#this is like. drop in the water.

[variousqueerthings]

Asking this genuinely in good faith but: im confused about what you mean when you say sex is a construct like gender? obviously like. The social and societal expectations around sex/gender are a construct. But I dont see how actual biology is? Obviously there needs to be greater understanding of the nuances of differences in sexes, and its not a binary like how a lot of people talk about it. But the difference in chromosomes, anatomy, hormones, etc. between different sexes is real, and it’s scientifically relevant to distinguish between them when performing clinical studies etc. so i guess i just wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean exactly when you say that? Thanks!

hiya, hope all is well in wherever you are anon. EDIT: well this got long

I assume you mean the post I reblogged about acknowledging that sex is also a construct that shifts depending on the agenda of the person speaking about it

first things first, gonna acknowledge, this is not my expert topic. a big reason why I reblogged this post (and a few other similarly ones over the years, reminding me that my tagging is a mess and I need to clean that up) is my allyship for intersex people - I want to listen to what they're saying, so my first big shout-out is to read up on what intersex people are saying about their lived realities and politics

also as a recommendation I've been enjoying a lot of what @genderqueerdykes have been writing (I believe I rb'd that post from there), which is a general widespread queer intersex-gender-and-aromantic-fuckery-based positivity, that is good for my all over the place soul (also I am currently unemployed, but if someone has a bit of cash to spare there's a continuous fund to help support through homelessness at the top of that blog)

secondly to second, I agree with you --it is important to be able to distinguish various characteristics in human bodies (for example, say, the ability to give birth, let's go with a big one there, not everyone can do that one) so that we can effectively support people medically, do important clinical studies, and also, for sure, speak about elements of bodies that are gatekept, monitored, denied agency, and otherwise become elements of a society that is white supremacist, colonialist, patriarchal, ableist, queerphobic, transphobic and -- returning to aforementioned under-discussed elephant in the room -- intersexist

so to clarify on the idea of the post you're referring to, whilst also going into why I've just listed out some of the violating institutions of our society, the way we decide what defines sex, is changeable, and comes from our cultural norms, it's 100% what you said "The social and societal expectations around sex/gender are a construct" <- you're very much understanding the post with this sentence

take sports. sports is currently one of the biggest spaces we're seeing this out in the open. the notion of what defines a Woman (sex-and/or-gender-malleable-depending-on-the-speakers-agenda) is changeable depending on skin colour, country of origin, "masculine" features (also white supremacist in function, who can forget that tweet where three cis non-white women were "called out" for being trans women -- I've seen similar many times), being intersex (whether or not the person knew about it beforehand, and in Caster Semenya's case, she was tricked into giving up that information, so that's a big non-consensual medical violation amongst all the others), and of course, the patriarchal idea that women just must be weaker all the time, and if they won't be it on their own dime, then we'll change the rules and force/coerce them to do things to their bodies that they did not consent to. gender roles enforcing sex as social construct

I note that since the 20s and all through today, women have had to undergo various humiliating checks to "prove" that they were real enough women to play sports. which coincidentally is what people have been saying girls are risking having to do now in America if things continue the way they have been

as a sidenote, I was watching a neat little documentary interviewing various trans people in sports called "Game On, Queer Disruptions in Sport," which included a story by a Bulgarian ex-rower who back in the day was ousted from professional rowing for being tested positive as intersex. in their story they talked about how actually over half the team were, but it was only because they told their coach and it became public that it was a problem. where does sex end and gender begin in all of this? whose agenda does it prop up when not talking about something "allows" some people to be women and others not to be (to be clear, they no longer ID as a woman, but if memory serves as intersex as their gender so that adds a whole nother dimension, but boy oh boy this is getting long)

sex -- in the sense that people are born with different chromosomes, levels of hormones, developmental Stuff that hijinks how those hormones interact with the body, and a million other facets that affect what we call sexual characteristics -- is real, in the same way that height differences are real (here's a video by philosophytube, which from memory is very trans-skewed, which, understandable, she was going head-on with the terfs and transphobes at the time, but I do think less overall on intersex people -- but yeah, she did the height example there, I'm borrowing it)

how we decide to enforce gender through sex, what sex counts as Enough to be allowed access to [insert gender], what sexual characteristics are allowed without censure and/or other forms of violation of body and (you guessed it) how that overlaps with ideas about gendered characteristics, how we create the gender roles based on our assumptions about sex, and then how we enforce those gender roles onto sexual characteristics like a depressing game of ping-pong, in which each reinforces the rights of the other part of the "argument" to say "well, we need to constantly remain vigilant in order for the world to be neatly divided into two, easily distinguishable categories, otherwise Chaos will ensue! how can we know what a Man and a Woman is if it's not clear cut somehow!" (deep breath)

we're.... sort of on the path of going "well alright non-binary is a thing, as long as we assert that this is purely Gender, the Thing Going On In Your Head Ya Weirdos, perhaps we can just about allow something that's a catch-all third gender type thing in a few countries (although, notably to meeeee, not in the UK)," but we haven't yet truly begun to deal with the fact that whatever is going on with the human body is so much more complicated than that and people are absolutely suffering because of this

and the more one thinks about the sheer rabbit hole of this reality, the more one realises just how damaging we're being, first and foremost to intersex people, and then spiralling, hitting every bigoted institution branch in the book on the way down, because well, okay, gender we'll juuust about accept can be fluid and changeable, but we'll not actually... interact with how bodies are fluid and changeable, because of genes, geography, medical intervention, illness, or idk, a hundred things I havent thought about

so in conclusion: how do we decide to define sex-and-gender? what is our agenda with discussing sex/when we bring it up in our politics (and I mean this not just as a hypothetical for frothing at the mouth rightwing bastards, us, who I believe to be well-meaning, too)? is it to end surgery on intersex babies, is it to make sure transmasc people can access pregnancy support, is it to allow girls and women (any and all girls and women) access to healthy outlets in sports, etcetcetc? is it to be able to more effectively discuss the ways bigoted institutions interact with one another to enforce their ideas onto bodies? or is it to rigidly enforce the divide and insist that while we'll allow the gender thing (again, just about, with caveats, heavy disclaimers, etc) there are two sexes, and never shall the twain intersect, interact, overlap, or indeed have anything to do with gender, for they are immutable objective realities that are not at all affected by our politics and ideals...

it's a sad, unsexy state of affairs

I hope this gave a little introductionary Thing and curiosity to poke at it further. potentially somewhere where someone has much more detail on the actual Philosophy of all of this, because I'd think that's cool, and also for this is like. pokes here pokes there, and also can you tell I'm actually jock from the focus I decided to take there? no? whew still in the closet on that one

[anoant-haikyuu-dump]

I'm all for people hitting yams with the "long hair and a cool fashion sense" beam but my favorite timeskip flavor is lame office worker

[bluebird-ascended]

listen it was an bonus icebreaker question in the world economy news ok

[pa-pa-plasma]

love fics where Danny ends up in the DC universe & every alarm goes off at once & the magic users are like "yeah that's the most powerful being in the universe & also possibly super evil we are FUCKED fucked" & the Justice League is freaking tf out trying to find this thing that casually tore a hole in reality & it just cuts to Danny (Fenton) standing in the background blissfully unaware & like "man my life sucks but at least i have this candy bar—" *drops it in a puddle*

[unhonestlymirror]

If you are a doctor, you will always have a piece of bread on your table. (c)

[guardian-angle22]

TK/Carlos + Touch

↳ 5.01 Both Sides, Now

[boydykedevo]

Yknow?

[shirecorn]

Tumblr keeps popping up to sell me ad free dashboard. But what it doesn't understand is that me and the ads have a sort of symbiosis at this point.

The guys from the fake gameplay trailers for a predatory mobile app are my blorbos

[queenlucythevaliant]

have you ever heard it? can you remember?

i. The gulls were crying. The gulls were always crying, in her memory. Whatever far off places Susan travelled after her family was gone, she always came back to the sea.

ii. The beach at Cair Paravel was the first place in Narnia where she really felt at home. She'd wade into the water with her eyes shut and feel she could be in England, on holiday with her mother and father. She'd open her eyes, and there would be waves cascading endlessly towards her.

iii. Before long, she knew every tidepool, every shoal.

iv. There weren't any bathing suits in Narnia, but no one seemed the least scandalized when Susan took to swimming in her underthings. There wasn't anything else for it, and she had to swim. She just had to.

v. She wasn't the only one of her siblings to love the sea, of course. Edmund loved sand and sailing and reading on the beach, and Peter liked to gaze out at the ocean and think. Lucy spent even more time at the beach than Susan did; she would rise before dawn and sit on the rocks as the sun rose over the waves. Susan was never sure whether her little sister was there to greet the sunrise, or to wait for Aslan.

vi. But for Susan, it was sense-memory. Water was water, wherever she was, and it always reminded her of home. She'd go out past the breakers, pull her limbs into a familiar breast stroke, and she'd feel like she was everywhere she loved all at once.

vii. Aslan came, and she was soaking wet to greet him. He laughed, in his lion-ish way, and didn't mind at all when Susan embraced him.

viii. Somehow, Aslan never got drenched from his journeys across the sea, but he was damp as though with mist. The scent of salt and brine clung to him, an overtone to that fierce, wild smell that was his own. Susan breathed in deep, those two scents she loved most in the world.

ix. In England, back at school, she'd go to the swimming pool and imagine she was in Narnia.

x. It wasn't the same, of course. The swimming pool at her school had no crying gulls, no smell of salt, no cascading waves. There was no Aslan coming towards her from the T-line at the other end of the pool. But if she submerged herself completely, Susan could imagine.

xi. She swam with her eyes shut too often, and her coach was growing irritated. It was affecting her times in practice, which would bleed over into competition if she wasn't careful. Somehow, Susan couldn't be bothered to care.

xii. One weekend, she and Lucy snuck away to visit the boys, and they all went down to the lake to reminisce about Narnia. When Lucy and Edmund spoke of their summer sailing the eastern sea, Susan was positively stiff with jealousy. Yet when they all dove into the water in the end, her heart pounded out a rhythm of home, home.

xiii. Six years after her last trip to Narnia, Susan hadn't touched a bow in four years. She still went swimming every week.

xiv. After the railway accident, she went to live by the sea. She missed her family, and she couldn't stand to live in the places they had lived. She wanted to forget.

xv. Susan had missed the salt air. She had missed the waves. There was a feeling of home by the sea that she couldn't quite place; a soothing echo of long ago dreams and fairytales.

xvi. But there were the gulls crying, "Can you remember?" and it broke her heart all over again.

[sysig]

Strictly professional showering (Patreon)

[starry-bi-sky]

how do you clone a fey? that's trick question; and fey love those!

@the-navistar-carol (<333) brought up a good point while I was talking about my changeling danny au with her -- Dani! How would she exist in this au? Danny's a changeling - a fae. How would Dani, a clone of him, be created? How do you make a fey? Not through any means that Vlad is doing; you can't make a fey through unnatural means, considering the Fair Folk are nature. And Vlad's not a fey himself -- he's a halfa, even if he could make a fey, it's not in his best interest too. He's a powerful ghost, but even the weakest fae can overpower the strongest ghost. He won't want a clone of Daniel to be more powerful than him.

(In a three tier hierarchy it goes Ancients -> Fae/Mythos -> Ghosts. They all live in the Infinite Realms, but on different Planes. The fae live above the Ghost Zone in the Fey Wild, while the Mythos live beside the Wilds or down in the ghost zone depending on where they are. Places like the Frozone, the Athens Acropolis, and other such large islands climb throughout all three Planes.)

(While Ghosts can travel into the Fey Wild, its generally advised against as the ectoplasm tends to manifest differently there due to close contact magic. It can make it rather disorientating for a ghost, and as human spirits, the Fae living there would jump them faster than they could blink. So unless you're willing to play mind games with 'steal thy name eat thy face' fae, most ghosts keep out of the way of the Wilds. Fey can travel down into the Ghost Zone, they just don't bother.)

That's of course, not taking into account if Vlad even knows Danny's a fae himself. Vlad doesn't ring me as someone who really cares much about ghost culture or the going ons of the GZ. He might be aware that fae exist, but the moment he realizes he can't use them for personal gain he just doesn't bother with them. The risk is greater than the reward, and he'd rather not get eaten. But lets assume he's aware by now that Danny is fey, and has to take that into account while cloning him.

So, how does Dani exist? Good question! Honestly; i'm not sure. She might not exist at all, or if she does, she's more halfa than fey. Vlad would need a lot of human dna and ectoplasm to balance out all that fae magic. He manages to steal DNA from Jack and Maddie to do it, and since Jack's fey ancestry is very dormant its much easier to use alongside Danny's DNA.

In turn, it results in a little girl whose more human-ghost hybrid than clone. With that little extra boost in fey magic making her not a fey, but still relatively powerful. Dani is less of a clone and more of a lab-grown little sister. It's a rather tedious, complex process that has Vlad tearing his hair out trying to figure out. But he does eventually figure it out.

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance Commands - Cure ~ Cura ~ Curaga

[hyunpic]

[snezus-christ-risen]

Those colds that put someone in a state of constant sneeziness, but make them work for every sneeze.

[actressposts]

Ludivine Sagnier

[vanmarkus]

most fanfic writers can only dream of coming up with something as casually devastating as 'I love you to the core'