#the right to be amab and feminine is a right we all fight for together

[yeen-meteor]

i love all of bridget guilty gear. i love her backstory, i love her portrayal in XX.

i love that she is a character that can be both. a trans, trans-ass transgendereded trans girl who is trans and is so, so extraordinarily happy to be living happy and free and cute and true and is giving all the trans girls a feeling of joy and hope that resonates. and also a statement of “the journey of self-discovery is worth venturing on even if it only leads you back to the place you started, because you’ll return with a new understanding of and appreciation for what it is about yourself you love to be”.

I love bridget as a statement of “phases are valid and healthy to experience”. i love bridget as a statement of “trying new pronouns doesn’t have to be a forever commitment.” i love a sheltered, confused 15-year-old going out into the world for the first time, experiencing freedom, and trying on He/Him for a while just to see if it fits, just to explore. It didn’t fit, long term! but people gave bridget room and support to really try, to really see how it felt to be a boy! and she found just as much support when she realized it wasn’t right for her and she wanted to try being a girl again!

bridget is the embodiment of “don’t crack eggs, build nests”. bridget is a winding self-discovery journey that she dictates for herself, while her loved ones give her support and patience and don’t push her or pressure her.

i love the reframing of GGXX bridget’s story that GGST presents. i love bridget. i love,

[genderqueerdykes]

the reason intersex people need to be visible and at the forefront of every queer's activism is because we are completely devoid of autonomy when it comes to identifying ourselves. no matter how hard we try to speak up on how we are treated, how we are dehumanized, how we are refused our right to say who we are, it falls through the cracks because of how many people continue to diminish our issues, and espouse intersexist beliefs.

when i speak up about being transfemme, and a trans girl, it's not because i'm trying to step on people's toes or speak about something i don't understand. i speak up about it because this is the life i've lived. it doesn't matter if strangers see me this way or not, this is how i've been my entire life. whether or not someone knows i was technically born AMAB and then had my gender "corrected" shouldn't matter.

trans people do not only come in binary sexes- just like gender, physical sex is also not a binary. i am an intersex trans girl , even if my agab didn't stay AMAB forever. I would be an intersex trans girl regardless of whether or not they assigned me male at birth, because my experience with womanhood and femininity is that they've always been held away from me, way farther than it would ever be possible for me to reach.

i've had to take estrogen & progesterone HRT in the past in order to "correct" my masculine features in order to look like and be a girl "correctly". the subject of my body and my gender has never been something i've been able to control. my whole live i've just been told that i'm a girl wrong, and that i need to "Fix" it.

boyhood or manhood weren't options either, that was held away from me with a 10 foot pole as well. i've had to transition into gender, itself, because i was forbidden to be a boy or a girl. i was always too sensitive or soft to be a real boy. gender as a concept has been a source of control and degredation for me. i had to transition into both manhood and womanhood in order to have control over how i identify. even now when i talk about manhood and being a man, people tell me that i'm not a trans man because of how i look. i'm routinely denied manhood, I "have" to be a trans woman only to some.

due to my intersex condition, i'm a trans man and a trans woman, transfemme and transmasc, but people struggle to accept this. there's no reason for people to give me hell about these parts of myself, and yet people still do. intersex awareness matters because we fight to be seen as the people we are. we struggle to have our identities be addressed correctly. we are in the same fight as trans individuals, and we owe it to intersex trans men, women, and people to help people understand that trans folks come in all different types of bodies, and that biological sex is not a binary, either.

we have to fight for each other's autonomy. for all of us. together we are stronger, louder, and braver.

[lefttitnonebeef]

If I had the chance to tell one story to the world it would be this: How It Took Twenty Years For Me To Have My First Birthday.

I'm AMAB. Born a man. Born - for me - wrong. I am a woman. A girl. Female, in the exactly wrong body. The signs were there the whole time: I was always interested in feminine things more than masculine things; I wanted barbies until I was given an Action Man, I wanted girly hair but was forced into a buzcut with my parents literally holding me down into the chair as I kicked and cried, i fucking said I wanted to be more like the women in the shows and films I watched instead of the men. But the thing I resent most about my childhood, was simply being lumped in with the boys.

My best friend at the beginning of school was a girl - we'll call her Zoe. Me and Zoe got on like a house on fire, doing everything we could together and what time we had was the best time I could possibly have as a child. Then I hit about 6-7 years old. The school - and our own social groups - began separating us by boys and girls. Guess which fucking group I was put into.

I went along with it, because I had no idea I was the only one who felt this way, I thought everyone was like me. Nobody ever talked about it so I had no frame of reference. I assumed all the other boys were like me, wanting to know why the body I was born in felt so fundamentally wrong. Years go by. I learn about basic chemistry, physics, maths. I learn how to put together certain woodworking joints that are key to keeping a house upright. I learn how to set house foundations, how to finance for a household, how to put on a brave face, how to bottle up any and all emotion, how to insult my peers, how to put up walls, how to isolate myself, how to "be a man", how to avoid making meaningful connections, how to avoid talking to Zoe.

Now imagine, if you will, a world without such things as separating classes into boys Vs girls before they know how to divide 10/2. Imagine a world where I could have learned how to be social, how to communicate, how to be vulnerable, how to be more than what materials I can provide. Imagine a world where I could stay friends with Zoe. Imagine a world where I, and many like me, could have lived the childhoods we were always supposed to have. Imagine a world where your first birthday is the day you are born, not twenty years afterwards.

You ever wonder why we care so much about young trans folk? You ever wonder why we care so much about representation? You ever wonder why we keep fighting for rights knowing that only the following generations will reap the benefit?

We want them to have what we didn't. We want them to have the childhood we didn't. We want them to have what we were robbed of. We want them to have the happiness we dreamt of.

If you believe you might be trans, even a little bit, listen to that faint whisper in the deafening cacophony that is the world. Listen to it, and what it has to say. It may just make you twenty years younger.

[burntlikethesun]

gay and trans people have such a shared history and shared experience that transphobic arguments about dropping the T don't hold any water whatsoever.

As a gay kid, I grew up being forbidden from the feminine, acting 'like a girl', being friends with girls, liking activities and TV shows considered girly, speaking like a girl.. the list goes on. Guess what experiences a trans woman will have also gone through at the same time. The inverse is true for lesbians and trans men.

Rather than just being a group of random sexualities beign thrown together, being LGBT is a political coalition of people to fight for their civil rights and against institutional prejudice that affect all of us who do defy the gender we were assigned at birth or defy which gender we are supposed to be attracted to.

some bigot yelling slurs at a gender non conforming person in the street doesn't care what you are, and legislation like Section 28 which made 'promotion of homosexuality' in schools illegal until it was repealed in 2003, would have meant any kid being bullied or seeking help for being gender non conforming would have had nothing in the way of support from staff.

The expression 'trans women fought for your rights' is like, inaccurate tbh because they were fighting for their own rights as well? It wasn't a favour they were doing for us, Gay bars that were being raided were home to all of us, sodomy laws affected all AMAB people, the AIDS crisis, accusations of being dangerous to children are being mirrored now as they were with gay people in the 80s, marriage equality, anti employment and housing discrimination is beneficial for trans people etc.

That's what we have in common, that shared history and experience, it's not the Sexual Orientation Club that you can decide a group within can no longer enter because they're to do with gender identity rather than sexuality, ignoring the massive overlap in our lives.

[traumacoreratboy]

Don't forget it's important to not only read the propaganda written by the groups. The common white cis 'radfem' TERFs like JK aren't oppressed like women in other countries and generally don't fight for the rights of those women. Rather, they fight to hurt other minorites like trans men and women.

They treat every AFAB the same, claim they have the same experiences, and often elevate those individuals as simultaneously unable to make their own decisions because of the patriarchy (especially something they claim about trans men) as well as strong and inherently better than AMAB (mostly it seems because half of them have never even interacted on a close level with anyone who is AMAB who isn't their abusers or anyone in real life and just go off of internet interactions).

Radical Feminism has its place, but Radical Feminism isn't inherently trans exclusatory, the movement has been co-oped by mostly conservative white AFAB women who hate trans women and think trans men are just confused.

They tend to have heavy vibes of being transmasculine themselves when they claim that everyone AFAB has the same thoughts as trans men. Think conservatives who say that if we allow people to be gay than everyone will be gay, those individuals sound like they are bi since monosexual individuals don't tend to "make a choice".

They are also perpetuate violence against gender non-conforming AFAB individuals by making bathrooms and locker rooms places where they feel entitled to check the genitals of anyone they don't think "looks like a woman" which is why you'll find a lot of butch and dyke lesbians are anti-TERF, excluding trans people is another way to enforce gender roles and "looking cis".

Absolutely agreed with all of your points. Radical feminism can have its place, but the radical feminism most people on this website operate by is.. spotty and exclusionary at best, dangerous and inconsistent at worse. In my personal opinion, that school of thought hurts all parties involved, as mot TRRF groups on here and similar websites are also STAUNCHLY anti men, and I find a lot of them are rascist or homo/transphobic. All parties except the cis white women leading the group are hurt by that group, as most of their ideas of femininity stem from white, western femininity.

I personally believe in all genders being equal, and being treated equally. But, as others have said, there are undeniable biological differences that make this a hard debate. I’m a trans man myself, and I have gotten a lot of comments about people thinking I’m just a confused woman who was convinced she was trans by the media. Something I’ve noticed is most TERF ideologies sound like repackaged misogyny to me, but especially their views on a woman being made a woman based on her ability to reproduce, which even some cis women cannot do.

From what I have observed, TERFism and trans exclusionism do often come together hand in hand. As you mentioned, the Radical Feminism movement was co-opted by conservative cis white women (+men), men and women who normally against trans and other lgbt people to begin with, and are normally otherwise bigoted.

You can be conservative and non bigoted, if I haven’t made that clear. I don’t give a flying fuck what your political standings are when you’re being hateful and exclusionary towards others.

Thank you for the ask, anon.

(I will tag this later when I’m not on the mobile chrome browser with a bad internet connection.)

[doctorzero]

Ok, so The Matrix and gender, and the running commentary in the visual language. This is gonna be pretty long, I’m sorry about that.

I’d argue there’s actually a lot more to do with gender that you can take from The Matrix than might be obvious on the surface, for example how most male characters have their female counterparts, who in combination work better than they do in isolation (notice how Morpheus seems to hide behind his belief in mysterious prophecies, up until he is reunited with Niobe, his female counterpart, who challenges his position and forces him to confront what he actually believes), or how the main antagonist, Agent Smith (and by extension all the other agents) is pretty transparently coded as a powerful and untrustworthy male character as we would understand it from a more modern perspective. i.e; he isn’t a hulking musclebound he-man, but instead an entirely self-serving man in a suit and tie.

Or, and this is a big one, how when Neo is freed from the matrix he is stripped of all cultural gender signifiers, he is naked, bald, and helpless. Escaping from The Matrix also means losing the image of masculinity, it’s the cinematic cliché of the Strong Female Character cutting her hair short, but reversed.

But I’m gonna go with the first movie just to keep on track, and I’m going to pull out one single point or we’ll be here for hours; Neo and Trinity.

Ok, this is a little out there, so bare with me. The way I read it Trinity is actually the feminine side of Neo, and if you pay attention to the visuals that plays out pretty strongly. Even more-so knowing that the directors, the then-styled “Wachowski brothers”, are now the Wachowski Sisters.

Yes, I’m saying that if you read the visuals Neo and Trinity are actually telling the story of one trans person. Specifically a trans woman or AMAB non-binary person, but wow do I wish I could find a way to twist it better to include trans men too. I’m sorry you dudes always get overlooked.

Worth noting, the examples I’m giving are all while characters are inside The Matrix, I could talk about how in the “real world” sections gender actually plays almost no factor, with everyone dressing the same and taking the same roles, which is interesting but that’s outside my scope here and again: we’d be here for hours.

SO LET’S BEGIN WITH THE OBVIOUS SCENE.

“I just, um, I thought you were a guy” “most guys do”

So that line is pretty telling and does set the whole thing up, but here’s the thing. In this entire scene you never see both their faces at the same time, and it’s done in such a way that there’s no way that isn’t intentional.

It also includes this very clever shot reverse shot, which if anything might be a little too obvious.

In fact later, after Neo has been freed from The Matrix but hasn’t found his place yet, we see almost the opposite scene;

Do you get it? In the first scene they occupy the same space, they’re visually tied together, and in the second they almost couldn’t be any more separate. You might think that runs counter to what I’m saying, but in terms of the narrative Neo is still trying to be the person he was before, suit and tie and all.

For the sake keeping this as short as possible, let’s skip forward to where the visual coding is pretty much impossible to ignore, where Neo and Trinity take charge and we get a super cool slow motion gunfight.

Do...do I even need to explain? I mean is it even possible to ignore that they are visually male and female versions of the same person? They could literally swap outfits and it wouldn’t look out of place.

And if that wasn’t enough, check this out. When Neo fails to fight an agent on their own terms (or bluntly, man-to-man), what saves his life?

TRANS RIGHTS BITCH

I could go on, this carries through the other movies, and if anything gets even more obvious.

So in closing, Neo basically wears a dress for the entire second movie.

[grison-in-space]

They hired Joey Batey because he showed up to the audition with an actual lute upon which he played and sang a song he’d written the night before called “The Lion Cub of Cintra” based entirely on the role he was auditioning for. Batey happens to be basically built as a fairly meaty guy, one of those people who seems to put on both muscle and fat fairly effectively, although judging from his music he is often worried about being seen as fat. He is not a small man and will never be a small man, but he is very committed to the role, a musician in his own right when he’s not playing Jaskier, and generally plays the role fairly well. Personally I am glad we went with “musical talent” as a higher priority in our casting than waifish slimness.

one thing the tags have been quietly driving me nuts about on this discussion is also... look okay, my original shitposting from last year? is very much based on the belief that the body you’re born with does not define who you choose to be. Jaskier’s costuming choices are most interesting to me as a conscious choice for several reasons, and I’m gonna rant for a sec because look I had a point there I wanted to jokingly but very seriously talk about and the costuming shit is all very well and good but I wanted to talk about what it means for the character to choose to dress and present himself this way. what does it mean in story fucking terms to have a big buff dude that presents himself as non-combatant, as vulnerable, as gossipy and a little swish but not a physical threat?

see, masculinity is often defined negatively, as “whatever isn’t feminine”, and the constructed artifice of deliberate appearance modification is pretty clearly coded feminine in mainstream Anglo culture (which is what I have access to, gender is complicated, but I’m going off here). what this means is that visibly trying to control your appearance and the way that people perceive you is something that is often assumed to undermine masculinity, which has all kinds of super special social drawbacks for men/AMAB folks who don’t perform masculinity well because misogyny+sexism+transmisogyny do fun things together. 

you’re allowed to control your appearance if you pretend that the reason you’re doing so is totally divorced from the way you look (I’m lifting weights to be strong/lifting weights because I want to be hot) and the artifice you use to execute the effects is completely invisible to the viewer (not wearing any kind of visible makeup, for example). so just from that perspective, the fact that Jaskier dresses consistently to make himself seem a certain way is interesting to me. his gender presentation is a deliberate choice, and it is a deliberate choice that erodes his social status in masculine posturing rather than shores it up.

the fact that Jaskier’s size also makes him a potential threat to other people and that he acts to minimize that is also interesting in the context of the way he earns his income. it’s heavily implied that he probably secures some of his patronage through a form of sex work (i.e. his patron the Contessa, who is both paying him and sleeping with him, which ends when she throws him out of the sexual relationship). moreover, he’s an entertainer, and being muscular and large isn’t very helpful when you earn your living via your fine motor skills: damaging your hands is potentially devastating if you earn your bread playing a lute, and getting into fights is therefore dangerous for his livelihood. threatening entertainers don’t relax people into parting with money and food and shelter.

we think of being threatening as an asset in all circumstances but that is fundamentally not the case. a large, hulking, threatening Geralt will incur a certain amount of posturing from dudes who want to feel big and scary and important in their home communities; Jaskier is likely to get ignored by coming across as meek and fairly non threatening. it’s a deliberate strategy, and we know it’s deliberate because he has the bulk and body size to present himself the way Geralt does if he wants. so he doesn’t want to do that, he must want to be perceived as expressive and a little swish and not dangerous at all and approachable, and he has clearly worked hard enough to get that across that it fooled a really ridiculously high fraction of the folks in my notes here.

this post has been really resonating with delighted surprised trans folks among other things and hey! I see y’all! you are still whatever gender you feel most comfortable in even if your body isn’t cooperating right now. you can choose a lot of the way you will be perceived by thinking about your clothing, your movement, and your postures, and you can learn to do all those things with practice and thought.

and I just think it’s neat seeing a character who easily has the body type to do a very normative gender thing choose to do a non-conforming thing in a way that you absolutely do not see much in media, because usually they fucking hire the twink instead of doing all that work to get the right gender presentation, and the story fucking suffers for it and people who aren’t naturally skinny waifs don’t get to see nice things that look like them in the show.

so.

that’s why.

idle Jaskier-related notion:

Joey Batey is really approximately the same size and shape as Henry Cavill, and there are a number of clever techniques in pretty much all Jaskier's costumes to hide this fact and make him look about three or four inches narrower than he actually is. The costumers work really really hard to make him look that twinky, often with cleverly cut shoulder decorations that pretend he's trying to look bigger than he is and have the actual effect of making him look a lot lighter.

On a Doylistic level this makes sense, because it's hard to make Geralt look Huge and Imposing next to your non-combatant harmless sidekick if said sidekick is a jacked six foot burly man.

On a Watsonian level, however, the notion of Jaskier as this big meaty dude aggressively arguing with all his tailors to ensure that he looks as non threatening and foppish and entertaining as possible while also looking as sexy as he can (for a Jaskier definition of sexy, at least) is generating considerable entertainment for me this fine morning.

[garbageivereleasedintothevoid]

04-14-20

I got to the Shep thing and I have a concern. Like I'm really glad there's a fully human character with they/them pronouns that aren't even questioned. But there is a slight issue.

Shep... Appears to be AFAB but masc presenting with a still very feminine sounding voice. And... That is a very stereotypical view of nonbinary people. Yes, people like that exist. And yes, they are perfectly valid. And that's all well and food but I'd really have loved to have seen an AMAB nonbinary person in a dress or a skirt. And maybe we will. I don't know. Maybe Shep will wear a dress. I'm not done with it yet. It could happen. But my initial impression is less than overwhelmingly positive. It's a criticism. It's not world ending. And it's something I can cope with easily. I just wish we could have broken out of that right off the bat. And maybe that was a Cartoon Network thing. And not a Rebecca Sugar thing. But I do get the feeling that it's partly her as well. Idk. I hate that so much of the nonbinary community is bending itself to prevent access for people who appear masculine or that are AMAB. it can be pretty infuriating. We should all be in this together and... I'm one of very few AFAB enbies who will say "If AMAB enbies aren't welcome or don't get this, I vehemently reject it and/or will siphon as much of it as possible to the AMAB enbies in my life."

I feel it is just another way to try and paint nonbinary people as girls but in suits and masculine clothing. It really sucks to see how often people like to pretend we're so one dimensional. And to see how many AFAB enbies just let it happen because it benefits them. It's like as soon as you dangle a bit of semi-acceptance in front of someone and deny it to someone else, they just lose all their fucks to give about anyone else. Like does no one have integrity? Is standing alone and fighting dead? Why won't people stand the fuck up for others? I'd literally rather die than abandon and betray half of my community.