#what does our natural hair have to do with getting seen as men or trans women??

[sanyu-thewitch05]

Me watching the LGBT community who almost never rarely gives black women and girls, asexuals, or aromantics genuine respect, pretend we’re all friends and have always treated us right the minute it’s June 1st and want to use black women(mainly darkskinned) and girls as their little poster girl:

[thatfeyboy]

Ok so just to get it out of the way, objectively anyone can be GNC and use whatever pronouns they want. This person is also being rude and making some unfair assumptions about Finn. That being said, I actually think there is an interesting point to make here.

I've seen this problem in communicating gender to a lot of people, especially cis people. There is this feeling that gender, as far as the average citizen is concerned, is just your sex. From there some are taught that your gender(read: sex traits) shouldn't affect want you like or do, while others are taught that certain actions and presentations are an extension of their sex, with a "natural/right" and "unnatural/wrong" way to do it. These are not always mutually exclusive, with many thinking things along the lines of; traits are more likely/stronger/more advantageous for one gender over another but that it's not wrong for some people to be different.

So then trans people come in. They see people that have one "gender" but take on another's typical roles. From this perspective being trans isn't very different from breaking gender norms in other ways, like dressing GNC or having interest in the same gender. All of that kind of blends together for the unenlightened, and from that framework the logical conclusion is that any trait that is part of a gender standard must be related somehow.

This of course comes from a misunderstanding of basic biology and evolution, or from religion. The later is pretty obvious, many religions have God given/designed/divine roles for men and women and so to be good you must follow them. The former however is a little more complicated. In basic terms most people view evolution as either having a goal set or always striving for "more perfect" with each generation. This is blatantly false. Biology and evolution are messy because what survives is what lives and there is no greater rule. This means each successive set of offspring will have any trait that doesn't directly prevent them from passing on their genes, even through relatives or clones, even if those genes do nothing for them or even hinder them. Genetics are therefore complicated and filled with redundancy and ways things can be altered.

Humans have sex traits. This is apparent. We have them so our species can produce two types of gametes and therefore have a good chance of novel recombinations of genes. We have males and females to do this, but they are made using the same starting parts and frankly very little distinguishing them. Male and female associated traits can exist in a huge range, with much overlapping. Even the genitals themselves have the ability to exist on a spectrum, or even have both aspects. Chromosomes can be mixed, or no functional, or have extra function. Not to even go into the fact that sexuality in either sex seems to be influenced by sex, but not even remotely enough to call it a sex trait on a level beyond 'men have more body hair'. This all to say, male and female are already categories that are muddled and not designed, just convenient.

The relevance of this comes from the common assertion that men and women are different because biology designed them to compliment each other, or so that people could attract the opposite sex and reproduce in an idealized way. Truthfully biology doesn't care, and as long as people are close enough and willing to have sex frequently this problem is resolved, never mind that each human does not need to reproduce to be successful or benefit their species. Humans are therefore mixed and complex and do not fall into those categories, as the environment does not place this pressure on them. So why do we make them?

I think this actually has something to do with transgenderism, in a tangential sort of way. The pressure humans do have is getting along with other humans. We are dependent for our whole lives on other humans as is obvious by observing how nearly every human has acted since there started being humans. This means like other social animal species, we need time to develope an understanding of our society and language. We sort of imprint on those around us and absorb what behavior is expected of us. This is where gender as most of us probably use it comes into play. Unlike what's been often asked, people cannot be taught to be a different gender, ie making a male baby see themselves as female by reassigning their genitals at birth and raising them as female. Yes that's a thing someone did, no it did not work.

Our sex likely goes into our neurological development. Now this is not at all to say men and women have inherent, set brain traits. This is more like how we have discovered that PCOS is a neurological disease caused by signals from the brain making the body to produce atypical hormones. The child has a general sense whether it is more like men, women, neither, or a mix and often subconsciously follows that example should no other desire interfere. Later in life this aids with social blending and sex-based intraspecific competition. Ones association with gender and presentation may change subtly throughout life especially towards the onset of puberty. I think this is why a lot of cis people have no strong sense of gender, as well as some trans people, as there is either a strong drive towards something unrelated to those traits or a very low drive to follow them. The sense seems to very frequently correlate with the desire to have sex based traits that are generally attributed to ones gender if they are trans, or acceptance with anatomy if not. The end result(for trans people) is essentially someone with mixed sex traits, trying to live comfortably with the gender their consciousness is rather than what they happened to develope externally/reproductively.

So when someone like the guy(?) above talks about gender this way, instead of all that stuff I just explained they are probably thinking more like this: men are their sex traits plus their gender roles. Therefore if someone wants to be feminine, they must be a woman or desire womanhood, as that to them is the point of being feminine. Men are masculine, and so a desire to be masculine makes you a man. In this line of thought trans people are acceptable, and can fit the ideal that sex traits have no value, as their desire for different roles is sufficient. If a trans woman is feminine, she's a girl because why would she want to be feminine unless she would be better off as a girl, as the desire in and of itself is female. This impression is not uncommon among newly accepting trans allies, seeing gender as a social construct and therefore trans people's genders as taking advantage of this fact. Of course most trans folk take it a step farther that it's all social and stupid so I can do whatever I want, but not so much with cis people. The price for this is confusion when trans people, or anyone really, is GNC. When we assert that gender is not in any way related to sex, but then in the same breath clarify that there is no social gender role to relate gender to either, and you also claim that it is utterly impossible for their to be a neurological reason for gender, it comes down to the point where gender is undefinable and meaningless. Though some may reval in this, it actively discourages any thought on the subject of gender and confuses most people to the point they abandon us because we refuse to even try to be coherent. It's not really fair when the community itself can't agree what gender is to be upset at outsiders for not getting it.

cis people are so funny like they’re just out there shaking & cowering in fear bc they can’t tell what gender someone is. relax

[nothorses]

Interview With An Ex-Radfem

exradfem is an anonymous Tumblr user who identifies as transmasculine, and previously spent time in radical feminist communities. They have offered their insight into those communities using their own experiences and memories as a firsthand resource.

Background

I was raised in an incredibly fundamentalist religion, and so was predisposed to falling for cult rhetoric. Naturally, I was kicked out for being a lesbian. I was taken in by the queer community, particularly the trans community, and I got back on my feet- somehow. I had a large group of queer friends, and loved it. I fully went in on being the Best Trans Ally Possible, and constantly tried to be a part of activism and discourse.

Unfortunately, I was undersocialized, undereducated, and overenthusiastic. I didn't fully understand queer or gender theory. In my world, when my parents told me my sexuality was a choice and I wasn't born that way, they were absolutely being homophobic. I understood that no one should care if it's a choice or not, but it was still incredibly, vitally important to me that I was born that way.

On top of that, I already had an intense distrust of men bred by a lot of trauma. That distrust bred a lot of gender essentialism that I couldn't pull out of the gender binary. I felt like it was fundamentally true that men were the problem, and that women were inherently more trustworthy. And I really didn't know where nonbinary people fit in.

Then I got sucked down the ace exclusionist pipeline; the way the arguments were framed made sense to my really surface-level, liberal view of politics. This had me primed to exclude people –– to feel like only those that had been oppressed exactly like me were my community.

Then I realized I was attracted to my nonbinary friend. I immediately felt super guilty that I was seeing them as a woman. I started doing some googling (helped along by ace exclusionists on Tumblr) and found the lesfem community, which is basically radfem “lite”: lesbians who are "only same sex attracted". This made sense to me, and it made me feel so much less guilty for being attracted to my friend; it was packaged as "this is just our inherent, biological desire that is completely uncontrollable". It didn't challenge my status quo, it made me feel less guilty about being a lesbian, and it allowed me to have a "biological" reason for rejecting men.

I don't know how much dysphoria was playing into this, and it's something I will probably never know; all of this is just piecing together jumbled memories and trying to connect dots. I know at the time I couldn't connect to this trans narrative of "feeling like a woman". I couldn't understand what trans women were feeling. This briefly made me question whether I was nonbinary, but radfem ideas had already started seeping into my head and I'm sure I was using them to repress that dysphoria. That's all I can remember.

The lesfem community seeded gender critical ideas and larger radfem princples, including gender socialization, gender as completely meaningless, oppression as based on sex, and lesbian separatism. It made so much innate sense to me, and I didn't realize that was because I was conditioned by the far right from the moment of my birth. Of course women were just a biological class obligated to raise children: that is how I always saw myself, and I always wanted to escape it.

I tried to stay in the realms of TIRF (Trans-Inclusive Radical Feminist) and "gender critical" spaces, because I couldn't take the vitriol on so many TERF blogs. It took so long for me to get to the point where I began seeing open and unveiled transphobia, and I had already read so much and bought into so much of it that I thought that I could just ignore those parts.

In that sense, it was absolutely a pipeline for me. I thought I could find a "middle ground", where I could "center women" without being transphobic.

Slowly, I realized that the transphobia was just more and more disgustingly pervasive. Some of the trans men and butch women I looked up to left the groups, and it was mostly just a bunch of nasty people left. So I left.

After two years offline, I started to recognize I was never going to be a healthy person without dealing with my dysphoria, and I made my way back onto Tumblr over the pandemic. I have realized I'm trans, and so much of this makes so much more sense now. I now see how I was basically using gender essentialism to repress my identity and keep myself in the closet, how it was genuinely weaponized by TERFs to keep me there, and how the ace exclusionist movement primed me into accepting lesbian separatism- and, finally, radical feminism.

The Interview

You mentioned the lesfem community, gender criticals, and TIRFs, which I haven't heard about before- would you mind elaborating on what those are, and what kinds of beliefs they hold?

I think the lesfem community is recruitment for lesbians into the TERF community. Everything is very sanitized and "reasonable", and there's an effort not to say anything bad about trans women. The main focus was that lesbian = homosexual female, and you can't be attracted to gender, because you can't know someone's gender before knowing them; only their sex.

It seemed logical at the time, thinking about sex as something impermeable and gender as internal identity. The most talk about trans women I saw initially was just in reference to the cotton ceiling, how sexual orientation is a permanent and unchangeable reality. Otherwise, the focus was homophobia. This appealed to me, as I was really clinging to the "born this way" narrative.

This ended up being a gateway to two split camps - TIRFs and gender crits.

I definitely liked to read TIRF stuff, mostly because I didn't like the idea of radical feminism having to be transphobic. But TIRFs think that misogyny is all down to hatred of femininity, and they use that as a basis to be able to say trans women are "just as" oppressed.

Gender criticals really fought out against this, and pushed the idea that gender is fake, and misogyny is just sex-based oppression based on reproductive issues. They believe that the source of misogyny is the "male need to control the source of reproduction"- which is what finally made me think I had found the "source" of my confusion. That's why I ended up in gender critical circles instead of TIRF circles.

I'm glad, honestly, because the mask-off transphobia is what made me finally see the light. I wouldn't have seen that in TIRF communities.

I believed this in-between idea, that misogyny was "sex-based oppression" and that transphobia was also real and horrible, but only based on transition, and therefore a completely different thing. I felt that this was the "nuanced" position to take.

The lesfem community also used the fact that a lot of lesbians have partners who transition, still stay with their lesbian partners, and see themselves as lesbian- and that a lot of trans men still see themselves as lesbians. That idea is very taboo and talked down in liberal queer spaces, and I had some vague feelings about it that made me angry, too. I really appreciated the frank talk of what I felt were my own taboo experiences.

I think gender critical ideology also really exploited my own dysphoria. There was a lot of talk about how "almost all butches have dysphoria and just don't talk about it", and that made me feel so much less alone and was, genuinely, a big relief to me that I "didn't have to be trans".

Lesfeminism is essentially lesbian separatism dressed up as sex education. Lesfems believe that genitals exist in two separate categories, and that not being attracted to penises is what defines lesbians. This is used to tell cis lesbians, "dont feel bad as a lesbian if you're attracted to trans men", and that they shouldn’t feel "guilty" for not being attracted to trans women. They believe that lesbianism is not defined as being attracted to women, it is defined as not being attracted to men; which is a root idea in lesbian separatism as well.

Lesfems also believe that attraction to anything other than explicit genitals is a fetish: if you're attracted to flat chests, facial hair, low voices, etc., but don't care if that person has a penis or not, you're bisexual with a fetish for masculine attributes. Essentially, they believe the “-sexual” suffix refers to the “sex” that you are assigned at birth, rather than your attraction: “homosexual” refers to two people of the same sex, etc. This was part of their pushback to the ace community, too.

I think they exploited the issues of trans men and actively ignored trans women intentionally, as a way of avoiding the “TERF” label. Pronouns were respected, and they espoused a constant stream of "trans women are women, trans men are men (but biology still exists and dictates sexual orientation)" to maintain face.

They would only be openly transmisogynistic in more private, radfem-only spaces.

For a while, I didn’t think that TERFs were real. I had read and agreed with the ideology of these "reasonable" people who others labeled as TERFs, so I felt like maybe it really was a strawman that didn't exist. I think that really helped suck me in.

It sounds from what you said like radical feminism works as a kind of funnel system, with "lesfem" being one gateway leading in, and "TIRF" and "gender crit" being branches that lesfem specifically funnels into- with TERFs at the end of the funnel. Does that sound accurate?

I think that's a great description actually!

When I was growing up, I had to go to meetings to learn how to "best spread the word of god". It was brainwashing 101: start off by building a relationship, find a common ground. Do not tell them what you really believe. Use confusing language and cute innuendos to "draw them in". Prey on their emotions by having long exhausting sermons, using music and peer pressure to manipulate them into making a commitment to the church, then BAM- hit them with the weird shit.

Obviously I am paraphrasing, but this was framed as a necessary evil to not "freak out" the outsiders.

I started to see that same talk in gender critical circles: I remember seeing something to the effect of, "lesfem and gender crit spaces exist to cleanse you of the gender ideology so you can later understand the 'real' danger of it", which really freaked me out; I realized I was in a cult again.

I definitely think it's intentional. I think they got these ideas from evangelical Christianity, and they actively use it to spread it online and target young lesbians and transmascs. And I think gender critical butch spaces are there to draw in young transmascs who hate everything about femininity and womanhood, and lesfem spaces are there to spread the idea that trans women exist as a threat to lesbianism.

Do you know if they view TIRFs a similar way- as essentially prepping people for TERF indoctrination?

Yes and no.

I've seen lots of in-fighting about TIRFs; most TERFs see them as a detriment, worse than the "TRAs" themselves. I've also definitely seen it posed as "baby's first radfeminism". A lot of TIRFs are trans women, at least from what I've seen on Tumblr, and therefore are not accepted or liked by radfems. To be completely honest, I don't think they're liked by anyone. They just hate men.

TIRFs are almost another breed altogether; I don't know if they have ties to lesfems at all, but I do think they might've spearheaded the online ace exclusionist discourse. I think a lot of them also swallowed radfem ideology without knowing what it was, and parrot it without thinking too hard about how it contradicts with other ideas they have.

The difference is TIRFs exist. They're real people with a bizarre, contradictory ideology. The lesfem community, on the other hand, is a completely manufactured "community" of crypto-terfs designed specifically to indoctrinate people into TERF ideology.

Part of my interest in TIRFs here is that they seem to have a heavy hand in the way transmascs are treated by the trans community, and if you're right that they were a big part of ace exclusionism too they've had a huge impact on queer discourse as a whole for some time. It seems likely that Baeddels came out of that movement too.

Yes, there’s a lot of overlap. The more digging I did, the more I found that it's a smaller circle running the show than it seems. TIRFs really do a lot of legwork in peddling the ideology to outer queer community, who tend to see it as generic feminism.

TERFs joke a lot about how non-radfems will repost or reblog from TERFs, adding "op is a TERF”. They're very gleeful when people accept their ideology with the mask on. They think it means these people are close to fully learning the "truth", and they see it as further evidence they have the truth the world is hiding. I think it's important to speak out against radical feminism in general, because they’re right; their ideology does seep out into the queer community.

Do you think there's any "good" radical feminism?

No. It sees women as the ultimate victim, rather than seeing gender as a tool to oppress different people differently. Radical feminism will always see men as the problem, and it is always going to do harm to men of color, gay men, trans men, disabled men, etc.

Women aren't a coherent class, and radfems are very panicked about that fact; they think it's going to be the end of us all. But what's wrong with that? That's like freaking out that white isn't a coherent group. It reveals more about you.

It's kind of the root of all exclusionism, the more I think about it, isn't it? Just freaking out that some group isn't going to be exclusive anymore.

Radical feminists believe that women are inherently better than men.

For TIRFs, it's gender essentialism. For TERFs, its bio essentialism. Both systems are fundamentally broken, and will always hurt the groups most at risk. Centering women and misogyny above all else erases the root causes of bigotry and oppression, and it erases the intersections of race and class. The idea that women are always fundamentally less threatening is very white and privileged.

It also ignores how cis women benefit from gender norms just as cis men do, and how cis men suffer from gender roles as well. It’s a system of control where gender non-conformity is a punishable offense.

[z0ruas]

What’s Wrong with Being Butch?

by twentythree for “Blood and Visions: Womyn Reconciling With Being Butch”

“A lot, apparently. I’ve been wondering how I lived as male for three years and yet never in my life entertained the concept of being butch. Throughout my transition and detransition I have fallen into the trap of gender stereotypes. I’ve been re-evaluating where to go from here, and I realized that one of my biggest issues at this juncture is not wanting to play the female gender role, and feeling as if that means I am not female, or cannot live as one. I have felt guilty about confusing others. Regardless of how I intellectually understand that no presentation has to indicate gender, I still associate the two. It’s impossible to get away from in our society.

“The other day, my manager was around while a customer repeatedly referred to me as a boy. Later, she asked me if that bothered me. I replied that it did, but I did not quite know how to correct people, especially while in a position of polite customer service. ‘Well, you cut your hair, so what’d you expect?’

“My hair is the only feature I have ever seen as beautiful. I love my hair, and I wish I could just give it to someone else. I don’t want to be pretty, I don’t want to spend time worrying about my appearance, fixing my hair. I relished having it chopped off at 18 while the hairdresser mourned the fallen ringlets, and I have enjoyed every buzz cut I’ve given myself since. I continue to go back to thinking that I’ll have to grow my hair out in order to live as female / be a ‘real’ woman. I’m pretty sure that would allow me to be read as female more consistently, and that without longer hair I will often be male in a stranger’s eyes. But I am most comfortable with short hair, and other people’s opinions about it shouldn’t be worth all the effort of long hair.

“When I was transitioning, I was adamant that I knew there was nothing wrong with being a butch lesbian. It just wasn’t ‘who I was.’ I’m still trying to work that one out. That phrase does not sit easily with me, still. Butch is unacceptable. Butch is unwanted. Outcast, failure of gender, freak of nature. Butch is a joke. It is old school. It is difficult.

“I used to say that I knew full well that I could be any sort of woman I wanted to be. What I really meant was more along the lines that the 1914 Model T came in any color, so long as it was black. I don’t believe trans men when they repeat this sort of thing, because I had no idea I was lying when I said it, either. I’ve seen some follow up this phrase by saying that they have butch friends, so of course they don’t think it’s bad, so did I, that it had nothing to do with my shame about myself, which did not bear any sort of label, and thus was easily disguised.

“It makes more sense from the other side: it makes me angry when I read a trans woman’s description of what it means to ‘feel like a woman.’ It’s always just an entire list of everything I am not, and yet I am a woman. I don’t go out of my way to try and be read as female, and I don’t need to. I want to be stronger, I want to build muscle, I want to be minimal and ‘masculine’ and I want that to feel okay.

“Other people have dictated my comfort level most of my life, and I am so pissed off that I have internalized the putrid message that what I am is not meant to be, natural, or acceptable. I am not a man. I cannot become a man, and I shouldn’t need to be a man for my ‘masculinity’ to be acceptable. I am exhausted from punishing myself for being the sort of woman I am. These ideas about butch are so ingrained that they never even rose to consciousness before. ‘Butch woman’ is not a paradox and it is only misogyny that says so.

BUTCH: JUST LIKE OTHER GIRLS”

[papirouge]

And don't even get me started on make up. It's super sad seeing tradfem saying that they wear make up because they want to look pretty... like you don't like yourself already? Do you think women need to wear make up to be considered pretty? And men don't? Do you think God made womens faces imperfect thus why you feel the need to cover His desing with these chemicals??

And seeing tradmen saying that they want their women to wear make up... and then they excuse themselves saying "but it's only light make up!!!" Like are you really attracted to women? Or are you attracted to feminity? Would you still like your girlfriend if she stopped wearing make up? Or shaving? Like I suspect that some of these "tradmen" still secretly watch porn and are too used to seeing the made up women on porn... either that or they still haven't shaken up the effects that porn addiction left in them.

And then you see them refer to women who wear short hair and pants and don't care much about their appearance as wanting to be like men, while also posting or rebloging dumb photos that have a phrase like "choose feminity" that features a heavily dolled up women with a tight, revealing dress, high heels, long hair and obvious make up.

Like ok, by this logic then an MtF who has long hair, wears dresses, shaves, uses high heels, has long fake lashes and wears make up is more of a woman than an actual woman who has short hair, doesn't shave, doesn't wear make up and prefers to wear comfortable clothing to "hide her womanly curves" (I literally have seen some of them phrase it this way 🤢)

Like ok sir, you don't find most women in their natural state attractive, they don't make your peepee hard, whatver but what does this have to do with religion?

And then they have the audacity to make fun of trans people when they're literally using the same stupid logic! Just with different agendas.

Sorry for filling your inbox whit this rant, it's just that I have been thinking about this topic lately and then I saw that post about life being too short for feminity and your comment about it and I just had to get it out of my system.

Anon you really feel sorry for dropping in my ask box you've been spilling nothing but #facts and you're the best anon I ever received so far😭💙💙🔥🍵

Honestly I'm team #tradmenshutupaboutwomenchallenge at this point. 99% of tradmen on this hellsite give me overweight mouth breather teas, sorry not sorry. They should be quiet, stay in their lane, and stop interacting with tradfem to simp after "ideal feminity". Tradfem aren't out there obsessing around men's look to fit an idea of "ideal masculinity" and shoving themselves into every discussion about them, so why do men feel entitled to do that?

I just CAN'T with these men having sooo many things to say about women, what they should wear, how they should behave, when they're out there, having the audacity to exist doing nothing to improve their own life and work to better themselves & become a fitted husband. Sorry but men bickering over women's look is extremely tacky and I'm shocked that none of the tradfem -that this kind of creature LOVE orbiting around- never had anything to say about it. A shame they enable such typical weirdo around - they only seemingly draw the line at porn blogs lmao The bar is just *that* low.....

Ah yes the famous "just light make up :)" LOL what's the point anyway? don't wear any make up at all if you're hellbent on wearing as little as possible¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You're right on the money babe : one of my biggest turning point in me dropping make up altogether was how disrespectful it was to disfigure God's work like that. If anything, not wearing make up is a good exercise of modesty and humility because it forces us to go beyond our fleshly desire to be appealing. And that's such a liberating experience. Make up is ALWAYS portrayed negatively in the Bible, so it does say everything about what God thinks of it. So weird how tradfem will totally understand such narrative when it comes to polygamy (never displayed as positive + always ended up bad) but suddenly when it's make up, they go Stevie Wonder and be like "just little make up is okay :)" Just a little bit of polygamy is okay, then LMAO

I remember one tradfem in her blog saying that "women not shaving was weird" and my petty self got like "how is women not shaving "weird" but not men?🤔" and she NEVER bothered replying to me lmao

Say what you want about radfem, but they're lowkey right on the money on the fact that some tradfem are actually men identified and rehash male identified code of feminity and pass it off as "biblical feminity". It also explains why tradfem will gloss over male bs to not sound like an angry feminazi but one woman says something remotely harsh against men and 'masculinity is under attack' lol Why femicide and rape stats aren't enough to make you think women are under attack?🤔 see? male identification.

Sorry but cutesy dress aren't any more biblical than comfortable/practical wear. Make up isn't biblical. These tradmen just want a "Christian doll" but a "doll" nonetheless and tradmen are buying right into this fishy narrative.

And yes, these unnecessary strict gender roles are partly responsible for transideology. Female not feeling comfortable with traditional feminine code start to think something is wrong with them and/or that they're not female. Women fetishizing feminity aren't any better than TIM (= trans identified men) doing so. So yeah, it's very ironic to see trads clown trans when trans are a byproduct of this idolization of feminity and compulsive reinforcement of gender roles in an outward way.

Eve didn't have her body hair shaved or plucked eyebrows. She most definitely didn't wear make up or wore fancy dress. And yet, she was the model for womanhood. Let that sink in.

[lochnessies]

ok here’s a dissection of a post an anon sent me the link to and bc i have the worst time management possible and i completely forgot i had it lol so sorry anon here you go ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

I am constantly thinking about how Edelgard just doesn’t seem designed to appeal to cishet men.

i hate to be the one to break this news to you op but just because a character doesn’t show skin like charlotte fire emblem doesn’t mean she isn’t designed to pander to men. she’s very much designed to pander to the (majority straight male) player base with her ‘uwu i only trust you professor omg did u see that rat? pls don’t look at my painting of you uwu’.

then there’s the whole edelgard c support in japanese where byleth makes reference to having come to her room for ‘yobi’ which is

there’s also the scene where byleth can make an unsolicited comment about edelgard’s breast size. which is… uhh… gross.

edelgard also has cipher cards that go from slightly fanserviceie to full on suggestive

and also her breast armor that my sister relentlessly mocked lol

and here’s a chart from the 3h subreddit about gender/sexually in regards to edelgard and edeleth. it’s extremely straight male. op might have just overlooked this since they probably don’t go on reddit and stay on tumblr (which unlike reddit is mostly female and has a high lgbt demographic).

Like the joke is that Bleagles is the Gay House, but everything about her feels deliberately non-hetero.

i don’t like where this is going…

She’s dressed in sharp outfits covering her upper body, with proportions that don’t seem exaggerated.

so women who cover up must be lgbt because straight women are naturally more revealing? oh y i k e s

Her poise and the way she effortlessly flourishes her axe exhibits an air of coolness. While titties out =/= character of no substance, Edelgard being dressed more modestly suggests that she wasn’t designed with male-centred fanservice in mind.

“titties don’t equal no substance but here’s my post on how she has more substance because she doesn’t show titties” ok

And she still looks absolutely stunning in her more modest attire (like seriously, I haven’t felt the need to return to cosplay in years but I want to do her academy look so bad). 

yes she does. amazing design 10/10. i have a feeling this is the only part i’m going to agree with

Edelgard is intense. She does not mince her words and she is constantly evaluating you. Though she tries, she has a difficult time understanding her peers initially. Early on, she talks about how she would sacrifice herself and others in the name of some greater good. She is terrible at communicating with her peers. She has to be seen as infallible. Her heart has been hardened for years and she assumes she has to stay that way. She also assumes everyone mourns the same way she does - which is why she (kind of insensitively) insists you move on when Jeralt dies. Because to her, grief has to be channeled towards action, or else you’ll get lost in it. This attitude is demonstrated time and time again as she presses on. It can make her come off as cold and unfeeling - but look closer, and she’s anything but.

don’t really have anything to say at this part. it is pretty on the nose though i would slightly disagree with that last sentence a bit. i wouldn’t say she’s as i feeling as hubert is but all of her talks of the war boil down to how she feels and never her victims.

Her story is ultimately about her realizing that to achieve her goals, she needs to let people in and allow herself to want things like cakes and tea parties and lazy days in peace. 

????? what ????? her goals include imperialism, ethnic and religious targeting. her story is about having a set of beliefs and mowing down anybody who stands in her way. that has nothing to do with tea, friends, and lazy days. also am i supposed to be sad that she has to get up everyday and work? i do that and i didn’t start a war and only throw a pity party for myself

The game leaves the player guessing as to how involved the Flame Emperor was in each Part I event, makes you feel hurt by her betrayal, and leaves you with a choice: do you follow the orders of the woman who tried to make you a god without your consent, or a young girl with questionable morals about to throw the world into upheaval?

this isn’t an ideal situation but i think i’m going to stick with the woman who tried to make me a god since i’m not selfish and i know it’s not only my desires and life at stake here. plus the green hair slaps ngl

Choosing her of your own volition (not for completionist reasons) requires the basic ability to sympathize with a woman’s pain. It also requires the player to read beyond her unwavering will and dubious methods to get a sense of how deep that pain goes and how the theme of humanity relates to her differently in each route.

i’m not going to touch this since @nilsh13 made a post on it that i’ll link here. i agree with everything he said so to repeat it would be redundant.

The player must be able to see a young woman’s desperate resolve to change the world so it stops exploiting people and ruining lives. They must be able to accept the fact that women can make the same morally wrong and ambivalent decisions that complicated male characters get to make all the time and still be the one to root for.

literally the same reason i love rhea lol her goddess experiments are dubious at best but her reasons are the same you mentioned. i would say that i like this quality in edelgard too if her ending, while bloody, actually ended in a good outcome for fodlan.

This is not unique to LGBT+ people, but this population is likely to understand why Edelgard feels so strongly about why she has to change the system. 

i understand wanting to change a system, i really do. like edelgard, i’m an opinionated bisexual woman (who’s also physically disabled) so yeah i get it. and change can be good but it can also be terrible. even if the church was the boogeyman edelgard treats it as she still replaces it with her own shit regime. so it’s the same circus just with a new conductor.

I don’t think “Edelgard gets undue criticism because she’s a woman” captures the full picture. An important aspect of her treatment by certain parts of the fandom is that she’s a radical woman.

or maybe she does some pretty fucked up shit and it goes unacknowledged in her own route. and yeah she’s radical but in all the worst ways.

Her hatred of the Church and the Crest system resonates way harder with people who have been hurt by institutions that are deeply engrained in our society. 

and what about people who have been hurt by systems where their ‘merit’ didn’t measure up and they were left behind? what about people from nations that experienced imperialism?

Siding with her means siding against the Church - which, while different from real world religious institutions, still invokes language about “sin” and “punishment.

yeah the ‘sins’ and ‘punishments’ are used in relation to attempted murders which i think everybody can agree is a bad thing that needs to be condemned.

Choosing Edelgard will likely hit different if homophobic and transphobic Christians used that rhetoric against you.

it has literally nothing to do with ‘sins’ and ‘punishments’ in regards to being gay or trans. that’s you projecting. especially since the church has 2 canon gay characters and two coded ones.

like i can understand why having a church condemn you can be uncomfortable but i’m begging you to please look at the context of what’s happening.

I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that the reason F/F Edeleth is the more popular iteration of that ship because most people who would choose to S-support Edelgard are LGBT+ themselves. This is not a revelation. To anyone in the community, it’s fairly obvious. 

i was talking to nilish and he said

so yeah… while there is definitely sapphic femleth shippers out there, there’s still a whole lot of weird fetishizing going on from straight men about edelgard.

Crimson Flower was my first route. I went into the game knowing absolutely nothing. I played it during the last week of 2020 and hoo boy was it cathartic. 

i can tell. this wasn’t supposed to be a dig but it came out that way and i’m not taking it out.

I felt like I was living out a gay revolution power fantasy, where I could truly change systems of oppression while fighting alongside a group of troubled students I’d shaped the lives of.

so a gay revolution power fantasy (cringe) goes hand in hand with imperialism and installing a dictatorship? also the war had nothing to do with sexuality.

Through your unwavering support, Edelgard learns that she needs to be human, that she must listen to her friends, and that she’s allowed to enjoy the world she’s creating.

edelgard gets to learn how to be human all while hunting those who don’t. and she doesn’t listen fo her friends. she doesn’t even trust them. she’s willing to talk to byleth but keep the people who’s been by her side for five years in the dark about everything. and yeah she gets to enjoy her new words since she’s on top. hate to be a commoner under her rule after she burned down my village in her war.

I love this character so much.

clearly. and i honestly don’t care if somebody likes her. i do as well even if my sometimes scathing words can make it seem otherwise.

It has been six months since I first played and I am still analyzing her,

me too. please help me escape i’m losing my mind

because there’s so much depth. Yet so many people fail to see that depth and dismiss her as evil,

i mean, she does some fucked up shit that goes beyond any of the less than desirable actions of the other main characters and does an extremely poor job in trying to make herself seem innocent. i personally don’t think she’s pure evil but i completely understand where the people who say she is are coming from.

because they never had the will to understand complicated women in the first place. 

that’s big talk from somebody who implies that a gay pope is comparable to homophobic and transphobic irl religions and that leads an oppressive regime all because she uses the vague terms of sin and punishments that you have to gay power fantasy your way out of

[i-did]

hi mlm here. so i want to write andreil smut but im a virgin so i have no idea what exactly sex is like. but i do not want to write it for the.... straight women gaze. what are some things that are accurate to write about. this is prolly super nsfw but i dont know who to ask.

Okay so this response took me literally months, and I'm sorry about that. I honestly was so excited when I got this question. I don't know why I put off responding?? But here I go: 

CW for discussion of NSFW, STD’s, and a lil homophobia

I bet a lot of people who write smut are virgins tbh, that's not to insult anyone or anything, but like writing is a non physical way to explore sex and fantasies by yourself, so you’re definitely not alone lol.

So you're MLM and want to write smut, (and others who want to get my opinions on writing non-fetishistic smut).

Porn is porn and can have unrealistic circumstances to fulfill said fantasy, such as anything from people messing around in locker rooms to tentacles.

To get a general sense of what is common in MLM sexuality, (rather than the typical feminine gaze that is seen in smut) looking at gay porn and gay porn categories is good insight. 

Bear culture, muscle culture, leather culture, etc. 

These are obviously still porn and unrealistic, however being attracted to sweat, jockstraps, and muscles is very common outside of porn. 

Bear culture is a body-positive movement that started because of the gay community's fat-phobia, age-phobia, and overall shittyness about body hair. 

Leather culture is also really big, it started because of the belief that gay men couldn’t be dominant or “masculine”, even in bed. So in America, leather culture was a way a lot of MLM embraced themselves. 

Going to pride, you will see many men wearing those leather harnesses, it doesn't indicate a preference of topping or bottoming necessarily, they're just something mlm wear and has grown quite popular in the culture, I've known some men to say it feels like a security blanket for them. 

And I think it’s very important to understand these cultures or at least be aware of them on a base level if you’re going to write gay porn. 

Also looking at erotic MLM art made by men, there is Tom of Finland, who was very historically significant, and is the most famous erotic gay artist. There is gay literature, one that openly talks about sex quite frankly is the book “We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan” which is a series of diary excerpts from a real gay trans man where you follow his life up until he died during the aids epidemic. He talks about sex with partners and discovering himself as well as what being a gay man means to him. He has a real love for sex in a way that is very unashamed and interesting to read about. We know that he wrote the latter half of his diaries with the plan of compiling them and publishing them but he passed away and people in his life carried out this wish for him. He is considered a significant part of gay and transgender history because of this, and his diaries are in LGBT museums. 

Reading gay poetry, looking at gay art, erotic, romantic, grungy, whatever, and you will find and see how they portray things differently than when it’s not portrayed by gay men usually. I mean there is a clear difference between yaoi and bara and that's the audience and authors. Some yaoi are made by MLM, (well technically their called gei comi, or gay comics in Japanese)

“Also known as ‘gei comi’ or ‘men's love,’ bara comics are by men, for men. There is a yaoi equivalent to this, and it is called ‘gachi muchi’-- it is written by women, for women.” – myanimelist.net (lol)

 but more than 90% aren't. I haven't ever heard of a non-MLM bara artist, but I'm sure there's at least one. 

Of course, I've seen things depicting MLM just together pretty realistically that didn't feel like it was written by someone who definitely wasn't MLM, but these scenes tend to be more writing in the general sense of art in the general sense rather than porn, which has a huge gap in characteristics between stuff usually written by MLM vs when it's written by women. (sorry about the binary language here)

I know some people don't like any realism in their porn, but I personally really like small details such as prep being mentioned, foreplay, even acknowledgment of the existence of condoms even if they choose to go without.

Especially as an MLM who lives in America currently, the ever-present acknowledgment and stigmatism of AIDS is around us. We think about it, even when we don't want to. An entire generation of MLM, trans people, and a lot of POC were wiped out. Not necessarily a PWP detail, but including discussion of prep, PrEP (the anti HIV medication) and/or getting tested, even for diseases besides HIV, is a small detail that I think is nice. MLM often have to have a moment when opening up a conversation about sex where HIV is mentioned, our dating apps and hook up apps have sections where you put positive, negative, non-transmissible/undetectable, or prefer not to say. The books take place in 2006 so PrEP didn't exist yet, but also the aids pandemic was happening when they were being born and as young kids, so it wasn't that long ago in society's mind. It's still illegal for many trans people and MLM to donate blood despite that the blood is screened for diseases after donation. 

Also, some realism I like is when a character isn't getting their ass ate first in the morning. Like, for me that's a huge turn-off because I think “holy fuck hygiene.” specifically with anal play I just really think even casually mentioning “washing up” or basic prep, or if you want more accuracy/details mention time between last meals or “x only ate a salad, so he would be fine”. It's like a joke in the gay community to eat chili fries or some shit on a date to indicate that either there will be no anal, or if there is you’re not going to be the one to do it, because you just fuckin ate those fries to say so. 

A cock just going in without prep and no condom is going to A) hurt very bad the body does not do that naturally and can cause injury B) get shit dick.

An also not sexy detail that is common for sex is just laying down a towel so you don’t have to wash sheets. Lube on hands? Wipe off on the towel that you’re on rn. Laying down a towel is pretty normal especially for anal. But this is if you’re going for a much more playing for accuracy sex scene. 

Honestly just writing fingering and prep and stuff like that in my opinion goes a long way and also gives the audience more to read. 

Also, sex is way more than peen in hole. Get creative, frottage, mutual masturbation, docking? Idk like thigh fucking, fucking buttcheeks but not hole, handies, blowies, anal oral, Neil doesn’t have to be the only one who gets his ass ate and things don’t have to follow formulas, in fact, they’re better when they don’t. 

Sex comes in many forms, and like I’ve definitely been with someone and he took off his shirt and I was like what, because he was skinny and clean-shaven and I didn’t expect him to have nearly as much chest hair as he did. I bet honestly Neil has a massive bush, like fuckin, massive. 

Andrew and Neil don’t have to like everything the same amount, Neil could be like “I wanna lick your armpit” and gets really off on it, Andrew is neutral but likes that Neil likes it and agrees even if it does nothing for him physically. Honestly, Neil having a sweat kink imo is pretty fitting lol. 

Try not to categorize the characters into “the bottom” and “the top”, or “the man” and “the woman”

This is something I see a lot and pay attention to how “the bottom” tends to adopt traits that are seen in straight porn that are over-exaggerated. I’m not saying it's inherently wrong to write someone as slim, but we know Neil isn't delicate, but I personally wouldn't categorize him as slim. He's a college-level athlete and is definitely muscular and defined, he has some bulk at least, he isn’t model lean for sure imo. You also often see PWP where the bottom makes a bunch of noise and the top makes none, or the top grunts and the bottom mewls, these are things I personally feel gives the bottom the role of a woman in porn. I don’t think Andreil have rough sex necessarily, but I do think when Neil does make noise, it would be because it was practically punched out of him by the feeling, and would sound more like a gasp than a kitten or whatever. There's nothing wrong with writing them both grunting, both of their voices being lower. Someone bottoming doesn’t suddenly magically not have secondary sex characteristics and stubble and body hair or a deep voice or however, they’re like everywhere else. 

When I read an over-emphasis on Neil’s slim waist and swaying hips and ass I’m like,,, okay someone please mention Andrew looking at Neil’s dick or bulge or shoulders. As an MLM, what do you find hot about men? I like stomachs and arms and shoulders, jawlines, collarbones, asses yes but like in a different way than how I like women’s asses (I’m bi lol) they are smaller and I like them muscled and squared almost. I look at veins on hands and noses and shoulders and backs, I look at a lot and I honestly don't have a type. But yeah so think about what you like, why you like it, what you might want. Or look at what others like, and why and how they want and like it.

what would Neil like, how would he feel about it? And Andrew. I kinda feel like Andrew is low-key masc 4 masc but that's just me lmaoo. Anyways, good luck writing. 

[henshengs]

About Rule 63 fanworks

I was asked yesterday to elaborate on my genderbend opinions, as a trans person, which I’m happy to do, and I’ve thought about it a bit today to make sure I’m not saying something off the cuff and not thought through. Still, this is a sensitive, complicated topic, and I’m open to discussion on it.

This also got long, so I’m putting it under a cut.

So, obviously I can’t speak for all trans people. No minority group is a monolith in our opinions and this is particularly the case for the transgender community because our experiences are so very diverse and individual.

I am very rarely hurt or offended by genderbends/genderswaps/rule 63 fanworks. I know people for whom this is not the case, and I believe the pain involved is very real. The thing is... living in this world is inherently kinda painful when you’re trans. This world’s not built for us. All kinds of random things can cause me pain throughout my day. Store mannequins. My own reflection. Lesbian poetry. Pictures of other trans people. When something triggers my dysphoria or feelings of alienation, I have to stop, acknowledge the feeling, and then consider whether the thing is, outside of hurting me, contributing to the ignorance of and hatred of people like me by its very existence.

I don’t think the basic act of asking, “What if this character who is a cis man, was a cis woman instead?” does that. I think if anything, it opens the door to then ask “what if he was a trans man? Or a trans woman? Or nonbinary?”

Asking “what if this story was about a cis woman” lets cis women talk about their experiences and see themselves in stories, something I think is valuable! and also can lead to stories exploring sexism and misogyny, things which affect all trans people too!

In the rest of this post I’m going to use the terms “rule 63″ and “genderswap” to refer to the act of creating a fanwork changing a cis/presumed cis man to a cis or not-specified-to-be-trans woman, because this is the vast majority of the work under that label, because most fictional heroes and iconic characters are cis men, and because people who create cis man->trans woman or cis woman->trans man content, in my experience, usually use terms like “trans headcanon” instead.

(A lot of rule 63 fanworks don’t explicitly specify that the now-female character is cis. We can presume that most artists aren’t even thinking about the possibility of the character being trans, but we can presume that for 99.99% of all art, anywhere. It’s not a unique evil of rule 63.)

The claims that rule 63 is inherently transphobic, rather than just something where it’s good to be extra careful to avoid transphobia, as far as I’ve seen, use two arguments: A) that making the character a cis woman is wasting an opportunity to make them a trans person, and this is transphobic, and B) that rule 63 fan art is gender essentialist and cissexist, because it ties gender to physical characteristics.

Argument A doesn’t hold up for me, 

because couldn’t one then say that reimagining an abled white cis character as an abled white trans woman is racist and ableist? that reimagining them as an abled trans woman of color is ableist? No transformative reimagining can cover every identity. We say “write what you know” and talk about Own Voices, and that includes cis women who want to write about the experience they know. 

It’s also not fair to tell trans people that we must always think about trans experiences, even in our fiction. A lot of the time we don’t want to have to write or think about dysphoria and discrimination and we want to live in the heads of cis characters or even just characters whose AGAB is not mentioned! 

And it is also, imo, not a great idea to pressure people who may not be educated about trans experiences to write about trans characters just because they want to explore sexism or write about lesbians. 

many, many trans people first begin exploring their gender identity through creating cis rule 63 content, because it’s ‘safer’ than directly engaging with trans content.

With argument B, I agree that a lot of rule 63 art looks like this

and this sucks. To me, though, it’s important that it’s not the genderswap aspect that makes it suck. Artists who do this are also designing original characters with sexist, gender essentialist designs. Artists who don’t draw sexist art in general, also don’t draw sexist rule 63.

(yes, I know She-Hulk is not a rule 63 of regular Hulk. But you guys know the kind of art I’m talking about.)

I’ve also noticed a genre of fanfic that’s like, “if these characters were girls, they’d be sensible and conflict avoidant and none of the plot would happen!” or “what if these violent, tragic male characters were Soft Lesbians who braided each others’ hair” and again, I assume these authors write canonical women the same way. The genderswap part isn’t the bad part, the sexism is. 

Non-sexist rule 63 actually, in my opinion, fights gender essentialism and cissexism. When a character is exactly the same except for the ways a gender essentialist world has shaped and pressured them based on their AGAB, that’s a strong statement on the constructed nature of gender! 

But the argument that making /any/ change is gender essentialist, is... I understand where it’s coming from. I am a trans person who presents androgynously and I am a hypervisible freak because of it. I would love to live in a society where visible gender markers weren’t a thing! Unfortunately, we don’t live in that society. We live in one where we are constantly under pressure to conform to one of two profiles. There are almost no gender non conforming male characters in popular media. And changing a gender conforming cis man into a gender conforming cis woman seems to me to be a neutral action at worst. Not to mention characters from historical canons, who would be under a ton of pressure to conform. 

For physical body type characteristics... 65% of all speaking roles in Hollywood are cis and male. It’s harder to get statistics on other forms of media, but it’s undeniable that overall, most stories are told about cis men who do not have breasts or wide hips. Changing the story to be about a cis woman who has those features is introducing more diversity! 

I typed “rule 63″ and “genderswap” into the tumblr search bar today, and I saw a lot of art of women with a variety of aesthetics and body shapes and characteristics, who looked like people I’d see out at the mall.

Again, I sure do wish we lived in a post gender society. But we don’t, and in our society, everyone, myself included, looks at a picture of a person and gender categorizes them based on appearance. It is not wrong for someone to draw “Geralt the Witcher as a hot butch woman” and give her some physical markers generally agreed upon to denote ‘butch woman’ rather than ‘gender conforming man’ to tell the viewer that that is what they have drawn. Just as it is not wrong to draw “my OC who is a hot butch woman who fights monsters” and give her those markers. 

Finally, both arguments against genderswaps are, in my opinion, flawed because they implicitly posit the act of creating fanworks of the original, cis male gender conforming character design, as neutral. I think this is incorrect. I think that if you’re going to argue that drawing a cis male character as a cis woman is transphobic, you have to also argue that drawing the character as a cis man is transphobic. But I’ve only seen people do this when a trans headcanon becomes extremely popular in a fandom.

Again, I’m just one person. I’m also biased, because firstly, as I mentioned, rule 63 doesn’t usually trigger my dysphoria; secondly, I almost always come down on the side of “don’t limit what people can explore in fiction; ask them to explore it more sensitively or with more content warnings instead.” 

I definitely encourage creators to seek out and listen to a variety of trans opinions. But this is mine: I love rule 63, I make a lot of it myself, and I think if no one created it we’d lose something awesome. 

At the end of the day, what I really want is more trans content*, but I’d rather have cis rule 63 than just stories about cis men. 

Also: I personally have nothing against the terms genderswap or genderbend. I don’t think it reinforces the gender binary to acknowledge its existence by saying you’re ‘swapping’ the character from being cis with one AGAB to being cis with the other. But I can definitely see the argument against it, so I don’t blame anyone for going with rule 63 instead.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading; I hope you have a nice day, and have fun creating and consuming the fanworks your heart desires. I’ll end by linking this comic, which is just eternally relevant.

(*by which I mean: trans content created by other trans people, that matches my hyperspecific headcanons, likes and dislikes, and doesn’t set off any of my often changing dysphoria triggers. See what I said at the start, about transgender existence being constantly mildly painful. There are many awesome aspects to being trans! This is one of the less awesome.)

[the-scottish-costume-guy]

JK Rowling, transphobia and a hopefully helpful post.

A few days ago I posted on my Facebook (yes I have one sue me) debunking some of the things Rowling has been saying on twitter. Since she made a statement I felt the need to make another one... but this time Im sharing it here. Please note this is long, it is fairly opinionated in places but her statements have felt so insidious I want to share something in depth. If you are cis I implore you to read, but I understand this is long and a lot of people wont want to. No judgement. 

Jk Rowling’s latest statement is a mess of valid concerns and fear mongering. At this point there can be no claim she doesn’t know what shes talking about - she herself has said shes been researching this for years. She throws in token acknowledgements to “real” trans people while framing the rest of her statements as concern for confused teens.So first things first - and something that might not be popular with some of my trans friends. I agree that teenagers should not be able to medically transition. It is a choice that should be made when the brain is fully mature. Hormone blockers are something I trust - and that are reversible. I have seen enough detransitioned people hurting to feel like we do need to be careful - especially with children who are trying to find themselves. I dont know about other people but during my teens I was coming to the crushing realisation that I wasn’t special. I was learning that no matter how well I painted someone else did it better, no matter how badly I hurt someone had it worse - I was learning about the wonderful mediocrity of life, and having anything that made me stand out gave a brief reprieve from learning to be okay with all these things. For me to be fair it was dying my hair outrageous colours and dressing in black leather during 30 degree summer heat - but its still something we cant forget. I KNOW a lot of kids claiming to be trans are - and I dont want to keep that from them, however I dont want to cause harm to the kids that are wrong. Continuing on, I’d like to address her comments about TERFS. Terfs are Self Described Trans-exclusionary-radical-feminists and the term does get thrown around a little too liberally at times. Terf is not and never will be a slur. No more than “White” is. It is about a group of people who have taken it open themselves to segregate another group - and calling that what it is, is not a crime. The reason Terf and transphobe have become synonomic is because the ‘radical feminists’ that subscribe to this have lost focus on nearly all other issues of feminism and sit squarely on “dropping the T” from the lgbt community and “keeping men out of womens bathrooms.” Terfs are overwhelmingly women - this is sadly simply a fact. Terfs are reviled because of how much it feels like a betrayal to the community. A group that fights for rights - except ours. A group that wants equality - except for us. Its different to the conservatives who hate us all equally - with Terfs we are singled out. Terfs are not, as Rowling claims, inclusionary to Trans-men. I’ve been met with a combination of pity, loathing, mockery and revulsion by people within this group. I’ve been told that I shouldn’t let homophobia push me into transitioning - only for all correspondence to abruptly drop when I mention Im marrying another man. I’ve been told my old body was beautiful - only for stunned silence when I agree. I was beautiful - I was curvy, I was a dancer and had a body to match - but I wasn’t Me. When their usual arguments against me fail - I’m met with hate. Im called anti-woman, traitor, homophobic. I even have some such comments saved on my blog. I have yet to meet a Terf who was pro-trans-man. Rowling claims that had she had the ability, as a confused teen, she may have sought to transition. I hate to tell her but she did have the ability and trans people didn’t pop into existence in the twenty-first century. I’m actually looking to do my dissertation topic in my final year on lgbt presentation throughout history - and in my overeager way I’ve already started researching. James Barry has been becoming a common name for years - a transgender surgeon who died in 1865. If Barry was able to at least socially transition from 1790 to 1860, I am fairly sure Rowling could have in 1980 - over a century later. Rowling also claims that groups of friends in schools all suddenly identify as trans at the same time. Speaking from my school experience - the queer kids group together. We seek out others like us, and we take strength from each others bravery to come out - often around the same time. We almost get a rush of resolve when one of our group musters the courage and strength, and some of us use that rush to bite the bullet ourselves. Its one of the beautiful ways the lgbt community is here for one another - and the influx of people identifying as trans is partially a factor of more people knowing the name of their feelings. Survivor bias will ignore the trans people through history without the knowledge or means to transition - and will claim they were never trans at all. Her initial statements about charities worry me in particular. As I said last time - we know sex is real, we just dont really like to be defined by it. She is worried that we’re going to “rebrand medicine” and ignores that medications for years have had warnings in their leaflets about “If you are or become pregnant” regardless of if the person receiving it has a dick or a vagina. We dont advocate for ignoring the differences in how people respond to heart attacks - and I for one would like research to be done on how hormones effect that. I dont actually know if I would respond more like a cis gender woman or a cis gender man if I were to have a heart attack or a stroke. But where possible we do want to change the language around some of these things. I have had a double mastectomy, but some Cis-men have these as well. This is not a gendered term. Why should a period be called anything else? Why call it a “womens problem.” I and Im sure many other trans people, support the research into how different medical and mental issues affect different sexes. I just think that should be extended further - and we know it should, as some medical issues affect people of different ethnicities in different ways and we don’t know how. I am truly sorry that Rowling has experienced abuse and assault of any nature. I am truly sorry that she has felt unsafe. But her feelings do not invalidate others experiences. Of the trans people I know, a saddening number have been assaulted, have been abused and in particular have experienced these things domestically. There is much work to be done on this in the UK. There are nearly no mens shelters for sufferers of violence to my knowledge. I, a trans man who have experienced some of these things in my teen years, would Not want to be around cisgender women even if I could be. A cis woman was responsible for much of the pain I personally suffered - and in fact one of the acts of violence she carried out against me was directly after I came out as trans to her. Trans women, even if they could go to male shelters, should not have to be surrounded by a group that put them in danger - in a place that is detrimental to them physically and mentally and is frankly degrading. The belief that allowing trans women into shelters for those escaping abuse is dangerous is sad. To be so afraid is deserving of pity. To let fear blind you to the suffering of others - to think its better that a trans woman face homelessness or a return to an abusive household because you personally would sleep better at night is the kind of passive evil we should be aware of in this day and age. It comes from choosing to see the word “trans” before “person.” Its from choosing to see a persons genitals before their humanity. Trans people are not dangerous - and cause no greater risk than any other demographic.  Her claims that she can empathise with this fear are empty. A gender recognition certificate is not a ticket into womens bathrooms. Funnily enough you dont actually require a piece of paper to go almost anywhere. I do not have a gender recognition certificate and use male bathrooms, can enter male spaces as I please. All a gender recognition certificate does is change the letter on your birth certificate. It doesn’t even affect other forms of identification - my passport, my student id, my drivers license all already say male. I am not sure why so many people have chosen this as their hill to die on because its the least relevant thing to them on the planet. How often have any of you seen another persons birth certificate? Rowling says she and other ‘gender critical’ (a terf dogwhistle) people are concerned for trans youth. Well… she can take her condescending concern and direct it to matters that are relevant to her. Trans people want to be left alone. Its a simple request, and yet people endlessly seem to trip over the dirt level bar.

[dragon-shifter-life]

Slight color changes are not indicative of a shift. There are many reasons as to why you might see a ‘different’ color. Most often this is due to lighting. For example If it’s sunny, natural light may make colors more warm toned. Even with basic white artificial light, it may be hard to tell the true color of something. The angle at which you look at things is also a factor. People from the ‘p-shifting community’ are always claiming they’ve shifted in one way or another. If you’re telling the truth you should show proof. Like the other anon said, how can people ever be expected to believe you when there is zero evidence backing your claims? Have you considered how harmful this can be to children learning about otherkin? Many have been taken in by cults, making them think if they just practice they too can transform. There are still people out there who think that the earth is flat despite they’re being pictures of the earth. The only “evidence” flat earth era have is that they cannot see the curvature of the earth. So clearly it must be impossible to prove the earth is round. But as we know, it’s impossible to see the curve of the earth due to our small size compared to the earth and how close we are to it. With an unobstructed view even it’s possible to see a fraction of the curve. I know you aren’t going to listen to what I have to say but you should consider the facts. Think of shifting as a science experiment, a hypothesis, rather than a fact of which it isn’t. Or until it can be proven. And if I’m being honest, you watch too much TV. No one is going to experiment you or hunt you. You are a human being. I do not doubt that you are otherkin but your physical body is human. If people were allowed to do so and kill freely then there would be anarchy. But there’s not. Of course there are criminals here and there, crime is present virtually everywhere. But you’re not going to have the government coming to your house because you *think* you grew a scale or your skin changed it’s tone slightly. And even if you were able to completely transform, biologically you are a human. Let’s say I take a ball of clay and I sculpt it into a coin. Maybe I paint it silver as well. I can’t just go to a store and pay for something with it. Does it look like a coin? Does it maybe feel like one? Certainly. But it’s not a coin. It’s clay and paint and it will always be that no matter what form it takes. Do you think trans people get experimented on just because they identify as the opposite gender? No of course not. And neither do otherkin of any kind. There has not been ONE otherkin that has ever been captured or hunted because of what they identified as. Any people that claim someone is a hunter is clearly a child who’s been manipulated into believing in them or an adult who’s trying to pass on those false claims. You’d really have to be extremely paranoid to believe in such a thing. You may as well believe in the boogey man or bigfoot. Honestly unicorns are more likely to exist than otherkin hunters.

I think there is a misunderstanding here. I definitely do think that shifting should be seen as a science to be studied, and I'm majoring in biology to study just that. On the biological level, our cells undergo a lot of changes- shifts, if you will- just being a part of our bodies. Stem cells, for example, transform and become whatever cell is needed in the body when they're needed. Stem cells are our microscopic shape shifters in everybody. Production of things like hair are regulated by hormones in your body, which is why men tend to have more body hair; it's regulated by testosterone. This works by telling a cell to activate and read a certain portion of the DNA in your cells that cause hair growth.

Now let's talk about scales for a second: scales are made of keratin. The skin on your body is keratinized skin, meaning it produces keratin. This is what makes your skin waterproof. Among the dragon shifters I've met, we all have a skin condition called keratosis pilaris, which is an excess of keratin in our skin that collects around hair follicles. I have a hypothesis that I intend to study and test empirically, but don't yet have the equipment to do so, that there is a connection between shifters that produce scales and keratosis pilaris.

As you can see, there is preliminary evidence to support this hypothesis, even though it's not yet been thoroughly studied. And this is how all science starts out. There's something that exists that suggests something, and it gets studied, repeatable experiments are performed, and the hypothesis becomes accepted as fact. I'm not approaching this like a conspiracy theorist, I've long wanted to study shifting empirically and develop factual evidence to provide to the public. As a personal rule, I would not ask anyone to do or endure anything that I wouldn't do or endure myself, and all studies would be done safely and humanely.

As for my skin color change, this is what's called anecdotal evidence. I wouldn't have claimed this as fact if I didn't see such changes in artificial lighting that I have seen my skin in many times before, and only sometimes have I seen it a different color. At these times, I've felt particularly like I was going to shift or like a shift was starting. While anecdotal evidence is considered impermissible in most situations, it can provide the basis for further studying and experimentation to figure out why it happens.

Also, I don't think otherkin are shifters. In my eyes, otherkin and shifters are different. You can be a shifter and be otherkin for a creature other than that which you transform into, but not every otherkin can shift. It is dangerous to spread information that suggests that, and I agree with those statements.

Let me rephrase the privacy topic and lack of evidence. There is a correct way to reveal the existence of shifters to the public. If done correctly, things will likely go the best way that they can, with the least amount of abuse of the information as possible. However, you have to recognize that even with mundane issues, such as racism and homophobia, people who are people and nothing more are being killed, arrested, abused, and otherwise mistreated in 2021. Shifters can logically expect the same, if not worse, because it would be much easier for people to call us less than human. These are real threats to the community, whether you think so or not. You cannot deny the violations of human rights in our modern world. Again, I won't deny the improvements within the past hundred years, but we're still far from perfect. So yes, we fear for our lives and safety of our identities are revealed and things are revealed to be true.

Posting anonymously online helps us find others like us and build a community, and yes we're aware of hackers and how easy it is to find your identity, but most people are going to see us as liars as you and the other 10 anons in my inbox have.

I have always and will always respect skepticism. I understand that it's difficult to believe something as truth with no evidence. But understanding that most shifters dont have the means to collect evidence, don't have the knowledge to explain it in a factual manner, or don't have the resources to study themselves and provide sufficient evidence can help you understand that it's not so easy to give you the evidence you require to quell your skepticism.

To the other anons, your asks may have been answered here as well. I appreciate the anons who are at least somewhat respectful in their requests for more information and seem receptive to the idea of a response that may sufficiently rebuttal some of their claims.

[celosiaa]

ill for the holidays

Summary: “You know what I’ve just remembered?”

“What?”

“The Christmas you got ill while you were living in the archives,” Jon says, smile evident in his tone. “Do you remember?”

History repeats itself, often in cruel ways. This time, however-- Jon's love and care remain a wonderful constant, as Martin finds himself once again ill on Christmas.

CW: illness, discussion of dysphoria

(PS this timeline is not accurate, but imagine with me that the Prentiss incident happened later on in 2016, so Martin was stuck living in the archives over the holidays.  Also Martin is trans because I said so lol)

tag list: @captaincravatthecapricious @airborneglitter @kindakola

“Bless you, darling,” Jon calls softly from the doorway of their bedroom, two steaming mugs of tea in his hands.

“Ergh,” is all Martin has the energy to reply before he pitches forward again, stifling three more harsh sneezes into his elbow before leaning back against the pillows with a sigh.

“Bless you again,” Jon says, handing him one of the steaming mugs. “And happy Christmas.”

Smiling through watery eyes, Martin carefully takes the mug. Jon cannot help but smile wider when the band on his left ring finger glints in the morning sun—the ring they had both decided would count as their Christmas presents this year.

“Happy Christmas, dear,” he says hoarsely as Jon runs a hand through his hair, pressing down on the locks which stand on end in the wake of restless sleep. “And thank you for the tea.”

“It’s no trouble,” Jon whispers, bending over to kiss Martin’s too-hot forehead. “You should probably take these as well—”

Reaching toward the nightstand, he grabs the box of tissues and tosses them into Martin’s lap before crawling back into bed himself. As Jon rearranges the blanket around them, Martin immediately presses up against him and tips his head to rest on his bony shoulder—a sure sign that he’s not feeling well at all.

“I’m sorry you’re ill, love,” Jon hums lowly, pressing a kiss into Martin’s hair.

“No, I’m sorry,” Martin replies, pausing for a moment to sniff wetly. “I’m sorry I’m ill on our first married Christmas.”

Jon can’t help but huff out a laugh at this.

“You know what I’ve just remembered?”

“What?”

“The Christmas you got ill while you were living in the archives,” he says, smile evident in his tone. “Do you remember?”

“Oh god, I thought I would die of embarrassment,” Martin moans, turning his face to nuzzle into Jon’s shoulder.

“It wasn’t all that bad,” Jon argues, determined to let this be an amusing memory rather than an embarrassing one.

“That’s because you were nearly plastered the whole time,” Martin says, picking up his head to look at Jon, eyes sparkling good-naturedly.

“Wh—I was not plastered!” Jon sputters indignantly as Martin laughs.

“Nearly plastered. And I have a feeling you don’t remember it all anyway. So let me tell it to you.”

“Fine, fine,” Jon gives in with a smile, planting a kiss on Martin’s cheek. “Tell me everything, darling.”

---

(December 2016)

It’s holiday season at the Magnus Institute, and Tim has single-handedly decided that this will be their biggest celebration yet. Martin knows he’s doing it in a gesture of kindness; knows that the very existence of this massive extravaganza is an effort to bring the holidays to him, since he cannot leave the archives—yet he finds himself struggling through every smile, every drink, every song.

God, I’d give anything not to be ill right now.

His illness has been steadily worsening over the past few days, starting with a light dripping from his nose into his throat, lowering his voice a bit for the day. Not that he had particularly minded this—the voice dysphoria that often plagued him was quite pleased, in fact, but he could do without the soreness that tempted him into coughing near constantly. The days following had been spent battling ever-growing congestion—sinuses packed full, lungs not far behind. It was particularly irritating to him that this would happen now, during the holidays, after he hasn’t even seen the outside world for months. No one in the archives has been ill so far this season, so where could he have possibly picked this up?

Probably just a bit run down.

Something got me that didn’t hit whoever carried it in.

Scrubbing a hand down his face, he leans back in his chair, watching the party around him as he desperately sniffs back the wetness threatening to drip from his nose. Of course, he had taken every possible precaution—loading himself fully with decongestants, cough suppressants, and fever-reducers, but it seems it might all have been for naught. Admittedly, most of the medications had been expired, having sat in the office first aid kit for years. He hadn’t been able to go to the chemist himself, and refused to even consider asking anyone to pick some things up for him. It had already been embarrassing enough asking Sasha to bring him some tampons—though of course she had been lovely, it was not an experience he wished to repeat.

He takes a shaking breath.

Just stop thinking about it.

Just have a drink, and maybe you’ll be alright.

Tim and Sasha are dominating the makeshift dance floor, both of their hair peppered with sparkling confetti, Tim’s neck adorned with garland and tinsel. The way their bodies move so freely, so naturally with the music, grinning drunkenly at one another all the while can’t but melt Martin’s expression into a fond smile. Catching his eye for a moment, Tim winks at him—grin spreading even wider, and pulling a blush onto Martin’s cheeks.

Prick, he thinks, smiling back through his beet red flush.

Scanning further to the left, he finds Jon standing against the wall, cornered by the bloke from research Martin knows fancies him. He squints a bit at the two of them, trying to read Jon’s expression, relieved to find a bit of discomfort there before—

Jon laughs. Heartily, and with a rare, gorgeous smile across his face.

Martin feels as if he could sink into the floorboards.

What is wrong with you?

Jon has a right to date whoever he damn well pleases.

Not like you’d ever have a chance anyway.

He sighs, but the breath catches in his chest, pulling him into a painful coughing fit—hastily stifled behind both his elbow and his closed lips. As he attempts to get himself under control, he glances back around the room, hoping no one has seen him—and with no small measure of dismay, notices that Tim and Sasha are approaching his table, arm in arm.

Shit shit shit

He sniffs hastily between coughs, swiping his sleeve over his dripping nose, disgusted with himself even as he does so. Mercifully, he manages to control the fit by the time they’ve really gotten close, reaching out for his drink at once to calm the raging furnace of his throat.

“Martin! There he is, the man of the hour,” Tim booms delightedly, sitting on the folding chair nearest him and pulling Sasha into his lap with a surprised shout.

“Tim! Shame on you,” she teases, swatting at his arm playfully.

“You love it and you know it,” he grins, nuzzling into her shoulder.

Martin uses their distraction as an opportunity to turn away, sniffling urgently against the rising buzz stirring up beneath the bridge of his nose, reverberating through packed sinuses. When he sees them peripherally turning their attention back to him, he plasters a smile back on his face, tipping his pounding head as casually as possible onto one fist.

“Having a good time?” Tim asks, resting his chin on Sasha’s shoulder.

“Y-Yeah! Yeah, it’s great, Tim, really nice job,” he says, trying to force his voice back into somewhat of his normal register.

“Fantastic! Can’t have you missing the holidays, can we? Now that would be a true tragedy!” he replies, clapping Martin jovially on the back.

Martin pitches forward at once, fighting back against his lungs, ready to burst with the jostling.

Not now not now not now

“You alright, Martin?” Sasha asks softly, still running a hand distractedly through Tim’s hair.

Offering her a quick smile, he nods vigorously against a few choked-back coughs, grabbing his drink at once and gulping it down. It barely helps, but it’s enough to get him through the worst of the painful tickling, though his eyes begin to tear with effort.

“Fine, fine, sorry—just choked on something, I dunno,” he lies, voice coming out in a bit of a croak.

“Well you’d better not choke and die before it’s time for karaoke!” Tim bellows. “Couldn’t stand to miss your lovely tenor!”

Martin quirks up a smile at this, blushing at the compliment, as always. Tim knows exactly how to push his buttons, and revels in it.

“We’ll see if there’s anyone still here who’s not too drunk to sing by then,” Sasha replies. “I believe I’m well past that point already.”

“Aw, come on Sasha, you can never be too drunk to sing karaoke! That’s what makes it great!”

They continue arguing like this for a while, and Martin finds his attention drifting back to Jon, who still stands against the far wall. A second person has joined in the conversation with him and the man from research, and Jon’s discomfort seems to have risen again, eyes flitting about for an exit route.

Then they lock on Martin’s.

Martin gives a little gasp, face flushing, the buzzing building in his sinuses at the disturbance. Looking away quickly, he hopes to god that Jon had not seen him staring, but when he looks back, Jon is already crossing the room toward him.

Oh shit.

The pulsing of his sinuses only continues to grow—of course Jon would be coming to talk to him now, when he’s a right mess, when he can feel congestion rising in his nose and throat.

I have to get out of here, he decides, extracting himself abruptly from the table.

“Hey, where are you going?” Tim calls after him, but Martin cannot bring himself to turn around—making a beeline for the men’s bathroom with all the energy he can muster.

As he ducks into the room, he sweeps his eyes around to check for any other occupants before grabbing desperately at the paper towels hanging over the sink. He barely lifts them in time to catch the painful sneezes that double him over—immediately causing his head to spin, coming one after the other in wet, heaving bursts. When at last his nose allows him to rest, he sinks down onto the floor of the bathroom, back braced against the wall. With all the effort he can summon, he does his best to clear his sinuses of their ghastly blockage—to no avail, the force of the breaths merely pushing his lungs into yet another coughing fit.

God, this is miserable.

It is in the midst of this coughing that the door opens, revealing Jon—who stares down at him in shock, frozen in the doorway for several seconds. Martin is quite certain he would rather sink beneath the earth, never to return than to be caught here in this moment.

Oh god oh god oh god

“…Martin? Are you alright?” Jon asks at last, recovering himself a bit and closing the door behind him.

“I-I’b fi—heh—” is all Martin can manage, consonants rounded out with congestion before his breath begins to hitch, desperately rubbing at his nose to keep control of itself while Jon watches him.

Jon furrows his brow, apparently unimpressed with this performance of “fine.” Crouching down slowly on the ground beside him, he peers concernedly into Martin’s face, which instantly flares up with heat.

I’m in hell. I’ve died, and this is hell.

“What is it?” Jon asks, so softly that Martin feels his heart could burst. “Are you ill?”

Damn it all.

If Jon has managed to guess the truth upon seeing him, Martin supposes there’s no way to hide it from him now—so he settles instead for trivialization.

“It’s fide, Jod—dod’ worry,” he croaks, wincing at his own pronunciation and sniffing in response.

Great. Excellent. Truly convincing.

“Hmm,” Jon replies articulately, before pressing the cool back of his palm to Martin’s scorching forehead—nearly killing Martin on the spot with the shock of it.

Oh Christ oh Christ

Jon pulls his hand back with a displeased huff, and a violent fever chill runs up the length of Martin’s spine.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” he demands, short and snappish.

Something about his tone tingles at the back of his mind, drawing the words from him unbidden.

“Because…because I didn’t want to ruin the holiday, and Tim was so kind to set up this big party so I could celebrate, and I just…I just couldn’t bear the thought of spoiling it,” he says, the words spilling out of him in a rush.

He immediately clamps a hand over his mouth, gasping in horror at his own honesty. Jon looks about as shocked as he feels, alcohol undoubtedly leaving his expression unguarded.

“Wh—I…Martin, I—”

Jon is saved from his stammering by a fit of heavy sneezing, hastily stifled into Martin’s pathetic little hoard of paper towels. Disturbed by the sudden convulsions, his chest begins to flutter into a coughing fit once again—a bit harder to stifle now due to the sheer force of it. When at last he is allowed a brief respite, he leans his head back against the wall, breaths wet and heaving as he fights against the renewed dizziness.

“Christ, that sounds awful,” Jon mutters, reaching up to hand him more paper towels.

“Thadks,” Martin replies hoarsely, both in response to the paper towels and the insult.

Jon watches concernedly for a few moments, worrying at his bottom lip while Martin rubs the paper against the tender inflammation of his nose, desperately trying to ease the constant buzzing.

“Look, Martin, you’re not well—” Jon begins, before cutting himself off. “I-I mean, you know that, of course you know that, but—”

He breaks off again, clearing his throat uncomfortably.

“I’ve got some medicine in my office. Do you think you could make it back there?”

Martin huffs out a laugh before beginning to stand.

“’Course I can, Jon, I’m not—" he pauses when yet another wave of dizziness washes over him, bracing against the wall where he stands.

Jon reaches out his arms on instinct, but Martin brushes them off at once.

“Sorry, it’s fine. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

When Martin looks back at him, Jon is staring at him with so much open concern that it steals his breath away.

God, he’s gorgeous.

“I’m sure. Th-thank you,” he stammers awkwardly, allowing Jon to lead him back through the outskirts of the party and into the quiet of his office.

Once they’ve arrived, Jon ushers him in quickly, flicking on the desk lamp as he does so. The peacefulness that comes with the closed door is enough to make Martin sigh in contentment, watching distantly as Jon begins to rummage through a cabinet in search of the meds.

“Sit down, Martin,” he orders simply, no heat behind his words.

Martin can’t help but oblige, sinking onto the chair they use when people come to give their statements. As he does so, the pressure in his nose begins to build again, threatening to break through the surface at any moment—and he feels it’s only fair to at least try to avoid a mess.

“J-Jon, d’you—heh—d’you have ti—hh—”

“Right, right, of course, here—”

Jon fumbles hurriedly with a box of tissues that he pulls from the cabinet, nearly dropping them in his haste to hand them to Martin in time. By some miracle, he manages—Martin immediately doubles over into a fit of violent, unforgiving sneezes, which morph steadily into coughing, and then back into sneezing—caught in a seemingly endless cycle of misery. When at last he is able to look up, eyes streaming, Jon has fetched him a glass of water, and holds out a small pile of pills for him to take.

“Here, better hurry before it starts up again,” Jon mutters, shoving his offerings abruptly into Martin’s hands.

“O-oh—thanks,” he stammers, hot shame flooding his cheeks as he swallows them down.

When he looks up, Jon is chewing at his bottom lip again, brows furrowed—an expression that Martin has learned means he’s considering his words carefully. It’s one of those expressions that endears Jon so much to him that he could just get lost in it—and perhaps he does, for he startles at the noise when Jon finally speaks.

“Martin, I—I’m not asking this to pry, a-and it’s none of my business, but—but I’m just…concerned. Are you…are you wearing a binder right now?” Jon asks quietly rubbing a thumb into his own collarbone in a gesture of anxiety.

Fuck.

…I didn’t think he knew.

Instinctively, Martin hunches his shoulders forward, crossing his arms tightly—the mere mention of his chest enough to drag his dysphoria to the surface at the moment.

“N-No, I’m not—shouldn’t when you’re ill,” Martin mutters quickly, dropping his gaze quickly to the floor.

Jon lets out a small sigh of relief.

“Good, that’s good, I—” he breaks off, clearly noticing Martin’s change in posture. “—oh. Martin, I-I’m sorry, did I—”

“It’s alright, it’s not your fault,” Martin cuts in, trying to offer him a small smile. “And it’s…it’s thoughtful of you to ask. Erm.”

He looks back up at last, willing to do anything to make this even just a bit less awkward. What he finds when he does so is not a face overwhelmed with discomfort—but rather one softened with worry, and blushing with…something else as well, though Martin wouldn’t dare to put a name on it. He can’t help the wry smile that pulls one corner of his mouth upward.

“Jon, how many have you had tonight?” he asks, a bit teasingly.

“How many…how many what? Alcoholic beverages?” Jon replies, tilting his head in confusion.

Martin can’t help but laugh properly at this, for which he is thoroughly punished when it turns into a heavy coughing fit.

“Christ, Martin, I-I’m sorry,” Jon stammers, arms reaching out, then floating back to his sides repeatedly, unsure of the proper action to take.

Martin waves him off at once.

“It’s alright, it was rather nice to have a laugh,” still smiling through labored breaths.

Jon can’t help but quirk up a smile in return, face flooding with heat before he hurriedly looks back down.

“Erm—right.”

He coughs awkwardly before continuing.

“W-Well, is there…what else can I do? To help, I mean?”

He’s adorable.

God help me.

“Nothing, nothing—thank you for the meds, I—I suppose we should head back out to the party,” he says, rising slowly from the chair.

“Absolutely not,” Jon says sternly. “I’m taking you to bed, and that’s the end of it.”

Martin’s eyes go wide, another laugh threatening to bubble up in his chest at this choice of words. For Jon not to notice it…that must mean he’s pretty far gone. The way he stands now, tiny and cross and blocking the door, tells Martin that he ought to just give in and save himself the trouble.

“Alright, alright,” he complies, raising his hands. “But that means you’ll have to talk to Tim, and you know he gets weepy when he’s drunk.”

Jon nods his head in acceptance, with such solemnity that Martin has to cover his mouth to hide his foolish grin.

Oh, Jon.

“I’ll talk to him. Just…just try to get some sleep, alright?” Jon replies, grabbing Martin’s hand as he passes by to step into the hallway.

Martin’s face instantly becomes a wide-eyed tomato, and Jon drops his hand at once, stepping back clumsily.

“Sorry, erm…I’ll…I’ll see you on Monday,” he screeches before bolting back into the crowd.

Left in the wake of this, Martin can’t help but laugh and savor the feeling of Jon’s hand in his.

---

(present day)

“Oh god,” Jon moans, face buried in his hands.

Martin laughs hysterically now, wrapping his arms around Jon’s shoulders as his entire body shakes with laughter.

“Sorry love—I’m sorry, it’s just so funny,” he giggles, wiping the tears beginning to stream down his face.

“Glad to hear my mortification is so funny to you, Martin,” he huffs, pouting dramatically and crossing his arms over his chest.

Martin swings a leg over him, straddling his thin form and leaning down to cup his face.

“Oh, silly me, did I forget to say ‘adorable?’”

He kisses Jon’s forehead.

“’Handsome?’”

He kisses his jaw.

“’Charming?’”

This time, Jon wraps his arms around Martin’s neck, pulling him in for a proper kiss—smiling against him when he lets out a soft noise of pleasure. Jon parts his lips in response, coaxing Martin deeper, cherishing the way he can feel the warmth of his body growing ever warmer above him. Pulling him back down beside him, he tangles his body up in Martin’s, passion intertwining with the gentle softness Martin always offers him. Several minutes pass by this way, and Jon starts to think he could lie here forever, just lazily kissing in their bed. When Martin at last breaks it off, it’s with such urgency that Jon can tell instantly a sneeze is on the horizon.

“Here,” he says wryly, plucking a tissue from the box and handing it to him.

Martin takes it as graciously as possible, face continuing to screw up as his breaths hitch. At last, he lets it go—turning away from Jon a bit as he sneezes once, twice, thrice into the tissue, and finishing with moan as he rubs at his sinuses.

“Bless you,” Jon whispers, propped up on one elbow and rubbing soothing circles over his chest.

Turning back now, Martin grimaces up at him.

“I’ve probably gotten you ill now, Jon. We shouldn’t have done that.”

“Oh, we shouldn’t?” Jon teases, kissing a trail down Martin’s jawline and into his neck, pleased at the way this makes him squirm.

“I rather think we should keep going,” he murmurs, lifting his head to look at him, lips barely hovering above Martin’s own.

With a grin so full of love he’s fit to burst, Martin pulls him back down—and they spend the rest of the day in such warmth as can only be found in each other’s arms.

[popculturebuffet]

New X-Men Xtrospective Part 2: Germ Free Generation (Annual, #117-120)

Hello all you happy mutants! And welcome back to my look one of my faviorite runs of one of my faviorite super teams by one of my faviorite comic book writers!

For those of you just joining us.. it’s been a while. I did the first instalment of this retrospective back in early January as a present to my friend for christmas, as he had never read E is for Extinctoin and what with this run being vital to the current, utterly brilliant Krakoa era of X-Men. But with both Black History Month and Valentine’s day, February had no real room for this one and march ended up being just as crammed with me doing essentially the entire della arc of ducktales in one month. I didn’t mean for this retrospective to get pushed so far back, but since I gave up doing weekly coverage of Final Space I had some room on the schedule so this retrospective is back with a vengance with two entries this month and hopefully at least one a month afterword to keep it at a decent clip. 

Last time I covered the background of this run and didn’t really find much for the issues after, so I won’t have to spend as much time on background. 

So since i’ts been a few months, a refresher is probably in order

PREVIOUSLY, ON X-MEN:  Our merry mutants enterted a marvelous new era. As Charles redidciated to the dream with new equipment and a new uniforms our hero encounter a new villian: The Mysterious Cassandra Nova, a powerful telepath who used an uwitting patsy from the trask family and a defucnt sentinel factory to slaughter the mutant nation of Genosha, killing 16 million mutants in the most horrific act of genocide against mutants ever known. And the fact there has been more than one genocide against mutant kind MIGHT, just MIGHT be the reason they blackmailed for peace with life saving drugs instead of helping willingly and freely in the current comics. Just maybe. 

Cassandra was captured by the X-Men soon after but escaped and nearly got a hold of Cerebra only to be stopped thanks to a combination of former enemy, genoshan resident at the time of the genocide, and that bitch Emma Frost who snapped her neck and Charles himself who uncharacteristically shot Cassandra in the head. That night Charles took a bold step over that would change the X-Men forever and told the world on live tv:

While all of this was going on we got caught up on the team’s personal struggles, currently consisting of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast and Wolverine with Emma joining as of the issue we’re about to cover. Beast is grappling with a secondary mutation that makes him look like Aslan, the jesus of narnia and all lions. Meanwhile Scott and Jean are grappling with their non existant sex life as Cyclops possesion by Apocalypse shortly before this story has severely rattled him and caused him to close himself off emotionally. 

So that’s where we pick up. Our heroes are now no longer hiden saftely in the shadows from a world that hates and fear them but are out front and center with the world watching. And we’ll see both how that helps their cause and how it puts them directly in the cross hairs under the cut.  Content Warning: This review discusses Transphobia and a scene involving a school shooting. If either of these are a trigger for you or something you do not want to read about  please skip this part of the retrospective for your own well being. Thank you and have a lovely day. 

The Man From Room X:

We have three stories today: an annual that introduces our final team member and the main villians of our next arc, a one off that moves the main plot for the first 12 issues along, and a three part arc about said villains.  Before we get into the Annual, I have to talk about it’s weird gimmick: The issue is entirely sideways. I don’t mean it’s bad though some parts are problematic I mean when bought it’d be on it’s side and in my trade I have to flip the whole thing over on it’s side to read it. It’s just a .. weird choice. Not the weirdest thing about this issue somehow but not unexpected from Grant as they like to play with the formula. 

We open in said Room X, a location in China where a mutant named Xorn is kept and showed off to a mysterious group of dickweeds in suits representing “Mr. Sublime”.  His jailer, General Aao Jun,, shows him off as most bad guys would : By undoing his helmet and thus disntegrating two innocent children just by looking at them. Sublime says they have a deal. 

Meanwhile also in China the X-Men are there for a funeral and Emma and Scott trade insulting questions back in forth: She mocks him about his lack of sex with Jean lately and he brings up her criminal past. As for why Emma’s still with the x-men.. it’s out of pragmatisim. WIth Genosha gone, the x-men are the saftest faction to throw in with. 

As for why the X-Men are in China, Charles has rapidly expanded his operations now he’s public by setting up X-Corps, a multinational humantarian aid organization dedicated to helping mutants in need wherever they sprout up. He’s set up offices in Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Mumbai and Melborne. 

He’s also half assed it, at least for the Hong Kong office and only gave them two employees: Domino, who those of you not as familiar with the comics may remember from deadpool and Risque.. who I honestly had never heard of before New X-Men and frequently forget existed. I just looked her up for the first time and she’s a minor mutant who was an associate of X-Force and Warpath’s love intrest. She could compress matter causing it to implode. My assumption here is that Morrison simply picked a minor mutant at random for the job. 

But yeah naturally with only two mutants charged with, according to domino “All of asia” went horribly and the x-men are there for Risque’s funeral and to find out what happened. Unsuprisingly it’s tied into our cold open: Risque had found evidence of a mutant trafficking operation and died fighting them off and Dom is naturally f eeling in over her head since said operation involves the chinese goverment, who according to her exccute most mutants at birth and John Sublime and his cult. 

We soon see a press confrence from this asshole and find out what his deal is: Sublime is the head of the U-Men, a group that belivies they are a “third species” of mutants trapped in human bodies that deserve to have the surgery to make them into mutants, and thus wear weird suits until the world is pure and allows them to have surgery for it. 

Yeahhhh this.. this is really fucking uncomfortable and is going to be present throughout today’s piece so let’s just go ahead and rip that band-aid off:  The U-Men come off as HIGHLY transphobic. They use terms similar to trans people call themselves trans species and are trapped inside a body they don’t belong in. It’s VERY uncomfortable to read as a result and something that hadn’t really sunk into till thsi reading but once it had.. oh god does this not age well. 

The one thing that keeps this from runing the run and Grant Morrison as a whole for me.. is that I do not think for one second it was intentional. Grant themself is genderqueer, nonbinary and a cross dresser. None of this means they CAN’T be prejudice, being Queer does not magically make you immune to being prejudiced. But before this Grant had the genderqueer sentient street Danny the Street over in doom patrol and a trans main character in his book the invisibles, Lord Fanny. And given New X-Men’s biggest flaw as a whole is clumsy early 2000′s unforutnate implications such as a good chunk of the things about Cyclops affair with Emma, we’ll get to that at the right time, Angel in the next arc and Dust, who was introduced as from afganastan wearing an outfit not seen in the country and speaking a language not spoken in the country. Grant didn’t make these mistakes TWICE, it’s why I still have respect for them, and this won’t be the first or last comic i’ve forgiven for being stupid for it’s time. But I will still call Grant out when I see it. Just because I respect an author just because they changed my life does not mean I won’t call them out when they fuck up. And if they prove to be truly vile, have harmed someone or what have you I will cut them the fuck out of my life. I’ve done it with JK Rowling, Warren Ellis, Brad Jones and Joss Whedon. I would do it with Grant if I truly belivied they were transphobic and instead didn’t just write something very stupid without thinking the metaphor through 20 years ago. 

So anyway back to the comic book bollocks as Wolvie and Dominio prepare for an infiltration and flirt a bunch. We also find out Jun is a mutant himself with a power only Grant could dream up: his skin, hair and what have you that falls off him turns into a naked golem for a bit before expiring. And if you hadn’t read this issue before reading this review, yes that actually happened. While the first arc had a BIT of Grant’s trademark batshit insanity, the series REALLY starts to pick it up from here: This issue has a mutant with functioning star for a head, a poorly thought out bucnh of sci fi new age organ theives, and a general whose power is “makes naked clones out of his dandruff”. Oh and his fondest wish?

I just... I don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t know how you respond to an old man’s weird murder fetish that he tells a somehow even creepier cult leader while said cult leader is paying him to buy a star man, and their both surronded by the creepy old guy’s skin golems that weirdly look like mudokons. Look i’ve  read Grant’s entire utterly bonkers run on doom patrol. I’ve seen a man who looks like a question mark use a bicycle that makes everyone high like their on LSD for president. And THIS is what breaks me. 

So while.. THIS is going on, Dom and Wolverine plan to do it all night long on the professor’s credit card, no really he gives all his professors carte blanch to use school fun, and inflitrate, Dom through the elvator this horrorshow just took place in and Wolvie james bond style. Also I gotta say I REALLY love how Morrison writes Domino. She’s wittiy, entertaining and her power is as awesome as always, super luck if you didn’t know. It’s a real shame he didn’t add her to the team: She wasn’t on any other x-teams, with X-Force having been rebranded into X-Statix by this point. She would’ve been a fun addition to the cast. 

Naturally wolverine is found out.. but that was the entire plan, for him to serve as a distraction then cut his way to domino while she steals something from the vault. As for the rest of the X-Men, Cyclops, Beast and Emma are all downstairs in the parking garage and find a secret entrance. Jean is not on this trip and that’s a major plot point for this run. This is where Risque died.. and it only get’s worse when Hank goes inside, finding a bug like child, basically htink a giant caterpillar but with tons of human arms inttead of legs with her wings cut off. 

Thankfully as Logan and Dom escape above, the U-Men are dumb enough to storm down bellow.. and while they incapacitate beast with some launched tiny knives, designed to incapcicate but leave them in tact for harvest, Emma beats the shit out of them and get the info out as only she can....

Granted she could’ve just turned back to normal and used her telepathy.. but what fun would that be? Plus they have blockers and you know CUT UP A FUCKING CHILD. SO yeah fuck them, let emma have her fun. 

Thanks to her they find out the U-Men are a front for illegal organ harvest, and while they can’t prove sublimes attached Emma suggests killing him.  Good idea but Scott suggests the lighter approach and we find out what Dom stole, a key, something Emma can psychcially scan. She warns it might take her a bit to get something.. only to be flooded instantly and we find out who the man in the box was. Shen Xorn... i’ll let emma tell you more herself. 

It’s stuff like this why, despite some serious flaws like the U-Men debacle and some stuff to come, some I mentioned above other that’s just with the plot that i love this run. Morrison just gets how to really tell an x-men story and the real tragedy of being a mutant. That just for being diffrent, you get shut out, or in this case thrown into a box when you could’ve and should’ve been something more. As emma turns herself to diamond to deal with the psychic backlash, Beast has some solemn words to share. 

That night Scott rests in his bedroom while presumibly hearing some truly horrific and sexy things next door while talking to jean before clocking out.. only for Emma to head in in a sexy dress with champagne. What happened? Well we won’t know for sure for most of the run. 

The next day the U-Men prepare to load and we get some scrap of what the idea was supposed to be: John talks to Ao Jun about his procedures. We see wings crudely sewen to his back and his throat implaants hurting “But one day I will fly”. THe IDEA is their supposed to be lunatics, people who envy mutantkind but don’t actually respect their culture or their sense of personhood. It’s not the worst idea and had Grant not used trans termnology for htis, it would’ve been a great one. I think he INTENDED for them to be coopting the idea of being trans and what not to maks their true intentions.. which is problematic due to debates like the ones on bathrooms where a lot of transphobic asshats make the bad faith argument a bunch of people are going to pretend to be trans to assault people. 

We’re.. we;’re not even to the main storyarc yet. 

But things soon go wrong as Xorn’s starhead starts to collapse into a black hole, with no solution as the x-men took the key to his helmet.. and assault the compound. Turns out the star collapse thing is Jun’s revenge on humanity for lockig him down here and he gets his neck snapped.  Scott has a solution though.. and it’s stuff like this why I fucking love Scott Summers and get annoyed when people call him “boring”: He realizes Xorn is comitting sucicide.. so he’s going to talk him out of it. Not just for everyone else but he deserves to live. And while Emma points out only logan among htem knows chinese and she can’t get through to Xorns’ head due to the way his brain works, Scott has a simple workaround: Use the nearest chineses speaker to teach Scott chinese. So.. with that he talks to Xorn. 

And that my friend is Scott Summers. A man who faced with powerful man whose given up, whose lost all hope... convinces him he can still go on. That living’s better than dying.. and that it does get better. The issue closes with Xorn basking in the sunlight for the first time in decades while Domino sweats having an extremley powerful unknown mutant out in the world. Scott’s already thought of that.. and signed him up with the x-men. Granted it won’t be until our next article that he actually fully joins the team, but w’ell get to that next time. 

This issue is great... while the U-Men stuff is pretty bad and isn’t going to get better, the tale of xorn is excitiong, Aao Jun is an intresting antagonist and the sideways gimmick suprisingly works. So now we’ve finshed our apitizer let’s get on to the main course. 

Danger Rooms:

We open in well.. the Danger Room with Beast training a new student. 

This is Beak. Beak is my faviorite character Morrison came up with and one of my faviorite X-Characters. Beak is a bird like boy who can fly, it’s just a struggle and due to looking diffrent and not having the most impressive power has very low self esteem. It’s also part of something Morrison took a concerted effort to do: introduce more mutants with genuinely odd apperances and drawbacks. Like we saw with Ugly John last time and Aao Jun in the previous issue, Morriosn really likes adding weird mutants but he also uses it to give a genuine downside to being one. While this isn’t NEW to x-men, Morriosn upped the scale and number of characters like this with weird powers and apperances. We see a bunch of human passing ones too but the backgrounds just jammed with all sorts of unique designs and students. It’s also the point where the school became far more crowded like the movies, a good call on my part both to help those coming in from the movies, and to help sell the mutant baby boom going on. After all it wouldn’t make sense if the school was just about 5-7 students and a bunch of grown adults doing superhero stuff like usual would it.

But we get to see that Hank is a good teacher, as he reminds the boy that he’s getting better and won’t be an x-man overnight, and worries about him to the professor, wanting the boy not to slip through the cracks, figuratively, and not to feel like an outcast.. especaily here. But Hank dosen’t feel blue for long, metaphorically he was blue long before he became the lion minus the witch and the wardrobe, as he has a date to night.. and so does Charles. 

Or rather he did.. his girlfriend trish, a long time love intrest of his and a reporter.. breaks up with him. Over voice mail. While in washington. And the reasons she gives are not great

Yes Hank’s transformation is radical.. but not only was it not his choice... she’s being a coward, sending the message it’s okay to dump someone because hteir a mutant or because they happen tobe diffrent and that efffects your career. Again it’s moments like this that make the run soar over the more awkward bits. 

Meanwhile Logan’s off doing logan stuff, i.e. gazing at a deer. Wow. Jean followed him. Both notice a space ship: Despite recently outing himself as a mutant, leading to an increased number of students and a bunch of rioting morons at the gates, Charles has decided NOW’S a good time to take a vacation to the Shiar empire. As for why Jean’s really out here, her marriage to Scott isn’t doing so good and while Logan encourages her to stay it’s just not that simple: Her telekenisis is coming back, stronger than ever. She feels the most alive she’s been while he’s shutting her out and feeling his deadest. She tries to turn to logan for comfort but he shuts her down. Just wait two decades jean... he’ll open up to a threesome. In all seriousness though having Jean try and come onto Logan .. will backfire slightly on later storylines. But we’ll get to that eventually. 

In the basement Hank is studying Cassandra or rather a virtual version of her since her body is naturally in storage. And he’s found out something disturbing: She’s Charles Genetic Twin.. oh and it gets way worse. The Professor’s weird behavior? Barely staffing the hong kong office, leaving suddenly with rioters t the gates, outing himself? About that...

Cassandra tourtures Hank with the possiblity he’s devovling and then tries to mind controlli him into cleaning himself with his diploma when Beak enters. The good news is this allows hank to shake off her control and tackle her, showing off why hank mccoy is fucking awesome in the process. 

That is the Hank McCoy I know, love.. and miss dearly. The one we’ll probably never get back sadly after what others did and what Percy’s had to do to reconclie with all they did. 

Unfortunately beak being around means cassandra can force him to beat beast into a coma with his bat. She plans to tear Charles dream down around him and make him watch.. and cryptically says he tried to kill her. She then cheerfully leaves Jean in charge.. and talks about just how much damage one could do with an entire interstellar empire in the wrong hands....

This issue is also excellent and sets up the next two arcs nicely while giving us a nice peak in hank’s head. Great stuff. The artist also hid the word sex in a lot of the images see if you can find them. 

Germ Free Generation Issue 1: 

So now we get into our main story for today. This story and the one before it were drawn by Ethan Van Sciver whose a talented artist.. but also highly contrversial for being a conservative. I myself.. don’t know what he’s said or did, though calling himself “Canceld Superstar’ on twitter really isn’t a good sign. So I really can’t comment on it but I also know someone would mention it if I didn’t bring it up and if you know what he did please enlighten me. 

So we open with a school shooter who also scooped out a guys eyes and is part of the U-Men. He get shot by the swat team while making his speech> it’s an effective opening but one that’s become more uncomfortable to read with each passing day due to school shootings going up and up in number. And mass shootings in general and I... I need a second. I need something to relax me

Thank you Stoopy. Your doing Odd’s Work. 

So the news reports on this and we soon see how Jean watches the news.. by using Cerebra to read the minds of every person on the planet. Neat. Everyone’s talking about them. We also get a hint for later as we hear on the suicide of one martha johanson who wrote the note in her own blood. She’ll be important later.... and I mean that both in the context of this retrospective and for the fact she’ll go on to be part of x-men in perpetuity. 

This is also where another great concept of Morrison’s pops up: Mutant culture. After all mutants are a minority, they should have their own culture. It’s something Hickman’s era has taken and ran with, but it’s a damn good idea and one that it shoudln’t of taken almost 20 years for someone else to use given Decimation was undone way back around 2012 in Avengers Vs X-Men, aka that event half hte articles on the mcu around the fox sale used as either their image for the article or asked about happneing. And yes that is a pet peeve of mine: while I do think like Civil War AVX could use a movie version to make it better, I don’t think it’s an event that could be done right away and would have to be almost entirely redone anyway given the context for AvX is entirely couched in decimation i.e. something NO ONE wants in any x-adaptation. 

So it turns out while watching the news in a next level way Jean is also talking to Logan. “Stay out of my personal fantasies”. Yeah I .. I don’t think your ready for a hairy canadian dry humping a transformer.. specifically killbison. And yes.. that is an actual transformer and why yes, I have been waiting to bring him up. 

And he is , and I am not making any of this up, part of a group of decpticons known as the breastforce. Your life is better for knowing that and you are welcome. 

Anyway as you’d imagine a genocidal old woman in her brothers’ body leaving the X-Men to fend for themselves after having a teenager bludgeon one into a coma after publicly outing them with a rabid bunch of bigoted morons at the gates has not gone great. Henry is still out and despite the short staffing Jean needs logan to stay where he is as he’s close to an emerging mutant and within range to go get her. 

Emma of course has never been so fucking irate in her whole life and is plotting various forms of psychic tourture with the help of her proteges the Stepford Cucokoo, 5 teenage mutants who functoin best as a unit and are easily some of MOrrison’s most prominent additions to the x-cast. Unlike a lot of the x-kids, they’ve been featured prominently in every era of x-men after this including the current one. 

Jean decides for a less “Make them hate us even more” approach, but no less pissed off, opening the gates and going out directly to chew out the assembled bigoted morons, pointing out the ones carrying “Mutants Go Home!” signs are especailly dumb as this IS her home. And while she dosen’t point this part out, it’ the same for all of them: most of the mutants are either adults who choose to live here, teenagers who along with their parents choose to live here, or in the majority teens who have no where else to go due to either being abandoned by their families or it being way to dangerous for said families for them to stay due to bigoted assholes like the ones holding mutants go home signs. 

A member of the press asks if she’s willing to talk to the media and she refutes most of his bullshit allegations: He asks if their building an army, she and Scott respond they are not and are simply educating mutants and protecting them. When he counters with the fact their living weapons and wearing uniforms... she counters with the fact she’s wearing them to protect herself, rightfully, from people like her, and the x-men are an aid orginzation going where needed to protect the world and while asshole points out no one apointed them.. jean shuts him down by pointing out there are no mutants in goverment and a genocide just happened, so someone has to do the job. Another random asshole tries to pipe up with “Genosha declared war on us” and Emma senses this is just going to go round and round and round and simply presses the assembled mob’s “bliss buttons” in their brains to knock them out. Non violent but honestly warranted: A dangerous part of bigoted assholes is they’l bring up racist bullshit to try and couch it like an actual conversation. None of these complaints really hold water if you looked at the x-men’s history for more than 5 minutes. Yes Charles is training them to fight and yes hte ingial class was an army but every class since has only been trained for self defense: they still got into adventures and what not, but it was usually by their own choice or because they were thrust into them by circumstance. Xaviers is exactly what jean said and endudgling these morons, while good on paper, only makes them seem legit. 

Jean retreats to the infirmary where she’s on the verge of breaking down from the sheer weight of everything. Cyclops proves that despite not being the best husband right now... he still loves his wife, offering to go look into Sublime with Emma and hoping Hank wakes up. Turns out his mind for now is a big blank room.

So she can’t get any info off his skull, and neither of the two think what happened with Beak adds up. Something is up here. Their also coming down with colds which will be important later. And just as important.. Magneto is becoming a symbol among people and merch sales with his image are on the rise.  We then get this. 

So Jean is trying to be a supportive, honest wife, and while the questions incredibly insulting.. his answer is equally so. Spoilers, as mentioned we do get an answer long after this.. and they did not. So Jean is wrong to be suspcious, at this point, but is at least trying to be polite about it and gave him the benifit of the doubt.. and Scott basically said he slept with her without actually saying it despite not having to. You could’ve said “no we did not have sex, we simply talked all night”. It’s not ENTIRELY better given the horrible state of their relationship right now, but it’s still better than HEAVILY implying he rocked her body to the break of dawn for no damn reason. 

So we meet our next major addition to the cast Angel Salvador, an abused teen who is a mutant.. and whose abusive and molesting step dad beats her and throws her out over this. The scene’s a bit overdone, coming off like an after school special.. but it’s what happens AFTER that’s truly heartwrenching. 

A poor scared teenager clutching herself, finding herself homeless alone and desperatly wishing she wasn’t what she was. It’s just a striking image and shows how well Grant uses the mutant metaphor. I could easily see myself in that position had my parents not been good peopl and had I come out far sooner as bi. The idea of desperatly hoping your not what you are simply becaus eof what hell it brings, despite all the joy it can bring too. . it’s heartbreaking to hear. 

Naturally though things don’t get much better as the next morning the U-Men have found her, calling her a freak and successfully kidnapping her.. if only because while she uses acid spit to escape, she flies into a power line. 

We then get Sublimes meeting with Emma and Scott and a BETTER use of teh u-men as while Grant made the horrible mistake of calling them “transpecies”, seriously what the fuck were you thinking, the way sublime frames it here is a MUCH better, much less accidently bigoted concept. 

The idea isn’t bad: A group of humans jealous of the mutants powers, blatantly ignoring the horrible downsides and mountain of persecution that comes with being one. Grant just made the mistake of couching in in Trans metaphors, clearly trying to have the U-Men steal from Trans People too as a way to make themselves seem legit. And I say if you want superpowers.. fine.. wanting to be a superhero or a mutant is fine, the issue with the U-Men is their copoting a culture, trying to be part of mutantkind without having any of the drawbacks and by actively butchering them. It’s why the concept HAS shown up elsewhere; it’s not TERRIBLE, Grant just made a bad creative choice that’s only gotten worse as Transphobia has ramped up further and further. 

Sublime denies it when our heroes bring up Hong Kong.. but naturally he’s simply just keeping them talking long enough to bring out his trump cards, an army of u-men and a brain in a jar he uses to incapacitate them.. and announces his plan to use the school as an organ farm for his third species. 

Meanwhile Logan finds the U-Men in their truck preparing to rip angel apart.. and given he snikit’s soon after.. i’ts very clear whose REALLY about to get ripped apart. 

Germ Free Generation Part 2: 

Part two begins wth Sublime monologoging about how Mutantkind are just cattle to them and reveals the brain is martha’s, her sucicide having been faked and her brain currently being controlled to use as a weapon. 

So while Johnny monlogues we find out what happened with Wolverine last issue he didn’t cut up the guys yet as they fired their little flichete guns at him... it was about as useful and effective as you’d expect and the massacre you were expecting occurs. Though in a nice bit of reality the fact wolverine’s soaked in blood and just killed a bunch of blood shockingly does not make the already frighttend teen feel he’s safe and she spits acid on him. Logan pours some stuff on the acid, figuring rightly a black ops murder farmacy would have something to counteract it and tells her she’s safe now .. and tells the guy behind him not to try it. He’s stupid and does anyway and likely gets a claw to the head off panel. 

They go to a diner to eat and find a local asshole who threatens them with a shot gun to leave once angel uses her power to digest and goes on a rant about how he snapped his own son’s neck to prevent him being born a freak. Just.. fucking hell this arc is not good for my depression. We get some more angst from Angel and whiel her dialouge is not the best, i’ts a too bit mark millar flavored edgelordy for my taste and if I wanted that i’d go read Ultimates or Ultimate X-Me, her pain is real and Logan helps her through it. 

Back at the Mansion the U-Men are on their way to strike, whlie Jean unaware continues to buckle under the weight of all the shit she’s had to deal with, feeling SOMETHING is making them weak with the colds and something worse is going on and thus tries going to Beak’s mind instead and gently helps talk him through it, showing her grace and empathy.. and in return finding out Charles was the one responsible. The alarms flair up and Jean tries calling the police now that’s an option.. but it goes exactly how you’d expect. 

Also a second artist took over for this issue and the next Igor Kordey. He’s fine, but not nearly as good as Quitely or Van Sciver and it shows. Meanwhile Beast awakens and heads for the body drawer with Cassandra’s body, and professor’s mind in it. 

However Jean’s finally had enough and got her second wind. She’s outgunned, outmanned and left to her own devices. And she’s fucking fed up with it. She steels herself and assembles the students. This is obviously a last resort.. but some of them can defend themselves and their going to need to. But today they won’t be learning.. they’ll be teaching and as the U-Men call them defensless Jeans simply asks “Are you sure about that?”

Germ Free Generation Part 3:

So we come to the finale of this arc. Angel is once again an ungreatful brat to logan and he opts to just leave her there if sh’es going to be like that pointing out being a mutant sucks, it’s going to keep sucking.. and she needs to deal with it instead of lashing out at him and herself over it. 

We get back to the U-Men, one of whom is utterly flabergasted they want to him to cut of Cyclops head... only for Emma to awaken.. and take back her regular form meaning she has her telepathy back. The only reason they were able to get her ealier is she was in diamond mode which is stronger but lacks that, a nice way to check and ballance her new powers. She quickly takes them out and disables Martha. 

Back at the school we get one of Jean’s definting moments for me and a true chance to show how badass she can be. Before this while Morrison wrote her well, and his version’s still my favoirite, she didn’t really get to do much and was motly in the background. This arc has been her time in the limelight, having trouble grappling with all the stress of running this place by herself.. and emerging from it stronger, more capable and ready to kick some racist weirdo ass. She tries a few diffrent tactics first, having a mutant with a voice power project it to make them think their san invisible army and having the cuckoos fuck with their heads but when both fail, Jean REALLY gets to show off. Thier blade ammo gets turned into a cool looking 3 dimensioinal shape with her telekneisis, and in a cool moment and a wise use of something gross makes the only one of them with useable powers throw up, before issuing a badass boast, wreathed in flames all while she crumples their guns into uselessness. and tears open their suits. 

Bad ass.. and logan and Angel arrive just in time for the cecendo as hte u-men flee in terror

The Phoenix has been Reborn. Jean Grey has risen from the ashes and returned to full power. 

Meanwhile Sublime is pankcing.. and it gets worse when Emma shows up, fully enraged after all of this and has some words for him. 

Iconic. Emma prepares to drop him out of a building but Scott rightly tries to get her to back off, pointing out the pr nightmare it’d create and the fact that they have enough evidence ot shut him down. Martha however has other ideas and gets him to let go of his own accord, falling to his death.. but given he’d aranged a stunt for the press apparently this gives our heroes deniability and Martha her revenge. 

So we end this three parter as Jean revels in her new power, and Beast returns with an announcment:

Final Thoughts for Germ Free Generation:  This arc is pretty good if forgetable. The struggle of Jean to run the school herself and her rising from the ashes of her own pain at the end with the power of the phoenix at the end is fantastic, finally both giving her a chance to shine.. and a worrying sign for her friends given what her phoenix force copy whose memories she has a copy of, long story, did is awesome. The other parts are okay and ehhhhhhhhh though. Scott and Emma’s investigation into the u-men while having a really good climax, is pretty standard x-men stuff, and Wolverin’es trek with angel is just okay with Angel being highly intolerable during this arc, with Morrison trying a bit TOO hard to make her a “realistic” teen instead coming off as horribly unplesant. She’s supposed to just be lashing out but comes off obnxious as a result. That said this arc does furhter a lot of Morrisons best idea and introduce more, and is a great setup for our next arc, which we’ll get to in two weeks. Soooo

Next Time On X-Men: We find out just what the hell Cassandra Nova is, what her plans are, and what happened with her and charles as our heroes come down with a cold as the might of the shiar empire bears down on them. It’s IMperial in two weeks. 

Next Time ON This BLog: Speaking of long Delayed Projects, I finally return to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as a young Scrooge starts his prospecting career, learning the ins and outs from a rich new mentor, and finding the price tag striking it rich comes with. Raid a copper hill with me tommorow. 

If you liked this review, subscirbe for more, join my patreon, and if there’s a comic you’d like me to cover suggest it in the comments or outright comission a review from me via ask. See you at the next rainbow

[whatsupspaceman]

Writing and reading non-binary characters

i think talking about non-binary characters in literary settings is really important.

Often times, characters who use they/them pronouns fly pretty easily in a visual our auditory setting like film or comics, but I’ve seen a lot of “how do i do this” when it comes to writing.

I want to talk a little about a character I wrote for a short story in a college writing class. Their name is Damien, they are a wizard in an urban fantasy setting, and they exclusively use they/them pronouns. I am a nonbinary person too, and while I use any pronouns, I knew my class was predominantly straight, cis people, and I did not want to compromise on this character’s identity- by assuming (correctly), that they would default to he/him pronouns because of Damien’s name. I was worried about doing this, obviously, knowing I would probably get some transphobic remarks in workshop. I’ll talk a little bit about that too.

The story was in third person, and centered around Damien, the college aged magic user, and Wren, a middle school aged girl who tags along with them. My first draft I did not really describe the appearance of either character- Wren I think just being a kid, and Damien having cropped black hair. The comments I received never questioned Wren’s appearance, but I received a lot of “Well, what does Damien Look Like”, “I would like to know more about Damien”, “I felt that you were being unnecessarily vague with the whole pronoun thing-”

In this draft, I didn’t mention that Damien was non-binary exclusively until near the end, where Wren asks, and Damien responds that they’re “neither a boy nor a girl.” I probably put a little too much faith in my cis classmates here- some of whom didn’t get it and others who skipped the comment entirely. Anyway, from a trans perspective- the act of clearing this up was an afterthought, something I’m tired of doing in my every day life, and something I didn’t want to focus on in my magical wizard story. However, because of the lack of non-binary representation in general media and especially literature, there’s a bit of compromise necessary to take with majority cis readers and trans writers. I had to move the clarifying remarks as to Damien’s gender identity earlier in the story to avoid the all-encompassing obsession with gendering people and characters that many of my readers possessed.

I think the most noticeable thing about this story was the reaction to transphobia- or the lack of- in it. I did not have any instance of Damien being misgendered, no snide remarks, no assumptions, and no physical description of their birth sex- all things that are absolutely rampant in trans characters I typically see portrayed in media. (Now, I understand the importance of having non-binary characters in media who aren’t perfectly androgynous because that is yet another stereotype in and of itself, but we’re still in Gender 101 here. I only had so many pages) And for this story, Damien’s assigned sex had absolutely no business being in the story. It would be absolutely redundant to tell the cis audience that, and only cement this idea of Damien’s “real gender” in their minds. Does that make sense? So, of course, all of the cis audience assumed that Wren, the cis character, was in the same boat as them and the need for a gender assumption. I got a lot of “Why doesn’t Wren misgender them?” “Why doesn’t Wren remark on how confused they are about Damien’s gender?” and the absolutle worst comment of all, “When Wren falls on them, why don’t they talk about their gender- like ‘she couldn’t tell whether the weight under her had breasts or not-‘“

I don’t have to tell you that was Really something else to read in workshop. And of all the “this was unrealistic” remarks I got, never once did anyone think to comment on the unrealistic nature of curses, magic wands, spells, and umbrellas that shoot fireworks. Turns out, it’s my fantasy world and I get to eradicate transphobia if I want to! The reason this happens once again is because of the predominance of sexism, racism, and homophobia in fantasy settings- some of the most famous of which are written by cishet white men. (and yes, Even cishet white men i actually enjoy reading.) it’s not a new thing, but it is something writers Must consider when writing fantasy. We have to destroy the idea that discrimination is inherent to fantasy and scifi universes, or that minorities just Don’t Exist in such.

And finally, the presence of singular they pronouns in a third person story. We’ve all read stories where there are two people (for example) who use he/him pronouns. Suddenly the author throws in a new paragraph, or dialogue without a tag, and you can’t tell which “he” is talking or doing the action. We’ve all been there. However, we’ve Also read scenes where all the characters use the same pronouns, and the author does a lovely job clarifying- peppering in the perfect ratio of names vs pronouns, collective actions versus clarifying characterization: “Oh, Obviously X character is the only one who laughs like that”

Writing they/them pronouns is absolutely no different. We must overcome this idea that it is some brand-new scary writing technique. And if you’ve never written non-binary characters, you’re gonna mix it up a little bit! It’s only natural. That’s where practice comes in, a lot of editing, and beta readers.

Damien shook their head. Taking Wren’s hand, they pulled her over to the side of the road, out of the way of the car.

Damien shook their head and grabbed Wren’s hand. They stumbled to the side of the road together, narrowly avoiding the car.

In the first example, I use singular they for the action of pulling Wren to the side of the road, and in the second, I use the collective they- and sometimes that might require you to use “they both” or “all of them” more than you thought you would. And here, the two examples are a little different- your language is still going to reflect the urgency of the situation, and what each character wants to do- that’s still natural.

The most important thing to remember is just to treat your nonbinary characters like people. Real people with tons of different identities and intersections and ways to express their gender. Bad and good and chaotic and quiet and loud and self absorbed and generous. (And please, please make more human nonbinary characters too!)

[sweet-xoxo-thatcares]

Pan? Polysexual sounds better now

Back to guys, gay girls, nonbinaries, pan, bi, gender-fluid, and queer people.

I might have to take a recap on matches who are trans for right now,

I still have a lot to learn about what my true identity is for right now.

Because I really can't stick to just one label...

Aye, that's just me. And dating apps are starting to feel like a job, there's too many people matching with me and trying to remember names is getting a lot to handle when you're on 3 different apps and about 20 conversations going at the same time. And still 99 people waiting on you to swipe right on them, on each one. And plus I'm not as picky about looks as I was before, so I'm mostly reading just bios, analyzing photos to see what could be their interests in, and making sure I'm not being too passive on red flags when people talk to you.

I will admit, I still swipe right on them if they're trans and I'm attracted to them. I just know me, I'd rather date someone who was fully transitioned or somebody who is still on the nonbinary, before part. Only because I know me.

I had to watch someone I had already grown into getting to know and getting attached to, and then when I finally got comfortable with them for over a yr, they changed that drastically during those 3months we were separate and I had no idea about it.....I'm not sure if I could watch it happen before my eyes. Cause then I would have to miss the way they were before, because of my attraction to their naturally mixed feminine/masculine looking features and actions. So, ideally I wouldn't have changed anything about them.

I don't wanna grow attached to a voice or a face or a body that will no longer be there tomorrow. I know that person before is still in there, but it's different when you're romantically attracted to them, been intimate with them vs when you're just a friend. My experience shocked and scared my paranoia and fear of change. I remember crying when my dad started growing white and grey hairs in his beard. Cause I never want my dad to change, cause I've grown up with him being this strong man that always was there for me, held me, made me feel safe, calmed me down when I had my moments, and tucked me in when I wanted to feel comfortable. He showed me that he always loved me, always cared about me, and that he was never gonna leave me. As if he's never gonna die during my time on this earth. Seeing his greyishly, white hairs, I thought death and that my daddy will soon no longer be the fun, happy, strong dad that I've always been with as his princess. And that's kind of what vibe this particular person was to me, even though they weren't as smart, strong, or always there for me....cause most of the time my nights alone cause they couldn't or didn't know I needed them to be there fo r me like that to feel loved or just to feel wanted. Cause I couldn't speak up.

But now, that they has turned into a he. I feel like its brutally denying me to chance to not only say goodbye to them as they, but I would have to get reacquainted to HE, with a totally different name, maybe different personality, maybe different sexuality, and I won't know if I like the new evolved version of this person. The fear of the unknown is high for me. Especially when there's a 40% rate of fems that decided to change their sexual orientation after taking testosterone. I 'm possessive about my partners and I would hate to know that after seeing this person physically change and go through so much emotional/mental changes that one day they decide "Hey, I think I like men now, I wanna give this a shot. Could we make this work?"

I would tell Him, to go right ahead and go on a date with that coworker or guy on Tinder/Grinder. But I'm not gonna be here when you come home. Because to me that's some bullshit. And I've known this person well enough to know, that they don't mind using other people to meet their sexual needs that I can't possibly give them due to my actual gender and my body as such. I wouldn't want to share my partner, nor watch them get fucked by another man...because I'm not a man, im a woman...theres a huuuuuugggeeee difference.

And if it ever came to that point 3 yrs later and He became someone I didn't know anymore, because of the hormones changing how they feel as a man, dysphoria gone....I get it, you've hated yourself for years and now you're happy in the dream body you always asked for. But, I would be scared to lose you, to whoever else you decide to open up to in your selections. Cause you're that type to leave to please you and not make it work. I don't want somebody who changes their mind all the time about who they wanna be, who else do they wanna smash, and who else they can flirt with. That's cheater mentality.

And I'm sorry trans community that I'm basing my recent experience with someone as the example for the rest of you. Because I know there are some ftm's who've already changed and stayed with their partners. I just don't know if I could trust this process, knowing the effects, the research on whether or not they become completely detached to women or become bisexual... I can't.

And I'm thankful for the ftm's that have been posting youtube videos and tiktoks for viewers like me who are curious about the possible cons, and physical or emotional changes they've overcome. I was shocked the first time I ever watched a bandaged ftm, who finally unrevealed their scars from top surgery. I've always been preparing myself for this. Because I knew one day, that this cute, fluffy, soft skinned, white latino looking, but really just mixed mocha, nonbinary person was gonna be...changed over a year or so. I thought I could prepare for it, so that when it does happen it doesn't hurt as much to watch to them in pain if the bleeding from the scars are irritating them or if one day they're super cranky and obnoxious for what seems to be no reason. Or if one day they end up feeling they dont need anybody like Zanthos, with the 4 avenger rings lol.

But I'm too damn fucking sensitive. I was born this way. I've always prepared myself with the worst and the best information, that way when it does happen, the tidal wave of emotions from the reaction, doesn't end up torching my soul or blowing me out the water. Cause I am gay. I adore women, men, and when I met this person I loved them as an in-betweener as nonbinary. They are so brutally harsh, twisted, manipulative, jealous, and possesive. But I've always liked that they had these emotions inside of them that they hold back because they don't wanna seem so soft, always hiding this feminine quality about them because ideally, they're pretty looking, gorgeous eyes that can turn black cold like obsidian, and those fucking cheeks and cat nose. I've only seen the slight hips, but I didn't mind it. And they've always hid their body away even when we would try to have sex. I knew the dysphoria was there, cause again I prepared myself to be patient and kind.

So, I'm glad they're turning a new leaf to make themselves feel more confident about being recognized in society as a full, grown ass man. I'm pretty sure HE, is gonna get cocky af, cause that's just the way he was when they were they.

I know it's selfish of me to say, but I'm afraid of what will happen down the line years later. But that's just me being afraid. If He ends up not liking me anymore, I know it won't be the end of the world and I walked away at the right time when I did. Because this person is currently separated from me, and I'm still insecure about that part too. Not knowing how they are during this transition for what may become years or not...I hope HE is doing okay and not piercing everyone with their new, world domination, ego.

I just don't wanna imagine them get fucked by a guy....sorry that's just me. And will their buttery ass kisses, still be as sweet anymore?

Will I be ok with HE having chest hair?

Will I love the sound of their new voice or will I just hate it, while still missing the old, brodie, sexy, slightly feminine voice?

Especially when they used to go all soft and cuddly on me over the phone, it was soooo cuteeee. I miss our phone and text conversations.

Will they grow into another relationship with somebody else because they started to become unattached and unattracted to my body, my tits, my hips, my vagina even....just because they completely changed their identity?

And I still a woman? I've only thought about wearing a binder a couple of times, and yes, I do watch ftm and trans porn because I did like the fantasy of being intimate with someone who had a bigger clit size or just having a big clit of my own that felt like a dick.

I'm willing to admit that. Because let's be honest, boys get away with so much more shit as a male, compared to us females.

I wish I could grow a dick overnight and nobody not know I'm still a chick! Lol, but I still don't like the all over hair body growth and I still want my vagina back. Like a rental suit with an actual dick and no tits. Those are the onllyyyyyyyyy things I've thought about, but would never admit out loud. Only because I still like my body and my gender identity as is. I feel like the blue girl from X-Men could get away with it, cause she can be anybody she wants to and go back to being herself at the end of the day. And still camouflage behind walls. Lucky chick. Especially if she could teleport, oh he'll yeah.

It's gonna take me awhile to get over this, so please be patient with me. As I'm trying not to cry as I watch my ftm porn get fucked by a guy. Cause I used to be heavy into it, now I feel wrong for watching it and then I'm reminded "40% chance, you're watching it" 😞🤮😫

[rapeculturerealities]

“BUTCH” HAS LONG been the name we’ve given a certain kind — that kind — of lesbian. The old adage applies: You know her when you see her. She wears men’s clothing, short hair, no makeup. Butch is an aesthetic, but it also conveys an attitude and energy. Both a gender and a sexuality, butchness is about the body but also transcends it: “We exist in this realm of masculinity that has nothing to do with cis men — that’s the part only we [butches] know how to talk about,” says the 42-year-old writer, former Olympic swimmer and men’s wear model Casey Legler. “Many people don’t even know how to ask questions about who we are, or about what it means to be us.”

Many of us wear the butch label with a certain self-consciousness, fearing the term doesn’t quite fit — like a new pair of jeans, it’s either too loose or too tight. The graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, 59, doesn’t refer to herself as butch but understands why others do. “It’s a lovely word, ‘butch’: I’ll take it, if you give it to me,” she says. “But I’m afraid I’m not butch enough to really claim it. Because part of being butch is owning it, the whole aura around it.”

What does owning it look like? Decades before genderless fashion became its own style, butches were wearing denim and white tees, leather jackets and work boots, wallet chains and gold necklaces. It isn’t just about what you’re wearing, though, but how: Butchness embodies a certain swagger, a 1950s-inspired “Rebel Without a Cause” confidence. In doing so, these women — and butches who don’t identify as women — created something new and distinct, an identity you could recognize even if you didn’t know what to call it.

By refuting conventionally gendered aesthetics, butchness expands the possibilities for women of all sizes, races, ethnicities and abilities. “I always think of the first butch lesbian I ever saw,” says the 33-year-old actor Roberta Colindrez. “This beautiful butch came into the grocery store and she was built like a brick house. Short hair, polo shirt, cargo pants and that ring of keys … It was the first time I saw the possibility of who I was.” And yet, to many people, “butch style” remains an oxymoron: There’s a prevalent assumption that we’re all fat, frumpy fashion disasters — our baseball caps and baggy pants suggest to others that we don’t care about self-presentation. But it’s not that we’re careless; it’s that unlike, say, the gay white men who have been given all too much credit for influencing contemporary visual culture, we’re simply not out to appease the male gaze. We disregard and reject the confines of a sexualized and commodified femininity.

ETYMOLOGICALLY, “butch” is believed to be an abbreviation of “butcher,” American slang for “tough kid” in the early 20th century and likely inspired by the outlaw Butch Cassidy. By the early 1940s, the word was used as a pejorative to describe “aggressive” or “macho” women, but lesbians reclaimed it almost immediately, using it with pride at 1950s-era bars such as Manhattan’s Pony Stable Inn and Peg’s Place in San Francisco. At these spots, where cocktails cost 10 cents and police raids were a regular occurrence, identifying yourself as either butch or femme was a prerequisite for participating in the scene.

These butches were, in part, inspired by 19th-century cross-dressers — then called male impersonators or transvestites — who presented and lived fully as men in an era when passing was a crucial survival tactic. We can also trace butchness back to the androgynous female artists of early 20th-century Paris, including the writer Gertrude Stein and the painter Romaine Brooks. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and early 1970s that butches, themselves at the intersection of the burgeoning civil, gay and women’s rights movements, became a more visible and viable community.

From their earliest incarnations, butches faced brutal discrimination and oppression, not only from outside their community but also from within. A certain brand of (mostly white) lesbian feminism dominant in the late ’70s and early ’80s marginalized certain sorts of “otherness” — working-class lesbians, lesbians of color and masculine-of-center women. They pilloried butchness as inextricably misogynist and butch-femme relationships as dangerous replications of heteronormative roles. (Such rhetoric has resurfaced, as trans men are regularly accused of being anti-feminist in their desire to become the so-called enemy.) Challenged yet again to defend their existence and further define themselves, butches emerged from this debate emboldened, thriving in the late ’80s and early ’90s as women’s studies programs — and, later, gender and queer studies departments — gained traction on North American and European college campuses.

The ’90s were in fact a transformative decade for the butch community. In 1990, the American philosopher Judith Butler published her groundbreaking “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” and her theories about gender were soon translated and popularized for the masses. In her academic work, Butler argues that gender and sexuality are both constructed and performative; butch identity, as female masculinity, subverts the notion that masculinity is the natural and exclusive purview of the male body. Soon after, butch imagery infiltrated the culture at large. The August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair featured the straight supermodel Cindy Crawford, in a black maillot, straddling and shaving the butch icon K.D. Lang. That same year, the writer Leslie Feinberg published “Stone Butch Blues,” a now classic novel about butch life in 1970s-era New York. In Manhattan, comedians such as Lea DeLaria and drag kings such as Murray Hill took to the stage; it was also the heyday of Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For,” the serialized comic strip she started in 1983. In 1997, Ellen DeGeneres, still the most famous of butches, came out. Two years later, Judith “Jack” Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano published “The Drag King Book” and the director Kimberly Peirce released her breakthrough film, “Boys Don’t Cry”; its straight cisgender star, Hilary Swank, went on to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon Teena, a role that still incites contentious debates about the nebulous boundaries between butch and trans identity. These artists and their legacies are the cornerstones of our community. As Legler says, “This is where we’ve come from, and the folks we look back to. If you identify with that lineage, then we’d love to have you.”

LIKE ANY QUEER subculture, butchness is vastly different now than it was three decades ago — though the codes have been tweaked and refined over the years, younger butches continue to take them in new and varied directions: They may experiment with their personas from day to day, switching fluidly between masculine and feminine presentation. There are “stone butches,” a label that doesn’t refer to coldness, as is often assumed, but to a desire to touch rather than to be touched — to give rather than receive — and is considered slightly more masculine than “soft butch” on the Futch Scale, a meme born in 2018 that attempted to parse the gradations from “high femme” to “stone butch.” (“Futch,” for “femme/butch,” is square in the middle.) And while there remains some truth to butch stereotypes — give us a plaid flannel shirt any day of the week — that once-static portrait falls apart under scrutiny and reflection. Not every butch has short hair, can change a tire, desires a femme. Some butches are bottoms. Some butches are bi. Some butches are boys.

Different bodies own their butchness differently, but even a singular body might do or be butch differently over time. We move between poles as our feelings about — and language for — ourselves change. “In my early 20s, I identified as a stone butch,” says the 45-year-old writer Roxane Gay. “In adulthood, I’ve come back to butch in terms of how I see myself in the world and in my relationship, so I think of myself as soft butch now.” Peirce, 52, adds that this continuum is as much an internal as an external sliding scale: “I’ve never aspired to a binary,” she says. “From day one, the idea of being a boy or a girl never made sense. The ever-shifting signifiers of neither or both are what create meaning and complexity.”

Indeed, butch fluidity is especially resonant in our era of widespread transphobia. Legler, who uses they/them pronouns, is a “trans-butch identified person — no surgery, no hormones.” Today, the interconnected spectrums of gender and queerness are as vibrant and diverse in language as they are in expression — genderqueer, transmasc, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming. Yet butches have always called themselves and been called by many names: bull dyke, diesel dyke, bulldagger, boi, daddy and so on. Language evolves, “flowing in time and changing constantly as new generations come along and social structures shift,” Bechdel says.

If it’s necessary to think historically, it’s also imperative to think contextually. Compounding the usual homophobia and misogyny, black and brown butches must contend with racist assumptions: “Black women often get read as butch whether they are butch or not,” Gay says. “Black women in general are not seen, so black butchness tends to be doubly invisible. Except for studs: They’re very visible,” she adds, referring to a separate but related term used predominantly by black or Latinx butches (though, unsurprisingly, white butches have appropriated it) who are seen as “harder” in their heightened masculinity and attitude. Gay notes that “people tend to assume if you’re a black butch, you’re a stud and that’s it,” which is ultimately untrue. Still, butch legibility remains a paradox: As the most identifiable of lesbians — femmes often “pass” as straight, whether they want to or not — we are nonetheless maligned and erased for our failure of femininity, our refusal to be the right kind of woman.

ANOTHER LINGERING stereotype, one born from “Stone Butch Blues” and its more coded literary forebears, particularly Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” (1928), is the butch as a tragic and isolated figure. She is either cast out by a dominant society that does not — will not — ever see her or accept her, or she self-isolates as a protective response to a world that continually and unrelentingly disparages her.

When a butch woman does appear in mainstream culture, it’s usually alongside her other: the femme lesbian. Without the femme and the contrast she underscores, the butch is “inherently uncommodifiable,” Bechdel says, since two butches together is just a step “too queer.” We rarely see butches depicted in or as community, an especially sobering observation given the closure of so many lesbian bars over the past two decades. But when you talk to butches, a more nuanced story emerges, one of deep and abiding camaraderie and connection. Despite the dearth of representation, butch love thrives — in the anonymous, knowing glances across the subway platform when we recognize someone like us, and in the bedroom, too. “Many of my longest friendships are with people who register somewhere on the butch scale,” Peirce says. “We’re like married couples who fell in love with each other as friends.”

Legler, for their part, recognizes a “lone wolf” effect, one in which some young queers initially love “being the only butch in the room.” In organizing the group portrait that accompanies this essay over the past months, Legler was curious “what it would be like for butches to just show up together and to be able to display all of their power, all of their sexiness, all of their charisma, without having it be mitigated in some way.” And not only for butches of an older generation, but for those still figuring things out, transforming the scene in ways that both defy and inspire their elders. “It’s been centuries in the making, the fact that we are all O.K.,” Legler adds. “That our bodies get to exist: We have to celebrate that. You can do more than just survive. You can contribute.”

[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

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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