#with real acknowledgments of queer gender and sexuality
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it’s sort of beautiful how stardew valley, a game made by a straight/cis man that is fairly heteronormative in a lot of ways, has become so beloved by queer people because of the few ways concerned ape chose to be inclusive. the fact that you can marry any marriage candidate as either gender was huge for me as a kid. the fact that several marriage candidates get special dialogue depending on if you’re a male or female farmer is really great, ca didn’t have to do that but he did. also, ca has completely embraced the modding scene, stating that one of the main goals of 1.6 was to make modding easier, which is an implicit acknowledgment that if there are parts of the game’s content that you wish were different, he himself supports you with open arms.
yeah, most of the writing itself is fairly hetero focused (and white, for that matter). all the pairs at the flower dance are hetero whether it makes sense or not, there’s no in game gay couples unless you yourself choose to marry the same gender, and any references to relationships in the game not focused on your farmer are almost always heterosexual, not to mention there’s really not a lot of genderqueerness period in the game. but honestly, i’m not too beaten up over it. i imagine ca probably wanted to stay in his lane while being as inclusive as possible, which i think he more or less succeeded at. i mean, no matter which way you slice it, this game is so meaningful to me as a gay boy and it probably always will be. the slight blemishes on the queerness of the game certainly don’t outweigh that for me.
#stardew valley#i feel even stronger about this knowing how many content mods there are that diversify the game#with real acknowledgments of queer gender and sexuality#also more inclusive character options regarding race and ethnicity#the creator of the game may have his own limited perspective as we all do#but there’s still so much room to let this game be exactly how you want or need it#maybe i’m just optimistic or have rose colored glasses cuz i love this game so much#but still i think it’s just really nice
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The problem with the concept of male socialisation is that it is based on a premise that is fundamentally innacurate, i.e. the assumption that your were raised as a Man and therefor your are, in action and thought at least, more or less a Man and in order to stop being a Man you have to remove this fundamentally Masculine thing that was somehow instilled in you
And yes, it is accurate that there is a series of processes in amab childrens lives that attempts to condition them into whatever their culture of masculinity is, but what it doesn't acknowledge is that the fundamental purpose of this is that you are meant to come out of it with an ability to perform whatever social function it is that designates you as a Man in your culture. That's male socialisation. It's the thing that allows you to signal to Proper Men that you are also a Proper Man so you don't face any consequences. However, when you are not a Proper Man, this is more or less impossible.
Male socialisation for transfems (and queer cis men to a lesser extent) is basically just a long series of friends, acquaintances, family members etc trying to shove you through a hole that you don't fit through. And there's only two things you can do, you can either cut bits of yourself off til you squeeze through, or you can just keep getting pushed, painfully and fruitlessly, and hope they give up.
And neither of these approaches actually works. Because of course, they aren't going to give up. Because, remember, a lot of these people pushing you actually like you. They think they're helping you. And in a way, they're not completely wrong, because being anything other than a Real Man is painful and difficult (largely due to these same people, but that's beside the point). So they aren't going to stop pushing you until you get away from them, a process that is difficult and painful and if you ever go back they will just start pushing again
But even if you shave away all the undesirable bits of yourself, and you cut your hair and grow a beard and wear the right clothes, it still doesn't work. Because you still don't fit right. And they know it. Sexuality and gender are two things that people have a very good sense for. And people will see it in everything. The way you walk, the way you speak, the way you hold a glass, the way you stand, the way your wrists move, the movies you like and the books you read and the colour of your shirt and how you style your hair and how you cut your nails and on and on and on. The very best you can hope for, after years and years of meticulous shaving away, is that you work yourself down from being a tranny to being a faggot. And sure, it is better to be a faggot, mostly, but you still aren't a Real Man. And so they'll keep pushing anyway.
Male socialisation is the process by which cis men become Men, but it's also the process by which transfems realise you aren't a Man, and you never will be, and people will always hate you for it. It isn't the process by which you gain some almighty Male Power, it's a process that uses that power against you because you can't wield it right
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A Brief History of Queer Representation in Modern Kdrama
Earlier this week, totally unrelated to Heesu in Class 2, @twig-tea and I were making a list of kdramas with proper queer representation, because Twig loves to track queer things and I love to make highly specific lists. In light of all the discussion around Heesu and its appeal to a mainstream kdrama audience, we thought it would be helpful to share as context for what Heesu’s creators set out to do, how it compares to Love in the Big City and its goals, and why both shows are so significant for those who are not as familiar with this media landscape. We wrote the below together (strap in, folks, it's a long one).
As always, let us be clear what we are talking about with this list. We’re only looking at modern mainstream kdrama, so this list is not inclusive of Korean queer cinema or QL dramas, both of which have a rich history of their own. And when we say queer representation, we mean canonically queer characters that are acknowledged as such in the text of the show, if not by saying the words, at least by openly acknowledging same sex attraction. If there’s anything we know about queer people on the internet, it’s that our community can read gay subtext into anything, but that’s not what we’re doing here. For this list we are only interested in depictions of LGBTQ+ people that are clear and spelled out for anyone watching a show. In addition, for the purposes of this list we are talking about intentional inclusion of queer characters with a proper role in the story, not nominal nods to queer people existing (like every Hong Seok Cheon cameo in a drama), comedic gender bending without real reckoning with sexuality (ala The King’s Affection), use of queer people as the butt of a joke (glaring at you Vincenzo), queerness in psychosexual dreams to titillate and generate buzz (hiiiii Friendly Rivalry), or subtextual gay tension between two same sex actors who happen to have chemistry (waves hello to The Devil Judge). The point of this exercise is to chart the evolution of significant queer representation in kdrama—both good and bad—not to document every gay character that ever appeared for two seconds on screen. That said, while Shan has watched several hundred kdramas and Twig has tried to watch everything gay on the planet, it’s possible we missed something that should be here, so let us know if you think we did (though please do mind the criteria and don’t send us an impassioned essay about why Beyond Evil should count).
With that, let’s begin our walk through of the last two decades of queer characters in kdrama.
Coffee Prince (2007)
Among the most famous dramas on this list, Coffee Prince kicked off queer rep in modern kdrama with a classic gender bender in which Go Eun Chan, a girl, pretends to be a boy for Reasons. But what made it stand out is that her love interest falls for her while he still thinks she’s a man and has a whole sexual identity crisis and bisexual coming out process. Choi Han Gyul (and Gong Yoo), you will always be famous! This show was sincerely groundbreaking, not only for depicting a male romance lead struggling with his sexuality, but also including lots of gender fuckery for the female lead. It’s still one of the most significant queer kdramas ever made.
Life is Beautiful (2010)
This show is notable for how high it set the bar and how nothing has reached it since. Yang Tae Sub is our central character in this 63-hour ensemble family drama, and his arcs struggling with the closet, falling in love, coming out, commitment, and marriage (yes: marriage! In 2010!), are surprisingly realistic and touching without being too cliche. Kyung Soo and Tae Sub start as a casual hookup, and they have to recalibrate as their feelings change (and yes, they kiss on screen and the show is clear that they have sex throughout the series). They fight, they make up, and as their relationship deepens they have other problems in their lives they support one another through—their gayness is not the only or even the most interesting thing about them. It’s also notable that both of these actors (Song Chang Eui and Lee Sang Woo) were established kdrama stars before taking these roles.
Secret Garden (2010)
This het romance features a side character (played by our beloved Lee Jong Suk) who is a young musical prodigy pursued for his talents by the second lead, a senior musician. Over the course of the story we learn that he’s gay and harboring feelings for his would-be mentor. His plot is minor, but he ends the story happy and successful in his career, if not in a relationship. It’s small scale representation in the grand scheme of things, but one of only a handful of decent depictions of a gay person in kdrama at that point.
Reply 1997 (2012)
This wildly popular drama (at the time, it was one of the highest rated cable dramas in history) that spawned two follow-up iterations features a gay character, Joon Hee, who is in love with his long time best friend, Yoon Jae, and confides his feelings to their other best friend, Shi Won. Of course, this show is ultimately Yoon Jae and Shi Won’s love story, so Joon Hee does not get his happy romance ending, but his friends and the show treat him with kindness and compassion, and his character was well received by audiences.
Reply 1994 (2013)
Similar to its predecessor, this drama featured a side character with a gay subplot, but this time it was more about questioning his identity. Bingguere is a character whose arc is all about his confusion and indecision, and that extended to his sexuality when he struggled to understand his attraction to the male lead. Ultimately, he moves past those feelings and we learn his partner in the future is a woman, and the drama doesn’t really clarify where his sexuality landed. It’s kind of weak in terms of explicit queer rep, but showing a man grappling with his sexuality in a very popular family drama still feels significant.
Seonam Girls High School Investigations (2014)
While most of their content is limited to two episodes of this 14-episode high school drama, Eun Bin and Soo Yeon have, to our knowledge, the first lesbian kiss on Korean television, which earns them a place on this list. They are an established couple struggling with how their relationship is a risk for them (because it can be and is used against them). Their relationship doesn’t survive to the end of the series, but they are treated with compassion and their humanity is underscored by the narrative. They also spark an important conversation among the main characters about whether they should be helped because they’re gay, which was a little better intentioned than it was executed, but the show had the spirit.
Perseverance Goo Hae Ra (2015)
In a show about aspiring musicians forming a group to take a second shot at stardom, Jang Goon (portrayed by solo idol Park Kwang Seon) is one of the core group members with a heartwarming arc about acceptance. His story is about his father coming to terms with him being an idol and being gay. He has a one-sided confession scene that is decently done, and the scene where his father accepts him knowing the truth (after having been outed against his will) is genuinely moving. It was also touching to see the girl who originally crushed on him support him once she found out about his sexuality.
Hogu’s Love (2015)
This drama was considered progressive for its time, as its core plot is about Hogu, a man who decides to support his first love when he finds out she is pregnant with someone else’s child. In addition to that, side character Kang Chul has an arc where he experiences attraction to Hogu and tries to sort out his feelings, considering whether he identifies as gay before ultimately deciding he does not. It’s not the best rep we’ve ever seen, but it was part of an interesting attempt by a drama to explore complicated social and identity issues.
The Lover (2015)
Lee Jun Jae and Takuya (played by Lee Jae Joon who was also in the gay film Night Flight (2014) and Takuya of jpop group CROSS GENE) are roommates in this series about four couples in an apartment building. Their story starts as a comedy, in which Jun Jae and Takuya end up in ship moments that are played off by the narrative as jokes and misunderstandings, but then they catch feelings for real. We see one of the characters struggle with his queer awakening and there is a happy ending. Using the actors’ real names was a choice, and led to some seriously disruptive RPF shipping; but it was refreshing to have an active idol not only play gay but in a romance with a happy ending.
Prison Playbook (2017)
Another ensemble show with a queer side character; Loony, one of the main character Je Hyuk’s cell mates, is notable for his queerness not being used as a joke and not being the core of the character’s arc. Instead, this character struggles with addiction and how that affects his relationship, which is only incidentally gay. His story is moving and well developed, especially considering the size of this cast, but it doesn’t get a ton of screen time.
Romance is a Bonus Book (2019)

The queer rep in this drama is minor but overall positive, as we learn that the male lead Eun Ho’s ex-girlfriend, who he is still friendly with, ended their relationship because she fell in love with a woman. The show presents her as a lovely person who helps the female lead several times and is happy in her lesbian relationship, and we even get to see her with her partner briefly. A small win for sapphic representation in a very popular Netflix drama.
Moment at Eighteen (2019)
Jung Oh Je (RIP Moonbin) is a side character friend of the main lead. His sexuality becomes part of the plot when he is confessed to by a friend of the female lead, and he admits that he has a crush on the second male lead (Ma Hwi Young). While the characters in the show are mixed in their response, it’s clear the story is on the side of treating Oh Je with compassion.
Be Melodramatic (2019)
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This is an ensemble show centered on a group of friends who move in together to support a grieving young woman, Lee Eun Jung, and one of the housemates is her younger brother Lee Hyo Bong, a gay musician with a long-term partner. He is a side character and his most significant plot is about supporting his sister, with his sexuality and relationship part of his characterization rather than an active story thread. It’s a positive depiction and the way his sexuality is presented as just part of who he is felt significant at the time.
Love with Flaws (2019)
Joo Won Suk (RIP Cha in Ha) is one of the FL’s older brothers, and while not the focus of the drama he gets his own fully developed arc, including the mentorship of queer side character Choi Ho Dol. The queer rep in this show covers suicidality, the loneliness of the closet, bullying, solidarity, and fear of parental shame. That makes it sound depressing, but it’s a hopeful story about the character moving out of depression and into self-acceptance, has one of the best scenes depicting gay acceptance from a father in any show, and both Won Suk and Ho Dol have a happy ending (including for their romance).
Itaewon Class (2020)
The first drama on this list to feature a transgender character, Itaewon Class is about a group of social misfits trying to launch a restaurant on a trendy street in Itaewon. Ma Hyun Yi, a transgender woman saving money for her gender affirming surgery, is among the gang. Her story is not a big focus for the drama, but she gets a nice arc about coming into herself and gaining recognition for her talents as a chef, and the other characters always respect her identity. It’s pretty solid representation for a side character.
Sweet Munchies (2020)
This drama tries to tackle the problems of homophobia and appropriating queerness but misses the mark on both. The queer character in this show, Kang Tae Wan, is here to function as a driving force and conscience for the main male lead and female lead; he’s essentially the second lead but never had a chance (though he didn’t know it, since the main lead is pretending to be gay for clout). Tae Wan is a good character, but the narrative doesn’t care much about him or about queer people in general, it’s focused on how heterosexuals experience queerness. Not exactly amazing queer representation, whatever its intentions.
Run On (2020)
This drama features both a gay character and an asexual character, both of whom are written respectfully and get proper coming out scenes. There is also some messiness around one of the main characters appropriating queer identity as a way to avoid the pressures of her patriarchy, and the drama knows she’s wrong for that. This was one of the first instances of a kdrama acknowledging queer people as a regular part of the world around us and not singular oddities, and it was nice to see multiple facets of queer representation in one show.
Mr. Queen (2020)
This gender bender retains its place on the list because the main character (a man who awakens in the body of a Queen during the Joseon dynasty) openly struggles with his gender dysphoria as well as what it means that he’s attracted to a man, and these struggles are present for the bulk of the show. The character also has sex with both men and women while in that body. It’s one of the better representations of gender swap and feels queer, even when the relationship on screen has the guise of heterosexuality.
Mine (2021)
In this drama about ambitious women married to powerful men who struggle to break free from their constraints, one of the main characters reunites with her first love—another woman. The drama follows Jung Seo Hyun as she struggles to acquire the power she needs to live as she wants, and she ultimately achieves her goal, reuniting with her lover at the story’s end. It’s the first kdrama with a lesbian character in a major role who gets her happy romance ending.
Move to Heaven (2021)
Despite only being featured in episode 5, this was a good story that garnered a lot of attention in a popular Netflix drama, so for cultural impact reasons alone it belongs on this list. We start the episode with Jung Soo Hyun’s death, but this is a show about finding closure after death, so for once this death doesn’t feel like bury your gays. This is a compassionate tragedy in which we see how fear held Soo Hyun back from his relationship with Ian Park while he was alive, but his belongings at death indicate he was getting ready to face his fear and move to the US to marry Ian after all. Through the main characters of the show, Ian gets the closure of knowing Soo Hyun loved him.
Nevertheless (2021)
Yoon Sol and Seo Ji Wan have a typical plot for side characters (they’re in the female lead’s friend group) with a friends-to-lovers arc that depicts the fear and frustration when both friends are closeted and uncertain about risking the friendship but reach the point where they can’t pretend anymore. Since they’re both women, this felt pretty radical. They got a good romantic arc and a happy ending, if not a lot of screen time.
Under the Queen’s Umbrella (2022)
In this sageuk, the fourth prince is living a double life, hiding away makeup and women’s clothing that they wear in secret. The character is depicted as trans, but given the setting, explicit language and modern terminology (including altered pronouns) are not used in this side plot. When the prince’s mother finds out, she supports her child to have an artist paint a portrait of their true self, and ultimately, the prince leaves the royal family to go live a more authentic life in isolation in a bittersweet resolution.
A Time Called You (2023)
The queer rep in this drama comes in the form of a brief backstory montage for two gay characters, one of whom (Yeon Jun) is in a coma. We learn that he ended up in this state after getting into a car accident while in the process of confessing to the guy he mutually liked (Tae Ha), who was killed in the accident. From there, Yeon Jun’s body is taken over by a heterosexual character (it’s a whole time loop thing). This entry is mostly notable for featuring a high profile cameo from Rowoon playing Tae Ha, and unfortunately, for being a fairly textbook example of the bury your gays trope. In 2023!
Wedding Impossible (2024)
This disaster of a drama purported to finally feature a gay character in a prominent role that drove the narrative—in a story about Do Han pretending to marry his longtime friend to avoid being forced to marry another woman—but Do Han ended up a minor side character in his own story when the show chose to focus nearly all its attention on his brother’s het romance. Worse, the other characters treated him terribly and the story blamed every problem on his sexuality. This show was straight up homophobic and it was a significant regression for queer depictions in mainstream Korean media.
Bitter Sweet Hell (2024)

image credit @respectthepetty
Choi Doi Hyun (played by Park Jae Chan of Semantic Error) is the closeted son of the main character, struggling with how hiding his secret affects his school life and his relationship with his family. His story ends happily with Jun Ho in the US, which felt like a win after the above history with kdrama, but because his secret being his queerness is hidden for most of the story, we don’t get to see it inform the narrative much except in retrospect.
Squid Game 2 (2024)
The most recent entry on our list features Park Sung Hoon as Hyeon Ju, a transgender woman who enters the life or death game at the center of this drama to earn money to move to Thailand and get gender affirming surgery. While her inclusion wasn't entirely groundbreaking, Hyeon Ju was a well-developed character with a sympathetic backstory who quickly became a fan favorite, notable given Squid Game's popularity and broad international audience.
Bringing Better Queer Stories to Mainstream Drama Audiences
With all that context established, we have been contemplating how queer creators in Korea can reach a wider audience with their stories and ensure queer representation in kdrama is both more common and more authentic. We look to Love in the Big City and Heesu in Class 2 as a start, as we would argue that both shows exist in the gray space between mainstream kdrama and kbl. They both leverage kdrama style and structure to tell queer stories that include, but are not limited to, gay romances. They both had unusual distribution and battled to even get released and in front of an audience, with LITBC rushing its episodes out amidst public protests and Heesu sitting on the shelf for two years before being quietly released on a streaming platform. And they both had goals to reach an audience beyond the usual BL viewers, albeit with wildly different tones and themes in their stories. The BL audience is too niche to effect the social change that queer creators are seeking, and the limited runtime, genre tropes, and laser-focus on romance means it is harder to make wider social and cultural points in a BL story (it doesn’t hit the same when gay characters are treated as human in a story that takes place in the no homophobia BL bubble). And as we’ve seen from this walk through the past, there are real limits to queer representation that is not created by queer people or informed by their lived experiences.
As you can see from reviewing this list, these two shows were the first kdramas in well over a decade (after the only other example, Life Is Beautiful) to center on a gay main character whose journey drove the story, and they were doing this in the context of a media landscape that rarely elevates queer people beyond minor side plots, still regularly fumbles on respectful representation, and in which representation seems to be getting worse. Love in the Big City set out to show a young queer man’s life in all its glorious messiness. Go Young was not an easy character, and the show did not hold back on his flaws or shy away from either the joy or the struggle he found in his sexuality. Heesu is about a younger character and so his struggles are centered around coming of age and first love, but it similarly depicts a beautifully flawed young gay man coming to terms with himself and asks the audience to empathize with and care about him as his loved ones in the story do. Where LITBC uses a unique storytelling structure to draw in the viewer and highlight what makes Young’s life feel different, Heesu roots itself in familiar drama beats and queer-coded side plots in the hopes that the audience will see and be comforted by the familiar in Heesu’s world.
Both of these stories, in their own way, speak to a mainstream audience and ask for queer existence and queer humanity to be acknowledged. And this does not make them problematic as queer works, because they accomplish their goals of speaking to a wider audience while still being true to queer experiences. Given how scant decent queer representation has been in kdramas over the last twenty years (consider the size of the list above against the fact that there are well over 1500 modern kdramas, and so few of the above listed characters are mains or even significant sides in these dramas), more shows like LITBC and Heesu are needed to bridge this gap. We sincerely hope they find the support they need to get made.
#kdrama#queer media#lgbtqia+#love in the big city#heesu in class 2#long post#no seriously the longest post#coffee prince#life is beautiful#reply 1997#reply 1994#secret garden#seonam girls high school investigations#perservance goo hae ra#hogu's love#the lover#prison playbook#romance is a bonus book#moment at eighteen#be melodramatic#love with flaws#itaewon class#sweet munchies#run on#mr queen#tvn mine#move to heaven#nevertheless#under the queen's umbrella#a time called you
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trans women & transfems have to jump through near impossible hoops to be gendered correctly and seen as real women. it's very true, very present in just about every pocket of society in general including trans spaces. it's so hard for other people to accept trans women as real women no matter what they do. this is important to discuss. there is something else to add to the conversation of the struggles trans people face, which is that trans men & mascs also have to jump through these same hurdles
if a trans man is not a hyper masculine or "normal" level of masculine cis passing dude, they're misgendered. if trans men do not or refuse to appeal to toxic masculine standards of what a "real man" is they're misgendered and disregarded as a stupid cis girl who's too stupid to think for themselves and is misguided and doesn't know what manhood "really" means. if trans men don't painstakingly try night and day, increase their T doses and focus on doing nothing but masculinizing, going to the gym, having only "male" interests. hanging out with only cishet men. if they don't do these things, they are not seen as men at all and are viewed as dumb cis girls.
if they're a masculine trans man, they're a "Confused butch lesbian" or a "tranny dyke". if they're a feminine trans man, they're called "quirky cis girls who need to feel special" or "transtrenders". if they're a gay man they're called a "tranny fag" or a fujoshi or a cishet woman. if they're genderfluid or bigender they're either called "AFAB" enbies or cis girls wanting to be special. if they're a feminine nonbinary person, they're called a quirky cis girl wanting to be special. if they're bigender they're called a quirky cis girl who wants attention. people threaten trans men & transmascs with corrective sexual assault in order to "force them to realize they're just stupid women", and unfortunately, this happens within the queer community as well as the tons of people outside of the community do it, mostly in both rad fem & specific transfeminine circles, though many other people do it as well.
trans men & mascs are constantly reduced to their genitals. people will say it's great for transfems & trans women to have penises, but it's gross for trans men to have vaginas. trans men who do have vaginas are reduced to them, and referred to in very disgusting, sexualized fashions when that trans man never consented to that or asked for it. trans men & mascs are reduced to sex objects & being women if they have vaginas. they're just stupid cis women who need to be fucked in order to remember that. if they have penises, they are mocked and told their penises are gross, among way worse things.
are we noticing a pattern here?
trans men & mascs have to perform to the most extreme toxic masculine standards in order to have anyone, cis, trans and everyone else to accept that they are masc/a man. when someone finds out someone is a trans man and/or masc they instantly start finding ways to reduce them to "quirky cis girls". people start instantly finding ways to misgender and de-gender them and all kinds of invalidating things such as questioning everything about them and treating them like they're too stupid to think for themselves.
trans men & mascs also do not have it easy and its okay to say that. i'm not saying that trans women & fems don't face these exact same things with being gendered correctly in fact, i'm saying they're very similar and just as bad. these are serious things to discuss at once in order to reveal just how bad transphobia is and how many people it affects. it's okay to talk about these things at the same time, it provides insight into what is happening to other trans people as well. we all have unique struggles. its okay to acknowledge that, and use words to describe it so that we can create open ended discussions and long lasting conversations that prove that what we are going through as a community is brutal and eats us alive.
we are all struggling. let that unite us so we can provide safety, comfort, understanding, and protection. the more we understand each others struggles, the easier to protect each other becomes, and it is a mutual thing, it is not purely one sided!
#lgbtqia#lgbtq#lgbt#trans#transgender#transmasc#nonbinary#transmasculine#genderqueer#ftm#trans man#lgbtq community#lgbt pride#queer#queer community#pride#transfemme#transfeminine#trans woman#trans women#mtf#genderfluid#multigender#polygender#genderflux#demiboy#demigender#transmasc positivity#trans man positivity#trans guy
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the longer i stay in fandom, the longer i think a huge amount of bad takes and discourse come from an... abundance of identifying with a character
to be clear, i don't think it's bad to identify with a character. far from it! i think that's part of what makes fiction so powerful.
and it's only logical people often attach to a blorbo because they're just like me, for real. a person will see some element of themselves-- their race, their gender, their sexuality, their hobbies, their family life, their specific flavour of neurodivergence-- and something just resonates. it gives them a way to explore and name this important part of themselves, a part they maybe didn't even know existed before it.
and everything is well and good until some split between them and the character shows up
because of course, no character, except an explicit self-insert written by yourself, will ever be a perfect 1:1 for your own experiences. so sooner or later-- maybe in canon, maybe in a fanwork-- your blorbo diverges from your lived experience in a huge way.
I think this is why shipping culture in particular gets so toxic. While it is by no means the only way to indulge with shipping, a significant portion is 'if i was in that character's shoes, i would choose X'. the fight becomes for your own self-identity.
but this gets expanded in other ways. a character who is revealed to be black when the majority of the fandom had just assumed they were white. or revealed to be queer, or maybe the 'wrong' flavour of queer. or fuck, even some more innocuous part of their backstory, one that's nonetheless so meaningful for SOMEONE, but now it feels like the story is saying, fuck you, we're doing something else
i don't know. i just feel acknowledging this perceived-attack-on-identity helps me understand why people react it what seems to be such outsized way to canon and fanworks alike.
at the same time, i think it's a really important thing to check in yourself.
it's nice, to see a character who you identify with. who resonates with for being like you. but it's also nice to acknowledge and appreciate the way characters are not like you at All. how great it is to get insight into this totally different lived experience. and to muse on how wonderful that recognition might be for someone who does have that background.
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are we just crazy or are lgbt spaces getting legit deranged?????
every unusual experience of sexuality/gender is a valid part of the bootiful qweer biodiversity of the world by default, but you can't be gay/bi/trans and not want to be called the q slur or see cishets say the q slur. and you can't say that you're afab4afab or amab4amab, that's just a creepy bigoted fetish you freak. unless you're transmasc4transmasc or transfem4transfem ofc, you get a free pass. but also kinkshaming is evil and deeply harms the most marginalized. but also make sure you don't have a fetish about genitalia... if you do, it's a "preference" not an inborn trait and you really can therapize yourself into liking it, just try hard enough. if you fail to you're a bigot, so just keep trying!! make sure to feel guilty abt it at least, you dirty homo. but getting beat up can be a cool sexual thing and bestiality or noncon is fine. but actual genitalia "preferences" are bigoted. if you don't call the genderqueer person pansexual instead of bi they'll chew their own arm off and hit you with it and call the cops but don't say you're a female trans man or that you're a trans guy lesbian or link it to being a female homosexual in any way ever okay?! you can't be at peace with acknowledging your sex/agab as a trans person!!!! or feel a connection to lesbian spaces as a trans man or gay male spaces as a trans woman!!! that's BIGOTRY and that's just feeding terf cunts you dumb theyfab. you can't link your cis womanhood to being afab AT ALL either bc that's transmisogynistic and dangerous rhetoric but every other group of gender marginalized folks can define their own identities and have a billion microlabels. you can't say you're not into girldick because not all trans women have dicks dumbass, surgical vaginas are defo the exact same as bio vaginas anyway so if you only like afab pussy & afab bodies you're a gross pervert mocking bottom surgery. and someone's upbringing as a male/amab or female/afab person definitely isn't a huge part of why homosexual ppl are into the same-sex/agab so you shouldn't give a single shit if a transbian flirting with you hasn't grown up facing misogyny or going thru afab/female body struggles or any of that, that has NOTHING to do with lesbianism between female ppl and has no bearing whatsoever on attraction you absolute psychopath. sexes/agabs is just a mix of detached body parts and you can play mr potatohead with it all and if you glued it good enough homosexuals wouldn't be able to tell at all that he used to be a mrs potatohead!! so they'd still hit that, right? homosexuals will go for anything anyway right?? homosexual love obvs can't be any deeper than genitals and fetishes. amab4afab ppl can be homosexual too anyway if they pass as gay irl too so homosexual isn't even a real tangible thing anyways it doesn't involve sex/agab at all and those ppl don't get to be their own specific oppressed class and do their own activism and have agency over their own identity bc they're super privileged worldwide and the enby living as a gender conforming woman in society dating a neckbeard looking for a third is more oppressed than a visibly gnc crossdressing bio guy holding hands with his normie bf. they might be gay but they're not qweer... except to the rightwing ofc!! oh and if you're trans and recently started passing as straight you're more privileged than an afab4amab couple who has lived as hetero til they transitioned! so shut the fuck up and listen to the New Gays. don't call yourself homosexual anymore or you're a cis bootlicker and if you're transmasc you're oppressing every transfem, including ones who have never faced misogyny irl a day in their fucking life!!! just be valid the RIGHT WAY!!!!!! be more queer you dirty normie homo!!!!!!
HAHAH i love it here
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This hard line being drawn on Jake’s sexual preferences in this blog is concerning. Gender identity and sexuality are fluid. Bisexuality is real. Why does no one here acknowledge that he could be queer and also in love with a woman; that those things are not mutually exclusive? Nothing that we’ve seen is enough to just decide Jake is gay and that’s all he can be. And doing so is digging your heels into the kind of ignorance Nic is constantly speaking out against.
Jake could be straight. Ive said this before. He could be anything, really.
But he’s not dating Nicola. I think that’s very obvious despite what gossip rag articles say.
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Wild how when I call Shipping Culture oppressively pervasive and awful for any Aro/Ace with the gall to enjoy anything on the Internet, I get called a Fun-Hating Killjoy and told to just shut the fuck up or off myself, no matter how mild or polite my comment is. Wild how when I say a character either is textually Aro/Ace or is easier to read as Aro/Ace than Alloromantic/sexual, people start talking down to me like I'm a child who doesn't know anything, saying "Friendly reminder that Aro(s)/Aces can Date/Have Sex too, just like us Normal People!". As if I don't know anything about my own identity. Wild how when I do either of these things or even just say I'm not into a pairing or uninvested in shipping in general people call me fucking homophobic, even if the (at least popularly perceived - let's be honest, people are wrong half the time) genders of the characters is never once made relevant. Even though their reasoning for me being homophobic is lack of investment in a gay pairing they like, and nothing more. Wild how people throw little baby tantrums at even the gentlest criticism of Shipping Culture, or someone choosing not to engage heavily in it. Wild how they have the audacity to ask, with hostility, what the fuck Aro(s)/Aces are talking about when they say Shipping Culture is hostile to Aro/Ace fans, or ask what's wrong with them when they say that they aren't into Shipping.
It's almost like Bigots don't realize they're being Bigots when they do Bigotry, so just saying you're not a Bigot isn't enough. It's almost like Aro/Ace people know what the hell they're talking about. It's almost like we have a fucking point. It's almost like we're valid in expressing contempt and frustration with the constant expectation to engage with Romance and Sexuality at every waking moment, even if we're Romance and/or Sex Favorable. It's almost like we're tired of getting our identities erased, and we're tired of expecting to "act normal", and we're tired of just taking it when Allos use the Favorable members of our communities as a scapegoat for why they should be allowed to totally erase any of our representation just for their "Harmless Queer Fun" - deliberately, and I mean DELIBERATELY, failing to recognize or acknowledge the character's orientation, and how an A-Spec's personal relationship with and expressions of Love are going to look drastically different from an Allo person's - and call us the Bigots when we even glance in the direction of objection.
It's almost like Allo/Amatonormativity are oppressive forces.
Alloromantics/sexuals are constantly looking for any reason they can to call Aro(s)/Aces unloving, unfeeling, frigid, soulless, cruel. Inhuman. They're looking for any reason they can to call us whiny children, stupid, people who "just haven't found the right one", addressing us only as "Works in Progress", or someone who can have their sexuality corrected with the right stimulus - Conversion Therapy and Corrective Rape are okay when it happens to us, after all. Any reason at all to call us heartless monsters. AlloAces are confused children. They can be fixed. AroAllos are manipulative, unfeeling sexual predators. They can't be fixed - just kill them. AroAces are frigid, mean bitches. They can be fixed. God forbid you're Aplatonic. God forbid you're part of the Repulsed spectrum. God forbid you're one of the Loveless. God forbid you hold any pride in your identity, God forbid you don't keep your mouth shut, God forbid you critique the overinflated importance Allos place onto Love as a concept. God forbid you critique something as asinine and juvenile as fucking Shipping Culture. Do any one of these and you've put a bright red, blazing neon target on your back.
Wild how the only real humans amongst us are the Romance, Sex, and Friendship Favorable who put their head down and mask as Allo, and side with the Allos when their fellow A-Specs get too loud for the comfort of their Allo friend's delicate little fee-fees. After all, Vitriol and Harassment are warranted when an Allo's feelings get slightly hurt that an Aro person says, on their own account, to no one in particular, that they're sick of every tag being 80% Shipping Content. Which is a vehemently evil personal attack, clearly.
Wild.
#this whole post is absolutely teeming with venom btw.#if you take personal offense to this then yes this *is* about you actually. now fix it and dont make it any of our problem ever again.#shipping culture#aromantic#asexual#aroace#aphobia#nekro.txt
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— sapphic allyship handbook —
✨ Sapphics! 🗣️
Contemporary radfem (TERF/TIRF) rhetoric may permeate your 🫵 algorithm! Stop 🛑 and think 🤔 when you see 👀 content such as:
⭐️ Lesbianism is the most politically correct sexuality to combat patriarchy due to its exclusion of men. Therefore, other queer women should not “roll back their queerness” by dating men during the current climate. Who you date should not be made political, and to demand this from an individual for their participation in feminism is authoritarian conversion rhetoric. Sexual orientation (and who you love) is not a choice; it is a morally neutral natural human identity. A queer woman is not less or more queer due to her current partner, and a straight or bi woman in a relationship with a man is not automatically a lesser feminist. “Political lesbianism” during second-wave feminism ultimately invalidated lesbianism as an authentic romantic and sexual orientation, and caused devastating sapphic culture erasure.
⭐️ Lesbians and trans women are minoritised even within the LGBTQ+ community and can therefore never cause tangible harm to bisexual women and trans men respectively. This is because lesbians and trans women do not hold any power over bisexual women and trans men under cisheterosexism. This generalisation does not account for intersectional systems of oppression across race, nationality, class, disability, etc. Privilege (or lack thereof) is not quantitative and depends on context. Additionally, lateral phobias across different minoritised groups can cause harm. A lesbian can be biphobic, or participate in monosexism (a historically enduring system that causes alarmingly high levels of documented life-threatening harm to bisexuals), despite not systematically oppressing bisexuals under cisheterosexism. A trans woman can be transandrophobic/transmisandrist towards a trans man, despite not holding systematic power over trans men. Obviously, bisexuals can exhibit lesbophobia and transmascs can exhibit transmisogyny as well.
⭐️ Queer women who switch away from the lesbian label, and/or choose to date men rather than being loyal to WLW encourage lesbophobia by implying to men that lesbians can be corrected by “tradwife” culture. When formerly lesbian-identified women say they feel “healed” by discovery of their fluid sexuality or by a specific partner who happens to be a man, it actively harms lesbian visibility, validity, and safety. Victim-blaming a bi+ woman for the behaviour of bigots is known as bimisogyny. It buys into the radfem (and patriarchal) belief that men are innately subhuman monsters that only exercise restraint when when women demonstrate puritanical abstinence, rather than acknowledging men are fellow flawed humans taught to be violent under patriarchy. A woman who consensually engages in sexual and romantic relations with men is not responsible for sexual assault culture from men. That would be slut-shaming. Queer folks of any gender/sexuality are allowed to proudly find comfort in their identities and partners, as this is the goal of LGBTQ+ movement.
⭐️ Real lesbians (and who lesbians are really attracted to) are conventionally feminine, must identify as women, use she/her pronouns, and never want to be known as “boyfriends” or “husbands”; otherwise you’re just bisexual. Lesbians must always be non-men who are exclusively attracted to non-men. Non-men who present masculine, don’t identify as women, or are attracted to non-feminine non-men genders “invade” lesbian spaces. This is lebophobia, butchphobia, and transandrophia. Butches, mascs, gender non-conforming women, genderqueer folks including multigender folks (who may identify as men), and transmascs (including some trans men) identifying as lesbians are not only perfectly valid but also a well-documented historically important part of lesbian community.
⭐️ It is by default unfeminist for a woman to cater to the male gaze and male pleasure, because it will thwart feminism. Even fem(me) lesbians who pass as straight center the “male gaze”. This is once again misogynistic slut-shaming and victim-blaming, and leads to villification of sex work. The patriarchy depends on maintaining authority over women’s sexuality; attempting to oppose that using further suppression is just compliance to and repackaging of patriarchal purity culture. The feminist goal is women’s sexual liberation. Femininity and feminine sexuality are a complex performance done for the self, for other women (the female gaze), and also to contrast/complement/seek admiration of masculine partner (who may also be a non-man). It can be conforming or non-conforming to conventionally patriarchal standards. All of these effects are highly subjective and context-dependent. To imply fem(me) lesbians center men due to their femininity is lesbophobic and ignorant of lesbian culture. A more coherent feminist goal would be to advocate for more women to have agency over their own sexuality under the patriarchy, as actual sex workers are often the most underprivileged women.
⭐️ Formerly lesbian-identified trans men and bi women purposefully chose new identities that conform to and offer more privilege under the patriarchy. Because of their greed and/or brainwashing, exclusive lesbian community is disappearing. Bi women and trans men are hardly “privileged” in the cisheteropatriarchy, and are subject to similar phobias as lesbians since all oppression is linked. An individual’s coming out into their authentic identity is cause for celebration. Queer identity is often in flux; it is normal and healthy to reevaluate identity through multiple LGBTQ+ letters within a lifetime. No one owes their gender and sexual identity to feminism, nor do they have a choice in these identities; to dismiss an individual’s intelligence and demand otherwise is authoritarian bimisogynistic/transandrophobic conversion rhetoric. They will always be part of our community, even if they no longer identify with a certain subcategory. Lesbian community is smaller now because lesbianism by definition used to include more mspecs and genderqueers. Resources such as the “Lesbian Masterdoc” (whose very author now identifies as bi) are useful to some, but may cause others to not identify as lesbian if they face gatekeeping. Lesbian community can be grown by avoiding exclusion of those who are (or are dating) “excessively” mspec, fem, masc, or genderqueer folks.
⭐️ Cis women are biologically fragile and should be separated from everyone else in sports for their own safety and to avoid being dominated by trans women. Trans folks should have their own category. Scientifically, gender is one of the least logical ways to universally divide physical sport categories to maintain “fairness”, but the practice has held strong due to patriarchal stereotypes based on binary beliefs of biological sex (ignoring and invalidating intersex folks completely). Each sport requires a unique set of ideal physical characteristics. Cis women are statistically at least equally as capable as cis men in many sports. Currently, transfems who are allowed to play professionally in women’s sections have to pass strict physical exams that even cis women are not subjected to. Trans women statistically cannot dominate women’s sports. This line of exaggerated transphobia is dangerous as it aims to gatekeep normal human experiences from trans folks, especially trans kids.
⭐️ Gender-neutral bathrooms, and trans people in women’s bathrooms, are dangerous for cis women as this may invite predatory men. Gender-neutral bathrooms are not uncommon in global cultures, and public bathroom hypotheticals are a historical vehicle for bigotry, such as when bathrooms were segregated by race in the US. It is transphobic to misplace blame and police trans peoples’ existence for potential bigoted cis men.
⭐️ Trans sapphics are men in disguise trying to invade lesbian spaces. Trans lesbians encourage the idea that lesbians are also attracted to men. Real lesbians have a genital preference for vulvas, but trans sapphics decieve cis lesbians into dating them anyway. These are transmisogynistic and lesbophobic stereotypes. Trans women are women and are not responsible for the existence of any bigoted men. Transfems with penises are not interested in dating anyone who is not attracted to them; many lesbians also do not have a genital preference. While having a “type” is normal, publicly announcing and imposing it with no relevant context is body-shaming, and, in this case, transphobic, regardless of your personal internalised reasons. (You would not keep repeating how you wouldn’t date a fat person and no one else should either, because that would be fatphobic.) A good way to ensure lesbian community growth is to wholeheartedly accept transbians.
⭐️ Lesbians who have never been with men or someone with a penis are more queer and superior to those who have. “Gold-star gay” rhetoric is harmful to all queer and trans folks, and misogynistically implies a woman can be tainted by a penis. This is lesbophobic and transmisogynistic purity culture.
⭐️ Cis bi women with boyfriends are invading lesbian spaces. Bisexuals should create their own communities rather than invading gay and lesbian spaces. Bi women shouldn’t bring their boyfriends to Pride. This is generally a hypothetical issue, as the vast majority of in-person lesbian events and bars depend on attendance numbers to survive, and all sapphics, often along with friends and plus ones, are welcome regardless of their labels. The most important requirement is to be polite and present good allyship. Due to the nature of bisexuality, bisexuals have historically participated in gay and lesbian spaces as well as their own, and it is monosexist to demand their exclusion from a culture they were fully involved in building. Many bisexuals are in bi4bi M/F relationships, and their queer partners belong at Pride. Bisexuals should also bring their straight partners to Pride as LGBTQ+ community is small, and we need dedicated allies to show up for our movements.
⭐️ Bi women inevitably center men because their sexuality is inclusive of men. Bi women cannot love women the way lesbians do since only lesbians have fully decentered men, and it’s valid for lesbians to find it repulsive to date bi women who have been with men. WLW relationships are not by default more queer whenever the participants are exclusively lesbian, as bi women are not “tainted” by men; that would be a bimisogynistic purity culture stereotype again. Just like lesbians, bi women also have to unlearn compulsory heterosexuality, alongside additional monosexist androcentric stereotypes. Bi WLW demonstrate unique devotion by choosing sapphic love despite having other, more convenient options under patriarchy. WLW exist regardless of any alternate attractions, not in spite of them. There are many bi and straight women who happen to have men as partners but are well-involved in women’s and queer coalition, mutual aid and activism. On the other hand, there are lesbians whose activism consists of entirely hypothetical online identity discourse centering the exclusion of men, rather than focusing on building sapphic community.
⭐️ Most bi men are secretly gay and will never be satisfied with a cis girlfriend, it’s valid for women to be repelled by a man who has dated or has attraction towards other men. This is an androcentric biphobic stereotype and another manifestation of patriarchal purity culture. Many bi men identify as gay to avoid poor treatment, so the opposite is actually true. Bi men are not “tainted” by their relations with men, nor are they less masculine simply due to their sexuality.
⭐️ Bisexuality is a stepping stone to being gay and non-binary is a stepping stone to being a binary trans individual. This is based in monosexism, and the opposite is often true—gay men and lesbians often come out as fluid, and trans men and women often come out as non-binary. The creator of the lesbian masterdoc herself now identifies as bisexual.
⭐️ Validity discourse is a redundant non-issue distracting from real LGBTQ+ rights crises. Affirming the queerness and belonging of perceived liminal LGBTQ+ identities such as the bi+, aro/ace, and non-binary spectrums is crucial to preventing well-documented and life-threatening hardships faced by these groups. This is an important part of LGBTQ+ movement.
⭐️ Lesbians are always prioritising les4les because they are biphobic. Women are harder to date than men.* Like trans folks who feel most comfortable and understood in T4T relationships, lesbians are valid for seeking out les4les. Highly marginalised groups prioritising relationships with one another is not automatically a slight against outside identities. While monosexism is a real issue within the LGBTQ+ community, there are many women open to dating any sapphics. Sapphic dating under the patriarchy may be difficult, but it is a misogynystic stereotype to proclaim women are by default “higher maintenance” than men.
⭐️ Most lesbians are biphobic, most bi+ sapphics are lesbophobic, most trans men are transmisogynistic, most trans women are transandrophobic, and so on. Just like all humans, small fractions of LGBTQ+ subcommunities are very loudly phobic on the internet, amplified by algorithms that prefer rage bait. They often unknowingly adopting divisive radfem ideology with limited knowledge of queer history. Internet exclusionists are symptoms of wider issues, but are not representative of the real life vast majority of these groups, who are incredibly kind, empathetic, and inclusive.
⭐️ Everyone is a little bit bisexual.* This generalisation can especially lead to lesbophobic stereotypes. Monosexuals do exist, and this is disrespectful to the severe challenges lesbians withstand to realise their sexuality excludes men under the patriarchy’s compulsory heterosexuality. Self-identified queer folks should be wholeheartedly believed. Expressing suspicion towards an individuals’s identity is violating.
⭐️ Bisexuality is a TERF identity because it implies the existance of binary gender, and doesn’t include trans, genderqueer and non-binary folks. You should use “pansexual” or other terms instead. Bisexuality includes all genders, as the “bi” refers to “two or more genders”. The bi+ or multisexual spectrum contains many MOGAI identities, including pan. Every queer person should choose the term that they personally feel fits best.
⭐️ Kinks do not belong at Pride because no one consented to seeing public sex acts, it is offensive to folks on the asexual spectrum, and children will also be present. Public sex is not being performed at Pride. Some queer folks wear kink-representing outfits that are no more revealing than regular outdoor summer festival wear. Puritanical respectability politics based on exaggerated sexualization is a tool to erase LGBTQ+ folks from public life, by dividing and conquering one “bad” group at a time.
⭐️ Butchfemme culture historically belongs only to lesbians. Other identities should use masc/fem. Femme4femme and butch4butch are less queer than butchfemme. Butchfemme is not by default superior to other sapphic dynamics. Historical lesbian butchfemme identity and spaces were inclusive of all sapphics (including bisexuals) before lesbian separatism. Decades before that, butchfemme originated in ballroom culture that included BIPOC men-aligned queers. Bi+ sapphics can perform lesbian butchfemme, and all other LGBTQ+ identities can also use these terms.
⭐️ “Bi/pan/mspec lesbian” is a recently-invented label for invading lesbian spaces and stoking lesbophobia by validating to men that all lesbians are attracted to them. “Bi lesbians” do not exist. They are lesbian TERFs because they believe lesbians don’t include trans women in their attraction. Or they are bisexuals with internalised biphobia as they don’t believe in bi fluidity. Lesbian identity is exclusive and can never be used by those who are mspec. “Bi sapphic” should be used instead. “Bi lesbian” is one of many valid LGBTQ+ labels that may appear complex, contradictory, or trivial. Statistically, a portion of lesbian-identifying women are mspec; bi lesbians make this part of their own identity explicit but do not intend to establish or imply that all lesbians are mspec, as it is lesbophobic to impose attraction to men on lesbians. However, it also remains bimisogynystic to hold queer women’s identities (such as “bi lesbian”) responsible for the potential bigotry from men. Before the establishment of political lesbianism (by mainly cishet white women), “lesbian”, was a universal umbrella term for all sapphics rather than an exclusive label. It functioned similarly to the word “gay”, which can refer to an exclusively gay man, but can be used by anyone. “Bi lesbian” is a historically significant identity that emerged as resistance to the destructive effects of separatism on lesbian community. Prominent activists identified explicitly as bisexual lesbian to take pride in their bisexuality when purity culture-based bimisogynistic monosexism was rife in the community. There are many valid reasons one may identify as a bi lesbian today, including limited non-actionable attraction to men, affirming trans/genderqueer identity (of the self and/or partner), or intimate connection to lesbian sexuality, gender, community, history, movement and lifestyle. While most contemporary bi+ sapphics choose to no longer identify as lesbians, they are not obligated to surrender lesbian terminology to radfem ideology; mspec sapphics have a right to lay claim to lesbian culture and identity, which they have equally partaken in for all history.
⭐️ Second-wave radical feminism isn’t bad because it actually did include BIPOC. Second-wave feminism was a complex, white-dominated movement that ultimately died due to its divisive and exclusionary ideology. There were many oft-erased marginalized BIPOC second-wave feminist voices, including queer Black women who favored intersectionality/inclusion and wrote excellent texts about it; for example, Bell Hooks critiqued the pervasive harmful rhetoric within the movement.
⭐️ LGBTQ+ identities are meant to be exclusive, with orderly definitions that are essential for meaningfully gaining relevant rights for each subcommunity. We reserve the right to correct or ignore people who misuse labels. Preserving lesbian spaces for monosexual lesbians only will achieve the eradication lesbophobia under patriarchy. LGBTQ+ identities have historically been based in complex shared experiences by multifacted individuals. For example, historical lesbian spaces were comprised of bi+ women, genderqueer and non binary folks, trans women, and trans men alongside exclusive cis lesbians. Imposing a queer person with labels they do not identify with is violating. Labels (and identities) are not definitive categories, and are meant for individual comfort and communication with no assigned “right” and “wrong” usage. The only “misuse” would be by a bigot specifically using a label to harm the subgroup, which is an arbitrary hypothetical. Safe spaces for minoritized groups with similar experiences, backgrounds and identities are important for recuperation and rehabilitation, but overall separatism is to the detriment to LGBTQ+ survival. The community at large is minoritised, and subgroups alone do not have a loud enough voice or visibility within the patriarchy. Historically, surviving queer spaces have welcomed all to even label-specific events.
Queerness is in opposition to patriarchy, which limits individuals in divisive assigned roles and separated classes. Queerness, by definition, is messy, complicated, and a celebration of unique individual agency. Movement cannot be sustainably achieved without intersectional inclusion and coalition—alongside those you do not relate to, and even those you may not agree with on all politics. This may require you to step out of your comfort zone, but that’s okay!
*not necessarily radfem rhetoric but still important!
Questions? Please read my sources! :)
🩷❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜
Disclaimer: I am a cis demisexual, bisexual femme WLW of colour. Colonialism has erased historical sapphic cultures in many countries, including my own. As the US has established cultural dominance, my understanding is based off western texts and studies. LGBTQ+ experiences are diverse, but we also reproduce patterns of existence and resistance globally, even without historical context. Unfortunately, this includes our mistakes, like succumbing to divisive rhetoric. Thanks for reading and kind suggestions & corrections are appreciated! :)
#gay#sapphic#wlw#bisexual#lesbian#queer#lgbtq+#bi#lgbt#trans#transmasc#transfem#mspec#bi lesbian#multisexual spectrum#queer discourse#queer history#queer bipoc#wuh luh wuh#wuhluhwuh#pride 2025#butchfemme#fem#femme#butch#masc#transbian#feminism#bell hooks#bi+
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I don't tend to talk a lot about my sexuality headcanons because I like to adjust things as I need for each story, but in honour of the end of pride month and the fact that I put off doing this for 30 full June days, I do want to talk about some of my favourite lgbt related headcanons for my HQ boys. A lot of these are "real" headcanons of mine (as in, stuff I actually write as a part of their character rather than just theoretically interesting asides) so you might recognize these if you've read my work!
This isn't going to be every character, just ones I have strong or specific takes on.
Starting off strong, I love Daichi being a completely unlabeled king. To decide on a label requires .05% introspection and by god he is not going to do that. I think his perspective on it is very "only what's in front of me matters" so when he feels attraction to a man for the first time he doesnt think this means he's attracted to ALL men, just this one. And in reverse, although he feels attraction to women, he doesn't think at any point his current attraction to women will stop him from falling in love with any non-women, so it never occurs to him that his feelings of attraction could even point to any one label because literally what does today have to do with tomorrow? He's just here. Asahi tries to suggest pansexual as a label when he tries to explain how he's simply open to whatever his heart wants and he gets mad because "i said ANY person not ALL people" and Asahi's like WHAT does that MEAN. All that being said, I think Daichi never considers himself queer/lgbt. Dude could be in a committed monogamous relationship with another man for ten years and when Suga suggests they go to a pride festival he's like "???for what???" All in all I think he's allergic to labels on his sexuality.
Related note, Asahi being asexual. I don't think Asahi is sex-repulsed at all, and later in life I think he definitely would enjoy being sexually active with a partner, but definitely when it comes to self identification, he simply does not feel attraction towards any gender. I also think he doesn't really crave physical intimacy even non-sexually, and he'd much rather talk through his feelings with someone rather than have them hug him to try and comfort him, so he really struggles to understand the kissing-sex thing even just from a theoretical pov. (Like why would you pick that over like a nice long heart-to-heart???) However I think this has to be coupled with like a panromantic attraction to all genders which makes him have a really hard time identifying what he actually wants and what will make him happy because there's a very uniform experience across people, which for someone so anxious already doesnt help him identify his own feelings at all. He probably very much struggles to relate to his classmates as they get excited for dating because even though he likes the idea of dating everyone always talks about dating as kissing and physical intimacy (because they're all like 17) and Asahi's like "sure, sure, sure, yeah, totally sure yeah" while just being fully checked out of the conversation
Ushijima! I fully believe that Ushijima is 100% gay, with no flexibility, but I also think he most identifies his own feelings via the negative, so he knows he doesn't experience sexual attraction towards women and mostly identifies via that, rather than acknowledging that he does feel attraction to men. I really like him answering questions this way, where if someone is asking about girls/his love life, he often replies with "I don't feel inclined towards women," or "I have no interest in finding a girlfriend/wife" which is, in his mind, the most true statement in regards to his sexuality. He almost NEVER out loud says anything about liking men or feeling attracted to men even though his crush/dating history is exclusively male. However, on the few occasions someone does directly ask him something like "so you're gay?" he will absolutely say yes. Like he is aware of what his feelings classify him as he just doesn't leap to those descriptors himself. I think part of the reason for this is that he's not really attracted to femininity in general, and he knows that femininity is not exclusive to women and that some men are not his type, so there's a part of his brain that thinks saying something like "I'm attracted to men" indicates ALL men (its that black and white autism brain clicking into gear) and that's simply not true, but saying he's not interested in women IS true in black and white autism land.
I don't have a fully formed thought on this one, but Tendou's gender is probably a little broken, right? I actually do think he still identifies as male, but I think if he had been born afab, he'd have been perfectly comfortable being a woman and identified as such. So maybe he's lightly agender but socially comfortable with being a man so he doesn't really bother with it. I do however think he doesn't "get" the whole gender thing. He probably thinks he's enlightened or something because he's so above being bothered by it all and he simply doesn't realize that's because he's agender and everyone else actually does feel a real connection to their gender they're not just making it up. This whole headcanon is mostly in service of that fact that I think Tendou with his sort of conventionally unattractive features would absolutely rock gender non-conforming fashion. Like put him in a long skirt and combat boots please. I don't think he has an ounce of femininity in him but there's something about the spiky red hair and monster gaze that goes so well with like... Female-tilted alt fashion. And I think he would dig that. And then get mad when people point out he's wearing women's clothes because "ugh literally why does anyone care about gender you're all so weird." (Proceeds to do zero self reflection). He just does what he wants.
This isn't a real headcanon of mine but I heavily support a FtM trans Kenma based solely on his calico cat mascot. He's based on a calico, guys, its right there!
Aromantic Kuroo. (+QPR KuroKen) I don't use this as much as I could, because it's a lot of emotional character work that I dont often want to bother with in unrelated stories, but AroAce Kuroo has become so near and dear to my heart. He wants so badly to spend his whole life monogamous with Kenma but every time he thinks about starting a romantic relationship with him he feels sick because he doesn't actually want to share space and kiss and have to sleep in the same bed all the time. I think it's sex-positive asexual but borderline romance-repulsed aromantic. He just wants to live his life, and he does see Kenma as his highest priority and life partner in the most true sense of the word "partner". He still gets unreasonably jealous if Kenma has any other love interests but thats because allonormativity threatens to take away his soulmate every day. I don't use this headcanon very often, but more and more I do think it fits his character. A really solitary, independent and self possessed person who simply cannot comprehend why anyone needs a lover to feel fulfilled. Kenma meanwhile absolutely would love a life partner that does not require him to leave the house for dates or do any kind of performative relationship shit. His twitch stream being like "oh my god kodzuken are you dating anyone???" And Kenma just replying with "not legally" is actually really fucking good.
Okay so I only did 5 characters but im lazy and dont wanna keep writing so imma click post now k thx bai
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So there's this character in Dead Boy Detectives.
He's:
Attractive
Flirts shamelessly with Edwin
Makes physical advances toward Edwin
Makes Charles jealous and "gets in the way of the main ship"
Is of indeterminate age but is possibly decades or centuries old
Can transform into an animal.
And it's this guy:
AND YET I have never seen any discourse calling Monty a creep and a predator.
Unlike The Cat King, he even kissed Edwin suddenly and without explicit consent. He also lied, manipulated and betrayed all of them and nearly got them killed. Yes, he said he didn't know Esther was planning on destroying them. But c'mon, it's Esther.
Somehow though, the fandom vilifies The Cat King more than Monty. I think the reason why is worth a long, hard look in the mirror.
The biggest difference between the two is TCK's sexual nature and his in-your-face queerness. Those are two things that have been historically vilified and othered about gay/queer men.
Even these days, through the whole "no kink at pride" discourse, this argument continues through respectability politics.
Simply put, a short little twink with a crush is a non-threatening gay man, while TCK with his overt sensuality and gender non-conforming clothing represents a threat. Monty's advances are seen as cute, while TCK's are predatory, even though Monty propositioned Edwin with a kiss as surely as TCK overtly propositioned him.
If TCK's sexually-charged flirting bothered you in a way that Monty's advances didn't (despite the fact the audience knew that at least at first, Monty's advances were a big old lie) ask yourself why that is. The reason is probably that you were taught to fear and vilify overt displays of queer sexuality . Even queer people need to unlearn this particular bias.
And just to cover all the bases, I will shout again that The Cat King is a fae/trickster and that Edwin's punishment was proportionate in that context. Edwin used magic and confined a creature he knew to be as intelligent as a human and was punished for it with a very long leash and a (totally doable) task. It was a task designed to make Edwin see the cats as individuals instead of tools to help him close a case. The sort of fiction that DBD has its roots in (and the source material) is full of these sort of eye-for-an-eye type of punishments with magical creatures.
Just to be clear, I don't think we should be vilifying Monty, either. You can't 1:1 fictional scenarios onto real life and apply our standards of morality to them, especially not in a setting with man-eating mushrooms, ghosts, and transforming animals. All the conflict these two characters brought to the plot was necessary. If everyone acted with perfect morality all the time, fiction would be incredibly boring.
And IF you did apply RL standards to fiction, you would have to acknowledge that Edwin's crime of binding and forcing a fully sentient being to give him information violated just as much consent as TCK putting that bracelet on Edwin. And that Monty was just as "predatory" as The Cat King, if not more so. The Cat King, at least, never lied to Edwin, while everything about Monty was a lie from the start.
#dead boy detectives#dbda#the cat king#the cat king discourse#cat king discourse#fandom meta#dbd meta#dbda meta#monty the crow
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@ The butch thing
"BUTCH (n. , adj.) : (n.) Usually a female homosexual who is the more aggressive and masculine partner in a social or sexual relationship; a female homosexual who assumes the responsibilities of the husband; a male homosexual who appears masculine; the opposite of a 'fem'. Some male homosexuals may assume the 'butch' role to conceal their homosexuality from heterosexual friends. (adj.) Masculine or mannish.
BUTCH IT UP (v.) : To behave in a masculine manner. For a male homosexual, to appear 'straight'; for a female to be aggressively mannish." — definition from Anthropological Linguistics, vol. 13-14 (1971)
That's an example from more than 50 years ago and it explicitly includes gay men in the definition.
The word butch has never been exclusive to lesbians and has been widely used in gay male communities for decades. In fact, it's even considered part of Polari (historical gay slang from 19th and early 20th century). You will find books like The Butch Manual (1982) that use the word exclusively to refer to gay men. The word is also used among QPoC in ballroom culture to refer to gay men, who are called Butch Queens.
According to the work of Marlon M. Bailey (scholar of African-American and LGBT studies), who studied ballroom culture, in the gender system of the ballroom scene, the word "Butch" is literally the gender term used for trans men, just like how "Femme Queen" is the word for trans women. (see : Butch Queens Up in Pumps : Gender Performance and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, by Marlon M. Bailey (p. 40) ; Black Genders and Sexualities, by Shaka McGlotten and Dana-Ain Davis (chapter 14)...)
Proeminent TMoC in ballroom (Reese Pandavies, Duchess Ebony, Reno Prestige Wright...), walked as Butches in balls. This is part of the history of the ballroom scene and shouldn't be erased. More recently in the 21st century, the Butch category has split to create a "Transman" category, because trans men were perceived as getting some sort of advantage at looking masculine when competing against butch cis women (you can hear Sean Ebony Coleman and Shady Prada, two trans men from the ballroom scene, talk about it in the short video "Changing Butch Realness Category" from the Ballroom Culture History Channel). So now there are often separate "Transmen" categories. Language and labels evolve.
The word "butch" has a long history among gay men and trans men, including MoC in the ballroom scene. You don't get to rewrite history and erase that to pretend it has always been some sort of lesbian-exclusive word, let alone a recent one. It is really disrespectful towards all the trans men in history who have fought, been beaten, jailed and died under that label.
It's just like how we now consider drag queens and trans women different categories that shouldn't be conflated, but trans women can still be drag queens, and a lot of "drag queens" in history were actually trans women / transfem. It's generally considered transmisogynistic erasure when people act like, say, Stonewall was just about gay men and that the people in the riot were all cis gay drag queens. And acknowledging all that says nothing about the fact that trans men can also be drag queens.
Maybe you don't like the fact that trans men are sometimes mentioned alongside butches. You don't have to like it, but you cannot behave like that and straight up rewrite parts of queer history, especially when it's black queer history.
fascinating
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Roughly 10 Cool Historical Queer Figures More People Should Know About
Part 1 - From Ancient Era to Early Modern Era
In spirit of Pride Month here's some snippets of queer history I think are interesting.
I've been working on a series of deep dives into interesting historical queer figures, but I haven't had the time to continue my list after the first entry about Julie d'Aubigny. I do want to continue with it, but I came to the realization that I will never have to time to do all the cool and interesting figures in depth, since there's too many, so I decided to do a list with brief descriptions about some of my favorite figures who are not that well known. Some of them are more well-known than others but I think they all deserve more acknowledgement.
I was able to trim down the number of figures to (roughly) 20, which was still too many for one post, so it's two posts now. They are in chronological order, so this part is set mostly before Victorian Era and the second part will be from Victorian Era onward.
This list is centered around western history (but not exclusively) because that's the history I'm most familiar with, though it's definitely not all white, since western history is not all white. I will be avoiding using modern labels, since they are rarely exactly applicable to history, rather I will present whatever we know about these figures' gender, sexuality and relationships. If there's information about what language they used about themselves, I will use that. Often we don't know their own thoughts, so I will need to do some educated guess work, but I will lean towards ambiguity whenever evidence is particularly unclear. If you are the type of person who gets angry with the mere suggestion there's a possibility that a historical gnc person might not have been cis, I encourage you to read my answers to related asks (here and here) first before sending me another identical ask. Try to at least bring some new arguments if you decide to waste my time with your trans erasure.
1. Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum (latter half of 2400 BCE)

Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum were ancient Egyptian royal servants, and possibly the first recorded gay couple in history known by name. They shared the title of Overseer of the Manicurists in the Palace of King Nyuserre Ini. They both had a wife and children, but they (along with their families) were buried together in a tomb. The tomb decorations show them similarly as other afterlife couples.
2. Marinos the Monk (c. 5th-8th century)
Marinos the Monk was born as Marina somewhere in eastern parts of Byzantine Empire, likely in the Levant. He was from a wealthy Christian family, possibly Coptic. Assigned female at birth his widowed father planned to marry him off and go to a monastery himself, but he convinced his father to take him with him dressed as a boy named Marinos. His father agreed and they were accepted as monks. After his father died many years later, he continued his life as a male presenting monk. Later he was accused of fathering an illegitimate child with a daughter of an innkeeper, which was not possible, but he didn't revoke the accusations, instead he begged for the abbot's forgiveness for "his sins". Marinos was banished from the monastery and became a beggar. For 10 years he raised his alleged illegitimate child as a father, until he was allowed to return to the monastery and do penance. Only after his death the abbot and the monks discovered his genitals and his inability to father children and were distraught for punishing an innocent man for 10 long years. The real father was discovered and along with the innkeeper and his daughter they all came to honor Marinos' grave and ask his forgiveness. He was canonized as a saint for his sacrificial selflessness, modesty and humility and honored across the Mediterranean from Ethiopia to France.
3. Mubārak and Muẓaffar al-Saqlabi (c. 10th - 11th century)
Mubārak and Muẓaffar were co-rulers of Taifa of Valencia in Muslim Spain. Al-Saqlabi means literally "of the Slavs", which in Al-Andalus was a general term for enslaved northern Europeans, as the two had been enslaved as children. They were in the service of another al-Saqlabi, a chief of police, and they worked they way up as civil servants till a local military coup in 1010, which resulted in them becoming the emirs of Taifa of Valencia. English language sources often describe them as "brothers" and "eunuchs", which gives the "historical gal pals" trope a concerning twist, but contemporary Muslim sources wrote fawningly about their passionate love, trust based on equality and mutual devotion. There was a popular genre of homoerotic poetry in the Islamic world at the time and poems in that genre were written about celebrating Mubārak and Muẓaffar's relationship. In 1018 Mubārak was killed in a riding accident and Muẓaffar shortly after in an uprising.
4. Eleno de Céspedes (1545 – died after 1589)
CW: genital inspection
Eleno was born in Andalusia, Spain, to an enslaved black Muslim woman and to a free Castillian peasant. He was assigned female at birth, given name Elena, and branded as a mulatto born to a slave. She was freed as a child and married to a stonemason at 15-16 years old. When pregnant, her husband left her and died a while later. Later Eleno testified that his intersex condition became externally visible, while he gave birth, and he became a man. He left his son to be raised by a friend and traveled around Spain. After he stabbed a pimp and ended up in jail, he started presenting as a man and openly courting women. Eventually he taught himself to be a surgeon with the help of a surgeon friend.
When he married María del Caño, his maleness was questioned and he was subjected to genital inspection multiple times and it was agreed by doctors that he had definitely male genitals, possibly also female genitals. After a year of marriage the couple was accused of sodomy. Eleno was tried by the Spanish Inquisition and subjected to more genital inspections, during which no penis was found. He claimed that his penis had been amputated after an injury. He defended himself in the trial by arguing that his intersex condition was natural and he had become a man after his pregnancy, so his marriage was legal. He was sentenced only for bigamy, since he had not confirmed that his husband was dead and punished as a male bigamist with 200 lashes and 10 years of public service to care for the poor in a public hospital. His fame attracted a lot of people wanting to be healed by him, which which was very embarrasing for the hospital so he was sent away and eventually exonerated from his charges.
5. Chevaliére d'Éon (1728-1810)
Charles d'Éon de Beaumont was born to a poor French noble family. In their 20s they became a government official and at 28 they joined the secret spy network of the king, Secret du Roi. They became a diplomat first in Russia and later in Britain while they used their position to spy for the king. Rumors circulated in London that they were secretly a woman. While in London they had a falling out with the French ambassador, accused him of attempted murder and published secret diplomatic correspondence. They were instead accused of libel and went into hiding. After the death of Louis XV in 1774 and the abolishment of Secret du Roi, d'Éon negotiated with the French government of the end of their exile in exchange for the rest of the secret documents he possessed. D'Éon took the name Charlotte, claimed she was in fact a cis woman - she had pretended to be man since a child so she could get the inheritance - and demanded the government to recognize her as such. When the king agreed and included funds for women's wardrobe, she agreed and returned to France in 1777. After that she helped rebels in the American War of Indepence - was not allowed to ]go and fight too, ghostwrote her not super reliable memoir, offered to lead a division of female soldiers against the Hasburgs in 1792 - was for some reason denied, attended fencing tournaments till 65 years old and settled down for the rest of her years with a widow, Mrs. Cole. After her death a surgeon reported that she had male primary sex characteristics, but fairly feminine secondary sex characteristics, like round breasts, which might suggest she had hormonal difference/was intersex in some way.
6. Public Universal Friend (1752-1819)

Public Universal Friend, or The Friend or PUF, was born as Jemima Wilkinson to Quaker parents in Rhodes Island, USA. Jemima contracted a disease in 1776, gained intense fever and almost died. The Friend claimed that she did die and God sent the Friend to occupy her body. The Friend didn't identify as man or a woman, and when asked about the Friend's gender, the Friend said "I am that I am". The Friend didn't want any gendered pronouns or gendered language to be used about the Friend. The Friend's pronouns, according to the writings of the Friend's followers, were "the Friend", "PUF" and possibly he. First recorded neo-pronouns perhaps? The Friend also dressed in androgynous/masculine manner.
The Friend started a bit cultish religious society disavowed by mainstream Quakers, The Society of Universal Friends, which I can only describe as chaotic good. The Friend first predicted a Day of Judgement would come in 1780 and when 1780 came and went, the Friend decided it was New England's Dark Day in 1780 and they had survived survived the Judgement Day so all was good then. The Friend preached for gender equality, free will, universal salvation (Jesus saved everyone and no one will go to hell) and abolition of slavery. The Friend persuaded any followers to free their slaves, which is probably the most chaotic good thing a potential cult leader can do with their influence over their followers, and several freed black people followed the Friend too. The Friend advocated for celibacy and was unfavorable towards marriage, but didn't think celibacy or rejection of marriage were necessary for everyone else, so it feels more like a personal preference. Many young unmarried women followed the Friend and some of them formed Faithful Sisterhood and took leadership positions among the Society.
The Society of Universal Friends tried to form a town for themselves around mid-1780s, till in 1799 the Friend was accused of blasphemy. The Friend successfully escaped the law two times. First the Friend, a skilled rider (what's a gender neutral version of horse girl?), escaped with a horse, then after an officer and an assistant tried to arrest the Friend at home, women of the house drove the men away. Third time 30 men surrounded the Friend's home at night, but a doctor convinced them that the Friend was in too poor health to move but would agree to appear at court. The Friend was cleared for all charges and even allowed to preach at the court.
7. Mary Jones (early 1800s–1853)

Mary Jones' origin is unknown, but she was an adult in 1836 in New York, USA. She was a free Black person, who preferred to present as a woman. She was sex worker by trade and used a prosthetic vagina. As a side hustle she would steel her customer's wallets, and usually they wouldn't tell anyone because it was 1830s and inter-racial sex and prostitution were illegal and everyone was repressed. Smart. Get your coin, girl. However after one of her more shameless customers discovered his wallet with 99 dollars inside had been replaced with a different man's empty wallet and contacted the police, she was arrested. The police discovered she had male genitals and when they searched her room they found several more stolen wallets. She appeared in court in her female presentation and when asked about her dress, she said that prostitutes she had worked with encouraged her to dress in women's clothing and said she looked better in them. They were right and she had since presented as a woman in her evening profession and among other Black people. She was convicted for grand larceny and sentenced to 5 years in prison. Later she continued to present as a woman and practice sex work, for which she was arrested for two more times.
8. George Sand (1804-1876)

George Sand was pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil, a French Romantic writer. Amantine was high-born with a countess as a grandmother. George wrote about themself with alternating masculine and feminine language, using feminine language when talking about his childhood, but masculine language often other times. Their friends also used both masculine and feminine terms about them. Victor Hugo for example said about them: "George Sand cannot determine whether she is male or female. I entertain a high regard for all my colleagues, but it is not my place to decide whether she is my sister or my brother." George preferred men's clothing in public, which was illegal for those seen as women without a permit, but they didn't ask for permissions. They alternated between masculine and feminine presentations. They were outspoken feminist, critic of the institution of marriage, committed republican and supporter of worker's rights. They were married at age 18, had two children and left their husband in 1831, but legally separated from him in 1835. They had many affairs with men and some with women, at least with actress Marie Dorval. Their most notable relationship was with Frédéric Chopin, but they fell out before Chopin's death.
I fucked up the numbering first and put less entries to this list than the second one (which I have not finished), but 8 is kinda roughly 10 right?
#i will be absolutely writing in depth posts about some of these figures#the friend is 100% one of those i fucking love the friend that story is a gift that keeps giving#history#queer history#pride month#queer#lgbtq history#queer tag#trans history#gay history#sapphic history#lesbian history#intersex history
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Gripping you, biting you, screaming in your face as I bitch slap you back and forth: YOU ARE ALREADY TRANS!!! YOU ARE ALREADY GAY!!! YOU ARE ALREADY A QUEER TO THE OLD WORLD AND THIS ONE!!!!
Why are you arguing with, measuring against, pissing at or putting down the experiences of those just like you???
You did not invent the word trans or lesbian or bisexual or gay or nonbinary or asexual. Not any fucking one of us has the right to determine or interrogate the experiences of those just fucking like us!!!
The state hates you now!!! They would have gathered to kill you in droves years ago if they weren't so secular that they would look at each other as enemies and plunge their own nations right after offing us all!
The only two things your identity, your label, your fucking badge you slap on your bio are, are either a safe community or a death sentence; for no state on Earth accepts all of us.
Who gives a flying fucking if someone doesn't have sex at all, the state wants to force your gay ass to experience sexual assault by the opposite sex so you can 3D print more soldiers!!!!
Who gives a single living frothy shit if someone has multi gendered attraction going this way or that. You are a faggot in the eyes of every military on Earth ANYWAY!!
Who gives a hoot, a holler, an on-fire rats burnt ass if this trans person has an experience with gender different from your own fundamentally??? Acknowledging you yourself are trans at all is admitting that all of this shit is made up bullshit forced on all of us. For everyone on the fucking planet, cis, trans, intersex! Black, white, and brown!
If you are arguing with queer people as your core engagement of being a queer??? A beautiful word with rich history, wrought with sacrifice, community, chosen family in the face of real death.
Insane. Insane. What is happening? Uplift each other now or admit you're a complacent poser and a bad faith actor in the midst of real fucking activists and champions of change.
The people before us hurt within first. Changed within first and then they shared their messages for peace and love with the whole fucking world. They threw those bricks for kin.
Act like fucking kin!
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Hey so maybe I’m crazy but am I the only person who thinks that the “all characters can be romanced regardless of player gender” approach to queerness in games with romance is… I dunno, a little odd? I mean, on the one hand, it’s a positive. Everyone is queer! And as long as you don’t end up with a gay button situation that is a valid approach, especially if it’s acknowledged as just being the norm.
However, at the same time, thats not really accurate to the queer experience? Some people are just gay, some ace, not everyone is attracted to everyone.
I think Fire Emblem: Three Houses had… sort of the right idea there. Only some characters could be romanced regardless of gender. However, these characters were still bisexual with none being anything else. But it makes their queerness feel a little more real, and I think if the idea were expanded upon, with different characters having different explicit sexualities, that may actually be better and more accurate than the player-sexual approach games like, say, Stardew Valley take.
Even games that are quite queer, like Fields of Mistria, ultimately have casts that are essentially entirely pan, which, though cool and great for gameplay reasons, is somewhat a loss. Lesbians, for example, just don’t really exist in that world unless the player decides they are one. This of course does make sense given the game’s closest thing to a gender tracker is pronouns, and keeping track of every potential gender identity would be incredibly difficult, but I still think it’s a missed opportunity to breathe life in to characters, not just in this one game.
I’d love to hear counter arguments though, I genuinely would like to be proven wrong here cause it feels like I’m missing something.
#queer#fields of mistria#stardew valley#fire emblem#genuinely curious to hear people’s thoughts here#video games#video game queerness#I guess
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Yes, I’m Transgender, but I’m not “Trans”
(31st Aug 2024)
When I think about this too much, I always come to the conclusion that I have got some internalised Transphobia. I identify as Male. I use He/Him pronouns. I dress in a way that conforms to the Gendered Norms of my culture. I’m just a guy. When “Trans” is added as a descriptor, not only does that become a thing about me, but it also sets me aside from other men. I’m not a Man, I’m a Trans Man. I’m a pseudo-masculine thing. When people realise I’m Transgender, I feel Castrated. That sounds pretty dang transphobic, doesn’t it.
The way people have expected me to be Trans often Superseded what Transness is to me. I had a lecturer in college who insisted that my depression was, In part, a result of my going home every day to a family who did not know I was Trans. She sat there and looked me in the eyes and I watched myself in the reflection of her eyes becoming an anecdote in real time. I’ll always be her “Trans Student” who did remarkably well in her class before dropping off in his second year when he got a different teacher. For reference, my family may not have known that I am Trans, but It’s very rare that my deadname is used in my home. I’m referred to by my Middle name almost exclusively. Jeff (Jeffrey). And in reality. Transness was not something that was always on my mind and even now, I can be sure that it was not fueling my depression. My Undealt with sexual trauma? That’s a different story. But my being Trans wasn’t it. I didn’t even think about it that much. I still don’t. It’s not something that is an integral part of me. I would be no different If I had been born Cisgender.
And that’s the thing. “Trans” carries a lot of weight to it, doesn’t it? A lot of people really connect to it on a level beyond it being simply a descriptor. It’s a culture, an experience, a mindset, an ideology, and what can I say to those people? Well done? Thank you? I don’t really have much to say, and that’s part of my problem. A lot of Trans artists are, at least partly, inspired by their queer experiences. I’m an artist (I yell into the void) and yet nothing about being Queer inspires art within me. I have nothing to say. My art would be the same if I were Cisgender. If I were Allosexual. I would be the same because I am not these descriptors that have been decided for me based on the way I live my life.
“Trans” has become a commodity that I can’t escape. It’s something I’m supposed to stick on my laptop. It’s something I’m supposed to pin on my wall. It’s a lifestyle. A trait. A Community. A Culture. An Ideology. A Concept. An Abstraction. It’s everything and it’s nothing. I’m supposed to disclose it with pride when I meet new people. I’m supposed to warn Littluns about the dangers of not expressing themselves and being comfortable in their identity when I can’t even deliver on that. I’m supposed to do all these things.
But no one is asking me to.
No one is telling me to be “Trans”.
I’m looking around at all of my Trans brothers and sisters and wondering if that’s behaviour I should emulate because I have a) no frame of reference and b) no connection to Transess as a concept. I feel like I’m doing a disservice to those who feel a connection to it as a concept, when I only see it as an adjective. When I try to remove myself from it as much as possible. And again here comes the internalised Transphobia knocking at my window.
I’m an artist, A filmmaker, and a writer. I’ve never felt compelled to tell Trans stories. Is it because I don’t want to be pigeonholed into this idea of Transness that again, supersedes my own, or is it because I’m ashamed of it? Am I acknowledging that I am more than a Trans artist or am I just not taking pride in the fact that I’m going to have to live with being Trans for the rest of my life? It’s not something that goes away. Trans doesn’t stop. I Will always be Transgender and I have to cope with that because I am male and I was not born that way.
I don’t Identify with Queerness. I don’t identify as Transgender. It is something I am, a thing that I cannot help. I Identify as Male, Transgender was just something that came free in the post. I didn't understand the terms and conditions of it. I'm dyslexic, you expect me to read the fine print?
Where does this end? What’s the accumulation of all of this thinking? I do not know. It doesn’t end. The debate where I am my own interlocutor only ends with more questions that I must ask myself.
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