#she literally said ‘i know and love trans people but women need single sex spaces’

[radical-fire-vixen]

okay, the reply feature isn’t working for some reason, so i’m gonna reply here, @gemblingcraft and @starlight-to-midnight

so y’all really don’t remember how homophobic the UK still was even after section 28 was overturned, huh? and how homophobic it still actually is cuz lesbians are still punished for being homosexual and not wanting to interact with dick? how even afterwards, publishers wouldn’t publish works about explicitly gay characters in children’s books? y’all have the memory of celery sticks.

and literally nowhere has Rowling said anything bad about trans people. but if y’all think that “sex matters” and “lesbians are homosexual females” and “women need female only spaces” are bad, then you’re just homophobic, misogynist idiots. not that i’m surprised anyway.

also, not sure how y’all don’t remember that it was pretty heavily implied that Dumbledore was in love with Grindelwald when they were young, cuz i remember reading that, and it was literally over a decade ago. like it was clearly implied that he had serious feelings towards Grindelwald, but after his sister had died, that changed. does no one remember the biography written about Dumbledore in the book?

[radlymona]

"I have experienced the world enough and made many important choice in my life and other people's lives. I think you mean to say that I'm immature because I don't hate trans women?"

You have not experienced the world enough and by the age of like 21, you'll understand this.

The second sentence shows this because you're blatantly unable to argue a point without bringing in something completely irrelevant to the original post I made, as is 90% of what else you said.

"What effects does it have on cisgender perisex women to be housed with trans women in rape centres and domestic violence centres?"

If you don't understand this, then you shouldn't be arguing on this point. You should listen to female rape victims about how they feel to be housed with trans women. This is the actual point of the original post.

Revulsion/fear/discomfort/anger/sadness. Take your pick.

"Are you discriminating on the basis of looks? Do you have a very particular idea of what a transgender woman can look like and you are discriminating by looks on the basis of sex?"

No, it is completely based on biological sex. The people born with penises are different to the people born with vaginas.

For the love of god, as this last comment points out, this post has nothing to do with my feelings about trans women. It's about the safety and comfort of women in vulnerable situations. You keep talking about my feelings, because you're unable to analyse a situation without taking into account personal emotions.

"What about visibly masculine intersex cisgender women?'

I didn't bring up intersex women and have no problem with them in single sex spaces. Because they're women. They have nothing to do with biological males who identify as the opposite sex.

"Transgender women are a MINORITY."

And biological women have been a marginalised group for millenia. Who's a smaller minority doesn't matter in this scenario. Again, it's about the safety and comfort of biological women.

"A transgender woman can pass all the bars of womanhood and be subjectively eligible to go in any female only space. Not all trans women look like men or masculine."

This isn't all about looking feminine or masculine. It's about the biological differences between the sexes. Again being born with a penis makes you different from being born with a vagina, regardless of how well one "passes". A trans woman could look indistinguishable from a biological woman, and it wouldn't matter if a biological woman requested to be taken care of by another female.

"We both know that no one is making a rape relief centre and rehousing centre for only transgender women for a good amount of time."

That's not biological women's problems. It's not our mission to help every marginalised group out there. If we're catering to "only" 50% of the population, then that's still more than other service for marginalised people.

Again, it's up to trans women to build their own shelters, as biological women did.

"You can absolutely "deserve" a role of a counsellor."

No, you literally can't. Especially if you're counselling a rape victim. You can have all the qualifications in the world, and it still wouldn't matter if a rape victim wanted a female counsellor. Because it isn't about what's best for the counsellor, but what's best for the rape victim. They are the ones who needs should be attended to, not the other way around. This is like basic empathy for vulnerable people.

"I know (repeating, KNOW) a transgender woman who is the senior therapist in a female only physical and mental therapy team for women only which works in Vietnam. She deserved that role very well."

Who cares. You knowing (one) transgender woman who is qualified for their role doesn't matter. Your personal experiences/anecdotes don't matter. The needs of vulnerable women are what matters.

"Any woman who didn't create or contribute to a rape relief centre should be allowed there if she needs it. I don't know what the hell you are on about."

That's not what I said and you know that. Biological women built rape shelters for biological women. Trans women were not involved in this process.

"A transgender woman CAN very well be a caretaker in a nursing home. Considering that no trans woman chooses to be trans, it is simply... bad to take away opportunities for her based on her identity. (Discrimination)."

No one said you transgender women can't be caretakers. This isn't about barring all employment opportunities. It's about women who request caretakers their same sex as themselves. Transgender women can just take care of patients who are men or don't care about being the same sex as them?? They're not entitled to take care of every patient ever. Again it's the needs of the vulnerable people that need to be attended to.

"A woman simply cannot identify with all "sex based" violence which has come before her, and this sense of entitlement can quickly vanish away when a white woman sees racial misogynistic violence on black women, for example. To identify with that violence, the white woman has to first erase the deepness of racial discrimination involved in the case. (Or recruit black women to their cause and just identify with the cause, lmao.)"

This has nothing to do with what I've been saying. You can't just bring up a completely irrelevant point (without an actual example no less). Every women can identify with some instances sex based oppression, because every women continues to be affected by it or has had female ancestors affected by it. Yes, I can't for instance identify with the mass rape of Indigenous women during the Stolen Generations period in Australia where I live. But I never said I was?? Because this isn't what this post is about??

"You are not being oppressed by every man ever. You have not seen every misogynistic instance of violence and you haven't experienced every social situation there is. Stop acting like you have, and give space for nuance."

Again, this isn't about my personal feelings/experiences. It's about what vulnerable biological women need. You're fundamentally unable to de-attach the Self from this argument, because you're a teenager. Like I'm not even being condescending that's just what like being 16 is like.

"If we go by your book, every crime committed by a white cisgender woman or black/brown "looks like a woman to me" cisgender woman is valid, no matter what it is."

...What? What does crimes by biological women have to do with this argument??

"The immigrants don't deserve my jobs" and "Transgender women shouldn't go into rape relief centres for 'biological women'" and "Women shouldn't be going to universities before marriage"

Three separate arguments that have absolutely nothing to do with eachother. Whataboutism at it's finest.

Sex segregation in rape centres is for the benefit of a historically oppressed group. This is why it can't be compared to instances of discrimination against other historically oppressed groups.

"It is not victim blaming to tell a cisgender woman that it is very much important to make space for transgender women. (I'm not afraid to say that it is important.) Transgender women aren't male. Male and female are social categories."

Yes it is. You're telling her that her need to be safe and comfortable after a traumatic instance doesn't matter. A rape victim can't even find safety and peace without being told she needs to make room for biological males.

Transgender women are male because they were born with a penises.

Even if male and females are just social categories, who cares. Biological women don't need to be technically correct about what constitutes as male/female to get the services they require. Again, it is the patient who deserves to be made comfortable.

"Not all people with penises are contributing to patriarchy. Trust me, I know MANY women who have brought women down in a ditch and made their lives absolutely fucking miserable. Not every woman is you."

Literally every man on earth contribute to the patriarchy on some form (minor and major) and if you weren't a minor you would know this.

You "knowing many women" doesn't matter. Women treating other like shit doesn't matter in the above scenario. It doesn't matter what you've personally observed in your life. For the fiftieth time, it's about what vulnerable women need.

For the love of god, a) get off this site and b) learn to look at other people's perspectives instead of centring yourself in the argument.

One of the only things I want to push back about the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Case case, is that rape victims who request female-only workers aren't "gender critical". Women in hospitals who ask for female nurses aren't being gender critical. Elderly women who request female carers aren't being gender critical.

They're just requesting a basic, single-sex service that is apolitical and has no ideology attached to it. This used to be like an ordinary thing women and girls could ask for without question.

[takerfoxx]

In response to JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, my (former) idols

I really didn’t want to have to do this.

So in addition to…=gestures vaguely=…all of that, the last few months have been kind of sucky when it comes to learning some really unpleasant things about artists that I looked up to, admired, and was in fact inspired by. I’ve already spoken about the Speaking Out movement revealing a lot of ugly behavior from various wrestlers, some of which I was big fans of, and then later we got Chris Jericho being a full-on MAGA. Yeah, that all sucked. But those were just performers whose work I enjoyed watching. The one that really hurt were writers who I deeply admired, whose stories I love, and who I was heavily influenced by.

The first, of course, was finding out that JK Rowling, the author of perhaps the single biggest YA fantasy series of all time Harry Potter, is a TERF. This really sucked for a number of reasons. Firstly, I really like Harry Potter! I mean, I’m not a super fan or anything. I came into it when things were kind of dying down, like the whole book series had already been released and there were only a few movies left, but I still really enjoyed it, have all the books and movies and a fair amount of merchandise swag, including a nifty wand I got at Universal Studios. Shit, I got two replicas of the Sword of Griffyindor, thanks to them screwing up my order in my favor and sending me a duplicate! They’re on my wall right across from me as I type this!

But in addition to writing a book series I really liked, JK Rowling was supposed to be one the good guys. She’s been vocally progressive, often openly comes down on British right-wing nonsense, has supported various persecuted minorities, and is on record as being one of the few self-made billionaires to actually stop being a billionaire for a time because she donated so much money to charity. And while we mock it now, her revealing Dumbledore as gay was a huge deal at the time. Plus, she cultivated this reputation as Auntie Jo, that cool, supportive aunt we all wanted.

But for a while her stock has been dropping. Her preference for confirming “representation” via tweets instead of explicitly putting it in the text of her stories has raised the question of queer-baiting, especially with a whole-ass movie with a young Dumbledore and Grindelwald to make their relationship explicit but failing to do so. The whole Nagini thing from the latest Fantastic Beasts movie was pretty gross. And re-examination of various problematic elements from the original novels has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Now, none of these really looked to be intentionally malicious, of course. Just about everyone’s early work will have problematic elements; that’s just how people work. And the later stuff smacked more of ignorance than anything. But after all this time, it’s like, c’mon. You should know better by now.

But the biggie came when her transphobic views finally came to light. Now, this one had been brewing for a while, due to some questionable likes and statements on her twitter. But then she decided to just go public and published what essentially amounts to a TERF manifesto, one with a very “love the sinner, hate the sin” condescending attitude and had a real persecution complex air to it.

Now, I’m not going to go into detail about what the manifesto was about, what the circumstances surrounding it were, or how wrong it was. It’s already been raked over the coals, dissected, answered, and debunked in detail by people far more qualified than me, so odds are, you’re already well aware of its contents and the subsequent rebuttals. But the gist of it comes down to her basically believing that transwomen are actually cis men claiming to be trans so as to infiltrate and invade female-only spaces.

Yeah.

Okay, that’s gross, but…why? Why is someone so noted for being progressive and wanting to foster an inclusive environment making this the hill of exclusion that she wants to die on?

Well, that’s where things get tricky. She mentions that prior to Harry Potter, her first marriage was highly physically and sexually abusive, and when she escaped from that, she had no place to go, leading her to be homeless for a time.

Oh.

Well, that makes sense. Someone goes through a highly traumatic experience with a member of the opposite sex, has no support structure when she escapes it, is left to fend for herself, only to suddenly get rocketed into fame, fortune, and influence, which in turn leads to a Never Again mentality. She was hurt, no one was there to help her, and now she’s afraid of men invading women-only spaces to victimize others like she was victimized. So…literally transphobic. Literally a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist.

Guys, this is so fucked up. Like, how do you even approach something like this? She’s a victim in every sense of the word, so of course she’s going to have physiological damage and a warped view of things. I mean, if I found out that a close friend of mine went through the same thing and had the same prejudices, I would be nothing but sympathetic! I mean, I’d still do what I can to convince her to overcome those prejudices, but I’d still show sympathy and support for what she went through.

Abuse warps people. There’s a reason why so many abusers are abuse survivors themselves. It makes you terrified of being hurt again and often causes people to adopt toxic behaviors, beliefs, and reactions to protect themselves. I’ve already talked about it at length while discussing She-Ra and its own handling of the cycle of abuse, which included franks discussions of Catra’s horrible behavior, why she was the way she was, while never losing sympathy for her and rooting for her to overcome it. So if JK Rowling is an abuse survivor, is it really right to come down on her for having warped views because of that abuse?

But that’s the problem. See, she isn’t your troubled friend that you’re trying to help. She isn’t your cousin Leslie who’s a really sweet person but unfortunately adopted some bad ideals due to trauma suffered. She JK freakin’ ROWLING, one of the most famous, wealthy, and influential women in the world. She has a platform of millions, if not billions, which means her voice lends credibility to her bigoted beliefs. Alt-righters and other TERFs have already swooped upon this for giving validation to their awful beliefs, which puts trans people even more at risk. And as horrible as Rowling’s experiences might have been, the trans community is often the victim of far worse, and they don’t have a mountain of money and an army of defenders to protect them like she does. I’ve said it time and time again: just because you’re a victim, that doesn’t give you the right to victimize others! And bringing things back to Catra, as much as I loved her redemption in the final season, she was still a TERRIBLE PERSON for a huge chunk of the show, one that needed to be stood up to and stopped.

So yeah. That’s the messiness that is JK Rowling.

Now, let’s talk about the one that really hurts. Let’s talk about Joss Whedon.

I’ve made no secret of what a huge Whedon fan I am. Unlike Rowling, I was a HUUUUUGE superfan. Seeing Serenity for the first time in theaters was akin to a religious awakening to me as a storyteller, making it one of my top three movies of all time. Firefly is my favorite show ever. And I adored Buffy, Angel, and Dollhouse as well. I love Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers. The very first fanfic I ever wrote was a Firefly fanfic that disappeared along with my old laptop. I know his style isn’t for everyone, but I cannot understate how much of a personal inspiration he is to me as a writer.

And like Rowling, Joss was supposed to be one of the good guys! Buffy was monumental in pushing the needle when it came to female empowerment. Will and Tara were groundbreaking as a gay couple. He’s been outspoken for years about his feminist views and beliefs and was seen as one of the most prominent and influential feminist voices in Hollywood!

And then things started to go bad.

One day he was on top of the world, the mastermind behind the first two Avenger movies. And the next, it seemed like he was in freefall. It’s hard to really pinpoint exactly when the change took place. Some would say him being brought in as a last-minute substitute for Zack Snyder to take over on Justice League after Snyder had to leave due to family tragedy, and the subsequent awful critical reception to that film tarnishing his image, even if those were very unique circumstances that couldn’t really be blamed on him. Others might point to Age of Ultron’s less than stellar reception, as well as criticism of some questionable jokes and certain creative decisions regarding the character of Black Widow, which then led to a more critical examination of how Whedon continues to write female characters, as while his work might have been revolutionary in the 90’s, his failure to evolve with the times had meant that many of his portrayals are now woefully outdated and problematic, with his vision for a Batgirl movie getting hit with a lot of backlash as a result.

Again, I’m not going to go into too much detail, as this is all public knowledge and can be easily looked up, but overall it seemed that Whedon entered into a period where he was getting criticized more than he was celebrated, and his image of a guaranteed hit maker was now in doubt.

But all of this wasn’t the big problem. All creators go through rises and slumps, and everyone hits points where they get hit with a barrage of criticism; that’s just part of being a public creative figure, especially a progressive one. And had nothing happened after, it would have probably faded, got forgotten, and Whedon would have moved onto the next project with no fuss.

But as it turned out, it wasn’t just a minor slump in his career. Instead, it was the priming of the pump.

In 2016, Whedon divorced his wife of sixteen years, Kai Cole, and in an open letter, Kai Cole accused him of being a serial cheater, who would have affairs with a great many women, from co-workers, to actresses, to friends, to even his fans. And in addition to raising questions of him possibly abusing his position as showrunner to elicit sex from those working on his projects, there also is the ugly question of how could someone who speaks so highly of women then go and backstab the person who was supposed to be the most important woman in his life, as well as lying to her and denying her the autonomy of deciding whether or not she even wanted to continue to have a relationship with him?

Furthermore, Whedon himself has not explicitly denied these accusations, and comments made by him seem only to confirm them.

Now if you’ll recall, I reacted publicly to this news, and despite my admiration of Whedon’s work, I came down on Kai Cole’s side, and stated that while things like marriage issues and infidelity were no one’s business but that of the couple’s, it did raise a lot of uncomfortable questions about how Whedon treated the women in his life and he really needed to get his shit in order.

But hey, a messy private life and a guy falling into temptation isn’t that big of a deal, right? Plenty of creators also go through multiple marriages and have problems staying faithful and still continue making great art. We’re all human, it’s a stressful job, and this shit just happens, right? Sure, it’s gross and a shitty thing to do, but ain’t no business of ours, right?

In late 2020, actor Ray Fisher, who played the role of Cyborg in Justice League, openly accused Joss Whedon of fostering a hostile work environment, claiming that the director’s behavior was abusive and unprofessional, and that Whedon in turn was protected by DC executives.

DC and Warner Bros. came down against Fisher, claiming they had done an internal investigation that turned up no evidence of wrongdoing (yeah, sure they did), and soon Fisher was out as Cyborg, apparently for rocking the boat.

But then Charisma Carpenter, noted for her important role as Cordelia Chase in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, then spoke up, claiming to be inspired by Fisher in doing so. She described Whedon did indeed foster a hostile work environment on his projects, that his often acted in a toxic manner, from asking incredibly invasive and inappropriate questions regarding her pregnancy to insulting her on set. She said that she made excuses for him for years, but after undergoing a lot of therapy and reading what Ray Fisher had to say, she felt compelled to speak out.

And this just open the floodgates. Other actors and actresses also came forward, some with stories of their own, others to offer support. Even Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, confirmed Carpenter’s stories and said that she no longer wanted to be associated with Whedon. Michelle Trachtenberg, who played the character of Dawn, stated that she also experienced toxic treatment from Whedon despite her being a minor at the time, and says that the set had a rule that Whedon wasn’t allowed to be alone with her again, which really raises some sickening questions of what happened the first time. Even male stars have spoken out, from words of support and apologies for not speaking up earlier from Anthony Stewart Head and David Boreanaz, to an earlier interview with James Marsters, in which he described being terrified of Whedon, mainly due to an instance when Whedon was frustrated with the popularity of Marsters’s character of Spike messing with his plans and physically and verbally taking it out on the actor. There have been many corroborating stories of Whedon being casually cruel on set, on seemingly taking delight in making his fellow show writers cry, and even the man himself admitting to enjoying fostering a hostile work environment during his director commentary of the Avengers. We’ve joked about Whedon’s supposed sadism for years, but that was in regards to how he treated the characters in his stories, not the people helping him make them!

So yeah. That’s the problem with Joss Whedon.

So, do I think that Joss Whedon is somehow some kind of sociopath who lied about his feminist principles and deliberately put on a progressive façade specifically to get into a position of power so he could torment people? No, of course not. I think he was sincere about his beliefs, and I do think he didn’t realize the wrongness of his behavior. But that’s kind of the problem. See, it’s one thing to have kind of a trollishness to your nature, a sort of sadistic side. No one can help that. But when someone with that quality gets put into a position of power in which they are protected by both the higher-ups and their legions of fans, they are allowed to mistreat and continue to mistreat people. And by never suffering any consequences, that sort of toxic behavior becomes internalized, becomes a habit, becomes their moda operandi. And when you’re constantly getting praised as a creative genius and a wonderful feminist voice, any self-criticism just gets wiped away, and you think yourself above reproach, leading to what Joss Whedon became and went on being.

And you know what scares me the most about this particular issue? It’s not that I am a fan of his stories. It’s that I can so easily see myself turning out the same way.

Look, I’ll be upfront about it: I’m kind of a sadist myself. You’ve seen it in my stories, you’ve seen me gloating after a particularly dark plot twist makes my readers freak out. That sort of stuff is fun to me. There’s a reason why I have a much easier time in the dark and violent scenes, because I’m channeling something ugly within me. We all have a dark side, and this is mine.

But UNLIKE Whedon, that doesn’t carry over to how I treat people in real life (unless Monopoly or Mario Party are involved, then it’s fair game). Maybe it’s because I wasn’t given the sort of power and praise he did so early, and I was always taught to be considerate of other people’s feelings, but if I ever find out that I hurt another person or went too fair, I feel TERRIBLE, and it just throws me off all day until I apologize. Even if I don’t notice right away that what I said or did wasn’t cool (autistic, remember?), when it’s pointed out to me and I have some time to think on it, yeah, the guilt is on and I make a point to apologize to whoever I’ve hurt. I’ve even made a point to apologize to members of my family for inconsiderate stuff I said years ago as a little punk kid because it wouldn’t stop bugging me.

So maybe Whedon got too big, too fast. Maybe putting people on these sorts of pedestals, especially progressive ones, is ultimately a bad thing.

So where does this leave us? How are we to treat JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, one who developed a lot of transphobia due to abuse suffered while the other became a toxic individual due to unchecked control and a lack of consequences? Can we still enjoy their stories despite them now being colored by their creators’ falls from grace? Can we separate the art from the artist, or do we have to do a clean split?

Honestly, I feel that has to come down to the individual. I can’t remove the influence Rowling and Whedon have had on me as a storyteller, and I still highly respect both of their talents despite taking major issue with their problems as people. And I’m not going go throw away all of my Harry Potter or Firefly stuff. Because that’s my stuff. It has value to me, it doesn’t represent the issues with their creators, and a lot of it was gifts from people who are dear to me. Though I do think it’ll be a long time before I return to either of their work, as I just don’t have the stomach for it now.

But I will be avoiding any projects they have in the future. I don’t want to put money in their pockets that might go on to support their toxic beliefs or behavior. And as for royalties for their past work that would also support the cast and crew of the Harry Potter films or those who worked on Whedon’s shows who do not deserve to lose money because we don’t want any of that money going to the creators? Er, that question is a little above my paygrade. I don’t know. You’ll have to all decide for yourselves. As for me, I still have a lot of thinking to do.

Regardless though, if I or anyone else is still able to enjoy their work, then it’s important to not divorce what these people said or did from the art they created, even if it makes enjoying that art less fun. It’s important to be critical about what we enjoy, to acknowledge the bad aspects along with the good, and open up discussion of those elements, because that’s what mature adults are supposed to do. 

And as for JK Rowling and Joss Whedon, whose stories I love, whose talent I admire, and whose past good work I’ll happily acknowledge, I do hope they both experience some sort of realization and enter into a period of self-examination that leads to them getting help for their issues, for Rowling to get help in coming to terms with her trauma and realizing that she’s wrong about the trans community and a full apology, and for Whedon to also come to terms with his toxic behavior and how he treats people, for him to make no excuse for what he did and sincerely apologize to those he hurt and work on bettering himself, as well as them both examining some of the more problematic tropes still present in their works. Because despite everything, I do feel that they can still be a creative force of good, and it would be a shame if they let themselves self-destruct.

But if not, then if it comes down to choosing between Rowling and the protecting the trans community, if it comes down between choosing between letting Whedon continue to make shows and protecting actors and writers from his abusive behavior, then I know who I’m siding with, and it ain’t the two individuals this whole essay is about. No story, no matter how good, no matter how creative, is worth letting sacrificing vulnerable people in order for it to be made.

[armillary-spheres-lover]

Hey

Idk if you ever got the answer to your thing. But I’m a person who is queer but regularly uses the term lesbian to make things simpler. I can tell you why I hate the phrase monosexual- it feels transphobic to me- I am not attracted to men at all, but I am attracted to women, non-binary folks, gender queer folks, and agender folks. If I was with a partner and they transitioned to be a man I would still love them. That wouldn’t change. Sexuality is fluid and calling someone monosexual seems to erase that and really put people in boxes. Everyone has exceptions. And as someone who has identified as bisexual and pansexual in the past and find those not to suit me and fit right (especially since I am not sexually/romantically attracted to people physically/based on appearances- it’s more about personality and what I could do with a person)

I don’t mean this in an antagonistic way, I really hope it doesn’t come off that way(I’m bad expressing myself sorry).

(I’m sorry, I know you’re not trying to be rude. My answer, however, will sound rude and upset because you touched upon some stuff that needs a lot of unpacking to me lmao. Just know this anger is not necessarily directed at you but at biphobia in general.)

Why do bisexual people may need to use the term monosexual?

A. It is descriptive

I see what you mean but as you said you're queer and lesbian is a term to make things simpler, right?

So I wouldnt call you monosexual because you’re clearly not attracted to only one gender (but if you want to who I am to stop you?). Monosexual is someone who is almost exclusively dating/is attracted to people of one gender. There are plenty trans people that are straight or gay that would NOT date a partner if they realized they were a different gender. For real: kat blaque made a video (here it is if youre interested) on youtube about this - she’s trans and she wants to date men and wouldnt feel comfortable on continuing dating if a partner of hers realized they were actually a trans woman all along. She wants to date guys not girls and that's FINE it just means A. She actually recognizes the girl gender, obviously B. She's straight af and that's wonderful! It’s not a box if that’s how her experience is and she likes it that way!

Also how is being monosexual transphobic? Cant a girl just like guys exclusively (both cis and trans) or like girls exclusively (both cis and trans)? It's not even enbyphobic since you dont need to be attracted to a person to support their rights. (Gay men arent attracted to women but can be 100% feminists.) Being open to fuck somebody is not the same as supporting their rights: fetishization is a thing. Again, I refer to the video Kat Blaque made.

Sexuality IS fluid but to some people (like me and you) it is more than others. Some people don’t feel comfortable dating people that dont fall into the gender theyre usually attracted to and thats 100% okay.

B. It helps in talking about biphobia and panphobia in society

Biphobia and panphobia are for the large part based on the assumption that you cant be attracted to more than one gender (not even non-binary and so on) and that if you do you're weird/disgusting/mentally ill/a sexual predator. I can tell you 100% that's the narrative both straight and gay people can and may perpetuate since I struggle w this kind of shit every single time Im attracted to someone no matter their gender (YES, EVEN IF THEY'RE A GUY, BECAUSE THE OTHER DAY I WAS ATTRACTED TO A GIRL AND NOW I FEEL LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL THAT CANT CONTROL ITSELF, even though it makes NO sense because if it was two girls or two boys the actual number of people my hormones activated to wouldnt change, but it would make my experience not subjected to biphobia!). I’m not saying gay people are the same as straight people. But I do feel alienated BOTH from heteronormative society AND from (subtly biphobic) gay spaces because of my bisexuality. I costantly feel like I’m outside both of those worlds and you know how humans are: I just need a term to encompass it all easily, to say “I don’t identify with any of this” (which is both straight and strictly gay spaces: ie, monosexual). To me is literally the same as saying non-bisexual/non-pansexual.

I dont mean to say lesbians or gays have it easier or are just like straight people. But we do have different experiences and I need terms to express that. It honestly doesnt matter to me if you identify as lesbian or queer (though I think you’re implying you’re more queer than anything). But I do need a term to talk about how society at large treats sexuality; ie, as a monosexual thing. Another concept that’s been thrown around is bi erasure. A strictly monosexual society is bound to view a girl dating a girl (or girl presenting) as if theyre both LESBIANS and erase a queer person the moment they’re in a m/f relationship, because people cant COMPUTE that it may not be the case and that the girl dating a cis straight dude isnt betraying her queerness.To think so is basic biphobia.

In some ways, I think it’s the same as when transgender people started using the term cisgender - which is applicable to both straight people and queer/gay people. They simply needed a term which meant “not-trans” as they were saying “I dont identify with this” (ie the cisgender experience). Does it imply that cisgender people, no matter if queer, have something in common? Yeah, yeah it does. Does it imply that queer people are just the same as straight people, or face no oppression? Of course not. Seeing people being offended upon being called monosexual feels like people being offended upon being called cis to me.

Also, saying that the terms bisexual people use are transphobic is almost implying that bisexuality is inherently transphobic? Or reeks to me of that kind of rhetoric. I use the terms I need to use, just like any other marginilized group does, and nobody outside of that group has any right of denying me that. It’s like I’m trying to create a safe space for myself and people like me and yall come around to judge us YET AGAIN. And I'm just tired of hearing this bullshit. I could accept this kind of criticism only if it came from a trans person themselves, I guess? But it’s not usually trans people who accuse us of being transphobic, in fact, many trans people identify as bisexual and use bisexual terminology lmfao.

“Hearts not parts” rhetoric

Finally, about personality being superior to physical appearance. That's amazing but I do want to note that, not you necessarily, but many people who are into the “hearts not parts” rhetoric are, how can I say this. Slut-shaming people? I’m not sure if you are doing this but I feel it needs to be said just to be sure. A lesbian trans woman can be just attracted to a girl for her physical appearance and just want to fuck her - and THAT'S OKAY. That's fine. I am a sexually attracted to people and that doesnt mean I have to form a deep bond first. Sex positivity is about accepting that people can feel like this and not shame them for this. "Hearts not parts” rhetoric has in the past infantilized, sanitized or outright shamed other queer experiences. It's fine if you feel that way but dont start acting like you're morally superior because of that. That's catholicism with extra steps. My bisexuality its not the symptom of some predatory and animalistic thing that should be purified into something more palatable and less sexual. That’s the same thing they used to say about gay people and now gay (biphobic) people are using this against us. That’s also the kind of thing trans women (especially if they’re sapphic) constantly hear every fucking day. Queer people have a good part of their discrimination rooted in the shaming of purely sexual desires. Forcing ourselves to be more palatable and less sexual is just respectability politics. I’m tired of it. (This is obviously different from being on the asexual spectrum: but you dont see ace people going around pretending they’re morally superior than everybody else, and many are actually very sex positive)   You would still love your partner if they were a different gender: that’s great, but that’s not how some (most) people feel, and they aren’t superficial because of this, just different from you.

Also, I think you’d really benefit from hearing a trans person say they don’t care if someone has genitalia preferences. Here it is. This obviously doesnt mean that every trans person will feel like she does, but it does mean that we can’t generalize trans experiences/preferences/what they feel transphobia is. Just like straight people dont get to say what’s homophobic or not, cis people dont get to say what’s transphobic or not. The definition of those terms relies entirely on the community that is targeted by these things.

I hope this wasnt excessively confusing but I wanted to make my point clear.

[drarry-with-a-side-of-harry]

Do you really support people sending death threats, rape threats and porn to a female author who expressed her worries about the treatment of dysphoric people and the protection of sex based rights? I liked your posts but if you can excuse that, I think I'm out

No, I do not support people sending death threats and rape threats to JKR. I don’t know anything about the porn but I wouldn’t support that either? I don’t excuse those threats. They’re horrible.

I am trying to listen to trans people. Trans people get to decide whether someone/something someone has said is transphobic. I have listened to the many many trans people who have said that JKR is being transphobic.

This is not a one time occurrence but I’m going to mention her most recent tweet regarding an article on ‘people who mentruate’. She made a comment that there’s a name for those people - women. She didn’t apologise but then made a follow up tweet using the good old ‘I know and love trans people, BUT...’

How can you say you love trans people when you’ve just shown them NO respect? She didn’t acknowledge the existence of people who aren’t cis women, who also menstruate. If you know trans people, that isn’t a difficult concept to grasp.

She talked about it being unsafe for women in single-sex spaces. That is NOT a problem because of trans people. That’s a problem because of men who are abusers/r*pists. She talked about trans people like they are the problem and it’s just not true. Could men potentially use the excuse ‘well I’m in this bathroom because I’m trans’? Potentially yes, but again, THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT THE FAULT OF TRANS PEOPLE.

When referring to her worries about the treatment of dysphoric people she made a comparison of transitioning to conversion therapy. If that doesn’t both alarm and disgust you, it should.

{Juno Birch also tweeted: "JK Rowling needs to be quiet immediately she is literally harming the trans community, she apparently just posted the clinic I went to as a child and said that they are experimenting on us, when in fact the Tavistock clinic saved my life.”} (I’ve taken this from an article in the Scotsman)

She says the clinic saved her life.

Anyway I’m going on too much because you shouldn’t be listening to me. Please go and listen to some trans people who have been openly speaking about this.

If you don’t feel any differently after reading my response (and hopefully doing some research) then please unfollow me.

TL;DR

I don’t support the death threats being sent to JKR. She has made transphobic comments and has not apologised or acknowledged the damage she has caused. Listen to trans people when they tell you something is transphobic.

[buddiebeginz]

So there’s this article that’s going around bashing the Reylo fandom as a response to Katie McCort’s article on ‘Systemic Hatred of Women’. Normally I would link back to whatever it is I’m referencing so people can draw their own conclusions but I refuse to post the link to the first article mostly because it’s just a nicely worded hate piece against Reylo and our fandom and it doesn’t need more attention from me. I’m sure you can find it if you look around the antis are sharing it. I’m still going to respond to some of it though because it’s a lot of the same things I see going around about our fandom and I want to address some of them.

There is this misconception that the Reylo fandom is almost exclusively made up of cis gendered, straight, white women and that’s just not true. We’re an incredibly diverse community made of various races, sexualities, genders, ages, etc. It’s clear that it’s easier for people who dislike us and the ship to dismiss us by saying well they’re all just a bunch of white women who want to ship the two main white presenting characters. They also mostly assume we’re teenagers so that’s another way they get to patronize us by acting like we’re simply a bunch of children who can’t make good choices even when it comes to which fictional characters to ship.

To that effect I think because many dismiss us all as a small (but loud) fraction of white women in the SW fandom it makes it easier to say we’re all racist. We as a fandom need to stop allowing this. This idea that our fandom as a whole is racist is false and in many cases is being used mainly as a weapon against us not to call out real instances of racism. People who don’t like us and our ship have just decided it’s okay to blanket our whole fandom as toxic and racist without real proof to back it up. Even those times when there have been people claiming to ship Reylo sending harassment and being racist they don’t represent our fandom. There’s a different between the actions of single individuals and an entire fandom using their collective power to hurt people and the Reylo fandom has never done that.

I also resent the idea that it’s our responsibility to find these people and deal with them. Is it important to call out problematic behavior when you see it? Of course. But we are not responsible for babysitting every corner of the internet looking for someone who has a Reylo icon and possibility sent out a racial slur. I’m genuinely confused why this responsibility falls on the shoulders of Reylo shippers to police our entire fandom but not on the SW fandom as a whole to do something about the many many problematic people calling themselves SW fans and sending hate. I don’t see people calling all SW fans racist because some chased Kelly Marie Tran off social media. I don’t see people calling all SW fans misogynistic with the amount of disparaging things that’s been said about Rey as a character and with how many didn’t even want a female protagonist for the ST. Or how TLJ was one of the most criticized in large part because it was more inclusive to female fans.

No apparently those are just trolls who don’t represent real SW fans. So why then does that logic not apply to the Reylo fandom? Maybe perhaps because it’s easier to try and get rid of a ship that the general SW fandom hates and silence it’s fandom by claiming it’s one of the worst things a person can be. Who is really going to want to be associated  with a ship or fandom if they think it’s racist right? I’ve seen new SW fans coming on tumblr asking about Reylo and the antis are quick to jump to them and tell them how toxic and racist it is (not to mention they claim it glorifies abuse against women which 🤦) filling these people’s heads with lies. I don’t care what people think of me I’m used to shipping the ships that everyone hates but I do care that people lie about us and our ship and don’t even give people the chance to make up their own minds.

As for the situation with JB which was also included in the anti Reylo article it’s clear the person who wrote this has a huge bias. Anyone who cares how people are treated would look at that situation and recognize JB was out of line, his actions caused real world harm to people. NO ONE is saying JB hasn’t been the target of racism from SW fans but to put ALL of that on the Reylo fandom is not only messed up it’s simply factually wrong. There are people who would never ship Reylo and who never wanted a leading black character in SW who have sent JB hate. The Reylo fandom just continues to be the easy target.

There’s a part of the article that talks about how some of the people who ship Reylo do so as a way to work through trauma in a fantasy that’s not possible in reality. They also say that one of the reasons people ship Reylo is about kink and bsdm which maybe these things play a factor (for some) but it’s not necessarily the main one. In the first place yeah Reylo is a fantasy not possible in reality it’s a soap opera in space. I recognize there are things that happen within their relationship that wouldn’t happen in real relationships but there’s also a lot about their ship that’s very much grounded in reality, which is a significant part of the reason people are drawn to them.

I’ve been through trauma myself and media has definitely helped with healing but I don’t look at Reylo as some fictional manifestation of reclaiming power that was stolen from me. I don’t look at Ben as some de facto stand in for my abuser and Reylo as some fairytale version of how things should have been. I don’t see Rey as someone who managed to get her “abuser” to change and then they lived happily ever after. I see two messy people who helped each other grow and change throughout the course of three movies. If anything I think Reylo helps me because I relate a lot to Ben. He’s shown me that it is possible to break free from the darkness and as person who has struggled with mental health problems my whole life it’s an incredibly important message. Rey and Ben together showed me it is possible to find someone who can understand you no matter what you’ve been through and no matter how alone you feel.

As for incorporating kink into Reylo many of us definitely do enjoy the smuttier side of fandom but I know for me that wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t emotionally invested in the ship. I think some assume the main reason we ship Reylo is because Adam is hot or Rey and Ben together is hot and it’s all simplified to being about sex but for the majority of us the ship is about so much more than that. I’m drawn to Ben and Rey because of the complexities of their stories both together and individuality. There’s this idea now that liking a character who does anything with questionable morals means you’re a bad person but I personally have never been drawn to the innocent characters. Both Rey and Ben are more grey not fully good or evil and I love that about them. More importantly I’m drawn to how much it’s clear they love each. Even in TFA they understood each other in ways no one else could because of their bond.

I feel like in order to get Reylo and especially Ben as a character you have to be willing to think deeper about the media you consume and some people only want surface level SW. On the surface it’s just bad guy Kylo Ren vs Rey but there is so much more going on than that if you look. I think people forget that fictional media is open for interpretation. Scenes like where Ben tells Rey “you’re nothing, but not to me” is one people have twisted to mean something manipulative when I don’t see it that way at all. To me Ben was trying to tell her he sees her. He sees that she came from nothing that she has no one like him (because he’s felt so abandoned by his family for so long) but she’s not nothing, to him she’s everything you can tell in how he literally begs her to stay with him. This is isn’t some example of me deliberately twisting facts to suit my narrative of what I want the characters to be this is simply that I see the scene differently than some one else might. I don’t get what’s wrong with that?

I know this got long and kind of rambly I just needed to vent. I just wish the hate would stop. If you don’t like Reylo don’t ship it. Learn to live and let live. Nothing we are doing is hurting anyone. We are shipping two adult characters because we see something positive here. I don’t get how something that’s about love something that brought so many people together can inspire such hate in others.

[kyashin]

Voltron: The Fandom of You

Soooooo, hi. I want to talk about Voltron fandom, because I have some positive things to say about it. But first, I want to talk about due South.

due South is one of my favorite shows, and the fandom produced some of my favorite fan content. All around, it was a fantastic contribution to the universe. Well done, humanity.

For the uninitiated, the show is: Canadian Mountie Benton Fraser, the most upstanding and honest (and sarcastic) person imaginable, first came to Chicago on the trail of the killers of his father; and, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, he remained, attached as liaison officer with the Canadian Consulate. It was a buddy cop show, and for seasons one and two, his cop buddy was an Italian-American dude named Ray Vecchio. Some people shipped it.

The show was canceled, and then, after enthusiastic fan campaigning, lovingly revived for two more seasons with Paul Gross––the actor who played Fraser––at the helm as executive producer. Unfortunately, David Marciano was unable to reprise his role as Ray Vecchio, so yikes! Now what? The entire premise of this thing was “sincere Canadian Mountie and cynical American cop shenanigans”. The solution was to replace Ray Vecchio. Literally. Like...in the show.

The first episode of season three has Fraser arriving in Chicago after a vacation in Canada to find this hot blond dude with a way different accent claiming to be Ray Vecchio, who is dark-haired and different-accented and just...you know...an entire different human being. Aaand let’s skip to the end of the episode where it turns out that Actual Ray Vecchio is undercover with the mob, so this new dude is gonna pretend to be him ‘til Vecchio gets back. New dude’s name is Ray Kowalski. People also shipped that.

But the fans who’d like, worked feverishly to get their show back on the air weren’t counting on having half the duo they wanted back erased from the show. !!!!!!!!!!!

Enter the Ray Wars. (Seriously, there’s a whole thing about them on fanlore.)

And a disclaimer: I wasn’t in the fandom for the height of the rage and fury, but I did saunter in as things were winding down, and even then some of the wreckage was still smoldering. That whole kerfuffle was Fandom Infamous for a super long time––and people who’ve been in Fandom long enough definitely know the Ray Wars by name AND reputation. For years, I’d see the Ray Wars held up by others as one of the ultimate examples of “intense fans” and just how Not Good a Look fandom can make for itself.

Here’s the thing though: the Ray Wars took place in the late 90s. No social media, no widespread understanding of fandom throughout the population. Fans were, like, on mailing lists and shit. The people who created AO3 were posting fic on web hosts like Geocities and Angelfire. Some people still called the internet “the web”, AOL was the gatekeeper to the internet things for a lot of people, and fans were figuring out that we could do ~*~*~*this*~*~*~ to make our user names look super unique and cool (not that I did that, just to be real, real clear). In that time, fandoms were very, super insular worlds with very tall, very robust fourth walls separating fans from creators and actors.

And for decades, these niche-occupying fans were accustomed to consuming very heterosexual content––shows and movies and comics and video games––and then writing whole-ass essays about how you could interpret this same-sex ship as legitimate within canon if you tilted your head 23 degrees, closed one eye, ignored the heterosexual ending, and stared long enough at these four screenshots from that one scene in episode 13.

You’d see flinches of contact between Fandom and The Established Source Material Creators sometimes. but it was rare. Anne Rice, for example, haaaaaaaaates fanfiction, and she’d go to great lawyery lengths to erase all she could find of it from the internet. Generally speaking, though, creators lived over there, and fans lived here, and we didn’t have much of an opportunity to interact with each other outside of, like, letters and conventions. There were still disrespectful fans, but you had to, like, make an effort to be a direct nuisance to the cast or crew.

Also, admitting to liking “slash” fanfiction as a woman back then got you “you just like slash because you’re too jealous to imagine your favorite male characters with women” at best and “that’s disgusting” at worst. ...Eh, there was probably worse, let’s be real.

So you can imagine the reaction many of us had when Paul Gross was interviewed about due South’s upcoming third season in 1997 and said of Callum Keith Rennie, the actor who’d play Ray Kowalski, “I tell you, slash fiction is going to go crazy when they see the new guy. He is really good-looking and sexy, the dangerous side of Fraser. It will be totally homoerotic.” THESE WERE THINGS AN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER SAID. IN 1997. KNOW WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN 1997? ELLEN DEGENERES CAME OUT. AND THEN LOST HER CAREER BECAUSE OF IT FOR A LONG-ASS TIME. WILL AND GRACE WASN’T EVEN A THING YET (1998). NEITHER WAS THE ORIGINAL UK VERSION OF QUEER AS FOLK (1999).

Like, holy shit???

And the thing is? He wasn’t baiting. The show intentionally included a LOT of subtext between Fraser and Ray Kowalski, to the point where the last episode of the show showed Ray having a literal identity crisis because he could tell Fraser wanted to go back to Canada permanently and like, “who am I without him” and then the series ends with the two of them sledding into the actual sunset no I’m not exaggerating that happened WHAT EVEN WAS THIS BLESSING IN 1999.

Were they canon? Eeeeeh. Kinda? It was 1997, I’d call whatever they were groundbreaking, at least for me. And the reason I say it wasn’t baiting is because all Paul said was, “Slash fans will like this,” and many of us did. So, y’know. Truth in advertising. Well done, Paul.

AND NOW IT IS THE YEAR OF OUR QUEERS, 20gayteen, and SO MANY THINGS have changed for the better for LGBTQ folks in the last two decades. Like, Voltron fandom is WILD to me sometimes (in a fantastic way) because some of the fans are actually young enough to have been born after the AIDS crisis, after Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered, after Don’t Ask Don’t Tell––after all these horrible, devastating wounds were inflicted on our beautiful queer family. There are actually fans in Voltron who believe, without a sliver of doubt, that a same-sex pairing can and will become canon.

That’s bananas to me. That there is hope like that! Belief like that! Because I was born at the very end of the AIDS crisis and I didn’t hear the word bisexual until I was, like, twelve, let alone have enough of a support system around me to embrace that label for myself. B A N A N A S.

So of course––of course––there’s a part of me that hopes a same-sex pairing will happen in Voltron. Just thinking about how Dreamworks almost made Miguel and Tulio a canon couple in The Road to El Dorado in 2000 makes my heart twinge with disappointment. (Yes, Chel is great, but.)

See, I’m super attached to Voltron even when the writing is clearly stifled and bridled in by the people whose job it is to sell lots and lots of Voltron toys. I read klance fic and reblog VLD fanart and I have one (1) friend who also watches the show. We talk about it sometimes, and I throw fanart of Shiro at her because he’s her favorite. She doesn’t ship anything, and I am a cheerful little klance-shipping demon. I am in a fandom of two, and it’s pretty great in here.

But.

Voltron’s a lighthearted kid’s show about humans and aliens piloting mecha lions in space to save the universe from space colonialism, and while I will be dizzy with glee if a same-sex couple becomes canon in this show, I want it more for the intended audience of Voltron: kids.

I met a kid last year at Osaka Pride whose mother said, “He came home from school and told me, ‘I don’t feel like a girl or a boy,’” so this young mother brought her child to Pride to learn more about the community that her baby might belong in. And that lovely little human stayed on the fringes at first, apparently shy, until their mother told them, “Go on,” and then they spent the next ten minutes literally jogging around all the booths and beaming at everyone: the trans women in neon dresses cooing at how cute this little sunbeam was, the booth folks selling rainbow-themed merch, the couples hand-in-hand without shame or fear. And when they came back to their mom, they were completely carefree. And I thought, I wish that had been me.

And maybe it could’ve been, if every single cartoon I consumed as a child wasn’t coding gay men as villains, overtly implying that LGBT people had a direct link to actual pedophilia, and aggressively promoting heterosexual romance as The Only Acceptable Way of Love. If I’d grown up in a world where Ruby and Sapphire were on TV being happily in love every week, I might’ve realized what was in my own heart sooner than college.

So there is part of me who understands why people are so emotionally connected to the possibility of a ship like klance becoming canon. I’ve felt that urgent hope, that wild hunger, again and again and again and again in my life, and the only time I’ve ever had that hope realized in canon was in 2016 watching Viktor and Yuuri skate together in Yuri!!! on Ice. I cried. A lot.

I understand the emotion fueling the very, very bad decisions being made. In the simplest possible terms, the people who repeatedly harass the Voltron cast and crew are people who want a thing and are prioritizing getting that thing over the mental health of real people. I think it’s a symptom of internet detachment. When one is flinging words into a void, one doesn’t have to see how they’re received. Their actions––if I haven’t made it clear––are objectively harmful, and I don’t condone them.

But what I want to say––what I wrote this whole thing to say––is that Voltron isn’t a terrible fandom, and it isn’t the first fandom to have loud, overzealous fans who cross the line and make people inside and outside the fandom alike think, Yeesh they’re/we’re all lunatics. Voltron fandom is not The Worst, because I guarantee you if The Ray Wars were happening today, there’d totally be people on Twitter attacking Callum Keith Rennie directly for daring to replace David Marciano. It could have been so, so much uglier than it was, and it was already Bad.

In 1997, the fourth wall still more or less existed, and LGBT content––let alone respectful content––was scarce to say the least, so Fandom Discourse at the time remained generally contained to fan-on-fan unpleasantness. Today, that fourth wall is utterly gone, and I think all fandoms have to adapt to that and learn a whole new code of etiquette. LGBT rep is important, but there are respectful and effective ways to get it that don’t involve harassing the cast and crew. The voice actors and creators and crew of Voltron deserve basic human decency, and to be seen as people first and content creators second. It’s entirely possible for the majority of fandom to interact respectfully with the creators––it’ll just take time and patience, like most things that last.

So listen, everything’ll be fine. Try to have patience with each other. To quote a manga I’ve been translating: “There will be times in your life when you won’t be able to avoid being angry. Don’t make little things bigger than they have to be. Laugh and forgive.” Or, in this case, laugh and ignore. If you like a thing, awesome! Tell people! Or don’t! And if you don’t like something, carefully consider the consequences of what you do after you realize, I don’t like this. I don’t ship sheith at all, but for the last two years I’ve managed to leave alone the fans who do ship it and not send Shiro’s voice actor and his family angry, threatening messages. It wasn’t even difficult, guys. I just, like, read some klance fic instead.

I felt compelled to make this because I keep seeing posts from Voltron fans calling Voltron fandom a raging garbage fire and sure, there’re people playing near dry kindling with flamethrowers more than is advisable, but Voltron fans have created and will continue to create some beautiful content and friendships just for love of a show, and that’s lovely as fuck. If you’re feeling ashamed of your fandom and you haven’t done anything wrong, remember that you’re fandom, too. Keep being respectful, kind, and good. The terrible people won’t go away, but they won’t define the fandom for you unless you let them.

Be kind to each other, and things will improve.

And if anyone tells you your ship is bad, don’t talk to that person anymore, because that person probably has some dry kindling and a flamethrower.

And hey, if you’re at the end of this post and you’re like: Wow, this was way too short, and I would like to read more things this person has written, there’s always my Team Voltron-in-Japan AU. It has klance and Nyma/Allura and I enjoy writing it.

Wow, I’m hungry. Bye! :D/

[feminismforlesbians]

I read through your blog: I suggest you stop giving any of your time to misogynistic women and start discussing with transwomen who aren't moronic retards instead. It sounds like it would be the solution to most of the inter-communities issues you address.

don’t use disgusting ableist terms like the r-slur please

also i’ve spent a lot of time in libfem spaces; years, even. i engaged in libfem beliefs and actions. i condemned radical feminists. i denied my own feelings and rights as a woman, born with the body and guaranteed oppression of a female. i punished myself each time i had a thought like, “but my body does matter, but my vagina does matter, my femaleness, the sex i was born with, is mine and it is important, trans women don’t understand that”. i would hate myself.

that’s what i developed in libfem “positive trans women” spaces.

make no mistake, neither space is perfect. libfem spaces i have come to feel, are more progressive and accepting of disabled women—this is not to say that radfem spaces are not, because they are, in their own way. but i do prefer discussions of disabled women, particularly mentally ill women, in libfem spaces. i met and befriended trans women. i do not begrudge trans women their personal identities.

but accepting trans activism and all the demands and accusations of trans women was literally dismantling the safety and integrity i so loved in feminism. i looked at radfem spaces and saw that here, female struggles, the real oppression and unique experience of womanhood that is found only through being born of the female sex, was not ignored. i did not have to constantly demean myself for the feelings of trans women.

also here in radfem spaces people are allowed have a fucking opinion. i’m allowed to discuss topics; like, actually discuss them. people are allowed to disagree, or to say “you know, i think i would explore that further”. people are allowed to talk about concepts, to think about them, openly, without condemning themselves to one concrete position, because that’s just not how humans work. i don’t agree with some things some people do here and certainly it was the same in libfem spaces, but i don’t feel afraid to say that here as i did as a libfem. the most underlying connection here in these spaces, in the briefest statement, is recognition of sex based oppression. these spaces let me be a female. and that belief breeds many more realizations and opinions—views that can be explored and challenged and accepted without fear of death threats.

trans women, within trans activist and libfem circles, wouldn’t give a damn what i said as soon as i mentioned being female. if i started with even “cis women need—” i would be called a terf and threatened with death. i’m not making this up because i know. i’ve been in those circles and felt forced to agree with threatening women with death for being women. i’ve apologized for being a “cis” women after they’ve made their death threats, for daring to be one of those “cis” bitches. as long as i knew my place as “cis” privileged bitch, they were kind to me. as long as i continued to reiterated that yes, of course, i believe that we are just the same, you and i, trans women are women, yes yes yes, my body and my sex doesn’t matter, yes yes yes. then they were very kind to me, and we were friends.

but that’s not actually friendship, is it, and it’s not actually supporting a common cause if one of the parties feels like she can’t open her mouth without damning herself as the devil. and the thing is, i felt like the devil. i hated myself.

then i gave in, and cautiously lurked on radfem tumblrs—sure i would find a community of hateful harpies conspiring to murder transwomen, sure that seeing this would make me stop having radfem, terf thoughts. instead i found the community i described to you: imperfect, but not in a vicious way. imperfect in that not every single view and person is a mirror image of my own. imperfect in a normal way. a community that lets me be a woman, and lets me speak.

so, tell me, with your righteous words, which space do you think is more misogynistic? the space that cries witch to a woman who speaks about her female sex and asks for respect and to be heard; or the space that shares a common belief that being female is real and matters and that ensuing discussion is open and exploratory, that the women here can have opinions and they’re not actually the devil for it? hm?

if trans women want to be called trans women, fine. but that doesn’t make them a woman like me. there’s more to it than that—my body and my sex cannot be changed, even if i were to be a “trans man”, my vagina still condemns me. I would still be a female. a trans woman was still born with her sex: that penis affords her an experience she can never deny, one that we can never share.

i do not have a vendetta against the people who call themselves trans women simply because they call themselves trans women; i have an issue with people who would silence female women to benefit them, i have an issue with spaces that are so frantic not to hurt feelings and accept everyone always always always that they would deny women their exclusive spaces, ones earned through hard work.

my vague ideal, one i am still exploring, would be one where female women were given their own spaces and respect, and exclusivity, and trans women could be afforded respect and resources—but would acknowlege that they are not entitled to us or or spaces. does this vague ideal fit completely with either ideology? no, not completely. but at least i won’t be threatened with violence and told i am scum for exploring it. and yes, radfem spaces support the idea of giving feminism back to women.

so no, i think you’re incorrect. i think you’re a self-righteous person who comes to me thinking you can sway me because of my “inter-community” views by insinuating that women in this space are misogynistic and trans women elsewhere are benevolent beings with no faults. i can sense the guilting of women and the idealization of trans women from a mile away; i drowned myself in it for years.

plus, you seem to think the ableist language will give you points.

you were wrong.

[argotmagazine-blog]

Hysto

I had my reproductive organs voluntarily removed at twenty-two years-old. I’d like to imagine they’re pickled and floating in a jar waiting to be dissected. This is not the first time the distance between myself and my body has become literal; my perfectly healthy flesh and blood are my own worst enemy. My body is company I can only hold at this distance, like a prism against the ceiling light, a spectrum full of indecipherable color. A piece of me, somewhere, is gone.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about what it means for a transgender person to have surgery. I had to refuse any and all food and liquid, a seemingly impossible task for raging coffee-addict. I gingerly walked up the women’s and infant’s clinic front-desk alone, and told them that I was indeed, the patient being operated on this afternoon. To any passing stranger, I was a young man asking about his partner, wife, child. The reality was I stumbled over my words, with sweat on my forehead as the clerk found my name and said I needed to sign paperwork.

“Are you the patient?” the clerk asked me. I don’t recall anything unique about her. She looked me over with the type of familiarity she might give an unpleasant co-worker’s child.

I say yes. At this point, there’s no going back.

Cue me being asked to follow the dotted yellow lines into a room where I’m met with a dark hallway—not unlike the one from Barton Fink. It was surreal and slightly off-putting, like a dim forgotten corner of a movie set. I walked into the office to sign the consent forms and am asked to follow more yellow dotted lines to another department. In a matter of hours, I would be put to a sleep and operated on, as if none of this preamble ever happened.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the yellow-brick road Judy Garland and her dog dutifully traveled on to see the wizard, a mystical hermit in his emerald towers. The Wizard of Oz was an obsession in my single-parent household. The stripes on the floor are intended to guide patients and their families, but I went through this all alone, feeling like Dorothy after her house crashed on top of a poor witch. I want to apologize for intruding, for bringing this body into a women’s space, but because of my sex this is where the surgery must take place. It’s frustrating introducing myself; I’m ready as I’ll ever be for the procedure.

When a trans body enters a hospital, it’s as easy as being sucked up into a tornado. It’s swept away from a sepia-hued world into a hyper-visible, technicolor land of prying eyes and confused stares. It’s enough to give anyone cold feet. But there are medical fees for that. There are dollar signs flying like winged-monkeys everywhere. Legal paperwork saying I’m someone else might as well be a house dropping down on my head. That it clearly says they have the wrong patient.

But I had a letter saying I was supposed to be here, for this, I emphasized to the clerk, being as vague as possible. The surgery. I’m piss-broke and have just signed away a significant amount of money to pay for a surgery I would never be able to afford without my Ivy League college insurance.

Nice people get what they want and I wanted to have my organs removed to become a better, more whole person because of it. I was determined to find my ruby slippers, slap them together, and walk out to attend class next week like nothing happened. In retrospect, this is the apex of the overachiever mentality: going in for major surgery on Friday and talking about Foucault the following Monday.

I was used to trying to appeal to others for respect, so I smiled and nodded with every well- intentioned “miss” and “m’am” knowing all too well that the clinical description of “gender identity disorder” was stamped on every page of my paperwork. This was the nature of the beast, and I was lost in this Oz world, stumbling my way along, doing my best not to make myself too noticeable. All I wanted was to go home, metaphorically, into a body I could better recognize myself in. I had a big house crash in on my life and it was the body I lived in.

The DSM-5 now calls “gender identity disorder” “gender dysphoria disorder,” which supposedly lessens the stigma attached to transgender people. But bodies are messy and on principal, they’re subject to change regardless of how we choose to talk about them. This is inherently a problem with language and how culture violently twists and depicts trans bodies. I’m not here to entertain baseless arguments about people wanting to cut off limbs because they “think they should be an amputee.” Here was the brick wall in my transition: squishy organs, ripe for the picking.

Fixating on what people ought to do to their body isn’t new or exciting. I’m interested in the visceral messiness of the experience, the bureaucratic ritualism that preludes any endeavor to present ourselves to medical institutions. The mechanical process of sex-related surgery isn’t exciting. I doubt those other than the morbidly curious and skeptical would find the technicalities illuminating. It’s boring being a transgender person going under the knife. Waiting for surgery is like watching grass grow—nothing ever happens. It’s miles upon miles of dotted lines, signatures, and the sound of your own urine splashing against a measurement cup minutes before you’re on the gurney.

I spent my recovery watching gross, schlocky movies. It’s comforting losing myself in the screen, doing my best to get into another person’s head. It’s a good enough distraction from picturing the sinews of my abdomen healing together, my pelvic muscles recoiling after being sliced open for the surgery to take place. My gruesome tendencies go wild—I want to imagine all sorts of morbid transformations taking place where my uterus once was. I pictured it like the scene in The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum realizes he’s growing tiny insectoid feelers on his forearms. This scene is not unlike my own discoveries of individual chin hairs after years of injecting testosterone.

Compared to most transgender men, I’m about as masculine as a naked mole-rat. My body will now require synthetic hormones to be injected on a weekly basis in order to maintain itself. This is something I of course discussed at lengths for months with my doctor. There’s no problem here—I became obsessed with my own boredom waiting for my body to heal. I felt abnormally well.

I fantasized about a creature inside of me ready to burst out like an Alien parasite, announcing that I’m here, finally in this new home I call my meat and flesh. But no abomination will come tearing me open from the inside-out. Only my own ennui ready to swallow itself whole like Ouroboros.

The monster analogies are easy—Frankenstein, Chimera, test-tube creatures. Walking through the world with this body is the equivalent of hiding the fact you are, partially, the product of someone else’s handiwork. This is how I’ve come to terms with own sense of monstrosity, the jagged edges of my body that don’t quite all fit together.

Scholar Susan Stryker describes the trans body in her essay/performance piece My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix:

“The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born.”

The trans body is both the site of medical and technological impact, crashing into each other violently to make beautiful results. The Frankenstein-qualities of a body that will need hormones to survive is admirable to me—it’s a powerful announcement of my own autonomy, the desire to live in a world constantly trying to kill me. I cut ties with the old biological demands of my old body for a new one, tailored to fit, in a form from “flesh torn apart.” This cycle began when I had chest reconstruction surgery and my hysterectomy is another symbolic middle-finger to the world. I have the agency to sew this body back together, transform it an optimized, beautiful living being.

When I inject my weekly hormones, I feel euphoria. I feel my body re-organize itself when I complete a dose. It’s an all-consuming experience that demands a concentrated up-keep of syringes, doses, needles, and gauges. To reject what I was given, I reach out for the tools at hand, become my own cyborg, someone who builds out of what’s despised.

From Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado:

“I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is post-pornographic, add a molecular prostheses to my low-tech transgender identity composed of dildos, texts, and moving images; I do it to avenge your death.”

Letting myself be used, medically, is an act of freedom. In his introduction to Testo Junkie, Preciado announces an “low-tech transgender identity” in conversation with the death of those he knows and loves. The consequences of dying, either on or off the surgery table, are all the same: the muscles give out and the body finally rests. Preciado and Stryker speak on the dissociation and pain of the trans body better than I ever could—the body isn’t one object, but a collection of “Frankenstein-qualities” and “dildos, texts, and moving images.” It’s an amalgamation of lost pieces sewn back together to make a façade that lasts just long enough, a shelter that endures just enough rough weather to survive. It’s a house, albeit one that crashed from the sky long ago.

Strewn on my bed, with my flesh bending itself back into shape, I couldn’t help but return to the image of bloodied meat. The recovery process is blinding, painful, and full of medication. My mind wandered to Elvira Weishaupt’s monologue in the climatic slaughterhouse scene of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons, in which a transgender woman recounts her childhood nostalgia with a friend. The scene is brutal, with vivid, long shots of cows being partially decapitated, their bloody flesh bare as Elvira speaks. Elvira is abused and traumatized by the men in her life after genital confirmation surgery, after which she commits suicide. The film, released in 1978—only one year before Janice Raymond published her hateful The Transexual Empire—explicitly associates the transformation of Elvira’s body with the carnage and violence that comes with production-line slaughterhouses. The transgender body is a site of mutilation and damage—surgeries only leave emotional and physical gashes that cannot heal, according to Fassbinder. The sentiment of the film is not empowering nor approving of transgender people’s autonomy in determining their own biology. It’s a moment of disgust and the re-opening of traumatic wounds by recollecting memories of a past body, one that the speaker cannot cling on to anymore.

The body is easily destroyed. It is also easily rebuilt, as sinews and connecting tissue regrow, the body regenerates itself, waking up again after being dormant. It’s amazingly resilient. A new flesh can spawn from the shrivel and bloodied remains of the last occupant—the meat of the body isn’t a dying thing. It grows and becomes—my scars now are just that now, only scars.

I still don’t know what the proper response is when people ask about the surgery.

It’s just a pinch, I want to tell them. A snap of the wrists. A crack of the skull.

A bullet to the heart. A fist to the eye.

That word, transsexual, hanging heavy and wet on a company’s tongue, because you had the dollar to your name and the will to live. Sticks and stones.

My body is vetting itself down the yellow brick road, hitting all the speed bumps along the way. It’s as good as broken. I like it this way.

Blake Planty loves crawling the web at the witching hour. He has fiction and essays published and forthcoming in Nat Brut, DREGINALD, Heavy Feather Review, Waxwing, The Fanzine, Tenderness Lit, and more. Find him talking about cyborgs and coffee at @_dispossessed on Twitter and online at catboy.club.

[lessthanhappyy]

I want to be critical.

Of myself and of others. When something is easy for me, I want to question why. I want to know if it’s because I’m in a safe and inclusive space or if it’s because of privilege. I want to know if it’s a mixture of both. When something is hard for me, or goes wrong at literally every single point possible – and the points I didn’t even know it was possible for it to go wrong at – I want to question why. I want to know if it’s because I am a marginalized and oppressed person, or if genuine mistakes were made. I want to know if it’s because of both of those reasons. I want to question the rules and regulations set up for that place and system. Who made them, why did they make them; who are we keeping out with those rules and regulations, who are we making it easier to take up space with those rules and regulations. Being critical is not a bad thing. Being critical of a movement, of a people, of a moment, of a restriction, or of a suggestion, is not a bad thing. Pointing out where movements have failed is not a bad thing. It’s important. It’s revolutionary. It’s making the points that have been pushed aside and fallen through the cracks – through lack of privilege, through oppression, through disbelief that that person or persons could have an important point – be noticed again. Without being critical we don’t notice those voices. Without being critical, people are made to believe that their narrative is the narrative. I want to be critical of that belief. If you ever feel like you have the narrative of a movement, a people, a moment, a restriction, or a suggestion, I would like to suggest, that you are probably wrong. Have somebody else define it for you.

When I am exploring community, I want to be able to say, this space, this thing, this rule, has done something against me and my people, and I want that to be met on its own merits. I want people to see that and ask, then how do we move forward. And if the answer is, I don’t know, then let’s ask somebody else. In response, I aim to respond to critiques of myself and my people with the same behavior. How do I fix this? How do we move forward? Who else can I ask? Where can I educate myself about this? Believe me, I have had problematic beliefs through the years, and I definitely still have some. You don’t get to grow up white without having privilege that will last you forever. You don’t get to grow up in a heteronormative, cisnormative, sex obsessed, purity obsessed, racist, xenophobic society without having lasting beliefs that stretch on for significantly longer than you’d think, unnoticed by yourself. I know gay people that call out their own homophobia, trans people that call out their own transphobia, and people of colour that call out their own racism. If you are cis, straight, and/or white (especially if you are then also Christian, stereotypically attractive, able, not fat, and others I can’t think of to list right now) you need to call out your shit too. You are not exempt from that. I am not exempt from that.

Being critical of a community is being able to say that feminists question my gender and my sex and my sexuality, and saying that’s not okay, how do we move forward from there, but also recognizing that I read an article by a black women who was explaining why she’s a womanist and not a feminist, and the entirety of the comments are feminists attacking her, because how dare she experience discomfort in a space that has historically been designed by and for white women. How do we move forward from that as feminists. The answer, by the way, is not to disown the feminists in those comments. Ignoring a problem is not solving a problem.

Being critical of a community is being able to say that trans spaces often don’t uplift a spectrum of trans voices, and that this can make trans folk feel not trans enough, that this can make cis folk question the voices of trans folk who aren’t the uplifted voices, and that’s not okay, how do we move forward from there, but also recognizing that every trans group or space I’ve been a part of in person or on the internet is uncomfortably white. How do we move forward from here? How do we solve these problems?

I want us to be critical.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s important. It helps us move forward. We need to move forward, and that happens with open critique. That happens through spaces cultivated for discussion and conversation, where people have the time and space to be called out, step back, and question, what am I doing? How can I make it better? More inclusive? And then turn back to the people who said, hey, this is problematic, and say, can you help me make it less problematic? Or at the least, can you point me to somewhere where I can find others to make it less problematic?

Listen to the voices of those who have critiques. They coincide with marginalized and oppressed voices all of the time. Listen to these people. Listen.

Be critical, and take it in if somebody is critiquing you or something that you think is good. Privilege blinds us all of the time, and chances are, if somebody is saying check your privilege, and you don’t understand, that’s why. Cis people aren’t bad – but they have systematically been taught that their gender and bodies are correct. Straight people aren’t bad – but they have systematically been taught that their love and sex and relationships are better and cleaner and less dangerous. White people aren’t bad – but we have been systematically taught we are better, deserve more, and are more logical because of the colour our skin. You don’t unlearn these beliefs by deciding they’re untrue: you unlearn them by deciding they’re untrue, learning how these beliefs influence behavior and opportunities, recognize you will never fully unlearn them, and then you question everything. If something is easy for you, ask why. Look at statistics. Look at personal testimonies. Look at your friends who aren’t cis and/or straight and/or white. Is it easy for them too? If something is hard for you ask why. Is it because this space was designed for trans people? Is it because black people have their own language (AAVE) and you’re falling through the meaning of their words that are meant for them and not you? Maybe it’s because you’re mentally ill, and the space is designed for neurotypical folk. Question everything. Be critical.

I need us to be critical. So that people can learn how to respond gracefully and respectfully and with an acknowledgment of their privilege when called out. I need us to be critical so that we can make inclusive movements and spaces and protests. I need us to be critical so that critique becomes a part of our experience and isn’t thought of as a bad thing. I need us to be critical, because I need spaces to support my people, and my friends people, and my partners people, and we cannot get there without being critical. We cannot get there without recognizing that we got from point A to point E on the backs of black folk, people of colour, trans folk, queer folk, and other marginalized voices and have then systematically ignored and not taught about those pieces of our history.

So go be critical of yourself; and if a marginalized person calls you out, listen, because there’s a reason that they’re raising their voice louder than a whisper, and there’s a reason why you’ve still interpreted it as a shouting match.

     - Arctic