#trans men are allowed to have a word to describe their discrimination

[drop-dead-dropout]

op of this post dmed me and condescended to me about how I "didn't understand" what she meant. proceeded to tell me transandrophobia is made up. i'm just not interacting idc anymore rant in the tags if anyone wants to hear it

haha yeah girldick! awesome! hey quick question how do you feel about trans women and transfems when you're not talking about fucking them or them fucking you or just using them as the buttend of your sex jokes. no don't run away internet transmasc speak into the mic boy. 🎤

[talisidekick]

@curiositycryptid

Two Spirit is an identity in some indigenous cultures in North America that describes a person who has both feminine and masculine spirits living in the same body. It's a non-binary gender identity that exists in First Nations cultures. In Canada, my country, a good example of this is Blake Desjarlais, a New Democrat Party Member who in 2021 became the first openly Two-Spirit member of Parliament.

For a long time the gender identity of Two Spirit individuals was largely unrecognized by Canada's Federal and Provincial Governments, and in many cases remains unrecognized today, but Canada is making strides to recognize the diverse gender identities it's citizens possess. In an ongoing battle to give recognition and make reparations to the First Nations communities past instances of our government have willfully attempted to harm and destroy, the recognition of Two Spirit identities in Canada has been a good step (note, a step) in the right direction after years of negligence and harm our government has both participated in, and allowed to happen under it's governance. They're a minority identity group that has faced, and does face, very real discrimination from Canada's government and Canadian Citizens.

For me personally, I've been writing the acronym 2SLGBTQIA+ deliberately for a few years now to highlight the systemic racism and casual abuse those who are Two Spirit face, and honour their struggle and commitment to the wider 2SLGBTQIA+ community that has largely gone underappreciated, much how the 'L' in LGBT was moved to the front from the original GLBT acronym, to highlight and honour the Lesbians who donated blood during the AIDs crisis to try and save the lives of suffering Gay and Bisexual men. Canada has begun doing the same but I'm unsure of the reasoning, though I hope it's the same as mine.

You can look up more, but please be aware that any news or journalistic coverage regarding anything that has to do with First Nations peoples and their culture is always compressed down to an easy to read article, which in effect, can and does white-wash and erase context. Additionally, no two First Nations communities are the same so what might be true for one, very well might not be the same for another. The First Nations and Indigenous peoples of Canada and North America are not a monolith, so if you're honestly looking to learn more, don't take the words of a white trans girl like me on this, reach out and let someone from the culture educate you on it if they're willing.

[b-lysia]

If a lesbian* is a Woman who likes Women

Then a lesbian does not exist. It is a nonsense word, and patriarchy treats it as such.

The gender "Woman"- the social role "Woman" of Patriarchy, necessitates an attraction to or at least a subservience to the sexual attraction of Men. That is the standard that anyone deemed sexually desirable to Men, under Patriarchy, is expected to adhere to under such a system. A Woman cannot be attracted to another Woman under Patriarchy in the same way flower cannot bloom and wilt at the same time, in the same way a boolean cannot be both true and false at once. A lesbian is a nonsense concept.

So of course when "the lesbian" persists anyway, Patriarchy must shift its language to accommodate the human behavior it cannot seem to stamp out.

A lesbian must be like a man. Or at least one of the two lesbians must be "the Man" of the relationship. But that means that a Woman is a Man. For a while, this is almost fine. The butch is not yet named, the word dyke does not yet bite, the trans sexual is allowed to exist as ftm or mtf under patriarchy for a time, and then patriarchy recognizes the existential threat such beings pose to its existence. So it doubles back.

But today we know a little better, and trans people are still discriminated against, but at least we collectively know that's a shit thing to do on a personal level. There's some shame in being a transphobe, even if many people are. It's at least something worth either hiding, or making into your personality's cornerstone, so you can adamantly refuse ridicule.

But the question remains, "what is a lesbian?"

Patriarchy required a lesbian to be; a person who fits all the criteria of Woman, but exclusively lusts for other Women; because Patriarchy demands that the definition, "Woman," describe people who can give birth as most desirable, and then sexually arousing after. The utility of "Woman: Madonna" is just as relevant to Patriarchy as the utility of "Woman: Whore" after all. Patriarchy requires the flattening of gender and sexuality into one another.

The word, "lesbian" I think, is something of a vestigial consequence of that. Because; what is "the lesbian" today?

We are dismantling Patriarchy brick by brick. We are destroying the "Woman," and rightfully so. It is a cruel and evil expectation to place upon a child, and expect they never deviate from, under penalty of suffering and death. We understand today, that a human is not defined by the assumptions we place upon the expression of their genes and sexual organs. These have nothing to do with desires and needs, with interests, and sexualities, or the value of one's personhood. We know better. But "Lesbian," is a word borne from the flattened understanding of gender and sexuality, a oppressive melding of physical utility to the machine with personhood, is... Useless.

Lesbian/Gay, is a nonsense word again. Two, almost three definitions, fighting for dominance.

What does the word woman mean, in the definition "lesbian?"

Is it the physical body? Do barren people not count? Which physical traits contribute to being a woman? Does a butch or femme even count?

Is it the social role? Does that transphobe RuPaul count, as long as they're on stage? Which clothes, voices, aesthetics count as womanly?

Neither of these questions can be adequately answered without either reinforcing the gendered oppression Patriarchy/gender places upon humanity in some fashion. Each answer one could give both invalidates a slew of candidates most would find ridiculous to exclude, and belies a dehumanizing strain of abuse.

What then do we do with these words; Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Pan/etc?

They are borne out of a fumbled response to existences that Patriarchy/Gender does not want to accommodate, just as much as trans/cis. And the confusion that these words carry is inherent to their core, they cannot be distilled to their essence, and made clear because Patriarchy allowed them to exist only as nonsense words. As a stopgap for further transgressions against its hegemony, the trans sexual and the trans gender.

We need better, new language.

Addendum: Don't be a fucking dumbass. Everything said here applies to the other descriptive label, "Gay" as well. We don't have a phrase for the dichotomies within the "Man" gender afaik, so let them be; "Soldier,*" "Slave,*" to "Woman's;" "Whore," "Madonna."

[bilesproblems]

The problem is that you're queerphobic asf and then call anyone who disagrees with you a TERF even if they are transfemme or just in general trans themselves.

You're queerphobic, actually.

A massive part of what queerphobia is, is not understanding someone's identity and choosing to be reactionary and fight someone over your assumptions on what that means rather than ask them why they feel that way. Which you are demonstrating right now by saying whatever word vomit this shit was rather than "can you please explain how being a bi lesbian works?" Queerphobia also heavily involves not being willing to understand someone and their identity. If you were willing to understand, you would, because there is no good reason to not support mspec lesbians that exists, and the only way a person could be unsupportive of bi lesbians is if they're ignorant and don't understand yet, or if they're going out of their way to be gold stars by excluding SAM-using lesbians. The lack of understanding you are demonstrating now simply by saying we're queerphobic for being queer in a way you do not yet understand.

You see the label of bi lesbian. You do not care to inquire. You do not seek to understand. You assume "mspec/bi always includes attraction to men" and forget your history that proves lesbian wasn't ever intended to be exclusive, and sappho of lesbos herself was fucking bi, and so you attack us and call us lesbophobic based on your assumptions when all we did was understand our history better than you and not misgender every nonbinary person who doesn't identify whatsoever as a woman.

Not to mention, you aren't allowed to call yourself queer if you think the rules of labels are strict. They're not. They're loose and they're meant to overlap. That's the point of being queer, to break the rules. You are queerphobic because you are going against the fundamental principles of queerness itself. You have no right to use th word of the weirdos if you shun us. You have no claim to the label for the rule breakers if you think lesbians can't be men or like men because that's "breaking the rules."

It is also horribly queerphobic to be bilesbophobic because bilesbophobia overlaps with many flavors of queerphobia; biphobia, transphobia and enbyphobia, specifically, as well as broader queerphobia (the hatred of and discrimination against identities that are queer. Even those who support SOME queer people can be queerphobic.)

The TERF/Transphobia claims come from several facts

1. The ONE and ONLY reason that the lesbian label currently tends to describe EXCLUSIVE attraction to women and elsegender people is because of TERFS. TERFS decided women who liked men couldn't be lesbians. TERFS decided men were evil. They also tried to get rid of you, dear transfem anon, and both nonbinary lesbians and butches, for being too close to manhood. They didn't succeed, but they did manage to push mspec lesbians and transmasc/trans man lesbians out, and make the label exclusive. These TERFS also tried to separate lesbians from the rest of the queer community. They failed, thankfully.

You are not being called a TERF, but you are being told you are using TERF rhetoric and falling for things TERFS say and TERFS created.

2. Being anti mspec lesbians is the same as hating non-binary people. Even if you are nonbinary yourself, you are hurting yourself and your community. I am a lesbian, exclusively. I have no attraction to men. I am attracted to women and I am attracted to elsegender people. My boyfriend is androgyne, in fact. That is lesbian, but it is bi. You must either say nonbinary people are not included in the lesbian label, making people like me just bi, or that all nonbinary people are women, making me just a lesbian, to not support mspec lesbians. There is no other way to go about it.

3. Multigender people fucking exist. An exclusive lesbian can be attracted to a man if that man is a woman. And if they date, the lesbian could call herself bi or even pan because she's capable of being attracted to all genders, but only if the gender of woman is present.

I am dead certain all your information on bi lesbians is not from bi lesbians. Perhaps you were told it's for lesbians who like trans women. It's not. Or maybe it's because you think we don't accept trans men as real men? We do, we just also accept that sometimes trans men can feel disconnected from cis men and still feel connected to the lesbian label because of their AGAB. It doesn't mean trans men can't be straight. It just means we won't decide for them what label they want to use, if they wanna say that they're straight because they're men who like women or lesbian because historically, transmascs and trans men were accepted in the lesbian community and people who's experiences keep them connected to their AGAB, even if they don't identify with it, will have a different relationship with their labels.

Pipe down. You don't know what you're talking about. I only dignified you with a response to show off my writing abilities to my followers. I don't think you will even read this. I do not care. If you've seen how foolish and queerphobic you were, I'll forgive you, but until then, stay quiet and don't try to tell people things about their identity when you don't understand it and we do. You're arguing with a strawman that you made up and won't listen.

There is nothing queerphobic about acknowledging that you historically belonged in a label. There is nothing queerphobic about using 2 labels because you feel you are in between the two. There is nothing queerphobic about using the split attraction model. There is nothing queerphobic about not misgendering nonbinary people while still not excluding them from the lesbian label. There is nothing queerphobic about breaking rules. There is, however something deeply and inherently queerphobic about not accepting someone's identity simply because it doesn't make sense to you right off the bat. It's not wrong to want to understand before you just accept it, because at least you are open to understanding it, but to call someone queerphobic because you don't understand is exactly what homophobes do, it's exactly what transphobes do, and it's exactly what all queerphobes do.

[panics-side-blog]

Yeah but being mistaken as a trans women isn't exactly the same thing as being a trans women, tma refers to the people who transmisogny is aimed at, which is trans fem people, it's a good frame work for trans fem people to discuss issues that are targeted specifically at them. For example the bathroom thing that transphobes are fixated on is targeted at trans women first with the rhetoric of "predatorary men entering women's spaces" with the existence of trans men forgotten

of course it's complicated when it comes to say intersex identity but i think most of "discourse" comes from people who think it's a way of just knowing what's in your pants, when in reality it's entirely about someone's relationship with being a direct target of transmisogny. i would say that tma/tme only really identifies trans women/trans fem people, as anyone else is labeled tme, including cis people

it's similar in a way to the concept of misogynoir, which is the intersection of misogyny and racism used to describe the unique experiences that black women face( and with how black trans women are very vulnerable to targeted transphobic harrasment and murder, the word transmisognoir is apt)

i hope my explanation clears things up!

It definitely does clear things up a bit, and I thank you for the explanation!

The only issue I have with it is that, while yes it isn't directly aimed at me I still faced this certain type of transphobia because they thought I was a trans woman.

They didn't care if I was or was not one, so I am affected by transmisogyny indirectly. My AGAB is completely unimportant in such situations to the people who have treated me like shit because they where transmisogynistic and believed I was MTF.

I am very much aware that I probably won't ever face transmisogyny in any way a trans woman does. I remember in the past i had read quite a few posts and positive discussion about how transmisogyny can affect other people even if they're not trans women/ the main target. And how not fighting for trans women and their liberation can affect others (since everything is more or less connected). But since I saw this acronym pop up it died down/ became very restrictive to talk about such nuance.

With that in mind my main, main issue with this is that I had seen people being extremely strict about this lable to the point that any sort of intersectionality is completely forgotten. That if you point the issue at hand how this sort of labeling can be very much faulty from the start(or better said how it is handled) makes other mad or they get shut down.

Which, with your very important example, intersex people could get issues with.

As you said yourself the main discourse comes from there, I believe TME/TMA in itself shouldn't be an indicator of your AGAB and I honestly have seen it used to this way more often if not always. It feels like others who are out of the binary get left out/silenced, which is really frustrating for a genderqueer person like me.

It should be an indicator how people treat you/what type of discrimination you go through because of your identity. To open up a bigger audience who can talk about their experiences with others (including others who aren't trans women/fem) while trans women are still the main focus since they're the main target.

I'm not sure if I word it right but I hope I do.

In itself I don't really hate the usage or label, but more so how people use it and become more close minded to intersectionality.(Or with what I have seen at least, other people very much could have a much more positive experience with it)

Either way I am affected by transmisogyny but that doesn't mean I'm the main focus of it. More so my experience is an extra by-product of it and such experiences should be allowed to be discussed.

The TME/TMA label by itself for me, doesn't work. Because saying I'm not affected by it is a lie as long as I look this way, how people think and how trans women/fem are oppressed, my experience with it will always exist.

(like how transphobia also affects cis people and in my opinion cis people very much so should be allowed to speak about the transphobia they faced. They should just be respectful and listen about the issue from the main source and not drown out trans people, just how others who are affected by transmisogyny but aren't trans women/fem should.)

(I think by this point I'm only talking in circles I'm sorry if I did and thank you again for your explanation.)

[manlarp]

I've stopped hating the term queer solely because it's a slur, and have now moved onto the fact that it's a catch-all term allowing completely heterosexual individuals who have never had a slur directed at them in their life into the community. But not just the community. Legislation, academia, and history, too.

The T was originally included in the LGBT acronym because there was intersection between homosexual people, and transvestites/transsexuals/GNC people. Many transsexuals were also homosexual, many transvestites were gay men, many GNC women were lesbian, etc. That's why the T was originally there. Nowadays, a lot of people argue that the painful mental illness of gender dysphoria doesn't tie in to harmless and healthy homosexuality. But that's another matter.

The word queer doesn't just include gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans people, or even heterosexual GNC people. Tongue in cheek, it appears to include:

'Aromantic asexuals', 'non binary' people, 'genderfluid/genderqueer' people, 'pansexuals', 'demisexuals', 'mlm', 'wlw', 'achillean' and 'sapphic' people, 'gay trans boys' (heterosexuals), 'transbians' (heterosexuals), drag queens, drag kings, girls with 'she/they' in their bio who are not GNC in any way, men wearing skirts, women with short hairstyles, 'non-binary lesbians', 'nb transmascs', people who use neopronouns, people who wear pronoun pins and rainbow flags, allies...

The problem with this is that it's actually impossible to gatekeep who is queer and who isn't. Now, "why is that a bad thing?" you ask. "Gatekeeping sucks!"

Consider this. When someone says, "I'm LGBT", that's a useful way of hinting that they're homosexual, bisexual, and/or transsexual, groups which have faced discrimination, oppression, violence, and ostracisation in every society for centuries. Identifying as "LGBT" means you don't have to disclose which specific part of the acronym you are, but you're pointing out that you know what it's like to face homophobia or transphobia (the latter, in my opinion, is usually borne of the former), and pressures both internal and external. This kind of discrimination can be deadly, and affect your human rights even to this day.

So if someone says they're LGBT, you can immediately identify their struggle. But if they say they're queer...

They could be a gay man who was hospitalised for injuries caused by homophobic violence. They could be a lesbian married to a woman whose entire family disowned her for liking women. They could be a homosexual transsexual who spent their entire childhood being bullied and mocked for not conforming to gender roles, to the point where transition felt like the only way to fit in.

Or... they could be a 13-year-old who hasn't had sex yet, and identifies as asexual. They could be a straight girl who uses they pronouns, but only on tumblr. They could be a 'trans lesbian' who has no barriers to marriage or having children, and never grew up experiencing internalised homophobia. They could be a 'genderqueer demiboy' whose identity consists of wearing a dress on Monday, and a pair of shorts on Tuesday.

This is why I abhor the word 'queer', because it's meaningless. Anyone can be 'queer', even people who hate being labelled as such. You don't need any kind of definable characteristic, such as same sex attraction, to be 'queer'.

That word doesn't indicate a shared struggle or history. It doesn't indicate a sense of belonging because there's so much discourse as to who belongs there, instead of a set definition as to what exactly makes you LGBT. And once again, it is a slur, with a terrible history, one steeped in violence and hatred. I don't like it, I don't use it, and I revile anyone who uses it to describe me.

[a-polite-melody]

Anyway.

Transandrophobia is a term that, among other things, is used to describe the intersection of misogyny and transandrophobia as it affects trans men and transmascs.

No it isn’t trying to play on there being true “androphobia” or “misandry” on a systemic level. It’s also a term meant to deal with, systemically, transphobia and misogyny.

Transmascs aren’t allowed to use the word transmisogyny to talk about the intersection of transphobia and misogyny as it applies to us. Trans women and transfems aren’t the only people who experience an intersection of those two structures of oppression, and so new word.

If I hear one more person being like “but there’s no structural androphobia” or “but words about discrimination need to reflect real systems” one more time I’m going even more feral than I already have about this issue. Because we know, and it does. Stop.

[uncloseted]

I'd like you to think about the deliberately othering words that you and your followers are using to describe me (the anon who is debating with you about transgender issues). TERF. Transphobe. I do not wish violence on trans people. I do not wish for them to be discriminated against. But I do not wish to engage in the delusion that a man can ever "become" a woman. I gave you a definition of woman: those who are born with the chromosomes, gametes and secondary sex characteristics of women.

Despite what you incorrectly stated, infertile women and women with PCOS do fit that definition; it does not need to be changed. It is intellectually dishonest to insist that you truly cannot tell the difference between a trans woman and a woman, or that trans women did not grow up with, and still to some extent retain, the same privileges that all men have across the world. There is simply a fundamental incapability with women’s rights and trans rights.

I'd like you to think about the deliberately othering words that you and your followers are using to describe me (the anon who is debating with you about transgender issues). TERF. Transphobe. I do not wish violence on trans people. I do not wish for them to be discriminated against. But I do not wish to engage in the delusion that a man can ever "become" a woman. I gave you a definition of woman: those who are born with the chromosomes, gametes and secondary sex characteristics of women.

Despite what you incorrectly stated, infertile women and women with PCOS do fit that definition; it does not need to be changed. It is intellectually dishonest to insist that you truly cannot tell the difference between a trans woman and a woman, or that trans women did not grow up with, and still to some extent retain, the same privileges that all men have across the world. There is simply a fundamental incapability with women’s rights and trans rights.

One of the first acts Biden did was to partially repeal Title IX, which protected biological sex characteristics – so yes, there is in fact a threat to the idea of sex as a protected characteristic. Here in the UK, where I work in schools, I see posters about protected characteristics replacing ‘sex’ with ‘gender identity’; so yes, that is a threat, and that is what people are calling for.

I am not a TERF; I am a feminist, the same as any feminist in past generations, who would see the obvious issues with allowing men into women’s spaces. Why do you think they were created in the first place? Trans women are not inherently different from men. That is where I stand, and if you do not stand in that same place, then that is a sticking point we can’t move past.

I am not ignorant. I used to be a trans rights activist, loud and proud. I am not anymore because I am a feminist, first and foremost. Women’s rights come first. That has never been the case in society, and trans activism is just the latest excuse as to why not.

Given the fact that this is the message you've chosen to send me, it seems like you're more interested in telling me that you think I'm wrong than actually considering any of the points I've made over the last few weeks. I don't think this conversation is particularly useful to either of us, because, as you say, there is a sticking point that we can't move past; I do think trans women are inherently different from men, and they should be treated as such. To believe otherwise is, frankly, ignorant, regardless of whether you believe yourself to be ignorant or not.

All that said, against my better judgement I'm going to give this one more go. Let's take a look at the points you brought up here.

"I'd like you to think about the deliberately othering words that you and your followers are using to describe me". We are. You are literally a TERF: a trans exclusionary radical feminist. You are... excluding trans people... from radical feminist spaces. You othered yourself by choosing to be a TERF.  It's not an insult or a slur. It's a fact. If you don't like being called a TERF, maybe take a step back and consider why. Like other people who are part of discriminatory groups, TERFs don't have to wish violence against trans people or wish for them to be intentionally discriminated against. By participating in TERF circles and perpetuating TERF ideas of what it means to be a trans person, you're contributing to the systemic oppression of and discrimination against trans people. You can't have it both ways here. Either you "do not wish for [trans people] to be discriminated against" or you "do not wish to engage in the delusion that a man can ever "become" a woman". It can't be both, because that belief is what causes discrimination against trans people.

"I gave you a definition of woman: those who are born with the chromosomes, gametes and secondary sex characteristics of women". Your definition is bad, babe. Infertile women and people with PCOS do not have a secondary sex characteristic of women (menstruation). But clearly you consider them women, as do I. Your definition needs to change or expand to be more inclusive of the people you think belong in your group. But obviously you're not interested in considering what being a "woman" actually means because it complicates your black and white view of gender and biological sex.

"It is intellectually dishonest to insist that you truly cannot tell the difference between a trans woman and a woman". I don't think this is the core of what anyone is saying. We're saying that trans women are part of the larger umbrella category "women", and that they have their own experiences, appearances, and histories that are "women's experiences". I do think some trans women look indistinguishable from cis women, but I also think it's intellectually dishonest to claim that trans women don't have a different experience than cis men or cis women. Many trans women did grow up with the privileges of being men, although many of them also face discrimination throughout their childhood for being feminine, girly, or "seeming gay". But whatever privilege they had is something they choose to sacrifice because living as a man feels so unbearably wrong for them. Trans women don't retain the privileges that men have around the world. They just don't. They face an incredible amount of violence and discrimination, as we've spoken about and fact checked previously. Protecting trans women is a fundamental part of women's rights because trans women face discrimination for being women and presenting femininely.

"One of the first acts Biden did was to partially repeal Title IX". No. No he didn't. He rolled back restrictive Trump-era Title IX regulations and expanded victim protections. Title IX now includes protections for people who are discriminated against for their sexual orientation or gender identity, for people who are discriminated against based on sex stereotypes, and for people who are discriminated against for being pregnant. I would really think about whether you want to align yourself with the Trump White House on this issue. Regardless, these changes to Title IX aren't "threatening the idea of sex as a protected characteristic." They're expanding protections to include gender identity alongside biological sex. Title IX's purpose is to "prohibit sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government." It's important that these protections include gender identity and gender presentation. Very few people are doing a thorough inspection of a student's "chromosomes, gametes, and secondary sex characteristics" before they make a decision to discriminate against them. They discriminate based on how a person appears... their "gender identity" or "gender presentation". People aren't calling to get rid of "biological sex" as a protected characteristic. They're saying that it's important to view both biological sex and gender identity as protected characteristics.

"I am not a TERF". You literally are. See above.

"I am a feminist, the same as any feminist in past generations, who would see the obvious issues with allowing men into women’s spaces." It's important to me that you understand similar arguments were made against the inclusion of lesbians, bisexuals, gender nonconforming individuals, and POC in feminist spaces. Intersectionality is an important part of feminism, trans women included.

"Trans women are not inherently different from men." You are wrong, this is dumb, and I think you know that somewhere deep down.

"I am not ignorant." Yes, you are.

"I used to be a trans rights activist, loud and proud. I am not anymore because I am a feminist, first and foremost. Women’s rights come first." Those two things do not need to be at odds! Trans rights are women's rights. Trans women are feminists, too, and they support cis women in their fight for liberation. Cis feminists should do the same for trans women. Liberation for any women is liberation for all women, and the less power the patriarchy has, the better. Trans people are not your enemy here. Cis men are. Trans women aren't like, spies for cis men who are infiltrating the feminist movement and reporting back to the cis men so they can oppress us more effectively. Trans women are literally on your side. Quit punching down and focus on the issues that actually matter.

[librarycards]

I just don't see how "heterophobia" and transandrophobia are the same? Trans masculine people, as a group, are not privileged. They are oppressed by transphobia, cissexism and misogyny. They are privileged in the sense that they do not experience transmisogyny, but that does not make them an oppressor group. Sure, not all concepts discussed under transandrophobia are going to apply to all trans men, trans mascs, and others. But we all have different experiences. Again, I don't see how having a word to describe common experiences among these groups harms TMA people. It doesn't have to imply they have privilege over us, it's simply a word to describe certain unique experiences of oppression, that's all it is. Trans masculine people do often experience a unique type of discrimination that's specifically targeted at them for the specific reason of being trans masculine. That's all it is, and again I don't see how it hurts TMA people to have a word for it. Like, how does it materially cause harm to others to use the term transandrophobia?

please read about what transmisogyny actually is. it's a structure of hyper/desexualization and/as systemic dehumanization tied innately to white supremacy & colonialism and animated by "commonsense" politics of desirability. it allows perceived "grossness", ugliness, or impurity to exile TMA people from communities, including trans ones, and in so doing vilify those who dare declare their womanhood in a way which challenges white cisheteropatriarchy. read Susan Stryker, Julia Serano, Florence Ashley, Jules Gill-Peterson, Riki Wilchins, Emi Koyama, Joy Ladin, ++++. they explain this shit better than I ever could.

claiming "transandrophobia" as counterpart to transmisogyny draws a false equivalence. transmisogyny is a structurally oppressive system. transandrophobia isn't - what we as tme people experience is readily classifiable as cissexism or transphobia. let's highlight the particularity of TMA peoples' oppression without running around trying to claim there's a TME equivalent.

tbh i'm sick of engaging with you & am especially sick of your implication that i am some "traitor" to transmascness –– and i'm going to be real, i'm TME, but do not and never have identified as "transmasc" –– by being realistic about what we do and do not experience. i'm not going to answer any more of your messages. just do the readings.

[cloudbxrry]

hello, and welcome to my blog! You can see some of my info in the blog description, but this is for rules and additional information. If you do not agree with the rules here, you can leave.

ALSO, I am cynophobic (scared of dogs) so do NOT try to send me pics of dogs. Cute puppies are ok, but just don’t send your fearbeastpics. Also, please do not come onto my blog to just send hate abt how I’m scared of your “little fluff muffin who can do no harm”. I am not sending hate to your dog, or any dog. Only putting this here just in case. Idk why anyone would send dog pics, but I guess I want to be sure idk lmao. • Black Lives Matter

• I believe that many cops are kind, but DO NOT support police brutality or racist cops.

• Stop Asian Hate

• Fuck Donald Trump

• All lives matter

• Pedophiles are NOT part of the lgbt+ community

Trans men are men and trans women are women

Non binary and Agender people are valid, including those who use neopronouns

You do not need dysphoria to be trans

Terfs and any other people who exclude/gatekeep trans people are not welcome to interact with me, my blog, or my content

Queer is not a slur. It is perfectly acceptable to identify as queer

I support ace and aro people, who are queer and part of the queer community

Love is not inherently romantic. I support platonic and queerplatonic relationships, as well as those who do not wish to be in any relationship • Lgbt+ rights

A relationship does not need to be monogamous. I fully support people in polyamorous relationships

I support bi, pan, and multisexual people, who are queer and part of the queer community

Pedophiles are not part of the queer community and are disgusting humans that are not welcome on my blog

Incest is never okay in any circumstance, even if it’s between foster or adopted family members

All religions are valid and welcome on my blog

Indigenous lives matter

Free Palestine

All races are valid. Racists are not supported by me in any regard

Nazis, white supremacists, alt-right members, zionists, and any other members of discriminatory groups are not welcome here whatsoever

Disabled lives matter, and this includes both mental and physical disabilities

Women’s rights are extremely important and I support feminist movements

Sex workers deserve respect, safety, and security

Wearing a mask is extremely important. Everyone should be wearing masks in public no matter what

• Your mental illness does not give you the right to be an asshole

• Do not use harmful slurs

• Do not post/talk about nsfw content on this blog please. I am a minor and am not comfortable with those types of jokes

These things are not up for debate. If you don’t agree with all of these, my blog is not for you and I am asking you to not interact with my blog. Unfollow me, block me, do whatever you must.

If you do agree with all of these, you are welcome and accepted here with open arms. My blog is a safe place for all people. I will not tolerate discrimination of any kind. Thank you.

(credit to mayflowers07 for some of the rules on here, I am not very good at wording things and I didn’t want to offend anyone/forget anything

These were already said, but If you are racist, queerphobic, transphobic, homophobic, biphobic, a “battle-ax Bisexual” (as in being a Bi that does not supporting omni, pan, or other multisexual people), Aphobic, or bigoted in any way then you are not allowed on this blog. It is a safe place for people of any race, religon, neurodivergant, cynophobic, and mentally ill people.

A BIT ABOUT ME:

(most of this is in the blog description)

Name(s): Ari or Nova

Pronouns: She/They/He/Void

Hobbies: Reading, writing fanfic, sports, drawing, memeing, stalking tumblr /lh

I do Grit Ninja (look it up on google if your interested, it’s a gymnastic/parkour thing lmao idk how to describe things)

My favorite ship is Cremini/Alyssa (my and my friends OC’s, they are dryad cottagecore lesbians ❤️) I have adhd (undiagnosed), depression, anxiety (getting diagnosed), and am a Bisexual Agender person.

MY (CURRENT) FANDOMS:

• Dream SMP (only the fandom. I have never watched the streams and my attention span wouldn’t allow it. I have been lurking in the fandom for a while tho)

• Hermitcraft

• 3rd Life

• Evo SMP

• Percy Jackson (especially TOA)

• Warrior Cats (kinda)

OTHER TOPICS I WILL POST ABOUT:

• ADHD/Neurodivergant stuff

• Depression

• Anxiety

• Therapy

• Abuse/Child Abuse (and Ptsd/C-Ptsd)

• School

HOW THINGS WILL BE TAGGED ON THIS BLOG:

Answering questions will be tagged #Ari Q&A

My Art will be tagged #myart

Picrews will be tagged with #Aricrew

Things with my and my friends OC’s will be tagged #AriOCs

Updates on therapy (starting in 9 days!!!) will be tagged #Ari therapy

My rants (I rant A LOT) will be tagged #Ari rants

Serious content (s3lf h4rm, depression, anxiety, gender dysphoria, suicidal thoughts) will be tagged #Ari srs

Random, more lighthearted things will be tagged #Ari speaks

MumboJumbo angst things will be tagged #Mumbo Angst Society

(Will use tags to tag this post to demonstrate)

Backround info to the Mumbo Angst Society:

I had noticed there wasn’t a lot of mumbo angst, and I was confused because he has just so many angst options! So I posted abt that and @ mayflowers07 in the post, and they responded (small fanenby noises bc fanfic writers are awesome) and said “Well this is a pleasant surprise! Thank you op, I am honoured to be the sole provider of the Mumbo Angst Society.” So now im calling it the Mumbo Angst Society ok.

Will add more to this over time :) have a good day!

[a-room-of-my-own]

Hi! Did you see the NewStasteman interview with Judith Butler? The way she framed the whole debate about gender is so depressing, I cannot believe it... And that's without going into the Rowling debate, the more I read about it on Twitter and tumblr and the most depressed I get. How can womanhood be reduced to a feeling anyone can claim?

https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

I had not seen it so thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it. She’s really manipulative and that’s pretty scary honestly. I picked up a few examples to show you 

“I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. (…) I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. (…)I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.  

It’s “our” responsibility to act on something she cannot prove? It’s quite easy to observe that trans-activists are an active minority within the feminist movement. On the other hand, it’s much harder to prove than most people support modern trans-activism in all its implications. She doesn’t give any source, proof or figures to support her claim but ask people to fight for it, nevertheless. That’s faith, not fact. 

If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” [the problem of men claiming to be trans to access women’s space] we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. 

Then again, no proof, when many gender critical bloggers have lists of dozens of examples of men using self-ID to access bathrooms, women’s shelters, women’s prisons, some of them sex offenders.  

The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. 

That’s a lot of words to call women who are afraid of men “hysterical”. #sorority 

Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry. 

Word salad that could be translated like this: our priority shouldn’t be protecting women from men, it should be accommodating men, because #notallmen are predators, so it would be very unfair to them, uwu. Men’s concerns should always be considered while women who are afraid are irrational. 

I am not aware that terf is used as a slur.  

I’m 99% sure that’s a lie, but okay. 

I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? 

Women who want to have spaces without men should be called exclusionary, because we define women based on their relationship with men and how they include them. Suuuuure. 

If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. 

We’re not the ones telling you can cure a psychological problem with cross-sex hormones and amputations, but we are the one pathologizing trans and GNC people. That’s hi-la-rious.  

My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived. 

Meaningless word salad > "women should let men redefine the word woman as they please"

Let us be clear that the debate here [between people who support JKR and others] is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. 

TLDR: Real feminist can only be trans-supporters. 

Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time.  

That’s gender for you Judith, not biological sex. Social identities vary, biological sex is a constant. Saying that isn't essentialism.

We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women...  

“Women who are afraid of men are irrational” third instalment.  

Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.   

Men are whoever they say they are, women are whoever men say they are.  

One does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle.  

Many feminists consider that men can only be feminist allies, so the debate is clearly not settled.  

When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?   

Does “woman” need to have a *gasp* definition? Judith is saying it doesn’t. You’ll notice that she doesn’t say that anything about “man” not having a stable definition. She believes it’s possible to fight against misogyny while having no stable definition for what a woman is. Laughable. 

I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. 

Word salad > “we don’t get to choose our gender but we get to choose it I am very smart"

Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.   

Many women have internalized misogyny and homophobia, which in turn had a huge impact on their sense of self and self-esteem, but that doesn’t mean they’re not women Judith. And I don’t think any woman who was forcefully married, who had her vulva mutilated for religious reasons, had to wear a veil since she was a toddler, or was sold as a child into prostitution ever “felt at home” with having been born a girl, you absolute unit.  

Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way. 

That was going so well until the last sentence 

I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. 

JB, darling, just read your own word salad and get some self-awareness. 

The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms. 

Tell that to your supporters Miss I Wasn't Aware TERF Were A Slur.

I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. 

Kindergarten argument, but sure. Also, yet again, no proof. 

I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US.  

“Threats against JKR are bad BUT have you seen what’s happening in Brazil?”. I’m sorry what? Also, could trans-activist please stop instrumentalizing Brazilian stats, since they reflect the situation of prostituted homosexual transsexuals ?  

 So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable. 

NO ONE, literally NO ONE said that threats against trans people were acceptable. In fact, most, if not pretty much all threats, especially physical threats, don’t come from radical feminists, but from men. Basically, what she’s saying is “who cares about threats against JKR, trans people (men) matter more”.  

If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists.  

��� Kumbaya my Lord, Kumbaya ♪ 

It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society. 

All radical feminists are right wingers, sure. 

Anyway, it's terrible that this kind of article is taken seriously when it could be summed up as "women are irrational and hysterical, men can be women and redefine the word woman if they so wish"...

[collegeburnoutsuperstar]

2021 Book Recommendations

Way back in March 2020, at the very start of quarantine I did a little quarantine-read book rec list. We are now in 2021 and we are still in quarantine, so here’s an updated book rec post to help you through a socially distanced winter break and holiday season.

Non-Fiction:

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name | Audre Lorde | Adult | Memoir | LGBTQ | Zami provides a detailed look into Lorde’s life growing up in the 30s, 40s, and 50s as a young, poor, lesbian, black woman. Discussion focuses primarily on racism, poverty, and sexuality. | Trigger/Content Warnings: rape, suicide\suicide attempts, death, racism, abortion, mentions of cancer, mentions of abuse, sex.

Redefining Realness | Janet Mock | Adult | Memoir | LGBTQ | “This powerful memoir follows Mock’s quest for identity, from an early, unwavering conviction about her gender to a turbulent adolescence in Honolulu that saw her transitioning during the tender years of high school, self-medicating with hormones at fifteen, and flying across the world alone for sex reassignment surgery at just eighteen. With unflinching honesty, Mock uses her own experiences to impart vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of trans youth and brave girls like herself” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: underage prostitution, transphobia, bullying.

An Autobiography | Angela Y. Davis | Adult | Memoir | A story of racism, discrimination, imprisonment, and Communism; “the author, a political activist, reflects upon the people and incidents that have influenced her life and commitment to global liberation of the oppressed” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: racism, murder, violence, police brutality.

Before Night Falls | Reinaldo Arenas | Adult | Memoir | LGBTQ | “Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas describes his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba, his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Fidel Castro, and his life in revolutionary Cuba as a homosexual. Very quickly, the Castro government suppressed his writing and persecuted him for his homosexuality until he was final imprisoned” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: underage sexual experiences with other minors, statutory rape, bestiality, incest, graphic descriptions of sex, suicide attempts, mentions of suicide, mentions of AIDs, homophobia.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou | Adult | “Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local ‘powhitetrash’. At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age-- and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Year later, in San Francisco, Maya learns that love for herself, the kindness of others, her own strong spirit, and the ideas of great authors will allow her to be free instead of imprisoned” (Goodreads).

Notes of a Native Son | James Baldwin | Adult | Essay Collection | “Written during the 1940s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the Civil Rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time” (Amazon).

Contemporary Fiction: 

Alex in Wonderland | Simon James Green | Young Adult | Romance | LGBTQ | “ In the town of Newsands, painfully shy Alex is abandoned by his two best friends for the summer. But he unexpectedly lands a part-time job at Wonderland, a run-down amusement arcade on the seafront, where he gets to know the other teen misfits who work there. Alex starts to come out of his shell, and even starts to develop feelings for co-worker Ben... who, as Alex's bad luck would have it, has a girlfriend. Then as debtors close in on Wonderland and mysterious, threatening notes start to appear, Alex and his new friends take it on themselves to save their declining employer. But, like everything in Wonderland, nothing is quite what it seems” (Goodreads). 

Red, White & Royal Blue | Casey McQuiston | New Adult | Romance | LGBTQ | First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz, son of United States President Ellen Claremont, finds himself back in the public eye after a confrontation with his nemesis, His Royal Highness Prince Henry, at a royal wedding. The only way to save American/British relations from crumbling: Create a fake friendship between Alex and Henry. But what happens when this fake friendship becomes something more? How will these two young men go down in history?

Fifty Shames of Earl Gray | Fanny Merkin | Adult | Parody/Humor | Very Heterosexual | “ Young, arrogant, tycoon Earl Grey seduces the naïve coed Anna Steal with his overpowering good looks and staggering amounts of money, but will she be able to get past his fifty shames, including shopping at Walmart on Saturdays, bondage with handcuffs, and his love of BDSM (Bards, Dragons, Sorcery, and Magick)? Or will his dark secrets and constant smirking drive her over the edge?” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: the is a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey...

Historical Fiction:

Water Music | T. Coraghessan Boyle | Adult | Adventure | “Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London’s seamy gutters and Scotland’s scenic highlands to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger” (Goodreads).

The Island of the Day Before | Umberto Eco | Adult | Italian Literature | “After a violent storm in the South Pacific in the year 1643, Roberto della Griva finds himself shipwrecked-on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis, he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing. As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he remembers chapters from his youth: Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale, that meaningless chess move in the Thirty Years' War in which he lost his father and his illusions; and the lessons given him on Reasons of State, fencing, the writing of love letters, and blasphemy. In this fascinating, lyrical tale, Umberto Eco tells of a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and of a most amazing old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood” (Goodreads).

Brethren [Raised by Wolves series 1] | W. A. Hoffman | Adult | Adventure/Buccaneers | LGBTQ | “John Williams, the Viscount of Marsdale, libertine, duelist, dilettante, haphazard philanthropist and philosopher, is asked by his estranged father to start a plantation in Jamaica in 1667. He doesn’t realize that he is going to the right island for the wrong reasons until he meets buccaneers and learns he has for more in common with the wild Brethren of the Coast than he does with the nobility of Christendom. Still, he questions joining them and leaving his title and the plantation behind until her meets Gaston the Ghoul, a mysterious French buccaneer who is purportedly mad. He quickly decides that the freedom of buccaneer life [...] [is] better than anything he could ever inherit” (Goodreads). Trigger/Content Warnings: violence, mentions of rape, mentions of death, mentions of torture, mentions of abuse, mentions of incest, slavery, discussions of mental illness at a time when it is not really understood, descriptions of sex, alcohol use.

Captive Prince [The Captive Prince Trilogy 1] | C. S. Pacat | Adult | Historical-inspired  Fiction | LGBTQ [more in later books] | Prince Damianos of Akielos finds himself captured and stripped of his true identity when someone close to the Prince makes a move for the throne. Part of the plot: ship the captured Prince to the enemy nation of Vere as a pleasure slave. In Vere, Damianos takes on a new identity, or else he would immediately be put to death by his new master, the Prince of Vere. Damianos quickly discovers that his capture and enslavement is not just an isolated incident, but is in fact part of a much larger plot that will drastically change the futures of both Akielos and Vere. | Trigger/Content Warnings: violence, torture, slavery/pleasure slaves [partially set within a culture that uses slaves], death, pedophilia, mentions of rape, descriptions of sex, suicide [in the second book]. DISCLAIMER: This trilogy has an enemies-to-lovers subplot, but it is in no way romanticizing slavery, rape, or violence. The romance subplot does not start until the characters undergo massive amounts of character growth and development.

11/22/63 | Stephen King | Adult | Time Travel | Thriller | Jake Epping, a thirty-five year old high school teacher English teacher and GED teacher from Maine embarks on a world-changing mission after a trip to the storeroom of his friend Al’s diner. Within the storeroom, Al has been hiding a secret, a secret that is objectively better than anything else that could’ve been hidden in a diner storeroom. Al has a portal to 1958. The mission: try to stop the Kennedy Assassination. Just remember, the current timeline may just be the best one. | Trigger/Content Warnings: death, violence, racism, domestic abuse, political assassination.

Adult Science Fiction & Fantasy:

The Rage of Dragons | Evan Winter | High Fantasy | “The Omehi people have been fighting an unwinnable fight for almost two hundred years. Their society has been billt around war and only war. The lucky ones are born gifted. One in every two thousand women has the power to call down dragons. One in every hundred men is able to magically transform himself into a bigger, stronger, faster killing machine. Everyone else is fodder, destined to fight and die in the endless war. Young, gift-less Tau knows all this, but he has a plan of escape. He is going to get himself injured, get out early, and settle down to marriage, children, and land. Only, he doesn’t get the chance. Those closest to him are brutally murdered and his grief swiftly turns to anger. Fixated on revenge, Tau dedicates himself to an unthinkable path. He’ll become the greatest swordsman to ever live, a man willing to die a hundred thousand times for the chance to kill the three who betrayed him” (Goodreads).

The Binding | Bridget Collins | Historical Fantasy | LGBTQ | While suffering from a mysterious illness, Emmett Farmer is sent away from his family to apprentice at a bookbinder’s workshop. But Emmett has been taught to hate books his whole life, they are dangerous and shameful. But under the instruction of the book binder, Emmett learns the secrets that books hold and uncovers a past that he didn’t even know he had. | Trigger/Content Warnings: homophobia, death, suicide, allusions to rape.

The House in the Cerulean Sea | T.J. Klune | Suitable for all ages | Urban Fantasy | LGBTQ | Don’t you wish you were here? Forty year old Linus Baker lives a lonesome, drear life. For seventeen years, Mr. Baker has worked as a case worker at the Department In Charge Of Magical Youth where he monitors the treatment of magical children in government-sanctioned orphanages. In a break from his usual routine, Mr. Baker is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management and is assigned a highly classified and possibly dangerous case. He is sent to the Marsyas Island Orphanage where he meets the six dangerous children; a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, a green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist, along with their caretaker Arthur Parnassus. At the the end of his stay, Mr. Baker must make a decision: Should he follow the rules, or protect a family? 

Wolfsong [The Green Creak Series 1] | T.J. Klune | Paranormal/Shifter Romance | LGBTQ | “Ox was twelve when his daddy taught him a very valuable lesson. He said that Ox wasn’t worth anything and people would never understand him. Then he left. Ox was sixteen when he met a boy on the road, the boy who talked and talked and talked. Ox found out later the boy hadn’t spoken in almost two years before that day, and that the boy belonged to a family who had moved into the house at the end of the lane. Ox was seventeen when he found out they boy’s secret, and it painted the world around him in colors of red  and orange and violet, of Alpha and Beta and Omega. Ox was twenty-three when murder can to town and tore a hole in his head and heart. The boy chased after the monster with revenge in his bloodred eyes, leaving Ox behind to pick up the pieces. It’s been three years since that fateful day-- and the boy is back. Except now he’s a man, and Ox can no longer ignore the song that howls between them” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: violence, death, age-gap romance.

The City of Dreaming Books | Walter Moers | German Fantasy | Absurd Fantasy | “Optimus Yarnspinner, a young writer, inherits from his beloved godfather an unpublished short story by an unknown author. His search for the author’s identity takes him to Bookholm-- the so-called City of Dreaming Books. On entering its streets, our hero feels as if he opened the door of a gigantic second-hand bookshop. His nostrils are assailed by clouds of book dust, the stimulating sent of ancient leather, and the tang of printer’s ink. Soon, though, Yarnspinner falls into the clutches of the city’s evil genius, Pfistomel Smyke, who treacherously maroons him in the labyrinthine catacombs underneath the city, where reading books can be genuinely dangerous” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: death, largely takes place in underground tunnels, illustrations can be unsettling.

Bored of the Rings: A Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings | The Harvard Lampoon, Henry N. Beard, Douglas C. Kenney | NOT AT ALL FOR CHILDREN | Parody/Humor | Adventure | “A quest, a war, a ring that would be grounds for calling any wedding off, a king without a kingdom, and a little, furry ‘hero’ named Frito, ready-- or maybe just forced by the wizard Goodgulf-- to undertake the one mission which can save Lower Middle Earth from enslavement by the evil Sorhed. Luscious Elfmaidens, a roller-skating dragon, ugly plants that can soul-kiss the unwary to death-- these are just some of the ingredients in the wildest, wackiest, most irreverent excursion into fantasy realms that anyone has ever dared to undertake” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: drug/alcohol use.

Dune | Frank Herbert | Science Fiction/Science Fantasy | “Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, heir to a noble family tasked with ruling an inhospitable world where the only thing of value is the ‘spice’ melange, a drug capable of extending life and enhancing consciousness. Coveted across the known universe, melange is a prize worth killing for. When house Atreides is betrayed, the destruction of Paul’s family will set the boy on a journey toward a destiny greater than he could ever have imagined” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: death, drug use.

The Magicians [The Magicians Trilogy 1] | Lev Grossman | Urban/Portal Fantasy | “Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A senior in high school, he’s still secretly preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. Imagine his surprise when he finds himself unexpectedly admitted to a very secret, very exclusive college of magic in upstate New York, where he receives a thorough and rigorous education in the craft of modern sorcery. He also discovers all the other things people learn in college: friendship, love, sex, booze, and boredom. Something is missing, though. Magic doesn’t bring Quentin the happiness and adventure he dreamed it would. After graduation he and his friends make a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin’s fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined. His childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: drug/alcohol abuse, depression, death, rape [in book 2].

Mo Dao Zu Shi | Mo Xiang Tong Xiu | Wuxia/Chinese Fantasy | LGBTQ | “As the grandmaster who founded demonic cultivation, Wei WuXian roamed the world in his wanton ways, hated by millions for the chaos he created. In the end, he was backstabbed by his dearest shidi and killed by powerful clans that combined to overpower him. He incarnates into the body of a lunatic who was abandoned by his clan and is later, unwillingly, taken away by a famous cultivator among the sects-- Lan WanJi, his archenemy. This marks the start of a thrilling yet hilarious journey of attacking monsters, solving mysteries, and raising children[...] Along the way, Wei WuXian slowly realizes that Lan WanJi, a seemingly haughty and indifferent poker-face, holds more feelings for Wei WuXian than he is letting on” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: suicide, death, murder, violence, incest, rape (I think), abuse, abusive families.

The Eye of the World [The Wheel of Time series 1] | Robert Jordan | Epic Fantasy | Adventure | “The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and pass. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow. Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time. The Wheel of Time Turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns again. In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, the World and Time themselves hang in the balance. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow. When The Two-Rivers is attacked by Trollocs-- a savage tribe of half-men, half-beasts-- five villagers flee that night into a world they barely imagined, with new dangers waiting in the shadows and in the light” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: death, violence.

The Lies of Locke Lamora [Gentleman Bastard Series 1] | Scott Lynch | Heist Fantasy | “An Orphan’s life is harsh-- and often short-- in the mysterious island city of Camorr. But young Locke Lamora dodges death and slavery, becoming a thief under the tutelage of a gifted con artist. As leader of the band of light-fingered brothers known as the Gentleman Bastards, Locke is soon infamous, fooling even the underworld’s most feared ruler. But in the shadows lurks someone still more ambitious and deadly. Faced with a bloody coup that threatens to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the enemy at his own brutal game-- or die trying” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: death, violence, torture.

The Name of the Wind [The Kingkiller Chronicle 1] | Patrick Rothfuss | Epic Fantasy | “My name is Kvothe. I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths my moonlight that others fear to speak of during the day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me” (The Name of the Wind). | Trigger/Content Warnings: death, violence, abuse, book three still doesn’t have a release date.

Trick [Foolish Kingdoms 1] | Natalia Jaster | Fantasy Romance | LGBTQ | “There is only one rule amongst his kind: A jester doesn’t lie. In the Kingdom of Spring, Poet is renowned. He’s young and pretty, a lover of men and women, he performs for the court, kisses like a scoundrel, and mocks with a silver tongue. Yet allow him this: It’s only the most cunning, most manipulative soul who can play the fool. For Poet guards a secret. One the Crown would shackle him for. One that he’ll risk everything to protect. Alas, it will take more than clever words to deceive Princess Briar. Convinced that he’s juggling lies as well as verse, this righteous nuisance of a girl is determined to expose him. But not all falsehoods are fiendish. Poet’s secret is delicate, binding the jester to the princess in an unlikely alliance, and kindling a breathless attraction, as alluring as it is forbidden” (Goodreads).

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Philip K. Dick | Science Fiction | “It was January 2021, and Rick Deckard had a license to kill. Somewhere among the hordes of humans out there, lurked several rogue androids. Deckard’s assignment-- find them and then ‘retire’ them. Trouble was, the androids all looked exactly like humans, and they didn’t want to be found out” (Goodreads).

Young Adult Science-Fiction & Fantasy:

Cemetery Boys | Aiden Thomas | Urban Fantasy | Romance | LGBTQ | “Yadriel has summoned a ghost, and now he can't get rid of him. When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free. However, the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is not about to go quietly into death. He's determined to find out what happened and tie off some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian, so that they can both get what they want. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: transphobia, dead-naming.

In Other Lands | Sarah Rees Brennan | Urban/Portal Fantasy | LGBTQ | “The Borderlands aren’t like anywhere else. Don’t try to smuggle a phone or any other piece of technology over the wall that marks the Border—unless you enjoy a fireworks display in your backpack. (Ballpoint pens are okay.) There are elves, harpies, and—best of all as far as Elliot is concerned—mermaids. Elliot? Who’s Elliot? Elliot is thirteen years old. He’s smart and just a tiny bit obnoxious. Sometimes more than a tiny bit. When his class goes on a field trip and he can see a wall that no one else can see, he is given the chance to go to school in the Borderlands. It turns out that on the other side of the wall, classes involve a lot more weaponry and fitness training and fewer mermaids than he expected. On the other hand, there’s Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, an elven warrior who is more beautiful than anyone Elliot has ever seen, and then there’s her human friend Luke: sunny, blond, and annoyingly likeable. There are lots of interesting books. There’s even the chance Elliot might be able to change the world” (Goodreads).

The Fascinators | Andrew Eliopulos | Urban Fantasy | LGBTQ | “Living in a small town where magic is frowned upon, Sam needs his friends James and Delia—and their time together in their school's magic club—to see him through to graduation. But as soon as senior year starts, little cracks in their group begin to show. Sam may or may not be in love with James. Delia is growing more frustrated with their amateur magic club. And James reveals that he got mixed up with some sketchy magickers over the summer, putting a target on all their backs. With so many fault lines threatening to derail his hopes for the year, Sam is forced to face the fact that the very love of magic that brought his group together is now tearing them apart—and there are some problems that no amount of magic can fix” (Goodreads).

Things Not Seen | Andrew Clements | Science Fiction | Realistic Fiction | “Bobby Philips is an average fifteen-year-old boy. Until the morning he wakes up and can’t see himself in the mirror. Not blind, not dreaming. Bobby is just plain invisible. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to Bobby’s new condition; even his dad the physicist can’t figure it out. For Bobby that means no school, no friends, no life. He’s a missing person. Then he meets Alicia. She’s blind, and Bobby can’t resist talking to her, trusting her. But people are starting to wonder where Bobby is. Bobby knows that his invisibility could have dangerous consequences for his family and that time is running out. He has to find out how to be seen again before it’s too late” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: Car accident.

Howl’s Moving Castle [Howl’s Moving Castle series 1] | Diana Wynne Jones | Fantasy | Portal Fantasy | Adventure | “Sophie has the great misfortune of being the eldest of three daughters, destined to fail miserably should she ever leave home to seek her fate. But when she unwittingly attracts the ire of the Witch of the Waste, Sophie finds herself under a horrid spell that transforms her into an old lady. Her only chance at breaking it lies in the ever-moving castle in the hills: the Wizard Howl’s castle. To untangle the enchantment, Sophie must handle the heartless Howl, strike a bargain with a fire demon, and meet the Witch of the Waste head-on. Along the way, she discovers that there’s far more to Howl --and herself-- than first meets the eye” (Goodreads).

Castle in the Air [Howl’s Moving Castle series 2] | Diana Wynne Jones | Fantasy | Adventure | “In which a humble young carpet merchant wins, then loses, the princess of his dreams. Far to the south of the land of Ingary, in the Sultanates of Rashpuht, there lived in the city of Zanzib a young and not very prosperous carpet dealer named Abdullah who loved to spend his time daydreaming. He was content with his life and his daydreams until, one day, a stranger sold him a magic carpet. That very night, the carpet flew him to an enchanted garden. There, he met and fell in love with the beauteous princess Flower-in-the-Night, only to have her snatched away, right under his very nose, by a wicked djinn. With only his magic carpet and his wits to help him, Abdullah sets off to rescue his princess” (Goodreads).

A Wizard of Earthsea [Earthsea Cycle 1] | Ursula K. Le Guin | Fantasy | “Ged, the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, was called Sparrowhawk in his reckless youth. Hungry for power and knowledge, Sparrowhawk tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death’s threshold to restore the balance” (Goodreads).

Middle-Grade/Children’s Fiction:

Island of the Aunts | Eva Ibbotson | Middle-Grade | Fantasy | Adventure | “When the kindly old aunts decide that they need help caring for creatures who live on their hidden island, they know that adults can’t be trusted. What they need are a few special children who can keep a secret-- a secret as big as a magical island. And what better way to get children who can keep really big secrets, than to kidnap them! (After all, some children just plain need to be kidnapped.)” (Goodreads).

Ruby Holler | Sharon Creech | Middle-Grade | Realistic Fiction | Adventure | “Brother and sister Dallas and Florida are the ‘trouble twins.’ In their short thirteen years, they’ve passed through countless foster homes, only to return to their dreary orphanage, Boxton Creek Home. Run by the Trepids, a greedy and strict couple, Boxton Creek seems impossible to escape. When Mr. Trepid informs the twins that they’ll be helping old Tiller and Sairy Morey go on separate adventures, Dallas and Florida are suspicious. As the twins adjust to the natural beauty of the outdoors, help the Tillers prepare for their adventures, and foil a robbery, their ultimate search for freedom leads them home to Ruby Holler” (Goodreads).

The Westing Game | Ellen Raskin | Middle-Grade | Realistic Fiction | Mystery | “A bizarre chain of events begins when sixteen unlikely people gather for the reading of Samuel W. Westing’s will. And though no one knows why the eccentric, game-loving millionaire has chosen a virtual stranger --and a possible murderer-- to inherit his vast fortune, one thing’s for sure: Sam Westing may be dead... but that won’t stop him for playing one last game!” (Goodreads).

Midnight for Charlie Bone [The Children of the Red King series 1] | Jenny Nimmo | Middle-Grade | Urban Fantasy | “Charlie Bone has a special gift-- he can hear people in photographs talking! The fabulous powers of the Red King were passed down through his descendants, after turning up quite unexpectedly, in someone who had no idea where they came from. This is what happened to Charlie Bone, and to some of the children he met behind the grim, gray walls of Bloor’s Academy. His scheming aunts decide to send him to Bloor’s Academy, a school for geniuses where he uses his gifts to discover the truth despite all the dangers that lie ahead” (Goodreads). | Trigger/Content Warnings: abusive family situations (mental and emotional), bullying, some parts can be creepy/spooky.

The Maze of Bones [The 39 Clues series 1 ] | Rick Riordan (the series is written by several different authors) | Middle-Grade | Mystery | Adventure | Action | “When their beloved aunt --matriarch of the world’s most powerful family-- dies, orphaned siblings Amy and Dan Cahill compete with less honorable Cahill descendants in a race around the world to find cryptic clues to a mysterious fortune” (Goodreads). Trigger/Content Warnings: Death, house fire, dead parents, abusive family.

The Doll People | Ann M. Martin | Middle-Grade | Fantasy | Adventure | “Annabelle Doll is 8 years old --and has been for over 100 years. Nothing much has changed in the dollhouse during that time, except for the fact that 45 years ago, Annabelle’s Auntie Sarah disappeared from the dollhouse without a trace. After all this time, restless Annabelle is becoming more and more curious about her aunt’s fate. And when she discovers Auntie Sarah’s old diary, she becomes positively driven. Her cautious family tries to discourage her, but Annabelle won’t be stopped, even though she risks Permanent Doll State, in which she could turn into a regular, nonliving doll. And when the ‘Real Pink Plastic’ Funcraft family moves in next door, the Doll family’s world is turned upside down --in more ways than one!” (Goodreads). | Content Waring: It’s living dolls, this is off-putting to many people.

Bud, Not Buddy | Christopher Paul Curtis | Middle-Grade | Historical Fiction | Realistic Fiction | “It’s 1936, in Flint Michigan. Times may be hard, and ten-year-old Bud may be a motherless boy on the run, but Bud’s got a few things going for him: He has his own suitcase full of special things. He’s the author of Bud Caldwell’s Rules and Things for Having a Funner Life and Making a Better Liar Out of Yourself. His momma never told him who his father was, but she left a clue: flyers advertising Herman E. Calloway and his famous band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!! Bud’s got an idea that those flyers will lead him to his father. Once he decides to hit the road and find this mystery man, nothing can stop him --not hunger, not fear, not vampires, not even Herman E. Calloway himself” (Goodreads).

The Thief Lord | Cornelia Funke | Middle-Grade | Fantasy | Adventure | Mystery | “Two orphaned children are on the run, hiding among the crumbling canals and misty alleyways of the city of Venice. Befriended by a gang of street children and their mysterious leader, the Thief Lord, they shelter in an old, disused cinema. On their trail is a bungling detective, obsessed with disguises and the health of his pet tortoises. But a greater threat to the boys’ new-found freedom is something from a forgotten past --a beautiful magical treasure with the power to spin time itself” (Goodreads).

Igraine the Brave | Cornelia Funke | Middle-Grade | Fantasy | Adventure | “Igraine dreams of being a famous knight like her great-grandfather, but castle life is boring. Until the nephew of the baroness-next-door plans to capture the castle for their singing spell books. At the moment of the siege, her parents mistakenly turn themselves into pigs. Aided by a Gentle Giant and a sorrowful Knight, Igraine must by brave, and save the day --and the books” (Goodreads).

Valley of the Dinosaurs [Magic Tree House series 1] | Mary Pope Osborne | Children’s Literature | Science Fiction (time travel) | “Eight-year-old Jack and his little sister, Annie, are playing in the woods during their summer holiday, when they find a mysterious tree house full of books. But these are no ordinary books... And this is no ordinary tree house... Jack and Annie get more than they had bargained for when Jack opens a book about dinosaurs and wishes he could see them for real. They end up in prehistoric times with Pteranodons, Triceratops and a huge Tyrannosaurus Rex! How will they get home again? The race is on!” (Goodreads).

Frindle | Andrew Clements | Middle-Grade | Realistic Fiction | “Is Nick Allen a troublemaker? He really just likes to liven things up at school --and he’s always had plenty of great ideas. When Nick learns some interesting information about how words are created, suddenly he’s got the inspiration for his best plan ever...the frindle. Who says a pen has to be called a pen? Why not call it a frindle? Things begin innocently enough as Nick gets his friends to use the new word. Then other people in town start saying frindle. Soon the school is in an uproar, and Nick has become a local hero. His teacher wants Nick to put an end to all this nonsense, but the funny this is frindle doesn’t belong to Nick anymore. The new word is spreading across the country, and there’s nothing Nick can do to stop it” (Goodreads).

Knights of the Kitchen Table [Time Warp Trio series 1] | Jon Scieszka | Children’s Literature | Fantasy | Time Travel | “Magician Uncle Joe’s birthday present entitle ‘The Book’ swirls green mist and grants pal Fred’s wish to ‘see knights and all that stuff for real’, sending Sir Joe the Magnificent, Sir Fred the Awesome, and Sir Same the Unusual to King Arthur’s castle opposing the Black Knight, grossly smelly giant Bleob, and fire-breathing leather-winged iron-clawed green dragon Smaug. Fred plays tag and wields a baseball bat. Sam cleverly politicks. Joseph, Arthur tricks with cards. But Merlin has ‘The Book’ to get home” (Goodreads).

Over Sea, Under Stone [The Dark Is Rising series 1] | Susan Cooper | Middle-Grade | Fantasy | Arthurian Inspired | “On holiday in Cornwall, the three Drew children discover an ancient map in the attic of the house that they are staying in. They know immediately that it is special. It is even more than that --the key to finding a grail, a source of power to fight the forces of evil known as the Dark. And in searching for it themselves, the Drews put their very lives in peril” (Goodreads).

Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery [Bunnicula series 1] | Deborah Howe | Children’s Literature | Fantasy | Mystery | “BEWARE THE HARE! Is he or isn’t he a vampire? Before it’s too late, Harold the dog and Chester the cat must find out the truth about the newest pet in the Monroe household: a suspicious-looking bunny with unusual habits...and fangs!” (Goodreads).

Howliday Inn [Bunnicula series 2] | James Howe | Children’s Literature | Fantasy | Mystery | “Not a great place to visit, and you wouldn’t want to live there. The Monroes have gone on vacation, leaving Harold and Chester at Chateau Bow-Wow --not exactly a four-star hotel. On the animals’ very first night there, the silence is pierced by a peculiar wake-up call --an unearthly howl that makes Chester observe that the place should be called Howliday Inn. But the mysterious cries in the night (Chester is convinced there are werewolves afoot) are just the beginning of the frightening goings-on. Soon animals start disappearing, and there are whispers of murder. Is checkout time at Chateau Bow-Wow going to come earlier than Harold and Chester anticipated?” (Goodreads).

Peter Pan | J.M. Barrie | Children’s Literature | Fantasy | Adventure | “The mischievous boy who refuses to grow up, lands in the Darling’s proper middle-class home to look for his shadow. He befriends Wendy, John and Michael and teaches them to fly (with a little help from fairy dust). He and Tinker Bell whisk them off to Never-land where they encounter the Red Indians [Native Never-landers], the Little Lost Boys, pirates and the dastardly Captain Hook” (Goodreads). | Content Warnings: use of the terms “Red Indians” and “Indians” (and probably other racist terms, I can’t remember though).

Owl Moon | Jane Yolen | Picture Book | Realistic Fiction | “Late one winter night a little girl and her father go owling. The trees stand still as statues and the world is silent as a dream. Whoo-whoo-whoo, the father calls to the mysterious nighttime bird. But there is no answer. Wordlessly the two companions walk along, for when you go owling you don’t need words. You don’t need anything but hope. Sometimes there isn’t an owl, but sometimes there is” (Goodreads).

Kiana’s Iditarod | Shelley Gill | Picture Book | Fiction | Educational | “Kiana is no ordinary dog. Born and bred to race, she leads her team of huskies on a journey unlike any other. The Iditarod --known traditionally as Alaska’s ‘Last Great Race’-- spans 1,049 icy miles from Anchorage to Nome. From the treacherous terrain to the bitter, blowing winds, the trail is full of obstacles Kiana and her team must overcome in order to reach the finish line. Along the way, they encounter pacts of wild wolves, a mighty moose, and other dog-sled teams fighting for first place. Can Kiana summon the strength of her team and lead them to victory? Author Shelley Gill brings her firsthand experience as the fifth woman to complete the Iditarod race to this crackling adventure story” (Amazon).

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Anonymous asked: Your blog isn’t what I expected for someone who champions conservative values because it is very rich in celebrating culture and strikes a very humane pose. I learn a great deal from your clever and playful posts. Now and again your feminism reveals itself and so I wonder what kind of feminist are you, if at all? It’s a little confusing for a self professing conservative blog.  

I must thank you for your kind words about my blog and your praise is undeserved but I do appreciate that you enjoy aspects of high culture that you may not have come across.

My conservatism is not political or ideological per se and - I get this a lot - not taken from the rather inflammatory American discourse of left and right that is currently playing itself out in America. For example my distaste for the likes of Trump is well known and I have not been shy in poking fun at him here on my blog. Partly because he’s not a real conservative in my eyes but a .... < insert as many expletives as you want here > ....but mainly he has no character. My point is my conservatism isn’t defined by what goes on across from the pond.

Rather my conservatism is rooted in deeply British intellectual traditions and draw in inspiration from Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, Roger Scruton, and other British thinkers as well as cultural writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Waugh. So it’s a state of mind or a state of being rather than a rigid ideological set of beliefs.

Of course there is a lot of overlap of shared values and perspectives between the conservatism found elsewhere and what it is has historically been in English history. But my conservative beliefs are not tied to a political party for example. I wash my hands of politicians of all stripes if you must know. I won’t get into that right now but I hope to come back and and address it in a later post.

As for my feminism that is indeed an interesting question. It’s a very loaded and combustible word especially in these volatile times where vitriol and victimhood demonisation rather than civility and honest discussion so often flavour our social discourse on present day culture and politics.

I would be fine to describe myself as an old school feminist if I am allowing myself to be labelled that is. And in that case there is no incompatibility between being that sort of small ‘f’ feminist and someone who holds a conservative temperament. They are mutually compatible.

To understand what I mean let me give you a potted history of feminism. It’s very broad brush and I know I am over simplifying the rich history of each wave of feminism so I’m making this caveat here.

Broadly speaking the feminist movement is usually broken up into three “waves.” The first wave in the late 19th and early 20th centuries pushed for political equality. The second wave, in the 1960s and 1970s, pushed for legal and professional equality. And the third wave, in the past couple decades but especially now, has pushed for social equality as well as social and racial justice. It is the first wave and bits of the second wave that I broadly identify my feminism with.

Why is that?

Again broadly speaking, in the first wave and overlapping with the second wave legal and political equality are clearly defined and measurable, but in the third wave (the current wave) social equality and social justice is murky and complicated.

Indeed the current feminist movement - which now also includes race and trans issues in a big way - is not a protest against unjust laws or sexist institutions as much as it is the protest against people’s unconscious beliefs as well as centuries-worth of cultural norms and heritage that have been biased in some ways against women but also crucially have served women reasonably well in unwritten ways.

Of course women still get screwed over in myriad ways. It’s just that whereas before it was an open and accepted part of society, today nearly all - as they see it - is non-obvious and even unconscious. So we have moved from policing legalised equality opporttunities to policing thought.

I understand the resentment - some of it sincere - against the perceived unjustness of women’s lot in life. But this third wave of feminism is fuelled in raw emotion, dollops of self-victimhood, and selfish avoidance of personal responsibility. Indeed it bloats itself by latching onto every social and racial outrage of the moment.

It becomes incredibly difficult to actually define ‘equality’ not in terms of the goals of the first wave of feminists or even the second because we can objectively measure legal, civil and political goals e.g. It’s easy to measure whether boys and girls are receiving the same funding in schools. It’s easy to see whether a man and woman are being paid appropriately for the same work. But how does one measure equality in terms of social justice? If people have a visceral dislike of Ms X over Mr Y is it because she’s a woman or only because she’s a shitty human being in person?

The problem is that feminism is more than a philosophy or a group of beliefs. It is, now, also a political movement, a social identity, as well as a set of institutions. In other words, it’s become tribal identity politics thanks to the abstract ideological currents of cultural Marxism.

Once a philosophy goes tribal, its beliefs no longer exist to serve some moral principle, but rather they exist to serve the promotion of the group - with all their unconscious biases and preferences for people who pass our ‘purity test’ of what true believers should be i.e. like us, built in.

So we end up in this crazy situation where tribal feminism laid out a specific set of paranoid beliefs  - that everywhere you look there is constant oppression from the patriarchy, that masculinity is inherently violent, and that the only differences between men and women are figments of our cultural imagination, not based on biology or science.

Anyone who contradicted or questioned these beliefs soon found themselves kicked out of the tribe. They became one of the oppressors. And the people who pushed these beliefs to their furthest conclusions — that penises were a cultural construction of oppression, that school mascots encourage rape and sexual violence, and that marriage is state sanctioned rape or as is now the current fad that biological sex is not a scientific fact or not recognising preferred pronouns is a form of hate speech etc— were rewarded with greater status within the tribe.

Often those shouting the loudest have been white middle class educated liberals who try to outcompete each other within the tribe with such virtue signalling. Since the expansion of higher education in the 1980s in Britain (and the US too I think), a lot of these misguided young people have been doing useless university degrees - gender studies, performing arts, communication studies, ethnic studies etc - that have no application in the real world of work. I listen to CEOs and other hiring executives and they are shocked at how uneducated graduate students are and how such graduates lack even the basic skills in logic and critical problem solving. And they seem so fragile to criticism.

In a rapidly changing global economy, a society if it wants to progress and prosper is in need of  valuing skills, languages, technical knowledge, and general competence (i.e critical thinking) but all too often what our current society has instead are middle class young men and women with a useless piece of toilet paper that passes for a university degree, a mountain of monetary debt, and no job prospects. No wonder they feel it’s someone else’s fault they can’t get on to that first rung of the ladder of life and decide instead that pulling down statues is more cathartic and vague calls to end ‘institutional systemic racism’. Oh I digress....sorry.

My real issue with the current wave of feminists is that they have an attitude problem.

Previous generations of feminists sacrificed a great deal in getting women the right to vote, to go to university, to have an equal education, for protection from domestic violence, and workplace discrimination, and equal pay, and fair divorce laws. All these are good things and none actually undermine the natural order of things such as marriage or family. It is these women I truly admire and I am inspired by in my own life because of their grit and relentless drive and not curl up into a ball of self pity and victimhood.

More importantly they did so NOT at the expense of men. Indeed they sought not to replace men but to seek parity in legal ways to ensure equality of opportunity (not outcomes). This is often forgotten but is important to stress.

Certainly for the first wave of feminists they did not hate men but rather celebrated them. Pioneers such as Amelia Earhart - to give a personal example close to my heart as a former military aviator myself - admired men a great deal. Othern women like another heroine of mine, Gettrude Bell, the first woman to get a First Class honours History degree at Oxford and renowned archaeologist and Middle East trraveller and power breaker never lost her admiration for her male peers.

I love men too as a general observation. I admire many that I am blessed to know in my life. I admire them not because they are necessarily men but primarily because of their character. It’s their character makes me want to emulate them by making me determined and disciplined to achieve my own life goals through grit and effort.

Character for me is how I judge anyone. It matters not to me your colour, creed or sexual orientation. But what matters is your actions.

I find it surreal that we have gone from a world where Christian driven Martin Luther King envisaged a world where a person would be judged from the content of their character and not the colour of their skin (or gender) to one where it’s been reversed 360 degrees. Now we are expected to judge people by the colour of their skin, their gender and sexual orientation. So what one appears on the outside is more important than what’s on the inside. It’s errant nonsense and a betrayal of the sacrifices of those who fought for equality for all by past generations.

Moreover as a Christian, such notions are unbiblical. The bible doesn’t recognise race - despite what slave owners down the ages have believed - nor gender - despite what the narrow minded men in pulpits have spewed out down the centuries - but it does recognise the fact of original sin in the human condition. We are all fallen, we are all broken, and we are all in need of grace.

Even if one isn’t religious inclined there is something else to consider.

For past generations the stakes were so big. By contrast this present generation’s stakes seem petty and small. Indeed the current generation’s struggle comes down to fighting for safe spaces, trigger warnings and micro aggressions. In other words, it’s just about the protection of feelings. No wonder our generation is seen as the snowflake generation.

A lot of this nonsense can be put down to the intellectually fraudulent teachings of critical theory and post colonial studies in the liberal arts departments on university campuses and how such ideas have and continue to seep into the mainstream conversation with such concepts as ‘white privilege’, ‘white fragility’, ‘whites lives don’t matter’, ‘abolish whiteness’ ‘rape culture’ etc which feels satisfying as intellectual masturbation but has no resonance in the real world where people get on with the daily struggle of making something of their lives.

But yet its critical mass is unsustainable because the ideas inherent within it are intellectually unstable and will eventually implode in on itself - witness the current war between feminists (dismissed uncharitably as terfs) who define women by their biological sex and want to protect their sexual identity from those who for example are championing trans rights as sexuality defined primarily as a social construct. So you have third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same issues. For instance there’s the sex positive feminists and there’s also anti-porn, sex negative feminists. How can the same thing either be empowering or demeaning? There are so many third wave feminists taking completely different stances on the same exact topics that it’s difficult to even place what they want anymore.The rallying cries of third wave feminism have largely been issues that show only one side of the story and leave out a lot of pertinent details.

But the totality of the damage done to the cultural fabric of society is already there to see. Already now we are in this Orwellian scenario where one has to police feelings so that these feminists don’t feel marginalised or oppressed in some undefinable way. This is what current Western culture has been reduced to. I find it ironic in this current politically charged times, that conservatives have become the defenders of liberalism, or at least the defence of the principle of free speech.

To me the Third Wave feminism battle cry seems to be: Once more but with feelings.

With all due respect, fuck feelings. Grow up.

I always ask the same question to friends who are caught up in this current madness be they BLM activists or third wave feminists (yes, I do have friends in these circles because I don’t define my friends by their beliefs but by their character): compared to what?

We live in a systemic racist society! Compared to what?

We live in a patriarchal society where women are subjugated daily! Compared to what?

We live in an authoritarian state! Compared to what?

We live in a corrupt society of privileged elites! Compared to what?

Third-wave? Not so much. By vast majorities, women today are spurning the label of “feminist” - it’s become an antagonising, miserable, culturally Marxian code word for a far-left movement that seeks to confine women into boxes of ‘wokeness’.

For sure, Western societies and culture have its faults - and we should always be aware of that and make meaningful reforms towards that end. Western societies are not perfect but compared to other societies - China? Russia? Saudi Arabia? - in the world today are we really that bad?

Where is this utopian society that you speak of? Has there ever been one in recorded history? As H.L. Mencken memorably put it, “An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.“

I prefer to live in a broken world that is rather than one imagined. When we are rooted in reality and empirical experience can we actually stop wasting time on ‘hurt feelings’ and grievances construed through abstract ideological constructs and get on with making our society better bit by bit so that we can then hand over for our children and grandchildren to inherit a better world, not a perfect one.

Thanks for your question.

[mrchristianaxavier]

Without Sex Work, Philly Trans March Would NOT Exist

Dr. Maya Angelou, hailed as a national best-selling author, a genius, a visionary, a god, Our Mother, Our Ancestor…was also a sex worker. But her sex work is not mentioned as much as her known accomplishments, although she speaks of her experiences as a sex worker unapologetically, in her book entitled, “Gather Together in My Name”. Marsha P. Johnson, a known Trans rights activist, used income from her sex work, to create housing for Queer and Trans youth in NY. The sex work of Revolutionary Malcolm X is also described in Manning Marable’s, "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention." Oftentimes, the words sex worker and role model are not used in the same sentence. But history has proven that sex workers have contributed to society in many ways, that are often invalidated and diminished under the politics of so-called respectability.

On October 10, 2010, a beloved Black trans woman from Philadelphia, named Stacey Lee Blahnik was brutally murdered in her South Philly home. She was a Legend of the Ballroom scene and was the Mother of the House of Blahnik. I did not personally know Stacey, but she had deeply touched the lives of many of my friends, who grieved their lost heavily. In support of my friends and fellow community, I attended Stacey’s funeral. It was the first funeral I attended for a Black Trans person. And it transformed the way I viewed Black Trans Lives and the movement towards liberation forever. I was deeply affected. As an empath, I felt every tear fall, every scream yelled, and every heart broken. Although overwhelmed with emotion, that day I came to understand that these were war times. That the lives of Black Trans ppl, especially Black Trans women, did not matter to most. With the life expectancy of Black Trans women at 35 years of age, as a Black Trans man, and as a king conscious of his own inner divinity…I knew I had to stand up and do something for my people. This was apart of my purpose.

In 2011, I founded and organized the Philly Trans March, as a response to Stacey’s Blahnik’s murder and the lack of action and response from local police, detectives, and government officials. The Philly Trans March is an annual protest and rebellion against the hate, injustice and inequity faced daily by Trans individuals, with a focus on the experiences of Black and Brown Trans adults, elders, and youth. That year 350 people marched in the streets of downtown Philadelphia, in support of Trans Liberation. It was a monumental and historical demonstration that continues to this day. In 2019 before the pandemic, 750 ppl joined the Philly Trans March and marched in the hoods of West Philly. It was the biggest and most impactful one yet.

Despite having a planning committee, the first Philly Trans March was not easy to organize. Funds were needed for this grand idea of mine to come to fruition. Initially, I planned every fundraiser under the sun that I could think of. From Trans fashion shows, to selling tee shirts, to movie nights, to talent showcases, to art exhibits, to bake sales…there was even a Pancakes for Supper event with a Live DJ! But despite my creativity, self-determination, and excitement, most of these fundraisers had low attendance and participation. As founder, I felt that I needed to do something to secure the funds needed for this particularly important March.

The same year that the Philly Trans March was founded, I began engaging in sex work to survive. There is a misconception that Black Trans men, automatically benefit from male privilege, once we medically transition, and that our lives become void of struggle, violence, and oppression. Although some privilege is seemingly gained, Black Trans men, like Black cis men, are ultimately feared, criminalized, targeted disproportionately by law enforcement, and discriminated against. We are seen as walking threats to literally everyone, even other Black men…and literally overnight. And as a Black Trans man, without a legal name and gender change at the time, finding safe and secure employment was extremely difficult. So, I began putting my earnings from sex work towards the funds needed to make the Philly Trans March a success. And for the first 3 years, the Philly Trans March was mostly funded through sex work. No one knew of my efforts, but without sex work, the Philly Trans March would not have existed. Since then, the Philly Trans March has gone on to inspire other powerful marches in places like New Orleans, Atlanta, and other major cities in the south. In Philly, the Trans March has prompted local government officials to create new laws and make policy changes, to create a safer Philadelphia for all individuals.

When people are allowed to work as they choose and make a livable wage, great things can manifest. And that includes sex work because sex work is real and legitimate work. Sex workers are not deviants or criminals. Sex workers are some of the hardest workers alive. Sex workers are visionaries, lovers, poets, artists, advocates, parents, counselors, and agents of change. Just like Maya Angelou. Just like Marsha P. Johnson. Just like me, Christian Lovehall.

[yurimother]

Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare - LGBTQ Review

Writing reviews is generally pretty simple for me. I set up the story of the work, discuss the characters and their dynamics, talk about the art, overuse the word “adorable” and then analyze about whatever romance or LGBT elements are present in it. However, Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare deserves more than that. This is not some fluffy schoolyard romance, it is an honest, powerful, and stupendous work of queer literature. I spent almost a full day slowly working my way through the original volumes in preparation for the English adaptation’s release and words can hardly capture the sheer power and raw emotion contained in this series. I feel perfectly comfortable in saying that Shimanami Tasogare is the greatest manga I have ever read.

WARNING: this review contains spoilers for all four volumes of the manga

Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare is written and illustrated by Yuhki Kamatani, who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community themselves and identifies as X-gender and asexual. Their illustrations are breathtaking. All the characters designs are distinct and the environments are detailed. But careful use of visual storytelling and employment of gorgeous surreal imagery is nothing short of artistic genius. These striking moments (literally) illustrate the characters’ emotions in ways far more complex and powerful than words ever could.

For example, the four pages which close the third chapter begin very minimally, with no background and only close-ups of character’s faces without words. Suddenly, it explodes into a visual representation of the protagonist's feelings, his realization, his fear, his overwhelming panic, and his confusion. Excerpts such as this are visceral, brutally effective, and hauntingly beautiful.

No matter how much praise I have to offer the remarkable illustrations, it is nothing compared to the commendations I give the story. It begins just as protagonist Tasuku Kaname stands over a bridge, contemplating jumping. People are making fun of Tasuku at school because of a rumor that he is gay and he believes his life might be over. However, he does not jump after he sees a strange girl in the distance leap from the window of a drop-in center.

Rushing over, he finds that this girl, called Someone, is the mysterious owner of the drop-in center. She tells him that the center is a gathering place for LGBTQ+ and that he can tell her anything, but that she will not listen. Soon Tasuku begins spending his summer at the center, working to fix up an old house with some of it other patrons, and learning everyone’s story. Each of the people at the center has an LGBTQ+ identity. In small arcs, which naturally cross and interweave with each other, Tasuku comes to better understand them and their identity as they work to navigate the world as a queer person.

One of the first stories told is that of Haruko Daichi and her wife Saki. Although they have not been able to get hold a ceremony, they consider themselves married. Haruko used to be guarded and quiet, lying to herself about being happy. When she finally came out and told her parents that she was a relationship, their relationship fell apart, a story far too common in the LGBT community. However, it is in this community that Haruko found solace and acceptation, thanks to participating in online forums and circles she accepted herself.

In one of these online groups she meets Saki, and they fell in love. Haruko’s greatest wish it to have a real wedding celebration so that everyone who knows her and Saki can celebrate them and their love together. Saki, however, feels differently. Although she is very much in love with Haruko, she does not want to risk starting fires by publicly coming out to her parents and relatives or holding such a brazen display of their love. This fear is held by many queer people, “how will I be seen if I come out? No one will accept me.”

Volume two of the manga follows the story of Shuufi Misora, a young child questioning their gender identity. At the center, Misora dresses as a girl, wearing dresses, makeup, and wigs, but outside they present as a boy (the gender they were assigned as at birth). They are initially somewhat hostile towards Tasuku, who is kind and compliments Misora regularly on their clothing while at the center, but one day asks to go to his house.

While there, Misora asks Tasuku some questions about being male and expresses their fear of their voice changing and getting body hair. Tasuku asks them, “do you want to be a girl?” Misora tells him that they do not know, but more than anything they feel so isolated and misunderstood. Before they can leave, Tasuku takes their hand.

After this, Tasuku encourages Misora to live as a transgender woman and eventually pushes them to go outside while presenting as feminine. The two go to a festival together and enjoy themselves. However, when someone gropes Misora’s butt, Tasuku remarks in an offhand comment that they did it because Misora looked cute. Misora, feeling angry, confused, and pushed by Tasuku explodes into a homophobic tirade, shouting at him before running away. After that, they do not return to the drop-in center.

Tasuku pushed Misora too much to come out, to take on the identity of being transgender. But, nobody can force a queer person to accept their identity or come out before they are ready and sure of their identity. Misora was still questioning themselves and Tasuku’s attempts to put them into a box and have them live a certain way was happening too quickly. I think that this is the chapter during which I broke down crying at the end, it resonated with me so deeply (it was two in the morning at this point and I had been up all day translating the Japanese text). I remember how much I struggled with my sexuality before coming out as queer. I think that the words a colleague once told me years later apply best, “ everyone comes out at the perfect time for them, there is no 'too early' or 'too late', just ‘ready’ and ‘not yet.’”

Volume three tells the story of Utsumi. He is extraordinarily kind, gentle, and charismatic. One day, while working the renovating the house with several volunteers, a woman comments that she knew him in high school, but that he presented as female back then, revealing him to be a transgender man. She asks him to attend a high school reunion, which he does and encourages him to speak at her daughter’s school. It becomes clear that she is a problematic ally, seeing queerness as a sort of illness and believes that he should work to teach everyone else about his identity.

Utsumi responds that she is reducing him to being only a trans man and that this is only one part of his identity, that he is so much more than that. Often allies want queer people to act as the voice and teacher of their identity and reduce that person to only being the token gay or token transgender person. They are not given the freedom to be their own person. This is what she is trying to do to Utsumi. However, he refuses and after that, she no longer interacts with the group.

In the fourth and final volume, the story of Tchaiko is told. He is the elderly visitor of the center and enjoys playing compositions by Tchaikovsky for everyone to listen to. He is gay, and his partner of thirty years, Agawa, is passing away. Agawa left his family, including his son to live as a gay man and be with Tchaiko. Unfortunately, he was not able to have both a child and live as who he was, and was forced to make a decision between the two.

Fortunately, Agawa’s son has begun to visit him in the hospital room, but while he is there Tchaiko stays away, as the son is not aware of their relationship. Tchaiko however, does not resent this, and loves texting Agawa and visiting while the son is not there. However, he acknowledges that, as he is not legally a member of his family, he cannot be there while Agawa dies. The legal rights of gay couples is a long source of grief for many.

I recall my friends getting ready to move to England with their two young children. They were married legally in the State that we live in (Massachusetts) but they had no federal rights and one of them was soon to be deported. Luckily for them, same-sex marriage was legalized across the country just weeks before they were to be evicted, and they were allowed to stay. The story I tell is a victorious one, but for so many people and their partners, they have so much tale. The law and discrimination keep them from experiencing every aspect of their life together.

Through Tchaiko, Tasuku learns of Someone’s past. He describes her as a person who wanted to live in isolation. In the past, before adopting the name “Someone” she tells Tchaiko and Agaway that she is most likely asexual, but that she is unable to find a place where she belongs, that whatever she does she cannot explain her identity.

The two men comment how strange it is that nobody is allowed to just live their lives in solitude, to live without having to explain, educate, and identify oneself, to just be “somebody.” It is at this moment that Somebody realizes that this is exactly what she wants. She takes the name Somebody and chooses to let go of labels and lives the way that she wants to.

I can hardly explain how much I identified with Somebody. I am not asexual, but I never found that labels worked for me, that I needed to be able to identify myself as straight or gay or fit into any of those boxes. For that reason, I do not identify my sexuality. I am queer, as a person who falls under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, but no more than that.

This final volume begins to bring about resolution to many of the conflicts and issues introduced in previous chapters but I will not go into detail about those here. Just know that I found each solution to be believable, well written, and satisfying. What I really want to talk about, is Tasuku’s journey and his relationship with Tsubaki.

Tsubaki is Tasuku’s classmate, whom he has a crush on. Tasuku struggles so greatly with coming to terms with these feelings and is helped greatly by his friends at the center. But these difficulties are exacerbated when he and Tsubaki become friends. His situation quickly takes a turn for the worse as Tsubaki starts to toy with Tasuku. Soon he begins making homophobic and transphobic remarks about the frequenters of the center. Tasuku stays silent, standing there tortured and wounded by his friend's hurtful remarks.

Things only get worse when Someone starts talking to Tsubaki about his sexuality, acknowledging that he is repressed and lashing out. Tsubaki angrily dismisses the idea. Finally, he confronts Tasuku, acknowledging that obvious fact that Tasuku is gay and verbally assaulting him and the center. And then, in what is absolutely my favorite moment from the wonderful manga, Tasuku stands up to him! He confesses his sexuality and affection for Tsubaki, tells him how much the center means to him and how much good it has done, and that what Tsubaki is doing is wrong. “I want you to know that what you’ve said has hurt me. It’s not like I want your sympathy or apology! I just don’t want you to hurt anyone else!”

My. God. YESSS!!

This is such an incredibly powerful moment, to see the struggling Tasuku stand up and tell off his friend, the person that he loves. To tell him that his actions are hurtful and wrong. This was such a triumphant moment for the character. The sheer number of people that I, that every queer person encounters in their lives that hurts us and that we want to tell off. Seeing this was cathartic and affirming for me in so many ways. Not only do we see Tasuku take this stand, but Tsubaki listens. He understands and realizes that his actions were ignorant, and hurtful, and cruel. After this, he begins to hang around the center more and become more accepting of the others and himself.

Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare expresses so many realistic and relatable stories of LGBTQ+ people that are told so beautifully and fully. If you are a queer person you need to read this manga, if you are questioning you need to read this manga, if you are an ally you need to read this manga, if you are a parent you need to read this manga, if you have no idea what LGBT life is like you need to read this manga.

Yuhki Kamatani has created the most honest, emotional, and affirming portrayal of living as an LGBTQ+ person that I have ever read in a manga. My feeble attempts to analyze it and express my appreciation here are laughable. My advice, get your hands on a copy right away!

To try and quantify this work with categorical scores would be nothing but insulting so I will end with only the overall rating: 10/10

Our Dreams at Dusk: Shimanami Tasogare Volume 1 is available now in at major North American retailers digitally and in print and volumes 2-4 are available for pre-order

Support yuri and LGBTQ+ content, news, and reviews by funding YuriMother on Patreon

All images are used for review purposes only and are owned by Yuhki KAMATANi, Shogakukan, and Seven Sea’s Entertainment. Please support the manga’s official release

[shiftyskip]

okay but aces aren’t inherently lgbt. like they weren’t at the first pride or rioting with us. no one at stonewall was ace, or at least not a cishet ace

LGBTIA+. The A ain’t for ally. Y’all so eager to allow straight people in but not aces. Also yes, they were there and they were recognized for it. They might not have been recognized as a community, but so many other identities and orientations weren’t recognized either. Does that mean they’re not LGBTIA+?? Or is it just aces? 

as one user said: “My biggest problem lies with people saying that we were not there at all because there was no name or community for us. Which is largely, glaringly untrue. We were there and no one will accept it because we can't point at something and go "There we are" because at that time, no one knew how to talk about us. We were just. There.. We didn't just come out of nowhere and try to hop onto the movement for fun or what ever the exclusionists are saying. “

But let us turn to history. We’ve been around since at least the 1970s. I did a quick search about asexuality, simply using the word “asexuals” into a newspaper archive and filtered it by the 1970s. 

August 9, 1978 - Asexual is used in an article to describe homosexual men. However it is used improperly and invalidates homosexual men. It is implying that if you are secretive about your sex life you are asexual. Not true at all.

November 12, 1979 - “Ask the pope about the role of asexuals” Quote: ““In a world filled with heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, and transexuals, haven’t we too long overlooked the plight  of the asexuals?” We have indeed.....Our members (come from all walks of sexual preferences.”  Sadly while this article is interesting, the ace in question denies it being from birth.

I will attach this article 

May 16, 1978 - An article about asexuality. Quotes: “People will got on tv and talk for hours about their homosexuality or their bisexuality, but who wants to talk about their asexuality? Asexuality is, of course, a term used by the public, and the professionals, who stress that no one is truly sexless. At the same time, however, the professionals do acknowledge that the chief symptom of self-styled asexuals - a lack of interest in sexual intercourse - is being expressed with growing frequency at clinics around the country.”

February 1, 1974 - I’ll let this one speak for itself

October 4, 1971 - Asexual is talked about along with homosexuality and trans, as a mental disorder among men. 

Onto the 1960s!

August 30, 1961 - The same man in the above article, who talks that asexuality is a mental disorder is at it again. This time he is implying that asexuals are different than normal and includes them with homosexuality. However he states that asexuals cannot love men or women. “ ....asexuals who never married because they had no ability to love either man or woman. “ Wrong

The 80s? 

January 8, 1984 - This one is funny. Al Pacino is stated to have managed to offend: “straights, gays, bisexuals, and asexuals...”

August 21, 1985 - I have no idea what this article is saying because the logic makes no sense  But does mention asexual.

July 3, 1981 - This one speaks for itself.

Even the ace flag hangs at Stonewall Inn.

Here is one source on twitter.

Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), Transvestite-Transexual Action Organization (TACO) and Fems Against Sexism (FAS), 'Transvestite and Transsexual Liberation', 1970

“Demands:

1. Abolishment of all crossdressing laws and restrictions of adornment.

2. An end to exploitation and discrimination within the gay world,

3. An end to exploitative practices of doctors and psychiatrists who work in the fields of transvestism and transsexualism. Hormone treatment and transsexual surgery should be provided free upon demand by the state.

4. Transsexual assistance centers should be created in all cities of over one million inhabitants, under the direction of postoperative transsexuals.

5. Transvestites and transsexuals should be granted full and equal rights on all levels of society and a full voice in the struggle for the liberation of all oppressed people.

6. Transvestites who exist as members of the opposite anatomical gender should be able to obtain full identification as members of the opposite gender. Transsexuals should be able to obtain such identification commensurate to their new gender with no difficulty, and not be required to carry special identification as transsexuals. There should be no special licensing requirements of transvestites or transsexuals who work in the entertainment field.

7. Immediate release of all persons in mental hospitals or prison for transvestism or transsexualism.

We share in the oppression of gays and we share in the oppression of women.

Trans Lib includes transvestites, transsexuals and hermaphrodites of any sexual manifestation and of all sexes—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and asexual. It is becoming a separate movement as the great majority of transvestites are heterosexual, and many transsexuals (postoperative) are also heterosexual, and because the oppression directed towards us is due to our transvestism and transsexualism and for no other reason. We unite around our oppression as all oppressed groups unite around their particular oppression. All power to trans liberation.” 

Please tell me why, if we are not LGBTIA+ we were always grouped with them??? 

Wow. You really failed at trying to be an exclusionist. Anyways, don’t police anyone’s sexual orientation and don’t gatekeep.