#rebloggable by mutuals /

[rose-from-ashes]

Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep.

[vulpinesaint]

pspspspsps poetry mutuals come here... new quiz... making you the patron saint of something...

[trans-axolotl]

my gendered experience growing up as an intersex person was overwhelmingly defined by my responses and resistance to everything that got me labeled as a failure: failure to quickly get a gender assigned at birth, failure to go through a normal puberty and grow up into a woman, failure at meeting the standards for "complete womanhood" because of my intersex sex traits, and yet simultaneously failing to ever be acknowledged as a "real man" and being treated as a threat when I expressed I wanted to transition.

before i realized i was a man and came out as trans, the ways that girlhood was denied to me was very often humiliating and painful. locker rooms filled with other girls were a frequent source of shame. there were many big and small ways that i was told that my intersex body made me insufficient, incomplete, broken. i was forced onto estrogen, forced into shaving my body hair, and was constantly being told to change myself to better fit this mystical idea of a "normal woman." and even though I ultimately ended up becoming a man, the denial of girlhood was painful.

but i think that these things would have been even more difficult to navigate as an intersex girl if on top of everything I already said, i was having to cope with the denial of my girlhood while i was forced into boys locker rooms. if my doctors were forcing me onto testosterone hrt and refusing to even discuss estrogen, if all my legal paperwork had "M" on it and was a logistical nightmare to change, if every support group for my intersex variation labeled it as a "men's support group," if the LGBTQ community spaces i tried to join were misogynistic towards me often to the point of exile, if my self determination as an intersex girl was denied in most spaces of my life, and on and on and on. while listing all these things out i also don't want to make it seem like it's all about suffering and pain--so much of transition for me has been about joy in my self determination and how much it feels like a reclamation of autonomy to decide what I want my body and self to be like--i know this is an experience i share with so many of my trans intersex friends.

as an person who was AFAB, although there were many ways that trying to grow up as an intersex girl were a painful, logistical nightmare, many times and places that i was excluded from woman's spaces, etc. however, there was a simultaneous affirmation that i was right to strive for that in the first place. which is logic rooted in some fucked up compulsory dyadism, but also which would have made some things slightly easier or even possible at all if i had wanted to embrace being an intersex girl within this fucked up system.

pretty much every time i've seen people on tumblr talking about "afab transfems" in an intersex context, people seem happy to collapse these experiences and act like there's no meaningful distinction or point in distinguishing between different types of intersex embodiment. it seems incredibly extractive, to be perfectly honest with you--taking terms already used by a community to make meaning of their experiences and to expand and dilute that term enough that it means something pretty different than the original.

it's making me think about the concept of epistemic injustice, which is a term coined by Miranda Fricker to describe oppression related to knowledge, communication, and making meaning of the world. There's two subtypes of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and hermeneutical injustice. Testimonial injustice refers to the dynamic where marginalized people are labeled as not credible, excluded from conversations, and their testimony and knowledge is labeled as unreliable, even when they're the ones who are experts and have first hand experience of what people are talking about. (this is why i probably won't make this post rebloggable--i've noticed this pattern on tumblr many times where trans men speaking about transmisogyny get lots of notes and are given a lot of grace, where trans women are silenced, attacked for not having perfect wording, and otherwise delegitimized.)

the second type is called hermeneutical injustice. it describes how marginalized people are denied the right to make sense of the experiences in their own lives. this can look like preventing people from building community, terminology, a political understanding of themselves, and the interpretive resources needed to process how you live in the world.

this is a form of injustice that I think almost all intersex people are very familiar with--we are denied community and interpretive resources to the point that we're told we don't even exist, that intersex isn't a real word, and so many more examples that leave us isolated and with very few options for understanding what we're collectively experiencing. as an intersex person i really intimately understand how frustrating, confusing, and painful it is to not have words for your experiences, your identity, your life.

so it makes me really sad and pissed off when it seems like intersex people seem to be replicating this exact same type of epistemic injustice towards transfems and specifically towards intersex transfems. pretty much every time recently i see people talking about "afab transfems" they're doing so in a way that seems to deny that trans women even have the right to make sense of their own experiences in the world. there seems to be this mindset that these political frameworks, these interpretive resources that transfems have built up are just up for grabs for anyone. and then on top of that has come with it a lot of cruel, hateful language and direct attacks towards many intersex transfems who are facing so much harassment right now.

an important value to me is this idea of reciprocity as a foundation for solidarity. to me reciprocity means that we're prioritizing the ways we care for each other, we're thinking about how we can uplift each other, and we're watching out for extractive or exploitative patterns where one group is constantly expected to be in "solidarity" with another group without getting the same respect and care back toward them. i think that there could be so many ways that intersex people of all genders could share our overlapping experiences and actually be in true, meaningful solidarity with each other, but i barely ever actually see that happen on tumblr. and that pisses me off, because i do think that there's so much we have in common that we could celebrate and support each other with. i feel so much kinship with so, so many of my trans intersex friends, and ways where i see our lives converge. but i don't think that can happen in an environment where there's no acknowledgment of the ways that our experiences will sometimes (often) differ from each other, and the ways that we have unique needs.

another frustration i've had based on this most recent couple months of transmisogynistic intersex posting on tumblr is how intersex people have been mostly ignoring intersex community resources and devaluing the existing intersex terminology that people created to try to meet our needs. so much of what i've seen people describing on tumblr seems to really line up with the term ipsogender. Ipsogender is a term coined by an intersex sociologist Cary Gabriel Costello, and is used to describe intersex people whose gender matches the gender they were medically assigned at birth, but who might not feel like cis or trans fits them, might experience dysphoria, and who might feel like they've ended up transitioning medically or socially in some ways. this is a word that exists that an intersex person put time into coining because they wanted other intersex people to feel seen, embraced, and have ways of understanding themselves and communicating to others, and that's something that's super meaningful to me! and yet, i've rarely seen anyone reference it, and also seen multiple people making fun of it in other spaces online.

there's also intergender, which is another intersex specific gender term used to describe when your gender is inseparable from your intersex traits, and that your intersex identity is intertwined with your gender identity in some way. some people just identify as intergender, others use it as an adjective and exist as an intergender man or woman. intersex terminology like this is really important to me, especially because we're so often denied the right to make sense of our own experiences.

i think ultimately what i wanted to say with this post is just that when i think about intersex community, some of the most important values of intersex community for me are solidarity, care for each other, and affirming our right to define our own existence. and i don't think that can happen in a community where people are acting in extractive ways, harassing and attacking their fellow community members, and being dismissive of the realities of other intersex people's lives.

[ekleiipsis]

courtesy of @allgremlinart <3

[mineyardjostenrivalry]

You know I get it.

[andnowrotfront]

it's extremely tiring that every time i want to make a post about ways i've experienced transmisogyny here i have to reword how i say it like 5 times to be nicer and nicer because people really hate when we express our emotions and are angry 🤣😂 we're only allowed to be talkpieces and not actually Talk

[sotwk]

Tolkien Blog Recs: Follow the Rebloggers!

I've been asked for Tolkien blog recs a few times now (in my short Tumblr life), and I would like to explain my personal strategy for getting the best and most comprehensive Tolkien content on my blogs:

FIND, FOLLOW, and BEFRIEND FANDOM REBLOGGERS.

Tolkien artists/writers/creators are amazing of course, and you should follow and support your favorites. However, Rebloggers are fandom connoisseurs that essentially do the important work of finding and gathering the content you want from various creators. They keep posts alive and circulating! I believe they are a crucial part of the fandom that remains underappreciated. (Many of them are or used to be creators themselves, but are just more active as rebloggers now.)

Rebloggers are often also great at supporting and engaging with other bloggers, so they are wonderful to have as Mutuals.

Below are some of the most consistently active and Tolkien-centered blogs I have the privilege of being Mutuals with. I might have missed a few, but these are great ones to start with:

@asianbutnotjapanese

@hobbitwrangler

@brain-empty-just-vibes

@talesfuzzy

@mithrilandvilya

@thranduilseyebrows

@hyperlexia-1

@urban-trek-thru-middle-earth

@stormchaser819

@sylvanprincess

@sleepyamygdala

@aduialel

@coopsgirl

@evenstaredits

@elithilanor

Thank you to the below Anons who asked me for my recs! <3 I'm sorry it took me so long to respond, but blog recs are difficult for me to make. I hope this helps you find the content you want!

[transgenderboobs]

still mad about the way tma fandom talked about georgie barker back in the day. like oooough this girl is the devil because she (checks notes) Enforced a boundary?

[beneathsilverstars]

au where dormont is a very tiny tumblr fandom

[nedconte]

fitzierconte, anyone?

[theragamuffininitiative]

When it seems to have been a particularly rough day/night for the mutuals and you just wanna tell them it will be ok and also that your ask box and dms are always open (anon or not) and they can feel free to ask for space to vent and be listened to, or to be talked off a ledge, or say they just want nice songs or funny videos or dumb memes. Hang in there besties and beasties, there is always hope.

[halfyearsqueen]

RHAENYRA TARGARYEN + MOTHERHOOD —

he insisted they were man enough, or close enough to make it no matter.

[ftl-faster-than-life]

It boggles my mind that there's people who are determined to hate Barry and Clark.

[lazywriter-artist]

They are indeed (x2)!

Their custody battles mostly devolve into heavy weapons fueled screaming matches till dad Storvis’s New boy toy Inquisitor buddy comes to drag him away or the skits and Gali come to get CentipedeMech

Every arbites member who’s had to delegate their matches fears the time the emperor’s will calls upon them again to act as referee for the duo—

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

WHERE ARE YOU GUYS COMING FROM, ILY <3

[tunacocina]

genuinely entirely unrelated to any other post tonight but i love opening the notes of a post reblogged by one of my mutuals and and going "hm🤔 it looks like theres a reblog missing here..." and opening the original post and seeing who my mutual has blocked. this is a judgement free zone i just love knowing