#this is a genuine question btw lol

[communistkenobi]

i know next to nothing about queer theory, but i did exist online during (what felt like) huge exclusionary periods (ace discourse, bi/pan discourse, and transmedicalism were the big ones i remember)

i wonder if the first drive for sexuality being something unchangeable and intrinsic to you had something to do with those things, that queerness was fixed and definable, which meant that there were strict lines to be drawn about who was and wasn't gay/lesbian/bi which was only made worse by trans and nonbinary people who didn't exactly fit the previous molds

ill be doubly honest and say i only interacted w/ the community online at the time bc living in a homophobic country doesnt give you a lot of opportunities to meet up in person which means my view of the whole thing is skewed. im not sure if this makes any sense

What I’m about to say isn’t a diagnosis of the causes behind those discourses (partly because i don’t think there is a single reason animating those arguments), but like I guess in general a very baseline authority people fall back on is biology. Dominant reactionary discourses describe being gay trans etc as a lifestyle choice, as an active decision to participate in sexual and gendered degeneracy, and so a very appealing counter-claim to make is to point to biology - we are born this way, we can’t help who we are just as cishet people cannot help who they are, so you should accept us because we can’t change our identity. That rhetorical strategy requires/assumes a stable sexual and gendered ontology, a primary authority of the body that can’t be altered. While I believe this argument is fundamentally flawed, I think this is a straightforwardly easy argument to make re: sexual orientation. With trans and non-binary people this is more difficult because the foundational claim to our existence is that gender is mutable, is alterable, is subject to change (and also “I’ve felt this way since I was a child” is a pathological model of gender dysphoria that is enforced through medical and psychiatric institutions, not a reflection of lived reality for many, many trans and non-binary people). That doesn’t necessarily mean being transgender is a “choice” (although if someone said they woke up one day and chose to be transgender then that is a perfectly authentic justification), especially because “choice” in these discussions is often framed as individualised, private, detached from the social world - we are all just free agents making rational autonomous decisions in a field of equally rational choices, etc. which I think is a very impoverished way to understand choice and agency. Gender is an institution, it is a set of behaviours and performances that we choose to engage in in many different ways, and my use of the word ‘choice’ there does not imply these choices are free from coercion, violence, or harm. I chose to transition, I chose to engage in performances and behaviours that signal to the social world that I am a man - where that desire to make those choices arises from is another matter, and honestly not one I’m super interested in figuring out. Like if I discovered the ‘origin’ of my transness it wouldn’t make any difference to me. Similarly, how I choose to signal masculinity is very obviously bound up in dominant gendered assumptions. Trans people get accused of upholding gendered norms a lot, but that’s only because we aren’t taken seriously unless we do so! It is a survival mechanism that allows us to better navigate incredible amounts of violence and social exclusion, and arguing that our desire to do gender with our bodies comes from some grade-school assumption that dress = woman and pants = man or whatever is pure projection on the part of cis people. cis men think if they drink pink wine they’ll become gay - trans people are not the ones enforcing these norms here.

Getting a bit far afield here, so to loop back around - I think a stable state of sexual and gendered subjectivity or “being” is very appealing to a lot of people because it’s a way to dismiss reactionary fears and to justify to yourself that your oppression is entirely out of your control (which is true obviously!). Again I think these arguments are flawed because they buy into cisgendered and heteronormative ideas about gender and sexuality, that it is a biological burden imposed on us, that deviance is not a choice, that gender is done to us as opposed to being gendered agents, that we are similarly trapped in a sexual prison and should be accepted on those grounds, etc, but they have massive rhetorical power.  

As I’ve said before I’m a pretty staunch believer in Butler’s assertion that it is social all the way down, that gender is not discoverable in the body but rather the body is the medium through which gender is done in the world. Cis people choose to do gender just as much as trans people do! The only difference is that institutional architecture is set up to facilitate and make invisible (in very misogynistic and racist ways) those gendered practices. I think the stronger counter argument to make is that cis- and het-normativities are deeply violent and miserable status quos that need to be dismantled and discarded, that true choice can only emerge vis a vis gender and sexuality once those institutions are abolished, and that choice is actually a desirable end-goal - I want people to be able to participate in gender and sexuality as free agents, as non-coercive practices that are sites of great joy and wonder and pleasure. And this world is only possible if we accept that there is no gendered or sexual ontology, that it is all smoke and mirrors, that this current system’s primary function is to reproduce the nuclear family, to maintain the hereditary nature of class and wealth and race, to provide a standardised system of labour division, to maintain a distinction between the public and private labour realms, and so on.

So again like, is this what animates discourses about who gets to be counted as lgbtq/queer/whichever label you want to use? I don’t know. Probably some of it has to do with that. Queerness is in party a pathological category that is used to describe a failure to meaningfully reproduce cishet norms and practices, it is a set of relationships you have to legal and political and medical and administrative institutions (which is especially true for trans/non binary people). I like this definition because built into it is the possibility of change - I do not want trans people to be assimilated into cishet society, I want society to become transgender, thereby making transgender an irrelevant medical and legal category of person. Much like communism aims to abolish class by universalising the proletariat, I want to abolish gender by universalising the legal and political and medical mechanisms of transition. Only then will cisgenderism be abolished.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about is something a friend said to me, which is that human rights to do not begin with a definition of human - in the same way, I think trans rights do not require a definition of transgenderism. Just universalise and de-pathologise the mechanisms through which transition is expressed. Make it easy to change your name, remove all barriers to hormones and surgery, make everyone economically secure enough that they can change their wardrobe however they please,  desegregate all gendered spaces, de-gender clothing, remove gender markers from all documents, and so on and so on. Doing so would make both cisgender and transgender an irrelevant legal and political category and, again, allow choice to emerge as a meaningful mechanism of gender expression. 

This isn’t a comprehensive policy platform, there are many things I’m sure I haven’t thought through and a large portion of this discussion has to contend with the colonial and white supremacist nature of the western binary gender (bringing us into discussions of decolonial efforts, socialist efforts, and so on), but this is already getting long and I feel like I’m rambling. But like fundamentally I believe in a radical political imaginary that argues that all of this is subject to change and therefore any arguments about an essential gendered or sexual being is, at the end of the day, a reactionary description of gender and sexuality 

[spikes-got-anger-issues]

This is how that episode went, right?

[blood-mocha-latte]

looking at starting a luztoye spooky fic for halloween.. is this anything

[redstoneheartss]

has there been a surge of popularity of mcsm here or has it always been this active and i just dont remember. checking the tag for the first time in months and seeing that there are actually multiple posts every single day is wild

[plusultraetc]

Do you know what I think about literally all of the time. How do Hawks’ wings work?? Where are his bones????

[ansleof]

Does your 4 have any after effects like scars or just trauma from being greyscaled and forced to fight 8?

Oh wow almost forgot I used to be a splatoon blog...

Anyways. In my lore Nettie didn't actually get greyscaled! I have some old doodles I never colored that get into this, hold on.

Yeah these don't explain it very well but basically, Harbor was fully convinced that Nettie had been greyscaled and decided that the mask must be somehow controlling her (based on what happened w Callie)

But when she got the mask, she realized this was not Nettie. This was just a mindless copy of Nettie created by Order.

Nettie finds out about this later and is mildly weirded out but otherwise fine. Tbh I think Nettie has the least angsty lore out of my guys, which I would change, but I've sorta moved to a new fandom for the time being. Maybe someday!

[humming-pokemon-helpers]

Livestream: Active

“I’m not being stupid. This isn’t stupid. Everything is fine.”

“…Is this thing working?”

“pzzt… i’m connected to the internet and streaming! even though your camera’s still turned off, pzzt…”

“Perfect, great, just how I want it.”

“Hello everyone—I’m Vanilla Cress, a licensed therapist. I don’t usually, or uh… ever, do live streams, but today I wanted to talk about a topic… close to me. A topic I’ve been avoiding for a really long time.”

“Cross, camera?”

“sure thing, boss!”

[The camera turns on. The lens flares adjusting to the light, before a video feed appears.]

“Some of you might’ve known this and stayed quiet to protect me, or to be polite, or whatever. I mean, I’m not a master of disguise or anything… But I’m not quite… normal. I’m… half a normal human? And half Zorua.

Or in other words, I’m a cross-species hybrid. Some people prefer “whisperer” but I don’t care. My mother was… as normal as a human who deluded herself into joining a Zoroark pack could be. And that makes my father… a Zoroark. Yeah.”

[Vanilla pauses to take a breath, eyes closed.]

“You can call me a liar, or a faker, or whatever else. Truth and ideals, wish I was. It’d make things a lot easier to have a birth mother who isn’t a disgrace and a body that isn’t… this.

At the least, I can think and speak like a person. …Maybe that’s obvious. But I’m also able to understand Pokémon. And I can use illusions. Which is why I’ve been able to look… well, mostly normal. Though I still prefer to stick pretty close to how I actually look, as you can see.”

“Anyways, that’s… pretty much it, for the basics. Any questions? I have a stubborn Zoroark to find.”

[coockie8]

Why can Roy not transmute the water that gets onto his gloves into Oxygen and Hydrogen gas? Two substances that are highly flammable? Does his Alchemy just not work like that, because it sure sounds like that's how it's supposed to work; like his flame alchemy literally works by him sky rocketing the oxygen in the air, so why can he not transmute water into Hydrogen and Oxygen? :/

I am aware that the reason the water is his "weakness" is because it gets his gloves wet, and you can't make a spark with wet gloves, but Ed is literally shown evaporating water off his clothes using Alchemy at one point, so it makes no sense that Roy wouldn't be able to do the exact same thing and just turn the water on his gloves into Hydrogen and Oxygen, which he could then ignite, since he gloves would then be dry.

::edit::

reblog privileges have be removed because this discussion has been resolved

[yanderespamton78]

okay guys should i make a side blog thats just random out of context clips of danny gonzalez because danny gonzalez is very funny and i like advertising my obsessions to people and i already have a folder of danny gonzalez clips out of context

id give credit ofc and id add links to the videos that i got the clips from im just worried that id be stealing content like does it count as stealing if im more or less advertising it?? and linking back to the source??

[acerikus]

Sometimes I just sit here like. Wow the k///h fandom really fucked me up lol

[khattikeri]

what on earth do i gotta do to make these Not be my default suggested tags any time i make a new post or reblog a post that prev left untagged

[wathanism]

i always found it funny that there's this weird idea that the theory of evolution is something that counters religion and is usually positioned in opposition to religious thought, bc i learned about evolution and it was the first time in my life i'd genuinely felt a deep sense of spirituality. i don't understand how you can learn that "all life on earth is connected at the root" is a literal, scientific, observable statement and not be fundamentally changed by that. it's the root of all my animist beliefs and all my ancestor worship. not that i'm saying you have to believe what i do, but doesn't it touch your soul?

obvs i myself am not really theistic, but i always thought it could make perfect sense from the perspective of a monotheist. like, you could so easily see it as, "evolution is the method by which god created us." that each mutation and each subtle shift in the environment were an intentional move by an artist with a vision of us as his grand creation. would it not be accurate to say that, when you're studying evolution, you're actively watching the hand of god lovingly shape the world?

[labyrinthofcrystals]

fellas is it a fic if it's through journal entries and only your OC's POV

[hum--hallelujah]

who wants to buy me the riot fest deer shirt

[heroicleader2763]

Good news! I think I figured out how to get Leafy's memories into this body! Let's try this!( with a nice comfy bonus present)

*Pin feels something hit her rim. A small piece of machinery with a speaker nestled itself on the ground about a foot from her. When he holds his hands out to grab it a severed fingernail falls into his hand. After bringing the item close enough to inspect the sound of something just barely missing her arm startles her. A seam ripper embeds itself into the dirt with force enough to twang. A spool of green thread falls softly near it, rolling to a stop near her foot.*

-🌿(dunno if Pin has it in them, honestly)

wait, What are you.. What Am i Supposed to do, Exactly?