#ofc 'men' here applies only to cis men

[chaos-of-the-abyss]

hm rgu just has a really nuanced take about how patriarchy harms men. it says that men are brought up in a society that encourages them to harm women and emulate other misogynistic, abusive men [touga emulating akio, and to a lesser extent saionji emulating touga and later akio]. this often does come at some cost to their own psyche, because the men they are emulating hurt and abuse them too [touga is abused by akio, saionji is abused by touga though touga is not nearly as skillful with it]. but regardless, they are punching downwards to mistreat the women in their lives the same way their abusive male role models do [touga abusing nanami, saionji abusing anthy], and they choose to act this way to women because, despite the conditions of patriarchy inflicting a toxic and self-destructive relationship with other men on them, they are willing to imitate and obey the same men that hurt them if it means they can keep the privilege and power over women that the patriarchy grants them by default for being men. [touga wants to be akio's successor, he wants to inherit the world that akio has constructed for himself, which is built on the foundation of patriarchal power over women. and to do this touga deliberately keeps himself on akio's radar rather than pull back once it becomes clear what akio's intentions with him are. touga believes he's letting himself be manipulated, he believes he is consenting to it, and that that will be worth it if it means claiming akio's seat of power in the future. (of course what touga doesn't consider is that he cannot meaningfully consent to any advances akio makes, because he's a minor and akio is an adult.)]

rgu asserts that yes, patriarchy does harm men, but that harm comes almost exclusively from other men. and, more importantly, while abusive men may have been hurt by the patriarchy at the hands of other men, it is still their choice to hurt the women around them. and rather than dawdle and sympathize with harmful men for how they themselves were hurt by other harmful men, it's more important to prevent them from hurting anyone else

[mrfoox]

me: -literally crying as i explain how roo was extra kind to me when i expected the bare minimum-

roo: miranda... thats the norm. you should expect guys to be gentlemen. men should be kind to women

me who has had so many things mentally damaged by men around me and thus have little expectations of others: um.... -sobbing- don’t think that is the normal thing for every guys alive

[tirfpikachu]

Omg the post about 'a lesbian could be attracted to a man if they're very special' reminded me of something that happened.

I go to a club and one of the girls who went there recently split from her BF, and apparently he wasn't very nice. She said she had only ever dated women until that point and before that she thought she was a lesbian. The girl's friend said well he did catfish you.

Turns out, the girl had met him on a dating app when he was identifying as a trans woman and he basically 'detransitioned' the moment they started dating.

So this girl's friend is going well, you are a lesbian, and then the girl goes, really quietly, well no, I guess I'm bi? Girl's friend: no, you're a lesbian.

Like, I'm holding my tongue because I'm bi. I've never dated a man (nor do I intend to), but I still find them attractive, so I'm bi. And this girl was genuinely attracted to her bf, but her friend was adamant she was still a lesbian and I'm just... if I can openly say I'm bi without any intention of dating the opposite sex, and never having done so, then what's the issue here?

It was so awkward, like the girl was clearly uncomfortable about it.

THAT'S SO AWKWARD WTF ????????????

like bruh if you're attracted to Just Some Dude who isn't even presenting as transfem anymore... you're bi as hell. if you've genuinely been attracted to a guy or an omab person who isn't presenting as female or even aligning with women socially... you're not a lesbian. febfem sexuality should honestly be more normalized. it's okay to choose to only date one side or the other! it doesn't make you any less bi. that's legit just biphobic rhetoric. people don't CHOOSE to be gay based on finding one side annoying or smth. gays legit are incapable of being attracted to either the opposite sex or people who present as the opposite sex, within reason ofc. and even then that's still technically a bisexual experience in the bi = both sexes definition, and not a homosexual experience unless you can't tell at all the person's sex... which imo is pretty unlikely once you learn the person is trans, there's usually certain features & behaviors that give it away once you look closer that might or might not affect your attraction. but yeah, saying that you can straight up be into someone who presents 100% as male and STILL be a lesbian is unhinged.

like the "well the person is transfem" as an excuse doesn't even apply?? that blows my mind. i would even, very controversially, have given people some leeway on the whole being technically bi/into both sexes yet only being into bio/cis men & transmascs (or bio/cis women & transfems) thing... like in a way that's being into both sexes but also only being into gay-passing relationships, which is a really unique experience. it technically still falls under bisexuality, but imo it's still a close cousin experience to gayness. honestly if the whole "bi lesbian" thing had been only about people who are technically bisexual in the dictionary definition of the term but are only capable to be attracted to people presenting as female or male and only date in a gay-presenting way, i wouldn't have had an issue with it since transness can make sexuality quite complicated. they would still face homophobia, including about them not being into het-presenting relationships. as long as they had been respectful abt homosexuals i wouldn't have cared. but alas, "bi lesbian" is for a rly stupid reason...

that "friend" is just pushing biphobic & lesbophobic rhetoric. i hope you can have a good convo with her and reassure her that if she was ever into a guy, a male person that's 100% male-presenting, she is extremely bisexual. there's just no way around it. even with the transfem identity, i'll see 100% male-passing transfems try to get with lesbians and it drives me fucking crazy. it's disrespectful af!!

[timetravelstudies]

a meandering post about transmasculine aesthetics (or lack thereof)

i was thinking about how in both big and small, common and niche/micro ways, when youre transmasc you kind of have to resign yourself to the double bind of both always having to borrow the language of other people and groups to describe yr own experiences and simultaneously being accused (though not always so directly & in so many words) of stealing valor.

this i think applies across the board in a variety of cases but specifically i was thinking about victimization/victimhood, including but not limited to sexual victimization. and ofc victimization is not all there is to being trans &/or queer but as i said a while ago in a post re: that one girl raised by gay dads who was complaining about how lgbt culture is "too focused" on homophobia, victimization (& ostracism, & aggression, & in general adverse social circumstances) is an inescapable part of the queer experience so i feel like this is an especially apt case study.

like (and now im gonna go so micro and niche this probably wont be recognizable outside my very specific sphere of mutuals & inlaws but its the example on my mind rn) i have often seen tboys etc. on here for lack of a better word romanticizing a certain kind of sexual abuse & exploitation that is commonly associated (socially and artistically) with boys and young men who are "too" "feminine" and thus attract the attention of adults esp adult men. and like even once we go past the whole "are you allowed to (fantasize/post/make art/romanticize/jerk off/...) about X thing, do you have the correct trauma, i want an itemized list of everything bad that's happened to you on my desk by tomorrow or i unleash the mob" and we get to people who correctly see that type of thinking as always anti-victim and inherently deleterious (as well as anti-art but thats another post entirely), there are still plenty of instances of in this case transfems who have this...... disdainful and almost condescending tone of "actually what youre sexualizing is MY experience, MY oppression, MY victimization, /I/ and/or people like me were the ones who were abused for being boys who looked like girls, NOT you" which ..... i dont even really want to disprove or anything like that bc im not particularly interested in that, and tbh i get how it can be extremely annoying and frustrating for a general group of people to not give a fuck about your extremely real and continued oppression and/or contribute to it only for some of them to turn around and also aestheticize some aspects of that experience. like i totally get where the girls are coming from on this mostly.

but what i want to draw attention to is something else which....... ok let's say all the guys immediately drop the ganymede/painting of isaac/takemiya bpd shota/whatever posting tomorrow. let's say that is a transfeminine or queer male experience the tboys have no claim over or whatever. the alternate pool of imagery & psychosexual landscape to borrow from is that of female victimhood. which again a lot of guys do draw from. but as soon as a tboy gets on some ldr coquette dollette traumacore shit he gets accused of holding onto his white female privilege of being presumed harmless and ontologically innocent and so on. so what then?

to be clear, im bringing up these criticisms which are most commonly levied at transmascs by transfems not because i want to criticize transfeminine people or transfeminism especially but because i see this stuff as the most poignant and relevant commentary on transmasculinity that exists in the contemporary discourse as of 2025, and im including academic & adjacent writing in that statement. (for instance, a cis feminist critique to the ldr shit would be that trans guys are trying to escape sexist oppression while stealing its valor, as i was saying at the beginning of the post. i think that statement is erroneous and dumb for reasons that should be self evident and if they arent then this post isnt for you.)

anyway. my aim isnt really to debunk these transfeminist criticisms or even put an asterisk next to them and say in which exclusive cases they are applicable. the transfeminist theory answer to these qualms is obviously that there is overlap btw the experiences of cis women, trans men and trans women because they all occupy a minoritary (in the deleuzian way) position in the hierarchy of power founded by and based on cis masculinity. but the point im trying to make, or rather the issue im trying to discuss, isn't one of power politics. it's one of language, or more specifically symbols, or more specifically aesthetics.

there is no such thing as a transmasculine aesthetics, and yes, this is most likely because of discrete sociocultural historical reasons and was probably in no small part spurred by a transmasculine desire for assimilation into one group of cis men or another at all costs or at least for blending into the background as "just a regular guy" (this was a really interesting post touching on this topic. i havent done the reading myself but it's a credible account that makes perfect sense to me). but again, im not interested in a social and historical account. What im interested in is aesthetics: how people internalize, digest, express concepts on a sensorial and pre-verbal (or non-verbal or quasi-verbal) plane.

regardless of the reasons, we are here now: there is no transmasculine imagery of sexual victimization. there is no transmasculine imagery of much anything. this is especially true the more "queer" you get in an academic sense, i.e. the further away you go from a type of (trans)masculinity that is as close to hegemonic as you can get without cisgenderism (strong, in control, buff, facial hair, capable, handy, butch, a top, dating a woman or someone unambiguously more feminine...). there is no transmasculine aesthetics of gender non conformity, of artsiness, of etherealness, of fragility, of madness, of gayness & bisexuality, and yes, of sexual victimization - or rather, there are aesthetic languages for all these things that transmasculine people understand, appreciate and engage in, because we are people in the world like everyone else, but none of them are recognizable as transmasculine.

if youre wondering, why do you really care that much about aesthetics? arent there real, material problems in the world? id say yes, and we face those too. however. i am a big proponent of the importance of aesthetics as a mode of analysis because i believe human beings perceive, interpret and digest the world largely (though ofc not exclusively) through aesthetics. but even if you dont agree with me on the general plane, please look at the world around you. in the 2020s aesthetics are everything. all of our culture, all of our thinking, is done through imagery first and logic and words second, if at all.

in fact, though it is almost certainly just a coincidence due to the unprecedented exposure transgenderism is having right now (which i dont count necessarily as a good thing but not the point rn) a kind of explicitly transmasc aesthetics IS being born through what some have jokingly dubbed the "sweatermuppet industrial complex" - you know, the st sebastian with top surgery scars, png of a syringe, dog poem, richard siken quote collage type shit. ive criticized that stuff before and i'll do it again, not only because i find it corny, but also and especially because i feel that not even a few years since its inception have passed and already it has become a self-referential, sterile vein only good for selling lame sweatshop tshirts. but thats what happens when you scold every other type of expression out of existence: at worst it simply never gets made, or at least shown, again, and so it doesnt get to inspire the next thing, at best its edges get sanded down into something inoffensive if not exactly excellent and you get the doglamb with two heads again. and at this point it feels important to restate that any representation of queer & trans existence, ESPECIALLY the negative aspects of it (which again, are an inevitalbe and intrinsic part of it) will necessarily be offensive or even repulsive and yes, problematic, to some.

anyway. it all pisses me off and makes me sad for so many varied reasons. because i love aesthetic and artistic expression - not even just art, but every kind of utterance that is done on an aesthetic level - and i want to be free to do my own & also i want to see those of other people who are similar to me in some ways but different in others and let that inspire me to create, think and live in new ways (as indeed i already do with stuff mostly made by non-transmasculine people). because those of us (transmasculine people, trans people, gnc people, queer people) who are marginal and specific and weird even within our already small identity-groups deserve to express ourselves and be understood rather than languish in unsayability. because any of these experiences - queerness, transness, sexual abuse - is painful enough already when you CAN talk about it. because transfeminine people are lowkey carrying & saving art, culture and cultural discourse in this century even more than usual and i believe and feel in my bones transmascs as a group can give that much more if not to the mainstream at least to the community. because i believe the only thing that can save us from hurtling past the edge and down into the void is an aesthetic revolution and i also believe that only queer people can bring that about. etcetc. and yes tumblr is a very bad place to have any sort of conversation bc youll get into fights anywhere but tumblr is also soooo irrelevent. but also i feel like this is the only place where we can have this sort of conversation at this (extremely granular, specific, sophisticated) level where you need to have understood a bunch of shit beforehand already. theyre still doing pronoun circle type shit on ig. anyway. that was my post thanks for reading. shuffles off my soapbox

[nothorses]

hi this is just me wanting to know more i don't support radfem ideology at all but im trying to think critically

cis men are the perpetrators of the majority of gender based violence right? so wouldn't the whole concept of lesbian separatism be effective in reducing violence? how do we respond to that argument if we're of the opinion that lesbian separatism is bad, because ofc it would make a difference to reduce that much violence by alienating cis men from society.

what's a productive response to someone who thinks eradicating men from society is a good feminist cause? i don't know if this is a separate question but: how do you logically explain that getting rid of men won't get rid of the patriarchy?

This is... a weird line of reasoning.

“Of course it would make a difference to reduce that much violence by alienating cis men from society” is such a bold claim.

First of all: why would we assume it’s only cis men being alienated by lesbian separatism? If the goal here is for women to only interact with other women, trans men and other trans folks who otherwise do not consider themselves women should not be included. If the logic is that this is a TERF movement (it is) and the intention is to include or exclude people on the basis of their AGAB, then trans women and trans AMAB folks are going to be excluded.

Second of all, cis men alone make up almost half of the world population. So where are they going? If they’re not getting uprooted and placed somewhere else physically, how do you plan on creating a society where all cis men are just Not Interacted With except for other cis men, and functionally, how does that work- in terms of jobs, families, partners, loved ones?

And... what metric are we using here? Is it how people look, how they act, are we checking everyone’s genitals and birth certificates? Do we need to put trans people on a registry, do stealth and cis-passing trans people need a badge or something that marks them Part Of Society?

On a global scale, there is no reality where All Cis Men are peacefully alienated from society so that lesbian separatism can happen everywhere. What you’re looking at here is mass genocide: “Kill all men” is an extremist lesbian separatist slogan, the idea being, very literally, that all men must die so that women can be safe.

I am taking for granted that any reasonable human being understands that mass genocide is a bad thing, which means this becomes a personal choice. Which is what lesbian separatism typically is; it’s about forming separate, distinct communities devoid of men. Communes and stuff.

And look, I’m not gonna tell people not to go make their woman’s-only commune or whatever. But I will ask these questions:

How do you determine who is Sufficiently Woman to be welcome at the commune?

What is the necessity of dis-including everyone else?

If they’re not a TERF about it and they decide trans women count, but trans men don’t, what threat do trans men pose to cis women that they must be barred from entry? What about non-women nonbinary folks?

What is it about women, specifically, that makes them uniquely safe and non-threatening? Why can that quality not apply to other genders? Are there exceptions to these rules? What do you do about them?

When a woman abuses, harasses, hurts, assaults, or rapes another woman or a young girl, what do you do about that? Does it “count”? Do you get rid of that person?

If women can be dis-included on the basis of being dangerous, or if non-women can be included on the basis of being safe, what is the necessity of making this space women-only in the first place?

What’s happening here, especially when the reason is something like “safety”, is gender essentialism: the assumption that certain genders possess certain inherent, immutable qualities. Like being uniquely safe, or posing a unique threat.

Cis men are responsible for a good amount of intimate partner violence against women because we live in a society where that violence is encouraged and excused. Cis men are also not the only perpetrators of intimate partner violence against women; this is a broad statistic, and by no means a rule.

If you want to reduce the rates at which cis men abuse and hurt their female partners, you should attack the systems enabling that violence.

[alrightfleur]

『 dominique jackson. forty-six. trans woman. she/her. 』did you see FLEUR CALLISTO in APARTMENT #27 in spectrum house? yeah, they’re pretty +CREATIVE, right? they’re very +WITTY, too. some say that they can be -CONCEITED and -CRITICAL, but i don’t see it. they work as a FORMER MODEL TURNED MODELING AGENT around san francisco. you know, they remind me of A MINK COAT DRAPED OVER A $30 CHAIR. i’m glad they’ve been at spectrum house for TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS. without them, this place just wouldn’t be the same.『 may. 21. est. she/her. 』

hi y’all !! i’m may and i’m so sorry i took so long -- i have been Busy and Tired but !! have also been dying to get this up !! it is not my Hottest nor most Detailed Work but !! i’ll add more as the days go on !! j wanna go ahead and get something up for her so i’ve got a good basis !!

triggers: brief mention of death, briefly acknowledged historical trans & homophobia

fleur was born and raised in san francisco. adopted by a wealthy couple when she was still an infant, she never knew the meaning of the word ‘want’ until what she wanted was acceptance.

before anything, she came out as bisexual. i don’t want to get too historical, but as everyone knows, the 80s were an awful time to make that decision. however, her parents accepted this. there may have been some peer distancing, but her support system still existed -- a support system she feared she would lose when she heard a term and realized an extra layer had been added: she is, and always was, a woman.

behind her parents’ backs ( not due to them not accepting her, due to the fear that they wouldn’t ), she would try on dresses and other typically feminine clothing. she tried her mother’s makeup. even with the littlest skillset, she was gorgeous.

it was then that her mother found her. she was unarmed with excuses... but it didn’t matter. her parents were new to the idea, a bit confused, but remained supportive of her. they bought her her own dresses for her birthday and christmas, her mother taught her how to apply makeup. nonetheless, fleur couldn’t build up the confidence to leave the house in that clothing -- reasonable -- until her parents offered to take her dress shopping themselves. she could get whatever she wanted. she just had to leave as herself.

so let me fast forward a couple of years. her parents fuckin died, because of course they did, and she was left astray. while able to live off of the money they left her in their will for a certain amount of time, she needed somewhere cheaper to stay. she needed a job. and, most importantly, she needed another support system. and that was when she met xavier.

it was the last year of his life, if i recall correctly, but he radiated warmth and a fatherly love that she desperately missed. he told her she was beautiful, inside and out. he told her she was valid, because she was herself. he told her things she had only ever heard from her parents. everything he said was... like home.

shortly after his passing, she took advantage of his words. her beauty. we’re gonna skip the logistics for right now because i don’t have time to look them up adklsjfhalejdks but, by the time she was 23, she was an actual model. 25, a ‘supermodel’. there were details of her life that were kept behind closed doors to the public, it not being the right time period for men to know that the woman on the cover of their magazine was not cis or straight.

but she hated hiding. it felt like she was 15 again, scared and unacceptable. but she was louder now, more confident in herself -- xavier and her parents had heightened that inner beauty.

at 30, she did something quite scandalous: in an important interview, she went off-script. she didn’t want to hide her truth anymore.

of course, this got her fired. her agency knew and, with her large appeal, had absolutely no problem with it -- they simply feared the public would. so she resolved, in that moment, to start her own agency -- specializing in lgbtq+ models.

it took it a long time to get it off its feet, almost running into bankruptcy, but, as the years went by, more and more people filed in. 

she is now back to being a Rich Bitch™, but continues to occupy the apartment she’s had for so long to honor xavier.

this was so bad i’m so sorry i’m gonna try to make it better tonight + add some personality and wc tidbits (though, in advance, one would be some models!), but!!!!!!!!!! here r some basics along w some random details bc. ofc i cldn’t just do one or the other.

[homosexula]

long post sorry

been thinking about how so many people (even other trans people) subconsciously believe in the gender binary and how it affects their views. like even people who accept nonbinary people view them as being on a spectrum with men and women being the opposite ends of the spectrum, and you can see this belief reflected in the way so many people view trans men and trans women (or amab people and afab people, or transmascs and transfems, or people who experience transmisogyny and those who dont, etc etc) as opposites.

i think this is why people act as though if trans women experience one thing trans men must experience the inverse and vice versa. why people think trans mens experiences must be the opposite of those of trans women.

if you follow this logic, it makes perfect sense to say that because trans women grow up traumatized by the closet and by transmisogyny, that because trans women grow up unable to truly access male privilege despite being viewed as bpys/men by many, and that because so-called male socialization is bullshit, the opposite is true of trans men.

however, as trans men and women are not opposites, that doesnt hold up. the fact that trans women and other trans people who experience transmisogyny are uniquely traumatized by their upbringing and dont experience the freedoms that cis boys do as children does not inherently imply that trans men and tme trans people are not traumatized by their childhood and are in fact allowed those freedoms.

(before i continue i need to clarify that you will never hear me say "female socialization" in any way outside of mocking, and that transmisogyny is absolutely a deeply alienating and horrifying trauma that people who arent trans women/transfems/etc are clearly not subject to)

in other words, trans women not being able to access the freedoms of living as a young cis boy or man does not mean that trans men are raised free from the trauma of being a child who people view as a girl and treat accordingly. and the fact that trans girls instinctively know that harmful messages and ideals directed at women apply to them even if theyre not always individually and specifically directed to them in their personal lives does not mean that trans boys instinctively know these messages do not apply to them even when directly faced with them.

its okay to point out the inherent trauma of being a closeted trans child who is subject to transmisogyny and also point out the trauma of being a closeted trans child who is subject to so-called misdirected misogyny (i dislike this term, i think it implies that if people were simply aware you dont actually identify as a woman they would stop, but i cant think of how else to put it so here we are).

in fact, i would say that the only true gender binary is the binary of cis men vs everyone else. cis men are the only group not directly targeted and traumatized by gender oppression in both childhood and later life. (this is not to say that gender oppression is healthy for cis men either tho obviously but theyre not its direct victim and it can benefit them in many ways while still emotionally poisoning them.)

the point here is that trans women and trans men are not enemies, nor even merely opposites. were all a community and we all experience transphobia and we even all experience gender oppression/misogyny in different but not opposite ways. we need to stop viewing our communities as separate and we need to stop lashing out at each other for having different experiences so that we can work together. and yes ive seen both trans men lash out at trans women and vice versa and thats just gotta stop!!! (and no im not counting trans women and transfems wanting a space that is specifically for people who experience transmisogyny and is free of men as lashing out ofc.) anyway idk how to end this this is just smth ive been ruminating on for a while and wanted to try and articulate lmao feel free to throw your two cents onto this long ass post if you feel so inclined

[spectraling]

I was reading a bit of Anons hating on Nancy, and two words came up in my mind, that describes perfectly what is going on: interiorized misogyny. Having in mind that a large proportion of the ST fandom are young girls aged 13-16 (correct me if I'm wrong), who still get fed by patriarchal standards on females and still don't have the mental skills to refraim from this mindset, this does explain a lot. A way to deal with this would be questioning them the reasons to dislike this female character.

Lol, anon, if only. There is definitely a ton of adults on here that think the same. (Internalized) misogyny is not something one escapes easily, unless you really start to question your priorities when it comes to male and female characters. If Steve had been a woman, everyone would’ve thought he was a selfish bitch. We claim to want flawed female characters, we claim we’re feminists, but yet when a female character makes any sort of mistake we tear her to pieces while her male counterparts are allowed to stumble around as long as they’re “charming” or “hot”. Hell, they don’t even have to be that, they just have to be white cis men with a one-liner or a baseball bat.

We know this is misogyny. @nancykali talks about this all the time. And it’s not limited to the fans, the writers are ofc not super aware of their own sexist bias when writing. It sucks that so many female characters on this show have a ton of potential, but it’s never fully realized bc they’re always intrinsically tied to male characters first and foremost. It makes no sense for Nancy to be this hated unless you apply the sexist bias that everyone has.

[sivisgirlfriend]

long rambly post about lesbian loneliness under the cut hhhhhh

it’s kind of sad that i just realized that these days at school i consider (most likely) straight men to be the easiest people to sit next to in class in case i need to talk to them. like, obviously i would prefer to sit next to & talk to women but more often than not i feel like i’m creeping them out or they just... don’t know how to talk to me? and i’m not saying this to praise men, like i don’t think they’re actively being nice to me and some/most of them are rude to me as well, but the “safe” state of them is just like... when they realize that i’m not interested in them so they’re not weird about it or try to hit on me but instead just act neutral and civil for like the five minutes we have to discuss a question. but with women i feel like a) they’re creeped out by me if they realize i’m a lesbian b) they’re confused because they don’t realize i’m a lesbian so they don’t know how to talk to me or c) i feel like they’re creeped out so it gets weird. so i’m just in this vicious cycle

and i know it’s pretty petty but i feel kinda jealous whenever i hear ppl talk about making friends or about how they just walk up to someone and start talking. like. i could never do that? and i feel like because of the way i look and how i’m kind of... ambiguous gender presentation-wise so much more is expected of me socially. like i already risk being seen as a weirdo by just existing as who i am so i feel like if i make the smallest mistake or if i’m a little awkward in a social situation people will feel weird and leave the conversation. ppl say that i should just act confident or whatever but that will come across as me “trying to be a man” or something and like... the only option i feel like i have left is to make a fool/joke out of myself and who i am which is something i don’t want to do after this many years of repressing my identity as a butch lesbian. like it’s so frustrating that in a social situation i can tell that i’ve got it and i’m saying a lot of things or even making ppl laugh but i can still tell that they’re uncomfortable and don’t want to be in the situation ://

ofc here i’m talking mostly about straight people but i feel like this sometimes applies to gay ppl and especially other wlw. it’s a little different of course but anyway. like... i’m content just having my own little social circle & family, it’s not like i actively need more people in my life but knowing that i couldn’t have them very easily if i wanted to just bums me out. i pretty desperately want to have other wlw/lesbian friends casually/irl or just to like... talk to other wlw but whenever i try it just doesn’t work out? online it’s fine but irl just like. doesn’t work. i especially want to talk to other butches but that’s a whole other story really because like... i get mistaken for a guy for quite a lot and that’s mostly straight people, like i don’t think other butches mistake me for a cis teenage boy BUT i’m so scared that they don’t pay attention to me or when they see me they think i’m a man anyway like. or that i’m transmasc or something. because people have done that a lot. and whenever i look at myself and the way i feel comfortable presenting it doesn’t scream butch even to me, like it just says genderless blob who someone could easily read as “man” and i’m just ! god ! i know this might be kind of problematic to say and obviously i don’t think clothing/presentation = gender but like.. many people do. idk other butches or anyone really interact lmao.

saljdakljd this got really long, can’t believe this started out as me realizing that my favorite school acquaintance is a straight man