#what about the ones who don’t want to call themselves men because they’re lesbians and know very few lesbians would date them i

[bulldog-butch]

my tumblr cancelable opinion: (as a trans masc) so many trans mascs on tumblr are afraid to call themselves men because they don’t want to admit that they can be oppressors. especially if they are white

Gonna have to suck on this one like a lozenge

[lycandrophile]

i clicked on the original tweet just to see if anyone else felt as weird about it as i did because at this point i’m just tired of seeing people going on and on about trans men dating cishet men who try to convince them not to transition as if it’s a funny joke about a trans man doing something silly and not a manipulative and generally very unhealthy relationship dynamic that can hurt the trans man involved really deeply (as forcing someone back into the closet tends to do.)

did i find anyone else feeling that way? no. there were a few people pointing out that it was weird in general, and plenty saying it’s a weird thing to say about a cis woman, but nothing expressing any sort of concern about the tired stereotype it’s perpetuating.

but you know what i did find? replies like the one in the second screenshot, using the tweet as their chance to tell the world how much they hate trans men and how repulsive they find the idea of ever being compared to us. and replies like the third one, shaming trans men in relationships like that as if the fact that they’ve found themselves in an unhealthy relationship makes them deserving of public shaming, as if their relationship is hurting anyone other than them.

stereotypes like this just feel like yet another way of indirectly calling us stupid little girls who don’t know what’s good for us, and the fact that a picture of a woman is being used (even jokingly!) as an example of what trans men “like that” look like should make the implications of rhetoric like this all the more obvious.

it’s relationships like these that keep us miserable in the closet for so long and drive up our sexual assault rates even more. they’re not funny and if anyone is going to be making jokes about them, it certainly shouldn’t be people who have never been in that situation. if you actually cared about us you’d be looking for ways to support the trans men you know who are in relationships like that instead of hopping on twitter to joke about how stupid they must be.

i don’t care if it’s a joke. if it victim blames trans men for the transphobia we face in our personal relationships, adds to the common idea that we can’t be trusted to make decisions about our own lives, and invites even more blatant transphobia against us by people who unabashedly admit they see all trans men as “disgusting and phony”, it’s not fucking funny.

(i also want to note that the people making these jokes never like to mention that this also happens to trans men in relationships with queer women. they also hate those trans men, of course, and are happy to express that when they get into fights about trans men who date lesbians, but they’ll never talk about it in the context of this particular stereotype. it’s always a man being manipulative in a relationship and pressuring trans men to not transition, as if a woman would never be capable of such a thing.

they also like to conveniently ignore the existence of older trans men who transitioned after already being in a committed relationship with a cishet man and were able to make that relationship work despite their transition, because acknowledging that would require recognizing that trans men can be in seemingly contradictory relationships and genuinely be happy with their partner. who needs nuance when you can simply choose to judge all trans men for our relationships regardless of what they’re actually like?)

do you think they also would call me “a trans man being purposefully misgendered” with this kind of vitriol because i’m still living with parents who don’t recognize my gender instead of moving out before i’m ready to be financially independent? at this point, i’m starting to feel like they might, with the way every decision a trans man ever makes is the subject of a public debate and people have decided that trans men are secretly using being misgendered as a weapon to somehow hurt other trans people.

as a general rule, i’d say the only people who should be making “X looks like a trans man” jokes about literally anyone/anything are trans men, and posts like this show exactly why those jokes being made by anyone else (even by other trans people) just isn’t a good idea.

[ingydar-phan]

I think people are misinterpreting my stance on dangender. So let me say more, I guess.

- I am not indirecting anybody. This is a wide topic with varying ideas in it. My stances aren’t about the participants, they’re about the topic itself.

- I do not think having this stance is inherently harmful, transphobic, or unethical. I think some aspects can be rooted in harmful things but believing in dangender doesn’t make someone a bad person.

- My issue isn’t about boundaries themselves or crossing lines DNP have set. I know some people agreeing with me are making it about that, but that’s not what it’s about for me. I am super icked out by people who think they’re doing some sort of holy work by “protecting” their “innocent blorbos” or whatever from other peoples opinions/speculation. I’m not trying to be like “how dare you! If he saw this his feelings would be hurt!”. In fact, I think if Dan were to see dangender posts, he’d probably giggle, tilt his head, and be like “hmm yea ok I see what you’re saying!”. Im not trying to decipher what lines DNP have laid out themselves about what’s ok and what’s too much. Nobody can do that accurately besides DNP themselves, and this is a fandom space, so that’s not what I’m worried about, even though people seem to think it is.

I think it is absolutely true that having queer people in the phandom pre-BIG discussing DNPs relationship and queerness was a huge part of empowering Dan to come out. He’s said it in BIG, he said it in TIT, he’s said it a lot. Their community being nosy gays is how he found the space to come out. I know this. I affirm and agree with this.

My issue is there’s a difference between laying ground for mind-opening, and acting like there’s a confirmed secret being hidden from us when it comes to Dans gender. So, the difference between thinking “maybe if Dan really dug into what his gender could be, knowing it’s a safe space, he may come out with an idea of something more complex than cis” and thinking “he is for a fact trans/enby and already knows this, he’s just hiding it, and trying to hint it at everyone through these secret codes.”

All the jokes about phyuri and DNP looking like lesbians, the calling Dan “she” or “wife”, wanting DNP to watch I Saw The TV Glow, transmascs seeing themselves in Dan, that IS the community opening our arms and saying to be free to feel however you want to feel and express yourself however you desire. That’s so beautiful.

Collecting evidence that you surely know better than Dan himself that he’s actually secretly trans and hiding it is just, different, and is what makes me uncomfortable.

Lest we not forget that gender and sexuality, that queerness as a whole, are intertwined. A young confused traumatized Dan feeling urges to express femininity is just queerness itself, not specifically transness. Queer men are often inherently viewed as feminine, and going outside of strict gender expectations is a part of gayness for many gay men. Feeling like you’re different from your peers, like you want to express yourself outside of the norm, is tied into all forms of queerness. Dan is gay: he knows he’s gay, he’s worked hard to call himself gay. Gayness is queerness, and queerness is unique expression. His complex feelings about non-masculine expression tie into his gayness because he is a queer man. Him having those complex feeling about expression and self image do not mean he’s trans. They mean he’s queer period. What type of queer is up to him; and clearly the expression and label of queerness that he finds most accurate to himself is gay man. You can be a cis gay person and still have your queerness attach to your gender without it making you trans.

May he one day in the future find that that complex expression of queerness goes into his gender to the extent of transness? Maybe! I don’t know! Would I support him? Of course! Would I look back regretfully? No! I’m not attempting to prevent anyone from building a welcoming space. I just don’t like this assertion of specific labels and the idea that you know better than him. That is it.

[certifiedsexed]

gen/good faith question — is it disrespectful to lesbians or queer people in general if i were to identify as a he/him lesbian?

for context: i’ve always known i was into girls, and for some of my life, i considered myself a girl as well. there was nothing about me that made me want to make that choice, other than the fact that i was perceived by everyone around me as a girl and expected to be one.

and then i started to question my gender. i don’t really feel intrinsically as though i have a gender, but at the same time, certain forms of gendered language and some forms of gender expression make me happy and comfortable. at the same time, some forms of both those things don’t.

the thing is, most gendered language (i’m only using this here for clarity — i know that really no language is gendered and people can use whatever terms, pronouns etc to refer to themselves and that doesn’t have to correspond to stereotypical gender that usually goes with that term) and most gender expression that i enjoy are both usually correspond to those used by men, and sometimes those used by nonbinary people. for example — i like being called a guy, i like referring to myself a person, i like dressing in traditionally ‘masc’ clothes, and i would love to be perceived as androgynous sometimes.

but also, on the flip side, i usually like traditionally ‘female’ gendered language and expressions applied to me. this is a bit of a nuanced thing for me, though! i love wearing dresses and looking ‘feminine’, but only really in private, because to me they’re an example of cross dressing or messing with the gender binary because i don’t consider myself a girl (i don’t consider myself ‘anything’ in regards to gender, as mentioned above — i think the term is agender?), but most people don’t see it that way since i’m usually perceived as female, which puts me off it. additionally, i like she/her pronouns, but only at certain times, and not very often. i would also consider myself genderfluid, in the sense that the pronouns i’m comfy with change… however, usually, those pronouns are he/him, and often they’re they/them, but only occasionally she/her.

so people have asked why i consider myself a lesbian if i feel this way, and that’s due to a lot of factors. it’s because i was always certain of my sexuality before i was certain of my gender (and before i out conscious effort into thinking about it), and so identifying as a lesbian has and still does influence how i see and interact with the world. also, i’m not someone who will ever be able to pass in general society as anything but female — i have d cups, a high voice, am often told i’m ‘pretty’, and am very curvy. so i also identify as a lesbian because as someone who doesn’t intend to do much in the way of medical gender affirming care, the fact that i am constantly perceived as a woman unless i say so (and that’s not always respected) does also have a bearing on how i experience the world too.

i don’t know, i’m just really confused about if i can use this term or not. i’ve spent a long long time agonising over what discovering my gender identity and what that means for me will affect my sexuality, and a lot of that agony now no longer comes from not knowing about myself, but from feeling like i’m being disrespectful. i don’t want to hurt the queer community, specifically lesbian woman, or trans guys, and i feel like i’m doing both. but on the other hand… he/him usually really fits me. lesbian usually feels right too. i took a long time to come to terms with both of those, and so they feel very hard-won — like i can finally exist knowing who i am, and so to not be able to deceive myself in the way i’ve tried really hard to find is something that makes me really sad. but i would love any advice! :)

There is no way for your pronouns to be disrespectful to someone else unless we're talking about your pronouns being slurs that do not apply to you. Your pronouns have nothing to do with anyone else [exception aside].

Your sexuality is also no one else's business but your own. You don't have to justify your pronouns or your sexuality: they are not hurting anyone. You are not hurting anyone.

None of what you're talking about is disrespectful to anyone. Its just your personal identity. That has nothing to do with anyone else.

All of this has no affect on the lesbian or trans community by large except that one more he/him lesbian becomes apart of it, which is actually a win!

If you makes you happy, go for it! If it feels right, go for it! It sounds like you've found a label and pronouns for you and that's awesome! Congratulations. <3

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions. <3

[antlered-angel]

unpopular opinions about the tumblr queer community

the Tumblr Queer Community is full of white supremacy, misconceptions, misogyny, and toxic masculinity. trans beauty standards are full of skinny white people who lean heavily towards trans women being feminine and trans men being masculine. It’s okay for trans people to lean heavily towards a certain gender presentation, be skinny, and/or be white. However, for it to be a beauty standard is not only exclusionary of POC but also towards those who present in gender nonconforming ways and/or those with different body types. As a feminine trans man of color who isn’t considered skinny, this needs to stop.

Gender may be fluid, but sexuality is not. Not in the same way. You can’t make up sexualities because you don’t want to identify with labels provided. It’s okay to not be into labels, but it’s not okay to create self-contradicting identity-erasing ones because you don’t want to identify yourself with one of the many sexualities that already exist. It lowkey gives lesbophobia in a lot of cases. Speaking of which, lesbian is not an umbrella term, Saphhic is. If you’re a bi person calling yourself a lesbian, relearn what lesbian means. You’re not a lesbian because you have woman-leaning attraction but are attracted to a man every once in a while, you’re sapphic.

Ace people and lesbians are not enemies, in fact a lot of the ace people I meet ARE lesbians

Ya’ll should be nicer to femme lesbians

In general, queer women should be praised just as much for embracing femininity as queer men. The tumblr queer community doesn’t care about lesbians unless they’re masc in any way.

Stop pushing masculinity onto queer women who do not feel comfortable with it. You’re not breaking gender roles, you’re just playing into them and cishet ideals of how queer women should present themselves.

[dichromaticdyke]

🗣 – What are your own personal HCs for HF!S and HM!T?

Also, what about the other girls? Murderface feels like another butch, almost try hardy, but I also see her as not having a label at all because she's trying to give herself as much as a chance to get laid by a pretty girl. Pickles feels more fem. Not Skwisgaar fem but definitely fem. She's a "Marlboro Reds and Whiskey" kind of gal, probably doesn't know the word shame. And Nathan, I feel like she's undecided, like she found an aesthetic that works for her but she wants to venture out but is too scared of being made fun of, so she's stuck in a comfortable place, but she wants to explore what else is out there.

ohhhhh my gosh so there’s a lot because. i have my own personal dykeklok headcanons, and this lipstick lesbian skwisgaar and hey mamas toki is kind of its own separate thing. i’ll put it all under the cut because there’s a LOT.

so in the hey mamas tokiverse that @god-impeaching-dj and i have been cooking, i’ve actually been imagining skwisgaar and toki as the only lesbians in the group. the rest of the band are men and they don’t know if whatever the fuck skwistok has going on is a lesbian thing or a scandinavian thing. toki calls skwisgaar her princess and skwisgaar calls toki her daddy because OF course they would, head in hands. we’ve narrowed down their aesthetics pretty well, skwis is kind of pastel goth inspired, she wears pink and black nails, she has heart-shaped nipple piercings, everything!! toki is. basketball shorts. grey sweatpants. sports bra. snapback. she still has her mustache though!!! and kandi has been using rhea ripley as a body ref for their art of toki 😍😍. they’re the worst most annoying tiktok lesbian couple of all time, totally cringe.

as for my dykeklok headcanons, they’re COMPLETELY different. i have them all written up somewhere, but i don’t wanna find them lmfao. the long and short of it is that in my dykeklok/dragklok universe (which is the universe i wrote in for dethentine’s wheeeeee), they’re all lesbians but they perform and make public appearances in drag as drag kings. but that’s a secret to the public!!! they do it because misogyny in the metal community RIP. but also then no one will recognize them when they’re just at food libraries or whatever. and i refer to them like this:

Natalie Explosion (transmasc, she/they/he, order of preference)

Pickles the Drummer (transmasc, he/she, no preference)

Wilamina Murderface (transfem, she/her/doesn’t care)

Skwisgaar Skwigelf (transmasc, any/all)

Toki Wartooth (transfem, he/she/they, order of preference)

nat started speaking in a death growl to avoid being clocked for her voice. pickles thought she was a trans man in the snb days but detransitioned just a bit afterwards (still kept the goatee). murderface didn’t figure out she was a trans woman for a while because she didn’t know you could be trans AND gay. skwisgaar is queen of the butch who gets mistaken for a twink by gay guys. toki went on E just to get top surgery. a lot of these are inspired by lesbians i’ve known in some way or another ✨ love the lesbian experience. and yknow it’s definitely hard for me to pin them down as butch or femme. because the butch/femme experience is SO unique and SO important to a lot of people (myself included) but it’s also not the only way to be a lesbian. there’s a reason that in the hey mamas tokiverse, i refer to skwisgaar as a lipstick lesbian and pillow princess instead of high femme. i reblogged a poem about the difference between the a lipstick lesbian and a femme lesbian at some point, it’s in my femme tag (as a butch i don’t feel totally comfortable trying to explain it, i’ll let the femmes speak for themselves 🩷). i do think they could all be different flavors of butch or masc though, even skwisgaar. i’d just really have to think about it and try to nail down my designs (I DON’T DRAW BUT I’M TRYING).

oh i forgot, every version of lesbian skwisgaar has a double venus tattoo on her hip. and her favorite thing to say is “don’ts dies wonderinks”. GOD. 🥰🥰🥰

[chaos-in-one]

Do you think people who are against lesboys would just like

Explode (figuratively) if they figured out about multigender & genderfluid lesbians who use the label lol

Also a lot of butch & gnc lesbians

Like, not everyone who uses the label is a binary man, or even man-aligned. In fact I’d argue it’s not even the majority. There’s a lot who use it who don’t consider themselves aligned, or who are even woman-aligned. There are whole ass binary women who refer to themselves with masc terminology like calling themselves boys as a way of expressing their gender nonconformity and masculinity. There’s women who are also men, or are sometimes men, who use the label because they are still a woman who loves other women. They are not less women and their attraction is not less sapphic because of this, and saying they are is straight up aligned with the terf ‘oh they can’t be One Of Us because they’re TAINTED by MEN’ talking point. Gender and gender expression are not black and white, at all. And therefore, orientation isn’t either, because labels for orientation are related to gender. Trying to kick people out of a label is almost never *only* going to affect the people you actually want out of the label when you make sweeping generalizations of what labels can overlap.

[redheadbigshoes]

I saw some multigender post talking a bunch of crap just to justifying saying men are included in lesbian identity saying 'butches are basically trans men and can be lesbians' and after the 'trans women are basically femboys' thing it's really obvious that these people are transphobic lesbophobes who try and garner sympathy among ignorant people who dont understand gender or sexuality, or are easily pulled in by a guilty feeling of 'oh my gosh am i not progressive enough let me ask this person saying many queer buzzwords how this works' and arent willing to think for themselves.

Of course the fact that none of the people in the reblogs or likes section were actually lesbian (blocked em all, none of them had lesbian in the bio) makes it obvious none of them have any stake in it and are willing to just listen to a non-lesbian talk about lesbian identity because they dont care about lesbophobia, or are lesbophobic.

I'm a little miffed they @'d me then blocked me so I couldnt call them out more but posting here helps relieve my frustration!

-🌻

What’s ironic is that these are the same people calling lesbians transphobic or terf… I truly believe they love calling lesbians that because deep down they know they’re the ones who have a terf mindset so to try to hide that they think always calling other people that will be enough.

And it’s so funny how they tagged you and blocked you cause it shows they don’t want to lose an argument lol if they truly think they had enough arguments to win a discussion they wouldn’t have blocked you.

[theexodvs]

The Handy-Dandy Exo Intro and FAQ!

27. Married. PCA deacon. My pronouns are uses/bathroom/standing. I am the intersection of BLM Tumblr, Christblr, and the part of Tumblr that criticizes MRAs.

Limited atonement and human sexual dimorphism are beautiful wonderful things.

Scrupulosity, touch starvation, and adolescence are figments of the psychoanalytical imagination.

I block all porn accounts I come across and unabashedly kink-shame.

My anons have anger issues.

When and why did you reject the men’s rights movement? The explanation can be found here.

Suicide-baiting is bad, m'kay? Yes, I know that now. I have apologized for the post you’re talking about, and have removed it.

Do you really think autistic people are perpetual children or think Autism Speaks is a reputable organization? Not anymore, and I haven’t in some time. I have redacted these statements publicly. However, most of my disagreements with other statements made by Temple Grandin and John Elder Robison still stand.

Are you a feminist? Depends largely on the definition. I don’t go about self-identifying as a feminist, but the fact I recognize women are vulnerable, even in rich, western countries, causes other people to see me as one. I stopped caring what people called me a while ago.

Doesn’t your refusal to call yourself a feminist make you as bad as Mpov or SirYouAreBeingMocked refusing to call themselves MRAs? It doesn’t make them “bad,” it makes them look ridiculous. The MRM is a much newer, smaller, and ideologically homogenous movement than feminism, and thus there are still major, definitive tenets it adheres to, all of which Mpov and SirYouAreBeingMocked agree with. The tenets of feminism vary widely by school of thought. I’m not even sure any feminist school of thought would want me in their ranks, while MRAs of all stripes will reblog posts from Mpov and SirYouAreBeingMocked like they’re God-breathed. They should just admit that they’re MRAs, and get on with their lives. It’s not like non-MRAs believe them when they deny being in the movement, anyway.

Why do you police other men’s masculinity? They have a very twisted view of what it means to be a man. They think that leaving scathing reposts towards angry lesbians with stupid haircuts is a good use of their time.

What’s with you and criticizing Israel/Zionism? I find myself under a religious umbrella term that includes those people who consider even the slightest questioning of modern Israel’s place in Biblical prophecy to be an unforgivable sin. Thanks, Jerry Falwell Sr!

Do you believe in replacement theology/supersessionism? These terms are meaningless neologisms invented by Christian apocalypticists in recent centuries to describe anyone who holds a different viewpoint regarding Biblical covenants. The only thing either of these terms has ever meant is “not dispensationalism.”

Which version of the Bible do you generally read? In English, I tend to use the NASB or ESV, depending on the context, as they are both devoted to accuracy in translation. Since I was able to find a bilingual Chinese-English Bible with ESV, that’s the one I use in print, while the NASB is what I use on my phone. For Chinese, I use either the CUV or RCUV (the latter I use in print).

What is your political philosophy? I'm a theonomist.

Are you an advocate for purity culture? The main issue I have with purity culture as it is currently practiced in American evangelicalism is that it expects more from women than from men. If we shamed men who slept around (regardless of their political affiliation) and stigmatized men in revealing clothing, I believe that purity culture can be viable.

Why do you generally refuse to engage SirYouAreBeingMocked? He is not actually interested in truth. He is interested in having a debate.

Why is a doctrine that teaches there are some people who are hellbound a beautiful, wonderful thing? Because the important part of Malachi 1:2-3 is not, “Esau I have hated,” but, “I have loved Jacob.”

I’ve found your account on a different website/know your actual name! And?

[futchmemes]

im actually sick to death of people acting like anyone who doesn’t call themselves queer is like, inherently assimilationist. i understand where they’re coming from because there’s definitely a population of (particularly white) lgbt people who are like. what i’ve described to friends as “straight people who happen to be gay” (or cis people who happen to be trans, although that’s much less common) by which i mean they’re extremely gender conforming in the same way straight people are and so are their partners, and they don’t seem to have any cultural connection to being gay and tend to be ignorant about social and political issues. they ARE often assimilationist and homonationalist. i know they exist, and i understand the impulse to want to separate yourself from that because frankly if you’ve thought about cisheteropatriarchy in any amount of depth, behaving like that isn’t at all appealing or fulfilling, and neither is hanging out with people like that. but the way to do that isn’t to separate out people who call themselves queer versus those who don’t. i’ve known people who call themselves queer who have the absolute worst takes imaginable, and people who don’t use the term queer who are some of the most radical people i know. it’s just not actually a meaningful separation, it’s one of convenience. convenience is appealing, but with things like this it just isn’t super useful and does more harm than good, particularly since the people who say this stuff are usually using gay men and lesbians as a scapegoat and implying if not outright saying their identities are outdated and not inclusive enough which is just blatantly homophobic

[tame-a-messenger]

Also I love how people are talking about assuming people sexualities when neither of us have ever made it seem like they’re cishet. I swear people just assume Angela is lesbian or something with the amount of people I’ve seen say they can never imagine or ship her with a man. I know she’s probably not straight I mean she was in a show that was for queer comedians but I honestly think if anything she’s bisexual because I’m pretty sure she had a boyfriend a few years ago and I know she’s used he/him to reference relationships and dating but again queer show so obviously not straight. Also she could be like Damien who’s cis and straight but on the ace spectrum. Last I heard Damien was ace flux but didn’t identify as part of the lgbt community though because he is cishet outside of that and he didn’t feel oppressed or anything due to being aceflux (idk exactly the clip is on tumblr somewhere). That was like a year ago though so maybe he’s changed his mind. But regardless of if they’re lgbt or not that doesn’t change anything I’ve said and I lowkey don’t like people accusing me of assuming things when they’re assuming things themselves. Bc seriously I’ve seen so many people say they can’t imagine Angela with a guy (and I’m pretty sure I know who that anon is bc I saw someone say exactly that and then call out romantic Damangela as an example). Don’t accuse me of assuming Angela is straight (when I’ve never said that) when y’all are basically assuming she’s a lesbian even though she has definitely referenced men in terms of relationships. The hypocrisy is funny 🤷‍♀️. Ok sorry now THIS one might’ve gotten too aggressive lol. If you think this one might cause problems for any reason feel free not to post it. I don’t want to cause too much trouble or drama for you (I say as I’m feeding the drama 😅)

No I totally agree with you the Anon saying it’s “bad to assume” as they assume the same thing (and also assumed A lot of things about my askers) in the opposite direction was probably bad wording, but I understand what they were getting at with that whole thing. (even if they were doing a LOT of assuming when that’s what they were very peeved about) “shipping real people that you don't know is weird” is I think the big thing that went unsaid in that post, at least as I understood it. 

To that I’ll have to say, they both are over 30 years old. they are fully grown adults, what kids say on the internet is not really going to change their life. The only POSSIBLE way that that would be weird for them is if ENTIRE comments sections were full of shipping and people being genuinely ANGRY that they aren’t dating. (we’ve seen this happen all over the internet, even at Smosh with Ianthony etc.) Even with Ianthony they played into it.

I do try to keep it as neutral as possible here though,(at least on the shipping front) but this blog does not welcome Smosh Cast and Crew. It’s a fan blog that I’d like to stay in it’s corner of the internet.

[my-strange-attraction]

Man people really do be straw-manning you and then interpreting all of your arguments in the worst faith possible and acting like that makes them So Smart And Correct. I’m sorry you gotta deal with all these bozos with zero reading comprehension or critical thinking skills. Just wanna add because it’s been seriously bothering me and I don’t remember you ever bringing it up: one of the core tenets of the original op’s post that you responded to was basically ‘this identity is bad because I’m a lesbian and those people aren’t lesbians in the exact same way as me so they’re hurting the lesbian community because I don’t want to see them when they don’t share all of my experiences and (gasp!) talk about men and their relationship to men sometimes because *I* don’t want to hear about men’ and I just. Idk man if that’s what his argument boils down to its kind of a shitty argument. Even ignoring all of the terf rhetoric (which you correctly pointed out) I can’t even begin to understand why someone would want to be in a queer community where everyone fits into neat little boxes and everyone with your label experiences their orientation exactly like you. Aren’t they forgetting that the whole point of the queer community is that larger society attempted to put us in boxes we didn’t want to be in and categorize us into labels and lifestyles we didn’t want? Why would someone ever parrot the actions of our oppressors and do that to other queer people, when they know what it feels like? I can’t even fathom being that selfish and closed minded

>your argument is chock full of straight up lies  Love how this was said in response to your rebuttal of an argument that CONTAINED ITS OWN “STRAIGHT UP LIES”!! Like pot meet kettle lol. Specifically referring to that one bit that was like “uwu bi women tried really hard on purpose to distance themselves from the lesbian community” because that is straight up not what happened!! I haven’t said anything yet but it’s been bothering me for a while and that one ask has so much fucking Audacity that I couldn’t stop myself from Pointing It Out this time. Ahistorical bullshit and they’re accusing YOU of lying. The audacity of it all I can’t

Anyway these guys are just mad that bi lesbians get more bitches than they EVER will. I heart bi lesbians I love you bi lesbians I hope y’all stay winning mwah <3

I'm assuming these are all from the same person because of the timing? If not, sorry for not doing separate responses.

Yeah, this whole thing has been pretty frustrating to be honest. In a way it's even worse than actual terfs, because these are people who are philosophically not that different than I am, and if we met in real life we probably wouldn't even know that we disagree. I mean, I do talk sometimes about label anarchy with some of my friends, but we have to be close and you have to get me in a philosophical mood. It's really frustrating to be openly disrespected as a person for one opinion that, though it does happen to be really important to me, doesn't come up in my everyday life (or, likely, theirs either).

The whole pronoun thing really got to me too. I KNOW they were just strawmanning, and I KNOW it wasn't really a valid critique of anything I said, but the suggestion that I would even consider purposely using the wrong pronouns for someone is upsetting. I don't think he even noticed before an anon pointed it out as a way to invalidate my argument. I don't think it upset him (or the anon) as much as the anon said it did. I still apologized though because I'm not going to not apologize for using the wrong pronouns.

Also I know jack shit about history because it doesn't stay in my break but yeah actually I do remember reading about that! That's crazy, I can't believe they called me a liar when they don't know their history. I mean, I don't either, but at least I'm honest about it.

Thanks so much for sending these messages! Not gonna lie, I was going a bit crazy with all this and the only anons I was getting until now have been the hate ones that I've shared and a few hate ones that I just outright deleted. I know people agree with me because I've seen the likes on my posts, but it's nice to have someone defending me as well, so thank you <3

[xx-slug-xx]

(Aroallo anon) “you’re the one making things into rigid boxes” followed up by “tight and narrow definition”… come on… they really typed that out and didn’t think it through.

Look, what I’m about to say is said from the perspective of someone who’s never actually felt any romantic interest in anyone and is repulsed by it even if amatonormativity taught me I had to force myself to try it anyway AND from the perspective of someone who has at one point wondered if he was ace-spec and eventually concluded he wasn’t. If you wanna abandon boxes, you gotta allow people whose experiences are slightly different from your own but still closer to yours than not into your community. If someone is 30 and has only ever experienced sexual attraction to anyone twice and both were people they were close to, their experiences are going to be much closer to an asexual who’s never felt attraction in their life ever than it is to an allosexual who can go to a nightclub and find five people hot as hell to flirt with that night OR to an allosexual who thinks people are hot on a fairly regular basis but does nothing about that because they’re “saving themselves for marriage as Jesus intended uwu”. Asexuals and demisexuals have a lot more in common than demisexuals and allosexuals do. Having them in ace-spec spaces doesn’t threaten the community but enriches it. I have more in common with a demiromantic because even if that demiromantic has had like one crush ever in their life while being in their late 20s like me, they still have probably felt the crushing weight of “so when are you gonna get married” and “why won’t you give John Doe a chance” and not relating to romance media but feeling romance shoved in your face everywhere.

And it doesn’t escape me that this started over you being aegosexual. Correct me if I’m wrong, and I’m a little worried I’m gonna offend with this but not so badly I can’t just learn and move on if I do, but isn’t that basically “attracted to no one but still likes porn”? That’s just ace but with a little extra going on. Reminds me of how many lesbians will still enjoy porn of gay men. Or gay men who watch porn with women in it. Those lesbians are still lesbians. Those gay men are still gay men. No one is kicking them out of their communities. It doesn’t make sense to me to kick aces out of the ace community for this. At this point the other anon is not just policing the experiences you can have and still be ace but also policing the behavior of aces. There’s no point to this and nothing to be gained, only something valuable to lose. Eating each other is not gonna make the aphobes like us better. I just do not understand why this has to be a Thing.

Anon, you are very correct on everything you’ve said, and I’m glad you could put it into words better than I could. This argument is so dumb at this point and I’m honestly surprised that people are still going with it. I don’t even know what they are trying to gain from something like this tbh. It’s just harassment at this point and honestly, I’m just mildly annoyed about it lol. It’s so stupid.

What’s the point of policing who can say they are asexual when there’s people all over the world who are actively being killed because they aren’t cishet? Anons and such who keep arguing and gatekeeping the terms others can use seem to have forgotten that homophobes and transphobes want us to be divided amongst each other so that they can “weed out the good ones from the bad”. There are no good or bad folks in the lgbtq+ community to them, because we’re all bad to them. They do not care about stupid shit like who has the right to call themselves ace, or really, any lgbtq+ identity. People like the exclusionists anons are worrying about things that are, ultimately, counterproductive, and it’s what the people who are against us want. When we fight about stupid stuff like this, it also causes us to make no progress in society. It holds us back and causes us to be unaware of what’s going on in the world when it comes to lgbtq+ equality.

And to confirm your statement, yeah, I’m aegosexual and it basically means that I can watch porn and all that. I just have no desire to do that in real life lmao. Porn and thinking about things using my imagination are the only times I truly feel any sort of sexual attraction. My experience is so distant from that of allosexuals and I have never related to sexual attraction in the same way that they have. Might have people call me a “porn addict” for that. If they do, then I don’t think I really care because porn addiction doesn’t actually exist and I don’t care about the opinions of people who use any sort of addiction that they think is real as an insult. If porn addiction was real, then it would be just as serious as drug or alcohol addiction, and people would be treating it as such. Plus, “porn addiction” is actually nothing more than purity culture rhetoric, and I’ll laugh my ass off if the “demisexuality is purity culture” anon try’s to say that porn addiction is real and harmful lol

[mithliya]

Hi mena, I sent an ask earlier that you didn't quite understand - sorry lmao I was at work when I wrote it. I'll try to explain it better this time. What I mean is that while some people want to identify /out of/ homo/bisexuality, because of the moralized and fetishized nature of any sexual orientation at this point, there will be those who are already confused that want to identify /into/ it. I'm not talking about people who want to be oppressed or infiltrate other identities, although those people do exist. But for example, I think that there are straight women now who call themselves bi bc they think that straight is "vanilla," or "boring," or that they can't be true allies if they're just straight. It's not because of "heterophobia" or whatever rebublicans want to claim, because that's never been a systemic issue, but because it's untrendy on tiktok and in younger circles. They still want to date men solely, but they think the label will make them seem more interesting or sexually adventurous (aka male-approved) because of, again, biphobia. I don't think all people like this mean harm, but it's still done. ON TOP OF ALL THAT, the issue is further muddied by the messages that true lesbians love dick and blah blah blah that change the definition of a sexuality so that it no longer has any concrete meaning. For the women who are younger or unaware of the true meaning of sexualities, it can obviously be confusing because in "liberal" communities we're all assumed to be bi in essence and just have aesthetic/label/personality "preferences." Let me know if that's any clearer of a message, also feel free to let me know if you disagree, I'm just putting my thoughts out there. Again, sorry for the confusing first message :P

i think that’s definitely a generous perspective dhdhs imo i feel like there’s this level of disrespect when ppl claim to be a minority sexuality despite knowing they don’t meet the definition (like het women claiming to be bi bc they think being het is uncool or w/e). it shows their privilege but also shows their blindness to their privilege, their lack of respect towards the minority they’re appropriating, and overall their entitlement towards minorities. i feel like genuine allies to lesbians & genuine allies to bisexuals wouldn’t intentionally do this. i can forgive someone having been a bad ally in the past and then realising that and no longer appropriating minority sexualities tho, i reserve my annoyance at the ones who continue to do such things esp the ones who fight actual gay ppl & bisexuals and speak over us & use their voice to further harmful rhetoric like “everyone’s a little bi” or “lesbians can like men” or even associating bisexuality w being able to simply sexualise women without actually being attracted to them

i do agree that some of the harmful rhetoric can be very confusing for young gay & bi kids tho. i know i was confused by it as a teen lol. i’d tell myself i can’t be a lesbian & must be het or bi bc i saw pre-everything trans men & was attracted to them for example but i may be alone there.

i get what u mean now tho! but here i don’t fully agree, though i see ur point with some parts (i agree theres a pressure to identify as Something even tho u don’t actually know what ur sexuality is. tho perhaps that pressure is mostly internal)

[sagevalleymusings]

They're Taking All the Girls Away

I’ve spoken about this before but I want to give this topic a closer look, because I’ve noticed it’s something that’s resonating with folks particularly now. Gender identity has been changing rapidly in the past ten years, and this has led to push-back. To some, it can feel like a concerted effort to confuse teenage girls being pressured into an ill-fitting stereotype to reject their womanhood altogether. ‘Trans activists are taking all the girls away!’ they say! And of course the response is, ‘no that’s not happening, TERF, now fuck off.’

But… isn’t it? I’m in a group totally unrelated to gender and in that group, one of the members mentioned they were having confusion about their gender, where they felt ‘femme’ but not like a woman, and there were over 70 responses on this one post, almost all of which were other people saying they felt the same way. Increased visibility of non-binary and trans as identities has caused a lot of people who would have otherwise lived comfortable lives as cis women to second-guess themselves and their feelings. They know they aren’t women in the way we expect women to be… so does that mean they’re non-binary? And if they would have previously been fine with calling themselves women but now they don’t, couldn’t you call that “taking the girls away?”

Is that a bad thing? 

Let’s take a step back. This is a personal subject for me. It’s a personal subject for a lot of people. It’s difficult to divorce the facts at hand with our opinion of what is correct because this is a very subjective issue. Yes, there are facts that are part of it. “Science is real” is a catchphrase because it is true. But people weight scientific fact with their opinions - the opinion that gender does not exist and people are male or female based on biology with no alternative options is as based in science as the opinion that gender is very real and a wider spectrum than just men and women, with some basis in biology which is also not a pure binary of one or the other with no overlap. 

So when I talk about this subject, I think it’s important to bring to the table my perspective and my opinion as informed by that perspective, because arguing semantics on this topic is simply ineffective. When facts become informed by opinion to the point that they stop mattering, attempting to argue based on the facts simply gets nowhere.

Where am I coming from, then? Well when I was 14 I started to realize I was attracted to women and not men. I responded to this with inching dread and a sudden inexplicable crush on one of the most unattainable boys at school. It had the benefit of sounding true while being impossible to actualize on. At 16, I came out officially as gay without having made a conscious decision that “gay” and not “bi” was the correct label.

When I went to college, I decided to remake myself in the way a lot of baby dykes remake themselves, and I cut my hair off and started shopping in the men’s section for more masculine clothing. In my sophomore year, I enrolled in a Women’s Studies 101 class which asked us how we describe our gender, and I chose to write about being gender non-conforming.

I talked about how being butch was a kind of woman - a subcategory that described a masculine woman as separate from the normal expectation. I talked about how I thought gender was more complicated than the rigid boxes that defined what was expected of me because I happened to be born female, and how I had no desire to follow those expectations.

It’s a perspective which I think a lot of radical lesbians have experienced themselves. In fact, some of the most anti-trans people I know are butch women who believe that someone transitioning is an affront to their decades long struggle to fight to be whatever kind of woman you can be. Have short hair, grow a beard, use a strap-on - you can literally be as masculine as you want. The thing that you are born with may be female, but that doesn’t need to define you. 

It’s honestly a perspective I understand. But what I don’t understand is why this has historically been so incompatible with trans rights. To me, they aren’t just two sides of the same coin, but the same side of the same coin, just viewed at different times. 

The first person I heard vehemently arguing that gender wasn’t real at all was a non-binary person, but the idea that gender is made up is the very basis behind the gender critical perspective. The same people who claim that they/them pronouns is going too far were standing with me identifying as gender non-conforming ten years ago. Radical lesbians believe that you have a right to be whatever kind of woman you want to be, and that the sex you are born into does not define who you are and what you are owed. Trans activists believe the very same thing, but with the added layer that you can be whatever kind of *person* you want to be, even if that person is not a woman.

When I was a kid, this perspective wasn’t really very wide-spread. Trans people existed, but mostly in the abstract. I and many others only really understood transness through the lens of someone with deep gender dysphoria. And in a case like that, you could say the person doesn’t really have a choice - this is something they need to do to treat their psychological distress. 

But as time passed, definitions around what it means to be trans shifted. You don’t need to have dysphoria, you don’t need to treat it with surgery or hormones, and you don’t even need to be binary. Now, there is an understanding of gender which is more nebulous, where a person can be neither a man or a woman - not based on their biology, but simply based on their feelings. 

A lot of people rigidly reject this notion, but the reasons for this rejection vary. I’ve heard the argument, “it’s just basic science” but the fact of the matter is that sociology is also science, and sociology stands by the notion that gender is something which is not rigidly based on biology. 

I think for many people who vehemently reject non-binary identities in particular but trans identities by extension, “science is real” is the fact that they can justify their beliefs with, but ultimately the belief itself is deeper. I suspect it has a lot to do with the way it leads to questioning of one’s self, which is why I want to couch this in terms of my journey with myself. Once upon a time, I used terms like “butch” to describe my gender and called myself gender non-conforming. If I had been born ten years later… Would I have transitioned?

I’m not the first person to bring this up. JK Rowling said the same thing in her infamous essay, that perhaps she would have become “the son my father always wanted” rather than continue to be a woman. And I went through a period of time where I cut my hair short, wore men’s clothes, and embodied a kind of masculine gait, with a zigzag in my step, shoulders broad and back. If I had a better understanding of what it meant to be trans when I was in my early twenties, would I have taken that phase to a different conclusion? 

I genuinely don’t know, but I do know that for me, it was a phase, and I settled on something much more femme as I aged. But most of the time I don’t really think about gender at all, and that’s something that I think bears noting. 

I’ve heard plenty of reactions to Rowling’s statement about whether or not she could have transitioned as a young woman, and most of it boils down to this: Rowling saying she might have transitioned because she self harmed, or had an eating disorder, or had anxiety as a teenager, misses the obvious point that trans men who transition do so *because they feel like men* and the depression and other mental health symptoms are a symptom of the way they’re treated because of that feeling. 

If you don’t feel like a man, the trans argument goes, then you are not one. But there’s a problem with this explanation. Most cis people have a very loose if not nearly non-existent feeling of their own gender. They don’t feel like a man. They don’t feel like a woman. I am a woman because I have a vagina and I have been told that the term for people who have vaginas is “woman” therefore that’s what I am. If I had been told the term for people who have vaginas is “man” I would be a man. For most cis people, it isn’t any deeper than that. I am not a woman because I feel like a woman. I’m a woman because that’s what society decided for me is true, and I’ve never had reason to question it.

Though, that’s not quite true for me personally. I have had reason and opportunity to question my own gender. After all, in my early twenties I was butch. I was deliberately fighting against gendered stereotypes of what a woman is supposed to be and playing with notions of masculine and feminine. This play did not disrupt my sense of my own womanhood at the time because my sense of gender was separate from my sense of gender stereotypes. 

But I’m willing to admit that recently, with the trans discussion in the forefront so much, I have started to question my own gender, in a way that’s confusing and disjointed and uncomfortable. 

I haven’t been sure what to do about this new uncomfortableness. I’m discovering that a lot of people, particularly women (or at least AFAB persons regardless of how they identify now) in their 30s feel this same way, that they are a woman because that’s what people call them, but it isn’t something they have a comfortable amount of ownership over. Anna Myakushina on TikTok has described it as being a woman in the way that a dandelion is a weed. It’s technically true, but not quite right. A dandelion is a flower that we call a weed because it springs up unwanted - so too gender. 

And this is something that at least 70 people in my Facebook group resonated with enough to say that they felt the same way. Some of them called themselves women, some of them called themselves demigirls, some of them called themselves agender, some of them called themselves lunarian, or librafeminine, or girlflux, or non-binary, or genderfae… They called themselves all sorts of things, but what it boiled down to was a resonance that the thing they had been told they are -a woman -was ill-fitting, so they had to find something that felt like it fit better. 

There might still be a few gender critical folks in the crowd who are thinking: “why do you need sixteen different words for the same thing? You’re all women! You can be whatever kind of woman you want to be!” Those folks may also be thinking a lot of very uncharitable things about trans activists, and their quest to “confuse girls” into transitioning when they don’t want to. After all, if everyone feels the way I do and no one has a concrete sense of their gender, then it does seem like someone could trick you into feeling a way about yourself that isn’t true to who you are. 

There’s a couple of issues with this. Firstly, when Rowling talked about transitioning because of feeling disconnected to the expectations of a teenage girl, it was in the abstract. Descriptions of girls being convinced to transition are by and large in the “might have been” category with less than one percent of one percent of people in the world actually making a mistake with their transition. 

But when these 70 people in my Facebook group talk about their gender journey, it’s a real person experimenting with what they want gender to look like for them, and in no case is that person on hormones or altering their body irrevocably to become more androgynous. They’re just using a term other than woman and a pronoun other than she to describe themselves. 

This is why I see  the gender critical perspective of being whatever kind of woman you want to be and the trans perspective of being whatever kind of person you want to be as exactly the same. Ten years ago, when I started using terms like “butch” and “gender non-conforming” that *was* me acting out a kind of non-binary identity. I just didn’t have terms like that for it. But they’re the same thing with the same goal: the expectations for people based on whether or not they are perceived to be a man or a woman don’t fit most people, and we need language to talk about that. 

I have heard some say that if non-binary was real, then everyone would be non-binary because no one fits the stereotypes of man and woman perfectly. And, yeah. I think they have a point. But I also think that in a lot of cases, people are not completely rejecting their maleness or their femaleness. They’re doing what Anna Myakushina or these 70 people in my Facebook group are doing. They’re enacting a kind of gender presentation based on stereotyped traits that appeal to them, and then picking what they want to call it. I did the exact same thing when I wore masculine clothes and called myself butch. 

I think you can make the argument that a lot of younger people are flocking to non-binary language because the stereotypes of gender are so outdated as to be useless, and that does translate in very real ways to more people identifying as non-binary, including people who genuinely wouldn’t have ten years ago. I wouldn’t have. I still don’t. Because as much as “woman” feels like a pair of socks that are both too small and not stretchy enough, non-binary feels like I put my shoes on and forgot socks altogether. But maybe if these terms had been around sooner, I would have felt more comfortable trying them out. I don’t think there is a word that describes my gender perfectly because our gender system sucks. It’s based on garbage, and it doesn’t work for most people, and regardless of which line in the sand you are on, that’s something we all agree on. There have been valiant attempts made to try and talk about gender in a way that feels more personal and more comfortable. But I also know that my gender is not my own. It isn’t just how I feel about myself. It’s also how people interact with me. Women are treated differently by virtue of being women, and if I decide to start calling myself lunarian but no one knows that, they are going to treat me as a woman no matter what I call myself. I can tell people this is how I feel about myself, and ask them to treat me differently based on that feeling, but there will always be strangers who have no reason to respect me who ignore that request. 

But at the end of the day, there are a lot of people who feel the same way I do about themselves but who have decided that they do want to call themselves non-binary, or agender, or what have you, and who do use they (or she/they) pronouns. And maybe they wouldn’t have ten years ago. So in some very real ways, the feeling that more people are identifying as non-cis is in fact real. Where I differ from the gender critical perspective is that I struggle to see how that’s a bad thing. After all, you didn’t think it was a bad thing fifty years ago when the lesbians were wearing suits at the bars. You didn’t think it was a bad thing when you were refusing to wear bras in the 80s. It wasn’t a bad thing to challenge gender when challenging gender stereotypes but ultimately leaving the concept of gender intact. 

If it wasn’t a bad thing for me as a baby butch to cut my hair short and wear masculine clothing, I can see a world in which someone now does the same thing, but also says that he’s a demiboy that uses he/him pronouns. 

Let the kids play with their gender for heaven’s sake. You already don’t like the system of gender we have in place, it feels hypocritical in the extreme to get upset that someone else is breaking a system you don’t want.

[redheadbigshoes]

I don't understand why everyone wants men to be included in lesbianism so bad. Like why is supporting nonbinary lesbians somehow a gateway for people to go "this includes male lesbians and butches who are men" like I can't even think people mean when butches call themselves men/boy in a lesbian way anymore and not like a is actually a man way. If any of that makes sense? I kinda wanna ask my 50+ year old cousin what she thinks but I'm also afraid somehow she'll agree with them and then I'll be heartbroken LMAO

People don’t want to recognize lesbians are not attracted to cis and trans men and they don’t want to accept that.

The people you’re talking about are transphobic, which is ironic because they’re usually the ones calling lesbians terf or transphobic for saying lesbianism doesn’t include cis and trans men. They are transphobic because they don’t see a difference between a lot of non-binary lesbians and men.

When it comes to older lgbt people I feel like they either support bi sapphics calling themselves lesbians because that used to be a thing or they’re totally against it.