#which is shit trans gay men have to hear constantly from cis gay men. fuck

[isa-ah]

literally how do I cope with a movie where the baseline message is that trans children are treated like monsters who will destroy society but ultimately the only person they're trying to hurt is themselves bc they lack the love, support and resources their peers get unconditionally. and that the surveillance state would kill as many civilians as it takes to eradicate trans kids to maintain the status quo by any means necessary.

[ohara-n-brown]

[WARNING: Rant]

Sometime made a post going 'Love the trans women in your life while they're still here'

Someone added 'Trans men and Nonbinary too!'

And this was the response.

My response: Cut this shit out, you're acting literally ridiculous.

First of all - no it's NOT an All Lives Matter moment.

ALL LIVES MATTER was created by white people who DON'T experience racism to silence the experiences of those who DO experience racism and die at the hands of it.

A transmasc or nonbinary person saying 'Us also!' is a not the same.

It's a group of people who DO experience transphobia adding to the experiences of those who ALSO experience transphobia.

It's A LOT MORE like a black person going 'BlackLivesMatter' and sometime commenting '#StopAsianHate too :)' and OP going 'wow fuck you read the room you're being racist.'

That's like a Gay person speaking out against homophobia and how it's wrong. And then a trans person says 'Transphobia too!' and suddenly it's 'Read the room. This isn't about y'all. Why do y'all have to bring yourself up always. This isn't about gender. Read the room-'

Sounds familiar to y'all? It should. I'm reading the room and the room is saying you just fucking hate another group of oppressed people lol

Another oppressed person who experiences the same violence as you adding their voice to your choir is NOT the same as white people using their privilege to silence others who experience racism when they themselves don't.

SECOND OF ALL - (tw death mention under cut)

YEAH THEY HAVE A RIGHT TO ADD 'Celebrate your trans brothers while there here' on a post you know..

considering a transmasc non-binary person got fucking beat to death on school grounds exactly a month ago.

Remember that??? The one whose death is being actively covered up by school, law, and state officials on a systemic scale??

Also - a fucking trans man from NJ is still missing as we speak (Elliot Ganiel)

But calling attention to that is like being a MRA??? Talking about a children deaths in a school bathroom and missing people are like being MRAs whose main concerns are women playing video games or some shit?

No. No it isn't.

Y'all misusing terms like MRA and yelling 'That's like all lives matter!!!' clearly show youdon't understand how oppression works in the slightest.

If you try to compare any white racist movement to an oppressed group of people - YTA.

One of us gets fucking killed with no justice, LGBTQ crisis line calls skyrocket, and when asked about it state officials say and I quote 'We don't want that filth in our state!!'

- and when we talk about it amongst people in our community it's 'read the room!!' or 'wow really MRA like'

Fucking bite me.

And before - 'Oh but they didn't have to put it on THAT post, they could've made their own'.

Did you not hear what I just said. A transmasc teen was beat to death and misgendered publically statewide.

Maybe transmascs would like to feel included by the community at this time? So they can feel safe? Safety in numbers? And maybe want to feel like the wider community cares when shit like this happens - which clearly.. y'all don't.

Cause when a transmasc kid is literally killed - and we see a post saying 'Love your transfemme friends whine they're here!' and add the same - only to be told to read the room - it tells us 'You only have a month or so to morn. They died last month? Why are you bringing it up now on a post about appreciating trans people before their death??? Read the room. That was for us only. Stop trying to hog all the attention'.

Like damn sorry for wanting to feel like my community would care if I got wiped off this fucking earth silly me. Silly us.

When we start the conversation on our own we're ignored. When we try to contribute our experiences to other conversations we're told to shut the fuck up and read the room and then compared to actual racists and sexists.

You constantly compare us to people who DO NOT face oppression - cis men and white people - in order to silence us, despite the fact you know we face oppression in ways both groups could never even imagine. You think you're slick. You're not.

BITE ME. HARD.

[olderthannetfic]

You can't tell me that Shinji wouldn't have some fierce pent up rage he'd let out in the bedroom whenever he manages to make it in there.

Idk, I know my experience isn't universal but I only saw the anti-pages and flash games in the fujoshi sector. Flame wars on LJ with het ships oh absolutely. Hello stalking and other such nonsense. If you saw any hate/kill pages for het ships I'd love to hear about them because that's a weird part of internet history that I sometimes wonder if I dreamed up. That experience was a big milestone during my formative years. I could've done better without that experience. Either way, internalized misogyny is something we all get to battle, I'm sure, but I do take exception to people weaponizing and pedestaling Teh Gays to do it. Or any race someone doesn't have a dog in really but to stay on topic. The overall vibe I recall was 'this is so taboo and that makes it sexy so let's play in this filth for a while and kill Asuka' etc and I just think it'd be nice if that was done? So yeah. 1) Are we normalized yet and 2) What's the updog on the female character hate-sites?

IS IT SAFE YET?

--

Hmm... an intriguing point.

Fandom! Please weigh in on this pressing topic!

How does Shinji fuck?

--

I think the het side of fandom just called their enemy characters "whores" instead of "stupid and boring" like the m/m-shipping side tended to. IDK. It's not like over-the-top hate for the character in the way of the ship has ever been restricted to one group.

Plenty of female character hate I remember was from straight dudes who pretended not to care about shipping. That absolutely includes jokey shit about Asuka being raped or murdered for not fawning on their self-inserty take on Shinji or for not being a ~demure lady~ like Rei or some bullshit. I'm sure they too would be quick to blame it on the icky m/m shippers now though.

There's a really toxic subtext to your comments that's a lot more pressing than someone's character hate webshrine from twenty years ago.

"Or any race someone doesn't have a dog in really" is such a covert radfem way of thinking. That's for two reasons:

1. A shitton of conflicted AFAB m/m shippers grow out of their "girls suck" problems when they finally realize that they are not girls and that this hatred of everything to do with women is coming from a place of being constantly triggered by how people perceive them.

I remember reading some of Billy Martin's old stuff as a teenager and being really grossed out by how it treated women. I liked the m/m parts and the kinky shit, so I kept reading, but yikes. Years later, finding out that Poppy Z Brite was struggling for years and eventually became "Doc" and then Billy Martin made so much sense. That doesn't make misogyny cool, but I'll cut the dude some slack for taking a while to figure his shit out.

I don't restrict that to trans men. NB people and, frankly, a lot of more-or-less cis women with non-normative gender in some way follow a similar path.

2. What makes you think I don't have a dog in that race? What makes you think a woman cannot relate primarily to male characters or equally to male characters?

As a bisexual woman, I like bisexual characters. I don't give two shits about lesbian ones. My first point of identification is orientation, not gender.

The reason I say your (extremely common and thrown at me daily) talking points are covert radfem is that they posit a situation in which women should identify first and foremost with other women. We should choose women. We should center women.

Why?

What if you want to center your ethnicity? What if you want to center your age? What if you want to center your neurodivergence?

Or what, for that matter, if you want to write about the inside of your head and not the outside of your body? There are many, many reasons people choose these cross-group identifications for that purpose. The entirety of drag queen culture and gay men's use of female celebrities is a version of this. Sure, some trans women have been into the same stuff, and it was an expression of them being women, just as some m/m-writing AFABs in fandom turn out to be men, but there's also this whole other thing that has to do with making art that expresses your insides, not a representation quota.

--

Are we normalized yet? Is who normalized? Gay men? People who hate on m/m shippers in cliched ways? Yes to both. If you want to hang with the cis gay dudes, I'm sure they're around somewhere, though probably not in the middle of AFAB-ville on fanworks fandom tumblr. If you want to find a bunch of dickheads who hate "fujoshi", often in self-hating ways, they're all over the place though. Throw a rock. You'll hit one.

Character shrines, positive and negative, are long dead thanks to geocities and its ilk deleting our collective internet history, but as long as you see strawmen lurking around every corner, it will never be safe for you.

[armillary-spheres-lover]

Hey

Idk if you ever got the answer to your thing. But I’m a person who is queer but regularly uses the term lesbian to make things simpler. I can tell you why I hate the phrase monosexual- it feels transphobic to me- I am not attracted to men at all, but I am attracted to women, non-binary folks, gender queer folks, and agender folks. If I was with a partner and they transitioned to be a man I would still love them. That wouldn’t change. Sexuality is fluid and calling someone monosexual seems to erase that and really put people in boxes. Everyone has exceptions. And as someone who has identified as bisexual and pansexual in the past and find those not to suit me and fit right (especially since I am not sexually/romantically attracted to people physically/based on appearances- it’s more about personality and what I could do with a person)

I don’t mean this in an antagonistic way, I really hope it doesn’t come off that way(I’m bad expressing myself sorry).

(I’m sorry, I know you’re not trying to be rude. My answer, however, will sound rude and upset because you touched upon some stuff that needs a lot of unpacking to me lmao. Just know this anger is not necessarily directed at you but at biphobia in general.)

Why do bisexual people may need to use the term monosexual?

A. It is descriptive

I see what you mean but as you said you're queer and lesbian is a term to make things simpler, right?

So I wouldnt call you monosexual because you’re clearly not attracted to only one gender (but if you want to who I am to stop you?). Monosexual is someone who is almost exclusively dating/is attracted to people of one gender. There are plenty trans people that are straight or gay that would NOT date a partner if they realized they were a different gender. For real: kat blaque made a video (here it is if youre interested) on youtube about this - she’s trans and she wants to date men and wouldnt feel comfortable on continuing dating if a partner of hers realized they were actually a trans woman all along. She wants to date guys not girls and that's FINE it just means A. She actually recognizes the girl gender, obviously B. She's straight af and that's wonderful! It’s not a box if that’s how her experience is and she likes it that way!

Also how is being monosexual transphobic? Cant a girl just like guys exclusively (both cis and trans) or like girls exclusively (both cis and trans)? It's not even enbyphobic since you dont need to be attracted to a person to support their rights. (Gay men arent attracted to women but can be 100% feminists.) Being open to fuck somebody is not the same as supporting their rights: fetishization is a thing. Again, I refer to the video Kat Blaque made.

Sexuality IS fluid but to some people (like me and you) it is more than others. Some people don’t feel comfortable dating people that dont fall into the gender theyre usually attracted to and thats 100% okay.

B. It helps in talking about biphobia and panphobia in society

Biphobia and panphobia are for the large part based on the assumption that you cant be attracted to more than one gender (not even non-binary and so on) and that if you do you're weird/disgusting/mentally ill/a sexual predator. I can tell you 100% that's the narrative both straight and gay people can and may perpetuate since I struggle w this kind of shit every single time Im attracted to someone no matter their gender (YES, EVEN IF THEY'RE A GUY, BECAUSE THE OTHER DAY I WAS ATTRACTED TO A GIRL AND NOW I FEEL LIKE A FUCKING ANIMAL THAT CANT CONTROL ITSELF, even though it makes NO sense because if it was two girls or two boys the actual number of people my hormones activated to wouldnt change, but it would make my experience not subjected to biphobia!). I’m not saying gay people are the same as straight people. But I do feel alienated BOTH from heteronormative society AND from (subtly biphobic) gay spaces because of my bisexuality. I costantly feel like I’m outside both of those worlds and you know how humans are: I just need a term to encompass it all easily, to say “I don’t identify with any of this” (which is both straight and strictly gay spaces: ie, monosexual). To me is literally the same as saying non-bisexual/non-pansexual.

I dont mean to say lesbians or gays have it easier or are just like straight people. But we do have different experiences and I need terms to express that. It honestly doesnt matter to me if you identify as lesbian or queer (though I think you’re implying you’re more queer than anything). But I do need a term to talk about how society at large treats sexuality; ie, as a monosexual thing. Another concept that’s been thrown around is bi erasure. A strictly monosexual society is bound to view a girl dating a girl (or girl presenting) as if theyre both LESBIANS and erase a queer person the moment they’re in a m/f relationship, because people cant COMPUTE that it may not be the case and that the girl dating a cis straight dude isnt betraying her queerness.To think so is basic biphobia.

In some ways, I think it’s the same as when transgender people started using the term cisgender - which is applicable to both straight people and queer/gay people. They simply needed a term which meant “not-trans” as they were saying “I dont identify with this” (ie the cisgender experience). Does it imply that cisgender people, no matter if queer, have something in common? Yeah, yeah it does. Does it imply that queer people are just the same as straight people, or face no oppression? Of course not. Seeing people being offended upon being called monosexual feels like people being offended upon being called cis to me.

Also, saying that the terms bisexual people use are transphobic is almost implying that bisexuality is inherently transphobic? Or reeks to me of that kind of rhetoric. I use the terms I need to use, just like any other marginilized group does, and nobody outside of that group has any right of denying me that. It’s like I’m trying to create a safe space for myself and people like me and yall come around to judge us YET AGAIN. And I'm just tired of hearing this bullshit. I could accept this kind of criticism only if it came from a trans person themselves, I guess? But it’s not usually trans people who accuse us of being transphobic, in fact, many trans people identify as bisexual and use bisexual terminology lmfao.

“Hearts not parts” rhetoric

Finally, about personality being superior to physical appearance. That's amazing but I do want to note that, not you necessarily, but many people who are into the “hearts not parts” rhetoric are, how can I say this. Slut-shaming people? I’m not sure if you are doing this but I feel it needs to be said just to be sure. A lesbian trans woman can be just attracted to a girl for her physical appearance and just want to fuck her - and THAT'S OKAY. That's fine. I am a sexually attracted to people and that doesnt mean I have to form a deep bond first. Sex positivity is about accepting that people can feel like this and not shame them for this. "Hearts not parts” rhetoric has in the past infantilized, sanitized or outright shamed other queer experiences. It's fine if you feel that way but dont start acting like you're morally superior because of that. That's catholicism with extra steps. My bisexuality its not the symptom of some predatory and animalistic thing that should be purified into something more palatable and less sexual. That’s the same thing they used to say about gay people and now gay (biphobic) people are using this against us. That’s also the kind of thing trans women (especially if they’re sapphic) constantly hear every fucking day. Queer people have a good part of their discrimination rooted in the shaming of purely sexual desires. Forcing ourselves to be more palatable and less sexual is just respectability politics. I’m tired of it. (This is obviously different from being on the asexual spectrum: but you dont see ace people going around pretending they’re morally superior than everybody else, and many are actually very sex positive)   You would still love your partner if they were a different gender: that’s great, but that’s not how some (most) people feel, and they aren’t superficial because of this, just different from you.

Also, I think you’d really benefit from hearing a trans person say they don’t care if someone has genitalia preferences. Here it is. This obviously doesnt mean that every trans person will feel like she does, but it does mean that we can’t generalize trans experiences/preferences/what they feel transphobia is. Just like straight people dont get to say what’s homophobic or not, cis people dont get to say what’s transphobic or not. The definition of those terms relies entirely on the community that is targeted by these things.

I hope this wasnt excessively confusing but I wanted to make my point clear.

[zunnyzee]

This pride, I've been thingking about a few things that, well, are kind of fucked up.

Like, we as a community were so ready to label ourselves we've got hundreds of identities, and it kind of makes the community harder to navigate for those who are questioning imo (in my opinion). There's even a flag for questioning, like, we're all queer, but we've sectioned ourselves off in such a way it makes me feel uneasy. Our labels are so specific, and I feel like it has impacted those who are clearly part of the community, but question it because they need to feel like the label is just right. Then again, I understand the joy of finding the right way to express yourself through your label, it's something we all share as people, but look at what enviornment it's created at the same time. Bisexuals saying pans are inheritably biphobic, pan folk saying to be bi is to be enby, or trans, phobic, you've got people saying that men can't call themselves lesbians and people saying that you can't be both bi and gay, and then you hear how bi people fight to not be seen as 'basically gay or straight' but actually bi' and then you see all the transmascs that still have a sort of connection to their agab, and we've brewed so much hate within ourselves and we're excluding ourselves and we're invalidating ourselves. We are a diverse community, and with that comes many different beliefs about the way our community actually is. I can see how someone can be insulted about how someone else interprets gender and sexuality, I can. We have people in the community who's identity means everything to them because finding out that they were queer changed their life for the better and they felt like a real person for the first time and their eyes were opened and they were free, and then other people use those same labels as if it were a choice, an aesthetic, and it can come off as almost disrespectful in a way. It'd be like if someone were cis amab and they just go 'you know, I feel so much like a boy that I'm going to id as a transman, going from man to even more of a man because I feel so comfortable in my agab and it feels right' like you could see how a trans-trans man (afab) would feel invalidated, right? There's the whole thing about diversity and not everyone is going to be the same, but we made labels mean something, we took the slurs that the cishet used for us and said that we would actually define ourselves, but a label means nothing because we don't really use it like a label anymore. People are getting away with thinking aces/aros aren't part of the community because we've made our labels exclusive somehow. We've got he/him lesbian controversy, which I am shocked to see from the one group that wasn't supposed to discriminate based on gender identity. We're no better than the cishets sometimes, being completely honest. Some gays think dating someone trans automatically makes you bi, gay, or straight, completely ignoring their identity. And to be fair, all these people are vastly small compared to the overall supporting group, but they add up, they really do. Don't even get me started on sexist queers. We made our own definitions, then we made them so specific that we can't even support some of our peers cuz we don't know what the fuck their flag means. And don't say we support everyone, it doesn't matter because you know people are always inventing ways to ruin this shit, like pedos/maps beastiality, and fucking cops (copgender exists). We're not even ready to talk about Mogai, I swear to you we are not the all accepting group you think we should be, and we don't have to be. As a community, we don't agree on what it means to be in the community, some of us don't accept queer as a label despite its current popularity, we are kind of fucked up and we have to admit that. I think that we are creating way more labels than we need, and we are separating ourselves and we are hurting each other. Some people think 'if you identify as y you have to be z' and that gets some people so mad, but at the same time, think about it, without some unity within smaller communities, what does their label even mean? We are not respecting each others

spaces, and I think it's because we over label. But what can we do now? Take those labels away? Tell them they can't id as queer because they're doing it wrong? We don't have the guts, or the general understanding of definitions to do that. We're just supposed to be 100 percent accepting of everyone, and it just makes me feel weird to think about this because I get that some people have a weird relationship with their queerness, but we also act as if we need to constantly define it. And then we go and define it, and then people redefine it like 4 times over because it's not good enough, which is, there is supposed to be some diversity in every group, every label, for anything involving people, but too much and too little are problems in their own right. Micro micro micro labels make people divided and feel like they are different from the others when they could have been a more united group, and not enough micro labels means that people feel like they are conforming to one group and don't feel the unity because of the overwhelming differences. I don't think we're balanced is all I'm really trying to say out of this, I don't like our community as is, it's confusing, it's harmful, and it's divided, and I don't have a solution, which makes me even sadder. A lot of our issues within the community is thinking we're different from each other, from my experience. I've been nb since I was probably at least 6, and I came out as bi only 4 years ago, I'm only 18 but I've been here a little while, I've gone through many phases and stages, and some things were just so unnecessary. Too many times I doubted myself because I saw someone else expressing my identity in a way I couldn't relate to at all, made myself question if I was just cis and faking, and it really could have been avoided, I could have had more confidence if my community just had my back. But it doesn't. And so I have to be queer on my own, I have to keep myself to myself because I can't exist in my own community without my identity being questioned by others. We are not the all accepting group we want to be, but we could be if we agreed on literally anything. But we can't cuz we're too busy accepting every idea of queerness, regardless of anything. Anyways, this is just what I was thingking, I probably didn't word everything exactly as I worded it but I just had to get it out my mind and I'm too lazy too proofread, and plus proofreading might cause me to sugarcoat this even further so. This is my stop, I guess.

[im-the-punk-who]

Idk if ur the right person to send this to so feel free to ignore if you aren't but I'm beginning to realize that I might be a trans guy after years of thinking I'm enby and I'm really struggling with that? I've received a lot of the messages over the years about how men are bad and violent and I've also experienced a lot of gender based violence before I was out. I know intellectually that there's nothing wrong with manhood and yet I'm still really struggling. Idk do you have any thoughts on learning to accept your own manhood

Okay! Sorry this took a few days to answer but this is...definitely still a complicated thing for me, too.

First off I wanna say that whether you end up identifying as a binary trans man or somewhere in between that and nonbinary, that is very cool and valid and all of this can apply no matter where on the spectrum of masculinity you ultimately end up falling.

I saw a post which explains the basic thesis of what I'm gonna say, which is that your gender does not equal your morality. 

Tumblr in particular really likes to go hard on the misandry and it can be really hard not to internalize that. Especially when it comes in the form of so many jokes, and especially especially when some of it does line up with experiences you’ve had. The biggest thing to realize, is that just *being a man* doesn't make you inherently violent or toxic or bad. All of the things that Tumblr and feminism in general tends to equate to “being a man = bad” are things that are learned or encouraged over time, no matter how much terfs like to insist they are traits inherent in being born with a y chromosome. 

(And yes, these misandry arguments ALL have their basis in gender essentialism and in arguing why trans people can’t exist.)

As this relates to trans men, it becomes akin to walking a tightrope our entire lives. In both society at large and LGBT spaces we're made to fit as close as possible into gender norms to avoid violence or oppression(or the insistence we’re really just lesbians or self-hating cishets). But we also have first hand experience of the ways in which men are *socialized* to behave being harmful and don’t want to perpetuate them and be labeled a ‘bad person’. So we have to constantly walk this line of, I suppose trying to act manly enough while also trying not to cause waves (And, AS A NOTE, does that sound eerily similar to the argument most feminists say is purely a feminine experience? Is it almost like the very system that seeks to free cis women through hatred of men perpetrates those exact same systems onto other marginalized communities?)

And I will say, this is something I still struggle with. A lot. It's not going to be something you can take a magic pill for and never have to worry about again. I started transitioning almost a decade ago and I'm still trying to find the balance. Cis men can spend their *whole lives* trying to find that balance. I know quite a few - in case it feels like this is a purely trans experience. Reckoning with the way that male privilege has socialized men to harm at the same time radical feminism has socialized everyone it can that all men intentionally cause harm is a universal experience among men who are aware of it. 

It's not easy, and I guess just...if you feel like you're struggling on that front as you continue your gender journey(Laynie i hate you i hate you i hate you) try to remind yourself that you're not alone. And that what you’re fighting against is a systemic socialization, not something inherent in yourself. You’re going to screw up - that doesn't make you a bad person or a bad man.

I listen a lot to Brene Brown. 

I know people are probably sick of hearing me talk about her, but she is a shame researcher who honestly helped me a LOT in realizing why I was feeling so bad about parts of my personality or my gender expression. She’s excellent. If you find you’re having a lot of trouble reckoning with being this thing you have perceived as bad for a very long time, I highly recommend listening to some of her ted talks and other speeches. Most of them are on youtube. 

For a long time I was trying to base my gender off of what I thought people would love. I went over the top, dressed in popular styles, was WAY more feminine than I actually feel, and tried to make myself as unassuming as possible - in part because of childhood trauma but also because I was genuinely ashamed to be a man(particularly a gay man) because I had internalized the idea that men - especially gay men - were woman-haters. (And, because I hated *myself* as a woman, I thought that I also hated women, and I thought that I must be one of those Bad Gays.)

But once I stopped trying to do that? Once I was like ‘no I’m actually a gay-up man’ and stopped berating myself for not liking my feminie body and hating the parts of myself that I didn’t identify with but felt forced to perform? Once I started looking at what made *me* happy and not other people? It became so much easier to not feel those things. 

SO I guess, what I’m saying is that the best way to deal with internalized misandry is to try to forgive yourself, and recognize that the things that men perpetrated against you and that people say are ‘toxic male traits’ are not *inherent* to being a man. They are things that are taught to men(both cis and trans) by society. And also that like, these are also things that are not just inherent to men. Any toxic trait that a man exhibits a woman can too - and yeah there’s a discussion about how the general power imbalance between men and women makes it less likely a woman would cause as much damage but honestly? If you’re on tumblr you’re most likely in female dominated spaces where arguably that isn’t true, especially with the number of fucking TERFS on this website. 

Also....you do not inherit cismale privilege just by identifying as a man. No matter how far you take your transition, you are *always* going to be at a different level of privilege from a cisman. Even if you transition as far as you are able to right now and live and pass as a cisman for the rest of your life, you are not a cisman and that is going to affect how you move through the world.

(That doesn’t mean you are not a *man* because you are not cis, btw. Just that there are things that cismen don’t have to worry about that are going to affect your life - things like ovarian cancer, breast cancer, hormonal dependence, corrective abuse, medical shortages, physical differences that out transpeople - there are a hundred things that trans men have to experience throughout their lives that cismen are never, ever going to deal with. And yes, this goes for transwomen / cis women as well.)

Something that helped me become comfortable living as a man was to look at specific traits of the men in my life. Why did I feel comfortable around this man, but not others, what red flags physically or emotionally did this behavior set off in me? And then focusing on those specific *behaviors* rather than the men themselves. If you can separate the individual traits from an overarching idea of 'manhood' that might be helpful in feeling like you can inhabit manhood without being toxic. 

Basically, my best advice is to tell yourself that what makes you a man does not make you inherently toxic. In fact what makes *all* men, men, does not make them inherently toxic. Men are not trash just because they’re men, and the fight against misandry *is* a fight for marginalized people. It hurts transmasculine people in exactly the ways you are hurting. No matter what TERFs say - no matter what male-critical or whatever they’re calling themselves to not have to call themselves TERFs say - men are not born evil, or bad, or trash. 

Toxic masculinity is a learned behavior. It is not something you are given the day you start identifying as a man, and it is not something you have to perpetuate. 

Calling it anything else does a disservice to everyone who identifies as masculine of center but especially trans men, who have to reckon with this exact knowledge that in affirming who they are, certain people are going to hate them and call them monsters and tell them they are trash and unworthy of loving without hurting. 

And that shit just isn’t true. It isn’t fucking true! Men are not toxic just because they are men, and you are not a bad person just because you are a transman. That’s, I suppose, the best advice I can offer you. I hope it helps, and I also just want to reiterate that I hope you find affirmation in whatever you end up deciding. <3 <3 <3

[bodtabs]

reposting and pinning this

being a straight black trans guy is really weird. there’s so many intersections of experience, and not in the dumb “technically i can reclaim this axis of oppression” level of terminally logged in lgbt person i mean it in a “going about my life” way.

for starters, idt i ever “hated” being a woman, i don’t really relate to that trans narrative, i just realized it was an identity that became increasingly frustrating to align with and moved on to a label that finally fit me. being a black girl was cool, despite all the social toll that came with it, black girls have contributed so much to popular culture and even to our own communities, so there was no real reason for me to dislike it other than “it just doesn’t feel like me anymore” and i like it that way. i have a very comfortable relationship with both black girlhood and black manhood, if anyone asks i’d probably fall under that “i remember being convinced i was a little boy. not knowing why my parents didn’t see it too and insisted on treating me like a little girl.” narrative that seems to be the narrative a lot of "trans stories that won’t make cis people uncomfortably avert their gaze” media. i had (and still do have) genuine interests in a lot of traditionally masculine aesthetics, music, career paths, and hobbies, but i don’t recall ever feeling disgusted, embarrassed, or insecure parts of my life where i was identifying as / being coerced into woman aligned individuality, and the strained relationship i had with my mother because of these things, like a lot of trans guys (understandably) seem to be with theirs. this proves for disconnect occasionally, between who i want to be and who i actually am, but the more time goes by the less i give a shit about who thinks what. i don’t take shit from anyone as a guy because i didn’t do it as a chick, which leads for a lot of leeway in being comfortable with who i was and who i currently am.

i still have a lot of pleasant associations with being a gay woman, i probably wouldn’t be where i am today without a lot of the gnc lesbians and trans bi women, i still feel a sense of community with that identity (never to the point of being invasive, i hope.) i’m never not going to get sentimental about a woman being happy with another woman, comfortable in their own skin; that’s just how my brain is default-wired at this point. i’m not offended by women (cishet or otherwise) not wanting me in their spaces (it’s honestly more validating than being seen as a defanged token feminist boy who will bring no harm or whatever, i much prefer people hearing about me or holding a conversation with me and deciding what direction they want to take with me based on those things, like you would any other human being) but it’s still cool to know that i can have these feelings– still be deeply involved and still have feelings for this culture i’ve ingrained in myself from a young age– and not feel like an intruder or outsider, despite being a straight dude, i’m always going to have a pretty firm grasp of gay culture and won’t get freaked out by people putting the sex back in homosexual like a lot of cishets and even a lot of gnc tenderkweers tend to get every 3 months. it’s honestly been the side of gay culture that i’ve always preferred lol.

i call a lot of bullshit on this “toxic masculinity intricate rituals” stuff that’s come into public conscious in the last couple of years or so as well, not only was it mostly popularized by MRAs (around the same time as public concious on ellior rodger and incel/chad terminology as well…shoulda been a red flag from the beginning imo) not just because it frames men as the ones who suffer the most due to their own actions rather than the women and children they torture on a daily basis, but it’s also been used to racially pathologize the boundaries and mannerisms i have that my (racist) white partners have been uncomfortable with in the past. your weird entitled impulse to police my body and the way i present myself in a way i genuinely enjoy and am comfortable is not remotely subtle, and the mental gymnastics behind your desires to impress your frat buddies does not excuse you brutalizing women on a daily basis and shaming children to the point they have serious issues coping with a lot of hardships that face them later in life.

the most visible majority of the trans masc community is white dudes and they all fucking suck. they’re terrible to women, trans nonbinary and cis, are either extremely liberal in their political stances or simply never talk about anything relating to it at all (and they all have garbage taste in fashion and music, i know that’s kinda petty but i think i’m allowed to be rude to people who try to make wanting to transition into a humanstuck karkat gijinka a universal experience and hozier and constantly self infantalize and weaponize their own softness while expecting everyone else on the planet to wait on them hand and foot.) i’ve met maybe 3 good white trans guys in my life and one of them i’ve been friends with since high school, it really put me off transitioning all together because i was raised mostly by women and a lot of my idols have been women since i was a kid (and even if this weren’t the case, colonialist concepts of respect / equality / gender in general are very different from nonwhite cultures, so even if i wasn’t constantly in immediate proximity of women or didn’t have any “significant” woman figures in my life it would stil feel very weird and removed.)

none of this, of course, is to imply that black men aren’t horrendously misogynistic (especially towards black women. lbr, mostly towards black women, lol. this is another one of those weird intersections, knowing that misogyny is not exclusively a product of white supremacy but that colonialism has definitely catalyzed it.) or that black men won’t use their race to get out of being rightfully accused of misogyny similar to the ways a lot of white gay people use their sexualities as a get out of jail free card, but i really don’t understand white trans guys like this. i think they realize they’re oppressed and cling to it as a personality trait, and when anyone calls them on it they get really offended cus they have nothing else to fall back on, hence all the gatekeeping and regurgitated TERF rhetoric (which any and all TME people have been guilty of, at some point, and a lot of whom unfortunately are still doing as i write up this post) and truscum antics. this nonsense got so bad that it put me off transitioning for like 5 years.

i’m here now, though, and i’m content with it, so i try not to hold too many grudges about it even if it is a bit frustrating and put me behind a lot of my peers. i’m mosly just focusing on how many doors open to you when you’re finally comfortable in your own skin lol.

[lachryphage]

heh. I feel like it’s been a while since I posted something super long and personal so I guess it’s due time, eh? a lot of that is because I know that ppl read these, and like I’m not asking you to NOT read them -- putting words into a semi-public space is actually a KEY component of the catharsis otherwise I’d just write this shit in a journal but... idk. the more someone knows me the more I feel as though I should be keeping myself secret. that’s a whole other casket of worms tho, today we’re talking about gender and sexuality. it is pride month, after all.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about not only my own identity, but also the space I have (and haven’t) occupied in the queer “community.”

Maybe, in a different life, in a more accepting world, or a different body, maybe I would identify as a gay man. 

Now there’s A LOT of qualifiers on that statement, which is why I haven’t really said it before. I mean, I don’t really feel like a Man, and I am certainly very attracted to women, to all genders, so being neither a man nor exclusively attracted to men -- well then how could I ever be a gay man? Those are, however, not the reasons I’ll likely never identify as a gay man.

So what’s making me say this in the first place? 

Before I really get into the meat of this I have to say that so much of what I’m exploring here rides the line of “””problematique””” which is a huge reason why I keep avoiding this conversation -- even when the conversation is only with myself. But so much of my identity has always been “problematic.” Ha. I’m never what people want of me. I’m queer and I’m trans and I’m kinky as hell and I don’t hate my abuser and I don’t give a SHIT about what words people use I prefer to withhold judgement even in situations I understand and doesn’t that just make you HATE me :)))))) and if it doesn’t I guarantee you there’s a part of me that makes you uncomfortable but that isn’t the point here, so once again, we’ll unpack that Pandora’s box another day. 

So with those disclaimers...

The people I identified with growing up were always people who 1) I interpreted as men and 2) were very “weird” -- which usually but not always meant queer. As a child I didn’t often understand when jokes were supposed to be mean. I didn’t see “men in dresses” jokes as mean because I always saw men who were having fun and being cool and I wanted to be just like them! I wanted to be like blatantly gay men, I wanted to be like men who were made fun of for being “accidentally” gay or were queer coded in a way that was meant to be belittling... bad rep didn’t hurt me. Because I’m not the identity those things are meant to harm, I’m not a trans woman. I’m not even, really, a gay man. At least not a cis one. And in general, as a child I just didn’t get when things were meant to be hurtful. I saw people having fun and I wanted to be like them.

(To kind of explain the problematic gender fuckery going on here I’ll go through one scenario so that MAYBE the intricacies are somewhat clearer: I often identified with characters that were SUPPOSED to be trans women -- superficially this seems bad because I am by no stretch of the imagination a trans women. But these characters weren’t trans women, they were how cisheteronormative society sees trans women: as men who are defying sexual and gender norms -- which is also bad because that’s not what trans women are. But the mockery went right over my head so what I was seeing in these characters were what cisheteronomative society sees (men breaking norms) without the judgement and bad connotations and THAT is what I identified with/admired. Is that still problematic of me? Most likely, but I’m fucking tired and this isn’t the point.)

So I found myself feeling more comfortable around boys and men (actually, once again, there’s a lot more than just sexuality and gender going on here but... come other time) and I especially felt comfortable around gay guys. Well. Sort of. While I was feeling harmony and understanding, they were rejecting me. You see, cis gay guys delight in talking about how disgusting “women’s” bodies are. Everything my body has, they hate. And I get it, it’s horribly traumatic to have something you don’t want constantly shoved down your throat by society. Trust me, I get it.

This happened again and again. I’d find maybe someone my age, or some older guys to look up to, that were gay and I’d finally start feeling comfortable and then suddenly I was hearing about how repulsive my body was. Even if I wasn’t trans, that’s pretty fucking damaging to hear in this stupid patriarchal society. Bodies with breasts and vaginas are already seen as lesser is it really necessary to say those things right in front of, right to someone with that kind of body? but I’m not cis. I get that extra layer of disconnect from my body called dysphoria and let me tell you that beast of a feeling really doesn’t need more fuel to feed my hatred of myself.

I know I’m wordy so let me simplify that. I identified with and felt comfortable around gay men more than any other type of person I had met at the time. And they told me I was disgusting.

It hurts. And I am angry. I see gay men and the culture they’ve created for themselves and even though it’s horribly cis and white and fatphobic there’s still so much of it that calls to me. And every time it’s a goddamn slap in the face because I know they’d never want me.

It doesn’t matter if I was 100% certain of my identity as a Man and that I only liked Men. They wouldn’t want me. It wouldn’t matter if I started T, if I got top AND bottom surgery, I’d never get to be one of them. And so you know what? Even if I decided all of those things about me, I will never identify as a gay man. 

I know they’re not all like that. Not all cis people, not all men :)

I desperately need to find more trans people to hang out with, because no matter how much I may have ever identified with gay men, they don’t want me and they don’t fucking deserve me.

That’s why, in different life, in a more accepting world, with a different body, I could identify as a gay man. But here and now, I never will.

[groundramon]

My official stance on he/him lesbians is that it’s 1. none of my business and 2. none of your business.

I can see where some harm comes from, but it’s minuscule compared to other subgroups in the lgbt community like terfs, truscum, ect.  Like, there could be misgendering of he/him lesbians (or misgendering trans men by assuming they’re he/him lesbians) and getting connected with someone based on an assume connection where you’re both trans men but one ends up being a he/him lesbian while another is a trans man.  Which I suppose is a valid concern for trans men to have, considering many lesbians have a complex relationship with men from a platonic perspective (”man-hating lesbians” but like, not in a mean way, I’m just saying it as a fact that there are lesbians who don’t like hanging out with men. anti-sjws/”menimists” dont interact with this post ok there now you can take it neutrally) but its a problem that can easily be fixed with a little bit of understanding from both sides.  He/him (cis) lesbians don’t belong in spaces for trans men (however if they’re nonbinary or mtf, they do belong in trans spaces, just not spaces for trans men specifically) and if someone incorrectly assumes something about you, just correct them - and if you get corrected, say “oh, sorry!” instead of throwing a fit.

Like, there’s SO many aspects of movements for each lgbt movement that can be considered harmful to other aspects.  Ace inclusionism is considered homophobic, biphobic, transphobic, ect.  Sex positivity, which could be considered “harmful” to sex-repulsed aces (lgbt aces if you’re an exclusionist) like myself, is everywhere*.  People say bisexuals existing hurts lesbians and makes men think they can “convert” lesbians.  The whole bi/pan discourse thing.  Truscum discourse (but like, reasonable truscum people), demisexuality/a-spec discourse, things like faegender for people who clearly aren’t cishet either way, all that jazz- so much stuff conflicts.

* = if you’re going to say “woah wait that’s homophobic/biphobic whatever, what the fuck are you really saying gay ppl dont deserve sex positivity in the lgbt community” notice my wording “could be considered ‘harmful’”.  I’m saying that it’s something that’s debated.  As a matter of fact, I’m all for sex positivity in the lgbt community and that’s one thing I want sex-repulsed asexuals to shut up on.  Make a separate ace group if you don’t wanna deal with that.  And if I hear sex-repulsed alloro aces complaining about this im gonna shit my pants bc I’m romance-repulsed too and you’d prolly be offended if I told you to stop being romantic, right?  My point is that dont say “you guys should stop talking about sex” in the lgbt community (unless its graphic and involving minors, no safe sex ed being exposed to minors does not count unless it encourages minors to engage in sexual activity.  Ok? ok).  Let gay people and lesbians and bi people and pan people talk about their sexual urges and fantasies, they deserve it and I’m not going to let people suppress the very thing this community was made for - to embrace the sexuality of gay people, lesbians, trans people, bi people, pan people, ect.  Ok?  Ok.

My point is that we’re constantly butting heads over stupid shit.  Yall just need to calm down, eat some bread, respect people’s pronouns, and mind your own business regardless of what your opinion on it is.  Don’t like it? dont use he/him lesbian headcanons.  But don’t police how people express their sexuality/gender when the trans and gay communities have been interlinked for decades and it’s still a very complicated issue separating the two.

[dekuinthelake]

Are you a Boy or a Girl?

I’ve been getting this question a lot since I changed my header to include gender, where as it didn’t before. This is hardly the first time the question of sex has be posed at me. People have been asking me this since I was six years old.

And the answer? Well, it’s a little complicated...

From a very young age I was classified as a “tomboy” by my immediate family. One of the few positive things I can say about my mother is that she tried to raise my sister and I rather gender neutral considering she’s a Mormon. My interests were (for the most part) aloud to be explored and what I ended up liking were animals, swords and video games; Any and all “boy stuff”. No one was particularly surprised or unsupportive, as many of my friends were boys. My Grandfather even called me Mikey, the male version of my name, and still does to this day oddly enough.

Before I went to grade school my preferences weren’t challenged by anyone. Except my actual male friends. Kids under the age of 4 tend to just take their clothes off, and so I got my first lesson of biological differences when my childhood friend and I decided to strip naked and run around the yard, as kids to.

It was incredibly confusing, and I hadn’t learned the term Tomboy wasn’t literal. So for a long time in my youth, I just thought I was a different type of boy.

When I went to school at 6 years old, people would question why I was wearing boy stuff, or why I had my hair cut short once I spoke and they realized that I was actually a girl. Most of the time, people just shrugged it off, especially adults. But kids were absolutely volatile about -any- aberrant behavior for a “girl”.

I got made fun of, a lot. He-she was the most common thing in elementary, but as I grew older, naturally the insults and bullying got much, much worse.

It was particularly bad in church. Women are not treated like equal citizens in general by young boys, and putting a superiority complex on top of that which is enforced by Mormon ethics was miserable. Girls -had- to wear dresses and act meek or wise. Up until this point, I’d been doing the opposite of what I was expected to do because for all intensive purposes, I’d been treated and raised like a guy. Suddenly my mother had these weird feminine expectations for me that coincided with Mormonism.

And that just wasn’t me.

I wasn’t raised on dresses and dolls. I was allowed to play with dinosaurs and go digging in the mud. All of my friends were boys and they treated me the same as the other guys.

Puberty changed that entirely in most situations. Sure, I still had a lot of dude friends who I was just one of, but increasingly I felt displaced because the comfort zone I was aloud to grow up in was drastically changing.

Highschool was absolutely the worst for this. I was desperately trying to fit in to the mold that was set out for me. Being a woman is important, and it alienated me from both men and women because I’ve never felt like a girl, but I’m not biologically male and it’s instantly recognizable from my features and voice.

There were days I’d skip home to just lay in my bed and cry about it. I wanted to rip off my own damn skin because I felt so -wrong-. I turn, I lashed out at a lot of people trying to figure out who I should be, or who my mother wanted me to be, or even the church I’d been forced to follow for most of my young life.

It’s scary now looking back, and even more frightening looking forward. I know now that I’ve never wanted to be the sex I was born as— ever. Over time this feeling as just kept getting stronger and stronger.

But what can I do about that? There are a lot of complications being transgender. I worry that many of my friends will find it awkward and stop talking to me, or that my father will be weird about it being the cis male republican he is. Dating would be a thousand times more complicated because fairly, a lot of gay men (men are my preference) won’t date people who aren’t naturally born men. How would you even bring it up in conversation? It’s reasonable to predict a lot of people would be incredibly rude, and to be honest when you take shit for just being you all of your life it gets harder and harder to even want to try socializing.

But by far, the most difficult part about all of this is the reality of it. There is nothing I can do to have what I’d like in this situation. No matter what, I’ll always be stuck with what I was born with, and people will find that repulsive. In fact, no matter if I had the inconceivable amounts of money and time to transition, people would still be upset. No matter what I do, it’s impossible to get comfortable in my own skin around people because I’m taking shit from all sides.

And that’s why I like the internet. Everyone starts out neutral when you can’t see a face or hear a voice. For the most part, people will judge you based on your actions and what you say... that’s ultimately what I want. When it comes to friendships or social interaction, I want people to come out of it liking, or disliking me for who I am as a person, not what genitals I have.

Online games in particular point out just how grossly people equate gender to skill. No one ever is nasty to me until I speak up in a voice chat and reveal I was an ABERRANT WOMAN the entire time. I always feel betrayed, especially because I feel like they constantly misgender me. I did some competitive WoW PvP earlier this week and I haven’t felt this isolated, this disgusting about my body in a long time.

Seriously, if you are a dude who plays games, please never immediately point out a female voice and make it a joke. It really fucking hurts to be singled out all the time, even as an adult.

Especially if you are trans and afraid to ask them to call you male pronouns because of how homophobic, racist and sexist the randoms you are grouped with can be... I mean, I can never be happy with my body and having men constantly point out how much worse women are is equivalent to skinning a person alive and rolling them in salt for an hour....

So, the short answer? The gender I identify with is male. Please call me male pronouns.

I don’t want any more special consideration than that. I don’t expect people to bend over backwards for me... but it would be nice to at least be comfortable for once in my god damn life.

[shinmegamitensei2]

i was gonna sleep cus i’m tired as shit but then my brain started blaring some thoughts in my head so now i can’t sleep, so now you guys get to hear me ramble angrily about privilege and intersections of it on my blog instead

warning: this is extremely long and at points starts to sound like “pwease weave the poow twans men awone we did nofing wrong uwu” but i promise there’s a point somewhere in here about how we gotta start thinking about what we say has consequences

just... i get so angry when privilege is conflated to “if you have it, you have every single facet of it and you always benefit from it” when that’s really not the case at all, and to treat privilege as a single card that is separate from, and consequently unaffected by personal experience, other VISIBLE aspects of identity and individuality, and so forth is a really flawed way of thinking

the way i see most people explain or treat privilege is whether you have, say, a “privilege card” and the more you accumulate, the more privileged you are and thus the more benefits society offers you as a result of your status over another person (say, a white cis straight man is far more privileged than a black trans gay woman)

this is it, a simplification of privilege, easily digestible and easy enough to regurgitate to other people to get them to understand on an elementary level what it means to have privilege - when you have it, you have benefits over another person because society deems you better than another person

but then the conversation stops there. it stops, and this simplification becomes a hard and fast rule rather than the beginning of an educational moment, and suddenly we have concepts such as self-determination of your identity means you can gain and drop privileges as you change and determine WITHIN YOURSELF who you are, rather than what society deems you as

and therein lies the problem: how do you gain or lose privilege? how does the concept of passing privilege factor into all this? what does it mean to pass, or to not pass, and can privilege be bargained, can it only be half-gained or half-lost, can it change on a whim?

the only times i ever see this brought up, it’s by some asshat who’s got some shitty opinions or is trying to defend the privileged group wherein exchanges of power usually do not happen on the level i’m trying to discuss (re: race and a white person whose family is predominantly european-white, although there is a lot to be said about someone who is white but also comes from a mixed family and the way that privilege can also be bartered based on perceived appearance versus the reality) but what i really want to look into, specifically, is the bartering of privilege gained and lost through identification as trans, nonbinary, or another gender unrecognized by mainstream society

because, like... it’s here, i feel like, where passing privilege becomes its most prominent (as well as sexuality and the culture surrounding it that has crafted a persona, either influenced by or influencing [or both!!] by homophobic caricatures of the past and present) and where we need to start having discussions, serious discussions, about how one passes not only affects their privilege, but also that we cannot and should not treat people specifically based on what privileges or disprivileges we believe they should be experiencing in their day-to-day lives, because... it doesn’t work that way

there’s such a monumental difference between people at different stages of passing, and what information they have about them that is on the internet, or among their friends and family, or to their bosses and coworkers or if it gets leaked in ways they didn’t intend or want people to see or know

i AM going to use trans men in this example, being one myself, because i don’t intend to try and explain anything using experiences that don’t belong to myself so as to not misrepresent anyone, so i apologize that this comes off as being really whiny and “wahhh stop treating transmasc ppl badly” because a whole lot of trans masc and trans men adopt misogyny and absorb toxic masculinity in an attempt to become masculine, in a world where manliness is often defined by how much you can reject femininity and the constant attempts to redefine masculinity in a way that doesn’t allow male predators to adopt it solely to hurt women I’M GOING ON A TANGENT ANYWAY

there was a point i wanted to make here, and it was specifically on the idea that, like... you cannot ever, possibly, expect a trans man who is completely untransitioned and is seen, societally, as a woman, to own any amount of male privilege that makes any real difference where it matters aside from an online community wherein anonymity is valued, but also in said community where that information (that they are trans, whether or not they mention they are untransitioned) may be open and ENCOURAGED to be posted online for the sake of engaging in these conversations in the first place

as opposed to a trans man who is fully transitioned, has spent several years being accepted as a man, having absorbed ideas about masculinity that may make him indistinguishable from other men and nobody questions his status as a man, and all of this is STILL contingent on the fact that nobody knows or SHOULD know that he is trans, as once that information comes out on a platform where people feel empowered to challenge him (not only including the internet, but in real life, where it is common and encouraged for men to engage in violence, especially where bigotry is concerned)

as opposed to any trans men who may be in between, too! a man who is taking T, whose voice is changing over time and where his neighbors may catch onto what’s going on and grow suspicious; a man who takes strides to act masculine where he can, but who is stifled in an environment where he could be abused or killed purely on account of transphobia; a man who does not WANT to take the steps required for society to fully “recognize” him as a man, and so may never be able to fully participate in presenting the way he wants

this is all transphobia, full stop. not transmisandry or whatever weirdo terms ppl are coming up with these days, but there is a lot to be said in how transness AFFECTS male privilege, and how that male privilege may be adopted, absorbed, and enacted depending on the way that society recognizes men, maleness and masculinity

trans masculinity, and the state of being a trans man, is not an experience shared by every trans man. trans men are not all the same - some are trans nonbinary men, some transition, some do not, some adopt abusive techniques and toxicity that comes built into the system that tells us what being a man is and what being a woman is (although i could also argue that in a lot of ways, to be recognized as a man without having homophobia and transphobia and misogyny thrown at you constantly is to HAVE to participate in these systems, but alas)

there is a wide variety of difference in all of these people, and how they are recognized on a widescale manner that makes any shred of difference outside of this website - which begs another question! where does privilege travel? can it disappear or appear depending on where you are? where you go? can you have privilege on tumblr, but then have it vanish when you leave this website?

there’s a distortion, a way we talk about privilege and the privileged folk, that makes it so damn difficult to discuss the finer and more important details about privilege, intersection, and how privilege is not the same for everyone. it CANNOT be the same for everyone, because passing privilege is not yet another token given to people just to show that they have it! and privilege is not a set of cards and coins that come separately and totally irrelevant of each other!

a trans man is pelted by misogyny, homophobia, as well as transphobia when he does not pass. just as cis men are pelted with these ideas, so too are trans men. and yes, they are misguided. they hurt women and gay people more than they hurt men and straight people, this much should be obvious to anyone. but these things - they are STILL internalized, and how they are internalized changes depending on who is on the receiving end, and in many ways these things are markers and indicators of how to and how not to act for men

i wanted to keep going on about this point and i think i have more to say but my end point with all this is just that privilege changes power depending on where you are, who you are, and on a moment’s notice depending on what information people have a hold of, and i know i did a not-great job of explaining this but also i’m just venting so whatever

another thought occurred to me, about something i was thinking about earlier today, and it’s about how we talk about this concept, and how we approach privilege and privileged people and people whose privilege may variably change

obviously tumblr’s a bad place to be. it’s polarizing, because a lot of people use it as a place to vent, and there’s a lot of gross and nasty people here (including highly-privileged folk and fucking neo-nazis for fuck’s sake) and having long and meaningful conversations here is pointless because it’s drowned out by the obsession and need for having notes yet lacking a cohesive way to spread posts and all proper additions to that post without someone losing some form of context along the way

(that fucking, pewdiepiekin post goin around is one such example, since it’s apparently a joke that OP has but everyone’s treating it as fact, and like obviously it’s hard to tell sarcasm on this website given how much weird shit we’ve seen, but also that it’s FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE to correct such a misunderstanding BECAUSE of the very nature of tumblr itself, go figure)

but that’s also why i think we gotta have this conversation, this like... talk that we can’t keep talking about shit the way we have been, especially in regards to social justice and conceptualizing it for the younger kids who USE this website, and like... we just gotta have a different way of approaching things now, because the more i watch idle chats where people gleefully and openly post screenshots of others making fun of them for minor shit or momentary fuck-ups that could be easily ignored because the person is still learning (ESPECIALLY IF THEY’RE LIKE 14) and otherwise give themselves a free pass to become openly vicious and in the name of coping or to share amongst their friends how pathetic they view some people

like ok not to be a liberal and i’d rather not be classified as such because i don’t lick the boots of the privileged or pull any of that devil’s advocate shit but this extremely hostile environment we’ve cultivated and continually defend because we think this website creates ANY sort of meaningful difference in the world and anything we do on this website has any sort of meaningful impact that is beneficial to us while also openly encouraging behaviors that mitigate and deny growth and learning from mistakes is honestly kind of fucking scary

this is in no way saying giving a pass or go on behavior that directly spreads violence like saying slurs and whatnot, but we’re also so, so very fucking vicious, and at some point, no matter what reason you have for saying what you do, the consequence is that your words and intents get hijacked and used out of context in a manner that forms high hostility in the first place

and it’s so, so hard to talk about here too, without going “well if you hate men hurr durr it’s ur fault everything on this site sucks don’t openly say you hate your oppressors hurr durr!” like that’s such an easy trap to fall into but i don’t believe that either, even if i’ve grown distasteful of openly expressing “i hate cis men” (because they terrify me and could murder me at a moment’s notice, both for thinking i’m a woman and for finding out i am trans) or “i hate straight people” (because they fetishize my gayness and shit!) and etc

i’ve got so many reasons why i could express those thoughts, but should i do it, and on a regular basis, consequences follow. consequences that destroy my cultivated and intended reputation as someone who is open and friendly and kind, because it is difficult to really PROVE that to someone who may be on the fence from allowing themself to be deprogrammed from societal teachings and ingrained and taught transphobia and homophobia and misogyny and racism and so on so forth

and i know not everyone is like that. not everyone WANTS to teach and to provide the resources for that and to help deprogram people. most people just want to vent, most people want to escape from the daily abuse and fear and vent their frustrations. i get that. but then where do we go from there, when we have such an absolute volume of people doing and saying this exact thing, in such a degree that such a climate becomes normal to be reactionary and to react to any level of ignorance with anger, no matter who it comes from?

i’m being so, so vague here, and i really do not want it to come off as protection of the poor soft privileged or what the fuck ever, i genuinely do not. i guess i’m just describing a time in my life where i was like that, where i openly enjoyed mocking people that i thought were beyond reprieve and “saving” and getting into fights and it was such a nasty attitude to be in because it led to me throwing people out of my life, throwing caution to the wind, destroying my reputation online and getting put on places like r/tumblrinaction and potentially k.i/.w/i./f./a/./r./.m//s for my actions

living that way endangered me, and not just because of who i am. living that way destroyed me, and it destroyed my way of thinking, too. it destroyed my moral system, it encouraged me to dehumanize others. it encouraged me to find new ways to rationalize violence as a way of “vengeance” and “retribution” for the damages society dealt me, as if that was any rational and correct way of approaching this situation

anger has its place. anger has its place in destroying the system we have now and rebuilding a new one. but we need to understand that our actions, no matter how justified, still have consequences, sometimes extremely unintended, and even unwarranted that we didn’t deserve, and just... i dunno

there is no easy solution to this. i don’t believe we’ll get anywhere by being nice to everyone all the time, just as much as i don’t believe we’ll get anywhere by developing such a community-wide but aimless anger that we develop as hostile an environment as we have on this website

i don’t know what we need, but it can’t be this

[captaindoubled]

Me, the person that spent the last years at college studying and researching evaluation conditioning in the media and how it affects people's feelings towards different races irl: Even though media is getting better, folks are still falling into harmful tropes that only harm the message they are trying to get across and it helping.

I love Akande in overwatch but he is still a hulking black villain and that only reinforces the black hulking stereotype. Evaluative condition g is quick and instant and on a subconscious level for the most part so when folks look at him, they make connections with the racist stereotype of a big black man even if his character is far from it.

Dream Daddy has trans representation but has had their name tacked on to transphobic gamers and regardless of their involvement, that association is there. Gay men will be played as a joke because viewers of these gamers will be primed to think of gay men as a joke and not nuisanced people.

VLD relies so heavily on character tropes that genuine moments of character growth are lost because viewers are only going to see them through those tropes. Example- Characters like Hunk have moments where he shines through as an individual in the show are lost because the viewers have already been told multiple times that he's a fat food guy coward and because this trope is old and connections are strong in people's head that this trope is easily recognizable, moments where he's brave, math clever and just kind are overshadowed even if those moments are even with his food moments.

Steven Universe is another show that I had a lot of hope for but ultimately i had to step back from entirely because they constantly did nothing about their anti black biases and continued to demonize or other black coded characters within the show. Black woman characters being mules for the feelings of other characters, even when they were given moments to deal with those problems were turned to moments to lift up another character in the end (When Pearl used Garnet to fuse to feel powerful but only ended up being a character development moment for Pearl when that story arch should have centered around Garnet carrying the burden of the team). The creators have refused to do better with the POC coded gems or POC characters in the town and have mostly focused on white coded or thin characters. This is an example of people trying to be progressive so much so that they don't stop to check themselves or allow themselves to be criticized which is a shame. It's hard to see the progress in media when half the time it's one step forward two steps back.

Also me, but an optimistic person who just wants to have a good time and have faith in folks: I still enjoy the characters of Overwatch and other actually diverse big name pieces of media and even with its flaws it's a step in the right direction. The flaws will help them learn and if it doesn't, the spite will fuel other people to do better with their own IPs. I've seen plenty of folk get on their grind from bad media just as much as good media. And within the full context of the story, Akande is more than just a big black man and if fans and folks don't see the humanity in him, that's their problem. It is the job of the creators to do what they can to not promote harmful stereotypes but if fans can not see humanity in black characters than there is little that can be done.

Example- Lució is a good man, a musician and a hero to his people but people either Demonize his character by saying his a criminal for stealing from an oppressive force or dehumanizing him because he's one of the shortest characters on canon and because they don't see him as a "threatening" black man, they find ways to make him even less threatening, almost infant like as a counter stereotype which is just as harmful to black people.

I will bring up Dream Daddy again because other than small moments that are iffy, the game is actually very tame and very well made and not the fetish fuel that the fans have made it out to be. Most of the dates are just friends hanging out and only on the third date do you lock in a romantic interaction. Some of those last dates don't even become romantic until the last minute. Even Joseph's story which doesn't have a "good ending" is balanced for in the fact that not every gay has to have a good end when the majority of them in the story do. Only positive stuff doesn't make people see gay men as complex human people and the idea that just because it's a dating sim, huh can't always get what you want is nice and treats him like a human man with his own issues and not just fan fuel. I can see this being a stepping stone for folks to take the dating sim genre more seriously because both them and visual novels are easier to program and create than fps,third person games, or side scroller and so more indie folks can create bigger and better representation without being tacked on to the Game Grumps.

VLD has been an odd show from the jump and has done a lot better than previous versions of the show. It's far more diverse and the stereotypes are annoying but not as bad as they were in the past. I prefer to watch the show outside of the fandom and I don't interact with the fans because again, it becomes a situation where the fans own biases have soiled the entire experience and made the show something that it isn't. It could be better but nothing is perfect and I'll critique it because that's my job as a viewer but I'm still proud of the work it's done so far even if it's not super good all the time.

Also also me, an exhausted person: Just do better. Both shows and fans. People make these shows and pieces of media and people aren't perfect. It's both the job of the creator to do better and to apologize when implicit biases, which are very hard to change unless you actively go out of the way to fix them and recondition yourself, are present in characters or they just fuck up on something.

But it's also the job of the fans to educate themselves on what's right and how to interact with folk. This isn't a reasonably, be nice thing. It's a, maybe don't send really weird messages to folks about your ship unless the creator has made it know that they like to engage in that talk. Even if you are angry, actually say what's wrong with sources instead of working off hear-say. If you don't know what's wrong with a show, ask and do your own research or only form your opinions from folks that actually did the research and not a random post with literally no sources but lots of outrage. Also accept that sometimes your opinion on stuff is wrong. Cis women who only interact with a show for the gay ships are fundamentally wrong?? And annoying and you hounding a creators for gay content is actually very gross when you can support shows when canon can characters.

BUT as fans you do have a right to critique a show for stuff going on and creators have to have thicker skin when it comes to critique. They have every choice to listen to it or ignore it but fans have every right to critique the media. It's how things change. Again, a point back to Steven Universe. Both with the fans and the creators didn't want anything bad said about the show. Just because it was progressive for one group, doesn't mean it's progressive for other folk.

There were good moments that children and adults needed to hear but nothing is perfect and if a show can't be critiqued nothing will get better and the deeper in your craw you get about a problem, folks tend to double down on them (I have a theory that racist/sexist/ist thoughts and actions tend to get worst when you tell folks to stop because they can be learned through conditioning and so go through a thing called an extinction burst ((an extinction burst is when you try and stop a trained behavior by not reinforcing it any longer the thing doing the behavior does it a lot more out of frustration because they aren't frying their treat anymore)) so they do racist shit more because they aren't getting rewarded for their behavior) the worst you'll get.

The rise of social media and creators wanting to connect with the fans have created a situation where folks have easy access to one another and there is a lack or respect for folks space. This was a problem with Bryke and members of the ATLA crew entering in spaces meant for the fans and being upset with how overwhelming the close interactions were and got defensive about critique of any kind. This is a problem with folks on the VLD fandom holding pieces of media hostage to get what they want, ignoring the real world consequences of those actions. The closeness allows for direct responses with problems but also the same way texts are, people expect and answer immediately when people behind contracts and are representing their content and everyone who's worked on it has to put the message out fast but same time it has to follow rules probably set out by their company. Both sides just need to do better.

[lesbitchka]

(submission)

I am sending this from a friend’s blog, not my own, because I’m overly anxious and don’t know how submissions work and… if my url was somehow posted with this and the guy I’m talking about found it things wouldn’t be good and I’m jsut too anxious to take that chance on something I don’t know the workings of. I’d appreciate if you had a way to omit my friends url though and answer this anonymously but if you can’t they said it’s okay. I’ll see this because I follow you on my blog. Thank you so much.

So this is a long question and I didn’t want it to get split up because it’s sorta important it’s coherent. Also I’m sorry if it’s not totally relevant, I’m not sure who else I could mention this with.

I recently turned 16, but when this all started, I was 15. I’m also a trans boy. I met a person who identifies as Asexual Demiromantic Gay Trans Demiboy. He was 20. But we were the the same fandom and had a lot of the same ships, so we got to talking and hit it off really well. We became friends outside of fandom pretty quickly. (He actually mostly just won’t talk with me about fandom stuff anymore… like he’ll listen to me but won’t engage on it.)

I came out when I was 12 and started transitioning. My family is really supportive and has helped me tons through everything. I was on testosterone at 14 and was approved for top surgery when I was 15 (and got it a month after my 16th birthday). So, yeah. Really supportive environment.

Needless to say, I find relating to other trans people difficult because I don’t go through a lot of the struggles they do. I used to go to trans social groups in my area but I’d always be singled out if I slipped up in the slightest to give a hint of how supportive my environment was.

I’ve gotten a lot better with this, but a roughly year ago, I wasn’t.

We were talking about attraction one day and I expressed that I would probably only date a cis boy.

And he flipped out.

He had said it was because everyone only liked cis boys. His ex apparently left him for a cis guy. And he said something weird, I don’t remember what.

And then it came out that he liked me, romantically.

Everything has been shit since then because I don’t like him back. I can’t define why, but he always asks and hates on himself, his body and being trans.

I’ve been pressured to give him reasons. I’ve discovered a lot about myself through that. I mean it’s fucked me up a lot, but I’ve come to understand more about my attraction. I’ve tried to explain to him. It’s not because he’s trans. I just don’t like him like that–I’d date a trans boy if I liked him!

But, uh. I also found that I’m probably hypersexual, or, at least, in a relationship, I feel as though I would need to be sexually desired to few valid. So this is obviously a reason I couldn’t date an asexual–asexuality is literally not experiencing sexual attraction. Maybe arousal and all, but not attraction.

I tried to explain this to him recently. And he tried to tell me that’s not how it works. He said he could want me sexually, and then explained that if I bought him strawberry pop tarts he’d hop right into bed with me, if that’s what I wanted. He told me I misunderstood him.

Now he’s constantly fighting with me telling me it isn’t fair. I think he’s trying to convince me I don’t know who I like or not. He’s super important to me, and I feel close to him like I haven’t someone before. But that’s not really special, I have unique attachments to most individuals in my life. I’m also an affectionate person. He tells me I treat him like a boyfriend. I tried to tone down my affection but if I cut it all out it’s just. “Hey!” And he’ll respond with “Hi.” And it’s. Dull and just a couple words, because he won’t talk to me about fandom or anything anymore. Just. How’s your day. I’m going to McDonalds. Etc. and then he gets sad and mad with me.

We obviously have very different views on affection and the likes, but I’ve explained a thousand times I don’t mean anything romantic by it. He just cries and gets mad at me and yells some (we have voice called when this happened).

He keeps asking how I know what i feel for him isn’t romantic attraction.

And he STRICTLY dates trans boys. He hates trans girls with a burning passion, like. If I mention it he flips and goes off. He also hates cis men. (Which I don’t understand, because he loves trans men…?) And he doesn’t hate cis girls but he’s not into them. So, yeah. Only trans boys.

And I just… I don’t know what to do. I don’t understand what it is to be demiromantic. He said it’s taking time to have romantic attraction until you really know someone, but I thought that’s how romantic attraction worked… and also he developed feelings for me in a couple of months, not even half a year, and at that point we mostly talked about cool characters. Nothing deep or emotional or about each other really.

And the whole asexual… but has the capacity to be sexually attracted to me thing, I don’t get that. He says I give him feelings he’s never had before. It’s stressful and I don’t get it and he won’t explain. Is it some part of the MOGAI community, like the concept of “good aces” having sex to make their partner happy…?

I almost feel like he only likes me because I’m a trans guy. It makes me feel fetishized–but like. I’d probably be more comfortable with some cis person expressing their attraction to my transness. Because he seems to think there’s nothing wrong with it at all. And there isn’t, I guess, I mean if you’re only comfy dating trans guys like yourself then I guess you are but? He claims to be demiromantic but “fell” for me so fast and it just makes me really uncomfortable. He focuses on it a lot, too. He still gets mad at me and claims I don’t like him because he doesn’t have a dick, even though I’ve explained countless times that I’ve worked through that and it isn’t about him being trans. I also feel like in his saying “no one wants a trans boy” (about himself apparently) he’s almost… trying to convince me that he’s the only person who will ever want me. But maybe I’m just paranoid? I don’t know…

And then, attraction. I mean… I… think I’d know what romantic attraction feels like. And sexual. Attraction in general. Isn’t it defined by individual? Or is he right? Am I romantically attracted to him and just… don’t understand or something?

I’m afraid that if I ever date he’ll kill himself. If I mention having a crush or even liking the idea of a person who would like, get me daisies, he flips out and won’t speak to me proper and is grumpy for days. He’s said that I’m all he lives for. That he schedules his day around me. That he should just kill himself because he’s “horrible” and I’d be “happier” and he’s “always going to be hung up on a guy (he) can’t have anyways”.

I know he’s genuinely suicidal. But he won’t talk to me about everything else… it only ever comes out if I’m going somewhere with someone who could potentially be a person I might like, or if I comment that there was a cute guy walking down the street or that I like the hair of a boy at school today.

I’m sorry that this is a lot. I didn’t know who to talk to about it–I don’t really have anyone, and a lot of it is based on attraction and asexuality and.. I’ve followed your blog for a while and you’re really knowledgeable and post lots of various resources hat I’ve felt are relevant before. I think I mostly just needed to get this out here… but if you can help me understand anything I’d really appreciate it.

first of all, i’m really glad that you came to me with this. i know it must have taken a lot of courage and you might even feel guilty for doing so - but it’s incredibly important that you reached out

i’m sorry, this is going to be hard to hear, but the best course of action for you and your well-being is to drop that guy and erase him out of your life, asap

now, he’s 20 years old. you’re 16, and were 15 when you met. that is not healthy and is already enough of a red flag (look at this post, and this tag). friendship? sure. there need to be boundaries, but sure. this thing he’s got going on? no way

“I’ve been pressured to give him reasons. I’ve discovered a lot about myself through that. I mean it’s fucked me up a lot, but I’ve come to understand more about my attraction. I’ve tried to explain to him. It’s not because he’s trans. I just don’t like him like that–I’d date a trans boy if I liked him!”

you should not be pressured to give someone reasons for why you won’t date them and the fact that he continues to press the subject just shows that he can’t take “no” for an answer, which also shows a sense of entitlement to other people. another red flag

“He said he could want me sexually, and then explained that if I bought him strawberry pop tarts he’d hop right into bed with me, if that’s what I wanted. He told me I misunderstood him.” 

yeah, no, he’s the one willfully ‘misunderstanding’. it’s not about having sex, but about being wanted sexually. like you said, ace people don’t experience sexual attraction and you’re fully within your rights to not want someone who can’t give you what you need in a relationship. more in this tag

“Now he’s constantly fighting with me telling me it isn’t fair. I think he’s trying to convince me I don’t know who I like or not.”

that’s manipulative and trying to convince you to subscribe to his views and beliefs, no matter how much they contradict yours, to get you to doubt your own perceptions. huge red flag

“He tells me I treat him like a boyfriend.“

again, manipulative. lots of people are affectionate and close with their friends

“I don’t understand what it is to be demiromantic. He said it’s taking time to have romantic attraction until you really know someone, but I thought that’s how romantic attraction worked… and also he developed feelings for me in a couple of months, not even half a year, and at that point we mostly talked“

demiromantic is not in any way a useful label, because everyone experiences attraction differently and saying otherwise suggests that everyone else falls in love at first sight

“And the whole asexual… but has the capacity to be sexually attracted to me thing, I don’t get that. He says I give him feelings he’s never had before. It’s stressful and I don’t get it and he won’t explain. Is it some part of the MOGAI community, like the concept of “good aces” having sex to make their partner happy…?”

i linked the sex positive ace tag above; if he’s ace it’s unhealthy for the both of you to have sex. again, it feels more like he’s trying to manipulate you into dating him (the whole “i’ve never felt like this before” thing) - another red flag

“He still gets mad at me and claims I don’t like him because he doesn’t have a dick, even though I’ve explained countless times that I’ve worked through that and it isn’t about him being trans. I also feel like in his saying “no one wants a trans boy” (about himself apparently) he’s almost… trying to convince me that he’s the only person who will ever want me. But maybe I’m just paranoid? I don’t know…”

he’s willfully ignoring what you’re saying, again, in favour of trying to guilt you into dating him. with what i know of him so far, i’m pretty sure he is playing the “no one else will date you” angle - not only is that not true, but it’s another huge red flag

“Or is he right? Am I romantically attracted to him and just… don’t understand or something?“

no, he’s not right, but he’s been working you and guilt tripping you long enough to make you doubt yourself  

“I’m afraid that if I ever date he’ll kill himself. If I mention having a crush or even liking the idea of a person who would like, get me daisies, he flips out and won’t speak to me proper and is grumpy for days. He’s said that I’m all he lives for. That he schedules his day around me. That he should just kill himself because he’s “horrible” and I’d be “happier” and he’s “always going to be hung up on a guy (he) can’t have anyways”.

I know he’s genuinely suicidal. But he won’t talk to me about everything else… it only ever comes out if I’m going somewhere with someone who could potentially be a person I might like, or if I comment that there was a cute guy walking down the street or that I like the hair of a boy at school today.”

he might be suicidal, he might not, but the fact that it only ever comes up when you mention the prospect of being interested in someone - again - shows that he’s manipulating and guilting you into cutting off other people and just going for him instead. huge, huge red flag

i know it’s hard to let go of someone you care about and who you’ve known for so long, especially when they keep threatening suicide whenever you hint at relationships with other people and you think you’re responsible for their mental well-being - but this is not healthy and the sooner you cut him out of your life, the better

you don’t owe him anything. not a relationship, not even a friendship, and you certainly don’t have to and should not stick around just because he’s guilted you into worrying what he might do if you try to leave. he’s not your responsibility, not to mention he’s a grown fucking adult who should know better than to pull any of this on a minor

the best thing you can do is to block him, change urls and move on. you don’t owe him any explanations, and trying to have a conversation about you needing to get away from him would undoubtedly turn ugly, with yet more guilt tripping you to stay. that will make it even harder to leave and he will be on the lookout for any following signs of you trying to get away

im here for you if you need someone to talk to and please do message me to let me know you’re safe 

[thespiderwriter]

1. Normalization     Once every month people between the onset of puberty and the beginning of menopause who possess a functional uterus shed their uterine lining through the vaginal opening.  This uterine lining contains blood, an unfertilized egg or two, and various tissues.  Since a baby didn't quicken that month, the body doesn't need all that extra material lying around getting old and stale and gross, so it hits the eject button and forces the uterus-possessor into a little mini practice labor, which lasts for somewhere between three and seven days.  For most women, and some men, it happens every month for somewhere around thirty-five or forty years.     Periods happen.  It's a biological fact and a day-to-day reality.  Sometimes it sucks fat honking monkey dicks; sometimes it only sucks a patch of crabgrass.  Either way, it's something as normal as eating or sleeping, and it happens literally every month for like half your life, if you live a long life.  If you add up your average number of bleed days a month and calculate the math, the average uterus-owner will bleed for somewhere between seven and ten nonconsecutive years of their life.     If you think about it, it's kind of metal.  I mean, we can bleed for seven days straight without dying!  I'd like to see a penis-bearer do that!  Yet because--one second.  *Steps onto feminist soapbox*  Ahem.  Yet because the Penis is King, our patriarchal society treats periods as something weird and gross and unusual, like having one is freaky-deaky and mad strange, yo.      There was a photographic series that was popular a while ago wherein a photographer took pictures of women going about their daily lives when their period set in, with blood trickling down their thigh as they walked out of a restaurant or swirling in the bathwater as they luxuriated.  The controversy the series was met with, and the disgusted responses, were really quite astounding--people who watch people fart on each other as a recreational activity acted as if capturing such an everyday aspect of the human condition was crossing some horrible, unspoken line.  Hell, people are more comfortable watching blood siblings bone each other than they are with seeing women bleed (unless it originates from the head, legs, or torso, of course, because a gaping chest wound is perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of).     We even treat piss and shit better than we treat menstruation, and menstruation is both more hygienic and better smelling.  Imho, at least; matters of sense are of course a matter of taste (buhdum tiss), but personally, I've never gagged cleaning menstrual blood up off the floor.  We even treat the blood that flows from our veins like it's somehow safer than menstrual tissues, glorifying things like the blood brothers ceremony, then acting like so much as touching an unused tampon will give you a horrible disease.    But guess what!  Unless you have an STD, or a yeast infection or something, your uterine blood is sterile!  And really, why wouldn't it be?  It's all the food that would have nourished a baby had you conceived one within that moon-cycle.  It may not stay sterile once it's exposed to the elements and bacteria find their way onto it (as they inevitably find their way into everything, sneaky little bastards), but when it's coming out, and shortly thereafter, it's totally safe, it usually doesn't smell all that awful....  It's kind of like spit; maybe you don't want it on you, but if someone drools on your arm a little bit while they're sleeping all you have to do is wash your arm and it's like there was never an issue.     But here's the thing; in this patriarchal western society, Penis=King, Vagina=Prisoner.  Sort of.  We treat male as the default, is what I'm saying; pants are considered genderless but a dress automatically indicates femininity; a flat chest could mean male or female or neither but boobs automatically equal woman; guy is male and gal is female but even though guys is gender-neutral, gals is still strictly feminine; male nipples are a just part of their physiology but female nipples are a political statement; and the list goes on, and on, and on....     The really weird thing is, if any sex were going to be the default, shouldn't it be the sex that was in the majority?  And yet, despite the statistic that there are 2% more uterus-owners than penis-owners, penises (penii?) are the default sex organ.  And nothing ever comes out a penis that isn't piss or semen (unless you are very very ill, in which case you should please consult a doctor immediately), yet it's more acceptable to talk, in great detail, about a penis emitting biological waste or sexual fluids than it is to mention the very existence of menstrual blood.     And why?  Because, as I said, we live in a patriarchal society.  This means that everything is tailored to the cis male experience; male is automatically normal, female is automatically abnormal, which is why it's totally cool to have a movie with only dudes in it, but totally weird and sexist to have anything at all ever with only women/girls as the leads.  So penises are funny and normal and vaginas are weird and disgusting, both alluring and vaguely intimidating, greatly sought after--but only if they never do anything that hints at biological processes, because why would you want to fuck something that's like, alive, and like, human and equal to you and stuff?     Okay, I'm getting off topic, and I could go on for hours so I'll just stop myself here.  What I'm getting at is; periods are not a political statement.  Periods are not weird, they're so normal more than half the world has them.  There are so many myths attached to periods that it can be hard to keep from backhanding someone who tries to plant misinformation within your range of hearing, and some families are so embarrassed by this biological fact of life that they never tell their uterus-bearing children about it until it's too late.     Some people still call it "Eve's Curse."  Kids make fun of you in the locker room if you don't have it, then they make fun of you when you do.  People get laughed at for leaking through their pants or skirt or what-have-you, like they could have helped it.  People act like putting in a tampon provides a sexual thrill, or if you're involved in sports you can get ridiculed by your coach for choosing to wear pads instead.     I repeat; there are teenagers who don't even know that periods are a thing!     Periods.  Are.  A.  Thing.  That.  Happens.  And chances are good that if you have a uterus, you have either had one, or will have one in the future.  And yet in all the many, many, many years that I've been reading books, I've only come across periods three and a half times; in the Earth's Children series, Ayla's period isn't a big plot point, but it is mentioned from time to time.  Jean M. Auel talks about the method Ayla uses for dealing with and collecting her menstrual blood, and the small effects it has on her life, such as her sex life with Jondalar.     In what I believe was A Girl Named Disaster (I'd forgotten the name of the book over the years, and this is the only book I could find in which a girl from Mozambique makes her way to Zimbabwe whilst becoming a woman, so I'm going to say that it is the one I read as a ten-year-old), young Nhamo begins to menstruate for the first time while alone on a deadly journey to find her distant relatives, and struggles with the pressures of becoming a woman while so utterly cut off from everyone she loves.  Later on, she also struggles to let go of the concept that menstruation means that one has become a woman, since the fact that your body is technically ready to bear children has nothing to do with emotional and intellectual maturity.     It was a sizable enough plot point that it's most of what I remember from the book, and it touched on important aspects of the experience of "first blood" that no one ever talks about because no one ever wants to talk about it.  If I hadn't been raised with a mother who saw no reason to be ashamed of biology, this book could have been my only exposure to menstruation outside of school "your body and you" seminars, and that kind of writing is pretty important.  "Your Body and You" seminars ghost over the details of pubescent changes and what's happening physically, but it never delves into the emotional and psychological effects of a reaching a milestone that one is being constantly told one should be both proud (you're a woman :D!) and ashamed of (you're a woman >:|).     Menstruation is so, so, so physiologically simple, but as simple as it is to explain biologically, it is every bit as difficult to navigate socially, culturally, emotionally.     These books both treat periods as a normal thing in different ways--Earth's Children by incorporating it into the world as a fact of life and mentioning it largely in passing, and A Girl Named Disaster by supersizing it, bringing it out into the light where young uterus-owners can stick knives in it and say, "Even though it's normal to feel this way about these things, maybe I don't have to."  At the very least, they can identify with the struggles of the character, which is sometimes all a kid needs.  To know they aren't the only one.     So why should you write periods?   Reason number one:  Normalize.  How can something be seen as normal if we lock it in the dark and pretend it doesn't exist?  That's why there's been such a big push lately to write more female characters, more gay and bi and pan and trans and genderqueer and PoC and disabled characters, etc etc, it's why I talk about Tourette's and did presentations all across New York state--because you can't normalize something you don't talk about.  If you can't talk about it, it must not fall under our current societal definition of "normal."     So let's talk about periods.  Let's write about periods, write about characters having them, write about characters talking about them, hating them, laughing about them, bonding over them.  Let's write about people having to borrow a tampon from a friend or offering a spare pad to a stranger on the bus, about the infinite kindness and desolate cruelty that surround the biological process.  Let's talk about it as a scientific event, as a social milestone, as just a daily bother.      Let's normalize, normalize, normalize, so that maybe one day, when one of our grandchildren reads Carrie, they balk at the motives and actions of the characters, seeing them as completely unreasonable.      Bleeding from your vagina is not weird, damn it. 2.  Plot Complications     Okay, so the desire to normalize menstruation isn't strong within you, or you can't find a good reason for it in your story.  Consider:  Plot Complications.     "How could it complicate my plot?" you ask.  "My character getting PMS and tearing someone's head off?"     "No!" I shout, thwacking you with the hammer of Don't-You-Sass-Me-Fool.  "That's one for the garbage fire!"     See, periods are normal, they're usually sterile, but they can be messy, they can be embarrassing, it may not smell as bad as feces but menstrual blood does have a distinctive odor, and when it hits you unawares, it's definitely something that needs dealing with.     There could be a whole subplot wherein a character has to sneak off to the nearest hygienic-materials-dispenser at an inopportune time, or they could meet the love of their life by offering them their jacket to help cover the stain forming on their ass.  Hell, a young person's quest for a Maxi Pad when they find out the bathroom dispenser is jammed could be what leads them to find the Sword of Destiny or discover the horrible secret that the principle's been keeping.     And if your story takes place out in the wilds, your uterus-owners coming into their monthlies could be a deadly issue if they don't have a good means of flow-stoppage and/or self-defense.  Predators are hella good at sniffing out blood, menstrual blood in particular since in a lot of animals it indicates heat, which is a great time for boning.  If a predator gets a sniff of that blood trail, it can mean big trouble, and if your team is already being hunted by something with super senses, it can be all the more deadly.  ESPECIALLY if it hits in the middle of the night, when the character in question is defenseless and unawares.  >:3     And yes, the symptoms that go hand-in-hand with the blood can be used to complicate the plot, too.  Some people do experience emotional sensitivity or mood swings during menstruation, which can cause arguments that might not otherwise happen, especially under stressful situations.  Periods can also be very painful, particularly on day one, making it hard to so much as get up and walk around, which if you're trying to get somewhere fast--or get away from somewhere fast--is going to be a problem.     Even if the stakes are only maintaining your character's current lifestyle, period day one can muck things up, dampening desire for social interaction, diminishing social and intellectual energy as well as physical, embarrassing you in front of your friends, whatever the case may be.  Plus, that pain I just mentioned?  Makes it a lot harder for a lot of people to maintain a pleasant attitude when talking to assholes or misogynists, so maybe when Angelina gets her period on the day of the big test and has to walk around with her sweater tied around her waist all day is also the day she punches Big Bigot Bob in the face and gets suspended from school.     If your villains tend to be of the misogynist sort, oh boy, is there no end to the shit you can stir up!  Like I said, menstruation can be messy and uncomfortable, and just like anything else, that can be used to kickstart drama, to heighten tension, or to cause problems, and as we all probably know by now, causing problems is the best way to keep a story going strong! 3.  Realism     It comes down to this; periods happen.  And you can write a perfectly good book without ever once mentioning menstruation, as many have done!  You can also write a great book that's all about menstruation, or centers heavily around it, or just bandies it around a lot.  Or you could just mention it in passing.     One of my favorite parts of a fanfiction I read recently was a passage in which a woman excuses herself to use the restroom, realizes her period has started, puts on a pad, and returns to her date.  Why is it my favorite?  Firstly because it wasn't that great a fanfic, but mostly because it was just so casual.  Just a detail.  One of the many small details we pepper in that don't really matter.  The fact that her period had started mattered as much as the color of the diner walls, and I had never seen it dealt with so realistically before.     The thought that ran through the protagonist's head when she realized she was menstruating?  I'm glad I don't work tomorrow.     That made me smile because, I mean, how fucking real is that?  My first thought when I realize I'm bleeding is usually, So that's why I've been so tired today.  Plus, I had an instant connection to the protagonist (an OC) because for me, the first forty-eight hours are always the worst, and life is always better when I don't have to be responsible for the first day or two.  I relate.  And I may not have loved the direction the story took after that chapter (the character became too impossibly humble for all her incredible talents for my liking), but that section of that fanfic is now stuck in my head, and I think I'll remember it for a long time.     Mentioning something small and real--"Mike took a piss behind some weeds while Edgar scoped out the scene," "Johnny pulled at the loose tabs of skin around his fingernails and chewed on the inside of his cheeks," "Mary stopped by the store to pick up Kotex and Raisin Bran,"--can make your world and characters seem more real.  You don't always need to be detailed about it, but mentioning that your characters do normal human things is often refreshing in our world of godmodded protagonists and underpowered villains.       Let's be real.  Let's be complex.     Let's naturalize.