#what if it’s two trans women in a relationship?

[bookshopsbizarreblog]

I don't normally care to get involved in Tumblr discourse, but ik you prev so I'll share my thoughts <3. The first set is more in relation to your comment than the root post, but it's your comment that got me thinking.

While your argument makes some sense on paper, and the fundamental core of it is trying to affirm folks trans identities (always a good thing), it still rings a bit.... not necessarily gender essentialist, since that has connotations™, but rigid in terms of what gender means. There is no universal set of features, internal, external, experiential, or socially mandated, that encompass what it means to be any given gender. I'm sure this is something we agree on, barring possible quibbles about how self identification functions. If someone says they're a certain gender (or not, for that matter), you believe them. How they identify is in their hands.

But identifying one way now doesn't necessarily mean that all of their past experiences align with them as their present gender going through that. For some people, I'm sure it does. There is a whole lot of utility in recontextualizing one's past in that way, in, as you put it, declaring that they "[were] not experiencing it as women, they[ were] experiencing it as men who are being treated as women." Or whatever other gender is relevant for the given situation. But it's not necessarily universally true. Case in point, genderfluid people. Someone feeling nonbinary one day and like a man the next doesn't mean that their experiences within the self-identification of nonbinary are all retroactively male experiences. Again, I'm sure that's preaching to the choir here.

For binary trans folks, I can't imagine not applying a similar principle. If someone believed and was treated as though they were a specific gender growing up, and later discovered otherwise, how they choose to relate to and understand their past is their call. The root truth is that gender and identification is a complicated mess, and we are all constantly shifting in our relationships to society and ourselves. Even cis people can experience dysphoria and disconnect from their preferred gender. There's no one unified story for what it means to be any given person. We get to make those ourselves. It'd be completely valid for a trans man to look back at when he thought he was a girl, along with everything that came with it, and pick out the early signs that would lead to them deciding that being a girl didn't suit them without invalidating their previous experience with that gender. We don't have to understand ourselves as always having been one way or the other, even within a binary identification. We can, if it serves us. But it's an individual's decision.

Anywho, that's just my rambling thoughts on what you said. TL; DR - I agree overall with you but think there's room for individual nuance and different self-concepts.

Now to actually address the disconnect I see between you and OP lol

I don't feel like your two claims are contradictory, and the linking factor is empathy. Let's set aside everything else I said, just work with a spherical trans man in a frictionless vacuum someone who has always known they were a man in the wrong body, with all the frustrations and dysphoria that entails. As OP said, they will not have always passed, and will thus have first hand experience of how society treats women.

Now, does this make them a woman? Obviously not. Does this mean they experience it identically to how women do? Again, no (though I'd also argue against any one universal experience with sexism and harassment). But they can still get it. They can still understand how it feels to go through all that due to society's perceptions of women. And I think that's closer to the point OP is making. They're not arguing that being on the receiving end of misogyny makes trans men women.

They're just saying "we experience it too. We understand how painful it can be. Don't discount our pain, or our knowledge of it, just because we're men. You're ignoring a very real struggle many of us have gone through, and that also hurts."

At least that's my reading, prev. Feel free to disagree, and I'd love to hear your thoughts! I'm sure I've missed some things and have points people might quibble or clarify. Learning is a constant process and I'd appreciate feedback!

i think im going to lose my fucking mind actually.

this little make believe game that yall are playing where ur all pretending that we have always been passing as cis men is honestly just really sickening to read. as if trans men have never been sexually harassed or abused because society perceives us as women. im genuinely of the opinion that u all just do not believe trans men face misogyny and thats so unbelievably fucked up and just not based in reality. its actually disgusting and vile.

[girl4music]

I have a question about WLW couples or relationships that I’m sure you guys will be able to help me answer.

Is it appropriate to say it’s a lesbian/gay couple or lesbian/gay relationship if one or both of the women in it do not identify as either a gay or a lesbian woman?

The reason why I ask is that I’m bisexual and a woman but if I was in a relationship with another woman, I would have no problem with anyone referring to us as a lesbian/gay relationship or as a lesbian/gay couple. But my partner might feel differently if she didn’t identify as a lesbian or gay either but bi/pan/queer or some other sexuality in the confusing alphabet soup.

Is that an appropriate term to use or is ‘sapphic’ better? Which I also would have no problem with.

In terms of WLW in TV art/entertainment or storytelling I don’t often have too much of a worry because the characters are fictional along with it.

However…

Xena and Gabrielle is a TV WLW relationship/dynamic I’ve loved all my life. They are my NO.1 OTP of all-time. But I’ve always been wary of referring to them as a lesbian/gay couple or a lesbian/gay relationship because I interpret Xena as bisexual and Gabrielle as a lesbian. But I’ve never worried about calling them a WLW couple or relationship because they’re both women. And so I often just say WLW or queer.

I’ve never really used the term ‘sapphic’ but I’ve seen it been used a lot in regards to Xena and Gabrielle due to them being in the time of Sappho but also because no one can quite agree on their canon sexualities in the Xenaverse fandom. There’s many that interpret them both as lesbian/gay. There’s very few fans that only interpret both as straight. But the one thing that seems to be unanimously agreed upon by all fans is that they have feelings for each other romantically/sexually if not a couple or never made it as a couple.

It’s a bit difficult when it comes to them so it just got me wondering what’s the most appropriate term?

Saying that. Would WLW also be appropriate if one or both in the relationship didn’t identify as women? But rather non-binary or transgender or agender instead.

You think I would know this information by now but I’m honestly not so sure with the sources I’ve been using to educate myself on. They aren’t entirely reliable for accurate and up-to-date information.

And I have a very diverse following on here so I think you guys could tell me more accurate information or at least direct me to sources of where I can find it.

[monsterfuckermilligan]

i am not anti sam but i sometimes find myself hating sam because some samgirls are super into bio/gender essentialism whether or not they realize it. sam is a woman and dean is a man and sam is the victim and dean is his abuser like what show are you watching?

[sailorportia]

Everyone loves posting about how men writing yuri might be secret trans women and how that means we need to support them, but nobody's posting about I Favor the Villainess, which was written by a trans woman... 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

[freebagels]

I wonder if I can make my trans guy oc identify as lesbian...

[21stcenturyschizoidfag]

thinking hard about relationships where gender really never factored into the equation at all in its conception but the roles have become something fun to play at fulfilling, or some sort of ritualistic performance done out of devotion and dedication.. "i'll be your man if you'll be my woman"... "i wish you were a girl"... the deep seated craving for a framework that inextricably links you to one another even if and especially if you would be a nontraditional fit.. GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY 😭

[mellowparabellum]

man i was at a restaurant today where I had to interact with one of the most beautiful humans i've ever seen. smiling, cute lil moustache, glasses and curly hair

people aren't allowed to look that amazing. wayyy out off my league. also probably too stable and reasonable to date my mentowwy iww ass

anyway, i found out that i can still crush on people (and also converse with them without being *way* too awkward), which is nice. progressing slowly out of being too scared of other people to go out. finally found the meds that actually work. it's looking up for me (hope this doesn't jinx it)

[themoonking]

actually, genuinely, people who are defending or are still "on the fence about" neil gaiman, tell me, what do you think is more likely:

(a) two women who have never met, who live oceans apart, and who engaged in relationships with neil gaiman two decades apart, and whose stories line up down to the manner in which gaiman acted during sex and the way in which he abused them, both decide to lie about being sexually assaulted by a man who they were apparently actually in a completely loving consensual relationship with (one of them going so far as to file a police complaint in 2022 that lead to an investigation that is still ongoing), undergoing serious personal, social, and legal risk, all to gain the sweet sweet reward that i keep hearing women who come forward about sexual abuse by famous men receive but coincidentally never actually see them get. possibly as part of a transphobic psyop to get back at a different man for supporting trans rights, or potentially as part of a government psyop to win votes in an election in a country that neither of them live in, and that the one who filed the police complaint did not file it in. or, according to gaiman, because one of them is still upset about the ending of a relationship twenty years ago, and the other is delusional and formed false memories of assault due to a medical condition that she does not have and never has.

(b) a rich and famous cishet white man sought out relationships with much younger women who he was in a position of power over and sexually abused them

[laur-talks]

yeah. yeah im scott. scott cawthon fnaf hor hor ho hor hor hor ho hor ho hor

confession: i project my personality traits onto teto and (some of) my physical appearance traits onto ritsu

HEHEHEHE okay but who doesn't project? i dunno if you remember my older ritsu interp but she's basically just me fr fr ...

[librarycards]

Spanning nearly two centuries of global history, the basic pattern of trans misogyny is much older than TERFs, or right-wing Christians, and extremely consistent. Trans misogyny is not a mere psychological and irrational hatred of trans women. In fact, trans misogyny as a concept helps explain how individuals, or interpersonal violence, can act on behalf of the state or other abstract political movements. At the interpersonal scale, however, trans misogyny testifies to the uncomfortable thickness of social bonds across hierarchies of gender, class, and race. When a straight man lashes out after dating or having sex with a trans woman, he is often afraid of the implication that his sexuality is joined to hers. When a gay man anxiously keeps trans women out of his activism or social circles, he is often fearful of their common stigma as feminine. And when a non-trans feminist claims she is erased by trans women’s access to a bathroom, she is often afraid that their shared vulnerability as feminized people will be magnified intolerably by trans women’s presence. In each case, trans misogyny displays a fear of interdependence and a refusal of solidarity. It is felt as a fear of proximity. Trans femininity is too sociable, too connected to everyone –– too exuberant about stigmatized femininity –– and many people fear the excess of trans femininity and sexuality by getting too close. But sociability can never be confined or blamed on one person in a relationship; it's impersonal, and it sticks to everyone.

The defensive fear and projection build into trans misogyny, whether genuine or performed, is an attempt to wish away what it nonetheless recognizes: that trans femininity is an integral part of the social fabric. There will be no emancipation for anyone until we embrace trans femininity's centrality and value.

Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny.

[cazort]

Why I'm Enthusiastic About Kamala Harris

I've seen so much negative talk about Trump and we all agree with that, but I want to highlight what I like most about Kamala Harris and why I'm actively enthusiastic and excited about voting for her:

She is pro-abortion rights and pro- comprehensive sex ed

She would appoint good Supreme Court Justices.

She respects people with a diverse range of political views and would include some voices from both progressive and conservative perspectives in her administration.

She is unambiguously pro-LGBTQ rights, including not just on gay rights but also trans rights.

She would represent continuity with the Biden administration, an administration that I think has done a good job on most issues.

On the issue of Palestine/Israel/Gaza (where I am most critical of Biden), I think Harris is a significant improvement over Biden, and also offers the better path of the only two viable candidates, towards ending the genocide. She has spoken out against the civilian deaths and she has snubbed Netanyahu which is a huge plus in my book.

She has shown a willingness to change her views, such as how she moved from being opposed to decriminalizing sex work in 2008, to being supportive of it in 2019, and being initially skeptical of marijuana legalization in 2010, but coming to support it in 2015. I like a candidate who can change their views, but more importantly, she is changing in a direction I like.

She would be good on the economy; she opposes tariffs, and would continue the Biden administration policies which have led to economic prosperity.

She has a solid and fairly diverse track record of experience, working as attorney general for the largest state, then senator for that state, then VP.

She has worked to combat over-incarceration and cruel treatment of people in prison, doing things like reducing mandatory minimum sentences and working to reduce recidivism, opposing solitary confinement, ending private prisons, and ending cash bail. She has also pledged to use the president's clemency powers to release a lot of people who have been imprisoned unjustly or given unfairly harsh sentences.

She has a concrete plan to enact immigration reform that would adequately fund the processing of asylum applications and fix the backlog of immigrants at the border. And the plan has broad bipartisan support.

On top of this she also has already done some things to address the root causes of migration in Latin America, particularly people fleeing Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador

She is pro-net-neutrality.

She supports universal healthcare, but also has concrete recommendations for how to improve the current status quo.

She is pro-science, including on issues like climate change, COVID, vaccinations, and health and nutrition. Her mom was a scientist!

She is pro-Ukraine, wanting to keep Russia out of Ukraine and ensure Ukraine wins their war of defense and maintains their independence.

She is across-the-board better on women's issues, not just reproductive rights but also sexual violence and domestic violence, workplace equality and the pay gap, and women's issues in Latin America (which is related to the immigration pressure I mentioned above.)

She generally takes stances on foreign policy I agree with, being skeptical of leaders (Putin, Orban, Netanyahu) I want us to be skeptical of, and working with and looking up to the ones I want us to work with and look up to (Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron). She already has a working relationship with many of these leaders too, and has a reputation of being both personable and tough, just what I'd want.

She's smart, well-educated, and surrounded with smart, well-educated, and wise people. Her campaign is stable and well-run, and I trust her to put together a team of competent advisors and run this country competently, probably even more so than Biden has done, and Biden has done a pretty decent job, exceeding my expectations even.

Harris also has an impressive list of endorsements. I can't possibly be comprehensive here, but it includes people as diverse as the most progressive Democrat Lawmakers (Bernie Sanders and AOC), some of the most conservative former GOP legislators (Jeff Flake, Liz Cheney), and over 100 former GOP staffers including a disturbing number of insiders from the Trump administration. This is telling! You don't see this sort of whistleblowing and defection from within the Biden administration.

The fact that Harris has racked up endorsements from people spanning the whole political spectrum from solid-right to solid-left and everything in between, impresses me. This is the sign of someone who is going to be good at getting people to work together, someone who will listen to a wide range of viewpoints and develop better policy and take better courses of action as a result. It's what I always want in a president.

In some elections I have been frustrated that I'm voting for a "lesser of two evils" but this time around I actually feel actively enthusiastic about Harris. I am excited to vote tomorrow and excited to finally be done with this election, and I am cautiously optimistic that it is going to turn out really well.

I encourage everyone to vote and make sure to make sure everyone close to you is also voting!

[celluloidrainbow]

GENDER TROUBLEMAKERS (1993) dir. Mirha-Soleil Ross & Xanthra Mackay What happens when two Transdykes get sick of non-transsexual's uninformed representation of their sexualities and their lives? They grab their 8 millimeter home video camera, their last 200 bucks, and come up with an uncompromising in-your-face flick about their shitty relationships with gay men and their unabashed attraction to other trans women. (link in title)

[communistkenobi]

could you expand / share reading materials on "gender is a structure that mediates access to personhood"? i feel like that's an important point that i don't fully grasp. especially because it is my understanding that until relatively recently even white, bourgeois, cis-heterosexual, perisex etc women were also denied personhood, but were already gendered as women, right?

thanks in advance!

I’m so sorry you sent me this ask like three months ago and I’m only getting around to it now lol

This is going to be a long post. I will be talking a lot about citizenship and rights in this post. I’ll include citations, but two overarching texts I will be engaging with a lot are Unequal Freedom (2004) by Evelyn Nakano Glenn and The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1989) by Gøsta Esping-Andersen.

This is also not meant to be a comprehensive answer to your question. I am much less familiar with migration & refugee scholarship, which is obviously deeply engaged with the concept of citizenship as an apparatus for granting rights. I’m flagging this because my answer has a particular focus that is not generalisable. Everything I say is not “the answer” to your question, but an answer informed by specific domains of scholarship.

First, I think a good place to start is that when we talk about ‘personhood’ as a status that a human being can or cannot possess, we are often talking about a status that is realisable through citizenship. ‘Personhood’ is itself a legal term, and we can see this in how stateless people (i.e. people with no citizenship) are treated - because rights are granted by and administered through states, being without state citizenship means you are unable to realise any set of rights, and therefore, you are rendered as a non-person. The UN has two separate conventions on the rights of stateless people for example, as being stateless is necessarily an international issue. I think this approach helps makes sense of why “human rights” is a popular framing in discussions of how to remediate inequality (e.g. “trans rights are human rights”). The “human” part of that equation is only realised through the attainment of “rights,” i.e., through citizenship. Citizenship = personhood can also be seen when people invoke “second class citizens” as an articulation of legal, political, and societal discrimination - i.e., groups of people who have less/no access to rights compared to other groups within a state. Systems of classed citizenship often emerge from regimes of settler colonialism, slavery, and apartheid (Glenn discusses this in her book).

The basic Marxist intervention in this discussion is that this class system still exists even in places that have abolished slavery, abolished apartheid, and/or gone through formal decolonisation, because state law under capitalism is fundamentally unjust. Marx calls law the “mystification of power” (I believe he says this in The German Ideology? I'm rusty on my Marx readings lol) - he argues that law is a bourgeois system of justice that caters to the wealthy and powerful and disenfranchises the poor and marginal, but appears as neutral and fair through a liberal “theater” (Marx’s term from The 18th Brumaire) of equality and democracy, mystifying its actual effects and purpose (The Red Demiurge (2015) by Scott Newton is a book about Soviet legal history that goes into some of this. His focus is on the evolution of the Bolshevik relationship to law as the USSR developed and encountered quite literally new legal problems that emerged as a result of the formation of a socialist state). This is also part of the Marxist critique of nationalism - if state citizenship is what grants access to rights, and citizenship is classed (through your relationship to production, through white supremacy, through patriarchy, through colonial status, through religious status, through etc), then equality does not legally exist, that all equality is bourgeois equality, i.e., not universal, not equal.

Gøsta Esping-Andersen provides a really helpful theory of thinking about citizenship rights within a capitalist state (his book only focuses on Western imperial core states, so just flagging that lol). He begins by arguing that:

all markets are regulated by the state, there is no actual “free” or anarcho-capitalist market,

because of this necessary regulatory function provided by the state, the commodity of wage-labour (i.e., the process of selling your labour-power as a “good” or commodity on a market in exchange for money in the form of wages) is likewise always regulated to some degree, and so finally,

welfare should be understood as the regulatory system of the commodity of wage-labour.

This regulatory apparatus is what grants people “social citizenship rights” - sick leave, pensions, disability and unemployment insurance, welfare payments, food stamps, tax bracket placements, childcare, healthcare, education, housing, so on and so on. Within this framework, Esping-Andersen demonstrates that various welfare regimes produce different citizenship classes - Canada, Australia and the US, for example, explicitly reproduce an impoverished “welfare class” through a marginal, means-tested welfare regime that only provides benefits to the very poorest. Various European countries by contrast tend to have what he calls a “corporatist” welfare regime that often grants different social citizenship rights based on which occupation you have, which he argues emerged from feudal and pre-capitalist religious (esp. Catholic) social forms of organisation.

ANYWAY, the purpose of doing all that set-up is to contextualise how we arrive at the question of gender. Feminists make the basic point that citizenship is also classed by gender - in Unequal Freedom, Glenn talks about this in the US, where white women were legally treated as extensions of their husbands and had no access to property rights, voting rights, and so on. Black women, in contrast, were treated sexually as women by slaveholders (i.e., raped and abused) but denied any and all personhood on the basis of their slave status. Citizenship in the US was historically based first on your ability to hold property (reserved for white bourgeois men), and then on your ability to “freely sell” your labour-power on the market - white women were denied citizenship on this basis because they were consigned to managing what was defined as the “private realm,” i.e., the realm that houses free labourers (white men). This public/private distinction emerges through capitalist markets and the commodity of wage-labour, which produces a sharp distinction where productive labour takes place “out there” (paid for in wages by the capitalist class) and reproductive labour takes place “in here” (i.e., labour that is not paid for in wages* by the capitalist class and forms the social basis of reproducing the public labour pool). 

*for white women. see below

As Glenn argues, this public/private distinction in the US is fundamentally racialised. We can see this difference in the emergence of the suffragette movement, where white women appeal to their whiteness (i.e., free labour status) as the rationale for being granted the right to vote. Black women were disqualified from this movement, and did not benefit from white women’s demands for equal citizenship on the basis of them providing all this unpaid reproductive labour to their white husbands, as Black and other racialised women often provided domestic housekeeping labour for white women (unpaid during slavery and for indentured servants, for wages after its abolition). This leaves Black women without a private realm, subjecting them to a “purely public” arena that is uniquely difficult to organise for unionisation and/or improve working conditions (Deborah King talks about this further in Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness (1988)).

Trans-feminism explicates this further - coercive sex assignment at birth classes people on the basis of reproductive capacity. “Females” are impregnated, “males” do the impregnating. This particular system of sex assignment is deeply tied to colonial population management concerns, where measuring the labour capacity of colonised subjects was a matter of managing white wealth (as well as making sure “there weren’t too many of them” compared to white people in colonies - this was especially a major white anxiety after the Haitian Revolution at the turn of the 19th century, the largest slave revolt in history. See Settlers by J Sakai). You can read Maria Lugones’ papers The Coloniality of Gender (2016) and Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System (2007), Alex Adamson's (2022) paper Beyond the Coloniality of Gender, and Guirkinger & Villar's (2022) paper Pro-birth policies, missions, and fertility for some introductory reading.

(Note: patriarchal gender hierarchies predate and exist outside of European colonial domination - it is a popular white queer talking point that Europe invented gender, that indigenous peoples actually all had epic radically equal genderfuck systems that were destroyed by Europe, and this is a very patronising and racist historical generalisation that I want to avoid making. Third World/Global South feminism is a necessary corrective to this - an arena of scholarship I am sadly not well versed in. Sylvia Wynter is the only scholar I’ve engaged with on this topic, which again, is a very limited slice. I welcome reading recommendations in this area).

While sex assignment is coercive for everyone, it is a particular problem for trans people, who are accused of impersonation and ID fraud if our sex markets conflict with our gender presentation, or we don’t “look like” our sex marker to cis people. Because you need a government ID to do basically anything - getting a job, applying for an apartment, getting a driver’s license, going to school, buying a phone plan, being on unemployment, applying for disability, filing an insurance claim, doing your taxes, opening a bank account, getting married, going to the hospital, buying lottery tickets at the corner store, etc - and sex markers appear on basically all government ID in many countries, trans people are systematically denied a whole range of citizenship rights (and thus personhood) on the basis of this sex assignment. Trans people are not merely treated as the wrong gender, they are ungendered, and by this process, rendered ineligible for personhood. Like just as an example, gay marriage is a luxury to trans people, as gay marriage is based on the state recognising both you and your partner’s gender in the first place. (See Heath Fogg Davis’ paper Sex-Classification Policies as Transgender Discrimination (2014) for example. Butler also talks about this on a more fundamental level in Bodies That Matter (1993), and Stryker & Sullivan also discuss this in The Queen's Body, the King's Member (2009)).  

This is likewise the impetus behind anti-trans bathroom bills and sports bans - citizenship guarantees, among other things, a right to public space, and these bans are meant to deprive transgender people access to those spaces. These bans should be understood as a way of circumventing the much more difficult process of revoking the citizenship of trans people outright by using a component of citizenship (sex assignment at birth) to impoverish the quality of citizenship that trans people have access to. This is why bans on medical transition are not actually just about medical oppression, but the oppression of trans peoples’ abilities to live in society in general. An instructive parallel is abortion bans for pregnant people, who, in addition to facing medical oppression and violence by being denied healthcare, are likewise systemically marginalised through being forced into the role of “mother” (again we see how cissexualism reduces people to reproductive capacity), economically marginalising them by reducing their capacity to earn a wage, tying them to partners/spouses that now have greater economic and social leverage over them (and thus have greater capacity to assault, rape, and murder them), depriving them of the choice of alternative life paths, and so on.

It’s generally much more difficult to get the state to sign off on unilaterally oppressing a group of citizens by depriving them of citizenship completely, so attacking a group through more narrow and particular policies like healthcare or the use of public space (with the ultimate goal of depriving them of their rights in general) is often much easier and more productive. See Beauchamp's 2019 book Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and US Surveillance Practices, who talks about this in the context of anti-trans bathroom bills in chapter 3. This is also a common thread in disability scholarship, as disabled people are likewise denied much of the same citizenship rights through similar logics - the book Absent Citizens (2009) by Michal J Prince talks about this in the Canadian context. To give an example he uses in the book, in Canada, accessible voting stations were only federally mandated in I believe the 90s, meaning that disabled people were practically disenfranchised until about 30 years ago in Canada, even though there were no laws explicitly banning disabled people from voting.

As a result, any barriers put in place by the state to change your legal name and sex marker should be understood as a comprehensive denial of personhood, not only because we as trans people want our IDs to reflect who we are, but because those barriers make it difficult to do literally anything in civil society. This the basis behind the cry of “trans rights are human rights” - taking away our healthcare rights also fundamentally denies us equal citizenship (and thus personhood), because healthcare is where we get all those little permission slips from doctors and psychologists to change our name and gender marker in the first place. This is of course not remotely the same as being made stateless (trans refugees are placed in a particularly harrowing and violent legal black hole, for example) - I as a white trans person living in the imperial core still benefit from a massive range of material, political and social privileges not afforded to many others, but my transness positions me at a deficit relative to cis people who have the same state citizenship as I do. As I hope I've made clear, it's not a binary case of either having or not having citizenship, but that citizenship is classed, and the quality of your citizenship is heavily dependent on a whole range of social, political, legal, economic, and historical factors that are all largely out of your control.

So not only is gender a barrier to citizenship, it mediates access to realising the full range of personhood within a regime of state citizenship. Trans people are not the only group effected by this, as I described above, but trans people are a group that makes obvious the arbitrary, coercive, and unequal nature of sex assignment through its connection to state citizenship.

[hadesoftheladies]

actually, I DID have gender dysphoria as a teenage girl without being exposed to anything about it on the internet, on top of "racial dysphoria" and body dysmorphia

there were points I DID want to kill myself because i wasn't, or bleach my skin or change my body, i would have done anything to be a white boy at one point

which is both sad and funny to me because i remember two of my then good friends explain being enby and transgender to me and me being like "that doesn't make any sense" and it's because of trans-discourse we eventually broke up. the closest i ever got to accepting trans-ideology was transmedicalism with weak support for "queer" culture. i did not understand pronouns, but i understood dysphoria. but i did not understand how one could be a man or woman without the sex characteristics.

how did i heal?

one, i left church. that was one of the places i was most scrutinized for my physical body. two, i distanced from my parents, especially my mom. who often made my ocd and body-image worse (not because she was mean, but because she was always fretting about "decency"). three, i focused on bettering my personal space. writing, reading, watching my comfort shows, getting the focus off me. four, i started eating better, and my body became less burdensome. i stopped getting horrible period pain. five, i surrounded myself with self-confident women and stopped trying to resurrect toxic friendships with girls and boys (especially boys). started eliminating each toxic friend and focusing my efforts on healthier relationships. six, i'd started educating myself on my own history, watching and listening to more black and African people. even when i didn't enjoy what they made or resonate with it, i found i appreciated the experience and could allow myself to hate or love whatever i found.

by the time i discovered radical feminism, this was like, the final step for me: consuming women-centric literature and media. this was HUGE. i'd see paintings and photography of women in all shapes, colors and sizes. i'd listen to master musicians, read women philosophers, anthropologists, etc. this started mending a lot of what caused initial disquiet when it came to my dysphoria or dysmorphia.

basically, i took myself out of bad environments (especially those which force you to scrutinize every detail about yourself, like social media, i took long breaks from that), drew boundaries with people i couldn't get rid of, learned about myself (ocd, dyscalculia, anxiety, female biology) so that i developed understanding and could empathize, stopped centering men and white people.

now, while there's still a hint or trace of dysmorphia and dysphoria, it doesn't plague my life. it's like the occasional itch. more of a mild temptation to go down a dark hole than an actual threat. and i've learned how to handle those.

i learned the root of things. not just my history, but the root of how society worked and how it affected me. and i'm still learning, and my life is still improving.

so yeah, girls and women going through this is normal and common. anyone who is used to who they are being shameful is more at risk (like gnc lgb kids), but you can recover. usually better if you get out of the places that are making you sick.

[spacerockfloater]

Being a female viewer and hating Criston Cole is deranged.

I have to get this off my chest. The blind hatred that Criston is receiving from women is insane and I’m going to explain why.

For context, I am talking about Show Criston, not Book Criston. Comparing two standalone versions of a story is silly.

I cannot wrap my head around the fact that so many women, who are the primary victims of utilitarian relationships, would ever come together and shit on Criston for enduring such a situation.

I’m sorry, but how many of you have been used by men? How many of you have been reduced to one night stands, situationships and placeholder wives? How many of you have been deemed “not good enough” to be an exclusive partner? I log into tiktok and I see NOTHING but stories of broken women who are just used for sex, money, care and whatnot by men, and then they are tossed away like worthless trash while said men continue their pursuit of the ideal woman. Being used by men just for sex and being denied the status of girlfriend, let alone wife, is probably one of the worst plagues women are experiencing in the western world because the MOMENT we were emancipated, men understood that they don’t owe us shit anymore and instead of treating us with respect, they decided to grab whatever they can and give nothing back. Do not tell me that there are women out there that are fine with this arrangement because the multiple “GWM while I tell you about the guy that was with me for 12 years and then married someone else” tell a different story, one of multiple women’s dignities being trampled by hungry men. My heart breaks for every woman (EVERY woman, cis, trans, EVERY woman) who has been called by a man she loves just for sex, for every woman whose man never wanted to be seen in public with her, for every woman who had to hear that her man is not ready for a relationship only to witness him getting engaged to another woman 2 weeks after. I hope you overcome this and become stronger and I am glad that we are finally supporting one another.

How can we then, the women who are helping other female victims rise up and speak out against this kind of abuse, push Criston down and tell him to suck it up and accept being Rhaenyra’s plaything? Have we no mercy? Are we so hungry for revenge against men that we’d want them to endure the same humiliation that we did, as if one fictional man’s suffering would bring us justice? Are we so jealous that Criston didn’t sit down and just take it like the rest of us, but instead spoke up and removed himself from that situation? Or are we so gullible that we accept what the screenwriters shove down our throats and unknowingly support the patriarchic view that if you’re being used by someone you should just accept it?

I can hear some of you arguing that “Oh, this is different because Rhaenyra is royalty!” as if being used and tossed by a powerful person somehow makes the situation any better? Would it be okay if a rich person wanted to constantly use you for sex while he keeps looking for a better woman to be by his side, just because he values his wealth and status more? Rhaenyra straight up sneered at the idea of a simple life with him. She straight up told him that HE is not worth as much as her crown. OUCH. Even though I can’t even begin to imagine the pain of being told you are not enough by your loved one, it was Rhaenyra’s right to choose what her priorities are, but WHY would he have to accept being her sidepiece? “These were different times”: does this make it any less devastating for the victim? And he was a victim because Rhaenyra still used Criston and misled him by constantly complaining about how she HATES her duties for YEARS and then luring him to break his oath. Do you think he would have still slept with her if he was aware that moments ago, Rhaenyra was begging on her knees to be fucked by Daemon and only turned to Criston because her first option was no longer available? Like, the man was contemplating having sex with her and resisted her for a good fucking while, so imagine how quickly he would have turned around and walked out that door if he had that information beforehand. You know why? Because he loved her. He loved her to the point that he broke his oath for her, the oath of a station he FOUGHT FOR IN A WAR. He shed blood and sweat and risked his life for the mere opportunity to gain that position. This was ALL he had, he came from NOTHING and he was still willing to toss it all away for Rhaenyra not once, but twice. It wasn’t just sex he wanted because we never see him have sex again after that. He became vulnerable and gave up everything that he was to be with Rhaenyra. He was willing to abandon his whole identity for her sake. Is this not what the ideal partner is? Ready to abandon everything for your shake? Everything he fought for, tooth and nail? Was he unreasonable in thinking that Rhaenyra was willing to do the same for him? Was he crazy to think that because he was ready to put everything he FOUGHT for aside for her shake, Rhaenyra would also put aside a duty she was handed and actively seem to hate for him too? Fuck no! After hearing her constant talk about how she hates her father, her duties, her refusal to wed other men, how she is trapped as a princess, how people have no idea how much it SUCKS being her, why would he not assume that she’d be willing to give it all up for him, as he’d do for her We never see Rhaenyra even TRY to be a ruler, just complain about it. Of course it would be a fucking shock to him hearing her say “Lol dude, I actually do kinda want this”.

Criston was actually the only person in the series that wanted Rhaenyra for her, not her money or crown. I’m not saying she had to follow him, it was her right to refuse him, but his willingness to lead a simple life with just her has got to mean something. And don’t give me that “he only wanted to redeem his honour by marrying her” crap, because first of all Criston nutted up and admitted everything to Alicent and was ready to face death without EVER blaming Rhaenyra for anything, and second of all, oh no, how dare a human being have ethical values and desire to live with dignity in society’s broad light rather than move in the shadows as the princess’s secret boytoy! Bad, bad Criston for feeling you have to atone for your sins. Maybe we as people have become so corrupt that we envy those who wish to walk a virtuous path in life. Or maybe y’all have become so fond of the unhinged unapologetic character trope because it feels “original” (even if it’s ridiculously overused nowadays) that you’ve actually forgotten what characters with good morals are. Like, picking your fave war criminal and rolling with them because you enjoy good drama, especially in a show that’s meant to provide entertainment, is one thing, but passionately stating that Criston had to submit to that humiliation is something else entirely.

Finally, let’s ditch the Criston being a misogynist bullshit because he had NO issue obeying Rhaenyra before their affair or Alicent. And he is ALWAYS true to himself and his values, because even after everything he endured, he did not use Alicent’s anger as an excuse to take revenge on Rhaenyra and harm her children. Criston never betrayed her, Rhaenyra used him and he walked away and he went towards the only person who seemed to spare him some sympathy and understand him and not condemn him for his crimes even if he hated himself, which is typical victim mentality. And don’t get me started on the Joffrey incident because y’all tore Cole to SHREDS for it. Joffrey had it fucking coming. You don’t go up to people’s faces, especially ones you don’t know, threaten them by telling them you know their secret, a secret that SHAMES them and burdens them to the point they’re ready to commit suicide, and all but directly call them a whore. What the fuck did he think was going to happen? They’d shake hands? Piss off. Let this be a lesson to anyone that doesn’t know how to keep their mouths shut and their noses out of other people’s business. Also, mocking his suicide attempt makes my stomach turn. Just take a moment to consider all the young women who just like him, reluctantly surrendered their virginities to men only to find out they were nothing but sex dolls in their eyes, all these girls whose trust led to their secret being spread and them getting ridiculed and slut shamed for it: how many girls have taken their own lives because they found living with such a burden unbearable?

For the love of everything you hold sacred, please wake up. The narrative that you can be used by someone powerful and you have to accept it because that’s the way things are is a man’s construct. Do not let them fool you.

[dinodogs]

I hope yall realize what an incredible loss RWBY will be if it doesn't get picked up.

Two of the main female characters are sapphic and in a relationship. Blake is canonically bisexual and a survivor of abuse. Yang is disabled and went through an entire arc about her ptsd and dealing with her trauma. Its also worth mentioning Blake is voiced by an openly bisexual woman.

the main character of the entire shows VA (lindsay jones) is gender queer and Ruby canonically neurodivergent, as well as aroace coded (she is not canonically confirmed to be aroace but she's widely considered to be at least ace)

It has one of the best written trans characters I've ever seen, voiced and written with the assistance of a trans woman.

The show openly shows other queer romances, with at one point a pair of married women being shown on screen with their baby, and yes the two characters had a real role in the plot.

While they haven't been amazing about poc rep before they are actively taking criticism and in recent years have learned how to write good poc rep.

RWBY, at its core, was an indie animation project. It was created by a small team of people on an incredibly small budget. Its gotten bigger and bigger over the years with a larger budget, RWBY is proof that an indie series can get massive, it is a massive win for indie animation all together.