#lav's gender theories

[lavendermanna]

i'm going on a date with a girl from a dating app tonite and i decided i was in the mood to get fancied up for it. and im excited to look good out in public for this girl, but honestly, i also enjoyed the process of getting ready way more than i expected?? like picking an outfit and doing my hair and lipstick and all. for so long, doing things like that were arduous chores for me because i didnt care about my body or my appearance at all due to dysphoria. it feels so nice to have fun with it. so i have 2 takeaways from this:

1. clearly i was always meant to be a lady in waiting, but was born too late

2. perhaps more importantly, i think that i want to identify as femme? like i can absolutely see this sort of thing becoming a core part of the ways that i interact and form relationships with women. i find everything associated with the identity to be pretty appealing, but i think i've just always felt like i couldnt be that kind of person. but i can do whatever the fuck i want!!

[villain-wallace-au-asks]

Im not too good with these things buuuttt, I assume that the 2 black pawns have to be the nightmares,the white pawn maybe Sven,the black queen and king V!Wallace and R!Ghosty perhaps and the white king and queen could maybe be either Dmitri and Galeforce or E!Burt and somebody else?...That's my theory.

That’s a nice theory, the only things you got accurate was the kings and queens. Wallace and ghosty are the black king and Queen, while Dmitri and galeforce are the white ones. Wallace and ghosty are interchangeable with the king and Queen as despite the gender roles of it being different it makes a bit of sense since the Queen is an objectively better piece then the king since it can move in all directions, making it powerful like Wallace. It also works wirh how he wants to protect ghosty from being captured too.

I placed the pieces in how the story is going. Sven and Burt are both pawns and can’t move since they are both essentially stopped by eachother. The pawn on what would repersent Dmitri is lav since Wallace has her over there to make sure he doesn’t try to step out of line.

The nightmares would honestly be represented by the knight pieces.

-🍃

[nebulariclover]

Rules: answer thirty questions, then tag twenty blogs you would like to know better Tagged by @acidwaste and @waspinat0r 1. Nicknames: Lav, Laddi 2. Gender: Nonbinary 3. Star sign: Leo 4. Height: 5 foot 1 5. Current time: 17:27 6. Birthday: August 20th 7. Favorite bands: Breaking Benjamin, Ashes Remain, Five Finger Death Punch, USS (Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker), Seether, The Script, Linkin Park, Coheed and Cambria, Fall Out Boy, and Theory of a Deadman 8. Favorite solo artists: Mikky Ekko and Logic 9. Song stuck in my head: I Don't Want To Miss a Thing by Aerosmith 10. Last movie watched: Transformers: The Last Knight 11. Last show watched: Supernatural 12. When did I create my blog: Sometime around the end of 2015/beginning of 2016 13. What do I post: Transformers and occasionally Supernatural and some YouTubers with various other things sprinkled in 14. Last thing I googled: What is sorbet? (I was trying to explain what sorbet is to a friend) 15. Do you have other blogs: @cherryautomobileenthusiast (KO shitpost/rp blog), @eternallyscreamingstar (TFP/RiD Starscream shitpost/rp blog), @imsurroundedbyslaggingidiots (TFP Ratchet shitpost/rp blog), @universallavender (oc rp blog that I made for some dumb reason) 17. Why did you choose your url: I love Knock Out and he is cherry-colored 18. Following: 989 19. Followers: 466 20. Favourite colors: Lavender, any other purple, blues, black 21. Average hours of sleep: 4-7 22. Lucky number: 7 23. Instruments: I can kinda play the flute 24. What am I wearing: Black shorts and a maroon muscle shirt 25. How many blankets I sleep with: 3 or 4 26. Dream job: I don't have a dream job 27. Dream trip: Anywhere that isn't this godforsaken state 28. Favorite food: Spaghetti 29. Nationality: American 30. Favorite song now: I have multiple and can't choose just one I tag anyone who wants to do this!

[lavendermanna]

quick edit: i put this under a readmore bc it turned out way longer than i expected. follow on through for a lot of thoughts on why some trans people begin to understand their own gender as children while others dont

for a long time i've been deeply curious about the question of what exactly it is inside my brain that makes me identify so strongly with one particular position in the social gender binary and not the other (or, more broadly, why do i have dysphoria and what is gender?) but im beginning to suspect that this is the wrong question to be asking. i was thinking about this earlier, and about my history with my understanding of my own gender, and i started to wonder instead what exactly it was that made me fail to realize that i was uncomfortable with performing masculinity for so long. what was it that prevented me from taking action w/r/t my discomfort?

whenever i talk to trans people who remember having a clear idea of their actual gender as children, their stories sound so strange to me because my experience was just fundamentally different. i was in denial for so long, even after my dysphoria and depression had started seriously ruining my life. i considered myself "non-binary, but basically just a man" right up until i started transitioning, because when i realized that i could be a girl i started moving as fast as i could. my conception of gender was so closely tied to my conception of body shape and genitals that i didnt consider the possibility that i could be trans until i started to consider going on hormones so that my body would change.

so why is it that for many other trans people, the shape of their body did not prevent them from understanding that they wanted to be a different kind of person than what their surroundings were trying to make them into, but i just followed along obediently and didn’t question it? if other trans people tend to realize as children that there is another way to exist (or don’t realize that the way they want to exist is not the way that others expect them to be) why do some of us get so thoroughly trapped by the burden of assigned gender that we can’t even imagine a way out?

in retrospect, i think i can definitely say that my inability to understand or take action wasn’t rooted in the belief that i was a boy and not a girl, but rather happened because i believed that i couldn’t be a girl, so i had to be a boy. i think that this may be the key difference between people like me and people who have some understanding of their real gender as children, in which case the question becomes: how does one account for this difference? was it a difference in my upbringing, culture, or education? is it something related to mental illness, brain chemistry, or the autism-spectrum? am i just better at doing mental gymnastics to avoid my problems than most? i think the answer is probably some combination of these: social influence, individual brain function, and individual personal response to stress stimuli.

one of the things that confused me the most when i first started talking to trans people about their memories of gender as children was the fact that so many of them received far stricter assigned gender socialization than i did. i never had masculinity thrust upon me as such; i was never told i could or couldn’t do some specific gendered behavior, i was never placed under any particular gendered pressure by my family, and my friends and schoolmates didnt start exhibiting really toxic or violent behavior until we all started to hit puberty. although i did get picked on/bullied somewhat, and i did get in a couple of fights, i was never really beaten up, ganged up on, or made to feel powerless, and i always tried to give back as good as i got.

it now seems obvious to me, of course, that physically and emotionally violent gender socialization has never been an effective way to make someone believe that their assigned gender is what they should choose. abusers are not trying to convince you to act a certain way, they are trying to scare you into conforming. they dont care what you think, only how you act, so while many trans people with childhood trauma learned to perform their assigned gender very well in order to avoid violence, that same hostility probably only made it more obvious how and why they were different from cis people (this is an assumption on my part, please lmk if its not accurate). i want to note here that im not claiming that trauma is what makes someone realize that they’re trans, but rather refuting the idea that gendered socialization makes a person more likely to believe that their assigned gender is accurate. this is definitely a belief i used to hold, and im glad to understand why its wrong.

so that leaves me with this, my best theory: whether or not a person realizes that they’re trans as a child is heavily influenced, although not defined by, the social factors of the environment in which they grow up. in my case, i had so little gender pressure put on me that for a long time i was free to simply not think about it and carry on with my childhood. my memory is fuzzy, but i think that i always knew i was “different” from other kids, i just never managed to figure out exactly how until i was like 21.

the next part of this theory, still under development, is blaming my father for severely stunting my emotional development because he himself has the emotional capacity of a walnut.

[lavendermanna]

weird how i used to be categorically, dysphoricly incapable of showing my shoulders in public, but now tank tops are like my favorite kind of shirt. they're just. so comfy and casual. and i found out i have big lesbian biceps and delts (for hugging girls really good) instead of gross masculine ones like i used to think.

[lavendermanna]

being trans is inherently punk rock. every single trans person has liberated their ideas about gender, or theyre a liberation waiting to happen. and once it does happen, theres no going back. its one of the fastest ways to sink from wherever you happen to be in life all the way to rock fucking bottom. our society treats us like garbage. when youre trans, no one advocates for you. no one helps you. no one even knows how. you have to do it yourself. once a trans person has this realization, they start fighting back, and they will never stop. and everyone has thay realization sooner or later. everyone fights back. for themselves, for their friends and lovers, for everyone who has suffered like us.

and that's punk as fuck.

[lavendermanna]

talkin abt being supremely genderfucked. cis ppl dont read pls.

i have a theory about my dysphoria. thinking about this has been like trying to untangle a knot made of mental illness symptoms, repression, trauma, and self hatred. ive started to gain an understanding of a lot of it thru therapy, but dysphoria always felt incomprehensible. but ive now realized that my dysphoria has always been closely linked to an intense desire to feel attractive, which is created by a toxic cultural standard that's forced on children literally from birth. so, because ive been attracted to women for my whole life, and never actually attracted to men, women's beauty standards became my own standards. i had no idea what made a man attractive within my cultural context, but with women it was obvious! so i ended up wanting to Look Like That so that i could be attractive, which wasnt too much of a problem when i was a child. but then when puberty hit i quickly started to realise that my body was not at all doing what i actually wanted. (that was also the first time i was able to identify and conceptualize what i wanted to look like at all). so i spent a lot of my developmental years resenting my body because it didnt meet my standards of attractiveness, even though people i dated told me they liked it. thats the beginnings of developing dysphoria and self hatred, which leads to repression and depression. and the longer you dont do anything about it, or even acknowledge it, the worse it gets. and i waited 8 years. so it's pretty fuckin bad now and potentially impossible to unlearn.

i know it's not like this for everyone, but it makes sense, right? and i kind of like framing it as "im trans because im a lesbian" instead of "im a lesbian because im trans" (which implies that if i wasnt trans, i would just be a straight boy). i love women first and foremost, thats what defines me. "trans" is just a label put on us by bigots who make the distinction because they think we dont count as a woman.