#it’s clear that MANY adult gay men and lesbians who are considered ‘cis’ did in fact go thru periods of intense wishing to be the opposi

[jawz]

why do people who transitioned as full-on adults continue to speak on what they believe the laws should be regarding child/adolescent medical transition? like how fucking dense do you have to be to think it’s the same situation? if you didn’t MEDICALLY transition in that specific age range, when your mind is more amenable to any number of ideas about identity or personal philosophy (as you are still a child figuring yourself out) then you do not know what it’s like to have doctors more or less gaslighting you into pseudoscientific concepts that adults can understand more like metaphors…

this is the same way religion harms vulnerable young people when their brain’s capacity for weighing what is and is not realistic is just not developed and the real life experience has not yet been gained… you don’t understand metaphors and gender roles and playing pretend and facades yet… it’s all REAL to you at that age… i was told i had a MALE SOUL… trapped inside my inferior female body which needed to be FIXED in some way.

the older i get the more i realize that what a lot of adult transitioners are describing amounts more to deliberate aesthetic changes, which do create a higher level of comfort in the body and self-expression, this is why there seems to be a lower rate of regret for these types… versus gnc children who have not yet gotten past the age stage of cross-sex identification (which seems to be a common experience during the development of sexual identity for a pretty sizable cohort of the current generation of homosexuals who transition)… i think adult transitioners without childhood dysphoria have a better big-picture view of the changes they’re seeking, and it’s extremely unfair for them to pretend that youth who are attempting to convert themselves from gay boys to straight women or from butch lesbians to straight men are in the same mindset. i know i was not. it was religious for me. it was totally all-consuming.

[ayanak-archive]

I went through your dave tag and man, there were at least 2 people who still deny davekat being canon, and what a strange phenomenon. When fandom is big and popular male characters (bi dave, trans/not straight lars/steven, pan rick, doctor who, any ow guy, some popular anime/tv show dude, voltron dudes, etc) have possibility of not being straight/cis male fans start getting mad but don't have the same problems with female characters.

I’m not sure what in my Dave tag this is referring to, but yeah, there’s some deal of deniability with such things from cishet fans. Quick summary of the mountains I write next: female characters often face the same things; same-sex couples are held to much higher standards to be accepted; trans canons are almost non-existent, unfortunately; and headcanons sadly Aren’t canon, though people don’t seem to care when such headcanons are straight/cis.

Now with Davekat, we have something which has been confirmed by the creator as fact, so most of what I’ve seen in terms of deniability has been less people not believing that it’s true and more.. complaining that Hussie went that route, as if he caved to peer pressure and slapped on a gay ending to Dave’s arc instead of more realistically writing Dave as a character whose arc concluded with him moving past compulsory heterosexuality and accepting that he likes men. I think there could’ve been more build-up, but honestly anyone who complained was going to complain anyway, and it was a nice direction to take his character imo. I’ve seen the “it came out of nowhere” argument with many characters (girls too).

Pan Rick/pan deadpool/other canon but more Word-of-God reveals than clear in-canon relationships type reveals fall into the same bucket as Davekat (idk if Rick is clearly with men or not, I don’t watch that show), where same-sex relationships are held to much higher standards to be considered canon, but also it would have been nice if the creators did show us more.

Lars/Steven/OW men/Voltron dudes etc fall into a different bucket where they’re not really canon, they could be left open to interpretation, and they might not be intended to be interpreted that way at all. It sucks that straight/cis characters feel confirmed with no effort, whereas clear clues for lgbt characters “don’t count” unless we have something more substantial. People who don’t want it to be canon spout all day that there is no definitive proof (whereas their side doesn’t have proof either). I have shipped Korrasami since season 1 and I NEVER thought it was gonna be canon. I saw the relationship forming, I thought it was nice that they were at least throwing us a close friendship bone, but I thought they wouldn’t follow through bc at the end of the day, characters aren’t real and no matter how good together Korra and Asami were, without clearer confirmation from the creators, it couldn’t be considered canon (but then it was!!). 

Also, you said female characters don’t get the same treatment but I vehemently disagree. Femslash shippers get hit over the head with “they’re just friends” A LOT. Korra and Asami got it until Bryke confirmed it as explicitly as they could, Tracer and Emily got it despite kissing each other just straight on the mouth, supergirl fans got teased for their ship by one of the actors, even though they’re just having fun with it… my favorite book character is an adult woman who shows no interest in men ever, but when asked by a fan if she is possibly bi or gay, the author responded with “no and I won’t tell her you said that”. :(

When female characters ARE clearly into women- and I say this not to imply bi representation is bad or unnecessary- many people argue that well at least she’s bi, right? bc they still want to ship her with men… Korra and Asami? Absolutely bi, I would never argue that. Pearl, from Steven Universe? Definitely a lesbian, but because she’s never said the world lesbian out loud, people insist she’s bi so they can ship her with Dewey… I saw a discussion about Tracer which was “they said she identifies as a lesbian, which means she could be wrong about it and actually bi” (???). Again, confirmed bi characters are GREAT, but also I want to note that lesbian characters are accepted even less than bi ones tend to be, unfortunately…

Broadly, in my experience, straight men don’t want guys to be anything but straight and want girls to be straight or bi. Straight women either love shipping men together and could care less about women, or want het ships and don’t want either to be anything but straight. Trans issues are a whole nother bucket, where canon representation RARELY exists and cis people get so threatened by mere trans headcanons… this is broad, of course, but I see a lot of it. 

Sorry for rambling, but this is my extensive answer on the subject.