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While yes intersex people can use intersex as their gender identity, that isn't what intersex is. Intersex is a natural biological variation that cannot be transitioned into or out of. It is a description of the natural state of our bodies. It is the same as me being autistic, white, and short. These are descriptions of things about me that I cannot change but are still important facets of my life as a human being. (Obviously some are more important than others)

(While the body can be changed, there are separate words for someone who willingly changes the natural state of their body, like altersex. Intersex people can also be altersex.)

On the other hand, gender identity and transness are personal identifiers that can be chosen. (And by chosen I mean that while you can't choose your gender you can choose the label you use for it) And it is also fluid and can change over time. Gender looks different for everyone and isn't based on any material thing that can be observed in the physical world. Gender is based more-so in what makes you happiest, and the most satisfied with your life. Gender is just as real as everything else I've mentioned, but it's just not a physical thing.

This is why transness is self determined and intersexuality is not.

Trans and cis are adjectives that describe a person's experience with their gender. A trans man/woman is just a man/woman who has a different experience with their gender than cis people do.

But if a person exists who is rejected by both cis and trans people, then what are they? What are they supposed to do? How are they supposed to identify? Cis and trans as labels were not designed with intersex people in mind and often do not fit our experiences, but we're forced to use this binary because perisex trans people insist that you must be one if you're not the other.

But, trans people also insist that being intersex is inherently trans. Any deviation from the sex binary is seen as trans. Intersex history is seen as trans history, intersex animals are called biologically trans, and intersex experiences and terms are often taken by trans people and applied to themselves.

We're inherently trans but the trans experience is inherently a perisex one. Our experiences are identical to trans experiences but only trans people are allowed to say that. Our bodies are deemed the ideal trans bodies but the natural state of our bodies is used as proof that we don't fit in with trans people. Trans people wish they could gain access to the violence done to our bodies. Our bodies are held up as proof that gender and sex is a spectrum but if we talk about our complicated experiences with sex and gender then we're called terf psyops and cis invaders.

Where exactly are intersex people supposed to fit into the trans/cis binary? Our experiences cannot be defined in the same way that perisex trans people define themselves.

When an intersex person identifies as transfem when they were afab or as transmasc while they were amab or calls themselves cistrans or transmascfem or transfemmasc, this isn't an attempt to invade spaces we don't belong or destroy the trans community. We're trying to describe our very complicated experiences with gender with the limited tools that we have, the tools that have been forced on us but simultaneously denied to us.

Can we just let intersex trans people have their weird gender labels in peace? This isn't about you, it's not an attack on you or your community, it's just us trying to exist comfortably.

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Countless possibilities got him waking up in a cold sweat

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歡喜禪／Yab-Yum

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happy 21st night of september everyone ^_^

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i think what bugs me about the jhinhwei fics i’ve read so far is the way they treat hwei. hwei isn’t naive. i think that’s a very important part of what makes the ship work, actually. hwei is tormented. maybe not as much as jhin (who is doing it like him really), but there’s a nuance to his actions and his feelings and his choices. it’s portrayed twice in his biography. first, by his deviancy from the temple’s curriculum, by his willingness to explore an aspect of himself that isn’t only harmful to hwei but to others as well. and the reason is selfish. he wants to know how far he can go, how good of an artist he really is. so he endangers his masters and almost kills them to simply test his abilities.

hwei is careless and so self-centered that he becomes distant to the consequences of his artistry. and then, when the damage is done, he takes the role of the victim, of someone who encounters these situations rather than entices them. this is not to say it’s his fault what happened to the temple masters because of jhin, but that the idea that he had anything to do with it is so unbearable to hwei that he needs, for his own sake, as a form of coping mechanism, to attribute the guilt to destiny itself. which brings me to my second point, which is that hwei actively seeks jhin, not to punish him, but once again with the premise that he “must do so”, that there’s no other viable option, no other path.

tldr.: hwei isn’t clueless, he takes a passive role in his own story and points to fate as the reason things happen to him. which doesn’t make him evil, but also doesn’t make him naive. he has selfish motives and that should be explored more often in fanfiction.

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Drew a panel from Hwei's short story🎨

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Do you remember💀🍂

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wishing spiders a successful strike, may they get everything they want

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does anyone know if i can like block sites from appearing in my google images searches??? i keep getting those awful ai generated things with a hand coming out of a man's neck and just straight up not what i was looking for, because this was in a search for "curly hair in medieval paintings". it happens every time i search for anything vaguely art-reference-like and it's so fucking annoying and it clutters my search results so much. i don't wanna add specific commands to the query every time too, what i need is like a browser extension or something

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man for a country that loves its guns the lot of you cant aim for shit

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Wouldn’t my writing be worse off if I forced in elements like diversity?

If you are asking this question, you have yet to challenge the “default” of your culture’s media. Consider that the majority of modern Western media fill their casts with white men, and when there are women or POC, they stick out conspicuously. Many people view adding diversity as tweaking some white man characters by toggling race or gender. But this assumes that “white man” is some default, standard character template.

If you feel pressured to include diversity in your writing, distance yourself from this pressure and ask yourself why you feel it. If you feel attacked when seeing campaigns for more diversity or criticism of all-white, uninclusive media, sit with the discomfort and ask yourself why those who are different from you say they need diverse media.

These are people whose voices and faces are rarely visible in entertainment. Despite this, they enjoy an adventure as much as anyone, and have become accustomed to projecting onto white characters. Yet, when the reverse is asked of white audiences to acknowledge protagonists of color, it becomes a difficult ask. These character choices are immediately questioned, discredited, fought against, and accused of being “woke” or “unrelatable.”

This resistance reflects a larger issue: the imbalance between audiences’ empathy towards the majority/“default” and empathy towards those perceived as Other.

By mostly reading about white people, they become easier to relate to. By the same token, if we are not reading media and histories from the perspective of POC, we end up with more people who literally fail to relate to POC. When we talk about hope-deficits, increased alienation and lower self-worth among marginalized populations, underrepresentation in media is a big factor. Imagine for a moment: never the beautiful princess in the tower, never the badass hero riding dragons; always the two-second sidekick.

People of color are people and want to be seen and treated as such. Not as a burden to devote your time to, but people who have a place in the world, fictional or no. Really, writing a world in your story that is all or mostly white is more unrealistic, more forced—after all, there are far more non-white people on Earth. Becoming comfortable with diversity requires unlearning White as the Default and POC as the Other. It takes setting aside feelings of pressure to emphasize, open your heart and listen.

Further Reading:

“Diversity has gone too far!”

Diversity is for everyone.

Children and the Myth of Colorblind Youth

Those who read about aliens learn to emphasize with aliens. Those who read about wizards empathize with wizards.

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This Q&A is an excerpt from our General FAQ for Newcomers, which can be found in our new Masterpost of rules and FAQs. If you liked this post, we have more recommended reading there!

-Writing With Color

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New zine that's free for anyone to print and distribute! Read the whole thing at newlevant.com/COVIDzine or in the rest of this post.

UPDATE 4/11/2023:

I swapped out the colloidal silver nasal spray info for xylitol nasal spray info. I originally included colloidal silver spray because of the linked study and recommendation from RTHM, but I don't want to be pointing people toward something with notable health risks. Xylitol spray (Xlear) is also cheaper and more widely available!

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