#my identity isn't sanitized sorry!

[blood-choke]

Thanks for saying the bit about butch being identity more than presentation. I'm aware it is, like I'm not dumb, but I never feel like I show the fact that I'm butch enough, even if I'm soft butch. Like wearing androgynous clothes means fuck all in modern day since women's fashion is androgynous at a base line currently, plus I have very long hair and tend to keep my nails somewhat long so my identity doesn't show at all and it makes me constantly feel like I'm appropriating the label. But like if I were cis, I'd probably take testosterone for a bit like she/her Lea did; that idea is super enticing. As is I like being trans because it gives some masculinity to my physicality. If it were the past where women wore dresses, I'd definitely wear men's clothes (probably mixed with some parts of women's stuff). Just modern day doesn't let me visibly defy social norms as much as I want. My leather jacket and boots just isn't enough to show my identity.

Sorry for the ranble. Just made me feel way better, seeing confirmation that it's largely identity. Even if I don't have anyone to truly express it with.

you're welcome!

it was definitely something i had to unlearn; especially now with so much of lesbian bar culture having been pushed out and forgotten, a lot of younger people just.. don't know what these words mean, and when i was their age, butch and lesbian both were Bad Words that you never said at all except to demean someone.

reading older lesbian literature helped me overcome that and learning about all of the people that came before us; both about butches and femmes. digging through archives and putting myself into butch/femme spaces online has been hugely beneficial to me. i used to feel the same & like i could never "claim the label" because i didn't look a certain way, but that's just simply not true.

and this is especially not true for lesbians and other women who are already having other labels forced upon them by society; for not being white, for not being skinny, for not being hyper feminine, for not being cis, etc.

one of the things that made it really click for me was picture archives, specifically these kinds of pictures:

(pride, nyc, 1977 by meryl meisler)

this one is nancy tucker & her partner, and the two of them would switch shirts throughout the march. (1970 by kay tobin lahusen)

you can see how similar butches and femmes can look, and this is also what i mean when i say femmes are just as sanitized in popular media. butch and femme can be adjectives, but they are also nouns, they are genders and they are roles that people fill within lesbian relationships and within their community; how they move through the world, interact with society and how they interact with other lesbians and other women romantically and sexually.

this quote is one of my favorites:

“Butch is a trickster gender—and so, in a similar way, is femme. Lesbian gender expressions do not emulate heteropatriarchy, they subvert it. Femme removes femininity from the discursive shadow of masculinity and thereby strips from it any connotation of subordination or inferiority. Butch takes markers of “masculinity” and divests them of their association with maleness or manhood. Butchness works against the gender binary—the masculine/feminine paradigm—and reclaims for women the full breadth of possibilities when it comes to gender expression.”

— Caroline Narby, “On My Butchness”

[selfidentifiednerdyprude]

Look, I'm sorry, okay?

I'm sorry I don't make NSFW content of any kind. I know it's a moral imperative to be a horny freak, and I've tried, but I'm incapable of it. The feelings everyone else has aren't there for me.

I don't think porn should be banned, I'm not some "think of the children"-ass puritan, honestly those people usually hate asexuals too. We're on the same side. We're both a threat to the status quo. We're both doing anything other than settling down and being traditionally married with kids. If your expressions of identity get censored, so do mine.

So believe me when I say that it's fucking killing me to not be able to fight beside you. Believe me when I say that I wish I was anything else besides what I am so I could fill the internet with smut in defiance of everyone who wants to sanitize it. But I can't. I can't. It just isn't in my nature.

I'm sorry. I know I'm a bad queer person. I'm sorry.

[sureuncertainty]

just saw a somewhat valid post complaining about the lack of sincerity in media today, particularly looking at like, reboots and adaptations without respect or love for the source material, and while I completely understand that perspective, it's also maddening to me to watch people say this and agree with it but not seek out/support those pieces of media that ARE made with love and care and sincerity (of which there are literally SO MANY) AND then turn around and call anything that IS sincere and authentic is actually cringey and problematic

LITERALLY people in the notes on that post going like 'everything is so sanitized bc people are worried about being problematic' on the fucking internet these days where literally everything is problematic and you can't like anything bc if you like it you're actually also part of the problem, and you have to have morally pure and correct and upright opinions about media and stories at all times, and if you don't you're a BAD EVIL PERSON

and don't even get me STARTED on the fucking person in the notes of that post who was like 'this is why i only read books bc books are just far superior to all other forms of media' like i am exploding you with my mind, art and storytelling are so valuable and important no matter the medium. there are movies and shows and podcasts and yes, books that are telling meaningful important stories and you just decide you don't care bc it doesn't fit your litmus test of what must be ideologically pure and perfect at all fucking times. you have to enjoy things but you can't enjoy them too much bc that's cringe. the HYPOCRISY of the people in the notes on that post being so cynical about media while complaining about media being too cynical these days

like sorry but i'm sick and tired of this culture. like isn't it exhausting? aren't you fucking tired of hating everything all the time? you spend all of your energy hating everything and then complain that there aren't any sincere stories? there are so many amazing movies and shows that have been coming out this year and every year, we are in a period of time where acknowledging the hard work of writers and actors and other storytellers has become more important than ever with the strikes and such, and you're going to sit up on your soapbox and act like you're better than everyone, preaching about how art is dead bc of capitalism while doing fuck all to actually support the HUGE amount of creators desperately trying to tell the stories we love and care about

also puts me in mind of the other post I saw awhile back making an addition to about how important stories are to us as humans, because of their stupid condescending 'you're too afraid to be alone with your thoughts that you can't have any identity outside of media lol aren't you so pathetic' and everyone in the notes like 'wow you so called me out!' and then when I responded to it op was like 'wow look at this cishet man being fake deep and shit' like the moment I try t express my own sincerity, even online, I am mocked and misgendered lol

like no fucking wonder stories aren't sincere anymore, you call them cringe and you mock them. there are so many beautiful stories out there and you don't even have to look hard to find them

[annieisyourfavourite]

definitely feeling lately like all this queer slur discourse is a way for people to police how other people describe their gender, to make sure people only stick to a couple, cis/binary approved options of how to have (or not have) a gender. Getting mad at people for saying femboy and girlboy, dictating who can and can't use butch or femme, trying to box who's allowed to say they're gnc, getting mad at dykes and faggots for calling themselves that, the whole anti-queer discourse. It's like. They come after everything so the only things left are like 3 sanitized options of "man, woman, or Androgynous Nonbinary" and I'm so over it. Being genderqueer is cool and good and personal and often contradictory, and calling anything that's not those 3 options a slur and getting mad at people for describing themselves as such is so ugly actually

[olderthannetfic]

Another non-Western anon, with a different perspective. "Gay" was used as a slur with such vicious intensity that it made the leap from English to my language *as a slur.* The same never happened to "queer". And yet I'm asked to respect the wanking of Tumblr-encultured randos, who, for all their claims of "we don't want slurs used to refer to people" never even *breathe* a word against "gay?"

Sorry, but I wasn't born yesterday. I will believe their stated motivation only when I see this kind of vicious campaign aimed at "gay" as well. Which is never going to happen, because the clash isn't fundamentally about slurs, regardless of how many useful fools got tricked into believing this. It's about the very nature of the community - is it a tiered space, where exclusive same-gender-attraction is centered and prioritised and everyone else has to make do with scraps... or is it a space where we're all equals in radical solidarity? This is actually testable. Ask the "q slur" people to react to the statement "within the community, a lesbian and an asexual woman are equals" (change to "pansexual woman" if there's another "pansexuality is a harmful identity!" hysteria wave going on). The responses will be very telling.

--

Yup. “Useful fools” is the right way to look at the vast majority of tumblr wank, honestly.

That’s interesting to hear about ‘gay’. It made it into a number of languages as a relatively neutral loanword--in that way that loanwords are often sanitized of heavy cultural associations. I didn’t realize it had been borrowed as a full on slur like that as well.

[teal-deer]

You know what gets me about Neo-Nazis and their whining about white slavery and white genocide?

There was a time when we DID have "white slavery." It was called "indentured servitude" and guess what: it was perpetuated BY PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN WHITE PEOPLE on white people they considered "lesser." It's one of the reasons the American concept of "whiteness" even exists: Eastern & Southern Europeans, the Irish, & the lower classes of England would work to hide their dialects, erase their own cultures, and "pass" as the dominant upper-middle class. They would give up their "incorrect" Christian faiths (Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, the "wrong" kind of Protestant) to fit in. This wasn't "ew the colored folks trying white genocide" it was white people perpetuating class warfare. We are our own worst enemy.

Please understand also: indentured servitude was NOTHING compared to the horror of the Atlantic slave trade or the genocide of Amerindians. But it helps to explain "why white ppl be like that?" (This is also a truncated and unsourced summary, sorry)

This is also why American "white" culture is *such* a non-culture -- it demands the erasure of any uniqueness before entry, a strict sanitization. It's also why so many white people get obsessed with their ancestry -- now that we're in the privileged class by default, we can afford to try to dig up what our ancestors erased in order to get us that privilege. Like... 90% of my ancestors came here AFTER 1860 (and 1/4 wasn't until 1930!) but they still -- STILL! -- refused to teach their kids Austrian German or Dutch or Scots Gaelic or Danish, because that was the price for getting the privileges of being *truly* White American.

People of color didn't do this to us. When you idiots lament the loss of European cultural identity and cry about white slavery? WE DID THAT TO OURSELVES. That was the upper classes destroying what made the lower classes human in order to control us. And you know what? It's happening again, with billionaires convincing poor white people to vote against their own interests with the false promises of a return to... Coal mining. To steel milling. Nevermind black lung, nevermind Centralia, nevermind the horrors of burns from molten steel, and especially nevermind that the money and benefits of those professions were won with the blood of unions, or that people of color also worked those jobs.

Our enemy is not the immigrant, the black, the native. Our enemy isn't either the old or the young. And our enemy certainly isn't those with whom we do not share a faith.

Our enemies are the rich assholes with whom white people ONLY share a lack of melanin. Our enemies are the rich assholes who stand only to gain by dividing us against those we *should* call family. Our enemies are the rich assholes who promise us that they'll fix the whole world, while they sit on their hands and continue to make money on the oil and gas that poisons the air.

White people: we are our own worst enemy. We must reject the shining lies our privilege tells us.

[clarz-cc-archive]

answered June 14, 2020

Q: i am at least 80% sure i'll agree with you but i'm having trouble understanding this text https://twitter.com/clarz/status/1272302164736647168 i know it's embarrassing but could you. elaborate/explain? sorry :(

A: i think there are a lot of ways to interpret it, and i'm still thinking through my own interpretations here, but the way i see it (especially re: how it relates to fan identities and the ways fans tend to police the identities of other fans) is that there's something a little unhinged about attaching any sense of Objective Reality to an identity. this is because social identities (some examples: gender, race, the "nerd" label, and being "an army," among many others) are made up, collectively, by society. they don't really have an objective definition, as much as we like to pretend that they do. their power rests solely in whether OTHERS say you are The Thing and whether YOU say you are The Thing, so for you to claim that there is any "correct" or "real" way to be The Thing, or that you can be somehow *more* The Thing than any other person, is a little silly. i don't take this to mean that social identities aren't real or that they're not VITALLY important, just that their "reality" is not an objective one, but one that is constantly in flux and open to redefinition.

when i see anyone running around trying to say that anyone else who claims their identity isn't *allowed* to claim it because they don't meet some criteria (i.e. "you're not a real woman because you're trans," "you're not a real member of the queer community if you're [bi/ace/kinky/insert literally anything here]," or "you're not a real army because [again, insert literally anything here]"), it just signals to me that that person feels that their identity needs to be somehow sanitized or exclusionary for them to feel secure in it. there's also some stuff i'm thinking through here re: people feeling a sense of internalized shame in their identities and therefore needing to exclude others from it in order to position themselves as somehow "Not One of the Bad Ones," but those thoughts are even less defined than the ones i've already shared.