#partially for gender reasons

[melathinn]

Ok I borrowed my friends dress and didn’t check the size but it’s a size 4 and it fits which is WILD. Also I saw a pic of me from high school and realized a. I do not recognize myself without tattoos and b. I def weigh less than I did then which is swaggy

[project-sekai-facts]

wait wait so speaking in terms of the eng translation, everyone in the cast uses they/them for mizuki?? or do people typically switch between the two??? the pronoun discourse when it came to mizuki (when it was really big a while back) stressed me tf out but i'd like to make sure i'm getting it right this time about what pronouns to use if that's ok

everyone uses they/them for mizuki on EN. There's old dialogue that uses she/her (I think all of it's from Kanade), but they stopped doing that very early on. The general consensus in the fandom nowadays is she/her though, due to it better aligning with how her story and gender is portrayed.

[communistkenobi]

Hey, I just wanted to thank you for your readthrough of Whipping Girl! You have a lot of excellent commentary on it, and although I've read the book many times myself and recommend it to all the other trans women I'm friends with, it rooted itself so deeply in my mind that I can't always tell when I'm drawing on Serano's argument. You've helped me to see the book in a new light.

thank you right back! It’s an incredible book and I’m learning a lot from it. It’s also a really good book to have productive disagreements with - I’m pretty skeptical of Serano’s conception of social constructions (or “the social” more broadly - basically, the social elements of gender) but that has more to do with the liberal framework of the book and her background as a biologist - every academic believes their field is the key to unlocking all other fields lol. I’m also sensitive to the fact that this is like a foundational text in trans theory and she has to deal with the biological essentialism embedded within virtually all discussions of gender, so i think reading her concessions to biology as charitably as possible is probably the best way to deal with those elements of the book

[gothic-chicanery]

I love getting myself into situations. My college’s theater is doing a duet roulette thing where you sign up and get assigned a random duet and find out who is singing the duet with you the night of the performance. And I signed up bc I like chaos and also attention and there was a bit where you could indicate your voice range and I said like oh I used to be an alto but I haven’t really sang since going on T so I’m not really sure what it’s like now.

Folks, they gave me a soprano part.

[aeide-thea]

thinking abt (1) that post abt how most censorship is preemptive self-censorship¹ (2) bras²

⸻ ¹ wow, tumblr search actually worked for once??? ² i do understand and respect that for many people bras serve an actual structural function wrt support/comfort! however, for many other people (hi!) they do not, at least in everyday non-sports contexts, and that's the set of concerns i'm speaking to here.

[spydertrans]

my sexuality being tied with my gender is so weird 'cause if i identified as female in any way, i would be attracted to women again

[samaspic31]

More ppl and characters with heavily fluctuating gender presentation in media I am not longer asking. where is representation for ppl who crossdress both ways depending on the day or even ppl putting wild amounts of effort on random days

[flecks-of-stardust]

'people should make weirder gender headcanons,' i say, looking at my main group of OCs, of which none of them use they/them except innocence (who is genderfluid)

[theophagie-remade]

"Not actually out but also no one who sees me doesn't think that there's something going on" is a fun state to be in

[eruukat]

voice heacanons. [head in my hands] voice headcanons!!!! theyre so powerful......

its rly cool that you can read a characters dialogue with a specific voice and politely disagree with other fans' voiceclaims only to one day wake up and realize u headcanoned them with your own voice on hrt or after voice training that whole time

or the feeling of reading a fic and feeling ur brain twist to see a new perspective as someone else describes their dialogue in a completely different tone of voice than you interpreted it to be. like the difference between a characters voice being harshly cold versus softly spoken with the words themselves carrying a cold, stern weight underneath. such nuance, interpretation, and personal characterization that is up to the audience is so unique to media w text based dialogue, like books n certain video games..... its very underrated i think

[sabrina-valerie]

>Read a really good fic based on the Mario Movie wherein Kamek's got a bit of an issue with his reflection in a mirror (cw: internalized transphobia)

>Want to go comment on it because it was that good (and i'm working on a comment bingo card)

>Want to include a mention of that flavor text from one of the Mario Party games about how Kamek has a panic attack when he sees himself in a mirror

>Go look up the fact on the wiki so i can quote it in the comment

>Realize the flavor text is actually this:

>Get really embarrassed and delete half the comment

[valentineblacker]

Oh! I have this due to a reduction! They're very noticeable because they stick way out- the surgeon made it clear that anything under the arms was NOT her department. It's actually pretty nice to see some positivity. But it's also nice to see in the comments that there's a fix.

more people should draw the dogears that often happen when you've have double mastectomy top surgery. they're important to me

[snekdood]

gonna be very annoyed if ppl insist on tryna turn all 5 of my dude characters into women when the majority of other characters in my comic already identify as women

[drchucktingle]

On your blog you've talked about dealing with chronic as a result from the stress of masking your autism.

It's a bit of a different situation, but my little sister (who we've begun to suspect has adhd) has been experiencing chronic pain in her arms and legs. I may be totally off base, but I was wondering if a similar stess might potentially be a factor in her pain.

If you're willing, would you mind talking about how your pain affected before you found a way to manage it (I tried searching your tumblr, but not much came up, so sorry if I'm asking a question that's already been answered)?

Thanks either way, I love your books. Love is real!

sure buckaroo GOOD QUESTION. i have had chronic pain in some form or another for LONG TIME in a number of STRESS RELATED WAYS. in past it has been cracking teeth from clenching dang jaws while i sleep and things like that, but a few years ago it was FULL ON BODY PAIN AND TIGHTNESS like every muscle was clenching up. went to the doctor over and over all kinds of dang specialists and it was very difficult to figure out what was going on. eventually landed on a sort of nebulous trot of STRESS but i can get more specific.

there are several things about me that you would never know just from looking or even talking to me for long times. i am a bi buckaroo, i am a non-dysphoric trans buckaroo, i am an autistic buckaroo. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE THINGS IS EITHER HIDDEN AUTOMATICALLY OR I AM SUCH AN EXPERT AT HIDING THAT IT IS SECOND NATURE

autism presents its trot in many ways, so my words do not apply to all, but my version is EXTREME ORGANIZATION AND ENDLESS WORK ETHIC. in way of freud (which is a silly way but sometimes good for symbolism talk) i have what you would call an OVERDEVELOPED SUPER EGO which is a double edged sword. i can write 100s of books at an incredible pace, but also feel like my body is constantly collapsing in on itself

this is not really something i consciously think about much, but eventually these health problems started creeping up. it was all from carrying this mystery tension in my body, because while it feels EASY for me to mask i believe all that tension goes somewhere and it stores up and stores up and stores up.

so i think the HEALTHY way that i have found to deal with this (i think of it as releasing the steam valve a bit so the boiler does not break down) is ART. this space where i am allowed to be CHUCK TINGLE and write without obsessing over the spelling or punctuation, or to loudly express my queerness, or explore gender, and to let my neurotypical mask down DIRECTLY RELIEVES my chronic pain because it literally makes my muscles relax.

when i started out this ARTISTIC TROT as chuck i used a LOT of metaphor to keep my privacy, with different words or different versions of people for different things, and buckaroos found this very funny. as a way to express myself artistically i also liked this metaphor trot a lot, but i have also found that the LESS metaphor i paint over my life as chuck, the better it is for my health. if you have noticed, i talk less about some of the parts of my life that were metaphors, or maybe you have seen that my voice has relaxed a bit in interviews, or that i carry myself a little differently over time, this is partially why. (there is another artistic reason that was a planned trot from the beginning and it has to do with my feelings as a young autistic buckaroo of not fitting in on this timeline, but we can dive into that later).

anyway, as PRACTICAL ADVICE i would say that FINDING A SPACE TO EXPRESS YOURSELF WITHOUT FEAR OR MASKING has been the number one trot for me. that can be a pink bag over your head writing hundreds of erotic shorts, or that can be just laying on the ground howling your heart out, or doing whatever stim you need to do.

i will also say that ONCE I REALIZED IT WAS MUSCLE TENSION getting a physical therapist helped a lot. because there are two sides, you have to start releasing steam from the steam valve, but at the same time youve also gotta start HEALING THE DAMAGE. so i think stretching and techniques like that can be very helpful.

hope that helps buckaroo LOVE IS REAL

[abtrusion]

wait where are all the trans guys

Historical-anthropological research, especially the work taking place before the 21st century or outside the West, tends to focus entirely on transfeminized groups. So when reading these works it’s pretty natural to ask — wait, where are all the trans guys? This is a reasonable question with a few clear answers; this post is something quick I can point people to.

The central condition of transfeminized groups' absorption into feminist activism has been to accept a kind of symmetry with select TME groups through the understanding of trans femininity as "gender variance." Under this framework, transfeminized groups' social position can be understood as a consequence of gender variance and some abstract violation of cis norms; this was proposed by people like Susan Stryker and Emi Koyama [1], among others, and continues to structure trans inclusion today. It also fails when considering several basic aspects of these groups:

Transfeminized groups are associated with hyperspecific labor practices, most frequently sex work, but also hair styling, drag, makeup artistry, acting, and other forms of 'gender work.'

Metropolitan transfeminized groups appear in the archive as highly clustered and active groups connected with, but usually intensely split from, the masculine men they fucked.

Transfeminized groups become a kind of 'third gender' on an epistemic level; they are Known to wider society before and after “coming out” in a way that USAmerican transmasculinity has only recently vaguely approached.

Transfeminized groups are heavily clustered in labor practice, social organization, and epistemic position, although this is not universal -- certain strains of USAmerican transfemininity have become a bit more labor-agnostic in the last two decades, not-so-coincidentally alongside more general currents of gender-labor liberation. The messy strains of trans male identity recovered from the archive and from current practice tend to lack labor, social, and epistemic coherence. As Aaron Devor notes in FTM, his 1997 history of FTM men, trans men in the 20th century tended to transition out of cities and into the countryside, finding low-profile places they could exist in. These practices, and the earlier "female husband" practices described by Jen Manion, relied on the labor-agnostic nature of transitioned manhood in order to disappear from public life. Transfeminized groups, on the other hand, are categorically restricted from the main form of economic life historically available to women -- marriage. Their labor practices are heavily constrained and have almost always revolved around some form of 'gender work:' as Susan Stryker put it, you need to get people to pay you for being a trans woman. Transmasculinity pushes away feminized restrictions on labor; trans femininity is labor.

Because transfeminized identities are so often labor-identities, and because their specific brand of 'gender work' and hormonal/silicone/surgical embodiment usually requires both specialized training and community support, nearly every metropolitan center in the world developed highly centralized transfeminized groups over the course of the 20th century [2]. As Ochoa notes, this visibility is partially due to epistemic visibility (everyone knows what a trans is), partially due to group structure (people work and train each other), and partially due to the selectively visible demands of finding clients. Fledglings come in with a way of being that is always already visible to society, but changing the body to match and learning how to fully enact and slowly contest the third-gender labor-identity they've been given takes a lot of community support.

So as labor-identities, transfeminized groups tend to a level of labor/community/epistemic coherence that has no clear counterpart. The news archives we have of trans men (as seen in Manion) position them as singular and easily absorbed back into the female gestalt; the cisgender feminist/gayguy/AIDS researchers that form the bulk of historical-anthropological work saw them as unnecessary to their grand theories of gender; the communities themselves have been materially fractured and, for the groups that rise out of lesbian-feminist activism, only partially committed to their own existence. The result of all this is that there is no clear equivalent to the "transfeminized groups" of Jules-Gill Peterson; there is no symmetry to trannydom, and while additional work to unearth trans manhood in the archive remains extremely valuable, sometimes the necessary level of label-coherence and social existence just isn't there.

[1] Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage," Emi Koyama, "The Transfeminist Manifesto" [2] As seen in Namaste, Invisible Lives, Prieur, "Mema's House, Mexico City," Kulick, "Travesti," Newton, "Mother Camp," Ochoa, "Queen for a Day," Hegarty, "The Made-Up State," and plenty more. Most of these works came out in the late 80s and 90s due to a combination of the feminist "third gender" craze, the burgeoning field of masculinity studies, and AIDS.