#not that the concept is inherently transphobic or hurtful to trans people

[carlyraejepsans]

saw your most recent post about really good fics that contain uncomfortable kinks and i immediately thought "ah, biscia must be reading the mpreg soriel fic" and almost left a reply talking about it but i stopped myself because i realized that would be an insane assumption to make. needless to say i felt so vindicated when i saw you link it in an earlier post.

like. HELLO?

HELLO???????

[justanotherhh]

Hi! Love your blog! I have a question:

Maybe it's because I listen to a lot of crime podcasts, but I have never associated psychopathy with being aro and/or ace (despite or maybe because I'm on the aroace spectrum myself?). Is this one of those things where there are people out there equating – I imagine especially aromanticism – with being emotionless? I feel like I've mainly heard the – also horrible – comments of aroace people being "like robots". Then again, I'm not "fully" aroace, nor have I had the need to be super open about it, so I don't pay much attention to this stuff.

Anyway, while I agree that calling Alastor an "evil psychopath" is simplifying things something that frustrates me in parts of the Hellaverse fandom in general....or just fandom in general, tbf...I don't think considering him to be on the ASPD spectrum is incorrect?

Enough rambling and onto my main question: in your opinion, should I always clarify that when I call someone a psychopath and that person also happens to be aro and/or ace, that the two things are not correlated? I don't want to accidentally imply something hurtful/feed into a horrible social mentality. P.S. I want to be clear that I don't want to imply that all people with ASPD are murderers/rapists etc either. Though clearly Alastor is the former. Of course they're not. And I can only imagine how much of a struggle living with such a disorder might be.

hello hello, thank you for the questions. i shall try to be methodical and not rambly (we'll see how it pans out)

yeah there's a big ableist and queerphobic cliché around "emotionless" characters being psychopaths who don't love -- basically it's an oversimplification of psychopathy and often conflates it with being psychotic, and of course, it assumes a correlation both between psychopathy and being evil, and being aspec -- especially the kind that's further down the end of repulsed and loveless and aplatonic -- as being evil (with "love" being the opposite of these things, which, tangent, do have a whooole other post on with this show, because it's done some very fun and potentially future-interesting things on love and sex)

the key here is that aro and/or ace is often never spoken of in narratives when this happens because well... people don't know wtf that is, so it's got that similar flavour to "oh well buffalo bill isn't transphobic, because actually the character isn't trans, the cisgender psychiatrist said so!" (actually... whole other thing on that too, but not on this blog... basically jame gumb is underrated and i root for them every time i watch the movie), but it's the Idea that "love makes you human, and sex is always assumed with love, and if you don't feel those things, it's a clue that you're evil, and the shorthand for that is psychopathic" -- generally the person writing this has never actually researched the words psychopath or psychotic, it's not about being interested in those concepts in characters, it's just a synonym for Bad

and yeah, the "like robots" fully ties into this -- the other side of the coin is aspec people as children, but alastor sooo far doesn't seem to be read this way, although the whole "but if he just discovers how to do Love/Touch/Sex in [insert whatever is wanted for this narrative] he'll become better" does play into some of those tropes too, that there is inherently something mentally ill about being aspec, and that being mentally ill is a sign of Badness (there really is a whole Essay i could do on this, and the general overlap between aspec-writing and trans-writing but! i will resist!), and it's about whether or not the Badness can be cured. if not, he's a psychopath, if yes, it's through normative relationship structures/fundamentally changing the character

it all comes down to actual curiosity -- hc'ing alastor as ASPD is totally fine (i also hc blitzø from helluva boss as BPD) and can open up a lot of doors for interrogation and interest, it's whether someone is using mental health as shorthand for shutting down further interaction with the character (think Psycho's "ah yes, this character is schizophrenic and has mother issues, hence why wearing women's clothing, the end"), or if this allows further play with the character, opens up potential doors, considers the character as rounded, rather than one-note. some aspec people do have a history of trauma or have personality disorders or are autistic, but is someone actually interested in exploring the rich variation of queerness within a character, or are we "explaining it away" as something that's merely a symptom (often one that is imagined to be fixable)

generally, im so into poking at villains and i think alastor is one of the juiciest characters ive had to play with in awhile, mainly because it feels like a lot of his writing is intentional and isn't me deciding to delve into the motivations of [slasher/monster/villain/etc] that doesn't actually exist in the text -- and i think alastor definitely does have some Stuff that could be unpacked from a neurodivergent and mental health perspective, even and including parts of his aroaceness

so in the end, picturing him on the ASPD spectrum and even linking that to aroaceness... I mean, totally chill. al-old-pal does have low empathy, and a pattern of reckless, violent behaviour, and fundamentally views relationships differently from the norm. im making arguments that he hasn't been able to create the kind of intimacy that works for him, except for perhaps with rosie and maaaaybe mimzy and niffty (@creepysora has had some very cool ideas of him connecting in alternate ways that work with his way of being and boundaries), but that doesn't mean he's suddenly More remorseful or empathetic about how his actions affect others

it's about whether or not one is using that as a way of minimising or pathologising aroaceness, and/or as a way of making aspec identities all about self-hatred (and that in turn fuels villainy), and/or generally as an explanation of his villainy as some inherent degeneracy, and/or using the word "psychopath" to mean something completely different from what it actually is... that's when we get into sticky territory

and in the end, it can be hard -- something that's perfectly reasonable to one person, could be crossing a boundary for someone else and we just have to live with that, so don't wait on my blessing, i just think as long as one's caring and curious it's heading in the right direction. i watch a lot of horror, and i can usually recognise when something is well-meaning and something is lazy, and even times when it's the latter i can still find enjoyment (think angela from sleepaway camp -- on the flipside the movie they/them was well-meaning and a complete miss in its final political statement)

i recognise also im bringing up a lot of trans villainy as-example, rather than aspec villainy. that's a. because my special interest is trans horror so go figure and b. because that overlap is soooo real

(another example, not horror unless you're a karate kid 3 truther, is the character terry silver, who is never stated to be aromantic, but whose villainy on the later show cobra kai is intimately tied to an unspecified madness that includes low empathy and... no love, vs all the happily monogamous (het) relationships around him. he's not aromantic, he's not diagnosed with anything, it's not of interest to the story that he may be mentally ill or have PTSD or be aro and possibly loveless or that he may be gay -- because yes, he's coded that way too and that overlap is also real, and a whole other tangent i could go on -- it's just subtext to add to the villainy)

now another tangent, but loosely connected: was reading a transcript of the 1974 TS/TV conference (the first of its kind that was organised in the way it was) -- a series of talks over the course of a weekend discussing trans rights, especially in healthcare, and it fully contained a section of someone saying that "true" transsexuals can be recognised because before they physically transition (into binary genders)... they're asexual. because they hate their bodies so much that they can't feel sexual attraction to others. lot to unpack there, but really in this little conversation as example, what i mean is that the roots of pathologising aspec identities run very very deep, including within the wider LGBT+ community, and since alastor is quite a complex character that has done some very bad things, it's worth really thinking about what headcanoning him as one way or another says about the character for oneself. what does it add? what does it potentially demonise or minimise? what does it allow?

the neat thing about hellaverse is the sheer amount of queer characters meaning we can go beyond "if x character is Bad this represents Every person within this group" but with alastor being (so far) the only character who's not doing the whole love-and-sex game (although i think striker counts in this as well, personally + listen... sir pentious givin' real demi vibes. and if we're looking for a link between trauma and asexuality, well, angel is right there. and, and, and...), it does bear going the extra length to learn about -- especially since a lot of people really don't know that these biases even exist in the first place, which leads to a lot of unthinking perpetuating

i think a good place to start would honestly be: "would this feel like a queerphobic and ableist coding if the character were gay? trans? bi?" not because we're totally over queerphobic writing in general (lol, can you imagine), but as a starting point: are we treating aspec identity in text in a way that makes the idea of being aspec in and of itself degeneracy?

but like. hell yeah villains. hell yeah neurodivergency, mental illness, low empathy, lovelessness, unhealthy coping mechanisms, Bad Mean Queers, cannibalism, and characters you just can't quite suss out. big into a fucked up little guy

how did i do on the ramblyness

[samuraipussy]

Hey! Just wanted to let you know that as a transmasc genderfluid mixed asian individual, i see a lot myself in mizu in all their struggles. I also see people going "shes just a woman ! With woman struggles!" A lot. Which kinda hits a very personal note of people often trying to erase my/our experiences. Thank you for being a rational and funny voice uplifting ours.

I keep wanting to shut up about it all and just enjoy my silly little corner of the fandom, but the amount of trans mixed race people I've seen hurt by this rhetoric is insane. There is no way to argue Mizu being trans erases womanhood unless you:

a. Erase the multitude of trans identities which don't inherently exclude womanhood as an identity.

b. Erase that even for identities that do, the experience of womanhood is still part of that identity for many people.

c. Imply transness is inherently a contemporary, white, western usamerican concept, which is both incredibly transphobic and incredibly racist.

d. All of the above.

So I guess I won't shut up about it. Glad I can at least bring some humour to it all ❤️

[bananonbinary]

i know ive said this before but literally everything in the discussion about gender affirmation surgery fucking sucks. on the one hand, yes. bodily autonomy. obviously. and making trans people jump through hoops to have a third party deem them worthy of having a say in what happens to their body is uhhhhhh real bad

on the other hand (shut up, not the transphobic 'surgery should be harder to get' hand, a different hand that says 'stop asking strangers their surgical history/plans') we really need to take a step back and take a hard look at the entire concept?? surgery is...a REALLY big deal. and an intensely personal decision, that has a lot more factors than 'trans y/n.' even the terms we use for non-op trans people are kind of very creepy? "non-op." one of those freaks in the minority that opted OUT of surgery to drastically change their body smh. like, real bodily autonomy would just treat it like none of your fucking business whether someone wants to or not. it's my body, stop talking about me like its inherently hideous and needs medical intervention??

like, out there in the real world, trans people are treated like a cult, some sort of hivemind that wants to hurt the children somehow with their scary surgery. and i understand that politically, the way we've decided to combat that is "it's not a scary surgery, you have no say in my body or sense of self," and i get it, i do, that's an argument that makes sense and has a chance in hell of gaining political traction.

but. but but but. i mourn that we've so thoroughly connected the trans experience to surgery. i mourn for me and my transgender brothers and sisters, made to feel like outside intervention is the only way to validate ourselves. i mourn for our trans ancestors, who we are implicitly arguing either definitely would have opted-in to a process that didn't exist yet, in a context that didn't exist yet, or weren't really the same as us at all. i mourn our trans children, who we are leaving all this hard work of decoupling to in the future after it's succeeded in this one very specific fight.

i know it's pointless, even actively dangerous to our rights, to try and decouple it right now, and that it IS doing more good than harm at the moment. but i mourn.

[kiruliom]

same anon

I'm sorry if I sounded uncomfortable, you're very kind person and always trying to look at brightside,it's just I can't help it but hating on harmful people I'm type of "you hurt me and hurt people you don't deserve second chance" person and especially because I've been groomed and harassed as kid and I was talking about adult transid (and I sometimes don't believe they're kids because of they identify as transage) because they're responsible and aware of what they're doing and as for young transid the best thing we can do is report them and block them and if they continued being like this as adult then I don't see them people who deserve second chance

(Sorry if I'm making you feel uncomfortable if you don't like me being in your blog then let me know )

thats a completely okay way to look at stuff! and dont worry Im not uncomfortable, the identities themselves make me icky not discussion of it, and youre always welcome on my blog. Im not afraid to use the block button when uncomfortable <:)

I definitely agree on the adult part, how are you, a grown person, altering what it means to be trans so you get to "cope with trauma uwu", being trans is never about trauma or neurodivegence, it can be connected, but its never the cause. and its not "identifying as something youre not", trans women arent "identifying as women", they *are* women, trans men arent "identifying as men" they *are* men, the "identifying as something youre not" and the whole concept of "trans-identity" comes from transphobic rhetoric and is therefore inherently transphobic no matter what. which is a waste to explain this as everyone against transids know this and transids would rather put their fingers in their ears and go "LALALALALALAL" than actually listen. so I definitely understand your anger, its definitely okay to be angry, you dont owe anybody kindness, it just personally ruins my mental health to be mad and complain too much so Ive thaught myself to be more open-minded and positive. Im sorry if I ever made you feel bad for being angry

[satedsaint]

hello!!! i'm what would be considered newly exposed to radfem theory/somebody that noticed just how ineffective liberal feminism is today. i have a question that's been on my mind for a while and i was hoping to get this answer from a lesbian!!!

so, on the basis that (most?) sexual attraction is sex-based, as in a lesbian might find a trans guy hot because he's female/afab, or a gay guy might find a trans women hot because she's male/amab, does it mean that sexual attraction is inherently transphobic/discriminatory against trans people? ive been trying to answer this myself by doing some research, watching videos etc. i've come to the conclusion that someone could say that they indeed are, but at the same time, it can't be that black and white. then i stopped because i realized that's a whole new conversation on "genital preferences" and my head started hurting. but i wanted your opinion on it as you happen to be a woman who experiences same sex attraction.

thank you in advance :D!!!

hello! i obviously do not speak for all lesbians, nor am i educated in the sciences of sexual attraction. sexual attraction is not inherently based on genitalia. have you ever been attracted to someone you saw out at a club or on the street? it's safe to say the majority of people have. congrats, you just experienced sexual attraction that wasn't sex-based!

in fact, purely sex-based sexual attraction would have to occur only upon contact with genitalia, which is not how people experience the world! lesbians have been trying to explain for years that no, we're not a threat to other people designated as women around us, in locker rooms, bathrooms, etc, because we do not experience attraction simply from seeing another body. "attraction to women" does not mean attraction to all female bodies. sexual attraction is not "inherently transphobic" because sexual attraction is not a binary, same as sex and gender are not a binary. we have not been able to identify any switches in our brains or structures that make people entirely same-sex or opposite-sex attracted. research on genes associated with same-sex behavior in humans "suggests that there is no single continuum from opposite-sex to same-sex sexual behavior", as well as stating that it is impossible to determine someone's sexual preference simply by looking at their brain.

now, as a lesbian, i resent this sentiment that biology says in likelihood there is no switch in my brain that says "no men". brother sign me the FUCK up for the no man switch!! however, cultural aspects of sexuality are, in my mind, a much larger part of sexual development than the "born this way" culture of the 2000's to 2010's suggests. if you don't want to have sex with men (as i don't), that is entirely your prerogative, and, as far as i'm concerned, that makes you a lesbian.

the concept of genital preference is complicated by the popularity of strap-ons in lesbian spaces, as well as post-op trans people. my personal opinion is that genital preference is absolutely present in some people. however, there are happy lesbians in healthy relationships with pre-op or no-op transfems. there are straight men in healthy relationships with pre-op or no-op transfems. essentially, humans are messy. same as there is nothing in our brains designating us as "female" or "male" (even after years of socialization and hormones), there is nothing in our brains strictly defining our attraction to one set of genitalia or the other. attraction is a combination of social factors and hormones. i'm happy to expand upon any part of this response, or answer further questions.

[gods-no-longer-tread-here]

I feel like there's two kinds of terf: the kind who can learn, and the kind who are so intent on making "I hate Men(tm)" their entire personality that they are just genuinely pathetic and SHOULD be mocked, belittled, and kicked out of feminist spaces.

the kind who can learn don't deserve coddling or whatever, because they are still terfs and therefore still dangerous, but they shouldn't be treated like they're inherently evil and can never mature or learn (you know. the way terfs treat men and trans women). it's the same concept as "Everyone deserves shelter, food, clothing, income, utilities, and medical care--even the awful people." (a statement that shouldn't be controversial btw) Human beings are human beings. yeah, there are terfs out there who won't change, but there are also terfs who aren't completely rotted by Hate And Violence and it's worth trying not to want them dead on principle.

terfs are still garbage. all transphobes are utter garbage. it's just that the majority of terfs are capable of not being garbage. which is depressing as fuck because they chose to be garbage in the first place, but hey, it's nice that there's a chance they can learn to be kind.

anyway, you as a queer person will be healthier mentally when you separate your immediate, absolutely justified response of "all terfs must die" from your core values. it's the bigotry that's killing us, not the existence of other people.

(again: there are terfs who won't learn. I am not saying you can't hate them and want them to disappear, or at least stop interacting with/hurting others. it's just that you will be less miserable when you manage to separate those people from the majority of humanity.)

this post is brought to you by "I'm 27 and tired of thinking everyone secretly wants to murder me brutally with a knife so I'm choosing to believe most people are fundamentally kind."

[menacingpolkamusic]

I generally feel the same way in that, in my experience, it's easier to be a visible man than a visible woman. I don't think tme/a is a way to communicate that though.

Although I am a visible trans man, I can't say I'm tme. I like feminine things; sometimes if I'm feeling brave I'll go into a store and try on a dress. A -phobe who's been scare-mongered to about trans women wouldn't stop and make sure I'm amab before taking that fear out on me, and it wouldn't hurt less just because I'm not a trans woman.

I don't think it's really the same issue had with androphobia; androphobia refers to a fear of men, and people usually argue that fear of men is an issue not worth giving a name to. They might say it doesn't exist, but they don't truly believe that when with their very next breath they argue that it's a human right.

Tme was created and is commonly used to mean that transmisogyny against people who aren't transfem doesn't exist. It's used as another way to say amab vs afab. I just really don't see a way to use "Exempt" as a category without sorting people based on assumptions. That was kind of the point of it from the beginning, the only way it would change is if everyone started voluntarily defining themselves by all the bigotries they were exempt from - and agreed to not label others. Jesus would come back first.

Definitely there's a need to talk about trans woman-specific issues but I don't think there's a way to truly seperate the "real" transmisogyny transfems face from the "fake" kind aimed at people mistaken for transfem...I think that just further divides the community. In reality very few people can be inherently exempt from a bigotry. It's funny, I know a cis guy who often gets mistaken for a butch lesbian. I suppose he's lesbophobia exempt...up until he's around someone who takes issue with butch lesbians.

Androphobia says something about a bigot's mindset, not about who can truly be hurt by it. Velvet frequently talks about how androphobia affects her as a trans woman and points out that a lot of transmisogyny forms around transphobes' fear of "men in dresses" - so the two concepts can have overlap. Under our own framework, a trans woman is not inherently TAE the way a trans man would be TME under theirs.

That's just my thought, anyway.

I'm tme and I'm not gonna stop identifying as such just bc it makes you uncomfortable to consider you might have certain privileges as a transmasc too. Being transmasc or otherwise a non-tma trans person doesn't mean you inherently have the same experiences as me. But if you notice that in public and social situations you are treated better than the trans women and transfems around you, you should really think on that. It doesn't make you a bad or universally privileged person. It doesn't mean no trans women and fems ever have privileges compared to you in other spheres. Transandrophobia and exorsexism are serious and not all tma people deal with those. But tma folks are asking to be heard abt the kinds of mistreatment they notice and I am doing my best to listen. Are you?

[thebutchtheory]

i think you raise a lot of good points. i'm not sure on whether we necessarily "need" a word either, but so much of the pushback on the subject is so hostile and venomous that it's hard not to interpret it as aggression towards transmasculine people in general, especially when a lot of it boils down to saying that we're annoying and entitled and aren't even actually oppressed at all just because we talk about the ways transphobia affects us. i've also noticed that i honestly see more vitriol from other transmasc people (who think that belittling our experiences makes them better allies to other trans people somehow) and cis women (who honestly seem like they're using the opportunity to take potshots at us because a good amount of what's been discussed is transphobic abuse we've received from cis women specifically and if they can just say "men shut up" about it they don't have to examine or unlearn their own transphobia), yet a lot of the discourse i've seen seems to scapegoat trans women by derailing with assumptions that we're talking about them to the point that i think some trans women now assume all of our posts are about them when they're largely about the way we're treated in wider society because it's been framed in a way that makes people think that we think trans women oppress us when we generally don't. there have been a few odd people bemoaning that they're hypervisible while we're invisible and it's difficult for us to find resources, but it seems like they're outliers and most of us acknowledge that hypervisibility is not privilege and comes with its own struggles, and i often even see people on posts about these issues discussing how aspects of some of them harm trans women as well, such as the way testosterone is demonized hurts both trans men who are transitioning and trans women who aren't able to or don't want to transition. i honestly think we could probably have good discussions about things like this if everyone didn't have such a knee-jerk reaction to the word or the concept of men being marginalized and it affecting them, but as it stands it honestly feels like nobody else in the community supports trans men and just views us asking to have our issues taken seriously as whining because they don't think we actually have any problems and that's really disheartening.

i agree with a lot of this, and i believe that a lot of the transphobia that trans men have been facing in the LGBT community has been based on that gender essentialism, that men are evil and disgusting and should stop whining, and that men are always privileged in some form.

i don't know if we need a term to describe the specific forms of transphobia that trans men experience, and i don't really care because i'm fine to use the term transphobia. but people acting like trans men don't face any issues or that we're whining when we talk about the issues we specifically face, being invisible and infantilized instead of hypervisible and demonized, is fucking ridiculous. being invisible and infantilized is not a privilege or 'less bad' than being hypervisible and demonized, because we experience transphobia just as violent as trans women. but when it happens to us, it's generally not mentioned that we're trans, if the discussion surrounding our attacks even happens at all, (because we're perceived as women and people don't like to take women seriously), we're instead presented as women or even lesbians and have our transness entirely erased.

i don't think that being hypervisible inherently makes it easier for people to find resources, or that people talking about being hypervisible is necessarily 'bemoaning', because it is a legitimately terrifying thing that deserves to be talked about. but so does being erased.

i wish we could have more constructive discussions surrounding these topics, because yeah, people do have an extreme knee-jerk reaction to them. it's all so black and white--no nuance. people really should be more open to this discussion instead of being so vitriolic about it. there are interesting gems of trans community discussion, but instead it's all venom.

[sink-drainage]

I'm gonna rant for a sec.

I need people to use critical thinking skills about trans issues.

Trans men discussing ways in which they're marginalized or discriminated doesn't erase or take away from issues regarding trans women specifically. I can't believe I have to spell this out.

When a blog dedicated to making posts concerning transandrophobia makes posts in relation to that, they're not inherently shitting on transfeminine people by doing that!! These things need to be talked about and god knows no one else will.

Guess what? When transphobic bills are passed into law, that hurts ALL trans people. When conservative talk show hosts make fun of Caitlyn Jenner because she's trans, that hurts ALL trans people. No trans person can "opt" out of transphobia. Attacking one of us is attacking all of us. And it doesn't hurt other people to acknowledge that.

That's why transmasculine people need to be there for transfeminine people. It concerns them too. And that's also why when transmasculine people make their own posts about how they're hurting, shitting on them helps NO ONE.

Trans men are not the "face of the detransition movement."

Trans men are not inherently "allies with terfs." And they're not inherently twerfs. That's fucking ridiculous.

Trans men are not perpetuating the concept of misandry or reverse sexism by inventing the word transandrophobia to discuss specific forms of transphobia that they face.

Yes, there are people out there who will detract from a post about one issue and attempt to make it about something else. That happens all the time, everywhere. And it should never be allowed or excused. But that goes both ways. If a transmasculine person makes a post concerning transandrophobia, sending an anonymous ask whining that they're "making light" of transmisogyny or whatever doesn't help anybody.

And I don't believe you're an ally to the trans community if you're only concerned about the welfare of one group of trans people as opposed to ALL trans people. Transandrophobia, transmisogyny, and enbyphobia will never be tolerated here. Transmedicalism will never be tolerated here.

If one of us hurts, we all hurt.

[bushs-world]

Anon challenge: this challenge is to help spread awareness about the harms the Loki series has done.

https://lowkeycritical.tumblr.com/post/665952395270995968/a-letter-to-the-cast-and-crew-of-loki

Read this letter and share with 3 people you think would be interested. Reply with your thoughts Below!

Anon I had already tried reading this long, long letter when it was first published unsuccessfully. I did try again, only because I was curious why people found selfcest transphobic.

After reading this, I can say I only agree with one problem the series had- the genderfluid representation, but it's nothing new since I realised the series had this issue long before I read this letter.

The rest minus the AGP part was completely useless and a complete waste of time. Like the Loki series did harm because Loki was ooc in the series, was nerfed, didn't use magic and allspeak? It makes zero sense to me. There are so many troubles in the real world right now, we just got out of a global pandemic, there's unrest everywhere. And this is the thing antis believe does harm? A fictional character being ooc in a fictional series? Loki is a fictional character in a fictional story so how the hell does his power level do any real life harm?

Now about the AGP and selfcest part, I get that there are some people who feel selfcest is transphobic. And I am not trying to invalidate anyone's hurt. But this has been niche sci fi concept for so long. And let me assure you a majority of the sci fi fans don't look as this concept as trans rhetoric but as fun, thought provoking concept that can't exist irl. I myself was so confused when antis started calling sylki transphobic, because the fact that such a stereotype ever existed about trans people only came to my knowledge after antis started ranting about it.

But keeping all this aside, there's one fundamental flaw in this selfcest controversy that is often overlooked no matter how many times the cast and sylki fans shout it off the roofs. And that is Sylvie is her own person, not just a female Loki. Loki didn't fall for Sylvie because she was his female counterpart, but because of her own strength and grit and their bonding over their life. I have never seen antis factor in this when they rant about sylki and selfcest. Instead they follow his absolute rigid thought that sylvie is Loki, completely invalidating Sylvie's struggle in the series to separate herself from the role of a Loki. This absolutism reminds of some TERF ideologies which leave no room for expression of one's individual identity. Imo, Sylvie is stripped of her self identity, one she made for herself and beaten down in the role of a Loki in order to shame the ship and it's shippers. Many antis straight out refuse to factor in this nuance of Sylvie, rather they employ a black and white thinking where either sylvie is a Loki or she is not.

That said, there was two things in this letter I found absolutely baseless and totally stupid. First that sylki is incest' because they both share the last name?? Sylvie is the daughter of his universes' Laufey, Loki the son of his universes' Laufey. If you go see Spiderman NWH, then you will realise that each of the spidey had their own aunt May. And I don't think I need to tell people that Tobey! Aunt May, Andrew! Aunt May and Tom! Aunt May are three totally different people. For Sylki to be incest, they are supposed to be born or raised by the exact same person; being born to two separate variants with the same identity isn't the same as being born to the same person. So, this incest is just deliberate twisting of the situation to add fake morality so that it is easier to hate the ship

Secondly, it's true romance isn't necessary for each story, but that doesn't mean adding romance makes a story worthless. And if a story wants to add romance as it's main theme, like the Loki series did, it has very right to do it. This idea that romance is inherently bad and unnecessary is a misogynist thought that looks down upon romance because it is something predominantly enjoyed by women. Hating a romantic arc is one thing, claiming a story would have been better without a romance or that it wasn't needed is another.

Ultimately, minus a few valid points, this letter feels like a rant because the series didn't fit into the headcannon and desires of certain fans. And while it is ok to rant about it or hate it, I don't get why antis are so eager to push their agenda down our throats. It's definitely exhausting.

[velvetvexations]

trans women wouldn't be sexually assaulted at disproportionately higher rates

When I was around thirteen my grandmother tried to dissuade me from being queer by telling a story about how a gay man in the area was raped to drive him from town. Rape is not inherently about attraction or even sexual release, and when it is, there's no guarantee a rapist will reconcile their worldview with the fact that they would not be straight by their own standards, nor does it preclude they're simply in denial of it - indeed, famous homophobes being caught with male prostitutes is a trope. Self-loathing, denial, hatred, power, and sadism are major factors in incidents of rape that cannot be ignored with the handwave that someone who claims to be attracted to women must view trans women as such if they sexually assault them.

incarcerated trans women wouldn't be forced to act as comfort women for male inmates in prisons

Okay, this is legitimately one of the most baffling sentences I've ever read in my life. This is not knowing the most basic facts about sexual assault in prison, because men have famously been raped in prison since the existence of prison as a concept. Near literally every work of fiction about prison in the last 20-30 years has touched on male-on-male sexual violence, including the fact that men are forced into ongoing roles akin to "comfort women" and any preference for trans women has precedent in the well-known preference for "pretty" male victims of prison rape, which is to say that there's a preference for whoever's available that most approaches a conventionally feminine appearance.

trans women wouldn't be discriminated against in many of the same ways women are

Not everyone at the source of all discrimination a trans woman might experience are also the same transphobes that don't consider them women, and indeed, it's more than possible to treat trans people like shit specifically because you so readily accept their gender identity, but beyond that it's important to understand that transphobes are stupid bigots and are not logically consistent androids carrying out transphobia.exe to perfection.

Then there's malgendering, which is when people intentionally try and twist someone's gender identity against them - but with malgendering, that doesn't mean they actually believe it, they're just twisting the idea around to be cruel, like a cis man making threats of violence against a trans man because it's "allowed" now, a sentiment dripping with sarcasm to put a joking justification over wanting to hurt someone they see as a woman stepping out of place.

trans women would be treated by society the same as effeminate men, not as a whole other category of threat to the presumed superiority of maleness and masculinity

Trans women are seen as an escalation, taking deviance from patriarchal standards even further. Until very recently trans women and gay men were in fact treated identically, but now the latter are seen as slightly more tolerable, and even then any LGB Without the T folk who actually buy into that "you guys are fine because at least you aren't trans" bullshit are idiots digging their own graves.

it frustrates me so much whenever people (cough cough, r/curatedtumblr) attribute transmisogyny to misandry. like, when a transmisogynist calls a trans woman a "man in a dress", they're not targeting her masculinity or "maleness"; they're explicitly targeting her femininity. when a trans woman is SA'd by a chaser, it 's not her "maleness" that makes her a target, but rather the objectification and fetishization of her female body. in media, it is always the trans woman's femininity that is mocked, sexualized, degraded.

people really need to read whipping girl julia serano. grr

[sixscythe6]

Personal opinions on several Bad Takes I’ve seen about pansexuality:

1. “Lots of definitions of pansexuality have transphobic roots because they single out attraction to trans/nonbinary people!”

It’s clear to me that 100% of these takes come from either young people and/or Americans. Allow me to explain why: bisexuality, whether you like it or not, used to be strictly defined as ‘attraction to men and women’ at least in some places in the world. With the implication that the men and women were cis. 

I am speaking from personal experience, as that was my real life introduction to the term bisexual. Which didn’t happen in the yonder days of beforetimes, it happened in the 2000s/early 2010s, because guess what? Out here in Eastern Europe, we don’t have the fucking bisexual manifesto. We don’t have ‘queer studies’ in college, hell some of us still don’t have the basic right to marry someone of the ‘same sex’ right now, in 2021, nevermind back when I was coming to terms with my queerness.

When I learned about pansexuality in highschool, it was with the now outdated concept of ‘hearts before parts’ and other such labeling, which at the time, for a queer kid in the closet in an incredibly conservative country, was the fitting label for how I saw my attraction to others. I was attracted to others “regardless of gender”, and I didn’t have the vocabulary to express that in an unproblematic way yet.

Over the years, I came to understand why ‘hearts before parts’ and singling out attraction to trans/nb people was wrong. However, the label pansexual, as meaning ‘attraction to others regardless of their gender presentation and identity’ stuck with me, as it already came to mean something to me, since humans tend to form emotional bonds with aspects of their identity. 

Furthermore, bisexuality in and of itself, as a word used to refer to sexual attraction, also started out “problematic”, as it was a definition for a mental disorder in a translation of a book called Psychopathia Sexualis. The author considered bisexuality and homosexuality to be ‘perversions’.

The roots of our labels are all drenched in hatred, you can’t reclaim one label and then insist that another is wrong to use because its history is not squeaky clean and unproblematic enough for you.

Which brings me to...

2. “Why not just use bisexual? They mean the same thing!”

The short answer is: because fuck you, that’s why. One post out there put it best when they said there are over 50 synonyms for the word beautiful, yet people don’t police the use of them. Why should it be any different for labels? 

How does it harm anyone if someone identifies as pansexual? What’s the concrete wrong it in, aside form the flawed argument of ‘some of the definitions were transphobic/cringe’?

Oh, wait, I know...

3. “It fragments our community!”

In what way, pray tell? Pansexuality falls under the bi umbrella. And if it didn’t, it would be a wholeass different sexuality,  so it doesn’t ‘fragment’ or ‘take away’ from bisexuality or bisexual representation regardless of how you view it.

Again, people are allowed to use whatever label they prefer for themselves, because they are not hurting anyone with their own personal identity. If you have a problem with that, you are advocating for policing people’s identities, which is an inherently anti-queer stance.

4. “It’s just a quirky fad word for kids!”

There’s lots that could be said here for why it’s not, but so what if it is? What’s wrong with younger generations using new words to describe their experiences? Why are you focusing on discussing how queer youth self-labels, rather than the real and heavy oppression that our community still faces around the world?

5. “I don’t believe pan people experience any oppression because-”

If you believe pansexuality is the same as bisexuality, and that bisexual people experience oppression... then by the transitive property of bigotry, we would at least experience the same kind of targeted bigotry that bi people do. 

Pansexual specific oppression has not been as well documented (to my knowledge at least), but frankly? All of this intra-community bullshit counts to me as panphobia. The fact that people are trying to erase us, push us out of the queer community, talk over us, explain to us what our attraction *really* is... hm yeah no, not gonna take that lying down. 

In conclusion: I will identify as pansexual for as long as your crusty asses will stay mad about it, and then a day more. You’re not going to intimidate or debate me out of my label just because it isn’t to your personal liking.

Any reblog or reply/comment (since that was apparently not clear) that attempts to deligitimize the use of the label, even if done under the mask of civility and politeness, will result in instant blocking. This is a personal blog and as such, I will yeet you off of it if you have a problem with my identity in and of itself.

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

as an autistic woman...

let me just say that someone simply asserting a boundary or telling you that you’ve hurt someone or crossed a line

is not inherently ableist or misogynistic

and it’s fucking disgusting seeing people constantly hold either of these two identities up like a shield to pretend they’re incapable of wrongdoing.

Autistic people don’t remain actual babies our whole lives and we are not incapable of learning to respect boundaries and people of different experiences. It’s not fucking ableist to tell an autistic person to stop harassing someone or being racist or misogynistic or transphobic or w/e. And it’s not unreasonable to ask us to learn these rules.

Not hurting people is not a “neurotypical social skill” that’s just demanded out of tradition in the same vein as “you have to make eye contact while talking to someone”. Not hurting people actually matters and it’s something that we can learn as well as anyone else if we work at it - just like everyone else has to. Like sure we can misread situations maybe a bit more often or not know the script for a specific situation and flounder a bit in expressing ourselves, but a genuine effort to not be a bigot & to not violate boundaries - and an apology when we fail - is not too much to ask.

Women are not fragile creatures who can be destroyed by the slightest criticism for our actions. We’re also not pure beings of light incapable of doing anything bigoted or otherwise cruel. I see other white cis women weaponise these concepts the most and it’s not subtle.

Invoking misogynistic myths about (usually white, usually cis) female purity and daintiness to implicitly or explicitly cast people you’ve harmed (esp people of colour and women who are trans, and ppl in other vulnerable groups) as violent aggressors is not just antifeminist, regressive and repulsive, it’s a further act of violence.

Stop victim blaming and acting fragiler-than-thou and start fucking apologising for your fuckups. None of us are immune to enacting harm on each other. When you feel embarrassed or attacked when someone asks you to behave better, take a beat to process it through and don’t jump to calling someone ableist or misogynistic just because it’s an easy out.

That kind of behaviour is inappropriate, manipulative, and incredibly unkind. Not to mention, it escalates the conflict instead of resolving it. You don’t have to “win” every time to have happy and healthy relationships with those around you - in fact, you can’t, because none of us are immune to fucking up and it���s not healthy for other people to not be able to tell you when you’ve hurt them.

Just apologise and try to be better.

[kuromichad]

different subject that’s heavy on my mind rn but since i’m already being harsh let’s get into it. i wish it wasn’t automatically presumed to be some kind of truscum attitude when someone tries to express that different parts of The Trans Community have like, different needs and different risk levels and different experiences and that we have the ability to talk over each other, harm each other, etc... like when i put it that way people generally are like ‘of course that’s true!’ but is it ever really understood in practice? a number of people (not a large enough number, but still) are able to loosely understand ‘you can be trans and transphobic’ when it’s applied to the matter of transmisogyny but when a trans person tries to express distrust of or frustration with afab nb people due to how common it is that that category of person will, despite being trans/nb, espouse bioessentialist, anti-medical-transition, radfem-adjacent if not outright cryptoterf rhetoric, suddenly ‘trans people can be transphobic’ gets applied to... the person with a complaint about transphobia. 

because he’s clearly an evil truscum man! regardless of if the person making the complaint is a trans man or trans woman, oops, lol. he’s a bad person who is attacking and invalidating and totally hatecriming the heckin’ valid, equally at-risk transgender identity of “an afab woman who isn’t a woman except when she pointedly categorizes themself as a woman because being afab makes them a woman who is ‘politically aligned’ with women but she’s not an icky unwoke cis woman because they don’t like being forced into womanhood although Really When You Think About It 🤔 all women are dysphoric because obviously the pathologized medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria in transgender people is something that equally applies to cis women just default existing under patriarchy 🤔, and no, equating these things totally does not imply anything reductive about or add a bizarre moral dimension to the idea of being transgender, whaaaaat, this woman who isn’t a woman doesn’t think there’s anything immoral or cowardly or misogynist or delusional about being transgender, they would never say that because THEY’RE transgender, except when she feels it’s important (constantly) to make clear that she’s Still A Woman Deep Down Inherently Despite Not Identifying As One, and none of this ever has any effect on how they treat the concept, socially and politically, of people who actually wholly identify with (and possibly medically transition to) a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, be it ‘the opposite gender’ or abstaining from binary gender altogether or ‘politically aligning’ with the ‘opposite’ gender from their asab. never ever!”

and like maybe that sounds like a completely absurd and hateful strawman to you! but in that case you’re either like, lucky, or optimistic, or ignorant. i’m literally not looking at random nb people and declaring that in My Truscum Opinion they’re ‘really a woman’ just because they’re not medically transitioning or meeting some arbitrary standard of mine. i am looking at self-identified afab nb people, who most often use she/they because, y’know, words mean things, especially pronouns, so people who are willingly ‘aligned with womanhood’ typically intentionally use she/her (sorry that i guess that’s another truscum take now!!! that pronouns mean things!!! the bigender transmasc who deliberately uses exclusively he/him wants it to invoke a perception he’s comfortable with!), who actively say the things listed above (in a non-sarcastic manner). 

like, the line between a person who says “i don’t claim to really not be my asab because i know no one would ever perceive me as anything else” because theyve internalized a defeatist attitude due to societal transphobia, and a person who says that because they... genuinely believe it’s impossible/ridiculous/an imposition to truly be transgender (in the traditional trans sense, beyond a vague nb disidentification with gender) and are actively contributing to the former person’s self loathing... is hard to define from a distance! i think plenty of people who are, in a sense, ‘tentative’ or like ‘playing close to home’ so to speak in their identity are ‘genuinely trans’ (whatever that may mean) and just going through a process. they might arrive at a different identity or might just eventually stop saying/believing defeatist stuff, who knows. but there are enough people saying it for the latter reason, or at least not caring if they sound that way, that it’s like, dangerous. it is actively incredibly harmful to other trans people. and it’s fucking ridiculous that it’s so difficult to criticize because you’ll always get the defense of “umm but i’m literally trans” and/or “well i’m just talking about ME, this doesn’t apply to other trans people” when it’s an attitude that very clearly seeps into their politics and the way they discuss gender.

because it’s just incredibly common for afab nb people (most typically those that go by she/they! since i’m aware that uh, i am also afab nb, but we clearly are extremely different, so that’s the best categorization i’ve got) to discuss gender in moralized terms, with the excuse of patriarchy/misogyny existing, which of course adds another difficult dimension to trying to criticize this because it gets the response of “don’t act like misandry is real” (it’s not, but being a dick still is) and “boohoo, let women complain about their oppressors” (this goes beyond ‘complaining’). a deliberate revocation of empathy/sympathy/compassion from men and projection of inherently malicious/brutish/cruel intent onto men (not solely in the justified generalizations ‘men suck/are dangerous’, but in specific interactions too) underpin a whole fucking lot of popular posts/discussions online, whether they’re political or casual/social, and it absolutely influences how people conceptualize and feel about transness. 

because ‘maleness is evil’ is still shitty politics even when you’ve slightly reframed it from the terf ‘trans women are evil because they’re Really Men and can never escape being horrific soulless brutes just as women can never escape being fragile morally superior flowers’ to the tumblr shethey “trans women who are out to me/unclockable are tolerable i guess because they’re women and women are good; anyone i personally presume to be a cis man, though, is still automatically evil, and saying trans men are Just As Bad is progressive of me, and it’s totally unrelated and apolitical that i think we should expand the concept of afab lesbianism so broadly that you can now be basically indistinguishable from trans men on literally every single level except for a declaration of ‘but i would never claim to be a man because i’m secure in the Innate Womanhood of the body i was born into, even as i medically alter that body because it causes me great gendered discomfort.’ none of this at all indicates that i feel there’s an immense moral/political gap between being an afab nb lesbian vs a straight trans man! it says nothing at all about my concept of ‘maleness’ and there’s no way this rhetoric bleeds into my perception of trans women and no way loudly talking about all this could keep trans people around me self-loathing and closeted, because i’m Literally Trans and Not A Terf!”

again, if that sounds like a hateful strawman, sorry but it’s not. i guess i’m supposed to be like ‘all of the many people ive seen saying these shitty things is an evil outlier who Doesn’t Count, and it’s not fair to the broad identity of afab shethey to not believe that every person who doesn’t outright say terfy enough things is a perfectly earnest valid accepting trans person who’s beyond criticism’ but like. this cannot be about broad validation. this can’t be about discarding all the bad apples as not really part of the group. we can’t be walking on eggshells to coddle what are essentially, in the end, Cis Feelings, because in the best cases this kind of rhetoric comes from naive people who are early and uncertain in their gender journey or whatever and are in the process of unraveling internalized transphobia, and in the easily observable worst cases these people are very literally redefining shit so that ‘actually all afab women are trans, spiritually, all afabs have dysphoria, we are all Equally oppressed by Males uh i mean cis men <3’ because, let’s be honest, they know that the moment they call themselves trans they get to say whatever they want about gender no matter how harmful it is to the rest of us. and those ideas spread like wildfire through the afab shethey “woman that’s not a woman” community that frankly greatly outnumbers other types of trans people online, because many of those people just do not have the experiences that lead you to really understand this shit and have to push back against concepts of gender that actively harm you as a trans person.

like that’s all i want to be able to say, is Things Are Different For Different Groups. and a willful ignorance of these differences leads to bad rhetoric controlling the overall discourse which gets people hurt. and even when concepts arise from it that seem positive and helpful and inclusive, in practice or in origin those ideas can still be upholding shit that gets other people hurt. like, i don’t doubt that many people are very straightforwardly happy and comfortable with an identity like ‘afab nb lesbian on testosterone’ and it would be ridiculous and hypocritical for me, ‘afab nb who wants to pass as a guy so he can comfortably wear skirts again,’ to act like that’s something that can’t or shouldn’t exist. it’s not about the identity itself, it’s about the politics that are popular within its community, and how the use of identities as moral labels with like, fucking pokemon type interactions for oppression effectiveness which directly informs the moral correctness of your every opinion and your very existence, is a shitty practice that gets people hurt and leads us to revoke empathy from each other.

like. sorry this is all over the place and long and probably still sounds evil because i haven’t thought through and disclaimered every single statement. but i’m like exhausted from living with this self-conscious guilt that maybe i’ve turned into a horrible evil truscum misogynist etc etc due to feeling upset by this seemingly inescapable approach to gender in lgbt/online circles that like, actively harms me, because when i vent with my friends all the stuff i’ve tried to explain here gets condensed down to referencing ‘she/theys’ as a category and that feels mean and generalizing and i genuinely dislike generalizations but the dread i feel about that category gets proven right way too often. it’s just like. this is not truscum this is not misgendering this is not misogyny. this is not about me decreeing that all transmascs have to be manly enough or dysphoric enough and all nbs have to be neatly agender and androgynous or something, i’m especially not saying that nb gender isn’t real lmao or even that it’s automatically wrong to partially identify with your asab; this is not me saying you can only medically transition for specific traditional reasons or that you don’t get a say on anything if you aren’t medically transitioning for whatever reason, now or ever. i just. want to be allowed to be frank about how... when there’s different experiences in a community we should like. acknowledge those differences and be willing to say that sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about or that what they’re saying is harmful. without the primary concern being whether people will feel invalidated by being told so. because these are like, real issues, that are more important than politely including everyone, because that method is just getting vulnerable people drowned out constantly.

[colorisbyshe]

I’m very tired of choice feminism being applied to bisexual labels.

“Let people choose what they want” implies that their choices don’t affect other people but they do.

“I identify as pansexual because I want to be clear I include trans/nonbinary people” implies that bisexuality is not clear in its inclusion and that pansexuality is the only orientation that includes trans/nonbinary people, thus hurting not only bisexuals but nonbinary people too.

“I identify as biromantic because I want people to know I don’t feel sexual attraction” implies that bisexual is a label that inherently includes sexual attraction and that bisexual asexuals, minors, and sex repulsed/traumatized people do not exist.

“I identify as pansexual because I don’t see gender (what the fuck does this mean) and want to know how I experience attraction” indicates that other orientations are just falling in love with gender and this reaffirms stereotypes of gay and bisexual people being shallow and can even feed into transphobic ideals of falling in love with genitals when in the wrong hands. “I don’t see gender” or “I fall in love with personality, not gender” is just “hearts not parts” all the fuck over again, this time with a glossy liberal spin. Thus hurting trans people as well.

Even the petty reasons like “I just like the flag better” implies there is something lacking in the bisexual flag, even though the pansexual flag is just a knock off of the bisexual flag that’s meant to be more nonbinary inclusive (and scroll back up again to see how that’s problematic).

Your “choices” and preferences do not exist in the a vacuum. They don’t only affect you.

There is no reason to identify as any label other than bisexual to describe multi gender attraction that does not hurt bisexuals as well as other groups. Your positive choices create negative space and in that negative space is bisexuality as a concept.

Bisexuality should not be in your identity’s negative space if you are attracted to multiple genders. It is your positive space. No matter how you feel your attraction to multiple genders (with or without sexual attraction, with or without romantic attraction, with gendered preferences, with no gender preferences, putting personality over looks, looks over personality, whatever) it is always bisexuality.

Bisexuality is an all inclusive term. It does not say how or why we feel attraction to multiple genders, just that we do in fact feel it. And it is always nonbinary/trans inclusive, as ALL orientations are trans/nonbinary inclusive.

When you say you aren’t bisexual, you’re biromantic/pansexual/omnisexual/polysexual for X reason, you are implying X is not included within bisexuality.

You are excluding X from bisexuality. You are separating X from bisexuality. You are tearing the bisexual community apart.

And there isn’t a reason in the world that’s good enough to justify that.