#its not about being 'the better sex' or 'womanhood is inherently suffering'

[bambinification]

I feel like it's literally impossible for a cis woman who actually experiences gender euphoria to exist and blog about their life without tumblr shoving one million terfs in their face per day

[rametarin]

Hi! I've been following you for a while and I have to say that I like how you go into detail and critically examine whatever discourse you are engaging in and don't just leave it at the basics, even if people find it to be "too much", but I'm the type to read in-depth essays of topics that I find interest in. Feminism (radical or not, although I stand by the fact that feminism has been radical since its inception) tends to be one of the main topics you deeply delve into in a way that I've seen very few do. When it comes to them, it's so obvious that they suffer from a severe case of "The grass is greener on the other side" mentality. This notion is so incredibly popular that even women who do not explicitly identify with the movement buy into it as well, regardless of where they come from and their age, and of course, since you are more educated on this than I am, you definitely notice it even more. I mean, this is one of the primary pillars of their ideology and movement, and they couldn't sustain themselves without it at all. This is one of the very first things people who criticize them notice, and I just can't help but think how miserable do you have to be to think about what you DON'T have and what you CAN'T get away with compared to the other. They don't focus on the benefits and pluses of womanhood, only the cons and the lacking, which points a reality about them that they delude themselves into believing it has to do with a sense of justice, but in reality, it's a sense of envy. This is honestly the case with the rest of left-leaning causes as a whole. They rigidly paint the other as the "oppressor" because they have something they allegedly don't have. Hence, they believe they are in a better state than them. What do you think? Keep up the work!

More or less, yeah. In my opinion, the recruiting pole starts from a position of envy and entitlement, and assumption of how the world works. Or rather, yes, "the grass is greener."

Not everybody will inherently or intrinsically believe or feel like this, of course, but enough of them do that there's a statistical probability. And it takes a certain amount of ego, a certain blindness and inconsideration, callousness.

The girl that believes the whole world hates them and thinks less of them for being a girl and that boys get all the attention and pats on the head and benefits, and girls get the shit labor; that's an immature and incomplete picture that negates what is expected of men, in whatever time or society in which they live, and cherry picks the shit parts to believe they live in the jambalaya of all the worst aspects of patriarchal society, in all eras, simultaneously. When, in reality, this is only true if you neglect history, or are ignorant of history.

Now, there's obviously truth in that actual patriarchal systems are shit, especially weighed against secular, egalitarian, liberal societies that believe you own you and that an individual human being's rights and personhood exists irrespective of their sex/gender, and that if your personal rights and liberty as a human, irrespective of sex, are being denied, then that's a crime, whether male or female.

But that sense of "I'm being slighted because I'm a GIRL" exists, and will continue to exist, the same as it will strike a chord in any population of demographic that is insecure, for valid or invalid reasons, that they're being denied prosperity, accolades or recognition and resources and opportunities, either because they're not the favored demographic or theirs is a hated demographic and unfairly handicapped.

It is this population that socialists chose to tailor their message to, because the female sex (and gender) are the perfect carriers. In a binary sexed species, their participation is absolutely essential to the next generation being born, so they're disproportionately the gatekeepers of who gets to breed and why. They like systems that just happen to exist and provide to any whom happen to be there, because they know that, as a woman, people are more likely to want women to get free shit and protection because you can't really have a future without women having babies. So, again, it's on their own best collective interests to cling to any organization and any rhetoric that promises free shit to women on the basis of being women. It's like promising a cocaine addict free coke for their votes.

And then the entire institution and culture of radical feminism was set up to groom women to tell them, "your feelings over this subject matter, regardless of the reality! If a BOY says otherwise, he's just trying to do what you're doing, but boy feelings are invalid, because-"

And their best trick was the sematic argument that feminism was purely just, "the struggle for female equality." Which I'd liken as the Christians rebranding colonialism as, "The struggle for religious freedom." In that, no that's not even anywhere close to true and so loaded with bias that you're doing a violent rewrite of history in order to try and define goodness and freedom as synonymous with your religion."

Feminism is, was and always has been the argument to analyze and interpret different things through socialist (often Marxist) principles, dogmas, just-sos, maxims and old wives tales, to judge equality from a gynocentrist position.

Which is kind of like Trump going, "Think of this Critically and use a Trumpinian lens and you'll understand I'm right." They use the term, "lenses," but god fucking damnit, that's just, "see things from my bias." Reworded and reimagined to sound profound or philosophical, and give my bias the benefit of the doubt.

They'll argue that you cannot have female equality without feminism and feminism is just synonymous for female equality, but that is absolutely not the case at all. Feminism is not about female equality or social justice, it's about applying a certain set of class struggle theorist ideas through the demographics of sex and gender and then basing the results of that equation on whether reality meets what's on the paper. Socialists will never stop doing this, because they believe their handwaved perspectives are synonymous with scientific rigor and reality. Even when they're trying to argue that gender doesn't exist as a physical reality at all, because that would defeat the view social constructs are the only reason why sexuality is static at all.

They go right after young women and culture them to thinking that you cannot have a belief in a more equal society or law system without also incorporating feminism, and that feminism is synonymous with that. And the only reason that flies any better than, "you can't have a just and fair and righteous society without the Christian god," is because Christians aren't quite so versed or experienced in the tactic of hiding their bias behind semantics. Whereas, feminists and to a large extent, socialist arguments, rely on ambiguous terms that appropriate neutral words and give them a clique charged meta meaning.

They make that rigid and brittle, like a ceramic. And then they incite them by saying, "you either believe this in extremis, or you don't actually believe in female equality." And they make sure that any pattern of argument against their viewpoints gets cultivated out by repeating them in a mocking tone and ( :^) ) smug 90s guy funnyman face. Just so they know, if you use "those" arguments, you'll be just like Ben Shapiro or blahblah whatever Andrew Tate figure they're scapegoating as "proof of a coming wave of antisemitic, misogynistic, racist, male chauvinist hate."

Now, Tate is a worthless bag of skin, and I argue his very existence is reactionary schlock specifically to be theater and be who they point at when they point to their scary opposition, but it doesn't change the fact that feminism is linguistically and culturally and socially structured to where no one that is male is allowed to critique it, and it have given itself carte blanche to critique everything else in its own interest. So, it's a very attractive mindset for women to fall into, and it's institutional to our colleges and universities.

And I argue, it's also part of the network of shitty hammer and sickle flying subcultures and groups that states like Russia find easy to manipulate into being disruptive at home. These people will make social media post after social media post about how Russia "for sure" meddled in our elections by just fucking running shitty ads on facebook and fringe right wing sites, and be utterly fucking flummoxed when you point out just how many fake assed Tumblr accounts and astro turf twitter/Xer accounts were banned for posting inciting and fake material back when BLM had more credibility. There's more proof that Russia was behind BLM riots internationally which killed more people and burned down more businesses, than there is it was behind getting right wing old white lady to vote for Trump, but they won't bring up the detrimental influences Russia has tenured and operating in every college state-side for the left. Just the stupid milquetoast fringe conservative up through the gradients to the unironic ethnostater white supremacist stormfronter types on the right. They're hypocrites that can't smell the smelly smell when it's coming from their own pants.

I adore the ability to post long form online the way I do, because it was absolutely defeating in real space trying to debate anything with radfems that take delight in disrupting, interrupting, insulting you, screaming over you, trying to trick you into an engaging debate on bad faith and just yelling, "LOL KUNG POW PENIS. XP STUPID MAAALE" in public. Putting on the pretenses of offering to challenge your opinion and then spending the entire time not disputing you, just mocking you and telling you you're wrong and talking to you like you're the amalgam of the Tates and Rush Limbaughs and televangelist-heres, which have no bearing on what you're actually saying- just taking potshots at the caricature of you and then doing victory dances for the zingers that might be zingers, if you'd ever actually fucking said that.

Here I can at least state my piece uninterrupted and not misinterpreted. It's very liberating.

[whitehotharlots]

Andrea Long Chu is the sad embodiment of the contemporary left

Andrea Long Chu’s Females was published about a year ago. It was heavily hyped but landed with mostly not-so-great reviews, and while I was going to try and pitch my own review I figured there was no need. Going through my notes from that period, however, I see how much Chu’s work—and its pre-release hype—presaged the sad state of the post-Bernie, post-hope, COVID-era left. I figured they’d be worth expanding upon here, even if I’m not getting paid to do so.

Chu isn’t even 30 years old, and Females is her debut book, and yet critics were already providing her with the sort of charitable soft-handedness typically reserved for literary masters or failed female political candidates. This is striking due to the purported intensity of the book: a love letter to would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, the thesis of which is that all humans are female, and that such is true because female-ness is a sort of terminal disease stemming not from biology but from one’s inevitable subjugation in larger social contexts. Everyone is a woman because everyone suffers. Big brain shit.

But, of course, not everyone is a female. Of course. Females are females only some of the time. But, also, everyone is a female. Femaleness is just a title, see. Which means it can be selectively applied whenever and however the author chooses to apply it. The concept of “female” lies outside the realm of verifiability. Suggesting to subject it to any form of logic or other means of adjudication means you’re missing the point. Femaleness simply exists, but only sometimes, and those sometimes just so happen to be identifiable only to someone possessed with as a large a brain as Ms. Chu. We are past the need for coherence, let alone truth or honesty. And if you don’t agree that’s a sign that you are broken—fragile, illiterate, hateful, humorless.

Chu’s writing—most famously, her breakthrough essay “On Liking Women”—establishes her prose style: long, schizophrenic paragraphs crammed with unsustainable metaphors meant to prove various fuzzy theses simultaneously. Her prose seems kinda sorta provocative but only when read on a sentence-by-sentence level, with the reader disregarding any usual expectations of cohesion or connection.

This emancipation from typical writerly expectations allows Chu to wallow proudly in self-contradiction and meaninglessness. As she notes herself, explicitly, meaning isn’t the point. Meaning doesn’t even exist. It’s just, like, a feeling:

I mean, I don’t like pissing people off per se. Yes, there is a pleasure to that sometimes, sure. I think that my biggest takeaway from graduate school is that people don’t say things or believe things—they say them because it makes them feel a particular way or believing them makes them feel a particular way. I’ve become hyper aware of that, and the sense in which I’m pissing people off is more about bringing that to consciousness for the reader. The reason you’re reacting against this is not because it contradicts what you think is true, it’s because it prevents you from having the feeling that the thing you think is the truth lets you feel.

And so she can get away with saying that of course she doesn’t actually believe that everyone is a female, the same as her idol Valerie Solanas didn’t actually want to kill all men. The writers, Chu and Valerie, are just sketching out a dumb idea as a fun little larf, to see how far they can push a manifestly absurd thought. If they just so happen to shoot a gay man at point blank range and/or make broader left movements so repulsive that decent people get driven away, so be it. And if any snowflakes complain about their tactics, well that’s just proof of how right they are. Provocation is justification—the ends and the means. The fact that this makes for disastrous and harmful politics is beside the point. All that matters is that Chu gets to say what she wants to say.

This blunt rhetorical move—which is difficult to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating or making stuff up, since it’s so insane—papers over Chu’s revanchist and violent beliefs. Her work is soaked with approving portrayals of Solanas’ eliminationist rhetoric—of course, Chu doesn’t’ actually mean it, even though she does. Men are evil, even as they don’t really fully exist since everyone is a woman, ergo eliminating men improves the world. Chu goes so far as to suggest that being a trans woman makes her a bigger feminist than Solanas or any actual woman could ever be, because the act of her transitioning led to the world containing fewer men. Again: big brain shit.

I’ll leave it to a woman to comment on the imperiousness of a trans woman insisting that she is bestest and realest kind of woman, that biological women are somehow flawed imposters. I will stress, however, that such a claim comes as a means of justifying a politically disastrous assertion that more or less fully justifies the most reactionary gender critical arguments, which regard all trans women as simply mentally ill men (this line of reasoning is so incredibly stupid that even a dullard like Rod Drehar can rebut it with ease). Trans activists have spent years establishing an understanding of transsexualism as a matter of inherent identity—whether or not you agree with that assertion, you have to admit that it has political propriety and has gone a long way in normalizing transness. Chu rejects this out of hand, embracing instead the revanchist belief that transness is attributable to taking sexual joy in finding oneself embarrassed and/or feminized—an understanding of womanhood that is simultaneously essentialist and tokenizing. When asked about the materially negative potential in expressing such a belief, Chu reacts with a usual word salad of smug self-contradiction: 

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

Politics, like, don’t matter. So, like, okay, nothing I say matters? So it’s okay if I say dumb and harmful shit because, like, they’re just words, man.

Chu can’t fully embrace this sort of gradeschool nihilism, though, because if communication was truly as meaningless as she claims then any old critic could come along and tell her to shut the fuck up. Even as she claims to eschew all previously existing means of adjudicating morality and coherence, she nonetheless relies on the cheapest means of making sure she maintains a platform: validation via accreditation. This is all simple victimhood hierarchy. Anyone who does not defer all of their own perceptions to someone higher up the hierarchy is inherently incorrect, their trepidations serving to validate the beliefs of the oppressed:

I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant.

Chu has summoned the most cynical possible interpretation of Walter Ong’s suggestion that “Writing is an act of violence disguised as an act of charity.” Of course, any effective piece of communication requires some degree of persuasion, convincing a reader, listener, viewer, or user to subjugate their perceptions to those of the communicator. Chu creates—not just leans on or benefits from, but actively posits and demands fealty to—the suggestion that her voice is the only one deserving of attention by virtue of it being her own. That’s it. That’s what all her blathering and bluster amount to. Political outcomes do not matter. Honesty does not matter. What matters is her, because she is her. 

This is the inevitable result of a discourse that prizes a communicator’s embodied identity markers more than anything those communicators are attempting to communicate, and in which a statement is rendered moral or true based only upon the presence or absence of certain identity markers. Lived experience trumps all else. A large, non-passing trans woman is therefore more correct than pretty much anyone else, no matter how harmful or absurd her statements may be. She is also better than them. And smarter. And gooder.

Designating lived experience and subjective feelings of safety as the only acceptable forms of adjudication has caused the left to prize individualism to a degree that would have made Ronald Reagan blush. And this may explain the lukewarm reception of Chu’s book.

While they heaped praise upon her before the books’ release, critics backed off once they realized that Females is an embarrassingly apt reflection of intersectional leftism—a muddling, incoherent mess, utterly disconnected from any attempt toward persuasion or consensus, the product of a movement that has come to regard neurosis as insight. The deranged mewlings of a grotesque halfwit are only digestable a few pages at a time. Any more than that, and we begin to see within them far too much of the things that define our awful movement and our terrifying moment.

[analytickle-lezdom-in-space]

Hey everyone, I’m about to say something very political about issues relating to gender identity. If you don’t want to read it, I understand, but before you decide to skip I’d like to ask you to consider this:

I understand that people come on to tumblr because they deal with all sorts of issues in the real world ranging from poverty to systemic discrimination to the vicious cycle created by the interaction of poverty and systemic discrimination, and some come to tumblr specifically to air out those issues with other like-minded people, but others come to tumblr to escape that and instead to think about nerd shit and/or pretty subs in ballgags. To an extent I feel this myself, I occasionally talk about social issues on this blog but I don’t make them the focus because mostly I wanna think about other things. And if you really don’t wanna read posts like this, I understand, you need to focus on self-care.

But if you’re at all willing, I’d like to ask you to stay and read this, and if you’re cis, even if you’re a little uncomfortable reading about heavy social issues on tumblr, I’d like to ask you, not demand, just politely ask you, to work through that discomfort right now because what I’m about to say is important for cis people to know. This won’t be very long, and after it’s done you can, and should, go back to distracting yourself from the horrible, awful social issues you’re dealing with yourself in this corrupt, wildly unequal crapshoot of a society, and if you really don’t wanna see it, I’ve tagged it so you can block it. But again, please don’t unless you really feel you need to.

Okay, here we go

I don’t generally like to try and make things an oppression olympics or go “this marginalized group is more oppressed than this marginalized group”, we’re all suffering together. But the inescapable fact is no matter what I’d like to do, the benefits of the last few decades of gains in LGBT rights have been primarily felt by cis gay and lesbian people. Everyone else has been falling behind them, especially trans/nb people, and of course extra especially trans/nb people of color. Why does our society have so much trouble with trans rights? I think there’s a few reasons, but I’d like to highlight one in particular:

Unlike many marginalized groups in and out of the LGBT community, cis society fundamentally does not understand, on a very basic level, what we actually are. Even the most tolerant, well meaning, well-intentioned cis people, who understand in an abstract way that we are the genders we identify as and try to treat us that way, don’t get some fairly basic things about us, in a way that affects how they go about trying to support us. And to some degree, there are things you’ll never really understand without being trans, but there are still some very basic things cis people can understand, and do understand when trans people have the time and patience to explain to them, but otherwise are completely unaware of. I’m gonna tell you all those things, so if you wanna signal boost this, please reblog it:

First of all, you need to understand that gender is at its very base, a social construct. No more, no less. It has no meaning other than what we as a society assign it. It’s not about sex. Sex itself does not follow the binary idea of gender we have. Some people are born with XY chromosomes but completely feminine bodies. Some people are intersex and their genitals and larger bodies do not fully fit into either conventional sex category, like they have a clit and a pair of partially developed testicles, or breasts and a penis, etc. some people have hormone imbalances caused at birth or by accidents later in life. If gender was about sex, there would be dozens of genders, and the fact that intersex people are still labeled at birth as either male or female should tell you without a shadow of doubt that gender as society defines it isn’t about your body, it’s about what gender your doctor and parents decided you were when you were born. And don’t try to bring non-human life into this, there are animals with no sexes at all, animals that are all one sex and reproduce by cloning, animals who change sex when there aren’t enough breeding options, animals who change sex based on the weather, and more, crazier shit.

And furthermore, most of what we associate with gender has not a goddamn thing to do with sex. What colors are girly. What job positions are masculine. Whether real men show their emotions and show vulnerability. How men and women dress and are expected to cultivate their bodies. And many smaller, subtler things, some so small they’re impossible to consciously notice or define, but are always there.

This is what gender is, and every culture, era, religion, and society has defined it differently. When high heels were invented it was a form of men’s fashion. Men all over the world wear skirts. Women are seen as emotional and temperamental in some countries, and cold and stoic in others. Some cultures like ours have 2 genders. Some have many, the peoples of the First Nation for example. Gender is a construct with no inherent meaning, this is a basic fact of psychology, sociology, biology, philosophy and logic. If you disagree with this indisputable fact, you are wrong. Totally and completely, and you’d be able to see that if you could see beyond your indoctrination with western dogma. I don’t care about your high school level understanding of biology, or your westernized interpretation of a non-western holy book only considered holy by a select fraction of the human population. (And for the record I’m religious and this is not meant to denigrate the role of religion in your life or make fun of religious believers, but you have to realize how much of your understanding of religion comes from cultural practice and not genuine spirituality. And if you’re reading this and you’re not religious, that’s also cool and other people’s religious beliefs should not be allowed to determine your gender identity for you). Gender is a human invention made to try and impose order on a chaotic world even where no such order actually exists.

Now, you may be asking then, if gender is simply a construct, then why does gender identity matter at all, and what does it mean for someone like me to say they identify as a woman? Well, that’s an understandable question, but the short answer is social constructs may be fake but they still hold power. Money is a social construct, it’s only worth what we agree it to mean, but that doesn’t mean poverty is meaningless. If you don’t have the money, then societal norms and constructed rules will make you suffer for it. And gender is the same. Societal norms like gender are deeply ingrained into the psyche of everyone living in a society, and they cannot be just ignored. Human beings need validation from other people and from society, and when we feel at odds with the gender construct society has given us and the things that come with it, that causes dysphoria.

In other words, society is telling us we’re one thing, our brain is telling us that we’re something else. Something that doesn’t fit with the societal idea of the gender we’ve been assigned. That causes us to have a hard time being confident in our own identity, and a hard time trusting our own reality, and the brain starts to wonder if it’s somehow wrong about itself. Thus, it becomes difficult to retain our sense of self. The only antidote is to find a different societally constructed identity, or an identity that specifically rejects those societal constructs, and identify with that. And we can’t just identify with that to ourselves, we need other people to validate that identity. We need other people to treat us as the gender identity we see ourselves as, because society is fundamentally not fulfilling our need for validation, and we need the people around us to substitute for that.

That’s why some of us get surgery and hormone treatments. It’s not actually because our body is “male” or “female”, it’s because that body reminds us of the identity society has assigned us that we don’t want. Our own bodies cause us dysphoria, and that can lead to crippling panic attacks and dissociation from reality, and that’s why some of us need HRT and surgery. I don’t need it, I’m comfortable in the body I have and it doesn’t remind me society expects me to be a man, and many trans people don’t need to change their bodies for their comfort, but many do, and that’s why.

That’s also why we bring up being transgender so much, we need validation from other people and constant reminders that they see us as the people who we know ourselves to be, because again, society is not fulfilling our basic needs for validation. It’s the same reason insecure people constantly need attention and validation, they’ve been starved of it, but much, much worse. It’s not just about the fact that we won’t be silent about our oppression, although that is another reason, and it sure as hell isn't because we “want to be special”, it’s because we have unmet psychological needs that make it difficult to find the energy to get out of bed each day and make some trans people contemplate suicide.

So, in summary, to be trans is to find an identity, based on the social constructs we’re stuck living with, that represents us better than the social constructs we were arbitrarily assigned before we could choose for ourselves. I am not a woman because I have some inherent womanliness to me, there is no such thing as inherent womanliness, but the social construct of womanhood suits me much better than the social construct of manhood and there is no better or more concrete way to define gender than what we personally feel comfortable with, for reasons I stated earlier, thus, I identify as a woman.

And that does NOT mean being trans is a choice, the fact that I was given an identity by society that doesn’t match how I’ve naturally developed to see myself is not my choice, and it’s not like I have other alternatives on how to deal with it. Don’t let TERFs and religious nuts with no understanding of psychology tell you otherwise, there IS ABSOLUTELY NO ALTERNATIVE WAY FOR A TRANS PERSON TO FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH THEMSELVES OTHER THAN IDENTIFYING WITH THE GENDER IDENTITY THEY FEEL MOST AT HOME WITH AND OTHER PEOPLE VALIDATING THAT IDENTITY. NONE. NADA. ZIP. Anyone who tells you otherwise wants to eradicate trans people. I’m not exaggerating or lying, that is what people who argue otherwise want with absolutely no exceptions. Me identifying as a woman is not a choice, it is finding the only way I can be happy with myself and have the strength to get through the day, and accepting that. It’s not a choice if there are no other alternatives.

And on that note, when your trans friends need constant validation of their identities and need you to just not argue with them and roll with what makes them comfortable? DO THAT. I don’t care if it feels like you’re discussing the same subject a lot. Your mild inconvenience does not outweigh their need for basic emotional support through one of the most difficult situations it’s possible for a human being to be in. And I guarantee you willingly mildly inconvenience yourself for the sake of friends all the time in circumstances that aren’t about gender identity. Why is this different? Just accept that they’re being constantly starved of validation through no fault of their own and give them as much validation as you can. If you think that trans people talking about their identities is a burden to you, either you don’t fully understand what they’re going through, or you’re just a bad friend.

This may also explain some things you may be wondering about why some trans people don’t make an effort to act or dress in the way we traditionally think of when it comes to the gender they identity as, and what it means to be nonbinary, and how one can be a nonbinary lesbian when lesbianism generally means “women being into women” and nonbinary people don’t identify as women: it’s because these are not actually hard rules, just vague social constructs we’re finding a way to be comfortable in. I have a beard, and I still go by a “male-sounding” name, and I dress very masculinely, and still identify as a woman, because number one, there are cis woman who do all these things too, cis women can have facial hair, masculine sounding names, and butch styles of dress, and you never question it in the same way, and number two, my name, facial hair, and style of dress are not the things about the social construct of maleness that makes me uncomfortable so I’d rather just stop identifying as male but keep them. Likewise, a nonbinary person can’t identify with the social constructs of maleness or femaleness and thus identities as something else that they feel better about. And since gender is a social construct, lesbianism itself is too, and one that has developed over the years quite independently from womanhood with its own culture and it’s own expectations, so some people identify with the social construct of lesbianism, but not the social construct of womanhood, thus they’re nonbinary lesbians. It’s all about finding the way to identity and express yourself that matches who you feel you really are, and none of these terms have exact meanings, so they mean for you whatever helps you be comfortable with your own identity.

So with all that in mind, my closing note is this: things like this are very basic aspects of what it means to be trans, and if you can’t understand them, you cannot truly understand what we are and what it means to respect us. Please, read this, make sure you understand it, and then spread the word. People understanding this more broadly will do a world of good for all of us trans and nb people.

[whiningaboutyuri]

Beware the Guise of Logic: Valentia’s Celica

One thing I’ve come to learn as I get older is that brilliant arguments can be made for ignorant points. For the better part of two months and two playthroughs, I’ve been desperately trying to suss out my feelings of Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadow of Valentia. I could barely stomach to play it, but for reasons that have eluded me for a very long time. I’ve already engaged in debate in regards to the game’s take on gender being fraught with destructive stereotypes and a largely inferior story even to its bare-bones original. And I think the most shocking thing is that most people agree that, at the very least to some extent, the game does have conspicuous sexist elements in its execution, but still defend parts or whole of the game as either not “inherently” sexist, or having enough merits to be excused by its own logic. Even more upsettingly, there are accusations that sussing out these elements are somehow the more backwards and destructive attitude to have.

So I have taken it upon myself to make an actual, honest-to-goodness, two-part essay making a case that this game is built on a narrative with intention of enforcing an outdated, gender-essentialist view of sexism--which by no means makes a more liberal interpretation incorrect, merely working against the game’s original authorial intent. To a lesser extent, this is also an attempt to contextualize a disparate narrative and demonstrate that its logic is so entrenched in a real-world sexism that it simply cannot survive on its own without it. Which is a big fancy way of saying “a two-part essay to better explain the points I yelled at in a previous article, and to offer some counter argument to a lot of defenses of the narrative”.

Today’s essay is going to observe how Celica’s route suffers for the game’s sexist internal narrative. No, I am not writing a big slander against Celica’s character or deeming it ‘inferior’ to her previous counterpart. But there is a lot to be said about the handling of both.

Before we get started, let’s get some term definitions out of the way, to prevent us from going at each other’s throat. When I say sexism, I mean the stereotyping and/or presumption of inherent characteristics, often negative, based solely on someone’s sex and/or gender identity; especially the implicit ideal that on a binary of masculine and feminine, the latter is superior to the former. Long story short, “the shit we do between two same people because one is a boy and one is a girl”. Also important to note that, while it is very true that men are harmed by sexism, sexism works on a principle of the feminine inferiority to the masculine, and thus women tend to be disproportionately negatively affected by its thinking. Fair? Good. Let’s move on.

Another thing to understand is principles and presence of a sexist narrative DOES NOT equate to an inherent diminished value of any kind to female or feminine participants within it. Obviously, there’s a damn high comorbidity to grossly sexist writing and poorly executed female characters, but the latter is often a symptom, not the part of the disease. Does a bad or poorly executed female character a sexist narrative make? Not necessarily, but it can serve as a strong indicator since, as previously stated, women are disproportionately affected by sexist writing.

So now we’ve got that all out of the way, LET’S GET ARGUING!

POINT A: SHADOWS OF VALENTIA WAS BUILT WITH A GENDER BINARY IN MIND

One would be hard pressed to have a game that opens on such a stronger note of opposites that are doomed to conflict. We lay our scene on the continent of Valentia, divided in half on its border between the peaceful and non-aggressive Zofia, and the barren and war-torn Rigel. These two nations are ruled by two different dragon deities, with Zofia ruled by the kind and gentle Mila, and Rigel ruled by the cruel and disciplined Duma. Take a guess if they are represented by two different genders and which one is which.

It cannot easily be overstated that sex conflict is a critical element to this game’s thematic. In a Degenki interview with the game’s director, Toshiyuki Kusakihara, Kusakihara says thus about his interpretation of Fire Emblem Gaiden, the original game to be remade by his team:

“Gaiden’s central theme was always about a confrontation between the opposites, such as “strength/love” and “men/women.” Alm pursues a path to power, Celica stands on the side of love.”

Co-director Kenshi Nakashi goes on further to say:

Duma and Mila are the very representations of power and love. This battle isn’t really portrayed in the original Gaiden’s story, though...We wanted to make this story known to all players of the game, so many scenes were added for this purpose.

Before we know the in-game conflict in the timeline, the two nations waste no time being binarized and essentialized, with gender being no small thematic consequence. Despite being divine beings, Duma and Mila are given clear gender, and they are symbolized by a presumed, inherent quality of said gender expression. The symbol of manhood is strength, power, and military dominance, with its citizens warlike and devoid of compassion. The country symbolized by womanhood is peaceful, spiritual, without conflict, and thus rendering its residence childlike and self-indulgent.

And one more time for those in the back, this essentialization is not subtle. You play two stories, with each country’s represented by one who identifies with their corresponding deity's gender. The offical art has Alm holding a sword and looking forward, with Celica’s eyes closed and silently praying. The tagline at the back of the box says “THE WAY OF THE SWORD OR THE WAY OF THE HEART”.

Gender, or more specifically, a binary, essentialist view of gender takes center stage of this narrative. Femininity is not strength, and masculinity is not compassion. And, notably, these two concepts are immediately set in conflict with each other. These two caricatures of nations are pitched at the opposite ends of a steep divide, symbolized in game as a divine accord that cannot be crossed for the existential safety of the respective nations. Crossing it, indeed, was the beginning of all the woes that were to befall this game.

In a real world context, this is a logic that simply cannot exist. Putting aside that the inherent differences between men and women are notoriously debatable and have cross-culturally and cross-temporarily have been demonstrated as variable, the human experience is not so easily divided in such lofty concepts of “power” and “love”. But is a logic that we must adopt, despite our real world context and sensibilities, in order to accept the story. A suspension of disbelief is no strange, perhaps even a necessity, for the immersion into a work, but it is very telling, and very troubling, that this is the one that we must accept first and foremost.

POINT B: AS CONSEQUENCE OF THIS BINARY, CELICA’S STORY IS DOMINATED BY A NARROW VIEW OF HER WOMANHOOD

The female protagonist of the story, and the implicit representative of womanhood, is Celica, a kind young priestess living in a priory. Despite being an inheritor of the throne, she chooses a life rejecting the privilege of her heritage to better help her people. She is, unquestionably, a deeply maternal figure to be respected, admired, and loved. And within the priory, for very good reason, she absolutely is. However, when her homeland is in danger of a drought caused by a sudden disappearance of its patron goddess, Mila, she chooses to venture out and discover the truth of why Mila has disappeared, and to restore her blessings to the nation.

It’s a noble cause, and should, by all accounts, have made for a story of a bright young woman’s attempt to save her country by her own agency and own choices. And a story that rejects the essentialism of leadership, and finds empowerment in kindness, altruism, and peace is by no stretch a fantasy considering her character establishment. But the story is ‘the way of the sword versus the way of the heart’. Celica may care, but not in action. She may love, but it must be of a passive, impotent love that shatters in the logic of her world.

The first and foremost snarl is the fate of Celica’s motivation, which is to find Mila and restore her blessings. In the original Gaiden, the goddess Mila never appeared in story; she was sealed away in a magic, and remains such without any time to be shown on screen. In Echoes, it’s taken a step further in showing Mila being removed from the story by main antagonist of Alm’s story, King Rudolf. While the female god’s own lack of agency and easily incapacitation by a male antagonist, especially upon a later reveal that she was planning her own death and depowerment for the better of society, does leave a lot of iffy subtext, it’s still a reasonable plot twist, and leaves the locking into the final, actual conflict--that Celica needs to confront Duma to save Mila and restore her country. Or at least, that’s what it should be.

But from that point forward, Celica’s determination begins to notably wane. After the twist, she is tormented by Jedah, a disciple of Duma who convinces her that the only way to stop Duma’s assault is to sacrifice her soul to the dark god in order to ease his descent into madness. Celica is frequently confronted with how pointlessly foolish a plan this would be, both by herself and (to be discussed later) the increasing skepticism of her notably male companions.

One very interesting thing of note is the development of Celica’s lock-in motivation--not to contront Mila, but to assist the male counter protagonist, Alm. Celica and Alm did meet briefly and catastrophically before Celica discovered the disappearance of Mila. Upon seeing Alm’s decision to march on in a military campaign after liberating the accosted capital of Zofia, she inferred that his intent was to further break divine accord and invade Rigel, possibly in conquest to become emperor himself (to be fair--she is 100% right). So it’s very interesting that, when she is approached to sacrifice herself to Duma, the following (emphasis mine) is what begins to give her second thoughts.

Jedah: Her soul, as Duma’s, is host to the madness shared by all dragonkind. Duma will grow stronger till that power brings his ruin—and Rigel’s alongside it. It is no different from how Zofia now rots in Mila’s absence.

Celica: Her absence by your hand! And what is this madness you speak of? Do you truly claim that Mila and Duma are fated to destroy themselves?

Jedah: I do. Which is exactly why your soul is required. It is rare and precious—born of Zofian royal blood and marked by the Brand. Such a soul could set Duma’s path to rights and ensure his survival. And with Mila restored to her place, both our peoples might be saved. As for the boy, Alm—if you do this, he could lay down his arms.

Celica: *gasp*

Until this point, Celica’s motivation was unquestionably that of her country and her people. But this marks the first, but far the only, indication that her ‘true’ motivation is Alm; and more specifically, her relationship with Alm.   

In fact, it becomes painfully clear that, even by her own admission, Celica’s motivation is transformed from “power”, the desire to protect and liberate her country, to “love”--her feelings for Alm. Is this troubling? Not necessarily; being motivated by loved ones is far from gender exclusive. But there is something troubling and damning by the direction Celica’s motivation goes. Compare her opening speech at the beginning of the game, where she begs the master of the priory to give his blessings for a mission to save her country…

Nomah: You’re certain I can’t dissuade you from going, little one?

Celica: I must, Nomah. It’s been years since crops last grew on Zofian soil. Our barren fields have fallen victim to Terrors, the Rigelians have invaded… I fear some ill must have befallen the Earth Mother, Mila. I can’t help but feel this is all related. I know it.

Nomah: Hmm… Perhaps it is, at that. I’ll not deny that the kingdom of Zofia faces her darkest hour in some time. More sick and hungry come to the priory’s door each day seeking aid…

Celica: The key to everything lies with Mila. I shall travel to her temple and learn what’s become of her.

Nomah: Yes, but little one… You know well the reason Mycen placed you in my care. With the king’s passing, you are the last living member of the Zofian royal line. There are many who would seek to use you. Or even end you. That threat is greater now than ever. Yet you would still leave, knowing that?

Celica: I must. Even if my decision betrays the care you and Mycen have shown me. You’ve done so much to keep me safe, and it breaks my heart to pain you. But what calls me to do this goes beyond my heart. I can only ask your forgiveness, Nomah.

To her conversation with Alm in the final act, before she agrees to the sacrifice.

Celica: You don’t understand, Alm. I came here knowing what awaited me.

Alm: What?

Celica: Back on the island, I had a dream. A dream where something terrible happened to you. So I decided to petition Mila for the strength to protect you. Yet for all my travels, you’ve still faced terrible danger. And you were even forced to end your own father’s life. …I’d seen it all. I knew it was coming, but I couldn’t change a thing. I failed to keep you safe, Alm!

Alm: That’s not… Celica, none of what’s happened is your fault. You’re not to blame for any of it!

Celica: But I won’t lose you… I won’t let any of you die! I don’t want you to fight Duma. I don’t want anyone to be hurt or killed. That’s my only desire in this life.

Alm: Celica!

Celica: And this is the only means I have of ensuring that comes to pass. So again, Alm—I’m sorry. I wish it could have been different. I always have. I wish I could have gone home to the village and lived there with you.

There was no reason that Celica’s motivation could not have been both her country and Alm. But by the game’s logic of power/love and man/woman, such would have been disruptive. Alm’s path, inevitably, drove him to violence in power, and Celica’s to self-sacrifice. By an external logic, this is absurd; Celica was already willing to defy authority to save Mila. She is a competent fighter, and rallied a group of soldiers to her cause. She cared about her army, and inspired them. But when push came to shove she could only engage proactively for so long. Her modus operandi goes from defying authority and venturing out to the world, to abandoning her army and her country in blind self-sacrifice. But to the game’s logic, one based on a sexist presumption that men and women are opposites, never to be crossed, and never to be reconciled, this is not idiosyncratic or a glaring farce, but a perfectly logical outcome.

It’s hard to parse where this change came from in Celica’s attitute. It is laced almost deviously into a few tells for the audience to pick up on. Celica goes from leading the charge without fear to apologizing for every action she’s taking. Her ‘flaw’ of keeping her emotions to herself develops when plot convenient and is used as a rough justification for her own leaps of motivation.

And her story is only further complicated by its execution...

POINT C: CELICA DOES NOT COMPLETE HER CHARACTER ARC WITHOUT THE AID OF OTHER MEN, ESPECIALLY ALM

It’s been argued that, despite being a roundabout path, Celica ultimately completes her mission of rescuing Alm and saving her country. I fundamentally disagree, because while it’s true that Alm is saved and Celica’s country is saved, it is by far and away not by her own hand.

If we consider her motivation is to save her country, while it is accomplished, it is not accomplished by her volition. She made great strides, and did many heroic things that benefited the country, but in the end, she never saved Mila nor did she liberate her country. By the final act, she has been manipulated by Jedah, her army has been condemned to die at the hands of terrors, and her hard work is rendered yet another crisis for Alm and his army to resolve.

Neither did Celica save Alm. Indeed, while she was willing to sacrifice her life and her dream to save Alm from being killed, she agreed to the manipulations of one who she knew from the start was untrustworthy, and thus could not save Alm without Alm’s participation of saving her first. Indeed, the last time Celica is an agency of her own in the story, it’s screaming for Alm to kill her because of how badly she failed in trying to save him.

And this cannot be overstated: this scene was not in the original game. Yes, Celica was trapped in Duma tower, but when you met her, she had her army in full swing, and was fighting for herself until Alm came to rescue her. When Celica meets Alm in Echoes, she’s kept apart in a cage, willing marching off to do something that she and Alm and her own army and the audience knows is completely and utterly foolish, while Jedah is treating her defection as another failure of Alm’s for not being able to save her. By the end of the game, not even Celica’s mistakes are her own.

Another thing that cannot be overstated is that this is not limited by endgame. Another completely added addition to the game is Celica’s brother, Conrad, who travels incognito and rushes in to save her for frequently contrived reasons. And yes, he does slap her when he learns that she’s planning to sacrifice herself to Duma (again why could he not just talk to her like a reasonable goddamn human being?).

Beyond that, there’s the inflated weight of Saber, the adult male traveling companion of Celica’s groups. He was literally nothing but a background drunk in the original game. In Echoes, he becomes Celica’s right hand and “mature” foil to her idealistic and sheltered ways. And sure, he may be loyal to her, but he’s far from respectful--calling her ‘lass’ instead of her name (hey, and it’s not like women have to deal with that stuff in the workplace, right?) and generally insistently inserting his own opinion into her decisions. It’s even worth noting that the game explicitly blocks Celica from going out to sea unless she hires him, despite the fact that she a warrior priestess who can uses swords and magic. Compare this to Alm, who has to go against his father figure in order to start his story (and continuously defies a characters acting as consul).

There’s a lot of internal justification to why Celica can be talked down by these other characters. A lot of it comes down to the game’s attitude of her being sheltered, or citing the every-justifying flaw of ‘hiding her emotions’. But there is more than a few notes of gendered hypocrisy, even in the text. When Conrad obfuscates a grand design in what he thinks is best for his country's interests, it’s portrayed as heroic. When Celica does it, it’s portrayed as selfish. When Saber can be flippant and weary, it’s justified because he’s a seasoned mercenary with world experience. When Celica is short, people immediately question it, like her fight with Alm, or when she gets upset at Conrad for slapping her.

But I think the most telling thing is not just that Celica’s right hands, sound boards, and foils are all men, but which men they are. Celica has a team of people who love her and respect her at the priory. Mae, Boey, and Genny all joined her because the loved and trusted her, and believed in what she can do. But the game conspicuously doesn’t let them be Celica’s confidants, and even shoes them out at plot critical moments to give room for these respectable male outsiders to save their peace and, more than once, save her instead of her own team.

POINT D: CELICA’S NARRATIVE IS NOT RECONCILED WITH ALM’S--IT’S ABSORBED BY HIM

At the end of the story, Celica’s birthright means nothing. Her desire to save her country means nothing. Her army has been absorbed into Alm’s, and she herself is married to him. She is not a queen because she was born of Zofian royalty, or because she rallied an army. She is not a queen because she gave her all to save her people. Because as the very story developed, her dream was to be accosted, and her story in arrested development. In the end, she is queen because she is Alm’s bride.

But Alm got to see the Valentia he wanted to create. He got to see a world without gods, and got to continue an empire of his own two hands. Alm accomplished everything he set out to do, and far more. But despite the divine accord of opposites being broken, it feels like nothing is different. In essence, the answer to the riddle of man and woman is the implication that there was no need for the woman to exist.

In the original game, Celica was an agent in the final battle. She was tricked by Duma, but in the final fight, she was allowed to hold back an army by her own hands to buy Alm the time he needed to find the key to Duma’s defeat. She made a mistake, but she was allowed, by her own hands, to redeem herself and take action to protect and aid the course of history. So for all it’s sexist origins, even in the original game, Celica was allowed to have something in the end. For the story to work, she was needed, or else Alm would have been trapped and unable to accomplish his mission.

Celica’s route could not exist without Alm. She would have lost what the game would deem her development and her motivation. Alm’s story could and did exist without Celica. Alm would have still followed his path that would inevitably lead him to Duma with no consequence. He would have been the hero who was the chosen one, who stopped the bad guys, who toppled the evil empire, who slew the god, and who saved the world. The only thing he’d be missing is a bride.

Very rarely will you run into a story with a strict-text statement along the lines of “women are less than men”. But like so many social ills, sexism has a language all it’s own, one that gets none-too-lost in translation. The game isn’t saying that women can’t be leaders, but the remake made sure Celica’s attempt to be one resulted in her death. The game isn’t saying women need to be saved, but Celica’s choices always seem to land her into trouble that she can’t get herself out of. The game isn’t saying that women can’t fight, or women can’t make good decisions, or that women are weaker, but it makes sure there’s a steady stream of plot contrivance for Celica to trip on, as well as a team of competent men to catch her fall. It’s not saying that a woman’s place is to be a wife, it just happens to be Celica’s happy ending. And it’s not saying that women are inferior, it just made a game where men are pitted against women, and let only one of our two protagonists hold the sword to save the world. And by the game’s logic, that makes perfect sense.

Anyway, this is only step one in sitting down and getting mad at a game none of my readers have played. As I said, men too are hurt from sexism too. For instance, it gives them stories that are laughably stupid and teeth achingly boring.

See yuns next time.

[queernuck]

Public Masturbation: National Anthems and Patriotic Displays as Related to Desiring-Machines

In the same week, at two different moments, in two different arenas, the National Anthem has been a part of specifically masturbatory moments in which the anthem was figured as a structure of sacredness, in specific response to the way that NFL players have protested during it. The former was in Buffalo, when a 90-year-old veteran stood for the National Anthem. The latter came in Indianapolis, before the Colts played the 49ers, the team that Colin Kaepernick played for when protesting in the first place. The two share a similar character in that they specifically serve as objects to stir certain characteristic desiring-machines within neoliberal ideology, to both extend neoliberal subjectivity and to disguise the fascist character of the actions at hand. 

The former, a 90-year-old veteran choosing to stand during the anthem at a Buffalo Sabres game, the season opener no less, relied on that choice being specifically the object of a certain degree of attention, relying upon her age and her disabilities in order to make a violent statement in itself. Marian Morreale joined the Coast Guard in 1943, her enlistment delayed by a father unwilling to sign for her early enlistment papers owing to his own injuries when fighting in France during World War I. She is talked about as an enormous patriot, and discusses her disagreement with the way in which NFL players have protested. Despite using and disagreeing with an intentionally sanitized version of what Donald Trump said about NFL players, she said that she still disagrees with the protest, thinking the anthem to be beyond protest, beyond reproach. Previously, she had been asked by the Sabres to stand at the 2016 home opener, after standing for the Anthem had become a specifically pertinent discursive issue. Kaepernick was protesting police brutality, but the focus going to the anthem, to the veterans supposedly disrespected by the action, was alluded to by her son’s discussion of raising the issue to the Sabres, who he said had been impressively forward in “honoring” veterans. While she was unable to stand for the anthem in 2016, and had to work for three months to be ready to do it in 2017, she still was able to. She had her left leg amputated in 2016 due to poor circulation, and had even more trouble standing than she had previously, but still stood. And through all of this, she presented a certain sort of signifying power, one codified through white supremacist violence.

That she is old, that she is disabled, that she is a woman, that she is at a hockey game, and most of all that she is white all plays into how she is approached. The act of distancing her protest from police brutality, instead making it about signifying her patriotism, and moreover the patriotism of being a veteran as recognized by arbitrating structures of imperialism, indicates her as part of an act of ideological figuration where she is in fact far more than herself, her body signifying numerous subjectivities as part of imperialist violence. Her whiteness, her womanhood, have a combinatory property that specifically contrasts against the blackness of NFL players, their masculinity and moreover the imposed-masculinity of antiblack and colonial structures of gendering bodies through the arbitration of race. The contrasting of hockey and football is by no means new, especially given the way in which the NHL is stunningly white in comparison to the NFL. And that she is elderly, that she can be named within a history that harkens back to the supposed antifascist character of American intervention in World War II (an intervention that had in fact been slowed by and later shaped by American anticommunist and indeed, fascist, ideology) contrasts with the way in which the youth of the NFL is linked to being flighty, unserious, unable to meaningfully understand a violent, imperialist nation. That the way in which she can be used to reflect other veterans, veterans who have suffered injuries in combat, is not accidental on the part of the processes of signification at hand: while she would have been an enormously important symbol before having an amputation, that she can be described as standing on one leg specifically goes even further in the attempt to undercut protests during the anthem. 

Previously, American imperialism relied upon the safe return of its soldiers in order to justify its actions: the ways in which the Vietnam War marked a certain shift in American attitudes toward combat as well as a shift in American ideology around the use of force in the form of bombings, in air campaigns more generally, is part of the means by which the figure of the injured soldier was removed from the American process of ideation. Indeed, for quite some time in the 80s and 90s, it was emphasized that the Army was for a process of bettering the body, the self, such that it became far more focused upon paying for college than paying the wages of imperialism. Occupations that resulted in few American deaths, only possible through overwhelming force on the part of the American military, culminating in the non-war of the Gulf War, a bombing campaign with a touch of adventurism for a few Soldiers and Marines, the occasional moment of combat part of assembling a show for the American people. The war was a series of non-events, part of a series that defined the American military during the 90s. But the collapsing of the Absolute Event on 9/11 into Afghanistan, Iraq, bloody occupations that were still far more violent for those occupied, effective acts of sanitizing policies that mimicked and echoed genocidal ideology in excusing their victims, one found a new body of the soldier that was broken on the wheel of the chariot, that had to be articulated yet again. And so, one finds the creation of charities for veterans focused upon the physical body, upon the body-as-mind, upon the body-as-soul in order to account for the massively present experience of PTSD within soldiers fighting irregular forces, faced with attacks of the sort that the Gulf War never could have prepared them for, a war with no lines and no meaningful enemy. That American body armor, armored vehicles, equipment, medical methodologies improved over the time from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, that the uneven character of combat results in ambushes, mortar attacks on bases that mix infantry with support in a way that defies the ideology of “front lines” within American war, the prevalence of car bombs and IEDs, all leads to a need to recapture the obvious violence that is seen when soldiers return. Thus, these injuries are rearticulated within a vocabulary that often overlaps quite literally with various fetishes, but is characteristically that of the process of fetishization. This is part of reclaiming veterans as bodies so they are unable to speak for themselves, unable to discuss disability or the violence of empire, instead empty casualties, undefined bodies that are only given organs so they may be removed.  

That attempts to raise patriotism as a sort of heroism, as a heroic value, have relied so often on a process of conspicuously disfiguring veterans, of creating a previously whole body that is then lost as if this change, this becoming-process was in isolation, is a specific sort of process where the topography of the body is altered in a fundamental process of change such that it reinforces conceptualization of the body as lesser if not “whole” in the way that such terms are typically reckoned. A body cannot be a whole unto itself, but rather must be judged against a standard, the same sorts of standards found in restricting surgeries based on sex so that the same medical resources are freely given under the guise of “cosmetic” surgery but derided as unnatural when given to alleviate dysphoria, in creating a hyperrealism of the body such that the “natural” only exists as another goal to be attained through concerted, specific training and even the aforementioned surgical alteration. It fundamentally concentrates on a sort of fetishized process of mutilation, fetishizes the structure by which this mutilation is rendered and uses that to drive a certain libidinal outpouring on the part of capitalist violence. All of this, in order to counter a protest of fists and knees.

That these protests are met with derision is hardly surprising, but the extent to which they are derided is another process entirely. Vice President Mike Pence, in attending and then leaving the Week 5 matchup between the Colts and the 49ers, was specifically conducting a sort of action wherein he could offer up his own son as a sort of sacrifice, invoke his son as an active-duty soldier and through the process of leaving, ensure that the overcoding upon protesting during the anthem that had been done by neoliberal appropriations of the protest was codified even further. Kaepernick’s fundamental protest lied in the opposition between the supposed-beliefs implied by the Anthem, and the actual lived experience of those facing police brutality, specifically police brutality of an antiblack character but also more generally the violence of police as colonial occupiers. However, that American signification of patriotism, of the nation, specifically relies upon seeing the unity of police, of soldiers, of reactionaries under the flag as part of a certain ideological affinity beyond the practical, fascist necessities of such allegiances is in turn necessary in order to make sense of the opposition to these protests. At once, one denies that there is anything to protest while claiming that the protest cannot be lodged in this way, that there is an inherently ill-founded nature to both the protest and the means thereof. 

Mike Pence is not remarkably naïve, and thus could have likely predicted that an NFL game in 2017 would see at least some of the players kneeling, given how common the gesture has become within the league. Attending a football game anyway and standing during the anthem could have stood on its own as a sort of message. But by resignifying the opposition to these protests previously voiced by Trump, by putting a far more acceptable action in correspondence with the one at hand, Trump redirects the flows of discourse surrounding these protests such that the oppositions become more clearly defined, and moreover defined in a manner that is specifically accepting to the sort of conduct one would find in generals, in soldiers, and indeed in veterans. The notion of a soldier as “active duty” and thus a representation of the military they are a member of, the means by which this is extended to tours of occupation far from any meaningful combat, the way in which drone operators and IT specialists are considered to be a meaningful participant in war in the same way that any other soldier is, requires a process of resignification that is completed in the actions of Vice President Pence. Thus, by appearing specifically in order to create his own absence, he engages in a sort of stimulation of flows of patriotism, a masturbatory beginning to the outpouring of fascist ideology. If the Vice President stands and all the players follow, there is a moment in which the process of overcoding through authority as a sort of power has a climactic moment, an ejaculation of overcoding processes that justify the ideological maneuverings of defending police brutality, of justifying the horrors of imperial control. If players protest, and he leaves, he is able instead to further arouse the fascist libido, to further fuel it and to start even more flows of libidinal power. In effect, Pence was able to take one alternative or another as part of a single act where satisfaction was assured: in short, a masturbatory action. 

The sexuality of vocabularies around these structures of desire, a self-centering and self-celebrating ideological process, is necessary and powerful specifically because of how it signifies the actions at hand in a manner that makes clear their relationship to the generation of desire: just as Deleuze and Guattari are unafraid to at least name the sexual origins and structures of desire in psychoanalytic concepts, further naming the sexualization realized in their expression is necessary. Rather than merely generating power, the masturbatory affectation signifies a certain kind of internalization, a self-reference, an exhibitionism that is realized through certain operations of the body and moreover in relation to other structures of desire and the expression thereof that are best realized in a vocabulary of the sexual.

[gcntlemanjack]

What do you think Anne’s relationship to womanhood is like, given that she’s a gender-nonconforming woman into other women? How much do you think it factors into her worldview and view of other people around her?

**WARNING SUPER LONG POST AHEAD**

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, actually—and keep in mind I’m by no means an expert here, these are just my own personal viewpoints coupled with not enough resources on Anne (I’ll hopefully be getting some books to read up on her soon).

I’ve had a lot of eye-opening discussions in my recent Play Reading course about women and gender expectations, specifically in plays that were written during time periods when women had far fewer rights than what we currently experience today (not that I’m saying we don’t need to progress more in society as a whole, because there’s still a lot of shit that needs to be fixed). We were reminded by my professor more than once that societal expectations and oppression played a major role in shaping how women were raised and taught to behave, and what the so-called “standard” was during each time period we found ourselves starting in. We read Medea, A Doll House, Machinal…all plays with a huge historical factor that defined each woman and how they were interpreted at the time. Our viewpoints of women today, having made huge strides since those plays were written, are radically skewed simply because we think about the female gender much differently. We vote, we wear pants, we hold political positions, we own houses and have children all on our own, and we can marry other women.

That’s something to keep in mind when thinking about Anne Lister and gender: their views of women were different than what we experience today. While people who identify as LGBTQ+ (though they had no terms for it then) have existed all throughout history, we know that for a very long time, it was a crime punishable by death. The fear of god was a powerful thing and it was widely preached that sharing a bed with a person of the same sex would send you straight to hell, so people who had an internal wish to do so had to keep it a secret or else suffer the consequences. Sexuality certainly wasn’t discussed or mentioned in intimate conversations, let alone casual ones. Women had their own strict roles in society as well: you were expected to be polite and gentle and marry into a decent (aka wealthy) family, producing heirs to keep land in the bloodline. Women sewed, sometimes read books, stayed in their houses, and had almost everything done for them besides walking; they were quiet and kept their opinions to themselves, lest they be put back in their place by a man who didn’t want to hear from the more “emotional” sex.

Speaking out or doing anything outside the norm was absolutely unheard of—it’s why Anne Lister is such an oddity. She knew right off the bat she was different and, somehow, moved past the societal block that dictated how she should have been and basically forged her own path moving forward. By her standards, for all intents and purposes, she is blurring the line between genders because of her actions and her own “god-given” nature: she is a landowner, collects her own rents, climbs walls, speaks openly about political matters, doesn’t care about what people think of her, and is interested in the same sex. To anyone of that era who heard a description like that, they would’ve believed they were referring to a man—it’s why I think her relationship with her own womanhood is so difficult, both in positive and negative ways. However, part of me believes she actually enjoys being a woman and defying those expectations—walking into a room knowing that you’re considered by many to be an enigmatic, mysterious presence has its own power to it that she truly relishes. Whatever rude, horrible things people say and gossip about her is something she’s learned to tune out from day one; it has no effect whatsoever on how she should view herself and it’s not stopping her from doing what she likes doing. In that respect, she’s incredibly self-aware and knows that words are just words: they’re not going to bar her moving forward.

As to her worldview, it’s very much worth saying again that she is so aware of things outside the societal box: because she’s already stepped outside what should be the confines of her own gender/nature, she can see the world around her much differently. Knowing that nothing is just black and white, knowing that just because it’s what’s expected doesn’t mean it’s necessary, is a very odd and freeing concept. She sees how other women behave and knows very well that they are capable of so much more—and on the flip side, she sees how men behave and know that they could be so much better. Her relationship with her own womanhood and her coming to terms with the fact that she’ll never be considered “normal” by the world she’s living in plays a massive factor on how she views others. She’s no longer seeing the person for what they are, but what they could be. It’s what she sees with Shibden, with her potential coal pit, with the Hardcastles’ son and sending him to school…life isn’t about the past or present, it’s about working towards a bigger and better future. It’s why she’s always moving, always working always planning…but that also has to do with blocking off her emotions and that’s a whole other can of worms.

Anyway, I really hope this makes sense and is at least semi-coherent. I’ll leave you with my last thought on the subject: for those days, she absolutely 100% would be considered gender non-conforming because she steered so far away from the societal expectations of that time period. By today’s standards (and in my eyes)? She’s a woman. Just a normal woman who’s going about her business and she just so happens to also be a lesbian, just like me. Either way, I think she inherently loves being a woman, and on top of that, she loves being a woman who loves other women.

[ievani-e]

I’m Genderqueer, I Guess!?

(AKA, My Experiences Accepting  — and Then Rejecting  — Womanhood)

Over three weeks ago now, on February 4th, I started out wanting to write a random little opinion piece about Disney’s Mulan. I had experienced a personal epiphany, and I wanted to revisit some of the ideas I had had about Mulan in the past, and contrast that with how I felt about it now. But, I realised, there was something else I had to write before I could. I had to write this random thing first, because this post informs that one.

So what this post is going to be about is this: I am genderqueer.

This is not a recent thing. I have not suddenly changed as a person. On the contrary, I’m exactly the same person I have always been. The only thing that has changed is the label itself: a label which, for reasons explained below, I have decided to don.

In order to properly tell you about where I am now, I have to tell you a bit about my past and give you an overview about my experiences growing up. I have to tell you how I first got to this place for my decision to come out as genderqueer/gender non-binary to make sense.

Some backstory, then: While I never directly suffered as a result of my gender identity the same way some others have, I did still struggle with gender dysphoria. I recognise that many trans and queer people have (or have had) it way worse than me, and that I am extremely fortunate to have avoided being bullied or ostracised due to my gender identity, having firmed up and sussed out what it even was only now. But, nevertheless, it was there the whole time.

Growing up, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was medically wrong with me: that the doctors must have made some kind of a mistake, and everyone around me treating me as a girl ever since was simply the result of carrying the error forward. I must have had a higher dosage of androgens in my system, or maybe an extra chromosome or something. I must have secretly been intersex and just hadn’t been diagnosed. Surely, something had to have been wrong. I couldn’t have been a girl, because any definition of or expectation for a “girl” I ever heard was something so different from what I was.

As a child, I grew up with a very narrow definition of what it meant to be a girl and what girls could and couldn’t be, because that was what had been spoon-fed to me by the media and the social norms I saw around me. These norms were perpetuated at school, by members of my family, and on TV — with TV standing in as a representative for the world at large. What I saw around me was: girls liked shopping and jewellery. Girls liked fashion and beauty. Girls liked horse-riding and ballet. Girls were vain. Girls were stupid. Girls only cared about wearing pretty pink dresses and chatting about boys. Girls were… <insert other extremely limited, restrictive, two-dimensional female stereotype here>. Those were the conclusions I had come to, based on what the world was showing me and teaching me.

And I wasn’t like that. I wasn’t like those girls. I was nuanced, I was complicated; I was intelligent and smart and not at all interested in love and romance, and I much preferred to hang out with boys like I was one of them than try to date any of them. I liked video games and horror films and reading thrillers and action adventures. I was no girly-girl: I was a tomboy, and proud of it.

Nothing I had heard about girls applied to me or appealed to me in any way. (I mean no offense if you are more feminine than I was and you do like that sort of stuff: it’s totally okay to be that way, too! It’s just that I, in particular, wasn’t).

I, the little weirdo that I felt like at the time, had never fit into the picture of the archetypal girl. So, I reasoned, the only logical conclusion was that I must not have been a girl. I must have been a boy. At least, I fit much more comfortably into the definition of a “boy” than I did the definition of a “girl”.

The problem there is, it’s easy to decide that certain characteristics associated with a certain group aren’t compatible with you when the characteristics given to you are so limited in the first place. There was a very specific mental image I had in my head of what a girl should be like, and there didn’t seem to be very much room for discussion. For boys, on the other hand, it seemed like they could be anything except that. That has a whole host of issues all its own — ones I won’t be getting into in depth now — where boys are discouraged from displaying feminine characteristics or emotionality, and this is just as harmful to boys as it is to discourage girls from displaying masculine characteristics. Double-standards do exist, and they are not okay.

But, putting aside that can of worms for now, boys generally had a lot more options than girls did. Of course I would be able to see more similarities between myself and boys when there was a wider range of options to choose from from the start.

Please permit me to be an optimist for a moment and say that I believe that, in an ideal world, all positive characteristics would be embraced and encouraged in children, regardless of whether they were typically “feminine” or “masculine”. We would love unconditionally, and judge each person for their own individual merits and demerits, rather than holding them up to some perceived notion of being “girl” enough or “boy” enough. Doing so is incredibly detrimental to us all because, when we start holding personhood up to some arbitrary standard, it becomes very easy to fall short. And that does not feel good for the many of us who don’t measure up.

But the real world and the ideal world are worlds apart, and social norms did, and do, exist. In any case, I certainly didn’t fit the cookie-cutter mould of what it “meant” to be a “girl”. And that felt like a failure on my part. I felt like I wasn’t enough; like I wasn’t good enough, just the way I was.

I grew up empathising and relating to men in a variety of ways, because in our culture and in our media it is predominantly male characters and male role models that we see. Female role models… Not so much. Female characters in books, video games and TV were few and far between to begin with, and those that did exist tended to be depicted as homemakers, love interests, sex objects and… nope, that’s about it. As a result, I didn’t know that there were more ways to be than just those.

That’s not to say that shows featuring more positive role models didn’t exist — it’s not even to say I didn’t happen across a few of them myself. Rather, it is that those positive influences weren’t numerous enough or prevalent enough for me, as a child, to notice; or to start to change my mind about women as a whole because of them. There weren’t enough positive portrayals of women for those portrayals of women to form part of a larger pattern; certainly not enough to challenge the already-existing patterns of behaviour that were being perpetuated far more prominently and pervasively. There were exceptions, but that’s just it: complex, interesting, autonomous female characters — women such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess — were exceptions; not the rule. (And I’ve never actually even seen Xena: Warrior Princess myself, so…)

One such example that comes to my own mind is that of Elizabeth Bennet, from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; which isn’t actually about pride and prejudice anywhere near as much as you might think. That, I read when I was 13? 14? 15? as part of my high school’s English Literature course, and Elizabeth Bennet was probably the closest thing I had to a positive female role model in literature at that time. Even then, Elizabeth, too, was posited as the exception, not the rule: even within the book’s own canon. You see, Elizabeth was exceptionally skilled, witty and intelligent; she was particularly sensible, reasonable (even if not open-minded…) and capable of critical thought. Unfortunately, the logical continuation of such a premise leads to the (incorrect) implication that other girls… usually… weren’t. So in the book, we see that Elizabeth wasn’t like other girls. Elizabeth was different.

So while I saw myself, to a certain extent, in Elizabeth, I also saw the same demonization of —  and the desire to distance oneself from — other women which I experienced first-hand, along with the desperation to distinguish oneself from the gender norms as if they were true; not as if they weren’t. The mistake Elizabeth and I both made was that, by thinking of ourselves as “special little snowflakes” and elevating our own status to that of the exception, not the rule, it came at the cost of failing to appreciate the basic humanity and the complexity of other women: women who may, in actuality, have had a lot more in common with us than we first gave them credit for.

Meanwhile, it seemed that (cis) men were allowed to be human, and experience (almost) the full range of thoughts and feelings and ways of life attached to that, in a way that women just weren’t. But, the issue of gender and representation in media is in fact another beast entirely. What is relevant to me throughout all of this is that this all culminated in the fact that I was someone who accepted men exactly the way they were, and could relate to men in a multitude of ways; but, before discovering feminism, despised anything even remotely “female” or “feminine” and discriminated against it, dismissing it or distancing myself from it for one reason or another, despite being female myself. What. The. Fuck.

Now I’m an adult and I know better, I know that the majority of my discomfort with “the feminine” stemmed primarily from good old-fashioned sexism, both internalised and otherwise. I know now that those beliefs — both the ones I had impressed upon me, and the ones I in turn applied to others — are inherently inaccurate and deeply flawed.

Problem solved, then: it’s not that my gender identity or expression was wrong. It’s not that I wasn’t woman enough, despite not feeling like I fit in all my life. It’s that sexism exists, and sexism is the cause for all of my dysphoria, hurray(!)

Or so I thought.

Sexism does still play a part, however, and that’s what has made coming to grips with my gender identity all the more difficult for me. Before I could discern what was really true about myself, first I had to disentangle what was really true about “what it means to be a female/ a woman/ feminine” from all the fallacies, generalisations and mistruths. When I came across feminism several years ago as a young tween and learnt about what it was, it opened a lot of doors for me in terms of coming to a greater understanding of myself and the world around me. Feminism has been a very positive influence in and on my life, and is responsible for a lot of personal growth. But also, in this particular instance, confused me even further. And that’s because, I started to think that… maybe the reason why I didn’t associate myself with the concept of “girlhood” or “womanhood” when I was younger was only because the concept I had in my head had been so completely wrong all along.

Before feminism, all that internalised sexism really did go a long way towards meaning I related more to men than I did to women; or at least, thought I did, because really, I never gave women much of a chance. I had to unlearn a lot of the preconceived notions I had grown up with, and learn everything all over again from the ground up.

The more I learned, the more I came to understand; but even so, the feeling of me being different or not quite fitting in anywhere didn’t go away. It’s just that I started to think that maybe it wasn’t me who was wrong: maybe it was the gender norms themselves that were wrong. It was the idea that “women are like X and men are like Y” — and that this is universally true for all women and all men — that was wrong.

What I had to learn was that women could be anything. And I mean; I already knew that about men — but women, too?! So women can think and act for themselves, and be incredibly intelligent and have their own thoughts and opinions and expertise on a subject, and have a vast array of interests?! It sounds stupid now, especially if you already know it to be true; but it was a much-needed life lesson for the twenty-year-old me. I was already fully accepting of a wide range of personalities and occupations for men, because I saw such a wide range of men and male characters/personalities in the media. It was already a given to me that men could be anything. And yes, there is that whole “…except be feminine” thing I mentioned before, and it is an issue; but I never personally bought into that. I had my fair share of male role models with a sensitive side or more typically feminine character traits as well. What was shocking to me is that I had to learn that the same thing I had always believed to be true of men was true of women, too.

What I had to learn, absurdly for the first time as an adult, was that not every woman had to like the same thing or have the same hobbies or interests. Not all women had to look or dress or behave the same way, or any way in particular at all. Not every woman had the same likes and interests as me: but — and here was the key difference — they could have done. There was, in reality, no logical reason why they couldn’t. I realised that girls can be tomboys and gamers and total nerds and still be girls.

If that was the case, then maybe my own experience and my own expression of self — despite being so far removed from that limited childhood notion of “girl” = “pretty, vain and vapid” — was nevertheless still valid within the wider, broader and more inclusive interpretation of “womanhood”. Maybe, even with my own complete and total lack of femininity and associating myself with more typically-masculine traits and behaviours, maybe I still was a woman: just that the category for womanhood was far broader than I had been led to believe. Perhaps I wasn’t a woman who had fit into those narrow definitions I had held as true in the past; but a woman nonetheless, who could still meet the definition of a woman if only I broadened those definitions up.

No two women are the same; and as such, it makes no sense to think that there is such thing as a universal expression of that womanhood. Every single woman is a unique individual, with her own skills and experiences and her own story to tell. Just because my own experience didn’t have much in common with the experiences of those around me, that didn’t necessarily mean that I wasn’t a woman, or couldn’t have been a woman, or that I was some abhorrent anomaly. I might have been three standard deviations away from the mean; but that doesn’t mean that I was not, nevertheless, a valid data point.

So I got confused.

The feminist within me wanted me to think of myself as, and identify as, a woman. After all, I had just truly come to understand and to appreciate that being a woman was okay. I had just come to understand that “femininity” existed on a wide spectrum, and even oddballs like me could be included within that. Besides, if I was a feminist and believed in women’s rights (as a targeted approach to believing in equal rights in general), then wasn’t I supposed to be proud to be a woman? Wasn’t I meant to further the cause and #represent? If being a woman was no inferior to being a man, and if women came in all shapes and shades and were allowed to claim and celebrate their own individuality as they saw fit, regardless of the norms, then why would I need to be anything else? Was “woman” not sufficient? How could I be a feminist and yet still feel a reluctance and general disdain towards identifying as a woman?

That was one side of the confusion.

The other side of it was: well, if I wasn’t a woman, what else would I be? As a child, I had felt I fit in more with boys; but I had no all-consuming desire to be a boy or to be thought of as one myself. What I wanted was simply to be myself. I didn’t think of myself as a boy, hanging out with other boys. I thought of myself as myself, hanging out with other boys. As an adult, I feel no more and no less an affinity for one gender than the other. There is no affinity for either; and likewise, no antipathy for either. I feel empathy for everyone; a general relation towards all individuals, regardless of their gender. I don’t come down on one side or the other.

It was around the same time that I started batting around the idea of being genderfluid; but ultimately decided against exploring it any further or even acknowledging it in any real way, because it “didn’t matter, really”. I don’t know why nothing came of that back then. I guess I didn’t have the courage to pursue it, nor was there the same motivation to do so as now. I thought private thoughts: I often joked/ seriously heartfully felt that I was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body; but I also felt like a gay woman trapped in a woman’s body. And, because I felt like both a gay man and a gay woman, I reasoned that, maybe, if I looked at it a certain way, that was almost like having elements of both a straight man and a straight woman instead. Either way, I was bisexual! (Which I am, by the way.)

I tried to use my own sexuality against me; I tried to twist it around, and pressured myself to act more like a “straight woman”, or how I thought a straight woman should be. And, no, there does not seem to be much logic to that train of thought: it was just me oppressing myself, trying to knock myself back down into a more “acceptable” way of being, even if that meant flattening myself in the process. It’s weird to see how, in this way, I was still equating “straight” with “normal”, even though I was bisexual myself. This is why queer representation is so important!!

That particular mental interpretation was lacking, for many reasons. And something I didn’t think about at the time was that either way, I wasn’t cis. Either way, there was that overlap of masculinity and femininity in me: I had elements of both, but neither were quite the way convention might have you expect. I felt like I approached femininity from a male perspective: I was “feminine”, but in the same way that (some, not all) gay men are “feminine” without being women. Likewise, I approached masculinity from a female perspective: I was “masculine”, but in the same way (some, not all) lesbians are “masculine” without being men. I had traits of both within me, but even then, they were crossed over; associating my inner “male self” with the “feminine” and my inner “female self” with the “masculine”.

So maybe now, as I write this, it’s more obvious why I didn’t fit in. Everyone else around me associated “male” with “macho” and “female” with “femme”. Such extreme interpretations were at direct odds with mine, and left no room for the many variants of gender identity and gender expression in between. It was, society said, one or the other. And I wasn’t either.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t something I came to understand until much more recently, or else I might have been able to place myself sooner.

But even those past times I did question my gender, those thoughts stayed only thoughts. And in any case, because I didn’t feel like I most definitely, most assuredly wanted to be/become a man, I thought that meant that I had to be a woman by default.

So, I thought, if I can’t commit to not being a woman, I guess I will just remain a “woman”. I guess I will just stand and be counted as one of the many women who do not fit the cookie-cutter mould dictated to us by gender norms, as many women don’t. I will be just one of the many examples of why the mould is rubbish: of why putting men and women in boxes does not work, because we do not all fit in neatly. I will hold my head up as a woman and say, “I do not follow the rules, but I am not the exception. It’s the rules themselves that are jank.”

And the feminist in me was appeased. After all, this way, simply by being myself I could prove patriarchy was wrong, or something to that effect. I was proof the norms were not catch-all, be-all and end-all. I could live with being a woman; just one that defies typical social norms. And those norms ought to be questioned and defied, anyway — so I comforted myself into thinking I was doing someone some good, maybe, somehow, by acknowledging the expectations for my gender but then subverting them; and that, in so doing, it might contribute towards shattering the preconceptions themselves.

I still didn’t feel comfortable in and of myself, but I shrugged it off. I was like, “okay, maybe this is fine.” In the wise, wise words of Lindsay Ellis: “This is fine. This is fine. This is fine, guys. This is fine.”

Of course, there were still times when I felt the incongruence more keenly than at others; my wedding and the times when I get compared to my sisters were particularly triggering experiences for me. But when it was just my husband and me, together and alone, there was no incongruence. There was no discomfort. We accepted each other, and loved each other, exactly the way we were. When it was just the two of us, we could just be the two of us. When we knew each other as well as we did, on that close and personal basis, then there was no need for labels.

And so, I had privately settled the dispute of my own gender. I had mentally filed it away under “agree not to agree; it doesn’t really matter, anyway. Putting a name to it doesn’t actively change who I am.” I had told myself that that was good enough; and I had kept on living my life, continuing with things just the way they were.

I had accepted womanhood, and resigned myself to it.

And that was that.

 Cue hbomberguy’s “Donkey Kong Nightmare Stream”.

 For those who missed it and the surrounding controversy involving TV writer Graham Linehan (#thanksgraham), hbomberguy (real name Harry Brewis) is a YouTuber who makes sensible — okay, maybe not “sensible” —, well-thought out videos addressing a variety of topics in modern media: usually video games, film or television series, but he also commentates on social trends and ideologies, as well.

Link to hbomberguy’s channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClt01z1wHHT7c5lKcU8pxRQ

My husband first knew him from his LetsPlays, and I became a fan too because of his game, film and television analyses. (Someone who overthinks and overanalyses works of fiction for all possible meanings and real-life takeaways?? Here’s a man after my own heart!)

So when he announced he was going to do a livestream of the classic Nintendo 64 game Donkey Kong 64 in order to raise money for the organisation Mermaids — a charity offering support groups, education, and crisis hotlines for transgender individuals and their families, as well as training for corporations to raise trans awareness — we were very interested in watching it.

Link to Mermaids’ website here: https://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/

Unfortunately, my husband and I weren’t able to watch the stream as it went up live; but we did watch through the archived footage after the fact. And boy, did it hit hard. So many feels were had. So many feels.

My husband isn’t as informed on social justice issues as I am, so a lot of the overarching context that was old-hat to me was brand-new to him. But bless him, he is learning. I, on the other hand, thought going in that I was just going to be watching a stream of a dude we liked from YouTube playing a game, and raising some money for a good cause while he was at it. What I wasn’t expecting was that some of what I heard would hit me so hard in the heart.

To pick out just a few key moments from what was truly an epic event the whole way through, Susie Green, the CEO of Mermaids herself, appeared in the stream — and, let me just say, she is so effing awesome. I have an aunt called Susie Green, too, who is also one of the most kick-ass ladies I know, so awesomeness must come with the territory or something.

Anyway, among other things, Susie Green (the CEO, not my aunt) was saying (and I paraphrase) that one of the best ways to support trans people is just to let them know that they can be safe around you.

And that broke my fucking heart, because fuck. Because LGBTQ+ people could be safe around me: but if I myself wasn’t out and proud — if I myself wasn’t visible, or open about my own situation — how the fuck would they know that?

That idea (built upon by CaseyExplosion when she said just to be a friend to trans people you know) deeply resonated with me because of past personal conversations I have had with some members of the gaming group I’m a part of. In private messages, there were people I spoke to at length about gender and about sexuality. The thing is, I was never the one initiating these conversations. Due to my own experiences and empathy, whenever they brought up that they were struggling, I would listen and I would relate and I would tell them a bit about my own experiences, too. And something that came up in one of those conversations was how difficult it was to know who you can talk to about gender and sexuality stuff, because you don’t know how people will respond or who you can trust.

One of my dear friends talked to me about his struggle with sexuality and being gay, and I could understand and empathise and listen to him without judgment because, although it isn’t exactly the same, I am bi and have my own experiences with making the personal journey of coming to understand and accept your own sexual identity, and the struggles along the way. Another friend confided in me she was having confusing feelings for another woman, and she didn’t know what to do. Again, I shared with her that I could understand because I was bi, and we talked for a long time about how she was feeling. She said later I was one of the few people she could trust to talk to about this, because she knew I wouldn’t judge her.

I know people who struggle with their own experiences, and I also know people who are so far removed from those struggles in their own personal lives that they can come across a little insensitive and non-inclusive in their speech or actions; not due to malice, but sincere lack of experience, lack of information, and lack of awareness. One such friend of mine gets very confused over what is “sex” and what is “gender” and frequently conflates the two, and tends to be very dismissive of the social issues going on around him or the community’s attempts to address those issues. And again, this is not because he is an uncaring or unkind person, because he is usually exceptionally caring and kind. But in these particular instances, because he is young and uninformed and he is not part of those circles himself (nor knows others who are immediately affected), there is no reason why he would know more about it. There is no reason why he would understand.

Still, he recognises that he doesn’t understand, and he does try to learn more and keep himself open to learning more. Thus, I unofficially took it upon myself to educate him, to try and foster that understanding; and I talked to him a lot about my own gender identity, too, to kind of serve as my own example for him of what the gender spectrum was. I told him a lot about my own experiences, eventually summarising my situation as, “I don’t agree with the gender norms and I don’t fit into them myself, but I don’t really know what I what I would fit into. I’m not comfortable being a woman, but I don’t know what I would consider myself as instead, so… … …”

On each of these occasions, and many more besides, I was fortunate enough to have these incredibly deep and meaningful conversations with real people all over the world; some of whom were struggling to find understanding and acceptance at a time when they really didn’t know who they could turn to. I’m so incredibly lucky to have them in my life, and that I could learn from all of them and know their unwavering love and support. Our friendship has enriched my life, and I have been exposed to so much love and positivity and really grown as a person because of it. I’m so grateful and glad that they found me, and that I could likewise be a positive figure for them in their time of need.

But that’s just it: they found me. They took a leap of faith, not knowing the outcome, because they needed someone to talk to and they didn’t know for sure if I would be accepting or understanding: it was just that, based on our group conversations, I seemed like the kind of person who might be. They demonstrated an incredible amount of trust and faith in me, and I am extremely grateful for that. But it’s something that they should not have had to do. They should have known that they were safe from the get-go; I should have made them feel safe. I should have been more open, more inclusive; more forthcoming with my own experiences and beliefs, so that they knew they would find a kindred spirit in me, without needing to take that risk. And that is a failing on my part.

Remember how I said about how it even came up in one of those conversations that it’s difficult to know who you can talk to about gender and sexuality, because you don’t know how people will respond or who you can trust? Well, back then, my response to that was something along the lines of: “I would hate it if someone was struggling with this stuff and they felt like they couldn’t talk to me about it, just because they didn’t know that I was queer too.”

And yet…

To my shame and my dismay, although I did share my own experiences with others one-on-one once they had already started talking about it with me, I was never the first to say, “hey, I’m LGBTQ+, and if you’re LGBTQ+ too, that’s A-okay!” I was never the first to bring it up; and in so doing, I’m worried that I might have inadvertently created an atmosphere within our gaming group where LGBTQ+ members feel like they might not have been welcomed or represented.

Because our gaming group is online, everyone is totally anonymous, and no-one has to reveal more about themselves than they want to: including their appearance, their sexuality, or their gender. Still, I wonder if maybe there are some members, new or old, who are LGBTQ+ or who are internally struggling with their own self-identity, who look around and do not seem to see anyone like them. The atmosphere in our group, as is the case with society as a whole, is one where it’s assumed cis/hetero-normative by default. Topics of gender and sexuality rarely come up in the group chat; the more in-depth ones take place in private messaging instead, where they are invisible to the others.

So, by all appearances, straight and cis is the norm… even when it isn’t.

(Update: I am very happy to announce that, since I began writing this, this has now changed! Although it was my intention to come out to my gaming group after posting this, I ended up outing myself to the group early, which initiated exactly the kind of conversations about gender, sexuality, and inclusivity we should have been having all along. Our gaming group has now officially adopted “other” as a third gender option when we are asking members to introduce themselves, along with asking for preferred pronouns! I hope this change, minor though it may seem, goes a long way to helping every member feel more comfortable when disclosing their gender and their pronouns, should they choose to disclose at all.)

Getting back to the point, Susie Green saying that something you can do is to simply help trans people feel safe… That really struck a chord with me. If even people like me who do struggle with their gender and sexuality don’t say that they do, how would anybody else know? What chance do we have of finding each other? What choice is there but to feel different and alone, even if you actually aren’t?

And in my case especially, it is very, very easy to assume I am cis and straight, even though I’m not. I’m very obviously female (thanks, big boobs), and I’m married to my husband — so that makes us a straight couple, man and wife. Luckily, my sexuality was much easier (relatively) to come to terms with for me, and I have been proud to say that I am bi the few times it does come up, as I have known that about myself in that particular regard since I was 13. Even so, because it is so easy for everyone else to assume that, because I married a man, I therefore must be straight, it doesn’t come up that often.

(Even my husband sometimes forgets. We often joke around with each other about the things we say, deliberately taking innocuous things out of context and saying, “That’s racist!” or “That’s homophobic!” One time, we were joking about something — I can’t even remember what — and I teased him about something he had said by exclaiming in mock-indignation, “Hey! That’s homophobic!” His response? “Well, can you really be homophobic against someone who’s heterosexual?” And I’m just like “…”)

It’s easy to assume a woman who is married to a man is straight. It’s easy to assume everyone is cis by default, because most people are. But that shouldn’t be the default. It shouldn’t be the norm to think, “Well, I’m just going to assume everyone is cis unless they specifically say otherwise.” All that does is create the idea that everyone really is cis, because after all, not many people (dare to) say otherwise; which in turn stunts efforts to spread awareness as many people who might have identified as trans if they had had the resources to know more about it don’t have those resources in the first place. And sticking to that as the norm creates the expectation to conform. It creates the idea that people, even those who aren’t cis, need to be cis, or at least pretend to be; because that is the norm and such thinking inherently comes with pressure to adhere to it.

Assuming cis by default makes it that much harder for trans people to say anything to the contrary, because they don’t see very many people who have the same experiences they do and may not necessarily know if it is safe to talk about it. If everyone assumes that everyone else is cis unless they make a big fuss about it, trans people may very understandably not want to make a big fuss. Maybe they’ll feel, like I did, that the only thing they can do is quietly fade into the background; to try and hide, and try not to draw too much attention to themselves, or out themselves as anything other than “the norm”.

What we all need to do is be more welcoming and inclusive, right off the bat; not because we know for certain that there are LGBTQ+ individuals in our midst, but because we recognise the possibility that there could be. Because we, as a society, recognise that there are many different expressions of gender and sexuality, and all are legitimate and valid.

I don’t want to fade quietly into the background. I don’t want to not be seen, not even by other LGBTQ+ people — those who should be my fellows. That sounds incredibly egotistical, but what I really mean is that I don’t want other LGBTQ+ people to look out at the world and not see themselves reflected in it and think that they are alone; the way I did before the charity stream began.

You are not alone. We are here. We are queer. And we should be proud of it.

For me, Susie Green’s line about simply letting trans people know that they are safe around you resonated with me deeply. For me, it was a call to action. I couldn’t hide any longer, privately satisfied with my own answer that I guess I just won’t bother defining who I am. That approach didn’t sit right with me after that. I want to be known; not for my own sake, because I’m an asocial fuck who couldn’t care less what other people think of me. But hopefully to be recognised; for someone else to see themselves in me and think, “Hey, maybe that person could relate to me. Maybe they know a thing or two about gender dysphoria and would be willing to listen to me. Maybe that’s a person I could talk to.”

That was what motivated me to come out. But I’m writing about my decision to come out as if it was a very simple process. It wasn’t. I make it sound as if I was just getting on with my life; then I happened to see the charity stream; and that inspired me to come out, and so, I did. In reality, gender issues have been interwoven with my psyche my whole life. Videos and discussions on social justice, representation and important issues within marginalised communities are something I actively seek out. And even when I felt like I really wanted to come out — to show others that they would be safe with me, and that I would welcome them and refrain from judgment — there were still things getting in the way there, too. And it was difficult.

The first time I heard Susie Green’s story on the stream, about her and her daughter and how things could be made better for today’s youth, I cried a lot. I thought about it a lot. I watched nothing but Donkey Kong for days on end, and dreamt about it too: not necessarily about the game itself (but also about the game itself), but the people, and their voices and their thoughts and their stories. I was trying to make sense of it all. For over a whole month now — ever since my husband and I started watching the stream — my head has been filled with thoughts on gender. It has overtaken my entire life ever since, and that’s because I want to do more, be more — and even this first step of simply coming out of the closet myself has taken a lot of preparation. Far more than I thought it would, actually.

For over a month, I have lived, breathed and dreamed gender non-stop. And thinking non-stop about such emotionally heavy, difficult issues does take its toll; especially when you include the multiple conversations I had about coming out with multiple people, multiple times.

But those difficulties I experienced with coming out weren’t what was getting in the way of coming out. The real difficulty there was giving myself permission to be anything but “woman” in the first place.

Remember feminism? Remember that feeling I had that, if I were truly a feminist, I would be proud to be a woman — not actively wishing womanhood away. I had unlearnt and relearnt a great many things about what it truly meant to be a woman; and ultimately, what it meant was to be human, just the same way as men were human. But even so, I did not know where matters of discrimination based on sex ended, and matters of individuality began. When it came to how I felt about myself, how much of it was to do with my sex? How much of that, in turn, was due to sexism? How exactly did I feel about myself, on the individual level, if, hypothetically, sex and sexism had (and had had) no part to play in it?

I didn’t exactly know.

Fortunately, my subconscious had the answer, even when my conscious mind did not. Some of the dreams I had about the Donkey Kong stream were mindless, repetitive, and nonsensical; just as the Donkey Kong 64 game itself is mindless, repetitive, and nonsensical. I dreamt only of hbomberguy getting endlessly stuck on puzzles and wandering around in circles — not so different from the real stream, then(!) When he cleared one level, he was faced with another, and another, and another; the game stretching endlessly on, in the way that dreams do. But the final dream I had about the stream was far more emotionally significant.

In that dream, I dreamt not about the game, but the stream itself. I dreamt about the chat, and the Discord channel for other YouTubers and allies that had been set up there. In my dream, for whatever reason, I had been accepted to join the mic call. I was able to talk directly to Harry himself and the guest stars; I was able to be a part of the stream as it went out live over the internet. I was able to talk to them all first-hand. I wept at the opportunity, and I thanked them all so much for doing this; I wanted them to know how much it meant, for them to be so open and so brave and for standing up for what was right. I told them how wonderful it was to hear them talk about their own experiences and their identities, because I was still struggling with mine. I told them about my dysphoria and my disillusionment with being “a woman”; but how I lacked the certainty and the conviction to do anything about it. I also told them about the guilt I felt as a feminist; that pursuing an identity as anything other than “woman” felt like it would be very un-feminist of me.

At that, I could very clearly imagine Harry’s face and hear his voice as he gave a bewildered, “What?!” And, to be honest, it’s probably the same reaction I would have had as well, if someone else had told me the same thing. And that’s because, as Dream Harry went on to say, that’s not what feminism is about. Feminism is not about forcing yourself to be a certain way, or about trying to be what you think someone else wants you to be regardless of the personal cost to yourself — so much so that you end up disempowering yourself in the process. Feminism, rather, is about empowerment. It’s about giving a voice to the marginalised and, in the case of trans rights and gay rights, telling them that who they are is real, and that they are worthy, too.

The stream itself is proof of that. It’s an example of the community coming together to support trans rights and recognising that transgender identities are valid identities too. No-one should be forced into a box that does not fit them, but allowed to define themselves for themselves. That included me, too.

And it was weird when I imagined the YouTubers telling me this in the dream, because it made me think about how I would respond if it was somebody else telling me they were trans. And if someone else came to me saying they were trans, I would accept them straight away, exactly as they were. I’d encourage them to be true to themselves and do what feels right for them, whatever form that may take. My own personal beliefs are that trans women are real women; trans men are real men; non-binary people are real people (even though I didn’t know that non-binary identities even existed until recently); and that feminism is about raising everyone up and empowering them, and accepting and embracing everyone as they really are. I would never tell anyone else they were being un-feminist just for being themselves; indeed, I would fight for their right to be themselves. I would regard them with unconditional love, and respect what they were telling me about themselves; accepting it as true without question. I would never tell them that their identity was wrong.

But it took hbomberguy telling me the same thing in a dream for me to actually apply those principles to myself, too.

Until experiencing the stream and hearing the personal accounts of other trans people first-hand, I had still been tied down into thinking that being for women’s rights meant that I was locked into being a woman myself; or that I was doing some kind of disservice to the cause if I were to acknowledge myself as anything else. But, for everyone to be free to be themselves and to be accepted without hate and without prejudice is the cause.

That was a conclusion that maybe I should have been able to come to on my own; but either I couldn’t, or just didn’t. It took hearing all of the wonderful people participating in the Donkey Kong stream talking about their experiences for me to realise that, maybe I was okay the way I was, too.

Discovering feminism and learning that I could be exactly the way I was and still be a woman had been an important step for me. But it was not the end of my journey. I had to go a step beyond that. Knowing that I could identify as a woman, with no degradation to myself, was one thing; but learning that I could also not identify as a woman if I so chose was also an important milestone. There are more options in life than the arbitrary one we get assigned to us at birth; and for me, being so uncomfortable with mine, I saw no reason to try and force it upon myself any longer.

I hadn’t been at all sure at first where the line was between respecting women and recognising that I myself was not a woman. But now, with the help of feminism, the Nightmare Stream and the dream that it inspired, all the amazing people who participated, and even just the knowledge that an amazing charity like Mermaids even exists and is doing great work in the world… I think I’ve disentangled myself and disavowed myself from enough sexist notions that I know that it’s not that I don’t believe in being a woman. It’s that I do believe in being an individual. And as an individual, speaking on the personal level, not only do I not follow the stereotypes and/or the mandated patterns of behaviour prescribed for my sex; I don’t want to, either. There is still something to be said for how maybe those stereotypes ought not to exist in the first place, and maybe then I wouldn’t mind so much what my sex was or what my gender was. But they do, and so I do, and I know the path that has been laid out for me is not the one I want to walk down.

And I also know that, if I hadn’t’ve been motivated to come out now, even after hearing all those brave and courageous voices; even after hearing all those incredible stories of personal tragedy, triumph, and strength; even after experiencing something which, even though I was only an onlooker, nevertheless felt made me feel like there was a space for me after all, and made me feel like I was home… then I was probably never going to come out. Ever. If even that experience, which moved me so much, could not bring me to accept myself, then it would probably have never happened.

What Mermaids and the Donkey Kong Nightmare Stream gave me was something invaluable: they gave me permission to give myself permission to be who I was all along. It taught me that I was allowed to be who I was; and that who I was was okay. That’s why the work Mermaids does is so valuable: so that no child has to go through this all alone, navigating complex topics without the words to properly explain it. Mermaids gives love and support and important information and resources, so that each child can come to terms with themselves and accept themselves the way they are. And that’s much more preferable than being a grown-ass adult trying to get your shit together when you have no clue what you’re doing; scrambling to put the broken pieces back together when really, you were never broken at all.

 So, that leads me to writing this declaration:

 I know what it’s like to feel uncomfortable with the gender norms thrust upon you because of your sex.

I know what it’s like when your internal experiences of yourself are incongruent with said norms and other external expectations.

I know what it’s like to feel like you are wrong just for being yourself, and like an outsider in your own skin.

I know what it’s like when you are forced to acknowledge your assigned gender and a piece of you dies because that’s not who you are, and it starts to feel like you never can be who you really are as long as the world keeps reminding you otherwise.

I know what it’s like when even simple things, such as which box to tick on a form, can be a deeply divisive topic rife with internal conflict and strife. And I know and I loathe how, in my case, I have to opt for “woman” anyway, on account of my being female and there being no better option.

And I also know how I have struggled to come up with a satisfying answer about what a better option would have been, though I have found my answer now. (Although, going back to speaking more generally, simply including the simple and unassuming option “other” would be a start!)

 I don’t know what the fuck I am. But I know I’m not a cis woman.

Thankfully, there’s a catch-all term for that, and that’s genderqueer. That’s why I wanted to write this post: to come to terms with myself as my new identity, and re-introduce myself as genderqueer.

 And actually, the above line about not knowing what I am is no longer true, and that’s because I can get more specific than that now. Unlike when I first started writing this, I can now say that I do know what I am. Three weeks down the line, I can now say that recognising myself as genderqueer was the start of something beautiful. Through the process of writing this post — and having many, many private conversations and coming out many, many different times to many different people — I have been learning more and more about genderqueerness all the time; and, in doing so, myself.

Through those conversations and through watching and listening to the YouTube channels of other trans and non-binary individuals, I’m becoming more and more sure of myself. I’ve realised that I am very happy to identify as non-binary; and that non-binary suits me and my own situation very well. So now, it’s not that I don’t know what I am other than “not cis” and am relying on a catch-all umbrella term to cover me anyway; it’s that I know myself to be non-binary. It’s a far more accurate of a term for how I feel myself to be than “woman” ever was.

So, while I may at first have picked up the genderqueer umbrella due solely to its all-encompassing nature, only knowing at that time that I was “not cis”, it has nevertheless led to a journey of self-discovery where I’ve realised that, hey, I actually really fucking love this umbrella. And it’s a much more comfortable umbrella for me to fit under than the “woman” umbrella had been for me. It’s so much roomier under here!!

 So anyway, that’s what I wanted to say. I am bi; I am genderqueer/gender non-binary; and I am still questioning. I am B and T and Q; and LGBTQ+ folks, you are safe with me.

 fin

 P.S. Thank you, everyone who read it this far. Thank you for tolerating my self-indulgent trite as I waffle on about my own life when, all things considered, I have enjoyed an immense amount of “comfort” — or rather, the avoidance of misfortune — because of being able to pass. I have enjoyed a lot of love and support from the people closest to me and the ones I love the most, and that is why sitting down and definitively defining my gender — when really, it is something so personal to the individual — didn’t seem to make much difference to me as an individual before now. But it might just make all the difference to someone. I’m planning on expanding my thoughts on this (namely, gender identities vs individual identities) in a future piece of writing.

That said, if you are a LGBTQ+ person reading this (or someone who is unsure, or questioning) and you are not currently out, then despite my encouragement to make ourselves seen and our voices heard, please, please, please don’t come out if you feel it is not safe for you to do so. I am only coming out now myself because it is safe for me to do so; it was just inconvenient for me before, and that’s why I didn’t do it until now. Your safety and your well-being is the number one priority, so please, do not do anything you feel uncomfortable with or which you feel might put you at risk.

 P.P.S. To serve as something of a glossary: “Genderqueer” is just an umbrella term meaning “not exclusively masculine or feminine”; which falls within the umbrella term “transgender” meaning “anyone whose gender is different from that of their assigned sex”; which itself falls within the umbrella term “queer” meaning “anyone who is not exclusively heterosexual and cisgender”. There are several layers deep to this, and getting further down is just a matter of specificity.

For example, someone who is gender non-binary is genderqueer, who is trans, who is queer. Someone who is a “trans woman” or a “trans man” (as opposed to “trans” on its own) is someone who identifies as the binary identity woman or man, but were born male or female respectively. Thus, trans women and trans men obviously come under the umbrella of “trans”, but are not “genderqueer”, though they are “queer”. The Q in LGBTQ+ can thus be seen as a kind of tautology, because all LGBT individuals are by definition not heterosexual and/or cisgender, and therefore are all queer. But while all LGBT individuals are queer, not all Q+ individuals are LGBT, as they might identify as something else entirely not covered by its own letter. The Q can also stand for “questioning”. In this way, the Q catches all individuals who are unsure of where they fit in but who do not identify specifically as LGBT, and the + denotes the inclusion of all communities and identities not covered by their own letter (of which intersex, pansexual and aromantic/asexual, to name only a few, are examples).

The website OK2BME has a great page on this. Link here: https://ok2bme.ca/resources/kids-teens/what-does-lgbtq-mean/

 P.P.P.S. Interested in supporting trans rights yourself? To once again paraphrase Susie Green, Mermaids CEO, a good way to support trans rights is to support trans people themselves. Look up your local trans charities, donate or volunteer if you can, call out casual transphobia when you see it, and just generally be a friend. A number of trans individuals have crowdfunding campaigns active to try and help them cover the cost of transitioning, so that is an option as well.

YouTuber and Twitter user Mama Math (link here: https://twitter.com/hellomamamath) made a spreadsheet with links to some of the guests on the Donkey Kong Nightmare Stream who consented to be listed with the details of their websites or where to follow them. The spreadsheet also includes whether or not that person is trans. If you are interested in learning more about trans rights and what it means to be trans, simply listening to the stories of those who are trans and supporting the content they make is a great place to start. Link to the spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sdavyrGPnsrNdTxWBILoulCKxvIvzMkMaJoXPjNQcOI/edit#gid=0

 If you are interested in watching the Donkey Kong Nightmare Steam yourself, here are the links to the parts:

Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/365966431

Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/366901309

Part 3: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/367450055

Part 4: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369226467

 P.P.P.P.S. (Okay, this is getting ridiculous now. This is the last post script, I swear!) In case you’re wondering, as I haven’t actually addressed it at all above, my preferred pronouns are “they/them”, as I consider “they/them” the most neutral and free of assumption. While I am not agender, I nevertheless prefer gender-neutral nouns and pronouns. I consider my own gender to be more fluid, and sometimes, “she/her” or “he/him” will feel right to me; but sometimes, they won’t. For example, if someone refers to me as “he/him” online, I won’t feel compelled to correct them and actually enjoy being referred to as such. I do not have the same euphoric reaction to “she/her”, though I understand that many people will fall into old habits and believe that it is the more “correct” term to use, even though actually it’s my least favoured out of the three. My point is that, sometimes, using “she/her” or “he/him” to refer to me may be acceptable; but using “they/them” is preferable and will always be applicable, so that is what I ask for you to use.

However, I do still have a feminine side to me, and as such, I will still relate with some feminine terminologies; but I am not “a woman”, nor do I relate exclusively to women. In this specific instance, I do ask for you to avoid calling me “a woman” and refer to me as “a person” instead.

I’m considered as something of the “mum” within the online gaming group, with others teasingly and lovingly calling me “mother”, and I love that. A very important person to me calls me “sis” or “sissy”, short for “sister”, and I wouldn’t want to change that, either. To my husband, I am still his “wife”. (I recently discovered I have a major aversion to “princess”, though, so that one’s definitely out…)

I am not truly gender-neutral, which is why I do not identify as agender; but rather, I encompass both masculine and feminine traits, and therefore I will adopt both feminine and masculine terms where they seem applicable. Some days I’ll feel more in touch with my feminine side, and some days I’ll feel more in touch with my masculine side. That doesn’t necessarily mean I want to reject all gendered terms completely, and certainly not all of the time. But I do want to introduce some gender-neutral ones into the mix, so that gender-neutrality is recognised as an option. Again, I am stating a preference, with my preference being for the gender-neutral.

As for my preferred name… well, I go by my online handle “Evani” within most game-related things, and I’m perfectly happy with that. In my mind, I know that the name “Evani” is short for “Evan-Evani”: an original character of mine who has both male and female selves (better known as the Animus and the Anima, à la Jungian psychology). Those selves are named Evan and Evani respectively, and thus they are collectively referred to as both names, even when they present as one whole and not as the two halves. I’m comfortable with my online name and don’t feel the need to change things there.

My “real” name, however… After a lot of thinking about it and batting around about a million different names and variations, I finally settled on one I was happy with: “Ievan”. (Pronounced just the same as “Evan”.)

I had been looking at all kinds of different names; starting with those which were variations on my birth name, to names which looked similar or shared the same letters, to ones which had the same semantic meaning. I couldn’t find any I liked, until a friend asked me what it was that spoke to my soul. At that point, I realised I had been trying to find a name “in keeping” with my birth name, “Stacey”; not for myself but to make the perceived adjustment easier on others around me.

But to be honest, I had never, ever liked the name “Stacey”; and changing how I spelled it to “Stacie” may have made it more tolerable, but even then, I still did not like it. I had been trying to find a new name I liked, based on an old one I didn’t. No wonder I had been having such difficulty!

Recognising that, it made no sense to base my new name for my new identity on my old one. The point of coming out as non-binary was to feel more comfortable with myself and my own identity; and adhering to my past name ran counter to that.

So, with my friend to bounce ideas off of, I took the search away from “Stacey” — the name I had never liked — and back to “Evani” — the name I had already adopted for myself some years prior and had used for myself ever since, albeit only in online settings.

I choose “Ievan” instead of “Evan”, which is perhaps the more obvious choice, because it’s an anagram of “Evani”. It also meant that, by slightly changing my online name from “Evani” to “Ievani”, I could create an amalgamation of both names. “Ievani” included both the names “Ievan” and “Evani” within it, symbolising the dual nature of the masculine and the feminine and the great deal of overlap between the two; just as I experience an overlap and a merging of the masculine and the feminine within myself. I appreciated the symbolism, as well as the fact that “Ievani” captured the same meaning to it as “Evan-Evani” did; only much more elegantly, representing “Ievan-Evani” but with much fewer letters. Having taken to “Ievani” as I did, my choice of name for “Ievan”, as opposed to “Evan”, became an easy one to make.

Plus, by spelling the name as “Ievan” with the extra “i” and not as “Evan” (even though they are both pronounced the same) meant I could have the best of both worlds: I could have a name which sounded masculine, but looked feminine. It was a blend of both, and gave me a lot of versatility and adaptability to play around with as well, owing to the fact that you can draw a lot of different nicknames and short-forms out of it. Some examples: Ieva, Eva, Ev, Evi, Evie, Eve, Iev, Ieve…Now I can basically be called whatever I feel like being called, and friends and those around me can pick out their own personally-preferred nickname for me! It grants a lot of freedom and customisation, which I love. Now, when people call me by my name, I smile instead of cringe.

(As a side-note: yes, this does make me “Ievan Evans”, and you are right, it is repetitive! But I love the peculiarity. It’s been a running gag of mine to have characters in my stories whose surname is a repeat of their first name; the first one being “Evan Evans” — the aforementioned Animus — and another one called “Luca Lucas”, though the latter is technically an assumed identity deliberately made to parallel “Evan Evans”. Now I can be a part of the joke myself, too!)

Realistically speaking, I don’t expect everyone to switch over to “Ievan” straight away. Not everyone is going to read this post, and I’m not going to choose to tell everyone who doesn’t. It’s fairly common within the queer community to not come out to everyone, and not all at once. So I accept that, to certain people, I will still be “Stacie”. And that is fine. As long as I am happy with my own identity and the way I live my own life, I can make my peace with it if I will still be “Stacie” to them.

So, if you still want to call me “Stacie”, that’s fine. I won’t fight you over it. I just might not be fine with it; but even then, it’s fine.

In regards to my writing and my self-published works: my past works were published under the name “Stacie Evans” and, in that particular regard, I think I will keep it that way going forward as well. “Stacie Evans” can be my pseudonym as an author! (Which is ironic, because usually it’s the pen name that’s supposed to be the fictitious one…) While I could legally change my name, it would be a hassle; and right now, I’m happy just adopting it for myself and testing it out.

In short, I’ll be using: Ievan for real life (including Facebook, which is more personal); Evani for games; Ievani for other social media (which I consider a mix of both); and Stacie Evans for works of poetry or fiction, as well as with those who are uncomfortable calling me Ievan.

Feeling confused? Don’t worry. You can always ask to make sure! (Which is a good idea in general, about anything; and you can apply it with pronouns, too! I personally love it when people ask my pronouns, as it confers a sense of understanding, compassion and respect.) All questions are welcome, because I believe there is no such thing as a stupid question. All questions are a chance to learn more. (But please, keep it considerate.)

 Useful resources:

(not an exhaustive list; these are the things I have come across and have found helpful myself, so I am sharing them here too)

 Mermaids, a UK-based charity providing support for transgender children/ young adults and their families, as well as crisis hotlines, online forums and interventions: https://www.mermaidsuk.org.uk/

 The January Donkey Kong Nightmare Stream to raise money for Memaids:

Part 1: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/365966431

Part 2: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/366901309

Part 3: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/367450055

Part 4: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369226467

 Spreadsheet of the participants in the Donkey Kong Nightmare Steam, with links to their Twitter and YouTube accounts: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sdavyrGPnsrNdTxWBILoulCKxvIvzMkMaJoXPjNQcOI/edit#gid=0

 Let’s Queer Things Up!, a blog about all things queer: https://letsqueerthingsup.com/

 More from LQTU! content creator: https://samdylanfinch.contently.com/

 Specific article linked to on the above about what it means to be genderqueer: https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/genderqueer

 Specific article linked to on the above about what it means to be gender non-binary: https://www.healthline.com/health/transgender/nonbinary

 Genderqueer Me, a website with featured voices from transgender individuals and their families, as well as online talks about trans issues and information regarding transition: https://genderqueer.me/

 OK2BME, supportive services for the LGBTQ+ community: https://ok2bme.ca/

 Private YouTube playlist I made of videos I have watched, discussing transgender and non-binary experiences and identities, which are of personal relevance to me in some way or which discuss things which are particularly useful or important when it comes to developing an understanding of the transgender spectrum (also not an exhaustive list; I plan to keep adding videos as I find them): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTv7NUhc6gDOr1AW13CmlZujWAEo2Msyh

[tarapai-blog]

sur-realize the reality

“Only he who has a different visual opening can see the world in another way.” Bruno Munari

I remember the first time I saw a school of black fish above my head, swimming towards me slowly. I was seven years old and believed I was in a fish tank–until the car horn blasted in my ear. The fishes turned into raindrops and I found myself completely wet, standing in front of my school. My father pressed the horn again, “Why are you standing in the rain? Come! Let’s go home.” I gathered myself and returned to a reality where everything was drab and solid, where I felt loneliness and silence. I was waiting alone in the late evening.

What I experienced was a type of dream, a vision, arising from my unconscious self. But this dream was different from a typical nighttime dream over which we have no control. It was a powerful fantasy over which we can take ownership. A daydream is a subjective and personal mental space where things can be anything we wish them to be. It can inspire us to imagine that things could be radically different than the actual world. Dreams and fantasy to me are the purest forms of play. As a child, I frequently focused my attention toward them to relieve myself from exposure to disturbing contexts and stress. As Lynda Barry, an American cartoonist and author observed: “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.”

Dreams are direct projections of the subconscious. They create inherent visions and actions beyond reason, translating inner characteristics and existence into dynamic forms and shapes. Sometimes, these visions can be illogical and last only a few minutes, but they always come from a deep internality. In 1960, D.W. Winnicott, an English psychiatrist, introduced the concepts of the “True Self” and “False Self.” He described a state of being one’s True Self as being in an unforced and spontaneous state. In this state, dreams convey our real self through fleeting imagery. These forms don't occupy a physical space but exist inside us. To reach this alternative space we need to reconstruct our perception. “Feeling real is more than existing; it is finding a way to exist as oneself.”

Most of the time we live within the realm of consciousness—in what we call reality. In this stage, we have a sense of clear straight perception and understanding. Certain aspects of reality, however, can force us into a state of feeling controlled or feeling boxed into conventional and external norms. Winnicott described this state as the False Self. These external forces get us out of our comfort zone, with fear, anxiety, and stress preventing us from stepping outside these boundaries to find the answers to the questions we may have, and stifling our curiosity. Winnicott also explains that the state of being overcontrolled could prevent the potential for experiencing "aliveness" and feeling only emptiness. In this state we feel pain, disappointment and a sense of impossibility. Fortunately, we also possess intellect, enabling us to find ways to get through these undesirable events—dreaming is one such avenue.

To express our True Self, in reality, we start by situating ourselves in the realm of the surreal world. Dreams and surreality are theoretically overlapping phenomena, both are internal, fluid, and ambiguous. The only difference is in their “duration.” A dream is temporary, but surreality can be permanent (Suzanne Césaire, 1941). It is clear that a lens of imagination is required to enter this state. In a heart-touching scene from the 2006 movie The Pursuit of Happyness, Chris Gardner (Will Smith) and his three-year-old son get ejected from a motel after they are unable to pay for his stay. They have nowhere to go, but the father tries to hold things together by making up a fantasy about dinosaurs for his son. The two end up sleeping in the restroom of a metro station that Gardner has convinced his son is a cave. This magical scenario illustrates what Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of psychic productivity and imagination calls "the calm beaches in the midst of nightmares." The father uses fantasy to mitigate his own fear and to prevent transmitting it to his son. The next day, his son innocently mentions he would be willing to stay in the cave again (instead of a motel) seeming not to realize the grim reality that surrounded them. In this state, Gardner creates a surreal world in which his son can place his trust.

“Surreality is a perfect nonsense that goes on in the world. Sometimes there is no plausibility at all.” – Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

Living in surreality can influence how we perceive the real world. We may have an illogical perception or see irrational images. Salvador Dalí, a prominent artist and surrealist of the 20th century, has proved how rich the world can be by embracing pure and boundless creativity. “Surrealism is destructive,” he said, “but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.” In Dalí’s work, he shows us visual representations of his dreams and hallucinations through exquisite paintings, suspending reality and discovering a new universe. His True Self is communicated and he makes his mental spaces permanently visible. Within his paintings, there are levels of strong emotion that embed true narratives about himself. For instance, his painting The Great Mastubator (1929) is not just a fantastical painting, but a representation of Dalí’s severely conflicted attitudes towards sexual intercourse. In his youth, his father left out a book with explicit photos of people suffering from advanced, untreated venereal diseases to educate him about the dangers of sex. The photo horrified, yet fascinated him. He continued to associate sex with putrefaction and decay into his adulthood. In adopting this approach, he recontextualized the reality about sexual disease into an engrossing vision.

Recontextualizing reality is to consider reality from different perspectives. These perspectives come mostly from one’s internal latencies such as the subconsciousness and sometimes from deep memories. When Ettore Sottsass, an Italian designer and the founder of Memphis Group, was a small boy, he loved to design cemeteries: “the tombs looked to me like small architectures, very much my size.” His sketches of cemeteries were outwardly patterned and colorful, removing the implication of death from the landscape. Later, his playful visions turned towards furniture and architecture. In this work, he invented unusual and hyper-functional objects based on his moods that he considered to be a major ingredient in his work–more so than any logical function. Sottsass fully lived in the realm of surreality until his last breath.

Considering these examples, what is interesting about dreams and surreality is that we can use them as a filter to reimagine and to irrationally change the assumptions of the immediate world. It allows us to see alternative contexts. As Lubomir Dolezel writes in Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, “Our actual world is surrounded by an infinity of other possible worlds.” Once we transport ourselves to somewhere else, from a real-time situation, we enter the sphere of surreality. In doing this, we must be concerned that entering this state can be either positive or negative. Horrific hallucinations can occur when we are awake. They are caused by one’s personal traumatic experiences–a stifling sense of insecurity or a response to a natural disaster. They are reactions to situations from which we want to escape rather than situate. When this happens, severe experience or memories overpower the subconscious producing zone of discomfort in reality. In this state, our memories and fears reinforce the False Self. We must be aware of never letting them become a wall between ourselves and our dreams.

Dreams are not just fantastical perceptual visions, they can be realized through the form of action. In early 2017, there was a sense of emerging political chaos as many people were upset at the result of the U.S. presidential election. To some, it was a traumatic experience, having a person who had taken positions and made statements that were regarded as offensive to women. This trauma significantly impacted many women’s subconsciouses. The sense of dread became a wall seemingly built to enclose them and increase their insecurities and fears. However, for many this new reality awakened their aspirations. This resulted in the Women March in January 2017 in Washington DC where dreamers rallied for change and opposition to the new regime. The protest was a manifestation of the expression of True Self in action. Dreams were represented through protest signs using strong symbol of womanhood, the uterus, to comically represent the power of women. Wearing costumes, and bearing protest signs, men and women of all races joined together, and visually colored the city using fantasy and humor in response to the actual, severity of the situation. This surreal phenomenon re-established trust among the American people and released the tension from the protesters’ insecurities, encouraging belief that an idealistic change in the country was possible.

“Surrealism is psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express — verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner — the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.” – André Breton

Dreams and surreality guide us to see better alternatives. In his 1516 work, "Utopia," Sir Thomas More introduced the concept of utopia and the opposite concept, dystopia. These ideas were presented as unrealizable fictions in the form of socio-political satire. Utopia is presented as an imaginary place that possesses perfect qualities for its citizens, and a complete absence of political problems. More presented utopia as place of eternal peace and happiness—a place that was obviously unrealizable. In their book, Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby describe a vision of Utopia that is far more interesting as a concept used as a stimulus to keep idealism alive, not as something to try to make real–a reminder of the possibility of alternatives, as something to aim for rather than build.

In adopting this attitude, we may see a great potential to put our trust in dreams and surreality as they have the capacity to recontextualize the undesirable parts of the actual world. There are many artists who are fascinated with visualizing a mental space through fantastical drawings. This approach invites us to view these visions as inspirational daydreams rather than as serious proposals. Paul Noble is a British Artist whose work is full of rigorous detail, so much so that it might best be viewed through a microscope. In his large scale work, Nobson Newtown (1998), he visualizes a vast phantasmagorical universe rendered in graphite pencil using a technique known as oblique projection. In his work, he presents a parody of various architectures; shopping malls, tourist spots, hospitals, factories, etc. but behind this humorous immersive drawing, is a caution—the drawings contain a total absence of human representation. Noble claims that “the truth is that wherever man goes, destruction and sadness aren’t too far behind.”

These examples address serious issues, through the lens of fantastical activity and imagery. They demonstrate how one’s personal creativity can address inaccessible and undesirable problems, and become clear significant manifestos regarding concerns in society. In this state, the appealing quality of fantasy can attract us more than a quality of realism. We can observe that the power of imagination or enter a state of being our True Self, which carries our internal exuberance and control forward and perhaps help us to conquer severe situations. As the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland observed: “Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” As Vincente Minnelli, an American Stage Director, famous for directing classic MGM musicals such as Meet Me in St. Louis, Gigi, and An American in Paris, said: “Surrealism is a way of life–” not just a cultural movement in the art history.

Living in reality, we follow the world. But living in surreality, the world follows us. We all know the world is what it is, it can’t physically be something else, but as Albert Einstein once said: “Logic will get you from A to B, but imagination will take you everywhere.” Perhaps, somewhere we never expect. If we want the world to exist in the way of our choosing, it is important to see the potentials of everything in our life. Once we give ourselves over to the realm of possibility, we are one step ahead of realism. Norman Bel Geddes, an American theatrical and industrial designer, mixed technologies with dreams, fantasy, and the irrational. In his work, he went beyond seeking functional solutions to problems, but used design to form dreams. In 1939 New York World’s fair, he designed an environment of large-scale models featuring a national network of expressways. It was viewed very much as an America of the near future: a realizable dream. Addressing a less optimistic reality, Herman Kahn, whose radical phrase was “thinking the unthinkable,” reconceptualized the practicalities of nuclear war by thinking through the aftermath in a rational way: how could America rebuild itself after an Armageddon? This speculative fantasy alerted people to the possibility of a nuclear war from the realm of the unimaginable to something much closer to everyday life.

Surreality is not the realm of the insane–whatever appears in our mind is eventually fantastic. In 1966, Yoko Ono, debuted her installation “Ceiling Painting” at London’s Indica Gallery where she and John Lennon first met. As with her instruction paintings, the “Ceiling Painting” was not a painting at all but an installation. It included a ladder with a magnifying glass suspended from the ceiling. In its original incarnation, the audience was to climb the ladder to see a word written in minuscule letters on a white canvas suspended from the ceiling above. The word was “YES.” Resolutely positive and elegantly simple, its humorous, intelligent twist gently transformed the audience into participants. The ladder and its accouterments are only the beginning of the artwork; its completion is in the “audience’s mind,” rolling over the meaning of that small yet powerful message; a word with an infinite definition. As John Lennon experienced this installation, the positivity of the word “Yes” incredibly conveyed Ono’s attitude and personality. Lennon was full of wonder and excitement to know her and ultimately made her his wife. In this work, Ono coupled a path to mental space with the action of climbing a ladder, metaphorically recreating the experience of a dream. If the word had been “No,” the power of negativity would have virtually eliminated all possible visions.

To perceive the value of dreams and surreality, we must understand the intimacy between our internal and external realities. In doing so, we can understand that the imagery that often occurs in our mind is never illogical. The irrational isn’t always impossible. It is important to listen to our True Self and let it speak in a way. In this world, with many unpredictable situations, we should appreciate that some people prefer to occupy the realm of surreality. By their examples, we will know that we have to do this for ourselves as well. Such an attitude can only enrich and broaden our minds. As Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst and follower of Sigmund Freud, once said “Our perception will become clear only when we can look into our soul.”