#realizing that I kinda feel disconnected from the whole Gender thing in the same way I feel disconnected from sexuality and romance

[immortalarizona]

for pride month I am haviiiiing. an itty bitty gender crisis

[enbies-and-felonies]

hey felony i've been following your blog for a while and you are a really amazing person and I appreciate you a lot!! I was wondering if you would be willing to kinda go into/discuss your personal journey with faith and queerness? it's something i've been struggling with recently and would really appreciate hearing your thoughts <3 (for real though, please don't feel obligated if youre not comfortable. I know this is a pretty hot topic, so please only if you're ok with it!!!!!!!)

first of all, thank you so much!!! I’m absolutely willing to talk about it, and afterwards if you have any questions (like, about specific aspects of it) I’m completely open to answering them :))

~~ Full thing under the Keep Reading, warnings for a lot of talk about God, Christianity, (a LOT of) homophobia, faith, and so on~~

I would like to start by saying you are completely valid, both in your faith and in your sexuality/gender, no matter what they are, and I am so proud of you.

okay, now about me laskdlsj

I have been raised as a Christian my whole life, and have gone to church everywhere I have lived, and my whole family has been very active in the Church body. It was church Sunday morning, AWANA on Wednesday evenings, and when I was old enough, youth group on Sunday evenings. (For awhile I even did a second youth group at a different church on tuesday nights)

My whole family is Christian (immediate family, that is) and because of that, I was raised surrounded by Christianity. The first two things when moving to a new place were (and are) 1. Unpacking and 2. Finding a new church.

All of this lead to me being more familiar with Christianity and the Bible than the average person. It also meant I had this... unspoken pressure to be Christian. So at a young age (around four I think?) I accepted that Jesus was the Son of God, that I was a sinner, and that by dying (and then coming back to life) Jesus had redeemed me from my sin. All well and good right.

I continued going to church two to three times a week, memorizing a few Bible verses for AWANA, and praying before every meal and sometimes bedtime. I grew older, moved, joined a new church, helped at a food pantry run by my church after a few devastating tornadoes. 

I saw God work in the aftermath of those tornadoes. I saw Him in the way we got donations for the ice maker we desperately needed to provide for disaster relief workers down to the cents of what we needed, and the way we were able to have meals for people who lost everything and the people who were working day in and day out to rebuild houses, clean properties, and overall do anything in their power to help the people affected.

My faith had never been stronger.

A year or so later I began to get really invested into BBC Sherlock, and with newly acquired access to the internet, I searched out the fandom on pinterest and wattpad. I was disgusted by all of the gay art and headcanons that came up. Didn’t they know that being gay was gross and a sin? it was repulsive and disgusting.

But I couldn’t avoid it. I was too far into the fandom and I ended up coming across more and more content with johnlock, crossovers with destiel, there was trans and ace sherlock, dean working through internalized homophobia (back when I didn’t even know who dean was, and I was still homophobic myself). Eventually I stopped clicking away whenever I saw a picture of john and sherlock embracing.

It was like... when you tell a kid they aren’t supposed to know about something, and they immediately want to know it all. I slowly began searching it out, because surely if people shipped them so much, there had to be something redeeming the fact that it was gay.

it started an interesting cycle of seeking out gay content, hating myself and the content because gay is BAD, loving the content because so much of it was loving relationships and heartfelt things, and then seeking out more gay content. eventually i accepted gay being okay, and after that (and a particularly moving trans!sam fic) i ended up accepting trans people.

and then came the hitter.

I started questioning myself.

I started relating to liking guys and girls, realizing that *maybe* finding girls that pretty wasn’t just platonic, and so i did a pro-gamer move (/s) and immediately became homophobic again. i couldn’t be gay, or bi, or anything, because that was WRONG

but it wasn’t. and eventually i was able to admit to myself that i wasn’t straight. I identified as bi at first, and even though i didn’t tell anyone about it, i was still happy that i was finding myself. (even though i still looked away when i noticed a girl was pretty)

then i realized that pan was just, a better fit for me? so pan it was!! and thus began the questioning!! since then I’ve come to id as ace, aro-spec, pan, and polyamorous, and eventually (after a severe gender-crisis) genderfluid.

throughout all of the questioning... I’ve really struggled in my identity and my faith. i often feel like i have to choose between the two.

i’ve been raised to think that if i accept my identity as a queer person, i lose my identity in Christ. and that, if i want to accept my identity as a child of God, i have to reject who i am (and that is partially correct, since i have to reject my sinful nature, but that’s not the same)

but that’s not how it is!! once you believe in God, and accept that Jesus died for your sins, you are irrevocably a Christian, and NOTHING can stop you from being a child of God and going to heaven. Not any sin, not anything you think, or say or do, for the rest of your life.

the thing is, the bible that we *think* condemns homosexuality, actually condemns incest, pedophilia, and adultery. God made people in His own image, and when he saw what he had made it was GOOD. He made me the way I am for a reason, and He LOVES me the way i am.

I still deal with a lot of internalized homophobia and transphobia. but,,, I also know that God is love. He is never-ending, overflowing love. and He thinks of me as His kid. 

My faith has struggled a lot since I started accepting my queerness, but... it’s not God that’s condemning me, it’s the Church (and not even all of the church!!) and my queerness doesn’t mean i can’t follow God and obey Him.

I have bad days, and I have good days, and even when I feel disconnected from God, I know that He loves me and that He is proud of me.

and the same goes for you, okay?

you are not disobeying God for being queer, and being proud of your faith doesn’t mean rejecting your queerness. He loves you and made you the way you are, and He is so proud of you. <3

[mystt]

i have a lot of thoughts about the state of homestuck right now and no one to talk to about it. im so sorry

i really want to love june egbert with all my heart, accept her with open arms!!! i relate so much to the idea of a weird awkward guying going thru a lot of his life feeling like something was wrong, like there was a disconnect between himself and the rest of the world, only to eventually realize that the problem was so deeply rooted that he never even realized that it could BE the problem! all of the art has been amazing, of seeing this just-out trans girl finally ecstactic to be herself and her friends meeting her for the first time all over again. the #juneisreal party on twitter yesterday was the most joyous and connected ive seen the homestuck fandom be for a long time!! but, because this is homestuck, i dont think everything about this situation is all sunshine and rainbows, not in the longterm anyway.....

frankly, a lot of ppl aren’t too happy about this, and they have every right to feel that way.  i can sympathize with those people because tbh i wasn’t a huge fan of roxy being transmasc in the epilogues (to be fair, theyve grown a lot on me now that ive had some time to think about it / see content involving them)! john has been an established character for a long time, someone that a lot of ppl have grown a very deep and personal connection with! its totally possible that someone read homestuck, interpreted john’s character in a very similar way to i just did, and come at the totally opposite outcome! maybe john is actually a trans guy and has a lot of trepidation navigating sexuality and gender because of it. the point is that all of it is valid, and as long as everyone respects eachother’s headcanons we’ll all be fine and dandy, right?

well, with hussie making her ‘real,’ the fandom dynamic around june (and roxy) content will inevitably change. the letter that hussie wrote for the epilogue is a bunch of garbage but it basically boils down to the epilogues not really being an epilogue but an on/off ramp to whatever homestuck ends up being in the future. this all but guarantees more june/transmasc roxy content, which im totally down for, but will that content be as ‘dubiously canon’ as the epilogues were? and if not, what happens then? 

are we supposed to believe that basically all homestuck content from this point on is al-a-carte, where each reader is able to pick and choose what is and isn’t canon? we were already doing that, but that’s the fandom’s job! call me crazy but there has to be some separation between fanon and canon! otherwise, you get complete mob-rule anarchy, which we’ve already seen wrt roxy and june!

homestuck is in a lose-lose situation with its characters at this point. the core appeal of the WHOLE DAMN COMIC is that all of its characters have very defined personalities and very amorphous everything else. homestuck is so everlasting because every reader comes out of it with their own permutations of each character in their head.....almost like.....a headcanon, u could call it!

but at the same time, homestuck has to have more ~representation~ in its cast nowadays. its just the trend that all media is following as people demand to see more of themselves reflected in the things they enjoy. that is absolutely valid in most forms of media where characters are well-defined in their identity, but that doesn’t work with homestuck, because no matter what you WILL be stepping on the toes of someone’s version of a character that they’ve been fostering in their own head for god knows how long

i think there ARE ways to make homestuck’s cast more diverse in a concrete way without making everyone upset! the first is to......make new characters......if homestuck really is entering a new era, why can’t it burst onto the scene with a new rainbow cast of misfits for everyone to imprint themselves onto? not enough trans mlm rep? why not make a new one (that isnt lanque)! not enough canon autistic rep? hire an autistic person to make an autistic character! friendsim would’ve been perfect for this, but they didnt take advantage of it basically AT ALL (and where they did they......kinda fucked up lmao)

something else ive seen suggested is to establish new identities for characters that don’t fundamentally change who they are. if you’re like me and you think homestuck needs more trans girls, why would you take JOHN of all ppl and make him mtf when you have a perfectly good rose....or jade....or terezi (or roxy but eh. thats not on the table anymore) right there!  

and i think its important to say that i dont blame this at all on the original creators of the june headcanon, i appreciate what theyve done and the works theyve inspired a lot! its not their fault, but things have really REALLY got out of hand. with pesterquest on the horizon, i think we’re in a fascinating and nervous period for homestuck. things are going to be changing soon, and i dont know if its gonna be for the better :C

[catboyfeli]

i think the reason i was so adamantly against the concept of nonbinary is, well partially because of crazies on tumblr ruining things, but also because? i thought it was normal for cis people to feel disconnected from their gender? and that social dysphoria was just caused by sexism so it didn’t count? and i thought me not having sex dysphoria meant i’m cis?

but apparently cis girls don’t get excited at the idea of being called he or doing drag or presenting as male, and the way people explained it made it sound like they were just tomboys or gnc cis girls or something, so i thought nonbinary as a concept enforced gender roles and therefore was harmful

but like now i get it. i still don’t like how the nb community forces the label onto anyone who doesn’t conform to gender roles and social roles, but like i get it now, i really do. i was feeling dysphoria this whole time and just brushed it off as internalized misogyny or me being sad that all the guys i like are gay or hating myself for being cis or wlm or something.

buuut ever since realizing this, i suddenly feel way more dysphoric and there’s no way for me to be seen as male and female at the same time and it sUCKS. i def don’t think i’m trans b/c i like being seen as female, but i also like being seen as male :/ the fact that i can’t really be both makes me uncomfortable feeling

but also like?? i’m comfortable with my body? for the most part?? so i’m worried i’m just confused or faking it lol. idk it’s complicated.

anyway the thought that i might be nonbinary fuckin terrifies me like i don’t wanna be seen as one of those crazies and i just?? aaaa??? kinda wish i never realized things so this dysphoria would gO AWAY