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enby-denby · 2 years ago

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I know this a personal anecdote, and I should probably make my own post, but I want to share this story to show that censorship of queer themes and characters starts as soon as writers and artists start putting forward their work in any media space.

So I was in a high school creative writing class in 2010, emphasis on the specific year and subject. We were given a singular prompt: the first page of a first-person mystery/noir narrative, where we were expressly told by our teacher Miss Patty Sloan (I don't care about censoring her name, if she's still alive she deserves to be shamed for this) that we could write our main character to be any gender, race, or personality type. Again, for emphasis, we were expressly told to get creative with the narrator's character as part of the creative exercize.

So I, being a baby gay in the school's GSA, wanted to make him a typical gritty noir protagonist... except he's gay. What a cool concept, right? A dame walks into his office and he has no reaction-- not a stoic exterior while his internal monologue is gushing over her fence Fatale beauty or whatever, genuine disinterest. He follows a lead into a non-gay bar and is genuinely worried he will be hit on by women and have to out himself to get any useful answers. But the biggest reason why I wanted it: the villain was also going to be gay, but instead of making out about it the protagonist would talk him through his internalized homophobia that he was unhealthy dealing with by experimenting on unwilling male subjects.

So we had a few in-class check ins before it was due, and I proudly described my concept alongside my classmates. But rather than praise me for my creative subversion of noir tropes, Miss Sloan pursed her lips with what I now recognize as disgust.

"I don't feel comfortable reading about queer characters written from a straight person's perspective."

This criticism led me to out myself to the entire class, to prove that as a lesbian (and now a nonbinary pansexual) that I had the "right" to write to write about queer characters. Then her excuse changed to it being "not appropriate to talk about sex and sexuality" in a school assignment. So a man kissing another man is too vulgar, but another man surgically implanting flowers and loose organs in other people's bodies is just fine? Years later, I would sympathize a lot witha certain quote from George RR Martin.

I even told her I had no intention to show either man in sexually suggestive situations: no kissing, no longing looks, nothing. Being gay was just a fact, a fact that would inform both characters and their actions. A necessary plot point. Non-negotiable.

And indeed, it was not: she gave me the ultimatum that if I made any of my characters gay, she would fail me for "not following instructions."

So I had to rewrite the entire story... and in malicious compliant fashion, I did. I gave the villain character a pet dog, a morality pet that was only put in to replace the heartfelt discussion on identity and the nature of love that was the crux of the original story. And how does the main character interact with this animal, while trapped in the villains lair and with nothing binding him to the villain but the physical binds he just escaped?

He holds the dog at gun-point, threatening to blow its brains out if the villain doesn't let him go and turn himself in.

So sure, the characters aren't gay anymore, bit I can still link them in some way: they are both sociopathic monsters now, the kind of villains old boomers like Patty Sloan seem to think all gay people inherently are. In this way, the Hayes Code coding came back with brutal avengence.

She graded this version of my narrative fairly, but my classmates feedback reflected their discomfort at my "survivalist ending". I wonder, if their discomfort would be more or less than if I had put forward the work I had wanted to... considering how many of my classmates have since come out as LGBT, I imagine they would have been thrilled with my original concept, had it been allowed to manifest organically.

There is one other epilogue to this story: I am still very queer, and still doing a lot of writing. Not for publishing, not yet, but I have an oc that I used in a traveller campaign. He is a greaser, he is very bisexuality, is very open with his preferences.... and he rides a Sloanobike Model XK-7000 hiver bike. If I ever publish the adventures of Zen and his friends, I might have to change the name of the bike for defamation reasons... but I will fight tooth and nail for him to continue to be bi, along with his girlfriend, his gender queer alien copilot, and his very trans-coded robro.

But maybe I'll get lucky, and the powers that be won't fight with me on any of these factors. Maybe they won't find this post, and accept the catchphrase justification for the name ("Is it slow? No! It's a Sloanobike!"). Or maybe they won't care at all, writers have gotten away with even pettier digs in their writing.

But yeah, tl;dr: even the baby gays are getting their works censored by gate-keeping, and the solution appears to be make all media so unhinged that they no longer have the capacity to care about the LGBT characters swept up in the madness.

Something I don’t think enough people recognize when it comes to making shows more diverse, there is so much going on behind the scene that you literally can’t “just add them.”

Alex Hirsch had to wait until the end of Gravity Falls to show that Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Durland were in love so that way the show didn’t get prematurely cancelled. And even still, that was censored in other countries.

________

The Owl House has a bisexual afro Latina protagonist that falls in love with a white lesbian. They kiss several times on screen and say “my awesome girlfriend.” It also has Disney’s first nonbinary character (Raine Whispers), their bisexual love interest (Eda Clawthorne), and an aro/ace woman (Lilith Clawthorne). However, because like five people said that TOH wasn’t the “Disney brand” the show is prematurely cancelled. So even with everything that TOH did, it only won battle but lost the war.

________

The art crew for Encanto had to fight to make Luisa buff. And when they were finally able to make her buff, Disney didn’t make as much Luisa merchandise because they thought little girls would want Mirabel or Isabela’s since they’re more “feminine.” (I think the same thing happened with Namaari when RATLD came out but I’m not sure. So don’t quote me on that.)

*Also, Luisa out preformed. So that’s a win.

________

Bubblegum and Marceline couldn’t kiss until the series finale of Adventure Time because it would’ve been cancelled. So throughout the entire series, the crew always just had to imply undertones about their past. Since HBO produced Obsidian, they were able to kiss on screen.

________

Korra and Asami’s relationship had to tempt down so that way Nick could continue airing the show and they weren’t allowed to kiss until the comics.

________

Turning Red got so much unwarranted criticism because not only did Mei’s mom say “pads” but she showed them on screen. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, if that made you uncomfortable, that’s a sign that we need to do this more and not less.)

________

Some countries marked She Ra as 18+ because Catra and Adora kissed on screen. (Once again, I’m not sure if this completely true but Nate Stevenson had to fight to actually show them kissing on screen instead of a fade to white.)

________

Steven Universe is the gayest show I’ve ever seen in my life which was both good and bad. It was good for obvious reasons. Example being that it was the first show that introduced to me nonbinary people in a way that wasn’t “haha, look, she uses they/them pronouns. She’s so funny and quirky.”

And it’s bad because it put a target on it’s back. SU has been censored so much that it’s honestly a miracle that we got an ending. And in most of the countries that censored SU, they usually portray Ruby as a man. So I can’t imagine how bad the censors were when the wedding happened and Ruby wore a dress and Sapphire wore a suit.

________

Also, you have to remember the outdated idea that gay/trans topics are “too mature” for kids to handle (there’s an episode of Adam Ruins Everything that talks about this). So it’s easier for shows with an older audience (like Arcane) to have queer/trans rep.

Not to mention, if you ever go on Insider’s website to look at the queer/trans characters in cartoons [here], most of the characters are revealed to be queer only online and not in the actual show.

________

All of this BS because God forbid that kids find out that other people exist.

Representation is important but please, just be aware of the actually struggles that go on that you don’t see and be thankful that this is where we are now because even though it might seem like it at times remember that this is actual progress. We need to keep pushing studios to do more. I’m sure that there’s millions of untold stories that would be made if not for this prejudice.

#lgbt #queer fiction #writing #petty revenge #malicious compliance #ttrpg campaign #could you imagine if Wizards of the Coast had the audacity to sue for royalties for their games AND THEN straight-washed the PCs?#we would riot #we would riot so hard.

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exclamaquest · 2 years ago

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what are ur thoughts on why radical inclusionism is harmful and/or do u have any resources on the subject? im interested in learning more about the pov

sorry for this taking so long! school has been taking a lot out of me. thank you for your patience! i've put my full response under a cut as to not clog dashes.

first off, i want to very clearly establish that i am not in any way talking about inclusion itself as a concept. being against radical inclusionism does not mean i'm for exclusionism as a blanket statement--again, i'm not against inclusionism itself, i'm against the very specific radinclus movement.

honestly, I totally understand why radinclus people think the way they do. it's a very easy rabbit hole to go down, and on a surface level, the concept of "including all good-faith identities" sounds fantastic. the problem comes when you look into what a lot of that really means.

defining it as "good-faith identities" means that if someone says they are identifying as something in good faith, you have no right to criticize them. i've seen it play out more than a few times--take people who are transabled or transrace, or identities that are inherently bigoted ("afab trans woman", for example). the very basic premise of radical inclusionism removes the suggestion of critical thought ("who is affected by this? is there harm coming from someone saying this?") and makes a person's inclusion in the community hinge on accepting everything told to them at face value.

this is not coming out of nowhere. i'm not going to block evade to get a few examples i'd like to because i'm not an asshole but the gist of it is "what right do we have to dictate anyone else's experience, just trust what people say they are". again, on the surface this sounds fine, but if you look a little deeper into some of the things that people who say this support, it becomes evident that there's a nasty correlation going on.

most evidently, it leaks into ableism. the venn diagram between radical inclusionists and people who treat mental illness like a fun game (aka endos, which is a whole other thing i'm not going to get into rn, and """transabled""" people*) is pretty much a circle, and it all connects (from what i've seen) to the single biggest problem with radinclusionism: it actively discourages critical thought. like i said above, radical inclusionism punishes those who dare to be "exclusionists" (criticize any part of any "good faith identity") with ostracization from their peers.

it also discourages looking at actual queer history or talking to people with experience to make your decisions. instead of asking for unbiased sources and talking to those around you, radical inclusionism shoves the idea of criticizing "good faith identities" being evil down your throat. if you ask for hard medical scientific sources when someone claims that they're a system without trauma so that you can review the evidence and make your own independent decision, you're discounting people's lived experiences. same goes for if you talk to someone affected outside of the group and ask how they feel about mspec lesbians or afab trans women and learn their opinion and then go back to the group and ask them to account for or respond to it.

they push the narrative that you're not using your resources and learning about science and history and figuring out your own stances through critical thought, you're perpetrating an exclusionist mindset and discounting "good faith identities".

not that you'd be able to see opinions outside the group's--it's a very, very tight echo chamber, with almost no chance of a dissuading opinion getting through in a way that isn't in the tone of a "get a load of this guy cam". who would want to interact with a nasty exclusionist, after all?

instead, i propose informed inclusionism. inclusionism that encourages critical thinking and discussion. inclusionism that advocates for talking to those around you as well as looking at historical and scientific sources as appropriate to make decisions. inclusionism that lets you take stock of the harm that some so-called "good faith identities" can cause, and that discourages you from turning a blind eye in the name of inclusionism when someone says how they are affected by said identities.

in order to become truly tolerant, you must be intolerant of intolerance. and, most importantly, you must know how to spot intolerance when it is disguised as tolerance. this requires critical thought that radinclus philosophy not only goes against, but actively punishes.

i hope this has helped you understand where i'm coming from better! again, thank you for your patience, this took a while to type out and edit and i've been very busy lately. if you have any questions, feel free to ask! i'll get to them as soon as i can.

note: this really doesn't seem to be an issue that a lot of people are talking about, which is interesting, and a reason there aren't more resources on this. i searched and searched, but couldn't really find much if anything that expressed this viewpoint. i honestly would have thought that there'd be more of a pushback against radinclus philosophy especially with how much tumblr tends to emphasize the need for critical thought, but i guess not. hopefully this can help create a space for dialogue + discussion in an area that sorely needs it! ^^ *i'm fully aware that biid is in and of itself a disability. someone being disabled in one form does not stop them from being ableist to those with another disability. if someone with biid identifies as transabled to being an amputee, that is ableist towards amputees. you cannot identify into a disability.

#anti radinclus #anti radical inclusionism #informed inclusionism #theo.pdf #theo.txt #important note im not a terf or an ace or pan exclus dont take this to mean i am one #queer tag #theo.ask #anon

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entheosareian · 3 years ago

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Practioner Red Flags

It’s hard to navigate who you should take information from and who you shouldn’t in Hellenic spaces. And of course there’s no one way to tell wether or not someone knows their shit, but here are a few red flags I’ve personally come across. If you don’t agree or have different experiences that’s 100% okay!

1. Oracles

A lot of Practioners consider themselves to be oracles. This isn’t inherently problematic but the practice of being an oracle is completely dead; an oracle was an elected position, so a modern day oracle is impossible because who the hell is electing you? There are other labels for seers / clairvoyant practioners, so the usage of the word oracle usually indicates a lack of historical understanding, and therefore cult understanding.

2. Zeus Haters

If you are a Hellenic polytheist, you cannot hate Zeus. If you hate Zeus your entire practice is invalid tbh. He is the king of the gods and the heavens, He is the father of the majority of the olympians He keeps balance and order and should be treated with nothing but respect. I can’t say this enough. Hatred of Zeus usually stems from mythos, therefore this hatred indicates a gross misunderstanding of the religion as a whole. This goes for anyone who “beefs” w any of the gods tbh. They all deserve basic respect and if you disrespect one of them you disrespect all of them.

3. Those Who Take Mythos Literally

Adding onto my previous point. The Hellenic religion is not centered completely around mythos. A lot of times mythos where entertainment; literature, plays. Not to be taken literally, not to be used to demonize the gods or other chilidish misconceptions. I have very little tolerance for this honestly.

4. Lore Olympus Stans

I don’t mean this literally. I mean the Hades and Persephone followers who say things like “Hades would never cheat on Persephone” or “Persephone had to escape her overbearing mother” or “She chose the underworld” etc. etc. etc. These practitioners have very little understanding of the gods they worship because these are very common statements that are very false and come from modern misconceptions. But also, literal Lore Olympus fans. The webcomic is just sketchy 😭

5. High Priestess / Priest

Again this is NOT inherently problematic but if someone’s best argument is “I’m a high priestess/priest of >deity< and they told me-“ everything that comes out of their mouth is going to be bullshit. A title w very little relevance does not give you the right to talk over other Practioners (see: Oracles)

6. The Conversationalist

Anyone who claims they are having full in-depth conversations w the gods should be handled w caution. Godphoning and clairaudience do not work like that & dramatized portrayals of those things are pretty harmful imo.

7. “Medusa was blessed”

Also known as “The Ovid Apologist”. This is a huge red flag & shows that the person in question is not critical of where they get their information. This myth was used to demonize Athena or Minerva plus it’s Roman; in the Greek myth, Medusa was born a gorgon. This applies to the Arachne myth as well, it’s Roman and was made w the intent to demonize Athena or Minerva.

8. Labeling the Gods

The gods are gods. They cannot be confined to labels. None of the maiden goddesses where aro, ace, or lesbian. none of the gods are gay or bi, they are all divine beings beyond these very human concepts. They do not have gender or sexuality because those are distinctly human things. Additionally these are modern labels being thrust upon ancient gods. Just an overall no.

9. TERFs

Men can worship any of the goddesses and, historically, have. Women can worship any of the gods and, historically, have. The gods do not confine themselves to gender and therefore aren’t invested in exclusionist bullshit. There are certain goddesses who protected women specifically (Hera, Artemis, Hestia, etc.) but they still had male worshippers and will continue to. The gods love their Trans and GNC followers and TERF rhetoric directly contradicts Hellenic practices, they cannot coexist.

10. Gate Keepers

Or fearmongerers. Deity work IS beginner safe, Hellenic deity work is open and Greek or Roman ancestry is not a requirement. Don’t let anyone scare you into delaying your path. You are the only person who knows what you’re ready for.

11. Triple Goddess

Hekate was not a triple goddess (in the mother/maiden/crone sense). but She most commonly is worshipped as such. She was a goddess of the crossroads and was commonly portrayed w three faces so she could see every direction. Hekate has many epithets and is the goddess of several things. She’s often reduced to the “mother of witch craft” which is. Sad tbh. She’s such an interesting goddess and Wiccan concepts have definitely watered down historical worship of Her. The Mother Maiden Crone thing is originally Diana, I believe.

12. Wiccans

Wicca is full of cultural appropriation & often times Wiccans convince themselves that their way is the only way. In general I personally avoid Wicca praticioners because it’s largely a cluster of practices from different cultures and it’s racially insensitive. It’s also a relatively new religion & I just don’t trust it honestly. Not all Wiccans are pushy about their practice, but it’s hard to seperate the cultural appropriation from Wiccan practices hence the red flag.

13. Rome Apologists

Dramatic title. In general people who don’t differentiate between Greek and Roman gods concern me. Some Hellenic Practioners completely divorce themselves from Roman influence and a common misconception is that all the gods are the same; they aren’t. Again this just indicates a misunderstanding of historical context in my opinion, but depending on how one incorporates it into their practice it’s not always a bad thing.

14. Anti-God spousing

When done right God spousing is a beautiful and personal practice. There’s a lot of people who take it out of context and turn it into a LARP kinda thing, but it’s easy to get information on what God spousing actually is so people who are adamantly against it make me side eye a little ngl. Especially because there is so much misinformation about god spousing, I think it’s important that Practioners push the correct narrative surrounding it instead of buying into the stigma.

15. Classicists / ~”Intellectuals”~

I see a lot of classicists thinking they have some authority over other Practioners but a good understanding of the classics does not equal a good understanding of the religion. Hellenic polytheisism is constantly reduced to its mythos and thats an oversimplification of what this religion and practice is. Classicists who want to have authority over the theological aspects only push this narrative. Don’t get me wrong, I prefer getting my information from classicists who study the religion, but not all classicists do. And being a classicist does not give anyone the right to talk over or down to other Practioners.

16. Twin Flames

Anyone who talks about soul mates and twin flames are concerning to me. A lot of times this narrative is used to make spirituality more marketable, a commodity to be bought and sold. “For $20 I can tell you who your twin flame is”. Point bank, I believe that everyone who needs to be in your life will be, and they’ll be there at the right time. The idea of a chaser and a runner or whatever normalizes abuse. It’s often used to excuse people’s shitty behavior. And don’t get me wrong, this definitely stems from TikTok, but at this point I just consider it a red flag. Don’t worry about the importance of the people in your life; let your relationships eb and flow naturally.

17. Manifestation

Personally I do believe in manifestation, but I don’t think it gives you power over other people and I see this common notion (on TikTok) that it does. I also think that it only works to an extent; the idea that reality is 100% in your control all the time can be harmful and contribute to delusions. I also don’t think u need to write down certain phrases 77 times or whatever. I’m very skeptical of new age manifestation I suppose.

18. Reality Shifting

I hate reality shifting. Honestly. Point blank it’s just lucid dreaming and like manifestation, it’s harmful to the mentally ill. Genuinely stay away from anyone who promotes it as reality shifting and not lucid dreaming. They have not done their research & clearly don’t care how the misinformation on reality shifting affects children & mentally ill people.

19. Star seed

The idea of Star seeds comes from new age spirituality I believe and has less presence in Hellenic spaces but it’s also ableist & often talked about in spiritual spaces so it earns a spot on this list. Like reality shifting, no one who preaches about Star seeds can be taken seriously. Or anyone who tries to tell you that you aren’t “from” earth. None of us are “from” earth, but all of us are supposed to be here in this life time and the idea that you aren’t is harmful.

20. Soul Contracts

The concept of soul contracts is the idea that we agree to every single thing that happens to us before we get to earth. And this is just victim blaming honestly. As humans we desire control over these things. We want to believe we agency but the hard truth is that we do not. And that’s okay. We don’t need to micromanage everything all the time. Not everything has to make sense. Sometimes fucked up things happen and there’s no rhyme or reason to it. The notion that we not only know these things are going to happen but that we agree to them or even decide they happen is disgusting. You did not bring your pain onto yourself and any one who tells you that you did shouldn’t have a tongue tbh. I hate the concept of soul contracts above all.

Please note, again, it’s okay to disagree. These are red flags in my experiences, and that could definitely be unique to me. It’s important that everyone makes up their own mind surrounding these issues. And just because these things make me question someone’s authenticity does not mean I actively dislike many of these qualities or beliefs (save for the TERF thing; if you’re a TERF or exclusionist fuck off).

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stopcannibalizingourown · 3 years ago

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Hi! Just found your blog and I really like it. Idk if youve been asked this already but whats your opinion on using agab terms vs tme/tma terms? I personally like agab terms when discussing how people have been socialized but Ive heard some transfeminine people have valid problems with them being overused. Wanted to know your opinion on it. Thanks and have a nice day!

let’s just pretend I didn’t forget about this in my drafts for months, whoops

The short answer: I dislike both tme/tma and agab language.

I don’t really feel like getting into it at this time, so I’d like to direct you to @nothorses whose pinned post has a few takedowns of the terminology, as well as this post. Basically it’s a shitty dichotomy that was either coined or popularized for exclusionary purposes by a group of Lesbian Separatist Radical Transfeminists (and I don’t know if you know this, but I have immense disdain for separatist politics and for radical feminism, and slapping a “trans” onto it doesn’t make it any better lmao).

Now, as for agab language, it has specific contexts where it can be useful, such as medical contexts--though even then not everyone with the same assigned sex is going to have the same medical needs, even when it comes to reproductive organs, and that’s before you factor in hormonal transitioning and such. agab is not a surefire predictor for literally anything after the actual assignment itself, and it being used as such inevitably excludes people whose experiences don’t match up with the typical narrative.

And outside of those contexts? Yeah no it’s just not helpful. Like, to use socialization as an example, there’s no such thing as a coherent “afab socialization” or “amab socialization.”

To use my own life as an example, though I grew up in a patriarchal society like (to my knowledge) everyone from the US, my parents’ chosen family and thereby my extended family is closer to matriarchal than anything, which very much informed my understanding of gender growing up--a lot of traits that are associated with masculinity, such as directness or even abrasiveness, were exhibited primarily by the women I grew up around and looked up to, with the men being for the most part more mellow and nurturing by personality.

Or, as another example: as a kid, I was very much a wild child (outside the classroom where I was excessively obedient because I trusted authority figures), always energetic and outgoing--but also extremely cheerful, openly emotional, and friendly to basically everyone. At the age of eight, trauma Happened, and overnight I became introverted, depressed, emotionally repressed, bookish, and closed off. In either case, however, I was almost always read as a girl (until I hit puberty anyway) in spite of identifying as a boy because the way I acted conflicted with people’s understanding of what boys are.

And that’s the thing--what we’re socialized into is the entire system of binary gender, not just a single specific gender. Both what we understand the two binary genders to be as a result of our surroundings and how much we internalize the expectations for the gender we’re assumed to be are huge parts in how that socialization impacts our behavior. Not only that, but the behavior you learn in childhood does not necessarily determine your behavior as an adult.

It will absolutely almost always affect it in unavoidable ways (it’s very unlikely I will ever not be impacted by my trauma), but just as I am neither the cocky, outgoing, unstoppable assumed-tomboy I was as a young child, nor the broody, depressed kid with a chronic inability to assert myself and my nose always buried in a book that I was during my later formative years, no one else is inherently defined by who they were taught and who they learned to be growing up.

This mostly turned into a tangent about socialization rather than about agab language in general, but I know some of my mutuals have written excellent posts about agab language as a whole, so feel free to drop those here lmao.

also P.S. I didn’t even get into how neurodivergence affects things but like. My autism absolutely informed my grasp of gender growing up and that’s common with many neurodivergences.

Edit: The other issue is, admittedly, the difficulty with replacement language—in spite of my disdain for it you'll occasionally see me using agab language myself. Idk things are complicated.

#ask tag #anon #gender linguistics tag #socialization #this post is a mess organizationally but I don't have it in me to do a round of edits #if i try it'll be another however many months before i post this thing #so what you see is what you get lol

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llsilvertail · 1 year ago

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(I'm reblogging this version of the post bc I like all the points made here, but my reblog is mostly gonna be addressing the original ask)

Disclaimer: I'm closest to fem agender (it's a work in progress lmao) and aroace. While I don't have any conlangs myself, I've been pretty immersed in it and worldbuilding for quite a few years now. I'm also very interested in queer/LGBTQ-ness to the point where I'm literally volunteering to help with an annual survey. I'm def not a trained resource for any of that tho XD, so don't take my word as gospel.

(TLDR at the end but before the footnotes)

So the way people conceptualize gender, sexuality, etc. comes entirely from their interactions with their culture/environment. Language is simply a reflection of those concepts, not a control over their existence[1].

Queer[2] people will always exist in societies in some shape or form no matter how open or restricted things are. For example, take trans people in western society. The idea of "transsexual" (and by extension "transgender") as an identity is a very very recent development (within the past century) when compared to the English language as a whole. Yet, through today's lenses, people who could theoretically be placed into it, have been around long before this label for it existed. (Another good example is the whole evolution in culturally Christian places from "people do sodomy" to "people are gay".)

Now that was a comparison over time. If we compare cross-culturally[3], "third genders" are much more common than what we, in the west, are led to believe. Unfortunately I don't have enough experience or knowledge to properly talk about a specific culture, so ig it's gonna be a more abstract discussion. The terms "lesbian" inherently has both a gender (woman) and a sexuality (interested in women) baked into it[4]. Even the gender neutral term "homosexual" requires knowledge of the gender of the identifying person[5]. But a different culture may use specific terms for "attracted to [gender]", which, while no longer needing the gender of the identifying person, also loses information about how that orientation would relate to society.

Those are the two primary macro variations[6], over time and over distance, of a society and, if we look at language, it also varies in the same way. So trying to apply our sensibilities to a culture that's (theoretically) unrelated to us is an exercise in futility, let alone trying to create language describing it.

That said, there will most definitely be a concept of "queerness" in most con-cultures. As I said, "queer people will always exist in societies in some shape or form", and that will also apply to a constructed human/human-like society. I can't give a full guide for "possible ways to construct variations within a culture that would lead to queer-specific language", bc that would be way too much for an already long post, but one way to come up with terms about that is: what is the "normative" way to be, both in the past and in the present; how does the culture react to people falling outside the norm; how might people (both intentionally and unintentionally) conflict with that and then resolve those conflicts[7]; in what ways might a subculture surrounding that develop and what vocabulary would it spawn. And then there you go!! A queer culture is born!!!!

TLDR: Saying a conlang "[isn't] progressive enough" is a flawed premise in a few different ways including, but not limited to: people will always be queer in some way or another, different people consider different things "queer" so they might not deem it necessary to have a word for it, etc. But if you are trying to include queer language in your conlang (and I assume you are), you need to consider how it would manifest in your con-culture before you can start coming up with actual words. Sorry, that got way longer than I intended for it to be (it's 3:30 am and I've been going since 1 or 1:30 so...) so I'm gonna go sleep now and hope it makes sense.

[1] Yes ik Sapir-Whorf, etc. exists but that's not what this is about (tho I suppose, if you think about it, the weak version is technically in play here lol).

[2] I'm deliberately using "queer" instead of "LGBTQ+", bc this would be applicable to much of the internal cultural variation which isn't necessarily encompassed by "LGBTQ+". (that doesn't make sense but my brain is starting to not work so oh well. have fun figuring it out)

[3] I have a lot of entirely irrelevant worldbuilding thoughts about this, but I put in an entire paragraph's worth of digressions I had to remove and I'd feel bad if I didn't at least mention its existence.

[4] Yes ik about he/him lesbians, etc. but that's not what this is about. I simply need a common, well known, example.

[5] It's "attraction to the same gender", so there's no way to know who they're attracted to without knowing the gender of the person themself.

[6] I'm sure there's an actual word for this, but I'm not a sociologist lol, so ig that's what we're stuck with.

[7] Including like, societal roles that would be more okay with "abnormal" things, safe spaces they could go to or meet at, etc.

I don't think that any of your conlangs are progressive enough to express being trans, but if they were, how would they? What about other gender/sexuality things?

That first clause is quite a thing to say. Languages aren't progressive. Their users may be, but the languages aren't anything. They're just languages. If you mean they're not modern (i.e. a lot of the languages I create are for cultures that are somewhat antiquated compared to our world), this is true, but that doesn't necessarily mean the languages won't have terminology for different gender identities.

There is a major assumption here, though. My understanding (and please do note: I am a cis man; please feel free to correct), cis and trans individuals, as opposed to nonbinary and genderfluid, are similar in that neither have any doubt about what gender they are, identifying with either male or female. So if any language I've created has a word for "man" or "woman", then there's sufficient vocabulary for a trans individual to express their identity that way.

However, there is a terminological difference, and it's both an individual choice and societal preference: Whether to identify as one's chosen gender identity, as trans, or both (e.g. "I am a woman", "I am trans", or "I am a trans woman"—and then preferring to use one of those or all of those, or some other combination of the three). My personal language preference (as a user and language creator) is fewer distinctions are better (why have three third person singular pronouns—or four or twelve—when you can have one?), because it's less to memorize, less work to use, and demands less specificity of the user—and allows the hearer/reader to make fewer assumptions. Unless the situation calls for it (e.g. the gender system hard-coded into Ravkan in Shadow & Bone), I prefer lumping rather than splitting. This is especially useful as I'm often not in charge of the culture I create languages for.

For example, the languages I've created for A Song of Ice and Fire were for cultures created and maintained by George R. R. Martin. Whatever cultural innovations I have made in creating the languages are, at best, pending—that is, true until George R. R. Martin says otherwise, which he is free to do at any time, as it's his world. As a result, I don't feel confident enough to say what life is like for a trans individual in his world, and how that might be reflected in the languages there. There's simply not enough information.

Where I might be in charge of the culture, you do know my preference now (i.e. fewer distinctions), but, as I am not trans, I'd prefer to leave it to the trans community to decide, and then do what I can to support those decisions linguistically (i.e. to make it work within the language). Any term chosen highlights some aspect of the experience while downplaying others. In English, trans, coming from transition, highlights the change from one identity to another. Other ideas for how to come up with a term might be using a root that refers to "true", highlighting the transition to one's true gender expression. Perhaps another root to look for would be "choose", framing it as one's chosen gender expression—IF one wishes to look at it that way.

In many ways, both the term and the experience are highly individual, and it's difficult to come up with a blanket term and say "this is the term". It's especially difficult since this isn't a life experience I share. It feels both disingenuous and a bit icky to come up with a term to describe an experience that is decidedly not my own.

My own preference in this regard is a twofold approach:

Allow trans users of whatever language to figure out what term works for them, and then support them in creating a term that obeys the various language rules (i.e. the phonology is correct, derived words are derived correctly, etc.). Those users, however, will be operating under the same "rules" that I operate under, e.g. the one who's creating the culture has the final say, if they care to weigh in, and so the result may end up not being canon, at which point it's up to the user to decide whether they care or not. (Note: I shouldn't have to explain it here on Tumblr, but, of course, you don't have to care if the creator of the canon says something isn't so, no matter how many billions they have.)

Allow polysemy. There will never be a term that is THE term. It may be an individual's preferred term, but someone else may like another, in which case it should be allowed.

A very important language-specific note (and the same is true of fandom, generally). By agreeing to work within a language, we're essentially agreeing to rules of a game. The rules can always be broken. When rules are broken, the question language users have to answer is if they've been broken so egregiously that they're no longer playing the game, or if it's fine. For example, if you look at fanfic, there's plenty of fanfic with gender-swapped characters, or the same characters in a radically different setting. Some readers may decide they don't want the characters to be gender-swapped. Others may decide that if it's not in the same setting they're not interested. And that's fine! Both the writers and the readers are deciding which rules of the game can be broken while still calling it the same game. This works very, very well so long as no one gets mad at anyone else. If someone says, "I don't enjoy this because it breaks the rules in a way that ruins my enjoyment", that's perfectly fine. If that same person says, "You're not allowed to break the rules in this way", that's not fine.

So hopefully this all makes sense. And, furthermore, when I say I want to support those who wish to create their own terms, I do mean it. If anyone has suggestions or needs help coining a possible word, feel free to message me! But do bear (2) above in mind. I'm not going to say any term is THE term, and have that be the end of it. It'll be one possibility amongst a rainbow of possibilities.

#worldbuilding #we love it #seriously tho #sorry for the length #(I saw David's reblog right as I finished writing this lmao so I figured I may as well add it onto that one)#my thoughts #queued

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olderthannetfic · 3 years ago

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I wanted to ask you about radical feminism (TERF-ism & TIRF-ism). Radical feminism never seemed to be *necessarily* some of the really bad things that people on this blog say it is. For instance, everything roach-works says it is in an earlier post. There are at least some people I've read who are part of the movement of radical feminism (whether or not they would self-identify as that) and who really don't espouse any of the views in roach-works comments. (1/2) Thinking of the list of points

From nothorses - the people I’ve read (e.g. Iris Marion Young) *do* espouse many of these, but not so in a way that has to lead to these more extreme views that roach-works mentioned. One may not agree with them but they don’t seem so bad to me? Are they? Am I a terrible person? It disturbs me to hear something with the word 'feminism' in it denigrated so harshly, and it always seems to me like the views get mixed up with the worst half of the people who believe in them. (2/2)

(Appendix...) I feel there's a lot of truth in SOME of the views that nothorses correctly ascribes (i. m. o.) to radical feminists, in particular: "Women are all miserable with their bodies, cursed with the pressure to reproduce and have sex with men. ... miserable with their genders, forced as they are to ensure the overwhelming and constant suffering that is patriarchy." Is it just that the "all" makes the views too strong? Or is there, for critics, a more fundamental problem I'm missing?

I've seen some much nicer, saner people self-describe as radical feminists and object strenuously to how I see radfems... However, all of them still kept talking about porn in terms that only make sense if you're talking about the evils of the mainstream industry, and moreso the mainstream industry of the 1970s (which is when a lot of this rhetoric comes from). And yet this attitude gets over-applied to porn in general, regardless of medium, working conditions, or level of economic necessity involved in its creation.

The attitudes I think are pretty much universal in this ideology, and universally shitty, come out when they're confronted with fsub content by and for women.

Yeah, yeah, "mommy porn". I'm not saying Fifty Shades of Grey is well written or not kind of embarrassing, but when people start bleating about how confused womenfolk will get bad ideas from it, you should be suspicious, whether they're radfems or fundies.

"The hot billionaire falls in love with me for no reason and does all the work to make sex hot while I lie there like a dead fish" is a common fantasy. It really doesn't say anything about the woman in question, nor does it make the patriarchy stronger.

The big one to look for from nothorses list is #5:

Sex, in particular, is more often exploitative than not. Only some kinds of sex are not exploitative. Many kinds of sex that we think are consensual, or that people say are consensual, are either rape or proto-rape.

This is saying "BDSM is rape", which is something that most radfems do think once you scratch the surface. Rape roleplay is also rape and furthering the patriarchy.

Even if they make some small allowance for informed adults doing BDSM in some strict environment with specific rules, show them 50SoG and women's right to choose goes out the window. Sure, the relationship in the book looks pretty unhealthy, at least at the beginning, but the thing being criticized is readers' right to choose.

Even the radfems who support butchness and don't think butch women are gender traitors will usually be assholes over trashy wank material like 50SoG.

And once you open the door to "your libido is political", you've started down a very dark road that leads to a bunch of naturally kinky tumblr teens sitting in their bedrooms, staring at their computer screens, and wondering if they're a future rapist because they like a/b/o or sex pollen or something.

I get where you're coming from. Maybe you're in a context where most women are pretty miserable. But I'm not. I was raised by a mother who thought diets were stupid and telling your daughter what you think of her body is active child abuse.

Being a victim of abuse, including "you're too fat" type abuse, is neither inherent nor unique to women. Sure, women tend to be under the microscope, but so are lots of people.

As an upper middle class anglo white woman in the US and moreover as a woman who looks fairly conventionally femme even with my very hairy legs (much to my annoyance), I honestly don't experience that much policing. I already, through no fault and certainly no merit of my own, conform reasonably well to the "neutral" standard of white womanhood. My male equivalent would be the most unmarked in the US, but I'm only a little marked.

What this gender-obsessed analysis misses is that it's not about womanhood: it's about failing to be the "neutral" default. Poor people fail. Black people fail. Asian people fail. Disabled people fail. At least in the US. In Japan, third generation Korean-Japanese fail. Burakumin fail despite being ethnically Japanese due to having been a separate caste for centuries.

"Intersectionality" on social media tends to get used as miserypoker: the speaker with the most listed oppressions wins the argument and you should signal boost them or you're a bad person.

In actuality, what intersectionality means is recognizing that gender and sex may sometimes just not be very important in a given person's life if they experience enough privilege or if, conversely, they have such a profound lack of privilege elsewhere that this other identity overshadows gender in terms of their lived experience.

Radfem ideology says I must prioritize Woman out of my many identities. But, in reality, I feel more kinship with bisexual men than with lesbian women. I feel more kinship with kinky straight people than with bisexuals who want AO3 and pride parades to be nothing but g-rated hand holding.

I get that it's upsetting for people to be railing against something called "feminism", but that's like saying that disliking the Jews for Jesus makes you antisemitic. The whole point is that a lot of people feel that radical feminism is pretty anti-woman in many of its core values.

I don't think you're a bad person. I do think that some of the underpinnings of radfem ideology lead directly to sensitive people who are concerned about such things wondering if they are.

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thedeadflag · 3 years ago

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I’m so confused! I know it’s not your responsibility to educate me but in your post bringing awareness to the negative aspects of g!p fanfic you say

“Why do these g!p characters rarely if ever involve experiences reflective of trans/intersex women? Why are they so utterly cis and perisex-washed? Why do nearly all writers have zero idea that tucking is a thing? “

Doesn’t that answer your original question? The reason they don’t reflect those groups of ppl is bc g!p isn’t trying to represent those groups of people or else it WOULD be transphobic to limit them to one specific fetish right? it just refers to a canonically female character with the addition of a penis (I don’t argue the name “g!p” should be changed bc that’s a no brainer why that could be offensive). But the fanfic in general, how could it be harmful? I’ve noticed in my time reading it as a non binary person it’s given me great gender euphoria reading a reader insert where reader has a penis while being a femme representing person just bc that’s a reflection of my personal experience. I don’t see anywhere where g!p fanfic ever references or tries to emulate the experiences of trans or intersex people so how could it be offensive?

Sorry this is way too long I’m just very confused

I'm going to try and lay this out as politely as I can. It's after 3:30 in the morning here, so this could be a bit disjointed and rambling. More under the cut:

In real life, ~99.999999% of women with penises are trans women. Which puts us in a tricky situation of (A) being the only women with penises around for media involving women with penises to reflect back on, and (B) being in the lovely position of precious few people actually having had meaningful real life exposure to trans women, meaning (C.) all those stigmas and all that misinformation are going to purely affect us and it’s going to be uncritically gobbled up by the masses, since they don’t have any meaningful information to fill in the blanks with instead.

When we peer into the depths of femslash fandoms and see all these folks who aren't trans women writing about women with penises, and using cis women’s bodies as platforms for these penises, it’s the simplest thing.

I mean, some of those folks might actually be struggling and confused about why they’re into it, what the real appeal is, why they get off on it, why they might have some feelings about wanting a penis of their own…

…but from our vantage point, it’s really easy to gauge 99.99% of the time. We can generally see valid, legitimate yearning to have a penis pretty damn easily in a piece of art/writing, and we can also see when people who create this media are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization.

And 99.9% of the time, the creators are just hung up on a boatload of baggage and fetishization, and see trans women’s bodies as a perfect vehicle to tap into that, generally due to deeply held cissexist views that link us and our bodies and genitals directly to cis men, to maleness. As if penises are rooted in maleness and masculinity (which is absolutely not true).

And I have sympathy for NB folks (certainly TME ones who have reached out to me in the past about this) who might be struggling with that, but just because they’re non-binary, it doesn’t mean they get to appropriate our bodies and reproduce transmisogyny and trans fetishization in their attempts at feeling better. Shit doesn't work like that.

Because again, the only women with penises in this world, essentially, are trans women. Meaning any woman with a penis in media is a trans woman, implicitly or explicitly. Meaning that when people who aren’t us want to write us, intent doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if it’s just the writer’s fantasy, it’s still going to attach a variety of messages directly onto us.

And more often than not, due to cissexism, those messages are linking us to maleness, to toxic masculinity, etc..

While I do want to believe they're a fairly small minority, a lot of NB folks in fandom spaces like g!p characters in part because they see penises as male and the rest of the body as female and think that duality is interesting and would be comfortable, and is a nice balance of “both worlds” or a nice position “between male and female”, but that’s a wholly cissexist, transmisogynistic view to have, and it’s one that absolutely cannot be supported without directing sexual violence against trans women and invalidating our entire existence. Certainly not all NB folks into g!p like it for that reason, but holy shit a fair bit of them do and it’s weird and wrong and fetishistic.

g!p emerged from the idea that women can't have penises, and drew on the transmisogyny and cissexism of tr*nny porn to structure that frame of desire and the core patterns and trends within these works. It's always been trans women's bodies being used as a vehicle, whether or not the writers of these fics are explicitly aware of it, because the trope itself still holds true to its original patterns and cissexism. It's not the name that's the problem, it's the content; changing the name would be a surface level change that wouldn't affect anything.

g!p objectifies women with penises (trans women). A woman with a penis is more than just a woman with a penis, but the use of the term and trope is literally to (A) remind people that women don't have penises, otherwise the g!p term wouldn't be needed if people actually accepted women with penises as women, and that (B) this is a story centered on a scenario where there's a woman with a penis, with key focus on that genitalia specifically. it's the drawing point, it's the lure, it's what everything is centered on. It is a means for folks to write lesbian sex while also writing about penis in vagina and getting off to it. It's also no surprise that the penises so clearly emulate cis men's penises in these works, that is by design.

As I’ve said many times before, if you’re only writing trans women’s bodies to showcase cis men’s penises, you’re not respecting the womanhood of trans women, and this ultimately has nothing inherent to do with penis-owning women, it has to do with (cis) men and their penises, because trans women are just being used as a vehicle to emulate them. When NB folks do the same thing, and imagining themselves as those g!p characters, they are ultimately embodying cis men, their maleness, and often toxic masculinity, in a way that feels safe and distanced enough for them, a shell that they often code as cisnormative due to their own unprocessed cissexism.

And trans women don’t deserve that.

You seem caught in the idea that if something doesn't directly perfectly reflect trans women, that it can't be linked to us., which ignores the long long history of media being used to misrepresent marginalized peoples and cast us in insulting, dehumanizing lights. You show a lack of understanding of the g!p trope and the long history of its usage across a few other names, even if the content and patterns remained the same. It shows a lack of understanding of tr*nny porn and transmisogynistic stigmas, which the trope draws heavily from.

I think we can all recognize that most 'lesbian' prn that's made does not represent actual lesbians, it's overwhelmingly catered to the male gaze. We can also recognize that this category of porn has led to a lot of harassment towards lesbians from cis men who at the very least want to believe lesbians are just like they are in the porn he watches, that lesbians just need the right man. Lesbians are being used as a vehicle for a fantasy that was created externally to them, and doesn't represent their realities.

It's the same kind of situation here. The way g!p fics play out overwhelmingly doesn't reflect trans women's realities, but they are inherently linked to us regardless, as we're the vehicles for those fantasies, as unrealistic and harmful as they may be.

g!p characters are built in our fetishized image that’s based on a deeply cissexist misunderstanding of us, of the gender binary, and of bodies in general.

I mean, when 99% of cis folks don’t understand how trans women tend to be sexually intimate… when they don’t understand what dysphoria is and how it works and how it can affect us physically and emotionally…when they don’t understand almost any of our lived experiences…then they’re not going to be able to accurately portray us even if they wanted to.

And I’ve read enough g!p fics where authors wrote those as a means of trying to add trans rep, but because they didn’t understand us at all, it wasn’t remotely representative, and it was ultimately fetishistic, even if there was an undercurrent of sympathy and a lack of following certain common g!p patterns there that differentiated it from the norm.

If g!p fics were at all about reducing dysphoria or finding euphoria, then it wouldn’t be explicitly tied up in the performance of very specific sex acts, very specific forms of misogyny and toxic masculinity, very specific forms of sexual violence and exertion of sexual power, etc.

But it is.

So the notion that creating g!p fics helps NB folks? Nope. It CAN certainly prevent/delay those folks from facing a whole boatload of shit they’ve internalized, and coddle them at the expense of trans women.

Because if it was really about bodies and dysphoria/euphoria, there would be a considerable push (allying with out own) to end our fetishization and to represent us in and out of sexual contexts with accuracy, respect, and care. Because they wouldn’t care what sex acts were performed and what smut beats were hit, they’d just want to see someone with a body like their ideal being loved, being sexual, connecting, being authentic, etc. Which very much is not the case in the overwhelming majority of g!p fics. That's what we want, and it's not what g!p writers want, it's nothing they give a shit about.

Like, a ways back I started doing random pulls of g!p fics from various fandoms and assessing them for certain elements to provide some quantitative clarity. I started on The 100 here, and did OuaT here. Never finished the 100 one since the results leveled out and stayed pretty consistent as the sample size grew, so I didn't really see the point in continuing any further after about 140 fics when the data wasn't really changing much at all.

Lastly, media influences people. I've read countless posts and comments from people who use fanfiction as a sex ed guide, in essence. Which is ridiculous, but I also know sex ed curricula often isn't very accurate or extensive in a lot of areas, so people take what they can get. Representation in media can be powerful, and when it overwhelmingly misrepresents people, that's also powerful. Just because fandom is a bit smaller than televised media, it doesn't make that impact any lesser, certainly not for those whose primary media intake is within fandom.

Virtually all trans representation in f/f fanfiction is misrepresentative of us. That has a cost in how people understand us, how people react to us, and how people treat us. Not just online, but in physical spaces, and in intimate settings.

I invite you to read that post you referenced again, or perhaps this longer one which is a response to a trans guy who seemed to feel something similar to you with this trope.

All I can do is lay it out there and try to explain this. It's up to you how you handle this. All I know is whenever there's a big surge in g!p in a fandom, trans women generally leave it en masse, because it's a very clear and consistent message that we're not valued, respected, and that people value getting off on us over finding community with us.

#g!p #creative responsibility #trans fetishization #trans representation #intersex fetishization #intersex representation #genitals tw #genital mention tw #intersexism #transmisogyny #fandom meta #long post #cissexism #t slur tw #media representation #media literacy

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woman-loving · 4 years ago

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I don’t identity as a “bi lesbian,” but I feel there is room for a woman to identify as both bisexual and gay/lesbian, and I don’t agree with the arguments I’ve seen against “bi lesbian” identity.

One thing that annoys me about detractors of the identity is the occasional claim that it is basically an internet phenomenon that arose within the last five years or so. Actually, women have been claiming both bisexual and lesbian identities for decades. There have constantly been debates about how bi women fit within lesbianism, lesbian identity, and lesbian community since the gay/lesbian movements have been active. This isn’t something that has ever been universally agreed upon, and there never will be universal agreement on it.

Just for reference and historical interest, I’ve compiled a few selections from articles and books, mostly from the 80s and 90s, that are by or about lesbian-identified (or gay-identified) bisexual woman, or that at least mention them. Inclusion doesn’t indicate my approval of the author’s perspective or argument; this is to provide a bit of history on the discourse.

What is a Lesbian? To me, a lesbian is a woman-oriented woman; bisexuals can be lesbians. A lesbian does not have to be exclusively woman oriented, she does not have to prove herself in bed, she does not have to hate men, she does not have to be sexually active at all times, she does not have to be a radical feminist. She does not have to like bars, like gay culture, or like being gay. When lesbians degrade other lesbians for not going to bars, not coming out, being bisexual or not sexually active, and so on, we oppress each other.

--Trish Miller, "Bisexuality," Lavender Woman, Vol 2 Issue 5, August 1973.

The definition of lesbian that I suggest, one that conforms to the two methodological considerations above, is the following:

5. Lesbian is a woman who has sexual and erotic-emotional ties primarily with women or who sees herself as centrally involved with a community of self-identified lesbians whose sexual and erotic-emotional ties are primarily with women; and who is herself a self-identifed lesbian.

My definition is a sociopolitical one; that is, it attempts to include in the term lesbian the contemporary sense of lesbianism as connected with a subcultural community, many members of which are opposed to defining themselves as dependent on or subordinate to men. It defines both bisexual and celibate women as lesbians as long as they identify themselves as such and have their primary emotional identification with a community of self-defined lesbians. Furthermore, for reasons I will outline shortly, there was no lesbian community in which to ground a sense of self before the twentieth century, a fact which distinguishes the male homosexual community from the lesbian community. Finally, it is arguable that not until this particular stage in the second wave of the women’s movement and in the lesbian-feminist movement has it been politically feasible to include self-defined lesbian bisexual women into the lesbian community.

Many lesbian feminists may not agree with this inclusion. But it may be argued that to exclude lesbian bisexuals from the community on the grounds that “they give energy to men” is overly defensive at this point. After all, a strong women’s community does not have to operate on a scarcity theory of nurturant energy! On feminist principles the criterion for membership in the community should be a woman’s commitment to giving positive erotic-emotional energy to women. Whether women who give such energy to women can also give energy to individual men (friends, fathers, sons, lovers) is not the community’s concern.

--Ann Ferguson, “Patriarchy, Sexual Identity, and the Sexual Revolution,” Signs, Autumn 1981.

Individuals who came together a month ago to discuss bisexuality and its relationship to radical feminism decided recently to begin a serious, regular study group on human sexuality and its social/political/psychological manifestations in our culture.

There are eight of us in the group. For all, understanding bisexuality, both in our own lives and and in our society, is a primary goal. To this end, we decided on a format of readings and discussion, with a facilitator for each meeting, that would bring us through the range of sexual options available in the United States today, from male-identified heterosexuality to lesbianism, to a final informed examination of bisexuality in the context of all that we had learned. Throughout our exploration, feminism will provide both a point of departure, and a point of return.

We started by trying to define some terms, specifically "feminism," "gay-identified bisexual," and "bisexual". Alot of us were amazed to see how many different interpretations each term, especially "gay-identified," could have. Is someone "gay-identified" because they devote a majority of their time, energy and emotion to the gay community? Or does an individual's radical critique of heterosexuality make them "gay-identified"? And does "gay-identified" also imply "women-identified"? Some people felt that one could be gay-identified, and still not be woman-identified. And exactly how many Meg Christian concerts make you "lesbian-identified"?

We didn't reach any conclusions, but had fun realizing that being bisexuals, we are dealing with a whole realm of experiences that can be classified in any number of different ways; and that the variety of possible bisexual lifestyles is as varied as the women who are in the Network.

--Barb H, “Study Group,” BBWN, Vol. 2 No. 4, July-Aug 1984

I recognize that homophobia is at the root of biphobia. I came to lesbianism long before my sexuality was clear to me. I lived an open lesbian lifestyle for four years. I cannot deny the importance of this experience, nor do I want to. For me lesbian identity is more than, and/or in addition to sexuality; it is a political awareness which bisexuality doesn't altar or detract from. 10 years ago when I left my husband and full-time role of motherhood, it didn't make me less conscious of what being a mother means. In fact, it gave me a deeper understanding. I am still a mother. That experience cannot be taken away from me. In much the same way, my lesbian awareness isn't lost now that I claim my bisexuality. When I realized my woman-loving-woman feelings, and came out as a lesbian, I had no heterosexual privilege; yet there were important males in my life, including a son. I am bisexual because it's real for me, not in order to acquire or flaunt the privilege that is inherent in being with men. My political consciousness is lesbian but my lifestyle is bisexual. If I keep myself quiet for another's sense of pride and liberation, it is at the cost of my own which isn't healthy--emotionally, politically or medically. Not only is it unhealthy, it's ineffective.

Since I have come out I have triggered many lesbians to blurt in whispered confidence--"I have a man in the closet. You're brave to be so open. What am I going to do?" These are not easy times. AIDS has given biphobia free reign in the lesbian community (and admittedly with much less destructive effect than how AIDS is fueling homophobia in society at large), it is all right to trash bisexuals, not to trust us for fear of AIDS. Bisexuals are untouchable to some lesbians.

We have to deal with oppression in a constructive way or we will be factionalized forever. Time is running out. We have to see the whole and the part we play in it. Forming family communities with people who share your sexual identity is important, but trashing is nonproductive. The sexual choices we make are equally valid for our individual experiences. AIDS is not a gay disease; it is a human tragedy, a plague that doesn't recognize boundaries. I urge bisexuals to take a political stand, and to become a visible, viable energy force. It is important and timely to open this dialogue in each of our communities. Nobody belongs in the closet. The only way to get a sense of "our" community is for us to begin to speak out and identify ourselves. When we verify the connections and the networks of our oppression, we build a unity that avoids the, "I'm more oppressed than you" syndrome

--Lani Kaahumanu, “Bisexuality & Discrimination,” BBWN Vol. 3, No. 6, Dec 1985-Jan 1986; Reprinted from the 1985 Gay Pride March magazine, San Francisco

What makes the Third Annual Northeast Conference on Bisexuality what it is? The breakfasts and dinners--the entertainment--the excitement of meeting others who feel like family. My first event of the conference was stumbling onto a cocktail party just around the corner from the Registration Desk, which turned out to be part of the Woman's History Week! A bit embarrassing after greeting many people with wine glasses in hand, asking them how they heard about the bisexuality conference!

I'll skip now to describe my experiences at the lesbian-identified affinity group and the two workshops I attended. Why do women who identify as lesbians go to a bisexuality conference? There were about 10 of us in the room, each with a different answer. Most of our relationships at the present time were with women; after that the similarity ended. One woman had affairs with men when not seriously involved with women. Another, in a non-monogamous long-term lesbian relationship, had recently begun a sexual involvement with a man. one woman, now involved with a bisexual woman, was here to discuss her feelings about the situation. Some of us had led exclusively lesbian lives for a number of years and were wondering if we'd closed off important parts of ourselves. Whether or not we would act on our sexual attractions for men, acknowledging them were important to us.

Our personal herstories contributed to our diverse opinions. For some, coming out was relaxed and easy and relationships with women refreshingly egalitarian. Others found sexual awakening and coming out difficult, and lesbian relationships fraught with many of the same difficulties as straight ones. We also discussed reasons lesbians don't accept bisexual women, such as fear that she'd leave for a man or desire to preserved woman-only space. We questioned the reality of "heterosexual privilege," wondering whether any women could really have it. We discussed the sorrows in our lives, such as family histories of alcoholism, incest or physical abuse, and the joys of our relationships, our work and our lives.

--Stacie, “Lesbian-identified Affinity Group Workshops: Lesbian Sexuality & Politics of Sexuality,” BBWN, Vol. 4, No. 2, April-May 1986

[Robyn Ochs]: What is your current sexual identity?

[Betty Aubut]: I call myself a "bisexual lesbian." I will always politically identify as bisexual, which to me means opposing restrictive categories. Some days I feel real separatist, and other days I feel that I want to be involved with men. Being bisexual to me means that I see men and women whom I'm attracted to. A man would have to be very special for me to want to get involved with him but I will fight for bisexual rights whether or not I'm sleeping with men. I see the bisexual community and movement as a very important bridge between gays, lesbian and straights. As long as gays and lesbians are considered completely 'other' from the mainstream, we'll never have any power. I consider myself gay. I think bisexuals are gay and gay liberation is our liberation. I don't consider myself 100% straight and 100% gay; I am 100% gay. That doesn't mean I won't sleep with a man every now and then--some lesbians do that. I never used to identify as lesbian out of respect for women who made the lifelong choice never to sleep with men, but then I realized that was a lot of bullshit. Calling yourself lesbian does not necessarily mean you have made that lifelong decision. Now I mostly identify as a lesbian--so I call myself a bisexual lesbian. I don't sleep with men right now, but I have male friends whom I spend time with and cuddle with. I've even become socially involved with some of the men from the men's network. I'm proud of where I am now because it's been so hard for me. People who have known me for a long time can't believe the change.

--Robyn Ochs, “Bi of the Month: Betty Aubut,” Bi Women Vol. 5, No. 2, April-May, 1987

Sharon Sumpter is a bisexual lesbian activist and psychotherapist who works with women survivors of abuse, institutionalization and sexual oppression. Her book-in-progress, In Pieces, is dedicated to opening the closet doors for former "mental patients." "I went into my work to undo the criminal things that were done to me and that I saw done to other women." She thanks Deena Metzger and Asherah for this, her first published work.

--Contributors' Notes, Sinister Wisdom, Issue 36, Winter 1988/89

Representatives of lesbian-feminist separatism may feel singled out as special targets of our anger and distress. To the extent that this is true, the seeds of anger lie in lesbian separatism as a politic: In this reading of feminism, specific sex acts take on politicized meaning. These are said to have consequences for the consciousness of the person performing them. Lesbian feminism is arguably the most proscriptive gay or lesbian politic, generating in its adherents the greatest tendency to judge others' (especially sexual) behavior. Gay men, for example, seem more likely to cite personal antipathy or simple stereotypes about bisexuals as a source of their chagrin. A great many bisexual women, particularly those who are feminist and lesbian-identified, have felt both personally and politically rejected and judged by the separatist sisters. Even those with no such experience may feel wary having heard of other bisexual women's stories. No one like to feel attacked, even politically.

----Carol A. Queen, "Strangers at Home: Bisexuals in the queer movement," Out/Look, Vol. 4, Issue 4 (16), Spring 1992

Closer to Home successfully deals with these and other problems of self-identification. As most of the writers are "lesbian-identified bisexuals" (one of several labels used for the sake of convenience), the definition of lesbianism is also reevaluated. Is a lesbian a woman who relates emotionally and erotically with women or a woman who does not relate emotionally and erotically with men? Must a woman fit both criteria to be considered a lesbian?

The "Principles and Practice" section expands these main course theories of identity with side dishes of memories and personal feelings--feelings of not being queer enough; of breaking all the rules, even the gay rules; of being dissatisfied with the waste of energy from political infighting. It's odd for lesbian-identified bi's to find themselves viewed as politically incorrect. It's maddening to have one's past feminist work invalidated by the inclusion of a man (or men) in one's life. It's frustrating to find oneself faced with a choice of being honest or potentially losing support of women's groups. It's confusing to work for the freedom to come out of one closet only to be asked to stay in another. As Rebecca Shuster write:

"If we choose a lesbian identity, we are subject to systematic oppression and internalize that oppression in a package that includes marginality; invisibility; isolation...; and countercultural rules about how to relate to women and men. If we choose a bisexual identity, we are subject to systematic oppression and internalize that oppression in a package deal that include a feeling of not belonging or having a home; defensiveness; isolation...; and countercultural rules about how to relate to women and men. Precisely because bisexuality represents freedom of choice, society ensures that the identity comes with its own package of mistreatment and constraints."

----Beth Herrick, "Bisexual Women Pushing the Limits," Sojourner, Vol. 18, Issue 10, June 1993

The first step is to move toward building alliances within our bisexual communities. Many communities are united by a commonality of the oppression. This is not so in our community, partly because of the different ways people identify as bisexual: gay-identified, queer-identified, lesbian-identified, or heterosexual-identified. Some people are bisexual in an affectional manner only; some are bisexual both affectionally and sexually; and some are bisexual only sexually. Since there are so many ways to express our bisexuality, the first step toward alliance-building is to work internally to accept all members of our own community. It is imperative that we build alliances across our own differences; otherwise, alliance-building will fail. Acceptance of the diversity of bisexual labels within our community will allow us to pursue alliance-building with decisive strength in the heterosexual community and what many of us consider our own lesbian/gay community.[3]

--Brenda Blasingame, "Power and Privilege Beyond the Invisible Fence, in Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, and Visions, 1995

Personally, I am unable to separate out the various ways that I am oppressed (as a woman, as an African American, as a bisexual lesbian, as an impoverished single mother) and say that one oppression is worse than the other, or that I desire one form of liberation more than another. I do not want to experience threats to my life, my child custody, or my job security because of racism or homophobia. I don't want to be oppressed for any reason!!!

--Dajenya, "Which Part of Me Deserves to Be Free?," in Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, & Visions, ed. Naomi Tucker, 1995

A good deal of criticism has been written about heterosexuals who are surprised when they find out the true sexual orientation of someone who they didn't think "looked gay." These criticism assert what is of course true--that there is no such thing as a gay or lesbian "look," since of course, everyone who is gay, lesbian or bisexual, looks that way.

Unfortunately, many of my experiences as a lesbian-identified bisexual woman have said to me that having an appearance or demeanor that diverges from the expected means I will not be accepted as truly belonging in the lesbian community. Despite my attendance at gay pride parade, dollars spent at gay resorts and in support of gay causes, and numerous attempts to participate in gay and/or lesbian groups and volunteer events, I have often felt unaccepted by this community.

--Amy Wyeth, "Don't Assume Anything," Bi Women Vol. 13, No. 4, Aug/Sept 1995

Joan Tollifson relays her struggle to make sense of her life and her spiritual awakening in Bare-Bones Meditation. Born with only one hand, she grew up feeling different, found identity and purpose as a bisexual lesbian and a disability rights activist, but struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. She first embraced Zen Buddhism then a very bare-bones form of spirituality that has no form. This exuberant and amazing testament is for the many people who don't fit into the conventional molds of existing religious traditions.

--"And on Publisher's Row," complied by Jenn Tust, Feminist Bookstore News, Vol. 19, Issue 4, Nov-Dec 1996

#bisexuality #bi lesbian

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kuromichad · 4 years ago

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different subject that’s heavy on my mind rn but since i’m already being harsh let’s get into it. i wish it wasn’t automatically presumed to be some kind of truscum attitude when someone tries to express that different parts of The Trans Community have like, different needs and different risk levels and different experiences and that we have the ability to talk over each other, harm each other, etc... like when i put it that way people generally are like ‘of course that’s true!’ but is it ever really understood in practice? a number of people (not a large enough number, but still) are able to loosely understand ‘you can be trans and transphobic’ when it’s applied to the matter of transmisogyny but when a trans person tries to express distrust of or frustration with afab nb people due to how common it is that that category of person will, despite being trans/nb, espouse bioessentialist, anti-medical-transition, radfem-adjacent if not outright cryptoterf rhetoric, suddenly ‘trans people can be transphobic’ gets applied to... the person with a complaint about transphobia.

because he’s clearly an evil truscum man! regardless of if the person making the complaint is a trans man or trans woman, oops, lol. he’s a bad person who is attacking and invalidating and totally hatecriming the heckin’ valid, equally at-risk transgender identity of “an afab woman who isn’t a woman except when she pointedly categorizes themself as a woman because being afab makes them a woman who is ‘politically aligned’ with women but she’s not an icky unwoke cis woman because they don’t like being forced into womanhood although Really When You Think About It 🤔 all women are dysphoric because obviously the pathologized medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria in transgender people is something that equally applies to cis women just default existing under patriarchy 🤔, and no, equating these things totally does not imply anything reductive about or add a bizarre moral dimension to the idea of being transgender, whaaaaat, this woman who isn’t a woman doesn’t think there’s anything immoral or cowardly or misogynist or delusional about being transgender, they would never say that because THEY’RE transgender, except when she feels it’s important (constantly) to make clear that she’s Still A Woman Deep Down Inherently Despite Not Identifying As One, and none of this ever has any effect on how they treat the concept, socially and politically, of people who actually wholly identify with (and possibly medically transition to) a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth, be it ‘the opposite gender’ or abstaining from binary gender altogether or ‘politically aligning’ with the ‘opposite’ gender from their asab. never ever!”

and like maybe that sounds like a completely absurd and hateful strawman to you! but in that case you’re either like, lucky, or optimistic, or ignorant. i’m literally not looking at random nb people and declaring that in My Truscum Opinion they’re ‘really a woman’ just because they’re not medically transitioning or meeting some arbitrary standard of mine. i am looking at self-identified afab nb people, who most often use she/they because, y’know, words mean things, especially pronouns, so people who are willingly ‘aligned with womanhood’ typically intentionally use she/her (sorry that i guess that’s another truscum take now!!! that pronouns mean things!!! the bigender transmasc who deliberately uses exclusively he/him wants it to invoke a perception he’s comfortable with!), who actively say the things listed above (in a non-sarcastic manner).

like, the line between a person who says “i don’t claim to really not be my asab because i know no one would ever perceive me as anything else” because theyve internalized a defeatist attitude due to societal transphobia, and a person who says that because they... genuinely believe it’s impossible/ridiculous/an imposition to truly be transgender (in the traditional trans sense, beyond a vague nb disidentification with gender) and are actively contributing to the former person’s self loathing... is hard to define from a distance! i think plenty of people who are, in a sense, ‘tentative’ or like ‘playing close to home’ so to speak in their identity are ‘genuinely trans’ (whatever that may mean) and just going through a process. they might arrive at a different identity or might just eventually stop saying/believing defeatist stuff, who knows. but there are enough people saying it for the latter reason, or at least not caring if they sound that way, that it’s like, dangerous. it is actively incredibly harmful to other trans people. and it’s fucking ridiculous that it’s so difficult to criticize because you’ll always get the defense of “umm but i’m literally trans” and/or “well i’m just talking about ME, this doesn’t apply to other trans people” when it’s an attitude that very clearly seeps into their politics and the way they discuss gender.

because it’s just incredibly common for afab nb people (most typically those that go by she/they! since i’m aware that uh, i am also afab nb, but we clearly are extremely different, so that’s the best categorization i’ve got) to discuss gender in moralized terms, with the excuse of patriarchy/misogyny existing, which of course adds another difficult dimension to trying to criticize this because it gets the response of “don’t act like misandry is real” (it’s not, but being a dick still is) and “boohoo, let women complain about their oppressors” (this goes beyond ‘complaining’). a deliberate revocation of empathy/sympathy/compassion from men and projection of inherently malicious/brutish/cruel intent onto men (not solely in the justified generalizations ‘men suck/are dangerous’, but in specific interactions too) underpin a whole fucking lot of popular posts/discussions online, whether they’re political or casual/social, and it absolutely influences how people conceptualize and feel about transness.

because ‘maleness is evil’ is still shitty politics even when you’ve slightly reframed it from the terf ‘trans women are evil because they’re Really Men and can never escape being horrific soulless brutes just as women can never escape being fragile morally superior flowers’ to the tumblr shethey “trans women who are out to me/unclockable are tolerable i guess because they’re women and women are good; anyone i personally presume to be a cis man, though, is still automatically evil, and saying trans men are Just As Bad is progressive of me, and it’s totally unrelated and apolitical that i think we should expand the concept of afab lesbianism so broadly that you can now be basically indistinguishable from trans men on literally every single level except for a declaration of ‘but i would never claim to be a man because i’m secure in the Innate Womanhood of the body i was born into, even as i medically alter that body because it causes me great gendered discomfort.’ none of this at all indicates that i feel there’s an immense moral/political gap between being an afab nb lesbian vs a straight trans man! it says nothing at all about my concept of ‘maleness’ and there’s no way this rhetoric bleeds into my perception of trans women and no way loudly talking about all this could keep trans people around me self-loathing and closeted, because i’m Literally Trans and Not A Terf!”

again, if that sounds like a hateful strawman, sorry but it’s not. i guess i’m supposed to be like ‘all of the many people ive seen saying these shitty things is an evil outlier who Doesn’t Count, and it’s not fair to the broad identity of afab shethey to not believe that every person who doesn’t outright say terfy enough things is a perfectly earnest valid accepting trans person who’s beyond criticism’ but like. this cannot be about broad validation. this can’t be about discarding all the bad apples as not really part of the group. we can’t be walking on eggshells to coddle what are essentially, in the end, Cis Feelings, because in the best cases this kind of rhetoric comes from naive people who are early and uncertain in their gender journey or whatever and are in the process of unraveling internalized transphobia, and in the easily observable worst cases these people are very literally redefining shit so that ‘actually all afab women are trans, spiritually, all afabs have dysphoria, we are all Equally oppressed by Males uh i mean cis men <3’ because, let’s be honest, they know that the moment they call themselves trans they get to say whatever they want about gender no matter how harmful it is to the rest of us. and those ideas spread like wildfire through the afab shethey “woman that’s not a woman” community that frankly greatly outnumbers other types of trans people online, because many of those people just do not have the experiences that lead you to really understand this shit and have to push back against concepts of gender that actively harm you as a trans person.

like that’s all i want to be able to say, is Things Are Different For Different Groups. and a willful ignorance of these differences leads to bad rhetoric controlling the overall discourse which gets people hurt. and even when concepts arise from it that seem positive and helpful and inclusive, in practice or in origin those ideas can still be upholding shit that gets other people hurt. like, i don’t doubt that many people are very straightforwardly happy and comfortable with an identity like ‘afab nb lesbian on testosterone’ and it would be ridiculous and hypocritical for me, ‘afab nb who wants to pass as a guy so he can comfortably wear skirts again,’ to act like that’s something that can’t or shouldn’t exist. it’s not about the identity itself, it’s about the politics that are popular within its community, and how the use of identities as moral labels with like, fucking pokemon type interactions for oppression effectiveness which directly informs the moral correctness of your every opinion and your very existence, is a shitty practice that gets people hurt and leads us to revoke empathy from each other.

like. sorry this is all over the place and long and probably still sounds evil because i haven’t thought through and disclaimered every single statement. but i’m like exhausted from living with this self-conscious guilt that maybe i’ve turned into a horrible evil truscum misogynist etc etc due to feeling upset by this seemingly inescapable approach to gender in lgbt/online circles that like, actively harms me, because when i vent with my friends all the stuff i’ve tried to explain here gets condensed down to referencing ‘she/theys’ as a category and that feels mean and generalizing and i genuinely dislike generalizations but the dread i feel about that category gets proven right way too often. it’s just like. this is not truscum this is not misgendering this is not misogyny. this is not about me decreeing that all transmascs have to be manly enough or dysphoric enough and all nbs have to be neatly agender and androgynous or something, i’m especially not saying that nb gender isn’t real lmao or even that it’s automatically wrong to partially identify with your asab; this is not me saying you can only medically transition for specific traditional reasons or that you don’t get a say on anything if you aren’t medically transitioning for whatever reason, now or ever. i just. want to be allowed to be frank about how... when there’s different experiences in a community we should like. acknowledge those differences and be willing to say that sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about or that what they’re saying is harmful. without the primary concern being whether people will feel invalidated by being told so. because these are like, real issues, that are more important than politely including everyone, because that method is just getting vulnerable people drowned out constantly.

#source on much of this: existing as a transmasc on tumblr for years and years.#i stopped identifying as any sort of 'woman-aligned' pretty much right before the ridiculous 'all afabs are dysphoric' stuff #but it sure did still make me hate myself and feel like a silly cowardly ugly little girl for wanting to transition!#and back when i WAS a she/they i definitely was falling for 'men are bad maleness is bad always inherently :)' rhetoric #not in the modern form outlined above but in the like. brainlessly parroted from 'baeddel tumblr' form #which was still like 'you can escape being a Bad Person by either becoming or admitting you are a girl :)'#and the only acknowledgment of trans men in this ideology was like. 'well i guess they feel like they have to do that :\'#'too bad for them. im not saying they shouldnt transition but you know. men suck though <3'#it was bad for me it was bad for other people so im saying from experience. Fucking cut it out! the end

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smallnico · 4 years ago

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Are you a Gold Star lesbian? (Just in case you don't know what it means, a Gold Star lesbian is a lesbian that has never had the sex with a guy and would never have any intentions of ever doing so)

EDIT: i’ve been told this anon is a bot, and a lot of people have received this same message. who would program a bot to do this and why is a mystery to me. assuming no harm is done in doing so, i’m going to keep my response up instead of deleting it because i spent a good amount of time writing it, and i think it’s informative, which is why i wrote it in the first place.

~~~

i’m going to do you a favour here and assume you didn’t mean any harm by asking me this, that you just didn’t know better or didn’t think it through. i’ve said some pretty weird things to people on impulse, so i know how it feels when people react aggressively when you weren’t trying to insult them or freak them out or anything. normally, i would just block you for something like this and delete the ask, but given the number of asks i’ve been getting these days after a long drought of interaction, maybe it’s a good idea to re-establish some boundaries, not to mention explain to someone who might not know better why i have so many objections to the concept of a ‘gold star lesbian’.

first off, even when i’m hosting a frank discussion about sexuality on this blog, i never want to be asked about my sex life. some people are comfortable talking about theirs on tumblr -- i am not one such person. people are welcome to enjoy this blog and ask the occasional question, probe me for opinions, but my personal life is not open for spectators. there’s a meaningful difference between asking me about my sexual orientation and my experiences as a queer person, and asking me who i’ve had sex with. one is an opportunity for education, and the other is inappropriate and invasive. i’m already really dodgy about answering questions about my personal life, about friends and location and whatever, so already that ought to be a good warning to never ask me about my sex life. it is none of anyone’s goddamn business. this is a recipe for an instant block, and to restate, the only reason i’m not blocking this anon is because it’s a learning opportunity, and i’m feeling generous today.

the other reason i’m answering this question is because it’s an opportunity to save you, anon, from the trap of believing in ‘gold star lesbians’. i already know what the term means, and i’ve long since formed a firm opinion about its uselessness.

1) a lesbian is not a better or worse lesbian for having/not having sex with men. there are a wide range of lesbian experiences that have room for a sexual history/future with men, and nobody -- absolutely nobody -- has the right to claim superiority over these people based on their comparatively “”pure”” sexual history. some lesbians formerly identified as straight, bi, pan, etc., and some may identify with those labels in the future. some older lesbians went their entire lives thinking they were straight, being married to men and having children before discovering who they are, does that make them less of a lesbian? does that make their current identity less qualified? i’ve been questioning my sexual orientation since i was thirteen years old, and not that it matters, but i don’t even identify as a lesbian anymore. am i tainted somehow? 2) let’s not pretend it’s not about purity, and let’s not pretend that purity means fucking anything when it comes to the spectrum of human experience. nothing is pure, nothing human will ever be pure, and anyone who claims their whatever the hell makes them pure is inflating their own pride at the cost of others they’ve arbitrarily declared are dirty. 3) men are not dirty. sex with men is not dirty. people who have sex with men are not dirty. you don’t get an award for not having sex with men, and the idea that ‘not having sex with men’ is a reward in and of itself is deeply unfair to both men and the people who find men attractive. there are a lot of excellent reasons people choose to have sex with men. the choice to have sex with men is not something i’m willing or even inclined to slander, even if the person making that choice is a lesbian, and even if they’re making that choice for pleasure. 4) sometimes, it’s not a choice. let’s not pretend rape in all its inglorious forms doesn’t count as sexual history, and hopefully we can all agree that, even if you’re 100% certain someone has never been raped, asking them to recount their sexual history to see if they qualify for some kind of honour is, at best, a rude and senseless violation of their privacy. 5) let’s also not pretend the concept of a ‘gold star lesbian’ isn’t borderline transphobic. i’ve seen a lot of people define ‘gold star lesbian’ as “a lesbian who has never touched a penis”, which naturally frames trans and some intersex women as dirty, while also discounting their womanhood. even if the term isn’t meant in a transphobic way, it has altogether too much flexibility as a concept for use by transphobic lesbians and terfs and not enough value in and of itself to bother reclaiming. 6) the label seeks to frame a specific lesbian experience as superior to any other experience, and does so at the expense of other queer people, and for what? is there a point to policing people’s identities and sexual experiences beyond “proving” one person is “”more queer”” than another? it’s ludicrous. it invalidates their experiences to make a select few people feel like they’re inherently better than everyone else, and i’m against that dynamic on principle. 7) if anyone thinks i’m reading too much into this, two things. one, it’s one of the only things my degree qualifies me to do, and two, just look at how the phrase ‘gold star lesbian’ is worded. you get a gold star. it’s a reward, an accomplishment, a sticker on your nametag, something which separates your from and prizes you above others because you did something good. in this case, ‘others’ is functionally everyone else in the queer community, and ‘something good’ is abstaining from sex with men. we’ve already been over why sex with men should never be seen as an inherently bad thing, and we as queer people should know better than to exclude each other for failing to conform to an arbitrarily ‘standard’ experience of sexuality.

i’m sure there’s more, but i’ve already spent enough time on this response. anon, if you’re reading this, it’s okay if you didn’t know better, and i hope i could teach you something today. i do get the feeling you asked this question in earnest, so as long as it doesn’t happen again (in which case, again, you will be blocked), no sour grapes. but to you and everyone else following this blog, this is an example of an inappropriate question -- for reasons on top of how many objections i have to the ‘gold star lesbian’ label. we have fun here on smallnico.tumblr.com, but i’m a real human being out there in the world, and this blog is my platform and spectacle, not me. there’s a reason i’m on tumblr and not twitter or instagram.

#loquor #anon #the askbox #'begone cryptoterf' is my favourite reply to this post

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petekaos · 5 years ago

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hi so ive been studying thai cultures of sexuality and gender for my (kind of not really) college thesis and obviously my research had been little limited because of the lack of english papers on the subject (so !! if you're thai and LGBT+ PLS correct me) but one thing that i've been wrestling with in criticisms of this show is how people have rallied against wife/husband discourse because it feels like a very Eurocentric look at how people express their sexualities. (And +

this comes from someone who hates top/bottom + wife/husband gendering myself!) Thai conceptions of gender/sexuality don’t really fit into the categories of LGBT(+) as easily as believed, especially since the terms people used can often differ based on the sexuality and gender of WHO they’re attracted to and also on the presentation of gender rather than what people feel they are! +

(Also the word phet means both gender AND sexuality, meaning there is not often a distinction between gender/sexuality and boy can you tell I have nothing to do with my time) Which is oh my god confusing but to give an example, when gay was first introduced as an identity marker people began to refer to themselves as “gay kings” v “gay queens” based on which dude was the sexually receptive partner. +

Lesbians are also gendered in a similar format: “tom” tends to refer to butch lesbians (and can sometimes be seen as part of the overarching kathoey third gender) and “dee” refers to femme lesbians. To clarify, I am Indian-American and therefore would solidly punch someone in the face if they tried to classify me and my (nonexistent lol) partner as the “wife” v “husband,” +

especially when the roles you take in bed become an essential part of how you communicate your identity within the gay community. In the states, you can call yourself a lesbian without having to qualify how butch or how much of a top you are, in Thailand the words themselves inherently hold that connotation. Not saying its right, but there is cultural precedent that I think is interesting to explore in asking WHY this trope is so common. +

I know there have been certain shows that have had characters say that they are bi/gay (ie. Mean’s character from UWMA, Ohm’s character from HCTM) but these are not words that originated from Thailand itself, they are loan words from English. That’s not to say they’re invalid in any aspect, but that DOES say that while people who do fall into gay/bi categories may have existed, there was little/no direct translation for these words in thai until the 1960s. +

When gender and sexuality are not considered distinct categories but are rather all lumped under the term “phet,” it is therefore Hard in Thailand to lump people together as ie. Bi without having an additional sex and gender qualifier in the term. “Seua bai” (which means bi tiger and wtf why is that SO cool) refers to /masculine/ bi men, but seau bai are also not seen as completely male because, +

again, seau bai as a phet implies that they are not 100% phu chai - male - which really only refers to heterosexual men. SO while I would love to see tine/sarawat say that they are bi/gay, I’d also equally love for them to express that they are bi/gay with terms inherent to thai, bc I think that offers a really interesting perspective to int fans (and straight thai fans who are unaware) on how gender/sexuality can be different in other cultures. +

They could also offer criticism on these terms if they feel too narrow, which would be really valuable coming from thai writers/producers themselves. Anyway I thought this would be good food for thought, and if LGBT+ thai people have different perceptions PLEASE talk about it if you feel comfortable bc your experiences and knowledge are very valuable and appreciated! Hope this was interesting, sorry for all the spam! i love ur blog rahul -bear

ah thank you so much for this! i have been wondering about this as well recently as more east asians have been speaking up about sexuality and gender in their cultures and how that doesn’t coincide with how westerners express their sexuality and gender. i mean, there are terms that overlap (in indian culture, we have some of those as well, but then we also have hijra and thirunangai and thirunambi in tamil culture) but there are some words exclusive to thai culture specifically. this was great food for thought and i’ll be more careful in the future when it comes to expressing my thoughts on terms for sexuality in bl shows.

i think it would be really interesting to see these terms used and criticised, if need be, by actual thai lgbt writers and producers. it would be nice to see more of thai culture paid homage to in shows like these and to see the search for labels or terms that fit oneself, i know that has been hard for me personally considering english terms as well. the way we perceive gender and sexuality tends to be very eurocentric and sometimes we need to realise that we need to see things through a different lens and the influence of culture and society on the reason why a lot of these characters don’t use fixed english loan words to describe themselves. this was a super interesting read, thank you! i should have educated myself on it earlier as i got more into this fanbase, but thank you so much for coming along and providing us this information :’)

furthermore i think it would be interesting, as you said, to get input from actual lgbt thai people on this! so if you are lgbt and thai, feel free to send me an ask talking about your experiences and journey with terms and labels, both thai and english, if you feel the want to. y’all always have a platform here with me and i will try my best to provide my insight as well if asked or needed, be respectful, and listen! your knowledge and inputs are very much appreciated, especially when it comes to shows like these and the sometimes unfair criticism they get from people with a western-centric point of view.

thank you once again, my friend!

#super interesting read !! thank u for opening my eyes to this even when you didn't need to #bearsippingtea #rahul answers #ref #asian tag #mlm tag

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myaekingheart · 4 years ago

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You've been visited by the random OC question fairy! :D ~☆

Happy International Women's Day! What is your OC's relationship with being a woman? How has being female affected their upbringing and/or their past? How does being female affect their actions, thoughts, and relationships with others, if at all?

Hi OC Questions Fairy!

I’m gonna answer this for all of my female OCs so they each get a little attention so this might take a minute hahaha With Rei, it was never so much of an issue of being a woman than it was an issue of what was expected of her as a woman. Her parents had a very specific vision in mind for the type of life they wanted for her that involved the usual “get married, have babies, be a housewife” route. And while Rei has always yearned to be a wife and a mother, she also has always yearned to be a ninja. The opposition of her family about her becoming a ninja, however, led her to believe that she could not do both and for a long time she suppressed her desire for domesticity in order to focus entirely on her career. Which is also telling of Rei’s mother, Hana. She had sort of an opposite experience in that her family wanted her to become a ninja and take advantage of the Yamanaka’s kekkei genkai, the mind transfer technique, but Hana was not fit for becoming a ninja. Every time she tried to use the family jutsu, she would get splitting migraines. She never even wanted to become a ninja in the first place, however, and feels right at home fulfilling her expected gender roles. Kakashi’s mother, Aijo, never really played by the rules when it came to femininity. She was always kind of feral and wild, she didn’t have any reservations about getting down and dirty in her work. Rei’s grandmother, Teiko, had very much the same path as Rei. Her family had no interest in shinobi whatsoever, but Teiko had a gift and she was drawn to ninja work. She also kind of defied what was expected of her for a really long time and tried to balance both a ninja career and being a mother but she ultimately had to make a sacrifice and choose her family over everything else. Teiko’s old teammates, Komori and Edna, have interesting relationships with their womanhood. Komori is kind of eccentric and materialistic in a way. She has a twin brother, Rojin, and together they run the local antiques shop. She never really felt like she was not on equal footing compared to her brother, but she also worked very hard to become a solid ninja. She was ready to give it up in a heartbeat in order to be the best mother she could to her children, though. Edna is the type who loves being a woman and engaging in things that are deemed “womanly.” Though she, too, was a fearsome ninja, she is also an expert in fashion and even runs the local high-end kimono shop. She’s the type who just absolutely revels in everything that she’s allowed to do and expected to do as a woman and she does those things with utmost confidence. Komori’s granddaughter, Suisen, struggles with not just womanhood but existing in a body in general. She deals with an eating disorder and therefore has struggled a lot with body image, peer pressure, and a sense of control, all of which are not exclusively feminine issues but are definitely influenced by those issues. Edna has two granddaughters, Sefure and Arai, who could not be more different. Sefure is far more feminine than her younger sister, but at a price. She has adopted that maternal instinct of wanting to provide for her sister, while Arai has the instinct to protect. In turn, Sefure has learned to use her womanhood and sex appeal for a source of income in order to support her sister, who instead turns to shinobi work and yearns to prove herself as strong and capable so that she can create a better life for the two of them. Rei’s teammate and best friend, Sekkachi, has a similar issue to Rei in that she has certain expectations pinned on her by her family. Sekkachi wants nothing to do with them, though. She refuses to become the doting wife and mother--it’s just not in her blood. She is, instead, the strong, independent woman type but with a fault. She wants to have companionship but she struggles with accepting others into her life and allowing herself to be vulnerable. She’s built up an impenetrable wall and keeps up this facade of being unaffected and aloof. And while we’re on the subject of her and womanhood, it’s also important to note how significant woman are to her as a lesbian, so despite her bluntness and her independence, she of course tries her best to support women (even if sometimes her support seems like the opposite, in terms of her and Rei’s relationship where they butt heads constantly and she tends to criticize Rei’s life choices once and a while. All in all, she’s not perfect.) Rei’s other teammate and childhood best friend, Naru, definitely also revelled in her femininity much like Edna and Sefure do. Naru has charm, she’s popular, and she always knows everyone’s business because she feels like she has a responsibility to be a nexus of information. She’s bubbly and bright but also knows how to use her feminine charm to her own benefit, i.e. manipulation and genjutsu. Rei, Sekkachi, and Naru’s sensei is Chikara, a former dancer turned shinobi. Chikara has a very vast knowledge of what it means to be a woman in this profession but rather than fight against that inequality, she teaches her students how to use that to their advantage. She taught her students choreographed dance routines and as a team, they created an entire ensemble alter ego of rave dancers to perform at a local club where many enemy ninja are often attracted so that in this way, the girls essentially weaponize their femininity in order to lure criminals to their deaths. And on the subject of weaponizing femininity, none do this better than Tenshi. While she also exemplifies some of the negative social aspects of being a woman such as sexualization and competition, she uses her sex appeal to lure men so that she can get what she wants. And often times what she wants are eyeballs. Specifically Sharingan. Because she works for Danzo. This is why she is currently in jail. Mikazuki doesn’t really feel very tied to her identity as a woman, I don’t think? She’s very spiritual and while she’s also very feminine in the way she presents herself, as well as demure and shy, I don’t think she really focuses much on the fact that she’s a woman. I know in terms of sexuality, none of it matters to her one bit. She’s more concerned with what type of person you are than what gender you are, though she definitely is aware of the inherent inequality of being a woman. After all, she’s in this shinobi business, too, which doesn’t really let you forget about that. In terms of Sekkachi’s family, her grandmother Kohai’s entire backstory hinges on her womanhood. She migrated to the Konoha because she dared to practice a sense of agency over her female existence in terminating an unwanted pregnancy, which her family disowned her for. She knew that she made the right decision for herself, however, and went on to carry that with a sense of self-acceptance--as well as a reclamation of the term fumeiyo, which means dishonor, and was the surname she chose for herself when she branched out on her own. Sekkachi’s cousin, Tenjikubotan, is another woman who soaks up all the advantages of her womanhood. She behaves like a socialite and enjoys the company of attractive men, as well as making herself attractive for them. Tenjikubotan’s younger sister, Roru, is far less concerned with appearances. She just wants to follow in her cousin Sekkachi’s footsteps and become a badass ninja. She isn’t entirely concerned with what effect her womanhood might have on her, which perhaps is merely a positive sign that her much younger generation is making strides toward gender equality in the shinobi world. While these two are more minor characters, I really want to include Amai and Hiretsuna, as well. Amai is very much invested in her womanhood and she enjoys engaging in the cute and the feminine. She is a waitress at the local dango shop and loves pink and sweet things and cute animals. She just wants to exist as something bright and positive and to make people smile. Hiretsuna is far more subtle in her femininity, but is feminine nonetheless. She works reception at the hospital and definitely engages in the local gossip and fantasizing about attractive men, even if it’s far more fairytale-esque and fluffy than sexual. Sosei and Seiiku are middle-aged twins who work in the hospital and represent the significance of mental and physical/reproductive health for everyone but especially women. Sosei works in the mental health ward as a leader for group therapy and inpatient treatment, a role that she takes very seriously. She is passionate about mental health and the inherent sense of healing that comes from community and communication. Her sister, Seiiku, is the head of the maternity ward and is very passionate about reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth. She has a very holistic, female empowerment approach with an emphasis on expecting mothers taking charge of their own birthing experience.

Seiiku’s star pupil is Tanjo, who had a really interesting struggle with accepting her womanhood. She was initially an enemy ninja sent to Konoha to gain intel but her mission was quickly sidetracked when she began experiencing severe abdominal pains and had to be rushed to the hospital where she discovered she was in labor and she didn’t even know she was pregnant.* This startling and life-changing incident at first left her reeling and with very little sense of direction but she decided to take charge of her own life after this and train to become a midwife herself as a way to regain control over a situation in which she had none. She is very much supportive but also a tough-love type of woman who went through a very traumatic experience but came out the other side better for it and having found a true passion in helping other women and empowering them the way that she wished she had felt when she gave birth. *This whole chapter originally began as a gag based on the fact that Kakashi Hatake’s English voice actor, Dave Wittenberg, also narrated I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant. The characters and plot points from this chapter, however, expanded to something far more developed so now here we are. I have more characters that I could speak on on this because about ninety percent of my OCs are women but this is already getting really long and I feel like there’s a pattern in the way I write female characters so many of them will probably sound the same in terms of the way they approach womanhood and the influence that being a woman has on them. I think this is a pretty well-rounded group to have answered this for, though. Thank you for asking!

#long post is long #i am so goddamn sorry #the scarecrow and the bell #naruto #naruto oc #answered asks #ramblings #random-oc-questions-fairy

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a-new-lesbian-flag-blog · 6 years ago

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It’s Lesbian Visibility Day– Lesbians Deserve An Inclusive, Easily Reproduced, and Symbolic Flag to Stand Under!

Oh boy, yet another flag proposal... What’s wrong with the flags that already exist, anyway??

No decently circulated lesbian flag currently meets all of the standards that must be met to make a pride flag great– a pride flag design needs to be inclusive, easily reproduced, and symbolic to be able to become a widespread, representative icon of a community!

What’s wrong with the labrys design?

The labrys design was created in 1999 by a gay man. Having a lesbian flag that wasn’t even created by a lesbian is a glaring issue by itself, but a second reason many lesbians have rejected this flag is because of its association with TERFs, which stand for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, a group of people that do not believe trans people are the gender they identify as, and wish to exclude trans people, especially trans women, from the LGBT community and feminist movements.

What’s wrong with the seven striped pink flag design?

This flag design is made almost entirely out of very specific shades of pink. These shades are extremely hard to translate into physical dyes, fabrics, and other materials used to create pride designs, causing the flag to be inaccessible to many people. Also, the flag was originally intended to be representative only of lipstick lesbians– many lesbians do not identify with this flag because of the very feminine design as many lesbians do not subscribe to traditional feminine roles and presentation. Also, the creator of this flag has made many racist, butchphobic, and biphobic comments on her personal blog, which is yet another reason why an increasingly large portion of the lesbian community has rejected this flag.

What about this flag with the orange on top and pink at the bottom?

I really appreciate this flag for its goal to step away from the exclusive femininity of the ‘lipstick lesbian’ flag and incorporate some deeper symbolism into the design. But there are still some issues with it that remain– one of which is that it does not fix the issue of accessibility/ease of reproduction. The shades of orange and pink are still extremely similar to each other which again, makes it very hard to replicate with dyes/fabrics/other materials. Not even the five-striped variation of the flag fixes this, as the shades of orange and pink are still very specific and are still two different shades of the same color. A pride flag needs to be able to be replicated with limited material options in order for it to be fully accessible and become widespread in the community and beyond. There is also the issue that the two-tone design of the flag is mainly meant to represent butches/femmes. Butch and femme culture is absolutely an extremely important and historical aspect of the lesbian community– but it is not everything the community encompasses. There are many lesbians that do not identify with butch/femme, and this flag leaves those people out.

What about any other design already out there?

This is not meant to be a bash on any individuals that have taken the initiative and courage to propose their own designs to the community– the community-wide effort to design a new lesbian flag is what inspired my own! But no proposed flag I’ve ever seen out there has met all three criteria that is needed to make a pride flag successful and widespread, and those are again, inclusivity, ease of reproduction, and symbolism.

Okay, what’s this new flag look like?

Many things were considered in the design process of this flag.

It could not be overly feminine (no major focus on pink, no pastel shades)

It needed to be easily reproduced (no multiple shades of colors, no obscure colors, no complex symbols)

It needed to incorporate historical and cultural symbolism in every design element (more on that later)

It would not focus solely on one aspect of the lesbian community (not just on femininity, not just on butch/femme, et cetera.)

What do the stripes symbolize?

Red, embodying passion and bravery– our loud voices and larger-than-life legacies, our bullheadedness and righteousness, our anger and joy and liveliness that is infused in every facet of the lesbian community, and every soul that calls themselves a part of it.

Orange for integrity and hearth; our wholeness despite the notion that a woman's life is incomplete without a man, as well as the home and sense of belonging we find in our identity and community. It is rejecting the notion that lesbians are cold, harsh, and untrustworthy. This stereotype is especially aimed at butch/masculine presenting lesbians, which is why the stripe also represents butches.

White symbolizes our inherent rejection of dichotomy in multiple senses of the word. Lesbians are not tied to the patriarchal and heteronormative standard of male versus female in our relationships, lifestyles, or identities. We reject traditional standards of both masculinity and femininity to instead establish our own unique methods of presentation and identity that cannot be tied to a binary norm. It also rejects the notion that lesbian love is automatically dirtier and more lustful than heterosexual love. It is not a coincidence that the purity stripe also represents trans and nonbinary lesbians– this is rejecting the notion that the lesbianism of trans and nonbinary individuals is somehow invalid, lesser or diluted compared to the lesbianism of a cis woman. In the current political climate surrounding many lesbian circles today, I found it more necessary than ever to impress the fact that trans and nonbinary lesbians are just as representative of the lesbian community as cis lesbians, and their inclusion is critical in honoring and acknowledging the community at large.

Purple, the color of violets and lavender, for our history: our lesbian predecessors who dedicated their lives in making the achievements of today possible, our traditions and symbols that have been passed on, redefined, and expressed through every new generation. The purple stripe acknowledges the contributors to lesbian achievement of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

Black– resilience and certainty, grounding our identities and community in the foundation of knowing we are exactly where we are meant to be in life, and that our identities are an inherent, permanent, and powerful facet of who we are as human beings. It rejects the notion that lesbians are confused or unstable in their identity, or that they are wrong or broken for not loving men. It also rejects the notion that a “gay lifestyle” is inherently unstable or unsustainable– lesbians are just as capable of marrying, settling, and living comfortably and happily as a straight person is.

I really like this flag! What can I do to support it?

Spread it any way you can!

Reblog this post! Non-lesbians are absolutely welcome to– in order to make a pride flag universally known, it has to be seen by *all* members of the community!

Make the flag your profile picture! (I will make free edits of the flag with any character/icon/other pride flag upon request! Just send an ask! Examples of edits I’ve done previously will be posted on this blog soon!)

Go to the twitter and instagram for the flag!

Like/retweet/repost the flag on your accounts!

Make irl pride art and show it off!

Tell your friends!

I hereby release this design of a new lesbian flag into the public domain. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, or use the flag design, including selling merchandise for profit! The last thing I want to happen is for the circulation of this flag to end up entirely based on one social media platform or occur strictly online. I intend for this flag to be able to be displayed and flown in online and real life spaces alike, by lesbians of all different backgrounds, experiences, cultures, locations, and ages.

Finally, there is a website that goes even further into describing the design process behind the flag and the symbolism incorporated into it! All the information about the flag has been included on this website so all anyone needs to do to help spread the word is share this link!!!

❤️❤️❤️ Lesbians deserve a flag that represents *all* of us and can be spread to be seen by the entire community! I need YOUR help in making this flag known! Thank you so much for your time in reading and your support! ❤️❤️❤️

#lesbian day of visibility #ldov #lesbiansafe #lesbian visibility day #lesbian flag #lesbian flag discourse #flagcourse #lgbtq #lesbian pride #anewlesbianflag

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ultralullstuff · 5 years ago

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Is Paris Burning?

There was a time in my life when I liked to dress up as a male and go out into the world. It was a form of ritual, of play. It was also about power. To cross-dress as a woman in patriarchy -then, more so than now - was also to symbolically cross from the world of powerlessness into a world of privilege. It was the ultimate, intimate, voyeuristic gesture. Searching old journals for passages documenting that time, I found this paragraph:

She pleaded with him, “Just once, well every now and then, I just want to be boys together. I want to dress like you and go out and make the world look at us differently, make them wonder about us, make them stare and ask those silly questions like is he a woman dressed up like a man, is he an older black gay man with his effeminate boy/girl lover flaunting same-sex love out in the open. Don’t worry I’ll take it very seriously, I want to let them laugh at you. I’ll make it real, keep them guessing, do it in such a way that they will never know for sure. Don’t worry when we come home I will be a girl for you again but for now I want us to be boys together.”

Cross-dressing, appearing in drag, transvestism, and transsexualism emerge in a contex where the notion of subjectivity is challenged, where identity is always perceived as capable of construction, invention, change. Long before there was ever a contemporary feminist movement, the sites of these experiences were subverisve places where gender norms were questioned and challenged.

Within the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy the experience of men dressing as women, appearing in drag, has always been regarded by the dominant heterosexist cultural gaze as a sign that one is symbolically crossing over from a realm of power into a realm of powerlessness. Just to look at the many negative ways the word “drag” is defined reconnects this label to an experience that is seen as burdensome, as retrograe and retrogressive. To choose to appear as “female” when one is “male” is always constructed in the patriarchal mindset as a loss, as a choice worthy only of ridicule. Given this cultural backdrop, it is not surprising that many black comediants appearing on television screens for the first time included as part of their acts impersonations of black women. The black woman depicted was usually held up as an object of ridicules, scorn, hatred (representing the “female” image everyone was allowed to laugh at and show contempt for). Often the moment when a black male comedian appeared in drag was the most succesful segment of a given comedian’s act (for example, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx, or Eddie Murphy).

I used to wonder if the sexual stereotype of black men as overly sexual, manly, as “rapists”, allowed black males to cross this gendered boundary more easily than white men without having to fear that they would be seen as possibly gay or transvestites. As a young black female, I found these images to be disempowering. Thay seemed to bothallow black males to give public expression to a general misogyny, as well as to a more specific hatred and contempt toward black woman. Growing up in a world where black women wer, and still are, the objects of extreme abuse, scorn, and ridicule, I felt these impersonations were aimed at reinforcing everyone’s power over us. In retrospect, I can see that the black male in drag was also a disempowering image of black masculinity. Appearing as a “woman” within sexist, racist media was a way to become in “play” that “castrated” silly childlike black male that racist white patriarchy was comfortable having as an image in their homes. These televised images of black men in drag were never subversive; thay helped sustain sexism and racism.

It came as no surprise to me that Catherine Clement in her book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women would include a section about black men and the way their representation in opera did not allow her to neatly separate the world into gendered polarities where men and women occupied distintcly different social spaces and were “two antagonistic halves, one persecuting the other since before the dawn of time.” Looking critically at images of black men in operas she found that they were most often portrayed as victims:

Eve is undone as a woman, endlesslyy bruised, endelessly dying and coming back to life to die even better. But now I begin to remember hearing figures of betrayed, wounded men; men who ham; men who have women’s troubles happen to them; men who have the status of Eve, as if they had lost their innate Adam. These men die like heroines; down on the ground they cry and moan, they lament. And like heroines they are surrounded by real men, veritable Adams who have cast them down. Thay partake of feminity: excluded, marked by some initial strangeness. Thay are doomed to their undoing.

Many heterosexual black men in white supremacist patriarchal culture have acted as though the primary “evil” of racism has been the refusal of the dominant culture to allow them full access to patriarchal power, so that in sexist terms thay are compelled to inhabit a sphere of powerlessness, deemed “feminine”, hence thay have perceived themselves as emasculated. To the extent that black men accept a white supremacist sexist representation of themselves as castrated, without phallic power, and therfore pseudo-females, thay will need to overly assert a phallic misogynist masculinity, one rooted in contempt for the female. Much black male homophobia is rooted in the desire to eschew connection with all things deemed “feminine” and that would, of course, include black gay men. A contemporary black comedian like Eddie Murphy “proves” his phallic power by daring to publicly ridicule women and gays. His days of appearing in drag are over. Indeed it is the drag queen of his misogynist imagination that is most often the image of black gay culture he evokes and subjects to comic homophobic assault -one that audiences collude in perpetuating.

For black males to take appearing in drag seriously, be they gay or straight, is to oppose a heterosexist representation of black manhood. Gender bending and blending on the part of black males has always been a critique of phalocentric masculinity in traditional black experience. Yet the subversive power of those images is radically altered when informed by a racialized fictional construction of the “feminine” that suddenly makes the representation of whiteness as crucial to the experience of female impersonation as gender, that is to idealization of white womanhood. This is brutally evident in Jennie Livingston’s new film Paris is burning. Within the world of the black drag ball culture she deicts, the idea of womanness as feminity is totally personified by whiteness. What viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like “real” black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of feminity that is white. Called out in the film by Dorian Carey, who names it by saying no black drag queen of his day wanted to be Lena Horne, he makes it clear that the feminity most sought after, most adored, was that perceived to be the exclusive property of whte womanhood. When we see visual representations of womanhood in the film (images torn from magazines and posted on walls in living space) they are, with rare exceptions, of white women. Significantly, the fixation on becoming as much like a white female as possible implicitly evokes a connection to a figure never visible in this film: that of the white male patriarch. And yet if the class, race, and gender aspirations expressed by the drag queens who share their deepest dreams is always longing to be in the position of the ruling-class woman then that means there is also thedesire to act in partnership with the ruling-class white male.

This combination of class and race longing that privileges the “feminity” of the ruling-class white woman, adored and kept, shrouded in luxury, does not imply a critique of patriarchy. Often it is assumed that the gay male, and most specifically the “queen”, is both anti-phallocentric and anti-patriarchal. Marilyn Frye’s essay, “Lesbian feminism and Gay Rights”, remains one of the most useful critical debunkings of this myth. Writing in The Politics of Reality, Frye comments:

One of thing which persuades the straight world that gay men are not really men is the effeminacy of style of some gay men and the gay institution of the impersonation of women, both of which are associated in the popular mind with male homosexuality. But as I read it, gay men’s effeminacy and donning of feminine apparel displays no love of or identification with women or the womanly. For the most part, this femininity is affected and is characterized by thatrical exaggeration. It is a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom feminity is the trapping of oppresion, but it is also a kind of play, a toying with that which is taboo.. What gay male affectation of femininity seems to be is a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the feminine, much as in other sports... But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine..

Any viewer of Paris is Burning can neither deny the way in which its contemporary drag balls have the aura of sports events, aggressive competitions, one team (in this case “house”) competing another etc., nor ignore the way in which the male “gaze” in the audience is directed at participants in a manner akin to the objectifying phallic stare straight men direct at “feminine” women daily in public spaces. Paris is Burning is a film that many audiences assume is inherently oppositional because of its subject matter and the identity of the filmmaker. Yet the film’s politics of race, gender, and class are played out in ways that are both progressive and reactionary.

When I first heard that there was this new documentary film about black gay men, drag queens, and drag balls I was fascinated by the title. It evoked images of the real Paris on fire, of the death and destruction of a dominating white western civilization and culture, an end to oppressive Eurocentrism and white supremacy. This fantasy not only gave me a sustained sense of plearure, it stood between me and the unlikely reality that a young white filmmaker, offering a progresssive vision of “blackness” from the standpoint of “whiteness”, would receive the positive press accorded Livingston and her film. Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight-acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness”. These folks left the film saying it was “amazing”, “marvelous”, “incredibly funny”, worthy of statements like, “Didn’t you just love it?” And no, I didn’t just love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The “we” evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that ther is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What would be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfracnhised black folks might rise any day now and make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a doumentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited, black folks are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power, and pleasure. Indeed it is the very “pleasure” that so many white viewers with class privilege experience when watching this film that has acted to censor dissenting voices who find the film and its reception critically problematic.

In Vincent Canby’s review of the film in the New York Times he begins by quoting the words of a black father to his homosexual son. The father shares that it is difficult for black men to survive in a racist society and that “if you’re black and male and gay, you have to be stronger that you can imagine”. Beginning his overwhelmingly positive review with the words of a straight black father, Canby implies that the film in some way documents such strenght, is a portrait of black gay pride. Yet he in no way indicates ways this pride and power are evident in the work. Like most reviewers of the film, what he finds most compelling is the pageantry of the drag balls. He uses no language identifying race and class perspectives when suggesting at the end of his piece that behind the role-playing “there is also a terrible sadness in the testimony”. This makes it appear that the politics of ruling-class white culture are solely social and not political, solely “aesthetic” questions of choice and desire rather that expressions of power and privilege. Canby does not tell readers that much of the tragedy and sadness of this film is evoked by the willingness of black gay men to knock themselves out imitating a ruling-class culture and power elite that is one of the primary agents of their oppression and exploitation. Ironically, the very “fantasies” evoked emerge from the colonizing context, and while marginalized people often appropriate and subvert aspects of the dominant culture, Paris is Burning does not forcefully suggest that such a process is taking place.

Livingston’s film is presented as though it is a politically neutral documentary providing a candid, even celebratory, look at black drag balls. And it is precisely the mood of celebration that masks the extent to which the balls are not necessarily radical expresssions of subverive imagination at work undemining and challenging the status quo. Much of the film’s focus on pageantry takes the ritual of the black drag ball and makes it spectacle. Ritual is that ceremonial act that carries with it meaning and significance beyond what appears, while spectacle functions primarily as entertaining dramatic display. Those of us who have grown up in a segregated black setting where we participated in diverse pageants and rituals know that those elements of a given ritual that are empowering and subversive may not be readily visible to an outsider looking in. Hence it is easy for white obsevers to depict black rituals as spectacle.

Jennie Livingston approaches her subject matter as an outsider looking in. Since her presence as white woman/lesbian filmmaker is “absent” from Paris is Burning it is easy for viewers to imagine that they are watching an ethnographic film doumenting the life of black gay “natives” and not recognize that they are watching a work shaped and formed bya a perspective and standpoint specific to Livingston. By cinematically masking this reality (we hear her ask questions but never see her), Livingston does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness “represents” blackness, but rather assumes an imperial overseeing position that is in no way progressive or counter-hegemonic. By shooting the film using a conventional approach to documentary and not making clear how her standpoint breaks with this tradition, Livingston assumes a privileged location of “innocence”. She is represented both in interviews and reviews tender-hearte, mild-mannered, virtuous white woman daring to venture into a contemporaty “heart of darkness” to bring back knowledge of the natives.

A review in the New Yorker declares (with no argument to substatiate the assertion) that “the movie is a sympathetic observation of a specialized, private world”. An interview with Livingston in Outweek is titled “Pose, She Said” and we are told in the preface that she “discovered the Ball world by chance”. Livingston does not discuss her interest and fascination with black gay subculture. She is not asked to speak about what knowledge, information, or lived understanding of black culture and history she possessed that provided a background for her work or to explain what vision of black life she hoped to convey and to whom. Can anyone imagine that a black woman lesbian would make a film about whete gay subculture and not be asked these questions? Livingston is asked in the Outweek interview, “How did you build up the kind of trust where people are so open to talking about their personal experiences?” She never answers this question. Instead she suggests that she gains her “credibility” by the intensity of her spectatoship, adding, “I also targeted people who wer articulate, who had stuff they wanted to say and were very happy that anyone wanted to listen”. Avoiding the difficult questions undelying what it means to be a white person in a white supremacist society creating a film about any aspect of black life. Livingston responds to the question, “Didn’t the fact that you’re a white lesbian going into a world of Black queens and street kids make that [the interview process] difficult?” by implicitly evoking a shallow sense of universal connection. She responds, “If you know someone over a period of two years, and thay still retain their sex and their race, you’ve got to be a pretty sexist, racist person”. Yet it is precisely the race, sex, and sexual practices of black men who are filmed that is the exploited subject matter.

So far I have read no interviews where Livingston discusses the issue of appropriation. And even though she is openly critical of Madonna, she does not convey how her work differs from Madonna’s apropriation of black experience. To some extent it is precisely the recognition by mass culture that aspects of black life, like “voguing”, fscinate white audiences that creates a market for both Madonna’s product and Livingston’s. Unfortunately, Livingston’s comments about Paris is Burning do not convey serious thought about either the political and aesthetic implications of her choice as a white woman focusing on an aspect of black life and culture or the way racism might shape and inform how she would interpret black experience on the screen. Reviewers like Georgia Brown in the Village Voice who suggest that Livingston’s whiteness is “a fact of nature that didn’t hinder her research” collude in the denial of the way whiteness informs her perspective and standpoint. To say, as Livingston does, “I certainly don’t have the final word on the gay black experience. I’d love for a black director to have made this film” is to oversimplify the issue and to absolve her of responsibility and accountability for progressive critical reflection and it implicitly suggests that there would be no difference between her work and that of a black director. Undrlying this apparently self-effacing comment is cultural arrogance, for she implies not only that she has cornered the market on the subject matter but that being able to make films is a question of personal choice, like she just “discovered” the “raw material” before a black director did. Her comments are disturbing because thay reveal so little awareness of the politics that undergird any commodification of “blackness” in this society.

Had Livingston approached her subject with greater awareness of the way white supremacy shapes cultural production -determining not only what representations of blackness are deemed acceptable, marketable, as well worthy of seeing- perhaps the film would not so easily have turned the black drag ball into a spectacle for the entertainment of those presumed to be on the outside of this experience looking in. So much of what is expressed in the film has to do with questions of power and privilege and the way racism impedes black progresss (and certainly the class aspirations of the black gay subculture depicted do not differ from those of other poor and underclass black communities). Here, the supposedly “outsider” position is primarily located in the experience of whiteness. Livingston appears unwilling to interrogate the way assuming the position of outsider looking in, as well as interpreter, can, and often does, pervert and distort one’s pespective. Her ability to assume such a position without rigorous interrogation of intent is rooted in the politics of race and racism. Patricia Williams critiques the white assumption of a”neutral” gaze in her essay “Teleology on the Rocks” included in her new book The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Describing taking a walking tour of Harlem with a group of white folks, she recalls the guide telling them they might “get to see some services” since “Easter Sunday in Harlem is quite a show”. William’s critical observations are relevant to any discussion of Paris is Burning:

What astonished me was that no one had asked the churches if they wanted to be sared at like living museums. I wondered what would happen if a group of blue-jeaned blacks were to walk uninvited into a synagogue on Passover or St. Anthony’s of Padua during high mass -just to peer, not pray. My feeling is that such activity would be seen as disresectful, at the very least. Yet the aspect of disrespect, intrusion, seemed irrelevant to this well-educated, affable group of people. They deflected my observation with comments like “We just want to look”, “No one will mind”, and “There’s no harm intended”. As well-intentioned as they were, I was left with the impression that no one existed for them who could not be governed by their intentions. While acknowledging the lack of apparent malice in this behavior, I can’t help thinking that it is a liability as much as a luxury to live without interaction. To live so completely impervious to one’s own impact on others is a fragile privilege, which over time relies not simply on the willingness but on the inability of others -in this case blacks- to make their displeasure heard.

This insightful critique came to mind as I reflected on why whites could so outspokenly make their pleasure in this film heard and the many black viewers express discontent, raising critical questions about how the film was made, is seen, and is talked about, who have not named their displearure publicly. Too many reviewers and interviewers assume not only that there is no need to raise pressing critical questions about Livingston’s film, but act as though she somehow did this marginalized black gay subculture a favor by bringing their experience to a wider public. Such a stance obscures the substantial rewards she has received for this work. Since so many of the black gay men in the film express the desire to be big stars, it is easy to place Livingston in the role of benefactor, offering these “poor black souls! a way to realize their dreams. But it is this current trend in producing colorful ethnicity for the white consumer appetite that makes it possible for blackness to be commodified in unprecedented ways, and for whites to appropriate black culture without interrogating whiteness or showing concern for the displeasure of blacks. Just as white cultural imperialism informed and affirmed the adventurous journeys of colonizing whites into the countries and cultures of “dark others”, it allows white audiences to applaud representations of black culture, if they are satisfied with the images and habits of being represented.

Watching the film with a black woman friend, we were disturbed by the extent to which white folks around us were “entertained” and “pleasured” by scenes we viewed as sad and at times tragic. Often individuals laughed at personal testimony about hardship, pain, loneliness. Several times I yelled out in the dark: “What is so funny about this scene? Why are you laughing?” The laughter was never innocent. Instead it undermined the seriousness of the film, keeping it always on the level of spectacle. And much of the film helped make this possible. Moments of pain and sadness were quickly covered up by dramatic scenes from drag balls, as though there were two competing cinematic narratives, one displaying the pageantry of the drag ball and the other reflecting on the lives of participants and value of the fantasy. This second narrative was literally hard to hear because the laughter often drowned it out, just as the sustained focus on elaborate displays at balls diffused the power of the more serious narrative. Any audience hoping to be entertained would not be as interested in the true life stories and testimonies narrated. Much of that individual testimony makes it appear that the characters are estranged from any community beyond themselves. Families, friends, etc. are not shown, which adds to the representation of these black gay men as cut off, living on the edge.

It is useful to compare the portraits of their lives in Paris is Burning with those depicted in Marlon Riggs’ compelling film Tongues Untied. At no point in Livingston’s film are the men asked to speak about their connections to a world of family and community beyond the drag ball. The cinematic narrative makes the ball center of their lives. And yet who determines this? Is this the way the black men view their reality or is this the reality Livingston constructs? Certainly the degree to which black men in this gay subculture are portrayed as cut off from a “real” world heightens the emphasis on fantasy, and indeed gives Paris is burning its tragic edge. That tragedy is made explicit when we are told that the fair-skinned Venus has been murdered, and yet there is no mourning of him/her in the film, no intense focus on the sadness of this murder. Having served the purpose of “spectacle” the film abandons him/her. The audience does not see Venus after the murder. There are no scenes of grief. To put it crassly, her dying is upstaged by spectacle. Death is not entertaining.

For those of us who did not come to this film as voyeurs of black gay subculture, it is Dorian Carey’s moving testimony throughout the film that makes Paris is Burning a memorable experience. Cary is both historian and cultural critic in the film. He explains how the balls enabled marginalized black gay queens to empower both participants and audience. It is Carey who talks about the significance of the “star” in the life of gay black men who are queens. In a manner similar to critic Richar Dyer in his work Heavenly Bodies, Carey tells viewers that the desire for stardom is an expression of the longing to realize the dream of autonomous stellar individualism. Reminding readers that the idea of the individual continues to be a major image of what it means to live in a democratic world, Dyer writes:

Capitalism justifies itself on the basis of freedom (separateness) of anyone to make money, sell their labour how they will, to be able to express opinions and get them heard (regardless of wealth and social position). The openness of society is assumed by the way that we are addressed as individuals -as consumers (each freely choosing to buy, or watch, what we want), as legal subjects (equally responsible before the law), as political subjects (able to make up our minds who is to run society). Thus even while the notion of the individual is assailed on all sides, it is a necessary fiction for the reproduction of the kind of society we live in... Stars articulate these ideas of personhood.

This is precisely the notion of stardom Carey articulates. He emphasizes the way consumer capitalism undermines the subversive power of the drag balls, subordinating ritual to spectacle, removing the will to display unique imaginative costumes an the purchased image. Carey speaks profoundly about the redemptive power of the imagination in black life, that drag balls were traditionally a place wher the aesthetics of the image in relation to black gay life could be explored with complexity and grace.

Carey extols the significance of fantasy even as he critiques the use of fantasy to escape reality. Analyzing the place of fantasy in black gay subculture, he links that experience to the longing for stardom that is so pervasive in this society. Refusing to allow the “queen” to be Othered, he conveys the message that in all of us resides that longing to transcend the boundaries of self, to be glorified. Speaking about the importance of drag queens in a recent interview in Afterimage, Marlon Riggs suggests that the queen personifies the longing everyone has for love and recognition. Seeing in drag queens “a desire, a very visceral need to be loved, as well as a sense of the abject loneliness of life where nobody loves you”, Riggs contends “this image is real for anybody who has been in the bottom spot where they’ve been rejected by everybody and loved by nobody”. Echoing Carey, Riggs declares: “What’s real for them is the realization that you have to learn to love yourself”. Carey stresses that one can only learn to love the self when one breaks through illusion and faces reality, not by escaping into fantasy. Emphasizing that the point is not to give us fantasy but to recognize its limitations, he acknowledges that one must distinguish the place of fantasy in ritualized play from the use of fantasy as a means of escape. Unlike Pepper Labeija who constructs a mythic world to inhabit, making this his private reality, Carey encourages using the imagination creatively to enhance one’s capacity to live more fully in a world beyond fantasy.

Despite the profound impact he makes, what Riggs would call “a visual icon of the drag queen with a very dignified humanity”, Carey’s message, if often muted, is overshadowed by spectacle. It is hard for viewers to really hear this message. By critiquing absorption in fantasy and naming the myriad ways pain and suffering inform any process of self-actualization, Carey’s message mediates between the viewer who longs to voyeruristicly escape into the film, to vicariously inhabit that lived space on the edge, by exposing the sham, by challenging all of us to confront reality. James Baldwin makes the point in The Fire Next Time that “people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are”. Without being sentimental about suffering, Dorian Carey urges all of us to break through denial, through the longing for an illusory star identity, so that we can confront and accept ourselves as we really are -only then can fantasy, ritual, be a site of seduction, passion, and play where the self is truly recognized, loved, and never abandoned or betrayed.

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