#people that treat me better because they assume i am a cis man for example will...

[uncanny-tranny]

What people often confuse, I think, is the idea that you can have specific benefits in different situations, but that is not the same as having systemic privileges for whatever identity/presentation/assumed identity or presentation that was given benefits.

If you want an example of what I mean, I have experienced some better treatment as people have recognized me as male, but society doesn't offer me systemic benefit because I'm a trans man - my transness, even in a context of being seen or assumed as a man, is not granted to me. I'm not saying that I don't ever get treated better in certain instances where I am seen as a man (even if I'm seen as a cis man), what I am saying is that that is different than systemic privileges. I think that difference matters, since people see systemic benefits as indications that people don't need help, or even that those people need to be "taken down a peg." This viewpoint isn't conducive to helping people, if that's what your goal is.

I use myself as an example just so people aren't confused. This is a complex topic that is, fundamentally, intersectional. If the only voices being heard are one type, we will be coming away with a dangerously narrow view of how social benefits and societal privilege work.

[earlmothraoffangbanger]

Thoughts on Community, Media Literacy, and How One Conducts Themselves on the Internet.

Before I get started I would like to preface this with the fact that I am currently sick from coming off of medication. I will do my best to be coherent and concise in my writing. Thank you for your patience. Feel free to send Asks if you would like to hear more from me or need clarity.

CW: Mild mentions of abuse, SA, as well as harassment in general. Feel free to not read, your mental health is more important than my ramblings.

In this section, I will cover things I have seen in the trans community that I feel need to be addressed. The most pressing issue I feel is this presumption of guilt or innocence based on an individual's gender identity. Point blank I want to say it is not okay to assume ill of someone purely based on their gender. This is misogyny and there's no other way to skin it.

I've seen this weird idea that Trans Women are infallible to criticism or being called out on bad behavior just because they are trans women. On the opposite side of the spectrum, I have seen people say that all trans men are terrible based on the fact that they are men. If you believe this you are playing into misogyny and mysoginysic ideals. No one is absolved of criticism in this world especially if they are actively doing bad things. You can still be a trans ally by calling out the bad behavior of a trans person just because they're being a bad person or behaving poorly isn't a reflection of their transness it's a reflection of who they are as a person as a whole.

The whole point of the feminist movement is to give people more freedom regardless of gender. To break down the barriers that gender poses. This is not only for cis women but trans women as well as cis and trans men and people who fall under the nonbinary umbrella. Saying trans men have it better than cis and trans women is actively counterintuitive to this goal. Saying cis men have no issues is also counter-intuitive to this goal. For example, many men are taught the only emotions they can have is happiness, anger, and horny and because of this many cis men have poor emotional regulation While this can and does harm society we also need to remember the negative impact this has on cis men be it men that fall under the binary as expected by society, are nonconforming to said societal standard, or trans men who are already not seen as a man enough for some people and constantly have their manhood under fire. Cis men also continuously have their manhood under fire if they dare show any sort of "vulnerability" such as crying or actually being in love with someone. This also comes back around to harm cis and trans women as they can be seen are not feminine enough if they have even just one masculine trait.

This is not to say that cis men don't have an advantage in society, I am painfully aware of this fact. We just need to remember misogyny affects EVERYONE.

Another thing I notice is that trans women can tend to be treated overly delicately which is something that stems from how society treats women in general. For example, there is this media "critic" (if you know me you know who I'm talking about) who despite having actively harmful and downright racist and fatphobic takes on the media she attempts to criticize there are those who think she can do no wrong because she is trans. Her fan's arguments are always "She is a trans person of color there by default you are over-criticizing her." This is actually harmful as it the person in question is not expected to take any responsibility for any of her harmful retoric and actions. And that's just about her takes on media. I'm not even going to get into to the actual allegations of crimes levied against her.

I'd like to conclude this section that just because someone is (insert characteristic here) doesn't mean that they are by default a good or bad person. you need to look at them as a whole and what they're actually doing and saying.

Next, I just want to say not all media has to be happy and nice to be good media. Some media has darker stories to tell and in doing so bring concepts to people that they may not have thought about before. For example, I would have never known that my father was abusing me had I not watched shows that painted his exact behavior as abuse and not okay. Up until that point, I had just thought "Well dads are just like that." Sometimes the stories that are being told bring much-needed awareness to those who need it. That is not to say that you have to consume this media I'm just saying it has a right to exist and a purpose.

Lastly, this is a comparatively small section but I feel is just as important. If you tell people that you want to rape or sexually abuse them or you tell them to kill themselves or you doxx them you are a bad person. There's no other way to look at that. I've seen so many people do this over just little things like disagreeing on headcanons or even someone just liking a character. This could not be a more extreme overreaction. Stop doing this and if you see people close to you doing this stop them too they deserve consequences for their actions. It's disgusting when people get away with this.

Thank you for reading my rambling and have a good day!

[jdenvs3000w24]

week 3 - Privilege

This week's readings sparked many conversations between myself and friends, in this course and not, mostly about the invisible backpack idea and the $100 race video. I found myself realizing by talking with friends that I had what some would consider to be a rough upbringing, at least relative to them. Most of the details I'd rather not put out on the internet for anyone to see, and I don't want this to be a pity thing anyway. I bring it up because I had a realization; that I shouldn't be so hard on myself. I want to be clear that I know there are others who struggled much worse than I did growing up. I am a Canadian-born, white, cis-gendered man, and I recognize there is a privilege to that. I just wanted to talk about how the race imagery really resonated with me. We're all running the same race in university, and in life, but some have to run longer and faster to reach the same point, and that's just how it is. There's no reason to resent the people ahead of you in the race and there is no need to pity the people behind you. We are in this race, or more so a journey, together.

To me, privilege is relative to the situation, but in general, it is characteristic of someone who has an advantage over another in some aspect due to a specific characteristic or experience. A common example is white privilege, where not only does being white in a nation like Canada shield you from being racially discriminated against but the laws of this country were often written in a way that benefits white people in particular. One could have privilege relative to another in a financial aspect, and because of that may have had more opportunities to play sports, learn skills, do better in school, get a higher paying job, etc. As a nature interpreter, we must recognize not only our own privilege but the privilege or lack thereof of our audience, to ensure they benefit from the experience we provide. While in general people who choose to go on a hike with a nature interpreter may want to be there, there's no guarantee they may have the experience or skills we might assume them to have. Therefore we must be mindful of the areas we choose to go to. Perhaps we want to cross a river by walking across a fallen tree. We might assume that since the water is relatively calm, even if someone were to fall in, they should be able to swim across anyway. But maybe one of the people we are leading never learned how to swim, making that river crossing an extreme risk we didn't account for. 

The point of the matter is, everyone deserves to be treated equitably in an interpreter-led excursion. I’m curious to see if y’all have the same view as me, or maybe there's something you'd like to add.

Till next week

o7

[fischyplier]

You like Brendon urie? /genq

Hi thanks for the question! I just want to preface this by saying I know the controversy as of late surrounding him. But I'd like to explain somethings first. If I truly believed he was a deplorable person I would not be listening to his music. And sadly I see a lot of rumours mixed in with actual things he's done. So without context most people would assume the worst. I stopped listening to his music for 2 years until I read some posts that cleared up a lot of confusion for me. The blog that explains every detail of this complicated situation is brendonuriegotcancelled. The allegations have been debunked along time ago. But I will not make excuses for his past racist behaviour. I believe that since 10 years ago he has bettered himself in that regard. I am not trying to change anyone's mind on who he is. I don't know him personally. But I believed he has changed and it is 100% genuine. If we can't give chances to those trying to learn and do better, we are not treating them with dignity or as a human. I am black so when he lip synced the n word in a song it honestly hurt. I saw a new clip where he was rapping a song and didn't say it so he learned. At least there is no malicious intent, he didn't say it angerly to a black person. I want to specify, I don't think it's ever appropriate for a non-black person to say the n-word. For example, Tyler Joseph was asked by black fans to speak on his platform about BLM since other artists do. Even Brendon wrote a long statement on his instagram that was very sincere. Just a heads up, he scrubbed his instagram because of the hate he received, and most likely death threats. So Joseph ignored his fans, posted a photo mocking the movement and I stopped listening to his music. Because I can't just all of a sudden not pay attention to BLM. Like Joseph, a white cis man with with privilege can. Brendon created the Highest Hopes Foundation that aids people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community and human rights a few years ago. By the way, before he was accused of disgusting allegations. I am explaining this because I have been harassed for listening to his music. I am asking for peace and understanding. Otherwise respectfully to anyone reading this and still wants to send me nasty messages, unfollow and block me right now. I have been incredibly stressed out because I can't enjoy something that brings me so much joy.

[ghoulpoole]

About Those Wait Times

Or, Hospitals Are Not Allies

I live in Portland, OR USA and have been receiving gender affirming care from Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), which is the biggest hospital in Oregon. It is well-respected in the Pacific Northwest for its trans healthcare.

OHSU has a Transgender Healthcare Program that claims to "provide support, information and advocacy [and] connect you with OHSU providers who are international leaders in caring for gender-diverse patients of all ages."

I am writing for all trans people to say not to believe that. If OHSU's trans healthcare is respected, it is only because it is better than nothing.

The Transgender Healthcare Program (THP) is a decentralized organization at OHSU. It is not a hospital, or a hospital wing, or a clinic that pays its own providers. It is a loose collection of aligned providers of different specialties and clinics. It has a dedicated staff of six people. Incidentally, it is directed by a cis man with no experience in providing care to transgender patients.

The THP is ineffectual for a few reasons. It is under-resourced by OHSU. It has no direct authority over healthcare delivery. And it has no effective way to advocate for trans patients because it has no actual power in the hospital's organizational structure.

Here is a personal example.

I have scheduled a consultation with OHSU Plastic Surgery for facial feminization surgery. This consultation was scheduled in 2023 to take place in 2026. That means the surgery won't take place until at least 2027, four years after the initial consultation scheduling.

Wait times like this are just as common for breast augmentation, double mastectomy, vaginoplasty and phalloplasty. Obviously, this is unacceptable.

The THP has no satisfactory answers for what is causing the wait. They say its due to high demand. They say if you want to know more specifics about the queue, reach out to the clinic where the physician is housed.

Of course, the clinic usually won't tell you anything either. I know, because I have tried to find out.

Indulge me in a rant about the point of "high demand". Let's start with some numbers.

Let's assume that roughly 1 percent of the population in the Portland metropolitan area is trans. That's roughly 33,000 people. Let's be generous and say that 1/3 (11,000) is not interested in taking any steps toward medical transition. So, that would be a potential patient pool of 22,000 people.

According to the Oregon Health Authority, roughly 20,000 Oregonians are newly diagnosed with an invasive cancer each year.

At OHSU, there is an organization called Knight Cancer Institute, named for Phil Knight (the founder of Nike). The Knight Cancer Institute is a single building and org with radiologists, surgeons, oncologists, researchers and admin staff all focused on the same mission of treating and curing cancer.

Given the size of just the local trans population, why does the THP not have its own building, its own providers, and a large admin team to give transgender people the care they deserve?

Well, for one thing, the Cancer Institute had an initial over $600 million infusion from Phil Knight. But, this funding was conditional on OHSU matching it. So, the point is clear: transgender healthcare is not taken seriously by OHSU like the treatment of cancer is, even though lives depend on both.

If a person who needed a colectomy were asked to wait four years for the procedure, it would be an outrage. It would be medical malpractice. The person would die before they get the surgery. I view the wait times for gender affirming surgeries with the same seriousness. Its malpractice.

And also: high demand? High demand from whom exactly? From trans people who are maybe 1-2% of the population? Or from rich cisgender people who are willing and able to pay out of pocket for cosmetic procedures from the same physicians?

Clearly the THP is failing to advocate for trans patients to receive the services they need in a timely manner. They are also failing to connect patients to services. The THP has an intake form on their website for new trans patients that asks for a great deal of sensitive information.

One would expect that this would lead to a phone call, or even an email conversation. But instead, new patients get emailed a pdf list of resources and are told to talk to their provider. THP staff has said in personal conversations that this is due to lack of appropriate staffing to screen intakes.

So, if the THP can't connect trans people with resources directly, and can't influence access to services, what exactly does it do?

It pays lip service. It is a way for OHSU to claim they center gender-diverse patients without providing them the care they deserve. The efforts of a caring and hardworking administrative staff for the THP go to waste.

The THP should be its own Knight Cancer Institute. It should have its own payroll and providers. It should be able to make its own income. It can't do that now because most trans patient dollars go to the clinics where their providers are housed.

It should be run by a trans person, a queer person, or at the very least a cis person with real-world experience in treating trans people. The current director is none of these. There is no indication that he has the slightest idea what the trans community needs.

The THP in its current form likes to think of itself as an ally to the trans community. It touts itself as one of the most robust transgender healthcare programs in the US. If that is true, I wonder: how low is the bar? In many places in the US, trans healthcare doesn't exist. Should we be thankful? Should we accept the unacceptable as better than nothing?

I don't. I won't. In its current form, the THP is is complicit in harm done to trans people. For years we wait and wait. Some die waiting. I for one am tired of being polite and not saying anything while standing in line.

[bonestructureandcontempt]

40+ hours into Cyberpunk 2077, I've been thinking a lot on the "is this game transphobic?" discourse. I enjoy the game a lot. It's the perfect game for me in a lot of ways. And I would say it has possibly one of the best examples of a transwoman in a AAA videogame ever. But unfortunately, it has some jarring limitations on player agency and roleplay opportunities. Limitations that are directly tied to your player character's gender. Limitations that I think shouldn't be there and wouldn't be there if the developers put a little more thought into character creation.

I realize I am a couple years late to the party with this take but man, tying your character's pronouns to what their voice sounds like is a really dumb idea. Especially when we live in a world where the Saints Row games exist and found a way to sidestep this issue. Why CDPR couldn't just copy them is beyond me.

I'm a cis man, so take my opinions with a grain of salt (or don't listen to them at all), but I feel like there's three ways to alleviate this issue:

Write and record in-game dialogue to include every combination of pronouns. Voice tone, body parts, and pronouns are all their own slider that don't affect each other. Possibly more labor intensive, but guarantees more freedom in character creation to players.

Pull an Animal Crossing. Don't even bother having NPCs acknowledge the player character's geneder. Every player character is they/them. Not a perfect solution, may prove alienating to some.

Have I mentioned just straight up copying how Saints Rows does character creation? It's pretty great. Voice, clothing, and appearance isn't locked to gender in ANY WAY. Doesn't allow for pronouns other than he/him or she/her, but still pretty inclusive.

Still, despite the botched character creation, I can't write Cyberpunk off completely because Claire Russell exists. Think back to Krem Aclassi in Dragon Age: Inquisition. Many would say that he is good trans representation. Many would also say it is slightly undercut by the fact that you, the player, find out he is a trans man by asking an insensitive question about his transition. Krem is voiced by Jennifer Hale, a cis woman.

And then in Cyberpunk there's Claire Russell. You can find out she's a trans woman in two ways. The first is you can read her bio in the pause menu. The second is she will mention her transition while explaining her backstory about wanting to avenge her husband who tragically died in a street racing accident. This is shared of her own volition with no opportunity for the player to treat her any differently because she is trans whatsoever. You may only choose whether or not you wish to complete her questline. Claire is voiced by Maddie Taylor, a trans woman.

I love Claire, she's a great character. It would be disingenuous of me to say that the developers didn't put care into creating and writing her. It is nice to imagine that even in a future as dystopic as 2077's, gender affirming care happens and isn't questioned or commented on. But then again, as Stacey Henley pointed out, Claire stands out because she is the only known trans person in Night City period. The rest of the city exists squarely on the gender binary and assumes you do as well no matter how you make your character.

This isn't me "canceling" Cyberpunk or telling you not to play it if you're interested in it. As stated before, I love playing the game. This is what we call "good faith criticism." I think games like this can and should be improved upon to better represent the real world and the real people who play it.

I'd be lying if I said all this didn't spring to mind in the wake of another action RPG coming out this year set in the universe created by perhaps the most well-known transphobe in the world today.

[rittz]

thoughts about being trans, idk where else to put them so here u go

it’s not like i don’t have trans guy friends to talk to about this, it’s just usually in the form of jokes or passing comments rather than an actually serious conversation. also, the transmasc people that i’m closest to identify more with the label “nonbinary” than i do-- it’s not like they couldn’t understand or relate to things i’m saying, but i’m just assuming that they probably don’t feel the exact same way i do

anyway, as a trans person we get often asked “so why do you feel like a [gender]?”, and the answer is usually some variation of “i just feel like it”. this is the most accurate but also vaguest possible answer, so i kinda wanted to break down my personal answer to that question?

basically, i identify as a man because i identify with men. in a general and also personal sense. gender stereotypes are something that trans people by necessity both embrace and reject. i relate to gender stereotypes about men more than those of women-- i’m less outwardly emotional, i like being handy, i don’t like kids, i have questionable personal hygiene, etc-- but obviously these things alone don’t make someone a man. however... you can’t deny that there is some general truth about behavioral differences between men and women (bc of society, not biology). men and women both experience different problems in the world, and each have trouble understanding the experiences and problems of the other. generally, i can relate to the experiences and problems of men more than those of women, even if it seems like i shouldn’t (for example, i am not afraid of walking alone at night, even though i am very tiny).

i, from a young age, have had a constant yearning for more male friends. i would occasionally choose to play video games as a male character. i was upset that i couldn’t be in boy scouts. i have been jealous of my younger brothers being treated by my parents the ways i wished i was treated. when i imagined myself older, i pictured myself less like my mom and more like my dad. when i’m around men, i want them to treat me like one of them. i want to be seen as a man.

and i think that’s what being trans really boils down to. wanting to be seen as someone other than how everyone sees you. wanting what you see on the outside to match how you feel on the inside. this obviously extends to nonbinary individuals, who face their own struggle when it comes to presentation. but at the end of the day, i think that presentation is equally important to gender identity as internal feelings. i mean, i think we’re all familiar with the research proving that transitioning makes trans people happier. surgery is an invasive, expensive, painful process that i DON’T think is necessary for every trans person, and HRT isn’t always easy to get. but changing a name, getting a new haircut, dressing differently, binding, etc. counts as transitioning. you don’t have to hate your body to be trans, but wanting to alter it in order to better connect your internal identity with your presentation, i think is necessary in order to consider yourself to be trans. 

i will admit i am confused by “GNC trans men” i see on tumblr and insta, who use he/him pronouns but exclusively present femininely. i’m not talking about trans guys who don’t yet pass, i mean trans guys who don’t want to. i don’t harbor any ill will, i’m just confused. if i understand being trans to mean “wanting what you see on the outside to match how you feel on the inside”, you can see how. doesn’t that make you feel dysphoric? don’t you want people who see you to read you as male? how is your life different from when you didn’t identify as male but presented the same way? this isn’t me trying to gatekeep on who’s “trans enough”, and especially when it comes to nonbinary identities it’s arbitrary to harp on presentation like this. but like, what’s going on here?

taking a turn here that will come back around, an extremely key component to why i identify as and with men is my sexuality. i have always idolized, envied, and evoked various queer icons from media and real life. the hunky, grunting, macho, hetero version of “man” never appealed to me the way that the fashionable, artsy, flirty, homo version of “man” did. drag queens, my mom’s hairdresser, glam rock stars, i could go on. associating my more feminine qualities with GAY stereotypes instead of FEMALE stereotypes suddenly made more sense, and made me feel less dysphoric. it’s also something that took me a long time to realize, because i had surrounded myself with queers who were mostly attracted to women. transmascs and butch lesbians historically have a lot in common, but personally, i didn’t relate as much to lesbians as i did to drag queens. in dating and loving men, i developed my understanding of them. but my attraction to men was why it had taken me so long to realize i felt more like a man-- i thought i was just some weird straight girl.

now, am i calling these “GNC gay trans men” with long pink hair and poofy skirts and conventionally attractive bisexual boyfriends “weird straight girls”? ...well, not to their faces. but i have to admit that i’m thinking it. these people would never go to a predominantly-male gay bar, these people would never be harassed on the street. i’m not saying i know someone’s identity better than they do, but i don’t agree with the liberal utopian ideal of “let everyone do whatever they want as long as they aren’t hurting anyone” when taken to mean that we can’t question other people’s choices. “why do you feel like a man?” is a question that, coming from another trans person, isn’t inherently transphobic. it’s not “forcing” someone to “prove” their “transness”, no one “owes” me an explanation of their identity. i’m just confused. i don’t disapprove of the way these people live their lives, i just want to know why.

a straight girl being feminine is different from a gay man being feminine, because it has less to do with personality and more to do with society’s historic view of gay men as closer to female than male because of the loving and fucking men aspect. an AMAB gay man wearing makeup and a crop top probably just wants to look good, but he is also signaling to other men that he’s gay via gender non-conformance. by being AFAB and female-passing, wearing makeup and a crop top is not GNC. in fact it’s pretty GC, and gay men will not recognize you as a gay man.

it’s easy to say “gender is fake so do whatever you want”, but like, we have to acknowledge reality. time is a social construct too, but we still use days of the week when talking to each other. strangers will treat you differently depending on what gender they interpret you as. different people will be willing to date you or not. you have to choose which public bathroom to go in. if being misgendered doesn’t bother these people, then who cares? but if it DOES, which it usually does, wouldn’t you want to take steps to prevent being misgendered in the future? if your desire to present femininely is stronger then your desire to be seen as male, then like... why call yourself a male at all? ultimately nothing these people do will really affect me in any way. it just makes me wonder if these people will eventually go on to present as male, or if they will later ID as nonbinary or even cis. i encourage people trying out different labels and exploring their identity, so it’s not like i think these people SHOULDN’T identify as trans guys. it’s more like, i wish they were able to articulate WHY they identify as trans more than “because i said so”. not wanting to be a woman doesn’t automatically make you a man, it just makes you not a woman.

maybe i’m particularly cynical because of the MULTIPLE times that people with larger online followings who identify and present this way have later turned out to be lying, manipulative people. hopefully it goes without saying that i do NOT think that everyone who identifies and presents this way is a toxic liar. the reason i bring it up is because some people genuinely can’t understand the possibility or purpose of misleadingly claiming a marginalized identity, but it can and does happen. an analogy could be made here about white people claiming indigenous heritage. we all WANT to believe what people say about themselves, and asking for “proof” is a social no-no. but we shouldn’t just... automatically trust everything someone says about themselves, right? and as bad as i WANT to live in a world where gender doesn’t matter and everyone default uses neutral pronouns and there are no divisions in clothing stores and bathrooms, we don’t live in that world (yet). when you are AFAB, /extremely/ femininely presenting, and have little to no plans of transitioning, saying “i am a man” will not make other people see you as one. and if you don’t want to be seen as a man, then maybe you aren’t one.

[cagandante-communistoide]

Let's go through this together. I will, often, in my attempt to answer the questions, continue the scenarios you set forth before issuing a thesis, because I tend to meander like that.

"How am I worse off than a binary trans man by default for being nonbinary?"

The example you proposed is an issue of gender conformity, not gender class. Nonbinary people can look like anything, so let's look at what happens when a nonbinary person looks exactly like said transgender man. You are just as nonconforming as a trans-man looking nonbinary person assigned female, except you're also nonbinary. You get to enjoy never passing, having all of trans healthcare based around an ideology which defines the majority of the nonbinary spectrum out of existence and puts our genders under increased scrutiny to receive treatment, and being scorned and disdained by other trans people on top of everything you said.

These things stack. Gender as a social classification system does not work as a trinary where if you are girl enough, you experience abc, if you are boy enough, you experience xyz, and if you are in between enough you experience mnlop. For every single configuration of binary trans person you can think of, of any AGAB, of any presentation, and all their challenges, there is a nonbinary person who looks just like that. And they experience all of the exact same things, plus all of the extra challenges of being nonbinary. That's what exorsexism means! It's not "well I get some things worse for being gender neutral and some better for not being fully binary trans", because it's fully possible to experience "binary gender" transphobia just by being legible to society as binary gendered. Exorsexism is the fact that by nonbinary gendering yourself, you have deliberately rejected the social technology by which the patriarchy mediates access to personhood, which will always come with extra scorn than an otherwise equivalent binary person as an incentive to continue adhering to the current gender strata as much as possible!

Follow up question saga:

When a passing, full op transgender man receives street harassment for being called a shemale, hell let's take it one step further - when a transgender man is attacked in a female restroom because he is assumed a "female impersonator", a "predatory man invading women's spaces", he is experiencing transphobia. Now, this by itself probably sounds like the most baby level observation ever, but hear me out: as much as transphobia sucks, as common as being physically or emotionally harmed by this is, there is one thing this man can do that a transfem in this exact scenario CAN'T do that makes a difference in how they are treated.

He can locate his birth certificate with "F" stamped neatly on it, or records of his legal name change, or any other evidence of his gender assignment, and win any dispute on whether or not he "deserved" it on the basis of slander, that is, an objectively false claim. "It is wrong to weaponize a rapist, pedophilic image of trans people against me, because I technically belong here as an AFAB like you wanted, and this stereotype is about actual female impersonators. It is wrong to be harassed this way because I am the wrong target".

A cis intersex woman can do the same thing. Look at Imane Khelif. Intersexism has disastrous reprecussions, as you can see from the massive harrassment campaign against her! But you know what she can do that a trans intersex woman cannot? Point to her birth certificate that says "F" and go "weaponizing this image of the female impersonator against me is wrong, because I am the wrong target". And you can prove that it works, because she's having her slander + libel cause against JK freaking Rowling, one of the most famous transphobes and transmisogynists in the world, taken seriously right now. Do you think a transfem accused of being a female impersonator in sports could do that? Do you think anyone cares about calling a transgender woman a predatory man?

I have actually personally been in both of these scenarios, because I am TME and intersex. I have once before passed as a man in a women's bathroom and been harassed, and I have once before harassed en masse for not being "enough of a woman". I experienced harm, but I also appealed to the authorities and they sided with me specifically because I was the "wrong target"!

This is what "exempting yourself from transmisogyny" means. Whenever you are in an audience, even the most transphobic audience imaginable, whenever there is vitriol meant first and foremost for transfeminine people, you have a "get out of jail free" card in the form of not actually being transfeminine. Does that mean TME people don't experience oppression and attacks for being trans? Of course not. But the reality is that people are more sympathetic to TME trans people than TMA trans people. When Nex Benedict was murdered by one of their classmates, it prompted a federal investigation into the Oklahoma school district to quell the outrage from every self confessed leftist in the US of A, PLUS every transphobe who felt that outright murdering a "deluded little girl" was just a bridge too far and we really shouldn't be permitting this shit, it's definitely TikTok's fault.

When Brianna Ghey was killed, the Sun dragged her name through the mud, people slandered her as having deserved to get killed for going to buy drugs and saying that she was a threat to her own murderers, police said she "wasn't killed for being transgender", the court ruled that the primary motivation for the murder was "sadistic tendencies" and not transphobia, and the petition to posthumously change her gender in death to give her some dignity was rejected by the British government. Far cry, huh? "Women and Nonbinaries": The Clusterfuck I am not claiming that being misgendered is good. My point is - ever notice how "nonbinary" always means "AFAB people"? This is exorsexist - nonbinary does not equal "women lite". But it's also transmisogynistic. Why are the only people safe to be around "women's spaces" are "male allies" and TME trans people? Have you ever questioned why AMAB nonbinary people don't seem to count as "nonbinary"? "Women and nonbinary" clinics means TME, is my point. They are explicitly exclusive of TMA people specifically regardless of their gender and it's transmisogynistic. A binary trans man can be and often is included in "femmes and thems" type shit, which is transphobic, but TMA people are not granted access to those spaces to begin with at all even if they're women or nonbinary. Spaces which, as enumerated above, often include healthcare, vital social support, or resources. Domestic violence shelters are famous for using this definition of "women and nonbinary". Where does it leave nonbinary TMA people who are not counted as either, because they are only ever counted as degenerate threats? Do you think it's any less exclusive for that nonbinary person to be lumped in with women and then not even treated like one when it would actually benefit them?

Yes, it's exorsexist that this exists. But alongside perpetuating exorsexism, it exists to reinforce transmisogyny. The purpose of making a space like this is primarily to say "Only TMEs Allowed". It primarily exists to harm TMA people. It's Transmisogyny, you could say. That was my point using it as an example. "What makes this language more useful than just saying transfem/not transfem? It's strange to lump me, a TME trans person, in with cis people who oppress me."

A) there are currently a cadre of stupid people trying to redefine the word 'transfem' to include people who are forcibly feminized at birth and do not have to 'transition' to femininity whatsoever just because they are intersex and developed virilizing traits. It's useful to specifically center Transmisogyny because that's what the term is used to describe, and the kind of person who wants to appropriate 'transfem' is uncomfortable using "TMA" because it becomes readily apparent when you actually speak to them about what their definition of "transfem" is that they do NOT experience transmisogyny. B) It's also strange to lump binary trans people in with binary cis people when one oppresses the other in discussions of exorsexism, now isn't it? But that's not what this is. It's a description of an axis of power, an axis of power you hold just the same over a transfem as a cis woman or cis man. Just like binary trans people can be just as exorsexist to nonbinary people as binary cis people, because they have binary privilege. You are transmisogyny exempt, and a lot of other people are transmisogyny exempt, not out of a desire to pretend you don't experience transphobia but as a descriptor of the capacity you have to wield power other people don't to get transfeminine people lynched if you so wished it. You can actually make broad claims about what power certain groups hold, because society fundamentally divides people into classes to maintain itself. Just like you can say binary people do not experience exorsexism, despite their wide range of experiences and privileges, on account of having the material interest in common of "not being unpersoned by renouncing the human sorting tool of gender", you can say that TME people, despite everything else, are TME specifically because of their relationship to transmisogyny. Or do you also feel it's not accurate to say, for example, that a black cisgender man does not experience misogyny as a social system? No, it's actually fair to say that because manhood is not an oppressed gender modality even if they are oppressed for something else in a gendered manner? Exactly. "Transfems with neovaginas are a minority of transfems and trans men experience medical misogyny."

Do you think transfems don't experience medical misogyny? Do you think transfems don't experience reproductive stigma? When a trans man gets pregnant, he is ridiculed, fetishized, he experiences medical transphobia, he has trouble seeing OBYGYNs because "men can't be pregnant", that's true. When a transfem wants a uterus transplant, she is ridiculed. When a transfem has children, she is plastered as a potential sexual abuser to her child. The transfeminine penis, the primary means for most transfems to conceive a child, is socially conceptualized as primarily a rape implement. When a transfem says she experiences periods despite the fact that she does not bleed, she is ridiculed by the medical community and TME trans people, told she is "making shit up" and also, ironically, told that thinking she could possibly infringe upon the sacred female space of menstruating and conceiving a child is misogynistic minimization of women's experiences. Hysterical. If a transfem has a medical issue, especially if it's reproductive, she also experiences all that same transphobia! She is ridiculed, fetishized, an object of disgust, told to stop being transgender, and it also comes from TME trans people. TME people will rave all day about how unfair it is they have trouble at the OBYGYN and then lynch a tgirl for daring to say that she has periods. gender clinics will have discussions with their TME patients about testosterone and fertility, and then prescribe mostly T blockers without enough E which ruins the bone health of transfems. And then they get the joy of going to the doctor and getting 'trans broken arm syndome' about it. They are told incorrect estimates about how much they develop on HRT, wrongly prescribed different hormones than cis women, and then referred to "science" that stopped measuring the effects of transfeminine HRT after only 2 years. Because they are treated as something worse than just being a failed reproductive unit misfit - they are treated as a fundamentally worse, alien form of person, who does not have enough sapience to deduce her own experiences, and whose every thought and word exists in subordination to anyone else empowered more by their gender class than her at all times. Kind of how like they treat cis women in comparison to cis men! because that's medical misogyny. Getting treated like a cis woman does giving birth with transphobia on top is not medical misogyny because that is transphobia, he is a man. You have to be feminized by society for that in comparison to a Neutral group for that. Misogyny defined as "everyone in this marginalized community except the women" is a useless definition. Trans men are not treated like that because they are "women", they are treated that way for being transgender, as evidenced by the fact that they are not being treated like women in that example, they are being treated like freaks. Treated like a freak + woman is different.

This might sound kind of blunt, and a bit of a shock to you if I take a guess at your worldview, but having a uterus is not an axis of oppression. Having a uterus is not what makes people experience misogyny. Being socially classed as feminized, as the Helpmeet gender strata, is what misogyny is made of. And going from "supposed to uphold patriarchy" to "deliberately joining the Subordinate class of humans" is a strata more conducive to misogyny that "stupid broodmare logically but selfishly renouncing reproductive capital to become a Logical Boy" because of the simple fact that masculinity is treated as inherently desirable prima facie and femininity isn't.

"transmasc oppression tends to manifest in the form of erasure whereas transfems are hypervisible due to the ways in which they are demonized"

Okay, please take into account that I mean this in the nicest, least judgemental way possible when I say the following: This is a nonsensical claim to make when you know what misogyny is and what hypervisibility actually entails. It has no regard for how hypervisibilized people are actually treated and assumes that people are more willing to report the violent bigotry against a group of people defined as ontologically evil than a group of people bigots want to "save" from themselves.

Let's use a different example than TMA people, to illustrate the concept as briefly as I can. I am nonwhite, I am specifically Latine and I grew up very visibly Not White in the crux of the most recent panic about immigration from Latinamerica. I, as someone perceived most often to be a racialized woman, am a member of a hypervisibilized group. PEOPLE DO NOT NOTICE MORE WHEN WE ARE HARMED. Being hypervisible is NOT just being more perceived in general. In fact, it often means the opposite! Being a member of a hypervisible group makes you ignored MORE, excluded MORE, noticed LESS. What hypervisibility actually is is to be marginalized in such a way that you are constantly a topic of denigrating conversation. It's having your positionality become Unignorable, Trumps Everything Else About You the second people discover it. It's being constantly scrutinized, having your behavior policed, because your behavior is never anonymized and your existence is never ignored when it could do you harm. Everyone is Already thinking about That Group, and now the representative of That Group is YOU.

Now let's bring that reality of hypervisibility back to transfeminine people specifically. What does being hypervisible mean for them? It means that everyone is already Aware of them, somewhere, as a person who can exist in their head, and just as for other hypervisible groups, that person is someone to be avoided at all costs. The hypervisible transfem is the narrative of the transfem as sexual predator, the transfem as a mentally ill degenerate whose mere existence heralds societal collapse as men stop upholding patriarchy, the transfem as a threat to women and children and The Nuclear Family, the transfem as a pathetic, delusional creature that has renounced humanity and can freely be told to die as many times as you please without ever feeling bad, because that's not a real human being. it's a Danger To The Community. The transfem that is visible is a constant threat, even if they behave now the second they step out of line they become Disposable. The transfem is someone who is so dangerous that they have to fall into lockstep with whatever the groupthink already is - be feminine enough, defer to cis women, defer to trans men, defer to everybody, never get upset or get too loud or say that a TME person abused you - or else they are a liar and a danger and they are Trying To Destroy You and must be exiled and have their name spread everywhere with a list of transgressions attached to it to "protect minors" (because she's a threat to kids! she's a predator!) and left to die on the street. It is misogyny and it is transphobia and by being both it becomes its own rhetorical tool designed specifically to punish the transfeminine, to keep people who, metastasized into cis men, enforce the patriarchy from ever daring to step out of it. The transmasculine person, by constrast, is invisible. They are Just A Girl. They are Delusional. They need to be Fixed. You're just trying to escape patriarchy. You're being tricked into doing this. You're being tricked by those awful Trannies (you know, trannies, the ones who are actually dangerous, aka transfems) into ruining your body. Don't you know what you're good for is being a good Subordinate Gender and making babies for the people who run the show? Go back to doing that or we'll "benevolently" force you to. This is, of course, massively hurtful. it is transphobia. and it is misogyny, but it is not transmisogyny, because it is the rhetoric aimed at cis women. Still though, clearly, this is horrible. Be honest with yourself, though. I advise you to mull it over for a good bit. Which of these two groups of people is someone who grew up in this society counting victims of hate most likely to perceive as a real victim? Which of these two groups has been ontologically defined out of victimhood? Even assuming all reporting is correct - which of these two groups of people is most likely to actually be willing to SHOW UP for self report studies about violence, because they haven't been bombarded with countless messages about how they are incapable of victimhood? Which of these two groups is the news more willing to report as having been actually victimized or some way, instead of simply reaping the consequences of existing as an inherently suspect, sexual degenerate? You are correct, that the numbers are not trustworthy. Every single fact about cisheteropatriarchy indicates a tendency for every metric of transmisogynistic violence to be underreported. Brandon Teena's case is not one I am familiar with, but the fact that he, of all people, is such a visible trans murder case and not, say, Marsha P. Johnson, whose transmisogynistic killing was ruled as a suicide quietly and never again investigated DESPITE what a central figure in queer activism only goes to show my point. Only one of these people was given the privilege of being a victim of a crime upon their death, even if it took a very long time. An extremely bitter, morbid privilege to be sure, but not one TMA people are likely to get compared to TMEs. The conundrum of intersex people:

Okay, so. I am intersex. I am very often frustrated by people's tendency to treat "sex" as a real two-category system and not a social construct defined around a loose bimodal distribution of various sexual development characteristics in humans for the purpose of reproductive control. That being said: The reality is that the experiences of intersex people are actually quite easy to group generally into TME and TMA, on account of every single one of us being forcibly shoved into one of two boxes at birth. Like everyone else. Like I said, having certain organs like a uterus, or virilizing traits as a result of an intersex variation, is not an axis of oppression. They are markers for which strata society 'reads' you as for gender categorization, but it's not an axis of oppression. So no, intersex cis women cannot be TMA. Intersex experiences do not interfere with TMA/TME because there are transfem intersex people, and they experience transmisogyny! Transmisogyny is based off of what gender class you were supposed to occupy by AGAB. It has nothing to do with what body parts you have, or how "masculine" you are. Transmisogyny is what the world does to you when someone who was not supposed to be feminine gets unpersoned by becoming socially feminized.

And frankly, the idea that cis intersex women can have the same experiences as a trans woman is a) transmisogynistic and b) intersexist. Here's how: a) this implies that transfems are oppressed not because they were AMAB and denied that, but because there is this group of women that is inherently "more masculine" by factors of biology, which is something they can have in common with anyone who is sufficiently a "masculine sort of woman". You're essentially saying that trans women and cis intersex women are a different kind of woman from everyone else, because of their body parts. I really hope I don't have to explicitly enumerate why this is incredibly transphobic and offensive. b) I also hope I don't have to enumerate why it's incredibly intersexist and offensive to equate being a virilized enough intersex cis woman with being a different sort. Intersex people can and do have the same genders as dyadic people. We are not defined by our hormone levels or body parts. Ironically, in the anti TME/TMA person's crusade to "defend intersex people", they treat us like a different species and neuter our ability to meaningfully discuss our own oppression because in their mind, our biology is supposed to negate being coercively assigned a sex at birth and the experiences therein. If you were intersex AFAB and you go on HRT to feminize yourself, that doesn't change that you were always "supposed" to be a woman anyway! You are not breaking any boundaries here! The intersexism she facees is not the same as transmisogyny because again, body parts are not an axis of oppression.

"What does logic have to do with any of this?"

Okay, so here is where it goes a little bit beyond discussions of transmisogyny. I am a Marxist, which means that all of my political opinions and methods are derived from (I hope) the scientific method of dialectical materialism. The short version is that I fundamentally believe that groups of people with competing interests, and the social structures they live under, are products of historical evolution as a result of changing economic conditions. They are not random, they are not individual logic errors made by people in power where they just believe something that isn't true out of malice or because they are stupid. They are tools, deliberately made over the evolution of society to keep advancing the interests of the CLASS (group of people with contradicting interests to everyone else) at the top in power, at the expense of everyone else. Which means that I think the fundamental logic error you make in this section is that you conflate something being true with something having logic.

When I say that there is a gender class hierarchy, I am not saying that this is true. I am not even saying that these are immutable categories! People can and do become transfeminized despite being a cis man, people do become debinarized despite being binary gendered, people become asexualized and aromanticed even if they are not ace or aro because these are social tools that exist to preserve a specific group of people's interests that punish anyone who stops preserving the current social order. I am not talking about individuals, I am talking about groups. I am not saying "person Y is worse off than person X", I am saying "group of people Y is positioned below group of people X by default as a function of cisheteropatriarchy because it enforces itself." "But I never said you believed any of that!" Hold on a mo, okay? I'm getting to it.

Let's use racism as an example. Is racism true? No. White people are not better than everyone else. But white people are treated better than racialized people, by a set of social tools constructed around you to ensure it on average, and this does, in fact, have internal logic. It exists because it serves a purpose, and it is consistent to achieving that purpose even when it is not consistent with reality. Does transmisogyny "make sense" when you think of it as a metaphysical quality that all people just Hold within themselves as they move about society? Of course not. Of course there are instances of a transfem reaping privilege over a transmasc, just as there are examples of say, white women reaping privilege over black men or rich women over poor men even though misogyny posits that all men are by default the Powered gender class and women are the Subordinate gendered class. But transmisogyny is not a law of physics. It is not a truth of the world, and so its objective is not to adhere to real logic. Transmisogyny is a social tool, and its objective is to reify the patriarchy against the threat of people devaluing cis manhood as the Powered class. To punish trans femininity for being the greatest threat to patriarchal gender logic under the trans umbrella, for explicitly valuing femininity. Does it "make sense" that two women who both grow facial hair and both have penises are treated differently because one of their birth certificates reads M and the other F? No. But it accomplishes the objective, and so its logic of "punish the transfeminine" remains consistent. Does it "make sense" that two groups of people, theoretically equally transgressing against cisgenderedness by transitioning, are treated differently because one of their birth certificates reads M and the other F? No, but it fits the internal logic of "deviation from masculinity to femininity is worse than the reverse, because femininity is undesirable". Bigotry does not "make sense", that's true. But bigotry serves a purpose, it exists to accomplish something. If you approach transmisogyny from the perspective that transmisogynists believe a logically consistent set of Principles which exist on their own, then it will sound like nonsense to you. But they don't. People, as a group in a class society where one class dominates the rest to advance its interests, believe what preserves the social order. Privilege, especially, behaves in such a way that it reinforces itself and punishes the other because they benefit from that! Obviously! That's what privilege is - a benefit at someone else's expense. And when you look at transmisogyny (or any bigotry) from the angle of a tool honed over centuries to accomplish that goal instead of a set of incorrect truths some people believe for some reason but stay consistent to? Then the world will begin to make more sense to you. Anyway, transmisogyny is real, I hope you enjoyed this essay. I patently refuse to revise this, so please kindly ignore any typos. Apologies if I missed a point, scrolling is hard on my fingers.

i think in terms of gender liberation what i would like people to understand the most is that the obligatory nature of manhood or womanhood exists in tandem with the obligatory nature of conforming to whichever you were assigned. I'm going to use a close friend as an example, who is a TMA nonbinary person: in a summation of their many words - "you know what it's like on top of being hated by everyone for being TMA? going outside and never passing or being able to say my gender even when i can pretend to be cis, and then going inside a group of other TMA people and getting misgendered there too." the axis of power between the nonbinary and the binary person is similar to the axis of power in between the TMA and TME person. Just as TMEs have greater access to healthcare, social recognition and capital over TMA people, so too in a group of just TMA people will those who are women more easily access healthcare due to transmedicalism, more easily pass as their genders (it is impossible for a nonbinary person to ever pass as nonbinary in the vast majority of the world), and more easily have their gender respected than a nonbinary TMA. to the point where even the people most up to speed on gender liberation, will say "trans women" instead of "TMAs" when talking about transmisogyny. Because everyone is either a man or a woman, right? Even if you consciously say otherwise, that's how you discuss gender, and it is incorrect because society does in fact acknowledge nonbinarity for one purpose only. To erase, suppress and mock it.

[olderthannetfic]

I just realized it’s Fandom First Friday and the topic is meta!

For months, I’ve been slowly working my way through How To Be Gay by David Halperin, which talks about drag queens and how certain aspects of gay male culture appropriate from women to empower gay men. (Halperin uses the word ‘appropriate’ extensively, not necessarily in a negative context.) He brought up some points I thought were highly relevant for thinking about slash.

Last February, I went to Escapade and chatted with a bunch of acafans. To my total lack of surprise, they too love Halperin’s book and had the same reaction I did. I thought when I finish the book, I’ll write up some meta. But I got busy, and it’s a long, dense book. So then in August, I went to the final Vividcon. There, I ran into Francesca Coppa and mentioned this idea. Her response? “Oh, I just wrote a journal article about that.”

…

AHAHAHAHA! Oh god, we are the same person.

(NB: We are not actually the same person.We just have similar first names, similar fandoms, and similar flists back on LJ, have done similar fandom history oral history projects, go to the same cons, and have both been on the OTW board. Laura Hale once went so far as to “out” me as her. And now we like the same academic books too. Heh.)

So, obviously, now I have to write meta about this, and Fandom First Friday is the perfect time to take a stab at it. I have so much more to say and I want to go back through How to be Gay and pull out many more amazing quotes, but better to write something than wait for perfection.

What I found the most interesting about Halperin’s analysis was that he points out that women may find these funhouse mirror versions of femaleness upsetting, and those feelings are completely understandable and valid, but they don’t make drag any less empowering or significant for gay men. He neither thinks that we need to get rid of drag nor that women should stop having those reactions.

He also talks about how subtext is often more appealing than text: when he first started teaching his college course ‘How to be Gay’, on which the book is based, he assumed that students would connect more with literal representation of their identities. That’s the narrative we push: now that we have literal X on TV or in a Broadway show, we don’t need subtextual old Y anymore! Instead, many of his students loved things like The Golden Girls and failed to connect with current gay representation.

It’s a long book, but what many of his ideas boil down to is that a Broadway show that is massively subtextually queer allows the viewer to identify with any of the characters or with all of them simultaneously or with the situation in general. It’s highly fluid. Gay representation often means a couple of specific gay characters with a rigid identity. Emotionally, that can be harder to connect to.

Sometimes, allegory gets closer to one’s own internal experiences than literal depiction does.

Coppa’s article (book chapter?) is about exactly that. It’s titled: Slash/Drag: Appropriation and Visibility in the Age of Hamilton. She uses Halperin’s book but extends the idea further. I particularly liked her example of how female fans use Bucky to tell stories that are essentially (and often literally) about rape. His story is about a loss of bodily autonomy and about having one’s boundaries violated in a way that is familiar to female fans, but he’s a male action hero, so those stories don’t have the same visceral ick factor as writing about literal rape of literal women.

Partly, that’s due to how society treats men vs. women, but it’s also about which fans are writing these stories and which fans are the target audience of them. Just as a cis gay man appropriating Joan Crawford to talk about his experience of gayness isn’t really for or about women, most slash fanfic about Bucky being victimized isn’t really for or about cis gay men.

It was on the dancefloor at Vividcon that I realized that, as a woman, I have this unconscious feeling like I am appropriating gay men’s culture when I’m into Joan Crawford and other over-the-top female performers. It’s ridiculous! How can I be appropriating a female celebrity from gay men? But it’s an experience I share with lots of other women. Telling women we have no right to things is the bedrock of our culture.

That feature film Slash, which featured a bunch of cis male slash writers was inspired partly by the male director going on Reddit and finding a bunch of gay guys saying that slash squicks them. He felt that he was being progressive by erasing women.

On Tumblr, the fujocourse gets reblogged not just by toxic pits of misogynist, delusional bullshit like thewoesofyaoi, but also by seemingly reasonable fans. Hell, I’m pretty sure I used to suffer from this problem myself: I remember a time when I felt like I, as a bisexual woman, liked slash better, differently, and more correctly than straight women did.

I no longer feel this way.

There are lots of reasons for caring about slash, some of which are just about the pretty, some of which are more about gender, and some of which are more about sexual orientation, but after seeing decades of arguments about who is allowed to like slash, I have come to the conclusion that none of them are valid. All of them are “Not like the other girls!” and hating on femaleness. Some of the fans who do this are female and some are not, but it all boils down to not feeling like women have a right to a voice.

And then there’s Halperin calmly asserting gay men’s right to self-expression!

It struck me like a bolt of lightning because it was so self-assured. He never doubts that there’s something valid and important about giving gay men space to explore their own emotional landscapes. Literal representation is important, sure, but so is the ability to make art that speaks to your insides, not just your outside, and that sometimes means allegorical, subtextual art played out in bodies unlike your own.

“Fetishization” a la Tumblr often means writing stories with explicit sex or liking ships because they’re hot. Sometimes, it means writing kinks that are seen as dark or unusual. Frankly, this sort of fujocourse boils down to thinking that sex and desire are dirty and that m/m sex is the dirtiest of all. I do write some ~dark~ kinks in my fic because, for one thing, I’m a kinky person in real life, and for another, I often use fic to explore the experience of having dark thoughts and wondering what that says about me.

A lot of slash writers are exploring feelings of victimization. Another big chunk of us explore things like rape fantasies from the bottom: maybe we have and maybe we haven’t experienced assault in real life, but for all of us, having that kind of rape fantasy brings up questions of whether we’re asking for it, whether it’s okay to be into that kind of thing, whether it means something. Another chunk of us are exploring a different kind of “bad” thoughts: feelings of aggression, violence, dominance. In my own work, I’m interested in sadists and how they come to terms with their desires, but I think slash is also often a way to explore any sort of violent, dark feeling, not just rape fantasies from the top. Society tells us women aren’t allowed to have dark thoughts–hell, that we’re not capable of impulses that dark. Sometimes, it’s easier to write even a relatively banal action story about a male action hero because he, in canon, is allowed to have the feelings and impulses that interest the writer.

The fujocourse is all about saying that women aren’t allowed to have dark impulses ever. That we’re not allowed to be horny. That we’re not allowed to enjoy art for the sake of an orgasm. When we depict people not precisely like ourselves, we’re overstepping. When we make art for our own pleasure instead of devoting our lives to service, we are toxic and bad. Any time. Every time.

It’s just another round of saying that women’s pleasure is not valid and women’s personal space should not be respected. No hobbies for you: only motherhood.

And yet that’s not actually what most slash fans think. I was heartened to read Lucy Neville’s Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography and Erotica. A friend read it recently and was trying to guess which quotes were from me. I have to admit, I was playing that game too! I honestly couldn’t tell, until I looked at demographic info, that some could not have been mine. They sounded so familiar. On Tumblr, I tend to wade into meta discussions, so I see a lot of loud, divisive views. I especially see a lot of views that, over time, make me start to wonder if I’m a crazy outlier. Intellectually, I know that this is all down to bad curation of my dash and a love of browsing the meta tags. I didn’t realize how much it had crept up on me unconsciously–how much I had started to feel like I had to justify and explain the most basic and common experiences of being a slash fan.

What was interesting about Neville’s book is how alike many of the women sounded. Now, no one book represents everybody, and she makes no claims to have figured out the exact size or demographic breakdown of fandom. Her focus is on women who like m/m material, whether slash or porno movies or anything else. At the same time, though, she surveyed heaps of women, and the responses were amazingly similar. Nearly every quote in that book strikes a chord with me. Nearly all of them, with a few minor variations, could be something I’ve written. Gay, straight, bi, asexual: we all had many of the same things to say about slash and what it means to us.

So, some brief, and more digestible thoughts:

Slash is “overrepresented” in meta and scholarly literature because people still ask us to justify ourselves constantly.

People ask us to justify ourselves because they assume that “good representation” is literal representation.

There are key emotional, psychological aspects of our experiences that are often better expressed allegorically, whether we’re gay men doing drag or women writing slash or any other sort of artist.

Here are some choice quotes from Coppa. (I will restrain myself and not just try to quote the entire thing. Heh.)

“There are endless transmedia adaptations of characters like Sherlock Holmes or Batman, so it is clearly not appropriation that’s the issue: it is the appropriation by the other—by women, in this case.

One could argue then that it is our awareness of this appropriative doubleness—of the familiar characters acting in an unfamiliar script, of the female storyteller animating the male characters— that boots slash out of “literature,” with its illusions of psychological coherence (see Edwards’s Chapter 3 in this volume), and puts it instead into the category of performance, itself so often associated with the fake, the female, the forged, the queer. My argument in this chapter is that it might be useful to compare slash to other forms of appropriative performance; drag comes powerfully to mind and, more recently, the musical Hamilton. These are forms where it’s important to see the bothness, the overlaid and blurred realities: male body/Liza Minnelli; person of color/George Washington.”

“In his book How to Be Gay, David Halperin (2012) discusses the ongoing centrality of certain female characters to the gay male cultural experience and takes as his project an explanation of why gay men choose those particular avatars and what they make of them. Halperin argues that gay men use these female characters to articulate a gay male subjectivity which precedes and may in important ways be separate from a gay male sexual identity (or to put it another way, a boy may love show tunes before he loves men, or without ever loving men). The gay male appropriation of and perfor- mance of femininity effectively mirror—in the sense both of “reflect” and “reverse”—slash fiction’s preoccupations with and appropriations of certain (often hyper‐performatively) male characters in service of a female sensibility; in both cases, appropriation becomes a way of saying something that could not otherwise easily be said.”

“A character like Tony Stark or Bruce Wayne speaks, obviously, to boys who are getting mixed messages about what successful manhood looks like in the twenty‐first century—it was hard enough in the old days to be Charles Atlas, but today you have to be Charles Atlas and Steve Jobs at the same time, which is a problem of time commitment just for a start. But these characters speak to women, too: differently. The doubled nature of the paired male characters taken up by slash fandom—these aliens, these costumed heroes, these men wearing man suits, men in male drag—make them appealing sites of identification for women, or proxy identities, to use Halperin’s (2012) term; that is, they provide “a metaphor, an image, a role” (185). They are sites of complex feeling.

But what these characters are metaphors for, what they make us feel, is not simple, singular, or easily reducible. Halperin takes hundreds of pages even to begin to excavate the complicated web of meanings around Joan Crawford; I am not going to be able to unpack any of these iconic male characters in a few paragraphs, and it is also the nature of fandom to build multiple and contradictory meanings around fan favorites (and to get into heated arguments over them).”

[In Halperin’s class] “Works that allowed gay men to be invisible were preferred to those where they were explicitly represented. “Non‐gay cultural forms offer gay men a way of escaping from their particular, personal queerness into total, global queerness,” Halperin (2012) writes. “In the place of an identity, they promise a world” (112). I would argue that slash offers something similar—that queer female space, as well as the ability to escape the outline of the identity that you are forced to carry every day—and that for gay men and slash fans both, the suggestion that you would restrict your identification to those characters with whom you share an identity feels limiting.”

“Visibility is a trap,” Phelan (2003) concludes, referencing Lacan (1978) (93): “it summons surveillance and the law, it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession”—and fans on the ground know this and talk about it in very nearly this language. Again, this is not to say that fans—or gay men, for that matter—do not want or deserve good representations: female fandom, slash fandom included, championed Mad Max: Fury Road, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, and the new, gender‐swapped Ghostbusters, all of which have multiple and complex female characters. Rather, I am arguing that representation does not substitute for the pleasure or power of invisibility; for, as even the most famously visible actors say, “But what I really want is to direct.”

[hollywayblog]

How “The Umbrella Academy” Surprised Me

In many ways, good and bad.

This is a spoiler-free review of season one of The Umbrella Academy

I remember when The Umbrella Academy comics came out. It was 2007 and I was a broke thirteen-year-old living in suburban Australia (a cultural wasteland!) so I never actually read them, but as a rabidly obsessed My Chemical Romance/Gerard Way fan, I managed to fold The Umbrella Academy into my identity anyway. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but hey. Adolescents are powerful creatures.

As a distinguished almost-twenty-five-year-old (I’d like to acknowledge that I took a small break here to have an existential crisis) my walls are free of band posters and my eyes are no longer encircled with that thick black eyeliner that always managed to look three days old and slept in, but I still got kind of a thrill when I learned that The Umbrella Academy was being adapted into a Netflix show. It was something I had always assumed I would end up reading, back in the depths of my emo phase (which is probably more accurately defined as a My Chemical Romance phase) but then just kind of forgot about. So, great, I’m simultaneously being reminded that this thing exists, and freed of the nostalgic obligation to go seek out the comic and read it. As much as I love reading, comics have just never been my thing.

Then the trailer came out. Honestly, it kind of killed my enthusiasm. It just looked kind of generic. Apocalypse. Superpowers. Bold characters. Lots of action. My takeaway was a big ol’ “Meh.” Frankly, without my pre-existing attachment to Gerard Way and the very idea of The Umbrella Academy, I highly doubt I would have given it a chance - not because it looked inherently bad, but just because I’m a hard sell on the kind of show it appeared to be.

But it’s Gerard Way, man. I had to watch at least one episode.

The Umbrella Academy centres around the famous-yet-mysterious Hargreeves family. The seven children - six of whom have special powers - were adopted by Reginald Hargreeves, a cold and severe patriarch who didn��t even deign to name them. He made them into “The Umbrella Adademy,” a crime-fighting squad of tiny children who would later dissolve after a tragic incident. Now they’re grown up, and Dad’s dead. His spare and tense memorial is what brings the adult Umbrella Academy back together, and this is where the show kicks off.

We’re treated to a rather clumsy beginning; a gripping opening scene followed by an unimaginative montage. We get a glimpse of each of the Hargreeves’ regular lives, leading up to and including them learning of their father’s death. It’s a heavy-handed introductory roll-call, complete with on-screen name cards. It’s a baffling waste of time, considering we don’t learn anything in this montage that isn’t later reiterated through dialogue or behaviour. We don’t need to see Klaus leaving rehab to know he’s an addict. We don’t need to see Allison on the red carpet to know she’s a movie star. It dragged, even on a first watch not knowing that the whole thing would be ultimately pointless, and I’m surprised no one thought to cut it and let us go in cold with everyone arriving at the mansion for the memorial - an opening that would have both set the tone and let us get to know the characters much more naturally. Maybe it feels like I’m focusing too much on this, and that’s only because it gave me a bad first impression - and I want anyone who reacts the same way I did to stick with it. It really does get better.

The further we got from the montage the less gimmicky it felt, and I started to sense some sort of something that I liked about this show. Stylistically it was interesting, and there seemed to be an underlying depth; room for these characters to be more than brooding ex-vigilantes with daddy issues. I was intrigued enough by the end of episode one to keep watching, and was gratified as the series went on and truly delved into those depths. There was a memorable turning point for me around episode five, where Klaus (the wonderful Robert Sheehan) was given space in the runtime to visibly, viscerally feel the effects of something he had just been through. It sounds so obvious, and so simple, but it’s something that is frustratingly glossed over so often in fiction. You know. Fallout. Feelings.

It wasn’t just that moment, though. Prior episodes laid the groundwork, developing not just Klaus but all the Hargreeves. Each character feels real and grounded, each of them uniquely good, uniquely bad, uniquely damaged by their upbringing. It’s this last point I particularly appreciate, this subtle realism in the show’s execution of abused characters. We see how siblings growing up with the same parents does not necessarily mean they got the same childhood, endured the same abuse, or that their trauma will manifest in the same ways. And certainly, it’s important to see the different coping mechanisms each of them have developed. Furthermore, there is a lot more to each of these characters than just their trauma. There are seven distinct personalities going on, and I have to applaud the writers for this commitment to character. It was largely this that kept me hooked (I’m such a sucker for good characters), and to my own surprise very invested in the way things unfolded.

I love the tone, which found a cool rhythm after the pilot. The pacing was decent and the character development balanced well against the plot. I like the little quirks that remind you of the show’s comic book roots, like Pogo, the talking ape and Five, the grouchy old man in a teenager’s body.

Weirdly, I like the apocalypse stuff, which they managed to put their own spin on despite it being such a played-out trope at this point. I like that the show found small ways to go in unexpected directions, even if the overarching plot and big twists weren’t all that surprising. And most of all I love that in a world saturated with forgettable media, I woke up today still thinking about this show.

Even if not all of my thoughts were so generous.

See, for everything I love about this show, there are also quite a few things that rubbed me up the wrong way. I can’t list them all without going into spoilers, but I think it needs to be said that there are like, a fair few problematic elements in this show. I couldn’t help but notice that while women and people of colour are the minority in this cast, they also seem to cop the worst abuse. Only two of the Hargreeves siblings are female. One of them has no powers and the other’s power is influence (a non-physical power). Their “Mom” is literally a robot created for the sole purpose of caregiving; she dresses and acts like the epitome of a submissive 50s housewife. The Hargreeves sisters are also the ones most likely to be left out or ignored when it comes to making decisions, with one of them even literally losing her voice at one point (yikes!). Beyond that we have some truly disturbing imagery of violence being inflicted on women of colour almost exclusively by white men, and the fact that the only asian character is um… well, he’s literally dead. Before the show even starts.

Overall the problem is not just insufficient diversity, with white men taking up most of the screen time, dialogue and leadership actions, but the way that the few female and non-white characters are depicted.

These are all depictions that, in a vacuum, would be innocuous. I mean, just looking at the root of many of the show’s problems exemplifies that - the root being that all of these characters were white in the source material (uh, a problem in itself, obviously). It wasn’t a problem, for example, when Dead Ben was not the only Asian character but just another white Hargreeves sibling. And wouldn’t it be nice if we lived in a world where you could race or gender-swap any character and have everything mean - or not mean - the same thing. But life is more complicated than that. Art is more complicated than that.

Honestly, I’m not sure if we should give props to the developers of The Umbrella Academy for diversifying their cast when the fact is they did so - and I say this gently - ignorantly and lazily. Race-swapping willy-nilly and leaving it at that ignores a lot of complex issues surrounding the nuances of portraying minorities in fiction, and leaves room for these kinds of harmful and hurtful tropes to carelessly manifest. So many storytellers don’t want to hear it, but let me tell you writer to writer that it does matter if the person being choked is white or black, male or female, trans or cis. It does matter who’s doing the choking. Camera angles matter. Dialogue matters. It’s all a language that conveys a message - about power and dominance and vulnerability in the real world. Because art doesn’t exist inside a vacuum, as inconvenient as that might be. Having the empathy to recognise that will actually make us better storytellers.

In shedding light on these issues, I am not dragging this show. I am not condemning it. And although it is problematic in itself, I’m not even saying it’s problematic to enjoy it. I’m pulling apart the lasagne, looking at the layers, poking and prodding at the individual ingredients and saying, “Hey, the chef probably should have known better than to put pineapple in here. Maybe let’s not do that next time.” I’m also saying, “When I get a mouthful with pineapple in it, I don’t enjoy that. It’s jarring and unpleasant. But it doesn’t ruin the whole meal for me.”

I’m getting better at allowing myself to dislike something on the basis of its shitty themes. To not have to justify myself when something is problematic in a way that just makes it too uncomfortable for me to watch. That wasn’t the case here. I won’t lie; the bad stuff was no afterthought for me. That kind of thing really gets to me. It does ruin a lot for me. But in this case, the show redeemed itself in other ways; mostly by just being a compelling story with characters I liked. I’m trying not to justify that too hard either.

So I liked The Umbrella Academy, and I hope it gets a second season. I also hope that the creators will listen to people like me who want to be able to enjoy their show even more and create more consciously in the future.

And please let Vanya be a lesbian.

The Umbrella Academy is out now on Netflix

Watch this show if you like: witty characters, iconic characters, complex characters, mysteries,  dark themes, superpowers, vigilantes, comics, dark humour, epic stories, shows about families, stylistic TV shows, ensemble casts, character dynamics, dramedies

Possible triggers (don’t read if you care about spoilers): suicide, child abuse, claustrophobia, addiction, violence, violence against women, violence against women of colour, death, torture, incest, self-harm, pregnancy/childbirth, kidnapping/abduction, blood, mental illness, medication/themes of medication necessity, blood, manipulation/gaslighting, homicide, forced captivity, guns, hospitalisation, medical procedures, needles, PTSD, prison rape reference (1).

Please feel free to message me if I failed to include a relevant trigger warning and I’ll include it.

[wakraya]

Alright, let me put a few points of stuff I’ve seen on the tags to rest here.

1) Jades Are A Rare Caste.

They are implied to be less plentiful than other castes, yeah, I believe Seadwellers are also rare? But here’s the thing- We have six Jades. When someone says “There’s twice as many Jades as we have Rusts or Bronzes”, it sounds like, shit, yeah weren’t they supposed to be less abundant? Except. They’re still, in total, just Six. Alternia is a planet. Lore-wise, they may be a less plentiful Caste, but they’re not even... In the double digits. This is not even the population of a neighborhood, Xefros’ suburban area likely had more Trolls in total than there are Trolls in this Troll Call, and besides it’s likely all Jades are in the same place for some reason- Jadeblood School is the biggest headcanon right now, for example, so... Why wouldn’t you have a bunch of Jades there?

2) Jades Are All Female.

This is a straight-up misconception, yeah they’re mostly girls, but canon still leaves room for Jadeblood boys. So Male Jadeblood? Yeah, can happen, and there’s nothing going against the canon here.

3) Trolls Have No Concept Of Gender.

This one is honestly baffling to me because I haven’t heard about this until the discourse today. I am assuming this comes from the fact Troll Reproduction doesn’t care who provides the genetic material? Their reproduction is not tied to gender, which has made people assume Troll junk is the same for both guys and gals. Except... That’s about it. Even though it’s silly because they’re bugs and implied to be hermaphroditic, they still show sexual dimorphism. And even if they didn’t, they still have a concept of Gender, merely based on the fact there’s Troll Boys and Troll Girls? He/She divide? With Hiveswap expanding on it and showing us there are, indeed, NB Trolls that prefer They/Them. This Gender Divide is actually talked about by Porrim, who also implies that while Fuchsia-down Alternia seemed a Matriarchy, Purple-down it was actually a Patriarchy, informing us that not ONLY is there sexual dimorphism, but also, a cultural divide. By saying that Lanque can’t be Trans because Trolls have no concept of Gender, you’re either mistaking headcanons for actual canon... Or being transphobic by equating genitalia to gender. In which case, fuck off.

4) Trolls Don’t Care About Fashion.

This is something Karkat says, and I believe Kanaya also implies she cares about it more than it’s usual? But Fashion in Troll Culture, seems to be exactly like Mail. Karkat mentions there’s no Mail they do not get a Mailbox with a Flag, yet we see Xefros get mail! Except it’s not Mail. It’s parachuted delivery straight from a website. There’s no standarized Mail system on Alternia, but that doesn’t mean companies can’t deliver things themselves, directly to their Hives. Similarly, Trolls have no concept of Fashion- They don’t care about things such as trends, variety, being dressed properly. And... Hiveswap doesn’t break this. They have more colorful clothes, and some look pretty good! But. Look at Cirava. They’re an absolute fashion disaster. Diemen is just dressed like a hot dog. The Jades all seem to wear uniforms of some sort. Fozzer and Marsti, Skylla, they are more akin to work clothes. The Soleil Twins and Marvus are more flashy, because they’re likely part of a spectacle. Most of them are either a sort of uniform or outfit that’ll fit whatever they’re doing, or a basic color with their symbol somewhere. And you can go from Bright Pink Bathrobe Stelsa, to Pirate-Clad Remele, and back to Punk Denim Elwurd. Not being Fashionable can be about trends, they may simply dress however they want, because of their interests, or their jobs.

But let’s think about this another way. Let’s say that, yeah, they did retcon Troll Fashion- Would... Would you really be mad if they retconned Troll Fashion. Like... Would you be happier if every Troll shown was wearing a plain black shirt with their Symbol, and pants or a skirt, with slight variations of a jacket or a tank top. I don’t think there’s a single Hiveswap design I dislike, and they’re all visibly varied and easily recognizable, and tell a lot about the character, which is like. Character Design 101? So I honestly don’t know what the complaint here is exactly, except Canon Purity.

5) Hiveswap Ruined Fantroll Variety

How. First of all, the entire previous point. Just, expanding upon basic Troll Clothes, showing us the extent of how Trolls dress. But also like... What did they limit exactly? We’re going to learn more about Trolls and Troll Culture and Biology, of course headcanons are going to clash with canon, but so far, what have they limited? I’ve heard about Horns, but like... These horns have all been so varied, and sure there’s stuff like hooks with Ceruleans and Jades, and Four Horns with Golds but... This pattern is also broken, with Azdaja having three, for example. We’ve seen new Psionic colors, we’ve seen stuff like Horn Piercing, we’ve seen Troll Twins, we have seen horns where the orange part starts at different heights than you’d expect and even some of the parts jutting out having their own red-orange-yellow coloration separate of the main shaft of the horn. If anything, until now, there’s always been headcanons for Horns, like, “Oh this is their symbol so it’ll be like this”, or “this is their caste, so, they’ll have big horns”, but no, we have Purples with small horns, we have Bronzes with curly horns downwards, we have a cerulean with super uneven horns, we have a gold with three horns, we have a teal with flat horns, we have rounded horns, we have hotdog horns. I’ve heard people wonder about some Horn Shapes in the prior weeks, about how they didn’t match their restrictive headcanons, and NOW you tell me they’re restrictive? There’s also been complaints about caste roles and stereotypes, and I feel people really forget that Alternia is a Tyranny that forces the inhabitants in roles they are most likely not happy with, specially for the lower castes. Like... Rusts are disposable, and likely to be bound to a life of servitude. Because they’re the lowest of the low, society treats them as such, and there’s stereotypes like Indigos being strong, but that’s not any more restrictive than Psionics being a Gold-only thing, and much like we see Zebede not having Psionics or Elwurd and Mallek having normal eyes to every other cerulean’s messed-up ones... There’s exceptions to the rule everywhere. There have always been.

I’ve also seen complaints about no mutant bloods or things like Albinism and such? And like... The fact they didn’t include it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We actually got Freckles with Zebede, so it already implies skin conditions are a thing, so Albinism could happen, if anything we have more PROOF that it may be a thing! Complaining about a lack of Limebloods and Violets, too, is just nitpicking, we know there will be Violets eventually, but either we haven’t been shown right now, or they’re just. In the sea. And we’re in the land. And Limes are likely to be a plot point, I’m expecting at least ONE Lime (Fiamet), if not more to show up at some point, and if there’s NO Limebloods I’m sure there will be at least talk OF Limebloods and their whole, you know, extermination, which is a canon thing that happened.

6) The Game’s Representation Is Bad Representation

Listen... Listen. I have friends ecstatic that there’s at LEAST three non-cis characters in Hiveswap (One trans boy, two NBs), without counting the possibility of other characters being Trans (Pretty much anyone could be), or NB (Like, I think about half of the characters don’t have pronouns on their bullet points?), not to mention, further acts with new characters. Hell, even Xefros or Dammek or Joey could be Trans. We. Literally know nothing about these characters, our information is so limited, and yet there’s already people cheering about it and super happy to see representation and I’ve seen one person in the tag encouraged to come out because Lanque is Trans. There’s also at least two Jewish Trolls, plus the possibility of Kanaya being Jewish as well, either her, Rose, or both. And yet, even though they have simply said this, in good faith, respectfully, and trying to add diversity to their roster, and even though we literally know NOTHING of how it’ll be handled yet, you... Bash them for it?

Like, okay. Lanque. The big topic today. He’s not particularly masculine, but as has surely been repeated over and over and over again, not all trans men are masculine, and not all trans people suffer dysphoria. And yeah, it’s true! It would be nice if there was a more masculine trans man! It would be great if there were trans girls! It would be great if there were more diversely coded NB characters! And there may be?? There’s going to be more characters, if not in this Act, in future Acts, and of the ones we’ve seen, many of them could still be NB or Trans. Like... Again. We’ve got three bullet points from each character. Like, I’m sorry you didn’t get a trans character that you could identify better with yet? But that doesn’t mean you have to bash the one we got? When there are people genuinely happy and encouraged about it? You’re not being progressive. You’re being an elitist asshole, if you only accept 100% perfect representation suited to your tastes, and everything else is garbage, or god help me, ‘fetishization’ or ‘disgusting’ (I have heard both on the Tags), like seriously. You’re being the oppressive one. You’re the one making representation harder than it should be.

Oh and if you’re on the OPPOSITE side of the spectrum and simply being Transphobic or saying how all of this is ‘pandering’ to the audience, really I have nothing to say, if you cannot have basic empathy for a group of people finding representation in a game which source material is extremely queer, and have to resort to bashing it down, screw you.

7) WhatPumpkin Are Doing A Bad Job

This is your subjective opinion, and I’d dare to say, a wrong opinion, but let’s not go there for now. WP has suffered a lot of hate for some reason? There have been lies and slander and bashing for absolutely no reason. People hate Cohen for some reason, and have demonized him, when so far what I’ve seen about him is that he’s a pretty chill dude. The writing of Hiveswap wasn’t like, a masterpiece? But it was fun and it got a good bunch of chuckles out of me and made me care for the characters, and even got me a bit scared and sad at some points during the game! It has that Homestuck Spark, and if you say ‘it’s not like Homestuck’, you’re... I’m sorry, you’re just an elitist, or simply don’t like the style anymore? But it carries a very similar charm.

I’ve heard complaints about Hussie not being involved in the project- Which is false, he did write the entire story FIRST THING, and is overseeing the whole project with the rest of the team. There’s also been criticism towards WP ‘failing’ at representation (Before actually seeing the representation apparently, again, we know NOTHING about the game and how it’ll handle stuff so far), and also accusing WP and Cohen specifically of adding representation because of Woke Points and like... WP are Queer as Heck? I don’t know all of them, I don’t even know how many people are working at WP. But they’re not all straight 100% for sure, and I believe they’re not all cis- And even if they ARE all cis, I also doubt a group working on such a Queer game would NOT hear out from Trans friends. What I’m trying to say, is that they haven’t shown at any point disrespect of ignorance regarding the diversity they want to tackle, they’re not doing things out of bad faith, and we haven’t seen how they handle it yet. Even if they didn’t handle it ideally! Does it need to be absolutely perfect, there can be missteps on the way there, god dammit if someone’s trying to better themselves but not quite getting it right you don’t insult them and tear them down! You show them what to do better next time or where they are mistaken, by pessimistically ignoring what they’re trying to do out of spite you’re discouraging good will and being an asshole! Which leads me to my last point for now.

8) They Could Have Told Us We Were Misgendering Lanque

This one is... Really, a bit ridiculous. Okay, let me explain. If someone is Trans and you misgender them accidentally, they’ll tell you quickly and you’ll, hopefully, correct yourself. Obviously. When the Trolls leaked, everyone latched onto Lanque as ‘Butch Lesbian’, and clung to that hope, and now that they were proven wrong, there was salt, at first, and THEN came the talk about Misgendering Lanque. And let me tell you, I think this is very selfish of everyone saying it.

What WP likely thought would happen is that they’d reveal Lanque to be a Trans boy, and people would be like “Oh! Nice, Trans Rep!”. Sure they could’ve told us back then but... Why? Lanque is not. A real person. He’s a fictional character, he’s not going to be offended because you thought he was a butch woman for a few months, in fact the SILHOUETTE alone ALREADY had people clinging to him as a butch woman. If he were a real person? Of course there’d be a quick correction. But he’s. A character. He’s just a god damn character. Who is Trans, out of good faith by a very Queer company, showing us a Trans man, who is a character, and expecting that, like NORMAL PEOPLE, we would not do something like THIS.

When you criticize WP for not telling us Lanque was a Trans Man, all I’m seeing is a shift of blame, not wanting to simply admit you were wrong and jumped to conclusions, and like- Even if there was Fanart or Fanfic of Lanque calling him a woman briefly, shipping him around mistakenly, who cares? You just. Go. “Okay, I’ll change it” or “Whoops haha this was from when we didn’t know he was a Trans boy!” Why the militant hatred? Why the absolute disgust shown today? I can’t understand, I simply cannot understand why your first reaction to “Trans boy Jadeblood” is “WELL I THOUGHT HE WAS A BUTCH LESBIAN!! I WASN’T WRONG BY ASSUMING THIS, WHATPUMPKIN WERE FOR TRYING TO MAKE THEIR GAME MORE DIVERSE”. It’s like... You just. Correct it? You just correct yourself? And yeah you can want more masculine Trans boys, that’s fair! But dismissing what we got, entirely, and insulting it, and getting like THIS, and blaming the team, it just seems.

Narcissistic. It seems narcissistic and extremely self-centered, and perfectionist to the extreme of not wanting anything other than a complete and absolute ideal, that may fit you but may also not fit others.

In conclusion?

People are happy about representation. This isn’t destroying diversity or representation, this is not reducing customization of Fantrolls, this is only building MORE on the already expansive system, and giving us representation and hope for MORE representation in the future, and if you cannot be happy for a genuine, good natured, and honestly, perfectly fine attempt, if you cannot feel empathy for the people who did feel for this representation, if you can only want to find reasons to bash something down and demonize something good and point out how BAD and NOT GOOD things are and how MUCH BETTER they could be, then honestly, you’re a deeply unpleasant person.

Give things time. Give people with good intentions chances. Learn to backpedal and learn from mistakes and simply correct yourself when you’re wrong instead of going down a hateful spiral. Learn to separate fiction and reality. Just like... Think, for a moment, when you’re writing something down- Is it a jaded opinion, or an objective fact? Will it hurt and discourage people who’re genuinely happy or trying to make others happy? Why do more harm than good when there are good intentions paving the way?

I just simply cannot understand the basic lack of critical thought and empathy of some people I have seen today, and hopefully with this I can make my opinion on the whole absurd Discourse that transpired today clear.

[just-a-black-boy]

Wish to add to this that like white queers from accepting environments especially should think about this. Like, I'm currently an exchange student in Japan and in my first week this white person came up to me and immediately assumed I was non-binary when they talked to me and started equating my experiences with their own as a white enby person while we were in the classroom and other people started walking in.

First of all, did not appreciate the assumptions being made about my gender identity by them. It was very invalidating as an experience and truly upped my "Is everyone around me constantly misgendering me?" Paranoia, and I basically started policing my appearance more as a result of the interaction bc I want to be stealth while Black and Trans in an incredibly conservative environment. I still get misgendered but if I correct teachers here they'll just assume I'm a cis guy with a softer appearance instead of that I'm trans, and if nothing else I value the certainty there is in that because it means I am Safer.

Second of all, we are in Japan and I am a Black Person, specifically a Black Trans Man. The person who spoke to me describes themselves as genderfluid and I am not trying to downplay their experience but our anguish being out in society and our sense for danger is inherently different. I've legally changed my gender in my home country prior to coming here and that's why I'm in men's dorms and have the confidence I do to affirm myself, because Japan is a country in which your legal gender and name are absolute. In those situations outing people or treating their queerness like a given can be dangerous depending on who hears, if nothing else we're part of a group of exchange students you can't assume none of the other people around us are queerphobic. Also, I do want to acknowledge that their whiteness puts them in a better position to me in which social perception is different. I was forced to react politely bc I don't want to be branded as "difficult"

You cannot assume that just because you think someone looks queer they'll appreciate it if you act like they are with them. People do not like being outed and they don't have internalised queerphobia if you came up to them with an expectation of immediate closeness and they reject that. Think about location, think about people's identity and fucking think about the factors (like race for example) that might make their situation a little bit more precarious than yours bc when you do stuff like this you're putting the onus on a stranger who you are unfamiliar with to avert and fix their own potential discomfort / genuine terror and or anxiety about being outed, especially in settings that are enclosed and public this forces them to go along with you and now they're in an even more vulnerable position.

Stop assuming that every other queer person is in the same boat as you, if you think someone is queer you don't have to mention it, if you mesh well it'll come up eventually when that person feels safe.

Young queers please understand that if you go up to strangers you’ve “clocked” as a fellow queer and just dive in with that, not only could you be seriously endangering that stranger, but you are seriously endangering yourself.

If anyone came up to me in public and went “are you… yanno… *limp wrists at me*” I would full-force punch them right in the mouth with no hesitation. I wouldn’t be sorry. You are not connecting with me. You are a stranger outing me against my will in public. I am not the only queer person whose fear response is fight.

[preevelynn-blog]

ManyVids Interview

Tell us about your cult:

I am the High Priestess of the Cult of Yith. We are a cult that is dedicated to learning all there is about consensual sexual perversion and deviancy. We accept every kind of gender identity and expression and sexuality.  The main goal of our cult is to collectively have as many different kinds of sex and orgasms as possible for the sake of knowledge. We only condone fully consensual sexual interactions and fully condemn any kind of nonconsensual sexual act. The Yithians collect data on all the different kinds of sexual activities that our cult members are a part of and they add it to their grand libraries that hold knowledge from infinite places and times.

The Yithians are a species of highly evolved extraterrestrial (and sometimes terrestrial) beings who can  swap their consciousness with individual creatures through not only space, but also time. A Yithian living on prehistoric planet earth could potentially swap bodies with Genghis Khan, or Abraham Lincoln, or a random person living in the year 2045. They can swap their consciousness with creatures and beings from anywhere in the universe at any time. This is how I first came into contact with them. They must have taken control of my body in the past because I now exist in strange dreams that involve them. I understand that all they seek is knowledge and I’ve always seen knowledge as power, so I’ve created the Cult of Yith to use my own talents as a sexual deviant to help the Yithians gain knowledge about human sexuality. It’s very convoluted, I know. The bottom line is that if you join the Cult of Yith and you have interesting, fun, consensual, and unique sex eventually when the Yithians come back to Earth and claim their rightful place as rulers of the planet, we will be given the role of librarian in their grand libraries for our contributions. Plus your life will just be better with a religion that fully supports your odd kinks.

What role does music play in your life?

Music plays many different roles in my life. The biggest role music plays in my life is that of a way for me to communicate. Music is also a friend, an enemy, a religion, and many more things. I am almost always listening to music unless I am sleeping and I create music every single day. It has a near constant presence in my life. I create music for all the porn that I make. It may not be very good, but it’s something I made and that makes me proud. My favorite art has always been art that is provocative and socially conscious. I think in American society right now we need to be pushing for sex work to be more protected, socially and legally, and music is a great medium to do that. Music can be a wrapper for a message that makes a message an easier pill for humanity to swallow. I love to make music that focuses on and is influenced by sex work, intersectional feminism, and the rights of genderqueer people while theatrically wrapping it all up in a recognizable package, such as the imagery of a religion or cult. *hint hint nudge nudge* Music, and all art forms that I indulge in, are a way for me to unapologetically say what I want to say.

What do you see as the major issues facing the LGBTQ+ community in adult entertainment?

I think one of the most glaring issues faced by LGBTQ+ people in adult entertainment is the remaining stigma around trans and gay performers and the silence of many cis industry members about this topic. Performers and managers steer away from gay and trans people for a lot of different reasons and some of these reasons are direct reflections of a past that’s already been thoroughly gutted and exposed as idiotic and queerphobic. There are some very stark differences between how cis and trans performers in the adult entertainment industry are treated. For example, segregation between cis and trans women is alive and well on MyFreeCams to the extent that MyFreeCams doesn’t allow trans women to perform on their site even though they are supposedly a “women only” cam site. In their rules and wiki there is a lot of trans exclusionary language. On their wiki it says “Natural-born women” only and on their official site rules they say nothing about disallowing trans women, but they do say “No men.” So if a trans woman can get through the background check (Which I did because they don’t ask for a picture of your genitals) and gets banned from the site, what rule did she break? It’s pretty safe to assume she only broke the “No men” rule even though she isn’t a man. MyFreeCams won’t address the issue at all and when I got banned from their site my account was deleted, they took all the money I had earned during my show, and I never got a response as to “why” I was banned. Their silence protects them.

This is a really important issue because MyFreeCams is probably the biggest cam site in the world and they sponsor so many huge events and conventions related to sex work. So you’ll have safe spaces and events for MyFreeCams models that are essentially spaces and events for women, but trans women are excluded. MyFreeCams is a huge part of the industry and they should treat all women equally, we should demand better from the large companies that represent the different aspects of sex work. Just a reminder to all cis models on MyFreeCams, 40-50% of your hard earned money is going to supporting this behavior. I understand you might not have the privilege to leave, but that’s not stopping you from emailing MyFreeCams asking why trans women aren’t allowed, or from putting them on blast on social media. On other issues too, we should not be silent. When MyFreeCams is transphobic we need our cis allies to call them out and be loud because they don’t care about what trans people think. If you’re an ally and your manager is being homophobic don’t be silent, call them out. Homophobes and transphobes don’t care about queer people, they will mostly only listen to other cisgender straight people. Power structures are torn down from the top, not the bottom. Please help.

What are your favorite fetishes? Are there any you got into thanks to making content? Any you keep for your private life and don’t film?

I think my favorite fetish is blasphemy targeted at Roman Catholicism. I got into blasphemy from doing private shows for ministers and active church goers who wanted me to really dig into their religion and basically replace their God with myself. I was raised Roman Catholic and I find the King James version of the bible to be very problematic and anti-queer, so I revel in the opportunity to tackle something that often puts me down. Whenever I do one of these shows I often start by detailing to my submissive the passages in the bible that condemn me as a trans woman, specifically the ones in deuteronomy, and explaining how their God wanted me to be in league with the devil by creating me this way. Then I will go on and explain how Satan and I are converting God’s own angels and humans against him by helping them to see the light of sexual deviancy. Then we do all kinds of naughty things in MY name instead of God’s name.

I find it refreshing and empowering to fight against something much more powerful than myself that actively oppresses me and people like me. The Catholic church is one such force and I revel in the opportunity to not only voice my opinions about the Christian mythos, but also to get someone who is a part of it to realize how anti-trans their own book can be. It is beneficial and positive for both me and the submissive and every single submissive I’ve done a blasphemy show with has returned more times than I can remember for the same experience.

Who are your: musical heroes, adult entertainment heroes, and political heroes, and why?

I don’t really have many heroes. I think some of my biggest influences when it comes to music and porn are Marilyn Manson and Natalie Mars. Marilyn Manson’s provocative style just really makes my inner goth girl squeal, and I think Natalie Mars is just so gosh darned physically talented. I wish I could take the things in my butt she does.

What is the most heartwarming thing you’ve ever seen?

That scene at the end of the Witch where the girl talks to the goat.

What is the most annoying question that people ask you?

It’s not a question, but I hate when guys want to talk about how they are straight, but they would still fuck me. Like, yeah… duh… if you were gay you would probably want to fuck a man?

What is something that a ton of people are obsessed with but you just don’t get the point of?

Ariana Grande

What sexual fantasy would you like to make a reality through making an adult vid?

I would love to recreate the exorcism scene from the Exorcist, but instead of Regan and two male priests I’ll be possessed and two sexy female nuns will fuck the devil out of me.

Say something to your fans:

I appreciate you all and if you respect and support me I respect and support you. <3

Fast 10:

The Best Topping/Ice Cream Combination Is:

Spaghettieis from Germany

One piece of entertainment I wish I could erase from my mind so that I could experience it for the first time again is:

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

If I could have an orgy with anyone on Earth it would be the following people:

Marilyn Manson (1994 version), Katie Marovich from CollegeHumor, and Peter Steele (Also 1994 version).

If you wanted to talk dirty to me you should say:

Describe giving me oral sex and then cuddling me.

The sexiest outfit I own is:

A lace bodysuit that one of my biggest supporters of the name Ser_Koopa bought me!

This sex toy I love and this sex toy I dislike:

I love my fleshlight and I’m not a fan of plastic prostate massagers.

If I could time travel I’d visit this era:

1994 for the metal or some time in the future when I’m not living way below the poverty line and I’m comfortable.

The best way to start the day is:

Yoga!

One thing I wish I knew more about is:

Stocks and investments

The one major sex tip I have for people is:

Communicate. It’s always a good idea to ask someone if they are ok during a sexual experience.

[aroworlds]

Could you talk a bit about amatonormativity and how it related to you? I know the 101 (aka the definition), but I have trouble identifying it in real life, discussing how it permeates in fiction, etc. and this is kinda weird but I think an informed discussion about it would help? IDK feel free to ignore it if you don't have the spoons for it, but if you want to it would be a huge help!

Anon, I told you this was going to be long, but … well, it’s long!

The problem is that amatonormativity is a wall I keep hurling myself against, as an aro and as an aro creative, and there isn’t much conversational space where I am permitted to go all out in talking about it. I fear discussing this with too much vehemence, to go beyond the hand-holding 101 conversations about being aro, in case I alienate the alloromantic folks who do support me. Alloromantic people aren’t interested in conversations that undermine their sense of the world, and aro-spec spaces are small; both things together result in silence.

Because of this, I think it’s reasonable that this is something hard to grasp, for aro-spec and alloromantic folks alike: the educative conversations are hard to find or don’t exist. When you add to the fact that for the last two years a-spec people have been fighting targeted hate, that our conversations have fallen back to claws-out defence or the shield of validation, how the hell are we supposed to understand our own experiences, especially something as-yet-unquestioned as the practical impact of amatonormativity?

I hope you don’t mind, but because this is so long, I’m going to concentrate on amatonormativity in media and its impact on me as a creative.

In terms of fictional media, I think amatonormativity shows itself most obviously in the concept of a happy ending–that two people in a romantic relationship is by far the most common variant. No, not all stories end witha romantic happy ending, but so many do, even if it’s only a romantically-happy-for-now ending. Think Disney films; think action films shoving in an unnecessary romantic side-plot because the hero gets the girl once the explosions are over; think every story where the guy got the girl for reasons we the audience are expected to accept without question.

Likewise, a film with a tragic or unhappy ending is often shown by a protagonist not falling in romantic love or the dissolution of a romantic relationship. While there are other forms of indicating tragedy, the lack of a romantic paring for a character expected to be in one is common. There’s a reason Romeo and Juliet has long been framed as a tragic romance even though the tragedy, I’d argue, lies more in the impact of feuding families on the next generation, not the death of two young people in a “star-crossed” romance.

Even genres that aren’t romantic in the sense that romance isn’t the focus of the plot will still include sexual and romantic tension between characters: many of the crime and thriller novels I’ve read, supposedly less romantic because they target a cishet male audience, devote a great many pages to depicting romantic relationships nonetheless. The majority of YA novels depict the development of romantic relationships (which is why I kept reading middle-grade books even when I was too old for them) and even low-romance adult fiction still has the protagonists having had or desiring a romantic relationship at some point. So many literary works deal with the breakdown of romantic relationships, affairs, being single, unrequited love, or the way dangerous or alien environments, or the tyranny of distance, places stresses on romantic partnerships. These often won’t have purely happy endings–often tragic or complicated–because they’re Literary, but they’re just as obsessed with romantic love as any romance novel. In constantly going on about romance’s failure without ever making the point that someone can be happy and self-fulfilled without it, literary works are as amatonormative as anything else.

Romantic love and relationships don’t have to be successful: we just have to show a character desiring these or struggling with these, just so the audience knows that the protagonist is human. Characters who are shown as disdaining romance, or being uninterested in it, are usually antagonistic characters who are beyond redemption, are aliens or robots, or are coded as robotic–characters who are literally inhuman or portrayed as such. There’s a reason that The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper becomes a kinder, more “normal”, less-autistic-coded man the more he falls in romantic love with Amy, despite being introduced as extremely aroace-coded, and it’s called amatonormativity.

This is the point in the post where we aro-specs are giving the world that long, pained stare, and for good reason.

Romantic love as a marker of human worth is the most succinct way I can describe the impact of amatonormativity. It’s not a flawless summary, but so often romance is treated as a universal concept, relevant to all, because Western society uses the possession of or desire for romantic love as an indicator of a person’s humanity. Romantic love makes us human, and so romantic love is everywhere, unquestioned and unassailable.

Elements of a more expanded sense of amatonormativity include:

- The idea that romantic attraction, love and relationships are universal to the human experience (predominantly a relationship encompassing, exclusively, one perisex heterosexual-and-heteromantic cis man and one perisex heterosexual-and-heteromanticcis woman).

- The idea that romantic love is the primary form of love and all other forms, once one gains a certain level of socially-acceptable maturity or adulthood, are naturally secondary.

- The idea that romantic love and relationships are relatable to and attainable by all, and any failure to relate to it or attain it is a personal or moral failing.

- The idea that people who do not experience, attain or desire a romantic partnership are, after a certain age, childish or childlike, immature, robotic, alien, inhuman.

- The idea that sex (especially non-heterosexual or non-vanilla sex) is only acceptable, for a person of high moral character, when it comes paired with romantic love. (Characters who have sex without romantic love are often coded as grasping, hateful, calculating, predatory.)

- The idea that the attainment of romantic love and relationships is a marker of character development, growth, adulthood or redemption.

- The idea that because romantic love and relationships are universal, to not depict them in media is to render one’s work childish or uninteresting. (Every aro-spec creator of narrative media knows the impact of this one.)

- The idea that the lack of romantic love or relationships, or the desire for these, is an indicator of a person of low moral character.

- The unquestioned idea that romance sells, accompanied with the assumption that the inclusion of romance in a work (or the story-arc of a protagonist) is a necessary part of making that work (or character) appealing to all audiences.

- No comprehension that romantic attraction can be felt and experienced in a diversity of ways and strengths, particularly with regards to fluctuation, intensity and circumstance.

- Very little comprehension of the difference between romantic attraction and romantic behaviours.

- An assumption that there is a certain set of behaviours that are only or best experienced with romantic attraction. (Engaging in these behaviours without romantic attraction is also often coded as predatory.)

Please note that all these discussions of romance are based on an alloromantic model: romance in and of itself is not inherently amatonormative. Aro-spec people’s experiences of romantic love and relationships do not fit the above because they do not and cannot assume that everyone fits this assumption of romantic attraction being a universal, unquestioned human. If your depiction of romance doesn’t assume that romance makes us a worthy human and everyone experiences it, it’s probably not amatonormative.

There’s heavy overlap with ableism, misogyny, heterosexism, whoremisia, etc, and this must be acknowledged. Amatonormativity hits hard on its own, but it seldom hits alone. More often it’s paired up with another form of oppression, which means people who better fit its norms can deny its existence by claiming the problem is due only to amatonormativity’s current partner.

Additionally, most mainstream amatonormative works are going to be about cishet romances (the romantic relationship between a cis heterosexual man and a cis heterosexual woman, presumed to be perisex and both alloromantic and allosexual). Women are far more subject to the need to be shown in romantic relationships than men; men are more often allowed to travel through the narrative without being subject to a romance, although most are shown as at least desiring it. Each experience of marginalisation is going to shape in different ways how amatonormativity impacts us, and this needs to be discussed (especially because if we don’t, antagonists deny the existence of amatonormativity altogether).

(I will say that amatonormativity and misogyny have a strange relationship in that excessive romance is treated as feminine and emotional, and denigrated because of it. We all know how literature is valued and respected over fanworks and genre romance. Cishet men, meanwhile, have a long history of treating the having of a romantic partner as a trap–phrases like “ball and chain” with regards to a wife, for example. Despite this, there’s still an unquestioned social expectation that men experience romance attraction and have, will have or want a romantic partner.)

I’ll use my experience as a trans aro to give an example of this kind of overlap.

Amatonormativity in LGBTQIA+ media is coloured by the fact that LGBTQIA+ folks have been denied romantically-happy-endings until recently; the rise of fandom and LGBTQIA+ genre media has done much to change this. Yet both are, predominantly, romance narratives, to the extent that there is little space for anything else. This history leaves me in an awkward position. The need for love stories featuring trans characters and trans bodies as worthy of romantic interest and desire is profound. In a world where romantic love is seen as the only kind of love worth talking about, powerful and primary, it’s natural many trans/NB stories are about just that.

I feel like I’m walking on thin ice if I talk about how depicting romance as the only acceptable trans happy ending defines my experience of gender by romantic experiences--and yet that is exactly what I feel. Furthermore, this is a narrative many alloromantic trans people need and deserve. In trying to tell stories about me, an aro trans person, who isn’t a target of romantic love, my stories are seen by alloromantic trans folks as mirroring the narratives that have long harmed trans people, treating us as unlovable. My work cannot provide the validation–that they are desired and loved romantically–alloromantic trans folks are looking for.

The amatonormativity isn’t in the existence of trans romance stories, but the fact there are fewer publishing options, and smaller audiences, for non-romantic/aromantic/gen stories about trans love and identity. The amatonormativity lies in the fact that romantic love for trans characters is the love on which trans genre media centres.

As a reader, I need stories that talk about different kinds of love, love for myself and my own body, a radical self-acceptance that isn’t tied to someone else’s romantic interest in me. Instead, I get stories telling me that I am accepted, as a trans person, if my identity is tied up in experiences I don’t have and don’t desire.

The intersection of amatonormativity and cissexism results in its own peculiar oppression for me as a trans aro, one that I find impossible to navigate in a world where it isn’t understood that romance doesn’t have to be the primary form of expressing love and acceptance for trans characters and even trans bodies. I’ve seen so many posts on my dash about people proclaiming a want for trans storytelling while getting no benefit from this movement because I’m writing about aro trans characters. That’s more than a little disheartening.

This kind of intersection does a lot of damage to aro-spec creators who are otherwise marginalised (so many marginalised experiences come with a heavy dose of we are lovable, our love is important, we deserve the right for our love to be accepted and protected and acknowledged, much of this conversation centred on romantic love) but just being an aro-spec creator who creates aro-spec narrative media comes with an inherent disadvantage that is difficult to surmount.

I’ve got some numbers for this disadvantage, actually. My latest work, The Wind and the Stars, has had fifty downloads in its first month, and I’m actually excited by that, because everything else I’ve posted with the tag “aromantic” has gotten approximately twenty downloads in their first months. A couple of works didn’t break the fifty mark until three or four months in! By contrast, with the same amount of promotion but published under a brand new name with no back catalogue to help (unlike my other works), my explicitly queer paranormal romance story got three hundred downloads in its first month. How am I supposed to provide representation for my community when I don’t have enough interest in my work to justify the work of its production?

The tag aromantic helps guide aro-spec readers, but it actively discourages most alloromantic readers (who exist in far greater number) from reading, and most of them won’t have any comprehension of why. They just see romance as normal and interesting, and anything that subverts this, be it specifically aromantic or just gen, undermines this worldview. It happens so subconsciously it’s near impossible to challenge.

In a way, one of the most damaging aspects of amatonormativity is its lack of recognition. Most people have some understanding, now, on what misogyny is and what harm it might cause, even if one disagrees with it or has a 101 understanding at best. There’s a social model for beginning to understand this. Amatonormativity, on the other hand, has no such basis. It’s so unquestioned that few people who aren’t aro-spec recognise it or need to, and it’s often seen as a lesser problem. As someone who is struggling as a creator because of amatonormativity, to the extent that I don’t know how I can possibly survive as a writer, it angers me to see this treated as less important than other forms of normativity. No, nobody will beat me up on the street as an aro, but if I can’t keep a roof over my head because only a small number of people are reading my free books and I have no belief they’ll buy my next book, how does this distinction matter?

Amatonormativity silences, erases and oppresses aro-spec people. It substantially disadvantages us in how we are seen by others and how we interact with the world around us. And almost nobody outside aro-spec spaces wants to acknowledge it.

Sorry for the rant at the end there, anon. Does this give you some idea on how amatonormativity is demonstrated through media and how it impacts aro-spec creatives?

[askanonbinary]

I have a very specific question. Hopefully I can be clear. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, which has a symptom of multiple personalities. I have eight personalities in total. They have a separate inner voice, emotions, perception of our physical state, memories, opinions, hobbies, and names. But there’s a sense that they are all me, just subconsciously. For example, I can’t remember a lot about high school, and when I do remember it I remember it from a third person perspective (weird right? I see myself doing things!). Those memories are held by another personality, and working with her can help me remember the facts. Becoming her would help me feel that ‘I’ experienced it.  

See, that’s the thing. I have depression as well, and to beat depression I am encouraged to deny abusive inner voices. My therapist tells me, “Depression lies.” And it’s true. Curing my depression meant separating myself from those inner feelings, recognizing that my depression is not me. 

But with D.I.D., it’s the opposite. Denying these inner voices, even when they’re being abusive, makes my disorder worse. I am encouraged to understand my other parts, not matter how different they are. To work together. Someday, to realize they do not lie, and that they are me. If, for most disorders, the survival method is to have a strong shield, for me it’s to hold hands with my disorder? Kind of? 

Anyway, I have been accomplishing it with one personality, named Conan (1 of 7, still a long way to go!). We work together. We collaborate, covering each other’s weaknesses with our own strengths. It’s a two-way communication – even though it’s just me! I can tell it’s working, because I’m starting to realize that he feels more like me. Like it’s more seamless. I’m more like him now (hahaha, I swear WAY more now) and he’s more like me (he admits he likes Disney movies). Like more than 90% of patients with D.I.D., he almost never ‘takes control’ of our body. No one does anymore – it’s a big improvement! But…  

Well, I never expected to feel gender dysphoria. But I did, and severely. Two years ago, I finally finished a total gender expression change – clothes, hair, makeup, shaving etc. Because it was unbearable without it. I still only pass about 40% of the time because I have a large chest (mostly from the back). I have trouble with binding, (back problems, weight, panic attacks), but I still did sometimes. I would really like chest surgery. It was great to look in the mirror with a drastically more masculine presentation, but I still feel like I am not myself when I look at my chest – but see, there I go! Talking about seeing ‘myself’, of feeling like I’m finally ‘me’…what does that mean for someone like me?! 

I feel like my experiences can’t belong in the context of trans or non-binary narratives. It’s just…I’m not who those labels are for? And, when people see me and ask, “Oh, you’re trans?”, even positively, it’s just a far more complicated question then they know. 

Maybe I’m not, because Conan isn’t trans; he’s a man. My personalities are young and old, man and woman. One is actually nonbinary? But what am I? I am me, but I know that my perception of me isn’t reality…or is it?

I identified as a cis woman until Conan and I started…blending, for lack of a better word. I was comfortable presenting as feminine. I think? But I also know that I started doing things like binding my chest all the way back in high school, though I’m still not sure why. Sometimes I had different clothes, that were specially for wandering the town. I liked to go where no one knew me; I liked to be someone else. Is that the same as having a fluid identity? Because in the end I realized it was actually a set of identities: 7, like I said. Yet…

There used to be 6. The new personality, emerged recently, is the person I was about three years ago. Before the dysphoria hit. The woman. Not just the woman but the idealist, the artist…her name is Willow now. She makes me think I’m not sure if I’m actually ‘blending’ anymore, or am I just becoming Conan? And does being Conan mean being trans?

I don’t talk about this usually, because so often people dismiss me as crazy. Lol, not that I’m not – I literally technically am! But I’m just not sure…what to call myself. I’m not fluid – that would be offensive, man, because this whole process of curing my disorder treats having fluid identities as the disorder! And it has many other symptoms for me, it’s true. I want to feel like I’m ‘me’. 

Non-binary is an excellent descriptor for me, I am literally more than two lol, but that’s not what that label means.

Many assume I’m trans, and I have a lot in common with the experiences of trans people I think, but being trans assumes one self. I think? Where I’m coming from is totally different. 

And, in the end, my other selves are not really real. But they are really me. It makes for a double experience: I feel like I’m losing myself, and finally gaining it.

In short, if I don’t know who I am, can I be something? 

Thank you for reading, I know it was long, and I would really appreciate some advice about how to identify, to feel secure and supported, but also be respectful of movements and terms that are larger than myself. And I understand if it’s confusing or you don’t know what to say, in the end. It’s okay. I feel the same. I actually think all of psychiatry feels the same, hahaha. Regardless, thanks for listening.

- @quiteamazedandthankyouforasking

Your existence and identity is not harmful to people’s perceptions of being nonbinary. If they’re gonna take problem with you, they’re gonna take problem with me because they hold harmful and ignorant beliefs. You shouldn’t have to hide yourself away in the closet for “the community’s” sake.

Nonbinary isn’t a term just for neurotypical people. I think you’ll find most of us here on this blog are neurodivergent ourselves, and while not all of us may consider our gender wrapped up in our neurodivergency, for many people, it really is. There’s even a whole category of nonbinary identities about this called neurogenders: https://nonbinary.wiki/wiki/Neurogender & http://gender.wikia.com/wiki/Neurogender

Gender can be impacted by any host of ‘outside’ factors: culture, religion, neurodivergency, trauma… I myself have grabbled over my gender identity being tied up to my past trauma. My romantic orientation certainly is, and my gender probably is as well, but working out if that’s how it feels is… difficult to navigate.

To say that being nonbinary can NEVER intersect with these factors is to do ourselves and our community a disservice. It is to gatekeep and police people’s identity, to tell them there is a certain way they must identify. It is to box them into a corner and not allow themselves to express themselves as they are.

The problem is when people think things like “being nonbinary in and of itself is a mental disorder and therefore something to be fixed because you’re wrong and broken”. But you can totally be nonbinary as a result of mental illness or a personality disorder or whatever. That’s 100% valid and anybody who tells you that you’re not welcome is being bigoted themselves. 

It’s also okay if how you feel in regards to your mental health and your gender(s) changes later! It’s okay if your relationship to gender changes as you make progress with your mental health. It’s okay to grow and change as a person. This sometimes means our understanding of ourselves changing, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

You can’t help who you are or if your identity is all wrapped up and confusing. You  just being you isn’t harmful to our community. People who paint us all with one brush are harmful to our community. People who would encourage eugenics or erasure for the “sake” of our community are harmful to our community. People who try to dictate how others experience their own identity are harmful to our community.

So you’re nonbinary and depressed with DID? (Since I’m also ace and these are big ace issues…) There are ace people who’s ace identity is wrapped up in them being autistic, or is wrapped up with medications they take, or is wrapped up as a part of mental illnesses they have, or is wrapped up in past trauma. Exact same thing goes for gender. That doesn’t make them any less valid and this doesn’t make you any less valid. We need to accept that there are many ways to be. Even if you were harming someone, that wouldn’t make your identity invalid - although it would mean you’d be less welcome in safe spaces.

So I say you’re welcome. <3

And more than that, if these different personalities have different genders… well, it certainly sounds like that is something to explore.

But however you identify, whatever label you choose… that alone is your choice and your choice alone. While you may not understand or know yourself that well, you are still the one who best knows how you feel and is best equipped to explore labels and decide what is right for you. If identifying as nonbinary feels right, then identify as nonbinary! Be nonbinary. If you relate to a lot of trans experiences, then that sounds like something to seriously consider! 

You do not have to be totally neurotypical or mentally healthy or physically healthy or completely absolutely understand yourself (honest truth: no one does) to be nonbinary. It’s okay if your identity and relationship to your identity is messy and complicated and confusing and even weird. Honestly? That’s some of what being nonbinary is about, really. The fact that we have messy, confusing, complicated, hard to understand relationships to our gender. No matter our mental status.

~ Mod Sock

[scriptlgbt]

I have a character who is trans, and I want to make sure I write him properly and as a real person without succumbing to stereotypes. So I was wondering if any of you would be willing to make a list of the most common and/or incorrect stereotypes about trans people? I know it's a lot to ask, and I totally understand if you don't have the time. But you don't know if you don't ask, right? Thanks!!

After a fruitless attempt to find a list for you I have come to conclusion that I’m just gonna have to write one myself… so please forgive me for the disorganised mess this is going to be, I’ve been digging around the internet grabbing whatever I can find. I’ll link to articles whenever I can, and some of these tropes don’t have names yet or have been named by me and the other mods. Also some are beliefs but people apply them to trans characters too. Lets go!

Notes: I’m going to add FIM (fine in moderation) to the ends of tropes that are perfectly fine, but are overused (given the very small amount of transgender representation, these tropes became big problems very quickly but aren’t harmful individually - or at least some parts aren’t)

Bury Your Gays/Punish Your Gays - (here gay is used as an umbrella term for any characters in the community) this trope is where LGBT+ characters are killed or punished and given no chance of a positive future for simply being in the LGBT+ community

Trans Tribulations - this is basically where characters are miserable because they are dealing and facing others transphobia or misconceptions or their own gender dysphoria (FIM)

Forcibly Outed and The Great Trans Reveal - this is where either another character forcibly outs a trans character to others, or when their transness is found out without their consent/forced consent (for example: someone walks in on a trans person while they’re changing to see them wearing a binder or possible even nude, or when a character is injured and when trying to save them others they find out they’re trans.)

Villainous Trans or Gender Non-Conforming Folks (link contains sensitive material) - this is pretty self explanatory, it’s villains who are either coded or explicitly trans and their transness is large part of why they are villainous (and often “creepy”). They’re often made to be predatory and violent

Trans Folks As Victims / Tragically Trans (same link as above) -  those poor tragic trans folk who are ostracised, brutally murdered, and forced into poverty/sex work but screw doing anything to actually help them! (this appears a lot in crime dramas)

Not Truly People - when trans/nb characters aren’t treated as real people or are treated as caricatures or objects

Cis Is Better - the belief that being cis is better than being trans/nb so trans/nb folks all obviously want to be cis

Trans Since Childhood - the belief that all trans folk have known they were trans since childhood/got the opportunity to transition at a young age (FIM, some trans people do know since childhood but not all. Some people are figuring this out in their 60s, they deserve as much respect and representation as young trans folk)

Trans = Gay - trans people aren’t really trans they’re just gay and have internalised homophobia! (sarcasm)

The Knowledgeable Ally - this cis ally knows everything to do with trans folk, in fact they know even more about being trans than trans folk do! They kindly share their bottomless knowledge and are always there to correct trans folk. In stories these brave heroes are often at hand to take transmen by the hand and tell them how terrible it is to ace bandage and give them a binder (that despite them not measuring them fits perfectly) and show them a better way to be trans (people should absolutely not use ace bandages to bind but it’s the patronising nature in which this is done that is the problem)

Trans = Gross / Trans Is Misleading - the “I was gonna get with this hot chick but then it turned out she had a penis and I started puking!” thing, apparently it’s supposed to be funny?

TRIGGER WARNING FOR NEXT TROPE

Predatory Trans Women / Invading Trans Women / Trans Women Are Predatory Men (straight or gay) - the belief/ rhetoric that trans women are straight men who want to invade lesbian spaces to to rape cis lesbians ( and to turn them straight). Or that trans women are gay men who want to rape straight men

END

Delicate Trans Boy - the “trans boy are soft and delicate” or “boys-light” thing, it’s basically where people infantilize and fetishise trans guys. (FIM - other than the infantilizing and fetishising thing, don’t do that). These characters frequently can do no wrong or their wrong doings are glossed over/ignored

Trans Guys Are Either Super Masculine or Super Feminine - no in between (FIM - this may be because of societal pressures, please do explore)

Trans Women Are Either Super Feminine or Super Masculine - no in between (FIM - this may be because of societal pressures, please do explore)

Transmen look extra feminine / Transwomen look extra masculine - this is done to establish their non-cisness/show how abnormal trans people are, transmen are all super curvy and soft and all transwomen are all very tall and very hairy ect. This is separate to the above tropes because this is usually used when fetishising trans people and is often done to other trans people from the “normal” cis people

Only Skinny White People Are Trans/NB - our media pretty much only includes trans/nb folks as skinny white, androgynous or hyper masc/fem people. This is beginning to change, but slowly

All Trans Women Are Overly Sexual - a side affect of the Predatory Trans Women trope (this is most likely linked to A Man Is Always Eager and the misconception trans women are men) as well as the fetishisation of trans women

All Trans Men Aren’t Sexual / Are Asexual - it’s an extension of the Delicate Trans Boy trope (most likely linked to the All Women Are Prudes (don’t want to or have interested in sex)) (FIM, there are asexual/non sexual trans men)

Trans Women As Sex Workers (link contain sensitive material) - the most common occupation for trans women in media is sex work, it’s heavily linked to the fetishisation of trans women and to Trans Folks As Victims

Easy Sex Change - the myth that transitioning is one quick surgery away when in reality it can take years, several surgeries, and HRT (assuming the person wants/can transition medically)

Trauma Made Me Trans - the idea that people are trans because of a trauma they’ve suffered, or because they didn’t get enough attention when they were young

My Parents Wanted A Boy/Girl So I Became One - when characters are trans because their parents wanted a kid of another gender and the character wanted to make them happy

“Trans” For Love - when a gay character pretends to be of another gender (sometimes even transitioning) so they can be openly affectionate/love their partner, or when a character pretends to be of another gender (sometimes even transitioning) so their love interest will be attracted to them. (if I’d seen this only once it would have been to many, but no, I’ve had to see it multiple times. do not.)

Love Heals Dysphoria - (the trans version of Love Heal All) It can help some people but doesn’t eradicate dysphoria (unfortunately) 

Born In The Wrong Body (narrative) - I don’t have enough space here so here’s a short article explaining the problems with this and a quick quote for those who don’t want to read it “I am not trapped by my body. I am trapped by your beliefs. And I want to reclaim this body from those who want it to breathe and be fed by their dogmas”

Trans = No Body Confidence - when trans characters have absolutely no body or confidence in their appearance what so ever. This is often used with The Knowledgeable Ally and Love Heals Dysphoria, in this scenario the trans character is filled with self hate and lacks any kind of confidence what so ever until their cis friend decides to take pity on them and helps them over come all their confidence/trans related problems (in a very patronising way)

“Required” Medical Transition - the belief that trans people need to undergo surgery/surgeries and HRT in order to be trans or to be their gender. This and it’s problems are very heavily linked to Born In The Wrong Body and Cis Is Better. Here’s an article which covers this and a quick quote “mainstream discourse has viewed cis-gender embodiment as superior and ‘correct’ […] it is as if you are not done until your body looks like a cis-gender body!”

All About Trans - this is where the whole story is focused around being trans, sub-plots included (while there is a place for trans centric stories, there’s more to us and our lives than just being trans). Or when a trans characters whole narrative/development is centred on them being trans

Trans Folk Must (Want To) Adhere To Gender Rolls - no one must adhere to gender roles, trans folk aren’t exceptions 

Old Friend, New Gender - while this trope seems innocent enough it’s often coupled with Trans = Gross / Trans Is Misleading. This is typically played out with a cis male who meets this strangely familiar super model looking women who he’s interested in, only to find out she used to be one of his old (”male”) friends. From here we go one of two ways, first the “omg she’s actually a man” repulsion where we’re supposed to find it funny/gross that he was attracted to trans women. And the second is where he has the same reaction but this time, it’s still played for jokes but, there’s a blatant message of acceptance/tolerance and he stops being attracted/interested to her but he accepts her as a women and as his old friend (this is typically handled terribly) 

This is a fairly sizeable list, but by no means a comprehensive one. 

Please do reblog and add trans/nb tropes and trends as well as links to lists by others!

If you have any questions or would like us to further elaborate on any of these tropes or any other trans/nb tropes, please send us an ask (when the ask box is open).

- Mod Emery