting the rest under a read more because even without getting into all of the problems i have with it, this got Long.

little to no player agency. player choices are ultimately meaningless and have little to no effect on the world. even when he seems to go along with a plan they come up with, it always ends with them having to go back to travis' pre-written script (see: subpoenaing the xorn, but not really because they had to go with travis' original plan of "send the xorn home through the rift".) the players repeatedly get told things about what they think or feel or what they've been doing to an unnecessary degree. fitzroy is the only one who really gets space to play and decide things for himself, and that's only because travis has decided he's the main character.

the NPCs are all too nice and willing to give the PCs anything they ask for and more, unless the PCs are trying to follow their own plan and then the NPCs are completely useless. but honestly, aside from gray, all of the NPCs are just.... nice. travis refuses to even let his antagonists be mean or cruel or even more than just slightly rude, because that'd be a bummer and we don't want that! the "twist" of gordy the lich king actually being polite and chill is not a twist at all because everyone is like that in this world. the NPCs are also wildly overpowered, but then suddenly absolutely useless when the PCs actually want their help.

too many cliffhangers that are dropped immediately at the beginning of the next episode. i feel bad for travis because so many of these cliffhangers actually set up good momentum and seemed like things were gonna get interesting, but almost every single time he just dropped them at the beginning of the next episode. like when althea showed up to interview the boys and the next episode started with travis being like "actually you went to sleep, she said she'll be back tomorrow!"

that time travis specifically said in his exposition dump that the thundermen left their horses behind because they thought the centaurs might be offended by them riding horses, only to later on rag on them for being surprised that the centaurs had horses they could ride.....

also the centaur arc in general, but i already listed racism above, so.

the way that the toxic positivity and parasocial tendencies in the mcelroy fandoms have made a large portion of the fandom take ANY criticism as a personal attack on travis and/or on themselves for enjoying something others consider bad, either morally or just quality-wise. it’s okay to admit that something you like has problematic elements or just isn’t as good as it once was. you can and should engage critically with the media you consume.

related to above: the way travis has handled genuine criticism, which is to throw public tantrums on his twitter or make weird passive aggressive tweets & ultimately ignore all the genuine criticism and advice he's been offered by claiming it's all subjective, even after he specifically asked for it and set up an email for folks to send in genuine, objective advice for him (after he threw a tantrum on twitter and replied to someone's criticism publicly, which resulted in his followers dogpiling on that person bc how dare they insult their internet best friend). while i was writing this last night, he actually announced that he’s taking a break from Twitter and acknowledged that he’s been using it as an echo chamber where he can easily get validation from folks, and honestly i’m happy for him that he’s recognized this problem and is stepping away for a while! i hope he’ll genuinely use this time to reflect on how he’s been behaving and find a more healthy way to use social media. i’m leaving this point in because i think his Twitter being such a positive echo chamber was encouraging him to do stuff like this, and him somewhat acknowledging his behavior doesn’t mean it can no longer be discussed.

rainer. extremely cool concept in theory and i was very into it until that awkward "does anyone want to ask about my wheelchair?" moment. also when travis had her use her mobility aid to RAM INTO A DOOR instead of just fucking knocking???? also all the times travis has tried to force a romantic relationship between her and fitzroy, despite fitzroy displaying no interest in her in that way. also, just to clarify: as an ace person, i don’t think this is aphobic! (and it’s kind of a stretch to call it that imo, especially since griffin never explicitly said that fitzroy's aromantic!) i just think it’s weird and awkward and a little uncomfortable for me personally, mostly because it reminds me of the times i’ve been in similar situations.

less of a problem than a lot of the other stuff and more just bad writing, but the forced emotional moments. in general, nothing in grad feels earned (why are the boys heading a war? when they have multiple actual heroes with combat experience on their side and a supposedly powerful secret organization? and the thundermen are like 21 years old max and have only had like ~10 fights in the entire campaign?) but there've been a couple times where travis has tried to force unearned emotional moments, presumably because he knows people enjoyed those with the last campaigns. but the difference is that in balance, the big emotional moments happened because they were earned. in grad, it's just travis throwing a baby pegasus at us for a few minutes and then the next time she shows up, it's supposed to be a tearful goodbye.

there are absolutely no stakes. remember when the thundermen got told that if they left, gray would kill 10 students? and then they left and came back and it turns out that what gray actually meant was, "i'll tie ten students who are mostly nameless NPCs to a tree and throw some dogs at them that you can easily stop in time, then throw a tantrum because how dare you but i'll leave before you can really do anything to hurt me lol" travis did have fitzroy's magic get taken away, but like. it didn't really do anything? also all he had to get it back was be coerced into using drugs by an authority figure and trip in the woods?

we're told that the school is weird and the hero system is corrupt, but the world of nua is still presented as more of a liberal utopia than anything? althea getting fired because of a corrupt villain is the only time we've somewhat seen corruption, but even then, she was still allowed to get (what seems to me, anyway, but admittedly i don't know for sure bc nothing about the HOG makes much sense) a fairly important job from the very people who stripped her of her hero license or whatever the fuck heroes need?

travis doesn't actually seem to understand how capitalism or bureaucracy works and just chalks up everything to "red tape." also more on the rest of the boys than him specifically, but the "let's destroy capitalism!" thing turning into just pushing some filing cabinets over................... okay.

and one last piece of extremely subjective criticism: it's just kind of.... boring. i think a lot of people, myself included, would be willing to overlook 90% of the problems with graduation if it didn't feel like such a slog to get through.

also people saying that we can't or shouldn't criticize graduation because it's "free" is absolutely absurd for several reasons. first, something being free does not make it above criticism. second, there ARE people who directly financially support the show with monthly donations. three, there's a difference between something being free and something being not for profit. podcasting is their full time job. they make their living off of money made from TAZ and MBMBAM (and probably their other shows to a lesser extent). this not a fun home game that they are graciously recording and sharing with us. it is a product they are producing that they make money off of, both from ads in the episodes and merch & books based off of these podcasts. they have marketed themselves as professionals, and both griffin and travis have been on panels where they are marketed as professional DMs and appear alongside other professional DMs (which makes it incredibly frustrating when people say that travis is just a newbie DM and we can't criticize him because of that. if he's a newbie, then he should not be taking part of panels as a professional DM where he speaks as an expert). TAZ is free in the same way that an episode of NCIS is free. i may not pay for it directly, but the creators are paid to create it and profit off of me consuming this product. so saying we should be grateful for any mcelnoise that the benevolent good boys share with us and that we're not allowed to criticize it "because it's free" is absolutely wild.

[disengaged]

idk if youd be comfortable with it but i'd love some advice for like how to get in the bowl ive been curious about it for awhile but have been nervous to start, super intimidating on my own

i'll take a crack at it below the cut.

step 1) be 18+, average-to-attractive, & fairly conventional (slim/athletic, good fashion sense, feminine). sounds shitty, but fat folks, trans people, alt/tattooed/pierced people, etc. don't do very well in the bowl, or else really need to "dig" to find an SD who's looking for that 'niche' kind of identity. there is a market for gay cis men, but it's also narrow. i was still moderately successful with a mohawk for the month or two that i had one, but only cuz i dressed up to compensate + settled for a less lucrative/more short-term arrangement. 'cute' really doesn't cut it in the bowl, you'll just end up with like. low-end losers LOL

step 2) live in a big city, highly-populated area, or popular business travel destination, ideally a rich one. this is a big one. if you go anywhere smaller, the pool shrinks down to like 5 random dads looking to pay $50 for a quickie

step 3) be comfortable having sex with older (& married) men, or at least able to fake it convincingly. this is Also a big one. i'll say it straight-up: it's rare to find anyone young, attractive, and single seeking a SB, and if you do, chances are they have something else wrong with them (cuz let's face it, no one pays for a sexy younger girlfriend unless they have Something wrong with them, in terms of either looks, schedule, personality, WEIIIRD kinks, or being attached). to add to this, if you take issue with participating in infidelity/cheating, the bowl is not for you.

step 4) have a thick skin. be prepared to talk to a lot of creeps, a lot of time-wasters and salt daddies, and a LOT of scammers. (never accept e-transfers, paypal offers, or amazon GCs from anyone until you've progressed into an in-person relationship, this is a common tactic.) also, sugar mommies, cyber-only, and no-sex relationships do not exist. they just don't. these are all scammers.

step 4) BE SAFE. for the love of god, have plans, backup plans, emergency contacts (plural), escape routes, all of it. never use your real phone number, it can be tracked. never post a photo that you've posted elsewhere on any social media, it can be tracked. never give out your paypal, it can be linked to your real identity. if you have a unique first name, make a fake one. if you have tattoos, cover them. always meet-and-greet in a public place, watch your food/drinks, and tell two (or more) people where you're going, what time, vague description of the POT, etc. every single time. never give identifying information like your school, job, or neighbourhood until you've progressed far enough into an arrangement to build trust (and even then, be careful). never agree to have sex right after the M&G. you might want an allowance, but always start with PPM (pay-per-meet) and get your money first, in cash. i really can't emphasize this one enough. so many people are idiots about this shit^^ & end up getting scammed or sexually assaulted, it's brutal

step 5) if you're really committed, and you're really, truly, 100% sure you can be smart and safe about it, you might want to start by making an acc on seekingarrangement. it's the biggest site for this stuff, and it's not the best (like 80% scammers and bots), but it'll show you POTs in your area, and some of them will be legit. (you'll also get like 200+ messages a day if you're new, and most of them will go nowhere.) you can also check out r/sugarlifestyleforum to do more research or get advice or profile reviews (profile blurbs + good, full-body photos make or break everything!!!), but idk, it's maybe not the most newbie-friendly forum.

step 6) once you get chatting with someone and get a good vibe, don't discuss finances on the site (or any other site). take the convo elsewhere, or maybe save it for the M&G if you've got a good feel for the situation. also, SET YOUR PRICING BEFOREHAND. this will depend on where you live and what is expected of you (e.g. how long is each meetup, will there be sex, what kind of sex, is it a sleepover). don't get lowballed, don't lower your standards. negotiation is normal, but haggling and bartering is unacceptable. (also ..... gifts are fun, but cash is king.)

it takes a while to get the hang of chatting with POTs, but i typically just like to have a quick and friendly convo to get the vibe of his personality, expectations/what he’s looking for (weekly, monthly, once in a while if he’s in town for business, is it necessary to be discreet...? etc.), maybe share pics, then move the convo to a different app.

this^ is all really just the very tip of the iceberg, so please do a lot more research and PLEASE think carefully before going ahead with this. the bowl is, as a whole, incredibly intimidating and overwhelming, & frequently stressful as shit. a lot of people have a really romantic sugar daddy fantasy where they get pampered and spoiled just for going on a date every so often, but it's typically not like that at all. it's basically like another part-time job, requires an immense amount of time and effort just to sort through the lowballers and scammers, & to be frank ... your average SD is a much older, overweight married guy. it's not that glamourous.

it'd be immensely hypocritical of me to say "don't do it", but like ...... once again, please think really, really hard before you make this decision. no matter what precautions you take, it's never safe (STIs, homewrecking, being robbed, raped, stalked, etc), and the money isn't always good. sugaring is all about business transactions, but you should be aware that the men on these kinds of sites are transparently looking to take advantage of younger women. like... that’s an innate part of the game. that’s how it works. the line between sugar dating and being a prostitute is very, very fine, and in some cases, it just disappears altogether.  (also? be prepared to commit tax fraud, or to do some funky, shady shit to disguise your income LOL.)

with that said, i'm happy to try to answer any other questions about this stuff, i know it’s not something a whole ton of people are super informed about. i don't sugar anymore (since a little while before i went on T), but i somewhat enjoyed it for a period, and it did help me to get my feet under me in terms of financial independence.

[coldtomyflash]

I've seen your speech pattern analysis on Flash characters. I was wondering if you had any advice on how to create speech patterns for OC characters?

oh heck this is one of the coolest questions i’ve ever received.

i’m gonna try not to go overboard/overwhelming and just give a bit of advice, and then if you want more details please come back and follow up!

There’s a few things to think about up front with character voices / speech patterns. The biggest and most obvious is language and cultural background. The second is personality. The third is personal history. Fourth, briefly, is gender. And the final one I’d say is idiosyncrasies to avoid ‘same voice’.

Culture and Group Dynamics

Depending on the setting, there’s a decent chance you’ll be writing characters from different cultural backgrounds. Even if you’re focusing on a single culture, there will be subcultures. Even if you’re focusing on a single narrow group of people, there will be age and generational differences.

Think about where your character is from. If it’s a fantasy world, that’s still (and even more, in some ways) important. What country, what ethnicity, what mother tongue? Did they grow up urban or rural? High socio-economic status or working class? What sort of educational background and peer group did they have growing up (and presently) and how does that factor into their vocabulary and mannerisms, if at all.

All of these can influence how people talk. There are regional accents and different modes of speaking to signal your group membership. There is code-switching across groups, for those who have had to learn multiple linguistics codes to survive and thrive in society. 

How much slang does this group and therefor this character use? What references (modern, outddated, topical, etc) do the rely on? What kind of references (pop culture, music, academic, etc)? What colloquialisms and proverbs do they say? Are these the same or different to their characters, even within the same culture, subculture, or group, and is it because they’re from a different place/sub-group or because of their idiosyncrasies?

You can use these to help your reader get to know more about your character’s background without having to spell it all out directly. Speech patterns and style are a great way to show instead of tell when it comes to details that are hard to drop in organically in other ways.

An important caveat: don’t write a bilingual character who switches languages in speech unless you’re ready to do a bit of research on that. In AATJS I did an absolutely horrific job of this because I was thinking more about fronting the fact that character was Italian rather than thinking through how people actually talk, and it came out exotifying and embarrassing. It’s important to make sure that the way you use language to bring in a character’s cultural and/or ethnic background feels authentic and manifests is a way that respects that language and its users. You can write a character with a complex cultural history without using multiple languages if you’re unprepared to do research and talk to bilingual speakers.

Personality

Probably the most salient thing in a writer’s mind when they’re trying to write character voices: is this the funny character? the serious one? the brainy one? etc.

Don’t overuse stereotypes and archetypes for creating speech patterns (or characters in general) if you’re trying to make a rounded, 3-dimensional character. Instead, go about three levels deeper.

Think about whether they’re introverted or extraverted, whether they are neurotypical or neurodivergent, whether they are introspective enough to express their own emotions clearly or whether they stumble when asked why they did a particular thing or feel a particular way (most people don’t or can’t clearly articulate exactly why they did something or how they feel, and come at things a bit sideways to circle around their motives and interior realities when pressed to make them external and concretely verbal).

Is this character calm, is their voice soothing, do they speak slowly? Are they excitable and loud and is their speech free-flowing? Are they angry? Do they swear? Do they use references for humour or are they more into puns? Do they laugh at their own jokes? Do they talk with their hands?

This character has social anxiety: how does that manifest in her speech? Does she clam up and get very quiet when she gets nervous, or does she go rapidfire and a little too loud (does she process by turning in or by distracting herself by turning outward)? Does she get very careful and deliberate in choosing her words (is she a bit high-strung?)? Ask yourself which fits best with the other elements of her personality and what you want the reader to know/interpret about her. 

This character is incredibly smart and a bit awkward: how does that manifest in their speech? Do they tend to use 5-dollar words, or do they expend a lot of energy choosing their words more carefully (how considerate are they to their audience when speaking and does that influence their speech)? Do they stumble over their words and explaining things, or are they good at making points with clear language learned from a lifetime of tutoring and helping others?

This character is the bff, who tries hard to make sure everyone else is happy first: how does that manifest in his speech? How does he switch between his happy-mask versus his more authentic self, and what changes in tone, word-choice, and inflection come in when he does?

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Personal History

I’m only drawing a distinction between this and personality (archetype, really) so that I can draw attention to ways to add simultaneously unique and shared layers to characters that are distinct but related to group dynamics.

Here’s sort of what I mean: the level of education of a mother (or primary caregiver) of an infant can determine that infant’s vocabulary size. While we can break down all the ‘why is that’ layers to this, the one I want to point is to the simple truth that the more education a person does, the more specialized language they end up learning over time. This doesn’t have to be formal education though -- the more you learn about something and the more you read and access new knowledges and perspective, the more and more words you learn, and then if you start using those words, they trickle down to those close to you.

So.

What’s your character’s educational background? Is it the same as their friends who you are also writing? Is the same as their family’s? How does this character’s family influence their speech? Are they formal, informal, warm, authoritative? 

If you’re writing siblings, they’ll have some shared things! But also some very different ones! Me and my sister talk nothing alike in terms of vocabulary, but a lot alike in terms of mannerisms whenever we spend a bit of time together!

If your characters grew up around each other, they’ll have a lot of the same references. People from the same cities or regions will have things specific to that region, either due to sub-culture effects or because of local references. 

The city of Calgary, Canada for instance has the Plus15 which are a connected pedway system between the buildings in downtown, so named because they are 15feet above the ground. Drive 3 hours north to the city of Edmonton, and you have an underground pedway just called the pedways, no special name. Go a few provinces east to Toronto and their underground pedway system downtown is called PATH. These are all known to locals and part of the vernacular, but are opaque to people outside those cities. And the whole idea of them is probably opaque to people who aren’t from super cold cities that don’t require building-connecting pedway systems for pedestrians to get around high-density areas like downtown (or university campuses) without going out into the cold. 

Friends, families, and groups are like that too. In-jokes, shared histories, speaking in references. What are your characters’ relationships to each other and how does that history influence the way they approach talking to each other?

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Gender

I don’t want to spend too much time on this one because ugh, gender. What even is it?

But like it or not, it has an impact on our speech patterns. There are cultural and societal norms in how men and women are likely to speak, and breaking those norms will be noticed regardless of whether you’re trans, enby, queer, or not. There are norms that people who are queer may fall into as well, sometimes without even noticing at first. A lot of these aren’t about word choice per se but instead about mannerisms and tone and body language, but some overlap or are specific to language.

Speaking in broad generalizations here, women use more emotional language and tend to speak with more hesitancies/qualifications. So more “i think, i feel” and less “it is”. More conversations that front emotions and dig deeper into those, with longer sentences to explain in detail. The obvious caveat is that personality matters more (i.e., is this a person who likes to talk about their emotions in detail or not) but it is something to consider because there will be general but subtle differences that you can use to help further distinguish your characters’ voices. 

Sidenote: this can also be exacerbated by different cultural backgrounds and languages (a simple example is Japanese which has different words for “I” depending on your gender as well as your personality, familiarity with the other persons in the conversation, and situational appropriateness, so interesting ways that gender and social expectations intersect in language).

Anyway this isn’t typically a huge problem except that I’ve found that a lot of writers have a tendency to overgeneralize the speech patterns that fit with their ascribed gender due to early-life socialization, or conversely to overgeneralize patterns that fit with their gender identity (when not cis) either due to heavily identifying with their gender identity’s speech model (or sometimes possibly due to a knee-jerk sort of backlash). I say this as an enby who both struggles with it and notices it and tries to edit and correct for it. 

I could get into all sorts of examples of ways this can lead to voice issues, but in general i think the point here is to make sure you’re writing any given character in view of that character’s personality and history, with gender only as a modifier for how some of these might come out in subtle ways but which can be important to help tell us about your character (and if you’re writing queer characters, it’s all the more important to consider how their relationship with gender and socialization might impact which speech models and styles they identify more with).

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Idiosyncrasies

So, you’ve got a character. You’ve got their personality and history down. You know how they manifest in their speech. And you’re still getting some ‘same voice’ issues.

People really are unique snowflakes. Let that be reflected in their speech.

This person uses contractions differently than that one. This one says “ain’t” and that one says “isn’t.”

This person makes Simpsons references and that one doesn’t like Simpsons, and makes Brooklyn Nine Nine references instead. That other one doesn’t use referential humour much at all. This one loves old movies and hasn’t seen any of the new stuff so they make references all the time but no one ever notices.

This one loves the word “excoriate” and that one doesn’t even know what it means because what the hell, who uses the word excoriate?

This one talks about food a lot, it overlaps with their interests. This one uses metaphors. This one grunts in response. This one exclaims. This one says “like” and that one hates it. That one refers to themselves in third person. This other one uses reflective language an usual amount (e.g., “love me some candy”). This other one keeps misusing the word inconceivable and that one speaks almost without contractions but still comes off as more charming and humorous while correcting him.

I have an aunt who says “girl” or “girlfriend” a fuck-ton and she has been my whole life and I don’t know why because none of her sisters do, but she does and it annoys me so much the way she says it. I swear a lot when I’m feeling casual despite never ever doing it in a professional or even slightly-less-than-relaxed space, so the idiosyncrasy of comfort levels has a massive impact on my vocabulary in ways which, I promise, almost no one who meets me first in a professional space expect.

Let your characters be individuals and try to make them as unique as possible without overdoing it, or over-relying on a single verbal tendency or habit. 

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And ... that’s all I’ve got for now. Completely failed at being concise. I meant to give like 2-3 bullet points or examples for each, not paragraphs, but here we are. That’s one of my verbal tendencies: long flowing verbosity :)

Hope this helps! 

[klugpuuo]

almost every puyo~tet single-character headcanon wie have

every character we've put more than three minutes of thought into are gonna be in this post. this *does* leave out a lot of characters, but still includes so many that hopefully that'll make up for it. ^also i forgot about this entirely while writing and tried to add a few characters i literally never think about everat all so you get extra funny commentary i guess

welp! enjoy the ride. and dont forget to like, comment, and subscribe (/lh)

warnings: mentions food, implied self-harm, delusions (not inherently triggering but still), general violence, some madou-era content, death. (more to be added + ask to tag) none of the things mentioned are in much detail.

Madou Monogatari / OG Puyo~Puyo characters:

Arle – 16 (chronologically 20 due to the Madou time stop but doesn’t realize it), has PTSD and ADHD + nonbinary transfem + sex-repulsed and questioning (she/he/they)

Assorted headcanons:

-Her armor was made into a sort of magical puberty blocker by her grandmother, who knew Arle was trans and wanted her to live her life to the fullest. -Although she has never been in an (official) romantic relationship, she’s usually the first person her friends go to for relationship advice. -She stims a lot, usually by twirling her hair around or jumping.

Relationship headcanons:

Partners: She’s in a vaguely romantic relationship with Serilly. “Vaguely” as in they go on dates frequently, kiss a lot, and would live together if they could, but neither is sure if they are actually dating. Friends: She adores Ringo and Amitie and wants to protect both of them – not in the super creepy and sorta patronizing way, but in the “she really cares about them and their well-being” way. Despite thinking that Schezo is an absolute fool at times, she still cares about him quite a bit. She’s come to regret what she did all those years ago, and is determined to make sure that Schezo never remembers it.

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Schezo – ~200, has ADHD and PTSD + transmasc + homosexual (he/it/gore)

Assorted headcanons:

-Although he can be away from his sword, it’s bonded to his body so strongly that if he is too far away from it for too long he becomes incredibly weak. -He borrowed a thesaurus from Aya and Klug and is not planning on ever giving it back. -He doesn’t remember a single thing that happened before Puyo~7, and can hardly remember anything from then until Puyo~Tetris 2. -After learning about tone indicators, he begins to put “/nx” at the end of *all* of his messages online. Although a few people make fun of him for it, many people find it either endearing or some form of cool, and he’s affectionately known as “the /nx anon” in a few social circles. -His main special interests are forging and dark magic (good for him <3)

Relationship headcanons:

Crushes: He has a slight crush on Lemres, and thinks that Incubus is.. interesting. He also thinks Witch is cute but can’t tell if that’s a crush or what. (Good) friends: He considers Arle to be his best friend, and she’s usually the first person he’d go to for anything. The two actually lived together for a while. Although he thinks Rulue is a fool at times, he still cares about her and thinks she’s pretty impressive. Enemies...?: He once was always looking to pick a fight with Satan, but after (rather awkwardly) remembering that he once saw the prince as a father, he mostly stopped doing that.

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Rulue – ~40-ish?, experiences delusions + cis lass + questioning (she/her and a few neopronouns)

Assorted headcanons:

-She’s not sure why there are so many people who are like her and at this point she’s wondering if it really is just a coincidence. -She secretly wishes that she could join Arle, Schezo and Witch’s arm-wrestling sessions, but as they’ve been going on for so long without her she feels almost awkward asking. -Although she still experiences delusions sometimes, she’s gotten a lot better at telling what’s true and what’s false.

Relationship headcanons:

Partner… sorta?: She’s sort of in a QPR with Raffina, and they go on platonic dates a lot. (Good) friends: She’s quite good friends with Arle, especially since she’s no longer chasing after Satan. Speaking of Satan, as she’s no longer absolutely obsessed with him she’s actually beginning to get along well with him, and the two regularly have friendly battles.

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Witch – >16, might be NT + cis lass + omni (she/it)

Assorted headcanons:

-The only thing she can transform people or things into without help of a potion is mushrooms. -She’s surprisingly strong and quite good at arm wrestling. -She’s not sure if she had any sort of neurodiversities, but she doesn’t really care either way.

Relationship headcanons:

Crushes…?: She might have feelings for Arle, but even she doesn’t have any clue. She’s also.. interested in Feli, as she sees Feli as quite the interesting person. Family: She’s an orphan, although she doesn’t mind it. (Good) friends: She’s okay-ish friends with Schezo, and the two usually do arm wrestling matches with Arle in their free time.

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Satan – ~3000<, only god knows + cis trans man (somehow less than a joke) + pansexual (he/it)

Assorted headcanons:

-As he’s so old and has changed his physical appearance so many times, he’s completely forgotten his original sex, if he even had one. -After getting very literally schooled by Raffina, he realized that his plans to acquire Arle were just never going to work, and after a while of self-reflection he decided that he’d rather spend the rest of eternity doing other things he liked than chasing around an underage lass. -Due to having completely remade the world himself, he feels almost completely disconnected from it. All the people he used to know.. aren’t the same, and it’s destroying him.

Relationship headcanons:

Partners: Misses his dead wife a lot, but is now happily dating (nd half-joke married to) Ex (Chosen) family: After Satan had a good long think about everything, he realized that he did actually care about Lidelle a lot, and now properly sees her as a little sister. Friends: He’s on good terms with Rulue and actually properly hangs out with her sometimes. -

Serilly – >16, has anxiety and experiences delusions + trans lass + questioning (she/her)

Assorted headcanons:

-hgnggng operea

Relationship headcanons:

Partners: She may or may not be dating Arle. (Chosen) family: Although she’s presumably an orphan, she has Suketoudara, who she sees as an older brother figure. Best friend: She platonically loves Harpy a lot, and the two of them spend a lot of time together. - Suketoudara – ~30, NT + about as cis guy as a fish can get + polysexual (he/him)

Assorted headcanons:

-I literally do not think about this guy

Relationship headcanons:

Sibling serilly

Puyo Fever (2) characters:

Amitie – 14 and a half, autistic + binary transfem + fem-leaning panromantic (she/fae/flare)

Assorted headcanons:

-She found out that she was trans when she was 7 years old, and managed to convince her parents to let her transition when she was 12. -She taught herself how to bake, and Arle taught her how to cook more salty things. She regularly makes lunches for her friends, even if they already have their own. -She cares a lot about Sig’s ladybug friend and usually “babysits” them when Sig has to leave to wherever. -Raffina and her are the only two with two parents who haven’t divorced and/or died, but as Amitie's parents are almost always at work she doesn't get to talk to them very much. -She stims by twirling her hair when it’s long, or squishing a puyo-shaped stress ball when it’s short.

Relationship headcanons:

Partners: She’s in a QPR with Sig and Klug, and says she wouldn’t give it up for the world. Crushes: She has a huge crush on Ringo, and a squish on Ess, but she doesn’t think either of them feel the same way. (Chosen) family: She feels rather lucky having contact with both her mother and father, as most of her friends don’t have contact with their own parents. Also, she looks up to Arle a lot, and sees them as an older sibling. Friends(?): Nobody can tell what exactly her relationship with Raffina is, but the most common theory is that they’ve kissed at least twice. Even during Lidelle’s fight with Sig, Amitie supported her, knowing she truly did regret her actions and it was mostly just a big misunderstanding.

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Klug – 14 and three quarts, autistic and has ADHD + transmasc nonbinary + ace/aroflux (he/they/wir)

Assorted headcanons:

-Although he had initially asked to be called by neopronouns just as a joke, he found he actually liked the wir/worm set a lot, and now tends to go by that exclusively on some days. -On one night he doesn’t remember, all of his cosmetic glasses were mysteriously destroyed, along with all his contact lenses. After that, he stuck to just one pair of functional glasses -He was gifted an “EiPod” by Ringo and Amitie, although only the latter took credit for it. -He stims by humming, writing, and aggressively cleaning his glasses.

Relationship headcanons:

Partners: He’s in a QPR with Sig and Amitie, and secretly wants to leave Primp and travel the world with them both. Chosen family: He sees Feli as both a rival and a sister, and now has come to see Lemres as an older-sibling figure of sorts. Friend: He’s on good terms with Lidelle, and she’s one of the only people who’s younger than he is that he still treats with respect. Rivals(?): He thinks Raffina is pretty rude, and he never lets her go without remembering that he’s better friends with Amitie than she is for more than a month.

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Sig – 15, autistic and has ADHD + transmasc demilad + biromantic (he/bug/they/it)

Assorted headcanons:

-Doesn’t consider any sort of bug to be his “favorite”, but has a soft spot for ladybeetles, stag beetles and fireflies. -After a failed attempt at acquiring Sig’s power, Aya accidentally gave Sig half of its own power, causing Sig to become slightly more than just a half-demon. -After he scratched himself one too many times, Amitie and Lidelle worked together to make a glove for Sig’s claw hand. -His main special interests are both bugs and history, and he usually stims by repeating words he likes.

Relationship headcanons:

Partners: He’s mostly queerplatonic, partially romantic partners with both Amitie and Klug. During the first half week of their relationship, he was the only one the two felt comfortable cuddling with, which he was completely fine with. Family: Although initially Sig and Aya were almost enemies, they managed to reach an agreement after being left alone together and now see each other as both family and friends. Friends: He’s pretty good friends with Lidelle, and he helps her with bug-related problems whenever she has any. He’s also pretty good friends with Raffina even if they don’t hang out much and he still has trouble with her name. Enemies: Schezo.

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Raffina – 16, has (canonical) imposter syndrome + transfem + pansexual demiromantic (she/her)

Assorted headcanons:

-As her family is very upper middle class, she was able to medically transition almost immediately after coming out. -She once tried to start a Primp Town Fight Club. It did not go well. -She’s the only person aside from Amitie that has two parents that did not abandon her and are not divorced. Unlike Amitie, however, only her mother works, so she gets to talk to her father frequently.

Relationship headcanons:

Crush: She secretly wants to kiss Lidelle really badly. (Good) friends: Although she was slightly distanced from them during the whole fight ordeal, she’s quite good friends with all the ASK trio. She’s pretty friendly with Ess.

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Lidelle – 14, has social anxiety + cis lass + questioning (she/her)

Assorted headcanons:

-She feels genuinely sorry for what she did and said to Sig and those bugs, and she’s proud of herself for apologizing. -She likes playing with marbles and has made pretty big marble “race” courses in the past. -She doubts her self-worth a lot, and is worried that others don’t take her very seriously.

Relationship headcanons:

Chosen family: Despite not having any surviving biological family, she’s found a family in the form of Draco and Satan, who have been taking care of her for some time now. Best friend: Lidelle hangs out with Raffina almost constantly, and she considers Raf to be her very best friend. Good friends.. again: After a very large fight with Sig over the fact that her flesh-eating plants killed some of his bugs, she and Sig stopped being friends for a bit. After a lot of talking with Amitie and Raffina, she realized her mistake, and she apologized to Sig – and to her surprise, Sig apologized back. Even during the fight, she and Amitie stayed friends, and Ami gave her a lot of emotional support. She looks up to Klug, although Klug sees her as an equal and even spares a warm smile for her during some of his most jerk-y moments.

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Lemres – 35, autistic, has SAD and PTSD + transmasc and nonbinary + aroflux/aceflux (they/them, he/him and any candy-related neopronouns)

Assorted headcanons:

-They are actually entirely blind due to personal reasons, and sewed their eyes shut as to not freak others out too much. They “see” by feeling the magic of their environment, and cannot “see” in low-magic areas (they also cannot read faces. At all.) -They have a sort of “vacation house” near Primp which they visit during the summer or any free time they have. The fact that it was built so close to Primp was a coincidence, but something they like very much. -Schezo occasionally “visits” the vacation house for a few months before running off on some random adventure for whatever reason. -Their broom was broken, presumably by Witch as they had fought with her not too long before that. -Su has a certain type of magic that allows sucre to read minds (or at least meaning). -His type of magic does not work on demons for a plethora of reasons. -They usually stim by twirling their staff around and messing with what remains of their broom.

Relationship headcanons:

Partners: They’re in a weird sort-of relationship with Schezo. The relationship informally started after Schezo assisted Lemres during a restless period and it doesn’t seem to be stopping any time soon. (Chosen) family: Although they want to keep their distance from their biological family, they’ve found a new family in Primp in the form of the ASK trio (Good) friends: They’re very close to Accord, having know her since Highschool (and even before she made Poipoi).

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Feli – 16 and a half, experiences delusions and has disorders + transfem + bisexual (she/her evi/evil go/goth)

Assorted headcanons:

-Rather compulsory heterosexuality with her. She doesn’t actually have that much love for Lemres, mainly just lust and a feeling that she has to date or marry him. -She personally believes sharing one’s birthday with someone else is a sign of extreme trust due to Zodiac reasons. -She feels like her gender is influenced by gothic aesthetics, but can’t really describe it further.

Relationship headcanons:

Crushes: She still very obviously has a crush on Lemres, although it’s starting to lessen now that Lemres is in a closed relationship. (Chosen) family: She sees Klug as an annoying little brother, although he’s marginally more mature than she is. (Good) friends: She’s pretty good friends with Lidelle and Raffina.

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Accord/Poipoi – ???? + cis lass and agender respectively + god knows (she/her for accord, he/it for poipoi)

Assorted headcanons:

-Accord secretly really likes hitting things with her hammer to the point where she’d go quite far in order to get a chance to do so. However, she would never readily admit this as she finds it to be incredibly childish. -Only Accord knows what happened to Lemres’s eyes. -During Highschool, Accord enchanted a puppet and gave it its own thoughts, personality, dreams, etc. That puppet was quite obviously Poipoi.

Relationship headcanons:

(Good) friends: Accord is close friends with Lemres, having known him since Highschool (she was his upperclassman by a few years) and never passes up a chance to talk to him. Poipoi managed to make friends with Aya in a particularly independent moment where it ran away.

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Ayashii – >800, has a lot of trauma + whats a gender + (it/any neos/they/he/she)

Assorted headcanons:

-It genuinely forgot what a gender was because gender is so unimportant to it. -It somehow found a way to continue being friends with the puppy it rescued, even going so far as to teaching them the difference between it and Klug. -As it has extreme claustrophobia, it tends to take very long walks whenever it’s using Klug’s body.

Relationship headcanons:

Crushes???: Aya has some interest in Lemres and Schezo, but isn’t entirely sure what kind of interest. (Chosen) family: It’s beginning to see Klug as a son of sorts, and recognizes Sig as its descendent. huh what: It doesn’t trust Accord at all, especially knowing (and being friends with) Poipoi as an individual.

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Yu and Rei - ??? + phasmaeic + (both use she/he/they gho/ghost spec/spectre and dar/dark)

- - -

Relationship headcanons:

Puyo~7 characters:

Ringo – 16, ??? + questioning (demigirl?) + bisexual (she/they)

Assorted headcanons:

-She’s questioning pretty much every single thing about her identity and beliefs to the point where she’s actually been having frequent migraines because of it. -She’s not at all proud to admit it, but she’s not-so-secretly envious of Maguro’s “beauty beam”. -She eats a LOT of things that you’re not meant to eat, to the point where everyone except for Sig (who does the same) is worried for her.

Relationship headcanons:

Crushes: She has small crushes on both Amitie and Tee, although she likes Amitie a *bit* more. Epic friends: She’s best friends with Maguro, and he’s one of the few people she properly trusts (not for edgy reasons, just because). A lot of people assume she’s dating him, which makes her feel pretty uncomfortable, but she doesn’t feel like she can really blame them.

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Maguro – 16, has ADHD and PTSD (latter from AU) + questioning + bisexual (he/they)

Assorted headcanons:

-He’s questioning the same stuff as Ringo, although he’s a lot more chill about it. -He was pretty scarred, emotionally and physically, after an unfortunate incident concerning a badly thought-out prank, a fishing net, and a timer set to one month -He remembers all of his trauma in perfect clarity, and has good memory overall.

Relationship headcanons:

Partner:He’s been in a romantic relationship with Tee for a few months, and so far it’s been really nice. Best friend: He’s best friends with Ringo, and he feels really comfortable around her. They share almost everything, and are planning on moving in together once they get the chance to have a proper house. Good friends: Although Ris moved away to study abroad a while back, they still send a lot of gifts and letters to him on a regular basis. Also, they’ve been staying in contact with Ess ever since the whole beauty pageant thing and the two go shopping when they’re both free.

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Risukuma – 19, NT + trans man + male-leaning pansexual (he/him)

Assorted headcanons:

-He’s incredibly interested in all types of love -After graduating school, he decided to study abroad to learn more about other cultures (and of course, love). -He really likes music, even having written some of his own songs in the past. One of his favorite bands is IDKHOW.

Relationship headcanons:

Partner: Despite only having interacted a few times, he’s quite good “friends” with Ai. Good friends: After moving away from Suzuran, he’s not been able to hang out with Ringo or Maguro as much, but he still sends them letters and gifts on a regular basis. What: He does not want to know about Ecolo. Do not tell him about Ecolo.

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Ecolo – ageless and has so many disorders (affectionate??) + gender + probably so (it/they/he/she/other in that order)

Assorted headcanons:

-If asked, it would describe its gender as “Once In A Lifetime” by Talking Heads. -It’s trying really really hard to respect Ringo’s boundaries nowadays, and not just because she refused to acknowledge its existence for a whole week after it accidentally hurt her. -It can change into its human form at will; however, if it wants to stay in that form for more than a few hours at a time, it has to actually sleep for several days straight. -In its humanoid form, it sports several scars. -It genuinely loves fidget spinners and has this really creepy one it carries everywhere.

Relationship headcanons:

Crush: You know it wants to kiss Ringo so bad. Friends: Ex-friends with Satan because Ringo hates him. Pretty alright friends with Ex and Marle, not entirely sure what to think about Squares. Uh…: After.. an accident it caused, Maguro started to be able to remember it.

Puyo~Tetris characters:

Tee – 16, + trans man + questioning (he/him)

Assorted headcanons:

-He can’t pronounce any name longer than four letters long. Somehow, the worst case of this is with Ringo and Maguro’s names. -Having transitioned at a very young age and only interacting with one lass for most of his life, he has a lot of internalized sexism. After Ringo points this out, he starts trying to work on it, but he hasn’t been doing very well so far. -He’s also trying really hard to find a balance between being too basic and too over-the-top, but..

Relationship headcanons:

Partner: He’s been in a romantic relationship with Maguro for a few months. It’s been really nice, but as this is his first relationship he tends to go all-out with everything, causing Maguro to get rather flustered. Crush: Although he’s very hesitant to admit it, he has a pretty big crush on Ringo and wants to kiss her. Chosen family: O is his parent, Ess and Ai are his siblings, and the twins are his messed up if true gay cousins. Friend: He’s pretty good friends with Sig because of their shared inability to correctly pronounce Raffina’s name.

-

O – infinite, ??? + ???? + probably gay? ????? (any and all pronouns)

Assorted headcanons:

-I cannot reasonably take myself seriously trying to make headcanons for this godforsaken cloud cube -Squares themself made this thing (on accident?) -Anger management issues incarnate

Relationship headcanons:

Parnter: Kissed Carbuncle once eChidle: Tee is its son

-

Ex – ~40, has autism, minor intrusive thoughts and (canon) depression + some form of Guy + yes (he/they)

Assorted headcanons:

-He’s not sure how he identifies gender- and sexuality-wise and feels as if he’s too old to try to figure that out (which isn’t true, but still) -He genuinely misses Ess and Ai a lot and is unendingly grateful for the chance to see them both again. -His intrusive thoughts are usually fairly easy to deal with, but can sometimes get pretty bad if he’s left alone for too long.

Relationship headcanons:

Partners: I’m pretty sure he has an ex-wife somewhere and that scares me. Also he kisses Satan every day of his life (Chosen) family: He misses his children, Ess and Ai, so much. (Good) friends: He’s become reluctant friends with Ecolo, and very good friends with Marle and Squares.

-

Jay & Elle – 13, autistic and have separation anxiety + nonbinary + ??? (they/them)

Assorted headcanons:

-Individually they’re okay with all pronouns, but nobody can reasonably refer to them as separate entities. -After a few people asked them, they stopped bullying Ai as much, but they still “prank” him a lot. -They were separated exactly once. It was not a very good time for them.

Relationship headcanons:

Partners:They’re queerplatonic partners with Yu and Rei, since that’s just kind of what happens when you’re two sets of evil twins who like bothering others. Friends: They don’t really have many friends as their creepiness scares people off a lot, but they like hanging out with Ecolo (even if they forget about it a lot)

-

Ai – 20, has pretty severe anxiety + transmasc + bisexual (he/him)

Assorted headcanons:

-He found out that he was trans after he managed to get a sort of wi-fi thing going during a five-month-long stay in a densely-packed asteroid belt. He had actually medically transitioned before that, but nobody on the SS Tetra had the word for it. -He has exactly one large scar from a prank gone horribly wrong. Otherwise, he’s not been seriously injured by anything the twins have done. - Recently he’s started to become slightly braver in general thanks to a lot of therapy and emotional support from his boyfriend, this has allowed him to stand up to the twins a lot more. He is also more physically strong, and plans to drop kick them both someday.

Relationship headcanons:

Partner: He kisses Risukuma on the daily Chosen family: As he canonically sees Ex as a father, he headcanonically sees Ess as a sister. Pure hatred(/j): He’s no longer as afraid of the tetra twins, and sometimes even manages to prank them back on good days.

-

Ess – ~15, only ex knows. Has serious abandonment issues, apparently canon(?!?!) PTSD, and so many things + cis demilass + lesbiab (she/they/ze)

Assorted headcanons:

-She actually has a job, and on the last weekend of every month she goes shopping with Maguro (or Amitie if he’s busy) on Saturday and Raffina on Sunday with the money she gets. -She kinda wishes that she were more physically strong for a multitude of minor reasons. -Ess doesn’t actually know how to say Ringo’s name and tries really hard to hide that fact.

Relationship headcanons:

Crushes:She’s absolutely in love with Amitie, although she’s in very deep denial about it. Chosen family: She sees Ai as a brother, and the two bond over the fact that Ex totally ditched them to go patch up dimensions or whatever. Speaking of Ex, she’s very recently found it in her heart to maybe forgive him for leaving her when she was young, although she still is a long ways away from seeing him as a father again. Friends: She and Raffina hang out and talk about their insecurities a lot.

-

Zed – uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh (he/him)

Assorted headcanons:

-uhhhhhhhhhh -I genuinely don’t think of this guy He reminds me too much of my ex-chosen-father -…to be added.

Relationship headcanons:

Ess is his belovt daughter that’s all you need to know.

Additional headcanons:

-Most of the Madou Monogatari gang feel entirely disconnected from what’s left of their humanity, so they identify with it/its along with whichever other pronouns they use. -Sig, Dark Sig, and the evil Sig from Sig’s Secret are all different entities. -Speaking of Dark Sig, they can actually purr, although Sig himself cannot. Klug thinks this is incredibly interesting and actually conducted several half-serious experiments to try to figure out why. -All of the SS Tetra crew see each other as family, although some have more clearly defined views of that. None of them have any romantic or sexual interest in any other member.

[innuendostudios]

Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie, a video essay on how the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers recruit. Clocking in at 41 minutes, 6756 words, 633 individual drawings, and 27 sources (including three full books), it is by far the longest and most heavily-researched video in The Alt-Right Playbook. I am very tired.

It took so long to put this behemoth together that my Patreon started to dip. So, maybe a little more than usual, if you want to keep seeing videos like these, please consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, your friend Gabe is starting to worry you.

Gabe’s always been just, you know, a regular guy. Not very political. He likes video games, sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, and anime. White guy shit. The only offbeat thing about him is you suspect there’s like a 20% chance he’s a furry. For all intents and purposes, Gabe is a normie.

But recently Gabe’s been spending a lot of time on some radically conservative forums, and listening to radically conservative podcasts, and picking some radically conservative arguments with you and your friends. You never would have expected this, not from Gabe, and, given the speed it’s happened, it’s worrying to think where it might be headed.

How have the Alt-Right gotten their hooks into your friend?

If you’ve ever known a Gabe, this video is for you. Here’s How to Radicalize a Normie.

Step 1: Identify the Audience

What you need to know before we begin is: around 2013, the Nazis went online.

Hate groups in the US, as tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had been growing in number since the noughts, but, between 2012 and 2014, they dropped by almost a quarter. Patriot groups dropped by over a third. However, hate crimes stayed about the same. Radical conservatism was not shrinking, but decentralizing. Still radical, still often violent, but now full of white nationalist nomads unlikely to join a formal organization.

This didn’t make them harmless. What it did was protect their asses from the typical hate group cycle: getting the public’s attention, making allies in conservative media, swelling their numbers, and then eventually disgracing themselves with failures, infighting, and, often enough, members committing horrific acts of violence, which come with social and sometimes legal consequences for all the other members.

So the Alt-Right and their fellow travelers these days don’t so much have members. They have hashtags, followers, viewers, and subscribers. This insulates them from their own audience. If Gabe, as a member of that audience, were to go out and commit a crime on their behalf, there’d be little doubt they had a hand in radicalizing him, but it’d be very hard to claim they told him to do it. On some of these sites, where Gabe spends hours and hours of his day, he’s never created an account or left a comment; the people radicalizing him don’t even know he’s there.

This distributed nature is what makes the Alt-Right, and the movements connected to it, unique. (You may remember a notable proof-of-concept for this strategy.) Doing almost everything online has, as compared with traditional hate movements, dramatically increased their reach and inoculated them from consequence. The trade-off, as we will see, is a lack of control.

And so we come to Gabe.

Gabe exists at the intersection of the kinds of people the Alt-Right is looking for - straight white cis men who feel emasculated by modern society, primarily, though they do make exceptions - and the kinds of people who are vulnerable to recruitment. Gabe fits the first profile in that he got bullied in high school, and often feels he has to hide his nerdy side for fear of getting ridiculed. The Alt-Right also has success with men who can’t get laid or recently got divorced or feel anxious about an influx of non-white people in their community. These things can make one feel like less than the confident white man they’re “supposed” to be. And it’s the closest they will ever come to being minoritized.

Regarding the second profile, it’s important to know that Gabe is not categorically different from you or me. He’s a cishet white dude - his problems are not unique. There isn’t a ton of research into the demography of the Alt-Right, but there may be a higher-than-average chance Gabe has a history of being abused or comes from a broken home. You don’t know if it’s true of Gabe, he’s never said. But most abuse survivors don’t become Nazis. The things that make people like Gabe recruitable tend to be situational: it happens often during periods of transition, as dramatic as the death of a loved or as benign as moving to a new city. Things that make people ask big life questions. Gabe has concerns like economic precarity, not knowing his place in a changing world, stressful working conditions. In other words, Gabe is suffering under late capitalism, same as everyone, and it’s entirely plausible he could have gone down the path to becoming a Leftist.

This is not to make an “economic anxiety” argument: the animating force of the Far Right is and always has been bigotry. But the Alt-Right targets Gabe by treating his “economic anxiety” as one of many things bigotry can be sold as a solution to. It is their aim that, when dissatisfied white men go looking for answers, they find the Alt-Right before they find us.

Step Two: Establish a Community

Were Gabe pledging an old-school hate movement, there would probably be a recruiter to usher him into an existing community. But that’s the kind of formalized interaction modern extremists try to avoid. Online extremism has many points of entry, and everybody’s journey is unique, so rather than be comprehensive we will focus on what are, in my estimation, the two most common pathways: the Far Right creates a community Gabe is likely to stumble into, or infiltrates a community Gabe is already in.

The stumble-upon method has two main branches, one of which is just “Gabe ends up on a chan board,” which we’ve already done a video about. The other is kind of the polar opposite of 4chan’s cult of anonymity: Gabe ends up in the fandom of a Far Right thought leader.

These folks are charismatic media personalities (that’s charismatic according to Gabe’s tastes, not ours; I don’t understand it, either). These personalities may gain traction on any number of platforms, from podcasts to reportage to blogging, though the most effective platform for redpilling is, and yes I am biting the hand that feeds me, YouTube. They may get Gabe’s attention through fairly standard means, like talking about or even generating controversy to get themselves trending, while some of the more committed will employ dubious SEO tactics like clickbait, google bombing, and data voids (just pause for definitions, we don’t have time).

What they tend to have in common, especially the most accessible ones, is that they don’t present themselves as entry points to the radical Right. In fact, many did not set out to be Far Right thought leaders, and may not think of themselves as such (though they are often selling products, of which the Alt-Right are among their biggest purchasers, and it’s not like they’re turning the money away). How they present is the same way anyone presents who wants to be successful on social media: accessible, approachable, authentic. The face-to-face relationship a budding extremist forms with their recruiter or the leader of their hate group’s local chapter are here folded into one parasocial relationship with a complete stranger.

Why this person appeals to Gabe is they’re not selling politics as politics, but conservatism as a kind of lifestyle brand. They rely heavily on criticizing or ridiculing the Left: feminists are oversensitive, Black people unintelligent, queer folks doomed to loneliness, and trans people insane; I dunno if it’s a coincidence that these are all things Gabe thinks about himself in his low moments. By contrast, they don’t sell conservatism as having sounder policies or a more coherent moral framework, but that abandoning progressive principles and embracing conservative ones will make Gabe happier. Remember, Gabe isn’t looking for white nationalism or misogyny, what he wants is the cure to soul-sickness, and these friendly micro-celebs are here to offer a shot of life advice with politics as the chaser. It is extremely important that politics be presented as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs.

The second pathway is infiltration, which is its own beast. Media personalities sometimes become gateways to the Right almost by accident: they do something edgy, a part of their audience reacts positively, and, facing no real consequence, they do it more; this leads to further positive reinforcement from conservative fans, the rest of the audience acclimates, and the cycle repeats, the personality pushing the envelope further and further based on what flies with their increasingly conservative audience. In this way, they become a right-wing figure by both radicalizing and being radicalized by their audience.

Infiltration is deliberate.

The Far Right will reliably target any community that has 1) a large, white, male population, 2) whose niche interests allow them to feel vaguely marginalized, and 3) who are not used to progressive critique of said interests. This isn’t to say progressive critique doesn’t exist, or hasn’t been baked into the property from the beginning, but that it has been, so far, easy for white guys to ignore. As such, progressives within that community probably don’t talk politics much, and women and minorities are perfectly welcome to post, same as anyone, but just, you know, don’t, don’t make identity politics, you know, like, a thing.

Given Gabe’s proclivities, he’s probably already in a number of fan communities where he can geek out and not get teased. And this is where the Far Right will go looking for him

Communities are at their most vulnerable to infiltration at times of political discord. This can happen naturally - say, a new property in the fandom has a Black protagonist - or it can be provoked - say, a bunch of channers join the forum and say provocative things about race to get people arguing - or both. Left to its own devices, the community might sort out its differences and maybe even come out more progressive than they started. But, with the right pressure applied in the right moment, these communities can devolve into arguments about the need to remove a nebulously-defined “politics” from the conversation.

The adage about bros on the internet is “‘political’ means anything I disagree with,” but it’d be more accurate to say, here, “‘political’ means anything on which the community disagrees.” For instance, “Nazis are bad” is an apolitical statement because everyone in the community agrees. It’s common sense, and therefore neutral. But, paradoxically, “Nazis are good” is also apolitical; because “Nazis are bad” is the consensus, “Nazis are good” must be just an edgy joke, and, even if not, the community already believes the opposite, so the statement is harmless. Tolerable. However, “feminism is good” is a political statement, because the community hasn’t reached consensus. It is debatable, and therefore political, and you should stop talking about it. And making political arguments, no matter how rational, is having an agenda, and having an agenda is ruining the community.

(Now, it is curious how the things that provoke the most disagreement tend to be whichever ones make white dudes uncomfortable. One of life’s great, unanswerable mysteries.)

You can gather where this is going: a community that doesn’t tolerate progressivism but does tolerate Nazism is going to start collecting Nazis, Nazis whose goal is to drive a wedge between the community and the Left. Once the Left acknowledges, “Hey, your community’s developing a Nazi problem,” the Nazis - who are, remember, trusted, apolitical members of the community who might just be kidding about all the Nazi shit - say, “Did you hear that, guys?! Those cultural Marxists just called all of us Nazis!” Wedge. Similarly, any community members who say, “but Nazis though” are framed as infiltrators pushing an agenda, even if they’ve been there longer than the Nazis have. They get the wedge, too.

This is how fandoms radicalize. They are built as - yeah, I’ll say it - safe spaces for nerds, weebs, and furries, and are told that the Left is a threat to their safety. Given a choice between leaving a community that has mattered to him for years and simply adjusting to the community’s shifting politics, the assumption is that Gabe will stay. This assumption is right often enough that a lot of fandoms have been colonized.

What is true of both of these methods - Gabe finding the Right or the Right finding him - is that Gabe does not come nor stay for the ideology. He’s here for the community, the sense of belonging, of being with his people, of having his fears validated and his enjoyment shared. The ideology is simply the price of admission.

Step Three: Isolate

There is a vast, interconnected network of Far Right communities out there, and Gabe is, at this point, only on the periphery. In order to keep him in, they need to disrupt his relationships to other communities, and become, more and more, his primary online social space. Having made this space hostile to the Left, they now seek to break his connections to progressives elsewhere in his life.

This is hard to do online. The whole appeal of moving radicalism to the internet is that your away-from-keyboard life doesn’t have to change. You are crypto the moment you log off. Some thought leaders will encourage their audience to cut ties with Family of Origin, or “deFOO,” but, even then, they can’t monitor whether the audience has actually done it the way an in-person movement could. And so alienating Gabe from the Left is less controlled, and, consequently, may be less total. How much Gabe isolates is up to him.

But the vast majority of Far Right media presumes an alienation from the Left. Part of conservative bloggers and YouTubers making the Left look pathetic is doing a lot take-downs and responses. This is a constant repetition of the Left’s arguments for the purpose of mockery, and, for Gabe, it starts to replace any engagement with progressive media directly. He soon knows the Left only through caricature. It also trains him, if he does directly engage, to approach the Left with the same combative stance as his role models. (For reference, see my comment section.) And this is only if he doesn’t partake in one of the many active boycotts of “SJW media.”

In addition to mocking the Left’s arguments, they also, curiously, appropriate them. This is one part sanitization: liberal centrism is more socially acceptable; indeed, many figures on the outer layers think of themselves as moderates, even as they serve as gateways to radicalism. But, also, many of Gabe’s problems could be addressed by progressive leftism, so they sell him racist, sexist versions of it. Yes, there is a problem with workers being underpaid and overextended, but the solution isn’t unions, it’s deporting immigrants; yes, there is a chronic loneliness and anger to being a man in the modern age, but it’s not because of the toxic masculine expectations placed on you by the patriarchy, it’s women being slutty; yes, wealth disparity does mean a tiny percentage of elites have more influence over culture and politics than the rest of us combined, but the problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the Jews. And it’s hard for Gabe to reject these ideas without, in the process, rejecting the progressive ideas they’re copied from; the Right’s “take the red pill” is, to the untrained eye, similar to the Left’s “get woke.” (Or, at least, the bowdlerized version of “get woke” that is no longer specifically about race which came to fashion when white people started saying it, grumble grumble.)

Take the red pill or reject them both; either is a step to the right.

As this rhetoric slips into his day-to-day conversation, even as seemingly harmless “irreverence,” it may strain relationships with people who are not entertained by this shit. Off-color comments about race and gender can certainly be wearying for female and non-white friends, which can lead to a passive distance or an eventual confrontation [“why is everyone but me so sensitive?!”], which only seem to confirm what his reactionary community says about liberal snowflakes. If he says these things on social media, he may get his account suspended, and, if he comes back under an alt, you can bet his new reactionary friends will be the first to reconnect, applaud the behavior that got him banned, and repeat should he get banned again. A few cycles of this and he’s lost touch with everyone else.

Also, his adoption of the insular, meme-laden terminology of this community makes him less and less comprehensible to outsiders.

Over time, sources of information get replaced with community-approved ones: conservative news, conservative YouTube, conservative Wikipedia if he’s really committed. The Algorithm soon takes note and stops recommending media from the Left. He stops watching shows with a “liberal agenda,” which usually means shows starring women and people of color. Now, there is evidence that the human mind responds to fictional characters similarly to real people, and that consuming diverse media can decrease bigotry in ways roughly analogous to having a diverse group of friends, which is one of many reasons we say representation matters. By consuming a homogenous media diet, Gabe stymies his ability to have even parasocial relationships with anyone who isn’t a cishet conservative white dude or one of their approved exceptions.

To the extent that any of this happens, it happens at Gabe’s discretion and at his own chosen pace. It has not been forced on him, only encouraged and rewarded. But the fact that it hasn’t been forced can make him all the more willing to accept it, because it seems safe to consider; even though his life and social circle are changing to accommodate, he does not feel committed. But many Gabes have walked these halls, and, if they close the door behind them, there’s nowhere left to go but down.

Step Four: Raise their Power Level

(...and they say we ruined anime.)

Consider the ecosystem of the Alt-Right as layers of an onion, with Gabe sitting at the edge and ready to traverse towards the center. (No, I’m not just going to reiterate the PewDiePipeline, though, if you haven’t seen it, go do that.)

The outer layer of the onion is extremism at its most plausibly deniable. Without careful scrutiny, the public-facing figureheads could pass as dispassionate, and the websites as merely problematic rather than softly fascist. It is valuable if Gabe believes this as well; that, at this stage, he believe the bigotry is simply trolling, the extremists an insignificant minority, and any report of harassment faked. That he believe where he is is as deep as the rabbit hole goes. And that he continue to believe this at each successive layer.

People in the deepest crevices of the Alt-Right self-report getting redpilled on multiple issues at different times in their journey to the center of the onion. If Gabe’s first red pill is about the SJWs coming for his free speech, he’ll think that’s all anyone in his community believes; there’s no racism here, people are just making a point about their right to use slurs. Then, when he gets redpilled on the white genocide, he’ll laugh at those Alt-Lite cucks who tried to sweep the race realists under the rug, and at himself for having once been one, but acknowledge that those channels and websites are still useful for onboarding people, so he won’t denounce them. At the same time, nobody takes those manosphere betas seriously.

And this process is reiterated with every pill swallowed: gender essentialism, autogynephilia, birtherism, Sandy Hook truth, pizzagate, QAnon if he’s really out there. The heart of the onion is typically the Jewish Question, but these can happen in any order, and in any number. But each layer sells itself as being, finally, the ultimate truth. Each denies the validity of the others; the layers ahead don’t exist, they’re made up my liberals, while the people behind are asleep where you are now awake. That’s why they chose “the red pill” as their metaphor: take it, and everything will be revealed. That’s why it cozies up with conspiracism. But what’s supposed to follow is that this knowledge help Gabe in some way, and it doesn’t. Blaming immigrants doesn’t actually fix the economy, and hating women doesn’t make men less lonely. But, having been alienated from everything outside the onion, once that sinks in, the only recourse on offer is to seek out the next pill.

And pills are easy to find. Those within the network have laissez-faire relationships, even as they, on paper, disavow one another. When they need a source or a guest host, they aren’t going to go to the Left; they’re going to feature each other. The Left is the enemy; their ideas are beneath consideration, and the only reason to engage them is for public humiliation. [Shapiro’s book.] But you can interview “western chauvinists” and that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing them, just, you know, it’s fine to hear ‘em out, nothing should be off-limits in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, Nazis are apolitical.

And because these folks keep showing up in each others’ metadata, regardless of what they say, Google thinks there is definitely a relationship between the guy “just asking questions” and the guy denying the Holocaust. Gabe is softly exposed to many flavors of conservatism just slightly more radical than he is now, and is expected, at the very least, to not question their presence. This is an environment where deradicalizing - listening to the Left - would be sleeping with the enemy, but radicalizing further? You do you, buddy.

Gabe’s emotional journey, however, is somewhat more complex. If you’ve spent any time reading or watching reactionary media you’ve probably noticed it’s really. fucking. repetitive. It’s a few thousand phrasings of the same handful of arguments. Like, there’s only so many jokes about attack helicopters! But these people just crank out content, and most of it’s derivative; the reason to pick one personality over another isn’t because they say something different, but because they say it differently. Gabe just picks the affect it’s delivered in.

Repetition dulls the shock of the most egregious statements, making them appear normal and prepping him for more extreme ideas. Meanwhile, the arguments themselves? They’re not good. (BreadTube will never run out of shit to debunk.) They are repetitive because they’re not good. They’re mantric. A good argument you only need to hear one time; if you can follow it, internalize it, and explain it to someone else, you know you’ve understood it. But a bad argument can’t convince you on its own merits, so it will often rely on affect. This can be the snappy, thought-terminating cliche, or the long, winding diatribe that sounds really sensible while you’re hearing it but when someone asks you for the gist you can only say “go watch these 17 videos and it’ll all make sense.” Both these approaches are largely devoid of content, but, gosh, if they don’t sound sure of themselves.

And that mode can be very persuasive, but it doesn’t stick the way a coherent argument does. It needs to be repeated, the affect replenished, because the words matter less than the delivery. There needs to be a steady stream of confident voices saying “we’ve got this figured out and everyone else is stupid” or Gabe’s gonna notice the flaws. They are not well-hidden.

And the catch-22 of returning to that stream over and over is that these communities are stressful even as they are calming. People afraid they will die virgins go to forums with people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, you will die a virgin.” People afraid Syrians are coming to kill us all watch videos by people who share and validate that fear, and also say, “Yes, Syrians are coming to kill us all.” Others have already pointed out that rubbing your face in your worst anxieties is a form of digital self-harm, but I need to you understand the toxic recursion of it: Gabe is going to these communities to get upset. Every emotion is converted into anger, because sadness, fear, and despair are paralyzing but anger is motivating; Gabe feels less helpless when he’s pissed off. And so, while he’s topping up on reassuring nonsense, he’s also topping up on stress. And, being cut off from everything outside the network, the only place he knows to go to release that stress is back to the place that gives it to him. It’s a feedback loop, pulling him deeper and deeper on the promise that, at some point, relief will come.

It is a similar dynamic that keeps people in abusive relationships.

When someone in Gabe’s community makes a racist joke, they are presenting Gabe with a choice between the human interaction of laughing with his friends and his societal responsibility not to be a fuckin’ racist. And not laughing seems ridiculous; everybody’s friends here; no one’s getting hurt; this is harmless. And so the irreverent race joke draws a line between the personal and the political, and suggests that one can be safely prioritized over the other. One way to look at radicalization is being asked to stick with that seemingly innocuous decision as the stakes are raised incrementally: first with edgier humor, and then comments that are funny because they’re shocking but you couldn’t really call them jokes, and then “funny” comments that are also sincerely angry, but, in each instance, since he laughed with his bros last time, it stands to reason he should keep favoring the personal over some abstracted notion of “politics.”

This is why the progressive adage “the personal is political” is among the most threatening things you can say in these spaces.

I’m not trying to make a slippery slope argument. Most of us who laughed at edgy jokes when we were teenagers didn’t grow up to be Nazis. It is a slippery slope in the specific context of being in community with people trying to radicalize you. Gabe is a lonely white boy in need of friends, and laughing at a racist joke is personal, while not laughing is political. Staying in a community that has Nazis in it is personal, and leaving is political. The personal is what brings people together and the political drives them apart. (The “only if some of them are bigots” part of that sentence is usually lopped off). There’s this joke on the internet that nerds perceive only two races: white and political. Following that logic, what could be more apolitical than an ethnostate?

They are banking on his willingness to adapt his beliefs to suit an environment that meets a need. That same need can be satisfied by white nationalism. There are few things more seductive to people who doubt their own worth than being told you are valuable simply for being white. And you can sub in male, cis, straight, allosexual, or able-bodied. It just takes priming: by the time Gabe officially embraces bigotry, he’s already been acting like a bigot for months. The red pill is simply the moment he says it out loud.

Change Gabe’s surroundings, and you change Gabe.

Step Five: ???

The final step in a traditional extremist group would be getting a mission. But that is one thing the Alt-Right can’t do. Once you start giving clear directives, you can’t play yourselves off as a bunch of unaffiliated hashtags and think tanks; you are now a formalized movement accountable to its followers, and can be judged and policed as such.

To my mind, Charlottesville was an attempt to become such a movement, taking things offline and getting all the different groups working collectively. And, as so often happens when these people get in the same space - especially with no official leaders or means of control over their members - it backfired. Their true colors came out before they were ready and a counter-protester lost her life.

This would be the point where, historically, an extremist group starts to disintegrate. Their veneer of respectability gone, they’re now hated by the public, the media wants nothing more to do with them, and everyone not in jail turns on each other or goes underground. This is also the point where the liberal establishment says, “My job here is done,” and utterly fails to retake control of the narrative, allowing the next batch of radicals to pick up more or less where the last one left off.

But to an already-decentralized group like the Alt-Right, Charlottesville was bad but eminently survivable. People retreated back to the internet, with its code words and anonymous forums, but that’s where much of the work was already done anyway. The platforms where they organized kept tolerating them, the authorities still didn’t classify them as terrorists, and any disgraced figureheads were replaced with up-and-comers.

The major change in strategy is that it doesn’t seem anyone has tried to formalize the Alt-Right since.

So where does that leave Gabe? He’s gone through this whole process of largely hands-off indoctrination - and I should stress his journey may look like what we’ve outlined or it may look different in places, this video is not comprehensive - but now he’s swallowed every pill he cares to, he blames half a dozen minorities for everything he sees as wrong with the world, and no one will give him anything to do. You’ve got this ad hoc movement frothing young men into a militant fervor and then just leaving them to stew in their own hate. Should we really be surprised at how many commit mass shootings?

This is a machine for producing lone wolves.

Leaving men to take up arms of their own volition is a way of enacting terror while being just outside the popular conception of a terror cell. There are also, of course, more classic militias that will offer Gabe clear directives - they’re recruiting from the same pool. And Gabe may stop short of this step, settling in a middle layer that suits him or finding the inner layers too extreme. But violence is the logical conclusion of an ideology of hate, and, should Gabe take this step, he can approach violence in the same incremental fashion he approached conservatism.

He can start with yelling at people on Twitter, and then maybe collective brigading, DDoS attacks, sharing dox, leaking nudes, calling their phone numbers, texting them pictures of their houses from the sidewalk. These acts of cruelty become games of oneupmanship within his community. All this can start as far back as Step 2, and get more intense the deeper he goes. Some people join explicitly partake in harassment and violence the way Gabe joined to talk about anime.

But this behavior can serve as a kind of buy-in. The Left and the feminists and the LGBTQs and the Muslims and the immigrants are all, within his community, subhuman. You’ve maybe heard the conservative catchphrase “feminism is cancer”; well don’t treat cancer by having a respectful exchange of ideas with it, but by eradicating it down to the last cell. Cruelty against the Left is framed as righteous.

From any other perspective, posting someone’s bank information is something you might feel ashamed of. Which creates a psychological imperative not to consider other perspectives. A thing that keeps people in is staving off the guilt they will reckon with the moment they step out. Gabe is also aware that anything he’s done to the Left could be done to him if he leaves; some communities even keep dox on their members as insurance. And the things he’s been encouraged to do to the Left will likely make him feel that the Left would never take him now; the radical Right is the only home he’s got. Harassment becomes another tool of isolation.

Steadily, options for Gabe are whittled down to being a vigilante or a nihilist. There are periods of elation: moments the Alt-Right feels it’s winning - or, more accurately, the people they hate are losing - are like cocaine. They are authoritarians, after all. But the times in between are mean and angry. They are antisocial, starved of emotional connection, consuming incompatible conspiracies that may at any point run them afoul of one another, devoted to figureheads who cater to but cannot risk leading them, and living under constant threat of being outed to the Left or turned on by the Right for stepping out of line. Gabe took this journey for the sense of community and purpose, and, but for the rare moments everything goes their way, the Alt-Right can’t maintain either. They can only keep promising his day will come, a story he could get from a $5 palm reading.

The feeling there’s nothing left but to kill yourself or someone else is so common it’s a meme.

But there is always a third option: Gabe can leave.

Pre-Conclusion: For Fuck’s Sake Do Not Make Gabe Your Whole-Ass Praxis

Before we continue, I want to state plainly that Gabe went off the deep end because he found a community willing to tell him that, because he is a cishet white man, the world revolves around him. Do not treat him like this is true.

If a fraction of the energy spent having debates with America’s Gabes were spent instead on voter re-enfranchisement, prisoner’s rights, protections for immigrants, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, and redistricting, Gabe’s opinions, in the societal sense, wouldn’t matter. Reactionary conservatism is a small and largely unpopular ideology that is only so represented in our culture and politics because they’ve learned how to game the system.

And I get it. Those are huge problems that are going to take years to address, where, if you know a Gabe, that’s a conversation you could have today. And, if you think you can get through to him, it is worthwhile to try. This is a fight on many fronts and deradicalization is one of them. But it is only one, so please keep it in perspective. It sends an awful message when we spend more time trying to get bigots back on our side than we do the people they are bigoted against.

Your value as a lefty does not hinge on whether you can change Gabe’s mind.

Conclusion: How Gabe Gets Out

He may just grow out of it. These communities skew young, and some folks hit a point where hanging with edgy teens doesn’t feel cool anymore.

He may become disillusioned after the movement fails to deliver on its promises.

He may become disillusioned if something goes wrong in his life and his community isn’t there for him, if he feels they like his race and his gender but don’t actually care about him.

He may be shocked if he sees the Alt-Right at its worst before being appropriately conditioned. Charlottesville was a step too far for a lot of people.

His community may turn on him for any perceived unorthodoxy, and he may leave out of necessity.

He may be separated by circumstance from the community - a trip with no internet, hospitalization, arrest - and not be able to top up on the rhetoric. This may lead him to question his beliefs.

His community may disappear, either tearing itself apart or getting shut down by authorities.

He may have incidental contact with populations he’s supposed to hate, and have trouble reconciling who they are in person with what he’s been told about them. In his community, people bond over shared intolerance, but, suddenly, being tolerant helps him make friends. (This is one reason the Alt-Right has made a battleground of the college campus.)

He may form or revisit relationships outside the network, people who can offer him the connection he’s been looking for. This may reintroduce outside perspectives. More importantly, it rekindles his ability to have healthy relationships at all, something the Alt-Right has estranged him from.

As with recruiters, it seems these “escape hatch” relationships can sometimes be parasocial; coming to respect a public figure who is on the Left, or is critical of the Alt-Right.

Someone he is close to may compel him to choose, “me or the movement.” A lot of young men leave to save a romantic relationship.

Hearing stories from people who’ve already jumped may help; there aren’t a lot of public formers, and some raise suspicions as to their sincerity, but it is getting more common, and may be the closest we get to exit counseling for the Alt-Right.

He may become aware of the ways he’s being manipulated, or have them revealed to him, maybe because he stumbled into BreadTube, I dunno. Knowledge that you are being indoctrinated is no guarantee it won’t work - you are not immune to propaganda - but it can help one resist.

And he may revisit a core belief system that used to guide him, be it religion or social justice or a really wholesome fandom, and be reminded of the identity he used to have.

Moments like these, in isolation or in aggregate, can inspire Gabe to jump. They are also good times for friends to intervene. The reach and the impunity that comes with the internet means it has never been easier to fall into reactionary extremism. It has also never been easier to get out. People who exit skinhead gangs often fear for their lives; for Gabe, there’s a chance getting out is as simple as going to a different website. Much of his community does not know his name or his face and he may not important enough to dox.

What doesn’t get Gabe out - not reliably, not that I have seen - is an argument with a stranger who proves all his facts wrong and his ideology bunk. Facts don’t always work because facts don’t care about his feelings. This was about staying in a community, and holding onto an identity, that mattered to him. It was about belonging, and that is something a rando from the other side of the culture war can’t give him and probably shouldn’t be responsible for.

The theme here is human connection. Before he can do the work of disentangling himself, and facing the guilt of what he’s believed and maybe done, he has to know there’s somewhere for him on the other end of it. That the Right hasn’t ruined him. They’ve told him all of history is groups fighting each other over status, and, without his clan, he’ll be an exile. He needs a better story.

I don’t know that lefty spaces are ideal for this, in no small part because bringing someone who’s a bit of a Nazi but working on it into diverse communities is… questionable. And it probably wouldn’t be good for him, either; having just gotten out of a toxic belief system, he’s going to be deeply skeptical of all ideologies. In a perfect world, people who care about Gabe could build for him - to use a therapy term - a holding space. Someplace private - physical or digital - where Gabe can work out his feelings, where he is both encouraged and expected to be better but is not, in the moment, judged. That comes later. It is delicate and time-consuming work that should not be done in public, but we find these beliefs, built up over the course of months or years, tend to fall away very quickly with a shift of environment. Change Gabe’s surroundings and you change Gabe.

But, instead, a lot of people who jump are functionally deprogramming themselves, which is working for a lot of them, but it’s haphazard, and there are recidivists.

If you don’t personally know a Gabe, or have training as a counselor, you may not be in a position to help him. Possibly there are things you can do to disrupt the recruitment process or prevent infiltration of spaces you’re in - I’m looking into it, but talk to your mods - but, elephant in the room: meaningful change will require reform on the part of platform holders. Tools to disrupt this process already exist and are being used on groups like ISIS, but they’re not being used on the Alt-Right because they try oh so very hard not to get classified as terrorists (and also any functioning anti-radicalization policy would require banning a lot of conservative politicians, so there’s that...).

But what makes our story better than theirs is that the fight for social and economic justice, though it is long, and difficult, and frustrating, when it works, it fulfills the promise the Right can’t keep: it materially make people’s lives better. I am not prone to sentimentality, or to giving these videos happy endings. But one thing we have that the Alt-Right doesn’t is hope.

[trans-cende]

I'm at my wits end tbh, but I think I've managed to get to the bottom of my dysphoria. I have no social dysphoria, any pronouns are ok and I could be seen as a woman for the rest of my life and not care less BUT while I relate to butch women's experiences, I relate more to trans men/nb because I really want to present as a man but to a further extent than most butch women go, like i want to pack and bind, would love top surgery, go on t, (and phallo if it wasn't so expensive). I would even love to have cis male secondary sex attributes. But yet I am very happy identifying as my birth gender eventho my body doesn't match up with what I feel it should be?

In my experience, exploring my gender based on what would give me gender euphoria vs. what would alleviate gender dysphoria has been more beneficial. I think its always in our best interests to find what makes us happy. If you feel that transitioning will better your life, you might want to consider it. Gender dysphoria isnt a requirement to be trans, if you feel like a man and want to present as one and you are in a position to do so, you might be much happier that way.

Furthermore, if you don't mind what pronouns or gender people percieve you as, Id encourage you to present and explore your gender outwardly how you want to. Many people's transition goals are to be seen as male or female passing. If you are not concerned about that, what would your transition goals include? What would be the best next step for you? My best advice for you would be to worry less about what you identify as and more about what will make you feel most at home in your body.

[transadvice]

I've recently begun reevaluating my gender identity and I'm definitely not the cis man I thought I was. I'm still figuring out exactly what I identify as, but my best guess is that I'm a trans woman. However I worry that I'm not giving enough consideration to the idea that I'm non-binary, genderfluid, agender or something else that exists outside the binary genders. At the same time, I also worry that my apprehension about choosing my identity stems from internalised imposter syndrome (1/2)

Part 2 of question: (2/2) and I'm only considering non binary and others as possibilities because they'd be easier to 'pass' as than being a trans woman. Since I've still got a lot to figure out, I was wondering, what questions should I be asking myself and where should I be directing my introspection as I do so? As an additonal side note; I feel more dymorphia about body hair than I do about having male genitals, is that unusual? Thank you for your help and advice.

My answer: 

Side note first: it’s totally common to not have genital dysphoria, or to not have much. Pop culture does us a disservice by painting genital dysphoria as the main or most important sign of being trans. It absolutely isn’t. Some people have it, and lots of people don’t. It’s common to have more dysphoria about other physical characteristics (e.g. body hair), or about social signifiers (e.g. pronouns), or about physical characteristics for social reasons (e.g. voice but only because it gets you misgendered), or to not have dysphoria at all but only euphoria (i.e. not disliking the name ‘Steve’, but just really loving/wanting the name ‘Katie’). By the same token, genital surgery isn’t the only/most important transition step, and for many people it’s not even on the radar! Of course, pop culture is mostly cis-driven and the cis tend to vastly overestimate the importance of genitals to gender identity, so.  

Okay. Onto your main question. It can definitely be a journey to figure out the specific flavor of your trans-ness: whether you are binary trans or nonbinary in some way. There’s a lot of gray area between them, and it’s okay for your thoughts to change on that over time. You don’t need to pin it all down now. Nor do you need to fully figure out your identity before taking any transition steps. In fact, I think that’s often impossible. You can only get so far with introspection alone. At some point you have to start trying stuff.

Think of this this way: It’s not like you’re choosing between the Deluxe Binary Transition Package and the Prix Fixe Nonbinary Transition Package. Every transition step is a la carte. You can change your name, or not; use she/her pronouns, or not; take HRT, or not; wear dresses, or not; and so on. Any of these steps could be part of a binary or nonbinary transition. You don’t have to know ahead of time how each step will end up factoring into your overall transition journey. You just have to want to do that one thing.  

So my challenge for you is to get out of the theoretical and into the practical.  Set aside “who am I really” and “what does it mean.” Those questions are too big, hard, and abstract. Instead ask yourself: What do I want to do or try? What makes me feel bad? What makes me feel great? What’s the next step I can try that may help me get further from bad and closer to great? If I’m not sure if I’ll like something, how can I test drive it in a safe way? 

For example, you know you feel dysphoric about body hair. Okay: so laser/electrolysis seems like a reasonable direction to go. If you’re not sure you want to make it permanent, or you can’t afford to, you could try waxing, or even just shaving your legs. You don’t need to know if you’re a trans woman or nonbinary in order to remove your body hair, temporarily or permanently. 

Each decision or experiment will give you more information. It may become more clear to you over time that you lean in one direction or another. Or you may end up where I am - still not sure if I’d call myself binary or nonbinary, but so glad I took the transition steps I did nonetheless. Happy enough that it doesn’t matter. 

P.S. You don’t owe everyone you meet complete knowledge of your gender identity, whether or not you understand it yourself. It’s okay to have a “public” and “private” version with more or less level of detail/precision.

P.P.S. Fear is the mind-killer. Any time you find yourself thinking “I must be X because it would be easier/less scary than being Y,” that’s a time to really lean in and unpack those thoughts. For one thing, it’s not true (neither being nonbinary or binary trans is inherently easier, they both have different challenges). For another, it’s not relevant. It doesn’t matter what outcome you hope for; you are who you are. And the least easy thing is to try to force yourself to be someone you’re not.

[genderfluid-existence]

Hi, I’ve been questioning if I’m genderfluid on and off for some time now, and so I thought I’d ask for advice from someone who knows that they’re genderfluid

1. Before you knew for certain that you were genderfluid did you feel like there were possibly other people in your head besides you? Not in a dissociative identity disorder kind of way, but something else? (sorry for the bad wording there)

2. What were some more obscure signs you were genderfluid?

3. Part of the reason why I don’t want to say I’m genderfluid is bc I’m worried actually cis, and that I’m just pretending to be genderfluid due wanting to fit in w/ my friend who is trans/wanting to be more queer than I already am (I already know I’m somewhere on the bi+ spectrum), it’s a coping mechanism for my semi-not-good mental state. (sorry again for the bad wording), do you have any advice regarding this?

Sorry a third time for the bad wording, but I need advice, and this seems like a good way to get it.

Howdy 🤠

I'm always very happy to help, but as always, keep in mind that you are the only person who can say what your gender is, what will make you happiest, and what is the right choice for you. I can only speak from my own experience.

1. Oh boy, quite a question right off the bat. The answer is kind of, I guess. I've actually wondered if I had DID for a long time. I almost certainly don't, but it's definitely very easy to worry that you've confused the two.

It's sort of hard to answer because I don't know specifically what you mean, if not in a DID way. But I'm curious, so do elaborate if you'd like.

I am not a different person when I am a different gender, but it's possible to think of my gendered selves as "personas" in a way, so in that way, I suppose you could explain it like that.

I also engage in a lot of self-dialogue and self-reassurance, which often manifests in my thoughts being formed in a conversational way (including the pronouns you. And yeah, I feel a little weird about it this, but it doesn't seem to cause any issues). There's nothing that indicates that I feel that there is another enitre person on the ends of these mental conversations, let alone that the two ends are different genders. However I still have yet to understand a lot about my inner workings. Some may judge this as a disorder.

Finally, I think I have some identity-formation problems. Including the fact that I often feel like my mental understanding of how I present to people changes a lot. Not strictly in a gender way, nor in a DID way (at least I hope not). I just have trouble forming a stable image of "me", so sometimes it can feel like I'm different people.

2. Hmm, interesting. I'm sure there are many that I have yet to identify since they come with time.

When I was a child I remember having a minor fascination with having a male version of myself. I've found an old drawing of myself next to an imagining of a male version of myself.

Also, I imagine that if questioning is especially long and difficult, it could be a sign of fluidity. I say this because if you feel one way for a period of time and another way for another period of time, it can feel like these experiences contradict each other, and it's abysmally confusing. Like, why don't any of my feelings line up??? If I'm a man, shouldn't I feel like a man all the time? Yesterday I didn't feel that way.

Grain of salt: questioning can be long and confusing for anyone, and dysphoria can fluctuate even for gender-solid folks.

Also, there are some indicators of being trans in general.

For example, dissociative dysphoria is a less discussed manifestation of dysphoria in which you just don't feel real/your surroundings don't feel real.

Also, irrational avoidance. When I was younger, my sister used a lot of highly feminine pet names and terms of endearment, it was just her style. But being around her made me incredibly dysphoric because of these reminders of how she saw me. So eventually I came to associate her with those bad feelings, even though I had no explination for the feelings, since this was before I even knew of transness as a concpet. It took me a while after she stopped to realize Oh shit, that's what it was. Now we've been on much better terms for years.

Also, there are signs that can be indicators of any number of psychological distress (so they could be explained by other mental health issues) like extreme escapism, sleep issues and other depressive symptoms, dissociation, aggression, anxiety, avoidance of social situations, etc.

3. This is common. Firstly, nothing is stopping you from claiming a label. Absolutely nothing. Coming out to yourself doesn't mean you have to come out to others, transition, or take any other steps. So if you're wrong, so what? A label does no harm.

What can have the potential to do harm is transitioning unnecessarily. If you think it's a maladaptive coping mechanism, my only advice is to seek counseling before taking any steps that you think you might regret.

I've never heard of a person worrying that they want to be more queer than they actually are. And indeed I've never heard a detransitioner point to this as an issue. The only thing I could think of, is perhaps a sort of munchausen syndrome where you would theoretically try and gain """ oppression points.""" To be clear, I don't think this is very likely, but not impossible. In that case if it really worries you, I would again seek counseling, since that sounds like a symptom of a larger issue.

I've not quite cracked the nut of what if it's social pressure??? to be honest. And immitation is certainly a common trait among young people (assuming you're young). So, quite honestly, is it possible that you (and I) have tried on the trans label out of imitation of peers? Yeah.

I don't know if there's a solution to this (except of course counseling) other than careful trial and error. Trying on aspects of the male (or female) role and testing to see if it makes you uncomfortable or comfortable. Indeed, many aspects of social and sexual dimorphism can be very evocative of euphoria/dysphoria. Like, being called she/her might elicit relatively minor euphoria/dysphoria, but (cw: AFAB dysphoria) the idea of being vaginally penetrated? Yeah, most people will have a pretty strong reaction to that one (cw: end).

In short, sometimes these worries about "What if it's X?" don't always have an easy answer, and I don't think any trans person can solidly eliminate the question forever. I have a friend who's more than 2 years on T and still occasionally worries that he's secretly cis. But the fact that doubt lingers doesn't stop trans people from transitioning.

I want to be careful here to not seem like I'm saying that you should run right into transitioning with no caution. I just want to frame your doubts in perspective. If gender affirming steps feel uncomfortable, and you find yourself surrounded by doubts, then it's important to listen to that and take a step back. But if you're 90% certain that transition is right for you, but that 10% of doubt is scaring you away, try and put it in perspective. There's a 10% chance you'll regret transitioning, and 90% chance that you'll regret not transitioning. And sometimes only time and experience can close the gap between 90% and 99%.

Gahhh, I seem to be infinitely apt at bloviating; sorry 🥴. Hopefully something in my essay of a response can be of use to you.

[pride-and-flags-47]

Nonbinary November, Again!

Last year i answered the 22 questions @letters-to-lgbt-kids made for november, and I think it’s a good idea do re-answer them!

1.Which labels do you use?

At the moment, my gender labels are trans guy, nonbinary and demiboy, my gender isn’t exactly three gender but also isn’t exactly only one. For other non gender related stuff, aroace and gay (gay as in mlm, nblm, nblnb and mlnb).

And Ive named my gender but don't actively use the term, but it's still my gender, boyenbyflux.

2.What are your pronouns?

Only he/him!

3.How old were you when you came out to yourself as nonbinary?

Had to look in the older answers, but ye, in 2017 I used the label demigirl but never really thought of myself as not cis at the time, and in december of 2018 was when I realized I was trans, and started using demiboy, but as far as using the label nonbinary itself, around the middle of 2019.

4.What’s one thing you’d like to tell your younger self?

I always have a hard time with things like this. I think I’ll focus this on Alec on early 2020 for this: you’re not faking or cis for having weird gender dysphoria/euphora/apathy days, and a part of these weird days is because of the nonbinary part being louder than the male part of your gender at that moment.

5.Is there a myth about nonbinary people that annoys you the most?

Not really a myth, but the wrong belief that nonbinary genders are only one thing and that they can’t sometimes lean towards one or both binary genders.

6.Is there a nonbinary celebrity you look up to?

Not really? I’m not really big on following celebrities.

7.If you’re out, how did you come out?

Haven’t come out to most people I know irl. But I did come out to a colleague, it went well! I came out through WhatsApp and just said that I'm trans and aroace and gay.

8.Is there a gender-related pun you like?

non-bee-nary

Also not really a pun but none gender with left boy XD

9.Do you have friends who identify as nonbinary, too?

Nbfbsbsnn yeah basically most of my transmasc friends are also on the nonbinary spectrum.

10.Do you have a favorite lgbt+ character?

My characters fndnfsnn

But also my friends’ ocs.

As for more known media I forgot everything right now.

11. Lgbt, lgbt+, lgbtqa+… which one do you usually use?

All of them but also LGBTQ and LGBTQ+ and many other alternatives. Depends on the day.

12. How do you explain the term “nonbinary” to people who have no idea what it means?

A gender that isn’t entirely a binary gender (aka man and woman), basically almost any gender that isn’t 100% man or woman.

13.Tell us a fun fact about yourself (gender-related or random!)

I’ve been drawing everyday this year so far!

14.How did you find your name?

OK now that I have more names, I’ll go through each one XD

I chose Alec because two months before I realized I was trans I created an oc and called him Alec and I thought it was the closest to the male version of my deadname (it’s honestly not that close) and then I started using it! And it's my main name still.

As for Arthur, I just like it! Same for Alexandre, besides the fact that I though of a hypothetical scenario where I’m called uncle Alexandre and it makes me soft :3 and I had already been thinking about using Arthur or Alexandre instead of Alec or as my legal name while Alec would be a nickname, back in 2019 but I forgot about this until like, august/september of this year. And its AlexandRE, not AlexandER, Alexandre is more common here in my country + I have an oc with the name Alexander and he’s a horrible person and I couldn’t ever use that name for me XD

And Alex, it’s because I ended up starting relating a lot with my oc with that name, and there’s the bonus that is very similar to Alec and it’s a nice name.

15.If you’re in a relationship, how did your partner react to your coming-out?

I don’t have a partner.

16.Do you prefer partner, datemate, significant other or something else?

I don’t want a romantic relationship but if I enter a QPR I’d like to be called boyfriend :3 I also like the term joyfriend :3 I’m ok with partner but isn’t my prefered one.

17.A piece of advice for questioning kids?

Take your time, there’s no pressure to find out as fast as possible. Also gender and orientation is weird so it’s normal to end up going through a lot of labels, to settle with the first one you think about, to change between labels and go back to the first one and even to never really always settle. Life is weird and labels are too, and you have my full on support on your questioning journey.

18.Which flag(s) do you use?

I've been also looking for other gay man flags but haven't settled with another besides the rainbow one, but Ive been looking at the one libragender made and it's pretty nice.

And these last two i made them! It's the mlm + nblm flag and the flag about my gender!

19.Any tips for bad days?

Drink water, eat something, if you’re able, socialize and/or take a walk and get some sunlight. It wont help everything but somethimes that’s what is what is wrong and if it’s not the case, at least it’s less things making you feel worse.

And this blog is always open to listening and supporting, althought I may not always have advice, I can lend an ear for vents and stuff.

20.Do you have a favorite nonbinary blog on tumblr?

@finley-myself

Their comic is great and they’re honestly a really nice person!

21.Feminine, masculine, androgynous - or none of those things?

I call my presentation soft masc. It’s definetly masculine, with a tinge of androgeny but without anything feminine, Or I take something feminine and make it androgenous. And it’s soft because it’s not overly masculine, it’s masc light.

22. What are your three favorite things about yourself?

1- My sense of humor

2- My knowledge of random things

3- My attention to small things

And that’s it! be sure to check Oliver’s blog out too! It’s a really nice and positive place and his letters always cheer me up!

[transboybreeder]

(1/?) Hi, I'm sorry if this is not ok, but I wanted to reach out to other kinky transmasc people. I've checked out r/ftmspunished on reddit and I've posted content there before. Sometimes, when I am horny, I like being misgendered/treated like a girl. But I deleted my reddit account because I always felt terrible after coming. I feel as if most of the men who would message me there are cis and really think I'm an actual woman. I feel as if trans people are nothing but a fetish to them.

(2/2) Also, most of them are not good at sexting? They ask for more and more pics of me doing this or that, but often the excitement goes away and I end up doing stuff without enjoying it. I feel guilty. I really like sexting like that. If I could find a reliable, trust worthy man who I know won't see me as a woman even if being misgendered gets me wet sometimes and who I can be sure won't do stuff like sharing my photos, that would be so good. I want to explore being submissive. But it's hard.

its totally okay to bring stuff like this up in my inbox ftr but oof, yeah. first of yall im glad that you had the strength to delete your reddit because that subreddit is garbage. the entire premise is just... awful. the first time i came across it i felt physically sick. not like, trans men being kinky and nasty, but just, the entire point of it is for trans men to offer themselves up for cis male consumption. it can be fun to post nudes or something like that and get comments and shit esp if youre into like exposure or humiliation (i’ve done it before through a dom who moderated comments) but that whole subreddit is just. such a toxic environment imo. like get better standards pls. cause i can tell you that you’re right and for the majority of the cis people on there its a fetish to them. even if they’re not necessarily transphobic otherwise, even if they see you as a man and know the kink doesnt change that, they are aroused by sexually degrading and misgendering trans people. thats a problem. and how commonplace it is is kinda just rebranded misogyny IMO, like misgendering kinks with transfem people are significantly less common.

but also, i totally get what you mean about the sexting. they just ask for pictures like they’re fucking ordering off a menu in a drive through. they want pics of this, and that, and you doing this, or wearing this, and give you little to nothing in return. its fucking boring and its not fun. i used to sext internet strangers a lot and i did some weird fucking shit just cause a guy asked me to bc i wanted validation. so my advice with that is to like. stop doing that entirely sndjkskdn its really not worth it and there are so many better ways of finding people to talk to. finding them through social media is usually good bc you can at least like vet them a little bit before you get into anything.

you just gotta find a guy. try looking around here, try fetlife (though my advice with using fetlife would be an entirely different post) and make a connection. bc fantasies involving misgendering and stuff involve a cis person being in the position of a violent oppressor, essentially, even in that fantasy setting. find someone you trust and like enough to GIVE that role. stuff like that subreddit revolve around cis people taking that role or assuming they deserve it when they dont. it can be hard and feel like youre hella pent up but keep kinks like that to private controlled spaces and relationships. thats my best advice to you. put yourself out there but save stuff like that for when someone’s checked your boxes.

also remember that a person having someone submit to them is a privilege. the idea that bottoms/subs should be grateful when a top/dom graces them with attention and/or their dick is fucking toxic as hell and creates unhealthy dynamics and expectations. 

[sapphos-darlings]

hi, i'm a bi girl dating a nb lesbian. they want to transition to appear more gender neutral/masc but idk if i'd still be attracted to them, especially since i think i could actually be a lesbian? note: i started dating them when they identified as a cis lesbian and dressed quite femme. i really like my relationship with them but currently this has been stressing me out. i don't want to talk to them about it and potentially break their heart or stop them from being themselves. i feel like an asshole for this :/

and i'm scared they might read this

Hey, Sade here.

Now here’s a bit of blog lore for you: me and Lavender used to have a relationship ten years ago. She ended up in a similar situation as you when I started to accept that I was trans and began to pursue transition first socially and then medically. The person she’d fallen in love with began to transform into someone else - arguably a more stable and mature person, but a different person nevertheless, and one that no longer matched her attraction. So she broke up with me.

The thing is, of course it hurt, and for a week or so we didn’t speak at all. We were both young and didn’t really know how to handle that situation. In the end, though, we started talking again and healing our relationship, not as a romantic one but as a friendship. It has been a stable, loving friendship since that time until now.

So I’m not going to tell you it can’t happen. I can’t promise you you’ll look at your partner and love them the same way as you did before. If your partner pursues transition, be it social or medical or both, things will change. Ultimately the only thing you can do is ride along and if it isn’t working, it isn’t working. You can’t change your partner - I know you already know this - and you can’t change yourself or the way you love. Even as a bisexual person, attraction is individual; if that individual changes, your attraction might, as well. Nothing’s guaranteed when it comes to that. People change. Sometimes people change radically.

If you use reddit, I’d suggest posting in or at least looking through r/mypartneristrans. It’s a subreddit for, you guessed it, partners of trans people. It has plenty of users both in relationships with presently transitioning people as well as people whose relationships didn’t work out and maybe you can find something that helps you feel less alone there. It tends to be a less judgemental place to go to for help even when you’re not sure if you can make it through.

You can’t feel responsible for carrying your partner’s identity or their dysphoria. Ultimately, they have to be aware that pursuing transition means potentially ending a relationship, as the consequences of transition on attraction are unpredictable. Sometimes a partner’s attraction stays or changes with the transitioning partner, sometimes it doesn’t. Often, though, it’ll be difficult.

The best advice I can give you now is to trust yourself and have faith in your relationship as it advances. Love your partner day to day, not in the past or in the future. What comes, comes. Enjoy what you have today and support one another, talk openly, communicate your concerns. Even when it hurts. Relationships live and die on that hill.