overelegantstranger

[overelegantstranger]

The 2025 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 12th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 30th August 2025.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

If you can't wait for survey numbers, you can click here for a public spreadsheet of non-secret info with graphs as it comes in, updated manually a few times per day.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

[overelegantstranger]

"They were complementary halves of a single warrior."

[overelegantstranger]

So I just discovered a cool conversation that spun off from one of my tag monologues on a gifset—I'd seen the initial tag peer review, but hadn't realized they'd gone further than that until @ladytharen tagged me. Yet again I didn't want to pester the original gifmaker too much, so I decided to respond separately to the part I found especially interesting.

For context, these were my original tags on the "This little thing? Just something I slipped on :)" Kirk captivity scene from "Tomorrow is Yesterday":

#captain gender strikes again! #i appreciate the read on this scene as 'captain kirk is a queer guy flirting with random 20th cent dudes holding him captive. bicon' #but personally my read is 'captain kirk is a queer guy deliberately leaning into effeminacy to fuck with hypermasc douchebros #from the very era in which the show was made irl. bicon' #it's definitely flirty but it is an aggressively feminine-coded flirtiness that's going to triply bother these kinds of guys #ngl i feel like kirk enjoys fucking with gender norms in all directions just because of who he is as a person (his true gender: diva) #but it's extra fun when it lets him troll ultra-military assholes neurotic about their own masculinity who are trying to intimidate HIM #(these guys aren't his type at all - christopher is much more that - but as usual that's not the point of the flirtation #k/s is nerd4nerd but also troll4troll)

I was really intrigued by this response from @mycroftrh, and thinking about it again on this inauguration of Pride month.

#yeah#in a certain context queerness and effeminacy are power#these are also unfortunately often the same contexts where queerness can get you hate crimed#but if you’re gonna be beat up/killed anyway…#you might as well make the homophobes maximally uncomfortable first

Yep, exactly. You can absolutely see the moment when he decides on exactly which side of his personality he's going to use for maximum effect on these gender policing, homophobic, ultra-military, paranoid bigots from the 60s:

I do think it's interesting that the full scene includes not only Kirk's bisexual chaos gremlin diva genderfuckery (enrichment for him!) but moments of fear and defiance:

He doesn't drop the flamboyance until he wants to, though. And the framing, lighting, angles etc only serve to emphasize their attempts to loom even more over him, aggressively get into his space, gesture right at his face to unsettle him, and his refusal to be intimidated by these fundamentally pathetic responses that are by no means free from real danger, just silly and contemptible nevertheless. It's not that he's too disdainful or amused at his own hijinks to understand how easily this could go very wrong. He simply has no respect for these men and enjoys leveraging their own hang-ups against them.

His eye make-up is also more than usually noticeable in the close-ups in this scene—even compared to other scenes in the same episode—which seems maybe not unrelated!

I think it's also worth pointing out that, TOS make-up aside, Kirk's navigation of gender performance in the original series is ... let's say, idiosyncratic. Most of the 23rd-century male characters are far more inflexible and singular about what gendered roles they're willing or able to inhabit. Kirk specifically is very deliberately fluid and versatile and theatrical about a lot of things, very much including gender performance and sexuality.

[overelegantstranger]

sometimes i feel ive got to

[overelegantstranger]

made a new document :///////

want to write except what i want to write is finished and i am sad about it

[overelegantstranger]

want to write except what i want to write is finished and i am sad about it

[overelegantstranger]

When I travel, it's usually to the country's capital but then sometimes I meet citizens of this country in different circumstances and they say they've never been there. I'm not judging because some capitals are far away and expensive but I'm wondering...

[overelegantstranger]

window screen

[overelegantstranger]

quick study of this 1988 doc martens ad

[overelegantstranger]

after my spell in the cognitive distortion chamber yesterday i have returned to the soup. big news. normally i ban all soup mentions for three standard weeks

[overelegantstranger]

The worst characters are the ones were you only get like three pieces of lore about them but the lore is so fascinating and hits your brain at just the right angle to have you behaving like a feral dog in front of your conspiracy theory cork board

[overelegantstranger]

Having parents who aren't as bad as they used to be is crazy cause they'll be sitting there doing some normal shit and you're like kubrick staring at them

[overelegantstranger]

woke up. curled lethargically on the couch until lunch. had lunch. curled lethargically in my desk chair. knit five (5) stitches. cried. panicked a little. cried some more. posted fic. drank tea.

[overelegantstranger]

me six months ago: maybe writing is no longer a key facet of who i am as a person. that's okay, people change. it's fine.

me now: if i'm not writing constantly i'm missing out on life

[overelegantstranger]

"Stuck in the timeloop as a punishment" is cool and all, but stuck in the timeloop voluntarily though? Oh, brother. Stuck in the timeloop cause you just can't move on. Stuck in the timeloop even if you know that it's not real and whatever should've happen already did. Stuck in the timeloop even if doesn't makes you happy. You just can't bear the thought of not being able to see them ever again. Stuck in the timeloop even if you know you should move on. Stuck in the timeloop even if you know they would want you to move on.

But maybe just a little while longer.

[overelegantstranger]

i then wrote 404 words in neither document.

and in celebration of all-but finishing my longest piece of writing in five years of course i immediately opened my eighteenth star wars document