#it's always the tenderqueers!!!

[heartshapedcreaturefromcriptoon]

Um, okay so some adult dipshit with a cartoon avatar with blue hair and a description implying they have an alter who's like a little kid or something (? I don't know) just posted that EXACT "u cant ship Al bc ASEXUAL!!!!!!!" video I was ragging on a couple days ago made by that turbovirgin brony with the brony dating profile DIRECTLY into main tags right now AND I'M REELING...

Don't let a DHMIS and Fnaf fan with a brony dating profile who sounds like Kate Micucci tell you anything about asexuality, fandoms or shipping especially if they label Al as a "Tumblr Sexyman" because they're so poisoned by their own bad taste I can't.

So much for keeping her anonymous.

The person who unironically posted that shit bronyscold video to the main tags too ... Like fandoms control your own cringe, self loathing and self flagellation and stop telling talented fanartists doing the most through fandom work and commissions what to do with their art for five minutes? Impossible!

[orpheuslament]

the worst most cruel person youve ever met: radical tenderness 💝

[pretty-roach]

queer is a beautiful word with a rich history of resistance. queer was taken back specifically to combat violence from homophobes. queer is fuckin punk. it lets me embrace black queerness and reject rigid boxes imposed by patriarchy and white supremacy. queer is intersectional, unspecific, deeply personal. So it's okay to not use label. But don't try and erase it from our history. Don't try to rebuild the societal boxes we broke out of. we're here, we're fuckin queer, get used to it

[mrfreezebug]

why

whY the FUCK

do i see a butch who has terrible taste in things and think “hot”.

why. why is this what does it for me.

hot and second hand embarrassed????

Why do i see this specific flavor of gay with specific hobbies or personality attributes that make me cringe, get horny over it, and wanna hook up more than once but am too embarrassed to let them into my social circle.

what the fuck is my PROBLEM

and then sometimes we hook A LOT so much that and i introduce them to my friends and they all HATE THEM GHUFUGGHGBG

And all the while while this embarrassing butch hottie is just spouting the most arrogant lukewarm takes. Cutting off my friends in conversation. And im just sitting there in the corner wanting to die but also being like “i cant NOT fuck them”

[heartshapedcreaturefromcriptoon]

Okay but also ... How it feels to have CW Supernatural fans with studio ghibli icons and tumblr badges try to passive aggressively bully you for sharing your experience as a Hazbin Hotel fan trying to ship an asexual character on a post that they made about fandom ship culture, certain actors being obnoxious, and basically, bullying, and they were getting along with Anne Rice Fans (of which you also are one) and letting them talk about their shit just fine, and after all, they're referencing Supernatural so you thought they'd know how to be humble and that you would be safe with them, but you weren't. Because unlike Amir Talai talking about Alastor, you actually had the balls to tag the Hazbin Shipping Discourse Tea on your reblog of the post that OP made about shipping culture (and bullying), that they somewhat already related back to CW Supernatural Fandom Discourse... And now you can just feel all of those nasty, negative energies coming at you at once for speaking your truth like you're Louis De Pointe du Lac at the end of the Interview with The Vampire Season 2 Finale, so you decided to just go ahead and eat those basic bitches all up before they have another chance to mumble in the margins of the tags about how badly they wanna try eat you or kill you or something, instead of just coming at you directly, saying what they mean, or giving you a cyber stink eye instead of just ignoring you entirely or learning how to use a damn block button...

And oh you did, you did eat them... It's just all so nasty and tasted like a Supernatural Tummy Ache and you're just kind of exhausted now because for some reason, the very nature of just safely trying to exist anywhere at all as a Hazbin Hotel Fan (even within the fandom itself, sometimes) just has to be so draining and exhausting ...!

*Raises my head to be perfectly straight without moving the rest of my body* For the sake of spreading positively though @zaebeecee , I'm currently at least 5 chapters into 'To Sever A Loveless Bond' and finding it lovely so far! ^_^ ❤️ And @fletchingbrilliant (s)' illustrations for it are beautifully brilliant as always! ^_^ 💜 X.O

Actual footage of myself

Art by 3330kt

[wombtowaste]

sometimes it does get really really really really reeealllyyyyy annoying that the only men that are interested in me are very submissive in nature. They dont understand. They have nothing on my levels of submission. They just have emotional issues and want the scary brown man to dominate them

[midwestvalleygirl-moved]

my kyrptonite is ot3s with m/m/f pairings

[sluttynurse]

the line between so-called blue-haired soft tenderqueers and ketamine edgelord club gays is blurred once adult swim cartoons get involved. or it's always sunny in philadelphia

[americascomic]

I talked to a trans femme teen yesterday who told me to not use slurs (faggot, tranny) and I think people like to blame social media for these kids being so tenderqueer-y, but this kid also told me that of the 1,400 kids in her art school, there is lots of out gay, trans masc and non-binary AFAB kids but only 10 t-femmes, and I saw in her and this other trans femme teen I know this harsh assimilationist streak (they want to go stealth, strive for conventional beauty standards, jealous of the cis het white blonde girls) because they barely have a community and so it becomes a place to survive.

The internet is this boogieman that distorts what is the consensus. It has a selection bias of hyper isolated, neurodivergent, and anxious people who are just looking to survive

I look at queer kids with annoying conservative opinions I don't see the solution being "internet stop sucking" - the assimilationist woodworking "Cross Dressing Quarterly" trannies of the 90's didn't need TikTok to get this way, it was the violence of the closet.

I see the problem being them being scared kids - what bell hooks calls "the most oppressed class" and I see the solution being a more porous, safe community between kids and adults (outside of the nonprofit industrial complex that uses queer youth spaces to condescend, infantalize, and give resources in a nondemocratic way)

We always say "protect trans kids" and it's worth queer adults of all types toughing through bigotry and accusatory stares to find these kids, build relationships, give resources and love them. All we have is each other. We protect us. Us tranny faggots

[drdemonprince]

We sometimes treat avoiding Annoying Queer People as if it’s essential to the LGBTQ community’s self-preservation. We agonize over event descriptions and identity-based admittance policies, wondering how to discourage all the Annoying (and often, it’s implied, fake) Queers from attending without restricting any actual queers. (This always fails, because it turns out that actual queer people are humans, and therefore pretty annoying. And being annoying, by the way, is not a crime.) In order to fortify ourselves against Annoying Queers, we mock all their signifiers and regard them as massive social red flags: straight husbands, bolo ties, sexual inexperience, ukuleles, rainbow pins from Target, misconceptions about what hormones do, and Picrew avatars all somehow get treated with equal venom, no matter where they are coming from and why. The problem is, none of these traits tell us anything about how safe a person actually is to be around. Only observing their patterns of behavior can do that. By demonizing “cringey” and irritating attributes as the signs of a deep character flaw, we ignore the fact they tend to cluster among the closeted, questioning, or newly-out for a reason. When a socially isolated queer person in the suburbs feels that nobody sees them as they are, they might cover themselves in rainbow swag from the local big-box store to an ‘annoying’ degree. When a closeted lesbian teen hasn’t had the chance to form genuine relationships with LGBTQ people, all her reference points might come from shows like Our Flag Means Death and Heartstopper which yeah, might seem fangirlish and irritating to a more seasoned adult. When a profoundly repressed trans divorcee still believes the misinformation about hormones they’ve been fed by the press, they might repeat some downright offensive myths about pelvic floor damage or body hair being disgusting. This too, is incredibly exhausting to help someone process again and again. I don’t think any of us literally believe that the more irritating a person is, the more of a pressing political threat they are. But we behave as if we do. We devote huge amounts of time to complaining about the types of queer people that irritate us, and develop complex taxonomies for describing why they are so annoying and why defeating that annoyingness matters. This person is a tenderqueer, that one is a tucute, and in their style of dress and annoying mannerisms we can tell that they represent all that we hate most about ourselves and how we are seen. It’s easy for us to wind up directing more attention toward the queer people that annoy us than we do to our shared enemies. It’s not a good use of our time. It’s not good for our shared futures. And it’s all rooted in internalized shame.

I wrote about biphobia, acephobia, transphobia, and the troubling respectability politics of hating the "Annoying Queer Person." The full essay is free to read (or have narrated to you!) on my Substack.

[busket]

imagine calling people "tenderqueers" while you have a conniption fit about a zine made from a folded piece of printer paper and markers.

people have been making these "family friendly" jokes about the hanky code for ages. the real hanky code is always going to be about kink and sex, and little tongue in cheek jokes aren't gonna change that. no one is gonna read this little zine and be like "ooh ok! I'm gonna put an orange hanky in my pocket to let people know I love soup! 😊😋🧡🍜" calm down. it isn't erasure, it's not ruining gay culture, it's a goof

these same kind of people love to say that young gay folks (especially those who aren't interested in sex or dating) are socially inept....but they sure don't seem to be able to recognize a joke!!!

[princehendir]

So okay there's this, obnoxious little thread going around on xwitter right now about "tenderqueers" and it's exactly the type of smug & superior but nonsensical if you think about it for more the ten seconds shit that people who try to use that term seriously always write. But the image used as a like header in the first tweet is so unbelievably fucking funny that it's making me breathless hold on lemme grab it for you guys

[roomwithavoid]

a handy guide on the appropriate way to discuss the issue of purity culture

✅ “purity culture sucks because i shouldn’t have to feel shame over harmless fantasies i have, and i’m sick of people getting involved in what i’m allowed to do with other consenting adults that they aren’t even invited to”

❌ “all these TENDERQUEERS throwing a fit in my comments! if you don’t like it why did you look at it?”

✅ “i understand why this topic might make a minor uncomfortable, but frankly minors shouldn’t be in this space to begin with. for your own safety i am going to block you and i encourage others in this space to do the same.”

❌ “lmao help me ratio this stupid PURITEEN.”

✅ “i wish people would use their block and mute features instead of ruining our fun and shaming us all of the time. i get this stuff might be triggering to some people but it’s your responsibility to cater your own online experience to your needs.”

❌ “cry about it. also the only way you would possibly see this is if you were looking for it so really it’s your fault you got triggered!”

✅ “puritanical thought policing is a dangerous tactic used by religious fundamentalists to enforce a feeling of shame so they can better control their victims, and is not something we should be welcoming/normalizing in any context. thought crime doesn’t exist.”

❌ “ANTIS ARE A CULT!”

and before you accuse me of straw manning these are all things i’ve personally seen said about this topic. if you aren’t saying the bad things, then congrats! this post is NOT ABOUT YOU!

also, when in doubt, just block! you don’t have to engage at all! you can always just SAY NOTHING!

[le-fils-de-lhomme]

Why is it always the uwu small bean tenderqueers that whip out the most hateful and violent language unprovoked?

[velvetvexations]

I have an OC named Aiden Jesse who I only decided was a trans man retroactively after I named him, and every time I try to tell people about how funny it is how that worked out, it always blindsides me that I have to explain the joke to them. It breaks my heart knowing that I grew up scared shitless for my safety in a community that was theoretically supposed to include me, watching people like me get relentlessly mocked and harassed for being queer boys the "wrong" way, but when trying to make light of that after the fact, even with other genderweird folks, it's always news to them, completely alien to all of my friends who didn't also grow up as cisn't boys. Like I'm glad that they never knew about The Horrors, but it feels strange coming across equally as "online" people who haven't heard of it before, knowing how prevalent and malicious the hatred for queer boys with those names was and still is. (though I still think it's funny as hell to have turned a regular-ass guy who was just kinda homoerotic before into a stereotypical tboy by adding one word to his bio. I will die on this hill.)

I dunno, I'm tired from heartbreak over the intense collective isolation, pain, and trauma caused by people mocking Aidens in the name of protecting and gatekeeping transness. I love you Aidens and Kais and Olivers and anyone whose name has ever been on those horrible "stereotypical tboy (read: 'theyfab,' 'tenderqueer,' 'transtrender') name bingo" cards, ESPECIALLY queer immigrants and BIPOC who were told for their own safety against xenophobic and racist violence that they should choose a White boy's name like Aiden instead of names from their own cultures.

Yes! Everyone should be protected and nurtured, that's what community is about and it's so upsetting that we aren't able to give that to so many because of what gets slung at them by other trans people looking to pick on anyone they can direct abuse at.

I have so much sympathy and love for anyone who's been effected by this.

[sayitwithsarcophilus]

One thing about tenderqueer/squeecore/etc. discourse that always keeps me from taking it seriously is that flexing about how edgy and mature you and your tastes are, unlike those dumb babies who still watch dumb baby shows, is in itself rather middle school-coded behavior.