#you KNOW im transing all their geners

[daftpatience]

the things im doing to lupin in my head

[i-cast-zone-of-truth]

Miles Vorkosigan is literally if "curiosity killed the cat / but satisfaction brought him back" was a person. Straight he may ultimately be, but im sorry Lois you CANNOT tell me he has not personally investigated every type of consensual sexual experience offered to him. You're telling me he'll have an intimate and mutually satisfying sexual relationship with a female werewolf but intersex BEL THORNE is a bridge too far? Girl.

[snekdood]

saw a post yesterday that was like "if you dont have trans women as friends u gotta think about why that is" and i really had to restrain myself from saying "it goes both ways my friend!". if you dont have any trans men as friends, ya gotta think about why that is also!

[genderqueerdykes]

I’ve been feeling really sad lately bc after this latest rise in anti transmasc sentiment I’ve had to unfollow some trans women I’ve been following for literal years bc they started reblogging and posting really nasty and very uncharitable things abt transmascs on my feed. And like. These are women whose voices I very much respected and listened to, and to hear them basically say they consider me an enemy who can’t be trusted bc I want to talk about my experiences, but all of our issues are really just splash damage from bigotry directed at them and talking abt my own experiences without acknowlefing that it’s not really meant for me is wrong. It’s like. So hurtful. And it makes me feel really hopeless about the future of the trans community.

How do I fight back against that hopelessness?

it really sucks and i'm sorry you're also being affected by this. i hear people talk about this every single day and i really don't like that this is just becoming a default in the trans community in general. it seems like the default mode of most online queers is hating transmascs and trans men as if that will somehow make cishet society accept them more. it's selfish behavior.

i'm an intersex trans woman and it's hard for me to interact with the online transfem and trans woman communities, because we're seeing a new experience in the form of transradfeminism, where trans women proudly adopt the anti-man ideals from rad feminism and spread it like it's the truth. it's a sad and painful thing to say, but these trans women are doing this because they believe rad fems and women who hate men are the only "Real" women and desperately want to be seen as "real" women. it stems from their personal dysphoria rooted in manhood, how they take out their own dysphoria in being seen as men on men and mascs. it comes from a place of pain, and it is misguided. instead of directing their hatred toward transmisogyny, they keep it inside the community. it's vile.

it's really sad but trans women and transfems are not immune to being indoctrinated by rad fems and terfs. applying those ideals to being trans isn't progressive. dictating who is and isn't trans is an act of policing. feeling as though one has the right to sit there and claim to know every trans experience, claiming to be the authority on transness... it's fascism.

i'm just plain tired of hearing people make fun of afab trans people and trans men and to talk about them like they're a blight on the community. im tired of people saying things like "do we really need more men?" i'm really sick and tired of chronically online people saying that trans men "aren't real trans people". this one really pisses me off. implying that trans womanhood and transfemininity are the only "real" ways to be trans is also identity policing. what is "unreal" about trans men? i'm tired of trans men being treated like they're unreliable. i'm tired of people wearing their misogyny on their sleeve to constantly treat trans men like they are not reliable narrators. i'm tired of people thinking somehow the instant you begin identifying as a man, you benefit from patriarchy.

i'm tired that people seriously think trans men and mascs can't coin terms for their own experiences. why the hell not? they happen, just because you don't see them personally doesn't mean they don't happen. i have met and lived with so many transmascs over the years, and we've all shared very similar stories about the discrimination we face. it's not spitting in the face of anyone to coin terms like transandrophobia and antimasculism. they happen just as often as transmisogyny does, and happily participating in it only increases trans violence

these talking points are old and it sucks to see more and more trans women get indoctrinated into literal rad feminism. hating trans men will not make dysphoria around being seen as a man go away. hating trans men does not dismantle the patriarchy. hating afab people isn't progressive, it's misogynistic. hating intersex trans men isn't progressive, it's transphobic -and- intersexist. trans men deserve so much better than this. trans men are trans. trans men are people. trans men are not evil by virtue of existing

i say try to do your best to connect with and appreciate the other trans men and mascs in your life. we have to stick together. if you have transfem friends who are on your side, make sure to be there for them, too. not every trans woman is like this fortunately, most trans women are very chill about trans manhood. this is a vocal minority of people who want to be fascists and want to control and police other trans people. transradfeminism isn't progressive, it's just as bad as regular rad feminism, if not worse, because now there's an even bigger focus on hating trans people.

hating other trans people will never get you ahead in cisheteronormative society. try to take care of yourself as best as you can. really relish trans joy when you experience it. take time to affirm your gender. know that manhood is a blessing. manhood is beautiful. it is varied, nuanced, and complex. it is a wonderful thing to experience. men are not evil. men are not bad. we should never remove the accountability from individuals.

hating trans men makes you transphobic. there's just no other way to it. whether or not you accept that it's called transandrophobia, it is still transphobia, and you really should care. the trans community isn't here for just 1 type of trans person. it's here for all of us. good luck, stay safe out there. be good to yourself

[genderkoolaid]

How do you respond to people who try to argue against various gender affirming surgeries with anorexic people wanting liposuction? I tried to point out that theres a lot of gender affirming surgeries for cis people who dont feel feminine/masculine enough, but my sister said that those people need therapy too. I feel that there's a difference between trans people and anorexic people but idk how to put it into words, im scared i accidentally made her more transphobic bc i didnt have arguments :(

Good question! It's important to question and critique our ideas of what separates "good, natural desires which should not be changed" from "bad, unnatural desires which should be changed," and I think sometimes trans people are too quick to reaffirm this binary in our attempts to defend transness.

I would say that the difference here is based in anxieties. Anorexia is born out of anxiety- which is to say, a persist concern over something that triggers strong emotional reactions and which you keep returning to over and over and over without resolution. Dysphoria can and does cause anxiety, but you can be dysphoric without having anxiety over it. You can have dysphoria, find relief, and be satisfied with your body, while there is never any satisfaction point with eating disorders. There is always a feeling of "not enough" because the desire to be skinnier is born out of anxiety over what it means to be fat & fatness' place in society (lesser value, moral weakness, medical abuse, etc.).

Like I said, dysphoria can and does cause anxiety. There are trans people who obsess over their bodies being too masculine/feminine because they are concerned with what it means for them to be too masculine/feminine: it means they aren't real, they are ugly, they're failure. And this is why its important for trans people to sit with our dysphoria and analyze it. If you are constantly worrying about your body being "real" enough, no amount of surgery or HRT will fix that (although it may fix many things).

Now, I am generally against any solution thats like "we should stop Those People from doing x because We know whats best for them!" because autonomy is a vital part of my beliefs, and I think that people rarely ever react well to being banned from doing something Because Mother Knows Best. The real goal with, say, EDs, is to get rid of the artificial desire for thinness by combating fatphobia (ah, if only all the anti-ED campaigns out there did this). The same with plastic surgery: I would much rather we focus on dismantling the system that makes people (esp. perceived women) feel they need to make their bodies fulfill the beauty standard, than saying that plastic surgery is Evil and we should stop anyone from ever getting it, because those little people aren't capable of using their basic right to bodily autonomy correctly. When we ban something, what we really want is to change people's desires. But that requires cultural change, and laws don't create cultural change out of thin air. Its like how yelling at your kids doesn't make them more honest or better people, it just makes them better liars.

Given that trans people exist in every society, potentially going back to the Stone Age, even after we unwork systemic misogyny & homophobia, trans people are still gonna want surgeries. So we should just work on combating those things instead of trying to control people's bodies.

[enduringmoth]

thoughts on marvin's abuse, care's existence and paul's transness

taking a break from my usual bg3 posting to talk a little bit about my newer hyperfixation through the lens of queer allegory

necessary author's note: i am an afab transmasculine nonbinary person. obviously, while i do believe my transness does lend my opinion authenticity, at the same time, being trans myself does not mean i can't be transphobic -- so if any of the contents of this post set off alarm bells, please tell me.

trigger & content warnings: child abuse, kidnapping, torture, general petscop badness. obvious spoilers for petscop in its entirety, as well as references to the recent youtube deepdive by nexpo.

TL;DR -- perpetuating the idea that someone can force someone else to be a different gender than they are is harmful to trans people. however, all things involve considerable nuance. to pretend that marvin's actions could not have influenced paul's sense of self in the slightest discredits paul's lived experiences, and i believe a more trauma-informed dialogue about paul could be worth exploring as a community.

my preferred theory explaining petscop is that marvin tried to make care more like lina through abuse and "failed". after this, care would eventually end up in lina's home, and transition to paul.

(simply to make all of this less confusing, i'm going to call paul pretransition "care", though i will avoid pronouns. this is not me trying to invalidate paul, it's just so i don't have to keep saying "paul before he transitioned" or similar phrases.)

it is not a result of marvin's "failure" that care transitioned to paul. but i do believe there is a link between paul's perceptions of self and the trauma he endured pretransition -- and discussing these things gives us a deeper understanding of paul and his history.

obviously there is no "canon" answer to petscop. but im seeing this theory discussed a lot within the tags, and i personally agree with it -- i just feel some of those who are saying we cannot consider marvin's actions are not necessarily accurate, either.

what i am positing is that while marvin certainly did not make paul trans and i would never claim that he did, we understand that marvin's abuse of care -- his cruelty towards care, his warping of care's perception of appearance and self-worth -- is certainly a factor in how paul must see himself.

marvin's treatment of care was poor enough that paul struggles to recall that time of his life. he thinks they are different people -- and in a way, they certainly are (and i've seen DID theories for them which i also enjoy because of this) -- and has clearly repressed what it meant to be marvin's child.

marvin locked care in a basement for six months. that is no small amount of time, and it likely had no small amount of affect on paul. we can assume based on the implications of some school scenes that marvin was trying to convince care to be more like lina during this time. care escaped, and returned home -- though eventually, we know from belle's dialogue that paul would find his way to lina.

"do you remember the day you were born?"

paul's "birth" occurred after marvin's abuse, and though it was not a result of it, there is something almost poetic about following the thread of paul's life from care to his authentic self that plays as a foil to the heinous rebirthing practiced by marvin and rainer.

contrasted with what happened to belle (and seemingly others), paul chose (a form of) rebirth -- transition. marvin tried to make lina be reborn through care. instead, care resisted -- and he would eventually become paul, and that strikes me as so narratively compelling. it's not to spite marvin and please don't think i'm saying that, as care was naturally always paul -- it is simply self-discovery at its most raw and beautiful, and i love it.

the above is why i love petscop as a queer allegory. taking ownership of one's future and selfhood, even when others are trying to tell you who to be.

and that's why i think saying marvin made his afab child transition in rejection of martin's quest for lina -- or that marvin tried to make his amab child transition to care/lina, as nexpo posited -- is so wrong, and harmful.

yet, paul's trauma is real. it happened. and it's a part of him that should be able to be discussed for what it is.

as someone with extensive trauma history, i can tell you that my gender expression and personal identity are in some way connected to pieces of trauma, because those pieces are part of me. i am not trans because of my trauma, but my gender and my trauma are parts of me at the same time -- i am not each of my pieces, but a sum of my whole.

the point i'm trying to make here is that while i think nexpo genuinely missed the mark here with this whole "care never existed, marvin tried to make paul a girl" thing, i do think there needs to be room for a trauma-informed discussion around paul.

i hope that all made sense. if any of this is harmful/transphobic, please let me know. i genuinely love this game and i think it's so fascinating to discuss. /gen

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for headcanoning deadnames for trans characters for symbolism purposes?

im a trans guy (minor if it matters) who's been a fan of this one show for a little over a year. none of the characters are canonically trans, but there's a lot of trans allegories to be drawn from the material if you're me or my mutuals at least. the two main characters are both male and i ended up developing an au where they're both explicitly transmasc as a way for me to just explore trans themes in an alternate narrative. i haven't begun writing it yet but definitely plan to once i feel like it's solidly locked in my brain, and i've been sharing snippets & concepts every so often.

part of this was thinking of how they would've chosen their current names, and name symbolism got me considering what they would've changed them away from as well. one character i thought could've initially been named after his mother so i can draw contrasts between the two, and the name i decided on for her has a meaning that highlights her relationship with her father (and the character's relationship with his father in turn); it's also the name of the character's daughter figure in the show. a lot of the other main character's backstory kind of revolves around his dead sister, so i thought by making his deadname that sister's name then i could turn that into an allegory about transness and childhood and sibling death (and sororicide but we don't have time to unpack all that). i don't plan on ever explicitly referring to the characters by their deadname in the narration, except maybe in an ironic tone, but i think it would be cool to sort of sprinkle in references as subtext to just give the readers something more to chew on.

the thing is i've seen posts around talking about how nice it is to make trans characters/headcanons without once considering their deadnames, or how weird it is for people to consider them, and i definitely agree with the sentiment; one of the biggest goals for many trans people is for their past selves to be completely irrelevant, and i feel a bit guilty for perpetuating something so painful for the general community.

but i still don't think i'm an asshole in any way since these are literally just characters and obviously i'm not going around talking about real people's deadnames or anything. i just don't want to make people uncomfortable/trigger dysphoria if they find someone talking about deadnames for a trans charactsr they're attached to (i've definitely had that happen myself when reading trans fics, enough that i had to stop reading, and i don't know how you'd even tag for something like that). if the general gut reaction to this ask is negative then i'll probably consider just not talking about the deadnames unless someone asks about it, since they're not crucial to the plot at all, just some uhh not so fun tidbits.

anyway sorry this is so long for something i feel like might be a non-issue that i'm overthinking. if you somehow guessed the fandom have a chocolate 🫀 if you're one of my few mutuals who knows who i am from the details of the au then um pretend you didnt see this post.

What are these acronyms?

[raevenlywrites]

A couple months ago I got a haircut.

I know this isnt that big of a deal. Lots of folks get multiple hair cuts a year. This is one of less than five Ive ever had in my life, not counting the kind of dead end maintenance trims even long hair requires. I went from hair down to my ass in high school to shoulder length in college, where it has remained for my entire adult life.

Not anymore.

Ive been rocking an undercut for the past several years, but the top layer had still been the same shoulder length it was, functionally unchanged as far as outside appearances go.

This October I cut it all off.

I have a buzz. Long on top, but still short enough it doesnt even fall in my face.

I went from nearly a yard of hair that was a defining feature of my personality to a pretry generic dude's cut.

No one noticed.

This is not to say my haircut went unremarked upon. I got lots of "did you do something with your hair? oh it looks good." But not a single acknowledgement that Id transed my hair style. That Id basically 180d my gender presentation.

Now granted, I still have massive tits and always wore my hair pulled back anyways. But Id pulled the trigger on a huge transformation and not a single person cared. Not even my stylist, who I specifically went to bc they specialize in gender affirming haircuts. That is the name of the sercive I booked: a gender affirming haircut. They whacked it off and blow dried it flat to my head and called it good.

Now all this is fine. I got my haircut for me and Im delighted to have it. This is the first time Ive ever been able to look in a mirror and recognize the person in it as me as opposed to someone related to me. But its just so fucking wild to me that not a single person can tell. That something that has made such a huge impact internally doesnt somehow show externally.

I dont have any point to make really. Just, the last person who hadnt seen me finally did and also didnt comment, so it feels like I can finally say with a certainty that it didnt fucking matter. Its okay that it didnt matter, but its just so wild to me that the people that know me best even just... didnt notice. Couldn't tell how much I was waiting with baited breath for them to react to something that illicited no reaction.

[catboygirljoker]

fun writing tip: you can justify making your blorbos as good at sex as you want if you also make it depressing

i will try not to be too graphic or horny and keep it mostly to character study analysis themes core motivations plot conflicts etc type discussion. still, id really prefer that folks under 18 do not interact with me on this post or about this topic in general, thanks!

for obvious reasons this post is gonna have a cut

UNLIKE HIS DIIIIICK [EXTREMELY LOUD AIRHORNS]

. sorry i just feel like hed appreciate that joke. uh anyway

Brief discussions of: BDSM, including sadomasochism; edgeplay; derealization/dysphoria; self-destructive recklessness in a sexual context.

ok. so there's this fictional guy. and i kiiiiiiind of have a crush on him. and i'm a basic bitch, so, like, obviously, when i think about him hornystyle, i want to imagine him being good at sex.

the thing is, "good at sex" is not always a particularly interesting trait to give a character! it can often be an eyerolling power fantasy trait. like "this is my oc Chuck Dongburger he has a ten pound cock and can make a babe cum just by lookin at her" yknow. it's a trait that, handled incorrectly, is more likely to flatten conflict than create it—more likely to make stories more boring than to make them more interesting.

also, "being good at sex" isnt a magical blessing that descends upon someone by chance. it is a quality that stems from a set of experiences and traits. it is a skill that one develops, or fails to develop.

so the question is, how do i justify him being good at sex? how do i make it feel believable and interesting?

the answer is simple! make it depressing! (that is, relate it directly to the character's central themes and conflicts, and therefore make it a natural part of/inclusion in their story)

in canon, xigbar has had multiple bodies, lost his heart multiple times, allowed himself to be a vessel for darkness on multiple occasions. he has endured all of this to carry out the will of his masters. every social role we've ever seen him take has been subservient to someone else, even if it has usually also involved social power over others, too.

here are the sex/relationship headcanons i have that expand on this:

related to: gender/sexuality

bisexual. for starters. obviously. his transness i have Deep Headcanons about, but his bisexuality is just "idk im bi so hes bi hee hee"

luxu is a binary trans man who experienced severe dysphoria in his original body and never felt like that body really belonged to him in the first place. to the best of his ability he has only chosen cis male vessels, including braig. in those cases he feels extreme disconnect from his body but not [very noticeable] gender dysphoria. the only thing connecting him to his cis male bodies is his sexual characteristics. theres this great art piece that has never left my brain that conveys the idea im going for. his face his hair his bones none of those are his, none of thise feel real, none of those feel right. but what does feel right is his dick.

related to: him being Good at Sex™

he is Very Experienced. he's tried a lot of shit and had a lot of bodies and largely had nothing better to do than be a horndog and kill time suckin and fuckin. he is down for just about anything with just about anybody. he knows how bodies work and knows how to deal with the exceptions and roll with awkwardness and uncomfortableness.

he is pretty good at reading people—it's a skill he has had to develop over his lifetime. he is sometimes wrong, but usually right, and reading people, understanding them, lets him feel like he has some kind of control or power over them. this is relevant because this is part of what makes him Good at Sex. he is shockingly responsive and attentive; not completely unselfish as a lover, but he won't blindly exert his will onto the other person and expect them to respond just because he has a big dick or is going faster or harder or whatever.

related to: his backstory as luxu

sex for him is a means of exerting control over the world, proving his own competence and worth to himself and another person, gaining some simulacrum of human connection, distracting himself from his derealization, grounding himself in his body, expressing and claiming his masculinity. all things, i headcanon, he also achieves (or seeks/has sought to achieve) from keyblade mastery.

he views his bodies as disposable, and knowing that he can just jump ship if he totals a body means that he processes pain differently than most people. not in a "all pain makes him horny" way*—it's more that pain doesn't make his self-preservation kick in the same way it does for other people. in bdsm/kink settings he is a masochist [as well as a sadist] and more reckless with edgeplay (when it comes to himself) than he really ought to be.

obviously i have specific personal motivation for wanting to headcanon this (he and his body are both Significantly Older Than Me) but i don't think he's too bothered by an age gap. some people it makes sense to me to imagine that they'd really want to date within their age and maturity range, but i think xigbar's chill as long as the person he's dating is a self-posessed adult. considering how long he's been alive, he's gonna have a significant gap in experience with ANYBODY; there isn't that much of a difference between him dating a 25 year old vs a 45 or 85 year old.

he has told close romantic partners about his Whole Deal before. it has never gone well. ("what do you mean youve been moving into random people's bodies in order to stay alive long enough to bring back a guy who intentionally manipulated his students into killing all of their students via senseless war??") they never understand and he doesn't know why they don't understand (i also headcanon him having severe cognitive dissonance vis a vis the MoM but that's a different post). his instinct is to put up a wall and go "well theyre just naive and stupid and haven't seen what i've seen, theyre too sentimental to understand this". he still keeps trying (if with less frequency) because he is desperate for someone to understand.

*i want to make this crystal clear: i do not headcanon xigbar as being automatically turned on by receiving or causing pain in every context, because he is a boss in a video game franchise where he fights teenagers. i am not comfortable sexualizing those fights!

(i do however think there are contexts where he might indulge in some "battle sadomasochism" when fighting another adult—maybe he makes it weird for them on purpose to fuck with them, maybe they're both into it and it's all foreplay, etc)

related to: him being subservient

youd think that when i talked about him being subservient to others, i was building up to a headcanon about him being a sub. however it feels most correct [and fun] to me to imagine him being a dom-leaning switch vers (doesnt get dysphoria from bottoming because. prostate). social role and personal dynamics dont necessarily correspond to sexual dynamics!

the headcanon i was actually building up to was that he craves affirmation in specific ways from specific people. he is desperate for someone else to give him worth. he wants to do a good job serving an authority he deems worthy of respect. he wants to be useful, he wants to serve a purpose and have a role. he hates feeling like he needs something from someone else, and feels much more comfortable if they need something from him.

he doesn't have a praise kink in a traditional sense, but he does really get his rocks off from being Good At Sex and from his lovers clearly and obviously enjoying themselves. he doesn't wanna be told hes done a good job, he wants to know, to tell from experience that he's blown someone's mind.

furthermore, in romance, he becomes a massive simp. if he likes someone enough to fall for them then they hang the fucking moon for him. he is outside in the rain crying throwing up begging for a sniff. absolutely pathetic. its not a total transformation of personality, i think he'd really hide it and really want to hide it. but i think in most situations it'd be subtle but observable. every joke he makes is directed to them and checked against their reaction; he stands at a middle distance outside of conversation kinda watching them, observing every move, memorizing their gestures and tics and quirks. he feels i love you before the first date but won't say it until five years into the relationship.

related to: i couldnt put it in the other sections and i really only made these section headers so it wasnt just big walls of text oops

he's a low empathy emotionally constipated bitch at the best of times, so he substitutes emotional intimacy with physical intimacy. picking up people at bars or dances or what have you for one night stands, satisfying them thoroughly, and then immediately dropping out of their lives.

he actively avoids romance (and any emotional closeness, including the completely platonic kind). but he hasn't always been this way. i think Dark Road was the most recent in a long long string of experiences where he lost people he was close to. he's tired of hurting people and getting hurt.

. im not gonna get into it because im trying not to be like too too horny in this post but hes So fucking brat tamer coded to me. i think you will understand at least the surface level reasons for this. i guess if i wanted to relate it to Themes i'd say something like "there is a specific romantic and sexual fantasy in being an asshole and even hurting someone and them still wanting you and trusting you and loving you and even enjoying it" but. well we dont need to go there do we

these are just the Depressing / Character-Related / Themes-y headcanons. some of my headcanons are just like "i think this would be funny and/or in character and/or hot" but you see how long this list is anyway. if i started in on all of that then we'd be here forever.

also, these are just headcanons! they're informed by analysis but shaped heavily by what appeals to me personally, what i find hot, what i find compelling about his character. if your headcanons for him differ from mine in any way, i don't think you're Wrong, because we're talking about the sexuality of a guy who comes from a video game franchise where characters are barely allowed to hold hands. this is all just toys and playing

anyway thank you for reading this post lmao its so long

JUST LIKE HIS DIIIIIIIIIIII—

[communistkenobi]

i know next to nothing about queer theory, but i did exist online during (what felt like) huge exclusionary periods (ace discourse, bi/pan discourse, and transmedicalism were the big ones i remember)

i wonder if the first drive for sexuality being something unchangeable and intrinsic to you had something to do with those things, that queerness was fixed and definable, which meant that there were strict lines to be drawn about who was and wasn't gay/lesbian/bi which was only made worse by trans and nonbinary people who didn't exactly fit the previous molds

ill be doubly honest and say i only interacted w/ the community online at the time bc living in a homophobic country doesnt give you a lot of opportunities to meet up in person which means my view of the whole thing is skewed. im not sure if this makes any sense

What I’m about to say isn’t a diagnosis of the causes behind those discourses (partly because i don’t think there is a single reason animating those arguments), but like I guess in general a very baseline authority people fall back on is biology. Dominant reactionary discourses describe being gay trans etc as a lifestyle choice, as an active decision to participate in sexual and gendered degeneracy, and so a very appealing counter-claim to make is to point to biology - we are born this way, we can’t help who we are just as cishet people cannot help who they are, so you should accept us because we can’t change our identity. That rhetorical strategy requires/assumes a stable sexual and gendered ontology, a primary authority of the body that can’t be altered. While I believe this argument is fundamentally flawed, I think this is a straightforwardly easy argument to make re: sexual orientation. With trans and non-binary people this is more difficult because the foundational claim to our existence is that gender is mutable, is alterable, is subject to change (and also “I’ve felt this way since I was a child” is a pathological model of gender dysphoria that is enforced through medical and psychiatric institutions, not a reflection of lived reality for many, many trans and non-binary people). That doesn’t necessarily mean being transgender is a “choice” (although if someone said they woke up one day and chose to be transgender then that is a perfectly authentic justification), especially because “choice” in these discussions is often framed as individualised, private, detached from the social world - we are all just free agents making rational autonomous decisions in a field of equally rational choices, etc. which I think is a very impoverished way to understand choice and agency. Gender is an institution, it is a set of behaviours and performances that we choose to engage in in many different ways, and my use of the word ‘choice’ there does not imply these choices are free from coercion, violence, or harm. I chose to transition, I chose to engage in performances and behaviours that signal to the social world that I am a man - where that desire to make those choices arises from is another matter, and honestly not one I’m super interested in figuring out. Like if I discovered the ‘origin’ of my transness it wouldn’t make any difference to me. Similarly, how I choose to signal masculinity is very obviously bound up in dominant gendered assumptions. Trans people get accused of upholding gendered norms a lot, but that’s only because we aren’t taken seriously unless we do so! It is a survival mechanism that allows us to better navigate incredible amounts of violence and social exclusion, and arguing that our desire to do gender with our bodies comes from some grade-school assumption that dress = woman and pants = man or whatever is pure projection on the part of cis people. cis men think if they drink pink wine they’ll become gay - trans people are not the ones enforcing these norms here.

Getting a bit far afield here, so to loop back around - I think a stable state of sexual and gendered subjectivity or “being” is very appealing to a lot of people because it’s a way to dismiss reactionary fears and to justify to yourself that your oppression is entirely out of your control (which is true obviously!). Again I think these arguments are flawed because they buy into cisgendered and heteronormative ideas about gender and sexuality, that it is a biological burden imposed on us, that deviance is not a choice, that gender is done to us as opposed to being gendered agents, that we are similarly trapped in a sexual prison and should be accepted on those grounds, etc, but they have massive rhetorical power.  

As I’ve said before I’m a pretty staunch believer in Butler’s assertion that it is social all the way down, that gender is not discoverable in the body but rather the body is the medium through which gender is done in the world. Cis people choose to do gender just as much as trans people do! The only difference is that institutional architecture is set up to facilitate and make invisible (in very misogynistic and racist ways) those gendered practices. I think the stronger counter argument to make is that cis- and het-normativities are deeply violent and miserable status quos that need to be dismantled and discarded, that true choice can only emerge vis a vis gender and sexuality once those institutions are abolished, and that choice is actually a desirable end-goal - I want people to be able to participate in gender and sexuality as free agents, as non-coercive practices that are sites of great joy and wonder and pleasure. And this world is only possible if we accept that there is no gendered or sexual ontology, that it is all smoke and mirrors, that this current system’s primary function is to reproduce the nuclear family, to maintain the hereditary nature of class and wealth and race, to provide a standardised system of labour division, to maintain a distinction between the public and private labour realms, and so on.

So again like, is this what animates discourses about who gets to be counted as lgbtq/queer/whichever label you want to use? I don’t know. Probably some of it has to do with that. Queerness is in party a pathological category that is used to describe a failure to meaningfully reproduce cishet norms and practices, it is a set of relationships you have to legal and political and medical and administrative institutions (which is especially true for trans/non binary people). I like this definition because built into it is the possibility of change - I do not want trans people to be assimilated into cishet society, I want society to become transgender, thereby making transgender an irrelevant medical and legal category of person. Much like communism aims to abolish class by universalising the proletariat, I want to abolish gender by universalising the legal and political and medical mechanisms of transition. Only then will cisgenderism be abolished.

One thing I have been thinking a lot about is something a friend said to me, which is that human rights to do not begin with a definition of human - in the same way, I think trans rights do not require a definition of transgenderism. Just universalise and de-pathologise the mechanisms through which transition is expressed. Make it easy to change your name, remove all barriers to hormones and surgery, make everyone economically secure enough that they can change their wardrobe however they please,  desegregate all gendered spaces, de-gender clothing, remove gender markers from all documents, and so on and so on. Doing so would make both cisgender and transgender an irrelevant legal and political category and, again, allow choice to emerge as a meaningful mechanism of gender expression. 

This isn’t a comprehensive policy platform, there are many things I’m sure I haven’t thought through and a large portion of this discussion has to contend with the colonial and white supremacist nature of the western binary gender (bringing us into discussions of decolonial efforts, socialist efforts, and so on), but this is already getting long and I feel like I’m rambling. But like fundamentally I believe in a radical political imaginary that argues that all of this is subject to change and therefore any arguments about an essential gendered or sexual being is, at the end of the day, a reactionary description of gender and sexuality 

[jev-urisk]

A Musing Monday 🎐

Today i'm musing about connections and how they are often synonymous with our opportunities, our ability to survive, and our thoughts- therefor changing who we are and who will become. Also coin metaphors 🪙

Last Tuesday out of the blue one of my partners was laid off, he started a new job two days later because he knows people who work at a cabinet mill. 🙏

My family made the most healing ratatouille that we ate off of all weekend because someone I know from work had too many eggplants. 🍆📈

We got our house thanks to the efforts of a friend with a real-estate license. I got the contact info for my current therapist from a girlfriend. I have a song stuck in my head from a child I work with and I pick up catchphrases from people on tv and I know how to do pushups for the 1st time in my life bc an online friend taught me how. 🔥💪

Its fun and frightening to think about- that we are obelisks of pennies created from every person that gave us their two cents 🪙🪙

If every trait, thought, inclination, or idea of yours was a coin- which of your coins are old, passed down through the generations until they were shuffled into your hands? Which are invaluable? Like my dads tendency to accept things (like my gayness and transness and polyness) as long as no one is getting hurt, which I know he got from my grandfather ❤️. Which coins are a burden you dont know how to get rid of? Like my mother's propensity to say "It could be worse, think of__ (children in Africa, Houseless folk, etc)" which has become my tendency to minimize my own experiences and neglect to give myself breaks 🫠. Which coins did you find on the sidewalk and which sit with you in your car? Which are made of metals you're allergic to? Which are tarnished and scratched but still good? Which coins of yours are most valuable to you? 🎐

There are so many times in my life where I felt like I couldn't get a leg up, and the only way I got through was stacking pennies, adding up my connections and the ghosts of connections past to try to escape the pit..

With that in mind I want to take a moment to shout out the change (🥁) that others have gifted me with recently, cuz boy buddy have I needed to stack pennies lately, but have been so blessed to have so many new coins.

Thanks @sableglass, the fire you put into the world ignited action into me. I spent a year lamenting the loss of a job until your 'fuck it we ball' attitude inspired me to get resolved about that 🤽‍♂️. I got a job offer today. You helped me get here.

Thanks @the-golden-comet , you were one of the first writblr blogs I came across. You shaped my idea of tumblr to be something positive and uplifting during a very hard time for me 🫂. Your stories are so free and wild (🐳💦) and wonderful that they changed my outlook on being a writer and that what im 'allowed' to put in a story is anything but a limiting factor. You taught me that the course of a day can be changed with a simple frog gif and that you dont necessarily need to know someone to know how much they care. ��💕

Thanks to @tragedycoded for DMLS and @words-after-midnight for Libaw. Yall write the mentalscape of various conditions so well that im taking better care of myself 🧠🌿. I'm more proud of the work I've put into myself. And i'm becoming proud of the person I could have become but didn't.

Thank you to @lychhiker-writes for being my first homie on tumblr and for letting me vent my various frustrations into your dms 😏😅, and for being a brave and honest alpha reader for 7C.

Thank you @wyked-ao3 and @cowboybrunch and @gioiaalbanoart for being such great cheerleaders for my writing 😭💕 seeing yall connect and feel your feelings in my comments gives me so much hope and happiness and I honesty dont thank yall enough. I finally finished ch8 (no, really, check the doc 👀) and your encouragement helped me really embrace Seeker, who I used to think was too boring, and get that chapter finished 🏁.

There are so many others and I'm sorry for not naming them all 🙏 but if I have read your work, thank you. If I follow you or you follow me, thank you. If we have ever bonked together in a discord chat like two wayward beyblades 💞- *Thank You*

Today, I feel like I'm finally out of the pit, and it's thanks to the random 2 cents and spare change yall have gifted me. Your influence is priceless. 🥰💰

(Still no taglist for Monday posts yet, hmu if you'd like to be on it!)

[transfemzedaph]

idea that definitely hasnt been living in my brain:

joel totally, 100%, does NOT have a massive crush on zedaph. zedaph, who he's heard a lot of things about but, but nothing could've prepared him for how blummin' cute he is, for goodness sake-- what. what? don't look at him like that. it's nothing. shut up.

(hope u like this even if u dont write smth for it DJBDJD)

i fucking loved this ask so much <3. i transed joel & zeds genders. bc im me. also the end is meh & i dont know what grians base looks like and i do not care

-

Of course Joel had heard about Zedaph, how could they not have. There was the rest of ZITS in the life series, Skizz specifically when he found out the both of them were joining, and of course Grians run down of all of the hermits. The basic gist of it was she's weird in a cool way and makes creative and useless but fun machines, which honestly, Joel thought sounded really awesome. Redstone was fine and all but they did tend to think most redstoners were way too serious about the whole thing.

So when Joel was invited over to be the first person to test Zeds newest thing, they were excited!

What none of any of his friends had told them, was how flippin cute she was. And yeah maybe Joel ended up stumbling over their words more than usual whilst hanging out, and yeah maybe they were a little bit distracted from the game? activity? workout? whatever it was, Joel was a bit distracted because they kept watching Zed.

Joel rushes their goodbyes and runs off back home, laying face down on the floor of their newly built home, void they should have put some furniture in already.

Grian wanders over and lets out a little snort at the sight of Joel, who just groans and rolls over, propping themself up a bit,

"This is all your fault."

Grian just stares.

Joel locks eyes with him face scrunching, "You didn't tell me she was cute."

Grian, promptly bursts out laughing.

"Gri, no, this isn't funny. This is serious. And she's gonna think I'm an idiot now and it's all your fault!"

Grian's still laughing.

Joel sits then self up and crosses their arms indignantly, "Are you done?"

Grian's giggling a bit when he replies, "You've got it so bad! For a blonde! Again! You have a type sooo bad."

Joel kicks their leg out towards Grian, grumbling slightly, "Yeah well, you're blonde but you're ugly and I hate you. So there."

Grian sits himself down next to Joel, bumping their shoulder with his own as he does.

"Honestly I bet Zed loved hanging out with you. Don't worry yeah? And at least next time you can compose yourself before you hang out."

Joel leans their head on Grians shoulder.

"Yeah." They sigh, picking at their fingernails, before mumbling "Think 'm just overthinking it cause of being new 'n all that. Just dont wanna make anyone hate me."

Grian scoffs, "No one is going to hate you, and you know Skizz, and probably Tango and Impulse as well, have all talked to Zed about you? Why do you think she invited you to hang out?"

Joel hums.

"To me it seems like she was also trying to impress you too, showing off what she made?"

Joel blushes, halfheartedly giving Grian a little shove, "Shut up."

-

It's a couple of days later when Joel barges into Grians house, "I have an excuse to go visit Zed!"

Grian sighs, "And you had to come and tell me about this? Right now?"

Joel takes in the scene, Mumbo, standing next to a coffee machine, his moustache looking very lackluster, Grian almost curled up on his stool, hands clasped around a mug.

Joel winces, "Uh, what time is it?"

"Too early for this nonsense, shoo." Grian lazily waves one hand in Joels general direction to usher them away.

Joel grumbles to themself as they walk away, "Whatever, Grian doesn't get to know my really cool and awesome plan of going over and saying that we need to beat Impulse and Tangos high score without being a bit cheaty like they were. Which is the best plan ever."

[catboybiologist]

I'm trans! Here's a way-too-long ramble on my internal thoughts on that!

My other posts on this:

https://www.tumblr.com/catboybiologist/725852054829023232/im-going-to-document-some-things-about-my?source=share

https://www.tumblr.com/catboybiologist/725851397783011328/the-short-answer-is-no-but-im-gonna-have-a?source=share

So yay I’m trans! Which like, is neither unexpected nor abnormal for the community I’ve fostered here, so I’m guessing most of y’all’s reactions is just a “hey cool”. But, you see the online side of me, not the irl side, so there’s still a lot of thoughts to sort out on my end. So I’m dumping a lot of thoughts here to sort all that out. And hoooly shit, it got very long, and I still feel like I have more to say… but yeah. If you wanna hear some perspectives on my relation to gender, transness, and femboy culture, read on!

I guess the best way I can think to style this is as an interview with an imaginary third person, sooo…. Bold text is questions I can imagine people having LOL

So what’s my own personal relationship with the term femboy, catboy, and gendered terminology in general? Is the name of your accounts gonna change?

Short answer, no. I like the name CatboyBiologist. “Catboy” itself is a term that is completely untethered from gender at this point to me. Tbqh, the “cat” part feels more wrong than the boy part- as time goes on, I’ve generally ditched the cat ears for most of my outfits as I take them a bit more seriously. Maybe that’ll change when my transition actually starts, but for now, CatboyBiologist stays, and the femboy related language stays in all of my own past posts (keyword, past- more on that in a bit).

I’m not gonna be updating my approach to pronouns. Any pronouns do just fine, I’m sending a vibe into the world and pronouns are my feedback as to what other people interpret that vibe is. Default to they/them if you don’t know what to do with that.

I will be updating my pinned post to link all of these posts, but mostly copy/paste the information from before. That might take a moment cuz I’m lazy, tbh.

And let’s get something else out of the way.

I’m not socially transitioning yet, and probably won’t for a while.

Which, I think leads to a lot of follow up:

Well, why not?

I present fully male and masculine on a day to day basis, and look the part too. Part of it is just this looks insecurity. The mask stays on in my pictures for a reason. Beyond just facial hair (which grows aggressively on me and always shows some shadow), my face looks pretty masculine overall. It takes time to look the way I do in my posts. I wanna give my face and body some time to change so I can look more femme in more casual ways before I present it to the world.

Beyond that, I’m also just worried about being “accepted” as femme straight off the bat. Implicitly, I know this will be easier if I already have some small amounts of physical feminization down my belt.

There’s two main environments that worry me: family, and professionally. Family is a weird hot mess grey area that is too personal to talk about here, but the professional atmosphere is certainly going to be a bit… weird. I live in an accepting geographic region, and around people who are very outspokenly trans supportive…. But most of whom are cishet and simply don’t have a lot of experience seeing or working around trans people. I’m more afraid of being seen as “trans first, biologist second” as far as my career is concerned, than I am about outright transphobia. I know this will never fully go away, and given that I’m 6’2”, I’ll probably never “fully” pass- but I’d at least like people to implicitly read my as femme on a gut level before I start changing how I present that way. One thing my irl femboy experience has shown me is that, even if people can “clock” you intellectually, the way their gut instinct reads you affects whether they treat you as masc or femme. I hope that makes sense on some level. Of course its always going to be an awkward shift, but I hope some time on HRT will make it less awkward.

I’ve come out to one person that doesn’t know about this online persona, or the depths of my queerness. They straight up told me they were shocked. They were incredibly supportive, but they told me they didn’t see it coming at all. And they already knew that I “crossdressed occasionally”. So that’s kinda what I’m working with here.

Essentially, I’m not actually truly “transitioning” in a real sense yet. More than that, I feel like I’m getting the ball rolling. If there’s anything I learned in my research, it’s that HRT takes a while, much longer than anyone expects (suppressing my rant about how the media cherrypicks people in early transition for trans representation and the effect that has on public perception). Two years is often cited as the “end” point, but based on both scientific and anecdotal accounts, that is wildly untrue and variable. I also know that the first changes onset quickly (skin and mood, most notably), but that overall body shape changes sometimes take a VERY long time to start and progress. So to be quite honest, I barely feel like I’m transitioning yet, I’m just laying groundwork for the future.

So yeah. I’m gonna be boymoding for a bit. Possibly a year or more. Even for the people who know, I’ve still asked them to address me as he/him or they/them, and use my masculine name for now (haven’t even really decided on a femme name yet, although I have ideas [open to suggestions as well]).

Wait, so why address it online at all?

Put simply, honesty. I’m displaying a lot of selfies and experimentation with my look here, and I want to make it abundantly clear what I’m doing to have an effect on that. People have asked me if I’m on HRT in comments before, and like, I’m not gonna lie about that. Might as well also make a shitpost, a data gathering post, and a too-long ramble about it as well (which you’re reading now!).

There are a LOT of body image issues in femboy spaces (and trans spaces too!), often among very young people. While I have no issue with people on HRT continuing to call themselves a femboy (more on that in a bit), I do think transparency on that matter is helpful for those body image issues.

So to make it abundantly clear: all of my selfies and pictures that I’m labeling and tagging as “femboy” are pre-HRT. In the future, everything I tag with “trans” is post-HRT. I still got 1-2 weeks before actually starting, and I’m still going to use the femboy tag for any outfits I post during that time. The moment an estradiol pill hits my mouth, though, new pics will use trans tags.

Posts that relate to discussion of the interplay of the communities, and how I view myself within them, I’ll tag with both.

Which leads to another follow up question. This one isn’t about me specifically, but it’s my hot take about a certain brand of trans discourse I’ve seen around (mostly on reddit tbh):

Why would someone who knows they’re mtf trans willingly call themselves a femboy and/or request people to “misgender” them?

So this is actually gonna be striking a nerve with me, and I know I’m gonna kinda be strawmanning here by arguing against the ghost of reddit comments past. I’m not gonna try to dig any of them up in the internet archive, but they are sentiments I’ve seen multiple times.

I’ve seen this question almost word for word in the comments of trans subreddits multiple times. Imma be blunt, and it’s maybe gonna sound a little mean. If this thought is going through your head, you’re likely way more sensitive and particular about labels than most people. And that’s okay! Ask people to address you how you want, you deserve that respect! But the real answer to this question is that many people simply don’t mind being called whatever label is most useful or familiar to themselves in various contexts.

The moment that it becomes completely unacceptable is when someone does actually change their pronouns, name, presentation, etc, and people still address them as “male” or “femboy”. That is completely the fuck out of line, and if you don’t agree, fuck off.

Why does this strike a little bit of a nerve with me? Well, the “conclusion” I saw reached in these trans spaces multiple times when the subject was brought up was annoying as hell. That conclusion was that the only or primary reason that people labeled themselves a femboy, even while on HRT… was to sell their onlyfans. My fucking god, seriously? This is just conservative rhetoric. Luckily, on tumblr, it seems that people are a lot more accepting towards people using whatever language they like to describe themselves, which I’ve enjoyed a lot.

I’ve also had a lot of hate towards “fencesitting” directed at me on reddit, from trans people, for calling myself a femboy. I can’t remember it verbatim, but I very distinctly recall getting a DM that went something like “I fucking hate femboys, just transition already. You’re making us (transfemmes) look bad.” So yeah. Bit of a sore spot.

Yadda yadda yadda the personal journey shit

If I can be real for a moment…. In an ideal world, I would still want to be a part time femboy. Even moreso than the sheer utility of it all (eg, enjoy cis male privilege when I want, but still get treated more femme in certain contexts), it feels almost more profound to fuck with gender norms without sitting on one side of the gender line or another. But I can’t really ignore what I’ve described as my “mental resting state”- a baseline crackle of dysphoria that fills the space in my head when there’s nothing else to fill it. It’s easily distracted, but its always there, and I can’t imagine living my life that way anymore.

I’ve pretty much known I was trans since I was about 12, and had a realization that puberty was just starting to hit me, and I hated it. I suppressed it deeply, for many, many reasons that I don’t think I want to share here. But it made a lot of other mental health struggles in my life a lot worse, even if I didn’t consciously acknowledge that’s what was happening. By the time I was willing to consciously acknowledge it, I realized that my dysphoria wasn’t so bad as to dive in right away. But, I made moves to stabilize my life overall, which have been massively beneficial to me in other ways as well.

During the pandemic, I found myself living alone for the first time ever. So during the pandemic, in one last ditch effort to try to convince myself I wasn’t trans, I delved into femboy aesthetics to try and “just be a feminine man”.

That failed.

So yeah, here I am. I have a wonderful queer community both irl and online, a meagre but stable income, health insurance that has great coverage for trans care, and accepting people around me in my life. It’s long overdue. Maybe I’ll beat myself up for waiting so long and masculinizing so much as a result, but I don’t think I really could have done it any other way.

This all said, I don’t actually really consider myself a woman yet. I’m sure many of you are aware of two different ways transfemmes view themselves(and trans people in general, but using a transfemme perspective here):

-Some view themselves as having always been girls or women, but took some time to realize it and make their body more comfortable for themselves with that information.

-Others view themselves as boys or men who made efforts to become women later.

I fall strongly in the second line of thinking for myself. For my own personal experiences, even though I have felt dysphoria for a long time, I don’t really think I’m “actually” a woman yet. I don’t know what my identity as a woman looks like yet. But I deeply want to discover and create who that person is, and there’s no way to do that without transitioning.

B but… BASIC BIOLOGY!!!!!

How many biology degrees do you have? I got a BS and an MS, and I’m working on my PhD. I’m sure you’ve brought a similar level of expertise to this discussion.

But seriously, I could genuinely write an entire fucking essay about how studying biology has influenced my views on this subject, but honestly, that’s an entirely different topic. But tl;dr is that bioessentialism is brainrot, and if someone tries to use essentialist language to “justify” someone’s transness (or gender in general)… well, I think they’re wrong. Plain and simple. We don’t say someone isn’t “really able to see” if they put glasses in front of their eyes.

I’m stopping myself before I write more here, because this warrants another post or even a fucking video essay, to be quite honest. But yeah. Biology based.

Conclusion?

Uhhhh… in conclusion, I’m not particular about language or pronouns you use for me, I’m making posts about it anyways to ensure honesty associated with my selfies, if you’re transphobic jump of the tallest bridge you can find. I think that about covers it.

[4thenookie]

Hi hi i heard you wanted some headcanons!! As always this is /lh, not meant to be taken that seriously, agree to disagree, yada yada all that good jazz lmao. Most of them are pretty crack-y in nature as well, they're just meant for fun lol. And with that, I'll compile my miles long headcanon list into (mostly) sorted by character for everyone's convenience lmao

- starting off strong with trans EJ! Idk why but do headcanons really need a reason? (I do know why) (i like to make my blorbos suffer 💖) (and also [diverges your neuros] [transes your genders] [homos your sexuals]). Also biromantic asexual king

- more EJ because he's THE blorbo. Boy is british asf and he knows BSL and is learning ASL. Touch averse as well. I feel like EJ would actually be a decent if not great cook.

- EJ purring like a cat when he's content/happy? I think yes! Also has a tail with one of those tail tuft thingies? Kinda like lions if you know what i mean. And the pointy ears (peak character design yaknow)

- moving on. I feel like Jeff knows how to play an instrument. Probably electric guitar. He also has like a bajillion band t-shirts. Jeff also likes to take long, hot showers but hates to comb his hair lol

- while Brian cooks food so bad/raw it could as well just still be alive, Toby is either a great cook or a disaster in the kitchen with seemingly no indicator for which one it's going to be on any given day. I'm talking managing to burn a pot of water one day and cooking a michelen star worthy meal the next.

- Kagekao is actually fluent in English and speaks and understands it perfectly, he just refuses to speak it. He takes great amusement in watching other people lose their minds over this

- speaking of languages, i feel like Toby would be bilingual if not multilingual. He speaks English and German, maybe even Spanish if we're going the multilingual route

- also. Oh my god. The generational difference between BEN "memelord who quotes vines like there's no tomorrow" Drowned and Slenderman is just. I cant stop laughing thinking about it. Any given conversation between these two is just a gamble on who is going to lose it first

- BRVR is kinds Lost Silver's pet but also not really? Like he just kinda goes wherever but Lost Silver mainly takes care of him

- LJ he/it truther

- Me and a friend came up with this which probably explains why it is cracky as fuck but hear me out. Jeff as a makeup artist. He made Slender look like Beyonce once. No one knows how he did it and how he's not dead (the answer, as my friend said, is "no one can hate Beyonce")

- i feel like Toby, BEN, and Jeff would be like. The chaos trio. God knows what will happen when you put the three of then alone in a room together

- i also feel like Brian sunburns really easily.

- Tim is one of those dads that wants to leave in the middle of the night for road trips / holidays to avoid the traffic jams

Hope this makes even a bit of sense and i hope you enjoyed whatever my brain spewed at me lol if u ever wanna share more headcanons or talk about blorbos or share character slander (looking at Brian and LJ (affectionate)) feel free to dm me!! (I dont mind i promise lol /lh)

hi!!!!!!!!!!!!! omg these are so so so real thank you for sharing them with me!!!! ill go into some more detail under the cut :)

to be honest, i can kinda see trans ej being real now that you mention it, ill definitely think about that a lot!! and i also hc him as asexual!!!! :)

im british and i claim ej as one of us lmaooo

i absolutely agree w the purring thing!!! i think ej does a lot of cat things idk :)))) i love all of your ej headcanons!!!

tbh i can see jeff either playing electric guitar like you said or maybe drums?? just any instrument he can go ham on when hes mad lmao

in my hc he has the worst case of chronic greasy hair and he doesnt want to do anything about it

cooking hcs are so real brian can NOT cook!!!!!!! toby will either serve you some 5 star gourmet shit or some rotten takeout he found during a dumpster dive

omg omg omg I hardly see anybody talk about kagekao!!!!!! i totally agree he would do that lmaooo

idk if its canon or not but i read somewhere that tobys German so i totally agree that hed be bilingual!!!

oh my god BEN whos native language is memes meets grandpa slendy that would be so funny

in 4 words youve converted me into a fellow he/it LJ truther!!!! could we consider he/it ej too? maybe??

ik you said it was a cracky hc but i can actually kinda see jeff being good at makeup??? like one of those things where he tries it once and it's the most drop dead gorgeous makeup look you've EVER seen and everyones like how did you do that

toby BEN and jeff are an absolute riot when rheyre together lmao

omg i never thought about it but brian sunburning super easy is so real!! and in summer he always wears sunglasses so he has like an unburnt patch on his face where his sunglasses were yk??

OMG YES LMAOOOOO "guys get up our flights in 10 hours WE'RE GONNA BE LATE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" he would 100% have a checklist or 3

thank you so much for sharing these with me!! i hope you dont mind me adding my own thoughts lol but theyre so much fun to think about!!!! if you ever wanna slander lj and brian with someone feel free to dm me lmao!!!!!! take care <33333

[genderqueerdykes]

is it entirely possible for me to want to, like, identify as cis AND trans ? for context I was born female, but I'm a transman .. To put it simply .. And I have an odd and confusing relationship with my womanhood, but it feels right in a way to say I'm a transman but also transfem ?? Buf like, cis trans man and transfem. Does this, work ?? I could probably ramble for hours about why I want to use both these labels. But I'm not sure if it'd be, disrespectful ?? misusing the terms ?? Just plain odd ??

Your blog is incredibly informative and your answers are as well so, yeah. can I use the labels transman and transfem.

yes! this absolutely works!!!!!

you are the type of person i've made a ton of posts about and i hope you don't mind if i'm kinda long winded here because i've been begging people to understand folks like you exist for weeks now and people just keep calling me transmisogynistic and it's absurd, i had no idea so many people didn't know your identity existed. here are some of the posts i've made about bigender cis men/transfems:

there is a long, long history of people who identify as cis men and a trans woman or transfem person. this is so common it's unreal. back in the 50's and 60's a lot of drag queens had this exact relationship with gender- sometimes presenting as cis men, or maybe still presenting as femme but being men. there were femme gays hanging out at the drag bars flirting with men and lesbians- identifying as femmes and men. there were drag balls held by people who had this exact relationship with gender going on around the time. you can read about a lot of these people in leslie feinberg's works actually!

the thing is is being cis doesn't cancel out being trans. bigenderism is complicated. if someone wants to consider both of their identities trans, they can. if someone wants to consider themselves cis and trans, they can! you are not in the wrong for being this gender! i've met so many people in your shoes! i lived with a lot of transfems for a while and a lot of them were cis men and trans women at the same time! a lot of trans women still feel like cis men, especially gay men. that's totally fine!

im really glad you took the time to send this ask because this is what i mean when i say that it's not okay to shit on cis men in the queer community or in general because cis men *can be queer*. you can be a cis man and a trans woman or any other number of genders at the same time and it doesn't not invalidate your transness! they don't have to cancel each other out, they exist at the same time independently of one another and it's a beautiful thing!

if you'd like to talk about it, please feel encouraged to do so! i've been trying to get people to understand people like you are out there and to not be shitty to people who are or read as cis men. it's okay to be a cis man and another queer identity! i think you rock! there are a ton of bigender cis men/transfems out there! you are not alone!

[genderkoolaid]

do you also get cis people treating transmasculinity as something super fragile or that they need to affirm constantly? i dont know if this is a transandrophobia specific thing but i get people like over-affirming my gender all the time ("supportive" cis friends calling me a "man" too much, talking about my dick (despite me being. pre surgery. and also it being weird to talk about my genitalia w/o consent), commenting on me "looking like a man" on days im trying to pass more) its like weirdly just. reminding me im not cis for no reason? ive seen stuff where cis people will overcompensate by calling trans men handsome, but a lot of the time in my experience it seems to be directly linked with an obsession of me being a non-passing, pre surgery/"fragile" trans men, its so weird

This definitely isn't exclusive to transmasculinity- I've heard a lot of transfems talk about a similar experience of cis people being very "yass slay queen" in trying to affirm their genders, but (especially when they only do that to trans people) it just ends up being very alienating. I think it generally comes from a good place but there's definitely an issue of cis people both assuming transness is inherently insecure and needs cis approval to feel good about itself, and also having a very narrow view of transness & what trans people's goals are.

Personally I really dislike "short king" as an unprompted compliment because it often ends up just feeling demeaning and pitying (like "aww you're trying so hard to be sexy when you're so short! how cute :) here's a charity compliment lil guy") which just makes me more dysphoric about my height than if you just compliment me like a normal fucking person. It's like people want to be allies but still get uncomfortable/unsure when someone is presenting a certain way while being visibly trans, so they feel the need to either point it out in a "compliment" or overcompensate to try and make themselves feel better about us not being cis.