thehouseofgrey

[thehouseofgrey]

starburst 🌟

[thehouseofgrey]

fucking love when I'm on a call with someone and they start to do a little errand or go somewhere else and they say "and you're coming with me" like. absolutely I am let's go on an adventure I've been spirited away

[thehouseofgrey]

[ID: On it’s own single line, the word Oh. On a new paragraph beneath it, the word Oh again but italicized. /end]

you know a fic is good when it has this

[thehouseofgrey]

sorry dude i got distracted by the beautiful river of chest hair you have flowing between your tits, can you repeat that?

[thehouseofgrey]

clicking a pen over and over again is actually fun as fuck its a shame it makes everyone in a 30 foot radius want to kill me with a rock

[thehouseofgrey]

Hi! We’re Black and variously trans, but for the sake of the brevity of the post, we’re transmasc and nonbinary. (If it helps you can think of us as genderfluid.) The rest of this will be written in singular I statements for ease of reading/understanding.

1. As someone who has lived all my life as a Black girl/woman, my femininity has always been denied to me. This isn’t news to any Black woman, queer or not. Femininity, and indeed womanhood and girlhood, is not for us. Decolonizing and embracing Black femininity, masculinity, and androgyny as separate and unique concepts was life changing. So I wish that nB people would understand that Black gender presentation and gender experience exists on its own axis. Judging Black gender queerness on the scales of the White Man’s gender is always going to make us look lacking. I’m not aiming for whiteness so stop comparing me to it lol.

2. I think I definitely get very skeptical of claims of good representation of gender nonconformity in media, bc like is it actually good or is it skinny white transmasc again? Imma let u guess what it is 99/100 times. It’s tired. It’s one note. Do smth else. Cuz at the moment it kinda seems like y’all can’t even include all yourselves in your own definition of transness, let alone the complexity of Black transness.

3. I admittedly haven’t seen a whole lot of depictions of Black trans identities in general, but if you want to depict a Black trans person I would say, please whole-heartedly embrace *us* in our entirety. The queerness and the Blackness of a Black queer person are inextricably linked. You cannot show one while hiding the other. You have to stand at the intersection.

Also this didn’t fit anywhere else and I wanted the responses to your questions to be short but, there’s a trend I noticed of a certain kind of White Queer who seems to think Black gender expression is just up for grabs, like how their folks can’t keep their hands off our hair and our language. Black androgyny is not yours to consume; it’s not yours to gender envy, or emulate, or appropriate. Black gender expression has history and context, and you cannot remove the parts that suit you for your own use. Sorry if that’s too off topic, Ice, but I really felt like this conversation needed this disclaimer.

I am reaching out to Black trans, intersex, and people with a societally-deemed "unconventional" relationship to gender!

I am currently working on a future lesson involving gender and sexuality. But for certain things, I am not comfortable speaking for a community when I think it would be better to let them speak for themselves. I too am still learning (so I ask for grace).

What I want to do is either have a post to link to the lesson with your opinions in the tags/notes, and a summarized section of bullet points to show the range of perspectives on what I'm about to ask you. You don't have to answer all of them (or any if you don't want, it's volunteering). You can even send asks that if you don't want to be published, I will not publish. Succinctness will help me read everyone's responses, I will admit 😅

My questions:

1. What's ONE thing you wish nonblack people would understand the most about your experience?

2. How do you think you see or experience the world and media in comparison to white or nonblack people with a shared gender identity?

3. What's a story you'd like to see of yourself in media? Are there current examples?

[thehouseofgrey]

i will say this as a person who is not white: i think being called racist as a white person is like way lower stakes than anyone makes it out to be. and like, the reality is that white people have an inflated sense of anxiety about what being called Racist Means when like. let's be fucking real for a second. it does not meaningfully often result in Material Violence to a person for being "called racist." and I think being racist is just a thing that happens. and like if we are going to say that being accidentally racist from time to time is something that like, is relatively low stakes, that has to go hand in hand with being like. ok well I guess i should take some time to think about why someone might think I'm racist and like Do something about that.

like I think the paranoia and anxiety about how Being Called Racist is something that Does Violence to People is rooted in a white guilt racialized anxiety and if I am going to be real with you I do not think it is based in material reality. you can be a little uncomfortable it's not the end of the world. i think it's frustrating as a racialized person to see so many white people more frantically hand-wringing over the prospect of being called "racist" than over the prospect of Being Racist. it's annoying to say the least.

[thehouseofgrey]

Paul uses one of those razor blade subscription services and, since it's cheap, sends Percy at New Rome University a spare pack every time he gets a delivery. Percy keeps a MUCH cleaner shave than Paul does, who kind of keeps it scruffy. Unfortunately, one time, there's a shipping error as Paul's package is lost in the mail, so nobody gets razors.

Percy doesn't consider it much initially, but as days go by without a shave, he starts to build up stubble - something incredibly uncommon for him. People turn their heads and tease him a bit until the stubble grows into a shadow, grows into a beard.

Suddenly, nobody teases Percy. They give him a wide berth, and on more than one occasion, a younger New Roman called him "Sir" reverently. Now, when Percy delivers some Classic Snark during a lecture or between classes, it's not met with snickers and eye-rolls. It feels scathing in a way it never had before. Now things that Percy pokes fun at are corrected, and people nod along to his comments as though they were suggestions - no, expectations.

Sure enough, people relax a bit when some new razor cartridges come in, and Percy shaves again, and things go back to normal. Percy isn't sure why people acted odd for a week or two there. Then Annabeth, who (tactfully) avoided kissing him for that duration, points out, "You look a lot like your dad."

[thehouseofgrey]

"writing about fucked up things doesnt indicate your values as a person" and "the way you write about things may indicate some of your values" are not conflicting statements if im going to be real

[thehouseofgrey]

if you didn't want me to think about my blorbo while listening to your song why did you write a song about the specific situation my blorbo was in

[thehouseofgrey]

[thehouseofgrey]

First off, spin this wheel.

You just landed on one of 200 fandoms that have been very popular somewhere on Tumblr over the years. Topics were chosen either from appearing on a @fandom end-of-year recap or from my own long (long, long) site memories before that.

also all of these fandoms are definitely things that really exist in the real world and none of them are Tumblr creations

[thehouseofgrey]

I love questionnaires that are clearly written with the assumption that anyone taking them has probably already self-diagnosed to the point that every question is so forer-effect-y that the idea of answering “no, this doesn’t describe me” is ludicrously funny

[thehouseofgrey]

ashes to ashes, dust to dust, reeses to pieces

[thehouseofgrey]

Why was it a universal experience for people who were teenagers in the 2010s to have a way older online friend who would use you as emotional support and would be suicidal every other day. And you’d be eating dinner with family pretending to be normal while your significantly older online friend was going through a crisis over text. I’m still not even close to the average age they were and I literally can’t imagine doing that in a million years

[thehouseofgrey]

i cannot hate myself into a version of me i will love.