#rather than her feeling dysphoric being in a more feminine body if you get what i mean

[betawooper]

i will have you know i have spent a fuck ton of time internally debating the subject of canon yoo joo’s gender identity since learning about that punisher thing and i still cant seem to come to a consensus

[missmastectomy]

hey so do you think it's possible to purposefully change your mind so you don't feel dysphoria anymore (before transitioning)? I'm a teenage female and I've socially transitioned to looking and acting male because it makes me genuinely happy and I'm dysphoric about being female (i have penis envy and everything) however recently I've started reading more gender crit stuff and really really wanting to get rid of the feeling of being trans. I just wanna be normal. It really is a mental disorder, and I wish there were resources for changing your mind rather than changing your body. I just want to be a normal girl, I want to be happy with being a girl rather than just delusionally happy when I'm pretending to be male. It's so damn hard to find gender critical resources for gender dysphoria, or it's just for parents of kids who have the disorder, not for the kids themselves cause no one actually consideres that there's people like me who genuinely want to have a normal brain without gender delusions. I'm sorry if this is TMI, or if you don't wanna answer questions, I just saw your blog in my "for you" and got excited cause it's so rare to see gender crits on this crazy website. I just wanted to ask if you have any advice (or know of resources) on changing your mind cause you're a detrans and I really wanna reach the point of being detrans without it causing me so much pain cause I'm so attached to my identity.

Not TMI at all! Yes, you can successfully treat gender dysphoria without a medical or social transition. You have already done the most difficult step - realizing that identifying as a man while being female is not conducive to your mental health in the long term. You sound very clear-headed and that is the most important aspect of managing dysphoria.

You say you are attached to your identity, and I think this is a big reason why people transition, despite the red flags that are there. The next step in accepting your body and sex is to realize that your sense of identity is fluid. Your identity as trans is not fixed, especially because you are a teenager. Take it from someone who's in her early 20's, you will change a lot as you grow up. You'll believe things and feel things that are in total opposition to the way you think now, because you are still a kid. In fact, without a social transition, most kids who experience GD will naturally just grow out of it as they enter adulthood. This is most likely what will happen with you. As you become an adult, you will feel more comfortable in yourself. I'm warning you now it will take a few years, but you just need to be patient.

However, you will still have to put in the work. I recommend going through my "mail" tag, because I've answered questions similar to this one. For you, I'd suggest digging into where your dysphoria stems from. Since you're a teen, you most likely are just experiencing growing pains and identifying out of "womanhood" is probably an outlet for that. It was for me. This can stem from many things - CSA, discomfort with feminine gender roles, hostility from others when you exist as a GNC girl, internalized homophobia... identify what the problem is first, then work on it. I'd suggest going to a non-affirming therapist OR a therapist who just doesn't care about all the trans stuff. They will give you advice that isn't grounded in ideology, but be warned that a more generic therapist might mistakenly try to validate your identity because they're not trained to actually deal with dysphoria. Transition is seen as a quick fix to dysphoria, but as you know it usually creates more issues than it solves, and doesn't deal with the feelings that caused it in the first place.

Ask yourself: am I ashamed to be a woman? Do I feel belittled as a girl? Why do I feel that way? Is it because I don't like to be pidgeonholed into stereotypes that don't fit me? Do I have some trauma related to my body? What would life look like for me as an adult woman, who may not prescribe to femininity?

I highly recommend seeking out butch lesbians who are very positive of their identities. Even if you're not butch, there perspectives are invaluable. I link it in another ask, but look up "Carol detrans" on youtube. She's an older butch who detransitioned and has great advice.

The important thing to remember is that often mental disorders and trauma are not permanent, in the sense that how they effect you right now will not be how the effect you in the future. Time truly does heal all wounds, but you need to be proactive about it by asking yourself hard questions. Don't be afraid of the answers, no matter how ugly they are. This is a pretty generic how to but if you have any other questions feel free to send another ask.

[sohin-ace]

May I request Brunos gang headcannons with a new transgender male member? It doesnt have to be romantic and id rather it not be. Please message me if you have questions. Some details id like to see: He is around the same age as Trish and no longer can live with his parents. He doesnt have much money so he binds his chest with bandages and fabric he can find. He hasn't transitioned at all and his gender isnt obvious. his hair is cut poorly due to cutting it himself. i hope this is okay!

This was hard to do. Trans identity is tricky to write as a non-Trans writer. Hopefully I did you justice!

Non rom.

Bucci gang w/ a Transgender male member HC

Bucciarati

The most understanding of the group.

He's horrified that such a young person has to live by themselves, especially if your gender identity is the reason you have no caretakers.

He makes sure to introduce you properly to the team and makes them understand your situation, so that you feel comfortable around everyone.

You're part of the family now, it doesn't matter what you look like or what you identify as.

Will ask you if it's okay for you to go undercover as female for specific missions, or it's that's too uncomfortable.

If you'd rather not it's okay, Fugo will do.

He comes back one day with a package on one arm.

Turns out it's a custom made binder, all perfectly fitted to your specific body type and size!

So that's why he was so insistent on taking your measurements, without ever explaining why... That sly man.

Still, you couldn't be more grateful. Those things were so expensive.

"As long as you feel comfortable and stay in good health, I'm satisfied, Y/N."

Abbachio

He's the last one to care.

If anything, the thing he hates about you is that offensive hairstyle, are you kidding him?

Boy, girl, mischief, he doesn't care what your gender is or what's in your pants, he just doesn't want you to disrespect his eyes with such a horrendous haircut.

Like, seriously, who hurt you?

Takes you apart and forces your ass on a chair to actually give you a proper cut/shave.

Bucciarati is here too, to give advice on what looks good and works for your face shape and hair texture.

Abbachio has a fairly feminine appearance himself and hardly ever follows gender norms, so he's not fazed by your own neutral or 'confusing' physique.

Just tell him your pronouns already, or else he'll call you 'Brat' out of doubt, that's pretty gender neutral.

Would appreciate it if you trusted him enough to confess about your dysphoria, as he is victim of it as well.

Yes, even a Cis-man can feel dysphoric from time to time. Please pull each other up.

Giorno

As expected of him, he is very respectful.

The very first time he mistook you for a girl, but immediately apologized for his mistake and never got it wrong again.

In fact, he was so kind and polite about it, it's impossible to stay mad at him.

Afterwards he asks a lot of questions to be sure to know the boundaries you set, what is okay and not okay to talk about or do.

Will help you style your hair in the prettiest way and adds a lot of flowers on top of it.

He is a very feminine boy himself and will make you feel handsome and confident about your more feminine traits, just the way you deserve to be treated.

If he can rock the long hair, pink clothes, cute flowers and ladybugs ornaments and still look handsome as hell, then you can perfectly rock whatever physical traits you have. He believes in you.

Uses Gold Experience on you when you're on your periods so that it last shorter.

Helps you bind your chest until you can get a proper binder, and makes sure to be very gentle with you.

Has stolen Testosterone for you, and will do it again.

Mista

The most oblivious to your gender at first.

He can't tell if you're a boy or a girl and asks you a bunch of dumb questions without really thinking of the behinds of it.

If you get offended he'll just tell you he's trying to understand and is so confused.

It takes time and a lot of explaining, but he eventually gets it and, even though he still has a lot of questions, he decides to shut up.

Hey, you were pretty nice and funny and your Stand powers were dope, so at the end of the day, who cares?

He may be a bit of a dummy, but Mista is kind. He teaches you to shave in case you grow facial hair in the future.

He'll tell you all those grown up advices about how 'You start off with small peachfuzzes and before you know it, you got a full grown ass beard'.

Goes full Big Brother™ on you.

In fact, he barely calls your name at all, only calls you 'Bro', 'Fratellino', 'Mini me', 'Bambino', 'Big guy', or anything of the caliber.

Makes you workout with him to get those big ass guns and broad shoulders (or just... Your desired body type).

Narancia

Oh god, you don't have to fret about a thing.

He's just like you and gets misgendered All. The. Goddamn. Time.

His appearance is effortlessly androgynous and he sounds fairly prepubescent as well, so you're in the same boat here.

He doesn't really care and would love it for you to not care as well. He's used to it anyways.

It's not like your gender identity is gonna stop him from dragging you into his shenanigans and make you bust the sickest moves he knows.

You two are out together and get cat called by some obnoxious dudes on the streets.

You have to stop him from blasting them with Aerosmith because, as much as he's used to being called a 'She',

He WON'T stand other people misgendering you.

"HEY! SHUT THE FUCK UP! I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU! Y/N, tell him to go suck your dick! Oh- you don't have one yet? Huh... Well uh... SUCK MY DICK, ASSHOLE! Sorry about that Y/N."

Tells you you're lucky you don't have balls because those hurt really bad sometimes.

Fugo

Is too shy to ask too specific questions about your body or sexuality, but would love to know everything about it.

Especially the more psychologic aspect of your gender identity. How it affects your mental state, how you feel, what made you realize you were trans etc.

He may seem insensitive about it, but he's really not. He's just interested and takes it with a very scholar approach.

He pretends he really doesn't care at all, but he does a lot of research and harasses Bucciarati with questions about you.

You ask him to help you bind your chest one day and he becomes a blushy mess.

He'll help you anyway though, trying to be as neutral as possible out of respect for you.

He doesn't want to get flustered and let you imagine that he sees you as 'a girl', so he plays it cool.

It's... It's just a chest right? No big deal...

He slipped up one day and almost called the wrong pronouns and when he does, he just screams. Loud.

"Let's go ask Y/N then, where is sh-hhhhhhiiiaaaaaaAAAAAAAAARRGGHHHHH!!!!!"

He doesn't know how to come back from these mistakes and he's so embarassed.

Trish

You two have so much in common, surprisingly.

You're both young teens and your parents have left you down. You could only lift each other up.

She immediately knows you're a boy and gets so confused when people misgender you.

I mean... You look a bit feminine, yes, but there were plenty of men like this. And more so than you'd ever imagine. Especially at only 15.

Also, you introduced yourself as 'Y/N', that's pretty much masculine, or at the very least, gender neutral.

"Pfft, don't listen to them, Y/N. They're so darn stupid."

Helps you voice train, e-v-e-r-y-d-a-y.

She knows a lot of vocal warm ups and exercises to not strain your vocal chords and helps you get that perfect deep voice you try to achieve.

It's just like singing in a way, right? She helps you find your vocal range to expand it and lower it to your prefered pitch.

She's so proud of you when you manage to finally use a much deeper and manly voice!

She has very short hair herself, and she'll defintely help you style yours properly and take you to her personal hairdresser (a very kind femboy who's super funny and who's gonna love you to bits)

[strongxsurvivors]

MLM SHIPS, FETIZATION, AND MISOGYNY IN THE RPC.

This is a small, or not-so-small, rant about a problem ( in my opinion ) I see more and more often in both the rp community and the art community. As a member of both, I just can’t escape this issue and need to put out some food for thought for everyone to read.

Not all of you are going to agree with me. Maybe, some will want to add in their two cents. Maybe, it’ll go over someone’s head completely. I simply appreciate you putting the time into reading this and giving it, like, two seconds of thought. It may not be an issue for you or be completely unrelated to you, but this is an issue I’m sure others will be able to relate to.

I will preface this by saying that I am a twenty-five year old transman. I am bisexual. I have a degree in psychology and excelled in gender and sexuality psychology. THIS DOES NOT, BY ANY MEANS, MEAN I AM THE END ALL BE ALL OF INFO IN THESE SUBJECTS. My experience is my own and I will not gatekeep or instruct people how to think in concerns of these subjects. I am only saying these things simply to assure you that I am valid in my perspective because I am in these communities. Please, don’t think that I want to invalidate anyone or say that I am better than you because I am these things.

Alright, let’s get the ball rolling because I have a lot of feelings and thoughts on a lot of points.

The number one thing that finally set me off to make this post is the absolute WORSHIP of mlm ( male loving male ) ships in the rpc ( and art comm., but this ain’t about them rn ). I have seen, countless times, entire blogs dedicated to shipping male characters to male characters.

Now, initially, this isn’t a problem. Having a male homosexual ship or homosexual male characters is absolutely fine. Peep my blog, I obviously have some. But, it’s the act of taking a character that was originally female, cisbend them to be male, and shipping them with another male character that's the problem. What was wrong with the female character? You kept her personality but made her male? Why? Is it necessary? It’s the same character. If you are uncomfortable writing female-related smut, fade to black. Smut is not necessary if you are truly focused on the essence of this character.

By making this character male, you are essentially saying that the only problem was that she was female. That’s it. That is misogyny. If you are focusing on her as a character, her body shouldn’t matter. As if females equate to their body when sex and gender are two separate things. But, you are bringing females down by getting rid of this one thing. You are telling them they are not good enough. That, maybe, you would like them better if they were the same but male. Am I being extreme about this? Yes. But, I’m trying to drive home my point here.

Another point to make about fetishizing mlm ships is that, even if you state your character is bisexual, pansexual, etc., that does not give you a pass. If your whole blog has characters who want only male partners even if some are stated to be something other than homosexual, you’re fetishizing them. If you put no effort in exploring relationships with females — platonic, romantic, or otherwise — you may as well call them homosexual and call it a day. I’m not here to dictate how you should play your character, but it’s easy to see where your loyalties lie when there is no evidence of female characters on your blog that you’ve interacted with. Actions speak louder than words. Rpc may be made up of words, but make your words take action. Plenty of people complain about their females being ignored. Go help them. Make your characters be friends, enemies, a crime-fighting duo idk. Females exist, don’t act like they don’t.

Oh, and changing a canon mlm ship to a wlw ship by cisbending them doesn’t change things. You’re still saying that those male characters were better than the pre-existing female characters. I would recommend you focus on the actual females of whatever medium you’ve taken these characters from, or create ocs that are genuinely wlw. This is mostly a thing I see in the art community, but I have seen it in the rpc.

We’re going to move on now to some transphobic and trans fetishization, which is fewer and far between. I say a few because I barely see trans characters out there in the community. But, when I do, OH BOY.

Simply stating a character is trans and doing nothing to upkeep what you said does not make your character trans. I’m sorry. Taking a pre-existing character and changing their gender and calling them trans is a sticky situation. I will probably get hate for this, but what are you going to do? It’s Tumblr. I would just prefer to see more original trans characters out there, as if actual thought and development went into their creation. 

What I mean by a sticky situation is this, and it goes back to a point I made earlier about cisbending characters to fit mlm ships: if you’re only making a character a transman to make him gay, that's fetishizing both mlm ships and trans people. I’m not saying a transperson can’t be gay and I’m not here to limit diverse characters — this is why I say this is a sticky situation. But, what I am saying is that if you only have muses that are involved in mlm ships and then you add a transmale character to also have an mlm ship based on faceclaims, it’s kinda sus.

Another thing I want to point out is if you are playing a trans character, refer to them by their chosen name and pronouns. You would think this is a no brainer, but you would be surprised. Even if your trans character is closeted, it is your job as the writer to write the correct name and pronouns. Other character interacting with your trans character could use their dead name and wrong pronouns — it makes sense, they don’t know your character is trans if they are closeted and non-passing. But, as you write your character, you and the reader are aware of your character’s true self. Neglecting to reflect your character’s true self through their chosen and name and pronouns is transphobic and harmful. Seeing things like this sends me into a whirlwind of dysphoria.

Changing a pre-existing character to nonbinary rather than cisbending them would be a recommendation from me and some others ( nonbinary individuals ) I’ve talked to. First off, there are very few nonbinary characters in general — media or otherwise. So, taking a pre-existing character and making them nonbinary is a nice thing to see. And, since the character is nonbinary, if they’re in a relationship with a male - the fetishization is redundant.

Now, who do I see making these wacky characters? Mostly cis females and trans men. I think it mostly stems from internalized misogyny as, when growing up, we’ve lived in societies where we are taught men are better than women. It can get to the point where cis females will glorify men so much that they have to have mlm ships. The same can be said for trans men. I’m not saying — as is often used against trans men — that this internalized misogyny / glorification of men has caused them to be trans. Obviously not. But, the internalized misogyny is still there enough to where they may either fear interacting with female characters. It might make them uncomfortable, dysphoric, or they just may think men are better. Women do not deserve to be the catalyst for someone’s discomfort. They are people. They are everywhere. They deserve to be loved. If they make you uncomfortable, if you think you are better than them, if you think men are better, I want you to sit down with yourself and think about this.

When I first realized that I was trans, I had some serious internalized misogyny going on. I would be uncomfortable writing female characters. I would be uncomfortable interacting with them. There was this discomfort that started to manifest in my behaviors and thoughts. Luckily, I had the best person in my life who told me that I was acting misogynistic and I needed to change. Pushing away females was me trying to come to terms with my transness. You don’t need to expel females away from you to imbed in yourself that you are trans. You don’t need to raise yourself above them as men have done for centuries. Do not become part of the problem. Accept the feminine parts of yourself, accept females, and I promise that the fear or resentment you may have with females and female characters will fade away.

Now, with all that being said, my last few words:

Being trans does not give you a pass to do the things I’ve mentioned. Being cis does not give you a pass. Being straight, gay, bi, etc does not give you a pass. If you are a gay man, I understand why you would only have male mlm ships. That doesn’t mean you can’t platonically interact with female characters. We all have made dumb mistakes and judgments in the past. I know for sure I’ve written some pretty cringe stuff in the past. It happens. The best we can do? Learn and take action on what we claim to have learned. Again, actions speak louder than words. Don’t piggy-back on posts that call out people for behavior like this when you participate in some of these behaviors yourself. Just because one person got called out and the spotlight is on them doesn’t mean you’re better than them or that you’ve been given a pass. If you read something like this, reflect on yourself and wonder — objectively — do you do some of these things? You may without realizing it or meaning to. In the end, I’m just a small blog that’s been around for seven years. I think we can get better as a community, but only if we help each other out. This is not a call out post. Call out and cancel culture is gross and counterproductive. I ain’t here for it. Call me out if you want, but what’ll that do? Nothing accept invalidate my opinion.

If you made it this far, I’m sorry. I took up a lot of your time probably. But, I want to thank you so much for reading this. As I said, you may agree, disagree, and not really get what I’m saying. I don’t know what I’m saying half the time either. But, I appreciate you regardless. Please, stay safe and healthy. I hope you have a wonderful year ahead of you.

[werevulvi]

I'm going back to labeling myself a trans man, and it's not just for practical reasons. Let’s dive into that for a moment.

Well, first off, I don't want to medically detransition, as it turns out. I explored that option upon recovering from my past traumas and cleaning up my internalised misogyny, 2 years ago, but ultimately I'm still dysphoric about my sex, and feel... I dunno, spiritually soothed, perhaps, by continuing looking like a man, and I wish to go back to living socially as a man as well. I don't hate being female, not at all. It's wonderful to be of the female sex, and I can appreciate it now, but only on the condition that I get to look physically masculine and pass as male. That's my aesthetic, and it's my literal appearance. So I'm embracing that too.

However, I don't feel good trying to force myself into the social role of womanhood, what "woman" means to almost everyone I meet in my day to day life. That social expectation of me to look a certain way, act a certain way, want certain things, dislike other things, and so on. That is what I need to take a step away from. People seem to be incapable of respecting transition choices the moment I call myself a woman, which hurts. I understand that 99% of my social dysphoria is literally just wanting to escape misogyny, but so what? That's just common sense, to wanna escape/avoid misogyny when being female. Don't blame me (or any other female) for wanting to get away from that. Blame men.

Genderwise though... I don't know what even is "gender" but for me, I'd say it's a strong inner desire to live as male and look like a man with male sex characteristics - or in blunt wording for those of you who are wilfully obtuse around here: a wish to immitate maleness and live as a fake man. Clear enough? I hope so. I don't "feel male" or anything dumb like that. I just wanna look as if I'm male and let others believe that's what I am, which comes with no effort at this point in my transition. I just exist as I am, and people read me as male. And I love just existing, comfortably like that. Not shaving, or monitoring my voice, or anything.

And by "living as a man" I mean talk about myself as a (trans) man, going by a male name (whenever I decide for one, although I have a suggestion in mind, however I will keep my original female names as middle names), telling my friends and family that I'd wish to go by he/him pronouns again, and just... kinda ride on that sorta wave. I don't mean acting some kinda role of stereotypical masculinity or forcing my ass into male only spaces. Except for bathrooms, for what should be obvious practical reasons, considering my appearance. I'd rather be an illusion among men then than freak women out. I still prefer gender neutral bathrooms whenever I can access them, but that's not always an option. Such is life.

I feel good simply thinking of myself as a man, even though I know I'm not literally male, and don't particularly want to be anymore. I'm transmale, and that's what I want to be, so it makes sense to call myself a trans man then. It calms and soothes me to just allow those feelings to exist within me, and nurturing them. As soon as I did, a feeling of relief snuck up on me, and a couple of days ago it hit me very strongly. Somehow I became a trans man in denial at 9 years into my transition. Because that's how much I hate being trans and wish I wasn't. But I've always known that's not something I can beat out of myself. Yet, that's exactly what I tried to do. I don't know how that happened, but I need to stop suppressing how much I want to live as a man. Which isn't a bad thing to do. I cannot believe that's bad when I no longer hate or try to escape my femaleness.

Because I wanna be openly trans and hold onto my lesbian label. Because I'm still a homosexual female, no matter what I call my gender, and that is an important aspect of me. I only have the capacity to be attracted to people of my own bio sex, including other trans men. My girlfriend is also a lesbian, and honestly I love her for that (among many other things, of course.) I know that she's attracted to me because I'm female and have a pussy, and I'm totally fine with that. I'm gonna keep my pussy (no SRS ever), I'm not dysphoric about it anymore, and I love that she loves it too. It makes sex so much better, lol.

I feel honoured being the only 'man' my girlfriend could love. It's not at all "invalidating" that she's not into bio men, because I honour my female sex in my own ways, and I wouldn't want to be loved for something I am not. I'm proudly female and FtM, embracing both those aspects of my transitioned body and my trans life. Although I still need to work more on accepting myself for being trans, it's getting better fast by just being very kind to myself and allowing myself to feel.

I'd say I'm a bit of a cusper between femme lesbian and trans man, as odd as that may seem.

I wish I could be a butch, because I look up to butches a lot, but honestly? I'd rather date them, and I only feel natural being on the receiving end of chivalry, so I'm a natural femme. Being both feminine and sex dysphoric is and has always been very confusing and difficult for me, but it doesn't have to be. I can just be a feminine, lesbian trans man and not give a shit. Because why not? (Truscum, don't even bother answering that question, it's rhetorical.) So yes, I happily encourage my girlfriend to hold onto her lesbian label as well. We are a lesbian couple for as long as we're together, and I want for us to stay that way. But yes, we are also straight-passing, which I quite like.

Because of reconnecting with my transsexualism, I will (when I get the energy to) unfollow radfem blogs that lack basic respect for transitioned people (I may bypass the occasional misgendering as well as some trolling, but calling trans people gross and mutilated is not okay and I've thoroughly had enough of it) and try to clean up what I reblog in the future. I'm still gender critical and radfem, but not that ass-deep in it anymore.

Also, if any other radfem/gender critical FtM's just so happen to stumble upon this, I'd love to hear from you if you have any advice on how to balance being radfem/GC with being trans. I may be an idiot, but I've been fumbling in the dark about this and shooting myself in my own feet for far too long. I still barely even know how it's possible to be both trans and GC, lol. Basically how to gender without gender?

[actuallyrandomperson]

I wanna ramble about how I experience dysphoria as a genderfluid person for a bit, and my identity in general, so I figured Tumblr was a good place to do it.

So, for starters, I should probably clarify how I'm fluid, as all of us are a little different in how we experience gender. I was assigned female at birth, and, to be completely honest, I wish I was amab. This shocks some people, especially as I tend to sit on the female/demigirl/nonbinary side of things, but it's true. Realistically, I know my life would be a lot different if I had been, and I would have experienced a different set of struggles, but in an idealistic world, where nothing would change about me except the way my body looked and what pronouns were used for me, I'd want to be assigned male. I could not care less what genitals I have, especially since I'm ace so it has no real effect on how I'm gonna live my life, this relates back to the two other most obvious issues with being afab: Periods, and boobs.

I hate getting my period. As most people do. I don't even have particularly painful ones, just some semi-bad cramps on the first day or two, but I hate it anyway. 9 times out of 10 I'm non-binary on the first day of my period. Whether that's related to hormone levels or some subconscious part of my brain whispering "hey periods suck being a girl sucks why were u born a girl", I do not know. I just know it happens.

I also hate my boobs whenever I'm not female. Including when I'm demigirl. I don't hate the idea of boobs in general when I'm demigirl, and don’t think I need to be completely flat-chested to feel happy when I’m non-binary (but that could come back to me doubting I’ll get fully flat without surgery), I just hate my boobs. That is because I am incredibly busty, especially for someone who is 5'1/155 cm tall. I'm an Aus 10G/US 32I, I have small shoulders (my straps slip down no matter how tight we pull them), and a large part of what made figuring out my gender identity hell was the constant question of whether me hating my boobs was an ace thing (not wanting to be constantly sexualised) or a gender thing. My best fitting bra actually helped me figure that out, as reportedly it made me look smaller (i.e. technically less likely to be sexualised) but it had the side benefit of making my boobs, well, actually look like boobs, and when I looked at myself in the mirror I wanted to claw my eyes out. So. 90% of the time I hate my boobs because they're so big, and 100% of the time I hate my period.

You might be sitting here, reading this, and going "but Em, are you sure you're genderfluid? Not just demigirl or nonbinary or agender or any of the other non-binary identities?" My answer to that is, well, sorta no. And sorta yes. No, in the fact that I've never been sure about anything in my life. Maybe time will go on, and I'll begin to identify with some other label, or no labels at all. Yes, in the fact that genderfluid feels right right now, and that's all that matters. Humans change. In turn, labels can change too. Hell, as a genderfluid person, my labels technically change on almost a day to day basis! That doesn't make my feelings and my identity at any single moment any less valid. It also doesn't mean that long term, I'll wake up one day and realise that I actually just identify with x gender. It just means that it could happen, and that’s ok, just as it's okay that my identity is changing constantly at the moment. Side note, while we're talking about labels- you also don't need to identify with one! I personally like to use them, as they bring me comfort, but everyone is different, and y'all who choose not to use labels for whatever reasons are entirely valid.

I have 4 main types of day, gender-wise. Days where I feel like a girl, days where I feel kinda like a girl, days where I feel non-binary, and days where my gender is that 'women' shrugging emoji (that I use all the time because long hair babeyyyy also their shirt is purple on iOS and purple rules). Day 4 I mostly lump under demigirl, as with day 2. Day 3 could probably be most accurately described with agender, or a similar identity label, but I find it personally easiest to just refer to myself as non-binary on said days.

In a hard to explain way, I feel as though I experience less dysphoria on days where I am demigirl than on days where I am fully female. This is not entirely accurate, and is almost certainly as a result of me having unintentionally put in place coping mechanisms for said days in terms of how I present myself for years now, and probably isn’t the right terms for me to use, but it's true.

You see, I dress in a fairly gender-neutral way. My presentation has still always come off as feminine, as I love my long hair and enjoy nail polish, but I've always hated shaving, and I avoid wearing dresses and skirts as much as possible in my day-to-day. I don't mind wearing dresses etc when I'm demigirl, I just don't gravitate towards them, and when I'm demigirl I generally present as a not-overly feminine girl whose a little uncomfortable with their body shape and likes to be comfy, and wears heels in an effort to be taller rather than as a fashion statement.

But when I'm fully a girl, I often love being feminine. I usually want to wear dresses/skirts, and jewellery, and lipstick (not any other makeup though, years of dance and stage makeup ruined me- if someone puts it on for me and it's not heavy/powdery I'm not actively adverse, though), and have my hair braided, and generally just to Get Prettied Up. But that’s not 'me' to other people. That’s not the person I've presented myself as for years. I've spent my entire life catering to my demigirl and non-binary days because they're more common, and whenever I do lean into my feminine self on girl days my family and a lot of my friends are kinda surprised. I wore lipstick and nice clothes to two separate movie hangouts with two different friends, and one of them (who I hadn't seen in a while, to be fair) commented on how it was unusual for me while the other looked visibly surprised. It's not a coincidence that the two irl people I'm out to outside of my schools lgbt+ club are my brother and my best friend- both of whom complimented me (in a non-creepy way with my brother slvjfk) when they saw me wear lipstick for simple things last year, without making a big deal out of it. My mum still acts shocked and gets excited about me being feminine when I express an interest into buying clothes from a particular brand (Princess Highway/Dangerfield in general, for my fellow Aussies, as I don’t think they exist in the US) even though I've been getting presents from there for a few years now. She's talked about slowly starting to replace my clothes with 'fashionable stuff' from places like Dangerfield as the years go on now that I've 'expressed an interest in nice clothes' and I feel anxiety start to ball up in my stomach, because I don't want to wear fashionable clothes all the time, because fashionable for me, closeted and big-chested as I am, means feminine. When I present or show interest in presenting in a more feminine way on my female days, my mother and a few people I'm surrounded by unintentionally make me feel guilty about not wishing to present like that all the time, make my dysphoric for my future and past self, and make me doubt myself as a genderfluid person because I wish to present as my birth gender on one day.

So rather than dealing with all that, I don't present in a more feminine way unless I'm going out, and even then, avoid wearing lipstick if my mum is home, or coming with me. If I can, I'll stick a tube into my bag to apply when I get to wherever I'm going, but it's not always possible. I have Safiya Nygaard’s colourpop collection hidden away in my room. I continue to present myself in a way that aligns more closely in my mind to my demigirl days, with the slight change of being able to actually look at myself in the mirror for extended periods of time, being ok with my slightly more tight-fitting tops, and being chill with wearing my best bra. And I feel, as a whole, dysphoric on these days. I am not happy with how my gender presentation is, because it does not reflect how I want to present. Dysphoria is probably not the exact right term to use to describe these feelings, given I'm afab but it is the easiest way for me to put it, as it most closely reflects the unhappiness I feel with my presentation on my non-binary days, it's just my non-binary days come with a whole lot more body-related dysphoria piled on top. A song I like to listen to on female days is Platform Ballerinas, by MIKA, as it helps remind me that I am a girl, and the way I'm presenting as a girl is valid even if it's not exactly how I want to (it doesn't actually fully come back to societal expectations placed on women because I might shave my armpits but my leg hair still stays, and I genuinely want to get prettied up rather than feeling like I should to be seen as a girl, it's just something I want to do and not being able to makes me feel whack, but the song is definitely more focused on the whole 'societal expectations suck y'all are all valid' thing).

Non-binary days suck in the same way I've heard a lot of trans people of all varieties discuss. I hate walking past mirrors, if I have to wear feminine clothing for whatever reason I feel like I'm going to cry, she/her pronouns kinda make me want to die (generally I'm chill with she/they, and on female days they/them is okay, but she/her on nonbinary days makes my dysphoric as hell), and I generally Do Not Have A Great Time dysphoria wise. But hey, one day I’ll have enough money for a binder. Eventually. I always feel weird about entering giveaways given there are people who experience extreme dysphoria around their chest every day, I can deal on my demigirl days and survive on my non-binary ones.

So, that’s been me rambling into the void about gender for almost 2000 words, how are y’all doing? Also, if anyone actually read all of this I’d appreciate like,,, a like. Or something. I kinda want to know if people have actually seen and read this.

[discyours]

What are your thoughts on contrapoints' new video if you've watched it ?

I had actually watched it before I got this ask but I wanted to rewatch it to make sure I had a good answer. Terrible idea, I spent way too much time on this, too much to justify shortening this out so I’ll put a cut out of courtesy to my followers. 

I did actually find myself agreeing with her on a few points, though I didn’t spend much time being excited about that since criticising “TERFs” is hardly a new or rare thing. Starting out the video with a dramatic reading of a Germaine Greer quote was funny in my opinion, but it did set people up for an obvious bias. Some radfems truly are that transphobic and that’s really important to acknowledge, but it’s hardly news to anyone in her audience. I would’ve preferred if she’d engaged with more moderate forms of gender critical feminism, though I can’t say it’s all that much of a surprise that she didn’t do so since the entire basis of her channel is essentially putting on a wig to create a strawman (that’s not to say that the points she argued against were never made by anyone, but she does get to pick and choose which ones she talks about rather than debating a real person).

It’s also quite telling that she only asked past gender critical feminists for their input, not anyone who currently holds those beliefs (though again, can’t say I’m surprised). I did actually like her explanation of gendercrit ideology (”The idea is that gender [femininity, masculinity, gender roles, all that] it’s all a patriarchal construct, and biological sex is the only thing that makes a person a man or a woman.”). It’s fairly rare to see people represent it even somewhat accurately, so props for that.  She then went on to mock questions about trans ideology as being comparable to “the Jewish question”, so,,, that strong start didn’t last long.

She explained that trans people are on the defensive against genuine questions because of the amount of transphobia we have to deal with from the government, the press, and oftentimes our family. It’s the reason we stick together and stick to unambiguous slogans that don’t concede anything (”trans women are women”). Which, cue 10 people unfollowing me, I don’t disagree with. I started this blog to talk about trans issues and at this point I’m about as trans-critical as troons can get, but even I don’t have the energy or desire to engage every single person I come across in their genuine concerns about trans people. The part Natalie leaves out however is that these slogans and chants are often part of an attempt to change legislation, where you don’t get to just state that trans women are women and refuse to discuss it when people don’t blindly accept it. Being on the defensive makes sense, but it’s incompatible with being on the offensive to change laws and social norms.

Moving on to CONCERN ONE: GENDER METAPHYSICS

This is one part where I actually strongly agreed with Natalie (well, as much as could be expected). She explains that sometimes, people use metaphors to explain feelings that are difficult to put into words, and that that’s how she understands the “trapped in the wrong body” language. Thanks to some groups who do mean this literally (thanks transmeds!) I don’t blame radfems for taking those statements seriously and attempting to debunk them, but I’m also really not fond of radfems jumping on just about any attempt to talk about dysphoria. A lot of the time these objections go beyond wanting to debunk something that is assumed to be meant literally, and beyond wanting people to think critically about their dysphoria; it reaches the point of expecting that they’ll simply reason people out of their dysphoria, since being dysphoric (and being trans) just doesn’t make any sense.

She also criticises brain sex theory much in the way that I do, and says she thinks of herself as a woman who used to be a man rather than having always been a woman. I’m too gendercrit to relate or agree completely, but compared to most trans people’s stance on this it’s pretty damn agreeable.

She finishes off this… chapter? With a quote about “living as a woman”, and while I have plenty of thoughts on that it’s elaborated on later on, so let’s move on.

CONCERN TWO: GENDER STEREOTYPES

Natalie explains that her clothes, makeup or voice don’t “make her a woman”, and that no trans woman thinks femininity and womanhood are the same. Rather, they’re using femininity as a cultural language to prompt people to see them “for what they are” (women).  

Obviously the question of what makes someone a woman has yet to be answered here (unless the quote from the last chapter was intended to but that’s pretty circular [go watch the video this is too goddamn long to copy everything]) so I’ll leave the “see us for what we are” be for now. But it’s absolute bullshit that no trans woman equates femininity to womanhood. How many trans women have explained that they knew from a young age because they liked to play with dolls and their mother’s makeup? There have literally been trans women claiming that butch lesbians are closeted trans men, and that an aversion to femininity counts as gender dysphoria. I do agree with her last point, though. I didn’t cut my hair when I came out because I thought that would “make me a man”, I did so because it’d help me pass. A lot of radfems are intentionally obtuse about the existence of cultural signifiers just to paint trans people as delusional gender-worshippers.

I am actually gonna quote her here because I think it’s important;

“I think butch or gender nonconforming cis women sometimes side-eye hyperfeminine trans women because they don’t identify with this version of womanhood at all, and they’ve had to struggle since childhood against a society that’s told them they have to be feminine. And I completely sympathize with that. I think there should be more gender freedom, less coercion less restriction. But also, I’ve had to fight against the same society that told me I should really, really, really, not be *this*. So, I feel like we should be able to form some kind of solidarity here.”

I was ready to be mad at the start of the sentence but I actually agree. I just think that solidarity is lost when trans women refuse to acknowledge that society’s insistence that they don’t be like *that* is about gender roles and hatred of gender nonconformity. There is great potential for solidarity between GNC females and feminine trans women, but trans women reject it because they don’t want to be seen as GNC males or acknowledge that other people do. They want to be treated as normal, feminine women, and not doing so counts as misgendering.

CONCERN THREE: ABOLISH GENDER

Natalie argues that, while potentially a good idea, abolishing gender is a Utopian project (/pipe dream), much like abolishing borders. That denying trans people their gender identity because “abolish gender” is much like denying immigrants citizenship because “abolish borders”. It’s targeting the people who are most vulnerable under the present system, and then leveraging that system against them under the pretense of abolishing it.

I’ll concede that abolishing gender (and frankly, radical feminism as a whole) is fairly idealistic. Most radfem goals are incredibly long term and while that’s a good thing in some ways (I’m quite happy to be with a movement that refuses to accept anything less than complete female liberation, rather than some form of feminism that insists it’s only needed outside the west [”We’re already equal! I can vote! Look at the pants I’m wearing”]), it also leads to quite a lot of abstract academic bullshittery, and unreasonable expectations of ideological purity.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to view individual trans people as personally responsible for accomplishing the very long-term goal of abolishing gender. But radical feminism is not about individualism (which a lot of radfems do seem to forget, to be fair). There are radfems who are supportive of trans people; Andrea Dworkin herself supported transition. Only as a bandaid for a much bigger issue (the existence of gender) but she at least felt that trans people should be allowed this bandaid, should be allowed to reduce their suffering in current society in whichever ways they can. Dworkin’s view on this is far from rare and some radfems are even trans themselves. But to get back to the part about radical feminism not being individualistic; while individual trans people are not necessarily an issue for gender abolition, the wider trans community and its current political ventures most definitely is. The entirety of radical feminism is not going to collapse from a singular tran getting a gendered hairstyle, but replacing laws to refer to gender identity rather than sex can absolutely be devastating in the long term (and in the short term, when you look at the amount of protections that female-bodied people lose as a result), and that’s exactly what the trans community is currently pushing for.

Natalie also criticises the fact that gender critical feminists don’t seem to go after, say, Kim Kardashian for promoting gender roles. That they attack trans women with barely any following rather than people with actual power and influence. And I disagree with that, radfems are definitely highly critical of women like Kim Kardashian. But the way Natalie makes this point exposes part of the issue; nobody is going after Kim Kardashian for wearing a dress because Kim Kardashian never made an active choice to start wearing dresses. She experienced female socialisation no differently than any other woman (or, arguably, far more strongly considering who her parents were), so there’s some sympathy to be extended there. She has more responsibility due to her platform, but it’s no easier for her to break out of gender roles whereas trans people, to some extent, knowingly stepped into another gender role.

CONCERN FOUR: MALE PRIVILEGE

Natalie argues that men don’t treat trans women like their equals. That non-passing trans women are not treated like men, but like monsters, and that “male privilege” is not a good description of that experience.

This is one of those things that’s really hard to argue against because there’s an inherent disagreement about gender. Natalie’s insistence that non passing trans women aren’t treated like men comes from preexisting notions that a man is more than simply an adult human male, which is where I disagree. Non passing trans women are treated like men, but that does not mean that men will treat you like an equal; much like straight men can still treat gay men like shit, white men can still treat black men like shit, etc. “Male privilege” has never been a good descriptor of gay men’s experiences with homophobia either, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have any. There is more than one axis of oppression.

Moving on, Natalie brings up radfems’ skepticism about the whole notion of “passing”. I’m not going to bother to quote it because the entire part is good, but I do have strong feelings about this.

Her argument about gas station attendants and plumbers is completely on point, and I fucking hate it when people try to argue that anyone who reads trans people as their desired sex is simply being polite. It’s genuinely fucking impossible that everyone we run into has been indoctrinated into politically correct gender ideology, and the nerve a lot of radfems have to insist that our genuine life experiences are worthless next to their opinion is downright insulting.

Passing is, in fact, subjective. With my shift in perspective since becoming gender critical, my perception of trans people has changed too. People I used to believe passed flawlessly are now quite noticeably trans to me, but that’s not to say that that’s a result of “breaking free from trans ideology”. Relying on gender roles to identify people’s sex is in fact the cultural norm, and only actively attempting to view things differently (or spending large amounts of time around GNC people) changes that.

CONCERN FIVE: MALE SOCIALISATION

Natalie starts off by acknowledging that she has no idea what it’s like to be catcalled as a nine year old girl, or what that does to a child’s psyche. It did not start happening to her until she was an adult, when she knew what she was getting into and was ready for it. I just want to mention that separately because I just about cried when she said this. Sexual harassment at a young age is one thing I see trans women consistently failing to acknowledge, and an end has just come to the years of frustration I have suffered as the result of this argument going completely unaddressed.

She goes on to argue that socialisation does not stop at childhood; that it is a lifelong process. One example she gave is that her appearance is commented on far more now that she’s transitioned, and that that’s been something she’s had to get used to. I actually think that’s a good point and one that should be considered more, but I’m uncomfortable with the implication she brings when talking about resocialisation, as if childhood socialisation can be erased/redone entirely (which I don’t believe it can).

Then there’s the “trans women don’t experience socialisation the way cis men do” argument. Let me quote this and see if you can spot anything wrong;

“But also, trans women often don’t experience the socialisation the way cis men do. Many trans women are feminine and queer before they transition, and have always experienced a kind of femmephobia that is rooted in misogyny.”

The implication that feminine/queer equates to trans is really harmful, and once again she’s arguing from a different concept of what a man actually is. Not to mention that “femmephobia” is only a thing against men, as women are expected to be feminine.

“Some trans women also identified as women years before transitioning, and internalised society’s messaging about women more than society’s messaging about men. Now that’s still not the same as living in society as a girl from birth, but it’s also pretty different from the socialisation of most cis men.”

Interestingly enough, I initially wrote down “masculine cis men” rather than “most cis men” because that’s what the captions said. I wonder if Natalie realised her unfortunate implication that feminine = trans after uploading her video and decided to change it in the captions, since the words don’t sound all that alike.

She then talks about “stolen valor”, that she suspects that male privilege and male socialisation are such major talking points for gender critical feminists because they feel like it’s an injustice for people to claim their identity without experiencing their oppression. She compares radfems to transmeds; both groups supposedly believe that you need to suffer for your identity to be valid.

Fundamental disagreement about gender is affecting her understanding yet again. Identity-based thinking just can’t be applied to gendercrit ideology at all; the whole point is that gender identity itself is harmful, and that women who consider themselves as such because they are adult human females have extremely different experiences than people who feel that they identify with womanhood regardless of their lack of life experiences actually being female.

[”You didn’t suffer like I’ve suffered! You don’t know what it’s like”] “I’m tempted to strike back by saying that you don’t know what it’s like to occupy an identity so stigmatised that most of the people who are attracted to you in private are too ashamed to admit it in public”

Ever heard of butch lesbians, Natalie?

“You don’t know what it’s like to have a body so non-normative that you’re shut out of whole areas of society”

Cough

CONCERN SIX: REPRODUCTIVE OPPRESSION

I’m getting fucking tired at this point and I hate myself for even writing this long of a reply up until now. Basically, she pulls the good ol’ “not all women experience their womanhood the same way” argument, and then makes a fucking coat hanger abortion joke. I wish I had an in-depth reply to that but I don’t. I honestly don’t have the words to express how angry it makes me that someone who has never even had to deal with even the mere possibility of unwanted pregnancy thinks they have any place to joke about the horrific lengths women were forced to go to as a result of their reproductive oppression.

CONCERN SEVEN: ERASING FEMALE VOCABULARY

Through her assumption that feminism is a mere shield for gender critical radfems to hide their transphobia behind, Natalie is disregarding the actual feminist motivations behind opposing gender-neutral language. I mean, she literally does not even touch on it, she only says that nobody has any issue with individual women referring to themselves as women rather than “menstruators” (or, by her suggestion, “people who menstruate”).

Medical lingo is complicated, and I understand wanting to ensure that trans people do not lose insurance coverage when they change their legal sex. I don’t believe that changing all medical language to be gender neutral is the only possible solution there, but at the end of the day doctors are gonna know the difference between male and female anatomy even if their textbooks talk about “pregnant people”. Medical language is not the issue here, it’s the expectation that this language becomes commonplace everywhere, including in feminist discourse. That’s the point where female vocabulary is erased, and where it becomes impossible for women to discuss the reasons for their oppression. Menstruation and pregnancy are not “gender neutral” issues when it comes to institutional oppression, and we should not treat them as such.

Moving on, let me quote her directly:

“I have no problem with cis feminists discussing or celebrating periods or wearing pussy hats at political marches. […] I totally get why cis feminists would want to celebrate their reproductive anatomy in defiance of a society that routinely shames and subjugates them for it. The problem arises only when menstruation or reproductive anatomy are used to misgender trans men or exclude [women who don’t bleed].”

The assumption wasn’t that every individual trans woman takes issue with women discussing their anatomy, so “I don’t have a problem with it” is not an argument. I mean, you’re obviously free to say it to get people off your back about it, but it does not debunk radfem concerns when there absolutely are trans women who believe it’s “terfy” and “exclusionary” to talk about issues that only affect “cis” women. That last point is a funny one, despite all the inclusive language trans women regularly forget that menstruation is not a cis thing. And that’s an issue Natalie appears to suffer from too, unless this was unfortunate phrasing and we were just meant to assume that trans men talking about periods is not up for discussion. Either way, it’s clear that inclusive language is clunky to everyone, the mistakes that are acceptable to make just depend on which side you’re on.

CONCERN EIGHT: TERF IS A SLUR

Natalie uses an interesting definition of “slur” here: “a pejorative that targets someone’s race, religion, gender, or sexuality”. I say interesting because I can’t find it anywhere. I could find “an insinuation or allegation about someone that is likely to insult them or damage their reputation.”, “an insulting or disparaging remark or innuendo”, “a derogatory or insulting term applied to particular group of people”, but not hers. Presumably because she made it up herself (and haf-assedly at that, did you forget disabled people exist Natalie?) knowing that all of the former definitions would, in fact, consider TERF to be a slur.

Now I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of the whole “TERF is a slur” thing. I’ve seen someone use that to say “if you call me TERF I can call you tranny”. I don’t think being called a TERF (which I have plenty of experience with) should be considered to be comparable to being called a tranny or a bitch. TERF has become essentially meaningless and is an inaccurate term roughly 95% of the time it’s used, but it is meant to have a meaning (”this person excludes trans people from their feminism”), whereas other slurs don’t tend to have any message aside from “this person belongs to a minority and I want to insult them for it”. I’m not ignorant to the fact that it’s often used as a synonym for “lesbian” though, and that it absolutely is used insultingly and with the intent to ruin a person’s reputation, so I’ll stay in my lane on that.

After comparing “gender critical” to “race realist” and mentioning a general refusal to use these terms as to not legitimise bigotry, Natalie explains that she has very little patience for “TERF requests for linguistic decorum” because of the “maximally hurtful, harmful, and insulting” language that radfems use to talk about trans people (eg, referring to transition-related surgeries as mutilation, and the terms “TIM” and “TIF”).

I have some thoughts on this because, while I fucking hate these terms, Natalie’s disdain for them is hypocritical. She just acknowledged that using certain language legitimises the ideologies behind them, and that’s exactly why “TIM” and “TIF” were born. Referring to trans women as trans women while also insisting that woman means adult human female, something trans women do not fall under, did not work out well for radfems in the past. Conceding linguistic ground merely for the sake of respect essentially meant they’d instantly lose that argument, an argument that is in fact extremely important for feminism. I justify using technically incorrect terms (including pronouns) to refer to trans people because I’m trans myself, I understand what it’s like to be dysphoric and I believe that signaling that level of respect can at times be essential to get people to listen. But this is not an apolitical issue and as much as I despise being referred to as a “TIF”, I can’t blame that term’s existence on hatred.

Natalie concludes her video by being “real” about what the core of the gender critical movement is actually about: transphobia. Visceral disgust and hatred for trans people’s very existence.

And you know, for some people that definitely is the case. But this isn’t where I concede that I’ve been faking trandom to give credibility to my transphobia, or where I break down, admitting that I’ve based my entire political stance on pure self hatred (I mean lord knows I have enough of it, but nah that’s not what happened). The reality is that there are gender critical trans people (including trans women), and I’d dare suggest that we are not the only ones who believe in gender critical ideology for reasons other than transphobia.

In conclusion, this video is just another rebuttal against a strawman of “TERF beliefs” which never even attempts to treat them as genuine, only as ignorance that is easily educated away, or hatred that can’t be argued with regardless. I can’t say I’m disappointed with this video (it’s certainly not lower quality than I’d expect from contrapoints) but I am disappointed with the political climate where this is the furthest any outsider is willing to go to debate against gender critical ideology.

[bullet-farmer]

Okay, I’m having a horrible mental-health day and feel overwhelmed by work, and talking about something that’s been bothering me really feels liberating. Because I feel like it’s one thing I can control right now.

Please don’t reblog this or tag it. I don’t want this to become Discourse, especially in an awesome fandom. But I needed to get this out in a space where people I trust can reply if they wish. I’m fine with disagreement and discussion, as long as people respect my feelings, or ask for clarification if they don’t understand what I’m talking about.

This got long. And it’s about pronouns. And fictional characters. And idk.

Another thing that kind of bothers me about assuming they/them or ze/zir for Beelzebub’s pronouns, and why I’m using both less and less*: I’m really uncomfortable with how few authors do the same for any other character (save, of course, for Pollution, whose pronouns are clearly mentioned as they/them and really should be used exclusively, because that’s just the decent thing to do).  Of course, some people use they/them across the board, or pronouns other than she/her and he/him in any combination. But in my experience, authors who do this are quite rare, at least on Ao3. In most cases, I find authors using “gendered” (for lack of a better word) pronouns for everyone else--namely, those that (presumably) match the gender of the actor who plays each role. For example: she/her for Michael and Dagon, and he/him for Hastur and Gabriel. 

I don’t want to make assumptions about why people do this. For one thing, making sweeping generalizations about people is always a bad idea. It’s even a worse idea when talking about why a group as diverse as fanfic authors. For another, I don’t know what is in people’s hearts or minds, and I’d rather not try to arbitrate any thoughts but my own. That said, in the West, we are swimming in a sea of gender essentialism and binarism. And I can’t help but feel that both are somehow in play in this phenomenon.

Angels and demons in Good Omens are nonbinary. But from a binarist point of view, you could say that nearly all of the angels and demons have at least a few stereotypical masculine or feminine qualities. For example: Michael wears makeup, and a very frilly blouse at one point; Michael’s suit and Uriel’s have what we would call a feminine cut. Dagon has long hair in a style we would call feminine, Sandalphon has male-pattern baldness, Hastur has a deep voice and wears “masculine” clothes, etc. 

But Beelzebub breaks this pattern. She’s what people in the West tend to think of when they hear the term “androgynous”: somewhat boyish and youthful in appearance, dressing in typically “masculine” clothes that don’t emphasize her shape, and behaving in a way that many would call more masculine than feminine. To put it another way, she is aggressive, she speaks forcefully, she shows no hallmarks of being a queen or princess, and she entirely lacks subtlety. Women, of course, are socialized to do the exact opposite. Save for her appearance at the airfield, she is also far more unkempt than any character in the series with the possible exception of Hastur.  I’m beginning to see several problems as I go deeper into this deep dive.  First problem: the assumption that “nonbinary” means androgynous or genderless. And, as a subset of that problem, the assumption that androgynous and agender/genderless are synonymous, and that they/them and ze/zir are “genderless” pronouns. For some people, they very much are. For others, they are not. (For example, a blogger I follow identifies as a cis woman and uses both she/her and they/them).  Second problem: The fact that a character played by an actress simply must be agender or “not female” because said character is androgynous and behaves in stereotypically “masculine” ways.  Third problem: ...Why are we only insisting on they/them or ze/zir for the dirtiest, least conventionally attractive character in the show? I mean, being dirty and unkempt isn’t a stereotypically nonbinary trait, but considering how society sees women who don’t obsess over their looks as “not real women,” this has some very unfortunate implications to me. Fourth problem: Y’all, Neil didn’t say that Beelzebub would probably use they/them as pronouns. He said “zir” (and to be honest, I think that was him being witty rather than making an official statement). I understand that some people can uses these interchangeably to describe themselves, but they really aren’t interchangeable. And acting like they are, strikes me as basically saying “well, these are all nongendered pronouns, so just pick whichever you like best when talking about someone.” Imagine calling someone whose pronouns are they/them, “ze/zir” and thinking that isn’t misgendering or upsetting. I also don’t see posts that insist we respect any other character as nonbinary--particularly characters like, say, Hastur, Ligur, or Gabriel. (Perhaps I’m mistaken, but I really feel like people are even more hesitant to call more “masculine” characters nonbinary than they are Dagon, Michael, etc. Which also strikes me as having really unfortunate implications. But that’s a whole other post.) Or regular use of “Nonbinary Character” and “Canon Nonbinary Character” tags on AO3 for any other demon or angel.  All of this is really starting to get to me as a nonbinary/genderfluid person who absolutely does not see myself as agender or androgynous, even if people regularly describe my looks as “masculine” for reasons I’ll get into in a second. I’m genderfluid and nonbinary because I do not fully or consistently identify with the gender I was assigned at birth--and because I never have. While some days I feel fine with having society see me as a cis woman, some days I am deeply not okay with it--and am actually dysphoric because my body doesn’t look more stereotypically androgynous. However, when I realized that stereotypical androgyny is a concept that cisheterocentric society forces on nonbinary people--and DFAB people in particular--my dysphoria became a bit more manageable.  I also do not attend to my appearance. I have no interest in wearing makeup, flattering clothes, or even feminine ones. I wear skirts for comfort; I’ve always hated pants because of sensory issues, but if I didn’t, I’d probably wear a lot of “men’s” clothes. As it is, I wear T-shirts cut for men, rather than the fitted versions for women. And baggy clothes that men can get away with wearing, but women not so much. I don’t regularly style my hair despite having it long. I don’t shave any part of my body--which began upsetting people when I was twelve, y’all. Adults constantly bothered me about it, and about looking more feminine and stylish. I may be the only “girl” on the planet whose father encouraged her to wear shorter skirts and more flattering tops when she was in her early teens.

It really upset me, but at the time I had no language for why--other than that I felt pushed and harassed. Thankfully, people have since mostly cut that shit out, but when you deal with it as a child, it really leaves some scars and some gender confusion--a fact I only realized while typing this out! Of course, I don’t believe that any of these life choices inherently make anyone any particular gender. But society thinks differently. To it, I’m a failure as a woman, and when you add on the fact that I’m nearing forty, childfree, offbeat, clueless about ‘appropriate” interactions with men, and loud and messy because of ADHD, I’m labeled as even less of a woman. I would have no problem with this if it didn’t come with the pejorative baggage. I have never been a girl or a woman, though I feel I share enough in common with this gender to be comfortable having it be part of my identity to some degree. Even as a child, I felt this but I had no name for it because no one was talking about trans issues in a conservative red state in the 80s and 90s, and they sure as fuck wouldn’t have done it around kids. I didn’t even hear the word “nonbinary” until the early 2010s.  All of this also means that I don’t get many characters or images that represent me. Again, media portrayals of people like me (DFAB and not consistently woman-identifying) are so rare that Beelzebub is the ONLY one I have found in my adult life who isn’t, you know, the butt of a joke about viragos and lesbians who are too ugly to get a man, and “undateables.” So having people insist that using she/her is somehow misgendering is...well, I get that it’s not directed at me. That it isn’t about me personally. That it isn’t meant to hurt me. That it is a lot of nonbinary people and genderfluid people talking about their own experiences. I know all of that, and I don’t begrudge people their feelings. But it still kind of hurts when they disapprove of disagreement. And it makes me worry that fewer people will read my fic, and may accuse me of misgendering if they do, even if I always “warn” for pronouns. I’m even hesitant to make posts like this or to refer to Beelzebub as she/her in casual conversation. Which, well...kind of makes me feel like I do in life. Almost no one but my therapists knows I’m not cis, because I don’t think I could explain it to them without causing confusion and some distress. Which I don’t want to cause and don’t have the spoons to deal with, especially when my own gender issues are so complicated and unclear even to me.

I also just don’t have the spoons to deal with people for assuming I’m a cis, straight girl writing a hetero relationship when I use she/her in most of my Beelzefic. And to be honest, I’m just sort of hurt at the inconsistency around pronouns and the issues said inconsistency raise for me. 

I mean, like I said, I know this isn’t personal, and I do my best to keep that in mind. But I don’t like having to hold my thoughts in because they might upset other genderfluid and nonbinary people.** I have to do that enough in my life already as a queer person, and as a mentally ill person whose feelings are not always appropriate to the situation. Having to hold them in here, too, feels really unfair and frustrating to me, and kind of like I can’t be myself even in LGBTQ+ spaces. so... tl;dr  Use whatever pronouns for Beelzebub you like, or no pronouns at all. I am not the pronoun police, and I would never tell anyone what to do with their writing. But please don’t accuse people of misgendering if they do otherwise, or mistreat them if they do, or make assumptions about them or their reasons. You don’t know who they are or what experience they’re writing from, just as they don’t know who you are and your experiences. I guess that’s it. thank you. 

* Yes, I am aware of what Neil said on the subject. I’m genderfluid and allowed to disagree and to present an alternate view. ** I really don’t care too much about cisgender folks’ opinions on this issue. I’m sorry, but I don’t. Especially when cisgender people opine about what pronouns we should use for a character. I’m glad that they’re concerned and think they’re trying admirably to be good allies, but this really is an in-house and stay-in-your-lane issue. 

[purpleskiesandpaperflowers]

Introducing me(us???)?

Ok no that's a terrible freaking title. We are not the jonas brothers.

Who's we? Haha honestly I'm not even sure anymore. This is a hard one to write because I literally don"t tell anyone about my "inner world" which is why I'm keeping my blog anonymous for now .

I guess I'm just a wierd human with a messed up brain that has no reason to be messed up. I'm in the process of figuring it all out .

Long story short "we" is me and my ... I'm not sure what to call them I used to think they were just imaginary freinds , but they have become something so much more real.

I remember being 5 years old and having imaginary freinds like any other child. I cant remember much but I'm pretty sure my home life was perfect. I have an amazing mum and dad and even had two grandparents at the time. I remember happiness and my cat who really wasnt a fan of me , but I adored her regardless , even if she did end up scratching the living hell out of me on many occasions. My main issue at the time was serious separation anxiety, I couldn't handle being away from my parents , it got better towards the end of the school year I think after a lot of spending most of the year screaming until my dad would pick me up. I found it hard making freinds as I was somewhat anti social and liked playing on my own often, but I found a freind in the end. I think we got on so well cause she was different too. Turned out she had Autism, something that I'll probably talk about a lot here. Anyway as I said back then was when I first remember having imaginary freinds , and constantly daydreaming . I used to watch my dad play video games a lot so a lot of my daydreams would be based off the video games . At the time It was perfectly fine. I was just a strange kid who had an over active imagination, zoned out a lot in school , and often enjoyed my own company, but couldn't understand why my peers didnt like the antisocial wierd kid. I remember getting teased as I have a harmless autoimmune skin condition that I developed aged 3 and I felt alienated for it . The serious bullying didnt start until later in primary school though .(I think age 11 or thereabouts, was when shit really hit the fan) Anyway the imaginary freinds were originally just that . Unfortunately things changed when my one freind from school left and moved across the country. I had no freinds so that's where I began to use my imaginary freinds to replace real people. By the time I was 13 I'd almost completely isolated myself , I didnt know how to interact with real people.

I eventually thought I'd got it all under control . I found a group of people that were all a bit wierd. Originally it was cool and I fit in okay.

When I went to sixth form college, stuff started to get weirder though. I'd been struggling throughout secondary school I'd spent a lot of time kind of going back into my alternate reality . Even at freinds parties I used to pretend that I was a different person in my alternate reality doing something with my inner world family. I mentioned it once or twice to someone at CAHMS (The british child mental health services) that I was seeing as I'd struggled a lot with anxiety and self harm , but I never wanted to be fully honest about it . I was embarrassed.

Aged 12 I remember "pretending" to be a character called Casey. At the time I was spending a lot of time pretending I was Kasey and I was making a talk show with my other imaginary freinds . Eventually another character called Paulie took Casey's place .

Paulie's whole existence is kinda embarrassing. They're a typical queer cringe OC That you know a 14 year old neurodivergent weirdo would make up. I kind of originally used them as a way to explore my special interests. And to understand things about the world . In many ways Paulie was kind of a reflection of myself and you know everything was fine . Paulie is a 5ft7 young non binary person . Born male but definitely presents more feminine. Some of the other details about them came from me incorporating things I'd learned from various medical documentaries and things I'd researched on the internet. (One of my special interests always was science , particularly biology, when I was young I wanted to be either a doctor or a vet or something like that. I dont know why I find it so fascinating. It's kind of my party trick - boring people with the details of a random medical condition that they absolutely did not ask for.) I'll go into full details at some point . I find it kind of embarrassing to talk about it all.

Anyway It used to be great we used to pretend to do makeup on our youtube channel that of course did not exist .(the deeper I get into this the more I want to delete my life) it became to the point where I was doing daily "vlogs" in the inner world as Paul , again just something I day dreamed about. It was getting beyond the limits of normal daydreaming.

At some point I came across a video about "Maladaptive daydreaming " for once in my life I didnt feel quite so alone. I couldn't believe that I wasnt the only one who did this! Ever since then I've toyed with the idea of opening up about it , maybe through some sort of blog or youtube video etc. However, I wasn't ready until now. I'm still not ready to be completely open with my freinds and family (the one person who even knows 1/3 of this stuff is my mum) which is why I'll remain anonymous for now .

In the last 2 years things have gotten increasingly more strange and confusing. When I was in sixth form college (british equivalent of high school) Paulie started to be kind of phased out of my daydreams. Then Eric showed up.

Again , it was just daydreaming that had gone a bit too far at this point, however I soon realised that my personality appeared to have changed to become much more like Eric. I stopped wearing makeup so often. I began to feel dysphoric about my body , I began to wish I was Eric.

From then it's just been confusing. It's never just been Paul , Casey or Eric . At first i thought I'd just made an imaginary family. I've been saying that I have literally no idea why because my family are great. But I wonder if it was because I lost my nan and then metaphorically lost my dad.

My dads not dead , hes alive (just about I mean he smokes like a chimney so it's probably only a matter of time) Our relationship is so wierd. I try to be grateful for him purely because hes not a completely bad person. He gave me a great childhood and has never laid a finger on me. But when I was about 13 , I lost him. He became self absorbed in his own past.

Around about that time one of my dads ex freinds died. Since then dads been remembering things from his past and is convinced that this ex freind emotionally abused him and traumatised him for life.

Hes told me the stories so many times because hes so caught up in it that I should probably remember more of what he told me but honestly I think after the third time I just gave up with talking to him. Dad never cares about what you're talking about . He only cares about himself.

I'll spare you the details for now. Maybe I'll make a post about it. I suppose that's his shit not mine though . I dont deny that his ex freind wasnt exactly nice to him and cheated him out of a relationship. But I just feel like he should maybe you know go to therapy rather than sitting at home , freeloading from my mum , mumbling to himself all day about things that happened in the past.

Its very selfish of me because I know even though dads not exactly had the worst life, and he is a little bit of a narcissist who thinks that hes had the worst life possible , I know hes hurting. But I used to have a dad , now hes just not there. We used to do stuff , and I used to adore him, However hes just not my dad anymore. Theres glimmers of him there . But hes so entangled with the past , (and also a bit delusional) that I cant have a normal father daughter relationship with him anymore.

I guess maybe the combo of that , the strain its put on my parents marriage (they're still together but they argue more now) and the fact that I'm a sensitive little snowflake who really cant deal with anything unpleasant, is the reason I created my imaginary family. I don't know if I want to put it down to that though. I feel like that makes me sound like my dad , blaming my problems on what feels like insignificant past events.

Anyway. I kind of hate the fact that I have another family on the inner world. Because even though my dads a bit of an asshat , hes my dad and as a multitude of people have told me " at least you have a dad , at least your parents are still together" and I adore my mum. Like shes as close to a perfect mum as you get in this world. Of course she has off days and it's not always sunshine and rainbows , but shes amazing. She loves me , she supports me through everything and she does so much for me. No matter how many times I screw up she just sighs and helps me move on. Mind you. I havent got anyone quite like her in the inner world.

Since I've been more honest with myself (and the boys) about the fact that I am in fact daydreaming and its not real , the boys have begun to accept my mum as their own almost. Obviously they have real mums, but I know they love her to pieces.

Anyway, so this big imaginary family. Has become more than that. A lot of the dudes are still just imaginary freinds but with a few of the boys , whom I've introduced you to two out of the three, have become scarily real. Eric is the main one. The last couple of years it's progressed to the point where sometimes , I'm not sure if I am me or if I am Eric , or if Eric is me. Sometimes I feel like I'm thinking in his voice. Sometimes I look in the mirror and see him. And sometimes he looks in the mirror and sees me. I think as Paul was so feminine. It didn't show so much. We could just pretend we were me on the outside. But when Eric is in my headspace, I hate my feminine body, I've bought a binder and my wardrobe is becoming less feminine. Because I just dont feel like the same person. I'm honestly so confused I really dont know what is going on or why it's happening.

In some ways the inner world is still just me navigating the world and my way of making sense of things. But it's also kind of like , parts of my personality, as little people that live in my brain , but not quite , I cannot begin to explain it .

And then of course, just when I'm trying to figure out the Eric saga and who the hell I even am anymore, Vlad pops up.

I'll always have a soft spot for Vlad. Hes Paul's older brother and has been in the inner world for quite some time , but has been more I suppose, in my headspace as I call it in the last six months or so. Hes the only one that I've managed to do a successful drawing of thus far although I'll try and do some of the other dudes at some point. Only issue is Vlad would much rather we doodle bugs than the other boys. Vlad has been my way of exploring the whole prospect of having Autism , I'm not diagnosed yet as the waiting lists are frankly ridiculous (yay for the tories?) but I've based vlads character around the traits that I have, and he helps me not be so ashamed of being neurodivergent. He also kind of helps me deal with my Emetophobia (the fear of vomiting) and my issues I have around food - which I honestly thought weren't that bad until I got told that the issues I've been having with my stomach and swallowing for the last year , are completely down to my anxiety. And it was at that point that I realised I may have been a teensy bit more traumatised by my phobia of vomiting than I originally believed. In fact vlads backstory is based off of my whole fear of being sick and what started it off (that time the norovirus kicked my ass, big time) .

Uhh so theres a bit about us . I'm not ready to fully open up yet . I want to eventually tell you more about the inner world but baby steps hey. I plan on trying to post more but , I'm useless so I wouldn't count on it.

[tumblunni]

Ok so.. I feel really ungrateful as fuck saying this.. but it kinda bugs me how much perrin being nonbinary just.. isn’t really shown at all.

At least, in what i’ve seen so far, yknow? I watched the first ep of someone else’s let’s play to see if i was gonna like this game, and i like this game SO MUCH that I stopped right there and am downloading it at the speed of light yo!!! My hype is maximum and I really don’t want this to be seen as a hate message or anything, it's just a mild opinion piece about something that bummed me out a little, as a nonbinary person.

Ok so.. again, this makes me sound like an ASSHOLE but I have to say it.. Perrin looks like a boy. 100% of all LPers I have seen have assumed they were a boy. I, a nonbinary person, assumed they were a boy. (And felt like absolute shit afterwards, man I still have to work on my internalized gender stereotypes!)

Now in real life I absolutely wouldn’t go around being some douchebag who tells other NB folk they aren’t dressing ‘right’, or whatever. In real life people can feel very different ways about being outside of conventional gender norms. Some people feel like “both at once” or “neither” or “something else entirely that doesn’t touch either side of our society’s current binary stereotypes”. And regardless of whether you’re agender/bigender/genderfluid or any other type of genderqueer person, your fashion sense doesn’t have to fit any strict rule to “prove” it to people. Some people try and dress in androgenous stuff, some people try to mix parts of both gendered fashion worlds, some people like to wear very neutral baggy stuff as a different way of being androgenous, some people like to wear wild and fun stuff that never had any gender stereotype in the first place/because it helps them feel confident in themself if they have a big brave kind of fashion, yknow? (that’s why I dyed my hair at least, and why I think a lot of lGBT people do) And of course, some people just prefer ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ clothes regardless of not being that gender, and if we can accept that cis women can enjoy ‘tomboy’ fashion then we should accept that trans people don’t have to fit into even more rigid fashion rules in order to ‘earn’ their gender.

BUT this isn’t real life, it’s a videogame

We have a lot more context here, with the context that this is a character designed within a fandom whose previous attempts at NB representation have kinda started setting up a trend. In that context, this is a bit worrying that it’s happened again, and maybe future fangame creators are feeling like they have to do it, or something?

Like the NB protagonist Pluto in Pokemon Uranium.

They’re still someone I deeply love, but their design looks incredibly masculine aside from a side ponytail. If anything their design communicates more that they’re a younger option compared to the other two, or something?

And the two NB protagonist options Ari and Decibel in Pokemon Reborn

Their designs look like more traditionally masculine and feminine-leaning ways of being nonbinary, ykno? And that wouldn’t be bad on it’s own, but let me try and explain what I mean...

A similar issue occurs in the unrelated dating sim Hustle Cat:

Which is generally incredibly progressive and actually the first dating sim I’ve ever seen that lets you play a nonbinary protag! But you still get only two character models to choose from.

Like it’s great that they had two options to aknowledge how not all trans people are the same, but it starts to look a bit.. odd, when those two options are ‘feminine and masculine’ and no form of androgenous is ever an option. or even like.. someone with a ‘masculine’ body build but a ‘feminine’ fashion sense. That would be kind of a stereotypical way to depict a trans character but it wouldn’t just be making a random design that could fit amoungst the already existing gendered protags and then just saying they’re trans. And a lot of people found it weird how these ones seem to be drawn as like.. both on the far masculine end, just a cis man and a trans man.

Like.. even as a nonbinary person myself, I wouldn’t have known these characters were nonbinary if you hadn’t told me. And that leaves me feeling horrible about myself that I judged them on first sight, but I mean this is within a genre of entertainment that’s literally never had any Me in it and i’ve got used to being all ‘no you’re just reading too much into it’ whenever i headcanon anyone as genderqueer...

And just.. I feel like if you’re gonna just draw another two masculine and feminine looking characters, or just a second masculine one (or a weird two masculine ones that’re labelled male and female with no option for in-between...) then couldn’t you have saved time by just letting us choose our pronouns for the two you already had? like I already play a lot of games headcanoning the protag as just a masc-fashion version of my enby self, I feel like kinda the point of adding a third design would be to make it something the others aren’t already delivering. Look at it this way, you already HAVE two nonbinary characters who look masculine and feminine, just like the player could also play them as a trans boy and trans girl. Pronoun selector box is the greatest invention of our time! So what I’m really saying is not “don’t have super masc NB protags” but just “can we have another option too?”

Oh, but then that’s also been done not-so-well by certain games too.. Awesome amazing multiplayer party game dating sim Monster Prom let’s you choose your pronouns!

...except these are your only character options! All of these are very clearly intended to be read as masc or femme, you’re probably gonna feel dysphoric as heck if you play them as trans, and none of them work super well as nonbinary either. I think pretty much every NB player has always gone for Oz (yellow one), cos he’s the one that’s most capable of fitting that headcanon just by virtue of being perpetually shadowed. Tho still his default is “he” pronouns, his fashion sense is masc and his voice is masc. Still I’m really fuckin proud of the fandom for collectively latching onto NB Oz and using “they” all the time in fanworks, and then the developers being okay with it, like holy shit man you healed my goddamn heart... <3

Still, it makes me feel a lil like this would have been easy to fix? like I’m not saying redraw everything to have them all change bodies/fashion style depending on your pronoun choice, but like.. maybe just not draw them with such super disparate body styles in the first place? like in this style every girl is hourglass and has weird legs out arms out pose, and every dude is a chunkfest with twice as big hands and feet. Like you could have maybe just made two of the characters be a very curvy girl and a very buff boy, and then the other two be more neutral in appearance but still retaining the same designs. Like I think if you just gave the blue girl a baggier shirt that doesn’t highlight her boobs and hips so much, she could easily be my favourite ‘most NB-able’ design! maybe also tone down the eyelash and lipstick effects?

I think probably a similar thing could have been done with the Reborn protagonists? like there’s nothing inherantly feminine about wearing a tanktop and having a fancy undercut hairstyle and such, its just the way they drew Ari that makes them look feminine. I guess maybe that’s a necessary evil of fangames, since they usually use edits of already existing characters from the games? Then again the games have plenty of androgenous characters already, even if nobody is canonically confirmed as LGBT. *shrug*

Anyway

I absolutely am not trying to nitpick and attack the game for not being perfect in this one aspect. i’m still super excited to even see someone like me in a videogame at all, and I’m definately not one of those people who’s like ‘I’d rather have nothing than have something flawed’. I already admire you greatly for what you’ve done for the inclusivity of this fandom, and I hope that my discussion of this stuff doesn’t discourage you from continuing.

And I guess my point is, in summary

What I mean is not “there are no nonbinary people who prefer to dress masculine instead of androgenous”, but instead that when you’re designing a nonbinary person as the only option a nonbinary player gets or the only nonbinary person in the game, with no playable option, it would probably be a little better to draw them androgenous.

Like, you’ve put that NB character into the role of representing all nonbinary people ever, to the hypothetical audience of people who’ve never heard of the concept before and aren’t super educated about the intricacies of gender presentation. And then also rather than using traditionally gendered outfits to aknowledge that NB people have many ways to present themselves... you’ve given us less ways to present ourselves.

Also it’s a little bit odd that you have an NB rival but said “we’re not ever considering an NB player option in the future”. Sorry but I cannot understand the logic? Like.. you know NB people play your game if you wanted to put NB representation in it, but you didn’t put it as playable because... reasons?? I hope maybe that interview was just taken out of context and you meant something more like “it’s not planned for now because it’s a lot of work and the game is still in its demo stage”, which is absolutely an understandable reason and how Uranium and Reborn did it. But Uranium and Reborn were kinda odd for being a world where literally nobody else aside from you could ever be NB, so I am really grateful that your game did add an NB character. And one in a big role!! This is what i mean about how grateful I am and how I feel awful that my bad internet typing skills are making this post come off as more aggressive than intended.. *sigh*

OH and also maybe a tip for Periin? just.. like.. mention their pronouns. It’s really frustrating to watch everyone doing let’s plays of this thing and constantly assuming Perrin is male because their design is very masculine. Even me! Even me was assume! :( So like... maybe just have Perrin actually tell the audience that they are nonbinary at some point, during this introduction? or have the protagonist’s inner monologue mention it, or another character mention it on the way towards meeting Perrin? like I dunno, maybe a Perrin fan npc?cos it would seem a bit more natural to talk about gender if it’s someone saying “wow I admire Perrin’s androgenous fashion sense” rather than like.. a stranger saying “i can’t tell if you’re a boy or a girl from your face”.

I can understand how it can be tricky to figure out how to introduce a LGBT character’s LGBT-ness without having them go around saying it to every new person they meet, it’s something I’ve had to fix in the editing process even as a trans person writing trans characters. But just having their gender only be mentioned on missable promotional material outside the game means that a lot of players won’t ever hear about it, and it like.. has zero impact of actual inclusivity on the game. It’s why people were angry about DUmbledore only getting revealed as gay after the series already ended. Him being gay missed all of its chances to make gay readers of the series feel welcome, or have any part of his character be informed by his sexuality. like the plot between him and grindlewold could have been way more effective if it was him losing a boyfriend to the dark arts, just sayin...

anyway whatever, bunni is bad at writing coherant posts in summary thanks for perrin and sorry for whining about perrin, aaaaa

[i-want-to-be-manhandled]

more trans ramblings (tramblings?) - to T or not to T, that is the question

so i’m writing this so i have some thoughts to show my therapist next week instead of scouring my brain for them but im posting it on the internet instead of keeping it in a word document or some shit cause i need some of y’all to relate and i’m already way too personal on here anyways. and also at this point this is my personal blog too, i’ve given up entirely on keeping it just for video games. tl;dr: please tell me i am not the only one with stupid amounts of doubt going against the stupid amounts of evidence that i am very transgender. 

tw: long post, doubts, testosterone/hrt effects discussed in detail, (don’t read this if you know me irl and haven’t personally talked with me about being trans? otherwise go ahead), nsfw cause we’re talking about genitals but mostly towards the end of the second to last paragraph (i’ll strike the nsfw stuff), mention of rape but no discussion of it happening, lemme know if i missed anything

so as my last transpost said im very excited for my hysto that im nowhere near getting but im flip-flopping as to whether or not i want to go on t. i know i can get it fairly quickly if i decide i do want it. there’s a trans health clinic in walking distance from where i am moving in 23 days, i have 3 therapists who will write me a letter of recommendation for testosterone, and my mother even found me the trans health clinic so she’ll try to find me somewhere else to go if they don’t take me in for some reason. (having a supportive mom is great i don’t miss her crying about how hard it is to have a trans kid in january and february.) and i’ve looked thoroughly at the effects of testosterone and have sorted them into pros, neutrals, and cons. (posting it here again mostly bc i need to do it but i also need some of yall to relate and/or validate me and/or answer my weird questions)

pros:

voice drop. im so tired of having a squeaky voice which is exacerbated by me always being anxious, and my sister has a deeper voice than me and always tries to sing ridiculously low parts to stretch it for some reason which makes me feel insecure. and apparently my voice is “always squeaky” according to my dad and like? shit man i pass until i talk that’s just the tea. 

i dont even care if i have a super deep voice, i actually think i’d rather be a solid tenor because that’s the vocal range of most of my favorite songs, but i want to sound like a man when i talk and not an 8 year old girl

side note apparently a lot of trans guys have male “internal voices” but mine just sounds like how i sound when i talk because i’m a very literal person and that’s why it took me forever to figure out i was trans and not having a male internal voice makes me dysphoric sometimes and even doubt that i’m trans at all... that’s dumb af i know it’s just my literal personality type not me actually being a girl

more muscle. i dont work out as it is right now but if i knew i’d see results the way i want them then i probably would. also im getting ripped during the school year anyways bc i walk everywhere with a 15-20 pound backpack strapped to me so i’m at least gonna look semi muscular which is what i want anyways. please give me strength quite literally i can barely lift bro

bottom growth. ik it’s still not going to be ~enough~ or whatever but i’d have... something? that would be nice. 

side note would packers start to be uncomfortable with something there bc i wonder about that sometimes. not that mine is super uncomfortable now or anything (i just haven’t figured out how to make it sit right) but i wonder about that

NO PERIODS NO PERIODS NO PERIODS NO PERIODS NO PERIODS

if im one of those guys whose periods dont stop on t i am actually going to perform a hysto on myself

fat shifting from hips, thighs and butt to my stomach. i don’t care if i have stomach chub or not, but i DO care that my hips are Like That and my things are Really Girly and i have a fucking Girl Butt TM like please just let me Not Have These Problems

having a more angular face. doesn’t happen to everyone per se but because of my facial structure as it is and also what my dad looked like when he was my age, i probably will get this change. i have actively wished for this since i was 13 and didn’t even know dysphoria was a word. hopefully it makes my lips a little thinner too or at least more masculine.

veins becoming more prominent. i have this one pic of me where it looks like i have Guy Arms and i just wanna look like that all the time ya know

lookin like a dude and passing? that counts right

neutrals:

facial hair. i know a lot of trans guys want this but i’ve never wanted one. i just want a jawline to cut a bitch tbh i’m never having more than stubble except the beard imma wear to my high school reunion

body hair. this is more of a pro-neutral ig bc i want it on my arms and legs but would prefer not to have a lot on my chest and stomach. fortunately i dont think my dad has a whole lot but i’m a pretty hairy afab person as it is i just dont wanna be a werewolf lmao

hair loss at temples. i just don’t care about my hairline enough for this to really bother me. maybe i will when it happens but *shrug*

scents of sweat/bo/urine changing? idk i feel like it will be weird, maybe gross if it turns out bad but honestly i don’t really care what i smell like as long as i don’t smell like a dumpster fire? i shower it’s fine lmao

rougher skin? i dont know if i’d like having rougher skin but i also dont like being an uwu soft boi so

acne. nobody wants it but like... i already have stress-acne right now and don’t really give a shit because i hate how my face looks anyways. not that i want a fuckton of acne because nobody does but im not gonna cry myself to sleep over it ya feel? it’s an annoyance but not really a con

cons:

increase in sex drive. not to be nsfw but masturbating is a chore as it is. it hasn’t been fun since i realized i had crippling bottom dysphoria and even then i can’t get off unless i’m completely distracted from my body (either through porn or being too tired to care). also i have like a 2% chance of ever having a partner so i really dont wanna have to deal with having the sex drive of a 12 year old boy when im 19, single, depressed, and dysphoric. im not even asexual but this is the worst con

emotional changes. yall know at this point i dont have the best temper, and i dont want t to exacerbate that. now, some of my friends have said that t has made them much calmer and actually less irritable, but the rest of my friends said t makes them angry. i have poor anger management and i know it. i don’t need it made worse. it’ll fuck my life up for real

increase in appetite. listen i have gastritis, ibs and acid reflux i cannot afford to be needing to eat more than i currently do

so as yall can see i have a fair number of all 3: 8 pros, 6 neutrals, and 3 cons. and what’s more, all of the cons are things that don’t have anything to do with my appearance (which my therapist and i noticed during our session a couple weeks ago and really made me think i should go on t). so then the answer should be clear: i should go on t, right? deal with having a fucked high sex drive and be pissed off because of it but finally be able to see my reflection in the mirror. so it should be obvious. what the hell am i waiting for?

the main reason i’m hesitant is i’m afraid i’ll want to detransition. even though i KNOW it rarely happens and the women who do thought they were trans because of unaddressed traumas relating to being female or have a personality disorder. i have neither of those things: the only female-related trauma i have is being slut shamed by my mom for wearing tank tops and any shirt that wasn’t a crew neck and one guy saying he’d rape me in 9th grade because he thought rape and sex were the same thing (for his sake i hope he’s grown the fuck up!! i’m not traumatized from this i just made my teacher not let him sit next to me in class and told him to stop talking to me. sadly this is the most sexual attention i’ve ever gotten), and the only mental illnesses i have are depression and anxiety (unless we’re counting dysphoria, which i definitely have). i also sometimes feel like i discovered it too late: i didn’t say “i’m not a girl” until i was 14, refused to explore my gender until i was 17, and didn’t fully accept i was trans until i was 18. and other dumb shit: i never tried to pee standing up so im not really trans even though i didn’t know what a penis was until i was like 9, ive caught myself twice recently wishing for longer hair which made me feel feminine and gross and dysphoric (even though i know hair length =/= gender??), and im not in danger of suicide if i don’t get testosterone and top surgery RiGhT nOw. the prospect of me detransitioning isn’t likely, when you look at all the facts, but the prospect makes me anxious because everything makes me anxious. i am the poster boy for anxiety. and yes, i know i would have said that even when i accepted that i was technically the poster girl but i would have said poster boy anyways because it was “gender neutral” and didn’t rub me the wrong way like poster girl would have. same reason i insisted on being a dude instead of dudette and only described myself with words that didn’t have a female equivalent in french class even if it wasn’t true. so what the hell am i waiting for.

like i know i shouldn’t be doubting at this point because it’s so, so obvious that i’m trans. just because i didn’t try to pee standing up when i was little or ask why i didn’t have a penis doesn’t mean i’m not a guy. i logically know this. like when i was 11 and i insisted to myself i had a male brain but knew i shouldn’t say that out loud because that was weird and i wanted to be a normal girl who didn’t have a weird male brain, and when i was 7 and at my friend sarah’s house and her room was super pink and girly and i literally thought the sentence “is this what i’m supposed to be like?” and when i was 14 and cut my hair into the Typical Queer Girl Pixie Cut and my hair was just??? gone like i wanted it to be when i was 9 and ended up with a bowl cut instead, and instead of looking in the mirror and thinking i looked like an owl when i was 9 i smiled at how “androgynous” (masculine) i looked, and when i was 11 and only hung out with boys at summer camp and they treated me like one of them and the girls were really mean to me but it was the best summer i’d ever had, and when i was 15 and my friend chris joked that i was the “guy” in my lesbian relationship and i was so fucking happy, and when i was 15 and starving myself because i loved my “angular” figure and jaw,  and when i was 16 and wearing a dress to winter formal because my ex met me in one and i wanted to be cute for him but i picked the dress that looked like a suit because it looked very “queer” (masculine), and when i was 14 and literally went “hmmm im gonna bind my chest just because i wanna know what it would look like” and it made me so euphoric and i knew in that instant i wasn’t a girl but repressed it for 3+ years because dealing with it would just be too hard, and when i was 11 and knew it was going to be my last day going to school without a bra on and just being so ashamed even though i wanted breasts so i’d be a normal girl, and when i was 16 and wearing that backwards snapback all the time and my friend said it was what tops did and i was so happy that nobody would consider me a bottom or whatever stupid shit because i couldn’t imagine myself being penetrated ever in my cisgender gay life, and when i was 16-17 and scouring the lesbian section of pornhub for pov/strap-on videos bc i wanted to know what it would look like to fuck a girl with a dick without watching straight porn because i’m 100% a gay female because the word lesbian is too girly im not a trans guy or anything haha, and when i was 14-and-onwards wondering why it felt so empty between my legs and why it felt like i was supposed to have a dick lmao im totally a girl though haha, and when i was 15 and had to google how to masturbate bc i couldn’t figure it out naturally and still felt like i was doing it wrong, and when i was 15 and looked at my vagina in the pocket mirror i got from selling like 30 boxes of girl scout cookies in 2007 and my first thought was “that is not my body,” and when i was 16 and actually very upset that i couldn’t ejaculate when i orgasmed. trans who? what the fucking hell am i waiting for

seriously. i was 7 and looking at my 2nd grade yearbook photo thinking “that doesn’t look like me,” and i was 13 and looking in the mirror saying “that doesn’t look like me,” and i went through all of my adolescence waiting for “puberty to turn me into a girl” and then i was 17 and done with puberty and crying because my body was still wrong. i can’t believe how hard i tried throughout my whole adolescence to be some facet of “normal girl” so i wouldn’t get bullied and be dateless forever and thinking “puberty hasn’t turned me into a girl yet” and not stopping to think about what i was if i wasn’t a girl until puberty was done, i realized it wasn’t going to happen, and it was too damn late for me. now i’m 19 and don’t leave the house without either a binder or a sports bra/baggy layers combo and i’d wear my packer everywhere if i could figure out how to get it to sit right (and also get it past my parents lmao).  like if anyone else rattled off that list of trans shit i wouldn’t question them for a second. but because it’s me and i’m like “what if i’m transwashing my memories? what if i’m gaslighting myself?” i’m still not on testosterone and please validate me. tell me other trans people doubt themselves, no matter how obvious it is that they’re trans. tell me it’s okay to doubt hrt, even though you know it will be so much more likely to help you. tell me it’s okay to be afraid of detransitioning, even though it’s okay if i DO decide to detransition and it’s so unlikely anyways considering all the evidence of Me Not Being A Fucking Girl.

if you read this all the way to the end here’s an awkward hug and some brain bleach im not even drunk or high i can’t even blame substances for this behavior 

[tape-hiss]

Late Tape Hiss - Yoshi

Hello! This is a late, special edition of Tape Hiss. I originally wrote up a whole post about Aetherian immigration law, but with recent events in-comic finally coming to light, I thought I would do a meta post instead. Spoilers ahead for chapter 6 of White Noise--if you haven't reached page 40, maybe catch up first before reading this! I get asked every so often (as do a number of other trans/queer creators I know of) how to write transgender characters if you aren't trans yourself. There are plenty of answers to this question that have already been covered, and I'm not going to cover more than the bare basics of that here. Look elsewhere for that. Here I'm going to talk about writing transgender/gender non-conforming characters in complex worldbuilding environments, specifically Yoshi. This is less a 'here's how to do this' and more a 'here's how to be thoughtful and deliberate about your writing in general, and how I applied that to a pretty complex topic.' Pull from it what you will! I'm of the opinion that being thoughtful and deliberate in your character-writing and worldbuilding only makes you a stronger writer and your stories more convincing, but what do I know? I'm just some schmuck really.

So after all that: Yoshi is a trans woman.

Some background: Yoshi's been a character of mine literally since I was maybe 11 or 12. She was the second one I made up, after Liya. She hasn't changed a hell of a lot design-wise since I started with her, as far as I can recall, but being trans wasn't part of her character until relatively recently. I went through a weird period around the start of White Noise wherein I felt like I had finally fleshed out a lot of my characters in a really full, rounded way that made it seem like I was writing more about people and less about characters in a play, except Yoshi. There were a lot of gaps in her history, a lot of quirks of her story leftover from my RP days (don't laugh, that's a super legit way to get into writing imho) that didn't really work with the way White Noise was coming together. I spent a while sort of going around in circles filling in bits of her character here and there--largely about her mother, and their time together on Earth, and how that's persisted in Yoshi's psyche to this day, and what it was like growing up with Shinobu, and what their relationship is like. I kept feeling like something was missing with her, though, something that would explain the shyness and discomfort that she was already working with. Something that spoke more to where her character is going, rather than where it came from. I was noodling around with her shapeshifting problems already, but: why was it such a problem for her? How will she tackle this problem in her own character arc unless I know why exactly changing shape is upsetting? What would be upsetting for her about it when there are so many other shapeshifters out there with no problems?

I can't remember what prompted it now, but I literally asked myself one night, what if Yoshi's trans? And it all immediately clicked.

What if the scary thing about shapeshifting for Yoshi was not the actual thing itself--not becoming a big skeleton spectre that fills a room--but the bodily aspect of it? It'll become clearer later in the comic, but Yoshi's night-shapeshifting started with the onset of puberty, when her body started to change in more mundane ways, ways that actively repelled her more than the night-changing did. And I imagine with most shapeshifters in this universe, there's a bodily sensation to changing shape. For people like Teige, maybe, shape-changing just feels like spilling from one form to the next, liquid-like, in such ways that he doesn't maybe have to think about the way his bones are changing, his organs moving. For others it's a more visceral experience: you have to have a certain amount of mindfulness about your own body and the way it's changing in order to make it change. I planned to explore this some with Hawk's shapeshifting, but where he's frightened by what he's turning into without his consent or control, Yoshi's more discomforted by the act of turning back.

And here's where I could, I think, let my own experiences inform Yoshi's. I found it easy, most of the time, to simply dissociate from my own body before I transitioned. It's how I coped with it not being Right for me. Anything that forced me to pay attention to parts of my anatomy or my assigned ''''girlhood'''' which I did not want got a hugely dysphoric reaction out of me. I imagine that Yoshi would have a similar experience, one that maybe would have been made a little easier by living in a society that was mostly not assigning her any particular role or gender to begin with. Maybe she could have kept up the dissociation as I did until the cost of doing so outweighed the benefit, but her experience coming out of her Big Spectral Skeleton Form forced to her to be Too Aware of her own body, and too often.

(Note: this shouldn't read as 'transfeminine experiences are the same as transmasculine ones, but opposite', because no. I don't even know how common this kind of dissociation is. This is just a small bit of my own experiences that I found fit neatly into explaining Yoshi's. I do this with all my characters, and if you knew what each character got from me it would probably be very embarrassing for me.)

So with that little revelation out of the way, I had to figure out a couple things: how does being transgender function in Aetheri, where all these different cultures are meeting and the dominant culture has no concept of gender? How do I communicate this in a comic without doing Advanced Queer Gender Discourse on the reader?

Yoshi lived in the United States until she was six, with a mother who was a shapeshifter. Now she lives in Aetheri, with an adopted mother who spends most of her time looking like a literal fox. What on earth is Yoshi's idea of gender? How much could her experience in the US shape the way she thinks about it? What has Shinobu told her about it? (What does Shinobu know, for that matter?) What is her conception of femininity and masculinity? How would she process feelings of bodily dysphoria in a cultural context where most people don't have any experience with gender or at least don't connect it to a person's genitals? What's her concept of being a woman, and where does it come from?

These are the kinds of questions I start with when building a lot of characters, like chipping away at a mold to pour something into. I do a lot of armchair psychology and try to be hella empathetic when writing anyone, and I tried to be extra so with Yoshi, because she exists in a weird vortex of both real and fictional cultures, during some tumultuous times.

So I started with a couple of conceits:

Yoshi's birth mother didn't enforce any kind of gender roles on her as a child. She didn't go out of her way to raise Yoshi in a gender-neutral manner, but Yoshi also didn't get to socialize with other kids, instead spending most of her time around her big scary wolf mom, growing her hair long and wearing too-big clothes and generally being a ragamuffin.

Probably the first time anyone did do this to Yoshi was after she left her mom's care. There was a brief time wherein Yoshi was in the care of some humans, who cut her hair and gave her things like trucks and GI Joes to play with. This was probably the first inkling Yoshi ever had that she wasn't what people were expecting, somehow.

I imagine Shinobu's view of gender used to be rather conservative, but by the time Yoshi comes to live with her, she's lived in Aetheri for twenty-ish years and her views on that have changed quite a bit.

Yoshi (and Shinobu) experience profound senses of Otherness as immigrants in Aetheri. Even where it's not clearly defined, they both have their own ideas of where they are not welcome in Aetherian culture by most natives. The species gap, of course, does not help.

(Moms.)

Based on that, plus the way I know Aetheri's native genderless culture would intersect with Yoshi's mishmash of midwestern-US-and-Japanese roots, plus the mix of other cultures that Yoshi would be in contact with in both Escalus and at the Palace--many of which have wildly varying ideas of gender themselves--I figured on the following:

Yoshi probably wouldn't associate any particular behavior or presentation with any particular gender. She's surrounded by too many different kinds of  people, most of whom are Aetherians that decide on their own pronouns as they feel like.

(Though, notably, literally everyone in Yoshi's life who identifies as a woman specifically are outspoken, tough people.)

I think there was, not a pressure exactly, but a sense that Shinobu gave that she and Yoshi both should be staying in their lane, so to speak, with a lot of cultural markers of theirs. Things they saw as uniquely a hallmark of spirits and rooted deep in Aetherian culture, they both feel rather outside of--things like holidays, the traditions of relationships, the lack of gender distinction, and so on. (There is not much of a pressure on immigrant populations in Aetheri to assimilate so much as a pressure on them to not be allowed to assimilate at all.)

Shinobu probably gave Yoshi a very clinical, simple sex education right around age 10 or so, and this included talking about the ostensible differences between 'male' and 'female' anatomy. As I've mentioned, sex education in Aetheri is a wild mess if you aren't a spirit, so this is probably the first time this was ever told to Yoshi, although I'm sure--living first with her mother and then with Shinobu--she had at the very least a growing sense that there was some physical difference between her and them.

Yoshi, being generally a shy person, probably didn't protest this too much at the time, but I think she probably dwelled a lot on how repelling the idea of growing up physically 'male' the way Shinobu described it was to her. It would have made her feel very panicked, to know what was coming.

Shinobu loves Yoshi dearly, but she's never been very good at picking up on emotional cues, and when presented with someone's emotional distress she rarely knows what to do. Even if she had noticed Yoshi's upset, I think she probably would have told herself that it was part of growing up--everyone gets a bit weirded out by the idea of puberty, right? It's a lot to take in. And maybe she didn't explain it well, or compassionately enough. And Yoshi's a shy, awkward kid, and talking about sex and anatomy is probably incredibly embarrassing to her. It could be, Shinobu would figure, any number of things.

Maybe the idea of 'this doesn't happen to spirits, not in the same way' was raised in this talk Yoshi and Shinobu had. Maybe Shinobu's answer was something like 'spirits are different. You're not a spirit.' which while not inaccurate (spirits do age and mature differently than Yoshi was) misses rather a lot of important nuance.

Yllur is a pretty well-known-about thing in Aetheri, and there's no real stigma about it. I don't know at what point Yoshi learned about it, but I think when she did was probably even more upset. Here was a thing that would have given her some relief, but it as far as she knew didn't apply to her because it was for spirits.

So I think Yoshi probably just went on sort of miserably into her teenage years, thinking she would eventually get used to herself and live with it (I don't know about you but this sounds familiar to me), but then her shapeshifting issues started happening and forced her to think about it more. You can't dissociate from your own body while simultaneously having a handle on it well enough to change its shape through your own will. Distilling back down into her normal humanoid form requires her to know what her body is actually shaped like, and be mindful of her physical form and the space it occupies. For her, this act is distressing in and of itself--a reminder that 'oh yeah, I'm this.'

No one told her otherwise, and she didn't tell a soul. She sort of just retreated into herself some. She moved out of Shinobu's place into the apartment in the Palace stables relatively early, and effectively isolated herself from anyone who might notice that she wasn't doing well. (Why she did this is another matter.) The human population in Escalus is small, and the monster population is varied, and neither are usually very welcoming to mixed-species types. She didn't have much of a community, even though Escalus is full of gender-variant people. She didn't even really have any friends, until Liya came along.

One of the trickiest parts for me to figure out is how to let Yoshi come into the realization on her own. The original draft of chapter 6 didn't include Vlad at all--Yoshi and Liya were going to discover the du Cuppra through different means. I figured Liya was the most likely person in Yoshi's life to know that 'transgender' was a thing, since we'd already established that Hawk knew what it was, I just had to figure out how it comes up. I can't imagine Yoshi being bold enough to actually talk about her bodily dysphoria, at least not now...she doesn't know Liya THAT well. And I couldn't imagine that the way that conversation would go would be incredibly fun to read, either. It would be Yoshi stammering a lot, and Liya getting impatient and trying to string together what she means, and it'd just be awkward and drawn out. I also didn't want Liya to be the one to suggest that Yoshi is trans. I wanted Yoshi to do that. She just needed to know about the thing is all. Bringing Vlad into the chapter fixed a lot of other narrative issues I was having, but it also gave Yoshi the chance to have this realization on her own, while Liya and Vlad were yakking about it.

And this is about where we're up to. Yoshi's whole character arc is just beginning; she's just about to get off the ground. Her trans-ness is not the only journey she's going on over the course of White Noise (everyone's going on lotsa journeys here, folks) but it's a big one.

I hope this was interesting to some of you! I cut out a lot of other stuff--turns out I have a lot to say about trans characters in comics? Who knew. Anyways, I guess if you have further questions, ask me! I have been sort of absent lately due to mental health issues and am in the process of changing medications (yey) so you may not get an answer for a bit, but I'll get to them.

Thanks for reading!

[werevulvi]

I'm starting to slowly understand that this de-transition I'm doing will probably always be pretty rough on me. I'm re-watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for the millionth time. I guess, for being about a hyper-feminine, conventionally attractive girl, it's pretty empowering. And Giles is definitely my favourite, British dork. Buffy is empowering because she really doesn't need anyone to help her out, except when she wants help. She's the furthest thing from a helpless damsel in distress, but she's also vulnerable and in many ways, like any other teenage girl.

I guess I can relate to that, on the level of depths I rarely swim in. Except in reverse. Like I look really masculine, male, and very different from other women, but on the inside I'm still vulnerable, and understanding the world from having been socialised female, like I guess most women are, to various degrees. And I guess I'm holding onto that. Sometimes too much. Sometimes... even to my detriment.

But when your womanhood is almost literally hanging by a thread, and you treasure it... it's easy to clutch too damn hard at it, as if your life somehow depended on that grip. And I guess that's how Buffy got me thinking, really a lot. Thoughts that have been passing through my mind for a while now, finally stuck around long enough for me to grasp.

It feels like there's just no ideal solution for me. I'm still generally at a pretty good place with my gender and presentation now. There's nothing I really wanna change, except from going back on testosterone. But how satisfied am I really? That's the difficult question. I get these moments here and there, when I get... you know, sad. I guess I get jealous of women who still look like women. Like Buffy, and all those other female characters that I relate to (all three of them, lol.) Their ability to blend into society as one of the females. That which I once used to take for granted, and barely even was aware of, and did not even like.

As a teen and throughout most of my 20's, I didn't like the idea of "blending in" or looking "normal" as I saw that as equal to disappearing and becoming insignificant. I liked standing out, to look like a someone, instead of a no one. But for the past couple of years? Not so much. I don't have that same mindset anymore. Now I understand that when people don't pay attention to what I look like... they finally notice my personality. And I really like that. I feel no need to have an alternative style for the sake of expressing myself anymore, although I'm still drawn to tattoos and piercings. If anything, it rather hinders people from truly listening to me, because they're too busy judging my appearance!

Whether I stand out now or not, well... I do have kind of a choice over. Just not so much in my favour. Or well, it is, but at the same time not. I can blend in among men as a "normal" looking guy, which takes no effort and has become my go-to, but I can never do that as a woman. I mean, I'm not just recognised as a woman who is ugly or looks weird, or "too" masculine. I'm not recognised as a woman at all.

And yeah, sure, I'm fine with that. Not a big deal.

But sometimes I still mourn the loss of my ability to be seen as a woman, and not look like trash while doing it. Sometimes... I can't help but struggling to look at myself. It just gets so raw sometimes, and I feel ugly. Society's beauty standards still has a certain choke hold on me. I can't break free from that over night. Especially since I was a makeup addict for a really long time and only just recently stopped wearing makeup altogether. Especially since I struggled with an eating disorder, which I only just recovered from a few years ago. Especially since I previously used sex with men as a way to seek value and worth, but found the opposite, yet still crave that harmful lifestyle. I'm barely a stone's throw away from being the slave of femininity I once was. Perhaps transitioning was my unconscious way of attempting to break free from it. Yes, I think there could be some truth to that. I revel in my masculinity now, but the wounds femininity caused in me, still hurt. It took me about this long to even understand their existence.

My mind still makes these connections, that by "woman standards" I look... absolutely hideous. Bearded, balding, scars for tits, hair all over my body. Yeah, great. I feel disfigured. Like some kind of abomination. I'm just gonna have to live with that knowledge, and what it does to me.

Because sometimes I get lost in what I think other people must think I look like, as soon as I tell them I'm actually a woman. I've gotten looks of disgust from that, and I guess I just haven't quite figured out how to handle that sorta thing yet.

I know that every time I've tried to "present as female" again, I've regretted it and felt absolutely horrible. On one hand it's tragic, because societal beauty standards still make me break down over my appearance sometimes, in desperate attempts to make myself look beautiful again... and that's when I feel the claws of femininity scratching me up from within, all over again. That endless chase for unobtainable, so called "beauty" and the failure that's bound to follow. And I guess it's a little bit sad, that I think I look a lot hotter as a man, than I ever even could as a girl or woman, and that could be part of why I hold onto my male-like appearance as a comfort in my newfound masculinity.

But is that so bad?

This harsh weather of self-discovery demands a comfort blanket. But on the other hand, most days I actually feel great about the way I look, and I can even manage to still feel good about the way I look when I see myself as a woman. That is great progress!

I'm actually starting to be able to connect my womanhood with my masculinity, and when I do, I feel great. That's my "good days" and I have a lot more of them than those "bad days" when I feel disfigured. Because that feeling is relative, not objective. It's relative, not only to social gender norms for men and women respectively, but also to my own inner norms of my own gender, which are highly influenced by the norms of the society I live and grew up in. And I've noticed I actually have the power to adjust that broken compass within me that struggles to connect my appearance with my mind.

I think my dysphoria broke quite badly, when I started poking around in it. I mean, not only do I get envious of other women (who have not transitioned) but as soon as I present as female, I instead get jealous of men again, and feel even worse about the way I look! It's a catch 22!

I do not know what my tired, dysphoric heart craves, or if any physical change would really help me feel better. I still regret my top surgery, but no kinds of reconstructed boobs would be able to fill that empty void. Because it's not nearly as much physical as it is psychological. It's missing and grieving something very specific, which cannot ever return. And that too... I just have to live with.

However, I'm again trying out wearing fake boobs. Small sock tits in sports bras. As often as my deformed ribs can handle. It quickly gets very painful in the dents I caused by binding pre-op. I ordered some oversized sports bras and gel insertions, that I'm impatiently waiting for to arrive! In the mean time I try to make do with what I have, which is too small and too tight, but for an hour here and there, is alright. I feel good with the illusion of small boobs, something like barely a B-cup at most. It feels more like my body when it's not board flat, and it makes me feel better about being curvy as well. Otherwise I still wear the same men's clothes I'd usually wear. Flannels, jeans, hoodies, suits, etc. That's perfect. It feels a lot like me.

I really should have left my chest be. But I didn't. And that's okay. I'll manage.

I reach out to testosterone again for comfort. Familiar comfort that always made me feel better, and badass. I know it won't take my pain away. But honestly, that's okay. I actually want to keep my pain, anyway. Because it helps me heal and feel stronger again. I don't like being in pain, but I feel like it's rebuilding me, strengthening me from within, and forces me to re-think what's not working. Pain is my guide to comfort. That fire in my ass that keeps me moving.

So yeah, I'll live.

I'll keep breaking down sometimes, and feel like I made myself into the ugliest woman on Earth, but even that, I can draw some kinda power from. Being proudly ugly is definitely something I can do! And then I feel untouchable. When I remind myself that my "ugliness" is not only entirely subjective, but also... entirely deliberate. That I choose to not try to salvage my thinning head hair, because I do not need it. That I choose to let my beard grow out, because it brings me comfort. That I choose to keep my chest flat, despite all my difficult feelings I have about it, because it allows me to go topless and braless. And so on.

My deliberate ugliness, worn with pride and survival... I'd say is quite beautiful. That's what keeps me going. Dated: January 7th, 2021.

[anti-dennor]

masterpost on why mod norway hates den//nor a lot without mentioning kin stuff or specific ships that are better

disclaimer: this post isn’t to start an argument, the only reason I’m making it is to organize my thoughts about den//nor because @ adhd wyd. 

This is okay to reblog, but I will ignore any and all reblogs adding on things about how I’m wrong. This is based off a mix of opinion, canon and scientific evidence about attraction, and I really, really, don’t want to argue about den//nor, especially with people who ship it. So really, for the sake of my mental health and your time, don’t bother arguing with my stubborn ass. I’m not going to change my stance on this and there’s nothing you can say to change that.

contents: yaoi / it’d be unhealthy (for both of them) / the actual shippers / dynamic

yaoi.

I’m not saying I dislike gay ships, no. I live for gay ships, I’m a gay male, I love mlm ships. Big comfort material. I dislike yaoi, gay ships are fine and dandy. Yaoi is gross.

Yaoi (”Also called BL (Boy’s Love) and Shounen Ai, yaoi is a genre of manga that fetishizes m/m relationships and relies on homophobic stereotypes for plot and character devices.”), and fujioshis.

“In most yaoi mangas, there is one agressive masculine man who preys upon an usually much younger, submissive feminine man. It strengthens the homophobic myth of gay men being predators and pedophiles.”

Doesn’t that sound a lot how the fandom portrays Denmark and Norway? Denmark is canonically the same height as Norway (Well, Norway is like an inch shorter at most), and the two have about the same body shape. Yet what do y’all fujioshis do? Draw Norway as some femme boy that’s like a foot shorter than Denmark.

“It also relies on heteronormative stereotypes, where there are always strict uke/seme roles in bed, as well as a feminine caring and a masculine powerful dynamic in the relationship outside of the bed.  “

Again, what do y’all do? Make Norway super femme and oh so much smarter than Denmark, making Denmark the unhealthily powerful one -- Bringing me to my next point;

it’d be unhealthy (for both of them).

“They have known each other since childhood, but while Denmark considers the two of them to be like best friends and believes that Norway thinks the same way he does, he is unaware of Norway's blunt teasing.[7] Norway frequently refers to him as anko[12], a term Himaruya has described as having a nuance like older brother or oniichan, the familiar form of big brother, and having a classmate-like feeling.[13]”

“Main article: Norway

Norway is a childhood friend of Denmark's, who he feels rather close to and strongly about, believing that Norway sees him the same way as a "best friend." “

(source: Norways wiki & Denmarks wiki)

Since I’m not sure how to word it; lets take my parents for example; they’d been dating since they were 15 (fifteen) until they were like 23-24. My mom used to go over to his house every. single. day. because she felt more at home there than at her own home. They never argued, they were like a perfect relationship almost. Why they broke up? My mom, and I quote, “saw him more like a brother than a lover.” Which is a completely justified reason to break up! My parents have the same relationship as siblings. Now, if my parents felt like siblings after 8 years of growing up together; imagine the bond that Denmark and Norway have.

They grew up together for thousands of years! Meaning they’d be much, much closer than my parents were. So maybe they could’ve dated at some point in their history, but I can see them doing the same thing my parents did; break up because they felt like siblings/being best friends would be better. Plus, you don’t call your lover “brother”, even if you’re not actually related or don’t mean it as sibling-way especially if you have other, blood-related, siblings.

Why would a relationship be unhealthy for the both of them?

Because if they feel like brothers, then you get the same unhealthy benefits of actual incest from the Westermarck effect, “a hypothetical psychological effect through which people who live in close domestic proximity during the first few years of their lives become desensitized to sexual attraction.” Which, guess what, Denmark and Norway have known each other since childhood, 

Fujioshis turning the shp into yaoi + the westermarck effect; what do we have?

If you put the two into a relationship you’re implying that one of them is unconsciously forcing themselves onto the other. Or just, y’know, people straight up writing something like Danish Slaughter House - a fanfiction where Denmark straight up rapes and kills all the Nordics.

And speaking of Danish Slaughter House, let’s move on to the next point;

the actual shippers.

I don’t even know where to start with this one. I guess I’ll start with shamchat, a great site, I spend a lot of time there - as one of my biggest hobbies in the past few years is roleplaying. I have almost 2 years of experience with writing Norway. The thing is, when I come across Denmarks on the site it almost always, if theyre a Dennor shipper, starts off as something like:

Best friends hanging out -> Denmark asks Norway to do something with him -> Norway is busy -> Denmark gets sad -> Norway tries to make him feel better -> Denmark confesses feelings.

what? and then Norway will tell Denmark that he sees him as a brother or just doesn’t feel the same, and then there’s a long range of reactions I’ve gotten from Denmarks with this, some of the worst including being harassed ooc for not shipping it, being guilted ooc for not shipping it (@ my RSD, someone telling me that they’re crying because I don’t ship something just. x20 as bad as neurotypicals), Denmark trying to force himself onto Norway sexually, and there was actually one where they had Denmark threaten to kill whoever Norway had feelings for.

For fucks sake! Once I was on as FtM!Caught Binding!Norway because I was feeling incredibly dysphoric, and I had a Denmark threaten to out Norway to the other Nordics, while Norway was begging him not to, and when he finally agreed not to  - which took actually making Norway (and me for that matter, since I have really big emotional ties with Norway) cry - he immediately jumps to a confession, which Norway sorta tells him off because what makes anyone think after threatening to out someone as trans they’re gonna accept a uwu love confession uwu uwu, which in turn upset Denmark and the entire rp turns to them - Norway trying to make him feel better, telling him that he’s his brother and always will be, etc. Making the biggest effort to make him feel better, but no instead he runs away to his bedroom, locks himself in his closet and tried to stab himself to death.

Most of these were done while I was on mobile, so unfortunately I don’t have saves to them.

Am I upset that you people portray Denmark horribly? Of course. My point isn’t the portrayals of Denmark here, though. Because the canon portrayal of Denmark is actually pretty fit for Norway, not going to lie, but my point is about how the shippers pull bullshit like this when someone doesn’t like their ship, which again ties into the homophobia of yaoi.

“Many mangas in this genre also have a plot centered around rape (the seme/top rapes the uke/bottom, then the uke realizes he actually loves the seme and allows the relationship to continue), abuse (physical, where the seme will hurt the uke, or emotional, where either part will threaten things as far as suicide if the other part dares to leave them), pedophilia (shota is a subgenre of yaoi in which boys as young as 5-6 will have sexual relationships with middle aged men). “

Most of these I’ve actually had to deal with personally aside from the pedophilia/shota bit, while I’ve never actually done an rp with someone as Shota!Denmark (I skip anyone who thinks shota is ok), I’ve seen them around, along with Shota!Norways.

I’m not going to start with the amount of Denmark’s on shamchat idealizing Norway in every way, shape and form.

dynamic.

Admittedly, Denmark is an almost ideal guy for Norway personality-wise, with how socially inept Norway is (Which Denmark can still be there for him if they’re friends), but for Denmark, Norway isn’t super suitable. The idea that Denmark needs someone to keep him in check is a little, how do I say it, wrong. Denmark is over 2000 years old, he’s smart enough to keep himself in check, while it would be nice for him to have someone to be there to tell him “You’re being too loud” and to give him a little help here and there, best friends can do that, can they not? As for a romantic partner, Denmark would probably be better matched with someone who doesn’t have trouble complimenting people or doing things solely to please him.

Denmark has his self image as a priority, and as shown by the above strips I’ve given, Norway isn’t the best to give him that. Norway is better at subtly doing things for people he cares for, not outright stating and cheering for him - which I did try to find the part of a strip where Denmark was imagining Norway and Iceland cheering for him (Or something like that), I couldn’t find it, but that one in specific emphasizes that a romantic relationship between Denmark and Norway wouldn’t quite work the same way their brothery relationship works.

Everyone teases and gets into arguments with their siblings, (Which Norway does tease & occasionally insult Denmark) and you always know that everything your sibling says to insult you isn’t serious, but even though Denmark “blatantly ignores offensive and aggressive social tones ”, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t pick up on them and he holds himself up too high for it to be a healthy relationship romantically if for either of them if Norway isn’t going to be positive, Norway is kinda negative and Denmark contrasts that greatly, but if Norway can’t give Denmark flattery and self esteem boosts straightforwardly, then Denmark won’t be happy in the relationship, which makes him less positive, making him less ideal for Norway. Whereas if they just stay as brothers, it’s easier for Denmark to just brush off any teasing or criticism Norway might have.

As for romantic relationships for Norway, I did say earlier that Norway needs someone who’s positive, good at social interaction, cheerful, friendly, etc. He also needs someone who easily picks up on the little things he does and isn’t extremely high-maintenance when it comes to needing flattery. Someone that Norway doesn’t have to be straightforward with. While we’re at it, I’ll also mention why someone who isn’t these things wouldn’t work, Norway needs someone positive and good at social interaction because he’s not these things, (He’s said it himself, he is painfully shy around strangers as he resolved to leave upon seeing them; yes I’m ignoring that he did all that speaking right after he said that, this is because I’m going off the it was only there for comedic purposes and doesn’t mean anything), and he needs someone cheery/friendly to contrast himself (I’m not saying he isn't friendly! He is quite that, but isn’t great at expressing it.), since a relationship between two characters who are really apathetic about a lot of things would just end in them thinking theyre apathetic abt each other. Picking up on little things + not needing to be straightforward with is kinda self explanatory after the stuff about Denmark.

Anyways, back on track. Kinda? Conclusion.

I do like the “quiet one & loud one”/”opposites attract”/similar tropes a lot, but when it comes to Denmark and Norway it doesn’t quite work out as well as others might. Especially with fandom misportrayals, it kinda ruins the pairing for me.

[werevulvi]

At this point I feel like I'm just floating between two identities. Like what does it really matter what I decide to call myself? Says the desperate and jaded. I feel like I need to juggle my two different perspectives for a while. I will mostly use tumblr for it when I lean more gender critical, and probably use fb instead when I lean more towards trans thinking, until I figure this shit out for sure. Thus, I will keep being a dysphoric woman here on tumblr, and nonbinary on my fb account. That way I can juggle my two conflicting sides without feeling too much pressure to "just make sense already."

To clarify, my views are mainly gender critical, but it wouldn't be wrong to say that I'm still flirting with TRA views on gender, dysphoria and transition. Essentially, bio sex is the only actually scientifically proven and tangible thing about this all. Laws etc should be based on sex. Sexual attraction is based on sex. Then dysphoria is also a real medical condition, like it's an actual distress and I don't think it's solely caused by social factors. There are lots of different types of dysphoria, alright. As for gender, however... I don't believe in it, but... basically I just respect that other people have an inner sense of gender (like that's their interpretation of their feelings) while I'm still highly critical of WHY they have that interpretation. And I can’t fit myself into my old thinking of gender at all anymore. It is completely alien to me. The spell has broken and I cannot cast it again.

As for my dysphoria, basically what I'm dealing with is (a probably very rare kind of) atypical dysphoria. I like some aspects of female on my body, but not all. I like some aspects of male on my body, but not all. I feel like I should look like a hybrid of male and female, and I feel both belonging and disconnect to/from womanhood and manhood. It is a constant push and pull in both directions, uncomfortably kneading me into a serene middle-ground. That middle-ground is not a compromise; it is a very peaceful and harmonic place for me to be. It's where I'm relieved of my dysphoria. I used to avoid it my whole life, until I finally stopped fighting myself. There is tranquility here, at this inbetween, that I didn't know existed. I'm clearly dysphoric, but I am not FtM - I'm FtX. I do not give a single fuck if you think nonbinary is real or not. What I'm telling you now is: this is my dysphoria and it simply is what it is. Then what you wish to call it and what I wish to call it does not matter.

Anyhow. I just wanted to give that little debrief of my dysphoria so that you'd hopefully understand why I'm struggling so much with labels, because it's not so straight-forward. Another thing I very much want to clarify is that labels are means of communication for me - NOT identity. Just like I use the label lesbian to communicate what my sexual orientation is. That has a clear purpose. For the same reason we call ourselves men or women: it has a clear purpose. Then my question to myself, my oh so eternal question, is: what is the best label for me to communicate to others what I am and/or how I wish to be perceived?

Problem 1: What I wish to communicate (that I'm a bio female person who's happily transitioned) is not the same as what I wish to be seen as (person of indeterminate gender.)

I don't know how to feel about that what I'm mostly assumed to be a male who identifies as a woman. Do I feel bad, ashamed or guilty, for looking like a bad stereotype of trans women? Yes. I think I fear that I will come across as mocking trans women, because my looks are deliberate. I feel bad for copying gnc men. My affinity for feminine stuff like lipstick and dresses, and my absolute refusal to let go of those things, makes me feel guilty in a feminist sense. I don't believe that the way I use femininity is harmful for myself, because I've adapted it to fit my needs of comfort as well as my social goals with it. It is not sexual, it is not restraining or hindering. It is not adhering to societal standards of beauty - if anything it's mocking that.

Yes, I am mocking femininity, but I also use it because it makes me feel less naked, and more expressive. I'm always accompanying my femininity with strong masculine features such as deliberately visible facial hair and body hair, etc. My femininity is not my womanhood, but it is a highly important way for me to express my personality, symbolically. I do not want for people to oogle my naked body, or a careless sack of clothing that I've rushed into - I want for them to see my personality, so that they'll get an idea of who I am before talking to me. But despite all that... I still feel guilty for being genuinely feminine. How can I be authentic, if no matter where I turn, I feel guilt, shame, or fear?

Problem 2: As soon as I claim the nonbinary label I miss calling myself a woman, and as soon as I claim myself as a woman, I miss calling myself nonbinary.

Do I have a gender? Yes and no. It depends on how I look at it. Do I need to have a gender? Not really, but it's easier in most aspects of socialising if I do, because of my appearance. Do I want to have a gender? Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't.

I feel like I went into the gender store and bought too many. Now I sit here with a useless pile of trash that cost a fortune. I am terrified to get rid of it. There will be consequences if I do. I've been building up to this moment for almost two years. I am still building up to it. The pile is stinking and I need to take it out to the garbage disposal, but I can't make myself do it. What if I'll need it later? I'm too nostalgic for my own good.

Problem 3: When I don't want to have a gender I'm a proud woman based on my sex, but when I do want a gender, nonbinary feels more right. I can't really make a gender in my brain and then stick to it. I keep picking it up, then tossing it away, then picking it up, then tossing it away, and so on. I want to have the gender cake and eat it at the same time. Sometimes I feel proud to be woman, who takes testosterone and loves her lesbian pussy. But then it gets increasingly uncomfortable and I'd just rather not be anything specific. Then I flip to view myself as a hybrid of man and woman and that feels comfortable and uplifting. Until it doesn't anymore and I miss taking pride in being a woman, and I just don't know what the fuck is up with that.

Perhaps my "identity" is split off from my dysphoria? I dunno what I meant with that thought. Perhaps it came from my lack of social dysphoria. It's just social anxiety over looking weird.

Oh I wish I could try living in a perfect society with no sexism, and see if I'd then always be comfortable with calling myself a woman and freely be this bearded, deep-voiced, charming lady in a gothy dress, wine red lipstick and a pearl necklace, with no need to beat myself up for not being "woman enough." Because I worry that is why I keep reaching for the nonbinary label. Maybe it is out of fear? Maybe the reason I feel good about calling myself nonbinary is rooted in just wanting to be left alone to be a beautifully virilized woman, because I'm never given the chance to be that kinda woman.

It breaks my heart. You know that? You should.

No matter how much testosterone I take and no matter how much I love the effects of it... I am forever female and I love that too. No way in this despicable hell... would I ever want my sex erased. It's profoundly important to me, and such is my transition. I think that is why I stand with one foot in self-loving and the other in the medical result of dysphoria. My body is a cocktail of this and that, a little bit tit for tat, and I revel in its strange combination of exquisite flavours.

I feel like I have transcended the concept of gender, but as a happily transitioned, dysphoric woman, I have a very hard time conveying that to the rest of my little world, and the world at large. What is a woman who is happily transitioned to a goal that falsely mimmics the visual effects of certain intersex and hormonal conditions? Who am I to glorify the visual results of others' suffering? Oh I dunno, but I probably have more respect for them than I do for myself, if that counts as an excuse.

What am I? And how do I move forward in society, as honestly as possible?

What I am... is in the eye of the beholder. Depending on your ideology, you will have a different opinion (boldly assuming that you'd even care at all) but what I think is... there is no one correct answer. Thus, in my desperate search for that one true answer, I cannot win. All I can do is pick whatever makes me the most comfortable, but the only thing that would soothe me is the ultimate truth. (No, that's not it. Keep scrambling.)

I have become a biologist obsessed with finding the truth of God with a microscope. No wonder people are beginning to question my sanity.

("Are you okay?" Uhm no, I don't think so.)

What I need to figure out, is if gender serves me, and if "woman" serves me. But they both do, and I have to make a choice. There I stand, finding that they both serve me, unable to make a choice.

(Somewhere around here, I started going off on a tangent and lost myself in the endless whirls of my heart and mind. So I rolled back the tape, and here I am again. The rest in an over-write.)

How do I see myself? I see myself both as a woman and as nonbinary. Sometimes I need my gender, sometimes I don't. What I am is still the same, but there are many different ways to label me correctly, and THAT is what chafes at me.

Problem 4: I do not want to have a politically charged label. Woman has become a political statement for me, because of my appearance contradicting that statement, and the statement contradicts my dysphoria. It being so politically charged makes me uncomfortable. I wish to just exist as a woman, not declare myself as one. Nonbinary is equally a political statement, of rejecting gender norms which are harmful to everyone. Nonbinary strips the bearer of their sex, and releases the pressure on them to conform. There is the catch. Woman, instead strips the bearer of the freedom to not conform, but releases the pressure of gender. And there I think I've hit the nail on the head. What I wish for... is a label which does not strip me of my sex, nor forces me into conformity to look like my sex. Woman should be that label, but the only way it can ever be... is to put on that armour and fight for it, which I don't want to.

The label woman is too heavy for me, as a male-passing female, to bear in this gender-obsessed world - while nonbinary feels like a betrayal, both to myself and all other women. Nonbinary feels like a happy fantasy, until it shatters upon my realisation that it is not real. Woman feels like the powerful authenticity from the bottom of my chromosomes, until reality hits that it's a very difficult label for me to wear. Then I run away scared into my happy fantasy, but I am tired of continuously shattering and rebuilding myself.

What I want is to fully embrace my womanhood, without running back to the trans community again and again, to cry about how cruel reality is, and please validate my special trans feelings, which of course... the zombies do. I feel like I have Stockholm Syndrome for the trans community. I feel hurt by its sexism and homophobia, which is aimed directly at me as a gender-breaking woman and as a female-exclusive lesbian, yet I keep running back to it, pleading for validation as the utter coward I am! Because I am terrified of being a woman and a lesbian in the real world... while looking like this. I love the way I look, but I am scared and I am ashamed of facing my reflection with pride, as a woman. Because that means something more. It doesn't "just" mean that I'm female, it also means that when I with pride call myself a woman... I am reclaiming the one thing which I ought not to. No one shames a trans man or dysphoric enby for wanting a beard and loving taking testosterone... but the second a "cis" woman does? You know that is different. Cis is a lie, but I am real. I'm a woman, and I love testosterone flowing through my veins. My true beliefs... lie with radfem, and I'm only "making space" for gender in those beliefs to not hurt my loved ones' feelings.

How am I supposed to handle and move beyond this? Will it ever get easier?

Problem 5: It's not the nonbinary bush I have been beating around... it's the radfem bush. I have not been honest about my sense of self, anywhere else than here on tumblr. I do not want a gender label on my feelings. Gender is so harmful and I need to stop being its martyr. Can I accept and respect other people for having genders? Sure, whatever, I don't particularly care what people choose to call their feelings, as long as laws aren't being built around those feelings. But I can't for the life of me stop squirming at the idea of ME having a gender again. It is uncomfortable. Get the fucking parasite off me! Gender has been poisoning me again lately. It was a mistake to look into it again. It has been clouding my vision, because I forgot what truly matters: To look like whichever gender expression I wish, to act out whichever gender role I want, to treat my dysphoria however I see fit for myself, but not to lie about what I am: female=woman.

Problem 6: I am free without gender, but I am also incredibly vulnerable. As if I was completely naked before the whole world. Then even wearing a clown suit feels better in comparison.

Solution: I need to break up with the trans community. That toxic relationship has been going on for way too long now. I don't care if I lose all of my friends over it. I need to break free, and liberate my womanhood, because I have been shackling her. No matter how hard it is. I need to face my fear, guilt and shame. I need to tell myself that it's okay to hurt, but that it will get better. I need to stop reaching for nonbinary whenever I feel scared and ashamed to be a woman. I can cry about how hard it is... but never give up.

My dysphoria does not define me, and I refuse to let it.

[werevulvi]

Okay I feel like I just got very close to what's going on with me genderwise and why I've been spinning in circles about it so much. Especially lately, but also always. Keep in mind most of this text is just me ranting in attempts to try to figure myself out. It’s not definitive or a conclusion. Input is however always welcome. I think I would have been nonbinary if I hadn't become a radfem and no longer identify with gender as a concept. My personality/brain is very androgynous and I literally can't say it's of any specific gender. The question, of course, is does anyone's brain even have a gender? Well I'm no expert but I think it's possible that some people do, or rather that they come to the conclusion that they do. In my world, gender is ideological and belief-based rather than factual. It's a belief that I don't have, but I'm generally fine with others having it. Just like I'm fine with people believing in God, or any other deities. Cause I mean heck, I believe in Satan, so...

But I like and want for general society to be sex-based, not gender-based; just like I want for all societies to be secular. Cause gender hurts people (women, mostly) just like religion does too.

My dysphoria is pretty much telling me I should be partially both male and female (as opposed to neither sex), so from that I could theoretically come to the conclusion that my gender is nonbinary, now in my detransition, if I believed in gender. But since I don't, I simply scratch the concept of gender altogether and only go by my biological sex instead. Which is, transitioned or not, and regardless of what I wanna look like, still female. And it's possible that since my dysphoria is at least half okay with me being female, that could be why I'm also totally fine with seeing myself as a woman, cause even my dysphoria doesn't entirely oppose of that. It just partially wants me to me a man as well. Somehow.

And I've always been much more concerned with my physical/bodily situation than however I'm perceived socially, anyhow. But simply "getting over" being perceived as a man 100% of the time when my brain just goes against that, is not so easy. Sometimes I like it but not by every new person I meet. I want to be consistent, but for unknown reasons I hate neutral terms and the "they" pronouns. I guess ideally I'd be a "he/she" but I'd absolutely hate being such an obnoxious brat as to even kindly ask people to switch around terms and pronouns for me. Like I'd hate myself for it and feel like a complete burden. So I stick to only female terms/pronouns for convenience and consistency.

It's not that I see myself as a man one day and a woman the next, but rather my dysphoria says I'm somehow both a man and a woman at the same time, always, and it doesn't really shift around or change. Although on some days I do connect more or less to one or the other, but always acknowledge both. You know those old depictions of Satan painted as half a man and half a woman? (Usually with a goat head, but ignore that part.) Yeah something like that, but more coherently blended together, like equally mixed on both sides. However I still like and want for my body to be predominantly female, I just also like it having gone through both a female and a male puberty. It's like I connect with both sexes, but I know I'm not actually both. I'm just female. And perhaps I would ideally want to be seen as a "both male and female" person, but I'm also totally fine with being seen as just a medically masculinised woman, cause that's what I literally am. We're back to scientific basics here. What my dysphoria says is a deluded fairytale; what I say is let's be rational. And I don't want to be seen as or consider myself as something I am not. Not anymore. "I want to live in the real world" as Neo says in The Matrix movie when he takes the red pill. But when it comes to labels... yeah, no there really isn't a term for someone like me, who de-/transitions in a nonbinary way but sticks with sex-based terms/words and doesn't agree with gender ideology. FTX, perhaps? No, I hate that one too, cause it looks like I tried to erase my sex instead of enhancing it and making it... merrier. Also, is it just me or don't most nb people who medically transition seem to quite often actually want to look genderless, rather than double the dose? As in wanting to look both male and female at the same time. Well, just thinking about getting anything removed from my body gets me anxious... I can't imagine what it's like to want no sexed traits, and the thought of it makes me a little woozy. Not to judge others' dysphoria, just saying I so can NOT relate to that, what so ever. Cause I guess that's the total opposite of my own dysphoria.

But anyhow, because I don't go by any gender identity, or because I ask to be gendered in accordance with my bio sex, I've little in common with the popular circles of nonbinary people who only seem to be interested in calling out accidental misgendering, making up ridiculous fake genders and neo pronouns, claiming to be "non-dysphoric trans" or whatever the fuck have you. I kinda don't wanna associate myself with that kind of clownery. And let's not even get into what I think of their harmful fake-feminism views that they often drag along with their gender views... Probably the only things I've in common with (some of) those nb people is having atypical dysphoria and wanting more gender neutral bathrooms/locker rooms available. And yeah, less harrassment of gnc people in society, please. Oh well, being part of any pack has never really been my thing. It's always tempting from the outside, but suffocating from the inside. But my real pet peeve is that all trans labels are based on the notion that everything starts with gender identity, rather than gender dysphoria. And I guess that's the thorn in my side. That I don't like how gender-obsessed everything has become. I'd be embarrassed to say "I'm nb" if someone would ask me if I'm a man or a woman. Just like trans isn't a "third gender" I don't think nb is either, but people really do treat it as such. I don't even see transitioning as becoming or transforming myself into something I wasn't born as. I don't see myself as any less female than any women who don't wanna look partially male like I do.

But fact of the matter is a huge reason why I now feel so super comfortable to just go bat shit crazy with my hyper-femininity is because I've got my now additional maleness to balance it out with. I feel very balanced and harmonic with my maleness and femaleness, my femininity and masculinity, or I would if only I also had boobs again. When I imagine that I do (which I do at least several times per day, cause it just happens), I feel so right that there are no words for it... gender euphoria? Those might be the words I'm looking for!

I've been considering possibly just calling myself nonbinary though, for simplicity's sake, even though I don't like that term or associating myself with that community. Cause few outside of radfem circles seem to understand what I am at all, as a dysphoric detrans woman, and I feel desperate for a simple thing to call myself that would make my communication easier. That is why I'm hunting labels, with probably very apparent desperation, cause now I've so thoroughly entangled myself in a web of not being able to communiate my situation to either genderists or normies. Perhaps I could use the slightly incorrect label nb as a crutch or foundational brick, and then explain that despite what my dysphoria is telling me I consider myself a woman, lesbian, she/her, etc because of my female biology.

I dunno, though. I hate it all. Why did I put myself in this situation to begin with?! I want gender abolished yesterday. It's giving me a headache.