#for me personally as a nonbinary/bigender person it's very affirming. but i understand for other nonbinary and trans people

[corviiids]

hi rook sorrgy I'm back but I've been thinking about your akeshu as girls genderfuckery tweet for 20 million years. idk if you can share anything in good faith here on the Tumblr corner of the internet (if not then by all means ignore this) but if you did I'd owe you perhaps my entire soul!! thank you very much either way :3

i would LOVE to talk about this thank you so much for asking

[under the cut in case anyone would not like to see genderfuckery stuff]

okay so first of all.

on the topic of boobs

this is important to lead with do you understand. most of the akeshu as girls stuff ive seen around has akc as flat-chested and ren as boobed. and that's valid i support that. but personally. personally to me. i think it's the opposite. tbe reason (well one reason) i think it's the opposite is because i think girlren is a little rat of a creature and akechi who is prim and feminine and perfect is so FUCKING angry about her crush on ren like she's barely surviving it and then this is the nail in the coffin. she's like why can't i stop thinking about that messy unassuming thing. she doesn't even have boobs

my other reasons for tihs are that i think joker is more androgynous charm while akechi is more feminine/masculine duality i think this makes sense to nobody else. i think ren regardless of agab is riding the rail of the gender spectrum 🛹 while akc is collecting extremes of gender presentation like they're pokemon do you understand. are we on the same page here. ren being into drag is important to me for this reason (again regardless of agab). meanwhile akechi having very clear feminine secondary sex characteristics but presenting gradually more and more masculine in terms of clothing/hair/personal style etc. is also extremely important to me. and that includes being biog of tity while her style veers more and more into masc as time goes on

ok

the detective prince

i think girl akechi (at 17-18) presents very femininely because it's what's effective for her. i would call her style................... kawaii corporate chic. does that make sense for everyone. it's like schoolgirl girlboss. she has a bow instead of a tie but it's a very classy one not a kitschy one. smart blazer, uniform pleated skirt, patent leather shoes, u know the drill BUT. people still call her the detective prince. this is VERY IMPORTANT to me. no detective princess. only detective prince. do you understand the importance of the genderfuckery of a super feminine girl being called by masculine terms. to me. we're continuing the legacy set by my hero naoto shirogane bigender queeng. bigender kin. bigender genderneutral non-monarchical ruler

i think by third sem girl akechi is starting to dress more androgynously/masculinely. more pants. i think her third sem outfit is unchanged from canon. just a smart coat, sweater, buttondown, slacks. postcanon she gets a haircut.

just trying to live an honest student life

ren is like so fundamentallyuncomfortable with the fact of his existence at the beginning of canon so to me girlren is like... she dresses like she's trying to hide in her clothes. messy hair. i have no strong feelings about whetehr her hair should be long or short, or whether it's loose or pulled into a tail, but i know it's messsy. untamed curls. and she uses it to hide her face. none of her clothes fit. she's in oversized everything. i have a very clear image in my head of a ren idle animation where she leans down to pull up her leggings because they keep falling down. she also has terrible posture. she's androgynous at this stage not on purpose but because she's too self conscious to like... exist... and present... in any notable way at all

i think as she gets more confident and as the year progresses she starts to dress more distinctively. i like the idea of her getting more comfortable prettying up. maybe working at crossroads helps her with this 🤔 i dont know how to explain this but i think she's still feminine in a gentlemanly chivalrous way rather than a girly cute way. girlren has that same steady calming vibe that guy ren does

joker & crow

crow has a magical girl skirt. i have a drawing of this but im too self conscious about my own lack of drawing skill to show it off so i cropped out the key part and put it into an ms paint void in the distance as my visual aid

there. i hope this is illustrative

i think given girl akechi's use of her feminine charms to gain popularity, her hero complex would be similarly gendered given we have confirmation that robin hood represents not (only) heroics for altruistic reasons but also the theatre of being seen doing good. there's a real drama element to the idea of a magical girl transformation that i honestly wish we got for male crow too. i always am depressed that we don't get to see much theatre for akechi's initial appearance as crow and summoning of robin hood, anyway, girlcrow has ribbons and a capelet that flap in non-existent wind.

black mask's outfit is unchanged from canon. i'd like it to look a little less stupid but that has nothing to do with gender i just want it to look a little less stupid.

joker's outfit is also unchanged from canon. listen. im back on my bullshit. in the metaverse her behaviour gets more feminine and more sly and confident than in reality. she's got that femme fatale shit going on. however, she is still a gentleman thief. she has the long coat. she has the poofy trousers. she has the waistcoat. she's still smirking and fixing her gloves and flipping her knife and doing that thing that canon ren does where he lifts his chin and does the little "come on" thing with her fingers. do you understand? do you understand me

[kirkwallguy]

Idk if you've posted about it before and I missed it, but I saw ur tag mentioning you have a critique on datv's treatment of transness and I'd genuinely be interested in hearing about it :)

hi, yes i have but it's been a while since i last talked about it! i've been meaning to write a long essay on my issues for a while but it would require actually playing the game and i don't want to do that. here's a long rant that got away from me though:

i've complained sometimes about various stereotypes or missteps in the way specific trans characters are represented, but i'd be able to ignore that if it weren't for my main issue, which is that trans characters just aren't properly woven into the world, leaving them feeling alienated in a way queer characters in previous games never were.

it's very clear that the writers haven't broken down their own perceptions of gender and the various cultures surrounding it enough to say something insightful, which is fine because most people haven't, but when people defend the game on the sole basis that its depiction of transness is revolutionary i do have to take some issue. there are books from the 60s that take a more interesting approach to deconstructing gender lol. veilguard may feel progressive in the landscape of aaa video games but i don't think that means it should pass without critique and i don't think that we should have to settle for this when it's possible to do so much better.

the easiest and most frequently discussed example of not properly incorporating transness into thedas is the use of language in the game. you've probably seen the endless arguments about whether taash calling themself nonbinary is an anachronism, and though i'm sure some of the arguments are in bad faith i think people overestimate how many people (on here specifically) are arguing from that perspective. it's been extremely frustrating to be called transphobic by cis people over this when i'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who has actually studied shit like this.

this is a problem throughout the game but it's easier to examine codex entries for this post than go through entire scenes. i've talked about hating the language in this codex entry before, but it really annoys me so let me complain about it again lol.

acknowleding that trans as a prefix means "change" is actually a good start here and if wasn't for how this codex entry continues i'd just shrug and move on, but i really hate the absolutist way it uses the very modern "affirming" and "was always" narrative and language as though it's universally agreed upon. you can argue that this is subjective and what taash was told (though which shadow dragon is talking to them like a GIC psychologist lol?), but when the entire codex entry feels like an educational pamphlet for clueless cis people it just comes across as very odd.

and then the rest of the codex entry just abandons any attempt at making the words "work" etymologically and gives extremely bare-bones descriptions of them. some of these words are younger than me, i saw them being coined on various forums and corners of the internet. is it representation if you say the word and put absolutely no effort into representing or even discussing the agender/bigender/demigender/others experience? in another post i compared this to being like if they did a lord of the rings remake and confirmed legolas as being bisexual by making him wear a bi flag pin with no extra context - of course people TODAY use that flag to signal their experience with bisexuality and there's nothing wrong with that, but to link modern language/signals with an experience that has clearly existed since before either of those things were invented comes right back around to being oddly invalidating, as though these experiences wouldn't exist without modern english speaking understanding of them.

as for the argument about whether or not it's anachronistic: i don't personally think you need to adhere to a binary of modern / historically accurate language and culture to make queerness work in a medieval-ish fantasy setting. the previous games (for all their faults) managed a pretty established status quo where they didn't aim to portray a utopia with a widespread queer culture while also not being gratuitous with their homophobia. and as much as queer x-topias can be interesting when done well, i think this is a good thing for a big budget fantasy game - unless you're EXTREMELY in the know about gender roles and queer theory etc, how can you hope to portray a queer utopia? some people write books whose sole point is to portray a world without gender roles or homophobia and they still misstep, i don't think it's the casual inclusive background thing a lot of fantasy authors believe it to be. it would have gone the same way as origins' claim that men and women are treated the same; maybe you make queer people hold hands in the street without being questioned and nobody makes negative comments about your romance option, but do you subconsciously assign gender roles to jobs? do you portray the majority of npcs adhering to western cishet gender norms? what is the ratio of monogamous f/m relationships portrayed compared to other relationships? these are all things people just straight up don't think about when designing a world and they will accidentally create a society that is welcoming of queerness in THEORY while actually replicating our own cishet patriarchal values.

i don't think veilguard is attempting to be a utopia, i don't think it's attempting to be anything but a finished game, but i see people defending it on the BASIS of it being a utopia fairly often.

taash's arc is another pretty big example of this struggle to examine gender in real life beyond the writers' experiences, namely white canadian. it's a deeply racist attempt at a multucultural narrative where one culture (which has already been demonised throughout the series, including in veilguard) is portrayed as less welcoming of queer people while the other culture, which is still a society with binary gender roles despite being a matriarchy, is portrayed as being instantly and unquestionably accepting.

there's a LOT of potential in an arc for a character like taash if they'd been written by someone with actual interest (and probably experience) writing about the queer experience of existing within two very different cultures. the qunari ARE a culture who are fairly big on binaries but they have an established acceptance of transition that would make their understanding of gender fairly fluid, meanwhile the lords of fortune seem ideal on the surface but human/(our) culture has so many hidden binaries that you don't notice in everyday life unless you're the one being alienated by them.

this could have been a chance to slightly turn the racist Othering of the qunari on its head by showing our own society from the perspective of perhaps some aqun-athlok characters taash befriends, a codex entry about an aqun-athlok character from the past that taash finds and takes inspiration from (maybe they start out aqun-athlok then reject the gender binary entirely?), or even from shathann, perhaps as a character who has explored her gender in the past or decides to explore it as a result of taash. (imagine if shathann was actually aqun-athlok herself, having adopted taash, and some of her complicated feelings about the qun involved the fact that her identity was more accepted there. just SOMETHING to balance the scales a little.)

then again, not even rivain gets to be the fully "progressive" society and taash has to go to the shadow dragons for their gender education. i think it's funny that someone seemed to be projecting an ultra-progressive modern activist group image onto the shadow dragons, i think i've said before that they remind me of all the modern au fanfiction about les amis from les mis that i used to read as a teenager, when they're supposed to be a ruthless abolitionist group. i think this choice was largely to facilitate interaction between the factions but it does feel a little odd given the other racist elements in taash's arc.

there's also the issue of the actual topic of medical transition being avoided. we have tarquin and mae, two characters who have seemingly undergone some kind of medical transition. we have top surgery scars in cc. but there's no discussion of how this transition happens - is hrt magical as krem suggests and is that the only option? is surgery affordable? do different countries and cultures have different levels of advancement in medical transition? these are things i'd want to see written about in codex entries, not lists of various identities that anyone can find by googling a list of genders.

i'm a little disquieted by the avoidance of medical transition given everything happening irl, but it's maybe the issue i understand the thought process behind the most. it feels like a very safe attempt at not veering too far into what happened with krem / the decades of weird fascination with trans bodies. my feelings on this entirely hinge on whether or not the dragon king does actually have top surgery scars lol, for my sanity i'll say he doesn't.

anyway, this all sucks because i've seen SO many fans do better for casual oc posting or fanfic. i've seen so many amazing ways trans culture and hrt and surgery could work in thedas and it's depressing that the writers couldn't even attempt to do something interesting with it. i know there was a lot of crunch that impacted the quality of the writing but i do also think some of these issues would have persisted if they'd had all the time in the world.

[sorin-sunchild]

I want to applaud you @pingintech with more hands than I have.

Reading the original post and seeing agreement really made me worry. What do you mean no transfemme (specifically who isn't AFAB) has a complex relationship with womanhood? What do you mean saying so is transmisogynistic? Nobody is saying that's what you HAVE to experience to qualify as transfemme, that's just want some transfemmes experience. Nobody AFAB who was raised a cis woman and still is one is calling herself a transfemme just because of a complex relationship with womanhood. It's very much still trans* people. What do you mean by using a certain label when you view them as not fitting it a person is transmisogynistic? That's astoundingly wrong and accusatory.

I've seen story after story from what OP considers 'real transfemmes' aka only if you're AMAB can you use that term apparently - all that showed me interesting perspectives on womanhood from women who were denied it. If you were able to slip into womanhood comfortably and were only hurt by transmisogyny then ok? But that's not universal.

Also it was my understanding that the label 'transfemme' as opposed to 'trans woman' was in fact created to allow greater numbers of people whose gender/transition was related to womanhood or nonbinary feminine genders in general to identify themselves under an umbrella term. So I really don't get the comments which are like 'urgh AFABs already have all these specific labels and we only have this one it's not fair, use those other labels!'.

You're really getting mad because some people under your umbrella label aren't having the exact same experience as you?

Also acting like only AFAB people use nonbinary labels, or that said words were in any way invented for AFAB people and are kind of dumb, is exorsexism. AMAB demigirls, bigender, girlboy/boygirl etc people exist. AMAB trans masc people exist. Maybe they'd feel less shy openly viewing themselves this way if we weren't so exorsexist about it. As an AFAB trans masc myself - I personally don't care if that demiboy with a complex relationship with masculinity calls himself trans masc and was born with a penis and raised a boy. Being overly concerned with birth sex and gender socialisation growing up is what TERFs and other transphobic people do. I'm begging you to try and not fall into that same trap and start believing that the existence of other trans people is oppressing you unless they fit into certain boxes.

Also... maybe we could try not to talk about AFAB people like they're the enemy? There's just certain comments here that talk about AFAB people as if said people are oppressing others, get some kind of special treatment or are otherwise inherently privileged just for being AFAB. I hate to tell you this but that's sexist. It's sexist regardless of their gender identity.

Speaking of the comments, the intersexism in some of the comments on this post is disgusting. Some of you clearly have no idea about intersex people at all and assume that being AFAB gives you this flawless relationship with womanhood that a Real Transfemme has to struggle for. "But being AFAB means they are encouraged towards womanhood whilst mine was denied to me-" I hear you, but you can talk about how society gatekeeps womanhood without pushing others who you don't think have struggled for it enough under the bus.

There are AFAB intersex people who have micropenises and went through a masculinising puberty who then, to be allowed womanhood in the eyes of transphobic society, had to go on E and get the same gender affirmation surgery as anyone AMAB - after spending years being treated incorrectly as a man by ignorant strangers and subjected to transmisogyny - because surprisingly (sarcasm) nobody cares what they're legally down as if they don't 'fit'. And she can't call herself trans femme because...?

And what about the AFAB who transitioned to male including medically very early in life, then realised she was wrong when she was much older, but views herself as transitioning to be a woman rather than detransitioning because she spent most of her life as a man and had basically no experiences of womanhood to 'go back to'?

I have a hard time conceptualising any reason these people aren't transfemme that doesn't boil down to gatekeeping identity based on birth genitalia rather than actual experiences with gender etc. As trans people we should know better than to do that.

And here's the thing...of course your experience of womanhood and coming into it is going to be different based on your AGAB and therefore how society treats you. Ofc binary trans women who are AMAB have harsher, harder obstacles from transphobic lawmakers, general bigots etc of course everyone isn't 'the same'. But commenting that you'll basically only care about AFABs when you believe transphobes are coming after them hard enough? Yikes!

I get it - you're hurting because of this. You, binary trans women or otherwise AMAB trans femme reading this who agreed with OP. I get that looking at AFAB people who use your umbrella term makes you feel like nobody understands you or being trans femme at all. That surely they can never understand what it's like to live under transmisogyny. To have womanhood denied and to have to reclaim it from scratch. Oh girl, I really think you deserve more than defining you or others based on the oppression you face, but it's not like it can or should be ignored. There really aren't as many AFAB people who use the term transfemme as you might think and even if they were, nobody in the trans community is forgetting about you. Nobody is judging you and your womanhood. Nobody is trying to change how you talk about yourself, your jokes and relatable posts you make about being transfemme or tell you that you have to have a complex turbulent relationship with your gender just because others under your label do. The people who do do this aren't liked by others for doing it either.

A label is just a label, you are you regardless, but preventing others from using a label that defines them and calling that transmisogyny? That's a hell of a leap. Your world will be so much more open and full of support if you try to understand every kind of trans person, to love our differences and our similarities and most of all to stop using birth sex as an indicator of whether we can use x label or are oppressed enough.

implicit in the idea of AFAB transfems is the conception of transfem as an identity category that indicates primarily a troubled, intermittent, or circumspect relationship to womanhood. this itself is transmisogynistic. transfems are perfectly able to have a relationship to womanhood as simple as being a woman.

[the-voice-of-night-vale]

You're nonbinary, right? How were you able to tell? Was it hard for you to come around to the idea or a relief to understand it? I might be nonbinary, I'm not sure if I am, so that's why I am asking you.

Hey anon! Sorry I’m only just now getting here, since my inbox decided it wasn’t gonna give me a notification (good old tumblr lmao) and I haven’t had my laptop for the weekend! I hope you’re still here!

I’m gonna put this under a readmore because. i know not the definition of brevity

So, first off: i’ve gone through... a lot of gender labels. Probably not as many as others, but I’ve gone through at least four before landing where I am, and I might go through more before my life is over.

When I first realized I was not-cis, it was a Big Depression Time for me. My grandmother had just died, my partner at the time had broken up with me, and I was dealing with the consequences of a mistake I made unintentionally. So I started feeling like a big “Blah” is how I generally felt about it. I didn’t feel a concept of gender at all. Now this is probably because at the time, being as depressed as I was, I didn’t feel much of anything. Either that, or it was my first step to detaching myself from my cis, female identity, but personally I think it’s the former. (I am DEFINITELY not saying that any nonbinary / agender people are “just depressed” lol absolutely not. That was just my experience)

after that particular depression phase ended, I started reattaching myself to the concept of gender, but found that I no longer felt like I was 100% girl. I had done a little bit of research and had found the term nonbinary, though I can’t remember much about that time or how I felt. It was really difficult for me to understand as I had only learned about binary trans stuff like.. three months prior lol. I started feeling more like both a guy and a girl, so I found the term bigender, which is where I stuck for a long time. More recently, I’ve found myself less and less happy with the concept of being a girl and being interpretted as a girl, and I’m sitting more in the “transmasc nonbinary” boat (a label that would probably describe this is demimasc / demiboy? But I don’t personally use the label).

For me, the way I could tell was... well, when I thought of the concept of being seen as androgynous or masculine (speaking from my modern label, of course) I felt really good and happy! Being seen as a girl or people assuming I’m a girl because of my clothes or my body type or my voice made me feel really not good! If you’re at all educated on the subject, this is pretty obviously dysphoria.

As for how I felt around the idea? Well. It was hard, but it was also really freeing. It’s TERRIFYING to realize you’re not cis, or to question your labels at all. Change is scary! (Especially if you’re me lmaooo). I leaned really slowly into my labels, not changing my name or pronouns for months. I didn’t cut my hair or start binding until I had IDed as nonbinary for around a year and a half? I’m not sure on that as the timeline is very fuzzy for me. Of course, for me, my dysphoria increased the closer I got to the “look” I wanted. I was more mindful of how others saw me, and when I realized that I didn’t “pass” and that people would assume I was a girl, that’s some bad dysphoria time. And that’s still something I’m unlearning. I don’t know if I’ll ever be free of it, but that’s part of the struggle and it’s an inseparable part of my experience so I’m okay with it (usually). But on the other hand, cutting my hair or wearing gender-affirming clothing or hearing others use my pronouns makes my heart go :D ! Gender euphoria is just as important to me as dysphoria, so realizing I was NB was a big rush of good stuff!

I’m not sure how helpful this was, and it was really long-winded, so for that I apologize. If you have any further questions or need further clarification, don’t be afraid to ask!!💜💜💜